Car Culture

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:

Artist Michel de Broin removed the engine, suspension, transmission and electrical system from his 1986 Buick Regal. He then equipped it with 4 independent pedal and gear mechanisms transforming his old Buick into the "Self Propulsion Car." De Broin's piece was shown here in New York City back in 2005 at an Exit Art exhibition entitled "Traffic".

As usual, traffic was heavy on 125th Street outside the Alhambra Ballroom in central Harlem, Wednesday evening, where the Department of Transportation held its fourth of seven planned workshops to discuss parking strategies in neighborhoods bordering the City's proposed congestion pricing zone.

Grim picture: A screenshot from the CBS Channel 2 web site.

Apparently parallel parking doesn't count for much in the NASCAR leader standings. Or maybe it does and that's why Elliott Sadler, the driver of car #19, angle-parked across the Sixth Avenue bike lane in Midtown this morning, is currently ranked 25th. (ADD: I just noticed that Elliott is also parked in front of a fire hydrant).