Cox Crow

Math and New York

Via kottke comes this Kuro5hin article on city planning and supercomputer design. Kottke also points to Manhattan Timeformations, a historical atlas in Flash, and the taxicab metric, or Manhattan distance, which is further optimized by jaywalking — and is incidentally why New Yorkers are the quickest pedestrians.

4:28:40 PM # Google It!
categories: Place

The Limits of Growth

Otis White, via Larry Felton Johnson, points out a Rutgers report that sprawl in the Northeast is slowing, mainly because

[t]he freeways and toll roads built after World War II were the enablers of suburban growth, and by the mid-1990s road construction was, for all intents and purposes, finished in the New York area. "This already is constraining further suburban growth," they write, "and it is making areas served by public transit more desirable as workplace locations."

The arteries are clogged.

New York is one of the few older cities whose population increased in the last census. Brookings characterizes this trend as population loss among pedestrian-oriented cities, though I think it is more accurate to identify the trend as movement from older places to newer: There is no newer, pedestrian city to compare to older, pedestrian cities. The newer cities just happen to be built for cars.

Anyway, Rutgers may be observing an oddity, or New York may be a trendsetter. Personally, I'd prefer that my work move closer to my bedroom, rather than move my bedroom closer to my work.

4:10:23 PM # Google It!
categories: Place