My pal Cam, from the Better Bus Coalition in Cincinnati showed up on the most recent episode of the War on Cars podcast: What if you could get around quickly and reliably in a state-of-the-art vehicle that you didn’t have to drive, park, fuel, or insure? No, it’s not an Uber or a self-driving car… […]
Author Archives: Ross
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Photo Challenge, Week 9: Found still life
What does this challenge even mean?? I don’t know enough to know what qualifies as a still life and what does not, so here are a couple photos of things being very still—because they are inanimate.
Meg weird
All of these tending apps sound like they come right out of Feed.
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck
I’m going to be thinking about Feed by M.T. Anderson for a long time. It’s mostly a not-too-far-off description of the logical conclusion of social media and capitalism, and was written in 2001 (before social media existed!?) but feels terribly present-day. It’s a horrible prophecy that we should have all heard and then used to […]
Taking a very important call
If you build it, they will totally come
Induced demand is the most bananas thing. Via City Observatory: But what appears to have happened is that the wider I-5 just funneled more peak hour traffic, more quickly into the bridge area. The result is that the roadway jams up more quickly, and that backups occur earlier and last longer, with the result that […]
Bug in the bush
Photo Challenge, Week 8: Trees
Trees! So easy! So omnipresent! But guess what? In the deep of February, in the midst of a million straight days of rain, trees are…not that awesome looking. Just a buncha black, severe, dead-looking things hanging out in tree wells across the City. Anyway, here’s what I came up with for week eight (one is […]
Waiting for the bus
Here’s a chronological set of pictures taken while waiting for the bus in various parts of town—Northside, Fulton, and Downtown. I’m definitely going back to Fulton at some point to get a better shot of that house on the terraced hill. My bus was coming down the hill, and that’s the best I could do!
Congo Masks
We took the mostly-free-from-work Presidents Day to check out Congo Masks: Masterpieces from Central Africa at the VMFA (open through February 24th). Here are a few of my favorite shots—I’m mostly proud I figured out how to take focused, non-grainy shots in a pretty low-light environment. Afterwards, we went to Greenleaf’s Pool Room for lunch, […]
Family portrait
Thinking about equity in transportation planning…
Mariia Zimmerman, a transit-oriented development expert, writes this two-part introspective about her own journey towards racial equity in transportation planning: We wrote a lot about the potential economic development impact of [Transit-Oriented Development], and that of streetcars in particular. Not surprisingly, we found that once the idea caught on and development began, much of it was […]
Photo Challenge, Week 7: Interior Architecture
I’m really proud of this first picture, taken in the chapel at Richmond Hill.
Familial graffiti
Multiple modes
A few shots of people getting around using different modes of transportation—foot, bike, bus, car. Taken as I got around by foot, bike, and bus.
Slow hobbies
Daniel Warshaw on cooking and family and practicing those things: So I’m practicing – literally practicing without an occasion – a particular type of cake. Once I’m comfortable with the cake, I’ll work on frosting. I already know how to make decent buttermilk biscuits, but I’d like to get proficient at making Japanese-style milk bread […]
Photo Challenge, Week 6: Refraction in Water Drops
Peanut butter. I’m just not super into these technique challenges, so, instead, here’s a picture of steam (which was the week before last’s challenge) that I got while making chicken soup.
From In an Unequal America, Getting to Work Can Be Hell: “A lot of these workers in low-wage jobs—they either have to [move] to Prince George’s County, Maryland, or Alexandria, Virginia, and the transportation network has not changed to meet the changing demands,” says Yesim Sayin Taylor, an economist and founding executive director of the […]