Car Culture

Speaking of the upcoming second round of citywide parking workshops, the summary of Round 1 is now online at the Department of Transportation's web site. To get a sense of why it's so essential for non-car owners and livable streets advocates to attend the second round of parking workshops (especially in Queens), download the summary memorandum.

The whole hour is well worth watching, but here are some highlights:

The much-hyped and much-criticized Tata Nano, a car that will hit the Indian market retailing for a mere 100,000 rupees -- the equivalent of $2,500 -- got a perplexing nod of approval from the Economist newsmagazine last week:

Last year rapper Common signed with Lincoln as the "new face" of its Navigator SUV. The first TV spot of the campaign debuted in November on NBC's Sunday night NFL broadcast, and continues in heavy rotation during the playoffs. In the ad, shot in Chicago, Common reflects on his roots in the Windy City, his voiceover set to a modern urban beat as he glides a shiny black Nav through unobstructed streets.

Through circumstances too convoluted to go into here, I found myself on a huge cruise ship over the holiday break, bound for the Eastern Caribbean. Our first port of call was San Juan, Puerto Rico, which is much the same as Aaron Naparstek left it two years ago:

This scarifying nine-minute peek into an auto-enslaved Disney world of the future, as seen from 1958, is as amazing for what it gets right (like urban sprawl) as much as what is laughably off the mark (like urban sprawl = Utopia).

What we wear or don't wear -- fashion, that is -- tells a lot about how we live, including how we get around.

Automobile crashes are the number one killer of teenagers in the United States, with nearly 6,000 deaths a year for the past decade, and more than 300,000 injuries annually. Yet millions of parents continue to let their kids drive unsupervised, many of them counting on God and government to keep them safe.

If you're a New York City transportation policy geek but you've had enough of congestion pricing realpolitik and can't bear to sit through another Kathy Wylde vs. Walter McCaffrey slugfest, Monday evening's New School panel may be just the ticket. Equal Tolls, Unequal Access? Congestion Pricing and Its Historical Antecedents brings together an unusual group of academic experts and urban design practitioners to examine urban boundary-making through the ages. New School professor Gustav Peebles has written the following article for Streetsblog: