Veritas et Venustas

Veritas et Venustas will be moving from massengale.typepad.com to blog.massengale.com. See you there.

Personal posts about topics like the glories of the New York Yankees will move to jmassengale.tumblr.com or blog.massengale.me: TBD.

blog.massengale.com

Happy New Year

 

VV REDUX: Jung On Traffic Engineers

The psychotherapist Carl Jung wrote about everything, including traffic engineers:

All time-saving methods, to which alleviaton of traffic congestion and other conveniences belong, do not, paradoxically, save any time, but simply fill the time available in such a manner that one has no more time at all. The result of this is inevitable, breathless haste, superficiality and nervous fatigue with all the related symptoms like nervous hunger, impatience, irritability, distractedness etc...

I found this at a public transit blog. Also take a look at their most popular link, P.J. O'Rourke's paean to the car in Give War A Chance ("...even if all these accusations are true, the automobile is still an improvement on its principal alternative, the pedestrian. Pedestrians are easily damaged. Try this test: Hit a pedestrian with a car. Now have the pedestrian hit the car back.... Which is in better shape?").

Children Demanding Play Streets Changed Amsterdam

via Angie Schmitt, "How Children Demanding Play Streets Changed Amsterdam," DC.Streetsblog.org

New York, New England, New Marlborough

ONE of the many great things about New York City is that it's easy to get from New York to many great places. We tend to head northeast to New England.

The Berkshire mountains in Western Massachusetts are distinctly not in New York, even though many New Yorkers visit the Berkshires. There are many beautiful ways to drive there, none of which require getting on an interstate highway. You can make the trip in 2 hours, or you can make it take all day. There are also trains to Dutchess County, New York, and people are working on a reviving the old rail line, which still has daily freight trains.

Old North Road, New Marlborough, Massachusetts

I've been to old Marlborough in olde England, too. It's in our new Street Design book.

High Street, Marlborough, Wiltshire

Fran Lebowitz Goes To Town (a must see video for New Yorkers)

New York Observer: Fran Lebowitz Goes to Town on NYU, NYU Students, and Bloomberg’s Micro-Apartments