Esquire Magazine Highlights Janette Sadik-Khan

Came across this link from one of the blogs I frequently read on Google Reader. I warn you right off though; it’s a long article. (Update: yep it was from the Planetizen network, their link is Here)

Many in the New Urbanism movement know of JSK, many in the cycling and walking communities know of her, and certainly in NYC, they know of her work. She is an international superstar, and is very popular with livable streets and transportation equity folks (along with Mr. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood)

So who is Janette Sadik-Khan, Esquire magazine (yes That Esquire) has a very good article looking at her in relation to another giant of NYC; Robert Moses.

The way she works to get around red tape and bring people on board, even if they were originally against her, can be a model for cities and DOT's nations wide. She has the facts to back up her claims, and to show naysayers that they really don't know what they are talking about, but without bluntly telling them off (as was Moses's style).

Her work is transforming NYC back to a future where people are king, not the car. She is the anti-Robert Moses and her timing couldn't have been better.

Take a read:
Janette Sadik-Khan - New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Profile

1000 hits and a link

Well this little ol blog hit 1000 visits today. I must say that’s no small feat, and while we may not be as popular as Ecovelo, I actually have a life that unfortunately means a great deal of work is put into things that are not related to this blog. I consider this a success though for sure, and it’s been good :)

I wonder if I can hit 2000 before the end of July...

Thanks :)

And now that link

Raise My Taxes, Please! Financing High Quality Public Transit Service Saves Me Money Overall | Planetizen Planetizen blog makes the case of raising taxes to finance good public transportation and the actual savings it can mean for each and every person served by said system. I agree that we should raise taxes and peg them to specific things, at least a percentage of the raise. The general fund is great but many politicians have proven that they cannot handle that type of responsibility. We save money when transportation is done right and we can get out of our cars. Or even when we switch to cycling everywhere! This is not the big bad government taking your cars, this is the government doing what its suppose to do, providing a service for all the public that is in everybody’s best interest in a lot of ways, and one major one is the thousands that could be saved when you switch to a good system. Many people have a knee jerk reaction to hating taxes in all forms, without taxes there would be no roads, no fire, no military, no public library, no schools... Without taxes, we would not truly live in a society. Done right they can make our life better and I for one welcome that.

It’s worth a read!

What our Food tells us about ourselves

In many ways we are actually what we eat and this article over at the blog for planetizen highlights some specific areas using GIS data that tell us a lot about ourselves as a country.
For thoes who don't know what Planetizen is, it is a:

public-interest information exchange provided by Urban Insight for the urban planning, design, and development community.

It has listings of jobs as well as books graduate schools and really lots of other very interesting and useful links and ideas for people in the planning field, especially people my age in undergraduate programs.

The blog entry I am highlighting was a quick mention of a new resource from the USDA, the Farm to school network, CDC, and the University of Illinois, Chicago(which has a good planning grad program actually) (among others). I was looking through the online Atlas, which gives an online visual representation to the data that was compiled by the group for this resource. It involves obesity percents by country, farmers markets, distance to food markets, restaurant expenditures, junk food taxes, percentage of fast food restaurants; big box stores and a whole lot more.

This data will be extremely interesting in raw form and put into a GIS database and manipulated to see more trends then the basic ones provided on the viewer. I was very excited to see this and I cant wait to have the time to take a look at the data and do some work normalizing data to population or land area to find some truly significant trends, as the article from ediblegeography (highlighted by planetizen) talks about looking at just diabetes rates, you can clearly see the significant proportion of the population in the south and south eastern US suffer from this health issue. Compare that to the %weight of fruits and vegetables eaten and you see that in this category the south does not consume as much as the west, east and west coast, is this a significant trend? I personally think so but you can look at the data and decide for yourself.

From planetizen via ediblegeography