Entries tagged “Transit”

The title of this post was a question posed several years ago by a John Slabyk-designed Threadless tshirt. Now, Martin Jetpack may have provided the answer. The company has designed and built a jetpack prototype which offers a 31.5 mile range (flying at 63mph) and their web site indicates that production models may ship by the end of this year:

It is expected that early orders for sales to private individuals will commence late 2010. If you would like to register your interest in purchasing a Jetpack for private use, please do so through our contact page. We will note your details and contact you when pre orders are being taken.

While this demo video only shows the product in limited action (flying around a warehouse space), that won’t stop me from imagining what it’d be like to use for transit between NJ and NYC. I could get to the Shake Shack in mere minutes!

(Link via Northtemple)

After perusing Wikipedia’s “List of U.S. cities with most households without a car,” Jarrett Walker, a public transit consultant, attempts to reach some conclusions about why certain cities make the list. Surprisingly (at least to me), a city’s presence on the list is not purely a product of available public transportation (though it is an obvious factor).

If I then look across the whole list and try to identify factors that seem to explain, in different mixtures, each city’s presence on the list, it seems there are three: age, poverty, and dominant universities (i.e. universities that are large relative to the size of the city).

The top three carless cities (by percentage) are right in my neighborhood:

1. New York, NY (55.7% of households are carless)
2. Newark, NJ (44.17%)
3. Jersey City, NJ (40.67%)

Of the top 30, only San Francisco (28.56%) is west of the Mississippi.

(via Bobulate)

This year’s World Series pits the Philadelphia Phillies against the New York Yankees — two teams separated by a stretch of highway running right up the middle of New Jersey. If the tickets weren’t ridiculously expensive, I could reasonably consider traveling to either team’s stadium to take in a World Series game.

From Hoboken, NJ:

• Train travel time to Yankee Stadium: 1 hour (rush hour train schedule)
• Drive time to Citizen’s Bank Ballpark: 1 hour 45 minutes (with reasonable traffic)

Not surprisingly, I’ve never lived within 100 miles of both teams playing in the series. In fact, this is only the fourth time in my life that I’ve lived within 100 miles of one of them:

Yesterday, the Phillies chose to take an Amtrak train into New York’s Penn Station. When the Yankees travel to Philly, I assume they’ll just get on A-rod’s back.