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New York City Gets Its First “Pop-up Café,” Similar to SF’s Parklets
The narrow streets of Lower
Manhattan date back centuries and pose a set of challenges nearly unique
in New York City. With the city's first "pop-up café," DOT is testing
out a solution to one of those challenges: the lack of public space
caused by cramped sidewalks.
August 12, 2010
Landscapers Used Banned Pesticide on New Marin County Bike Path
Marin County's ribbon cutting and celebratory ride Monday in the Alameda del Prado bike lanes - a
long-missing link in the county's North-South bikeway - was followed by the revelation that landscapers used a weedkiller banned under the county's
strict pesticide law.
August 4, 2010
Bike Tour Taps San Francisco’s Water Innovations
When most San Franciscans turn on a faucet, they'll see water that's traveled as far as two hundred miles from Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. But that's not the case for some locally-minded gardeners, for whom careful water stewardship is as important as selecting their crops.
July 27, 2010
More Space for Parking Than Offices at Boston-Area TOD
Another
city, another would-be transit-oriented development undermined by a
glut of parking. This time it's Newton, Massachusetts, where plans are underway
to build 420,000 square feet of office space, 60,000 square feet of
retail, and 190 units of housing at the Riverside terminus of Boston's
Green Line, the highest-ridership light rail line in the country.
July 26, 2010
Of Cable Cars and Whales
The invention of cable cars in 1873 by Andrew Hallidie is an oft-told saga, with a perhaps apocryphal point of origin on a rainy winter day in 1869 when he saw a team of horses pulling a horsecar up a steep grade on Jackson Street between Kearny and Stockton. One horse slipped, the car man slammed on his brake but it broke, and the horses and streetcar ended up at the bottom of the hill in a mangled, mutilated mess. Andrew Hallidie wrote that he wanted to construct a public transit system that would alleviate the “great cruelty and hardship to the horses engaged in that work.”
July 19, 2010
Detroit: The Return of the Repressed (Bicycling Culture)
Visiting the ghostly motor city these days is an eye-opening and surprisingly inspiring experience. The city has fallen from more than 2 million residents a generation ago to around 800,000 today. A great deal of the land area where homes and factories once filled the blocks are now expansive vacant lots, masquerading as greenways in this wet June, filled with grasses and wildflowers. Some of these vacant lots have been converted into urban farms, but the larger majority is simply empty, reverting to some version of nature. Wild pheasants skitter across the vacant lots while songbirds, from bright red cardinals to brilliant yellow finches, fill the trees and bushes with their cheerful sounds.
June 29, 2010