Greater City Providence

News & Notes

News & Notes New RIPTA bus route proposed, coming right through Summit neighborhood [Summit Neighborhood Association]

Link shows a map of proposed routes. SNA is seeking comment and is deciding if they need to have a neighborhood meeting to discuss the proposed options.

My 2 cents, a bus route that serves Miriam directly is a good thing.


Investing in urban centers key to growing new U.S. economy: Brookings [International Business Times]

“When cities collect networks of entrepreneurial firms, smart people, universities and other supporting institutions in close proximity, incredible things happen,” [Bruce Katz, Director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution] wrote.

“People engage. Specializations converge. Ideas collide and flourish. New inventions and processes emerge in research labs and on factory floors. New products and companies follow.”


The Silver Lining: 73 Percent of Transpo Ballot Measures Win [Streetsblog Capitol Hill]

Ready for some good news? Voters around the country got to decide on 29 transportation-related ballot initiatives yesterday. According to an analysis by the Center for Transportation Excellence, transportation advocates and reformers won 73 percent of them. If you add in other initiatives that passed earlier this year, the victory rate jumps to 77 percent.


Carmakers’ next problem: Generation Y [MSNBC]

…this generation also is thinking more than any other about the repercussions of driving, both in terms of the environment and our dependence on oil.


Vaclav Havel is dismayed by Prague’s sprawl [New Urban Network]

President of the Czech Republic speaking at the opening of the Forum 2000 conference:

“What was until recently clearly recognisable as the city is now losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become a huge overgrown ring of something I can’t find a word for. It is not a city as I understand the term, nor suburbs, let alone a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares. There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and collections of family homes that are admittedly close together but are otherwise desperately remote. And in between all that – and this is something that bothers me most of all – are large tracts of land that aren’t anything, by which I mean that they’re not meadows, fields, woods, jungle or meaningful human settlement.”


Getting These Cyclists to Use Helmets Is Like Tilting at Windmills [The Wall Street Journal]

I always wondered why no one in all the bike films I see about Amsterdam are ever wearing helmets. Turns out wearing helmets is uncool; uncool like German people are uncool.

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2 comments

  • Perhaps RIPTA is preemptively avoiding a neighborhood battle but sending the bus down Rochambeau to North Main so that it must go up 5th or 2nd street seems awfully sluggish. I live 2 blocks from Summit Avenue, so those on Summit might discredit my opinion, but I don’t see how a few (mini)buses a day can be that big of a nuisance, especially if they will (hopefully) bring cars off of the road. If going down Summit is too egregious, perhaps Camp>Rochambeau>Hope>Seventh(with a nice bus shelter at the new entrance on seventh street)>North Main would do. Hope street has less service than North Main, so another bus route, even for just a smidge, would be nice and less redundant. Unless the idea is to hit the parking lot on North Main and 4th?

  • It actually seems that going directly across Camp would make the most sense.

    I agree that since there are already 10 minute headways most of the day on that section of North Main there is no reason to send the 49 down there.

    The other thing to consider is that you don’t want the bus obstructing ambulance routes. That’s why I don’t see them using the narrow streets between Hope and Miriam. Ambulances use 6th and 7th all the time and there is not enough room to safely have a bus pull over on those streets and have the ambulance get around. this may also be why they are avoiding Summit, although Summit I think is wide enough in most places to allow and ambulance to pass.

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