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Get a look at 23rd century public transit in the latest Star Trek movie

In the Star Trek universe, transporter technology can instantaneously whiz characters from starships to planets and back again. The latest Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond, shows us transporters in service as public transit.


Public transporter booth. Screencap from Star Trek Beyond. Click for video.

Although transit has never been a key element of Star Trek, which is rarely set in big cities, the franchise’s long history does include a few scenes with futuristic transportation.

A few seconds later in that same scene, a high-speed train zips by.

In the previous movie, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, we saw a brief glimpse of a futuristic articulated bus.

And finally, in a 1995 TV episode of Star Trek Voyager, one character emerged from a 24th Century San Francisco subway system called Trans Francisco.

But all those futuristic trains aside, the transporter has got to be the coolest of Trek’s multimodal options.

 Comment on this at the version cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

November 7th, 2016 | Permalink
Tags: fun, transportation



DC once had its own Arc de Triomphe

Paris’s Arc de Triomphe is world famous, but did you know DC once had its own version?


Photo from the DC Public Library.

The Washington, DC Victory Arch sat on Pennsylvania Avenue, at the corner of New York Avenue and 15th Street NW.

It was a temporary structure built to commemorate the end of World War I. This photo, from 1919, shows the US Army on parade following the end of the war. Presumably the arch was made of plaster, like the White City of Chicago, and thus never intended to be permanent.

Here’s another view, showing the arch from ground level.

 Comment on this at the version cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

February 11th, 2016 | Permalink
Tags: architecture, fun, history



There’s a “Washington” neighborhood in Milan, Italy

Milan, Italy’s second largest city, has a neighborhood named “Washington.” Its main street: Via Giorgio Washington.


Washington, Milan. Map by Google.

Washington Quartieri is about a mile from the center of Milan, outside its historic Renaissance core but very much in the midst of town. It looks like this:


Via Giorgio Washington. Photo by Google.

Milan isn’t the only European city to honor Washington. At least one other, Paris, has a short Washington street near Champs-Élysées.

Both Milan’s Via Giorgio Washington and Paris’ Rue Washington are more likely named for George Washington himself than for our fair District of Columbia. But still, it’s interesting to look at a map of a European city and see “Washington” in bold letters.

What other foreign cities have streets or neighborhoods named Washington?

 Comment on this at the version cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.
 
 

February 3rd, 2016 | Permalink
Tags: fun



America’s most bonkers bikeway is in Clearwater, Florida

What do you do if you have active freight rail tracks running down the middle of a downtown street? Add bike lanes, of course!


East Avenue, Clearwater, FL.

This is East Avenue in downtown Clearwater, Florida. It’s one of America’s most unusually multimodal streets.

On the left: A normal one-way general purpose lane with normal car traffic. In the middle: Freight rail tracks. On the right: A major regional two-way bikeway, the Pinellas Trail. What could go wrong?

Actually, it’s not as dangerous as it looks. Freight traffic on those tracks is relatively light, and extremely slow-moving. The train in this photo was moving maybe five miles per hour. And unlike cars, trains don’t suddenly change lanes. There’s zero danger of a CSX right hook.

In fact, the rail tracks are effectively a buffer between the bikeway and car lane. They make a bigger buffer than normal buffered bike lanes get. In a weird way, the tracks are a sort of protection.

So it’s totally bonkers. But maybe it works.

What do you think?

 Comment on this at the version cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

January 13th, 2016 | Permalink
Tags: bike, fun, transportation, urbandesign



5 amazing cities from the Star Wars universe

Part of the appeal of the cultural juggernaut that is Star Wars has always been its fantastic settings, including its cities. As The Force Awakens arrives in theaters today, here are the five most fascinating cities from the six previous live-action Star Wars movies.

5. Theed


Theed. Image from Star Wars.

The Phantom Menace may have been a disaster of a movie, but its setting at the height of the galaxy’s pre-Empire luxury showed us a strong contender for the most beautiful city in the franchise. Theed is Queen Amidala’s home, and capital of the planet Naboo.

Picturesque Naboo is the Neoclassical Europe of the Star Wars universe. Its ornate buildings and grand, monument-strewn avenues are an idealized version of the Baroque Mediterranean. There’s no visible traffic or industry, besides one spaceport at the bottom of a waterfall. Theed’s citizens appear to do nothing but shop and picnic.

It’s the Garden of Eden of the Star Wars universe. Perfect and naive, and out of place once the galaxy descends into evil and civil war.

4. Mos Eisely


Mos Eisely. Image from Star Wars.

The complete opposite of Theed, Mos Eisely is a frontier settlement on a poor and dirty planet, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. If Theed is Habsburg Vienna, Mos Eisley is Dodge City. Its famous cantina nothing so much as a wild west saloon.

There’s precious little art of culture in Mos Eisley. Its hardscrabble populous struggles to survive, and its streets are full of pack animals, cargo crates, and industrial equipment.

3. Gungan City


Gungan City. Image from Star Wars.

Return to Naboo for the secret underwater Gungan City. It’s beautiful, but like all things Gungan, it makes little sense.

With a fairly small number of orbs that appear to be mostly empty air, Gungan City is clearly more of a village than a metropolis. Maybe the Gungans prefer isolation, or maybe they’re too clumsy to live many side-by-side. Hopefully we’re never forced to sit through more Gungan scenes, and therefore never find out.

One would think that if Gungans are such great swimmers that they’re happy to build underwater cities, they’d spread their city vertically as much as sideways. Guess not.

2. Cloud City


Cloud City. Image from Star Wars.

High-concept sci-fi at its best, Cloud City is an atmosphere-mining colony on a gas giant planet with no solid surface.

Its workers harvest gases for use in Star Wars’ futuristic technologies, and its government is more corporate CEO than democratic president.

Being an expensive floating factory, Cloud City’s layout and infrastructure are necessarily vastly different from a cobbled-together frontier town like Mos Eisley. As a single, purpose-designed mega-structure, Cloud City needs nothing so messy as parking lots, and piecemeal expansions are strictly not happening.

And if you approach it without an invitation, cloud cars shoot at you. It’s the ultimate gated community.

1. Coruscant


Coruscant. Image from Star Wars.

One city that covers a whole planet. Coruscant is either the ultimate in sprawl, or the ultimate in extreme urbanization. Given what we’ve seen on-screen, it seems to be the latter.

Like Washington, the capital of the Star Wars galaxy clearly has a height limit, with a canopy of blocky same-height buildings rolling over the landscape, and monuments like the Jedi Temple (above) dominating the skyline. But unlike DC, Coruscant’s city planners allow frequent skyscrapers to pierce the blocky canopy.

Unlike other Star Wars cities, Coruscant features busy air-highways, crowded with flying transports. But there don’t seem to be enough vehicles to move around a population as dense as Coruscant’s must be. Surely the planet is a public transit paradise.


Coruscant’s galactic capitol building, with air-highways. Image from Star Wars.

What will we see next?

If the past is any guide, The Force Awakens promises even more aliens and sci-fi landscapes. When I see it, I’ll be hoping to see some fun cityscapes too. And, I admit, a few light-saber duels.

 Comment on this at the version cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.

Aimee Custis contributed to this post.

December 18th, 2015 | Permalink
Tags: fun, galleries, urbandesign



In Independence Day 2, aliens once again destroy DC

The movie trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence shows that when aliens invade, DC is still their top target.


Image from Independence Day: Resurgence.

Independence Day was the biggest summer blockbuster of 1996. In the movie, aliens invade Earth, destroy DC, New York, and most of the world’s major cities. Eventually Will Smith, Bill Pullman, and Jeff Goldblum beat the aliens and save humanity.

Now, 20 years later, the aliens are back and our heroes (minus Will Smith) are at it again.

And, as this still from 1:21 into the trailer shows, DC eats it once again.

In the still, you can clearly make out the National Mall on the far right, with the Capitol, Washington Monument, and Lincoln Memorial in order. Except apparently, post alien apocalypse, Arlington’s surviving community leaders rebuilt the Pentagon in place of Rosslyn.

Watch the complete trailer:

 Comment on this at the version cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

December 15th, 2015 | Permalink
Tags: fun



This transit nerd music video is the best thing ever

Yes, yes there is a music video about transit nerdery. And it’s fantastic.

The video comes from the band TSUB Analysis, an “Americana/Bluegrass/Indie” group made up of transit professionals from Denver.

And yes, VelociRFTA is my personal favorite too.

 Comment on this at the version cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

November 3rd, 2015 | Permalink
Tags: BRT, bus, commuterrail, fun, lightrail, metrorail, transportation



If car commercials were honest, this is what they’d look like

A sporty coupe glides joyfully along a seaside highway, all by itself. It’s heaven for the anonymous driver. That’s the standard, ridiculous car commercial.

This video shows what car commercials would look like if they were actually honest.

 Comment on this at the version cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

August 25th, 2015 | Permalink
Tags: fun, roads/cars, transportation



Seven spectacular photos of last night’s stormy sky

Last night’s heavy storm produced a truly breathtaking evening sky. Here are seven spectacular photos from around the region.


M street, Georgetown.

According to Capital Weather Gang, the storm washed pollutants from the air at exactly the right moment. The clear air combined with dramatic clouds and red light from the sunset to produce the memorable view.

> Read more

The rest of this post uses photos from the GGW Flickr pool. Therefore the full post only appears on Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

June 24th, 2015 | Permalink
Tags: environment, fun, galleries



Friday funny: This town ain’t big enough


Image from Imgur user crunchtooth.

Can anyone definitively say the gunfight at the OK corral wasn’t to settle a zoning dispute over pop-up condos?

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

April 24th, 2015 | Permalink
Tags: fun, law



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