After completing my Masters Degree in Urban and Regional Planning at San Jose State University, plus many hours of gaming and contemplating about moving forward, I am returning to a refreshed website. It might be far simpler than previous versions, but it is a start worth rebuilding. However, with more than half a million images on Flickr and Photobucket combined, more time will be allocated to share my best images and up-to-date stories about my journey to becoming a transportation planner.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given me more time to think about my future, especially as an introvert and well-educated person. Traveling around on public transportation has been grounded to a halt, and staying at home has been relatively easy for me to deal with. Despite those setbacks, I've been able to use my time to do other things, from testing out (and playing) new games to migrating and rebuilding my website away from Weebly. It took me time to sort things out, and we are now on Joomla after many years with Weebly.

 

Hello! My name is Anthony Nachor, a transportation planner and tutor who is passionate about educating people about how urban planning should be taught and applied to every day life and how to improve math skills using transportation planning. Debuted in 2008 as the blog supplement to a SimCity 4 City Journal, my website has evolved itself into a more general content site, containing photography from my travels around the Bay Area and beyond, as well as my thoughts about Urban Studies and Planning, transportation development, and local issues that matter today. Along with those, I also focus on specific issues, from San Francisco's transit agency, Muni, to Marin County's "environmental conservatism", both presenting contrasts between two neighboring counties and how they address such issues as cleanliness, crime, and corruption, all of which provide significant effects to both residents and officials.

I graduated from the Masters of Urban and Regional Planning from San Jose State University in December 2019, right before the COVID pandemic. Prior to that, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts of Urban Studies and Planning from San Francisco State University in May 2015. Currently, I am involved with the following organizations:

With Project Rebound, I personally work with students through tutoring statistics and mentoring as they transition from life behind bars to university life. As a long-time volunteer for both San Francisco Transit Riders and Seamless Bay Area, I am passionate with addressing issues governing regional transportation and mobility, participating in the Regional Transit Working Group for the former and providing advice on fare integration with the latter organization.

I aim to become one of the best and most trusted transportation planners you will ever meet. In addition, I have over fifteen years of tutoring experience, especially with mathematics. And I also like to research on topics related to urban planning and transportation planning, from mundane topics like why we need to narrow streets to shorten pedestrian crosswalks, to more complex issues like how to rebuild an entire transit network.

My philosophy for transportation planning is threefold:

  • With climate change and global warming, I'd like to reduce my carbon footprint by using alternative modes of transportation instead of driving alone, including public transit, walking, biking, and electric scooters. Basically, rather than just talking the talk, I walk the walk by choosing public transportation over driving to most places. (There will always be exceptions, trust me.)
  • Since public transportation has a social justice component, I am committed to make mass transit affordable, accessible, and fun for everyone to use, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, background, or disability.
  • As transportation continues to evolve, I want to make it sustainable and approachable for everyone to appreciate. While issues governing the future of transport, like flying cars and self-driving vehicles, are years away, I'd like to tackle issues that are human-scaled and financially reasonable for communities and politicians to implement.

My philosophy for tutoring is also threefold:

  • Students really need a lot of time to learn, with many of them struggling to learn lessons in one go. I totally understand that. I felt the same way when I was in high school, especially when I had to endure bullying and teasing by my peers. Given that I have Asperger's, I can be an intelligent individual, I just needed a different way to learn things, which is visually rather than just memorizing numbers.
  • Rather than just learning equations and principles theoretically, I want to apply them to real-world situations. In transportation planning, I always get new data every single day, be it in visual form using maps, or numerical form with ridership numbers. I want to bring those lessons to life as I do tutoring because it allows students to understand, not just what the numbers are or how those work, but also why such figures come out in a particular way.
  • Each individual has his or her own learning style, in which I account for where they struggle, what conditions inhibit their ability to learn, and their ability to find creative ways of learning new things. All of those allow me to teach lessons and create sample problems on the fly with minimal need for textbooks or generating problems from online. (I only use books and online resources as inspiration.)

Born in Makati City in the Philippines and resided originally in nearby Mandaluyong City for most of my childhood before moving to Novato, CA in 2006, I grew up in a very dense, urban megalopolis, in which I lived within 15 minutes of some of the largest and most prominent shopping centers in the country, including SM Megamall, Robinson's Galleria, Shangri-La Plaza, EDSA Central, and Star Mall (formerly Manuela 3 Complex). I grew up loving transportation since childhood, from matchbox cars to sketching maps, SimCity to Cities: Skylines, participating in conferences and conventions to attending classes and lectures. I also loved riding mass transportation options since youth, from buses to boats to BART, tricycles to taxis to TNCs (transport network companies, like Uber and Lyft), MRT-3 to Muni Metro, and many more. The evolution of public transportation options and opportunities to improve transit networks never cease to amaze me.

And I want to use what I learn from public transportation musings into my education. I use data (e.g. maps, schedules, ridership) from transit agencies, conversations from transit professionals and advocates, and collaborative work from mentors and professors to provide teachable moments in mathematics, including arithmetic, algebra, and statistics. At the same time, my ideal of "I don't want to leave anyone behind" rings true in tutoring: when a student struggles--for any reason--in mathematics, I want to give him or her a helping hand, a lift up, and motivation to understand the beauty of math in an approachable way.

I am a lifelong learner and educator on urban and transportation planning, and I use mathematics and research as solid foundations to make the journey worthwhile. Both transportation planning and math require extensive discipline, from understanding the fundamentals to recognizing patterns to formulating solutions to challenging problems and issues. I truly believe that, through my knowledge of transportation planning and math, I can help people succeed in their lives and confidently say to themselves, "math is something worth learning" and "transportation planning is worth fighting for".