“Fairbanks after $10-per-gallon gasoline” — Clucking Blossom report

I reported a week and a half ago that I’d be giving a workshop at the fourth annual Clucking Blossom festival, on the future of city planning and neighborhoods in Fairbanks after $10-per-gallon gasoline. I’m happy to report that the workshop was well attended, and that my audience gave lots of participation.
Following is a [...]

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Reader participation

If you’re already a reader of The Fairbanks Pedestrian, you may not have looked recently for an “About this blog” link. But now there is one — look, at the top of the page! Chances are, you know the kinds of things I write about, so you won’t learn anything new about the [...]

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The bench test

My travels sometimes take me to Anchorage — often enough, by car. It was on one of those trips, in the past year or two, that I devised a simple measure of a place’s pedestrian-friendliness: the bench test.
I drove in on the George Parks Highway, entered the city at Muldoon Road, and turned west [...]

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Fairbanks Pedestrian at Clucking Blossom this Saturday (tomorrow)!

This Saturday (May 17), join me at Clucking Blossom for a discussion on the future of neighborhoods and city planning amid rising gasoline prices.
Clucking Blossom is an annual festival of music, art, and ideas. It is absolutely free of charge — in fact, no cash is allowed to change hands on the day of [...]

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There IS no free parking

A letter to the editor in Tuesday’s News-Miner sparked a little discussion about the Fairbanks Parking Authority. It seems that a number of people don’t like getting tickets when they park downtown and blame the Parking Authority for excessive zeal. They seem to want parking offered that is free of charge and unrestricted [...]

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Caught between the present and the possible

UAF’s Rasmuson Library is going through a strategic planning process right now, and my department — Alaska and Polar Regions — is doing its own as part of that process. One thing I’ve been reminded of is how long-term vision gets too easily sacrificed (if it’s even conceived) for short-term feasibility. And I [...]

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A pedestrian pocket

I recently visited a friend on Fairbanks Street, in an area I haven’t regarded too highly in the past. I discovered some of its hidden virtues that make it one of Fairbanks’s pockets of pedestrian-friendliness.
This is something I think about often: What will we do when gasoline becomes so horrendously expensive that it’s no [...]

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