There's more of this in Tokyo these days.Photo: Byron Kidd Shortly after last month's disastrous earthquake and tsunami in Japan, we posted a dispatch from Tokyo by Bike blogger Byron Kidd (@tokyobybike) about how more people were biking to work in the quake's aftermath. Today, The New York Times has a story about how the uptick in bicycle commuting seems to be persisting in the weeks following the tragedy: [Shigeki] Kobayashi, director of [a] bicycle advocacy group, regularly counts the number of bikers passing by a busy boulevard that leads to downtown Tokyo. On a day last November, he counted …

Perfectly at home.Photo: Sarah GoodyearIf I asked you where the picture above was probably taken, I don't think your first answer would be Manhattan. But that's exactly where I found this fine-looking red-backed salamander: In a brushy, overgrown part of a park in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. This is the second time I've gone salamander-hunting in this spot. Here's how you do it: You get off the subway and walk a few blocks, along streets where merengue music is blaring from the storefronts, past the sidewalk food vendors and the cellphone stores and a group handing …

Making a greener office park.Photo: Keith CuddebackFascinating case study in The Atlantic about getting people out of their cars and onto transit for their commute. Lisa Margonelli writes about a program at a suburban California office park that has had huge success in encouraging workers to leave the car at home -- by emphasizing the practical and financial advantages of using transit, working with local government to improve bus connections, and creating a culture in which using transit is aspirational -- simply a cool thing to do (are you listening, John Kasich?). One of the things that makes it work …

Is there anything more uncool than a 50-something politician in a suit talking about wanting his state to be "cool"? Nah. Probably not. Witness Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a newly elected Republican whose union-busting policies have made him pretty unpopular, as he delivers one of the more delicious soundbites in recent memory. The video moment was captured by Mark Kovac of the indispensable Capital Blog (via @rustwire): We've got to make Ohio cool. You know, I was down at Lexis-Nexis down in Dayton, I'm meeting with the CEO of the company, and he says, you know, a lot of these, …

Refreshing, isn't it?Photo: Ed Yourdon Despite positive reviews from local business owners, area workers, tourists, and other human beings, New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo won't stop frothing at the mouth about the pedestrian plazas in New York's Times Square, lamenting that the once car-clogged streets have become "asphalt loitering grounds," and that the redesign has "extinguished the strangely beautiful confluence of auto lights between 47th and 42nd streets, an archetypal image of elegant, urban dynamism." His latest screed was prompted by the proposed addition of food service to the plazas, which have been in place since spring 2009. So …

The grass is always greener.Photo: ClaudiaAh, the American lawn! Symbol of prestige! Source of unending drudgery! Environmental nightmare! Why do we have this thing, anyway? The lawn originated in Europe, perhaps first as an area cleared near castles to allow for the easy sighting of potential attackers, then later maintained as a sign of social standing -- all that open space without food growing on it meant you had to be pretty rich. These days, many American neighborhoods require a well-tended, well-watered lawn (although more environmentally friendly types of landscaping are sometimes acceptable as well). Failure to maintain the standard …

Too many American streets and roads are missing something.Photo: Nicholas_TCreating an environment where people can get across the street without being killed by a driver should be a top priority for the people who design our streets and roads, don't you think? Sad to say, it isn't always so. You only have to take a look at Charles Marohn's enlightening "Confessions of a recovering engineer" to learn that. Here's what Marohn wrote: [T]he engineer first assumes that all traffic must travel at speed. Given that speed, all roads and streets are then designed to handle a projected volume. Once those …

Well, if supporters of the Prospect Park West bike lane in Brooklyn are a bunch of terrorists (as some bike-lane opponents might have it), they are very effectively disguised as cute little kids and their parents. Streetfilms has the evidence. Yesterday, hundreds of bike lane supporters showed up to ride the controversial lane, which has become the target of a lawsuit filed by neighbors seeking to have it removed. (Full disclosure: some of the material filed as part of the suit consists of nasty comments from Streetsblog, a website where I used to work.) The lane's opponents say it is …

Considering that at some point in our childhood past, almost all of us rode a bike, it's pretty incredible how much fear bikes can inspire in adults. There's the fear of riding in traffic -- that's probably the main one, and something I won't deal with here. There is also the fear of how to take care of the bike itself -- compounded by the fear of the all-too-common assholish guys at bike shops who ignore you or sneer at you by default when you walk in the door. But here's the beautiful thing: Bicycles are really quite simple machines. …

Facebook's headquarters will have a new suburban face.Photo: pshabNow that Facebook has eaten the entire world and drunk its milkshake, the company understandably needs more space to let it all hang out. So they're moving from their offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to a campus of their own in Menlo Park, a corporate park that is being vacated by the retreating Sun Microsystems. Here's the thing about the move. The choice of the site, which is cut off from the rest of Menlo Park by roads, railroad tracks, and protected wetlands, makes one thing quite clear: Facebook doesn't want to …