A cautionary tale

Need some, um, persuading as to the efficacy of bicyclists' wearing helmets and obeying traffic laws? Here you go.

Some food for thought for the WDDC, the Delano District, etc., etc.

No time to comment on this (I shouldn't even have been reading what I'm about to link to--Finals Week, you know), but via Matthew Yglesias this morning comes this post from the excellent urbanist blog Greater Greater Washington, DC, on results of the steps that city took in the '80s and '90s to revitalize a formerly-moribund part of their urban core.

A couple of paragraphs:

DC created the DD in 1991 to shape the revitalization of DC's downtown. The office center of gravity had moved to K Street and the Golden Triangle, but as that area filled up, developers began looking back at DC's historic downtown. Planners wanted to avoid reproducing the Golden Triangle's monoculture of law firm offices, low level of ground floor retail, inactive sidewalks, numerous garage entrances and repetition of boring boxes. What to do?

The 1981 "A Living Downtown" plan recommended retail on F, G, and 7th Streets; hotels around the Convention Center, Thomas Circle and "Downtown East" near Union Station; residential development in the Penn Quarter and Mount Vernon Square, and offices around Franklin Square and Judiciary Square. In 1991, DC implemented zoning rules requiring residential units and arts or retail in various areas throughout downtown. The zoning also required transparent glass over a majority of the ground floors on certain streets, with entrances no more than 40-50 feet apart and no garage entrances.

To create an incentive for desired development, the DD created a Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) program. Any residential, arts and retail, or historic preservation exceeding the requirements generated TDR "credits" that developers could sell to projects in various "receiving zones," including parts of downtown, NoMa, the western half of the Golden Triangle, the Southwest Federal Center, and what's now the Capitol Riverfront (ballpark) area. Buying those credits would allow new buildings in those areas to reach the maximum allowable heights, creating an economic incentive for more housing, arts, retail and historic preservation downtown.

[snip]

The DD was a great success. Counting buildings currently under development, there will be 12,580 residential units, especially in the Penn Quarter and Mount Vernon Triangle, exceeding the goal of 12,410. Museums and theaters comprise 1,218,000 square feet downtown, concentrated around Gallery Place, beating the goal of 900,000. There are 1,600,000 square feet of retail plus another 400,000 in the pipeline. That falls short of the DD's initial 5,600,000 goal, but planners now believe that goal was probably unreasonable. And many historic buildings remain downtown.

Once the dust settles from Finals Week, I plan to come back to this in combination with some comments over at Momentum, the WDDC's blog--where, by the way, more people need to visit and comment.

Critical Mass event this Friday

The cover for Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration. Image found here.

Via an e-mail from District 6 City Council Member Janet Miller comes new-to-me word that, as of May 7th, Wichita now has a Critical Mass group, with a MySpace page (EDIT: and a website) and everything.

Here's their announcement:

Come join us May 15th for a massive street ride through downtown at 5pm - The Donut Whole 1720 E. Douglas! Mood: rockin'

To be very honest, I have mixed emotions about Critical Mass events. On the one hand, raising community awareness about cycling and the benefits that constructing bike-friendly infrastructure is clearly a good, especially in Wichita, where, as I've noted recently, interest in bike-commuting seems to be on the rise this spring. It's also good, even if it's only a coincidence, that the 15th is National Bike-to-Work Day; the two events, assuming decent levels of participation at each, will serve to reinforce each other. On the other hand . . . .

I'll be wrapping up Finals Week on Friday, so I won't be able to attend Critical Mass. I hope it goes well, though and, assuming it does go well and as I receive news of upcoming rides, I'll be happy to announce them here.

Sunday-Morning bicycling music

Image found here.

Bosques de mi mente, "Los titanicos esfuerzos de una bicicleta oxidada por avanzar" ("A Rusty Bicycle's Titanic Efforts to Move Forward").

If you like this, you'll like all of Bosques de mi mente's work (the name, by the way, means "Forests of My Mind"). . . and, even better for you, it's all available for free. You can find it either at his website or at Last.fm.

Something more serious now . . . The Wichita Downtown Development Corporation has just received funding from the city council to support its development of a master plan for the urban core and has a site called Momentum where it is posting info and soliciting input from citizens regarding their vision of downtown. I just wrote them a long-winded letter in which I expressed my desire that they envision their residents as not just sleeping there or being entertained there but as genuinely living there and so should make the area more alt-transportation friendly and see about recruiting a large full-service grocery store or a couple of smaller ones along those same lines. I hope you'll visit their site as well and write them as the spirit moves you.

John Brown says . . .

National Bike-to-Work Week is next week! National Bike-to-Work Day is next Friday, May 15. If what I have observed round about town these past few warmer weeks is any indication, interest in bike-commuting is growing here in town; I'm hoping we'll be visible enough next week that we'll inspire others to consider cycling to work and motorists generally to see cycling as beneficial to them even if they themselves don't give up driving to work.

I encourage the bike-curious to plot a route to work and give it a try for at least a day or two. If you need maps to help with your planning, click on the "Bicycle Wichita" graphic in the right gutter for a .pdf file of bike routes. For inspiration, visit Bike Wichita. And if you happen to see me out on the south side of town on my burnt-orange Fuji, give me a wave that I'll interpret as a more-or-less friendly gesture, and I'll be sure to reciprocate.

Finals Week is next week; more (and more substantive) blogging will resume here after that. In the meantime, read this post by Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (hat-tip: League of American Cyclists) and take heart that cyclists appear to have the ears of several folks in Washington who actually do have their hands on the purse strings.

(Photoshopping by the Mrs.)

Coming up for air

Sorry I haven't posted for so long--work and other matters have been and will continue to keep me away at least until next week some time.

The end of this semester cannot come soon enough.

While I'm here, though, I do want to draw attention to Michael James' comment at my previous post. There are rumblings out there--quiet ones, to be sure (we're on bikes, after all), but this spring they are pretty audible.

I'll see y'all soon.

Be careful. We're out there.

Just a quick acknowledgment that everywhere I go of late, not just in my part of town--which has what I'd guess is the heaviest bike traffic in Wichita--cyclists of varying levels of seriousness are far more numerous on the streets than last year. That's good.

What's not so good, though, is when--as I observed last night--a whole gang (by which I mean a half-dozen at least) of these folks think it's okay to just sort of roll out of the alley by the Society of Decorative Arts building at the intersection of Seneca and McLean without checking for oncoming traffic . . . one of whose number happens to be the author of this blog.

Had I hit one of them--how would that be for some irony? Right up there with semiotician Roland Barthes' crossing a street against the light and being run over by a truck.

This isn't meant to be a Dumb/Ignorant/Careless Cyclist post. It's more in the vein of those "It's the first robin of the spring" posts combined with those "Look out for little kids because school's back in session" PSAs. Well, that, and a "Gee--both McLean and Seneca (at least between Kellogg and the river) could really use dedicated bike lanes" post.

It's great to see all the cyclists out there. Really. But cyclists, let's do what we can to keep some of you around long enough to learn the rules of the road and ride accordingly. And motorists: Patience.

Sunday's Readers' Ride: A Lutheran and a rabbi go for a bike ride . . .

(Note: Later I'll replace this note with a link to a map of the route I and then Moti and I took; check back again in a day or two.)

This past Sunday dawned ominously for anyone looking forward to a pleasant ride: it was chilly, overcast and threatening rain . . . and our constant companion the wind, this time in the guise of a steady 20 mph north wind, was paying a visit. I ran a quick morning errand to the post office and the downtown Intrust bank on my bike, and when I turned up Waco to head back home, let's just say my first thoughts were not informed by Christian charity. That was the slowest 4 blocks, psychologically-speaking, that I think I've ever ridden. Still, within half an hour of getting back home, the clouds began to break up, and actual direct sunlight appeared. So, in my best tough-guy mode, I thought, "It's on."

My route over to the intersection of Kellogg and Armour was one that I had ridden from east to west before, but never west to east: thus, the initial climb up the hill on Mt. Vernon that begins immediately past the intersection with George Washington really took me by surprise with its steepness. Of course, I'd already ridden about 6 miles and, as I noted here, I'm not in the best shape after the long winter layoff. So: combine my weariness from that with heading north into the wind when I picked up the Gypsum Creek path at Woodlawn, and the upshot is that, by the time I reached Kellogg and Armour a few minutes before 2:00, I was glad to sit a spell.

A little after 2, Moti (he of the excellent blogs FedReb and Jewish Simplicity and a long-time good friend of this humble blog) arrived, and we chatted while waiting to see if others would arrive. Moti is the proud owner of his father's '70s-vintage 3-speed Raleigh with, as Moti put it, "all original equipment." He said his dad had bought it, rode it a couple of times, then just put it away in the garage--thus, in terms of miles, his bike is basically brand-new. Moti bikes daily from his home to the office (a distance of a couple of miles) and runs other occasional errands via the bike. We also talked about our respective work and families and "politics" in the very vaguest and wide-ranging of ways (I don't intend anything by that other than the fact that we didn't dwell on any topic in particular), and a bit about variations among Jews' observance of the Sabbath and the work of the Wichita branch of the Jewish Federation (for the benefit of this Gentile).

No one else joined us, and so at 2:20 we set off. Despite Moti's living just a few blocks away from where we were, this was his first trip down the Gypsum Creek path. He seemed to like it. And I have to admit that I liked this about him: When we reached the sewer line construction at the path's intersection with Pawnee that I'd mentioned here, he saw that we could easily get around it and continue on our way. And so we did.

We rode together to where the new extension intersects with I-135, and there Moti turned back for home. Along the way, we talked about other possibilities for rides: I mentioned my recent post soliciting proposals for neighborhood rides, and Moti mentioned the possibility about longer rides outside the city, such as up to Newton. Both these suggestions strike me as muse-worthy, and I hope those reading this who are so inclined will join us in musing on these and/or other possibilities for exploring the city and environs by bike.

Then, the ride home. It must be a function of topography, the distinct impression I have that the winds along the long north-south stretch of the Arkansas River path seem more intense, there below street level by the river bank, than they do at street level. Whatever the case, the winds were so strong (and I a bit weary, after having by that time ridden around 20 miles) that I had to pull over to the side a couple of times to rest a bit. But by the time I got home, I had to say to myself, "Good ride." It was a genuine pleasure to meet and talk with someone who has faithfully read this blog for many months of its still-young existence; and, my weariness was itself confirmation that I needed the exercise. Yes indeed: it was all good.

"The Hobby Economy": Not just for your mama's basement anymore?

Deluded by grandeur, or a worker-bee in the new economy? Image found here.

Via Andrew Sullivan comes what is, in effect, an economic answer to--and justification for(!)--the question, "Why do we blog?": "Hobby Economy," by Rob Horning. You'll want to read the whole post, especially if, like me, you even find yourself wondering what good(s) (in all its senses) blogging on things like, oh, I don't know, riding a bicycle around Wichita contributes to the real-world commonweal. But what follows are some especially pithy passages that ask us to consider re-thinking traditional notions of economies, commodities, the relationship between labor and wages, etc. (Note: The passages are cut-and-pasted from Horning's post; all wording is his. Emphases, however, are mine.):

[T]he internet, as a relatively affordable and powerful means of production available to many noncapitalists, has perhaps started to make possible an alternative to wage legitimation of labor. Tyler Cowen, in a post from a month or so ago, responded to BusinessWeek economist Michael Mandel’s theory that the alleged productivity gains from the IT boom of the past decade and a half were illusory. Cowen writes, “My take is this: there was some productivity growth but much of it fell outside of the usual cash and revenue-generating nexus. Maybe you will live until 83 rather than 81.5 and your pain reliever will work better. In the meantime you will read blogs and gaze upon beautiful people using your Facebook account. Those are gains to consumer surplus, but they don’t prop until the revenue-generating sectors of the economy as one might have expected.” In other words, gains in productivity derived from things like the internet aren’t showing up as more money in our pockets, and they are not showing up as corporate profit, but they do exist in a kind of nascent alternative economy. The “consumer surplus” is being generated outside of capitalist structures, outside of the market, though it is still occurring within a capitalist, consumerist society. It’s being made through activity that has in the past been generally dismissed as hobby behavior—collaborative open-source projects, online content production and archiving, tagging information, sharing and organizing useful data, etc., etc. The internet amasses this effort, consolidates it, distributes the example and rewards of it, and draws more people into contributing.

[snip]

Weirdly, I feel fortunate to be able to be motivated to do all this work for free. The source of that motivation remains obscure to me, but it’s clearly a product of the (perhaps imaginary) audience the internet appears to marshal for my activity. Getting paid might even discourage me. Right now, I keep writing in part because my motives are obscure. They taunt and provoke me, make me restless and frustrated with procrastinating. If there was a cash payment involved, I’d know exactly why I was doing it, and would feel much better about procrastinating and putting in only the amount of time I thought I was being paid for. I suppose there’s a chance that I like not having a price attached to what I am doing here because it frees me from having to see how little it is really worth. But the more ambiguous rewards, those that the internet as a means of production allows for, seem to be more generative—one must keep trying different things to try to secure them.

[snip]
Re technological innovations on the Web such as open-source software:

Since no wages are paid to produce them, and they generally don’t cost anything once they are made, they are outside of the market; yet they exist, and innovation is clearly being harvested there. But the use of innovation and productivity to justify income inequality doesn’t hold up—innovation is taking place outside the income-distribution system; the winners in that system are gaming in in some other way—through financial chicanery recently.

[snip]

If our social production in our spare time on the internet is where we experience the true gains in our life—if that is where we notice marginal improvement, if that is where innovations beneficial to society are being developed more or less spontaneously (see Clay Shirky’s book)—a sensible society would permit us to spend more time doing that stuff. The market and wages don’t direct us to do it, but we do it anyway. Theoretically (and this is getting pretty techno-utopian), we will be able forgo wages (work less) in favor of such social production, since the rewards we get from online participation come cheap. Whether or not employers will be so flexible is another question—traditionally, according to Marx, employers must purchase our labor in blocks of time so as to squeeze surplus value out of us.

An important question is whether this nascent hobby economy now developing alongside the capitalist one has become symbiotic with capitalism—is it helping to perpetuate a system that would otherwise become intolerable without the outlet that it provides, while feeding traditional capitalism with innovations to keep it dynamic?

This last segment is especially intriguing to ponder, in that some descriptions of capitalism-as-system-of-power contend that that which could potentially challenge capital's hegemony becomes co-opted by it so as to render it harmless or, at least, less-threatening. Still, the Internet economy--the exchanging of information and ideas--is clearly the engine driving recent discussions popping up everywhere, it seems, about the need to re-think and, even, re-engineer most if not all of that which has made possible our consumerist economy (most philosophically at Front Porch Republic; pragmatically at any number of the newish urbanism blogs). It is way too early to know how this new economic model will effect real change, but the ubiquity of the 'Nets makes it clear that it will, and profoundly.

UPDATE: Karen of Delano Wichita kindly linked to this post and added both some links in the same vein and some ruminating on existentialist questions pertaining to the Delano District. Local folks--especially those interested in thinking about notions of neighborhood and community that aren't entirely contingent on state action (or lack thereof) or on the usual ways of thinking about economies--should pay a visit over there and, maybe, get inspired.

A tentative idea: Neighborhood Rides

This morning, while thinking that we've run out of major bike-paths to explore on our Readers' Rides (at least till the main connector between the Arkansas River and Gypsum Creek paths gets built) and catching up with Karen's yeo-woman's labor of a blog, Delano Wichita, it occurred to me that an ideal augmentation of the Readers' Rides would be pre-routed rides through the city's neighborhoods. A basic subtext of this blog is that cycling can help foster a sense of neighborhood and community and, really, what better way to see what a neighborhood is really like than by walking or riding through it? I admit to there being two political angles to this, as well: biking through some neighborhoods in town could oh-so-subtly impress upon riders the value of adding sharrows along some streets, if not full-blown bike lanes; and it would drive home the idea that "community" consists of more than retail businesses.

Here's where readers can join in the fun: I'd like to invite readers in the city to propose routes that are pleasant and relatively safe, traffic-wise, through their neighborhoods, map it using a map-making program such as MapMyRide or Veloroutes, and send me the link, either here in comments or via e-mail. Think as well about what neighborhood warts you'd like for us to see--not just the Norman Rockwell stuff. The idea is for us to see a community's strengths and weaknesses so as to begin discussions that could jump-start and foster a stronger sense of identity for that part of town. Anyway, I hope that those who propose these routes will also be willing to serve as our guides along these routes, so also suggest possible dates and times for these rides when you'd be available, and I'll post about them here--as will, I hope, those other bloggers who are neighborhood-inclined.

Neighborhoods such as the Delano, Riverside, and College Hill are obvious candidates for these rides, but here is a map of other possibilities to consider.

I look forward to hearing from you.