Tag Archives: transportation

What Really Happens When a City Makes Its Transit System Free?

Reblogged from “Atlantic Cities” about free transportation in Châteauroux, France:

The motivations for making a transit system free are obvious. Increased ridership can relieve traffic, improve the environment, boost the system’s efficiency, give residents more spending money, help the poor, and rejuvenate central business districts.  Unfortunately, the Châteauroux report contains little large-scale analysis of the effects of the system.”

Read the whole article here:

What Really Happens When a City Makes Its Transit System Free?.

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Guest Article: Skywalks in Hong Kong and their Consequences on Urban Communities

Figure 1: An Impression of a Multi-Level Transit City by W.H. Corbett, 1913 drawing “City of the Future”

by Patricia Woo [1]

Higher-density living has been long explored as a means to contain urban sprawl.  Past research has found many environmental benefits with this strategy – reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, using less land and reducing air pollution and water usage.   However, high-density cities pose two major problems for transport planning: one relates to planning for facilities necessary for ease of movement of a large number of commuters within the city, and the other to the task of addressing pedestrian-vehicular conflicts that could arise in the competition for space in the constrained spaces in cities.

Planners and architects in various cities have been pre-occupied with these two problems for a long time.  Visionary architects and planners have come up with imaginative pictures like the “multi-transit city” (Figure 1), where several skywalk systems criss-cross at different levels, and working in concert with each other. Continue reading

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Three Short Movies about Traveling the World and Their Messages

By Renard Teipelke

Traveling the world as an adventure (or a luxury) undertaken by young adults has become a well-known part of life of today’s younger generations. Multiple blogs are filled with online diaries, pictures, videos, links, and other pieces of information that are shared with friends and the world wide web for various reasons. Rick Mereki, Tim White, und Andrew Lees have been on a six-week travel around the world and made three short movies with impressions from the eleven countries they visited. Each movie has been framed by a specific theme, and they all highlight (indirectly) many aspects of traveling the world and understanding its heterogeneity and complexity – both, as I would say, with regard to leisure activities as well as research. Continue reading

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