So Kevin Durant has signed with Golden State, and we're all heart broken about it. That's as it should be. The reason we play, follow, buy, and love sports is that we get to compress our emotions into something outside of ourselves but of relatively low significance. Sports, then, is like a compact dress rehearsal for real life. I am a sports fan. So I don't begrudge people their anger, heartbreak, feelings of betrayal about KD leaving to win himself a sure-thing ring. I'm not one of those people who will flame at angry fans, "why can't you understand it's just a business," or "if only you cared as much about education," and all those other things people say to make themselves feel superior to sportsball fans.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
Showing posts with label Walkability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walkability. Show all posts
Monday, July 4, 2016
Durant Did Not Invent OKC
So Kevin Durant has signed with Golden State, and we're all heart broken about it. That's as it should be. The reason we play, follow, buy, and love sports is that we get to compress our emotions into something outside of ourselves but of relatively low significance. Sports, then, is like a compact dress rehearsal for real life. I am a sports fan. So I don't begrudge people their anger, heartbreak, feelings of betrayal about KD leaving to win himself a sure-thing ring. I'm not one of those people who will flame at angry fans, "why can't you understand it's just a business," or "if only you cared as much about education," and all those other things people say to make themselves feel superior to sportsball fans.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
Durant Did Not Invent OKC
So Kevin Durant has signed with Golden State, and we're all heart broken about it. That's as it should be. The reason we play, follow, buy, and love sports is that we get to compress our emotions into something outside of ourselves but of relatively low significance. Sports, then, is like a compact dress rehearsal for real life. I am a sports fan. So I don't begrudge people their anger, heartbreak, feelings of betrayal about KD leaving to win himself a sure-thing ring. I'm not one of those people who will flame at angry fans, "why can't you understand it's just a business," or "if only you cared as much about education," and all those other things people say to make themselves feel superior to sportsball fans.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Imploding Downtown. . .Again, or 'the Problem of Missing Teeth'
This morning, the former Hotel Black and the Motor Hotel next-door were imploded as the 400 block of West Sheridan continues to be cleared to make way for new development. This comes after the hotly debated destruction of the Union Bus Station at 427 W Sheridan in July, after Councilman Ed Shadid's efforts to save it through litigation failed.
I admit that I will have a hard time missing 427 West Sheridan. Generally, if I know a place by its specific street address, that's a bad sign. It means I've had plenty of negative contact with the place. So though I understand the general anger among otherwise like-minded folks over the demolition of the Union Bus Station, I have a hard time mustering the righteous indignation I was able to for Stage Center (a place I loved and whose address I do not know). I'm more bothered by the destruction of the old Hotel Black, whose glass encased penthouse (or whatever that was) was one of the defining features of our skyline for me when I was a kid. I also hated to see the destruction of the block of retail store fronts along the south side of Main Street. Though they were all empty, and perhaps no longer viable, I loved the porcelain tiled facades that so richly captured their period.
What worries me most, though, is whether or not anything worth having will actually replace these. It's bad enough that historic buildings with lovely facades are being destroyed. But I would at least feel a bit better if I had more faith that something worth building would actually replace them.
Perhaps my fears are unfounded. Before the block was cleared, plans were well underway to develop the 27 story 499 Sheridan project, which already has two major tenants. It's just that we in OKC have heard all this before.
In the 1970s, the Pei Plan called for huge swaths of downtown to be razed to make way for the future Myriad Gardens, the Galleria shopping center, and several other projects. Much of the demolition work, which is cheap compared to actually building new projects, was done so that by the end of the decade, vacant lots separated the financial district from Film Row (where not much was going on and which is only recently on the upswing).
Then, the oil bust of the early 1980s came. A detailed account of the boom/bust and its effects on Downtown development can be found in Steve Lackmeyer and Jack Money's book OKC: Second Time Around (Full Circle Books, OKC), essential reading for OKC enthusiasts. The short account is that many of the planned projects were abandoned. The botanical gardens and the Crystal Bridge were eventually completed, as was a portion of the Galleria which mostly sat empty until the Oklahoman moved into the building recently. Many of the lots that remained were eventually bought on the cheap and paved over into parking lots.
This created what planners have called "missing teeth" (see Jeff Speck Walkable City, 214-5). These gaps in the urban fabric of a city create a sort of false barrier. People don't want to walk across the open, unshaded and uninhabited space of a parking lot, so they simply don't. Thus, each part of downtown becomes an enclosed space, separated and disconnected from all the other enclosed spaces downtown. These empty spaces are part of what makes a downtown un-walkable, unenjoyable, and uninhabitable. (To see how these missing teeth have changed the look of several cities in the period of urban sprawl, see Shane Hampton's overhead slider project for OU-IQC, "60 Years of Urban Change.")
Of course, this is not a problem if the 499 project goes along as planned. But as the lot that's supposed to house the new OG&E headquarters sits fallow across the street (a project that was supposed to begin as early as May), and oil and natural gas prices plummet, I worry that we are simply going to go through the same cycle all over again. After all, this period of renewed fervor to reclaim downtown followed by a stagnating energy market seems eerily reminiscent of, well, the last time the exact same thing happened. What if these projects, like the projects of the 70s, are abandoned? Will the Motor Hotel, Hotel Black, and the Union Bus Station become parking lots?
I hated 427 W Sheridan, but not near as much as I would hate another parking lot in the middle of downtown. I will hopefully (probably?) look back and wonder why I was ever so worried about this. I'm probably afraid over nothing. I'm probably being reactionary. But I can't help it; I'm an Oklahoman, and I've seen it all before.
I admit that I will have a hard time missing 427 West Sheridan. Generally, if I know a place by its specific street address, that's a bad sign. It means I've had plenty of negative contact with the place. So though I understand the general anger among otherwise like-minded folks over the demolition of the Union Bus Station, I have a hard time mustering the righteous indignation I was able to for Stage Center (a place I loved and whose address I do not know). I'm more bothered by the destruction of the old Hotel Black, whose glass encased penthouse (or whatever that was) was one of the defining features of our skyline for me when I was a kid. I also hated to see the destruction of the block of retail store fronts along the south side of Main Street. Though they were all empty, and perhaps no longer viable, I loved the porcelain tiled facades that so richly captured their period.
What worries me most, though, is whether or not anything worth having will actually replace these. It's bad enough that historic buildings with lovely facades are being destroyed. But I would at least feel a bit better if I had more faith that something worth building would actually replace them.
Perhaps my fears are unfounded. Before the block was cleared, plans were well underway to develop the 27 story 499 Sheridan project, which already has two major tenants. It's just that we in OKC have heard all this before.
In the 1970s, the Pei Plan called for huge swaths of downtown to be razed to make way for the future Myriad Gardens, the Galleria shopping center, and several other projects. Much of the demolition work, which is cheap compared to actually building new projects, was done so that by the end of the decade, vacant lots separated the financial district from Film Row (where not much was going on and which is only recently on the upswing).
Then, the oil bust of the early 1980s came. A detailed account of the boom/bust and its effects on Downtown development can be found in Steve Lackmeyer and Jack Money's book OKC: Second Time Around (Full Circle Books, OKC), essential reading for OKC enthusiasts. The short account is that many of the planned projects were abandoned. The botanical gardens and the Crystal Bridge were eventually completed, as was a portion of the Galleria which mostly sat empty until the Oklahoman moved into the building recently. Many of the lots that remained were eventually bought on the cheap and paved over into parking lots.
This created what planners have called "missing teeth" (see Jeff Speck Walkable City, 214-5). These gaps in the urban fabric of a city create a sort of false barrier. People don't want to walk across the open, unshaded and uninhabited space of a parking lot, so they simply don't. Thus, each part of downtown becomes an enclosed space, separated and disconnected from all the other enclosed spaces downtown. These empty spaces are part of what makes a downtown un-walkable, unenjoyable, and uninhabitable. (To see how these missing teeth have changed the look of several cities in the period of urban sprawl, see Shane Hampton's overhead slider project for OU-IQC, "60 Years of Urban Change.")
Of course, this is not a problem if the 499 project goes along as planned. But as the lot that's supposed to house the new OG&E headquarters sits fallow across the street (a project that was supposed to begin as early as May), and oil and natural gas prices plummet, I worry that we are simply going to go through the same cycle all over again. After all, this period of renewed fervor to reclaim downtown followed by a stagnating energy market seems eerily reminiscent of, well, the last time the exact same thing happened. What if these projects, like the projects of the 70s, are abandoned? Will the Motor Hotel, Hotel Black, and the Union Bus Station become parking lots?
I hated 427 W Sheridan, but not near as much as I would hate another parking lot in the middle of downtown. I will hopefully (probably?) look back and wonder why I was ever so worried about this. I'm probably afraid over nothing. I'm probably being reactionary. But I can't help it; I'm an Oklahoman, and I've seen it all before.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Plaza Mayor WILL Fail. . .Thank God
I spent the early part of my career on the south side, patrolling from Santa Fe to Portland and the river to SW Grand Blvd. SW 29th street is the main artery of the area and so I was up and down that street a dozen times a day. Though the traffic is at times horrendous, one of the things I loved about SW 29th street, then and now, is that so few of the signs are in English.
For me, the presence of districts where the signs are in languages other than English is a sign of a great city. They suggest a number of things that are important in a thriving urban area. First, they suggest international influence and diversity (albeit a limited type of diversity, since a possible drawback of these districts is that they may allow people to remain segregated in their own neighborhoods). They also suggest a strong sense of community and loyalty, anchored in a sense of place. This sense of place, of being grounded, promotes community involvement, responsibility, and ownership.
While certainly the international neighborhoods in Oklahoma city, notably the SW 29th Street corridor and the Asian District, cannot rival neighborhoods in other cities like the Chinatowns of LA, NYC, and San Francisco, or the North End in Boston, they are hidden gems in our city, deserving of attention and investment. One of my frustrations working on the south side was that it had so much potential but received so little investment. I've believed for several years that SW 29th Street, already a natural commercial district by virtue of its location within OKC's sizable Hispanic community, could become a thriving destination, a place where Hispanic business owners might enjoy the benefits of the kind of local chic, hipster vibe of places like Paseo and the Plaza District (though there's admittedly drawbacks to this, like gentrification. A subject for another time).
So, in 2013, it was with great irritation that I learned of plans to rebrand the old Crossroads Mall into Plaza Mayor in an attempt to lure Hispanic businesses into one place to "serve" the Hispanic community (and to save the dying mall). This plan horrified me for a number of reasons. First, it felt a bit gross that developers seemed to be trying to save a failing business model by passing it down to a minority community. Something just didn't feel right about, once again, bequeathing to minority communities our used-up, hand-me-down, middle-class commodities.
My greater fear, however, was that it would work--at least a little for a little while. My fear was that Plaza Mayor would pull Hispanic businesses and services away from SW 29th street, Commerce Avenue, and other Hispanic business districts that were embedded within the actual Hispanic community. Of course, developers tried to sell the idea that the Hispanic community in OKC was centered in the south side and so, Crossroads being on the the south side, this was a perfect place for such a development. We're putting businesses for the Hispanic community where the community lives. Sounds great, right? Of course, the fact is that this is only true if we're still thinking in terms of middle-class suburban car culture. This is because, in reality, no one lives near any mall. Just look at the overhead view:
This is why every time I drive past the empty Plaza Mayor parking lot, I'm encouraged by the hope that it will die sooner rather than later, before it is able to destroy the neighborhoods I grew to love early in my career. I'm also encouraged by today's report by the Oklahoman's Brianna Bailey that community leaders on the south side have begun working to secure public support for development on SW 29th street.
After all, many of the pieces are already in place to make SW 29th the kind of thriving urban neighborhood that might rival international districts in other cities. There are loyal, grounded residents in close proximity. There are a few well-established cornerstone restaurants like Taqueria de Los Desvelados (my favorite). On weekend nights, the street is teaming with taco trucks and people cruising in customized cars, giving the street healthy potential for a thriving street festival scene.
One of the things the area needs is some coordination--someone to connect with in-place neighborhood associations like the College Hill NA, a well-run, highly involved model of a neighborhood association. College Hill, hosts its own neighborhood movie nights, projecting movies onto screens in members' backyards, meets with police and fire officials for Neighborhood Night Out, gets together for ice cream and "Mexican Bingo," and so on. With support from and coordination with other NAs and business owners, these types of events could easily become district events rather than neighborhood ones.
But the area also needs and deserves some public investment. The area needs better sidewalks and well marked crosswalks to make 29th street more walkable and more suited to gathering. As it exists, SW 29th street is pretty uncomfortable if you're not in a car. The street, which has a reputation for being in a "bad side of town" could also use more highly visible but benign police presence, like one might see in Bricktown or at the Fair, in volumes high enough to make visitors feel safe but laissez faire enough to be part of the atmosphere. Finally, district signs, decorative lighting and other "placemaking" amenities visible in other neighborhoods would help to give the residents in the district a sense of pride and the affirmation that the city supports their efforts.
There is enough neighborhood loyalty, community interest, and embedded commercial presence on the south side that, with some reasonable public investment to support what's already being done there by private citizens and business owners, the SW 29th street corridor could become one of OKC's really cool places. Though, admittedly, Big Truck Tacos should worry about what would happen if hipsters were to find out about south side truck tacos. And perhaps the south side should also be a bit worried about hipster-creep.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
A Caution to Urbanists: The Ethics of Gentrification
Each year, the FBI publishes (in several steps) comprehensive data from its UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) reports. Media outlets gather the data and scramble to publish stories in which they produced rankings based on violent crime. Readers then eagerly look for their own cities on these notorious Top 10 lists. This year's lists (which use 2012 statistics) are showing an interesting reverse trend in which large cities, long regarded by suburbanites as dangerous, crowded, and dirty, are falling off the top lists. Perineal top seed Detroit has fallen to number 6 in violent crime per capita. Other usual superstars like Memphis, Atlanta (26th), and Washington DC (now 46th!) have fallen out of these lists entirely.
Over the past several years, these cities have been replaced on violent crime lists by old industrial hubs and suburban (but poor) cities on the outskirts of major cities. Memphis is gone, but West Memphis, AR is now number 4. Detroit is gone, but it's been replaced by Inkster, Flint, and Saginaw. Saint Louis remains on the top ten list, but number one on the list is East Saint Louis, IL (a horrifyingly polluted and poor city featured in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities).
To those of us who grew up thinking about the suburbs as the upper-middle class, clean, safe havens defined by manicured lawns, pizza places, parks, and high school sports, this trend may seem strange. These are the images that the suburb brings to mind in the US, but in other countries, this is not the case. In large French cities, the banlieues (outskirts or suburbs) have long been the home of poor people in subsidized housing--the home also of crime, gangs, and political turmoil. They are more like what we here the in US would think of as the inner city--poor, under-served, and racially segregated. Such an arrangement, which seems a kind of reverse urban arrangement to us in the US, exists for easily traceable reasons. Large cities in France (and other parts of Europe) are old, beautiful, gentrified, highly walkable (which ensures a lot of people are always out, with their eyes on things), and well used. People want to be there, and people want to live there. This means that property values in the city are very high. As a result, undesirables in these cities, rather than being abandoned by white flight, have instead been pushed to the outskirts. In these cities, where there is high incentive to attract and keep tourists, public housing and social service agencies are built away from the core of the city--away from where tourists might see that Paris or Lyon have problems too.
In the US, on the other hand, the post-war industrial boom (namely in the automotive industry), cheap (heavily subsidized) gasoline, fear of the polluted industrial city, and good-old fashioned American spirit of expansion led to the opposite. People who could afford to fled the cities into the new suburbs, leaving behind the poor, undereducated, and minorities in the inner cities. When they left, they took all their resources (especially in terms of taxable property value) with them.
The result, in both countries, has been that large cities are highly segregated. Though the spacial arrangement is flipped, both countries have large cities divided into geographic areas whose residents know very little of the people in the other area. In both countries, this division is clearly drawn along lines that are class and race oriented. Here in the US, all respectable middle class children are taught that you are to stay away from a certain "side of town." Likewise, kids who live on that "side of town" discern quickly that they are not welcome on our side. What results from this geographical and social arrangement is a situation in which people in the inner city (in our case) are made to believe that the resources available to the affluent are not available to them, and the affluent, even if they are well meaning people, are not often acquainted with the plight of people living in the inner city. So people in the inner city live in squalor, while people in the suburbs live in affluence. The affluent especially are trained to see this as the natural way of things. It is, I would argue, a highly unethical arrangement. And it is, in part, perpetuated by geography.
The good news is that influential, affluent educated people are moving back to the city in droves. The New Urbanists celebrate the fact that late Gen-Xers (like me), Millennials, and even aging baby boomers are packing up their advanced degrees and moving back into the cities. Those of us in this group desire walkable neighborhoods, mass transit options, shorter commutes, more night life and many other things that come with living in a rich urban environment. This is great news for a lot of reasons. But it also comes with a danger.
I am admittedly a novice (I'm a rhetorician who fell into New Urbanism through a love of the city and through researching rhetorics of space), but I sense a bit of a divide in the literature of New Urbanism. Architects and city planners, like Jeff Speck, often address the benefits of urbanism in terms of economics and conservation. Their focus tends to be the benefits of density, walkability/bike-ability, and mass transit options. To academics and authors, like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler (New-Urbanist doomsday profit), social ethics are more central. Kunstler talks at length (citing Jacobs often) about the potential for urban living to bring people closer together in space, thus forcing them into awareness of one another. For him, the mixed use, mixed income nature of naturally urban environments is a road to cure for many of the social ills brought about by the segregated communities indicative of sprawl. Though Kunstler is at times, I think, a bit reductive in his attitudes toward the poor (he believes a major benefit of mixed income housing is that the poor will learn how to behave by watching the affluent--an assertion that carries some problematic assumptions), he nevertheless understands that the way that we live in built space has important social-ethical dimensions.
I don't intend to suggest that urban planners and architects aren't interested in these concerns (many of them no doubt are), but their professions seem to make these concerns secondary in their writing. Further, since these are the writers who have the ears of public officials (and perhaps because public officials tend to listen to parts of things they like), it is possible for the economic progress promised by urbanism to become center stage in public discussion while the ethical dimensions of geographical space remain invisible.
This can very well lead to an inappropriate form of gentrification. As we invest in our rich urban environments (which we should and must do), it is possible to lose sight of the importance of mixed use, mixed income neighborhoods. It is possible that in our enthusiasm to attract well educated, relatively affluent people back into our urban cores, we may also drive others out. One of my few critiques of Jeff Speck's Walkable City (a current intellectual man-crush of mine) is his somewhat unqualified assertion that our downtowns should be the focus of our efforts because "downtown is the only part of the city that belongs to everybody (260). This certainly can be true, and should be, but it isn't necessarily true. As long as we keep social/geographical arrangements ethical, Speck's argument is unassailable: if we can't fix an entire city (we never can) we should start with the parts of city that benefit the most people. However, the work of Mike Davis in Fortress Los Angeles (and some of my own graduate research) suggests the ways in which space can and sometimes is effectually shut off from undesirable people. Davis's article is an extreme (but real-life) example of the ways in which it is possible to build a section of city for ourselves, then literally wall other people out.
As we move back into the city, we demand better schools, better security, and better housing. These are all good things and can, if done correctly, better the lives of both us and the people who already live in these areas. But they can also take the form of charter schools that can remove our kids from traditionally underserved inner city schools, police harassment of the homeless or addicted roaming the streets, and skyrocketing property values that drive out those who had lived there.
In other words, it's possible that our arrival can in fact make things much worse for other people. It's possible that, rather than bringing people closer together both in space and sentiment, we will instead just drive others out to make room for ourselves. It is possible for us to fail at changing the unethical arrangement of urban sprawl, but instead to simply to flip-flop it. If this happens, we have gone in the wrong direction, ethically, because we will have moved the poor out into the suburbs where the lack of viable public transportation and density of social services further isolates them. This may, I suspect, be part of what we are seeing in the crime statistics cited above. The popularity of urban living is creating a kind of reverse white-flight.
So, my charge here is that as we continue advocate for urbanism, we make a purposeful effort to keep the conversation balanced so that our city leaders see not only the economic benefits of urbanism, but the ethical dimensions as well. As we pressure them to allocate resources to attract the educated, we must also pressure them to stay attuned to the needs of those already living in the urban areas into which we are trying to move. We do this by making sure that they understand that part of what makes urban living attractive to us is the diversity of the city. In order to maintain a level of diversity, it will be important that housing options remain diverse, that schools serve privileged and underprivileged students equally, and that our downtown truly does, as Speck suggests, belong to everyone.
Over the past several years, these cities have been replaced on violent crime lists by old industrial hubs and suburban (but poor) cities on the outskirts of major cities. Memphis is gone, but West Memphis, AR is now number 4. Detroit is gone, but it's been replaced by Inkster, Flint, and Saginaw. Saint Louis remains on the top ten list, but number one on the list is East Saint Louis, IL (a horrifyingly polluted and poor city featured in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities).
To those of us who grew up thinking about the suburbs as the upper-middle class, clean, safe havens defined by manicured lawns, pizza places, parks, and high school sports, this trend may seem strange. These are the images that the suburb brings to mind in the US, but in other countries, this is not the case. In large French cities, the banlieues (outskirts or suburbs) have long been the home of poor people in subsidized housing--the home also of crime, gangs, and political turmoil. They are more like what we here the in US would think of as the inner city--poor, under-served, and racially segregated. Such an arrangement, which seems a kind of reverse urban arrangement to us in the US, exists for easily traceable reasons. Large cities in France (and other parts of Europe) are old, beautiful, gentrified, highly walkable (which ensures a lot of people are always out, with their eyes on things), and well used. People want to be there, and people want to live there. This means that property values in the city are very high. As a result, undesirables in these cities, rather than being abandoned by white flight, have instead been pushed to the outskirts. In these cities, where there is high incentive to attract and keep tourists, public housing and social service agencies are built away from the core of the city--away from where tourists might see that Paris or Lyon have problems too.
In the US, on the other hand, the post-war industrial boom (namely in the automotive industry), cheap (heavily subsidized) gasoline, fear of the polluted industrial city, and good-old fashioned American spirit of expansion led to the opposite. People who could afford to fled the cities into the new suburbs, leaving behind the poor, undereducated, and minorities in the inner cities. When they left, they took all their resources (especially in terms of taxable property value) with them.
The result, in both countries, has been that large cities are highly segregated. Though the spacial arrangement is flipped, both countries have large cities divided into geographic areas whose residents know very little of the people in the other area. In both countries, this division is clearly drawn along lines that are class and race oriented. Here in the US, all respectable middle class children are taught that you are to stay away from a certain "side of town." Likewise, kids who live on that "side of town" discern quickly that they are not welcome on our side. What results from this geographical and social arrangement is a situation in which people in the inner city (in our case) are made to believe that the resources available to the affluent are not available to them, and the affluent, even if they are well meaning people, are not often acquainted with the plight of people living in the inner city. So people in the inner city live in squalor, while people in the suburbs live in affluence. The affluent especially are trained to see this as the natural way of things. It is, I would argue, a highly unethical arrangement. And it is, in part, perpetuated by geography.
The good news is that influential, affluent educated people are moving back to the city in droves. The New Urbanists celebrate the fact that late Gen-Xers (like me), Millennials, and even aging baby boomers are packing up their advanced degrees and moving back into the cities. Those of us in this group desire walkable neighborhoods, mass transit options, shorter commutes, more night life and many other things that come with living in a rich urban environment. This is great news for a lot of reasons. But it also comes with a danger.
I am admittedly a novice (I'm a rhetorician who fell into New Urbanism through a love of the city and through researching rhetorics of space), but I sense a bit of a divide in the literature of New Urbanism. Architects and city planners, like Jeff Speck, often address the benefits of urbanism in terms of economics and conservation. Their focus tends to be the benefits of density, walkability/bike-ability, and mass transit options. To academics and authors, like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler (New-Urbanist doomsday profit), social ethics are more central. Kunstler talks at length (citing Jacobs often) about the potential for urban living to bring people closer together in space, thus forcing them into awareness of one another. For him, the mixed use, mixed income nature of naturally urban environments is a road to cure for many of the social ills brought about by the segregated communities indicative of sprawl. Though Kunstler is at times, I think, a bit reductive in his attitudes toward the poor (he believes a major benefit of mixed income housing is that the poor will learn how to behave by watching the affluent--an assertion that carries some problematic assumptions), he nevertheless understands that the way that we live in built space has important social-ethical dimensions.
I don't intend to suggest that urban planners and architects aren't interested in these concerns (many of them no doubt are), but their professions seem to make these concerns secondary in their writing. Further, since these are the writers who have the ears of public officials (and perhaps because public officials tend to listen to parts of things they like), it is possible for the economic progress promised by urbanism to become center stage in public discussion while the ethical dimensions of geographical space remain invisible.
This can very well lead to an inappropriate form of gentrification. As we invest in our rich urban environments (which we should and must do), it is possible to lose sight of the importance of mixed use, mixed income neighborhoods. It is possible that in our enthusiasm to attract well educated, relatively affluent people back into our urban cores, we may also drive others out. One of my few critiques of Jeff Speck's Walkable City (a current intellectual man-crush of mine) is his somewhat unqualified assertion that our downtowns should be the focus of our efforts because "downtown is the only part of the city that belongs to everybody (260). This certainly can be true, and should be, but it isn't necessarily true. As long as we keep social/geographical arrangements ethical, Speck's argument is unassailable: if we can't fix an entire city (we never can) we should start with the parts of city that benefit the most people. However, the work of Mike Davis in Fortress Los Angeles (and some of my own graduate research) suggests the ways in which space can and sometimes is effectually shut off from undesirable people. Davis's article is an extreme (but real-life) example of the ways in which it is possible to build a section of city for ourselves, then literally wall other people out.
As we move back into the city, we demand better schools, better security, and better housing. These are all good things and can, if done correctly, better the lives of both us and the people who already live in these areas. But they can also take the form of charter schools that can remove our kids from traditionally underserved inner city schools, police harassment of the homeless or addicted roaming the streets, and skyrocketing property values that drive out those who had lived there.
In other words, it's possible that our arrival can in fact make things much worse for other people. It's possible that, rather than bringing people closer together both in space and sentiment, we will instead just drive others out to make room for ourselves. It is possible for us to fail at changing the unethical arrangement of urban sprawl, but instead to simply to flip-flop it. If this happens, we have gone in the wrong direction, ethically, because we will have moved the poor out into the suburbs where the lack of viable public transportation and density of social services further isolates them. This may, I suspect, be part of what we are seeing in the crime statistics cited above. The popularity of urban living is creating a kind of reverse white-flight.
So, my charge here is that as we continue advocate for urbanism, we make a purposeful effort to keep the conversation balanced so that our city leaders see not only the economic benefits of urbanism, but the ethical dimensions as well. As we pressure them to allocate resources to attract the educated, we must also pressure them to stay attuned to the needs of those already living in the urban areas into which we are trying to move. We do this by making sure that they understand that part of what makes urban living attractive to us is the diversity of the city. In order to maintain a level of diversity, it will be important that housing options remain diverse, that schools serve privileged and underprivileged students equally, and that our downtown truly does, as Speck suggests, belong to everyone.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Alternative Other Cities: Portland, Maine; Good-Bad Urbanism
Yesterday, we stopped briefly in Portland, Maine on our way from Boston up to my grandfather's hometown of Bath, Maine. This little blog about Portland is not at all scientific. It's a travel journal based on spending about an hour in the city, looking for a place to eat and park (and finally settling on Subway, by the way; a cop-out I know, but it was getting late and we had grumpy children and another hour of driving ahead of us).
What was interesting to me was how the city's downtown is such a salient example of what should be bad urbanism. It looks like everything that people were fleeing from when they fled to the suburbs. The sidewalks are narrow, the few street trees are skimpy (in a state with a lot of beautiful trees, like, everywhere), and there are a ton of one way streets. It breaks all the rules of New Urbanism. Portland is a classic Industrial Revolution city, designed without cars in mind. And this, actually, might be what makes it work. Now that the smoke and smog of the Industrial Revolution are gone, this old urban model is somehow really inviting.
Street trees are lacking in much of downtown because the sidewalks are so narrow. But these sidewalks are classically charming. They are paved with very old brick (as are some of the older streets), and they are faced by granite curbs. More importantly, the buildings are all (and I mean ALL) built to the sidewalks, so that the walks are lined with small boutique stores, pubs, and restaurants. The sidewalks team with life. A very diverse crowd fills downtowns sidewalks: families walking to games at the city's minor league park, hipsters in their fitted pants and outsized glasses, old fashioned hippies with dreadlocks selling knitted bracelets, and primped old women looking at the shops.
And though there are a lot of one way streets in Portland, there is also plenty of curbside parking. If the city wanted to convert the one ways into two ways, it would have to either close on street parking or remove the granite curbs and brick sidewalks. But these two things seem to be much more important than two way streets. The sidewalks are responsible for the city's charm, and curbside parking is incredibly important for pedestrian safety and comfort. There is a hierarchy, it seems, of urban elements, and Portland has chosen these elements correctly.
Perhaps the most important thing about Portland is its incredible density. The city is small, at just over 66,000 residents. This makes it a lot smaller than the OKC suburb of Edmond (83K) and almost half the size of the college town of Normal (110K), but its downtown goes in all directions further than downtown Oklahoma City, albeit without the sky scrapers (those oh-so-overrated phallic monuments to capitalism). Its design is classically European: most of the buildings are four or five stories tall, and built to the sidewalk. All buildings have windows facing the street, including the parking garages which have shops on the first level, hiding the fact that they are garages. Plus, there are bike routes everywhere.
The impact is noticeable. There are people everywhere. It has the feel of, well, the other Portland. (My wife, joking about this connection, says "we're real hipsters because we were here first. We were Portland before it was cool.") It's a little hard, without having spent enough time in Portland, to put a finger on why it works so well. I suspect it's the romantic notion of a European style city here in the States that makes Portland so attractive. Maybe the fact that the city is really a compact small town that makes it work so well, despite all that is theoretically "wrong" with it. But something here is working.
Friday, May 17, 2013
The Importance of Districts
A couple days ago, Collected Thread in the plaza district tweeted a picture of the owner wearing one of DNA Galleries' "Support Local Art" shirts. This is hardly surprising to anyone who has spent any time hanging out on the Plaza; it's a pretty tight knit community (this is evident even to an outsider like me). It does, however, provide a salient example of why and how urban districts work, and why they are so important to a city's sense of community. I have no doubt that none of what follows will be news to anyone who knows anything about city planning or urbanism is general, but I'm a rhetorician and writing teacher, and not a city planner, so this is revelatory for me.
The term "district" as used in urban contexts can mean a number of things. I live in an Urban Conservation District, which simply means that I am supposed to abide by certain covenants in order to maintain the look of the neighborhood. All sorts if districts like this, which deal mainly with public policy, exist: urban redevelopment districts, TIF districts, etc. Of course, there are also districts that are primarily associated with specific minority groups, like the Asian District here in OKC, where specific nationalities have historically gathered in a city. These districts, like the famous Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco and the Italian North End in Boston, are very important in their own right. But my interest here is the kind of district where similar businesses have gathered in one spot, sometimes in haphazard, slapdash fashion, and sometimes very purposefully.
The most famous of this type of district is, no doubt, the Broadway Theatre District in New York. This very important district gives us an example of how/why such districts happen. This type of district invariably involves a particular niche. Most people don't go to the theatre, and even those who do don't go particularly regularly (I'm a former professional actor, but I've been to the theatre maybe a half dozen times since 2008, when I finished my Master's degree. . .in playwriting) . So to survive, theatres opened near each other. This allows a kind of one stop shopping for the kind of weirdos who go to the theatre. In this way, a theatre becomes visible to folks who've actually come to go to a different theatre.
This same dynamic exists on a smaller scale in our own districts, especially Paseo and the Plaza District. Any of the businesses on the Plaza, with their relatively small and firmly artisan inventory, would likely have a difficult time surviving in a suburban mall (which is, by the way, just a high overhead, indoor counterfeit district). But, perhaps counterintuitively, these "weird stores" (Gopnik) thrive when they open in a row--next to all their competition. This works because the fact that these stores exist in a district attracts the niche customers interested in these businesses. Beyond this, the highly walkable nature of these districts makes it inviting to hang out--to spend lots of time looking at and buying things.
Again, none of this is particularly ground breaking information. What's significant about it, however, is that it points to an economic model that is uniquely urban. In urban districts like these, survival and success comes not through competition, but cooperation. Most large businesses treat commerce as a zero-sum game. If Walmart is to succeed, K-Mart must fail (it did). But in the urban district, if DNA Galleries hopes to succeed, Collected Thread must attract people, and vise verse. Though these are very similar businesses (one is an art gallery that doubles as a boutique, the other is a boutique whose designers are artists in their own right), they realize that they don't benefit by "beating" the other. Instead, each of these businesses benefits when the other benefits. When one place thrives, the whole district thrives. When the district thrives, the individual stores thrive. But, this unique economic model doesn't quite explain why these districts are so appealing to those of us who hand out in them.
Perhaps more important than the economic model districts provide are the social benefits that come to a community built around these districts. By serving, and thus attracting, a relatively specific particular crowd, these districts also provide a sense of community that becomes definitive. People who live, work, or spend a great deal of time in Paseo think of themselves as Paseo people (have they named themselves?). To an extent, this ultimately involves many of the social aspects that define communities such as shared community ethics, behavior systems, discourse conventions, and so on. Though these districts may often start out as primarily commercial zones, they morph quickly and naturally into something much more meaningful as people who like to be in the district begin to move close to it. As people begin to work, live, and socialize in a district, it becomes a neighborhood. And neighborhoods are what cities are made of. These are what give big city life flair and personality. For this reason, the health of our clever local districts is, I think, far more important to the sustainability of our cities than are all the tourist amenities we can plan. Now, if you don't mind, it's a pleasant day; I think I may get on my bike and ride down to the Plaza.
The term "district" as used in urban contexts can mean a number of things. I live in an Urban Conservation District, which simply means that I am supposed to abide by certain covenants in order to maintain the look of the neighborhood. All sorts if districts like this, which deal mainly with public policy, exist: urban redevelopment districts, TIF districts, etc. Of course, there are also districts that are primarily associated with specific minority groups, like the Asian District here in OKC, where specific nationalities have historically gathered in a city. These districts, like the famous Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco and the Italian North End in Boston, are very important in their own right. But my interest here is the kind of district where similar businesses have gathered in one spot, sometimes in haphazard, slapdash fashion, and sometimes very purposefully.
The most famous of this type of district is, no doubt, the Broadway Theatre District in New York. This very important district gives us an example of how/why such districts happen. This type of district invariably involves a particular niche. Most people don't go to the theatre, and even those who do don't go particularly regularly (I'm a former professional actor, but I've been to the theatre maybe a half dozen times since 2008, when I finished my Master's degree. . .in playwriting) . So to survive, theatres opened near each other. This allows a kind of one stop shopping for the kind of weirdos who go to the theatre. In this way, a theatre becomes visible to folks who've actually come to go to a different theatre.
This same dynamic exists on a smaller scale in our own districts, especially Paseo and the Plaza District. Any of the businesses on the Plaza, with their relatively small and firmly artisan inventory, would likely have a difficult time surviving in a suburban mall (which is, by the way, just a high overhead, indoor counterfeit district). But, perhaps counterintuitively, these "weird stores" (Gopnik) thrive when they open in a row--next to all their competition. This works because the fact that these stores exist in a district attracts the niche customers interested in these businesses. Beyond this, the highly walkable nature of these districts makes it inviting to hang out--to spend lots of time looking at and buying things.
Again, none of this is particularly ground breaking information. What's significant about it, however, is that it points to an economic model that is uniquely urban. In urban districts like these, survival and success comes not through competition, but cooperation. Most large businesses treat commerce as a zero-sum game. If Walmart is to succeed, K-Mart must fail (it did). But in the urban district, if DNA Galleries hopes to succeed, Collected Thread must attract people, and vise verse. Though these are very similar businesses (one is an art gallery that doubles as a boutique, the other is a boutique whose designers are artists in their own right), they realize that they don't benefit by "beating" the other. Instead, each of these businesses benefits when the other benefits. When one place thrives, the whole district thrives. When the district thrives, the individual stores thrive. But, this unique economic model doesn't quite explain why these districts are so appealing to those of us who hand out in them.
Perhaps more important than the economic model districts provide are the social benefits that come to a community built around these districts. By serving, and thus attracting, a relatively specific particular crowd, these districts also provide a sense of community that becomes definitive. People who live, work, or spend a great deal of time in Paseo think of themselves as Paseo people (have they named themselves?). To an extent, this ultimately involves many of the social aspects that define communities such as shared community ethics, behavior systems, discourse conventions, and so on. Though these districts may often start out as primarily commercial zones, they morph quickly and naturally into something much more meaningful as people who like to be in the district begin to move close to it. As people begin to work, live, and socialize in a district, it becomes a neighborhood. And neighborhoods are what cities are made of. These are what give big city life flair and personality. For this reason, the health of our clever local districts is, I think, far more important to the sustainability of our cities than are all the tourist amenities we can plan. Now, if you don't mind, it's a pleasant day; I think I may get on my bike and ride down to the Plaza.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Biking in OKC: First Impressions
I live in an Urban Conservation District several miles from downtown. It's a decent compromise for a parent who knows that the good public schools and sidewalks are out in the suburbs, but who refuses to live there. Where I live, I have the benefit of a big, nice yard but I'm close to most things I need and want. My neighborhood's Walk Score is 52. But, in Oklahoma City, where the car rules, I have no sidewalks and there is almost no pedestrian culture in the neighborhoods around mine (though my particular neighborhood is full of hip, young professionals, so we are systematically building a walking culture for our few square blocks). I even drive an SUV, sometimes alone (in my defense, it's a four cylinder).
The result of all of this is that, despite my wishes and intentions, I still require a car to do most things. At the very least I need to extend my range beyond a ten minute walk, and that has always meant driving. Listening to the speakers at OUIQC's Placemaking Conference, which featured a panel on biking, and reading Jeff Speck's Walkable City, I realized that I could extend my reach without resorting to driving if I had a bike. So, for the past couple of months, I've been planning to get myself a halfway decent bike and replacing my car for short trips whenever possible.
So, over the weekend, I bought myself a Schwinn Suburban bike. I've wanted a Schwinn since high school, when a classmate had a classic Schwinn so cool that he used to bring it into class rather than trust a bike rack to protect it.
In order to test out time/distance, and the overall bikeability of the city, I spent the day biking around many of the places I like to go that are within biking distance. I made it, ultimately all the way to Bricktown, stopping to eat lunch with a friend at Big Truck Tacos, to visit my mother at work, to shop for t-shirts, to drink a soda at Coffee Slingers, and just to look around. I went through the Paseo Arts District, Heritage Hills, Midtown, Downtown, Bricktown, the Plaza District, and the neighborhood we lived in when I was born. Here is what I learned:
Biker Safety: Roadways
Speck's book has an entire section on biking, so I went into my ride with a theoretical base with regard to what I expected on certain kinds of roads (I'm an academic; I can't do anything without a theoretical base). I know enough from living in OKC to know that main arterials would be a problem. These are pedestrian killers (literally and figuratively) because the wide roadways and high speed limits allow cars to drive very quickly, scaring away any would-be pedestrian or rider. This is true anywhere, but the problem is compounded in cities like our's, where there are no sidewalks (because the car has ruled for more than half of our city's history). Unfortunately, I live neatly nestled in the corner of N. May, a five lane monstrosity where traffic is so bad that I hate to leave on heavy shopping days, and I-44. This means that I have to carefully navigate my way out of my neighborhood through alternative routes, since there's no way I'm riding a bike on May. I don't intend to get smacked by an SUV being driven 50 MPH by some person on a cell phone, thank you very much. Once I get out of my neighborhood, though, I have several different kinds of bike routes in my path. As I'm very familiar with the interior of the city, I knew where these were, so I was able to plan my route in advance.
Sharrows:
I spent most of my ride on a sharrow. This is a wide street where, on the right side, a bicycle placard has been painted on the road to alert drivers to the presence of bike riders.
Dedicated Lanes:
Closer to downtown, the city has painted bike lanes. I likes these okay, because they gave me a sense of legal standing. In the sharrows, I felt like I was in a place that was, ultimately, designed for cars. I was a trespasser, not necessarily welcome to people who had to slow down ten miles an hour for an entire block to deal with me. In the bike lanes, I had the empowering feeling that I didn't have to care if drivers found me inconvenient; I'm in my own lane. On the other hand, the closer to downtown I got, the less comfortable I felt. This is because, downtown, the bike lanes sit right against marked parking spaces for parallel and sometimes even angle parking. In these areas, I pathologically worried that a car would pull out without seeing me.
Shared Space:
In a perfect world, all roads would be shared roads. There would be an understanding that roads are public spaces to be shared equally by pedestrians, bikers, street cars, and automobiles. In fact, in Europe, Hans Monderman has made this a reality in many public squares (to the chagrin of some advocates for the blind). And, in fact, most roads are shared space. Neighborhood streets, places not designed for bikes, and even some downtown streets where biking is encouraged are all shared space.
Once one follows the well delineated bike lanes into the financial district downtown, the lines disappeare into the shared space of the street. The "bike route" signage remains, but the separate lane is gone. Surprisingly, I felt very comfortable on shared streets downtown. When the bike lane disappeared (or turned back into parallel parking, to be exact), I simply merged into car traffic and became part of the traffic flow. Though this may sound terrifying, I found that it was actually very pleasant. It was, in fact, one of my favorite moments on my day of riding. The blocks are small, so there are lots of lights stopping cars. Plus, there are pedestrians everywhere: professionals walking to their offices or to lunch, tourists walking to and from hotels, and construction workers tearing things up. All this meant that cars were going very slowly.
Some discomfort expected:
All in all, my trip was well planned (though I called a lot of audibles), and so I felt pretty comfortable biking most of the day. There were, unsurprisingly, some places where I did not feel comfortable riding.
When I wrote on facebook that I was testing the bikeability of the city, a police officer I know commented "is this based on the armed or the unarmed." Well, I went unarmed, as I usually do when I'm running around, and I never felt in danger because of the neighborhoods I was in or the people I ran into. Instead, requisite to the actual data on the subject, the real danger came, not from strangers looking to rob white hipsters, but from cars.
When I got west of Penn, the roads got wider, the speed limits got higher, and the drivers got more careless. This was not surprising. The area where I felt uncomfortable that did surprise me was in intensely urban Bricktown. This probably should not have surprised me. Though it's downtown, it;s full of people who are not from downtown, or from town at all. It's where suburbanites come to drink (which is why I intend not to talk about it much on this blog). So it's probably not surprising that the people here drive like suburbanites on wide arterials. What is surprising is how little the city has done to mitigate this. Though, again here, there is signage indicating that these streets are bike routes, there is nothing done to slow cars. There are not placards painted on the pavement, the curbs are high (which means no escape for a biker), and the lanes are very wide. The only place I felt in more danger was crossing 23rd street at Villa (a two lane that everyone speeds on where I also felt out of place).
Legal Issues:
In Oklahoma City, riders of bikes are treated just like drivers of cars. A biker must follow all traffic laws and controls. This is not a problem with regard to speed, since the average speed of a biker is 12 MPH. But it also means that a rider must stop completely at all stop signs, maintain his lane, signal, stay on the right side of the road, and so on. This might seem reasonable, but perhaps my biggest lesson of the day is just how impractical this is. I found it very helpful to act like a car downtown. I stayed in the in the middle of the lane, used turn lanes where appropriate, and stopped at the lights along with all the cars. Following these ordinances was helpful downtown because the ordinances made me feel safe. I didn't cut between cars to advance on red lights, since, had someone opened a car door to spit or to get out of their car, I would have crashed into their door. Instead, I held my place in line, just like a car. Also, maintaining my lane let others know that I was there and was going to stay there, so I wouldn't be hit by a car coming around a corner unable to see me popping out from between cars. Here, traffic ordinance worked for me because I knew what to expect of the cars around me, and they knew what to expect of me.
But in neighborhoods, ordinances designed for cars are often impractical. I can only imagine how quickly I would have tired out had I actually stopped for every stop sign, having to pedal myself back to speed after each of them. Beyond that, some fluidity with regard to position in my lane allowed a lot more negotiation between me and other drivers. In order to maintain the flow of traffic and to keep myself safe, I often found it helpful to move out of lanes in intersections and stop on corners, allowing cars behind me to pass. I also found myself driving left of center to show that I was about to turn left, thus avoiding turning left across traffic from my usual place on the right side of the street, and I occasionally even rode on the sidewalk to escape fast moving cars on big, unfriendly roads.
Though I don't know any cops (and I know a lot of cops, obviously) who enforce traffic laws on bike riders, I do know that if something were to happen and I was injured in a crash, I would be considered at fault if I was breaking an ordinance meant to control cars. A more fluid system of traffic laws for bicycles would help protect riders in legal situations. As a city dedicated to becoming more bike friendly, our ordinances could stand some revision.
Overall impressions:
Overall, I felt very comfortable most of the time during my almost six hour ride. I can get to almost all the places I most like to hang out in a relatively short ride. Plus, it was enjoyable. The pace is slow enough to allow a rider to look around, checking out the houses and greeting the people he passes. But the speed is also high enough to extend reach outside of the neighborhood. Finally, my legs are on fire and, since I burned about a million calories, I'm having ice cream tonight without feeling badly about it.
Were it not for the fact that I'm attending a graduate school 25 miles away and that my children go to school in a neighboring city, I could envision selling a car and going about on bike or foot. Maybe in the future, this will be possible.
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