I'm a writer and editor at Forbes, covering all things quantitative through long-form articles, infographics and interactive applications.
I also manage some of the internal data that goes into our big editorial efforts like the Forbes 400 and Best Places, and I've dabbled in content management systems as well, getting familiar with PHP and the WordPress API to help build Forbes' contributor platform during the summer and fall of 2010.
See my recent work or visit my Forbes blog for more.
We’ve just published a neat set of maps on Forbes.com that highlight America’s worst traffic chokepoints. The situation in New York, illustrated at left, should be familiar to anyone unfortunate enough to own a car in the area. The Cross Bronx Expressway, one of the great urban planning disasters of the late 20th century (and the subject of some really excellent exposition in The Power Broker by Robert Caro), has the worst single traffic tie-up in the country, as well as several others among the top 10.
The data that the maps are based on come from my friends at Inrix, a clever company based just outside of Seattle that measures traffic congestion using data from GPS tracking systems in commercial fleets. I’ve written about them before, and used their data in December 2008 to form the Forbes “Chirp Index,” a group of leading indicators with which we (fairly accurately) predicted that the recession would bottom out late in the summer of 2009.
After a couple of years of declining traffic congestion (due first to rising gas prices and then to rising unemployment), traffic congestion seems to be coming back. Growth in economic activity and stimulus-related road construction projects are bringing more people onto the roads and then slowing them down.
A minor tiff erupted in the comments section of my article; one commenter suggested that traffic congestion wouldn’t come back if only we invested more in public transportation. The next commenter wrote that public transportation hasn’t been proven to have any meaningful impact on traffic congestion.
Both commenters make legitimate, though incomplete, points. Public transit advocates tend not to talk of payoffs from transit investment in terms of immediate relief from congestion; after all, much of the housing and commercial space that’s been built in this country over the last 50 years is fundamentally incompatible with efficient transit schemes. The office-park worker who lives on a cul-de-sac will likely never be able to use even the most ambitious new transit system to commute–at least not as long as he lives in a housing tract and works in an office park.
That’s why transit advocates concede that new rail lines won’t immediately cut traffic on adjacent arterial roads. Rather, they say, transit systems encourage the kind of development that is compatible with transit use: walkable neighborhoods with a combination of townhouses, apartment high-rises, offices and shopping that are based around transit stations.
This kind of development is popular in places like Northern Virginia, where a well-run rail system links outlying areas to a massive job center in Washington, D.C. It takes much more patience to introduce these kinds of transit-oriented neighborhoods to cities with comparatively weak central business districts, like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, since people who live in them but don’t work in them may still have to drive to otherwise-inaccessible office parks.
So new transit networks in car-oriented areas constitute major investments in reorienting urban development over a period of decades, not a quick attempt to remove a few cars from highways. Traffic will come back this year–there’s no way around that–but sound investments now could mean that it will bring fewer headaches fifty years from now.
Laurie Burkitt and I have put together a nifty Super Bowl ad viewer for Forbes. You can embed this viewer (for free!) in an article or blog post to display this year’s Super Bowl ads alongside your own content. No need to go through the colossal hassle of finding, compiling, and encoding the ads. We’ve done it for you because we at Forbes love you.
Here’s how it works: copy and paste the code below into the HTML of your web site wherever you want it to appear. Because we’re bound by an embargo and are not allowed to release this year’s ads until the end of this year’s Super Bowl game, the viewer will contain ads from last year at first. Embed it anyway. In an unprecedented feat of Internet magic, the viewer that you put in your own blog will automatically replenish itself with fresh, fresh 2010 ads after the big game on February 7. Again, we make it easy for you.
When we switch in the new ads on the 7th, we’ll also remotely activate a voting feature in the viewer that will let readers pick the best and worst ads. Expect to generate some good discussion in your comments section.
Here’s the viewer. Scroll down to copy and paste the code.
And here’s the code:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://images.forbes.com/scripts/swfobject.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
swfobject.embedSWF("http://images.forbes.com/jb/superbowl/viewer.swf",
"myAlternativeContent", "568", "600", "9.0.0", "expressInstall.swf", {},
{allowscriptaccess:"always", allownetworking:"external"},{});</script>
<div id="myAlternativeContent">You must have Adobe Flash Player 9
or higher installed to view this content
<a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" target="_top">
<img border="0" alt="Get Adobe Flash player" align="left"
src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif"/>
</a></div>
Visit Forbes.com for more details on our embeddable Super Bowl ad viewer.
The G.W.B. doesn’t disappoint. It’s really big—the roadway is almost a mile long and is suspended more than 200 feet above the surface of the Hudson River—but it’s also digestible. Walking across it doesn’t take terribly long, and it’s actually a bit easier than the walk across the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridges, since the deck links a high point in New Jersey to a high point in Manhattan.
The day that I took this walk, the south sidewalk was closed, so I used the walkway on the north side of the bridge. The natural scenery up the river is just as magnificent as the man-made scenery downriver.
From the metro area that gives us such names as Hoboken, Weehawken, Hackensack*, Harsimus Cove and Throgs Neck, comes Yonkers, which sits across the city line from the Bronx. It’s visible from the bridge.
The Cloisters, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sits on the top of a hill in Fort Tryon Park at the very northern tip of Manhattan. Its tower pokes through the trees in this photo. Below it, just above the shoreline, is Robert Moses’s Henry Hudson Parkway. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, the construction of the Henry Hudson Parkway was where Moses went from arrogant-but-generally-good to essentially maniacal (but there were signs earlier, of course).
The views of Midtown are as good as ever, of course. The scale of the Empire State Building is, I think, best appreciated from this distance, where it still overpowers just about everything else.
As we cross over the Manhattan shoreline on the bridge, we can see railroad tracks below us. These were originally built by the New York Central to gain access to the West Side (its Grand Central Terminal is on the East Side). Now they’re owned by Amtrak, which uses them for trains to Albany and Chicago. These tracks and the environment around them in the early 20th century inspired Robert Moses to pursue public works in the first place. When he built Riverside Park and the Henry Hudson Parkway, the tracks were the source of much of his funding, part of which came directly from the New York Central and another chunk of which came from Federal funds earmarked for the elimination of railroad grade crossings.
Upon arriving in Manhattan, we’re greeted by the sight of the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal (in the foreground). Behind it are residential towers that are located directly on top of the Cross-Manhattan Expressway segment of I-95.
And now, a final view of the bridge.
The tour is over. The A train whisks me back downtown, and safely home to Park Slope.