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Maybe City Planners Think Your Arms Are Tired

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | 3 Comments

I’ve always thought of London as a friendly city. The only city to thrice host the Olympic Games, London hails itself as an welcoming destination city. That is, if you’re an Olympian, or a tourist. Not if you are experiencing homelessness. 

Recently, London installed spikes outside apartments to prevent anyone from sleeping on the ground. The instillation came about a month after one man was seen sleeping outside. The one-inch spikes are not the first of their kind, and are known to exist in other parts of the United Kingdom and Canada. London mayor Borris Johnson, to his credit, called the spikes not only “anti-homeless” but also “stupid.”

He was not the only one. You may have even seen the spikes on social media, as outrage spread across London and internationally. Perhaps it was the political shaming, or the large-scale social media blitz that protested the spikes, but news reports indicate they were removed earlier this week.

This is hardly the first example of creating an environment unsuitable for homelessness. If you have ever looked at a park bench or a subway stop and wondered why the city planners were so worried about people having a place to rest their arms, they probably weren’t. Benches with multiple armrests, divided only wide enough to sit, are too narrow to lay or sleep on, dissuading homeless people from staying the night.

photo: TimberForm

Among all this techniques for making cities unwelcoming, a Canadian company created an installation that is both humanitarian and an act of advertising genius. Notice that not only do these city benches not have intrusive arm rests, but they actually prop open to create a temporary rain shelter. Inside are directions to a RainCity Housing, an organization that specializes in working with low-income individuals to meet basic needs.

vancouver homeless bus bench

photo: Huffington Post

Decisions as small as armrests matter greatly if that armrest ruins your bed for the evening. The steps we as city planners, politicians, social workers, and concerned citizen take to develop and improve our hometowns truly do affect the lives of many people, and these small injustices could easily go unnoticed if you are not the person impacted. This time, Toronto leads the way in providing both shelter and dignity to homeless individuals in Canada- perhaps other cities can also design a place for all residents, giving even the impoverished a place to call home.

 

 

The Rundown

By | The Good Plan | One Comment

In a deviation from the biweekly rant and rave on one thing in the world of planning, TheGoodPlan is pleased to present a current rundown of … well, several things in the world of planning:

It Snowed.

Yes, dear Baltimoreans, our godforsaken winter isn’t over yet. And while I’m keeping sane with salt sprays and irresponsible trips to the Caribbean, I cannot escape the cold or the snow forever. This past week, winter storm Pax blanketed us with more of the cold wet white grit, causing us to hunker down, bundle up, and express our displeasure through wails of desperation or clenched teeth of remorse. In the planning world though, the snow created a visual map, indicating places we didn’t need to tread. Coined “sneckdown,” snow has added a new lens – and abbreviation – to the transportation term “neckdown,” used to refer to the sidewalk extension occurring at a crosswalk. Bear with me. When we shovel snow or remove it from our path of travel, we’re leaving a physical indicator that the space is used and desired. Piles of untouched snow, however, indicate the realm of public space that isn’t desirable, isn’t traveled upon, and isn’t used. This essentially means that our still snow-covered roadways are showing the planners and the engineers that there are spaces in the street which nobody uses. Due to the seasonality of park benches and plazas, the sneckdown is most effective with traffic and on roadways, but the concept of how much extra space we have is pretty cool to think about.

Source: Twitter User Prema Katari Gupta

Source: Twitter User Prema Katari Gupta

It Rained.

It continues to rain in the United Kingdom. Reportedly the worst rainfall in 250 years, winds over 100 miles per hour are pummeling homes and forcing the Prime Minister to scrounge up money for emergency management and relief services. While a plethora of organizations plan preemptively to protect against forces of nature like earthquakes and hurricanes, it may be time for planners to take a more realistic approach to combat increased rainfall and extreme heat. While floating schools and Waterworld-style planning is hypothesized and entertained, the reality of extreme weather is here and now. It’s time for planners to focus not just on disaster relief due to an unprecedented force of nature, but relief from climate change induced storms.

Source: Daily Mirror

Source: Daily Mirror

Sochi Isn’t Perfect.

THE OLYMPICS AREN’T PERFECT (did you read my last blogpost?). The Twitter account @sochiproblems blew up in popularity, gaining over 110,000 follower in two days. Through snark and wit, @sochiproblems documented the yellowed water, bashed through bathroom doors, and fallen athletes (no, truly, athletes who have fallen over). Despite criticism for posting photos without context or timeliness and for portraying an ethnocentric level of entitlement, the account brings Olympic problems to the human level.

Source: The Independent

Source: The Independent

Southeast Baltimore Activates.

With crime rising in the southeast district, two floors of standing-room only residents and tenants packed house this past week to discuss city actions. With Mayor SRB present, word on the street was that Commissioner Batts was the true star of the evening, providing direct answers to tough questions. As a resident of the neighborhood in question, this past week has featured an increased police presence on the roads and a rise in awareness when walking from place to place. The hope and approach to crime prevention is to stop crime before it starts. And kudos to all the residents who attended the meeting. Apathy is not alive here in the district.

IMAGE CREDIT. [Wikimedia Commons].

Don’t Ask Me, I Don’t Know

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | 3 Comments

Maybe you believe in miracles. Maybe you believe in Santa Claus. I believe in Baltimore. At ChangeEngine, we’ve been wondering what will save Baltimore. When I moved here a year and a half ago, it was because I was given the opportunity to be in a place that needed changing — and wasn’t ashamed to admit it. When I interviewed with the AmeriCorps program that I eventually was accepted into and moved here to join, my program leader — a Baltimore transplant herself — described Baltimore as a city evolving. “People talk about the murals here because the art is cool,” she said to me, “but the theme I see over and over again in the art here is Believe, and I think that people here really, actually, believe in their city. And that’s not true everywhere.”

I didn’t move here because I thought the city was broken. Individuals far more talented than myself have been charged with saving a city and buckled under the pressure. I moved here because I liked that Baltimore wasn’t afraid to admit that there is room to improve. Eighteen months later, I’m proud to wake up in a city with a new festival every other weekend, great places to eat and endless neighborhoods to explore. But I’m not proud to go to sleep in a city that leaves more than 4,000 individuals without a stable place to stay — and I know we can do better. But how?

There are some proven, crucial steps that this city can take to provide increased affordable housing to all Baltimoreans. The city needs to provide enough living-wage jobs so that individuals can afford to pay rent. There need to be enough safe, affordable housing units so that individuals and families are healthy and strong enough to get up each morning and go to such jobs, and there needs to be reliable transportation to get them between the two.

Is that the answer? Barely. All I’ve given you is a pathetically simplified look at what basic necessities individuals need to survive. You knew that. I didn’t say anything revolutionary. And while I really believe that these three pieces will fit together to create a much healthier, thriving city, I’m not sure about any further ideas. Do we need new technology? Streamlined nonprofits? Should everyone give more to charity? At the risk of losing everyone who has ever read any post in The Race to End HomelessnessI’d like to admit that I’m no expert. I’ve never experienced homelessness. To me, the answer to homelessness — the way for a city to win the Race — is to provide basic human needs for everyone that calls Baltimore home. But this isn’t enough. So where can we get new plans?

To really find the new ideas, the creative ideas — the ones that might actually change and save the city we all share, we need to turn to those experiencing homelessness — and listen. In many ways, a mid-Atlantic city with 4,000 people homeless is a travesty. Some are keen to dismiss them from the population. New York City adopted a program to fly, ship, or bus its homeless anywhere they chose, just as long as they get out of the city. This is a mistake; not just a moral and social infraction, but a mistake that weakens the personal infrastructure of the city.  I’d like to point to the homeless population as the truest population of Baltimore.  This is not a warm city; this is not a city that is low on crime or particularly inexpensive. This is not a great place to be outside, yet this city is home.

Individuals without housing in this city have a rich history of organizing, advocating, and working toward social change. Imagine what such talented minds could come up with if they were warm, safe, and financially secure. If Baltimore hopes to save itself, the truest Baltimorians have ideas, plans, and hopes everyone needs to hear. The city just needs to believe in those that call this place home.

The Architecture of Our Psychological Health

By | Health, The Global Is Local | 4 Comments

A beautiful old mansion would be easier to redevelop than a home where someone was murdered.

This week’s post by Lindsey Davis spurred me to think again about how our environment influences the way we experience the world around us, and the impact it has on our lives. Lindsey points out the balance that is struck when planners and city leaders determine that a neighborhood or area of the city would be better demolished than repaired.

Perhaps, she argues, these parts of the city should start a new story, free from the architecture that haunts their past.

I think she is probably right. Their present is the part that I have been thinking about, though, and the impact that living with a history and an environment may have upon the residents in any neighborhood. Each of us experiences Baltimore in a different way, and so that architectural impact is different for all of us, depending on our habits and our pre-existing constitution. Many of us cut a fairly narrow slice of the Baltimore pie (or whichever city or pastry you live in), because of where we work, study, play, or live, and the locations and routes between these activities vary for all of us.

This past weekend, the Baltimore Marathon (which I watched, but did not run) wound it’s way through much of the city, hitting the Inner Harbor, Druid Hill, Waverly, and many miles in between. The Baltimore Bike Party often has a similarly winding route, and I appreciate that both attempt to expose both residents and guests to parts of the city that typically do not get seen by tourists, commuters, and — more often than not — white people like myself.

There is no way to understand the city from the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, or from the Inner Harbor, or from the Under Armor headquarters. The particular portions of the city that Lindsey makes reference to are not pretty, and in fact may be derelict or downright abandoned, but are integral to understanding what makes this place. Neighborhoods stricken by urban blight have an enormous impact on the financial, social, and psychological health of the city.

From a public health standpoint (which, I have argued before, is perhaps the best lens through which to analyse a human population), there are a number of concerns that urban blight brings up, including correlation with poverty, high disease burden, low literacy rates, crime and violence incidence, access to food and services.. the list goes on, of course. However, an issue that is harder to quantify is the psychological impact of a blighted neighborhood.

A 2002 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry linked found statistically significant associations between the built environment and rates of depression. Another study published in 2002, this one in the Journal of Social Science & Medicine,  found that “neighborhood disadvantage was associated with higher rates of major depression and substance abuse disorder” among other negative psycho-social conditions.

This is not surprising. Think about your own home, and your favorite room or space in it. What are a few of the things that you like about it? Pick two or three of them and then meet me at the next paragraph…

Hi, welcome back. Although I can’t be sure, I strongly suspect that the things you like about your favorite room in your house have to do with beauty, comfort, positive memories or associations, or attractiveness. Now reverse that scenario, imagine your least favorite part of your home, and I would again be willing to bet a bowl of freshly roasted pumpkin seeds that the space you just identified has negative connotations, gives you feelings of dread, disappointment, or even disgust (if you’re struggling to get your walls out of the 1970s, I hear wood paneling looks great with a coat of white paint). Now scale these impressions to a street or a neighborhood, and the correlation with psycho-sociological outcomes starts to make a lot of sense.

It all comes back to the poverty/wealth disparity, in my opinion. Will money make you happy? Certainly not in isolation, but if it buys/rents you a decent place on an attractive street in a part of the city with strong civic engagement, then you’ve probably got a head-start on happiness compared to someone who lives sandwiched between abandoned buildings, has to rely on an unpredictable bus system to get to their job, and lives in one of only a half dozen occupied homes in a three block radius. Besides, once you’re in that nice neighborhood, there’s a good chance that grocery stores will be easier to get to, crime rates will drop, and transportation options will be better (well, maybe that last one is a stretch…).

The question that lingers for me is one that Lindsey also raised — is there a point where the “institutional memory” of a place is so malign that the only recourse is to remove the architecture of those memories? According to Lindsey, that may be the case. The individuals who collectively hold and live these institutional memories may be the most compelling reasons of all, however. Preserving a neighborhood of decay and bad memories is no way to effectively raise morale and standard of living. Instead, city planners may hope to cause social change through infrastructure improvements, a tired, but tried and true strategy that has had positive results in the past.

Congestion Cycle of Doom

By | Health, Silo-Breakers, The Global Is Local | No Comments

…..But first, a look back at Silos in the ChangeEngine world:

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, either in the comments section of Silos or Silos II, The Power of the Triple-S, in person, or as Michelle and Rodney did, in full fledged posts on ChangeEngine. Excellent discussions have been taking place, and I want to encourage that to continue. Challenge yourself and your colleagues:

What is the box you are in, for better or worse, and how can seeking partnerships or experience outside those parameters benefit your organization AND the community you live in?

Good luck, and keep us all posted! Link back to Silo Breakers as you post about your efforts, use a hashtag (I’ll defer to Hasdai on how to do that), and talk to friends and strangers… (Ed: Thanks Adam. It’s @ChangEngine #breakoutchallenge on Twitter, facebook.com/ChangingMedia, or email hasdai@changingmediagroup.com).

——-

Okay, this week, we touch upon the issues raised in posts about bicycling this past Spring (B’More Bike Friendly, Bikemore in Baltimore, and I Bike, You Bike, We Bike!) but with a wider lens. Although the previous posts brought up the local ramifications of taking cars off the roads, getting more of our community off the couch and out of the drivers seat, and so forth, today we will take a further step back to look at the transportation trends across the country and the world.

As was noted in the recent post by Stu Sirota, Our Trillion Dollar Dirty Little Secret, transportation funding in the United States is hyper-focused on roads and bridges. It’s not an unreasonable priority. The road infrastructure throughout the nation is vast, adding up to just over 2.5 million miles of pavement (not including the quadrillions of acres that make up parking lots and such things). We rely on roads and bridges for transport and economic vitality.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The trouble is that those pesky roads share some unfortunate traits with us — they get stiff in the winter, squishy in the summer, and show the effects of age sooner than they feel like they should (“I swear it was only yesterday that 695 and I were at the prom together, young and fresh, and now look at us, full of potholes and cracks!”). The context in which this massive infrastructure was built was far different, and the maintenance costs increase over time. The current political climate has not been productive for passing thoughtful, long-term legislation of any sort, and future transportation bills may face the same problems.

As Sirota points out in his piece, the network of roads and associated development that have grown out of the national highway building efforts of previous decades have initially eased and then subsequently caused congestion and a need for expansion and development.

Shifts in our expectations about transportation, urbanization, work and play are undergoing a generational shift, however, which may reverse or at least force a reassessment of earlier priorities. New industries and young workers have a greater interest in working and living in urban areas, rather than suburban software parks for instance.

OK, so great, good for U.S.; we’re progressive as hell and living the green dream, right? Well, no, of course not. America will continue to rack up miles on our cars, build roads while others crumble, and generally remain a servant of the internal combustion engine. But things will improve, of course — better gas mileage, improved bike/car education, and pro-environmental youth will vote with their dollars more and more as they join the labor force.

Other places in the world however, are on a different trajectory:

Image credit: European Environment Agency

The developing world has long epitomized a biking culture for decades, and although many people now own Motos (mopeds, scooters, or other low-powered motorbikes) and aspire to own their own car, bikes still fill the streets. India and China in particular are projected to experience a massive increase in car ownership in the coming decades, fueled (ha) in part by their own domestic auto industries.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This trend is going to have a massive impact on vehicle emissions in coming years, but with any luck, the exploding population of car owners will be the proud owners of smaller, more fuel-efficient cars than were typical in the United States — imagine millions upon millions of Cadillac Eldorados cruising the Chinese landscape. At the same time, heavy industry in these countries will likely benefit from a greening culture as well as more efficient technologies, decreasing environmental impact.

This ebb and flow of transportation and urban fashions both here and around the world will have profound and lasting effects on our lives, our economy, our health, and our city. Baltimoreans have a particular responsibility to share innovations, be good ambassadors when traveling or hosting international guests, and break out of our regional and national silos when we engage in the online community.

Baltimore shares many characteristics with cities in the developing world — substantial industry presence, high poverty and disease burden, and vibrant pockets of entrepreneurship and innovation. We must share our lessons learned, reach out to inspire others, learn from disparate cultures with similar characteristics, and change the world.

I Bike, You Bike, We Bike, He/She Bikes!

By | Health, The Global Is Local | 2 Comments

(The third in a Spring series about bicycling in Baltimore: Who should do it, how, and why?)

Welcome back, whether you are bike-aholic, bike-curious, or bike-phobic! I hope you have enjoyed following the biking series as much as I have enjoyed researching and writing it. Today’s post will be the final in this series, but don’t worry, there will be additional bike-related commentary in this space in the future.

First, Who should bike in Baltimore?

Leading by Example: Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake, courtesy of her Twitter feed

Well, if you have read the previous posts in this series, B’more Bike Friendly and Bikemore in Baltimore, you may have gotten the sense that I advocate for more biking by more people. If that hasn’t come through, let me take this opportunity to state clearly that I think everyone ought to bike in the city. If you feel like you want to be connected and informed and involved with the place you live and work, it’s important to experience it outside the sterile environment of your car.

You may or may not already be pedaling your heart out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be convinced. According to Chris Merriam of Bikemore, there are some accepted statistics about who is and isn’t likely to bike.

The 1%: These people will bike anywhere, anytime. Fearless, possibly a little obsessed, they probably have a giant stash of bikes in their hallway.

The 9%: Confident but Cautious. We in this group, while glad to bike most places most of the time, are willing to admit that there are times and places that biking is not appropriate. Some roads are not safe, some weather isn’t worth it, and sometimes we’re tired and don’t feel like it.

The 60%: Interested, but Concerned. You know how, you may own a bike, you may bike on protected bikepaths in parks, but there are some barriers to making the jump to occasional bike commuter or city cyclist- concerns about safety, for instance.

The 30%: Not Interested. No thanks, no matter what. Chris tells me that he thinks this is OK, not everyone needs to bike, he is interested in focusing on the 60%. Education about sharing the road and biker awareness are his interventions for the 30%.

Second, How should people bike in Baltimore?

As we said over the past two columns, there are some safety concerns about biking in an urban environment, so my answer to this would be: Carefully. If you aren’t biking often or at all, but are willing to give it a shot, there are a few ways to try it in a safe and supported environment.

Bike To Work Day is on May 17th, and there are convoys that will meet at points all around the city to bike in to the downtown area in the morning. They are listed on the Baltimore Metropolitan Council site, join up and ride in! Throughout the city will be stations offering bike maintenance, breakfast and coffee, and educational materials.

RecRide and BikeJam is a Bike MD event on May 19th where bikers can get out and see the city before coming together for music and food in Patterson Par.

Bikemore Homebrew Tour is this Saturday, go register, we can bike together and sample local beers!

– Baltimore Bike Party will almost certainly be on May 31st, since it’s always the last Friday of every month.

After you try one of these group events, some recreational cycling is just a short psychological leap, and after that you are well on your way toward joining the happy bike commuters of Baltimore.

Finally, Why should you (or anyone else) bike in Baltimore?

We’ve touched on this before, and I won’t belabor the point. There are substantial physiological, psychological,  and economic benefits to exercise in general. Biking or walking to work magnifies those benefits while contributing to the health of the neighborhood, city, and world. Taking cars off the road during commuting hours is extremely important for local emissions reductions and global environmental sustainability. With billions more people in the developing world joining us in clogging up the roads with lungs and our lungs with their toxic emissions, the global and local truly come together at the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

It’s Spring, go out, get connected, and save the world!

By the way, the new banner by Hasdai is awesome, isn’t it?

Also, shameless self promotion- Pottery Sale in Annapolis on Saturday.

Bikemore in Baltimore!

By | Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

(The second in a Spring series about cycling in Baltimore: Why planning for strictly vehicular travel makes pedestrians and bicycles an unwelcome nuisance rather than a welcome expectation.)

In my last column, we began discussing the bicycle culture of Baltimore. Recently, I had the chance to continue that discussion with Bikemore Executive Director Chris Merriam and Board Member Dave Love. I asked Chris to frame the relationship that bicycling has with public health, how one impacts the other, and how Bikemore’s efforts are designed to improve both the health of the community and the acceptance of bicycles on Baltimore streets.

“There’s a huge public health aspect to what we do,” says Chris, who was recently award an Open Society Institute Fellowship to further Bikemore’s mission of advocating for cycling and cyclists’ rights in Baltimore. “Cycling is a means of addressing the obesity problem in Baltimore — and all over the country of course. This is a working class city, though. It’s not like Washington D.C. or San Francisco. Not everyone belongs to a gym or eats healthy food all the time. The corner store diet of chips and soda is such a pervasive issue here.”

Chris has a background in urban planning, which informs his perspective. He agrees that our transportation system is a major component of public health, and a major obstacle to improving it. “We have a substandard [public] transportation system. For instance,  I’ll see people waiting for hours at a time for buses that will take them to work. A lot of the job sprawl in the area is such that many jobs for lower income people are in suburban malls, in Towson or Whitemarsh. Using public transit, depending on where people live, can take a long time: take one bus, take another bus, take the light rail, and there’s a lot of waiting around in between.”

And yet, despite the obvious advantages of a more bike-friendly city, Bikemore and other bicycling advocacy groups are trying to counteract 80 years of car-based engineering on our cities. Designing both vehicles and cities for strictly vehicular travel makes pedestrians and bicycles a nuisance rather than an expectation, and that is reflected in driver attitudes. Often the relationship between bikers and drivers is fraught with animosity.

Dave thinks that this may change due to sheer volume of bikes on the road, remembering his time in Berkeley, California: “Regardless of where I’m going, there would be three or four people on the same path, at a stop light five or six bikes back up. We wait just like traffic…If we got enough people on the roads, we could be looking at a sea change.”

But getting Baltimore drivers not to see red when they see a skinny person in spandex “in the way” is more than just a matter of numbers. Culture has to change too, and Bikemore realizes that Baltimore is a city with its own needs, and certainly its own culture.

People cite Portland as the ultimate case study. But remember, Portland is largely homogeneous, doesn’t have a lot of conflict, has a lot of taxpayers, is relatively young, etc. We can learn lessons from other cities, but we need to be wary of the ‘if they can do it, why can’t we?’ game.

Chris and Dave believe that these problems can be solved, but it will take effort on three fronts: education, infrastructure, and policy. They are leading in all three of these areas, but if you see the Bikemore sign around town, you are seeing education in action. Whether it’s a Bike Valet stand at the Food Truck Gathering or a presentation to a group of innovators at a conference like Reinvent Transit, Bikemore is constantly encouraging awareness and mutual respect between bikers and drivers.

Housekeeping: I wanted to address a couple of questions that came up in comments last time. First, the marked gender gap in bike commuters. I have two thoughts on factors that might be contributing to the disparity:

  1. It seems likely that there are safety-related differences in male and female biking behavior, as there are in many other activities. These safety concerns are related to both the perceived and actual intrinsic dangers of the activity itself and the external threats associated with being a single woman without a protective (vehicular) barrier. This study here comes to some similar conclusions, but I welcome any comments.
  2. There is reporting bias of some sort. This study from Stanford refers to a bias on survey forms that minimize or aggregate the kinds of trips that women tend to make (leaving aside the 50’s housewife stereotype slathered on the surface of the whole premise).

Second, how to get involved:

There are a number of groups that are active in the City, Bikemore being today’s obvious example. Velocipede and other bike shops and coops are all educators and advocates worth knowing, and of course join the Bike Party on the last Friday of each month.

Next Time: Who should bike in Baltimore, how, and why?

IMAGE CREDIT. Benson Kua

Shoelaces and Car Keys

By | The Good Plan | No Comments

As much as I value the convenience of a parking spot, I resist development efforts that aim to provide more parking. Parking-focused design prevents us from fully embracing a walkable lifestyle and all its benefits to our health, economy and environment. While it is ultimately our responsibility to put on our shoes rather than fill up the gas tank, it is also the responsibility of our cities to make walkability viable – encouraging healthy living and local economic prosperity.

The Atlantic recently published an article on the walking disaster that is America – a disaster brought on by the all-too-prominent mentality that places walking at the lower end of the priority spectrum. Those misplaced priorities are evident in our own neighborhoods. Last week I returned home to East Canton. It took me a minute before realizing our two-way street with parallel parking on either side had disappeared. In its place remained a one-way street with back-in parking on one side and parallel parking on the other.

It seems like each day a formerly two-way street surprises me with a ‘do not enter’ sign, and a sea of cars backed onto the sidewalk. While I understand one-way streets and back-in parking provide for traffic calming and more parking spaces, it looks unappealing, and providing more spaces does nothing to discourage people from driving. I compare this approach to road widening – if you build more lanes, you’re just encouraging more traffic.

Living in downtown Baltimore, many of us at least have the option of walking to and from the grocery store, the bar, public transit, restaurants, and drugstores. We worry less about not being able to get milk in a snowstorm or not having our car plowed out the next day because we can walk to get things while those in the suburbs cannot. And yet even in those more walkable areas, the car mentality holds us hostage. I have friends in North Canton and Federal Hill who would rather drive when they could walk, but often won’t venture out for fear of losing their parking spot.

Until those creating policy and directing construction crews start rethinking urban access to help us rethink the use of our car keys, our walkable road to social change will remain very, very rocky.

Classic Dodson: A Bump in the Bike Lane

By | Design | No Comments

(Editor’s note: our brilliant design columnist has been struck down with some awful form of plague, and has been sent to bed with a mustard plaster and a vat of chicken soup. So in the style of old summer re-runs, we present “Classic Dodson,” casting into the dark backward and abysm of time for a post that’s rather timely, given that our friend Read More