Matt Yglesias

My Kind of Book

Sometimes the publishing house PR people do a good job of deciding who needs review copies of what, and thus I recently opened up a package to discover My Kind of Transit My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but in the interests of rewarding those who send me books I’m actually interested in, why not offer you some PR copy:

In America’s car-dominated landscape, public transit has long played second fiddle, but rising gasoline prices and the global warming crisis point to a need for alternative means of transportation. Darrin Nordahl sets the stage for these efforts by proposing that the experience of public transit and the quality of the ride are pivotal to the success of public transit.

My Kind of Transit explores America’s most beloved transit systems and how they work. From San Francisco’s cable cars to Pittsburgh’s funiculars to the streetcars of New Orleans, Nordahl recounts a transportation history of both short-sighted planning and visionary policies, and reveals that current American transit systems contain many key elements for successfully expanding public transport. My Kind of Transit explains the characteristics of ideal transit, or “passenger enrichment,” such as transit vehicles that offer views of the surrounding landscape and systems that enable diverse peoples to interact.

Successful public transport must be a uniquely enjoyable experience for riders, My Kind of Transit contends, and it offers a new vision of civic engagement that occurs when we step out of our cars and onto the train.

At first glance, I do think that this sort of issue is oftentimes under-appreciated. Streetcar systems have some substantial advantages over buses. But I don’t think that reciting those advantages, in a technical sense, fully captures the difference. Something like the Barcelona Tram is cool and futuristic, and the MetroBus in DC is not. On some level, it’s just impossible for a bus to replicate that—no bus can ever be as quiet or smooth. But DC’s Circulator bus actually does a pretty good job of capturing some of that “cool and futuristic” appeal while running alongside WMATA’s generally unappealing main bus service.

Dunkin Coffee

Megan McArdle writes:

One of the first things you encounter when you read personal finance gurus like Dave Ramsey or Suze Orman is the concept of the “latte factor”–the surprising way that little luxury purchases add up. A Starbucks latte a day is well over $1000 a year, which sounds less like an “affordable luxury” than a sizeable chunk of after-tax income for many, even most, of the people who buy them. When Dunkin Donuts is selling for less, and your office is giving it away for free, it seems like a relatively painless way to shore up your finances.

Probably. The real reason I quoted that, though, was that ever since I realized that the Dunkin Donuts outlets that are surprisingly ubiquitous in Barcelona are branded as “Dunkin Coffee” I’ve been waiting for a pretext to blog about this fact:

For whatever reason, I find the subtle differences embedded within the uniformity of fast food chains sort of fascinating.

Pretty Pictures

By Matthew Yglesias

The guest bloggers are doing great work, but seem unfamiliar with the idea that the blog looks better when some images are put into the posts. Hence, a photo of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church:

Cool building. My guess is that this kind of construction wouldn’t meet the land use regulations of your typical city—such tall spires, and no underground parking!—and yet how many cities would actually be worse off if they featured a landmark work of architecture?

Barcelona Bicycle Policy

By Matthew Yglesias

The weather’s pretty soggy in Barcelona this week, but it still looks to be a pretty solid bicycling town. One feature that I wish more American cities has is bike lanes that are actually separated from the flow of traffic so that they can be used for bicycling rather than as double-parking lanes:

They also have a bike sharing service called “Bicing” that appears to use identical infrastructure to our smaller SmartBike DC program in Washington:

It occurs to me every time I see a bike share service in another city that it would do a lot to extend the utility of these things if there were some kind of reciprocity agreement in place between different bike sharing cities. I’m a SmartBikeDC member, but I rarely use it because like most people inclined to get around town on a bike I own a bike and usually ride that. It’s when I’m not in DC that I really want to use a bike share.