So, about the crisis of confidence in the Albuquerque police department. A roundup to settle my thoughts.
1.
I am wondering if the peace officer who has charged David Correia with assault at the sit in at the mayor’s office is Chris Romero, the officer seen manhandling Correia in this video, and possibly the same Chris Romero dismissed from, but present at, an absolutely Soviet case of police harassment detailed by Joline Gutierrez Krueger. There appear to be at least two Chris Romero police officers in Albuquerque.
Video and screen caps of Correia’s take down by Chris Romero at the mayor’s office:
http://lajicarita.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/in-defense-of-
Krueger’s 2008 column on the unbelievable excessive force incident at which a Chris Romero was present:
http://www.abqjournal.com/upfront/26115988688upfront09-26-08.htm
2.
I am interested in the proposals by a retired policeman, Joe Byers, for the reform of the police department. It takes courage and love to come forward, and I’m glad he did. I want protesters to work on putting together a group of Joe Byers and his colleagues, as many as possible, to work together for plausible and real reform.
http://eyeonalbuquerque.blogspot.com/2014/06/degradation-of-apd-continues.html
3.
As beady-eyed as I feel about David Correia, he makes the perfect points in Mayor Berry’s oddly stoned, bubble boy response to the APD crisis — hiring dubious interlocutors, setting up toothless police complaint commissions. The idea that a photo op kind of charrette is reparation, rather than a.) PR control, b.) nut-cutting co-optation, c.) surveillance of citizens by notably violent and paranoid cops and d.) a veritably Dickensian Office of Circumlocution, is firmly planted in Berry’s mind as a form of proactive governance.* It’s not. Correia’s “press release” (um, no, it’s a polemic, although a good one; fighting spin with “press releases” strikes me as vying for the spotlight) on the topic of Berry’s spurious police complaint commissions is here. (If this is a movement and not a personal crusade, the good points about the police complaint commissions should have issued from protest HQ, not by the professor personally.)
http://www.apdprotest.org/2014/05/30/apdprotest-press-release-may-30-2014/
4.
The APD audio in the shooting of Ralph Chavez is here, along with a transcript.
http://krqe.com/2014/05/22/audio-released-in-apd-shooting-of-stabbing-suspect/
The video of Officer Pablo Padilla arresting for drunk driving, and smashing the testicle of a law student, is here.
http://progressnownm.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/video-misdemeanor-arrest-costs-abq-student-testicle-after-groin-strike-by-officer/
It seems to me both officers are performing for the camera. The audio of the Chavez shooting has the cop repeatedly saying I do not want to shoot you as he prepares and signals his intent to do so. Officer Padilla appears to discover a joint invisible to the camera, but pointedly described by Padilla — Is this a joint here?.
I think this is obvious to anyone who listens to or watches the (disturbing) tapes.
_____________
*I have to add, given, for example, Dinah Vargas and others’ detailed accounts of harassment by the APD as activists against excessive force, that community participation in police complaint boards is going to be minimal. The account in the Krueger column of the torture of a citizen by four police thugs at night is reason number one why no citizen with a real complaint against the police would ever show up and say anything to a police complaint board. Considering the fates of civil rights lawyer Mary Han, and Jerome Hall, shot dead six days after he won a police brutality suit against the APD, no sane person would show their face at one of the proposed police complaint commissions. You’d have to be crazy.
Doris Lessing may have been — but for her acceptance of the Nobel Prize — the first of the feminist breed for whose existence Virginia Woolf called in *Three Guineas*. The non-secessionist outsider.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91tg/chapter3.html
I never loved the *Golden Notebooks*. As someone who had from my childhood in Africa been there and done that it was no big woop. I have to think more about Lessing as an African, an Africanist, and an Afro-futurist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/arts/design/the-shadows-took-shape-at-the-studio-museum.html?_r=0
A much greater book, *The Four-Gated City*, has immortal passages, not least of Martha Quest walking for days through Blitz-cratered London, one of the 20th century’s number one *flaneuses*, a woman seeing the city. Check out Deborah Parsons’ important book on this matter.
http://www.amazon.com/Streetwalking-Metropolis-Women-City-Modernity/dp/0198186835
*The Four Gated City* is the only book I can think of, with Dickens right up there at the top, which actually gets down to what the virtue of money is. One of the protagonists is a rich schizophrenic. In those days the treatment was some lobotomizing drug like Lithium. The rich schizophrenic has the wherewithal to reject Lithium, go home to a safe and well-equipped basement apartment in the family home, in a safe neighborhood, with servants, and stay there, going over the walls with her fingertips, until the fearful tempest has passed. Martha Quest stays with her and takes care of her. In this way, the rich schizophrenic is not a vegetable all the time, but can continue with a life of the mind and maternal affections when she is not ill. That is the value of money — and it presumably exists in village or community life even when there is no money, and a superfluity of unmarried women at home, if not precisely servants. This scene speaks directly to one small political aspect of Foucault’s indictment of mental health practice — Lithium is brain police for the poor.
Lessing’s third great contribution to civilization was frankly telling it like it is about motherhood and abandoning her two little children, just as her mother had spent Lessing’s own childhood telling her what a burden it was. Yep.
The science fiction was, perhaps, a mistake unless you think of it more as unmedicated Sun Ra Afro-futurist riffs. Did she deserve the Nobel? I think perhaps not. But I would have given it to her just for saying motherhood is too hard, spiritually deceptive, and not as important as the patriarchs want you to believe.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.htmlSt
Judy Trammell, the choreographer of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and Kelli McGonigle Finglass, the director, mesmerize me as champions of the Texas avatar of femme performance.
Choreographer Trammell (L) and director Finglass, both former DCCs, judge auditions for Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
Now the texts on this, as I’m sure you all know, are the three Scholz sisters’ memoir of their time on the cheering squad (’78-’85), and the Channelview, TX tale of tiger mom Wanda Holloway, who was convicted in 1991 of plotting a murder-for-hire of Verna Heath, the mother of Shanna Holloway’s greatest rival for the cheering squad, Amber Heath.
The Scholz sisters’ mama taught them how to dress, a terrifying process in which bags and shoes must match and hair must be high — a mean girls’ Texas aesthetic whose persistence can be sussed today by seeing Finglass in her orange sheath or the terrifying female VP of the Cowboys, Charlotte Jones Anderson (daughter of the owner), who looks like a ravening, Stanford-educated ferret in poufy little Prada dresses.
Mean girls doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Trammell was a DCC from ’80-’84, and Finglass from ’84-’89. I figure they’re both in their 50s, and I am always thinking about what makes an Old Babe and what Old Babes do and wear. I think Finglass is and Trammell isn’t. What made Finglass a babe — her smile — still makes her one today, as mean a pimp as she is. (For the smile, check out the GIF third from the top, left, for the pimpin’ watch CMT’s show.) Trammell’s hair — and you know that hair whippin’ energy takes the place of jiggle on the DCC — is the same do she was whippin’ in the ’80s, very long and prematurely blonde. Even the black girls on the squad have long whippy dos. I am trying to deconstruct the Trammell/Finglass eyeliner — completely surrounding the eye with a black line after 50 is an aesthetic choice of the kind I deemed some time ago, deciding to be an old woman who paints, with Louise Nevelson as the Old Babe Who Paints avatar. The paint becomes your face, instead of your face being your face.
Sculptor Louise Nevelson
Iris Apfel, who is the captain of the Old Babes team, sometimes paints and also is a polychrome old babe, one trope of how to dress as an Old Babe. Please note use of I.M. Pei glasses as eyeliner.
Iris Apfel, captain of the Old Babes team. She replaces Princess Lilian of Sweden, who died in March and evinced an entirely different style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Lilian,_Duchess_of_Halland
Here we see Apfel, painted, hustling her own line of MAC cosmetics. Note there is nothing natural about the colors, such that the paint once again becomes your face.
I am trying to deconstruct Trammell’s hair — it’s the 2013 version of her 1980’s do, which Finglass has most cleverly left behind. Her hair in the 80s was the biggest poufiest and poodly-est of all, and now it’s cool MILF hair. As Trammell’s is not. I have to think about it some more. I wonder if Trammell thinks of whippy hair as part of her dance costume?
Judy Trammell, ca. 1980s
The makeover editions of the aspiring cheerleaders, in which Finglass supervises their haircuts and teaches what not to wear, has to be one of my greatest drag learning experiences, as if the Scholz sisters’ mama had survived into the 21st century to teach us all how to get closer to God with our hair.
http://www.cmt.com/videos/dallas-cowboys-cheerleaders-805-appearance-counts/1714824/full-episode.jhtml
Induced Travel
Pedestrian Traffic Engineering Principles
How the Mayor’s Path Through the Bosque Will Run Pedestrians Out, Increase the Crime Rate, and Complete the Ecocide We Started
- A Surfaced Graded Trail Induces Travel
Traffic engineering formulas say for every 10 feet you widen a highway, you increase traffic by 3.3 percent.[i]
The Paseo del Bosque is a bicycle trail adjacent to the bosque. The mayor’s proposed 10-foot-wide graded and surfaced trail within the bosque falls under this traffic engineering rubric.
The city says 780 cyclists a day pass under I40 on the Paseo del Bosque. Three point three per cent of that is nearly 25 cyclists a day. So the minimum induced travel on the mayor’s proposed path would be 25 cyclists a day. Given a 12 hour day, that’s one cyclist traveling through the bosque every half hour.
A much more likely scenario is that half of the Paseo del Bosque cyclist traffic will use the mayor’s proposed path, for 390 cyclists a day. Given a 12-hour day, that works out to 32.5 cyclists per hour traveling through the bosque, about one every two minutes.
A reasonable scenario would be that the path doubles cyclist traffic adjacent to and within the bosque, such that 780 cyclists a day use the Paseo and 780 a day also use the inner bosque trail. Given a 12-hour day, that works out to 65 cyclists traveling through the bosque per hour, or just over one cyclist per minute.
2. Cyclists Run Pedestrians Out, No Pedestrians Increases Crime
The proposed 10-foot wide path, when shared, would be safe neither for pedestrians or cyclists.
Pedestrians cannot and do not use multi-use trails.[ii]
Albuquerque has done a survey of conflicts between users of its many multi-use paths. This is what the then trails coordinator had to say on the international pedestrian engineering listserv, Pednet:
Here in Albuquerque, New Mexico we have over 80 miles of paved multi-use trails. The weekends are the worst times for user conflicts due to the varying speeds of users,i.e. rollerblaers and bicyclists vs. walkers and runners. The only solution is either separated paths or wider paths, say 14 feet. Otherwise it will forever be a problem.
We recently completed trail counts and surveys. 368 surveys were collected and many of the comments were “please make the trail wider and smoother”, and this was from rollerbladers and bicyclists. Most walkers and runners would actually prefer an unpaved surface, since it is easier on your hips, knees, and ankles vs. walking or running on concrete or asphalt.
This is obviously not a full blown study but I can assure you that the data
we’ve collected here over the past two weekends is indicative of the needs and conflicts which exist nationwide on trails whether they be in urban or more off-road/wilderness areas.
Hope this is useful and helpful.
Henry N. Lawrence III
Associate Planner, Trails Coordinator
City of Albuquerque
Parks and Recreation Dept.
City transportation planner Julie Luna confirms this is the only study Albuquerque has made of conflicts between users of trails.
“Shy space” or “shy distance” is a term used by pedestrian traffic engineers to calculate safe widths for sidewalks, trails, and bicycle lanes. One fast-moving pedestrian such as a runner requires three feet of shy space. Give that runner a dog, who also requires three feet of shy space, and six feet of shy space are required for just two pedestrians.
On a 10-foot-wide trail such as the one the mayor proposes, that leaves four feet of shy space for one cyclist to pass the slower-moving pedestrians. Best practice traffic engineering principles for cyclists recommend six to eight feet of shy space for each one. Any trail through the bosque that would safely allow both cyclists and pedestrians to use it would need to be 12 feet wide at a minimum, or 14 feet wide as the Albuquerque trails coordinator suggested.
Crime increases as pedestrians decrease. Out of the line of sight of motorists, a cyclist-only bosque would harbor increased assaults under the well-documented public safety rubrics of “eyes on the street”. [iii]
A 14-foot-wide trail through the bosque would induce even more cyclist travel, decrease pedestrian travel, and increase crime.
3. Animals and Birds Flee Increased Human Contact
These statistics can best be calculated by the many professional naturalists who oppose the mayor’s path. Gale Garber of Hawks Aloft Inc. has scientifically surveyed bird life in the Rio Rancho bosque since so-called invasive plants which provide nesting habitat were removed, and a crusher fine trail installed. The reduction from over 700 summer birds per 100 acres to under 200 in just eight years cannot be accounted for by drought alone.
The minimum induced travel of one cyclist per half hour twelve hours a day – much less the maximum of one cyclist every minute – would have a permanent damaging effect on the safe nesting habitat of birds, mammals and reptiles in the bosque.
[i] For a survey of the scientific literature on induced travel Google this.
http://www.cts.cv.ic.ac.uk/staff/wp2-noland.pdf
For an August, 2013 report, see Todd Litman, Generated Traffic and Induced Travel: Implications for Transport Planning, Victoria Transport Policy Institute.
http://www.vtpi.org/gentraf.pdf
[ii] For the Federal report on conflicts between users of multi-use paths Google this:
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/recreational_trails/publications/conflicts_on_multiple_use_trails/conflicts.pdf
[iii] For “eyes on the street”, “shy space” and “barrier effect” outcomes, see the most recent best practices guide recommended by the experts at the international pedestrian traffic engineering listserv, Pednet: Pedestrian and Bicycle Planning: A Guide to Best Practices, Victoria (B.C.) Transport Policy Institute. Their director, Todd Litman, is thought by senior pedestrian traffic analysts to be among the most solid analysts now at work.
The mayor’s vision for the bosque from the first plan through this last one, of which the main feature is still the 10-foot wide surfaced trail, has always had a peculiar dissonance with the nature preserve character of the site. An eyewitness to a discussion with Hizzoner told me the mayor’s vision is pretty much based on his desire to ride his mountain bike through the bosque.
A battle 10 years ago in Washington, D.C. to keep the city, backed by the powerful Washington Area Bicyclists Association, from stripping a 10-foot wide asphalt “trail” down the middle of a long and skinny neighborhood park taught me cyclists are the most entitled of athletes. And the least interested in, and the least scrupulous in protecting, the slow-moving amenities of pedestrians. It may be different in the land of enchantment, but in Washington, D.C. cyclists are the highway lobby dressed in green clothing.
Without going into the truly ferocious war stories of the battle between the dogs and the toddlers and the runners and the baseball players and jungle gym climbers and basketball players and tot lot occupants whose right to the public space they already occupied in the park carried no sway with the city or the cyclists, I have started to think about mountain bikers.
Only about 3% of all Americans participate in mountain biking, as opposed to the far greater number of pedestrian athletes — 12% hiking and 18.5% trail running, according to the Outdoor Foundation 2013 Outdoor Participation Report. Outdoor recreation is a man’s world; women’s participation peaks early in life, with 60% of six-year-olds playing outdoors. The percentage of women playing outdoors is all downhill from there, coming to rest with under 20% of women over 66 playing outdoors — as compared to twice as many men — 40% of men 66 and over.
Mountain biking is a Hispanic and Caucasian man’s world. Here are the Outdoor Foundation demographics by race of mountain bikers and other outdoor recreationists:
African Americans
Ages 6+
1. Running/Jogging and Trail Running 19%
2. Freshwater, Saltwater and Fly Fishing 11%
3. Road Biking, Mountain Biking and BMX 11%
4. Birdwatching/Wildlife Viewing 5%
5. Car, Backyard and RV camping 4%
Caucasians
Ages 6+
1. Running/Jogging and Trail Running 18%
2. Freshwater, Saltwater and Fly Fishing 17%
3. Road Biking, Mountain Biking and BMX 16%
4. Car, Backyard, and RV Camping 16% 5. Hiking 14%
Asian/Pacific islanders
Ages 6+
1. Running/Jogging and Trail Running 24%
2. Road Biking, Mountain Biking and BMX 14%
3. Hiking 13%
4. Car, Backyard and RV Camping 10%
5. Freshwater, Saltwater and Fly Fishing 9%
5. Cross-country, Alpine, Freestyle and Telemark Skiing 8%
Hispanics
Ages 6+
1. Running/Jogging and Trail Running 22%
2. Road Biking, Mountain Biking and BMX 17%
3. Freshwater, Saltwater and Fly Fishing 14%
4. Car, Backyard and RV Camping 11% 5. Hiking 9%
Click to access ResearchParticipation2013.pdf
Hispanics are the biggest percentage of people who mountain bike (17%), with Caucasians at 16%, Asian and Pacific Islanders (of whom the 2010 census counts about 600 in Albuquerque) at 14%, and African Americans at 11%. About three percent of children do mountain biking, and 2% BMX (competitive dirt trail racing).
Mountain biking is not for poor people. The average cost of a beginner’s bicycle is $600-$800, according to Essortment. Minimum equipment recommended for the minimum bicycle — a maximum mountain bike can cost $3000 — is “…good helmet, gloves, good cycling gear, shirt, lightweight jacket, cycling shorts that are padded, a hydration pack with at least 50-ounce water storage, and good cycling shoes. ” The cheapest mountain biking shoe at REI is $70, bike helmet, $25, padded bike shorts,$48 — for a dangerous minimum of safety equipment total of $143. Total outlay, $743 for a mountain bike and minimum safety gear.
Here’s the problem. As every pedestrian traffic engineer acknowledges, cyclists drive pedestrians away.
A 10-foot wide paved trail through the bosque would induce travel by cyclists at rates pedestrian traffic engineers have scientific formulas to calculate.
These cyclists would, as a matter of well-documented fact, chase pedestrians away. What would be left for outdoor recreation in the bosque is a path it costs $743, at a minimum, to access and use.
And what is the average income of the Hispanic communities closest to the part of the inner city bosque the mayor wants to close to everyone who doesn’t have $743?
In Barelas, the median per capita income is $16,118 a year. Households earn $29,194.
In Atrisco, the per capita income is $16,685 and household income is $43,052.
The Outdoor Foundation reports 35% of outdoor recreants — and remember, mountain cyclists are men — are cutting back on non-essential expenses in 2013. No one has done the statistical breakdown for Hispanics and their beloved mountain biking. But the user surveys show that everyone who recreates out of doors lists a pedestrian activity as their first preference.
It’s not hard to conclude that the mayor’s vision for the bosque, the centerpiece of which remains a 10-foot-wide surfaced trail, would essentially close the bosque to most of the people who live near it and wish to use it. The imposition of a plan privileging men on bicycles, and dis-empowering pedestrians — the majority of users of outdoor recreation — has a political theory component. It is a disturbing unilateral exclusionary move via landscape architecture. It fits into the centuries-long history of the privatization of public space by minority interests. The Spanish broke the Indians’ backs and privatized public land and water by making them dig the first acequia. The river hasn’t been the same since.
No road through the bosque.
http://www.change.org/petitions/mayor-richard-berry-and-albuquerque-city-council-keep-the-rio-grande-bosque-wild
This is an excerpt from a report I wrote for another park 10 years ago. The dates but not the principles have changed, and some bosque-specific information has been added.
I. Multi-Use Trails
“Multi-use trail” is, in practice, a bicycle commuter highway that joggers and walkers shun. The asphalt surface injures joggers’ ankles, knees, and hips. Given a choice, they prefer to run on the earth alongside existing multi-use trails, according to the only recent survey on conflicts between users of multi-use trails, done in Albuquerque, N. M.[i]
Two thirds of walkers on multi-use trails fear cyclists, according to a federal report on conflicts between users of multi-use trails. Bicycle traffic volume on weekends appears to outpace rush hour traffic all day, thus mimicking weekend auto traffic statistics.[ii] It also corroborates the Albuquerque survey finding that user conflict on multi-use trails worsens on weekends.
In the 10 years since the foundation of multi-use trails, there have been only two studies on conflicts between users, according to the 300-plus pedestrian traffic experts on the international e-mail listserv, Pednet.
The first study of conflicts between multi-use trail users was commissioned by the Department of Transportation when the funds were set aside nine years ago.[iii] User conflict was seen as the number one problem with multi-use trails. This prediction has proved correct. Recently, the city of Albuquerque, N.M. tallied the conflicts between the 368 respondents to a survey of users of their multi-use trails. The city trails coordinator concluded, “The only solution is either separated paths or wider paths, say 14 feet. Otherwise it will forever be a problem.”
Lacking other precedent, four well-established principles of urban planning and traffic engineering are useful to inform speculation on the future of a multi-use trail.
The first is the certainty that widening induces travel. Senior researchers of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S. government academics, not the highway lobby, nor greens) have authoritatively concluded that every 10 per cent increase in the width of a highway leads directly to a 3.3 per cent increase in the number of vehicles traveling upon it.[iv] This is a revolution in thinking previously formed by the highway lobby credo, “ease traffic congestion” by building more roads and widening extant ones. What actually happens is that gridlock is not eased, simply widened.
One career environmentalist and long-term observer of the bosque estimates 3 to 5 people an hour currently walk the main bosque path on a summer day.
According to the city, “an average of 780 bike riders per day pass under I-40 on the Paseo del Bosque”. Given a 12-hour day, that’s 65 bicycle riders an hour, more than one a minute. If the proposed bosque path is connected to the existing Paseo del Bosque trail, pedestrian traffic engineers calculating the environmental impact of a 10-foot-wide surfaced multi-use trail through the bosque would need to take this high volume of use on a parallel path into consideration. As far as I know, no bosque path usage or environmental impact study has been done. But these figures, from 3 to 5 an hour to one a minute, suggest and can be used as ballpark parameters for estimating induced traffic on the proposed trail and its impact on pedestrians, including bosque fauna attempting to cross the trail at twilight, or those inclined to depart high levels of human activity.
Immanent calls by cyclists and bladers for future widening of what is officially designated “multi-use” will almost certainly ensue, as the Albuquerque survey suggests. Conflicts between users are intractable, as the federal report foresaw before there were any trails or users, and as the Albuquerque survey corroborates nearly a decade later.
Second,[v] an urban planning concept known as “eyes on the street” comes into play. A Jane Jacobs concept, the idea is that crime decreases as the number of pedestrians on foot increases. [I wrote this whole document about a proposed path through a neighborhood park in Washington, D.C.. I’m leaving this part in, because while specific to the D.C. site, it also explains in detail what will happen in the Bosque when pedestrians are chased out:
[The Rock Creek Park bicycle commuter path usage survey conducted by the Happy Trails Caucus shows walkers shun the bikeway. The bikeway which crosses west of the creek, and passes under the P Street bridge has sheltered repeated attacks. The first series of assaults were by an ice-pick-wielding bicycle thief (1994). The second series were by a rapist intent on assaulting lone female joggers (1996). This crime zone was created – according to this rubric of eyes on the street – due to the fact that walkers shun it, and that it is out of the line of sight of motorists. Thus, the establishment of a multi-use trail in Rose Park would possibly create a crime zone by eliminating walkers from the mix, as they have been eliminated from the mix on the Rock Creek Park bicycle commuter path, for which a link is sought to Rose Park.
[If someone knows a similar crime zone on Albuquerque’s cyclist trails that demonstrably, with newspaper clips of the crimes, has become dangerous because pedestrians have been forced out of the area by cyclists, please do the research and make the point at the public meetings Sept. 4 and Sept. 18 on the mayor’s plan for the bosque. If you could give me your sources of info and corroboration, in a formal bibliography, I’d be delighted to include it here with a credit to you.
[In ABQ the Plan, city public safety authorities are quoted (p. 32) on this principle, saying an increase of visitors to the park will make it safer. They seem not to have taken into account that an increase of cyclist visitors, who are not considered eyes on the street, will run off all other law-abiding users of the proposed trail.]
Third, traffic engineers calculate that each pedestrian on foot requires only 1.5 feet of what they term “shy space”. As speed increases, so does the amount of shy space required. Thus, two pedestrians walking very quickly side by side would each require 3 feet of shy space, for a total of 6 feet of shy space. A sidewalk of 6 feet wide would thus be recommended, under the best practices rubric, to accommodate just two fast-moving walkers. A multi-use trail would add even faster-moving cyclists and bladers to this mix. The proposed bosque multi-use trail is 10 feet wide. Given just two fast-moving walkers abreast, that leaves four feet of shy space for cyclists and bladers. Cyclists are usually calculated as needing six to eight feet of shy space apiece. No reasonable plan would increase bicycle traffic while expecting cyclists and bladers to confine themselves to four feet of shy space.
The fourth possible outcome for a multi-use path in the bosque is known to pedestrian traffic engineers as the “barrier effect.” As with Robert Moses’ Bronx Expressway, a broad asphalt surface with induced traffic traveling upon it prevents pedestrians from crossing to the other side. The barrier effect creates dead space on the side of the highway to which people do not cross. Thus, a multi-use path could halve the space people use, could create a dead zone in the half of the park to which no one wishes to cross. In the bosque, amphibians like the soft-shell and painted turtles who live in the water and emerge to lay eggs on land have a low tolerance to lack of cover. A 10-foot paved trail along the river’s edge would prove a barrier to migration for reproduction that the turtles would be unlikely to overcome. According to one long-term scientific observer of the bosque, a 10-foot paved path would create a barrier effect which could drive amphibians from the bosque.
Click and scroll down for photographs and descriptions of the turtles of New Mexico. Save their species. No road through the bosque.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/108460088402018418673/posts
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[i] Private communication from HNL.
Here in Albuquerque, New Mexico we have over 80 miles of paved multi-use trails. The weekends are the worst times for user conflicts due to the varying speeds of users,i.e. rollerblaers and bicyclists vs. walkers and runners. The only solution is either separated paths or wider paths, say 14 feet. Otherwise it will forever be a problem.
We recently completed trail counts and surveys. 368 surveys were collected and many of the comments were “please make the trail wider and smoother”, and this was from rollerbladers and bicyclists. Most walkers and runners would actually prefer an unpaved surface, since it is easier on your hips, knees, and ankles vs. walking or running on concrete or asphalt.
This is obviously not a full blown study but I can assure you that the data
we’ve collected here over the past two weekends is indicative of the needs and conflicts which exist nationwide on trails whether they be in urban or more off-road/wilderness areas.
Hope this is useful and helpful.
Henry N. Lawrence III Associate Planner, Trails Coordinator City of Albuquerque Parks and Recreation
[ii] Sipress, Alan. (February 19, 2000.) Saturday Saturation; Traffic Volume on ‘Off’ Day Now Outpaces Weekday Rush Hours in Region. The Washington Post.
[iii] http://world.std.com/~jimf/biking/conflicts.html
That’s a dead link from the original document I wrote 10 years ago. It may refer to this, but I doubt it.
A study of readers of Backpacker magazine found that over two-thirds felt the use of mountain bikes on trails was objectionable (Viehman 1990). Startling other trail users, running others off the trail, being faster and more mechanized, damaging the resources, causing erosion, frightening wildlife, and “just being there” were the biggest concerns (Kulla 1991; Chavez, Winter and Baas 1993). Keller (1990) notes that brightly colored clothes, a high-tech look, and the perception of a technological invasion can all be sources of conflict felt by others toward mountain bikers.
[iv] Sipress, Alan. (January 13, 2000.) More Lanes Better? Not Necessarily; Traffic Increases, Studies Find. The Washington Post.
Fulton, Lewis M., et al. (April, 2000.) A Statistical Analysis of Induced Travel Effects in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic Region. Journal of Transportation and Statistics 3, 1. http:// www.bts.gov/jts/V3N1/vol3_n1_toc.html
Noland, Robert B., and Lewison L. Lem. Induced Travel: A Review of Recent Literature and the Implications for Transportation and Environmental Policy. Paper to be presented at the European Transport Conference, Sept. 2000. London: click Research, then Current Working Papers. Centre for Transport Studies, Imperial College of Science and Medicine, 2000. http://www.cts.cv.ic.ac.uk/
Noland, Robert B., and William A. Cowart. (August, 2000.) Analysis of Metropolitan Highway Capacity and the Growth in Vehicle Miles of Travel, forthcoming in the Journal of Transportation and Statistics. London: click Research, then Current Working Papers. Centre for Transport Studies, Imperial College of Science and Medicine, 2000.
[v] For “eyes on the street”, “shy space” and “barrier effect” outcomes, see the most recent best practices guide recommended by the experts at Pednet: Pedestrian and Bicycle Planning: A Guide to Best Practices, Victoria (B.C.) Transport Policy Institute. Their director, Todd Litman, is thought by senior pedestrian traffic analysts to be among the most solid analysts now at work.
Tressie McMillan Cottom in her epic post on the Miley Cyrus MTV awards performance has got down to the stasis point in all the gasbaggery around that performance. My old friend Karen DeWitt has posted on Facebook today betraying a freshly shocked outrage at the unreasoning persistence of racism, as she contemplated incarceration and arrest rates for black men in the U.S..
I felt the same, shocked that I could be this old and still have my world rocked by Ms. Cottom’s piece relating her personal experience in college town bars with twerking frat boys and girls soliciting a threesome with her (and not her black date), as a matter of course. She relates to the black women whose asses Cyrus was slapping in her MTV performance.
Recovering somewhat from the shock of Cottom’s incandescent racist experience, I have two discreditable responses.
One is only slightly neener neener. With the Trayvon Martin verdict, the Crunk Feminist Collective raised, quite properly, the issue of white feminists’ responsibility for the all-female jury verdict. I accept this responsibility. I also see where those white women on the jury are patsies of a racist sytem. I also see there is a point where free people can stand up and say no to unjust law — that is, indeed, part of what a trial by jury system is for. (I still believe a trial by jury of your peers is one of humankind’s greatest inventions, if not number one. And, please, perfection is the enemy of the good.)
I also see, where the defense of the Hutus in the Rwanda genocide quickly reverted to blaming the French for setting up a society in which Tsutsis were considered smarter and prettier, that I am doing the same for the patsy jury verdict. There is a point where the perp needs to be told, you did the crime. Not the French. With the big round black women dancing in the Cyrus performance? Girlfriend, you were out there shakin’ it for the man.
Second, I want to declare, once and for all, how stupid all the twinkie feminists are for inventing the protest against slut-shaming. There’s no slut like a crone slut, and I am going to tell you what it is.
A slut does not do femme performance. She does not kiss other women in bars for frat boys or Joe Francis himself. She does not ask the only black woman in the bar to leave her date and come twerk with Miss Anne’s creepy boyfriend. A slut does not go all Mrs. Grundy and shake her finger at people for slut-shaming — every libertarian who calls herself a slut has a secret sociopathic and anti-social agenda which is not feminist. Trust me.
A slut — and do not ask me how I know this — is a gourmet. She simply does not give a shit what other people think, and she is never on camera. It’s not a secret vice, it’s just of no concern to a slut that other people know about it through photographs, video, performance. I repeat, there is no femme performance (or butch or whatever) in being a slut. To call people critiquing Cyrus’ performance slut-shamers is just about the stupidest, and most proscriptive, prune-lipped use of “feminism” I’ve ever heard of. There is not an authentic, unmediated bone in Miley Cyrus’ body, except perhaps the Molly’d-out stoner one, and to accuse people of slut-shaming a completely commodified capitalist tool is approaching abomination.
The real issue is what fake sluts are doing to black women. Cut it the fuck out.
http://tressiemc.com/2013/08/27/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland/
Five straight skinny reasons why *The Wire* is revolutionary, and TV’s best-ever show.
1.) Real People
As with British and Australian films and TV (as well as Euro, Persian, Chinese and world film and TV, which I don’t watch a lot of), the cast looks like real people. Many of them are. It’s not that many of them are black, which they are, it is that the white people and the black people all look like real people, not Meg Ryan’s post-surgery lips. As Liz Taylor used to say, “There are no real tits in Hollywood any more.”
There are in *The Wire*, and it is thrilling to see. No orthodontia. No nose jobs. No videogenic lipstick of a coral shade only seen in nature on blow up dolls. The diversity of peoples’ teeth, noses, skin textures, hands is beautiful to see. Sonia Sohn’s epithelial folds are almost as titanic a thing of beauty to regard as James Gandolfini’s eyes. The sets are natural colors too. Trees, water, blood, ruins.
2.) No Heroes
There is no star system. There are no heroes. The Hollywood/derriere garde/Aristotelian heroic system in which the story is the story of one handsome young guy does not exist in *The Wire*. They kill a protagonist off every season. The one you really love. McNulty, who is less the protagonist than the linking device, is far less attractive a hero than his creators believe (there is a lot of macho shit going on in the writing, a point to which I shall return.) And there is a reason the macho shits have the confidence to do that. And it’s not just in the ensemble player system.
3.) Real Life Mimesis
It is mimesis. Simon and Burns created the stories out of real life, with which, as a reporter and a homicide detective-turned-middle-school teacher, respectively, they were fairly familiar.
You know, of course, that Hollywood scriptwriters are all old Poonies. That is, they wrote for the Harvard Lampoon before they all got jobs writing for the Simpsons.
Cambridge to Hollywood. Not a circuit famous for the intrusion of anything but ideas, some of them wholesome, but quickly forgotten. Hollywood writers don’t know anything. They make stuff up. It’s called diegesis, as I’m sure you recall, which means basically narrative.
Simons is instinctually clear on the difference between making shit up and being a good writer. He also puts his finger on what keeps old reporters from ever really being able to let go of – let’s just call it, The Game. It’s why people who are paying attention to real life, and writing mimesis, will come up with a killa new protagonist – D’Angelo, Stringer, Frank Sobotka, Michael and the lost boys – every season, because they’re all out there. In the city. The major reason Simon’s new effort Treme is a flop is because he doesn’t know that city, and is falling back on tropes and stereotypes. And diegesis, like a Hollywood guy.
“God is not a second-rate novelist,” Simon says. “God knows what he’s doing, and if you just take what actually happened and marry it to where you want to go, it’s better than if you thought of it yourself.”
http://sepinwall.blogspot.com/2006/08/wire-money-for-something.html
4.) The Back Channel Economy Is Ruthlessly Capitalist
The sharpest political lesson is not we’re all together in The Game. Many people I respect argue this, eliding the point that ruthless capitalism is an I.Q. test for the underclass, apropos a season four episode in which a hopper repeats state senator Clay Davis’ line about taking the money of people who are giving it, and the disgraced police major Bunny Colvin says goodbye to his superiors in the same terms Stringer Bell faces down his executioners. The egalitarianism of The Game, in which the good guys and the bad guys share values is a good point and an interesting one. The political smarm of the idea that sexist black thugs are capitalists just like Nice People is more easily felt when one recalls that Spielberg dedicated “Schindler’s List”, in which the capitalist saves Jews, to his dead capitalist mentor, Steve Ross.
To me the sharpest political point is not, perhaps, that the back channel economy, The Game, systeme D, is as resistant to the reform efforts of people like Stringer Bell and D’Angelo Barksdale as mainstream politics and economics. It is that the back channel economy is just as ruthless a capitalist system to all who do not conform to the macho shit norm as the mainstream economy. In other words, all the macho shits are playing on a level field and the rest of us can suck eggs.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/28/black_market_global_economy
5.) Cynicism As a Full Employment Mandate for Reporters
I disagree with Simon’s politics, which seem to be that The City is failing because its institutions, including the back channel economy, are incapable of reform, due to the self interest of people like the master politician, the spider seemingly at the center of the web, the police commissioner Ervin Burrell. The image of a truly powerful black man in Burrell and his performance has gone under-appreciated. I appreciate it. And I disagree with Simon’s apparent politic that no politics can or will save the city, and that only individual action, like Cutty’s, can make a difference in anyone’s life. I reiterate here that Cutty is a character invented by George Pelecanos, not Simon and Burns, to relieve the cataclysm of entropy Simon so enjoys depicting.
The cynicism is pretty much one of self –interest. A broken city is a reporter’s full employment mandate, and a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have to think some more about the fallacies of cynicism; one of them is bullying. RIP, Hitchens.
http://amphibian7.blogspot.com/2007/09/fallacy-of-cynicism.html
There were several pieces posted on my FB flist on the fatuousness of the celebs at the Vogue mag sponsored Met gala celebrating the opening of the punk clothing show at the Costume Institute.
Just for the record, no one missed the death sentence for aging Plaid Forevers that the Metropolitan’s museumization of their youth represents.
Jaded Punk misses the point entirely, however, in lambasting Anna Wintour’s guests for being sellouts. Srsly, Wintour asked uber punk Kanye West to entertain. He brought his baby mama Kim Kardashian, who was dressed in Givenchy maternity wear as the Duchess of Devonshire’s sofa. We were not amused in 1981 by punks’ puerile performance of purity and lack of selling out. And nor are we now.
Here is baby mama Kardashian at the Met Gala. Actually the Duchess’ sofa Kim wore is more punk than the plaid flannel shirt Leonard DeCaprio wore to the black tie event.
Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala opening for the Costume Institute show on punk fashion.
The thing is, punk was always performance wear, and couture designers of the aging Plaid Forevers generation have always alluded to it. That’s what the museumization — the show at the Met — is about. I’m not sure if it actually makes the point that performance wear kind of museumizes (in the full Foucaultian sense of the word) itself the minute a Ramone shreds his jeans, and it is little different from the most exquisitely confected couture evening dress, or, punkest of all, Andre Leon Talley’s vast evening coat which looks like a vast suzani-appliqued kimono. Talley, who represents everything that is punk and actual wear, and Kardashian, who represents everything that is performance wear/fashion troll, looked more alike than either of them knew.
Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley in a Tom Ford evening coat at the Costume Institute punk show gala.
I want to salute the girls at Go Fug Yourself for carrying on a long existential dialogue on performance wear versus actual wear. These are two parallel discourses in fashion little explored elsewhere. You can get publicity in this paparazzi world by trolling fashion — wearing performance wear rather than actual clothes.
There was no real coverage of this event except deep in the Times Style section last Thursday. There was a long story inside about the East Village (aka center of the universe) shop, Trash and Vaudeville, where the Ramones actually got their black jeans, from which punk fashion took over the U.S. universe. Its longtime proprieter, Ray Goodman, points out there were two kinds of punk. The Ramones kind of street fashion he helped establish, and the “more theatrical” British invasion kind established later on. Actual wear vs. performance wear.
The manager of Trash and Vaudeville is an old school heroin addict — an upstate boy who came to the East Village in the ’70s lured by a Lou Reed song. He bottomed out, went back upstate, then returned to the East Village of his youth. Spiked and wrinkled, now, both, manager Jimmy Webb makes explicit what not selling out is.
He says, “We are true mom-and-pop, the bodega of rock ’n’ roll clothing. It’s here because of truth and spirit, just like Iggy Pop giving it his best every night and going all the way until everything in your body is broken except your soul and rock ’n’ roll. We can move it to Mars and still live.”
Jimmy Webb, manager, Trash and Vaudeville, the venerable Saint Mark’s place punk fashion store which dressed the Ramones.
Writing 