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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58624440087402503722016-09-26T12:27:05.873-04:00Cap'n Transit Rides AgainHere are some reasons to get people to shift from cars to transit:

Reducing pollution

Increasing efficiency

Reducing carnage

Improving society

Access for all

Capn Transithttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-17624534632452573152016-09-06T01:56:00.000-04:002016-09-06T02:03:01.056-04:00New traffic patterns, new driving habitsI'm not a traffic engineer, but I know that old habits die hard. I also know that it's possible to create new habits, and once those habits are in place it's hard to get rid of them. Whenever you institute a new traffic pattern, it's an opportunity to teach new good habits, but also to inadvertently teach bad habits. And I know that here in New York we can't trust the NYPD to consistently enforce protections for pedestrians, so habits and barriers are our main lines of defense.

Because I know this, today it was frustrating for me to see the current state of the eastern end of the Queens Boulevard median expansion at 57th Avenue. It looks like the DOT plan involves four colors of paint (white, yellow green and beige), flexible bollards, stop signs and concrete islands. I only saw bollards at the slip lane just west of the Port Washington LIRR viaduct, and a stop sign in front of the Elks Lodge east of 51st Avenue. They have not laid down any beige paint yet, and green paint stops at Broadway. But the white paint continues east almost to the end of the project.

This is not so bad going eastward. The problem is that going westward, the first thing drivers encounter is a few lines of white and yellow paint. There is no beige paint to indicate that this is now pedestrian space, and no green paint to indicate that there is now a bike lane. There are no bollards, or even temporary orange barrels.

Some of these drivers have just come off of the express lanes, some off of Woodhaven Boulevard, some off the LIE. They are in four lanes of traffic being squeezed down to one, and many of them did not know there would be only one lane. They did not have any warning, so they did not know to slip over to the express lanes.

The result I saw today was people driving right over the yellow and white paint, as though it wasn't there and they had two driving lanes the way they've had since the sixties. Private cars, taxis, Access-A-Ride vans, even the Q53 bus drove over the lines. How long have they been doing that? How long will they be allowed to continue? What kind of precedent does that set?

Like I said, I'm not a traffic engineer. Maybe I'm worrying too much about this. Maybe once the green and beige paint get laid down, and the bollards put in, the drivers will all learn to slip into the express lanes, or even to take the train or the bus instead. But it just seems to me that we should have a hard barrier at the place where the median begins, to keep people from driving on it. And this is not an academic concern; the DOT's stats show that 87 people were injured at the 57th Avenue intersection between 2010 and 2015, two of them severely.

You may know that a 22-year-old cyclist, Asif Rahman, was killed on this stretch of Queens Boulevard in 2008. Since then his mother has fought hard to make the road safer for people who travel it in the future. As I was passing Rahman's ghost bike a cyclist overtook me, using the new lane marked only by white and yellow paint. It felt a bit safer already. We're all hoping the DOT does it right and makes it stay.Capn Transithttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-44741546522904406622016-07-24T12:23:00.000-04:002016-07-24T12:23:44.068-04:00A way among the tube socksI am not a Bicycle Advocate, and I don't believe that Bikeshare is Transit. But I'm now convinced that the combination of bike share and protected bike lanes has improved mobility for a lot of people. It has worked for me when I've traveled to DC and London, and at home here in New York. The cost has been relatively low, whether measured in terms of dollars, square feet of public space, or advocacy hours.

Photo: Dave Nixen / Flickr

In my experience, bikeshare is not effective for getting people out of cars and taxis and decongesting our subways and sidewalks without that network of protected lanes and quiet side streets. I am a cautious rider, and I avoid streets where it feels like drivers have too much power or speed. Rather than fear for my life I will just walk or take the subway.

A few months ago I was on Irving Place and wanted to go to Soho. I figured I'd ride the relatively quiet Eighteenth Street to the Second Avenue protected bike lane. But when I got to Third Avenue I found my way blocked by a street fair.

I turned south for a few blocks on Third Avenue. I hate riding on big avenues without a bike lane; the drivers are either speeding or frustrated or both. It was also difficult to remember which streets went which way, but I think I avoided the pattern at Stuyvesant Square that sends you back west on Fifteenth Street, and headed east on Twelfth.

I was looking forward to getting onto Second Avenue. But when I got there I found the avenue completely filled by another street fair. These were not genuine community festivals, but the generic fairs that have become the norm here in New York City. My way was blocked by tube socks and mozzarepas. There wasn't even room on the sidewalk to walk my Citibike.

I doubled back and rode down Third Avenue again. I checked again a few blocks later and I was past the fair, but that was just luck; I didn't know until I'd gone all the way down the block.

For bikeshare to serve as a true transportation option, we don't just need a bike route network , but a reliable one. If any part of it is unavailable, the whole network is compromised, and people will be less likely to rely on it.

Of course it's not just bikes; the car network is disrupted. But drivers have lots of alternate routes: a driver whose way is blocked on Second Avenue would not be terribly inconvenienced by driving on Third. But for me, with Second Avenue blocked the nearest protected southbound avenue is Ninth Avenue/Hudson Street/Bleecker Street, meaning I would have to bike clear across the island and back.

This is also an issue for pedestrians. Walking a long city block out of the way is not always practical, leaving those of us trying to get somewhere mixing with the zeppole eaters.

As many have said, we need to reform these street fairs. We also need to convert more car lanes to bike lanes on the avenues. But in addition, we need to preserve some bike access through street fairs. If they can have fairs on sixty foot cross streets like Eighteenth, they can leave twelve feet of space on a 75-foot avenue like Second.

At a minimum, we should have some notification system for when the bike lane network is disrupted, whether by street fairs, construction or something else. A tweet on the Citibike feed would help.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-18265350906844351852016-06-28T01:02:00.001-04:002016-06-28T01:02:39.961-04:00Windows on the Van WyckA few weeks ago I went for a walk in Briarwood and Kew Gardens Hills. I got off the train at Jamaica-Van Wyck, the first time I'd ever used that station. It was full of red brick, reminding me of other stations that were opened or renovated in the seventies and eighties, like 21st Street-Queensbridge and 49th Street, but it was uncomfortably dark, despite the high ceilings and fairly bright lights.

I looked up and saw an elevated walkway inside the station, leading to the exit, similar to other grand stations of that era like Queensbridge, Auber in Paris, or Dupont Circle in Washington. On the other side of the station I saw what looked like balconies or windows above, but there was no light coming through them.

When I got outside, I crossed the Van Wyck Expressway on Jamaica Avenue. I looked down, and could actually see the outside of the station in the trench next to the highway. It's even more obvious in this Bing aerial photo:

It's hard to tell through the fence, but the panels on the walls look like they could be windows covered with paint or plastic.

I then looked up the station on the web, and found more information. The windows were uncovered as late as 1998, when Wayne Whitehorn took a series of pictures including this one:

Nycsubway.org has that photo, plus a couple of other good ones. According to user R32 3671 on the NYC Transit Forums, they were covered over by the year 2000, due to "vandals." Some commenters on SubChat said that the vandals actually broke the windows; others only say that they spray-painted graffiti over them. There was certainly graffiti all over the window covers when I took these pictures.

If they uncovered the windows now, in 2016, how often would people try to tag them? How much would it cost to keep them clean and guard them? Would it be more than the cost of maintaining the "Low Line" park proposed for the Manhattan Terminal, plus the amortized cost of constructing that park, estimated at $55 million in 2013?Capn Transithttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-15649837639913453332016-06-18T20:52:00.000-04:002016-06-18T20:52:40.422-04:00How carfree is your City Council district?One of the most eye-opening things I saw during the 2007-2008 congestion pricing debate was a series of fact sheets produced by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and the Pratt Center for Community development for each City Council and state legislative district. Each sheet gave two figures in particular, tabulated from census results: the percentage of working adults in the district who commuted to work primarily by transit, and the percentage of households that had no cars.

I've made maps for the percentage of carfree households for the City Council and State Senate districts, based on the Tri-State/Pratt Center fact sheets. The figures are interesting in two ways: in general, these elected officials tend to promote transit or driving depending on how prevalent car ownership is in their districts, but some are particularly out of touch with the majority of their constituents. These are relevant to a wide range of transportation issues, beyond the question of whether to toll the East River bridges.

These maps were based on data from the 2000 census, and as the years go by they get less and less relevant to contemporary debates. I find myself wondering what effect recent trends have had on car ownership and commuting, but Tri-State has not released updated fact sheets.

The Census website does tabulate data based on state legislative districts. Charles Komanoff analyzed the data for Streetsblog in 2010, and he recently used it to call out Councilmember Daneek Miller for opposing bridge tolls. But because Komanoff didn't have data for City Council districts he used the figures for the 32nd Assembly District, which turns out to be a bad match.

In November, Tri-State criticized Senator Tony Avella for his part in the coalition. They also challenged Miller based on a "special tabulation" - but in both cases this was based on journey to work data, not car ownership.

To make this easier for anyone who is interested, I have written a small Python script that takes GeoJSON files created by the Department of City Planning, and produces a JSON file mapping census tracts to City Council districts. It uses the Shapely library to check whether a census tract is contained inside a council district. It works for either the 2000 or 2010 boundaries. For census tracts that overlap more than one council district, the script gives the proportion of the land area of the tract that overlaps with each district.

I also created two scripts that transform census tables using these tract2census files, one for table HCT 32 from the 2000 decennial census and the other for table B08141 produced by the American Community Survey since 2005. These scripts produce tables showing the total number of households in a district, the number with zero cars available, and the carfree households as a proportion of the total.

It is important to note that this algorithm introduces a potential source of inaccuracy by assigning the households to split census tracts on the basis of area. This assumes that the households are evenly distributed within each census tract, but that is not always the case. For example, a tract with 75% of its area in City Council District A and 25% in District B would have 75% of its households assigned to District A, but if there is a large apartment building in the District B part of the tract, it could contain over 50% of the households.

Interestingly, my results for the 2000 census seem a bit lower than Tri-State's for some districts, but about the same citywide. It's probably due to different assumptions about the data; if anyone has details about the methods they used, please let me know!

Neil Freeman suggested using QGIS for the visualization, and it made a nice pretty map. I've got more to say about these figures and their implications, and maybe get to work on Neil other suggestions, and add a legend to the map, but this is a good place to stop. I've posted the tables in a Google Sheet here.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-78249252490895339512016-05-20T23:22:00.001-04:002016-05-20T23:22:32.673-04:00The safety and comfort of ridesharing"It's so 2015," Vogue writer Karley Sciortino's friend said to her in Los Angeles last year. "This girl I know just fucked a guy she met in an UberPool." Intrigued, Sciortino spent some time researching and discovered that there were indeed a bunch of young people hooking up in the back seats of Uberpool and Lyftline cars.

Via-cles are getting bigger

As of press time I have been unable to confirm this, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched. What I have seen is that the vast majority of passengers on Via and express buses are women, of all ages. The first five or six times I took Via, the other passengers were all women.

Contrast these tales of young twentysomething women eagerly flirting with men in Uberpools to the horror stories of women of all ages being harassed and assaulted on subways, and it's clear that women feel a lot more comfortable sharing Ubers and Lyfts than subways with strangers. It's not too hard to figure out one reason: taxis have a driver sitting just a few feet away who could potentially intervene if a guy oversteps any boundaries. Both services also have rating systems for passengers, and a passenger who harasses other passengers is likely to get low ratings - or even be banned from the service.

But women also report feeling more comfortable on local buses (in Manhattan), express buses and commuter trains. Public buses and commuter trains can't ban passengers, but they do have a lower passenger-to-driver ratio than subways. The higher fares on express buses, commuter trains and taxis also discourage overcrowding (but not always, especially on the Long Island Railroad). And that feeds into the hookups as well: a guy who can afford to take an Uber, even if it's an Uberpool, is more eligible in some women's eyes than a guy who takes the subway.

I should point out here that it's not just women who are discouraged by crowds from riding transit. As a guy I've had to deal with belligerent and inconsiderate people. Some of them have even wanted to fight me, but I don't trust them to fight fair.

In my middle age I have aches and pains - not always enough to qualify as a true disability, but enough that I don't want to stand up in crush conditions for an hour. At those times Via or Lyft can be a welcome relief. I don't want to separate myself from other travelers. I just want a little space, a seat and someone who can step in and protect the vulnerable.

Old-style taxis and single-passenger Uber and Lyft services have their own problems. Women are regularly harassed and even assaulted by male drivers, to the point where every once in a while someone tries to start a service with all female drivers. The presence of additional passengers can actually counter this harassment somewhat.

As I wrote last month in response to Emma Fitzsimmons and Sarah Kaufman's posts about the experiences of women on transit, this runs counter to the Spartan aesthetic of some transit advocates. In this view, if even one person is crowded on a train, all must be crowded.

Of course it's not fair for women and guys who aren't tough to pay more for the privilege of not being assaulted on our way to and from work (or shopping, or fun). Poor people will be faced with the choice of an unsafe trip or no trip at all. We should do more to ensure a minimal level of safety and comfort for all.

This does not mean that we shouldn't allow people to pay more for comfort and safety. They have already been doing that for millennia, and most commonly these days they do it by driving their own cars or taking taxis. Uberpool, Lyftline and Via offer that missing middle: safer than the subway but more efficient than a private car.

I don't think I've heard women who regularly take transit accuse Uber or Via or even Leap of elitism. These accusations come mostly from men and cyclists, who seem to think that transit can create a classless society all by itself. I'm not waiting around for that.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-82100674250164419382016-05-06T01:22:00.001-04:002016-05-06T01:22:16.668-04:00Un-constraining our imaginationThere are a lot of things that constrain what we can do to change transit. Ultimately, we can do very little by ourselves, so everything requires political and budgetary buy-in. The terrain and water are very hard to change. Then there are our goals for transit. Is transit always the best way to achieve access from point A to point B, or is it sometimes easier to move point A or point B?

There are people who are talking about whether we should be moving where people live and work. For every new development in my neighborhood there's at least one NIMBY who brings up crowding on the 7 train as a reason to never build anything else again. People talk about developing secondary job centers in Newark, White Plains and Melville. When it's presented negatively as Someone Else's Problem it's stupid and nasty, but when it's presented thoughtfully and constructively it's promising.

Sometimes people talk about changing the terrain and water. These are the plans that are typically labeled as "visionary" by people with limited imaginations. Let's dig a tunnel under the Long Island Sound, build a deck over the Sunnyside Yards, fill in the East River. The spirit of innovation!

What we don't do enough of in New York is imagining what we could do with more money, more land or more political support. There are some great people making fantasy maps, but not enough. People are too ready to lecture each other about "political realities."

That's not to say that a low-budget solution isn't something to be proud of. When I read the proposal for a new Linden Boulevard station my only response was, "Why haven't we done this decades ago?" But we also need to think bigger.

Most importantly, we need to be willing to challenge political power for street space, for bus lanes and loading, and eventually for trolley tracks and stops. Any street that can fit a car lane can fit a dedicated bus lane; the only question is whether bus movement is a higher priority for us and for our government than car movement or storage.

Finally, we need to be open and honest, both with others and with ourselves, about what constraints we're challenging, and what we're holding steady. If we all work within a constraint and never mention it there's a danger that we'll stop seeing it, like fish in water.

I've been thinking about this in terms of two challenges that we're dealing with these days. There's the general problem that we've been successful in getting people to move to New York and ride the subway, but we haven't been making more subway fast enough, so we're all crowded into the subways we do have. Then there are the more specific issues about particular pieces of our transit infrastructure that will need to be taken offline and/or replaced in the next several years: the Fourteenth Street Tunnel, the North River Tunnels, the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

So let me ask you to think of these problems in two ways. First of all, forget about the budget. What if tomorrow, Anthony Foxx and Janet Yellen came to you and handed you a check for ten billion dollars that you can spend in the next five years. What would you in the short term to address specific challenges like the Fourteenth Street Tunnel and the general challenge of lack of capacity? How would you fulfill your goals by spending this on transit?

Second, let's bring back our budgetary constraints, but remove the constraints on land use. Imagine that you had complete control over the streets and highways and buses, backed by a Mayor and two Governors that everyone was unwilling to challenge. So you could put bus lanes absolutely anywhere you wanted them: on Main Street, on Thirty-Fourth Street, on Liberty Place, on Prospect Park West, over the Brooklyn Bridge. You do have a budget to buy as many buses as your plan requires. You can take any piece of land anywhere for bus terminals or garages. Nobody can stop you, there are no Community Advisory Councils, and the MTA has to implement whatever solution you come up with. Oh, and you can go to Jersey too, because you control the Port Authority, New Jersey Transit and NJDOT. What would you do with buses to fulfill your goals? Who would you enjoy telling to fuck off the most?Capn Transithttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-35228794389363356262016-04-15T01:11:00.002-04:002016-04-15T01:11:39.645-04:00The majestic equality of subway gropersIn February Emma Fitzsimmons reported on a recent rise in crimes against women on the subways. On Wednesday, in a thoughtful guest post for Second Avenue Sagas, Sarah Kaufman summarized an important point in Fitzsimmons's article: "Women are also the predominant victims of subway-based crimes, specifically robbery, forcible touching (340 cases reported in 2015), public lewdness (223 cases) and sexual abuse (130 cases)."

Photo: AEMoreira042281 / Wikimedia

Kaufman continues, "When possible, women prefer another, safer mode, rather than waiting in desolate subway stations or at dimly-lit bus stops. Depending on their economic well-being, women may opt for dollar vans, taxis, livery cabs, Citi Bikes, Lyfts, Vias or Ubers. Women outnumber men in the relatively inexpensive dollar vans (ridership is 63% female, according to Eric Goldwyn), but use taxis less frequently than men do (34% female) and are vastly underrepresented on the comparatively costly Citi Bike (24% of rides are taken by women)."

This may be increasing, but it is not particularly new. In 2013 Kimberly Matus talked about her experience being groped on the subway. In 2009 I remarked that many of the riders on express buses are women, particularly older women who are probably commuting to clerical or managerial jobs. Years ago a middle-aged female friend of mine said that she even preferred the local buses of Manhattan to the subway.

The connection that Kaufman draws between transit and Citibike is insightful. People have criticized the gender imbalance in urban cycling generally, and in particular in the "vehicular cycling" movement, which in its majestic equality, encourages men as well as women to mix with speeding traffic protected only by a light helmet. Citibike is a bit safer, being rolled out only after the installation of protected bike lanes on some Midtown avenues, but the numbers suggest that women feel much less safe.

As with vehicular cycling, there is a movement within transit advocacy that disdains all comfort, and quite a bit of safety, in pursuit of a sort of Spartan equality. They have no power to increase transit funding, but they insist on low fares, resulting in crowded, unreliable subways and buses. All conditions on transit must be completely equal; as the reactions to San Francisco's Leap bus showed, any difference in comfort or convenience is worse than offensive, it is ridiculous. And yet private cars, and the public infrastructure we built to serve them, can be as comfortable or convenient as possible because it is completely off the radar for this movement.

These transit advocates, in their majestic equality, encourage men as well as women to pack into subway cars with thieves and sexual predators, shout down any other options, and somehow seem puzzled when these women buy cars at the first opportunity. Hm.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-29116658387172183622016-04-07T17:04:00.003-04:002016-04-07T17:05:49.208-04:00What are your #SightsOfSI?Tourists don't know where to go when they get off the Staten Island Ferry, so let's make some posters for them! Here's one I made:

And here's one Joby Jacob made:

You can make your own!

Find a picture of the sight on Flickr or Google Images, or create your own. It must be freely distributable - either your own picture or one marked as shareable with Creative Commons.

Find the shortest off-peak travel time to the sight, by bus or Staten Island Railway, from the Ferry terminal, using Google Maps or the bus/SIR schedule.

If the route is by bus, find the ramp where the bus leaves from the ferry terminal in the bottom right inset of the bus map (PDF).

Put the name of the sight, the travel time, the bus route or SIR, the ramp letter and the photo credit over the photo.

If you like, you can credit yourself and add the #SightsOfSI hashtag.

Add your photos to this Google+ album or tweet them with the #SightsOfSI hashtag, and I'll feature the best ones on this blog!Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-34093111581478529802016-04-05T00:02:00.000-04:002016-04-05T00:04:46.680-04:00Visit Saint George!Staten Island is home to beautiful parks, lovely architecture, tasty restaurants and fascinating museums. As Joby Jacob and I recently documented, on a warm sunny day thousands of tourists take the ferry to the island, getting a free harbor cruise. While there, they could grab a quick bite, explore the prewar architecture of the North Shore, or take a short bus ride to the museums of Snug Harbor. Instead, the vast majority catch the next boat back to Manhattan without ever setting foot outside the ferry terminal.

Some tourists play it safe, follow the herd, go where they're told or plan in advance. Those kinds of tourists will require more explicit marketing, which deserves its own post. Other tourists like to explore, and many of them do this already.

Part of the problem is that the design of the ferry terminal and the streets around it discourage exploration. The neighborhood by the ferry terminal, Saint George, is charming and walkable, and has been acknowledged by the New York City Economic Development Corporation as the most promising site for "the kind of vital downtown that has long eluded Staten Island." The terminal and the streets obscure the attractions of the area and make pedestrians feel unwelcome. Since tourists getting off the ferry are pedestrians, the design winds up making tourists feel unwelcome.

View from the roof deck

The problem begins with the elevation of the main passage of the ferry terminal. While the roof deck has a clear view of some interesting-looking buildings in Saint George, tourists are not guided up there. Instead they are confronted with a series of ramps leading up to bus platforms, a stairway down to the Staten Island Railway, and a stairway marked "Richmond Terrace." None of these provide a view of anything outside the terminal; the line of sight is blocked by stairs and canopies.

Some tourists find their way up the stairs to the walkway. It affords a decent view of Saint George, but it is mostly bare, exposed concrete with a minimal canopy protecting people from the elements. It is very wide right outside the terminal, but narrows to a twenty-foot sidewalk when crossing the SIR tracks before the intersection with Richmond Terrace. Half the width of this sidewalk is currently blocked by construction for the Staten Island Wheel and outlet mall project.

The intersection between the ferry terminal approach and Richmond Terrace is the third part of the problem. The walkway is now just a sidewalk for the Ferry Terminal Viaduct, four two-lane ramps carrying buses, cars, taxis and bikes over the Railway. The intersection is designed for the cars and buses, with slip lanes, recessed crosswalks and lots of extra asphalt. It is confusing and intimidating to pedestrians.

The fourth and final obstacle is the buildings that greet visitors leaving the ferry terminal: Staten Island Borough Hall, the Richmond County Courthouse and the Saint George branch of the New York Public Library. According to my AIA Guide they were all designed by Carrère and Hastings in the early twentieth century. I should rather say that they fail to greet visitors, because they all have turned their backs to the ferry.

The front entrance of the Richmond County Courthouse, permanently closed.

On one visit in 2014 I passed a troupe of thespians performing scenes from Shakespeare on the steps of Borough Hall, but this past Saturday Joby and I found the steps deserted, and the courthouse entrance permanently closed (without even any markings to indicate what it was). The handful of shops on the next block of Richmond Terrace were either closed or of no interest to tourists, or both.

A short walk around the corner showed us a different scene. Stuyvesant Place offered a variety of modest but inviting restaurants and shops. The courthouse has a fully functioning door on that side. So does Borough Hall - with parking for the Borough President and various high-level functionaries. The Library still presents a closed door to Stuyvesant Place, but you can walk around the block again and find a welcoming entrance, as well as the new Supreme Court building.

These buildings, shops and restaurants may not be things that every tourist would find interesting, but Joby and I saw a number of tourists who were tempted to stay on Staten Island for more than ten minutes. Many of them made it past the first two obstacles of lack of visibility and the exposed walkway (it was a warm Spring day), only to disappear at the intersection with Richmond Terrace.

I can easily imagine more tourists spending an hour or two in Saint George, New Brighton and Tompkinsville. We saw a number of storefronts that were either empty or closed on Saturday. It wouldn't take many more tourists to support a few more cafes and shops, which would in turn bring more tourists.

It would cost a lot to reconfigure the terminal so that arriving passengers can see the way to Saint George. It might not be worth spending that much right now, but we should talk about that when it comes time to redo the terminal for other reasons.

The walkway from the terminal to Richmond Terrace needs to be wider for its entire length, so that tourists never feel like second-class citizens, even if they are on foot on Staten Island. It needs to be better protected from sun, rain and wind, but also to be more interesting for tourists. A few signs advertising nearby attractions and businesses would help, but the city could also grant permits for vendors and buskers in the wider parts.

The intersection where the terminal viaduct meets Richmond Terrace needs to be reconfigured to be more welcoming to pedestrians. This is the kind of thing the DOT has done all over the other boroughs. They know how.

Finally, the institutions of Richmond Terrace - Borough Hall, the Courthouse, the Library and even the Post Office - need to turn around and welcome tourists. The Shakespeare performance I saw was a nice start, but the borough could do a lot more with that plaza. What about a Bryant Park-like cafe? Or the Supreme Court could rent the space inside its east facade to the Staten Island Museum, which is a block north on Stuyvesant Place.

Saint George is a pretty, walkable neighborhood just steps from the ferry. There is no good reason for eighty to ninety percent of people who arrive in the ferry to turn right around without leaving the terminal.Capn Transithttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-69469271819207550492016-03-31T00:30:00.000-04:002016-03-31T00:30:25.959-04:00Saint George's Hidden TreasuresThe AIA Guide says there are a bunch that we didn't get to. See this album in Google Photos.

Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-15464231398186976762016-03-27T19:50:00.004-04:002016-03-28T23:25:56.279-04:00Visit Staten Island!Staten Island offers lovely architecture, beautiful parks and fascinating museums. Thousands of tourists set foot on the island on warm sunny days. But as Joby Jacob and I discovered yesterday, there's a problem...

Capn Transithttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-79395902844931081052016-03-25T23:58:00.002-04:002016-03-26T00:11:23.629-04:00Transportation values are arbitrary - somewhatThis has been sitting in my queue for years, possibly in response to this post by Engineer Scotty, and tonight I realized it was pretty much ready to go:

Photo: El Salvador Spanish Schools / Panoramio

For all you bus-haters out there, I wanted to post this excerpt from the world's greatest writer of train travel. In 1978 Paul Theroux traveled from his childhood home in Medford, Massachussetts to Esquel, Argentina, mostly by train. All over Latin America, he found that people not only preferred buses to trains, but they saw trains as dirty old conveyances for poor people, and buses as fast, modern, classy transportation. Here he is in El Salvador:

But no citizen of this town had any clear idea of where the railway station was. I had arrived from the frontier by car, and after two nights in Santa Ana thought I should be moving on to the capital. There was a train twice a day, so my timetable said, and various people, with hesitation, had directed me to the railway station. But I had searched the town, and the railway station was not where they had said it was. In this way, I became familiar with the narrow streets of Santa Ana; the station continued to elude me. And when I found it, on the morning of my third day, a mile from the hotel, in a part of town that had begun to tumble into plowed fields and cash crops, behind a high fence, and deserted apart from one man at an empty desk — the stationmaster — I understood why no one knew where it was. No one used the train. There was a major road from Santa Ana to San Salvador. WE TAKE THE BUS: it seemed to be a Central American motto in reply to all the railway advertising which said TAKE THE TRAIN — IT is CHEAPER! It was a matter of speed: the bus took two hours, the train took all afternoon.
Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-72562241201533534272016-02-26T00:14:00.000-05:002016-02-26T00:16:06.475-05:00The Via experienceHere in New York when people talk about "microtransit," they usually mean Uberpool or Lyftline, and those are the services I've been focusing on. Some have mentioned a third service, Via, that works a bit differently. Via is all shared; there is no service where it's just you and the driver, like a traditional taxi. The prices are fixed: currently five dollars per trip on weekdays if you buy credit ahead of time, and up to just under ten dollars for a pay-per-ride weeknight.

Photo: Via publicity photo

I've tried Via several times over the past year. The only real complaint I have is that they don't go to Queens: the service is restricted to Manhattan. I have hope, though, because when I started it was only available from Fourteenth to Fifty-Ninth Streets, and it's now available from the Battery to 110th Street. The next expansion will probably be Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope, but I don't think they'll ignore western Queens for long.

The first couple of times I took Via I had to wait a while, and it was just me and the driver, but the service seems to have caught on quickly. Every time since then, there has been at least one other passenger and the wait time has been minimal. If I've had to wait more than five minutes it was because my "Via-cle" (har) was stuck in traffic less than two blocks away.

Via is much more like a bus than a taxi. Twice I've gotten sedans, but the Via-cles are usually SUVs. I've had at least one trip with three other people, meaning I had to sit in the third row of one of those Suburbans or Navigators or Explorers. Since those aren't really made for people getting in and out frequently, I'm wondering how soon Via is going to start running vans big enough to stand up in.

A number of people have objected to Uber and Lyft because of the "gig economy" arrangements they have with their drivers. Of course, they're not much worse than the taxi medallion owners in that regard. But on one recent Via trip the driver was chatting with us, and he said that Via drivers are all paid by the hour, possibly even full time. If that is correct, it sounds like a much better deal for them than just about any other taxi arrangement.

As I've said before, Uber and Lyft are a huge improvement over the way we did taxis up to a few years ago, but in their current incarnations they won't do much to help the transit capacity crunch we're feeling in cities like New York. The Via model is much more promising, and the more Uber and Lyft act on those lines, like with Uberhop, the more helpful they will be in relieving our capacity constraints.

There was another fascinating aspect of my experience with Via, and to some degree with Lyftline and Uberpool, that deserves its own post. I'll write about it soon!Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-42325478961044884702016-02-19T23:42:00.000-05:002016-02-19T23:42:16.531-05:00A Century of Subway ScoldingJessica Hester had a great post detailing how we've been trying to alternately shame and cajole people into being respectful and not taking up too much space since the subways were built more than a century ago. But she didn't explicitly draw the conclusion I did: that there is no evidence these campaigns have actually decreased manspreading, blocking doors or rude language on the subway.

Don't get me wrong: there's a lot of stuff on the subway that annoys me, and I want it to stop. But it's not the same stuff that annoys other people. For example, I can't stand cell phone conversations or some asshole playing deejay on their tinny little speakers, but I have no problem with people clipping their fingernails. I would do it myself if so many people hadn't told me they hate it. And that's what I think a lot of these people are missing: the understanding that even if you can't understand why something bothers other people, it still does, and maybe you still shouldn't do it.

It may be simply that evil will always exist in the world, and the campaigns are necessary to simply keep us running in place against the forces of backpacks and panhandling. But if you've been doing something for a hundred years without making any progress, maybe you should try something else? As Hester points out, these conditions respond to forces outside the system: there is a lot less boombox-playing, smoking and tobacco-spitting today than there were in previous decades, and more mobile video games, cell phone music and Showtime.

Police Commissioner Bratton visited the subway last week, and as Ben Kabak observed, his comments were mostly clueless and out of touch. Outsider perspective can be valuable, but only if the outsider watches, listens and thinks before saying anything. I think Bratton was correct that if we are seeing more fights it's a symptom of overcrowding.

There are some transit problems that are encouraged by underuse of the transit system, like muggings, rape and graffiti. But there are others that are exacerbated by overuse and crowding, like unwanted sexual contact, door-blocking and fighting over seats. This means that the real solution is to increase transit capacity, and efforts to get people to be more polite and take up less room are mostly a waste of time.

That said, there is at least one area I can think of where a real education campaign - not a scolding campaign - could make a small difference. I'll talk about it in a future post. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to increase capacity!Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-88905644357533933542016-02-03T23:32:00.000-05:002016-02-03T23:32:57.428-05:00The Uberpool/Lyftline experienceI wrote last year about how the current challenge for transit in cities is not building ridership but making room on transit for all the people who already want to ride, but are getting passed up or squeezed on. A lot of people have been paying attention to Uber and its competitor Lyft, and their Uberpool and Lyftline services may already be reducing car ownership. I've tried them both multiple times over the past couple of years, and they've gotten more promising.

Photo: Jazz Guy / Flickr

When I first tried Uber, all they offered were big SUVs, that you had all to yourself. It was more convenient than trying to find the number for the local car service and wait on hold, but it was too expensive for me. The smaller Uber, and Lyft vehicles and the ability to share rides with the Uberpool and Lyftline brought the price down to where it was a potential splurge for when I was tired of the subway.

After decades of taking taxis rarely, if ever, I was actually underwhelmed by the taxi experience in general. People pay so much more than for a subway ride, but the ride is often a lot slower and less smooth. Basically, you're stuck in traffic in a car with at least one stranger, who controls the radio and the heat, doesn't necessarily know where they're going, and sometimes really wants to talk. How is that relaxing?

Sometimes it is definitely worth paying for a taxi, to have a guaranteed seat, a one-seat ride, or door-to-door service. For places and times where the buses and trains run at low frequencies it can be a lot quicker.

I was interested to see how well these sharing services work. For the first several months I had the vehicle to myself, even if I took advantage of Lyftline's offer of waiting ten minutes for a lower price. But recently I've had a few shared rides. One couple was on their way to LaGuardia, and taking us home must have added at least fifteen minutes to the trip. I hope they left plenty of time!

One thing that can't come soon enough is services like "Uberhop," currently in pilot in Seattle, where you can get quicker and/or cheaper service by walking to a point chosen by the software. Last year I was waiting for a Lyftline to twist through a maze of one-way Greenwich Village, and noticed that my fellow rider was being picked up a few blocks away. I texted the driver, and was able to get to the car right as the other passenger was getting in. I saved all three of us another four-block loop on congested streets.

A promising application of this technology is when there is an unexpected outage on the subway, or even a skipped bus run, and a surge of SUVs (or even vans) come and whisk the waiting passengers away. Cost is a potential factor, but I think if people could be confident that a car would come quickly and get them there with minimal delay, a lot more of them would do it.

More observations on this issue coming soon.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-89305882053340864072016-01-29T00:18:00.000-05:002016-01-29T00:56:08.623-05:00Better subway station namesBack in October, City Council Transportation chair Ydanis Rodriguez argued that some of our identically-named subway stations really are confusing and should be changed (see the full report in PDF. In general I agree; the worst are those that are on the same line in different boroughs; back when there was a 23rd Street-Ely Avenue stop in Queens, I helped a poor recent arrival on the V train who got it confused with 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

I like how in Paris every station has a unique name, and that's part of the navigation system for the city: directions regularly include the name of the nearest Metro station. Of course that's because Paris has no grid, and grids actually make subway station naming kind of boring: do we really want stops called 23rd-Park, 23rd-Broadway, 23rd-Seventh and 23rd-Eighth?

On the other hand, I also agree with Ben Kabak that the names proposed by Rodriguez's staff are not great. They're not as bad as the DC Metro with stations like Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter, but they're still too long. I'm going to take them one at a time:

7th Avenue 53rd Street: This can be just plain Seventh Avenue, because we're going to rename the other ones.

7th Avenue Prospect Heights: This is in line with the MTA's push to rename stations after the neighborhoods they serve, but it's silly. The next stop on this line is Prospect Park, and there's a 15th Street-Prospect Park stop on the F and Prospect Avenue stops on the R and 2/5 lines. Why not just rename it Carleton Avenue after the street on the other side of Flatbush Avenue?

7th Avenue 4th Street: This is a typo, unless Rodriguez is working with the MTA to fund a subway under Fourth Street. I think we should rename it Ninth Street, and then the Smith-9th Street station can just be Smith, and the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street station can just be Fourth Avenue.

Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall: Take off the "City Hall" part, off of this and the IRT station. There's a City Hall station across the park on the R train.

Chambers Street-World Trade Center: Since this is part of the same complex as the E train terminal at World Trade Center, why not call the whole thing World Trade Center? Well, even the south end of the A/C platforms are pretty far from the WTC, and we'll have to make sure the #1 train station won't be called World Trade Center when it opens.

Gun Hill Road - White Plains Road: This can stay as just Gun Hill Road.

Park Place: Are people really getting this one confused with the Franklin Avenue Shuttle stop? If it's a big deal, call it Park Row instead.

Gun Hill Road - Eastchester Road: As Larry Velázquez pointed out on Twitter, it's not even very close to Eastchester Road. We could name it after Seymour Avenue or Hammersley Avenue, both of which are closer.

Pelham Parkway - White Plains Road: This is probably the best we can do. We don't want it to get confused with the other Pelham Parkway stop, but there are nine other stops along White Plains Road. so it looks like we're stuck with both of them.

Pelham Parkway - Williamsbridge Road: First, spell "Williamsbridge" right. We could just call this "Williamsbridge Road," but then people might think it's close to the "Williams Bridge" station on the Metro-North Harlem Line.

36th Street - Sunnyside Yards: The problem with this one is it assumes that Sunnyside Yards is a destination. I mean, sure, I took Alon Levy there, but we're transit geeks. Does it mean someone in Rodriguez's office is expecting this part of the Yards to be developed soon? How about 38th Avenue instead?

36th Street - Fourth Avenue: If we rename the LIC station to 38th Avenue, we can keep this as 36th Street.

Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-11394572910464382862016-01-18T01:02:00.001-05:002016-01-18T18:19:39.109-05:00We need to stop converting streets to one-wayNew York is famous for its livable streets revolution, where Janette Sadik-Khan, with the backing of Mayor Bloomberg, turned the city Department of Transportation from an agency focused on moving traffic and placating angry drivers into one that prioritized the safety and movement of pedestrians, cyclists and bus riders. Under Sadik-Khan the DOT took away some car lanes and narrowed others to install pedestrian plazas, protected bike lanes and bus lanes.

Under Mayor de Blasio and his transportation commissioner Polly Trottenberg, the DOT has shown more timidity and more deference to unelected "community leaders," but it has continued to install safety measures and bus lanes, sometimes taking space from cars to do it. Where neither administration has been very good is on one-way streets. It's pretty uncontroversial that one-way streets have less head-on collisions. It used to also be the consensus that they are safer for pedestrians. Instead of looking for cars from two or even four directions, people crossing a one-way street only have to look in one or two (or maybe three, but who's counting?).

More recently, people have come to realize that the old consensus was too simple. Removing most of the danger of head-on collisions only encouraged people to drive faster, increasing the danger of other collisions. Drivers have to drive further to get to their destinations, adding to congestion and turning moves.

One-way streets have also had a negative effect on street life. The difficulty of navigation, and the difficulty of parking next to speeding cars, have discouraged drivers from patronizing businesses on one-way streets. The danger, noise and unpleasantness of speeding cars have discouraged walking. Stores and restaurants have closed, giving people less reason to walk. This is a vicious cycle, because just the absence of other people drives pedestrians away.
New York was an early leader in the movement against converting streets to one way. In fact, it was a plan by the City Department of Transportation to funnel cars into the Barclays Center that demonstrated the livable streets movement's growing power. Stirred by a series of Streetsblog posts, 650 people came out to speak against the DOT's proposal to convert Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Park Slope to one way.

Since then, other cities across the country have converted one-way streets back to two way. The size of the crowd was probably a factor in Mayor Bloomberg's decision to appoint a reformer like Janette Sadik-Khan as Transportation Commissioner. With the support of Streetsblog and Transportation Alternatives, and against the opposition of community boards dominated by local driving elites, the DOT rolled out bike lanes, pedestrian plazas and intersection redesigns to make streets safer.

The odd thing is that as far as I know New York has not converted any one-way streets back to two-way, either before or since 2007. I haven't heard anything about the issue from Sadik-Khan, Streetsblog or TA. The architect John Massengale wrote about street safety last month and even spent a paragraph talking about the dangers of one way streets, but for some reason did not explicitly include returning the streets to two-way in his list of recommendations.

What is even more surprising is that since 2007 the DOT has continued to convert streets from two-way to one-way. For example, under Sadik-Khan they converted 49th Avenue in Long Island City and 58th Street and Maurice Avenue in Maspeth to one-way. Under Commissioner Trottenberg, they have converted Fifth Street in LIC, and have proposed converting 77th Street in Jackson Heights (PDF).

To be fair, these streets are not like Sixth and Seventh Avenues. 58th Street and Maurice Avenue are industrial truck routes, and 49th Avenue and Fifth Street are primarily residential. Both are in areas with higher car ownership rates. These factors can explain why livable streets advocates didn't notice or draw attention to the conversions.
But those factors don't mean that we shouldn't try to stop these one-way conversions, and they don't mean we shouldn't talk about them. People need to be safe where they live and work, not just where they shop. These neighborhoods have a lot of pedestrians, and we need to protect them from the demands of the driving elites who dominate their institutions.

By the way, this applies to narrower streets too.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-10546986154806648122015-12-27T20:41:00.001-05:002015-12-27T20:42:24.709-05:00Knowing you killed someone is not punishmentAdvocates for safer streets have been pushing back against the use of "accident" to absolve drivers of responsibility for not killing or injuring other people. When drivers engage in behavior that demonstrates a callous indifference to human life - or even an unjustified faith in their own ability to avoid killing people - death is no accident, but a predictable consequence.

Photo: WPIX via Streetsblog

The next line of defense is commonly that the driver "has suffered enough," sometimes simply by witnessing a horrific death that (by implication) they were powerless to stop, or even by being forced to consider the possibility that their behavior or choices may have been connected to this death.

In circumstances where there is really no denying that the driver acted recklessly or irresponsibly, the claim is that this knowledge serves as a lesson. The driver now knows the consequences of reckless behavior or irresponsible choices, and will never do it again.

Many drivers flee the scene of the crash, because they believe they will be held responsible for it and do not want to face the consequences. (Some do it for a chance to sober up.) Reckless killer drivers who do this have compounded their crime of reckless driving with another, leaving the scene.

Unfortunately, some people are so upset by this effort to evade responsibility that if the driver is caught they treat that as the major crime. Conversely, they may be so relieved that a killer driver turns themself in, or chooses not to leave the scene, that they praise that and forget any reckless behavior.

This is all bullshit. We have laws specifying the penalties for killing someone with a car. They could use a little more tightening up in the evidence department, but they're pretty clear on the consequences.

To the best of my knowledge we do not say that reckless knife-wavers have "suffered enough" or that negligent builders have "learned their lesson." We do not praise incompetent gun handlers for not running away (although ). We should not treat drivers any differently.

Actually, we also treat some incompetent gun handlers differently - we sometimes say they've "suffered enough" if they negligently kill their own children. In a post about this craziness, some guy named Greg Laden made an astute point:

Suggesting that the decision to hold someone responsible for an irresponsible act that has damaged another should be based on how the perpetrator of that act feels post hoc, extended more generally, means that the standard for punishment under the law is inverse to the severity of the crime. It is suggesting that the severity of the possible punishment be inverse to the seriousness of the crime because how bad one feels is proportionate to the severity of the crime.

Knowing you killed someone is not punishment. Realizing that they might still be alive if you had made different choices is not punishment. Staying at the scene is not accepting responsibility. Turning yourself in is not penance. As long as we continue to treat them as such, people will continue to die.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-76840718292284698322015-12-19T00:14:00.000-05:002015-12-21T11:11:21.242-05:00Our stratified transportation systemA lot of people are nervous about the possibility that privately-run electronic taxi-hailing systems like Uber and Lyft could take over functions that have recently been filled by government-run transit services. Others are disturbed by the sight of privately-run companies like Leap and Bridj marketing local bus services as luxury products. I share some of these concerns, and I've addressed them in previous posts.

What I don't share is the idea that any of these services will create a "two tier" or "stratified" system with one service for the rich and one for the poor. There's a simple reason for this: we already have one.

If you go to a small city like, say, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you'll see our stratified system in action: the people on the buses are mostly poor and nonwhite, and everyone else is driving. Ride the bus in a city like Kingston, New York, where the received wisdom is that "everyone drives because you need a car to get around," and you'll see that there are still people who don't drive: the extremely poor and the mentally and physically disabled. Here in New York the majority rides the subways, but there is a stratum that drives everywhere, and pretty much runs the city.

The bus and rail strata are largely run by the government and paid with tax money, but some of the money comes from fares paid by passengers. In the strata where people drive, passengers often contribute the labor of driving themselves, and pay a lot of money for the vehicles, fuel, insurance and other costs, and also contribute to the construction and maintenance of road, bridge and parking infrastructure through taxes. But as has been shown time and again, they do not pay the entire cost of the system; a much larger share of general tax revenue goes to driving than to transit.

This stratified system can be very cruel to those in the bottom strata, and it generally gets worse the smaller the share of the population that takes transit. The poorer the average transit user is, the slower, dirtier, more crowded, less frequent and less reliable the transit.

Even here in New York, the driving classes are constantly blocking improvements to transit, whether it's another commuter rail track, extension of an el train, allowing bus pickups or dedicating a bus lane. So yes, I know firsthand how bad it is to have a stratified system with minimal investment in the lowest strata. And I can't see how Uber, Lyft, Chariot and Bridj could possibly make things any worse.

In fact, I see it the opposite way: that people who take these taxi and premium bus services are less likely to identify as drivers and more likely to take transit and support transit expansion. If they don't have cars to park, they're much less likely to go crazy over reallocating street space from parking to transit.

As I've written before, I'm not a libertarian, and I'm not even much of a capitalist. One of my goals is access for all to jobs, housing, shopping and services. I would be open to a state solution, a government monopoly on transportation with a single level of service. But to impose a government monopoly on transportation would require drastic state action. Use your transit quota well, comrade! The government would most definitely be coming for your cars. Who would be first up against the wall - Rory Lancman?

In any case, I'm trying to think of an area where our government provides a monopoly with a single level of service, and coming up blank. Housing, food, energy, school - there is usually some government service, but it always has substantial competition from the private sector. Even services that are nominally single-tier like identification, permitting and licensing have inequalities. If you can afford to pay a rush fee or an expediter, or if you just live in a wealthier area, your interactions with the government will be quicker and smoother.

It's not just our government, either. The most revolutionary, egalitarian governments ever have failed pathetically at imposing transportation equality, when they've even tried it. Even the Soviet Union had its Ladas for the Party officials.

Sadly, these people who bleat about "stratification" don't even have the vision to realize the amount of stratification between cars and transit or the guts to mention it, much less address it. They would never think about taking away cars or parking, or defunding roads. They'd rather make a big show of opposing inequality that doesn't exist than address inequality that exists.
Capn Transithttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-64444396966786241022015-12-08T23:32:00.002-05:002015-12-08T23:32:38.571-05:00Let a thousand Brooklyns bloomAs I said last year, what many people call "gentrification" in large American coastal cities is the result of the confluence of four or so different migrations. Cities have been drawing the Best and the Brightest and International Migrants for all of history, since the first trading post was set up where a trail crossed a river. They are not the main source of demand for urban real estate. Rents are rising because those two streams are joined by two other major streams, the Empty Nesters and the Small City Exiles.

Beacon. Photo: Chung Chu / Flickr

The conformist Baby Boomers failed to make their utopia in the suburbs, and the back-to-the-landers failed to make their utopia in the country. Now they've got bad knees or bad eyesight or whatever, and if they care at all about any people, deer or trees on the road they'll do the right thing and buy a condo near their kids in the city where they can walk to shopping. Sucks if you wanted that apartment, twentysomethings.

Here's what I said about the Small City Exiles last year:

not the best or the brightest, or complete misfits, but they're pretty bright, mildly kinky or noticeably nonconformist. Or maybe they can't drive because they're blind or epileptic, or they just don't want to. Eighty years ago they'd have been pretty happy in Rochester or Knoxville or Omaha or San Luis Obispo: reasonably normal, functioning members of society, with enough peers to have a stimulating intellectual and artistic fellowship.

Today, those towns have hardly any jobs at all, especially within walking distance of downtown, shopping and services are sprawled out across the area, and transit between them is inconvenient. With this fragmentation, they can barely sustain a monthly open mike or an Indian restaurant, let alone a poetry slam or a regional Thai place. Our heroes – somewhat large fish in not-so-large ponds – see the grim desperation in the faces of their older neighbors and head to the bigger cities, where there are more opportunities, not just for jobs but for dinner after 8PM.

In that post, and in other recent posts, I've pointed out that the Empty Nesters and Small City Exiles don't need the big cities. They don't need a regional Thai restaurant. They were happy enough in the small cities, but there were no jobs and nowhere to walk. If we can fix those two problems they won't move to the big cities and drive up the prices.

If we make these small cities really attractive, many of the exiles will move back, and some will move to other small cities. What would it take? I'm not an expert on economic development, but I can think of a couple things that would help. First of all, they should be Strong Towns, keeping taxes low by focusing government spending on cost-effective, dense areas and avoiding spreading obligations out over huge distances.

It seems that a lot of our current economic growth is in high technology, and the places with most promise for tech are those that attract techie types, creative types and financial types (and people who are some combination) and allow them to mix and bounce ideas off each other. But I don't think you can declare a "Silicon Mangrove" in the middle of nowhere, upzone and automatically get tech jobs. It also seems that it helps for the city to be a physical port, connected to trade routes that make it easy for them to get materials and ship out products.

To my mind, the most promising small cities are those that are close to established centers like New York or San Francisco, so that staff members can spend a day in the city talking to potential collaborators and funders, and be home for dinner. Just as before the highway era, they can benefit from their proximity to the big port.

Some of these small cities are already coming back; you can tell because they're often called "the next Brooklyn." And where they are, people are already worried about displacement. It's important not to dismiss those displacement fears out of hand. Some towns have more vacancy than others. If rents are rising faster than wages, either the town should loosen zoning to allow more housing to be built in walkable areas, or we should work to boost opportunities in other towns.

Some people in those towns have expressed fear of their unique towns being swamped by a "monoculture," turning them all into clones of Brooklyn. I'm skeptical about these fears in general, but in small cities they're particularly unfounded. Beacon isn't Brooklyn, and neither is Rosendale; they've got way too much of their own personalities to become clones of Park Slope or Williamsburg. In particular, a lot of the people moving there are actually Small City Exiles who grew up in the area and tried to make it in the city.

I'll talk about what I think would help revive these cities in another post.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-82259592996148887362015-11-29T23:51:00.000-05:002015-11-29T23:51:43.172-05:00Could Lyft and Uber reduce congestion?Charles Komanoff has created an open-source multimodal transportation model for New York City, available for free download as an Excel spreadsheet. In July, after learning that there were almost two thousand Uber cars on the streets of Manhattan every weekday, Komanoff used his Balanced Transportation Analyzer to estimate that these cars had slowed traffic by seven percent.

Photo: Jeffrey Zeldman / Flickr

A month later, some new information came out: taxis were sitting idle on the streets of Greenpoint. Drivers had found that they could make more money with Uber and Lyft than with the medallion giving them the right to pick up street-hailing passengers in Manhattan.

This suggests that instead of adding to the cabs in Manhattan, many of the Uber and Lyft cars have been replacing them. This is confirmed by an analysis conducted by Reuben Fischer-Baum and Carl Bialik for Five Thirty Eight. The net increase in congestion may be a lot lower than Komanoff estimated, especially since, as he mentioned, cabs hailed with apps don't have to cruise the streets.

I emailed Komanoff, and he was aware of this new data. "I revised my approach in mid-summer. I think the main change was a higher assumed displacement of yellows, which resulted in a lower impact of Ubers. The impact of 20,000 Ubers (not all of which are in the CBD all the time, obviously) is now a 4.3% slowdown in CBD speeds," he wrote.

To me this suggests that there is a limit to the number of taxis that we can add in Manhattan's Central Business District ("the CBD"). If vehicle speeds slow below a certain point, some passengers will decide that it's not worth their time and money, and either take the subway, go at a different time, or go somewhere else. The "surge pricing" (in fact, a form of congestion pricing, which Komanoff has advocated for all vehicles for decades) practiced by Uber and Lyft probably also serves as an extra disincentive.

If enough passengers make this decision, the driver doesn't get the hail. Because the fare they get for sitting in traffic is different from what they get while moving, they may decide that even if they pick someone up it won't be worth their time. And in fact, electronic hailing and traffic monitoring allows drivers to read and respond to these signals more quickly. A driver can now get a sense of the number of hails before they even enter Manhattan, and choose to go elsewhere.

The Economist's analysis of trip data suggests that these services are not adding very much to congestion: "During the two years to June 2015, Uber's pickups in the CBD rose from an estimated 175,000 to 1.8m [per month], while yellow cabs' hails in the area fell by around 1.4m. This implies that where Uber and yellow cabs compete most directly, just 13% of the growth in Uber rides has added to prior demand. The remaining 87% has replaced trips that would otherwise have gone to taxis."

It's even possible that electronically hailed cars could eventually help reduce congestion, and provide an alternative to subways and buses. Of course, not if they're single-passenger taxi trips: as I said recently, if Uber and Lyft simply take a vehicle with one person who's both driver and passenger and replaces it with a vehicle with one driver and one passenger, it may lead to a reduction in carnage and an improvement in the way people relate to each other, but there would be no net change in the number of passengers per car, and thus no practical change in efficiency or pollution.

There is one major difference in shifting from single-occupant vehicles to taxis: ownership of the vehicle passes from the individual (usually the driver/passenger), to the taxi driver or fleet owner. This means that control of the other passenger seats passes from the driver/passenger to the taxi service. As many people have observed, when combined with real-time schedule coordination, this makes it much easier to add passengers.

Uber offers an electronic carpooling service called Uberpool, and Lyft offers one called Lyftline. With these services, instead of carrying a single passenger, a Prius sedan can carry up to three comfortably, and an Escalade can carry five. The companies claim that they are very popular: Uber said that "almost 50,000 New Yorkers" used Uberpool in the last week of October. In April, Lyft said that Lyftlines made up thirty percent of its rides in New York. Unfortunately, both of those numbers are fairly useless for our purposes because they don't say how many of those rides were in Manhattan during business hours.

Still, each of those shared trips represents one of several possibilities. One is that the person took Uberpool or Lyftline instead of driving their own car or taking a separate cab. If these services do take, say, a thousand cars off the streets of Manhattan every rush hour this way - cars that are not replaced by other taxis, personal cars, or even trucks - that's a very good thing. Komanoff's model indicates that if we could get 32,000 less cars going into Manhattan every day, it would increase speeds by 3.2%.

It may be that the possible congestion limit I mentioned above is actually an optimal congestion point, and every car taken off the road by these carpool services will be replaced with another car, taxi or truck until it reaches that point. In that case, the only way to free up space on the roads would be to increase the price - tolls on the bridges, raise on-street parking rates, reduce government employee parking placards or implement a taxi congestion fee. In the meantime, at least this means more people that will be able to get into Manhattan.

Another possibility is that the person took Uberpool or Lyftline instead of taking the subway or bus, leaving space for someone else. A number of transit advocates have gotten all doom and gloom about this, saying that these services will "poach riders" from the public transit agencies, depriving them of fare revenue, but here in New York today the system is at capacity. All rush hour, people are watching full buses and subways pass them by. Poaching is simply not an issue, and will not be for the foreseeable future.

As I've written before, I do not believe that electronically hailed taxis can be a satisfactory replacement for fixed-route transit. I do believe that they can help us deal with our current capacity crunch, and potentially ease the way to eliminating personal cars. I've got more to say about this in the future.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-10256481675740007742015-11-28T00:27:00.000-05:002015-11-28T00:27:18.188-05:00Coming downstairs, bump, bump, bumpLast year, a number of people noted that recently there had been a significant drop in vehicle miles traveled across the country. At a minimum, this shows that transportation engineers are wrong to base their recommendations on simplistic linear models. Connecting this with similar drops in vehicle sales and sales of sprawly houses, some felt that there was evidence that Americans are "falling out of love with the automobile."

John Michael Greer. Source: adruidway.wordpress.com
I tend to agree with both of these points, and they're the kind of change I would like to see happen, but more recently the picture has clouded. Vehicle sales are up, the average fuel efficiency of vehicles sold is down, home sales in some sprawly areas are up, and VMT is rising again. What's going on? Was all that good news just a blip? Should we keep building big roads?

The Archdruid has the answer. I've tweeted about him before, and … crickets. If you're reluctant to click through and read him, let me just remind you that you're reading a blog by a guy with a name that sounds like a superhero crossed with a sugar cereal mascot. Go read the Archdruid, he's good.

So John Michael Greer, the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and an occasional guest on the KunstlerCast (December 2011, July 2014, December 2014), predicted that we'd see something like this. Basically, when a society has built more capital (infrastructure, buildings, mines, etc.) than it can maintain, it begins to defer the maintenance of that capital. When it can't defer maintenance any longer, there is a crisis. This crisis is compounded if the maintenance is dependent on non-renewable resources.

The critical thing to note is that we don't fall all the way down. When someone claims that a situation is unsustainable, one popular response is to deny it and predict business as usual, and another is to predict a complete and sudden collapse, all the way back to nothing. The Archdruid predicts something in between, something a lot like what we've been seeing.

Greer observes that a collapse has the effect of tipping "some fraction of the stuff that would otherwise have to be maintained into the nearest available dumpster." That relieves the society of the responsibility for maintaining it, providing an opportunity to recover some balance and stability. It can seem like the fall is over, and many people will then pick themselves up and resume business as usual. But business as usual will just lead to more capital that the society is unable to maintain, and eventually to another collapse. And so on.

When the resources used to build and maintain the capital are not renewable, it makes things worse, because the periods of stability and regrowth are shorter and the collapses are bigger. The result is what the Archdruid calls a "stair step down": with each crash, the standard of living gets lower and lower.

Our energy and economic crises fit the pattern that Greer describes. In 2008 we abandoned large tracts of McMansions, malls and Mitsubishis for apartments, streets and transit, and that helped us to recover a bit (in combination with unsustainable emergency strategies like fracking and quantitative easing). If we were smart we'd use that time and energy to build more sustainable trains and apartment buildings. But we're not that smart, so a lot of us have gone back to building mega-bridges and sprawl. That means that the next step down is not far off, and it will probably be painful.Capn Transithttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-88612116506029744012015-11-22T00:40:00.001-05:002015-11-22T01:11:13.783-05:00I am Monoculture, Destroyer of WorldsThere's an idea going around that "gentrification" imposes a monoculture on the neighborhoods it touches. In a whirlwind of destruction it sweeps away the indigenous diversity that existed since the dawn of time, tearing up unique old buildings, tossing aging deli owners as for away as Florida and scattering younger ones to the Five Towns. In its wake it leaves a sterile landscape of Vertical Suburbs, identical high-rises anchored by chains like 7-Eleven, the Gap and Trader Joe's!

Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Flickr

What's that you say? The old buildings are recent and identical? They're already full of chain stores, clone restaurants and relatively newly arrived inhabitants, selling the same mass-produced stuff? The residents haven't moved out at a higher rate than any other time in the past fifty years? The new businesses aren't chains, and many of them sell handmade and secondhand items?

Well, it's still a monoculture! In a whirlwind of destruction it sweeps away the hopes of immigrants just beginning to put down roots with their first bodegas and Dunkin' Donuts franchises, swamping the old residents with hipsters from Ohio in identically unique flat caps and tattoos who produce a sterile landscape of coffee bars and vintage stores!

The great thing about this argument is that these elements can be combined in infinite ways to fit the situation. Any time there's a change you don't like, just highlight the diversity in the old and the similarity in the new. Bonus if you can sniff out any privilege the new people have over current residents!

Meanwhile, if you look at culture from a place of curiosity and not a place of fear, you find similarities and differences everywhere. Fads, formulas, common suppliers and the desire for a consistent customer experience are indeed forces that promote uniformity, but it is often a superficial uniformity. Uniformity is unsustainable, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures that diversity always wins in the end. The Goths convert to Christianity, but then produce the Reformation. The Romans may have gotten the Iberians to speak Latin, but within a few centuries the Italians can't understand them any more.

When you get people from all over the country, and all over the world, coming together in one city or one neighborhood, of course you get some assimilation. But you also get a lot of continuity. A friend of mine is doing the artisanal hipster food thing, but she's actually using recipes and techniques passed on in her family for generations, knowledge that might have died out if she had taken a nice office job.

Yes, there is displacement, and it's not all good. There's a lot that we should be doing better. But we're not losing our diversity. The encroaching monoculture is a myth, a scary story that people tell their kids at bedtime. We're grown up now, and it's time to face facts. There is no monoculture.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-62358576446639752502015-11-09T00:46:00.000-05:002015-11-09T13:25:44.765-05:00The anti-bus terminalThe Department of City Planning thinks it would be a good idea to have a bus terminal in the new "Flushing West" district that they're planning (PDF). Apparently at one of their outreach sessions people talked to them about "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street" and the "Need for a distinct central bus terminal." So they said they would "Evaluate siting a mixed-use Bus Transit Center (BTC) near northern and southern edges of the rezoning area."

As this map shows, there are twenty MTA bus lines that converge on Flushing, as well as the #7 subway, the Port Washington Branch of the Long Island Rail Road, and private buses to Chinatown and Sunset Park. There are also private buses to various casinos in the region. Of these, the underground 7 train station is the only one that is at all protected from rain or snow. The buses pick up and drop off at a variety of stops along Main Street, 39th Avenue, Roosevelt Avenue, 41st Avenue and 41st Road.

Because the Flushing West district starts at Prince Street, a block west of the western entrance to the Main Street subway station, the proposed bus station could be as close as the corner of Roosevelt and Prince, 225 yards from the subway, or as far away as Northern Boulevard and the river, three quarters of a mile from the subway.

But is there actually even a need for a distinct central bus terminal? It's a good idea to go over the reasons we have them. City Planning gave only one: "Provide relief to bus congestion from curbside layovers in the downtown." But if we think about existing bus terminals like the Port Authority or Newark Penn Station, they provide value in several ways:

One-stop shopping for buses. Right now if you're going to Bay Terrace, you can take either the Q13 or the Q28, which is handy because they leave from roughly the same spot in Flushing. But if you're going to Northern Boulevard in Bayside you'll have to decide ahead of time whether you're taking the Q12 or the Q13, because they leave from stops a block apart.

Easy transfer between buses, and from buses to trains. Right now if you want to change from a northbound Q44 to an eastbound Q13, or from the 7 train to a southbound Q17, you have to walk a couple of blocks on crowded sidewalks.

Short-term bus layovers. Some of the bus routes (like the Q44) pass through Flushing, but most of them terminate there. It makes sense to start and end as many bus driver shifts as possible at transit hubs, because it encourages drivers to commute by transit. Sometimes drivers need a short break between runs, and sometimes they finish a run early. It's important to have enough short-term bus storage to handle those needs.

Long-term bus layovers. Demand is not flat for buses; there are rush hours. It is often more efficient to store buses close to the transit hub in the middle of the day instead of sending them to the depot (a two mile trip) and back.

Avoiding street congestion. One of the biggest time savers for bus riders at the Port Authority is that most of the buses have direct ramps into and out of the Lincoln Tunnel, and don't have to compete with private cars.

Ticketing, shelter, bathrooms, food and shopping for people waiting for buses.

The first thing to ask is what the current arrangement does and doesn't provide. It does not avoid much street congestion or provide for long-term layovers. According to the City Planning powerpoint, the buses stored for short-term layovers get in the way of buses picking up and dropping off passengers. As I detailed above, some of the transfers require walking multiple blocks through dense crowds, and there are a few problems with one-stop shopping. There is very little shelter for people waiting for buses.

On the plus side, transfers from the 7 train to most of the buses are pretty quick and easy. One-stop shopping for the buses that go on Main Street, Kissena Boulevard and Parsons Boulevard works pretty well, and now that bus schedules are available through Google Maps it's even easier to know which bus is scheduled to leave next. There are public bathrooms and Metrocard machines in the subway station. Downtown Flushing's biggest advantage is in terms of food and shopping. If you're transferring in a hurry you can usually pick up a scallion pancake, a Big Mac, a bubble tea or any of a staggering variety of other fast foods and beverages before the next bus leaves. Within a block of the Main Street station there's a Macy's, a Duane Reade and half a dozen Chinese mini-malls.

So what would the proposed bus terminal provide that we don't already have? Shelter and space for short-term layovers, maybe shorten a couple of the transfers and make one-stop shopping a bit easier. Hmmm, maybe that would be worth it if someone else paid for it...

But note that the terminal proposal doesn't do anything to address the biggest obstacle to bus flow: private cars. And it would make the single most important transfer - the transfer from the 7 train to any bus - at least a block long, and potentially much longer. People currently disperse from the corner of Main and Roosevelt in all four directions to board buses using six staircases and two escalators; the proposal would concentrate them all along one route, accessed by one staircase: the one at the northwest corner.

Some people go to Flushing specifically for the restaurants. Others go for specific shopping and cultural anchors, and stop at restaurants on their way. But if you think about it for a minute, it's clear that the dispersed pedestrian flow from the subway to the bus stops is one of the biggest drivers of business at the shops and restaurants in the area.

There are of course other factors at play, but I wonder how much of the affluence and growth of Downtown Flushing relative to other transit hubs like Jamaica and Journal Square can be credited to this layout, where businesses are on the way in a sense that can't be said of the other hubs. How many people would cease to walk by the Quickly+ on Roosevelt if the B12 terminus were moved west of Main Street? Are the Flushing merchants ready to find out?

Sadly, I'm guessing that they are. That first quote from the City Planning powerpoint, "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street," sounds just like the kinds of quotes that Flushing's elites give to papers. No matter how clear the evidence that the vast majority of shoppers arrive by bus or train, both the old white elites and the new Asian elites seem utterly convinced that anyone who matters comes by car.

Despite what livable streets advocates, city planners and the developers themselves wanted, these merchants and politicians insisted on raising the amount of parking in the new Flushing Commons development to an insane level. They fought bitterly a recent attempt to increase bus speeds through the area by dedicating lanes of Main Street to buses (PDF). The new mall south of Roosevelt Avenue comes with a staggering amount of parking.

It would not surprise me at all if it were a merchant or politician who asked for "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street." This is clearly someone who sees the upper-middle-class white and East Asian drivers as the rightful users of Main Street, and the bus riders, many of them black and South Asian, as interlopers who must be banished to the periphery.

This is yet another situation where we have to ask "who's getting out of the way?" The only way that I could see a bus terminal as an improvement is if it (a) directly connected to the subway and (b) bypassed a large amount of car traffic. No long nasty tunnel like the one to the Port Authority; I'm talking about demolishing a big chunk of one of the blocks at the corner of Main and Roosevelt. I'm talking about bus-only underground ramps from further out on Main, Kissena, Parsons and Northern that flow right into the bus bays and layover garage.

Of course, that would be a humongous cost, and if you're going to dig a tunnel you might as well put in an orbital subway connecting Flushing to Jamaica, the airports, Astoria and Upper Manhattan. None of it sounds like it would justify the cost of construction, so let's drop that, at least for a few decades.

What could we do that's cheaper? In 2012 the Department of Transportation considered reconfiguring Main and Union Streets to provide dedicated bus lanes, and rejected those options because they didn't want to slow down private cars and trucks (PDF). If we really want to improve bus service, we could revisit those options. We could also widen the sidewalks on Main Street to make room for bus shelters.

What we should not do under any circumstances is move bus stops away from Main Street and into the Flushing West area. Transit advocates need to be clear: that is not a bus proposal, it's an anti-bus proposal. The staff at City Planning listened to the anti-bus people; now they need to listen to the pro-bus people and kill any effort to put a bus terminal in Flushing West.Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5862444008740250372.post-15033998071878010172015-10-31T01:58:00.000-04:002015-10-31T01:58:04.432-04:00It's time to stop saying "gentrification"Gentrification is a bad word, because it blames the wrong people. Don't talk about "gentrification" or "gentrifiers." Talk about what the problem actually is: high rents, high prices, displaced residents, displaced businesses, losing old buildings, ugly new buildings, or not enough trains, buses, classrooms or parks.

Everyone knows that gentrification is the biggest problem facing our cities, and that it's the fault of the hipsters and techbros and greedy developers. The rents and prices jump sky-high, displacing poor people and small businesses. Historic structures are torn down and replaced with out-of-scale apartments. This strains the already burdened infrastructure serving the neighborhood, resulting in crowded buses, schools and parks. Everyone knows that, but everyone is wrong.

It is true that the rent is too damn high in some neighborhoods, and prices are pretty high too. Some people are getting priced out of neighborhoods where they've lived. Some good-looking old buildings get torn down, and some ugly new buildings get built. The government isn't always quick to increase transit, school or park capacity to meet demand.

What is not true is that these high rents, high prices, displacements, ugly buildings and strained infrastructure are somehow caused by hipsters (whatever they are), techbros, or greedy developers (or even non-greedy developers). In fact, we know the cause: we've turned our suburbs, small cities and countryside into hellish car-scapes, and severely limited the growth of places where you can get around on foot or by train. People try to move to those places anyway, driving up the rents and prices. Developers respond to that by building where they can.

The solution is to stop subsidizing car-oriented development and legalize more walkable, transit-oriented development. It has nothing to do with developers, hipsters or techbros. They are the symptom that will go away when the disease is cured.

The word "gentrification" automatically places the blame on the "gentrifiers." There is no way to hear the word without assigning the blame to them. If you know that they are not to blame, you have to make your mind do extra work to remove the blame from them each time you use the word. The people who hear you will not always do that work.

That's why I've stopped using the word "gentrification." Maybe you haven't noticed, but it's been absent from my blog and Twitter feed for over a year, except when I'm challenging the concept. But I still hear a lot of my friends and comrades-in-arms using it, even the ones who should know better.

So please, don't say "gentrification" unless you're attacking the concept. Think about what your focus really is - high rents, high prices, displaced residents, displaced businesses, losing old buildings, ugly new buildings, or not enough trains, buses, classrooms or parks. And then say that. And tell your friends!
Capn Transithttps://firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
January 12, 2015Next week, President Obama is scheduled to deliver his sixth State of the Union address. But this week, the president is giving the nation a sneak preview into some of the priorities he plans to share [...][Posted in ITI]
December 18, 2014From 1935 - 1997 there were only 11 "Lame Duck" congressional sessions. Once a rarity, they are now commonplace and have occurred in every congress since 1998. As the frequency of these sessions have [...][Posted in ITI]
December 16, 2014WASHINGTON – The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), the global voice for the tech sector representing 60 of the world's leading technology companies, issued the following statement from President [...][Posted in ITI]
December 11, 2014WASHINGTON – Today, the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), the global voice of the tech sector, as well as the Information Technology Alliance for Public Sector (ITAPS), the public sector division [...][Posted in ITI]
December 09, 2014The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) submitted comments yesterday to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA)'s Request for Comment on Automotive Electronic Control [...][Posted in ITI]

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Tournament 620-4007 24" 6-Arm Umb Rig 12 Silver Stkbts #4 Maja White
Price: $119.95
TD Code
|Umbrella Rig
|Bunker Spoon
|24in 6-Arm Reversible Umbrella Rig with 12 Silver/Silver 3D Stickbaits
|#4 Tony Maja Bunker Spoon - White
Tournament Cable has partnered with Tony Maja to bring you the finest in Striped Bass/Rockfish tackle. These two East Coast Giants have put their heads together, combining spoons and umbrellas with innovation and technology, once again raising the bar on quality and angling efficiency. The umbrella rig with the bunker spoon is a deadly combo, but don't just take their word for it. Go try the rigs out for yourself.
Overall Rating for Tournament 620-4007 24" 6-Arm Umb Rig 12 Silver Stkbts #4 Maja White
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11 Baby Animals Who Fell Asleep At 'Lincoln'
A lot of people enjoyed Lincoln over Thanksgiving weekend. These li'l cuties were not among them.
1. This mouse rolled his li'l mouse eyes every time a lonely trumpet sounded.
Via 61p.net
2. This chipmunk knew he was in trouble right from the start, when the movie's idea of an attention-grabbing opening scene was having a bunch of random guys recite the Gettysburg Address.
3. If these leopards had wanted to look at a diorama, they would've made one themselves.
Via acuteaday.com
4. This puppy thought there were going to be vampires.
Via cutestuff.co
"Abraham Lincoln: Amendment Passer"? No thanks.
5. This bear cub tunes out when he feels like he's being lectured.
Via tppc.tv
6. This kitten has never seen a stiffer, more lifeless movie. Seriously, it was like reading a history textbook.
7. This hedgehog felt bad because America, but she just couldn't.
Via acuteaday.com
8. This chimpanzee found the endless parade of name actors playing historical figures to be tedious.
Oh look. It's James Spader. Yawn.
9. This squirrel KNEW he should've seen 'Skyfall' instead.
10. These red pandas appreciated the artistry of Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of Lincoln, but felt that the filmmakers' reverent attitude toward their subject matter gave him very little room to work with.
11. And this duckling was just sleepy.
Via tehcute.com
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In The News Today
- Donald Trump's supporters think his comments about Miss Universe are no big deal.
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- Asos workers at the heart of its global retail empire say they're being treated like machines to deliver fast fashion.


text:
Mrs. Brown's Boys (IRL)
451 Fans
Mrs. Brown's Boys is a sitcom created by and starring Irish writer-performer Brendan O'Carroll. The programme is a co-production between BBC Comedy and BocPix in association with RTÉ. Mrs. Brown's Boys began broadcast in Ireland on RTÉ One starting January 1st, 2011 and finished on 5th February, 2011. It begins in the UK on BBC One on February 17th, 2011 at 9.30pm.
Played by:
Character Bio
[ul][li]Brendan O'Carroll as Agnes Brown[/li][/ul] A loud, foul-mouthed Irish matriarch who is always looking out for her family after the death of her husband Redser. Agnes is a very nosy woman, who is very interested in other people's lives. Agnes works at a fruit and veg stall at Dublin market. She takes great pleasure in making a fool of her neighbour and best friend Winnie, and her father-in-law
Episode Screenshots
Agnes Brown Quotes
|Season 3 / Episode 2: - Mammy's Inflation
Rory Brown: Danger is my middle name.
Dino Doyle: Bond. James Bond!
Agnes Brown: Off. Fuck off!
|Season 2 / Episode 6: - New Mammy
Agnes Brown: [answering the phone] Hello? [pause] Kieron? Here, it's for you. [hands the phone to the show's cameraman]
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Grateful Dead
Hey Now:
(oops, I just posted this same message on "tix wanted"... I really have 2 tix for sale!)
I mail ordered for Shoreline, Sunday, 5-10-09, for my honey & me & our friends. Friends got their own tix, so I have 2 extra GA (Lawn) to sell. Face + M.O. + Mailing ++ = $46/ticket
Please leave message for me ASAP @ 661-946-3205, 831-917-2796 or firstname.lastname@example.com
2 more souls should be dancin' on the grass!
ej ramblin
need 4 tix to Izod either show only have $100 to spend for all 4
Single ticket available for Izod Center Wednesday 4/29. Section 119.
Please email me at minshky at aol dot com
Hi i live in yakima and am desperately looking for tickets, wonderinf if we can make a trade or sumthin
I probably should have said in my earlier post that tonight is 4/28....and my email address is email@example.com
I have up to 10 extra tickets on the floor to tonights Dead show in the Meadowlands, NJ. Face Value is $98. Hoping to get Face if possible. I can meet you in the parking lot this afternoon with the tickets. Thanks!
I have 2 tix for Philly Sat May 2nd. Face was 95 each. I'm in a pinch and can't make it. I'll let them go for 150. I have paypal and can ship over night, or a buddy can meet you there to exchange. Mike 513-706-3771, firstname.lastname@example.com
I have a great seat Tuesday - Section 109 Row 1 - to trade for a decent seat on Wednesday.
I am located in NYC / NJ.
Email to firstname.lastname@example.com if interested.
CHICAGO 5/5 SEC 110 row G (on the 110/111 split) GOOD SEAT FOR FACE
I have a pair of tickets for the Sat May 2nd show in Philly. face value is $95 each, I will let go at $150 for the pair. Section 309A.