Welcome to ryanjrichter.com! In case you don’t know me, I am the real Ryan J. Richter – accept no substitutions. Welcome to my next project, designed to showcase myself to the world, or at least the world-wide web. I am certainly not new to the internet, having established a transportation planning blog, Transport Nexus. This project…
I have not mentioned this before, but my favorite planning book in the last year has to be Human Transit. Authored by Jarrett Walker, the book is based on much of what he has been saying on his blog by the same name. Reading his interview with the Urban Land Institute on how developers need to…
So who watched the elections on Tuesday night? I was up until 1:30 AM watching the speeches. If you are an urban planner, it’s likely that you pulled the lever for Barack Obama. Because, sadly, the ideals and principles that planners hold dear are more often than not represented by the Democratic Party. And that…
It is the Old River Control Structure. This strays a little from the topics on this blog so let me explain. I just finished reading a fantastic book, The Control of Nature, by John McPhee. In the book, McPhee examines the human struggle to control nature and how incredibly difficult and perilous it can be….
So I will admit: I am out of my league when it comes to municipal finance. As a transportation planner for a major transit agency in Chicago, I am not expected to know much about municipal finance in my professional line of work. But I do know a bit about Strong Towns. And after recently…
In response to a comment in my last post, I’d like to discuss further how cities could affect transportation mode share, particularly as it concerns driving. In the U.S., every single city has a dominant auto share (drive alone and carpool) except for New York, Washington D.C., Boston and San Francisco. In Chicago, where I live,…