BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

This is what I've been trying to do for over 15 years, getting people out of their cars and onto transit, and more recently, bicycles. It's felt like whistling into a windstorm.

Not building more suburbia is key, but what to do about the suburbia that's there now? Bulldoze the strip malls and office parks and megachurches and replant the forest? This is partly why my response to the SPC 2040 plan, and the Gov's Transportation Funding and Reform Commission stated that all road expansion should cease completely.

But getting people to take transit is key, and that's greatly dependent on informing people of options. Using bikes to make the transit trip easier must be an integral part of that.

Could someone please hand me $100K to figure this all out? How many seconds does it take drivers in Allegheny County to spend $100K in gasoline?

James Kunstler has been saying this for years, and pointing out that new tech/energy doesn't get at the real problem.

Relying on new technologies to solve energy dependency problems seems akin to relying on bariatric surgery to address obesity. Sure, it might help, and in some cases it may even be the best approach, but it shouldn't be the first thing ya try...

@bjanaszek - they should hand out free copies of "The Geography of Nowhere" to people considering a move to the suburbs. It took me 10 years to figure it out and *then* I read the book and thought "this could have saved me a lot of trouble"

+++on stop building suburbia. I hate how the shifting trends take so ridiculously long. It's totally a runaway train. Even with the growing interest in "livable" walkable communities I just had 2 separate interactions this week with people who think that culdesacs are the bees knees and that "everyone" wants to live in one.

I consider myself lucky that I've never lived in a home newer than 1940. I've never had to unlearn the bad habits of driving absolutely everywhere that is fostered in suburban developments.

Getting only slightly OT, IMNSHO any house built since 1980, on a road built since 1980, should be bulldozed. I pick that year since we already had an oil scare in 1973, gasoline rationing in the mid 1970s, and Detroit automakers got caught with their pants down when gas hit $1/gallon in 1979, tripling in about 10 years. We should have learned by then, but no. We buried our heads in the sand, then went gonzo on freeway and suburban construction. Now we're paying for it.

+1 on the runaway train image.

Agreed on all points. There is no shortage here of people who know that GHG emissions aren't the only thing wrong with car culture, modern suburbs suck, and road expansion should slow or stop.

I partially posted this because it could be very useful in writing grants or something for bike-pgh, or other bike/ped advocacy efforts. As convincing and sensible as your arguments are, grant givers want to see "studies" and evidence about your claims. There are plenty, yes, but "why should we fund you instead of clean car technology?" is a question that might come up in someone's mind. Now someone can point here and say "says right here that clean cars aren't going to cut it on the greenhouse gas side of things." For a funding agency that is focused on pollution (rather than health, culture, universal mobility, etc.), that could be the most important point to make.

@ tabby Even with the growing interest in "livable" walkable communities I just had 2 separate interactions this week with people who think that culdesacs are the bees knees and that "everyone" wants to live in one.

That's the thing about cul de sacs - they are nice to live in. The wreck the community, of course. So, the ideal would be to get rid of all the OTHER cul-de sacs. But the cul de sac one lives in is wonderful!

It's nice to live in a community that doesn't have to pay city taxes too! Particulalry if it has easy access to the city!

Is the lack of car traffic the main reason people love cul de sacs, or are there other reasons?

Xenophobia.

ah, yes Mick you can be a NIMBY for culdesacs. Only the one you live in is okay. I do get why they appeal to people in that it's a private neighborhood where the kids can play without worrying about car traffic. However, there are many better ways to achieve the same end.

If you want a safe place for the kiddos, why not build communities with common courtyards with green space and paved playing court space?

People don't want culdesacs. They want safe and quiet neighborhoods. Find other better ways to offer people what they want.

Same with cars. Most people aren't in love with driving. They love freedom of moving around on their own timeline and free parking at their destination.

I grew up in the burbs. We lived on a cul-de-sac. As a kid, it was super cool. A huge, flat, paved place with almost zero cars right outside your door. We played baseball, roller-hockey, kickball, etc. I learned to ride my bike in the cul-de-sac. In the winter, they had a front-end loader that plowed all the snow from the entire street and cul-de-sac into a giant pile in the middle. When you're 9, a 50x50x20' pile of snow is the coolest thing in the entire world. Many a fort was made.

Now, you couldn't pay me enough to move into the burbs. There are a couple of cul-de-sacs in Pittsburgh. I suppose I really wouldn't mind living on one of those.

My old neighborhood had an "add-on" cul-de-sac. It was so awesome it even had its own sidewalk - just like city living!

http://maps.google.com/?ll=40.560056,-80.056&spn=0.00129,0.002411&t=h&z=19

Or maybe I was just jealous because I lived in the bad part of town, right where the sidewalk ended.

This is the city street I lived on for my first six years, and weekends and summers until early college. Flat, residential, your basic street grid, sidewalks everywhere, stores and churches and schools all a reasonable walking distance. Even a corner bar 200 feet down the street. It's still there, 50 years later, and it had to be 50 years old when I was a kid.

We kids played in the street. We set up hockey goalposts in the street. Traffic came, we pulled them out of the way, and put them back when the cars went by. The whole street is only 500 feet long with a T intersection on each end. Of course we played in the street. Where else could we play? Note that there are no parks close by.

Why was this bad? Why did we all have to abandon all this and move to Scatteralltohellville?

I lived many places growing up, but never on a bona fide cul-de-sac. I did, however, go to first grade in a former ghost town out west which was at that time at the end of a dead end road at least 20 miles long. K-6 was in one room and the school had three sets of twins. Definitely xenophobic (cue banjo music here).

Dense South Buffalo had its share of xenophobia, too. When a black family moved into #48, the family in #50 moved out to the suburbs. (Almost 50 years later, I can still remember all their names.) The main reason my parents moved was we'd outgrown the place. Two parents, three kids, in a 1BR apartment. I spent the next almost 20 years in a rural area 15 miles outside the city. No nearby anything, but I had a square mile (of various property owners) pretty much all to myself. Thus, I lived two lives, the city on weekends, the sticks the rest of the time. In one, the cars were in constant motion. In the other, a car wasn't necessary. I guess that's how I still identify with both worlds today.

As a kid in S. Buffalo, not only did we have to-the-door milk delivery, in the early 1960s we still had to-the-door bread delivery, too. Four general store groceries within a half mile. Shoes, clothing, pharmacy, hardware, catering services -- all were storefront businesses a half mile away. Some would deliver, hiring a healthy 15yo on a bicycle to get it to you within 15 minutes of a phone call.

That's what we abandoned for suburban living.

@ Salty, that's an interesting image. The sidewalk really just ends rather harshly. Did one developer do all of the add-on part?

Here is the cul-de-sac I grew up on: http://goo.gl/maps/LbBd

First thing that I noticed, holy shit those trees got big! I would have killed for big trees when I was growing up. By the time I was in college, the trunks were thinner than a baseball bat.

@psuedacris I wasn't there when it happened but it definitely looked that way - the "neighborhood" had it's own dumb little stylized sign ("Breezewood Manor", IIRC) and everything. I think the main development (where I lived) was built in the 60s and the semi-McMansions back there were added in the 90s.

I lived on a cul-de-sac until I was 7, the end of our street there was a "pedestrian" (unofficial) cut through to the highschool, so that was convenient for my sister (who was 10 yrs older, and technically lived far enough away to require busing). The next street down from us towards the rest of the world, where my bestest friend in the universe lived, was also a cul-de-sac... with an island in the middle that was HUGE, and it had 100 foot tall pine trees growing in it (scale to 7yrold eyes). We spent every summer climbing up to the tippy top of those trees, falling out of them (at least a broken arm a season), and riding bikes around them. AWESOME. I pitched a fit when we moved to the city, but even in the city we lived on Ridgeville - little road with no traffic and lots of kids. When I moved to Beeler at 10, I stopped going outside (nothing but city buses and obnoxious college kids on a busy street with nothing to do, not allowed to walk to nearest park where there were no kids to play with anyway).

Now? I live in the 'burbs (for a shorter commute 6 years ago, in a 1925 house, so they built dumb back then too, but I guess I was a Verona 'burb back when it was the closest 'city'), and kids play hockey/basketball in the street now, cul-de-sac or not.

People like cul-de-sacs because the only people that should be there, live there, so theoretically they are known and "safe". These people clearly don't understand that most violent crimes are commited by perpetrators known to the victims (as any tv crime drama will tell you).

back to the topic at hand, re: technology... I have many coworkers who used to think that we were in agreement, because they support "green" technology like solar panels and fuel cells and wind farms, and I'm a "hippy"...

The truth is uncomfortable - convenience on the level that we have grown accustomed to is not sustainable. It is much more fun to consider futuristic engineering solutions so we can live like the Jetsons than future austerity measures reducing this country to living on par with the rest of the world and much more like the Amish than the Jetsons.