egelder22

zelgadis: I don't care about the health hazards of smoke outdoors, I, along with many non-smokers, just hate the smell. Even more than dump trucks and cars. and to manticorefan: the reason for all the bans is that most people simply cannot be trusted. What does a poor city guy who has never shot anything in his life need a pistol for? And you may think it's alright to smoke in your home, but what about the family with the young child who are forced to inhale those horrible toxic chemicals because of the parent's inability to control their addiction? Or the guy walking down the street with asthma who has to hold their breath every time he passes someone blowing smoke into the air? The bans are i place for a reason. Maybe you don't care if you're killing yourself, but it's not fair to try and kill everyone around you. and btw, second-hand smoke does kill. If you are forced to pass by smokers every time you step outside a building, your doing as much damage to your lungs as they are.

To Britain: What took so long? In New York indoor smoking has been banned for a while, even in NYC. I say, thank god, I hate the smell of cigarettes. It's not about freedom, it's about politeness to others. If you light up, even outside, everyone around has to inhale the smoke and smell it. And if you go to a college like I do, people are smoking everywhere and it sickens me. I say, ban it in all OUTDOOR public places as well. If you want to kill yourself, I don't care but do it where no one has to smell you.

Somwhere in Mexico, either Guadalajara or Mexico City

reno, or phoenix?

Given the hint, I would have to guess Las Vegas. Relatively mid-sized city with a big reputation

I would have to agree with DFire870. Texas doesn't need a huge superhighway that bypasses every major city and destroys so much valuable land. They just need to upgrade the system they already have. Widen the interstates, build some commuter rail and mass transit lines so that at least you could get some of the cars off the road. This whole TTC scheme is not a method to improve transit between cities, it's just a way to bring in more cheaply made goods from Mexico further into the U.S. It's ultimately going to hurt American businesses, destroy farmland, and become a vast empty roadway with no way on or off except in major cities. I don't see a positive.

I HATE this building with a passion... For starters, it looks like a pile of crap stacked on top of each other. And it's going to be one of the tallest buildings in the city! Everywhere you go you're going to see this guy's monument to his own ego... And in a place like Mumbai, with so many people living in slums and shanty-towns, this is not going to go over well. The government of India rwally needs to get control over this guy and forbid him from building a 60-storey, (The British spelling for Duke87) single family monstrosity. At least with a large sprawling mansion you could hide behind a gate and nobody has to see your hedonistic excess.

Smart Growth IS the answer. What we need to do do stop sprawl is go back about 60-70 years, to pre-WWII suburbs. Cities like Boston and New York are great examples, if you take away everything built after 1950. Before there was urban sprawl and Levittowns and interstate highways. The towns on Long Island were individual communities built along rail lines into the city. And from what I've seen, each had their own Main Street and trolley line. Today the trolleys are gone, but the idea still remains. Everyone in my town commutes to the city, but in a city like New York, cars are actually impractical. The furthest city workers drive on Long Island in to the train station. I don't mean to glorify my hometown, but I really do think it is one of the best examples of a successful community. I love LI. And to think the answer to all the problems of urban growth is to just look to the past.

Smart Growth IS the answer. What we need to do do stop sprawl is go back about 60-70 years, to pre-WWII suburbs. Cities like Boston and New York are great examples, if you take away everything built after 1950. Before there was urban sprawl and Levittowns and interstate highways. The towns on Long Island were individual communities built along rail lines into the city. And from what I've seen, each had their own Main Street and trolley line. Today the trolleys are gone, but the idea still remains. Everyone in my town commutes to the city, but in a city like New York, cars are actually impractical. The furthest city workers drive on Long Island in to the train station. I don't mean to glorify my hometown, but I really do think it is one of the best examples of a successful community. I love LI. And to think the answer to all the problems of urban growth is to just look to the past.

c2check: say what you want you're not going to change how I think. CMU's campus is beautiful and well-planned and the new building is probably going to be the most interesting piece of architecture in the region. But that's it. CMU is not representative of the city because it is a worldly place and no one there is actually from Pittsburgh. I guess you would have to have lived there to really like it. I think it's a horrible place with bad weather most of the year in a crumbling region of abandoned steel mills and coal mines.

c2check: You obviously don't get out a lot. The whole city is a crumbling mess and it's not "fun" to drive around for hours and get lost going up and down hills. As for a medium-sized city, it is truly a failure. It is a small town that's grown too big, and it's anyone that has to go downtown that suffer. There's no main route into the city and the buses are infrequent and unpredictable. And the rivers do smell. You can't swim in them because of the raw sewage being dumped in them. And as an architecture student, I can say Pittsburgh's architecture is pretty generic, not interesting. The old stuff is alright, but nothing new is really noteworthy. I've never been to Europe but I think I would like it. Cities in Europe are much cleaner. Pittsburgh's hills are overgrown and full of trash and decrepit buildings. The only source of stability in the city are UPMC and CMU. If they collapsed (as CMU might because of it's financial problems) then the city will fall with it. And as for that article, it all sounds pretty bad if you ask me. What character? All I see is people who hang around in sports bars all day and wait for news about the Steelers. It's quite sickening to go to place that only has one thing on their mind. It's the lowest-class place I've ever seen. If you like a city full of poor surrounded by suburbs full of white trash then you'll love that hell-hole. Not for me. I'd trade Pittsburgh for my home city of NYC any day. NYC has real class, and a city that has multiple personalities and is not just black and white.

Well, I can tell you about Pittsburgh. The steel mills are long gone but the soot remains. Buildings in the city still have black soot stains on them. It does have a lot of low-income neighborhoods, though. The rivers are horribly polluted and smell. The streets are narrow and wind up and down steep hills and with people always parallel parked on both sides, there's hardly any room to drive. Freight trains are a frequent sight bu there is no passenger rail to speak of except for one Amtrak trains which I've never seen. There are still a lot of abandoned steel mills and factories. Steel may be gone but the Steelers prevail. Everyone is obsessed with that football team. I see old ladies wearing Steelers jersies. Overall, Pittsburgh is not a pretty place. The only reason I can imagine anyone would want to live is because it has the lowest cost of living in the country.

Well, I don't know much about Philly, but I enjoy bashing Pittsburgh. I'm from NY and go to school in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is no comparison to NYC. The transportation sucks. You can't walk anywhere, driving is a nightmare, and there is no mass transit to speak except for the buses that seldom show up. Downtown is nothing to be proud of. It literally closes at 5pm. Nothing is open after dark in the entire city. And as for industry, the only thing Pittsburgh had going for it was the steel industry. And now that it left, they're trying to "revitalize" the city by knocking down the old mills and replacing them with big box shopping centers. The "Waterfront" development has no visual or physical connection to the actual river! And as far as culture, Pittsburgh is a sports town. And I hate that. It's entire population consists of crazed Steelers fans who hang around getting drunk in bars and live and breathe for their beloved football team. It's actually pretty pathetic. I've never seen such a low-class town in my life. And that's another point. Pittsburgh is a TOWN, not a city. It tries to keep it's small town feel, but all that leads to is major traffic problems and everything being closed at night. The way I see it, despite all the fruitless efforts to save the city, it's inevitably going downhill. The only thing holding it together now are the two major universities: Carnegie Mellon and U Pitt who really only use Pittsburgh in their name and do nothing for it. Without them trying promoting the city, it would just be an abandoned steel town.

I agree sprawl is terrible. It's impersonal, it destroys nature, and the only reason people move there is so they can own a small piece of land. Although I must agree with schooner2 that when it comes to smart suburban development, Long Island is the model. Maybe it's just because the area developed before the age of suburban sprawl, but Long Island's suburbs are (mostly) not huge tracts of farmland that has been bought and subdivided. It's all small towns often over a hundred years old with strong community sense that have grown together. Each has their own main street, they're own school district, and they're all connected by mass transit to the city. So many people commute to the city and no one drives in. And each neighborhood has it's own distinct character. My town of Babylon has a very maritime feel. You move to a place on LI because you like what it offers, not because it's the cheapest group of cookie-cutter houses going up. Although as you go out to the east end where development is newer, you start to see more and more sprawl areas.