city design; mass transit

Since my last post's comments section seems to have turned into a bit of a free-for-all on mass transit and city design, I thought I'd put in a plug for a book I'm reading, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (cognative is reading it too, and I know it's a favorite of ukelele's as well, so other people who've read it are welcome to share their thoughts.) It's not a book without flaws, by any means -- she is far too self-righteous about data-driven planning for someone whose own "data" could easily be interpreted as "cherry-picked anecdotes that support my hypotheses" -- but it's full of interesting suggestions and food for thought, and her ideas are concrete enough that it'd be possible to do some analyses and see whether they hold up to more systematic scrutiny. And, well, self-righteousness is usually in extremely poor taste, but nevertheless it does make for entertaining reading, especially when the people being skewered are some of those who got us into the sprawl mess in the first place. ;)