Tag: urbanism

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Review

“Better Buses, Better Cities”

Steven Higashide

Now this is how you write a “we need $x policy changed” book! Short and to the point, and the conclusion is not just a call-to-action but instructions on how to best do the action. Absolutely wonderful, and a great case for improving bus systems as the backbone of a public transit network!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and highly recommend it; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Killed by a Traffic Engineer”

Wes Marshall

If we need to constantly remind people in the transportation system to be safe, is it really a safe transportation system?

As someone who works in a field other than traffic engineering, I’m not quite the target audience of this book. There’s a lot of citations that I didn’t bother looking at, and detailed discussions of the various 1,000–page guidebooks that, presumably, every traffic engineer owns and nobody else has ever heard of. But I still found it a very interesting read; it’s basically a takedown of the current state of the field.

It’s 88 chapters long, and the majority of them are devoted to taking a “standard practice” and showing how thin the evidence backing it is. It’s more than a little disturbing to know how much of our road design is based on a single study from 60 years ago with a limited dataset and nary an attempt at replication… and which only sorta addresses the topic that became the standard. And those are the better cases! As a “fun” example, consider those retroreflective road stripes: on rural highways, it sure seems like having stripes marking the outside of the roadway, and not just the division between travel lanes, would make the road more visible and thus safer, right? Bad news, that vibes-based approach isn’t even what it’s based on; safety studies showed adding them actually increased the crash rate.

There’s a lot of that sort of thing in this book. I think my only edit I’d make is adding an 89th chapter at the end; the last three chapters are the “call to action” portion, but said calls to action are directed almost entirely at traffic engineers. Maybe throw in another one for people like me, who don’t work in the field but want to help improve things; I could use a few tips on what sorts of public comment meetings I should be attending, and what questions I should ask.

Overall, an interesting read; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Key to the City”

Sara C. Bronin

This feels like a book that I wasn’t quite the target audience for. I’m a secondary target, because I’m sitting here contemplating sending a copy of this book to everyone on the city council. That’s who this is for—the people who can update the zoning code, and haven’t realized yet that they can. Or, more importantly, that they should.

It’s an interesting overview of various parts of the zoning code, and strikes a pretty good balance of pointing out the good and bad outcomes that have come from those zoning codes. Parking minimums: pretty uniformly bad, we should get rid of them. Historic preservation districts: can be used for good! I think the bit that felt the newest to me was minimum size requirements, which is something I hadn’t much thought about until now—and, now that it’s been pointed out to me, I’m considering the spacing between houses in various towns in my area, and realizing how much nicer a neighborhood you can create just by getting rid of, like, social distancing for houses. Having neighbors nearby is pretty nice, actually!

Overall, an interesting read; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Paved Paradise”

Henry Grabar

Be still, my urbanist heart.

I loved this book. Being me, I probably still would’ve enjoyed it even if it was textbook-dry, dully reciting the history of parking policy in the United States, breaking for the occasional multi-page table of data. But that’s not what this book was. This was a wonderfully well-written piece, going through the surprisingly entertaining history of parking policy and arriving at the current state of affairs. (In retrospect, it should’ve been obvious that parking lots were ripe for corruption — in the same way that the number of gym memberships sold has very little correlation with the occupancy of the gym, nobody knows the actual occupancy rate of a parking lot, so if it’s operating on cash… who’s to know that you pocketed half the day’s receipts?)

I’d actually listened to two different podcast episodes about this book before picking it up to read, so I was already filled in on the key points, but I don’t think the book lost anything for that. It was the details that really captivated me—little mentions of things like “UPS got a $6 million discount on their New York City parking tickets by agreeing to pay them in bulk instead of individually disputing each one,” which by the omission really emphasizes exactly how many parking citations UPS picks up in NYC in a given year.

And I actually came out of this one feeling particularly optimistic. Not only do I live in one of the places that’s making a fair amount of the right sorts of moves to undo all that historic damage, but I’m also at the right time. We just came out of the pandemic, and boy was that ever a time for people to learn that… we can be doing better things with all that space? Outdoor seating at restaurants is great! Pedestrianized streets are awesome!

So hey, go read this one, it was super interesting. Absolutely worth the read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Big Roads”

Earl Swift

I have, of late, fallen down something of an urbanism and transit policy rabbit hole. Although, I suppose calling it “of late” isn’t all that accurate, it’s apparently been the last couple years. Regardless, I have a certain set of existing thoughts about the interstate highway system, and thus came into this book with a certain amount of skepticism. It felt poised to be a glorification of the “open road,” a paean to the greatest infrastructure project ever undertaken.

And, for a while, it was, but just as the public feeling on highway construction changed at a certain point, so too did the book’s. We were no longer following the early motorists and their obsession, and instead delving into the fight against the freeways. Suddenly, we were seeing some of the same arguments that urbanists are still making today:

In retrospect, the survey’s were self-fulfilling—their yardsticks were motorist safety, travel time, gasoline use, and incidence of repair, all facets of the driving experience. The effects on those not using the roads were neither as easily tallied nor as eagerly sought.

The final part of the book felt very “bittersweet Americana” to me; we saw the retirements, fading into obscurity, and obituaries of the men1 who built the interstate highways. And at the same time, we saw the dream fading into the reality we got, culminating in this description that felt truly, deeply tired:

Interchanges have more in common with each other than any one of them has with wherever it happens to be. The twain have met; exit a California interstate, and you’ll find what you left in Connecticut—and very little that you didn’t leave in Connecticut. The interstates take a distillation of the broad American culture—a one-size-fits-all, lowest-common-denominator reading of who we are and what we want—wherever they go.

All in all, I found this a fascinating history. How many people know that the interstate highway system is properly titled “The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”—much less that he really had no idea what he was signing, and his design for the highway system had approximately nothing to do with what was in the bill, much less what was built? I knew the first part, but thought he’d actually been, at least in part, the architect of the thing. I bought the story that the system was created based on his experience of the Autobahn during the war, and of a horrible cross-country “road” trip prior to it, not that it was an existing plan written up a decade before by engineers. Seriously, there’s plenty of new information in here—and quite a few wild characters, because it starts back before the automobile was even around, and boy howdy were some of those early motorists bonkers. I would up enjoying the heck out of this book, and highly recommend it; check it out.2

  1. And yes, they were all men; the only women really making an appearance anywhere in this book were the wives. I thought the “secretary treated as right-hand woman” of The Chief was going to be an exception, but at some point they began an affair, and he apparently celebrated the loss of his job by asking her to marry him. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩