As The Future Melts Away

I’ve always been a sucker for a good time lapse.  This one strikes me as a time lapse within a time lapse.  It’s half a day, compressed into less than 5 minutes, with people flitting around like moths, posing for pictures with an ice sculpture of the future.  Only the time lapse eyes of the camera can see what’s happening.  And by the end the passers by probably can’t even tell what the message might have been.  But the art is a piece of time lapse too.  A century or a millennium compressed into a day of melting.  Even that is a stretch for our attention span.  Even the 5 minute video seems long and slow.  How can we create a society with a more meditative mindset?  With an attention span that reflects the extent of our impacts in deep time?

 

Anti-drone street artist arrested in NYC for satirizing NYPD

A street artist in NYC has been arrested on 56 counts of forgery in connection with his campaign this fall, putting up posters around the city that satirized NYPD’s potential use of drones for surveillance.  Forensics teams and a counter-terrorism unit were deployed to apprehend him, at lord knows what expense to taxpayers… which would seem to justify his point about police overreach and the surveillance state.

How safe is our bike infrastructure?

A major study in Vancouver, BC has looked at the relative safety of biking on various types of infrastructure, by looking at several hundred actual accidents resulting in hospital visits by cyclists over an 18 month period.  Vancouver has a lot of different types of bike infrastructure, some of it extremely safe, so it’s a good test bed.  Unsurprisingly, busy roads with parked cars and no on-street bike facilities were the most dangerous.  Cycletracks (physically separated dedicated on-street bikeways) were an astonishing 90% safer.  Interestingly, multi-use paths weren’t all that much safer, despite being preferred by many cyclists.

An Afternoon of Boulder Streetscapes

I spent the afternoon wandering around downtown, reading, sipping coffee, and taking pictures.  I was surprised to see that Boulder had apparently been invaded (in the best possible way) by stylish olive skinned women wearing high heels, until I got to the Tea House, and remembered it was Persian New Year (also known as the Vernal Equinox).  The music and dancing was just winding down, but the outdoor space was still filled with people, and social buzz.

Happy Nowruz

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Thoughts on the TVAP and Junction Place Village

Boulder Transit Village Before and After

Boulder has about 100,000 citizens, and about 100,000 jobs.  Of course, a lot of us aren’t working.  Some of us are climbing bums; some of us are four years old; and some of us are climbing bums staying home to take care of four year olds.  50,000 people commute into Boulder every day to work, and about 10,000 leave the city to go work somewhere else, for a net influx of roughly 40,000 workers, making up for those of us too old, young, lazy, or busy to have a so-called “real job.” (The kind you tell the IRS about).  That’s a lot of people moving around, and a lot of lonely driving, since around 2/3 of those commuters are in single occupancy vehicles.  If only there were more places to live in Boulder, especially more places that service employees could afford, maybe so many people wouldn’t need to move around.  This is how the story goes anyway, and while it’s not quite that simple, I think it’s close to true given the 5:1 ratio of in vs. out commuters.

One of the few remaining large tracts of low-density land within Boulder’s borders is the light industrial area between 30th St. and  Parkway, straddling the Pearl Parkway, between Valmont and Arapahoe.  The northern portion of that area is now slated for redevelopment, following the 2007 Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP).  The general idea of the plan seems to be to create an eastern downtown locus, and to eventually have an urban spine running through central Boulder along Pearl St. and Pearl Parkway, from 9th St. all the way out to Foothills Parkway, and to ensure that transportation within this urban core is functional by de-emphasizing the use of private cars and providing excellent connectivity to the rest of the city via transit, foot, and bike.  Additional regional mass transit connections are also planned to this eastern core, including both BRT and rail.  As a human powered urbanist, this idea sounds great to me, and much better than the ocean of asphalt and big boxes that 29th St. unfortunately turned into.  I’d love for Boulder to accept the role of being a small city rather than a big town, while aggressively enforcing the existing well-defined geographical boundaries, and avoiding high-rise buildings.  If we can pull that off, then we will have an interesting, beautiful city of intrinsically human scale, and I can’t think of a nicer kind of place to live.  I haven’t been around for the years of debate leading up to the present situation, instead being preoccupied with graduate school, and unsure whether I would be staying long enough to actually see anything actually get built.  But now I plan to be here, have the time to pay attention, and am interested to see what happens.

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