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…
Remembering Lee Joseph
Twelve year old Lee Joseph’s father beat him until his skin was black and blue from his hips to his ankles. Lee ran away from home, was befriended by a gay male prostitute, and turned his first trick in Houston before his thirteenth birthday. This was in 1978, four years before the Center for Disease…
A Job like HM&F
I’ve never worked at a place like the HM&F factory brooded about in Brothers of the Milky Way, but did once have a job that inspired my description of Hank’s miseries there. I was just out of college, a few years younger than the artsy fellow shown with the preposterous old microbus elsewhere on this…
Back to Transitophile …
… if you’ve been rudely redirected, and are wondering why the URL in the address bar looks unfamiliar. You’re not on a Russian spam site. You didn’t swallow anything funny at lunch. This blog now lives at transitophile.com. Just like the original transitophile.blogspot.com, but without those pesky nine extra characters. No more redirects (I sincerely…