thoughts and images about how to stay in place...

be where it's hard, take note(s) where it's easy, delight in smallness, let yourself be transformed.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Brooklyn Community Board 6 collects voices on much debated bike lanes

Last night, round about 400 people muddled through steady rain to reach John Jay High School Auditorium and register their support for or argue against the redesigned Prospect Park West.  Soooooo much has already been said about this project and now the lawsuit filed against the DOT for insufficient community engagement, project monitoring, and data falsification in its process.  And it's touched off debate about the role of bicycles on streets more generally.  The NYTimes, New Yorker (and also), NY Daily News, and New York Observer have all run pieces that play up the street reallocative scandal here.
 (photo of pedal demonstration supporting challenged PPW bike lanes, Oct 2010)

Most portray a wild-eyed, unstoppable and unreasonable Transportation Commissioner who's got ludicrous ideas about what street space is for in this town.  And her defenders have also come to the rescue; the letters written to the Times after last Sunday's truly stilted portrayal by Michael Grynbaum.  But some articles--including the above-referenced Observer piece and of course the Streetsblog's reliable coverage, plus this piece by Aaron Naparstek, and also the Guardian's bike blog piece that ran this week--are speculating on the underlying tension in this vociferous "culture war"--and what's at stake for anyone who doesn't live here.  In some way or another, these latter articles agree that the vitriol invoked by the multiplying, slow-moving obstructions in our streets reveal a clash over future city visions for New York.  
I agree.

Unless we open a conversation about what street apparitions impede our forward thought about paving a next, stay-able place, lots of senior citizens will die thinking that the car was their generation's savior.  Instead, I'd like to see these seniors coaxed back out of doors--especially car doors--and let themselves imagine that their slowing pace of life is actually en vogue, a growing trend among bike and ped commuters.

"How can we humane street lovers help these neighbors find the courage and hope to tune their ears to the word on the street?"
--I found myself thinking last night while approximately 10 elderly people from the lawsuit-filing coalition Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes + Seniors for Safety suggested that cyclist proliferation is more dangerous than speeding cars, and that a high speed, car-crowded street was easier to cross, look at, and fall asleep to at night.  

Heck! even these mean streets' signs aren't shouting anymore!

Should I get a tandem or my very own passenger cargo bike and offer free rides to these folks?  A cyclist-eye view of PPW and many other City streets could help them see that this _is their moment_--the moment when the earlier anti-car battles for slow spaces, lost by their parents are being re-opened.  How could they forget what it was like when the streets were their playground?  
Or have I got my generations mixed up?   
Anyhow, whether they want them for stoopball or pinochle, I'd love to get my fearful, aging neighbors out into their quieting streets and using their twilight years to bring about a more humane City.  

Anyhow, I slapped together a little meditation along these lines--something of a paean to NYCDOT --and tried to deliver it at last night's hearing. 
Sadly, I was a little late in the queue for the invocation, and too early for the benediction, so i've got this mostly unheard sermon I thought I'd post up... 


Community Board 6 Public Hearing
Remarks to the Transportation Committee
10 March 2011
First, I want to thank Councilman Lander and the CB6 transportation committee for your leadership on the issue of what streets we need in this community.  Your diligent monitoring and public relations efforts speak volumes about your concern for the well-being of all who travel or live along PPW. 
And thank you DOT for your patience with us: we realize your job is to move along and improve safety and mobility all over the city, and we’re holding you and our neighboring boroughs’ mobility needs captive.  

But I also want to thank you because, as trained planners and engineers, you know what generations of favoring cars have wrought in this City and your vision for a hopeful future is what has you working so hard for us. 

First, there was the hollowing of the city by car owners who chose distance and single family homes over our City’s advantages. 
And as they went, so too did many of these advantages.

These same commuters’ daily tidal flows to and from our City bound its perimeters like a noose, and tore in half communities like the South Bronx and Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
And soon people-vacated streets made us want to move through them as quickly as possible, in sealed steel and glass.  And while we hid from those streets, crime increased.  So did traffic crashes and rates of serious injury and fatality in them.

More people left and a drag on property values jeopardized the City’s ability to provide for quality services for those who chose to remain.

And of course the outer boroughs took the hit in the most lasting way, and to this day have the longest commutes and most spread out lifestyles, least accessible public transport and… highest car ownership rates.  Many saw the car as their only vehicle for upward mobility--a tragic irony since it is the single most expensive and least efficient form of transport.

Whether filling the streets during the day or overnighting curbside, more cars also brought incredible volumes of CO2 particulate and exacerbated industrial pollutants, yielding shocking rates of asthma and other respiratory illness, particularly in poor communities situated next to highways.

So, thank you, NYCDOT, thank you Commissioner Sadik-Khan, and thank you Mayor Bloomberg for your bold leadership on our streets.  Your foresight to lay down new pathways for the 1 million residents we will welcome in the coming couple of decades is saving us.  You are protecting our future from a repeat fate.
We ask for your patience while we get over these fear-filled memories of a time when cars were our local safety and getaway vehicles.

Be assured that under your leadership, we’re learning to look at our streets and ask them to become as good for people to stay in as they are to move through. 
We’re learning to expect our streets
to make us healthier, to bring us together,
to take better care of our children and seniors,
to enhance our valuable parks,
and feed vibrant, local businesses that don’t depend on car traffic. 

By laying down pedestrian plazas in intersections once a tangled morass, you’re showing us how much we wanted to sit around together and steal a little sunshine in between morning and afternoon work shifts. 

And by installing thoughtfully-designed, separate cycle tracks and bikeways such as the stunning addition up yonder rimming our park, you’re
Saving lives,
relieving our strained and cash-strapped transit system,
drawing us out of doors, out of cars and into our skin,
making it safe for parents and their kids to commute by bike together.

Together, these interventions are doing more than anything to preserve New York’s qualities worth staying for because: 
what happens in these streets doesn’t stay in these streets.

All these improvements spread through our City circulatory system as nutrients to sustain healthier destinations—residential and commercial.  And this is why the US government has always upheld the status of streets as a commons—to protect their anchorless benefits that do not just accrue to the places they run through.  They, too, ought to be put to their highest and best use.

Devoting precious public space to private car parking and speedy throughput is a city-stultifying proposition. 

The privilege of living in New York has to do with its smallness, and all the resources we can access very locally—on foot and on bicycle and transit. 
The more we do this, the more of that kind of close, convenient, familiar New York we invite.  And this is a New York worth staying in.

Cars are for leaving, and if we return them to street pole position, our growing city will go with them.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Fun with Trash

This winter's huge snow storms left big white snow banks crowding NYC streets' shoulders, but also black trash mountains.  And recycling: bundles of cardboard and large, clear bags of plastic and glass, plus miscellaneous bulky items.  Sanitation workers occupied with removal of the great white visitor that threatened us all, the city's daily detritus (plus the usual complement of TVs, clothes, furniture...) would stack up for days--two weeks went by before curbside pick-up resumed after the first big blizzard hit on December 26.

 (kids playing at the base of a massive snow sidewalkgnome built on the northwest corner of Canal and East Broadway, Jan 29, 2011. Note orange cone top hat, courtesy of NYCDOT)

After snow heaps receded and trash remained, I thought about rounding up some friends to join me at creating a multi-cited sculptural commentary on the situation: I envisioned  3-black-bag-tall 'trash men' complete with bottle cap eyes and aluminum can pull-tab noses springing up in strategic locations (the steps of City Hall?  The Sanitation Dept. headquarters' curb?).  Instead, I wrote these haikus, while the streets and sidewalks still bore witness to that storm's social crisis:

I love a Saturday
When new years eve is Friday
Streets recovering

White wet receding
Replaced by mountains of trash
Busy bulldozers

Hurried, heroic
Racing high temperatures
But not quick enough

Third term sullying
Blizzard buries Mayor Bloomberg
As if by design

Black trash bags
Splintered pallets broken crates
Chinatown wreckage

January and early February brought more storms and more heaps of trash, but the visuals weren't ever quite as striking as that first storm.  In the end, it's been a rather trashing winter--New Yorkers have been with fairly frequent reminders of their voracious consumption.  Aggregated in biggening curb walls, our trash froze and thawed, grew white afros and then shed them, got stray, cast-off bits tossed onto them, and waited around for their ticket onto a truck and eventually up or downriver on a barge.  They embarrassed us with their persistence, and annoyed us when we were in a hurry and had to single file past them on our sidewalks.  Luckily, it was too cold for rats and roaches.  I know I wasn't alone in thinking it could be good for us to live semi-regularly with these betrayals of our appetites for take-out and single-serving yogurt.  Wonder whether we could come up with the curbside pick-up equivalent of this special Swedish can, brought to us by Volkswagon, via Andrew Revkin's NYT Dot Earth blog:


Thursday, March 3, 2011

Google Streetview Peddler: My new career aspiration

Though I am [gratefully and at last] nearly a doctor now, news about Google's new mobile map-researching trike has me itching for a return to my most purposefully philosophical, car(e)-free grad school days.


For about half of my grad school summers, I maintained a tradition (cultivated the art of...) _the fun summer job_.
(the author during bike work summer, c. 2008)

Hands down, the best best best of them was working the streets for a few months on Birdbath Bakery's cargo bicycle*.  Already a student of the streets, it was this summer as honorary member of NYC's two-wheeling pedal force, that I really reveled in the bike's city-seeing powers.  How bulk and classification as 'delivery vehicle' changed my relationship with motorists and other cyclists were protracted, provocative meditations through my 7 hour shifts.

I'd leave home at 5am and ride Violeta across the Williamsburg Bridge through vulnerable, just waking streets known only to dog-walking early-risers and NYC sanitation workers.  With my back to Brooklyn on that bridge,  I'd watch the sunrise knife a big, red gash into the side of the black glassy UN building, three times per week.  A gesture from the east about US-headquartered world diplomacy?  Could be.

The Revolution Rickshaws depot, founded by Gregg Zukowski, was at that time a couple of alleyway entrance-only "garages" on W. 35th Street near 9th Avenue.  Bike safely locked against a fence back there, I'd pick up Birdbath's rig, and pedal down 9th Ave., wiggling my way gradually to 1st Ave. and 14th Street, where Birdbath's 'home' bakery was located.


(film about Birdbath, starring my boss, restauranteur Maury Rubin. Produced by PlentyTV, c. 2007)

There, as two-three other times in a work day, I'd pick up trays of cookies (that slid into a custom-fitted baker's rack inside the cargo hold), large tubs of iced tea, coffee condiments and various paper goods, and pedal across town to the [now shuttered] other Birdbath, at Charles St. and 7th Ave.
I'd also make runs to The City Bakery on 18th Street (Birdbath's parent), for iced coffee, sandwiches, and *most important* to fuel up--rickshaw drivers could have an all-you-can-eat meal from The City's conscionable buffet-style dining room.

On all of these runs, in sweltering summer heat radiating off the asphalt and in heavy downpours, I was elated to be learning traffic work to complement my habitual traffic play.  Not only had i joined the multi-modal factory floor, cooperating with large UPS trucks, deft and swift bicycle messengers, wrong way-riding-addicted food delivery guys, I'd joined a class of manual laborers where white 30 year-old, advanced degree-seeking women were a rarity.  I pondered gendered division of street labor, but also what it meant to volunteer for NYC's vital but woefully underpaid service class.**  Several encounters delivering City Bakery's green food to catering customers, where I was treated rudely--neither thanked nor tipped for my efforts balancing boxes, bags, coffee dispensers and a helmet while holding open doors for me and the customer--were privileged views into a pitifully common but nevertheless veiled side of what money could buy conscience for lunch.

But mainly  I had visceral fun.  I was in great shape, and once I really got the hang of maneuvering that 200-lb rig, had a blast as a still-human-powered-but-now-with-greater-girth traffic dancer.  That summer also marked NYC's inaugural Summer Streets event, where Lafayette Street and Park Avenue were closed to automobile traffic for a blissful sunday morning of running, walking, cycling, dancing, skipping, scooting, skating, mid-road drawing and more.  And for that, I borrowed a passenger rickshaw and captured what was among my proudest streetworking moments:
(the author with still minor celebrity NYC Dept. of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan)

So, even though I'm about to graduate, I, like so many others, just might go work for awhile 'at' Google...Who knows? maybe they'd pay me to pedal Iceland collecting streetviews this summer...


*Though Birdbath 2 has been closed, Birdbath has three new NYC locations--in SoHo, TriBeCa, and the New Museum's cafe.  Soon, Third Avenue between 9th and 10th Street will also host a Birdbath.

**Unlike the mobile factory floor's other pedal workers, however, I was paid a fair hourly wage rather than a piece rate (i.e. comped by number of deliveries made /papers served, and tips).  The difference is significant--the more common piece rate is a structural explanation of the regularity with which self-propelled street workers violate traffic laws, and have earned a reputation as menaces to pedestrian safety: courtesy is costly to such low wage earners.  This situation is likely to improve in the coming years as a densifying NYC shifts to a more efficient and perhaps even centralized cargo delivery system.  Eventually, UPS and FedEx may replace some of their large trucks and vans with high capacity, human-powered bikes and trikes.  And demand for their speedy and safe operation could even result in human-powered cargo lanes on streets, complete with strategic signal sequencing.  Infrastructure and regulation like this could drastically improve the current ped/pedal worker space competition.