I grew up in Tel Aviv and Singapore, and now am in the process of moving from grad school in New York to a job in Providence. I’m a pure mathematician, with a side interest in urbanism and mass transit that is entirely unrelated to my work. Because I’ve lived a large majority of my life outside the US, I tend to be skeptical of American exceptionalist (or New York exceptionalist) arguments and prefer cross-national comparisons to find the best way to run transportation.
My address is alonNOSPAM_levy1@yahoo.com.
I work for the national nonprofit Reconnecting America. We follow news and events relating to transit-oriented development with our Tracks email newsletter and our Half-Mile Circles blog.
Your post “High Costs Should not be an Excuse to Downgrade Projects” was included in the most recent Tracks newsletter.
We are putting together a list of people who would like to receive news about our efforts. Can we add your name and address?
More about Reconnecting America:
At Reconnecting America, we help transform promising ideas into thriving communities – where transportation choices make it easy to get from place to place, where businesses flourish, and where people from all walks of life can afford to live, work and visit.
Reconnecting America provides both the public and private sectors with an impartial, fact-based perspective on development-oriented transit and transit-oriented development, and seeks to reinvent the planning and delivery system for building regions and communities around transit and walking rather than solely around the automobile.
Our website is http://www.reconnectingamerica.org or http://www.ctod.org
John Hughes
Communications Manager
Reconnecting America
Goodness, if only I had known the existence of this blog, whose back catalog will give me many hours of delightful [and somewhat less political reading]. You seem to have an incredible understanding of the problems facing urban and transit development, however, like the math you study, I’m too undereducated to understand how little I’ve
understood about the topic.
It doesn’t hurt that you’ve been blessed to live in Manhattan, and I can only admire the outside perspective from Florida, where infrastructure is an afterthought because the land is cheap, the lawns are big, and everyone is too lazy but too drive.
Brilliant piece; I want to use it in our newsletter Destination:Freeedom.
We are the National Corridors Initiative, founded in 1989 to negotiate the release of the funds needed to complete the electrification the Northeast Corridor; our bi-partisan group was invited to the White House in 1990 and over three visits to the Bush I Office of Management and Budget 1990-1991 secured the release of $125 million authorized by Congress under President Jimmy Carter but blocked by the Reagan and Bush White Houses.
We succeeded, and the funds were released; the second year we got $155 million; the third $168 million, and so on until the project was completed in 1999, allowing 3 and 1/2 hour rail service Boston-New York, down from the previous 5-6. If you live in Providence then you know that Rhode Island’s Governor is Lincoln Chafee; he was my first executive director 23 years ago and is a strong rail advocate.
Reconnecting America was founded as The Great American Station Foundation by my Board member and later Chairman, and friend, John Robert Smith, who now heads it up as President (since 2010, I believe).
There are resources out there to win this war, but they must be coordinated and VOCAL. Welcome to the battle.
By the way, American Exceptionalism is real. It is an attitude not of smug superiority. Rather, it is a reservoir of inner strength, which allows us as a nation to re-invent ourselves, such as doing things like electing an African-American President who has the middle name Hussein, just seven years after people with very similar names blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and vowed to kill us all.
Jim RePass
Chairman and CEO
The National Corridors Initiative
jprepass@gmail.com
617-269-5478
I live in New York, but am about to move to Providence. I’m kind of iffy about the investments made in the 1990s – the electrification and upgrades of the tracks north of New Haven were precious, but the Acela equipment is substandard, thanks to Congressional pressure to make money fast and FRA meddling with the standards.
The American exceptionalism I’m talking about is not an inner strength; it’s a not invented here attitude, preventing American transit agencies from learning about best practices abroad. Every country has this, but because Japan and Europe are already far ahead of the US in transit, their NIH issues aren’t as pressing. In my previous blog life, I did talk about Europe’s NIH issue with racism, but when it comes to transportation, there’s practically no local expertise in the US. The US is not reinventing itself; it’s doing infrastructure as poorly as ever.
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I went to college in Providence, so i would be interested to hear what you have to say about their transportation system, such as it is. It is not as flat as other cities, like New York or Philadelphia, so it is not as easily bike-able, but still not unfriendly terrain to bikes.
Question for Alon: you’re a pure mathematician–does that mean that all this transit analysis is done on the side? This isn’t your job? If not, WOW, you’ve always had great analysis on transit topics; analysis that is pretty grounded in fact and very deep (certainly not something you could do quickly). Well done.
Agreed on your American “not invented here” attitude. As a countryman who has traveled to many foreign countries, it is easy to be objective about my own country, as I can see it clearly through the eyes of people from elsewhere. I’m preparing to embark on a multi-city photo shoot of TOD’s around USA and Europe with emphasis on best-practices high-quality transit design. Most of that is in Europe and I’m looking to de-emphasize location and instead point out through before-and-after photoshop manipulations how various American cities can be enhanced. I want to stop resistance to sensible planning before it starts by presenting ideas by way of captivating imagery and compelling narrative.