Human Transit

if you like intellectual travel-writing on cities ...

If you like intellectual travel-writing on cities, you might enjoy some of the work that I do on the personal blog, Creature of the Shade.  Most posts there are on either cities or nature, and sometimes both.  My pieces on cities tend to dwell on architecture and urban form, and usually track unstructured long walks (what Baudelaire called flânerie) across the city in question.  Posting there is much more intermittent than here, so if you like it you'll probably want to put it on a reader. 

In 2009 I did fairly satisfying pieces on Berlin and Paris, and a short mood-piece on the Netherlands (which can be understood as one city, the Randstad, and its rural hinterland.)  There are decent 2008 pieces on Delhi and Visakhapatnam in India.  And while I find it impossible to write as a traveler about cities I live in, a small piece on Sydney happened while the place was still new to me.  The 2006 Montréal post is not bad. 

Happy New Year, everyone.  Back to transit topics tomorrow.

comments?

Typepad's been behaving oddly lately.  If you tried unsuccessfully to comment on the last post, please try again.  Seems to be working now.  If it doesn't work for you, please email me (link below photo at right) and tell me what happens.  Thanks.

weekend (and monday, and tuesday) reading

• The Urbanophile wonders if California's decline is as inevitable as that of the Rust Belt.
• Cap'n Transit contemplates the Transition Towns movement.
• Madison, Wisconsin abandons commuter rail plans, considers Bus Rapid Transit.
• Have you explored this blog's older material on topics that interest you?  (We've only been going for five months, so it's all still timely.)  See categories under my picture at right ...

Next post mid-week.  A little busy all of a sudden.  Stay tuned, but keep breathing. 

meanwhile

I'm in Delft, Netherlands at the International Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport, also called Thredbo 11.  It's fairly intensive, and I'm also having some laptop problems, so things may be quiet here for a few days.  If you're looking for new material, I bet there's interesting old material here that you haven't read.  Just explore the categories in the first column on the right. 

the other meaning of "high-speed internet"

Sometimes, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message. 

I thought it worth a post to say only that I'm now on a Deutsche Bahn ICE train sliding across the German countryside at around 200 km/hr while enjoying seamless internet service.  (Those trees are further away than they look, a common high-speed rail illusion.)

At EUR 8.00/hour it's a little expensive, but most things are in version 1.0.  Like many German services, they clearly put quality before price.

trainspotting (and busspotting) in europe

On Saturday I'll be flying to Vienna for five weeks poking around northern and central Europe.  I'll be giving a paper at the Thredbo 11 conference in Delft, Netherlands in late September, and taking some time off, but mostly I'll be looking closely at transit systems we've all been taught to admire, and sharing reactions and questions here, all in the spirit of semi-deductible flaneurie.

I lived in Paris for a while in my twenties, but this will be my first trip to the continent in over a decade:

At the moment, I expect to visit Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Bern, Geneva, Paris, and Brussels, but the itinerary is deliberately fluid.  Transit-tourism tips are most welcome.  

new feature and request for feedback

Over on the right under my photo, there's now a list showing where I currently am and where I plan to be in the near future.  I figure both friends and enemies might find this helpful.

Also, in the recent streetcar post, I was playing with several forms of emphasis, including bold, italic, underlines, and permutations of these.  Which are easiest for you to read?  Which work best for you as emphasis?  Which make you feel that I'm hitting you over the head too hard?  Or not hard enough?  As always, we aim to please here.

travels

I've intentionally backdated this post (it's actually July 5) so as to leave the recent and evolving streetcar post on top.  

Hello from foggy San Francisco, one of the few places that is reliably colder in summer than in spring or fall.  I'll be hitting Las Vegas, Portland and possibly Vancouver in the next three weeks, and will do at least a bit of transit tourism in each, with posts to follow.  But I'll also be spending some time off the grid, so posting overall probably be more sporadic than the one-a-day pace I've tried to maintain until now.  

Stay with me.  And if you've enjoyed anything you've read here, pass the word.

look-and-feel note

I'm trialling a new TypePad Widget called LinkWithin that produces the "You might like these stories" buttons at the bottom of each post.  They're automatically generated based on keywords, so they're not always relevant, and on this post I'm sure they won't be.   Let me know if these are useful or just distracting.  So far I like them.

Also, my practice is to compress posts that are more than a few days old, so that the main page shows just a paragraph or two and then the "Continue reading" link.  Is this link prominent enough?  Do the LinkWithin buttons distract from it?  Let me know.  We aim to please here.

meanwhile, in tehran

Today seems to be the climax of the conflict in Iran, and I'm up far too late following the news.  What's it about?  The truth.  Huge numbers of citizens are risking their lives to create a more truthful society, one needing fewer lies.  If we think about what we advocate as environmentalists or urbanists or transit advocates, it's ultimately just that, I hope.  We're looking for clarity, truth.  We're trying to see through the murk (some natural, some man-made) and give others the courage to do the same.