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Showing posts from December, 2013

Living an almost car-free life (and what does that have to do with the arts?)

I recently watched a video of a talk by Gabe Klein at the 2013 Aspen Ideas Festival about the new world of transportation planning. He is the head of transportation in Chicago, previously headed the transportation office in DC, and before that was a VP at ZipCar, and it got me thinking about the changing modes of transportation in my own life. In Philadelphia, I was one of many people who lived without owning a car, living downtown and walking to work and most places I needed to get to. Most places I could not get to on foot, I used mass transit, and very occasionally a taxi. When for work reasons I needed to get somewhere best reached by car I was able to draw on a Mayor's Office pool car, and for personal use when a car was needed I used ZipCar. I used a bicycle mostly for recreation but occasionally for transportation as well, at which time I did take advantage of and appreciate Philadelphia's relatively new bike lane program. As one of the nation's most walkable big ci