Dinner links: Kansas outdoes everyone else edition

Roads

Dinner links: Kansas outdoes everyone else edition

by David Alpert • June 19, 2008 8:41 pm

Tom the Dancing Bug via Salon.

Buy a Chrysler now, and lock in your destructive lifestyle! A great Tom the Dancing Bug satirizes Chrysler's offer to lock in $2.99/gallon gas to new buyers. How long until they go bankrupt? Who cares! Since when did US automakers think about the future? Via Richard Layman.

What about the "character of the community"? Greensburg, Kansas was completely destroyed by a tornado. Every building was gone. Now, they are building a walkable, mixed-use town in its place. (But we still have to rebuild Klingle Road exactly as it is!)

Good at sports, bad at urban planning: Boston is planning a new TOD development at the Forest Hills subway, commuter rail, and bus station in Jamaica Plain. But the MBTA still insists the developers replace all the parking, and planners are thinking about making all the streets one-way and changing traffic signals to speed traffic. All this while the development seeks LEED certification. Can LEED please add "not building lots of parking and adding traffic" as a factor? Via Planetizen.

Please go away, Mary Peters: The FTA also doesn't like Baltimore's Red Line proposal. What else is new? The Baltimore Sun is eager for a new administration, as is The Overhead Wire.

Get inna the road: MyBikeLane, the site where people publish photos of cars parked blocking bike lanes, is now operating in DC. Via Matthew Yglesias.

5 comments

Tags: Baltimore, bike lanes, Boston, cars, FTA, Jamaica Plain, Kansas, links, Mary Peters, Smart Growth, transit

Designing sustainable communities with LEED-ND (Nov 18, 2008)
Westwood Station (Jan 21, 2006)
Terrible parking ideas come from Boston's "T" (Jan 6, 2011)
Boston's new planner not a fan of starchitecture (Jul 1, 2008)
Connectivity: a good way the stimulus can invest in roads (Jan 9, 2009)

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington. He has had a lifelong interest in great cities and great communities. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.

Comments
Add a comment »

The Greenburg story reminds me of a book idea I've always had which is a study of cities that turned natural disasters into opportunities to clean the slate and rebuild right. New York and Paris for example both took advantage of city devastating fires to rebuild their chaotic, organic street system on the grid. There are probably as many examples as their are disasters (and it'd be interesting to look at cities that blew it too - my hometown was hit hard by Hurricane Rita. When insurance checks came in, local car dealers made a fortune. Oy.)

by VC on Jun 20, 2008 7:52 am

Title for book: "Lemonade"

by Vc on Jun 20, 2008 7:54 am

As a commuting cyclist, I'd much rather put the time and effort into building more bicycle infrastructure of lanes and trails rather than take pictures of peoples' cars while they're loading groceries.

by asl on Jun 20, 2008 8:52 am

Boston's a weird place when it comes to transit. They're blessed with a great infrastructure, but they are not very good stewards of it (with the exception of the recent expansion of commuter rail down the South Shore).

However, I hear that New Hampshire is trying to expand it's commuter rail system and draw more Boston workers tempted by New Hampshire's low taxes.

by Reid on Jun 20, 2008 9:22 am

I've said it before and will say it again: LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.

by BeyondDC on Jun 20, 2008 9:42 am