Jack Turek
Public Historian & Baseball Fan
recent posts
- Presidential Visits to the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers
- Analyzing the Sentiments of Declarations of Independence
- 2024 Is Still As Dangerous as Ever in San Antonio for Pedestrians & Cyclists
- So Far, 2024 Has Been Worse for Pedestrians & Cyclists in San Antonio
- Mapping Educational Gag Orders
Hi, I’m Jack! Welcome to my site. I’m a public historian interested broadly in cities, labor struggles, and baseball history.
Category: Archives
An archive of older writing and analysis.
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I’m in the middle of making some significant updates to the San Antonio crash map (which will hopefully be ready by the beginning of December, but definitely for the start of 2024), but I wanted to take a quick look at some new residential construction permits issued in San Antonio. Like many other cities throughout…
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It may not exactly feel like it in San Antonio, but summer is over. At least it should be. Cooler temperatures have finally arrived with some consistency, which means I now have to put on a light hoodie for my early morning walk with my dogs. Cooler weather has got me thinking more about summer…
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In my last post, I looked at overall ridership trends for VIA Metropolitan Transit and how they’ve changed over the last two decades. VIA ridership took major hits during the Great Recession of 2008-09 and the COVID-19 pandemic, and ridership hasn’t recovered despite an increasing population. I detailed some of the factors that could be…
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I grew up consistently using public transportation, but as I’ve gotten older and lived in less transit-rich parts of the country, I’ve found myself resistant to hopping on the bus in San Antonio to get somewhere I want to go. Some of this resistance is that taking the bus to a destination like the office…
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My San Antonio pedestrian/cyclist dashboard is now updated with July’s crash data, so now is a good time to take a look at how pedestrians and cyclists fared on San Antonio streets last month. 16 bicyclists were involved in crashes during July, with 1 serious injury, 11 minor injuries, and 4 suffering a possible injury.…
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Disclaimer: I used to work for the City of San Antonio (COSA) as an analyst in the Department of Human Services Homeless Division. This post is not going to be about homelessness, but about an email that I would see land in my inbox nearly everyday during the summer months: Ozone Action Day!!! Ozone Action…
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I’m waiting for July to end so I can do my monthly data pull from Texas’ CRIS site and I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent report from the Governors Highway Safety Association that stated that the number of pedestrians killed by vehicles has reached a 40-year high. In 2022, 7,508 people out for…
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San Antonio is a car-centric and sprawling city, encircled by two major freeways – Loop 410 and Loop 1604. If you count the convergence of several other freeways in the downtown area, there’s actually three highway loops wrapped around the city. According to walkscore.com, San Antonio has a 37 walk rating, a 31 public transit…
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The last week or so, I’ve been working on refining some aspects of my Vision Zero pedestrian/cyclist crash map for San Antonio. I think the updates do a couple things: 1) It’s easier to view the points on the map; and 2) it provides some more visual information. Starting with viewing accessibility – all this…
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San Antonio is one of the fastest growing cities in Texas and is a culturally vibrant and friendly city with several universities and a growing job market. The City’s Economic Development Department estimates that nearly a million more people will move to the San Antonio area in the next 20 years. Unfortunately, San Antonio is…