Search Results

My 1994 Oregon-made Burley bike trailer-stroller (above) is still dear to my heart, but innovations in newer Burleys and in other companies’ offerings show that tools for human-powered urban mobility are developing at a rapid clip. The 31-year-old Eugene company Burley and four manufacturers outside the Northwest offer bike trailer-stroller-cart-jogger hybrids that convert into so many mobility tools they are like something out of Transformers. Almost every Burley model is...

Because the Census Bureau emails me data, behold: The table shows a rank-ordering of states with the highest rates of Internet use in 2009. Nationally, only slightly more than two-thirds of US residents access the Internet at all. (More Census data here.) It’s groovy enough, but the Internet is sometimes overlooked as a transportation solution. That’s not to say you can drive a car on it, but that given high speeds and high...

Interesting.  The Journal of Sustainable Real Estate recently accepted a paper showing that, after controlling for incomes, neighborhoods with low car ownership have fewer defaults on mortgages.  NRDC took a look at the findings, and concluded that… …factors such as neighborhood compactness, access to public transit, and rates of vehicle ownership are key to predicting mortgage performance and should be taken more seriously by mortgage underwriters, policymakers, and real estate developers....

Check it out: City-Go-Round, the transit app index to rule them all, created by our friends who did Walkscore. City-Go-Round has transit apps from cities from around North America. It’s live now, with transit data for the Northwest’s biggest cities — Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver — but also for a bunch of smaller cities too. No matter where you are*, City-Go-Round will let you figure out when the bus arrives or which subway to take....

Whether or not your Thanksgiving plans require a trip over rivers or through woods, Mapquest has a new little tool to help you figure out what it’s going to cost you in gasoline.  When you use the site to get driving directions, it now prompts you to calculate your fuel cost based on your vehicle’s estimated miles per gallon and using local gas prices. It’s not crazy accurate, but at...

Walk Score, which has become the most widely-used measure of pedestrian friendly neighborhoods in North America, has added a new trick: they’re now incorporating transit data into their walkability ratings. So in addition to stores, restaurants, parks, and the like, Walk Score now treats nearby bus stops and rail stations as key ingredients of a walkable neighborhood. What makes this extra nifty is that Walk Score has already partnered with...

It’s been a big week for walkability, with two steps forward for online mapping of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods: Walk Score—which has become North America’s most prevalent gauge of neighborhood walkability—is going open source, so that anyone can see how their rankings work and (just as importantly) suggest improvements.  This has a real potential to lead to some major breakthroughs, since it will let academics and others add their own insights and...

You may have already heard of  Walk Score—an endlessly entertaining internet tool that lets people discover how pedestrian-friendly their neighborhood is.  Walk Score ranks neighborhood “walkability” based on the mix of stores and services that are within walking distance of any home in North America.  If you haven’t already, you should check it out—but only if you’ve got nothing pressing to do, since it’s pretty addictive. Now, the good folks...

A recent Crosscut post by Knute Berger has people fretting over the possible impact of their cat on the planet. Berger suggests that getting rid of your cat might be the solution. But a closer look at Mossback’s logic reveals a bias against density. Berger’s criticisms make a big (and probably mistaken) assumption about the cat population: that they are all roaming around chasing birds and burying their poop in...

My calendar tells me that my wife and I will welcome our first child into the world any day now. Yikes. (This is good news for readers too: I’ll be doing less blogging this month.) A couple of weeks ago, we toured our hospital’s birthing center where we learned that newborns aren’t allowed to leave without a car seat. That’s just commonsense. No argument from me. And yet I found...