National Bike to Work Day!

So today is national bike to work day.

For me it was a normal commute that I take everyday north to the Pulaski Bridge into queens, up to the Roosevelt Island Bridge and then into work.  In the city all the bridges into Manhattan were staffed with Transportation Alternatives volunteers giving out water bottles, bike maps, and fruit.  On my way home I stopped by the entrance to the Queensboro Bridge on the Queens side and spoke with some of the people there got a cliff bar and then headed back towards my normal commute.  The weather was perfect for it today and its always great to see other people out on bikes.

Bike to Work Day

I see more and more people out riding every morning.  Everyone of them puts a smile on my face.  Some mornings I actually get into bicycle traffic!  It is such a pleasure getting to and from work.

Crowded Pulaski walkway

This evening I am going to a rally on the Pulaski bridge to show support for bicycle and pedestrian improvements.  Hundreds of walkers and bikers cross the bridge between Queens and Brooklyn on a single narrow walkway.  Riders are actually supposed to dismount and walk across if they use the walkway or take their chances on the narrow four lane speedway with the cars.  Personally I really do not know what could be done just based on the bridge structure but this is how I get to work everyday along with tons of other Brooklyn and Queens residents that could use some more space to cross the river.

Speed Limit Signs Only Do So Much

Speeding is common everywhere.  We act so surprised that people do it so much but ignore it in most applications.  65 MPH speed limits on the highway are impossible to enforce because everyone is going over 65.  You have to be going at least 80 to get a speeding ticket in a 65.  This is indicative of a huge problem in Transportation engineering schools and design guidelines like the AASHTO Green book I mentioned before on this blog.

Who are we kidding with this?

Like other disciplines of engineering factors of safety are used in all aspects including design speeds.  A factor of safety is the practice of designing something for higher levels of capacity than they are expected to reach.  For example when designing a building if the expected loads are say 800 pounds you design for 1,000 pounds.  The difference is that the loads will not decide to increase to 1,000 pounds when you do this.  In road design you generally add on about 15 mph to the posted speed limit.  So a 65mph road is geometrically designed(sight distances, curve radii, lane widths) for 80 mph.  People usually drive at 80 mph on the highway.

Speeding happens because of the way we design our roads.  Enforcement of traffic laws can play a large role in compliance but more importantly roads themselves control speeds people use them.  If we want people to drive a certain speed we should design the street for that speed.  Hopefully the letter AASHTO sent to USDOT is a sign of things to come from them and publishers of transportation engineering books.

heavily signalized

No signs whatsoever

For the most part I do not like signs in general.  I think they do very little to increase safety and tend to decrease overall driver awareness.  Where I work on Roosevelt Island I think they should get rid of all the traffic signs, save for one sign when you enter the island that tells you to drive counter clockwise around the island.  Hans Monderman did this in Drachten Netherlands where he removed all the signs in a village except for one sign before you enter the village that says “no road signs ahead, speed limit 30kmh”.  Traffic flowed smoother with a sharp decrease in crashes.  It is really quite impressive and radical idea that worked.

relaxed cycling

Manhattan, mole people, and taxis.

Dr. Garrick once told me that he never particularly liked New York City.  In school when we were learning about city planning and city infrastructure and preparing to do our research projects we looked at various cities around the US and the world both statistically and qualitatively.  Looking at NYC quantitatively and trying to analyze it from an urbanist point of view it looks good.  It has the highest transit user-ship, the highest density in the US and the numbers are almost at European city levels.  Some of us asked Dr. Garrick why NYC was not one of the cities we could pick for our projects(some of our choices were Amsterdam, Washington DC, Curitiba Brazil, Portland OR, and London).  All he had to say was that he did not feel it had much to offer in terms of the types of urban forms that we should study.  I did not fully understand this until recently.  Do not get me wrong here, I love New York City.  I think it is an absolutely wonderful place with so much culture and diversity.  The problem is that transportation policy for years has been backwards for decades but it looks like that is beginning to change now.

Beep beep beep Yeah!

If we take a look only at Manhattan this is what  we are dealing with.  Just over 10% of trips in Manhattan are in personal automobiles, another 15% are by taxis, and then transit which includes buses and subway are account for about 40% and walking and bicycling about 30%.  Now what do people think of when they think of Transportation in NYC.  Taxi cabs!  Now this should not come as any surprise because that is what you see when you are in Manhattan.  Most of the public surface space is dedicated to automobiles when in reality they provide less than 30% of the transportation in Manhattan.  New York city takes all the advantages of the dense population and public transportation while literally pushing it underground.  This is an entirely different subject that volumes can and have been dedicated entirely to.

The idea of new urbanism is not only efficiency of moving people but creating safe communities that are built on a more human scale.  All up and down Manhattan you have six lanes of motor vehicle traffic on the Avenues.  Surface Transit is given a bus only lane in some places but it is rarely enforced and turns into a parking lane more often then not.  On the avenues sidewalks are generally narrow(less than twelve feet in most places).  The sort of things that NYC needs are streets that are more friendly to people and priority given to pedestrians, bikes, and surface transit.  I would love to see two streetcars going in each direction on all the avenues in Manhattan or at least true Bus Rapid Transit that mimics streetcars.

This brings to the other major point I am trying to make, taxi cabs.  Taxis pose a complex issue, they are given far to great a share of space and priority in NYC which I believe could stand to do with far fewer cabs but at the same time their service creates many jobs for New Yorkers.  Every transportation issue in NYC has to take this into account and avoids things that will harm the taxi business.  Personally I would like to see less taxis on the road but certainly do not want all those drivers to be put out of work and lose all the movement of capital they produce.

Secondary benifit, WAY LESS NOISE!

I have a radical concept for dealing with this.  It is a very abstract idea but seemed appealing in philosophical exercise.  If Manhattan changed the streetscape to accommodate more surface transit thus reducing the amount of taxis and personal automobiles I would set up some sort of corporation weather public or private or maybe just use tax incentives of some sort but the idea would be to make sure that any cab driver who lost their job would be offered a job as a pedicab driver.  You would have to adjust the fares for both taxis and pedicabs so that drivers are getting competitive wages.  I think the pedicab fares should remain below taxi cab fares but this should not be a problem.  Pedicab drivers have much lower work related expenses compared to taxi drivers.  The no longer need to pay for gas or to maintenance.

Now this is not a nearly perfect solution and not every taxi driver would take a job as a pedicab driver but I think it has some sort of potential or at the very least is effective as a theoretical exercise.

The One with Lots of Pics

These are fenders

Alright I have not posted in a while so here is a lot of recent pictures.  More posts to come soon.

So first up.  I put some fenders on my bike this week to keep my back dry when the weather is not in my favor.

Planet Bike

They came from the great white north at the Niagara Cycle Works.

Up next is some fresh salmon I cooked a couple of weeks ago with some squash and zucchini and coconut cashew basmati rice.  I was just very pleased with how it looked so I plated it and took some pictures.

You can see the netflix envelopes in the background

Just some salmon

I rubbed the salmon with some sea salt and spices from the Isle of Capri.  It was pretty tasty.

pepsi cola

Took this from the garden behind the pool at one Beekman place.  It seems to be a very old ad, as you can see the red looks orange and the bottle is old style.  I have never been close to this but it is in Long Island City Queens across the East River from the building I work in.

Bell-X1

Not a photo of Stan Lee

Heather won tickets from the radio to see this Irish band last weekend for St Patty’s.  It was pretty fun and Heather likes to take slow shutter photographs in low light to get these kinds of effects.  There were also three of the lead singer.

So That’s it for now.  More updates coming soon.

Quantum and the reading

I just finished reading “The Life and Death of Great American Cities”.  It was quite excellent,  there were too much in the book for me to point out any specific parts at the moment, but I have moved on to two new books “No Country for Old Men” and “Quantum and the Lotus”. The latter is a non-fiction dialogue between a Buddhist monk and a astrophysicist discussing Buddhist philosophy and science.  It is very interesting how much Buddhist thought actually fits in with quantum mechanics.

This brings to a book I read last year “Quantum Evolution”.  This book was so fascinating.  Its thesis is to propose a theory for the evolution of life in the universe and subsequently the evolution of conciseness and intelligent thought.  It begins by defining what life is and how it has been defined throughout history from Aristotle and the beginning of the scientific method to Galileo then to Darwin and finally to quantum mechanics and modern science.  It provides a fantastic history of life science.  As a fan of both science and history I was completely absorbed into this book.  Possibly in a future post I will get more into just what exactly quantum mechanics are.  For now I will leave it at the fact that this book was totally amazing and I am very close to going to the library tomorrow to start reading the book again.  I usually do not read books more than once and when I do it is because I remember very little of the last time I read the book.  That is not the case here I remember so much of it that I just want to get anything I may have missed the first time out of it.

I find this short mockumentary to be very funny.

please to enjoy.

The war of the worlds style music is great.

AASHTO to the President and Ray Lahood

AASHTO just sent me an email informing me that they have prepared a brief presentation of the comments they collected from thousands of Americans.  They are sending this to the Obama Administration(USDOT chief Ray Lahood in particular) and Congress.  The project that they started last fall at Itoldthepresident.org allowed anyone to leave their thoughts on how this new administration should focus our national transportation policy.  Here are the comments they collected.  http://downloads.transportation.org/YouToldUs.pdf

Just a little icy out.

It impressed me that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials would select this cross section of comments.  Most urge for more mass transit, public transportation, bicycling, walking, and high speed rail with only a few sprinklings of comments about highway growth.  Even a couple of comments addressed the issue of accessibility instead of mobility(which we are very good at in this country, on average Americans move farther and at higher speeds than most other countries yet we fall onto the end of the spectrum when it comes to how long it takes to get where we have to go).  It does not surprise me that a large number of commentators asked for these things and not highway construction because I think most average Americans support alternative modes and inter modal transportation.  AASHTO has traditionally stuck by the Eisenhower philosophy of highway expansion, meaning “cars are the way of the future!” but it seems they are shifting gears in their policy with this message to the President putting walking and biking front and center.  This is good news I think, now if they would only put out a street design book that reflects that.  Previous editions of the AASHTO “greenbook” only emphasis moving cars as fast as possible with no concern to much else.

I think the inclusion of the word street on the cover is a typo.

It’s an encouraging prospect.

TV in G-Point

So I have noticed many television shows film on my block.  They come from many different networks too.  As far as I know since I moved here the following programs have flimed on my block, the park at the end of the block and the bar across the street; from HBO flight of the conchords, from NBC Kings and Off Duty, From ABC The Fringe and Life on Mars, and from FX Rescue Me.  I’ve gathered some examples.

This clip from Rescue Me was filmed in the bar across the street.

This is what it normally looks like.  I don’t know those people this picture is from the interwebs.

You can see the distinctive lip on the endge of the bar

This video takes place in my park and is from Flight of the Conchords.

heres a photo of the park.

I know that The Flight of the Conchords film in a warehouse down the street.  So they film in the streets in us all the time.  I think also maybe NBC has some warehouse space near by, but I don’t know if they do all of their shows out of there or if ABC and FX also are located nearby.  It’s very interesting I’ve almost all of these shows multiple times.

UPDATE:
So tonight(Friday) we saw either the NBC show Life on Mars or Off Duty being filmed in the bar where Dennis Leary filmed the scene in Rescue Me.  Heather took some photographs of the exterior and I’ll post along with regular pictures of the exterior.  I think that bar makes more money from appearing on TV then selling booze.  This is also the same place Heather and I went to watch the Superbowl halftime show and were graciously feed a buffet of homemade perogis, baked ziti, baked eggplant, sausage, and meatballs.  They are very nice people there.

Some Drawings

This was something I sketched at a meetup event.  I was a Tuesday night and we meet up with some people at a bar in South Williamsburg to just hang out and make art of whatever kind you want.  None of these are to scale but are just vague concepts.

This one still has too many cars I think

Now this one I did much more recently because I was thinking about how the above sketch had too many cars.  It is a very vague cross section and I would like to expand the idea and flesh it out into something that might be feasible.  Also the Cyclists look really ambiguous and look better in the first sketch.

Are those Pogo sticks?

Afterward I wanted to improve on the first sketch to this is an overhead view showing more details and traffic calming measures.  Again very much not to scale I would have changed a lot of things if it was not based on that first sketch.  Also I forgot o to populate it,  although it is a little presumptuous to populate a sketch with people who are all so clearly having fun.

wheres the people?

Post One.

Lately I have been reading a lot of books.  So for the time being I will mostly be posting about what I am reading currently or just finished reading.

Right now I am reading “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs.  It is a very interesting critique of 50′s urban planning policy.   Even though the setting is over forty years old the problems are still applicable today many of the failed planning polices are still applied today.   Urban planning as a whole has moved on from the major blunders of the era but many old policies still linger.

It gets me thinking more carefully about the thing that’s are going on as I walk around my Greenpoint naib.   I can see that the neighborhood park on the corner of my street is successful for a multitude of reasons but least of which is the fact that it happens to be a particularly beautiful park.  The block surrounding the park isn’t successful because it surrounds a park.  It achieved success on its own, and contributes more to the park’s achievement than vice versa.  The park is surrounded by brownstone apartments, two different churches, a funeral home, a few bars, a luncheonette, a couple of restaurants, convenience stores, bodegas, a grocery store, and an elementary school.  It is this variety and diversity that keeps the park full from dawn to dusk.  Different kinds of people with different schedules stop by at different times throughout the day.
This idea that mixed use neighborhoods are stronger is not a new idea to me but I had not really looked at neighborhood and my park this way until I started reading Jane Jacobs.

I have a long back log of books I have really wanted to talk about.  It might take a while though.

*In the mean time watch out for zombies and remember, use the shotgun and aim for the head.

Zombie Alert!