That’s the headline of this week’s BusinessWeek article, reflecting the fact that subways are the ‘new hybrids’, the ultimate status symbol of being a progressive major urban city.

According to a VP at Alstom, one of the largest transit car builders in the world, “You have in some cases a prestige issue, which is more the case in young cities in need of an image. Unless funding is an issue, cities usually will spring for a subway. The tramway [light rail] has a very old image of the 19th

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30 years ago, some creative minds in Bogota, Colombia launched an experiment where city streets were closed to cars on one day to allow pedestrians and bicyclists their own place. The crowds came and defined the experiment as a vibrant scene they wanted permanent, and today it’s not only permanent, but this experiment known as ‘Ciclovia’ (Spanish for ‘bike way’) is now a community of two million people every Sunday, with a crowdsourced ‘main street’ of activities over several …

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As profiled in the previous entry, Buenos Aires’ bohemian neighborhood of San Telmo becomes a pedestrian-only arts district (the Feria) on Sundays, and I thought I’d provide a photo of the crowd favorite wind-blown ‘live art’ couple I mentioned in that story.

It’s not like you see this kind of art in every neighborhood, but perhaps it’s worth looking at why San Telmo is a popular host for not only this weekly version of live art, but many others.

- The neighborhood-wide, half-mile long arts

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Six days of the week this street (Defensa) in the bohemian neighborhood of San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina is full of cars, adding to the city’s reputation as the second noisiest in the world (next to New York).

However, every Sunday it’s a remarkably different place when what seems like at least half a mile of the street is closed to auto traffic and replaced completely with people, as you can see.  In fact, there were so many people walking through the streets that it felt like they just

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Believe it or not there are still parties out there that argue against higher-density developments built around transit stations, predicting they will cause traffic congestion as a result of more housing units present.

Thankfully, research for the Transit Cooperative Research Program provides some evidence for the logic that assumes fewer auto trips will result simply because people will take transit or walk more often, and drive less. The numbers are pretty convincing proving this is the

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‘Augmented reality’ - Experiencing future places… live

Many of us walk down a street with a vision for what it could be in the future - a congested street of noisy cars replaced by a pedestrian walk filled with outdoor diners, an abandoned warehouse transformed into shops and lofts; a parking lot as a green building…

Thanks to the field of augmented reality, others can experience that vision too. Augmented reality is best explained by watching the video above, or this one here - it

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