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San Onofre Nuclear Plant Helps Create International Blackout

September 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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On September 8th, 2011, just after 3:30 on a very hot summer afternoon, the entire electric power grid from Arizona to Mexico and southern California, went dark. A critical link in our nation’s underfunded power infrastructure was severed near Yuma, Arizona; this disruption created intermittent low wattage throughout our interconnected power supply, which then triggered the San Onofre Nuclear Power plant to completely shut down. The automatic closure of the nuclear plant then created an escalating snowball effect throughout the system, causing the largest blackout in the entire history of this region.

Our Grief Is Not A Cry For War

September 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Reverend asks “What happened to peace?” On that impossible day when the skyline of New York City collapsed on its southern tip – I watched from a rooftop across the East River – we entered an unexpectedly peaceful eye of the storm. We all fell toward the terrible [...]

Boston Bike-Sharing Program is Rockin’ It

September 9, 2011 By 2 Comments
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D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare bike-sharing program has been a great success (despite its rather small size). Paris’ Velib bike-sharing program rocked the world with its tremendous, unprecedented success. Barcelona’s Bicing program was much more successful than originally anticipated. And so on and so on. Now, it’s being reported that Boston’s new bike-sharing program is a great success, even much more successful than originally anticipated.

Telling Tales: Stories as Regional Brand Markers

September 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Intangible culture largely concerns items of cultural heritage that cannot be touched. Yet it also includes those things that are sometimes immortalized into things that can be touched, such as a story into a book or immortalized on platforms which do use resources such as virtual tours and the internet.

Shareable Future of Cities (Alex Steffen TED Video)

September 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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As a city planner by education, I’m a big fan of Alex Steffen, since he talks all about reworking cities (especially U.S. cities) to be more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, more efficient, more enjoyable. But this TED video of Steffen shared with me by Eat Drink Better and Feelgood Style director Becky Striepe talking about the place of sharing in greening our cities is beyond the typical talking points and is quite interesting. I highly recommend checking it out: