Art Deco, taking many cues from fascist architecture and graphic design, who in turn was referencing early Roman design.
Archive for November, 2007
Many people are going to be traveling this holiday season. The Sun-Sentinel and the Miami Herald both point out that airports will be crowded and parking scarce for the Thanksgiving travel days. They offer tips like “get a ride,” but they neglect to offer the best suggestion to avoid both the parking issues and the vehicle traffic in the terminal: Tri-Rail. Parking is free at Tri-Rail stations, so put what you would have paid at the airport towards your Tri-Rail ticket and enjoy your gas savings as you zip along towards any of the three major
Once you get to the appropriate station, just hop on a connecting bus and head over to the airport. The connections take anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes to get from the train station to the airport terminal, so don’t forget to add in a bit of extra time. If you’re going to FLL or MIA, Tri-Rail provides the free shuttle bus to the airport. If you’re going to Palm Beach International, you’re stuck using Palm Tran routes 40 or 44, but it’s still free with the Tri-Rail ticket.
We all know it would be better if Tri-Rail consistently ran on time and you didn’t have any delays there. And it would be better still if Tri-Rail or even Metrorail went straight to the airport terminal without bus transfers. (We are all patiently awaiting the
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Gabriel- I can’t help myself but I have some serious issues with this article which ran in the Sun-Sentinel yesterday listing parking at “South Florida’s” Airports. What’s missing? MIA. Since when is MIA not considered a South Florida airport? Just another instance of the Sun-Sentinel segregating Miami from South Florida (Broward and Palm Beach) a serious nomenclature issue which needs to be resolved and shows the confusion caused by creating so many municipalities within the greater Miami region…
Having been a citizen of Miami for nearly three weeks now, it has become increasingly clear to me how vital the work at transitmiami.com truly is. As with all things Miami, it seems that many of the elements that make Miami so wonderful are in constant battle with the elements that hamper its greatness. The realities of traffic, congestion, infrastructure, public transportation and the reliance and love affair with the automobile are a major burden. The fallout of this reality is not limited to, but includes-after just a few week- significant limits the potential for productivity, impacts on the environment, and an unfortunate blanket of struggle over daily life. I for one, as I believe for certain many concerned Miamians do as well, have been trying to find alternative solutions, however, there is little help in place, with woefully inadequate public transport options. It will require nothing less than getting very creative. Aquatic mass transport, in this oasis of waterways is perhaps, a logical good step. More will need to be done than to leave it to the one man solution illustrated here, however, zero impact on the environment is a good thing.Too often our society seems to overlook one of our most important modes of transportation- our own two legs. A new website, Walk Score, aims to change our dependence back to our own legs for personal mobility and seeks to help homebuyers find homes with many destinations within walking distance.
The premise is simple, you enter an address and the system characterizes the neighborhood on a 0-100 scale based on how many destinations are within a reasonable (less than 1 mile) walking distance. Essentially any ranking below 25 is is impossible to walk around while scores above 90 signify dense easily accessible neighborhoods. The website takes schools, restaurants, grocery stores, shops, parks, and libraries among other items into consideration when calculating the neighborhoods walk score.
Walk score allows people to quickly find homes in areas where car ownership let alone full dependence on a vehicle is not a requirement. In playing around with the program for a little while you’ll quickly see the disparity between automobile based/designed sprawl areas and true urban neighborhoods. The importance of walking to destinations daily cannot be emphasized enough from a planning perspective or as new research shows as a matter of your health.
President Bush’s Crawford Ranch somehow attained the dubious zero rating. Let us know how your neighborhood compares…
Can anyone guess where this (like always, without cheating)?
Photo: Flickr.com
Hills discouraging cyclists from hitting the streets? Not in Trondheim, Norway where the first Bicycle escalator has been in use since 1993 providing over 220,000 cyclists safe passage up the 130 meter ride:
Over the coming weeks, months perhaps, we here at TransitMiami will be working hard to reshape and rework the website with new content and a new message. We plan on using your feedback to shape the site in a new direction and by bringing you more of the type of content you’d like to see. We’d like to hear from you for some insight on what we can do to make this site better for you, our readers. Leave us a message, give us a grade on the left sidebar, or email us with your more personal thoughts (movemiami@gmail.com)…
We are also working on finally forging some relationships with the agencies which matter most in Miami. My e-mails to MDT director Harpal Kapoor have thus far fallen on deaf ears (blind eyes, perhaps?) We’d like to establish ourselves as a bigger voice in the community for transit/planning advocacy and plan on doing so with or without the help of the agencies responsible for much of our planning problems thus far (FDOT, MPO, MDT, BCT, etc…)
When a Bus and SUV collide, the SUV is carrying more passengers than the Bus…
The new Freitag flagship store in Zurich’s western developing area, made of seventeen used freight containers stacked together.
The Ontario Professional Planners Institute (OPPI) recently came out with a report that, like so many other reports the last few years, illustrates the relationship between sprawl and obesity. The report argues that if planners are to reverse this crisis, they’ll need to find ways to get people out of cars and auto-centric communities and into denser, mixed-use neighborhoods where things are closer together. From the Toronto Star:
There’s no question there’s a connection between obesity, diabetes and heart-related diseases and the built environment, specifically sprawl, said co-author George McKibbon. Air quality is an issue, too, especially for those who live near highways. We also found that if you’re in a car four to five hours a day, social cohesion is at risk.
The report’s authors go on to say:
Good urban form is functional, economically and environmentally sustainable, and liveable, in a way that promotes public health. These communities offer a variety of housing options, facilities and open-space systems. They are walkable, cyclable, and include transit-oriented development, and promote alternatives to the single occupancy vehicle.
The report takes a close look at the issue of childhood obesity and how patterns of large, spread out schools have contributed by not allowing kids to walk to school. According to OPPI traffic engineer, Nick Poulos, simply by letting kids walk to and from school, we’d be healthier, pollution would be reduced, and neighborhood traffic would be reduced by 15 to 20 percent.
This is just one more reason why Miami needs to become denser and more transit-oriented. Do you know how much money per year is spent on obesity-related illness in the U.S. right now? Over $100 billion, including $60+ billion in direct medical costs and $50+ billion in lost productivity. That, my friends, is the very definition of a health and spending crisis.
You are where you live — think about it.
Can anybody guess where this is (without cheating)?
Photo: thomas_hobbs flickr
A quick reminder for anyone in Broward county: tonight there is another public meeting/summit to discuss your transit concerns. Head to the South Regional/BCC Library, 7300 Pines Blvd. in Pembroke Pines from 6:30 to 8:30 PM. Sorry about the last minute notice, but go if you have the chance!
Add Rome to the growing number of international cities implementing bike sharing programs. Details are currently sparse, but the Roman version will kick off with a pilot program, which will include 250 bikes at 22 stations throughout the city’s historic center. If (when) fully implemented, the Roman program will boast approximately 20,000 bikes citywide, similar to Paris’ Velib program. Also like Paris, Rome has hired an advertising giant, Cemusa, to set up the system.
Miami, the writing is on the wall. I still challenge the City of Miami Beach to at least pursue a pilot bike sharing program for a few months, even if it’s just confined to South Beach. I am so confident the program would prove to be wildly successful, even without a high level of bicycle infrastructure (bike lanes, bike parking, traffic calming, etc) installed yet. This is the time of year to introduce such a program as well, given the phenomenal weather and massive influx of tourists (see: traffic).
Photo: Walter Parenteau’s Flickr
The South Florida International Auto Show kicked off this past Friday. GM unveiled a Hybrid Cadillac Escalade with much fanfare and was showered with awards from Sobre Ruedas (including “Best Vehicle of the Year” for the 2008 Chevy Malibu, which has a hybrid option). We won’t trouble you with too many car details, but the important thing was the chance to have a few words with Troy Clarke, president of GM North America. He outlined the goal of GM’s hybrid strategy: to electrify the car (presumably with plug-in hybrids) in order to allow a distribution network to be put in place before another all-electric vehicle is released. Quite the turnaround from their previous electric car exploits.Since GM sponsored the winning vehicle of the DARPA Urban Challenge, we asked whether they would incorporate any technology from the race into future cars. Clarke said the point of sponsoring Carnegie Mellon was indeed to look at the technology. He then focused on connected vehicles that communicate with each other for safety and network to the driver’s home to deliver things like music. He steered away from the subject of communicating with infrastructure like the road itself and focused on cars communicating with cars. GM is a car manufacturer, not a road builder, so vehicle infrastructure integration may have to be pushed by someone else.
Clarke also highlighted the current connectivity option that is supposed to become standard in all GM products: On-Star. With features like the Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, the system is already controlling many basic operations of the car. He touted the On-Star system as their current offering of a connected vehicle. Surprisingly, he made no mention of adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, or other active safety features available in luxury GM models. He did remind us that most such technology begins life in luxury cars and filters down to the others once it has been proven good on the market.
It will be a long time before production vehicles achieve full automation. Until that time, On-Star and active safety systems are computerizing things and leaving in the human interaction ingredient. Looking at the theft slowdown feature, it seems like cars would be able to slowdown and stop at red lights if a few more controls were added; but stolen vehicles are only getting stopped at the command of an On-Star operator. That’s nothing more than remote control—the automation is yet to come. We have to have the computer before we have the artificial intelligence, so their progress with On-Star is at least a step in the right direction. Hopefully, just as with the hybrid strategy, they can get the network and the technology in place and then throw in full automation.
Energy and oil is the dominant theme this week, however the articles about the Everglades and affordable housing in Miami are very troubling.
- NY Times: Efforts to save the everglades are faltering
- Newsday: Gas prices affecting community, car use
- NY Times: Rising demand for oil provokes new energy crisis
- KITV Honolulu: Gas prices have reached $5 per gallon in parts of Cali
- Miami Herald: Housing crunch (lack of affordable housing) hitting low-income residents hard
- NY Times: High gas prices and long commutes having an impact on the sprawl market
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