'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

New blogging gig on urban transportation systems

I have a new little blogging gig-- a periodic feature called "Eyes on the Street" over at The City Fix, which is a blog published by the Washington DC-based World Resources Institute on Exploring Sustainable Solutions To The Problems of Urban Mobility.

While I was working on my new book over the summer, it became clear to me that the emergence of the climate change challenge is one of the two or three big issues in world politics that the US political class has been largely "out to lunch" over, over the past 4-5 years, because of the country's quite understandable focus on developments in Iraq.

No, I'm not going to stop writing about Iraq or any of the other issues I've been dealing with here at JWN. But I am a long-time train-freak; and in general I like and value urban public transportation systems, because of the tenor and context they give to public life.

Ethan Arpi, the editor of TCF, suggested the name for my little feature there as a tribute to the great American/Canadian urbanist Jane Jacobs, who argued in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities that:

A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe. But how does this work, really? And what makes a city street well used or shunned? ... A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:

First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space...

Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street...

And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers...

One of my other big goals doing this new gig is to try to wake more Americans up to the idea that not having a car can be a quality-of-life enhancement, rather than its opposite. This is, of course, particularly the case in well-planned cities.

Finally, a small confession. I have always regretted a little that I didn't become an engineer or city planner. Or maybe an architect. So this way I get to indulge in a little bit of urban criticism, at least... (I'm writing this from Boston, where I've already planned out my subway-plus-walking routes for the next few days.)