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The New York Times: Commuters Pedal to Work on Their Very Own Superhighway

Picture 11 miles of smoothly paved bike path meandering through the countryside. Largely uninterrupted by roads or intersections, it passes fields, backyards, chirping birds, a lake, some ducks and, at every mile, an air pump.

For some Danes, this is the morning commute.


Pedestrian Observations: Northeast Corridor HSR, 90% Cheaper

Amtrak’s latest Next-Generation High-Speed Rail plan is now up to $151 billion, from a prior cost of $117 billion. This is partially a small cost escalation, but mostly including Master Plan upgrades to the legacy line. Per kilometer of route length, this means the project has now crossed the $200 million/km mark, a higher cost than 60%-underground Chuo Shinkansen maglev. The primary cause of the high cost of Amtrak’s project is the heavy amount of deep-cavern urban tunneling: nearly a tenth of the cost is the Gateway Tunnel, a rebranded bundling of ARC into the project, and a similar amount is a similar project in Philadelphia. At least this time they’re serving Rhode Island with a stop in or near Providence rather than Woonsocket.


The Atlantic Cities: The Psychology Behind Why Creative People Cluster

A large body of literature shows that highly creative people – artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and the like – are highly likely to be open to new experiences. An earlier study by Rentfrow and his colleague Sam Gosling of the University of Texas, titled “The New Geography of Personality,” tracked the five major personality types across states. They found open-to-experience people were more likely to “attempt to escape the ennui experienced in small-town environments by relocating to metropolitan areas where their interests in cultures and needs for social contact and stimulation are more easily met.”


The Atlantic Cities: Why We Should Stop Talking About ‘Bus Stigma’

North American public transit has a lot of work to do, especially when it comes to buses, but telling transit agencies that they must defeat a “stigma,” or break into a new “class,” amounts to telling them to despair. It implies they must uproot supposedly deep-seated feelings in people’s hearts, the sort of feelings that may change en masse only with the turning of generations. More disturbingly, it tells everyone that an incurious aversion toward buses is a normal part of being a successful person.

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