Category: Transportation

  • Bangkok in Layers

    Bangkok in Layers

    I traveled to Thailand in 2024 and I was inspired by Bangkok’s transit network. It moves millions of people every day across a metropolitan region of 15+ million residents. It does so through a collection of overlapping systems that have accumulated over time rather than through a single, unified plan. In that sense, Bangkok feels…

  • Xiamen BRT

    Xiamen BRT

    I had the chance to visit Xiamen in October 2025. China continues to inspire and impress me on every visit, not because everything is perfect, but because the pace, ambition, and willingness to build infrastructure at scale are impossible to ignore. Xiamen is a coastal city of about five million people in Fujian Province. Before…

  • Tri-State Trillions

    Tri-State Trillions

    $1.2 trillion dollars for US infrastructure. How do you wrap your head around such a large number? (Believe it or not, it’s not even close to the amount spent by the U.S. government in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it is around the size of the NYC metropolitan region’s GDP.) The NYC region will hopefully be…

  • Urban Legends

    Urban Legends

    NYC has plenty of urban legends, many of which are literally urban legends. Perhaps this article will finally put an end to these largely untrue “myths” about the city’s built environment! NYC is fully “built-up”. The New York metropolitan region is populated by more than 20 million people. Approximately 70% of the world’s countries have…

  • Planning Beyond Boundaries

    Planning Beyond Boundaries

      The New York region functions more inefficiently due to its municipal and state boundaries. The Northeastern megalopolis is home to more than 50 million people and 20 percent of America’s GDP, centered around New York. Seventy percent of Manhattan employees commute from outside the borough. The region historically was entirely within New Netherland, but the British split…

  • Cost

    Cost

    In around the same time it takes me to travel from D.C. to Boston on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC), I was whisked from Guangzhou to Luoyang, one of China’s ancient capital cities – roughly the distance from Dallas to Chicago (or double the mileage on the NEC) in a little over 7 hours by rail.…