I depend on the Metro to get around. That means I have to walk a lot and I think that is just fine. You get to know a place a lot better when you literally put your feet on the ground. Today, for example, I had a conference at FSI and had to walk from Ballston Metro. It takes just over a half hour and it is a nice walk through Arlington. I have included some pictures from my various walks.
This one is not from Arlington. This is the statue of Jame McPherson in Washington. McPherson commanded the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War. He was killed at the battle of Atlanta in 1864.
Ballston Mall near the Metro.
A pedestrian passage under Rt 50 on the way to FSI. This is a relic of an earlier time and I am surprised it stays open. It is very convenient however. If it were built today, it would need lots of other features and the government would pay millions of dollars for construction.
Housing in Arlington, VA
New construction near Ballston–February 20.
New construction near Ballston–November of last year.
Car stack near Ballston
Nature Conservancy across from Ballston Metro in Arlington. The Nature Conservancy is the best of the environmental groups, IMO. They actually buy, restore and manage ecologically sensitive places. Instead of just protesting or demanding something be done, they do something.
I thought that I would need a root canal in at least one of my teeth. I counted on that or some other health care disaster, so I put money into my FSA account, but no such luck. My teeth stayed healthy and so did the family and we put too much into the health care savings account that I have to use or lose by March 15. This has never happened before. Maybe I should just get that root canal preemptively.
Below is a decoration at the Air & Space Museum.
The FSA is one of those heath savings accounts. They are great. They deduct money from your paycheck each week. It is tax free, with the caveat that it be used only for certified medical expenses and that it be used by March 15 of the year following when it was deducted, or else they just take it back, so you have to guess right. You can use it to pay deductibles, medicines etc. My insurance doesn’t cover most dental expenses, so I pay myself for all that Coke and Hershey cars I consumed in my misspent youth. Tooth fillings don’t last forever, and the ones I got when I was young are breaking down. I don’t fear the pain of the dentist, only the price. FSA spreads that out over the year.
Below is the National War College, T. Roosevelt Hall. The building was started in 1903 and finished in 1907.
This is the first time I have put too much money into it. Usually I don’t have enough and I get stuck with unexpected expenses, so this year I decided to be smarter. It looks like smarter was dumber. I am sure that something will go seriously wrong on March 16 and I will be stuck again.
I suppose I can stock up on aspirin, Pepto-Bismol and Nyquil, but you can only buy so much of that stuff before they suspect somebody is setting up a meth lab. It is odd to have this problem and it is better than the alternative, but I don’t want to throw away the money. I will figure something out. I suppose I can pay for something in advance.
The thing about health care is either you need it or not. It is not discretionary. I generally dislike going to doctors and avoid them if I can. My father went to the doctor only once between when he was discharged for the Army Air Corps in 1945 and when he died more than fifty years later. I am not trying to match his record but we have done all the routine checkups, even the colonoscopy I should have gotten three years ago. If medical visits can make you healthy, I am there.
As long as I am on the subject of forfeiting heath related stuff, let’s talk about sick leave. The USG gives me four hours of sick leave every two weeks. We can roll the hours over at the end of the year and I have been saving it up. I now have 2275.50 hours of sick leave saved up. If you count in paid holidays, I could be sick for around a year and a half before I ran out of sick leave. This is good. It provides a de-facto disability insurance and I don’t need Aflac. But the government, in its wisdom, has decided that it will just zero out all those hours when I retire. This is the “new” retirement system that came into force the year I joined the FS. Unused sick leave was added to your retirement in the old system. Some in Congress are talking about changing the rules for the new one, but given the hard economic circumstances I don’t suppose anything will come of it.
Frankly, this doesn’t bother me too much. They can have the sick time back; I am just glad I never was sick enough to use it up. But a significant number of people evidently view sick leave as just another form of vacation day and giving sick leave days an expiration date doesn’t encourage thrift or conservation, especially as so many employees are approaching their own expiration dates. The first generations of employees in the new system are approaching retirement and absenteeism will no doubt rise among those in the new system within a few years of retirement.
Energy transitions take a lot of time and we won’t have that green energy anytime soon. That was the sobering message I heard at the lecture today by Vaclav Smil, from the University of Manitoba. I went to hear his talk, Energy Transition: the Time Factor, today at AEI.
Below are energy saving devices. I will be riding my real bike soon and I figure that I can walk anyplace that one of these little bikes can take me, but I think that Smartbike is a good idea.
It took nearly 400 years for England to covert from wood to coal. The U.S. didn’t get more energy from coal than from wood until 1884, and still has not really left the age of coal, since more than half of our electricity comes from coal fired thermal plants. Things take time for a variety of reasons.
Many enabling factor are necessary for an energy transformation to take place. A resource that cannot be brought to market is useless and sometimes transport is a limiting factor. That was the problem for natural gas. Oil and gas are often found together. In the old days, the oil could be shipped in tanks or barrels. There was often nothing they could do with the gas, so they just flared it. Gas couldn’t be transported until particular alloys and welding techniques developed that could move it under pressure and this didn’t happen until the 1930s. Even then, it took time to construct the network. W/o these things gas was useless even if it was essentially free at the well-head, demonstrating once again that a resource is not a resource until the technology is available to make it so.
Now You’re Cooking With Gas
Once the pipes were in place, gas became available around the country. In the 1940s, there was a phrase – “now you’re cooking with gas”– that implied you were up to date. Gas had been abundantly available for more than fifty years, but not accessible. Even then, it still took many years for most houses to get hooked up to gas. Some of our neighbors were still burning coal to heat their houses well into the 1960s.
Natural gas can now be piped long distances because of better compression engines. Back in the 1980s, President Reagan tried to block Soviet access to modern compressor technology. The got the engines in Europe so that today the cappuccino you buy in Italy is probably warmed with Russian natural gas.
BTW – recent technological improvements allow gas to be more easily shipped in tankers. Using more gas in place of oil requires less of a shift, so our energy future may be gassier.
BTW 2 – they talked re methane hydrates. I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up. This is the link. This is evidently a big potential source of natural gas, although I saw something on the Science Channel talking re how melting of methane on the ocean bottom had caused the great extinction at the end of the Paleozoic Era, so I don’t know.
Below – this and the next picture are union representations near the White House. Unions are enthusiastic about getting jobs back and counting on the new energy infrastructure to help.
Professor Smil didn’t have much confidence in solar or wind power. These things, he said, have significant problem with availability (wind doesn’t always blow and he sun doesn’t shine at least half the time.) But the bigger challenge is transport. It is analogous to the problem with natural gas. The wind blows the strongest where there not many people and we don’t have the transmission lines to move the power. The same goes for surfaces where solar could be placed. Beyond that, both types of energy are small scale and locally intrusive. You will need lots of lines and lots of machines. Some of the people who love wind or solar in theory object when it ruins their view, as Edward Kennedy did when he squashed a wind project near his home in Massachusetts. Everybody lives somewhere and many places where the wind blows best have some rich guys nearby who can stop the project.
We also do not have a real electricity grid in America. We have separate local grids and the connections go north-south. This means that Canadian hydropower can move from Ontario to Florida or from British Columbia to California, but you probably could not power your I-pod on the electricity you could move west-east from windy North Dakota to busy New York.
Probably the most significant thing that will slow our energy transition is what we already have. We have thermal plants. We have paid the up-front investment costs and the variable costs are a lot lower. Think of it in terms of your biggest investment – your house. If you build a new house, you will be wise to incorporate energy saving devices, but it is probably a bad idea to tear your house down and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a new one just to save a couple hundred dollars a year. You will wait until your house “wears out” and that might be a long time. What does that say about the speed of transition?
Smil thinks that we will be a fossil fuel society for a long time to come. The most effective thing we can do in the short run is conservation that makes fossil fuels use more efficient. We can use more natural gas and we can make engines much more efficient, especially if we switch to diesel engines. Americans are prejudiced against diesel, but up-to-date engines have greatly improved in terms of performance and pollution and they get much better mileage than their gasoline counterparts. My first car was a diesel. We were very happy with it.
BTW – T Boone Pickens disagrees. Read re the Pickens Plan at this link. I like the idea of the Pickens Plan better, but I am afraid I think Smil is probably closer to right for the short and medium-term.
Of course, nuclear energy is very efficient, creates no green house gases and can work with the current electrical infrastructure, but some influential Americans harbor a hateful grudge against nukes. The French get 75%+ of their electricity from nuclear. I always figured that if the French could do it, so could we. Guess not. Viva la France.
My truck got recalled because of something to do with the wheels. Since I was off because of President’s Day, I could take it to the dealer. They looked at it for a couple hours and then told me that they needed to order the parts. They will call when the parts come in. Until then, there is evidently no imminent danger. Besides this excitement, it was an uneventful day.
Below is a ponderosa pine plantation in Oregon. The ponderosa pines that grow on the western slopes of the Cascades are different than those that grow in Rockies. Please read the original entry re at this link.
I found a good report on the Internet re ponderosa pine forest restorations by the Wilderness Society. You can read it at this link. Ponderosa pine forests are among the most pleasant ecosystems in the world. They are widely spaced if fire is not excluded. But fire has been excluded too long, as you will see in the report. The ponderosa pine forests are usually found half way up the mountains, at higher elevations farther south and lower up north. Individual trees can survive significant drought once established. A lone pine you see on the prairie is probably a ponderosa pine.
Below are thinned loblolly on my land taken last fall. Pines ecosystems look similar wherever you find them, but there are clearly differences. Read the original post at this link.
All pines have a generalized pine smell but there are lots of variations. Ponderosa pines have a distinctive smell, like vanilla. What most of us call pine smell – the one that the fresheners or pine cleaners try to imitate – smells to me like white pine. I have been trying to figure out how to describe the smell of loblolly. I really can’t, but I am pretty sure that I could identify loblolly by smell alone.
One of the better lessons of the report linked above is not only about trees. They recommend adaptive management, where each action is an experiment that informs future activities. This iterative, continuous learning approach is good no matter where you use it. They also stress that we must acknowledge that we cannot predict future conditions, which is another reason for the experimental management.
Please read this linked article first. All the pictures are taken today in places where I have been running for more than ten years. I have been observing what changed and what stayed the same during that time. The picture texts could be read independent of the general text.
I was still thinking re the ivy problem and the general problem of native and invasive species. Let me stipulate that there are real problems with invasive species. In fact, I would rate it as one of the most important problems we face, bar none. The Washington Post has an article today on potential release of Asian oysters into the Chesapeake, which is one of the high risk plays that scare everyone involved. On the personal side, I spend many days fighting the Chinese paradise trees that infest parts of my forest land and they seem to be in league with another invasive – the multiflora rose – which makes approaching them painful. So I know the problem with invasive theoretical and practical.
Below is an ivy covered culvert. It has been holding the soil since before 1997, when I first saw it. The ivy slows the storm water and allows it to soak in. Ivy is low/no maintenance and nothing else would grow as well in this shady and stressful environment. This human environment will NEVER be like the natural world. The rain quickly runs off the impervious surfaces and washes away soil and most vegetation…but not ivy. It would be foolish to forgo this option.
But the whole concept of invasive lies on a continuum. Horses are not native to North America, at least since their ancestors disappeared here during Pleistocene. Nature did not place the horse on our continent; the Spaniards and English did the job. Few people today consider horses an invasive species, but they are. In fact, wild horses get special legal protection. Also among the immigrants are honey bees, white clover, cows, sheep, wheat and even earthworms. It is clear that these species have altered the environment in profound ways; they made the land more productive and it would be insane to try to eradicate them. On the other hand, we have chestnut blight, snakeheads, kudzu, wild hogs, Chinese longhorn beetles, emerald ash borers … the list goes on.
Below is an alternative to ivy – concrete. Storm water rushes down and floods stream beds. This culvert, BTW, is above the ivy in the picture, so it rushes into the ivy, where it is slowed down and tamed.
Reasonable people disagree about where to draw the line. Norway maples are the most common street trees in the upper Midwest. Are they invasive? Some people think so. They replaced the American elm, almost eradicated by the invasive Dutch elm disease. The salmon introduced into the Great Lakes are generally well received. They replaced the lake trout, wiped out by the invasive lamprey eel. We cannot dial the history back to the past, and what year would we choose anyway? Species composition is always changing.
Below – somebody dumped gravel into this low spot to slow erosion. They still mow the grass all around. Maybe ivy would be better than this alternative.
The problem of invasiveness is really a type of cost/benefit calculation. My own bias is to prefer native species – actually local species – because they have been around together a long time and have a demonstrated adaption to the nearby environment. But I do not limit my choices to only local species because I recognize that human activities have changed the environment sometimes rendering the previous adaption less adaptive. The human changed environment is the new environment. The old one is only historical.
Below – imagine the force the stormwater will achieve as it rushes down this hill in a concrete culvert with no plants to slow it down and no possibility of soaking into the ground.
This last part is important. Every species is adapted to a niche. But the niche is not the species and the species is not the occupant of the niche. A species that occupies a very narrow niche is probably on its way to extinction in our rapidly changing world. One of the definitions of an invasive species is that it can invade several niches and do it well. This is also an advantage.
Below is a local stream where most of the water running through the culverts ends up. The impervious surfaces and the fast water runoff ensures that it floods and erodes. The rip-rap holds it somewhat, but it requires consistent attention.
Our environmental tool kit should include a variety of solutions, native and not. While native is often the best choice, a slavish devotion to the environment we happen to have had in 1607 is senseless.
Below – the neighborhood is in many ways an oak savannah. The oaks were planted years ago when the houses were built and/or some were left from the original cover. It would be better if the lawn was replaced with some more resilient, non-mowing, vegetation.
BTW – some of our native species are invasive in other places. Our native southern pines are planted all over Australia and South America, where they often grow better than they do back here at home. Some people in Scotland complain that our Sitka spruces and Douglas fir are now the main components of their forests. The world’s largest redwoods may soon be in New Zealand, where they were introduced 150 years ago. They grow even better there than they do in California. I saw some very big redwoods in Portugal and some really majestic sequoias in Geneva.
Below is a bad introduced species – bamboo. Bamboo is extremely aggressive and hard to eliminate. People plant it because it provides quick cover, but it takes over real quick.
Below is a yard with a ground cover of pakisandra. I don’t know if they are native, but they are not as hardy as ivy and they can be killed by too much foot traffic or even weed wacking. The advantage is low maintenance and no mowing. BTW – most lawnmowers make more pollution than a full sized car.
Below is a “good” non-native, a Lebanon cedar. They get big and live a long time. I really cannot reliably tell cedars apart unless they have some special color, like some sorts of Atlas cedars. I planted a deodar cedar near gallows. The only way I could identify it was from the tag at Home Depot.
Below is a bad non-native, multiflora rose. You cannot see them very well in the picture, but they cover the forest floor. They have pretty flowers, but I hate them for their thorns; those thorns, however, are why they are so common. The government recommended them as erosion control and as a “living fence.” I can attest to their value as fence barriers.
Below – the urban forestry meeting was held at the Fairfax County government center. Fairfax is the biggest and most populous county in Virginia. I was told that there are still some farms in the county, but I have not seen them. There are a lot of forested acres, however, both in private and public hands. I heard that the Fairfax School System plans to plant trees on some of their mowed places. This is good for the environment and saves on maintenance costs.
BTW – if you want to attend these sort of events and learn re forestry in Virginia, the best information aggregator is the Virginia Forest Landowner Update.
Urban forestry meetings attract a consistent demographic divided into two parts. The first segment is at or near retirement with time to pursue their interests unpaid. I guess this is where I fit in. Then there are the professional “tree people,” those involved with forestry, landscaping or local government make up the second group. There is essentially no ethnic diversity. Everybody looks like they walked out of a 1950 LL Bean catalogue. This may become a problem. A good part of Northern Virginia’s tree cover depends on the volunteer efforts of local citizens. Trees are too important to be the concern only of the dwindling LL Bean demographic. I have noticed, however, that the age ratios have remained consistent over time. Maybe people just don’t get interested in these sorts of things until they reach a certain stage of life and maybe this problem is not a problem.
I am interested in forests but many of my fellow attendees seem more interested in trees. These are not the same concerns. Some of my colleagues personify individual trees. I agree that some extraordinary trees need special protection, but the forest trumps individual trees and forest health depends on cutting some trees. Somebody even used the term “tree-rescue” in referring to moving trees from a place being cleared for a highway interchange. This implies another “rights mindset,” and a fundamentally anti-ecology theology.
Below is the natural range of the loblolly pine range. The range extends as far as New Jersey and the tree can survive if planted farther north, it is essentially a south-eastern species.
The Rappahannock River is roughly the boundary between Northern & Southern Virginia both culturally and ecologically. I have a foot in both regions, since I live in Northern Virginia, but my forest is in the South. In suburban Northern Virginia, a few acres or a couple of trees are a big deal. Down in Brunswick County foresters don’t pay much attention to anything less than forty acres. In the Virginia suburbs, trees are usually seen as part of a garden landscape. In the in Southern Virginia they are timber in a forest. In the North, tree lovers look toward the Middle Atlantic States. South of the Rappahannock, where the southern pine forest ecosystem starts and then stretches to the Gulf of Mexico, it is natural to look toward the Carolinas. There was a little grumbling at the meeting that southern forest interests kept Virginia in the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern District, but I think that is where we belong from the forestry point of view.
Some people at the meeting really hate English ivy and often voice their feelings. They want it declared a noxious week and banned, and evidently tried w/o success to get the State of Virginia to do that. I understand that English ivy could be characterized as an invasive, but it is not that hard to control and it serves useful purposes. For example, nothing that I see around here holds soil better in ditches, since the plant can root in the firm soil and form a network of vines in the erodible dirt on the sides and in the bottom. This is especially true near paved roads and driveways. When people advocate ripping out ivy, they do not provide real solutions. Sure, native plants might be better (although I am unenthusiastic about poison ivy), but they won’t grow in the disturbed conditions and soil structures that human activity creates. It is just dreamy to think we can – or will – create and sustain the conditions that will allow the beautiful native diversity we would all want in theory. We need solutions we can actually live with. You can use Virginia creeper or wild grape, but those tend to climb into the canopies worse than English ivy does. Those vine covered trees we see along the Metro line and along I-66 are being harmed and killed by native vines. English ivy in many cases may be the best obtainable solution.
Besides, it is pretty and well-suited to the area around Washington. I don’t feel bad about the English ivy. It also seems to displace poison ivy, which is a native plant but it provokes rashes in about 80% of the population. Native is not always better.
Below is the my regular Capitol picture taken at 7:45 on February 13. As I wrote, I am trying to take regular pictures through the seasons. It is getting warmer and lighter in the mornings.
Beauty is all around us and all sorts of common things are interesting if examined. The beauty often lies less in the physical attributes of the things themselves than in the serendipity of finding them or in their ephemeral nature, like the flower that blooms only for a day or the leaf that hangs an instant in the wind. Of course, people create and appreciate art.
Patronage. That was the whole basis of art until a short time ago and it was a good thing. In the days before government grants, few artists had independent means so they had to find patrons. Most of the world’s great art was made to order. The patrons set the bounds and artists were not free to express themselves exactly as they wished. In fact the tension between artists and patrons was one of the ingredients of masterpieces. The Sistine Chapel is great because of the tension between Michelangelo, who was doing the painting, and Pope Julius II, who was paying the bills. Everybody needs boundaries.
Below is modern art at the Hirschhorn Gallery. It is interesting, but not much. It has no particular context. I bet the government paid way too much for it. I am sure the artist had fun making it and even more fun spending the money he got for doing it.
The context determines the value. We all hold onto things that have meaning to us. I have carried around the world a little statue of Caesar Augustus that my Aunt Florence gave me in 1965. Objectively, it is worth next to nothing and it is poor art (It doesn’t look like Augustus, more like Napoleon), but it has meaning to me on several levels. It is representational.
Below is another sculpture on the Mall. Also of limited interest. I read the sign in front and didn’t get any more meaning than you do from looking at it. It would be okay if they let kids climb on it, but they don’t.
I take sublime joy in just walking around the Capitol Mall. The monuments and buildings have meaning to me as an American, a lover of liberty and as an individual. I have “a history” with these things personally (25 years of knowing them) and for the larger reasons. The monuments represent something bigger than what you see. You can find out the names of the artists who worked on them, but it doesn’t really matter. They don’t represent an individual’s narcissistic artistic ambition or personal vision. They represent traditions, aspirations, sacrifices and triumphs of the American people. Of course, there is also the modern art pictured on this post.
Below is the Natural History Museum. I like the traditional buildings better, but that is just my taste.
I don’t like art that doesn’t have greater meaning or is just an expression of what the individual artist wanted to say. I don’t like the artists to challenge or try to shock me out of what they considers my complacency. The artist has no more right to challenge me than I have to challenge him. A lot of challenging art is just crap. We have fallen into a kind of emperor’s new clothes trap, where all of us are afraid to express our own taste for fear of being seen as unworthy philistines. But as Emerson wrote, “The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise.”
Above is a community garden near the Capitol. I think they started these things in the 1960s and there used to be more of them. If is kind of interesting to see this little hippie farm in the middle of the monuments and monumental buildings. This is a more meaningful art than those two modern sculptures above.
Two of the most easily observed (in others) but difficult to counter biases are that we over-weight recent events and we rely too much on easily available information. I thought about this when I saw the results of a recent poll re the best president. Americans rate Reagan #1, according to Gallup, followed by Kennedy, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and then Washington.
Humans are programmed to take shortcuts when trying to understand situations and some of these patterns go way back. They work in simple situations with good and timely feedback – i.e. the kinds of situations our Pleistocene ancestors faced on the African plains trying to avoid becoming leopard food – but lead us astray on complex choices where the effects are separated from the causes in time and space – i.e. much of what we deal with in the modern world.
I think all those presidents were okay, but no matter what you think of the actual merits of that presidential preference, what are the chances that the two best presidents would have been in office within living memory? You get this same sort of bias when you ask about the greatest people in history in general. There is a bias toward people of the late 20th Century. What does this say about people taking the long view? And what does that mean for our practice of persuasion?
Below is the merry-go-round at the Smithsonian.
I bet Lincoln would have moved up in the standings if the poll had been taken yesterday or right after some kind of television special.
There are a lot of good books on these sorts of bias, BTW. Most have some connection to prospect theory. The easiest to understand book on the subject is called simply Decision Traps. It is an old (1990) book. A more recent one that covers some of the same ground is Nudge. Nudge is more recent and more readily available, so I suppose it will be given more weight.
BTW (2) a few more of the pernicious rules of thumb include:
Confirmation bias – people search out and remember information that confirms rather than challenges their current beliefs.
Vividness – particularly vivid experiences or images interfere with judgment.
Anchors – people consciously or unconsciously set baselines and then have trouble adjusting. This is why salesmen and lawyers try to get a big number mentioned up front. That becomes the anchor from which all adjustments are made.
BTW (3) I think the greatness of presidents should be measured by how crucial they were to the development of our country.
W/o Washington, there would be no U.S. as we know it, so I would rate him #1. Lincoln saved the Union and made it what it became, so he is #2. Other transformative presidents were F. Roosevelt, Reagan and Jackson. In that order they were great.
Kennedy was okay but not great, IMO. T. Roosevelt was a great character, but at time that didn’t call for greatness. Wilson had some great ideas, but he was unable to carry them through. Jefferson was a great and crucial thinker, but not a great president. Ditto the father of the Constitution James Madison. Truman and Eisenhower were very good, but not great.
We create a lot of our own troubles by demanding standards that individually make sense but together make our world less pleasant. Today I went to an urban forestry meeting where we discussed trees and roads. It turns out that our policies are a big part of the reasons we do not have beautiful tree lined vistas, why it is scary to be pedestrians and why we don’t have the tree canopy in our cities and suburbs that could give us shade and help keep our water cleaner.
Let’s start out with street trees. I imagine the trees near the streets on that little belt of grass. Today’s rules don’t permit that unless they can be several feet from the road. Otherwise they are hazards to traffic. Usually there is not enough room on the grass strips, especially because our new roads tend to be way wider than they need to be. I understand why you don’t want obstacles (like trees) along high speed highways, but city streets are different. On the city streets having trees on the grass next to the curb is not only more attractive; it is also safer … for pedestrians. I would rather the car hit a tree than hit me. Beyond that, the speed limit on city streets should preclude the trees being a real danger. Only a drunk or a manic would veer off a straight city street and hit anything on the side. But it is clear that road designers see everything from the car point of view.
The woman explaining the rules told us that anything near the road has to be “breakaway” so that it is not a danger to a car that hits it. Trees cannot be made break away, which is why they cannot be close to the road. The thing that surprised me is that bus stop shelters are designed to be “break away”. I think they should make an exception for bus stop shelters. If a car comes careening across the sidewalk, I would hope that the bus stop can at least slow it down before it hits the “break away” pedestrian sitting in the shelter.
The car point of view is also why they round the curves. You can see an example above from just outside my townhouse complex. This very wide strip of pavement is supposedly a city street. The speed limit is 25 and there are lots of pedestrians. The cars should not be taking that corner fast enough to require the rounding. Every time I cross that street at the place shown, I have to keep looking over my shoulder to watch for the idiot making a high speed turn while talking on his/her cell phone. I would prefer that they have to slow down to make the squared corner. Maybe put both hands on the steering wheel.
BTW – they are going to make the road above even wider. It is one of those shovel ready projects that the bailout money will buy. I am glad it will create a few jobs, but I don’t really welcome the prospect of having an even longer jeopardy zone to cross. It is like that old video game “frogger.”
In a very good book about livable places, A Pattern Language, the authors studied patterns that people around the world like in the places they live. People feel more comfortable with narrower roads with buildings and plants near the road. Of course this is when they are walking or just living nearby. Drivers like wide open roads with no obstacles. We all impose suffering on each other by thinking like drivers when passing through somebody else’s neighborhood. Our love of driving has destroyed the attractiveness of our cities.
One reason our roads and the areas around them have to be so wide is that utilities are placed far from the actual road. Suburban roads don’t have manholes and that is why. The total road footprint is a couple of football fields wide.
Something we could use around here are traffic circles or roundabouts. They work very well in UK. Traffic moves through. Drivers yield to the traffic already in the circle and enter and leave w/o the need of stop lights or stop signs. We cannot seem to pull it off. We don’t even try to put them in real streets anymore. The original design of Washington included circles, which now just confuse and perplex drivers. The one in the picture is mostly decorative. It is the traffic circle at our complex. Notice even in this simple case they have to have a sign telling people what to do. They also have stop signs on the sides. Ruins the advantage.
The tragedy is that all of us are making good decisions for ourselves but taken together they end up being bad decisions for all of us. Most of us are drivers and we all like convenience, but we should consider how much it is really costing us.
Below – the Holocaust Museum is designed to make inside space seem like outside space. You are not allowed to take pictures within the exhibits themselves.
The Holocaust Museum featured a well-done exhibit on Nazi propaganda. I had seen many of the things in books, but I learned from walking through it. It is comforting to consign Nazis to the past, call them a discontinuity or an aberration, but that kind of thinking doesn’t help us understand. In those days most of the world was run by some stripe of dictator. Whether they called themselves communists, fascists, nationalists or something else, none of them believed that individuals could or should be allowed to make choices. They manipulated the masses with powerful and pervasive propaganda. Regrettably, propaganda, braced by state coercive power, did the job.
The old fashioned propaganda grates on our modern ears and eyes. We have become largely immune to that presentation style. Besides, Nazi propaganda was a vast web of deception inseparable from the coercive power of state and its time. Posters, music and media were just the outward manifestations and today are just artifacts. But remember the immense damage they did and take them seriously.
Nazism was based on big lies. The one we often overlook is their claim of victimhood. Maybe the paradox of being simultaneously a victim and a perpetrator is too much for us to handle. They claimed they were victims of Jews, the democratic great powers, plutocratic capitalists, traitorous socialists, just bad luck and the Treaty of Versailles.
There was some truth. The Treaty of Versailles ending WWI was unjust and unworkable. John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1919 that it would result in economic collapse. Ten years later he was right. Germany in general and Hitler in particular played on latent feelings of guilt in the allied populations. Leaders who appeased Hitler in the 1930s did so both out of fecklessness and their own lack of confidence that they were right. Hitler covered his aggression with the cloak of the victim. It was a subtle but effective propaganda victory. The idea that they were just “getting back” what was theirs was strong and influenced decisions until 1939. Truly effective propaganda sets the frame so that the players are not consciously aware of the manipulation. This is a lesson we can keep.
Germany had valid complaints about the Versailles Treaty, but it was a non-sequitur to say that only they had a right to dictate the solution.
The exhibition ends in the present with a picture of Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It is pretty hard to figure out what that guy is trying to say … or maybe not. Hitler was clear about his plans, but ordinary people couldn’t believe that he really meant it. They rationalized and made excuses. Propaganda has modernized since then, but some things don’t change too much.
Some things are just beyond understanding but we still have to try because these things didn’t end in 1945. Exhibits like this are good for focusing thought.
