Over much of the past year I have had a real education in the power of community organizing around an idea or a vision. It started with my campaign running for president of the Jefferson Park Neighborhood Association. I had only recently joined in January 2015. I joined because I didn’t understand the opposition that…
I can’t recommend reading Alex Pareene’s article enough on why mass transit is doomed. Sure, it’s true that politicians don’t use it. Let’s put this into a Chicago context. How often do you think Rahm Emanuel rides the CTA, despite living a couple of blocks from the Montrose Brown Line? What about Pat Quinn, who could…
As you have no doubt heard by now, the federal government has shutdown. So for those in the transportation planning community what does this mean? In Chicago, my own agency will be running normal schedules with no direct impacts to riders due to the shutdown. However, we might have a few less riders because… Chicago…
Today’s Republican Party has some serious challenges facing it. The demographics are not in its favor. It’s leaned perhaps too far to the right. It does not seem to have a coherent governing philosophy. It has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. So how does the party right the…
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…
Almost 2 weeks ago I responded to a Streetsblog article that had a list of seven questions to ask as the transportation bill conference committee that was underway. I was unhappy with the questions in the article and felt that they were more beltway politics than transportation policy questions. Tanya Snyder, Streetsblog’s Capitol Hill editor, was…