Learning About Moving Around
Lincoln is not LA or NYC, but we share some concerns. The scales may not be the same, but the issues are similar.
A planner talks about transportation issues and bringing about change:
LA and Lincoln share an entrenched auto-centric culture, both in their citizens and public officials. People desire the freedom provided by automobiles: freedom of time and freedom of location. You can go where you want, when you want. Particularly elected officials are sensitive to this, because their constituency may not care for public transit or transportation reform, even if that is the best thing for the city.
It was interesting to here Ms. Whitaker's opinion that traffic engineers cling to the status quo. We can't change because we've done it this way for so long.
Also, the idea that providing free parking encourages auto-based transport was something I hadn't really considered before. In fact it's a feedback loop: the vast parking lots we use to store our vehicles as we move around cause destination structures to be farther apart, making it more attractive to get to them by auto, requiring parking.
She also talks about improvement by baby steps
. Like she did,
I want to see world-changing improvements, but those are unlikely to
happen, either because of expense or just because they are out of the
mainstream. Small changes, though, can make things better, too, and over
time, they add up to big changes.
(How much time do we have, though?)
An ethicist talks about the imporantance of livable streets
:
...[I]f you live anywhere but a few cities and you want a quart of
milk, you have to take the car.
Lincoln is one of those cities
where, in general, you currently have to take the car.
Mr. Cohen describes indiscriminate use of cars as selfish
for
various reasons, but the question for us is, in Lincoln, what other
choices do we have? We aren't as compact as Manhattan, with neighborhood
groceries, etc., and we don't have the public transportation system
enjoyed by some other municipalities.
Discussion of the parking placards used by officials in NYC allowing them to park wherever they care to reminds me of some of our elected officials and their attitude toward bus service and public transportation. In New York, officials may not perceive parking and pedestrian friendliness as high-priority issues because they typically drive from place to place, and can park wherever they care to. Members of Lincoln's City Council may not put stock in public transportation simply because it's not useful to them.
No solutions here, just questions to think about.
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Nothing Could Be Finer
We just returned from our trip to South
Carolina. It was the first time in several years that all three
Wilson girls were back in Columbia. It was a largely domestic
trip, with lots of time spent being familial and stuff. We celebrated
Roland's birthday at Robin's house with lentil soup (96 calories/cup),
ate an early Thanksgiving meal, drank lots of coffee, and cut into one
of Barbara's raw milk camemberts.
assert(visiting_family == eating);
I downloaded Gutsy Gibbon while we were there, intending to play a prank on a Windows user involving the live CD. To my dismay, it Gnome would not start cleanly on the system, leaving me with a blank X display, no toolbars, no menus, and no way to start a terminal (without resorting to one of the virtual consoles). This was not a state I wanted to leave the computer in, even as a prank, because the point was to demonstrate the usablity of Ubuntu to a Windows user who had earlier in the weekend claimed that he might be persuaded to change to Linux if only he were a computer nerd. Disappointing.
We also went out to visit Village at
Sandhill, an example of the lifestyle center
retail shopping concept. Interesting to see in action, it's a mixed-use
development heavily weighted toward shopping—like a cross between
new urbanism, a traditional mall, and Disney World. The Disney
World
feel comes from a sense of artifice and manufacture. I'd
like to go back in a few years and see how they're doing, not because I
think it's doomed to fail, but because I think it might need some time
to become lived-in before it starts to feel like a neighborhood, which
is, I think, what the developer intends.
I should have blogged all these things separately, but I was mostly
cut off from my
exocortextthe net the whole time, save a trip to the
bookstore, where I mostly tried to gather research materials for later
reading. Is it bad that I often think of vacations in terms of time
to work on projects
?
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