Transportation: A Tale of Three Cities

Miles O'Brien, former CNN spaceman/science reporter, teamed up with PBS to produce a series of documentaries on America's infrastructure crisis called Blueprint America.  It's a great series (editorial note: I've only watched a couple so perhaps the rest is all trash with crayon graphics and O'Brien on a cell phone) but one in particular stands out with a compelling narration of how transportation and land use choices affect cities.  To illustrate the impact of these decisions, O'Brien tells the story of NYC, Denver, and our bike-happy friends in Portland.

Perhaps most importantly, the series is done in a way that is easily digestible for people who are not subscribers to Municipal Government Monthly.

Alas, no video embed feature was available, so you'll have to go to PBS to see it here.

The New York Times review points out something that I think is true, but would have been lost on the target audience.  It wanted more depth on the differences in each community which might make certain changes impossible in others.

Mr. O’Brien ties the transportation situations in Denver and Portland to local attitudes toward suburban development. It is certainly valid but seems simplistic: what about geography, energy sources, differences in local economies? And what does any of this civic history have to do with the future of our infrastructure, which is supposedly the point? It often feels as if a longer, more discursive report on urban planning had been shoehorned into the “Blueprint” format.

What do you think?