Aaron Donovan
Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.
Recent Posts
Transit-Oriented America, Part 4: The Trains
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This is Part 4 of a five-part series on U.S. rail travel. (Parts 1, 2 and 3.) Susan Donovan boarding Metro-North Train No. 737 on July 11, beginning an 8,000-mile rail journey at Grand Central Terminal. I always find it a little amazing that a handful of times a day, one can descend into Penn […]
Transit-Oriented America, Part 3: Three More Cities
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Part 3 in a series on rail and transit-only travel across the United States focuses on the final three cities of our journey. Part 2 looked at the first three and Part 1 presented an overview of our travel. San Francisco Fully restored streetcars, cable cars, buses with and without pantographs, submerged and at-grade light rail, a […]
Transit-Oriented America, Part 2: Three Cities
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This is the second installment in a five-part rail travel series that began yesterday. In between all that fun Amtrak travel I described yesterday, my wife Susan and I stopped on our honeymoon at six great cities with an eye toward observing their built environments and transportation systems (but mostly just being plain old tourists). […]
Transit-Oriented America, Part 1: Eight Thousand Miles
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My wife and I were married last month in Brooklyn. For our honeymoon, we wanted to see as many great American cities as we could. In 19 days of travel, we visited Chicago, Seattle, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans (and also stopped briefly in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia). How could two people as obsessed as […]
Book Review: Twenty-Three Years to Save the Planet
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When George Monbiot, the popular columnist for the UK’s Guardian newspaper, gets interested in something, he digs and digs until he’s found what he’s satisfied is the truth. Monbiot is interested in global warming, and presents in Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (U.S. Edition: South End Press, May 2007) a heavily footnoted 215-page brisk and compelling case for why […]
The Perfect Argument for Congestion Pricing
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The Staten Island Advance ran an article last Thursday about a "perfect storm" of crushing Staten Island-bound traffic on the Gowanus Expressway and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. To give you a sense of the frustrated tone of the article, it was entitled "21-Month Nightmare: Agency Offers Zero Solutions for Verrazano Lane Mess." Here’s how it began: […]
An Old Car Interred
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Bud & Walter Brewer Collection/Tulsa Historical Society, via The New York Times. Fifty years ago last Friday, the people of Tulsa, Oklahoma, assembled downtown and buried a brand new Plymouth Belvedere hardtop as a time capsule to be opened in 2007. The car, and $100 plus 50 years worth of accrued compound interest (a bit more than $700), would […]
PBS to America: Fight Global Warming, Drive an SUV
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In 2005, PBS came out with a widely promoted documentary narrated by Alanis Morissette called "Global Warming: The Signs and the Science." For people interested in learning more about the topic of global warming and climate change, this DVD is widely available. Being produced and distributed by a well known and highly respected organization, serves […]
Eyes on the Street: Grim, Immovable
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The BQE, as seen from Lorimer Street. All this talk about Robert Moses lately leads one to think about the Freeway Revolt.
New York City is the New Baltimore
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A couple of articles related to global warming got my attention recently. First, the Washington Post had an article about plant species common to North Carolina now finding their homes in the District of Columbia and environs. The article quotes the curator of the United States Botanical Garden as saying, "You could say D.C. is the new […]