… but ends and odds about different cities. This time the frequent-flying Bald One got to flash his now thoroughly broken in passport in London, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam and Oslo. In order: London (♦) I regarded London as about the least hospitable city for cycling I’ve ever seen, but still saw some martyrs-on-wheels there anyway.…
Biking in Amsterdam
Amsterdammers are likelier to ride bikes to work than they are to drive, walk or take public transport. The city possesses more than three bikes for every car. More than half of traffic movement in the central city is by bicycle. I was vaguely aware of these impressive stats when I touched down at Schiphol…
European Odds and Ends
(♦) Expect occasional squinting through a haze of Other Guy’s cigarette smoke while waiting for rides in both Zurich and Copenhagen. (And perhaps in Stockholm and Moscow, too. Your scribe took inadequate notes.) ‘Smoking europe’ in the omnibox pulled up this. (♦) Also expect to see much more graffiti in both Zurich and Copenhagen than…
How I Get Around
I didn’t pull a flat EKG after the last post after all, and will celebrate with an overdue account of my own travel habits. A next-to-nobody like me could bump along on a Chalmers Rotobaler, for all anyone cares, but I think that those who vote or sound off on transit issues should be forthcoming…
Zurich and Copenhagen
Copenhagen and Zurich have to be two of the world’s best cities for life without a car. I write ‘have to be’ because my visit to each was brief; I acknowledge that a longer look-around might dilute my enthusiasm. But I can’t believe I’d see anything to dilute it very much. I hope I sound…
About those transit gulags
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…