Times Square used to be filled with cars. So was Central Park. Today, having cars dominate either of these seems stupid. Because it is. Central Park is much more pleasant when you hear birds chirping instead of engines revving, and…
On Manhattan’s Third Avenue in the Upper East Side and East Harlem, I biked through 40 green lights in a row. That’s because, when the city put in a new protected bike lane starting at 59th St, they also retimed…
I would like to steal Jarrett Walker’s opening line from his piece, The Fall of Philadelphia: “The Pennsylvania State Senate has decided that the transit system of America’s fifth largest city should be substantially destroyed.” Because of the insanity and…
In the fall of 2019, I was living five blocks from Union Square when New York City banned most private cars from 14th Street. The “14th Street busway,” as it became known, turned the two-way crosstown artery into a bus,…
Obviously, if you’re a high-level chess player, then Duolingo’s chess course is not for you. That’d be like a native speaker doing Duolingo for their own language. But I don’t consider myself a high-level chess player (I’m a roughly 1400…
Note: This piece originally appeared in my newsletter. One of my first weeks in the garden last year, I walked in and saw a group of half a dozen older gentlemen sitting around the long table. From a distance, I noted…
“The Tide,” Norfolk, Virginia’s light rail system, has been called “The Worst Light Rail System in the U.S.” I rode the Tide myself when I visited friends who live in the Hampton Roads area, so I got to see some…