Category Archives: Transportation

I rode three new rail transit lines while in Bangkok last month: the extension of the MRT Blue Line west to Lak Song; the MRT Blue Line connection between Tao Poon and Tha Phra; and the BTS Light Green Line … Continue reading →

I spent the third week of January in Doha, Qatar. I’d been there only once before, on a one-day trip from Dubai in 2010. On the earlier trip, I’d been extremely impressed by the Corniche—and wasn’t much taken by anything … Continue reading →

I’ve written about Singapore’s “park connectors” before.1 These are paths for pedestrians and cyclists that are generally separate from the city’s conventional sidewalks. The park connectors often follow Singapore’s coasts or its abundant watercourses. Sometimes they pass through parkland as … Continue reading →

I recently spent nearly a week in Bordeaux, a city I had previously been in only briefly. I was particularly interested in looking at all the ways that Bordeaux has been attempting to push back against the hegemony of the … Continue reading →

Most of the maps on this site were created at least in part with GIS data from OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM (for those who do not know) consists of GIS data—that is geographic data in a format usable by computer mapping … Continue reading →

Moscow, as I pointed out in an earlier post, is quite a good city for pedestrians. There are high-quality sidewalks nearly everywhere, and there are lots of people using them. The enormously varied and generally attractive built environment guarantees that … Continue reading →

I visited Kitchener and Waterloo last week and rode on the new ION light-rail line there. I also walked along the route for several kilometers. This line is distinctive in that it’s in a relatively small urban area. According to … Continue reading →

Like Japan’s other coastal urban areas, the Tokyo region is crossed by several large rivers, among which the most important are the Ara (Arakawa 荒川), the Edo (Edogawa 江戸川), and the Tone (Tonegawa 利根川) east of the city and the … Continue reading →

Anyone who likes cities to be lively and full of people at all hours would appreciate cities in Japan.1 There are large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists not only in the central business districts but also in many of the … Continue reading →

In the 1980s I wrote a paper on the then-mostly-new recreational trails that had come into being in many North American cities. In most places, these trails were quite fragmentary. They were built where it was easy to build them, … Continue reading →