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.
-
One of the fun but frustrating things about working on a project is exploring the seemingly infinite number of possibilities and iterations that could make the project “cooler” or “better”. The fun part is thinking of new ways to show information. The frustrating part is realizing that to make the project that much cooler, you…
-
Austin may be the most peculiar large city in Texas. One one hand, it’s the capitol of Texas, where Republicans have dominated state politics for the better part of 3 decades and have legislated some very conservative laws. On the other, more colorful hand, Austin is a city offering tons of live music, a hoppin’…
-
Land use and zoning play an exceptionally large role in city design, dictating where people can live, where shops and restaurants can operate, and where businesses can be located. New York City adopted the first zoning code in 1916 to deal with city nuisances that caused illness and disease. Over time, cities began to use…
-
An almost complete San Antonio Vision Zero crash map is now live!
-
A few days ago I was reviewing Washington, D.C.’s Vision Zero Crash site and realized that an essential component of this site and many others was an actual map that showed where pedestrian and cyclist crashes were occurring. The DC Vision Zero dashboard lets users easily filter the data to view crashes based on the…
-
A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Europe to visit my brother who had moved to Paris for work. I was incredibly excited because I was going to see my brother but also because we had plans to take the train to Torino, Italy for the weekend before returning to Paris for the…
-
Now that our Vision Zero data collection is mostly complete, we’re starting to move onto the analysis phase of the project. Since our home is in San Antonio, TX, we figured that examining the Alamo City’s crash data would be a good jumping off point for this part of the project. We first went to…
-
My wife and I have been collecting crash data for about a month and half now for cities in the Vision Zero Network and I’m happy to say that we’re pretty much done! I say “pretty much done” because there are still a few outstanding items. There are a few cities, like Albuquerque, NM and…
-
I’ve been slowly (but steadily) collecting crash data for U.S. cities acknowledged by the Vision Zero Network for the last month and a half and I’m happy to say that I’m almost done. About 90% of the cities have data collected and logged in the project repository on GitHub and I’m still waiting for a…
-
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about various urban issues affecting America’s cities and I’ve been thinking specifically about how our cities have been designed for speeding hunks of metal (cars). I recently read the 10th anniversary edition of Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, which lays out ten rules for designing city spaces for people, not…