Back in 2020, when I was living in Sweden and (as usual) commuting everywhere by bike I came across a wonderful animation on reddit, depicting the poster’s five years of biking data in London. Bike routes are added onto a black background one by one in rapid succession, combining to make the street grid of the city legible. I immediately started recording my own bike rides with Strava. I even took more creative routes to make sure I was padding out the grid, leading me to reflect on how measurement can influence behavior.

I am a big fan of autoformatting code with a language-specific tool. This removes all the mental overhead of choosing how to style things nicely, and ensures styling is consistent across a project, usually while also bringing your code into compliance with a popular style guide (like PEP8 for Python.) This is especially important if you are collaborating with others. Instead of mixing styles or having to police each others styles in pull requests or (worst of all) fighting over styles and changing things back and forth, you each run your code through the same formatting tool and everything comes out looking the same.

While having dinner with friends, I got excited about the idea of playgrounds as little microcosms of cities, in which the “affordances”– or “action possibilities”– of the built environment heavily influence the types of activity that take place.1 When designing playgrounds, as with cities, we must think carefully about how to create spaces that encourage and facilitate desirable interactions. For example, let’s talk about swings. A classic swing is good for a parent to push a young child, promoting parent-child bonding.

I’ve been reading the book “Killed by a Traffic Engineer” by Wes Marshall. I find it to be a very thoughtful, well-researched and well-argued critique of the myths that underpin modern road design and where they come from and why they are wrong. The key argument of the book is that traffic “engineering” is different from other forms of engineering because you must manage human behavior, not just objects that follow physical laws.

While commuting down Washington Street this morning, I encountered an Eversource electrical truck protruding into the bike lane. Though this seemed like a reasonable blockage, I still murmured something under my breath about how there is always shit in the bike lane and glanced over my left shoulder, preparing to merge into bustling traffic. Then, I realized the workers had actually created a path of cones, preserving the lost bike lane and sidewalk while closing down one lane to car traffic.

A growing number of states have legalized the “Idaho Stop,” which allows cyclists to treat red lights like stop signs, citing safety benefits. Whether it’s legal or not, this behavior drives drivers crazy. Judging from comments I see online and occasionally shouted out of car windows, motorists hate when cyclists run red lights. They see it as reckless, chaotic, and, worst of all, unfair. True, I have seen cyclists run red lights recklessly.

For the past month or so I have been working on a little activist video game called “Stroad Hero.” I’m using the Godot game engine, and the code is on GitHub. Here’s a write-up about how it started and how it’s going. While my partner and I were attending to family matters in Muncie, Indiana, we stayed in a hotel that was laughably difficult to reach by foot. The hotel was embedded within a sprawling shopping area that stretched along a major roadway.

I recently watched Jennifer Lawrence’s raunchy comedy No Hard Feelings (2023). I’m sorry to say, it’s pretty bad!! However, if you squint and dream a little, you will find a crystal clear anti-car message, which I appreciate. The movie has an awkward premise: the overly concerned parents of a 19-year-old boy hire a 32-year-old woman to “date” him and bring him out of his shell. The comedy, which is also awkward, does little to salvage the premise.

I recently attended a Somerville city council meeting regarding the city’s Bicycle Network Action Plan. After city council members presented details on the plan, there was time for public comment. Many residents spoke in favor, many against. A recurring theme among those opposed to bike lane expansion was appeals to accessibility: Sure, bikes are fine for young and healthy people. But what about the elderly and disabled? What about my grandma who isn’t able to bike?

Updated: December, 2024. I created an audio-based geography game called GeoHearo. When the game begins, a mystery country is chosen at random and you are presented with five radio stations to pan through. As you submit your guesses, the game tells you how close you are and which direction to go. The map is provided as a visual aid; you can hover a country to check it’s name, and your guessed countries are filled with a color that reflects proximity to the correct country.