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Low Traffic Neighborhoods
George Monbiot on traffic calming and control, in The Guardian
Summary: Direct, physical changes to neighborhood streets that reduce the volume and speed of traffic increase personal safety and community quality of life. Some drivers get very angry when they feel their need to move swiftly through city neighborhoods is impeded.
My take: We’re getting a little of this with the speed humps the City’s putting in. It’s just a beginning. GoBike’s bike lane tests are showing us another part of the way forward. Monbiot makes a good point about how the effects of reducing traffic volume and speed are different for bigger and smaller streets. Also, efforts to calm biggers streets can push it through neighborhoods, to bad effect. Neighborhood streets are full of those pesky pedestrians, cyclists, old and disabled folks and little kids, often because they’re avoiding the local stroad.
“There could scarcely be a more reasonable policy. Low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) seek to stop residential streets being used as escape valves for overloaded arterial roads. They replace a privilege exercised by a few – rat-running through local streets – with rights enjoyed by the many: cleaner air, less noise, safe passage for children, cyclists, users of wheelchairs and mobility scooters, stronger communities.”
“The angry drivers insist that LTNs have been imposed on them. Well, whether they agree or not, there are consultations. But no one was consulted about their streets being used as short cuts. No one was consulted about facing a higher risk of asthma and dementia as a result of air pollution, or seeing their communities split by walls of traffic. No one was consulted about losing the places where neighbours could talk and children could play.”
Nancy Hayes, 1949
This is a watercolor my mother, Nancy Hayes, painted around 1949. View is to the south/southeast, from a ninth floor window at 23 High Street, Buffalo.
Edited for clarification: I’m guessing 1949, but it could have been anywhere from 1946 to 1954, when my Dad worked at UB for the first time.
The building’s gone. It was between Main and Washington, I think mid-block. South side of High Street.
I’m re-doing the matting. The frame was made by my father, then finished by my mother. She slathered black paint on the oak, then wiped it off, the front side anyway. Then my Dad finished it off, in a fairly crude way that’s held up very well. They were a handy couple and quite a team when it came to making things.
I think the houses in the painting are on Washington Street. Some may still be there, though houses were moved around in that block so it might be hard to tell.
If It’s Not True . . .
Sam’s Benecia Ballet Nutcracker Performance by johnpat10 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
. . . it should be: Jesse Ventura, in the course of his successful run for Minnesota governor, was asked by a reporter if wrestling is “fake,” to which he answered: “Fake? Is the ballet ‘fake’?”
Paco de Lucia, Flamenco God
Paco, what do you think of the image that all the artists have of you? You’re practically a god in flamenco.
Well, it’s something I got used to. Because it’s always been like that, ever since I was a child I think. When I was small people praised me and they’d say “oh, the kid, how the kid plays!… the kid …the kid…” So it’s something you get used to and it’s more a pain in the ass, if you pardon my language, than anything else. Well, you enjoy it but the responsibility of being there is huge and every time you make a record you get obsessed and you want to do it better. It’s very nice, I can’t complain, but sometimes the responsibility overcomes the pleasure of doing things, having to do things well can at times cancel out the pleasure of doing them.
Humor
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
James Thurber
A Console Table . . .
Am I Tired of Talking About It?
An Army Against Love
–Steve Silberman, in Lion’s Roar