Hello, and I guess I am back to [attempting to] blogging. I thought I'd try to consolidate my thoughts and interests on urban planning and related topics in this blog post. Growing up, I've always had an interest in transportation related topics. Whether it be city planning, trains (mass transit or high-speed rail), airplanes, or cars, my interests have drifted in and out of these areas.

I've always found this topic very fascinating, probably due to growing up in big cities like Tokyo. Though I am a computer scientist by training, I'm hoping that I will find some area in the future where I can apply my computer science skillset in this domain. I find work by the Senseable City Lab or research by people like Cathy Wu to be very inspiring. Industry options like Sidewalk Labs or Cruise are places that I may wish to work at in the future.

That said, while I am not working on my research, I do spend time reading and thinking about these topics. Below are a series of links that I've enjoyed following and reading.

Blogs

Here are some blogs that I follow (somewhat regularly):

• Pedestrian Observations: This is a blog I found some time ago that provides a lot of detailed analysis on cities and their transit planning options.
• CityLab: This is a news site run by the Atlantic which contains a lot of interesting posts about city-related topics.
• New-Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens: This is the classic high-traffic Facebook group consisting of a healthy mix of transit-related memes and fruitful discussion. (wiki). There are derivative groups that focus on bicycles, aircrafts, and other topics.
• Yelling at Trains: This is run by my friend Ian Reynolds, who had his live map of the Boston MBTA featured on the Boston Globe!

Airplane Related Resources

I'd say that I am currently (c.2018) in a lull in terms of my aviation interests. In late 2017 I was paying close attention to United's Boeing 747 retirement event. I was interning in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the last of the Boeing 747s were based, and in my twelve weeks in the bay area I probably visited San Francisco International Airport about ten times. Evan Yao and I were able to attend the United's 747 Farewell Family Day, through winning a twitter sweepstakes hosted by ThePointsGuy.

That said, there are probably a lot more interesting topics about airplanes. Skift and CAPA provide interesting analysis on the business or product side of the aviation industry. For travel blogs or tips on churning, I defer to FlyerTalk, OneMileAtATime, and ThePointsGuy.

To follow airplanes in particular, I use Planespotters to look up airplane inventory. FlightRadar24 is my go to for tracking flights or airplanes. Certain airplanes, such as the Lufthansa 747-8I retrojet (D-ABYT) or the ANA 787-9 Star Wars Jet (JA873A) deserve special attention!