Sustainability Through Transportation and Urbanism: Saving the Planet, One Fewer Car Trip at a Time

Living in a vibrant, walkable neighborhood is simply amazing. It is difficult to articulate precisely why. I know that I have always embraced the idea of a walkable neighborhood- particularly one where owning a vehicle is not strictly necessary. Vibrant, walkable areas are awesome. But why? I have lived in Downtown Cleveland for over 2 months now. The experience has been nothing short of amazing. I'm in a reflective mood this evening, so I feel compelled to write about why I think such neighborhoods rock- spoken from the heart of one who experiences the awesomeness on a daily basis. This evening, I decided to go for a bike ride towards Edgewater Park- one of my favorite places to visit. Not only is it simply beautiful, but it is a vibrant place where something is always happening. It also has an awesome view of the Downtown Cleveland skyline. Perched atop a hill, taking in this view is like watching over the city. There is certainly the chaos of the city occurring "down there&

A lot of people I have had conversations with note that they would love to ride transit more often, but the time difference between riding the bus and driving is simply not acceptable to them. This is completely understandable. Take the following as an example. A GCRTA bus in Public Square. Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer A couple of weekends ago, I was visiting a friend in West Park, on the west side of Cleveland. Since I do not have a car with me, I rode the bus. According to Google Maps, the bus ride to that side of town takes 49 minutes. The drive? 17 minutes. Now I know I am probably not like most.  Personally, I am largely not discouraged by this long travel time. It allows me to relax, read some articles on my phone, think, etc. The 49 minutes, to me, is not a huge barrier to travel. What else do I have to do anyway? However, when it comes to a commute to work, I understand that this would discourage most people from riding transit. I think it stands to reason that more people wou

It's been a while since I've written anything on here- life has been pretty busy lately. Between the Amtrak trip, starting a new job, and moving into a new apartment in Downtown Cleveland, there hasn't been a whole lot of downtime. Now that I am all settled into the routine of being an urban dweller, I hope to post more frequently. "Gas pump entertainment" by MarkinDetroit is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Here, I want to discuss something that has been on my mind for some time now- multimodal transportation- or more specifically, the lack thereof. To me, a multimodal transportation system means that you are able to easily and safely utilize multiple transportation methods to carry out the needs of life. This includes transit, walking, biking, scooters, inter-city rail travel, air travel, and anything else. Yes, this includes driving as well. As it stands currently, our transportation system is extraordinarily unimodal. We drive everywhere.  Indeed, 76% of commut

Now a little recap of the 3rd leg of our journey- LA to San Jose. For the first time on this trip, our train was not delayed! We set off from LA Union Station around 10 and rolled in to San Jose around 8. As a side note, California is currently building a high speed rail system that will connect LA and San Francisco in under 3 hours- quicker than driving by quite a bit! Anyway, we stayed with my family in San Jose and had a lovely dinner with them- a much needed home-cooked meal. After hanging a bit with Zooey, their behemoth black lab, we went off to sleep. Day 1-Alcatraz, Lombard Street, Chinatown, and Japantown  I love San Francisco because unlike LA, it is very easy to explore without a car. There is a robust transit network, plus San Francisco is very dense and compact, which means that many things are within walking distance. My aunt drove us to the San Jose Caltrain station, a commuter rail connecting San Jose, Palo Alto, and other communities to the south and west side of the S

We are once again on a train off to our next destination of the San Francisco Bay Area after a quick stop in Los Angeles. Here's a little recap of our time in So-Cal: Day 1- Chilling and a short walk We arrived in Los Angeles about 3 hours behind schedule, which as I mentioned in my previous post , actually worked into our favor because it required us to kill less time before checking into the hotel. Normally, Amtrak will allow you to temporarily store carry-on luggage at the major stations (New York, Chicago, LA, etc) for $10, but because we were delayed, they let us store all of our luggage for free, which was a huge help for us, as we otherwise would have had to lug things across Downtown LA while waiting for our hotel to be ready. With the weight of our luggage literally off our shoulders, we took a 15 minute walk to the Grand Central Market, which is similar to the West Side Market, North Market, etc in Ohio. This was a really cool place since they had tons of different and un

I am sitting on the train to start leg 2 of our journey across America. It's 6:30 am and a bunch of people on the train seem to think it's acceptable to talk extremely loudly when the rest of the train is trying to sleep.. What better time than now to reflect on the first leg? As a reminder, our first leg involves us traveling from Cleveland to Flagstaff, AZ Train 1: Cleveland to Chicago  To start our journey, we had to hop on the Capitol Limited, which provides service between Washington, D.C. and Chicago. The train departs Cleveland in the wee hours of the morning- it is scheduled to depart at 2:58 am but due to delay, we ended up leaving around 3:20 am. While it is unfortunate that the train leaves at this ungodly hour, the good news is that you arrive in Chicago around 9 am. This makes me particularly excited to use Amtrak for some weekend trips to Chicago- get off work at 5, sleep for a bit, hop on the train early in the morning, catch some z's in Amtrak's fairly c