Walkability has become a highly sought-after neighborhood trait, but many American cities just aren’t designed for it. With more funding available today than ever before to invest in active modes of transportation, the door is wide open for that to change. My wife and I spent the last few months…

When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it didn’t immediately find much of a readership. “Another book dropped down the bottomless well. Into oblivion,” a despondent Abbey wrote in his journal shortly after its release. …

Transportation Twitter is a weird place. A couple of weeks ago, someone I’ve followed for a while, a well-known and well-respected author who often posts really interesting stuff, offered his appreciative synopsis of a recently-published paper in an academic journal. “Executive summary,” he wrote, “‘Since you’re a car-owner in the…

Forest ecosystems are the largest terrestrial carbon sink on the planet, every year soaking up a total of 2.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — around a third of total global emissions. But while it might seem intuitive to infer from this that planting more trees is, broadly speaking…

By 2050, 68% of the world’s population will live in urban areas. That’s according to a United Nations report released in 2018. The population of our cities will have grown by 2.5 billion, the report predicts, and the majority of countries will have more than 50% of their population city-based…

Human beings are nomadic creatures. For 99 percent of our existence as a species, anthropologists believe, we’ve been on the move. Some scientists have argued that a propensity for travel, novelty and adventure is actually encoded in our DNA. Either way, we don’t take well to confinement. Confinement, however, is…