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98 articles

A construction staging area and a sidewalk: never a healthy pairing, but sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease.

November 7, 2019 No Comments

For most of the 21st century, and certainly in the last ten years (since the Great Depression) the majority of American downtowns have enjoyed a reinvestment no longer measured merely in spruced-up old façades. The cranes, dozers and other construction equipment are all the evidence one needs. People are returning to central business districts, in

Angled parking in Oregon: a solution in search of a problem?

May 15, 2019 8 Comments

The affable little city of Corvallis (approximate population of 55,000) has a lot of things going for it: a large and prominent university (Oregon State); a downtown within walking distance of the big school, replete with locally owned retail (a real oddity in 2019!); a fortuitous location along the state’s prominent Willamette River and only

Contraflow: when compared to people or cars, salmon still have it the toughest.

April 26, 2019 7 Comments

It’s hard not to wonder if there are unspoken rules that explain why well-moving vehicular traffic operates in much the same configuration as human crowds in a congested, spatially constrained setting. Which came first? Well, humans/pedestrians obviously. But vehicular motion remains subject to numerous regulations in the interest of safety for pedestrians and other vehicles.

Portland: the apex of bike-friendliness—by American standards.

November 18, 2018 2 Comments

During my first visit to the West Coast in many, many years, I encountered the following sight on an unseasonably cold Friday morning in the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood of Portland. It might not seem terribly striking to readers of this blog from other countries—just a normal street scene. And even Americans may see nothing

Steering with stanchions: keeping the corners safe in the Christmas City.

October 29, 2018 18 Comments

For those of us who care about this sort of thing (the precious few), it’s become increasingly obvious that bollards have become a significant element of the average streetscape. We owe some of this, no doubt, to the unfortunate reality of an escalating collective fear of terrorist attacks in the form of vehicle ramming, either

Drive-thru Subway: a contradiction in transit…and in sandwiches.

May 30, 2018 16 Comments

The remote and rapidly depopulating town of Welch, West Virginia offers a handful of surprises: a remarkably intact and densely-built downtown with a fair share of four, five and even six-story buildings; a functioning Episcopal church; and a three-screen movie theater.But since I’m far more intrigued by the banal, the one image that really struck

Two lanes diverge on a road, and I took the time to blog about it.

March 31, 2018 15 Comments

Generally, when I stumble across an unusual bit of infrastructure, I can figure out what’s gong on after some careful scrutiny. But bicycle and pedestrian markings have gotten so variegated and complicated that, more often than not, I’m left scratching my head. I pondered the rationale for a weird crosswalk in Baltimore a few months

Green street in Seattle: over the long term, will it put the City in the red?

January 27, 2018 16 Comments

By this point, the term “green building” has more or less entered common parlance: even if a sizable majority of people don’t know exactly what it entails, they can form a reasonably well-educated guess from the adjective. And, extending those contextual cues, they can speculate with similar accuracy on “green design”, since it loosely applies

Let’s detour to Northampton. Now orange you glad you did?

January 11, 2018 7 Comments

At this time in 2018—nearing the point when “Happy New Year” seems like a stale salutation—I have yet to post a blog article, and this one is undeniably dinky. But it’s not for lack of ideas or writing activity on my part. Lengthier, more ambitious articles are underway and will emerge in the weeks and

In Central Falls, a strip mall is still salvation.

November 30, 2017 5 Comments

Even in the best of times, the opening of a new strip mall rarely if ever gets anyone’s pulses racing. This one, on the southern boundary of Central Falls, Rhode Island, a suburb of nearby Providence, is no different.The only characteristic that distinguishes this is a certain three-letter adjective that appears in my first sentence—a word

In Central Falls, a strip mall is still salvation.

November 30, 2017 5 Comments

Even in the best of times, the opening of a new strip mall rarely if ever gets anyone’s pulses racing. This one, on the southern boundary of Central Falls, Rhode Island, a suburb of