We live our lives; we do the best we can. We make personal choices, but those choices are shaped by our surroundings the way the landscape shapes the paths we follow. And our surroundings are shaped by a web of inter-connected systems including transportation, food, energy, manufacturing, communications, markets, and more. These systems make some choices easy and others extremely difficult — even to the point of shaping our assumptions about what is possible and what we don’t even bother thinking about.
This blog explores how our transportation system and built environment can be better structured to improve our lives, health, and planet – to make it easier to earn a living, buy our necessities, stay well, participate in supportive families and communities, be active citizens, be good stewards of our fragile ecosystem, leave our children a better world than we inherited, be creative and enjoy ourselves throughout the life cycle.
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Steven E. Miller
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Steve Miller's Blog Musings on transportation, health, and livable communities
http://blog.livablestreets.info/
I wear a bike helmet. Always. Every time I get on a bike. I don’t think that the helmet will keep me from having an accident, just that it will protect me from serious head injury if I do. It’s likely that people who cycle like I do – regular commuters with enough experience and [...]
Keep It Simple. Focus. You can’t walk and tie your shoes at the same time. Projects are much easier to manage, and it is easier to hold project managers accountable, if there is a single and explicit goal. Transparency is vital to maintain public trust in government, and it is best accomplished
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What will save the MBTA – and our region – from the disastrous effects of proposed service reductions and price increases? Over the past few years, in response to the demand for “reform before revenue,” innovative T leadership has significantly improved efficiency, squeezed more out of available re
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The Cambridge City Council recently passed a home rule petition (HB3852) asking the state Legislature to give it the authority to significantly increase the penalties to be paid by pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists for a wide variety of road violations. Jaywalking fines would increase from $1 t
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A while ago, following the fatal collapse of some ceiling panels in the Big Dig tunnels, Commonwealth magazine published interviews with local pundits about what went wrong with the management and public relations aspects of the gargantuan, 30-year project. Some of the issues they raise include the
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“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” “I should have called it Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost The two most important things about relatives, my mother used to say, are that you don’t get to choose them [...]
After years of effort, instead of holes in the sidewalk and pavement through which you could see the river below, the BU Bridge now has solid surfaces and (drum roll….) bike lanes! It is a major victory for the Better Bridges campaign. True: the bridge isn’t any wider than it was before, so the sid
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It’s both a cliché and a powerful insight to remember that the solution you come up with depends on which problem you are trying to solve. A road builder sees problems in terms of the need for movement – usually meaning car capacity – and comes up the road expansion solutions. A transportation pla
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This post was meant to be about three of the old highways now falling down and the increasingly bitter policy disagreements within nearby communities over what to do about it. But as I thought more about these debates, it became clear that a significant secondary theme is that so few people trust t
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Q: Why do people live in cities? A: Because that’s where all the other people are. It’s really wonderful that Mayor Menino has a special group of “urban mechanics” finding ways to put new information technologies to work for the city. Technology is very cool. And fun. And useful. And has
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