Rich Mintz  

We all know the yahoo New York press has manufactured a bike lane culture war, because old people don’t like change, and certain of those old people are used to getting their way and go batshit when they don’t. But it’s nice to see the actual facts bearing out what everyone who thinks about it for 30 seconds can figure out for themselves: bike lanes don’t “cause accidents,” and if the data were more complete, it would likely be demonstrated that they reduced them. That, at least, is the on-the-record conclusion of one of the study’s authors, transportation engineer Cindy Chen.

If you’ve ever been on a bike on a city street, trying to ride safely and not get hit by guided missiles 15 times your weight going 8 times your speed, you would intuitively understand that establishing a designated part of the street where drivers and pedestrians should expect to see bicycles would likely reduce bicycle-car and bicycle-pedestrian collisions, because some huge fraction (90%?) of collisions are due to one party “not seeing” the other. (The other 10%: equipment failure, other operator error, and the occasional instance of homicidal or suicidal mania.)

In other words, “duh.” But studies by the DOT are mistrusted by … well, by people with a political agenda, is the polite thing to call them. So it’s nice to see an independent academic study bearing out these common-sense results.

I’m sitting on a Delta shuttle from O’Hare back to New York (on which a toddler, roughly 2 years old, keeps shouting “Party!” over and over for no apparent reason), and I feel I should write something brief about two unexpected developments: the recovery of Delta from its turn-of-the-millennium squalor, and the consistently pleasant airport experience provided by the city of Chicago.

First, Delta. (And i realize that this flight is operated by Shuttle America, but they’re carrying the Delta livery and flying as part of an integrated system, so hear me out.)

My memory is faulty, but I’m pretty sure this Delta Shuttle i’m flying today is the one that used to be the Pan Am shuttle, and so once upon a time it had some glamour, but Pan Am closed down in 1991 or so (I flew it on its final weekend, from Mexico City back to Los Angeles) and for most of the ensuing dozen years the shuttle service was increasingly dismal. A decade later, when I was living in Atlanta and Delta was my hometown airline, I rooted for them partly out of pride, but the Delta flying experience was pretty glum around the turn of the century: sullen flight attendants, poor inflight service, cracked upholstery and broken armrests, unreliable departures and arrivals.

Then things started to change for the better, 7 or 8 years ago. Some of it had to do with Delta Technologies, which has always run a good logistics operation and for more than a decade now has run a great website, along with excellent kiosks and other electronic customer services. But that can’t explain it all, because some of the magic is back, too. The staff, by and large, seem happy again, even at La Guardia (the sullenest in the national network of sullen airports). The uniforms are brighter. I’m flying on an Embraer jet that smells like it just came out of the factory last week. There’s free beer and wine in coach, for those who are into that. For about the 5th time in a row, we’re arriving on time. And on this Chicago flight, I paid what I think of as a competitive airfare — well under $400 round trip, booked just 2 days before.

Now, yes, yes, I know, not mainline service, Shuttle. But still. My recent encounters with Delta mainline have also been positive. (Incidentally, Hartsfield-Jackson is looking good. It’s still one of the best-run airports in America.) In general, dealing with Delta these days, you have the feeling you’re dealing with a competent organization. And as small a thing as that sounds, when we didn’t reliably have it for all those years, its absence was felt.

Now, the Chicago airports. You already know I love Midway. And for my entire adult life, everyone I know has loved to hate on O’Hare. But why? Yes, it’s big, that’s a given. And it has its bad days. But the food and beverage options are excellent (lentil salad from Argo Tea on my tray table), there’s some interesting retail, and the city has put a lot of money into airport arts. Not to mention that you can go door-to-counter from the Loop in less than an hour for $2.25 on a single train. In the Delta gate area today, seating was ample and well-lit, there were electrical outlets all over the place (including USB charging stalks) — nothing to complain about. I even saw a TSA supervisor scolding a TSA agent for a small customer-unfriendly infraction (cutting in line during a customer service encounter).

The NYC Summer Streets festival kicked off this morning, and will be continuing for the next two Saturdays, 7am to 1pm. A tremendous “thank you” to the army of NYC DOT volunteers, NYPD police and traffic control officers, and sponsor staff who made it a safe event for the thousands of walkers, skaters, and bicyclists who participated today. I rode from the foot of the route (near the Brooklyn Bridge) up almost to Grand Central and then back down to Houston, and I saw people of all ages out enjoying the streetscape — including young children and older people who might not normally be comfortable bicycling in the street.

As a side benefit, I saw a ton of gear, including a Dutch pannier bag that I now covet.

A few photos below, but I didn’t take many, as I was busy, you know, doing things.

I found myself near Columbus Circle at the end of the workday today with my bouncy little Dahon folding bike, and so I decided to take a trip down the Broadway bike lane, snapping photos all the way. I took pictures basically every time I had to stop at a light, or when I saw something interesting.

You’ll note that that route took me right through Times Square, which is CRAZYTOWN.  Not much riding for about 10 blocks.  Incidentally, anyone who thinks the pedestrianization of Times Square isn’t an overwhelming success is a nutjob with an agenda; on a random Thursday evening, the entire zone was as mobbed with happy-looking people as anywhere I’ve ever been (and I’ve been to Oxford Street!).

I would have shot photos the whole way home, but I ran out of iPhone battery somewhere in the thirties, so I had to give it up.

And so here you go. Almost all the bike lane-oriented photos are south-facing (i.e., in the orientation in which I came upon the scene). These are in rough order from south to north (that is, in reverse order from how they were shot)…

“To boost cycling, make women happy.” That’s the headline on this Tribune story, which argues that if women’s underrepresentation among US cyclists is addressed via safety measures and education, the increase in women cyclists will help drive a cultural shift overall. And women’s reluctance to bike is tied to factors that can be addressed directly, according to this study (PDF) by researcher Dr. Jan Garrard in Melbourne.

One of the characteristics of bike-heavy cities like Copenhagen or Amsterdam or, increasingly, London is that you see a much higher proportion of what you might term “ordinary people” on bicycles. The stereotype in the US is that urban cyclists are either professionals (bike messengers), or politically motivated extremists, or adventure-seeking young men. But in a city like Copenhagen or London, you see women alongside men (or leading them), families with children, people in business suits, the elderly. To an extent this becomes self-fulfilling: if you see others like yourself on bicycles, it makes it conceivable to hop on one yourself.

What makes this happen? I think it’s a combination of perceived safety, perceived convenience, and perceived style. I say “perceived” in all three cases because, objectively, in any big American city with traffic congestion (which reduces average speeds) and a grid pattern (which provides lots of alternate routes), cycling is relatively safe and relatively convenient; the difference is at the margins. And, of course, cycling is stylish at any time and in any place, if you’re in the right frame of mind.

Regarding safety, bicycle facilities like paths and lanes and priority signals do matter, but what matters even more is a sense that the culture as a whole (i.e., drivers and pedestrians) is educated to expect bicycles to be part of the traffic mix, and that bicyclists on the whole are educated and trained to be predictable on the road. For all the complaints about NYPD you hear in connection with New York City’s trumped-up bicycle “culture war,” official New York City, including police and cabdrivers, overwhelmingly expects cyclists to be part of the flow of traffic and acts to keep us safe. The two types of vehicles I never worry about being hit by (absent something inadvertent, which of course can always occur) are NYC medallion yellow cabs and NYPD cruisers: they know we’re here, watch out for us, and give us room on the road.

And, of course, the sense that the city as a whole is orderly and well-kept is absolutely critical. Fortunately New York hasn’t been safer in my lifetime; even property crime is near historic lows.

Regarding convenience, one of the biggest inhibitors is the “what do I do with my bike when I get there?” problem. One response to this is bike sharing, which (as you saw) is working well in the DC central core, but it’s not the only option.

The NYC bike parking law has been helpful, not just in the workplace accommodations it’s led to, but also in the fact that the posted bike parking rates at every garage in the city are a reminder to people who don’t cycle that we’re part of the community, too. (In this, Edison Park Fast, operator of the lot where I park my car, are in the forefront; they cheerfuly promote their dollar-a-day bicycle parking, installed bright new racks throughout their system, and will even hold my bike in the rack while I take my car out.

But even more important is the street furniture — especially the locking loops installed on sidewalks throughout the city. Places to lock up aren’t optional; they’re a fundamental part of the infrastructure that cyclists depend on, and they’re more important for new or casual cyclists than they are for dedicated riders. (A serious cyclist can always find somewhere to lock up; and a really serious cyclist, defined as “someone more serious than you,” is just riding a piece of junk anyway which he or she will brazenly leave out on the sidewalk while popping into the deli.)

I’ve heard people complain that bike messengers and food delivery people are taking up all “our” locking slots, but hello, those people are all actual NYC cyclists just like you — that’s an argument for more slots, not for some sort of action against the people who are legitimately using them.

People like me might even bike to the train station (like you can do in Amsterdam, or in DC), or to the airport, if it was clear what to do with our bikes when we got there. (There’s a covered rack for about a dozen bikes near 33rd and 8th; that doesn’t cut it. Edison lots are a few blocks away; if they had covered bike parking, I bet they’d sell it.)

Finally, the matter of style.  Londoners (and, increasingly, Brooklyners) cycle in all sorts of weather, and (in good weather) in all sorts of outfits.  In January, on a side street just above Oxford Circus, I saw a woman in a fur stole on a very elegant bicycle whose large basket was filled with cut flowers.

It’s wonderful to see the free market responding to the hunger for style in bicycles and bicycle accessories, as it always does eventually. Public Bikes and Republic Bikes are two obvious examples, but really all the companies making comfortable, well-built city bikes and color-coordinated accessories are in the same business. Even cheap, crappy bikes are looking good these days. As I ride around the city, one of the things that makes bicycling so much fun is seeing the choices everyone has made in terms of bikes, clothing, and accessories. People express their individuality. Hooray for that!

Photo credit: the inimitable Amsterdamize.com.

I tweeted about this video earlier this week, but I just watched it again and it was so arresting I had to embed it here.

Gotta go now, I have to go play SimCity…

I haven’t written anything here in quite a long while, chiefly because I’ve been busy living (which I think is the point of all this, isn’t it?), but I have been feeling the urge to get back into the swing of things. So I’ll start small, with this short post about my weeklong visit to London earlier this month.

It was a business trip, so many of my expenses were paid, and I was there for seven full days and nights, which gave me the sort of opportunity to experience the city that I’d never had on any of my previous half-dozen or so visits. Indeed, I went into the week with a very, very sketchy mental map of London, and now have a very clear one — at least of the central and eastern parts where I spent the most time, Mayfair to Hackney or thereabouts.

I vastly preferred the bus to the Tube — the Oyster card works the same on both, maps and signage at the stops are exceedingly clear, every stop is clearly announced, and from the top of a London bus you can actually see what you’re passing through. (Only once in the week did I see a single bus stop without a full complement of maps; entertainingly, it was when waiting for the night bus with a group of logic-impaired drunks, who took forever to decide whether to walk in the direction of Old Street or Shoreditch High Street. Shortly after they left, their bus arrived.) And London is proof that clearly marked bus lanes (separated or not), enforced with lane cameras, make the bus an efficient choice even in heavy traffic. Londoners complain about
TfL, but it seems exceptionally well-managed to me. I even got to ride the East London Overground line, which has barely been open six months.

Most of the week I was at our office, in Clerkenwell, with some limited tourist time in the evenings — which I mostly spent shopping and orienting myself with regard to the central landmarks, though I didn’t do much in the way of touristy things — but I spent the Sunday and the Saturday roaming from Soho to Islington to Brixton trying to see things a bit off the tourist path. I spent a lovely afternoon in Stoke Newington with my new friends Graham and Keri, eating gourmet fish and chips and sipping espresso beside a neighborhood high street. And I took myself to Brixton, expecting — well, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I got felt more or less like Flatbush, only with a well-stocked Marks & Spencer and vastly better transit connections. Here’s a map of my Saturday adventures.

If you want more of this (God help you), including dozens of photos, take a look at my Twitter feed for the week of 13 September.

In a stroke of great good fortune, I get to go back to London next month, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say.

Just saw this work with my own eyes — Broadway, along with the north side of Union Square, is in the process of being reconfigured as planned. And some new motorist signage has gone up in the last couple of days, too — in Clearview, my favorite signage typeface. This will be a great safety improvement, especially right at the corner of Broadway and 17th, where I personally have been almost run over at least three times.

…namely, that “if your aim is to attract people, food and drink are the main attractions,” in the words of Philip Myrick of the Project for Public Spaces.

The occasion is this story about cafe life in Portland — you can read it. Myrick’s point is that if you want people to organically gather on the streets of your neighborhood, you need food and drink, suitable for all ages and stages in the community, sold and served in a way that lets people consume them in an organic fashion outdoors or visible from the street.

All true. But argh!

I don’t disagree with any of this, it’s all true, and I mean no disrespect to the exceptionally committed people at PPS — my reaction is more a sense of frustration and missed opportunity that this isn’t intuitively obvious, that it has to be said, and re-said, and re-re-said every decade or so, to every generation. If you, dear reader, are just figuring this out now, what have you been doing to your own downtown for the past 25 years? And how many young people have you driven away, how many working-age people have you effectively locked in their office buildings all day for how many days/weeks/years, how many old people have you consigned to spend their waning days sitting in their apartments (or, worse, sitting on a bench in the mall) because there’s nowhere worth going to?

Let’s get with it, America!

Anyone older than about 60 who grew up in a healthy community probably already knows that food is at the center of everything social. Nevermind community events like church socials and picnics — every town over a thousand people had a drugstore, with big plate-glass windows and a soda fountain or lunch counter, once upon a time, where you could see people going about the private business of eating in a semi-public way. And even younger people know it, if we’ve lived part of our lives in a healthy big city. I was living in the newly minted municipality of West Hollywood when the first round of modern artisanal coffehouses appeared in the early 1990s; the moment cafes started to appear, whole new populations began to use the street. Nothing has driven the sidewalk re-revitalization of Santa Monica Boulevard over the past decade more than streetfront dining.

Closer to home, think of New York: the most transformational change to the streetscape in the five years I’ve been here has been the simple addition of lots of chairs and tables all over the place, including in what used to be traffic lanes in the middle of Times Square. People want to sit down and, very often, eat and drink, in public. What are the healthiest public spaces in Lower Manhattan? One of them is Stone Street, which today is given over almost entirely to street dining. (Photo above: the pop-up cafe thrown up by the DOT on nearby Pearl Street last month.)

Or look at the opposite case. I was on a message-board thread this week about Fulton Mall, the tattered retail strip in downtown Brooklyn that (due to the volume of people passing through, and the lack of local alternatives) commands among the highest retail rents in New York City, despite the fact that nobody can stand it. Sure, Fulton Mall is filthy and disorderly and way too crowded, but if you’ve ever been to, say, the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles, you know that filth and disorder and crowds are not sufficient to make a place unlovable. There’s something else. And something landscape designer Gil Lopez said on the list reminded me that one of the reasons everyone hates Fulton Mall is also one of the most obvious: there’s nothing to eat except junk, and there’s nowhere to sit down and eat it!

I follow the news from the city I lived in from 1999 to 2007, and a couple of things I’ve read recently, such as this short piece from the Economist’s American politics blog, have got me wondering whether Atlanta — like Phoenix and Las Vegas — may have hit its growth ceiling in the current recession, and whether the Atlanta of, say, 2030 might not be somewhat smaller than today’s.

I’m not talking about the city of Atlanta (2008 pop: 537,000), the municipality at the heart of the metro area, which has absorbed rapid growth over the past decade (due to both densification and immigration) and can presumably absorb plenty more on its ample vacant land. I’m talking about the Atlanta metropolitan area (oops, the “Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta MSA”) — the agglomeration of 20 counties, covering an area the size of Massachusetts, that is home to 5.4 million people.

Much of that land — and virtually all the land outside the Perimeter, except along traditional rail and road corridors like US 41 — was rational to develop only in an economy that counted on three things: unlimited cheap gasoline married to an unlimited willingness to build new highway mileage; endless real estate appreciation, leading to endless speculative residential construction; and a core city of Atlanta that was perceived as unsafe, tax-hungry, and crumbling. The recession’s taken care of the first two; and the third has been taking care of itself, as the city has spiffed itself up, embraced its advantages, and started living within its means. (When I left for good, the city of Atlanta was a much nicer and better-kept place to live than when I arrived eight years earlier, and the progress has continued.)

Geographically speaking, Atlanta is in an arbitrary spot. It is located where it is because of the decisions of railroad-builders and local boosters more than a century ago. Unlike most American cities, it is not on a river, not on the fall line, not on a traditional trade route. And it’s so far up in its watershed — in the Piedmont of the Appalachians — that even something as basic as water can by no means be taken for granted.

When I was in high school, the late Father John Gill, who taught me 9th-grade European history — and was also a California history fetishist, and our chaplain, and probably one of the most interesting adults who took me seriously before I moved away for college — said that if we wanted to make a mint, we should all study riparian law. He was thinking of California (where it’s also true), but his advice would have been useful in Georgia, too. The endless squabbling with Florida and Alabama over water rights — in which, the Economist writer points out, all of Georgia downstream of the Atlanta metropolitan colossus inherently sides with Florida and Alabama — may well be resolved in the favor of those downstream, which would make it difficult to sustain a population the size of Atlanta’s indefinitely without major civil engineering projects.

The City of Atlanta — the hole in the doughnut — will likely be fine. Dense enough to justify infrastructure investment, it’s also proportionally wealthier now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, so a solution will be found to serve the water needs of 600,000, or 800,000, or a million. But at least two or three of the remaining four million in the metro area are living unsustainably, and as foreclosures hollow out their neighborhoods and job losses devastate the county tax bases, there’s going to be a lot of shrinkage in the doughnut itself. And it looks like the go-go days of a decade ago are probably gone for good.

In the long term and even the medium term, that probably means densification, infrastructure, and quality-of-life improvements that my old friends in Grant Park and Candler Park and East Atlanta and Decatur, and the other inner neighborhoods I used to frequent, will get to enjoy. But it will also mean a lot of pain, spread out over a decade or two, for people who bought into an unsustainable lifestyle in places like Suwanee and Buford.