All right, folks, it looks like I officially have a case of the "F's", both musically and otherwise.
F is for...
Fan-freaking-tastic! to see a Husky win this past Saturday against Utah (boo, Mormons!), 31-14. We checked out the game at a sports bar in The Marina District, and it was like I had never left the Greek System. The Marina's general doucheyness aside, there is simply no better way to watch a football game than hammered with your UW friends. We are even thinking of going down to Stanford to represent the Huskies in their game there in 3 weeks.
Fuck you, landlord! $2250 for a mice-infested shithole??? You gotta be kidding me. I'm counting my lucky stars it's only a six-month lease.
Free at last, free at last, by God almighty we are free at last! The Occupy Wall Street protests continue unabated in NYC. I'm glad to see people are finally stepping up en masse to protest the serious economic inequality in this country that makes any talk of a financial "recovery" from the recession little more than a cruel joke to the 99% of people out there. Here are some pictures from the San Francisco version of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which took place on our Montgomery Street, a.k.a. "Wall Street of the West." I stumbled upon the protests randomly on my way back from a bike ride in North Beach. Although I don't think the SF protests had anywhere near the same impact as those in NYC due to their relatively small size, it is great to see the protest ethic is still alive and well in this city. There may only be 800,000 San Franciscans (compared to 8 million New Yorkers), but damnit we aren't going down without a fight!
Now for your songs of the day:
I like Friendly Fires' "Skeleton Boy" because of its unique medley of indie lead singer and disco beat. Usually that combination will leave you sounding like a rip-off of MGMT, but these guys rock it!
Future Islands are the closest that any band I've heard of has come to sounding like The Talking Heads, my number one favorite band of all time. I think only !!! (chk chk chk) would be able to give them a run for their money on this type of sound, but Future Islands has that whacked-out David Byrne-like wail and perfect beats down just right.
You know things have gotten dead serious with respect to climate change when major world leaders are no longer talking about cutting emissions and instead talking about "geoengineering" or even simply throwing in the towel and evacuating their nations en-masse from rising sea levels.
Let's start with the first of our doomsday scenarios. Geoengineering is an emerging scientific field that aims to use frighteningly large-scale engineering projects to counter the effects of climate change. Part of the concession the field of geoengineering is making by default is that limiting our carbon emissions - or even eliminating them altogether and becoming carbon-neutral - is not enough to stop the most devastating impacts of climate such as:
At least for now, the field of geoengineering is has little funding and is not understood to be a viable solution to the climate change mess. Proposals such as ocean iron fertilization to boost phytoplankton growth and soak up ocean carbon sound effective, but there is no way of knowing currently whether it is cost-effective. How much carbon would you have to displace to be able to justify the expense? Other ideas, such as space mirrors or cloud reflectivity enhancement are no more effective and could produce nasty unintended side effects.
Ocean iron fertilization off the coast of Argentina
So clearly how we build our cities' infrastructure must drastically change even as we cut emissions well into the future. Here are some of the more outlandish ideas on the table for retrofitting our coastal cities to deal with rising sea levels and climate change:
In San Francisco, Iwamoto Scott Architecture imagines so-called "fog flowers" that would be installed on Twin Peaks and other major hilltops to collect the condensation from incoming fog belts. This method of water collection would be very important, as water resources are expected to be very strained in the coming years.
Farther downhill, high-rise residential towers double as algae farms for biodiesel production.
"Fog Flowers" covering Ocean Beach in the Outer Sunset
Another alternative comes from the increasingly water-logged city of Bangkok. Already home to 12 million people in a marshy river delta that will face more flooding with rising sea levels, a plan from the designers S+PBA aims to embrace flooding as a constant resource in a more resilient "wetropolis".
The vegetation basis for the Wetropolis is a forest of indigenous mangroves, which the government is already trying to implement in Bangkok. The mangroves naturally filter water, and they also supply fresh oxygen and natural cooling. As the water is filtered, shrimp farming can flourish in a sustainable manner. The community will live above the water fields in a network of interconnected homes, walkways, and roads, with curvaceous lines that emulate the rippling water below.
Dubbed "A Post Diluvian Future", the "wetropolis" suspended above mangroves would allow Bangkok to live sustainably with natural flooding as a constant, rather than something to resist. The plan would also help detoxify the city's polluted water supply, a major protection against the more frequent droughts tropical climates are likely to face.
Now let's say you are a tiny, impoverished South Pacific island nation without the money for geo-engineering or fancy design remodels like these. What do you do then?
"The last time I saw the models, I was like 'wow it's like science fiction, almost like something in space. So modern, I don't know if our people could live on it. But what would you do for your grandchildren? If you're faced with the option of being submerged, with your family, would you jump on an oil rig like that? And [I] think the answer is 'yes'. We are running out of options, so we are considering all of them."
Whoa...can you imagine President Obama getting up on his podium and telling the citizens of New York or San Francisco, "you know, we really tried to do something about this global warming business, but you wouldn't listen, so we have no choice. All aboard the floating lilypad, everybody" ? Insanity would quickly ensue. The fact that the Kiribati president has made such statements and is still alive and still president is testament to how imperiled these and other island nations like the Maldives, Seychelles, and Tuvalu really are.
The structures are the brainchild of Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut. This "ecopolis" would not only be able to produce its own energy through solar, wind, tidal and biomass but would also process CO2 in the atmosphere and absorb it into its titanium dioxide skin.
The nation of Kiribati, just south of Hawaii, faces a bill of $900 million to shore up its infrastructure in the face of rising sea level projections for 2050. With most of the islands less than two meters above sea level and only a population of 100,000 how exactly are they supposed to pay for that?
Solutions like Callebaut's lilypad may look ridiculous and farfetched, but they are grounded in a tradition of artificial islands. For centuries, people have lived on floating islands of reedgrass in Lake Titicaca, Peru.
Floating villages of Lake Titicaca...yes, that really is the name of the lake :)
The sad truth is that unless we really start getting our act together on climate change, we too may have to look at these pretty fucking outlandish floating scenarios with a more serious eye.
Dominic Boudreault: "a motion photographer, recorded five cities in over a year to create a time-lapse video showing the bustling nightlife of metropolitan areas. From late 2010 to early 2011, the artist documented the cityscapes in Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Manhattan and Chicago. The video is a series of images from a high vantage point gathered to display the duality of city and nature."
Music: Hans Zimmer
Watch the HD version on full-screen with the volume full-blast for the full experience!
As I've saidbefore on the blog, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Highly informative "infographics", as they're called, are an outstanding way of broadening our understanding of politics, the environment, and pretty much any big questions you can think of.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Where do tourists take the most pictures of Vancouver? And where are the locals' favorite spots? Using geo-located photo compilations from Flickr users, Eric Fischer was able to show us a map of where their shutters go off. Blue pictures are by locals, red by tourists, and yellow is unknown.
Some other great versions of Seattle and LA:
So these pictures essentially answer the question of "where are the local secret photo spots?" I won't tell you where they are, but here are a few of my secret spots:
New York City's public non-emergency hotline - where residents report anything from complaints about trash removal, to graffiti, to noise complaints, is a virtual library of information in itself. It offers a real-time glimpse at the pulse of the city's millions.
3. Just how bad is your city's problem of urban sprawl? Take a look at the ringroads, or beltways, around the city's borders and you might get a general idea.
4. Where do people actually go when they use London's bike-sharing program? This video/graphic from The Bike Sharing Blog tells you pretty much all you need to know.
5. Should I rent or buy when I move to a new city? Real estate website Trulia has the graphic for you...Surprise! You should probably rent if you're moving anywhere cool (LA, SF, Seattle, or New York, that is).
In Seattle, late February marks the unofficial start of biking season, because let's be honest, everyone except the most hardcore bike commuters and Critical Mass-types among us has pretty much had their bike sadly rusting away in storage since late October.
So in honor of this, I dusted off my 15-year-old Trek hybrid bike, which had been sitting in my apartment's front doorway almost unused since I moved here in...gulp....September! I'm a terrible cyclist - terrible, terrible, terrible. Bicycling used to be a big part of my life, the one type of exercise I never wanted to quit, the way I discovered new neighborhoods anywhere I went. Hell, a 60-mile ride around Lake Washington was a "training ride" at one point for me not so long ago. I promise to redeem myself this year by doing two things:
1) Train for and do STP, the annual 10,000 rider-strong race from Seattle to Portland. I did STP two years and absolutely loved it!!! There's free food and drinks every 20 miles (a drop in the bucket compared to the 200 miles between the two cities), and my favorite part about it - getting tranced out on my iPod the whole f*cking way there. Wouldn't do it any other way :-)
2) I will devote more space on Green My Fleetto bike-related issues, like bike infrastructure, bike sharing, upcoming rides and events, and bicycle cultures from around the world.
Riding through one of my favorite cities in the entire world - Valencia, Spain
In deference to ultimatum #2, I found a pretty interesting trend that's emerging among the more left-leaning green circles of - where else ?- Portland, Oregon: bike-only boulevards. What's that, you ask? A street where only bikes are allowed - in America??? Impossible. It has to be the psychotic dream of some deranged hipster twat with chronic anomie and gauged ears! (see below in case you missed the latest episode of Portlandia):
You'd be wrong in thinking that bike-only boulevards are doomed to be an idea of the loony fringe, however. Portland happens to the be the US city with the largest bicycle mode share of 7% (planner-speak for the proportionate ways we get from point A to point B), but it pales compared to bike-friendly cities internationally. European cities take the cake on bicycle population - some 30-35% of all trips are made by bike in most Dutch cities, as well as many cities in France, Germany, and Scandinavia. That most US cities, including Seattle (2% bike mode share), fall way behind Portland is an indictment of our unsustainable transportation system in general.
Portland achieved the success it did by allocating more bike infrastructure - bike lanes, sharrows, bike racks on buses and light rail trains - than any other American city for many years. Portland pioneered the neighborhood bicycle boulevard and the traffic-separated bicycle track that were a first in the US, though hardly elsewhere. A large portion of Portland's large biking population is due not only to its relatively flat geography and outdoorsy culture, but also its 15 neighborhood bicycle boulevards, where traffic is calmed to the point where cyclists almost begin to take precedence over cars.
Recently installed traffic-separated bike track on Manhattan's 9th Avenue, photo courtesy of Seth Holladay of http://www.nycbikemaps.com
Recently, though, Portland's bicycle hegemony may be slipping. Portland was bested by Minneapolis as the most bike-friendly city in America by Bicycle Magazine this past spring. New York City has laid 250 miles of bike lanes in the past three years alone under the partnership between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. Meanwhile, bike-sharing systems are sprouting up like weeds across the US, from Washington DC to Denver, San Francisco, and Miami, and Portland is nowhere to be found on this important trend.
Bike-only boulevards represent one of the great bits of uncharted territory for bike infrastructure that Portland and other cities are now looking to tap into. How exactly do you make the transition to a street completely dedicated to bikes? This is something no city in the US can match, and only the densest parts of Amsterdam have any experience with. One of the most important ways to encourage more people to hop on their bikes is to eliminate the threat of riding in traffic, a danger that deters an estimated 60% of "would-be cyclists", that is, people who say they would like to ride their bikes as their primary mode of transport but choose not to.
So by this measure, all of the previous bike infrastructure we've ever experimented with doesn't even come close to meeting people's needs. Bike lanes are often narrow, rarely continuous, and provide zero safety if cars are speeding just inches away from you at 40 miles an hour or more. Most streets lack the space for a dedicated bicycle track, so this option does little for us. Bike paths built on railroad spurs, like Seattle's Burke Gilman, are fun recreational spaces but impractical as commuting paths because they are difficult to integrate with the street network and can only be built where there was once a railroad. Sharrows don't even pretend to give you any space as a cyclist - rather than allocating any street width for bikes, they just paint a bicycle on the asphalt to "warn cars" that bikes might be nearby. Big help that is...
There's already a great deal of evidence in support of bike-only boulevards. The city of Bogota, Colombia, regularly sees almost two million people use its 100-mile plus system of bicycle boulevards that are closed on Sundays as part of its Ciclovia (Spanish for "bike-highway"). Los Angeles copied the event with its own CicLAvia series and likewise saw a huge increase in people out on their bikes. Why? Because the bike-only boulevards remove car traffic and finally make people feel safe being on their bikes.
As cities grapple with how to become more sustainable, we're set with some very big goals to achieve. San Francisco aims to have 20% of its residents moving by bike in just ten years, by 2020. Portland is aiming even higher, 25% bicyclists by the same year. It might just take something otherwise considered radical to hit targets like these. The San Francisco Bike Coalition is lobbying the city's Board of Supervisors to install 27 miles of bike-only boulevards that connect the most important commercial and transit hubs. I can only suspect a proposal like this would cost far less than what the city has spent so far on who knows how many bike lanes.
The bike-only boulevard trend is even spreading to cities as ass-backwards as Seattle. A "neighborhood greenway", borrowing Portland's granola terminology, is planned for the NE 45th St. corridor in Wallingford.
Will these bike-only boulevards work as truly functional transit arteries, and not just a fun Sunday recreational pastime? If the two boulevards installed in London recently are any indication, we needn't worry about that. Bicycle traffic went up 70% in less than a year since installation, which speaks volumes about the difference good infrastructure makes in our transportation choices.
In case you needed any more motivation to be on the look out for bike superhighways, check out this statistic:
According to a report from the Political Economy Research Institute, a think tank based out of the federal Department of Transportation, construction on bike and pedestrian infrastructure creates TWICE the number of jobs per dollar spent than road construction. Take that, Tea Party assholes!
I'm discovering an untapped resource for all things nerdy and dear to my heart :)
The folks at Streetsblog, through their film organ, Streetfilms, have been releasing films for years that get to the core of many of our most pressing urban problems in a fun and visually stimulating way.
My favorite part about their new series, Moving Beyond the Automobile, is their roundtable of celebrity (kind of :p) panelists who talk about the steps they are taking to move their cities in a progressive, less car-dependent direction.
Here's their promo:
Today is an exciting day here at Streetfilms as we are officially announcing the debut of our 10-part series "Moving Beyond the Automobile" (MBA). Each Tuesday over the next ten weeks, tune in to Streetfilms as we'll be posting a new chapter about smart and proven strategies to reduce traffic and improve street safety for all users.
We'll be tackling many fascinating topics in the next few months from "Bus Rapid Transit" to "Congestion Pricing" to "Car Share" to show how each can help people to use cars less - or not at all.
We've been out talking to the experts. Well-respected voices like former Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa, Tri-state Transportation's Kate Slevin, Commissioner of NYC Department of Transportation Janette Sadik-Khan, Portland's Mayor Sam Adams, former 4-term Mayor of Milwaukee, and President of the Congress for New Urbanism John Norquist and dozens of other transportation authorities across the country to get their input and advice.
At about the halfway point of the series, we'll also be posting a MBA curriculum that includes lessons and discussion points for each of these fun and important films. Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.
The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has announced the three finalists for the vehicle they will choose to replace New York's aging taxi fleet. The winning cab will replace a large chunk of over 13,000 cabs that traverse the city. Whichever design is chosen will have a major impact on which green fleet technologies get adopted - New York has the largest taxi market in the US - and which don't.
These are the criteria that will determine the winning bid:
Meets highest safety standards
Superior passenger experience
Superior driver comfort and amenities
Appropriate purchase price and ongoing maintenance and repair costs
Smaller environmental footprint (lower emissions and improved fuel economy)
Smaller physical footprint (with more usable interior room)
Compliance with appropriate Americans with Disabilities Act requirements
Iconic design that will identify the new taxi with New York City
It will be especially interesting to see how the winning cab stacks up, in terms of fuel efficiency, with the city's current crop of hybrid-electric cabs, or Chicago's CNG (compressed natural gas) cabs that I wrote about here. This is to say nothing of San Francisco's Japanese-made all-electric cabs that received a huge federal grant earlier this year.
Here are the finalists:
Turkish automaker Karsan's entry, the only cab that is wheelchair-accessible
2010 has thrown up some buildings and developments that are out-of-this world, spectacular, outrageous, and even absurd. All despite the worst recession in thirty years. Here's a look at some of the best, courtesy of GOODmagazine.
The tallest freestanding structure on the planet, the Burj Khalifa, will open in Dubai in January, standing 2,717 feet above the desert. Designed by Adrian Smith, the tower is the centerpiece of a $20 billion development named Downtown Dubai, but it opens at an ominous time. The tower itself, known as the Burj Dubai, is re-named after Sheikh Khalifa al-Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates, who gives it the economic bailout necessary to complete it. Dubai is plagued with financial problems, and in October, only 825 of the 900 apartments are rented, overlooking a city where cranes hang motionless across the sky.
Meanwhile, a few months later in China, the new tallest tower in the world officially opens in Guangzhou, Guangdong. Designed by Information Based Architecture with Arup, the Canton Tower twists up 1,968.5 feet (beating out Toronto's CN Tower) into a hyperboloid (or double-ellipse) structure. An observation deck is planned for its rooftop. Meanwhile, Nanjing Greenland Financial Center and the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong are also completed this year, meaning China secures the titles of the second and third tallest buildings in the world.
After years of speculation about the future of the Santiago Calatrava-designed Chicago Spire, which would rise 2,000 feet over Chicago's waterfront, a foreclosure suit threatens to end construction for good. If ever completed, it would be the tallest building in the United States, topping the neighboring Willis—formerly Sears—Tower in Chicago. But since 2008, the construction site (literally a huge hole in the ground) has been abandoned, symbolic of the nation's waning power in the skyscraper race.
It officially opened in late 2009, but 2010 sees the completion of the final phase of CityCenter in Las Vegas, a spiky, fantastical, starchitect-studded collaboration featuring hundreds of A-listers like Daniel Libeskind and Cesar Pelli. The $8.5 billion project is the largest privately funded development in U.S. history, and one of the largest LEED-certified projects in the world. Yet reviews slam the development for its faux-urban nature, and suffering Vegas hotels blame its 6,000 new rooms for glutting the market. In November, Norman Foster’s troubled and still uncompleted tower, the Harmon, is slated for demolition. Um, what does that do to the LEED ratings of the other buildings?
At the Shanghai World Expo this year, plenty of architects had a chance to flex their muscles while designing the various national pavilions. While the U.S. architecture was a dismal failure, there were otherstandouts from countries like Denmark, who featured a working bike track, equipped with bikes, that wound through the Bjarke Ingels-designed sculpture. But nothing tops Thomas Heatherwick's Seed Cathedral for the United Kingdom, a stunning tribute to biodiversity. More than 60,000 fiberoptic rods showcase specimens from Kew Gardens' Millennium Seedbank, which will hold 25 percent of the world’s plant species by 2020. Which makes it even more fitting that it was nicknamed "The Dandelion."
In October, official renderings are revealed for Park51, an Islamic community center that plans to occupy the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory in Lower Manhattan. Instead of the design by SOMA Architects, the media focuses on the fact that it's three blocks away from where the 9/11 attacks took place, inaccurately dubbing it the “Ground Zero mosque” (even though it's not a mosque, and there are already other mosques in the area). Although there's no explicit commentary about what the design means, the exteriors seem to evoke an Islamic star pattern while flooding the interiors with daylight.
Also in October, a family of five finally moves into what's widely regarded to be the first billion-dollar house, a private, 27-story tower in Mumbai that's built for India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani. Designed by Perkins+Will, the "house" has a health club with a gym and dance studio, swimming pools, a 50-seat cinema, three helicopter pads, a garage for 160 vehicles on the ground floors, and 600 full-time staffers to maintain the house, which is widely regarded to be the most expensive permanent residence in the world.
In December, after perhaps the most ambitious World Cup proposal in history, the tiny Middle Eastern country of Qatar wins its bid to host the 2022 games. Its radical plan to host millions of soccer fans in 130-degree heat include building 12 stadiums that will later be disassembled into 22 new stadiums for neighboring countries, and mysterious solar-powered air conditioners that will keep even open-air stadiums cool. Well, at least they’ve got 12 years to figure it out.
Just finished re-reading Saul Williams' groundbreaking work, The Dead Emcee Scrolls. I first saw Saul Williams live at UW's Kane Hall when I was a wee freshman, having no idea of what a poetic firestorm I was about to witness.
Williams' poetry can best be described as a tongue-lashing, luscious harmony of hip-hop Zulu NYC Afrocentricity. He is also the only artist who is commercially successful as a slam poet and hip hop star. For more of a sampling of his poetic beats set to rap music, check out his hit single, "List of Demands." It was used as the soundtrack to a Nike commercial several years ago. Can you top that, Sherman Alexie? I think not...
My favorite quotes from Dead Emcee Scrolls could go on for days...suffice it to say his writing packs a punch!
Let me mold a guitar of your bodily bazaar. Strap your tongue, chord your lungs, string your toes. And bows that precede the rain shall serpent symphonies in your name.
Mother of countless daughters. The tricks of time. It is your thrust and grind that defines us. We are the offspring of your decapitated head. The bastard sons of Father Time.
Dance. Even when your feet hurt. Dance like the fires of hell are upon you and you’re dodging every flame.
Dance when it tastes good. Dance when the spirit moves you.
Dance because you feel it and you don’t have to be taught how to count, how to step and slide, how to twirl and jump and land on a good foot before taking off to fly,
NGH, dance. Dance, nigger. Paint your faces. Shine your shoes. Pop that collar. Shake it. Wind it. Kick fight scratch rip kill BREAK.
Neck back jump back kiss BREAK. Uprock freeze pop lock BREAK. Don’t stop don’t stop snap BREAK.
Into ferocious song and dance. Calculated movement. Gestures of prayer and invocation. Dance. Your life depends on it.
Cakewalk. Lindy. Charleston. Mashed potatoes. Camel walk. Hot pants. Hustle. Electric boogaloo. Patty Duke. Steve Martin. Pee-wee Herman. Prep. Wop. Rooftop. Cabbage Patch. Chickenhead. Ragtop. Wobble. Crump. Snake. BREAK!
Not until you listen to Rakim on a rocky mountaintop have you heard hip-hop. Extract the urban element that created it and let an open wide countryside illustrate it.
The trains and planes could corrupt and obstruct your planes of thought so that you forget how to walk through the woods which ain’t good cause if you never walked through the trees listening to Nobody Beats The Biz then you ain’t never heard hip-hop.
And you don’t stop. And you don’t stop. And you must stop letting cities define you. Confine you to that which is brick and cement. We are not a hard people. Our domes have been crowned with the likes of steeples.
The wind plays the world like an instrument. Blows through trees like flutes. But trees won’t grow in cement. And as heart beats bring percussion fallen trees bring repercussions. Cities play upon our souls like broken drums.
We drum the essence of creation from city slums. But city slums mute our drums and our drums become humdrum cause city slums have never been where our drums were from.
Just the place where our daughters and sons become offbeat heartbeats. Slaves to city streets. Where hearts get broken when heartbeats stop. Broken heartbeats become break-beats for NGHs to rhyme on top.
Cop car swerves to the side of the road. Hip-hop takes its last breath. The cop scrawls vernacular manslaughter onto his yellow pad, then balls the paper into his hands, deciding he’d rather freestyle.
You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to remain silent. And maybe you should have before your bullshit manifested.
Song is the invitation from the primordial unseen to become one with that which is seen. To nod your head is to agree that the moment is godly: communion. To dance is to become God. There are many ways of dancing. Follow your heart.
The buck and gully. The native son. Bigger and Deffer. The freshest one. The sewed-in creases. The flavored twills. The confidence snorted through dollar bills.
The “Fuck I care for?” The boldfaced lie. The been there and done that. The do or die. The dirty dirty. The filthy clean. Thugged out and nerdy. No in between. The blackest berry. The sweetest juice. That complex NGH born of simple truth.
A wealth of violence. A violent wealth. You caught up, NGH, better watch your health, the beat is dope though. The junkie nod. The use of breakbeats to beat the odds.
God and pussy. Objects of desire and ill repute. Some’d rather seek up high than dig and grind that inner truth. The angel of my eye a bit too fly to substitute with any other form than the messiah’s.
Shower me with blessings. No second-guessing. ‘Cause God, herself, is sitting on the edge of my bed, slowly undressing. A night symbolic as the resurrection. I’m about to slide up in the kingdom of God with no protection.
And I can hear a second coming. ‘Cause I already hear the drummer boy barumpumpum pumming. A host of angles look at me through your eyes. My first communion with my hands on your thighs. You’re catching the spirit, the Holy Ghost and the fire. Yo, this is wild.
I’m every Jay-Z album played in reverse. I’m risen from blunt ash and stashed in a purse. I’m smuggled over borders, contraband, ‘though I rock. I paper. I scissor. Nah, NGH, no Glock.
Pay me cash. Simply ‘cause what money means to you. Your currency has currently devalued what is true. When freedom rings through costly bling, it’s overdrawn, past due. The bankroll of an empty soul kept vaulted. Code and clues:
NGH WHT, I represent the truth you claim to be. The hero of the eastern sky, the storm’s eye, westerly. Rough, rugged, raw, eternal law recited over beats. Some poetry to oversee the dance floor and the streets.
Your evolution stopped with the evolution of your technology. A society of automatic tellers and money machines. NGH WHT? My culture is lima beans. Dreams manifest. Dreams real. Not consistent with the rational.
I dance for no reason. For reason you can’t dance. Caught in the inactiveness of intellectualized circumstance. You can’t learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts. Spirit/soul can’t be store bought. Fuck thought. It leads to naught. Simply stated, it leads to you trying to figure me out.
Your intellect is disfiguring your soul. Your being’s not whole. Check your flagpole: stars and stripes. Your astrology’s imprisoned by your concept of white, of self. What’s your plan for spiritual health? Calling reality unreal. Your line of thought is tangled.
The star-spangled got your soul mangled. Your being’s angled, forbidding you to be real and feel. You can’t find truth with an ax or a drill, in a white house on a hill, or in factories or plants made of steel.
New York City's Transportation Commissioner is not only responsible for the city's biggest expansion of bike lanes in history and the largest (planned) bike-sharing program in the US.
She's also taking charge of one of the simplest infrastructural changes you could think of, one that turns out to have a dramatic influence on the quality of our experience as pedestrians.
In a Lower Manhattan pilot project, Sadik-Khan has installed "pop-up" cafes that take up the space where parked cars would normally sit. Because land uses in cities are generally determined by what developers call the 'highest and best use,' it bears questioning whether having a six-foot swath of highly-trafficked streetscape devoted to parking our cars is truly the highest and best use.
It comes down to a question of priorities - do we build our cities to move traffic or to move people? Increasingly, progressive leaders like Sadik-Khan are choosing the latter.
The locations in Lower Manhattan were so successful that this pilot program is being expanded to 12 additional locations across the city. Each pop-up cafe is just six feet wide - the width of an ordinary parked car - and roughly five cars long.
Each pop-up cafe is sponsored and maintained by a neighboring business across the sidewalk, generally a restaurant or coffeeshop. These stores are reporting a 14% increase in business when the sidewalk tables and chairs are installed. Although they are privately financed, the spaces are considered as public as any park.
Originally inspired by similar "parklets" in San Francisco's Castro and Potrero Hill neighborhoods, this type of "guerrilla park design", if you will, is destined to become a permanent fixture wherever it's installed. Simply by provoking thought about the purposes of our street space - how much space for parked cars, and how much for people - seems to be enough to provoke people to take back the public space that is rightfully theirs.
A similar transformation, albeit on a larger scale, took place in NYC's Madison Square Garden. Take a look!
Is this the reason why so many drivers hate bicyclists? Quite possibly. Especially, check out what the guy does at 1:34. He's lucky he didn't get shot!
A few days ago I wrote about New York City's plans to create one of the largest bike-sharing programs in the United States, with up to 10,000 bikes available 24 hours a day by 2012. The program is just the latest of a string of revolutionary projects from the NYC Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan.
A parklet on San Francisco's Castro Street, inspired by similar open space projects in New York
As press coverage from Esquireto The New York Times has attested, if Sadik-Khan's sustainability projects on as grand a scale as New York succeed, they can be replicated anywhere and everywhere.
Transportation Nation posted an interview with the ground-breaking New Yorker herself, with more details about the bike-sharing program in the city. I'm posting the full interview below:
NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, in the now car-free plaza at Times Square
Richard Hake: New York City today takes the first step toward launching the largest bike-share program in the country. New Yorkers will be able to rent bikes one-way for short term rides all over Manhattan. The idea is that the program will be entirely privately run, but the city will share the revenues. Joining us now is the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan.
Tell me how this program would work. If I get off work today, I’m here on Varick Street and I want to take a bike up to Union Square, would that be possible?
Janette Sadik-Khan: The system would be similar to the bike share format we’ve seen in Paris and London and Washington where heavy-duty bikes would be located at docking stations every few blocks throughout the system, and they can be ridden and dropped off at any other docking station in the system. So we’re asking for companies to come in and give us their ideas where the best place would be to site a bike share system.
RH: So where would these docking stations be? Would they be in major sections like Union Square? Would there be one in Times Square? Have you investigated how that would work?
JSK: Well, the RFP does not specify the number of bicycles or the precise geographic area to be covered. But we do have preliminary research that says south of 60th Street in Manhattan in the central business district would be an ideal match for New York’s geography because we’ve got high density and a growing bike infrastructure there.
RH: Now are you looking at this more for tourists, for people who just want to leisurely go around the city or could this be done for people who want to go to work and get some errands done?
JSK: We expect it to serve bothgroups. Bike share would give New Yorkers many more transportation choices as the city’s population continues to grow and as traffic congestion increases. And it would be privately funded, so taxpayers will not be on the hook for coming up with dollars to support this, but they would share in any profits. And we think this is really the best deal in town for on-demand travel and a nice complement to our transit system.
RH: So when you say privately run, does that mean, there would be different companies or maybe one large company would actually purchase the bikes, maintain those bikes and actually rent the bikes out to people that want them?
JSK: Yes, the RFP specifies that a private company would bear all the costs and responsibilities with the system during the initial five-year period while sharing revenues with the city. No taxpayer funds would be used for the system’s implementation or for the upkeep or for the maintenance of it. And in fact, we expect significant revenues from user fees and sponsorship and we will negotiate a city share of that revenue.
RH: One of the big problems of riding a bike in New York City is actually where to put it and the risk of theft. Now I know you’ve investigated the other programs going on in Europe and the other cities in the U.S. What have they been doing with the risk of theft of the bicycles?
JSK: Modern systems are much more sophisticated than they used to be. And security and technology on bike systems has really improved significantly. Theft and vandalism hasn’t occurred in places like London. I think something like five bikes have been stolen because the contractor failed to lock them properly. Even judging Paris as it applies to New York, in 2008, Paris’ larceny and theft rate was more than four times that of New York and more than double that of Boston and Washington, D.C. And overall property crime such as theft and vandalism is much more frequent in France than in the United States.
RH: I know since you’ve become the Transportation Commissioner, we’ve seen lots and lots of new bike lanes all over New York City. Are there enough bike lanes now for this program to be actually safe?
JSK: We’ve built on an extensive system in line with Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative. The idea is we’re not going to be able to battle traffic congestion and continue to grow and thrive unless we provide New Yorkers with some more options. What we’re looking to do is build on the safety record we’ve got here. New York city cycling is getting safer as more people are riding bikes and the network expands. Cycling has more than doubled from 2006 to 2010. But at the same time, cycling injuries and injuries to all users, where we’ve put down bike lanes, has gone down from 40 to 50 percent.
RH: Janette Sadik-Khan is the city’s transportation commissioner. Commissioner, thanks so much for joining us.
Bicycles are one of our oldest and most enduring forms of carbon-neutral transportation, but it is only within the last five years or so that they have been re-evaluated as key pieces of our urban transit infrastructure, rather than fun recreational toys.
Bike-sharing programs embrace the budding concept of "collaborative consumption," in which traditional capitalism is replaced by networks of consumers who band together via the Internet to provide shared needs.
Examples of collaborative consumption abound, especially in more progressive and tech-savvy cities. On Craigslist, people shop for used furniture, job postings, and even casual sex! The free, minimalist, and communal nature of Craiglist and other online classifieds has spelled death for the local news business. ZipCar provides a shared, publicly available fleet of cars for short trips in urban centers, so regular people can avoid the expense and hassles of car ownership. Travelers increasingly use Couchsurfing instead of booking hostel rooms, creating a stable network of peer-reviewed, intimate accommodations, and even lifelong friendships along the way. Urban gardeners aching to get a plot of land and frustrated by the lack of public garden space have taken to "garden-sharing", where homeowners advertise their open space via iPhone applications.
A full history of the collaborative consumption movement is available here, via GOOD.
Let's go around the horn and take a look at some of the big developments taking off in American bike-sharing sytems:
SAN FRANCISCO
A $7.9 million pilot project is set to provide bikes in San Francisco and along the Caltrain corridor in San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View and Redwood City for use by registered subscribers. Over 1,000 bikes are scheduled to be available in late 2011.
The system is aiming to replicate the success of European bike-sharing, with automated charging stations and annual, daily, or monthly subscription fees for users, along with hourly rates. Like many of the most famous systems, the first 30 minutes would be free of charge, to encourage riders to use the system for short trips close to home.
The pilot program would begin with about 500 bikes and 50 stations in the San Francisco city center, focusing on the City Center, Tenderloin, Market Street, and Transbay Terminal areas. An additional 400 bikes would go into the urban centers of CalTrain corridor south of the city.
After the program is fully operational by 2013, the bike-sharing system in the Bay Area is planned to expand to over 13,000 bikes! 2,750 of the bikes would be in San Francisco and another 10,000 in Santa Clara County. This is on the scale of the famous Velib system in Paris, which boasts 20,000 bikes.
NEW YORK CITY
New York is taking steps to create the largest bike-sharing system in the United States, one that eventually will turn a profit through advertising with a public-private partnership. According to Transportation Nation, the system will have 10,000 bikes available 24 hours a day by 2012.
“New York is made for bike share,” said Paul Steely White, Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives,” so this announcement is very exciting. The characteristics that make bicycling an everyday form of transportation, New York has in spades: density, flat terrain, temperate climate, lots of short trips and an on the go lifestyle. This nimble and inexpensive way to get around will fit easily into New Yorkers’ constantly shifting errands and schedules.”
By using wireless technology, including a searchable map of solar-powered bike stations using GPS, New York believes it can replicate the success of the London system and quickly turn a profit.
WASHINGTON, DC
In our nation's capital, an earlier bike-sharing system run by SmartBike DC will be replaced by a newer expanded system, offering 1,100 bikes and 114 stations in the District and Arlington County. This is a dramatic increase from the current 120 SmartBike stations.
"The new system will allow a wider range of membership opportunities. Annual memberships will cost $80, double the current SmartBike rate of $40, though for a much better service. People can also purchase monthly memberships for $30 or daily ones for $5. All memberships allow unlimited bike rentals, free for the first 30 minutes with usage fees (levels not yet specified) after 30 minutes."
MINNEAPOLIS
Minneapolis has just launchedNice Ride, the largest bike-sharing system in the US to date. It debuted in June 2010 with 700 bikes and 65 stations, where riders swipe a credit card, take out a bike, and go. As with other popular programs, long-term subscriptions can be purchased online for the low price of $60 per year. That's lower the cost of Netflix, people!
DENVER
Denver's program launched in April 2010, with 400 bikes and 42 stations. Already, it has logged 8,000 registered users and 800 annual members.
One important byproduct of the rise of privately-funded bike-sharing systems is that they help point to the overwhelming lack of bike infrastructure in most US cities. Simply by creating a critical mass (no pun intended) of everyday cyclists, cities are quickly made aware of where the street networks need the greatest improvements to accommodate them.
MIAMI
Miami, or as I like to refer to it, the "whitest city in Latin America," has started its "Deco Bike" system in posh Miami Beach. The program boasts 100 solar-powered stations and over 1,000 bikes. It claims that a single station can meet the needs of up to 200 commuters who would otherwise travel by Lambourghini. Not bad, Miami! You just might redeem yourself after your stint as Jersey Shore South.
SEATTLE
Seattle is predictably falling behind in the race to provide public transit alternatives. We are good at one thing, though: Feasibility Studies! The City of Seattle commissioned a feasibility study through the UW Department of Urban Design & Planning. The study identifies possible corridors and phases where stations could be installed, potential ridership, and limitations. Any chance we could expedite this process we are so infamous for, Seattle?
