Stockholm’s new towns — no longer very new, and referred to as gulags only playfully — are the clusters of housing and commercial development herded about the outlying stations of the T-bana metro system. Transit guru Robert Cervero beamed about them in Transit Metropolis, and here I was jetting off to Europe anyway. I figured…
More about Moscow …
… although most of the ‘more’ will be about the Metro. I must have spent half my visiting time underground. You know me. * * * * * Skyscanner imagines Russia to be one of the world’s rudest countries, and my late April arrival at Sheremetyevo International coincided with much east-west mud slinging over unrest…
Moscow Metro guide for English speakers
The free, pdf’d, certified-as-official-and-requested-by-absolutely-no-one transitophile guide for English speakers navigating the Moscow Metro is online at: https://transitophile.com/chango/files/moscowmetroguide.pdf The 200+ mile Moscow Metro carries more yearly riders than any earthly subway system outside of Beijing, Shanghai and Seoul. The lion’s share of construction credit has to go to the maniacally paranoid Stalin, who masterminded a propaganda…
Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai
Those are the Asian cities I visited, lucky me, and I can prove it: you’ll find photo sets at: Tokyo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/36217981@N02/sets/72157642352812245/ Seoul: https://www.flickr.com/photos/36217981@N02/sets/72157642390067303/ Shanghai: https://www.flickr.com/photos/36217981@N02/sets/72157642406170383/ Fellow transit aficionados will recognize these burgs as home to some of the world’s most formidable metro networks, by system length and annual passenger rides. I spent much of the last decade telling…
Travels Deeply South
Photos from a whirlwind trip to the Deep South are online. Your lucky correspondent traveled in the fourth week of January, and not the fifth; I missed out on the wince-making weather miseries recently described in big fonts on news sites. The needle dipped below freezing in Birmingham, Atlanta and Asheville, but skies remained clear…
Sign Hill Park
JFK was probably still chasing secretaries around the Oval Office when I caught my first glimpse of the South San Francisco The Industrial City sign from Mom’s old Fairlane on Route 101. I might not have been old enough to sound out the words, but I certainly knew my letters by kindergarten … and there…
Travels Northwest
Photos from a trek northwest earlier this month are online at Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. I have outed myself as a transit geek, so please don’t be surprised that twelve of the fifteen pix are of people movers. Why photograph something that yearns for meaning in life when you can point the camera at a…
Transit riding tips at random
What follows are one veteran straphanger’s tips, tricks and general counsel on getting about on public transit. I don’t think they’ll amount to much, and cheerfully acknowledge that you regularly share seats with riders better qualified than me to write this post. But they didn’t write it, and I have. So: In no particular order:…
San Bruno Mountain State Park
In the first chapter of the blockbuster referred to so frequently on this blog, my protagonist confides a plan for San Bruno Mountain that probably wouldn’t plump his stock at a Department of Parks meeting. I hadn’t yet visited this mountain when Hank whispered his nefarious scheme during work on the first draft, but did…
Graffiti on the 14 bus
Two years ago in Public Transit in L.A.: an older-but-wiser look back, I grumbled that I have seen graffiti in some San Francisco buses worse than I’d expect in a public bathroom on Venice beach. Those of you lucky enough to straphang in better governed cities might have thought I was exaggerating. If only, if…