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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More from @grescoe

Oct 10
Hey, nobody says you can't make commuting fun, as well as easy!

In the #Netherlands, you can cycle to #Utrecht Overvecht station, drop your bike off, then ride the slide down to the platform. Multi-modal travel, Dutch-style.

🛝🧵
Here's another "transfer accelerator": a slide next to an escalator to the turnstiles of the #Budapest metro.

(My kids have been begging me to try this at our subway station for years.) Image
Here's the pop-up version. All ages allowed! Image
Image
Read 5 tweets
Sep 26
#Disney World has better transit than most US cities. Its 12-train-set monorail + 325 buses would make it the nation's 16th most ridden transit system.

People drive to a place where, for once, they don't have to drive everywhere.
Turns out that's exactly what Walt intended 🚝🧵 Image
As a child, Disney lived in Marceline, Missouri. It became his idea of Anytown, America: park with a Civil War gazebo, bustling and walkable Main Street, the Santa Fe depot. Most of all: trains, lots of trains. Image
After Fantasia bombed at the box-office, Disney became depressed, and retreated to his backyard in the Holmby Hills part of Los Angeles, where he built "Mickey Mouse Park," whose centerpiece was an oversized model railroad. Image
Read 9 tweets
Aug 31
1: #Tokyo metro map in 2D.
2: The same map in 3D.

🚇🌐🧵
Image
Image
1. Pittsburgh streetcar map in 2D.
2. Pittsburgh streetcar map in 3D.

(#2 is a 1910 model, submitted to Mayor's office, showing the actual elevation of streetcar lines in #Pittsburgh, that city of inclines.)

transitmap.net/relief-map-pit…Image
Image
1. Map of Los Angeles streetcar/interurban lines.
2. Relief map of same LA lines (1920).

(Transit relief maps are as rare as they are wonderful.) Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
Aug 12
This is a map of western part of the network of just one Canadian passenger railway in 1955.

You could really go a lot of places by train then.

And fast: 71 hours, 10 minutes from #Montreal to #Vancouver. (It's 94 hours, if you're lucky, from Toronto to Vancouver today.)
🛤️🧵 Image
There were two express trains across the country that year: The Canadian (CP) and the Super Continental, run by Canadian National Railways, the "People's Road." Image
Your freedom of movement was impressive, especially if you lived in eastern Canada. From Montreal, you could go to Chicago via Detroit; you could ride from Quebec City to Boston; Atlantic Canada was served by a very dense network of tracks. Image
Read 7 tweets
Aug 6
Great-grandfather: allowed to walk 6 miles on his own Grandfather: could walk 1 mile
Mother: could walk a half mile
Son: could walk 300 yards (to end of street).
What happened? *Cars* happened.

A flood of traffic shrunk the geography of play and free-roaming.

🧵 Image
(Thanks to Shrinking geography of childhood in UK, thnx to @timrgill and @drwilliambird for the research and graphics.)

What's the solution? One way forward—play streets.

The UK once had 700 of them; closed to traffic, but open to kids.

Image
Image
Image
@timrgill @drwilliambird A century ago, Play Streets were common in NYC, closed to cars by order of the police. Image
Read 7 tweets
Aug 5
This #Paris métro station is a steampunk masterpiece.

Designed by Belgian comics artist François Schuiten, to call to mind one of Jules Verne's submarines or airships.

Where else can you find secrets of the métro?

🗼🚇🧵 Image
Look out for the original édicules, designed by Art Nouveau master Guimard
This one's at Abbesses métro station, deepest in the city, in Montmartre.
Pro tip: contrôleurs like to trap people at the bottom or the top of the spiral staircase, so make sure you've paid your fare! Image
Watch out for "stations fantômes," now closed, but which you can see flashing past on some lines. I got to visit St. Martin, which still has beautiful tile ads from the 1950s. Image
Read 11 tweets

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