Aaron Naparstek
AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.
Recent Posts
Evaluating Summer Streets
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Here's a modest proposal for evaluating the success of a Summer Streets event: Measure the amount of time kids are able to run and play without their parents having to worry about them being hit by a car, the number of friends you bump into and new people you meet, the pounds of automobile exhaust and carbon that aren't being spewed into the hot summer air, the amount of horn-honking, engine-revving and boom stereos you're not hearing, and whether your local merchants are happy about the event and making more money than they usually do on a slow summer weekend.
Forbes Rates North America’s Most Bike-Friendly Cities
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You know it’s summer vacation time for America’s magazine editors when the top ten lists starting popping up. Forbes gets into the act this week with a rundown of North America’s ten best biking cities: New York City comes in eighth place. "Visitors shouldn’t always expect courtesy from those behind the wheel." Neither should residents […]
Highway Funding: The Last Bastion of Socialism in America
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Matthew Yglesias over at The Atlantic points us to this eye-popping chart from A Better Way to Go, a USPIRG Education Fund report published in March 2008. Download the report here. It’s a good one to have on-hand. A few factoids to accompany the chart: Since 1956, federal, state and local governments have invested nine […]
Al Gore Connects the Dots
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"We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change." — A Generational Challenge to Repower America, Thursday, July 17, 2008.
Auto Dealers, Parking Garages and, Well, Lots of Others Fund Shelly
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In case you missed it last week, New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is raising bucket-loads of campaign cash — lots more than his two opponents, Paul Newell and Luke Henry. Groups that opposed congestion pricing are, no surprise, among some of the most enthusiastic contributors. The Times reported: Like Mr. Paterson and Mr. […]
Williamsburg Walks: Opening Up Bedford Avenue
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Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg Brooklyn was de-motorized and opened to the public this Saturday for a new event called Williamsburg Walks. Streetfilms’ Clarence Eckerson was there and he’s already churned out a nice three-and-a-half minute video to give you a sense of the event. If you want to check out Williamsburg Walks for yourself, you […]
Richard Florida: Decline of the Burbs is Not Just About Gas Prices
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Via Planetizen, Richard Florida argues the decline in the popularity of suburbs is not just a product of rising oil prices, but a result of a new "spatial fix" that is reorganizing how and where people live their lives. From Florida’s column in the Globe and Mail: What’s happening here goes a lot deeper than […]
Is San Fran More Walkable Than NYC?
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Remember that web site, Walk Score, that you could use to rank your neighborhood’s pedestrian-friendliness? They just came out with a souped-up new version that is very cool yet somehow manages to rank San Francisco the #1 most walkable city in the U.S. and New York City #2. Is Eastern Queens really dragging us down […]
Tom Vanderbilt Ponders Motorist Sociopathy
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Yesterday, at the end of our piece about the recent road rage incidents in usually-polite Portland and Seattle, we posed a question to Tom Vanderbilt, author of the forthcoming book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us. We asked: What is it about automobility that often seems to […]
Touring the East Side Access Tunnel, Surrounded By Schist
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This morning I took a tour of the MTA’s newly completed East Side Access tunnel 140 feet below Midtown Manhattan. My laptop is about to run out of batteries and, of course, I left my power cord at home. (It’s a good thing I’m only in charge of running a blog and not, say, a […]
Rising Demand for Transit Could Be a “Turning Point”
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CNN also led off this morning with a relatively in-depth piece on U.S. cities scrambling to meet rising demand for mass transit. With a fight over billions of dollars of federal transportation funding set to heat up immediately after the swearing-in of the next president, this may very well be the most important transportation policy […]
Williamsburg Walks: Volunteer Orientation Tonight
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Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue will be going car-free for four Saturdays this summer. If you want to be a part of making the event happen, Billburg.com invites you to a "Williamsburg Walks" volunteer orientation session tonight. Boricua College186 N. 6th St. (bet. Bedford & Driggs Aves.)Brooklyn RSVPs are encouraged, but not mandatory. RSVP to williamsburgwalks [at] […]