{"id":1147,"date":"2012-11-28T18:58:17","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T02:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1147"},"modified":"2012-11-28T18:58:17","modified_gmt":"2012-11-29T02:58:17","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s2e22-uncaptive-rider-with-jarrett-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1147","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E22: Uncaptive Rider with Jarrett Walker"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with\u00a0Jarrett Walker<\/a>, public transit consultant and author of the blogs\u00a0Human Transit<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Creature of the Shade<\/a>\u00a0as well as the book\u00a0Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives<\/em>. They discuss how Portland “turned the battleship” toward sustainable transport in that least likely of all decades, the seventies; the city’s discovery of its own extraordinary capacity for self-promotion in the nineties; his adolescence there spent in fascination at the buses departing to all their myriad destinations; how thinking about transit makes thinking about cities more interesting; the unfortunate divide between urban design and transport planning; how the North American revolt against highway-building also hampered the construction of transit infrastructure; a city’s transportation system as the ultimate test of its citizen’s freedom; the close relationship between a city’s density and its transit possibilities, and why fantastically inefficient systems are always pleasant to ride; how he has come to love Los Angeles, during its current transitional moment, as someone who has hated it; Los Angeles’ place as a “city on the edge” that always captures the imagination, no matter the petty judgments it draws; Los Angeles’ distinctive geography offering the best possible opportunity for transit-building; the questions he asks about whether a city wants him to understand the whole of its transit system, and whether it treats him as a free actor; the surprises that delight him now that he’s gotten used to confusing, sad, and unpleasant transit experiences; airport stations and their tendency toward “symbolic transit”; and the importance of whether a city treats transit as a commuting device or as an all-purpose urban structure, and whether or not it’s motivated simply by the coolness of the vehicles.<\/p>\n

Download the interview from\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/a><\/em>\u2019s feed<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with\u00a0Jarrett Walker, public transit consultant and author of the blogs\u00a0Human Transit\u00a0and\u00a0Creature of the Shade\u00a0as well as the book\u00a0Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives. They discuss how Portland “turned the battleship” toward sustainable transport in that least likely of all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1147"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1150,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions\/1150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}