I’m still taking a break, but I thought I’d interrupt this attitude maintenance window to point you at an article about traffic engineer Hans Monderman, whose innovative ideas about the people, driving, and traffic have led him to remedy dangerous streets in several Dutch towns by removing almost all of the traffic controls. It’s a fascinating idea, and it seems to be working.

Beyond simply figuring out ways to move more cars through the streets, Monderman’s ideas revolve around how people drive in different contexts, and how overriding those contexts with traffic controls takes responsibility away from drivers, who then stop paying attention.

There’s also an interesting discussion about differences in perception of distance between peds, cyclists and motorists.

Monderman was interested in this notion that the car changed time and space. He commented on Proust’s observation that a visit to a relative that once took a few days could now be completed in one. Suddenly, more trips could be made, but each trip seemed shorter. “What happened to these people?” said Monderman. “They had gone to their uncle’s, spent three days. Suddenly they’re in a hurry. . . . It’s quite ­simple—­they bought a car. The first thing put in a car is a clock, ticking away in an objective linear time. In the past time went different. They woke with the chickens, and went to bed when it became dark. You had your own time schedule depending on what the seasons told you. Suddenly we can measure the whole day around objective time.”

The implications are clear to any modern driver. Commute times are precisely that—times—with distance obliterated, as if we were driving across the face of a clock. Cities have essentially expanded in size to the extent that new transportation means have arisen to keep commuting times more or less stable. Pedestrians, on the other hand, who possess a more intimate knowledge of the geography they are traversing (and must provide the actual power to do so), tend to think in terms of distance. As a New Yorker, my first instinct is to think of some destination in terms of how many blocks away it is, not how long the walk ­is.

I also enjoyed this quote: “all traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity”. I concur, a cross country flight is practically a miracle of transportation by any historical standard, but I’d rather read and re-read a Reader’s Digest than pass the time watching Kansas or Utah slowly scrolling beneath me. Throw in the delights of navigating through the airport, and you’ve got an experience that’s both aggravating and dull!

Monderman’s ideas challenge the fundamentals of traffic engineering, and is changing the way people look at this aspect of urban space. If this kind of thing interests you, it’s definitely worth a read.

I’ll soon have more to post about biking in New York with the kids, pastries from Balthazar, toddlers gone wild at Tompkins Square park, picnicking with friends at 9th and C, and other delights. There are many pics that need pulling off the phone, but I thought I’d post one that had me thrilled.

Check out what they done gone and built in Chelsea, going south on 9th Avenue:

That’s a real honest-to-god bike lane. Note, going from right to left: three lanes of traffic, one lane that’s parking or a left turn lane (depending on which way the cross street goes), a physical barrier, and a full bike lane. You can’t see it very well in this shot, but the traffic light at the corner, to the left of the bike lane, is a stop light exclusively for regulating the bike lane (the red, yellow, and green lights are actually in the shape of a bicycle). The light just to the right of it regulates the left turn lane, allowing cars to safely cross the bike lane.

Riding down this section of 9th, with my daughter in her kid-seat, I felt like the city recognized us as legitimate traffic and took our safety seriously. I felt like I was on a road built with bikes at the core of the design, rather than one where the design half-heartedly acknowledges that bikes are vehicles and then throws us into a raging current of cabs, busses, and SUVs. It felt really, really good.

That is infrastructure you can believe in, my friends.

[UPDATE]: fixed the lane order, here’s a document that lays out what I’m trying to describe, around page 19 or so. There’s more benefits than I’d considered, like a shorter crossing distance for pedestrians and a barrier to turning the wrong way on a one-way street. Neat.

It should also be noted that food messengers don’t seem to understand that the awesome new bike lane only goes one way, and that the northbound bike lane is over on 8th Ave. Or, they get it and don’t care. I’d typically blow off that kind of anarchy because, ya know, it’s New York and they gotta make a living right? But this is a real, permanent, well-designed bike road we’re talkin’ about, it’s undeniably a one-way thing, and going the wrong way on it makes it unsafe the same way that driving a car the wrong way up a one-way street does. So fuck that, ticket the living shit out of ‘em. Growing up ain’t always easy, ya know?

[UPDATE AGAIN]: This really was just supposed to be a short post, but I ran into this StreetFilms short about efforts to create more separated bike lanes in New York, it seems appropriate to throw it on the stack. I wonder if Mayor Fenty’s seen any of this. It’s quite a vision of what a city can be.

I’m out tomorrow, travelling this weekend, so the singin’ and dancin’ and whatnot comes a day early. My personal 3-day weekend means early entertainment for you!

But, before we get to dessert, I thought I’d throw out something nutritious. Don’t worry, it’s funny too, but it’s something substantial to chew on. Here’s James Howard Kunstler smacking America around with its own architecture and city planning.

There’s not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel okay about goin’ down this block.

Enjoy the stinging sensations!

Via the foyn folks at Car Free Days, check this out:

I’d say that’s worth more than a thousand words, eh?

Also, they’re drawing attention to a July 4th Cargo Bike Ride meeting at Pioneer Square at First and Yesler at high noon, partner. If it weren’t 2700 miles away and two days from now, I’d totally be there.

That stings.

Of course, one of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape from it for a weekend.

First off, just got word from a friend that design and construction of the Metropolitan Branch Trail is back on! Though this news may not shake the foundations of D.C., it’s a big fat deal in our neck of the woods:

Note: This map was taken and adapted from WashingtonsBestAddress.com. Kinda says it all about how D.C. feels about Brookland and company, doesn’t it?

The current commute options involve routes with shoulderless stretches on major arterials that people around here mistake for freeways. Once you’ve made your way to the south or west of the big, blank NE section you see on the map, things improve dramatically. But our part of D.C. is, if not quite cut off, surrounded by routes that increase the pucker factor when riding with the kids.

So having a North/South connection to bike-friendlier routes will be delightful. They’re also going to connect the Metropolitan Branch Trail with the Northwest Branch Trail in West Hyattsville, as well as connecting it to the Capitol Crescent Trail up in Silver Springs (and that’s gonna be a real nice loop, by gawd). Great news!

And then there’s this: my wife said something really, really sweet to me last night.

She prefaced by mentioning how for her whole life, she’s always liked beater bikes, and never cared much about performance or tune. And how, when it comes to tools and things I use frequently, the reasons I research and obsess and will spend more for one over another have always eluded her (but she knows that about me and loves me anyway).

But she’s been riding my Long Haul Trucker quite a bit lately, and she told me last night that it is the nicest bike she’s ever ridden. She mentioned that, at first, it felt kinda twitchy to her, and she didn’t like the position. But since then, she’s really gotten to like it, and she’s never ridden a bike that felt that good.

Needless to say, I’m still turned on. “By your Girly or your Surly?” you quip cleverly. I can only reply, “Yes.”

Paul Krugman talks about what a Future That Doesn’t Suck might look like, and he thinks it might look like Europe, where gas is about $8/gallon (emphasis mine):

Any serious reduction in American driving will require more than this — it will mean changing how and where many of us live.

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

It’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea?

An objection that comes up frequently in any discussion of changing our way of getting around is that people will never give up their cars, that they’d rather drive alone than ride a bike, take the bus, or take a train to work.

Now I understand that many people making this claim haven’t had the experience of living somewhere with a functioning, useful public transit system. But I also know that folks from urban sprawl centers do have the experience of trying to get from point A to point B in a city like Los Angeles or Atlanta, and know how jaw-grindingly, wheel-poundingly aggravating it is to do 3 miles per hour on a freeway filled with single-occupant automobiles. They have to have experienced the hostility and stupidity of inching and crawling through gridlocked surface streets, and I know I’m not the only one who has looked upon the thick, brown layer of smog that periodically hovers over such a city and thought, “I can’t believe I raise children in this air”.

And it always puzzles me as to why anyone would choose that over… well, over anything else that isn’t that? I always thought people did this because there wasn’t a better alternative, not because it was the most desirable option. Does having one’s own HVAC and stereo system really make up for everything else? Is it just a failure of imagination that people can’t envision their city with functioning pedestrian, bicycle, and public transit infrastructures? Is it a failure on the part of those of us who can see that future to compete with Madison Avenue’s car-culture message?