Netflix binges.
Late-night Skype sessions with a bottle of wine.
Stress baking.
With gyms, playgrounds, + pools closed, #covid19 is set to cause another public health crisis: an epidemic of inactivity.
Fortunately, there's one outlet available.
In many, if not most, cities in North America (unlike some European cities, which can be much denser) public parks provide ample room for outdoor exercise, strolling, giving the kids fresh air.
Great North American urban parks were planned after epidemics of TB, cholera, and typhoid—often explicitly to provide city people with salubrious public space to escape crowded neighborhoods.
Some of the greatest were laid out by landscape architect (and civil war sanitary officer) Frederick Law Olmsted, among them Central Park, #Boston's Emerald Necklace, and #Montreal's Mont-Royal.
Today, for fear of contagion, some cities—among them #Halifax and #Toronto—are closing these resources, so crucial to physical and mental health, to the public.
cc: @JohnTory@jen_keesmaat
This is a mistake. There is an alternative, one that cities like #Portland (OR) have already taken.
Close the parks not to people—but to cars.
Parking lots and cross-park roads are what encourage gatherings and crowds.
cc: @val_plante@projetmontreal oregonlive.com/portland/2020/…
As the weather improves, some monitoring by park officials and police will no doubt be necessary, but...
Parks, accessed on foot and by bicycle, provide more than enough space for physical distancing. When people arrive by carload, then gather in parking lots, the danger begins.
An excess of caution is normal in such times.
But closing parks imposes another burden on citizens:
The burden of inactivity.
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First time on a new Siemens Venture train, leaving from #Quebec City, destination #Ottawa.
First impression… 🚅🧵
…it’s astonishingly spacious inside. But feels a bit more like a plane than a good ol’ @VIA_Rail train. (Mostly b/c of the jetliner-style seats).
Second impression: how can I be on a European-style train à grande vitesse while I’m still in Canada? (I mean, a couple of days in #Québec is disorienting enough. It always feels like waking up in St-Malo.)
The #Istanbul Metro has outsourced its fare collection, and the new ticket inspectors are very strict.
#Istanbul tried to use canine inspectors for a while, but they kept on getting distracted. Especially by the view of the Blue Mosque from the city ferries.
Cats stay focused.
Love of cats runs deep among Istanbullus.
There are cat-feeding stations in the metro, and cat hotels all over the city. (For real, photos from my last visit.)
By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin—a journey of 1,000 miles—exclusively by electric trolley.
🧵🚋
The tracks, and often the wires, extended deep into forest and farmland, making the railroads de facto intercity highways; after nightfall in the countryside, farmers would signal drivers to stop by burning a rag next to the track.
Streetcars and interurbans became the dominant mode of urban transportation in North America, carrying 11 billion passengers a year by the end of the First World War.