resourcefulness, or getting rid of the rules

Resourcefulness: it’s what I say I love most about Turkish people.  It’s what I miss in the sterile communities I see in community development projects, even the ones I am helping to develop at MPC.  It’s what I feel is so often being trained out of us in our laziness - we have come to expect luxuries like cars and buses running on time and not having to wait in line at the bank and paying your bills online and reliably and ordering food and getting what you know you will get and expecting that there will always be ripe bananas and your favorite kind of yogurt at the grocery store.  

MPC and the Chicago Dept of Transportation ran a workshop last week on designing complete streets (I designed a fancy fact sheet, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, or just want to see how proficient I am becoming at lining up boxes of text in InDesign, check it out!).  Complete Streets sound like a great idea - make streets safe for all people by making sure everyone knows when and where they’re supposed to move.  '

Copenhagen Cycle Chic

But I have two major problems with them, I realized.  

1. Designing complete streets STILL means designing for cars, it just means designing so that the cars don’t hurt or kill so many people.  

2. There are way too many rules!   

This is the foundation of my frustrations these days.  Relegating everyone into their own spaces, their own channels marked with a dotted white line or a painted bicycle and arrow or a raised sidewalk and blinking white walking man in a crosswalk may contribute to life on the street, but it certainly won’t guarantee vitality.  And really, where else in the world will a broken sidewalk prevent people from walking down the street?  If there’s something worth getting to, people will get there.  

And so, perhaps the problem doesn’t really lie in crappy streets designed for four lanes of fast-moving traffic.  Of course, that’s an issue, but it’s a symptom of cities designed too strictly, of a lack of open spaces filled spontaneously by peddlers or musicians or little gardens, if only transient, cities where every space is zoned to such a detail that all dentist offices the country over are as sterile as the next, and you’ll never have the idiosyncratic hubs of commercial activity, of friendly competition that exists in the blocks in Istanbul for instance, where you find all of the teapot manufacturers, or bike shops.  (That’s a run-on sentence, but why not let a few of those slide, too, in appreciation of the frustration I feel with staying between the lines.)  

I’m wishing for something that runs counter to so many concepts taken for granted - we should be able to get from one place to another reliably, in a relatively straight line, we shouldn’t build factories next to elementary schools and enormous Big Boxes next to quiet historic neighborhoods.  Sure, these are things I want, too, but I think the rules have gotten out of hand.  Is there a way to get people to appreciate the unexpected?  

I’ve quoted him before, but I think a reminder of my dad’s wise words is warranted: “We need a language of enthusiasm for life's casual moments and spontaneous encounters."  Who’s with me for enthusiasm and spontaneity?  

navigating the big city

Now that winter is here (sadly we don't have the magnificent snow of the east coast, though), I admit it's harder to get on my bike for trips downtown.  Active Trans' lakefront trail conditions blog is irregular, but it seems to suggest that the southern part of the trail is more reliably clear.  That doesn't stop the biting cold, and the fact that I still have no sufficient gloves for the cold wind once it gets below 20 degrees.  

The fact remains that however nasty the weather - on Friday I made the pretty unsafe decision to bike to REI in the driving sleet and snow, without my glasses, at dusk - when you get to your destination after 20 minutes on your bike in this weather, it feels damn good and satisfying.  And I wouldn't give that up for anything.  

Still, it's wonderful living in a city where I am guaranteed to walk or bike somewhere when I leave home.  Anny recently wrote on her blog about how Charlotteans' conceptions of what is too far to walk are so out of whack - since when do we need to get in the car for the half mile trip to Harris Teeter?  (You know who you are...)

All this talk of transportation makes me think of winter transit in Istanbul - mornings when the wind and weather were bad enough that nobody knew whether the ferries would be running, walking down to the dock and crowding onto the Turyol docks, because those boats ran in the sketchier weather, being smaller and, honestly, probably no safer than the big IDO ferries.  

NYTimes slideshow 36 hours in Istanbul

I will never forget the day it was so foggy you could barely see the bow of the boat from the stern, but we rocked back and forth, crossing the Bosphorus with its foghorn blaring, a man standing on either side of the bow, seemingly looking out to see obstacles or other boats or buoys before the captain in the cabin 20 feet back.  I stood in a prime spot in the front, right at the window in the middle, drinking my tea and calling Mireille to get her to hold the shuttle on the other side so I could get to work on time and without having to take a bus.  

Not quite a bike-able commute.  But there really is nothing to compare to a ferry commute.  Especially one where they serve tea in glass tulip glasses for about 38 cents.  

I've been doing a lot of work at MPC lately on Complete Streets.  (Although I am still infatuated with the idea of Shared Streets that I wrote about earlier and which I still honestly think could work - with some considerable effort to educate the public - in certain Chicago locations, like Polish Triangle in Wicker Park where I also spend a lot of research time.)  We've got two Complete Streets workshops coming up soon, and its an important item on our legislative agenda for the year, so I'm learning a lot.  It turns out Charlotte is nationally recognized for its Complete Streets policy, although it certainly has a long way to go implementing those guidelines on the ground with designers and developers.  While some of the people running these upcoming workshops want to bring in some of the planners from Charlotte, a just-published Benchmarking Report I read yesterday by the Alliance for Biking and Walking says that "Charlotte is the least safe major city for bicycling with 62.7 bicyclists killed per 10,000 bicyclists."  Inshallah, ten years from now when the much-praised Charlotte Urban Street Design Guidelines have had time to be implemented, we will look to Charlotte as an example of a city that successfully turned itself around from being a car-driven city to a multi-modal transit-driven city with plenty of bicyclists and walkers and bus-riders and maybe even - am I dreaming too much? - a well-utilized and integrated light rail network.  

Am I dreaming too much?  Or could that be Charlotte's future?

livability = public transit!

Last week boasted good news in the public transit world: Obama and US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood have proposed a major policy shift, effective immediately, calling for all Federal Transportation Administration projects to be based not on a calculation of cost and journey time, as they were in the past, but on their contribution to the livability of an area.  

Livability is one of those invented words I've been throwing around a lot lately.  The Obama administration has been using them to guide all sorts of projects, from housing to environmental work, and now transportation.  There are officially 6 "Livability Principles" that guide coordination between departments and, in my opinion, a nice healthy change from a focus on nothing but efficiency and speed and grandeur to things like healthy communities, affordable housing, and transit options.  

Hooray for livability!  

reflections from europe

I have two comments to make today.  

The first is pretty darn simple: I've added a few more images, my drawings, on the "projects" page of this website.  

Gare du Nord, ParisThe second is in response to a roundtable presentation/discussion at MPC, where I work as a "research assistant" (read "intern") twice a week.  Today's was about Berlin, namely the new, big, bold Hauptbanhof in the center of the city.  

I went to Berlin in the summer of 2006, nervous and anxious and excited about my first stint of solo travel, and I arrived at this train station early in the morning after an overnight train from Paris in a car full of snoring men.  I was too much a bundle of emotions and exhaustion to really look around, unfortunately, but the train station has come up in conversation many times since.  

The presentations today were a mixed bag - good stuff all around, but really I wished there was more time for everything, since three speakers (and intros before and questions afterwards) were all crammed into an hour-and-a-half lunch slot.  I came away with yet more reinforcement of the greatness that is European public transportation systems, their universality, ubiquity, simplicity, and technological innovation. It reminds me somewhat of the universal health care debate, or socialized education - why is it so hard for Americans to decide that health, education, and mobility should be accessible to everyone?  What is it that makes the European cultural values so different - that's as far as anyone got today, declaring that European transit is so far ahead of American transit systems because of different cultural values. That's all well and good, and certainly true, but how are the American systems ever going to improve, or be used and valued by more people, if we don't know why those European values are different.  Where did that precedent come from? An economic, functional necessity for good, universal public transit?  Or is it some underlying social value of community that we don't have in the US, where liberty and capitalism have won out over equality as the social values we hold most dear?  

Berlin Hauptbahnhof