Our Old Towns

I put the boat into Miller Park today to spend time on the Sacramento river. Nice way to keep cool on this near record hot day. We took advantage of the subsidized parking at the Old Sacramento public dock and ate lunch at Hot & Spicy, blowing one bill and pumping cash back into the local economy at a local eatery.



This part of Sacramento is very nearly the only part in the whole county that is designed in a traditional urban layout. What is it about this that attracts me, vs. Old Town Elk Grove:



First and foremost, the lack of enclosure in Old Town Elk Grove. And by that I mean buildings that form an enclosure around me, the pedestrian. I wouldn't have much business to conduct with second or third story tenants but that isn't my point; my point is, I feel more comfortable in an enclosed outdoor setting. Elk Grove feels rather like walking across a soccer field to the next business, and without a population density that puts people on the street, that soccer field is empty.

There is no way these newly planted trees are going to compensate for that lack of enclosure because these trees were planted haphazardly -- there is no uniformity, no formality, no likelihood of them overarching the future street forming a canopy. Elk Grove is a hundred degrees five months out of the year! Old SACTOWN doesn't employ many trees, either, but their pedestrians are sheltered from the elements. Even on a scorching day you don't feel like you're trying to cross the Venusian equator. The buildings themselves provide that enclosure. There is a continuity to the buildings while each is unique. That's the problem with Elk Grove -- our building codes say everything about what you can't build but give no guidance on what ought to be built; hence, a hodgepodge of styles and sizes and parking lots in between sections and overall disharmony...even though Old Elk Grove is designated a Special Planning Area! The code offers guidelines for what to do, but yet? Doesn't that make you wonder about the planning area in which you live? It ain't special, that's for damn sure.

I also think that Elk Grove Blvd., with its 5,000 daily thru commuters, doesn't help things. But compare this to Livermore's 1st street -- even though that thing is brutalized by thru commuters taking the shortcut from Tracy to Freemont, there remains a degree of livelihood on its margins. Parallel parking provides pedestrians a physical buffer from traffic and there is a substantial volume of parking on the street (although as you're endlessly circling around looking for one on a Friday night you wouldn't think that). It not only offers a place to park but the sheer volume of parked cars slows down all those irritable thru commuters. A thousand slant parking spots means there are a thousand potential cars pulling out and drivers have no choice but to slow down. Old Sacramento is not on an expressway, not on a thoroughfare, and not on a commuter freeway. Speeding to get to the dry cleaners before closing time doesn't happen there but it happens all the time on Elk Grove Blvd., and with a city mandate to ensure that the comfort and ease of vehicular transport trumps everything else, well...I'm not thinking, living, and shopping Elk Grove...

Ninety Degrees

To get to my bus stop I have to pedestrinate across my street corner:

This is an action very, very few people ever endeavor to take, and for good reason -- it's a death march. No one crosses in this direction, and as a consequence the neighborhood is gutted in two. Truthfully, there is not one neighborhood. The people living over there might as well live fifteen miles away; they aren't my neighbors. It's two neighborhoods separated by a wall of speeding cars.

I live on this suburban corner that's brutalized by traffic; not from the volume, necessarily, but from the speed. Take note of my corner's radius -- instead of it being at a pedestrian friendly right angle, the wide radius encourages cars to take the turn at high speed. Tell me -- why is it at all necessary for Elk Grove to build street corners like this? What purpose could it possibly serve other than to place all its inhabitants at risk? And I do mean all -- the driver who now feels comfortable taking the turn at 31 mph who might lose control in the turn; the bicyclist who now has to take the lane to stop the driver from attempting to cut her off while taking the turn at 31 mph; the child who's crossing to walk to school, crossing a corner now twice as long facing cars moving twice as fast; the mother walking her dog; everyone is put into harm's way...but we build these fucking things nonetheless.

Suppose for a minute that the corner concrete met at ninety degrees. Everyone would immediately become safer. The only drawback would be that cars would have to slow down to negotiate the turn. Apparently, this is too big a drawback to allow. To impede speed is treasonous in our auto dependent city.

Perhaps the Elk Grove traffic manual outlaws 90 degree curbs, outlawed because a fire truck's response time would be lengthened as the fire truck would also have to slow down to negotiate the turn. This might impose an unacceptable fire safety risk. To address that risk I offer only one incredibly obvious observation -- how many fire truck and ambulance calls are made to traffic accidents relative to fires, huh? 17:1? 60:1? More? Less? The actual number doesn't matter; what matters is that life safety is reduced as a consequence of us building residential neighborhoods resembling NASCAR ovals. Firemen spend a fair chunk of their careers responding to traffic accidents, and it would be beyond irony if the same fire department enables these accidents in the name of response times or truck maneuvering. At least their response times to traffic accidents are "satisfactory."

Every day I ride the bus home I get to stand on that adjacent corner by the fence waiting to cross the street, and the curvilinear street makes it impossible, impossible, to cross the street with any sense of safety. I risk death by anyone driving 30 mph over the posted speed, which happens all the fucking time. The only way to ensure I live to see the other side is to listen for a speeding car on Frye Creek.

And two decades from now, when I'm 60 years old, deaf from thrash metal, crossing my street for the last time on my retirement day, and all our cars, trucks, motorcycles, ice cream trucks, scooters and tractor trailers are battery powered and silent, some dumbass "neighbor" of mine driving his Oldsmobile Ohm thirty miles over the limit will run me over.

Strikes!

Peter Calthorpe, the "renown" San Francisco architect, built Laguna West as a Transit Oriented Development project in the early 1990's. The whole point was a human scaled, mixed use development within walking distance of quality transit. Following a few scornful letters to the editor I wrote to the Sacramento Bee regarding the project and Elk Grove in general, the Great Tsakopoulos opined in a later piece that he helped develop "the first walkable community built in the U.S. since WWII."

On the whole, the project is a total fucking failure.

15 miles south of Sacramento, it's indeed walkable. Walkable to Nowhere. You can walk to the Laguna Interstate 5 interchange if you want, only to be handcuffed by the CHP if you pedestrianate down the freeway. Laguna Blvd. itself is a Great 6-Lane Divider, dividing the residences to the south to the supposed job centers to the north, making walking across it to your job a wholly dissatisfying experience and one fraught with danger, so I've not ever seen one resident do it. The Laguna interchange regularly hosts thirty six thousand vehicles per day, filled with chronically speeding housewives late in dropping off their kids and inattentive husbands commuting to Sacramento to work. Light rail plans have long since been scrubbed -- the community will never, ever see any train service whatsoever. The whole of their residents commute to Sacramento and the Bay Area. As my bus commute takes my through the famed Laguna West, I've only ever seen a handful of people drive their cars near the bus stop and walk to board the bus; this is the extent of "the first walkable community built since WWII." What a total crock of shit.

Regarding the job development on the north side of Laguna: well, I admittedly stand in awe at the potential this had, but I am totally underwhelmed by what actually did get built. Tsakopoulos and Phil Angelides both lured Apple and JVC (among others) into the development and for years we actually had some manufacturing in the city! Elk Grovians actually built stuff rather than just consumed it!

But wouldn't you know it, JVC pulled out a while ago. Another out-of-town corporation with absolutely no loyalty to the locality decided (for whatever goddamn reason they chose) to pull up stakes and bail. They used to produce 3 million CDs and DVDs per month and employ just north of 100 people; today, those 100+ manufacturing jobs [likely] reside in Cambodia whilst it's the same Americans who are consuming those CDs and DVDs.

JVC also, presumably, paid development impact fees to site the facility there; fees to provide sewer, water, natural gas, police and fire service, roads, what have you.

Cut to the present. 2008 sees the reincarnation of their old manufacturing facility into Strikes! Bowling. Actually, it's called the Strikes Family Entertainment Center. So instead of 100 decently paid manufacturing jobs, now we get one multi-millionaire developer, one multi-millionaire owner, and scores of wage slave attendants and fast-food servers earning far less than required to buy even the most decrepit Elk Grovian piece of shit starter home...and certainly nowhere near any capability to buy in the more expensive Laguna West "development." All these wage slaves commute in by their own private motorized vehicles from elsewheres. So much for "walkable."

And now! The City of Elk Grove has announced to the Strikes! owner that he's on the hook for $536,000 in developer impact fees...the owner who had no idea this was coming (supposedly). Mayor Hume says it's "just been a communication breakdown between parties...but you still owe us a half million dollars, please."

The owner and developer "assumed" that JVC paid that shit two decades ago. Nope, the city and mayor want their own slice of our growing retail/service sector pie.

I have been to Strikes!, once, and not likely ever again --the beer prices are completely fucking outrageous...and these prices don't even reflect the "impact fees" supposedly still due. I would say primarily I do not enjoy Warehouse Entertainment. Several hundred patrons stuffed into a big-box venue surrounded by five acres of parked cars. Poor, poor Strikes! may have to close up shop because of these fees, according to our Elk Grove Citizen. Of course, the city, while demanding hundreds of thousands in fees, won't possibly allow it to close simply because the city has no other jobs other than bowling alley attendants. They think that keeping all these low paid jobs in the city will keep millions in payroll tax receipts rolling into their coffers, so they won't let it fail.

Personally, I see the total need for Elk Grove to double dip, to charge Strikes! for development impact fees -- primarily because they don't have jobs that are worth a shit, jobs whose payroll taxes will pay back all that road upkeep their South Sacramento employees use, jobs that will pay back the scores of police service calls, jobs that will pay back all the local vandalism and mayhem those South Sacramento employee's friends bring. All those employees aren't buying new cars at the Elk Grove Auto Mall either..can't afford them...they're driving Sacramento County Paul Blanco beaters. Perhaps the owner and the developer are buying new cars, but they won't bother buying any of that suburban housewife shit offered by our Auto Mall. A Honda Odyssey? Please.

Charge away, my fair city.

SACTOWN 2020

Sacramento City planners and supervisors are really digging WalMart's new digs at the old Florin Mall. What a breath of fresh air this new store brings to the community!

One hundred and ninety one thousand square feet of retail heaven, tremendous tax revenues, and three hundred more jobs than their abandoned store a mile away (a total of six hundred now work there). Bustling, vibrant parking lots; bustling, vibrant satellite retailers like Sleep Train mattresses, a store that reported to get about five additional passers-in now that the WalMart has opened. Not just drivers-by.

So we've created three hundred new jobs. Is that wonderful news? Let me take a guess on the average hourly rate for all three hundred...$13 an hour?

$28k per year, assuming this is a full time worker which probably doesn't apply to a quarter of these employees. I hold no contempt for anyone's wage, I never have, but I do stop to consider that in a better economic clime these workers probably have a 25% turnover rate, implying that they don't give a shit about their jobs, only their paychecks. There is little dignity as a sales associate. "It's a job, man." And with the median home price in South Sacramento at $102,500, that's about 3X annual wage which, in my opinion, is too large a spread.

Now, there's no one who would expect a sales associate to pull down enough to become a homeowner, so I realize this is a straw man I'm burning...but stop to consider that this employee is also forced to own a vehicle to get to work...do you think an overnight stocker can take a bus at 10:30 PM to work? Can take a 5:00AM bus home? Hell no...because we don't have a sufficient level of transit service in this city. What, he's gonna ride a bike? And park it where? His motorized vehicular costs will probably eat a quarter of his income -- especially in South Sacramento where a $2000 car is required to have $1500 rims and a $2200 thumpin' audio system.

OK, enough of this. I think the far more important issue about this new super WalMart, an issue that is totally and completely ignored by everyone, is the big box shell WalMart vacated less than a mile away at Franklin and Florin. The original site is now a ghostbox. The building now sits derelict and silent on an ocean of unused asphalt. There are no windows on this warehouse sized building -- it can't be used for much of anything else other than more discounted mass retail -- and with SuperWalMart a mile away, who's going to occupy it? Huh? Besides, I would bet my next paycheck that WalMart's lease on that ghostbox forbids competitors from moving in, or that they've cut a deal with our city leadership that in exchange for building the new site we've given them exclusive market share by preventing any other retailer from taking over the old big box shell. This is your precious free market at work, folks.

Perhaps it'll become another fucking church, like we don't have enough old supermarkets and roller rinks already converted around here.

Perhaps it'll become an indoor go-kart track. Wa-hey! More jobs! Hundreds of six figure jobs! Go-kart attendants, go-kart mechanics...and it'll feed off South Sacramentan lust for all things NASCAR: unbridled speed, promotion of street racing, beautiful twill racing attire, etc. Put in a climbing wall and a laser-tag game area and you'll be set for the next wave of economic recovery when South Sacramentans cash-out re-fi their houses and spend it at the raceway. Even sheriff's are getting into the street racing game...at least this well-liked idiot killed no one but himself.

Perhaps it'll become an indoor waterpark, filled with scores of six figure jobs attending to all those fat, overweight, pasty-skinned, out of shape South Sacramento residents who can't haul up the rubber raft to the top or who'll get stuck in the tubes.

In Austin, MN, they've converted a vacant WalMart into the Spam Museum. Hmmmm....what kinda museum would we create? Perhaps The Museum of Broken Dreams. A museum of beautiful and lasting architecture...filled with relics and art prints of buildings that used to be worth a shit. Buildings that used to get built but aren't anymore, that are illegal to build anymore...

A 24-hour fitness center! Wa-hey again! We don't have enough gyms in South Sacramento, for sure...yes...that's why the obesity rates are over 35%. There's enough space for an indoor track, so people can run even when it's raining outside or 108 degrees, and also because we can't run around our own fucking town without having to compete with motorists. There isn't a single, not one, area in all of South Sacramento where runners can run without the constant threat of being mowed down by a motorized vehicle.

Perhaps a velodrome! Yes! This would also help South Sacramento's chances when we bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics. SACTOWN 2020. This would elevate our international standing, put our city on the map...SACTOWN 2020. I will petition to become a delegate, schmooze with the National Olympic Committee in all corners of the globe. SACTOWN 2020.

Low income housing! Better yet, how about an indoor tent-city? That way, we wouldn't legally be required to air-condition it, just install a really big fan on the roof.

Yes, I think there are endless endless! possibilities here. I should consider this ghostbox store an opportunity instead of just blight.

Edit 7-21-09: Just learned that BJs Fish and Chips, which is located in the Southgate Plaza more or less next to the vacant WalMart store, is now going out of business after 40 years. While the sleeptrain near the new WalMart supercenter gains customers, the ancillary businesses near the old dead WalMart are dying. Don't read about that in the Sacramento Business Journal, do you? They are creaming their shorts about the new superWalMart and the shitloads of tax revenues but they don't give a flying fuck about what damage a vacant big box brings to the old "plaza."

My guess is that the whole of Southgate Plaza will stay derelict for years. Years! Then, at some point, the whole damn thing will come down and a new Hong Kong Plaza or Vietnamese bazaar will emerge. It's only too bad that it takes a dozen years and the complete destruction of the area to force the change. The bad news is that it will be the same goddamn single use, single floor,retail model -- only Saigon style.

Thank Hitler

Western Germany is today well connected, in part, due to the efforts Hitler made to transport Ruhr valley war materials to the battlefront. Praise is due this man, yes.

It might seem callous, but hey, I'm just calling it like I see it. I know of no other region of the world that is better and more efficient in the movement of humans today, thanks to earlier efforts to more efficiently kill humans yesterday.



This is a typical view out of any main station. This one is just a small one in the city of Gelsenkirchen -- three tracks supply trains that run into and out of this city every ten minutes or so. Some are express trains, others stop at all stations, and all provide a stunning level of service. Indeed, for the entire week and a half, of all the trains I traveled on, not a single train was off by more than sixty seconds from schedule.

Then, when you're traveling within the city, you have access to an unprecedented level of surface trains and busses:



Now, realize that this city is about the size of my Elk Grove. Three intercity trains...seventy eight bus routes -- compared to Elk Grove which after nineteen years of unmitigated suburbal sprawl is still looking at another nine years to get a single fucking light rail train station. Elk Grove has thirty one bus routes, with half of them express commuter busses that only run weekday mornings and evenings. Less than half as many for a city as big with a quarter the level of service.

The truth is, Elk Grove public transportation can never, never! work. Never. Its low density is insufficient to make any service profitable for competing providers, nor self-supporting for governmental providers. Elk Grove has utterly failed to develop regionally or self sufficiently, so that surface streets, collector roads and freeways are all choke-a-block with traffic...the consequence of which would lead to intense resistance to either convert or sever any roadway to make room for rail. Or it leads to intense costs to shoehorn in rails and stations on top of an existing suburban automotive dominated fabric.

And all on top of a nation that subsidizes gasoline so heavily that car ownership becomes compulsive and mandatory. Why does California not build and maintain roads without federal matching funds? Because without federal tax dollars funding roadworks instead of gasoline taxes, and without state general funding instead of gasoline taxes, California wouldn't have enough money on its own. We end up with a perverted payment system where people end up paying for it indirectly. But so little is ever allocated to rail, bus, or alternatives such as multi-use trails.

Wishing for a transportation system like that in Germany for my little Elk Grovian burg is a fucking pipe dream, and I know this. It's a futile effort to even blog about it, mostly. But I do, because I like to comment on the sad state of our affairs, our environment, our culture...I like to comment on how wretched things are...not as they ever will be.

ADT

Here's another classic example of how my Elk Grove has done things completely wrong (actually, every city in America for that matter). After spending the last eighteen years doing everything it could to fuck up its historic town center, to intentionally destroy it, Elk Grove is priming itself to "revitalize its core."

Old Town is right on Elk Grove Blvd., an east-west street dating back to the 1860's, and this road (dirt at first, then a two lane for many, many years) was more than enough to service the town core. Elk Grove was always something of a very small city, but (wouldn't you know it) people a century ago decided that a human scaled, walkable, tree-lined, compact community would provide for most everyday needs for its residents who lived both on the main street as well as close adjacent streets.

For over a full century, there was never a need for "redevelopment," or "revitalization." The city core organically adjusted to the new conditions of living during the earlier decades of this century.

Today, within a span of less than twenty years, we are shuttling 22 thousand cars per day (ADT, or average daily traffic) through the intersection of Elk Grove Blvd. and Elk Grove Florin Rd, a half mile west of the Old Town. To preserve the core "character," Elk Grove Blvd. became a zipper street, necking down from a four lane 'freeway' to a two lane 'expressway' straight through the heart of the town core, slicing it in half with commuter traffic from Highway 99 to the 8,000+ housal units (we'll call this development) to the east. The city has no intention of stopping further development to the east...although our "tough economic times" has sorta squashed any recent growth. Once Elk Grove is back to 15% growth and 20% annual housal unit price increases then Elk Grove will expect (and rightfully deserve) suburban sprawl all the way from Old Town to the Consumnes river, with all these new "happy" citizens gleefully commuting through Old Town to get to the freeway and to all those jobs elsewhere in other cities. They represent all the future potential spenders in the core.

Having already spent north of $6 million to "revitalize" the core with sidewalks and vehicular amenities that (wouldn't you know it, it made traffic worse!) was a complete failure, businesses are dead and dying. And guess what all the council members, business owners, and historic preservationists are suggesting as the "antidote" to this fucking fiasco?

A Parking Structure!

Wa-hey! That will cure it!

Strip retail success in our great, grand America is predicated on one thing, and one thing only: ADT. The only bit of information any developer needs is "how many cars will drive by, because that defines the pool of potential 'hits.'" Hmmmm....somehow, eight thousand vehicles a day commuting through Old Town, somehow, hasn't managed to spur Old Town spending. So let's build vertical parking and lure those citizens consumers in. And make it free! Yes! Free parking, subsidized by all of Elk Grove.

"Some type of parking structure [is] vital, vital for the area." -- Elk Grove Mayor Pat Hume

You know, my fair city is going to spend hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, studying, planning, examining, reviewing, and recommending options that won't do, that can't do, anything to rectify decades of bad civic design. The only thing that works is correct urban design from the beginning or correct infill afterwards. Unfortunately, with suburban sprawl proponents funding 87% of our elected officials' coffers and re-election campaigns, Elk Grove will never be in the business of doing things correctly. It can never recommend solutions that work for an old city core atop a framework of car dependency and single use zoning.

Why do you suppose nearly every original city core in America also needs "revitalization?" If our suburban sprawl model is so fucking superior, then why is anyone concerned with "preserving" these cores? Why don't we just raze them all down, all of 'em, and erect more efficient large format retail and acres of parking to shuttle in all our superior citizens consumers?

Old Town Elk Grove is doomed to fail.

Voltaire

As I'm nearing the end of my mortgage, I'm planning ahead what to do with a $2400 per month surplus.

I'm not into American-style consumption anymore. Don't need an HDTV, Durango, Stainless Barbecue, 25" computer monitor, X-box 360, Vulcan stove, satellite TV, newer furniture, car stereo, DVD burner, or a garage full of power tools I buy but won't use, only to show up the neighbors.

You know what I'd like? A charming house.



This would cost me an arm and a leg here in Sacramento, however. Unfortunately so, because no one can build one here anymore, for it's illegal. Note that this house doesn't have 2/3rd's of its facade sporting a blank 3-car garage door. Without a frontal garage, shit! How would Americans park their mandatory 2.3 vehicles? All of our American cities think this exact same way, so they outlaw the alley (can't get those big fucking fire trucks down 'em), enforce 45-foot wide street widths, and won't approve subdivisions without sufficient parking in garages in the front.

The only way to buy a Craftsman Bungalow here is to buy one in the most expensive areas, because that's the only place where they were allowed to be built in the 1920's and 30's.

Does anyone, anyone in this fading Republic, have any idea what sorts of prices a new subdivision of small bungalows would command? If they could build them with alleyways so trash cans, vehicles, and underground utilities can hide? If they would provide sidewalks ending at T-intersections, with formally planted Red Oaks lining them and sufficient space for parallel vehicular parking? With corner groceries?

I just can't believe that all of you, every one of you, think that by building the exact same cookie-cutter tract-home subdivision in Dayton or Fayetteville, with no character, no charm, no vibrancy, that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." I am positive that almost all of us yearn for something different, something better, but instead we accept shitty architectural abortions in unsustainable, energy-squandering suburbia because we don't know anything else.

If we don't accept Elk Grovian style suburbia, we accept the northern Colorado model: build a 3,700 sq ft abominable piece of shit as a totem of success in the middle of a 3/4 acre spread, land that's now unfit for anything else other than displaying nostalgic farm implements, pink plastic flamingos, garden gnomes, or propping up comedic full-sized plywood cutouts of a woman bending over weeding, exposing her polka-dot ass crack, or the leaning cowboy, or kissing Dutch children, or a small child peeing in the bushes.


Then aside from these ignoble assaults on our dignity, a four car garage is built fronting the roadway, to house all those motorized accessories required for life twenty four miles away from everywhere and everyone.

Citizen Consumer

Watching the evening news the other day, I was amazed at how many times we were referred to as consumers.

We are nothing but.

We are no longer citizens. No longer organized for any purpose other than to consume and to mature private enterprise. And the nature of that private enterprise, over the last thirty years, has resulted in the wholesale destruction of community.

In this regard, Loveland, CO and Elk Grove, CA are not all that different. Both cities were developed in the late 19th century more or less as stops on major transportation routes. Both probably looked very similar in the early part of last century -- small, close knit populations, a dense town core, vibrant activity, walkable districts. Agriculture was dominant in all directions out from the center. They had true rural and urban demarcations.

We then decided, just a few decades back, that economies of scale were more important. We wanted the ownership and use of produced goods but we didn't want to pay American wages to make them. We soon determined that the regional glass factory (that made durable, long lasting products, by the way) couldn't compete with the quantities coming from overseas glass manufacturers who had less environmental oversight and a seemingly infinite supply of low wage workers. From glass to toasters, to ball bearings, sour cherries, hair dryers, food processing equipment and textiles -- all have been shipped out. We happily, cheerfully, and gleefully threw parades for the opening of the new K-mart on the fringes of the existing city. After all, these outlets concentrated these foreign manufactured goods into one stop shopping emporiums...and the prices! Man! So much better than the Podunk retail outlet back in the city center.

Nevermind the fact that an American made toaster would last twenty five years if cared for, compared to four or five with a cheap Chinese made piece of shit...but no matter. The price we pay now is the price that counts, period. No matter if we have to buy 4 over those twenty five years...with blinkers on Americans don't care anymore about the future -- only now.

Yep. We opened the K-mart on the edge of town, the first wave of large format retail. This has only been expanded with WalMart, Target, Old Navy, Bed Bath & Beyond, et al. Their ability to buy thirty seven thousand cheaply made toasters at a crack from a factory in Shenzhen, and that all of us only give a shit about cheaply priced goods, well, that's where we went. The Loveland and Elk Grove town centers turned into decrepit wastelands.

City council members then sat and tried to figure out how to "revitalize" their historic districts, after already having approved the widening of Elk Grove Boulevard into a four lane, cross town expressway that utterly destroyed the character of the original city. Loveland threw money to prop up local businesses in the core, now competing with all the big box shit they approved along the 34 towards I-25.

Today, one walks through Old Towne Elk Grove while dodging tens of thousands of thru-commuters. The city core has been completely destroyed. New setback codes require any new businesses to locate on a half acre lot with a frontal moat of parking, and now things are so spread out that everyone is forced to travel by automobile to buy a pack of cigarettes or get a spare key made. Sheldon High School was placed at the edge of town on a two lane rural road where no one in their right fucking mind would allow their kids to walk or ride with no sidewalks or bike lanes. The road has since been "upgraded." It's now a four lane expressway.

We built to encourage consumption, not citizenship.

We are citizen consumers.

A Tale of Two Cities

I rode the bike today to work, the day after Christmas, under a 34 degree cold front (cold for Northern CA). Not too many folks will ride a bike with gas at a buck fifty, let alone ride when you can see your breath. "What is that dolt doing?" they ask, as they motor around him in their heated vehicles. "Thank God I'm not as poor as that schlub."

As I ride up Franklin towards East Sacramento, where I work at SMUD, I've noticed how much better the roads are as I get closer. This is the pedestrian crossing at 59th and Broadway, about .6 miles from SMUD:



Last spring, road construction crews ripped out two inches of existing asphalt and installed a whole new, quiet, rubberized open grade asphalt along the entire length of 59th. They also bricked this crosswalk across Broadway. Where I'm standing while taking this picture is the north entrance to Curtis Park. Smaller, older homes in Curtis Park command many tens of thousands of dollars more than newer, bigger homes in Elk Grove precisely because of the park (embedded in the neighborhood and accessible by foot, not only by car), of their arrangements (walkable & engaging), of their architectural character (where 2/3rds of the facades aren't swallowed up by blank garage doors). Not just because they are located in East Sacramento.

So...as I rode the bike home today down Franklin Blvd., I passed the new signaled intersection of Franklin and Turnbridge, where road construction crews recently performed a state/federal tax funded road beautification project. Look at this mess:

If you click on the photo, you'll notice that this ain't brick. It's a simulated brick paint job on top of a chip-sealed surface that was deteriorated to begin with. In a few years this chip seal is going to slough off, the cracked bottom road bed will become re-exposed and this whole intersection will fall apart. They stopped the chip seal just south of this intersection, too. Just couldn't seal it all the way to Florin. Nope. That old section of road will always be even worse than this 'new' road.

Tell me...on this road, across this intersection...who is going to push that walk button, huh? Who? You? Who is going to walk that one and a quarter miles from this intersection to Florin Rd, or to anything of interest? You? Yeah, right. I've not seen a single person hoofing it across this intersection in the past nine months.

The city, however, also knows this. They assume any pedestrian here in South Sacramento is a fucking moron who wouldn't know the difference between a brick walkway and a faux brick asphalt strip. It's the only possible explanation why city-core neighborhoods get "real" roadways, new quiet asphalt surfaces, and brick walks while the fringe neighborhoods get painted bricks and thinly sprayed hydrocarbon sealers. It's just one more little example of how and why I believe that suburban neighborhoods are always destined to become slums.

This is not an intersection worth caring about, and it shows. Pedestrians don't care about it (why there aren't any), the city doesn't care about it (why it gets thermo-plastic paint bricks), and drivers don't care about it (why they travel 75 mph past it).

At The Gates

This new development is just over one mile north of my house on Franklin Blvd:



It's beautiful, no? Again we have flag waving...more developer's semaphore for "we are special." But they also fly The American Flag. No one would dare criticize this place because The American Flag Is Flown Here.

Except for your Monologueonian.

First of all, are there four units in this photo, or only three? What exactly is that out-of-scale narrow unit? In any event, a full seven eights of the first unit's frontal facade is the blank garage door, so to embellish it they added four-square windows to the garage door. An illusion. An illusion as they are unusable. The garage windows are so high that no one will ever be able to look out of them. There are no other windows at ground level, which in earlier times was an integral feature to the street-feel of a neighborhood, when windows were proportioned taller than wide, to 'frame' a human standing in them. The opposite proportioning is true today. More importantly, windows provide security for the street because humans might appear in them at random. Nope. There's no expectation that anyone will be outside unless housed in a motor vehicle, so there's no longer any need for them.

We also have fake white window planter boxes mounted underneath the upstairs' small bathroom/bedroom windows. Another illusion; a begging for a return to old architecture when window planter boxes were actually built and held dill, sage, or basil.

I suppose, however, the most egregious thing this developer did was to erect a big blank stone wall around the whole of this 'community.' One could argue it's a sound wall against all the Elk Grovian thru-commuters, but the upstairs bedrooms would hardly be shielded unless the wall were thirty feet high. No. This wall's purpose is to segregate this society by income, because what you can't see in this photo is that this walled community is surrounded by twenty year old second-suburban-tiered South Sacramento sprawl that is already turning to liquid shit. It's an effective way to suggest that "if you lived within our walls and gates, you can consider yourself more successful that those chowderheads outside."

This is a fundamental problem with sprawl: not only the zoning of land by activity but the indirect zoning by income. Say I buy an Elk Grovian starter home, and as I live there for several years, I (perhaps) engage neighbors, develop friendships...I become part of a community. But to move up forces me to move out, and as I move every six years (the Merikan average) I am forced to move to a different community. The same thing would happen if I'm just about to retire at 64 and I wanted to downsize. Seniors are forced to abandon their familiar communities just to seek a smaller place to live and they have to start all over.

And any kid, growing up within these gates and walls, will be ill prepared to live in a diverse society...and indeed they never will.

I went to the Chicago Power Metal Fest in 2005 and toured the city for the first time. The most striking thing I remember about that trip wasn't the metal music or the Cub's home opener, but how one moment I'd be driving north on Michigan Ave. among the most valued places in the city, to turning west and within seconds be driving through the burnt out, bombed out craters of what was then left of Cabrini Green. The contrast was absolutely stunning. A place where the social meltdown was so complete that it had to be demolished...this is what happens when 'affordable' housing is built in dense concentrations...or what happens when you completely segregate by income.

But in some sense, this is exactly what we are doing here in SACTOWN and in Elk Grove. My point is to suggest that we've learned precisely dick about where income segregation takes us.

Main Street

Have you heard? The bailout on Wall St. will affect those on Main St.

Supposedly, I live on Main Street, and you do, too. However, both NBC and CBS (both!) newscasts today displayed images of a tree-lined business district in a small town, with either parallel or slant parking, benches on the sidewalk for people to relax, enjoying ice cream. Main Street USA!

Truthfully, most of us live in suburban slums nowhere close to resembling a main street. You won't be able to find the actual main 'street' because suburban cities don't have a central core and don't have a street labeled 'main.' But look to Southern California (the automobile slum-de-jour) to find the only one around:


This is Main Street! Wa-hey! A pretend version of a living arrangement that might actually work if it weren't the entrance to Fantasyland or Tomorrowland.

People flock to this pretend place even during recessions. They spend seventy bucks just for the privilege of being able to walk through this Main Street. They like it, because it reminds them nothing of the autocentric suburban shitholes they actually live in. They like the idea of engaging other people, even if it's so obviously contrived here, the purpose being to sell large quantities of Chinese made Disney merchandise.

What makes this such a nice place? I could ask a hundred of these patrons (and I will, the next time I'm there), and not one of them will tell me that it's a nice place because there are no fucking cars.

Nope. Not one person. They'll say a hundred other things before they key into the fact that they don't have to dodge traffic. Put a few diesel F250 trucks doing 47mph on this street and it would immediately turn to shit. Put two Honda Civics on this street racing each other.

The truth is, you could actually put a few cars on this street and it would still be an acceptable place for pedestrians on the sides...because it's enclosed, has a vista at the end, the sides engage pedestrians, in and out, in and out, and...almost has a full complement of formally planted trees! A physical buffer between the bipedal apes and their motorized vehicles.

Trees! Something illegal in Elk Grove and nearly everywhere else! City planning departments prostituted themselves decades ago for a standard set of zoning codes that makes Bellingham look just like Omaha, just like Louisville, and in all cases, tree lined roads are outlawed outlawed! because trees are nothing but fixed impediments for vehicular traffic. City planners don't give a damn about what civic benefit trees might provide. Not a damn. They aren't planners, they are only actuaries; measuring this, disallowing that, this ain't wide enough, this is too close, that is too far, that is too tall, not enough outlets here, not enough parking spaces per retail space, too many wires there...they don't plan...they execute, as any rat pressing a lever for a pellet might.

What I will show in a follow-on post, disturbingly, is how inept Elk Grove and Sacramento planners are in approving fake second story windows/shutters and the illusion of 'apartments over retail' on the facades of strip retail and personal storage units. These are so god-damn stupid and completely degrade the public realm, but that's all these fucking morons can approve...because it's all their precious codes allow for!

The Office Park

While Palin has her Drill! mantra going, I've got my bad urban planning mantra going. I continue.

Clearly there was a need in the remote past for zoning laws. It made sense that if you owned a home and suddenly a tannery or rolling mill opened up shop next door it would lead to instant slumification. There was also an issue with pollution, as early industrial activities weren't at all concerned with their effluents, emissions, discharges, leakages, off-gassing, or wash-outs.

But what about today? Why the hell do we force office workers to commute from their suburban compounds to an "office park?" What is so obnoxious about this activity? I'd argue that the bulk of Merkian jobs nowadays are performed in cubicles -- almost every industry imaginable sports a cube worker -- hospital administration, financial planners, distribution engineers, IT managers, fire marshalls. Especially in this so-called digital/information/service economy.

Now consider one major consequence of zoning these activities separately...parking. During the workday, all the suburban infrastructure required to maintain motor vehicles (private parking lots, garages, street signage, lane striping, curb cuts) goes unused, while during the evening the acres of parking and/or parking garages around office parks goes unused. We have to build-out redundant vehicle infrastructure and of course freeway and collector road slums to link the two together.

Many of the most desirable places to live (in the world) combine the two activites, and all these were built generations ago. It's only recently, recent in a human civilization timeframe, that we've fuckered up the relationship between man and his environment.

An office park, isolated in its proximity to anything else, setback ninety five feet from the sidewalk, and surrounded on all four sides by pavement, divorces the practice of building from the historical and social meanings of building. These "parks" are nowhere near any of the other activities we use on a daily basis: hardware stores, coffee shops, florists, dry cleaners, restaurants, locksmiths, groceries, pawnshops, titty bars, pornshops, and crackhouses. At lunchtime or break, you either sit in your cube or you climb in your car, you've got no other choices.

A Thousand Per Inch

If you've ever driven Hwy 101 from Marin County to San Jose, attempting to take a freeway south through San Francisco, you'll be forced onto city streets to get through. There was enough resistance in the past not to fillet San Francisco like a salmon with a freeway. This doesn't mean they've stopped traffic. No, far from it. All thru-commuters (and there's thousands of them) get to navigate the stoplight madness of Van Ness in any attempt to get through SF. And thousands of SF residents get to deal with these thru-commuters daily. The same with the 710 through Pasadena...enough resistance (from wealthy landowners, I'll add) to stop any freeway from being built.

Imagine the cost, imagine! of trying to build a freeway through these places today! It would be in the low billions!

And wouldn't you know it...it's gonna cost hundreds of millions, two hundred and seventy million to be exact, to build a 4.3 mile extension of light rail into Elk Grove. Indeed, it doesn't even reach Elk Grove with this new extension, it just gets 4.3 miles closer (set to open by 2012). The costs are astronomic precisely because our city is a fully paved-over automobile slum, and now to shoehorn in a set of train tracks as an afterthought over existing suburban sprawl is ridiculously expensive.

4.3 miles is ~22,000 feet. And at 270e^6 dollars, that's about $12,000 dollars a foot to build, or a thousand dollars per inch.

A thousand dollars per inch! And come on, when was the last time you heard of a major transportation infrastructure project coming in under budget? This thing is going to cost a third of a billion dollars once it's all said and done.

If RT didn't have to screw about with buying rights of way, building sound walls, building parking garages, and building grade separations to manage the traffic fiascos that will ensue with four-lane collector road widenings and crossings, this would be so much cheaper...and would likely have already been built. No. Elk Grove was too myopic to plan for public transit as they built out. Elk Grove was too stupid to understand that they've added nearly a hundred thousand more motor vehicles in the past twenty years (because living here is impossible without one) and to now add a light rail crossing would cause traffic to stack up a quarter mile while waiting for two trains to pass. Elk Grove was too near-sighted and allowed the suburban building of hundreds of homes right up against a proposed transit right of way that now requires noise mitigation (i.e., a big blank wall).

I'll bet light rail never, never! comes to Elk Grove. Just like light rail never came and never will come to Calthorpe's Laguna West. They said it was too expensive. It's too expensive now! Then they'll sell off the rights of way to brownfield developers and build more suburban slums and then light rail, instead of being just too expensive, will be absolutely impossible. So everyone will just have to continue to drive. And when gasoline is a steady 4 bucks a gallon, then 5, and Elk Grove commuters have no other options available to them...well, fuck 'em. They'll get what they deserve.

Shared Realms

Yesterday I walked about a mile and a half to the East Sac Hardware store, plantar fasciitis and all, to buy some lawn mower wheels. My mower is fifteen years old, has no throttle control, a replaced carburetor, a handle held in place by four pipe clamps, and now, I drove it till the wheels fell off...literally. Every one of my neighbors would have ditched it years ago and replaced it with a cheap imported mower. Then 6 years later, they'd be buying another cheap imported mower.

Nice that I have an option, here at work, not to have to drive to the hardware store. I rode the bike into work, walked to get my lunch and wheels, and did it all with virtually no direct energy purchases. That's what pre-WWII communities provide -- and what everything built since has failed to provide.

In Elk Grove, we have no hardware stores. Only 120,000 sq ft depots, all three of which are located miles away from everyone. Your only option is to drive, and they stock them to the rafters with cheap imports. 7" imported Chinese injection molded plastic lawnmower wheels, and if you don't like it, tough shit. That's all they offer, and you're gonna take it, stupid Amelican consumer.

And you know, I was able to buy 8" steel wheels at this local-owned shop yesterday. These will last longer than the rest of my mower, sad to say, but that's the point. Merikan made, and only marginally more expensive. And the profits I paid to the store will stay local, not shipped off to fatten CEO/CFO/CIO salaries, bonuses, compensation packages, stock options, and severances in Atlanta, GA or Morresville, NC.

This is hugely important to your Franklin Monologueonian. I chatted with the owner as he led me in the backroom to hunt down these wheels. I asked how long he'd been there -- twenty seven years himself. The thing is, he takes care of two buildings in East Sacramento -- his own home and his business. What is the probability that an associate manager at Lowe's gives a damn about his business' tilt-up building? He doesn't, and when the next predatory depot-sized store opens up a few miles away offering an additional dollar and a quarter an hour, off he goes.

This hardware storefront abuts the sidewalk, something illegal in Elk Grove and damn near everywhere else in this auto centric nation because of our setback requirements. This makes the sidewalk something people are willing to use, even if they never enter this store, because it contains, it encloses, it makes the street a decent place to walk. Not a fucking no-mans-land some two hundred and eighty seven feet from a depot entrance. Along this street there are sufficiently large tree plantings and parallel parked cars that provide a physical buffer between anyone walking on the sidewalk and fast moving cars on Folsom Blvd. Cars and pedestrians share this realm. Spend a few minutes walking from the sidewalk at a Home Depot to their store entrance and discover how the pedestrian striped markers are never contiguous, and how you get to dodge motor vehicles driven by inattentive consumers if you're stupid enough to be walking in.

Developer's Semaphore

Three miles north of my suburban pod they've ceased construction on a new 115-unit enclave called Villa Terrassa. They started in 2006 during the peak-boom and now there's just twenty of them built out, while the remaining 95 are concrete pads overgrown with 4-foot high weeds. Just what any new homeowner wants to live next to for the next four to six years, eh?

This is my view of the Villa everyday as I bike along Franklin and Mack:


This sign once read "...under $300,000" back in 2006. I'm curious what each of those 20 new homeowners paid, and how many of them fell off the foreclosure cliff. If I were upside down a hundred grand I would absolutely walk away.

Absolutely. I was given a property with nothing required from me. I would absolutely walk off and take the credit hit. Come on...I bet I could get a new credit card less than three months later. I bet I could buy a new car less than six months later. I'd simply ride out the foreclosure for a few years until it's a buyer's market again, my credit will be 'restored' to nearly new and I'd have another go at it by 2013.

Pushing aside all this housing crisis horseshit, the worst of it is that I and everyone else who drives/bicycles by this "Villa" has to look at this model home with a banner draped across it. And when the banner gets torn to shreds from this upcoming winter winds, the community will be rewarded with a blank fucking wall for the next seventy seven years. This enclave was never intended to integrate with anything else. The blank walls of its edges means nothing to the developer, it's only supposed to show good from the front. And that's where the sidewalk ends...right into a 4 foot high wooden barricade.

Who is going to walk on that sidewalk, huh? Who? And where would they be going, after negotiating over this wooden fence into that muddy rockway? Only miscreants and rapscallions, that's who, all of whom will be looked down upon by thousands of Elk Grove thru-commuters as less worthy citizens who for one reason or another cannot participate in our society's compulsory automobile ownership program.

And tell me, does the presence of a half a dozen orange and yellow flags do anything redeeming for this "community?" Do these flags make it somehow more livable? Perhaps it's developer's semaphore -- "We fly flags. This is a special place. If you lived here, you'd be special, too."

The Assessment

I want to acknowledge that there are others in Elk Grove who are doing their part to try to make this a better place. I'm certainly not one of them; I bitterly complain on a lone blog and in the end this doesn't go very far.

Having recently posted about Elk Grovian trees, I found a tree assessment the city did a few years ago, found here. What I take away from this assessment is 1) there are others who realize the benefits of trees, 2) I was pretty close to their assessment with my own Franklin Blvd. 'assessment' and 3) how galactically stupid we are for thinking we can obfuscate shitty urban design with trees.

I'm not entirely facetious here. If I may quote the first section in their recommendations:

Implement best practices in tree planning, planting and maintenance:

• Design more separated sidewalks with landscape strips to replace, or add to, front yard street trees on private property;
• When front yard trees are used, design for narrower streets to optimize the street canopy...

This is exactly WHAT WE AREN'T DOING! The first two recommendations come in, and the planning department says "Can't do it. Not in our playbook." Since this assessment, I can't find one street in Elk Grove where either of these recommendations were followed. We can't do it in this city, because to do so would require us to build something other than our curvilinear, auto-dominated shitscapes and that's all our codes can deliver.

Urban planning is a joke. A joke, because since 1940 we've thrown out three thousand years of human scaled living histories for sets of motor vehicle and building codes that dictate only setbacks, street widths, parking requirements per 100sf, and other shit you can't do. They tell us nothing about how things ought to be laid out. There's no god-damn planning; it's only rule-following.

How much more obvious can it be to build narrow streets with big trees? To allow canopies to arch together? To define a sense of place? To soften hardscapes? To allow for safe pedestrian passage along with motor vehicles? This is a crucial component in what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood and we completely ignore it! A narrow street is illegal, illegal! because the codes say so! Elk Grove streets are designed to allow tractor-trailers (or...firetrucks) to pull a u-turn at any location, so fuck all you pedestrians! If you can't afford a private vehicle you're unimportant in our community. We're going to make streets wide enough so you stand a much better chance at getting killed by a speeding minivan. We're going to make it so that any chronically late suburban househusband will run you over as he can easily negotiate any street at 57mph. We're going to allow for 30 foot radius street corners so that you spend twice as much time crossing the street walking twice as far to get hit by cars moving twice as fast.

Enough!

The Grid

It dawned on me yesterday that Frye Creek, the corner of which I live along with Moonlight Way in Elk Grove, has no houses on it over its entire length. Not one Elk Grovian house sports a Frye Creek address...a street that's almost a full mile long.

Frye Creek is nothing but a minor suburban collector road with no saleable property. Its sole function is not to house houses, but to house moving vehicles. This kind of shit would not exist if my neighborhood was laid out in a traditional grid.

This could be my neighborhood...but it ain't:

Nope. From above you couldn't tell if this is Elk Grove, CA or Greenville, SC. Sprawl is conspicuously the same everywhere.

Note the curvilinear street (bottom left to the top right). This is similar to Frye Creek in shape except that this street actually has building frontage...but only on one side of the street at a time. The other collector road (top right to bottom right) has exactly zero...no building frontage at all.

The ability to move people and things in and out of a development is a requirement no matter how you lay out. But note, in just this snapshot you can see that about a full quarter of this plot of former farmland is the exclusive domain of motorized vehicles. In other words, a full quarter of this land and pavement is redundant. 25% more dirt, asphalt and concrete than would be required of a traditional grid. And and! the streets are ~25% wider than those in traditional development. No stretch of the imagination is necessary to see how a teenager might easily do 57mph on either of these collectors.

I'm at odds with the notion that, in this era of mega-efficiencies, just-in-time inventories and hypertrophic GDP, we continue to underwrite a universal mechanism to waste 25% of our farmlands, hillsides and praries and 25% of our non-renewables to build it.

Wrong Way Feldman

I think I broke the law this morning. My son's first day of sixth grade and we rode bicycles to school; I rode with him halfway then it was off to work for me, adding another mile and a half to my regular ride. I broke the law by not motoring him to school. Elk Grove children by law are forbidden to walk, bicycle, scoot, or skateboard to or from school.

Skateboards and scooters aren't allowed in the classroom, the principal's office forbids their storage, and lockers are a relic of the '80s...so they're illegal. Walking is unsafe, what with every third home housing a convicted sex offender, and besides, for ten years there weren't any sidewalks to Sheldon High School from Bradshaw Rd. Ten years. For ten years I biked on a 3-inch shoulder while dodging kids walking the other way. As for bicycling...well, that's not to be done for utilitarian purposes. It should be for recreation, not commuting. Competing with all the other vehicles driven by chronically late parents shuttling their own kids off to school, well, that's unsafe. Besides, the city just recently demolished the bike lanes on Bruceville Rd. to make more room for vehicles. Children in Elk Grove are expected to be motored.

The thing is, as gas rises to a sustained four dollars, then five, then six, we're going to see incrementally more kids breaking the law...because no one ever teaches them how to ride a bike.In many parts of Europe bicycle training is mandatory education. They teach children the rules of the road, how to signal, how to avoid accidents. Here, all we tell them is "you gotta wear a helmet! WEAR YOUR HELMET!" American children don't know the first damn thing about riding a bike. They grow up and they don't know the first damn thing about how to drive or how to ride a bike.

I gotta tell you, folks, all these new bicyclists are creating a danger for themselves and for others. On one hand you'd think I'd approve of all these new bike commuters; they displace one more motor vehicle each, our increased numbers mean increased awareness to drivers...but on the other hand, I don't approve; they are blowing through stop signs, riding on the wrong side of the road, not signaling passes or turns, riding on sidewalks, talking on cell phones, and blowing through stop lights.

One of the very first things a new bicyclist will do, almost universally, is ride into traffic. It feels safer. In reality, it's the most dangerous error to make:

• You increase the number of vehicles that pass by up to three times (150%).
  
• Increase in turning danger due to cars entering the roadway that don't look for wrong way bicyclists.
  
• Danger to other cyclists (ME!).
  
• Increase in closing speed.
  
• Limited time and space to react for drivers.
  
• Greater impact force and breaking distances.
  
• It's against the law (OK, this isn't dangerous).
  

The good news is that my son already knows about every one of these. At twelve he can ride better than most adults.

Phoenix International

What do you suppose is the purpose of this tower overlooking the newer Phoenix Park development on Franklin Blvd.?


What does it do? Will snipers post here? I fully admit I have not once stepped foot into this Phoenix Park Activity Center. For all I know, this tower might house fifty people. But come on; you and I both know there isn't one damn thing this tower does. Not one damn thing it provides for its residents or its community.

Look at this thing; there was a lot of effort put into the architectural design, the construction, the 'detailing.' It's nearly as tall as the flagpole on the right. Is this what we pay architectural firms to design? Apparently the flat single story center wasn't sufficient; no, the firm had to shoehorn in a 13' by 13' conning tower...SSN-664, the Sea Phoenix. Or maybe it's the control tower for Phoenix International.

In any event, the bottom cornice above the lower window serves no purpose whatsoever; it certainly doesn't throw rainwater free of the window below it, and neither does either cornice above it. The tower's frieze is blank yellow stucco with faux shutters and windows above it.

I see myself as a young architect, waiting for my opportunity to really outdo myself. I propose the Phoenix International Tower, presenting a scaled down popsicle stick model to my superiors. That it does nothing, provides for no one, and affords the community with precisely dick is irrelevant. It looks cool. The fight to get this thing past the city's zoning codes was admittedly bloody, but worth it. I was granted an exemption to the law-against-more-than-one-story. The firm prospers, and I become partner.

The Sixty Five

Wondering why you're stuck in traffic? Why we haven't done enough to get some of those other cars off the roadways? Wondering how to get others to use public transit? Look no farther than the #65 bus stop on Franklin Blvd.:

The Siggy Five runs on the hour. If you just missed it, you could stand here under the shade of the 4x4 signpost for 60 minutes. But you've got your three cold babies, and their mouths and your patience can't take an hour waiting for the next bus. So you think "maybe I'll start humping it." You could cover a good range with your 2.4 mph hoof speed. So you turn around and look south:

(Note: Bike show for scale)

What a pleasant walk this is going to be! There's shade every eighty feet or so, county provided illumination, and there's even nature -- snakes, squirrels, and burrowing owls! Most of them aren't moving, you notice, and why do they all lie there, lifeless, in the middle of the roadway?

Well, as pleasant as that walk sounds, you nevertheless elect to return home across the street for two cans of Mr. Pibb while you wait for the next bus. You're pretty sure that jaywalking the 4 lanes of bidirectional traffic here is legal, as you don't see a crosswalk within 200' in either direction. You also know that every driver is obeying the posted 45mph speed limit on this road, so you elect to time your crossing based on their known distances. You've already worn down a path between the hawthorne bushes on the landscaped median during your first crossing to get to the bus stop, so going back will be a breeze.

"Oh, darn," you say, having missed the bus again...the second time this week. Mr. Grant is gonna be mighty sore with me...