An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
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MOTORDOM IN MEXICO
All the usual arguments about the impact of the auto, plus the equity argument (only 30 percent of Mexicans drive but everyone pays for the subsidies).
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The Mexican office of the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) produced this film – in Spanish with English subtitles.
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WHEN A PARKING LOT IS SO MUCH MORE
An opinion piece in the NY Times by Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
… the modern surface parking lot is ripe for transformation. …
The ubiquity of parking lots has also led to an overlooked social dimension: In the United States, parking lots may be the most regularly used outdoor space. … Better parking lots would embrace and expand this role. Already, many lots provide space for farmers’ markets, spontaneous games of street hockey, tailgating, even teenagers’ illicit nighttime parties. …
Planned with greater intent, parking lots could actually become significant public spaces, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks or plazas. …
The parking lot also has an underutilized architectural function. A parking lot is the first part of a space you visit or live next to. It is typically the gateway through which dwellers, customers, visitors or employees pass before they enter a building. … Yet parking lots are rarely designed with this function in mind. When they are, the effect is stunning. For instance, the parking lot at the Dia art museum in Beacon, N.Y.,…
For something that occupies such a vast amount of land and is used on a daily basis by so many people, the parking lot should receive more attention than it has. We need to ask: what can a parking lot be?
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KILLER COMMUTE, THE POSTER
Jen Rhee, a PT reader who came across us “while searching for bloggers that have talked about the traffic in LA,” submits a poster that she and her classmates worked on to capture a slew of data and put it all in one graphically interesting place. For instance:
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And this:
Lots more with these came from – here.
