Category Archives: Urban

I’ve been in London twice this summer, in early July and then just last week. In London, as in just about every other big city in the Western world, there has been a serious effort over the last fifty or … Continue reading →

I spent a few days in Ottawa this month. I’d been in the Ottawa area several times over the years, most recently in 2015. Ottawa is not a huge, complicated metropolis in the way that Toronto, for example, is, but … Continue reading →

High-density, pedestrian-oriented residential urban neighborhoods in the United States are rare. If one sets the criteria tightly enough—substantial population density and crowded sidewalks being the most important—the majority of such places are in New York, and even there largely in … Continue reading →

I spent some time on Miami Beach Walk this week for the first time in a couple of years. It was interesting to see that the replacement of the old wooden boardwalk sections with pavers that I mentioned in an … Continue reading →

I visited the new Underline trail when I was in Miami last week. The Underline is supposed to replace and to be a big improvement over the M-Path, the simple trail that was created under or next to the southern … Continue reading →

I made two short trips to Paris this fall. I particularly wanted to take a look at some of the changes in Paris introduced by the administration of Mayor Anne Hidalgo, which, since 2014, has garnered a huge amount of … Continue reading →

Here are four census-tract-level maps showing the “modal split” of journeys to work by workers 16 and over during the 2015/2019 period in the central parts of the New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco areas. All these maps … Continue reading →

Over the last thirty or so years, most of the urban areas of the Mountain West and Sunbelt have been taking some tentative steps to mitigate the less attractive aspects of their dependence on automobiles. They’ve built hiking and biking … Continue reading →

A map of the United States by census tract suggests that–except in a few remote and nearly roadless parts of Alaska–few households are carfree: In fact, a closer look reveals a different story. In 351 (out of 74,002) tracts, 75 … Continue reading →