A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation. 

Gustavo Petro, mayor

Uber’s plan to get more people into fewer cars

TALK

Travis Kalanick, Ted Talk, February 2016

Now, in China everything is supersized, and so we’re doing 15 million uberPOOL trips per month, that’s 500,000 per day. And of course we’re seeing that exponential growth happen. In fact, we’re seeing it in LA, too. And when I talk to my team, we don’t talk about, “Hey, well, 100,000 people carpooling every week and we’re done.” How do we get that to a million? And in China, well, that could be several million.


To read Jarrett Walker‘s response in City Lab to Uber’s (and other tech “disruptors” of transportation) approach to public transport click here.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro review – a landmark study

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 23 Oct 2015

ARTICLE

Technically, Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker is a biography of urban planner Robert Moses, but that description feels laughably inadequate on multiple counts. For more than four decades, this particular urban planner was the most powerful man in New York, an unelected emperor who dominated the mayors and governors who were supposedly in charge, and who physically reshaped the city through sheer force of will. Caro’s enormous book, meanwhile, is less a life story than an epic, meticulously detailed study of power in general: how it’s acquired, how it’s used to change history, how it ultimately corrupts those who get it.


See also Citizen Jane: Battle for the City.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Henry Ford, industrialist