Transportation Problems and Policy (2020)

When contemplating what I wanted to do for my creative blog post, I kept revisiting the idea of writing a personal essay in the style of my gal Joan Didion. While I have long been a devoted fan of hers, her essay that we read early in the quarter, “Bureaucrats” made me realize how much we as planners can extract about the community’s relationship with their local transportation system (or built environment more generally) through personal reflections. But in a less academic sense, I also just saw myself in her writing. As a native of Los Angeles County, there is a comfort in concrete and freeways and traffic that many outsiders won’t understand. Yet as I set out to start writing with a Didionesque lens, I felt conflicted. Is it a privilege for me to be able to romanticize the highways of my childhood, even though I now know as a planner how destructive those roads are to communities? I myself grew up in a low-income neighborhood off of the 710, a corridor notorious for pollution and po...

I thought it would be fun to revisit my summer 2017 Japan trip and bring in some stats I found from various sources. I wanted to give my perspective as a visitor, pedestrian experiencing the city, and as a someone who has learned more about transportation since the trip. This post will mostly focus on Tokyo as that's where I spent the most time during the trip, but you'll see pictures from other cities as well. The post is organized into some of the themes of the city reports assignment. The picture at the top of the post is one I took of the bullet train in Aomori. Apologies ahead of time for the bad image/text formatting! Congestion & Safety In 2019, Tokyo was ranked 32nd in the world for congestion. Congestion level was estimated to be 42%. The worst time to travel by car is 5:00-6:00pm when there are low average speeds on streets due to congestion. (TomTom) There's a different local context to the congestion in Tokyo. Many residents own and drive a car, but there ...