public transit
lborkowski | February 4, 2015A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Tara C. Smith at Slate: Measles is Horrible
Jason Cherkis in the Huffington Post: Dying to Be Free ("There’s A Treatment For Heroin Addiction That Actually Works. Why Aren’t We Using It?")
Sara Ainsworth at RH Reality Check: Lawyers for Fetuses? Yes, It’s Absurd, But It’s Worse Than You Realize
Wil S. Hylton in the New Yorker: A Bug in the System: Why last night's chicken made you sick
Sarah Goodyear at Citylab: More Women Ride Mass Transit Than Men. Shouldn't Transit Agencies Be Catering to Them?
lborkowski | March 15, 2013If you've followed the link from the New York Times Magazine's letters page, welcome to The Pump Handle! We're a public health blog covering issues from healthcare to worker health and safety to water and sanitation; see our About page for the story behind our name. The full version of my post about Amtrak is here.
What I said in that post was that it makes sense to invest in intercity rail because intercity car and air travel might become prohibitively expensive and/or time-consuming in the future -- whether due to a carbon tax, oil supply issues, traffic and air travel hassles, or something…
lborkowski | September 19, 2012The New York Times has a terrific graphic that plots the number of auto fatalities per 100,000 people and the vehicle miles driven per capita from 1950 to 2011. Overall, we're driving far more vehicle-miles per capita and seeing far fewer auto deaths than we were six decades ago, but this hasn't happened in a linear fashion. Rather, as Hannah Fairfield explains, change occurs unevenly:
Plotting the two most important variables against each other — miles traveled versus deaths per 100,000 population — yields a pattern that looks like a plateau followed by a steep drop. It evokes the theory of…
lborkowski | March 15, 2012Yesterday, the Senate passed a two-year transportation bill by a vote of 74 to 22, putting us close to getting a reasonably good piece of legislation signed by March 31, when the current stopgap extension will expire. Last month, the House Natural Resources Committee approved a terrible bill that would have eliminated the current dedicated funding for public transportation, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has so far not brought it to the floor for a vote. The American Public Health Association and 15 other public-health groups wrote to Representatives urging a "no" vote on the House…
grrlscientist | May 23, 2009tags: NYC, Upper West Side, Manhattan, A train, cities, NYCLife
Broken A Train.
Photographed while standing around, waiting for the engineers (and everyone else) to figure out if they can fix the downtown-bound A train that broke down at 168th street and Broadway this morning (Upper West Side of Manhattan, NYC).
Image: GrrlScientist, 23 May 2009 [larger view].
So, how did you spend the first morning of your three-day holiday weekend? I spent my first morning standing around, watching the conductors, engineers, and roughly six thousand passengers trying to fix the downtown-bound A Train,…