New York City, Los Angeles, and other cities are changing their streetlights to LEDs, meaning these and cities around the country and world will soon look very different at night—both in person and on camera. (Personally, I think it's a good thing.)
In a long overdue but very welcome announcement, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced plans to extend PATH to Newark Airport.
The American Dream has been defined for several generations now as an idyllic home in the suburbs, with a car to get you everywhere you need to go. But that dream appears to be something more of a nightmare, with Americans' dependence on automobiles leading to increased rates of a variety of ailments, "all of which can impair the quality and length of life," writes Jane E. Brody at nytimes.com.
Were brutalist-style academic buildings really designed to thwart student riots and counterculture? Probably not, writes Slate's J. Bryan Lowder. The more likely reason: because they were cheap. University administrators were looking after the bottom line a little more than they were looking to quell student aspirations. Though, as any student who has taken classes in a cold, colorless, concrete brutalist building may tell you, they may have succeeded in doing that, too.
Salt Lake City, a relatively small metro area in the heart of the Rocky Mountains that is also the capital of one of the most conservative states in the country, shows that you don't have to be a large, top-tier global city to have great, visionary transit.
Forty maps that might not explain the world, but they're still pretty fascinating.
People move to the suburbs and cul-de-sacs because they perceive them as being safer. But are they really?
I've mentioned to my wife several times that I think the new One World Trade Center should have been built taller, and Slate's Brian Palmer agrees.
Los Angeles, the city that embodies America's love affair with the car (and auto-centric suburban development), may be kicking cars to the curb, reports Bloomberg News (via The Boston Globe). A cultural shift is underway in L.A., changing how Angelinos get around their city, with massive investment expanding subway, light-rail, and bus lines and doubling bike lanes.
Dustin Tyler Joyce 