Quick -- what should a city do to improve access to a rapidly developing area near a BRT station? In Boston, officials have settled on an expensive plan to subsidize driving and traffic.
wenty is plenty in Boston, according to its elected officials. The City Council voted unanimously this week to lower the default speed limit on most residential streets to 20 mph — and not for the first time. Speeding is the number one complaint council members hear from residents. And on Boston’s narrow streets, packed with pedestrians, […]
[This piece also runs in “Checkerboard City,” John’s transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.] When Pete Stidman, the former director of the Boston Cyclists Union, visited Chicago for a bike conference a couple of summers ago, I let him crash on my futon. When I visited Beantown last month, Stidman, who’s […]
Boston’s MBTA has been having a tough year. Following a disastrous winter season marked by extreme weather and service disruptions, the agency has been inundated with charges of mismanagement. While the MBTA has its flaws, the charges against it don’t stem from a good government campaign so much as an ideologically-driven assault, filled with exaggerations and lies and backed by groups […]
Bostonians making polite requests for a clear path on one of the city’s key bike routes were met with disdain from the state agency responsible for maintaining the paths. Here’s how one unnamed official from the Massachusetts’ Department of Conservation and Recreation responded in an internal email thread to a message from a Boston resident […]
Transit-oriented development in the Chicago region is falling behind cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, according to a report released in May by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a local “think and do tank.” In “Transit-Oriented Development in the Chicago Region” [PDF], CNT warns that Chicago’s failure to focus housing and jobs near transit is […]