The Blog

For Alon Levy, the Future Is Not Retro, but It Might Still Surprise

“The Future is not Retro,” declares a recent Pedestrian Observation post that has been my metaphorical pea under the mattress for the last several weeks. Its tone is so bombastic and cavalier that the piece is difficult to take entirely seriously—much like another Alon Levy hot take, “The NTSB Wants American Trains to Be Less Safe,” or that infamous Market...

Movie Review: Moana (2016) Was Quintessential Late-Stage Disney

So far, 2019 has seen the release of the new Dumbo, the new Aladdin, and the new Lion King—and a new Mulan, by the way, is in the works, too. All-mighty Disney used to inspire kids to sing about the “circle of life”; now they’ve got critics jeering cynically about the “circle of franchise reboots.” Et...

Movie Review: John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

On the night I opened my browser to buy a ticket to see John Wick: Chapter 3, I had never actually seen any of the John Wick films before. Fortunately, the premise of this sequel-to-a-sequel isn’t terribly complicated: John Wick himself (Keanu Reeves) is a professional assassin who has run afoul of the High Table, a world-spanning secret society...

Walking with Southeast Bakersfield on MLK Jr. Day

Last week, I swung by the Wilson Library to attend Bakersfield’s 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. Day march. To me, it was a march that lacked bite, because the adjectives I would use to describe that event—docile, tame, by-the-book, ordered—are not words I would normally associate with a march for civil rights. Yet how else would I describe a civil...

So You Want to Fix Your City

A contemporary review of The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biographical masterpiece.

Big City, USA, in 2019—where the traffic doesn’t move at rush hour, the roads are full of potholes, the mass transit is useless, and the schools and parks are overcrowded and falling apart—and despite all of that, the rent is still too damn high.

Some say the modern...

Debunking the Urbanist Fairy Tale

Put succinctly, urbanism is the belief that we can fix everything wrong with our cities by building them upward instead of outward, shunning suburbs, homesteads, and cars for row homes, bike lanes, and public transit.

The case goes something like this: Climate change? Density reduces the land footprint of cities and the amount of resources consumed by their residents. Traffic...

Transit Advocacy Is Not Urbanism

It’s not too often I attempt to write a justification for my existence, but here goes.

Few people in Austin are willing to talk about public transportation right now, which seems odd given the major developments in Connections 2025 (now branded “Cap Remap”) and Project Connect. This is a gap I’ve tried to fill with my new transit blog, the...

Gone: Clearing the Path for California’s Last Freeway

Westpark is a neighborhood like any other in Central Bakersfield. It’s filled with single-story ranch homes from the 50’s and 60’s; its streets are wide, clean, and lined with orderly parked cars; its lawns are neatly divided by fully matured palm trees.

But Westpark is a neighborhood under siege.

Over the past several years, city bulldozers sliced a wide, sterile...

New Year, New Network: Connections 2025 Looks Fresh, but Feels Oh-So-Familiar

After months of analysis paralysis, Connections 2025, Capital Metro’s shiny new transit system, is almost here. I witnessed the board of directors approve the first set of service changes back in November. The new local bus network is slated to roll out in June 2018.

In the spirit of other transit network redesigns, Connections 2025 will transform Austin’s bus network...

Weighing Desert: Justice for Kings, Justice for New Yorkers

One man is on trial for murder under the threat of the death penalty, and a jury must decide his fate; he lives. This is the basic outline of Aeschylus’s The Eumenides and Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, except one courtroom is in ancient Athens, while the other is in 1960s New York City. In The Eumenides, protagonist...