Alissa Walker
Curbed
Los Angeles, CA, United States
Contact Alissa
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Past articles by Alissa:
Expert: How to Stay Safe on Poor Air Quality Days
New York and East Coast skies are thick with smoke from Canadian wildfires. The city’s air quality is some of the worst on the planet. Air-quality expert Daniel Westervelt talks about how to protect yourself on hazy, smoky days. → Read More
Katie Hobbs’s Plan to Curb Development Is Good Water Policy
Arizona governor Katie Hobbs took the dramatic and necessary step to restrict the construction of new homes in the Phoenix suburbs if the developers’ plans include relying on groundwater supplies, which have been severely depleted in a long drought. → Read More
California Is Becoming Uninsurable
State Farm will no longer provide home insurance to new California customers, citing increased construction costs and “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure,” which is something homeowners will face more frequently in an age of climate disasters. → Read More
The Case for Taxing Vehicles by Weight
Deion Sanders’s brand-new customized Ford F-650, a tuxedo-black, diesel-powered behemoth is the perfect argument for taxing heavy vehicles like pickups and SUVs by weight because they are more dangerous and destructive. → Read More
The Off-Peak Rider Is the Future of the Subway
Like other large U.S. transit agencies staring down a fiscal cliff, the MTA is making big operational changes for New York City subways and buses focusing on increasing off-peak service as it attempts to bring back ridership lost during the pandemic. → Read More
‘We Were Riding in a City That Simply Hadn’t Existed Just a Few Years Earlier’
New York City’s bike-share system Citi Bike turns 10 this month. A dozen people including city employees and transportation advocates discuss bike share’s impact on NYC and share their memories, experiences, and ideas for how the program can grow. → Read More
Q&A on Parking With Henry Grabar, Author of ‘Paved Paradise’
Interview with Henry Grabar, author of the book “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World” on how car storage ruins our cities, how eliminating parking minimums can combat the housing crisis, and why we should be paying more to park in public. → Read More
The Small Electric Car Is an Endangered Species in America
GM is killing the Chevy Bolt, with CEO Mary Barra saying production on the electric sedan will wrap at the end of 2023. In an industry increasingly dominated by SUVs and trucks, the Bolt was a refreshingly sensible and affordable little car. → Read More
Heavier Vehicles in Aging Parking Garages Are a Recipe for Disaster
Officials say the Ann Street garage collapse that killed one person might have been caused by the size of the cars parked inside. Structural engineer Russell Simmons discusses how a future of heavier vehicles, including EVs, threaten old buildings. → Read More
Los Angeles Police Have a Helicopter Problem
L.A.’s police departments have the largest combined aerial fleet in the U.S. and the short flights of their helicopters are an emissions disaster, yet their unproven effectiveness and dubious claims about crime prevention escape climate scrutiny. → Read More
Elon Musk Could Ruin Your Commute (Again)
A brief outage on MTA’s rider-alert Twitter account offered an unsettling glimpse into the platform’s future: Elon Musk wants to introduce a tiered payment system to access the API that could potentially cost the MTA a lot of money it doesn’t have. → Read More
Uber Says It’s Trying to Fix the E-bike Battery Crisis
Uber will sponsor two “cash for clunker” programs to help New York City’s deliveristas buy or rent safer e-bikes and e-scooters after fires caused by cheap and unsafe lithium-ion batteries have killed at least five people this year alone. → Read More
New NYC DOT Street Sensors Are Tracking How the City Moves
Tiny cameras installed at a dozen New York City locations are anonymously tracking the number of street users, including their mode of transportation and their route, in NYC DOT’s effort to make more effective, data-driven changes to local streets. → Read More
It’s Already Been a Deadly Year for New York Cyclists
10 people have been killed while riding their bikes in New York City in the first three months of 2023. Responding to ongoing high numbers of cyclist deaths, the Department of Transportation is launching a new PSA meant to prevent dooring. → Read More
What Does the Potential Demise of Lyft Mean for Citi Bike?
Lyft’s financial woes have brought in a new CEO to help the troubled ride-hailing service, but lean times at Lyft could spell trouble for its near-monopoly on the country’s bike-share market, including the largest system, New York City’s Citi Bike. → Read More
No, Cities Aren’t Doomed Because of Remote Work
Interview with David Madden, a sociologist and director of the Cities Programme at London’s School of Economics and Political Science, who discusses why the rhetoric of doomed downtowns fails to account for what urban recovery should look like. → Read More
Disney’s Reedy Creek Board Thwarted Ron DeSantis’s Takeover
Before Florida governor Ron DeSantis stripped Disney of its decades-long ability to self-govern a special tax district, the previous board granted the company powers until 21 years after the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III dies. → Read More
‘Train Daddy’ Andy Byford Will Head Amtrak’s High Speed Rail
Andy Byford, the London-based transit consultant lovingly nicknamed Train Daddy who swooped in to save the MTA, has been named an executive vice president at Amtrak where he’ll be overseeing high-speed rail, somewhere the U.S. has fallen very short. → Read More
Los Angeles’s Metro Is Using Classical Music as a Weapon
Los Angeles’s Metro is blasting classical music at one subway station to drive out people who are seeking shelter during the relentless rains and cold weather, an approach commuters and some Metro leadership are condemning as cruel and ineffective. → Read More
Eric Adams: Windows May Hold Back Affordable Housing
New York City mayor Eric Adams said that windowless bedrooms would make the city’s housing more affordable, drawing him into the current discourse around office conversions where architects and developers debate windowless layouts and floor plans. → Read More