Grieve-Smith on Transportation

Granpa Nate smiled. Today it would be just him and little Adriano. It was hard to get that son of his to give up Adriano on a weekend day, but Granpa Nate had persisted, and finally got a nice warm Sunday to spend with the boy. A great day for the beach, he thought as he rang the doorbell.

"Hey Granpa! Look at this program!" A plush-covered dove flew steadily out of Adriano's bedroom door, hovered over Granpa's head for a few seconds, then crashed into the living room wall and landed on the couch. "Aw, it went too far, Daddy!" said the boy.

"Well, how many meters did you program it to go after the hover?"

"Three- Oh, that's why! Granpa, can I bring Paxie the Dove to the beach?"

"Not to the beach, Adriano. No, don't worry, you'll have plenty of time to play with it later. Listen, if Paxie gets seawater inside, it'll never fly again. Bring your shovel and pail, I'll put them on the back of my bike. Now say goodbye to Mommy and Daddy."

Granpa Nate and Adriano rode the elevator down and rolled their bicycles out into the bright sun. "Well, well, Paterson, New Jersey!"

"You always say that, Granpa!"

"I know, buddy. I've been here a hundred times since your mom and dad moved here, and I still can't get over how this place has come up. I still remember the way it was when my Mama and Daddy brought me here to see the Great Falls ... some seventy years ago! It must have been 2010 or 2011. A little worn-out but not a bad place. It was a sleepy suburban town. Not like this!" He waved his hand towards a row of high-rise apartment buildings.

"What else was different?" asked Adriano, as they rode down Broadway.

"Well, the train station, for one. It was just a little shack under the viaduct. Not like Union Station today. And so many cars on the streets! Adriano, be careful. Ride on my right side and don't get too far ahead! Some of these people are speed demons. Hey, come back!"

One of "these people," in fact, was Adriano's classmate from fourth grade, Luke. Granpa Nate had to pedal hard to cut the boys off. "No racing now, Adriano. We've got a train to catch."

"Hey Mr. U., we're taking the train too! We're gonna go to the Museum of Natural History and see the dinosaurs!"

"That's great, Luke! You and Adriano can play on the train. Where's Mama?"

"She rode ahead to get some tamales for us to eat in Central Park."

And there was Luke's mother, standing astride her bicycle in front of Union Station. "Hello, Mr. U. Great day for the beach!"

"Yes, I hope it won't be too crowded."

"The beach monitor says that there are still some unreserved spots at Gilgo Beach, so we won't have too much travel time."

The four rode down the bicycle ramp to the air-conditioned platform, where they got off their bikes and waited. Three minutes later the train pulled in with a whoosh, the doors opened, and they wheeled the bikes inside. Granpa Nate and Luke's mom hung the boys' bikes from hooks above their own bikes, while the boys pulled out their handheld video games.

The stops went quickly: Saddle Brook, Hackensack, Ridgefield Park, Fairview, West Harlem. Luke and his mother got off at West Harlem to transfer to the downtown subway. Granpa Nate and Adriano stayed on past La Guardia Airport and Flushing to Garden City, where they would catch the Beach Jitney.

Paris développe ses doubles sens cyclables en 2010. La République du Centre, January 10, 2010.

Over the course of the year, Paris will gradually extend two-way cycling in 30 kph zones.

Photo: B. Millot for the City of Paris

The Second and Eleventh arrondissements (districts) of Paris will see changes in mid-January as work begins. Marking will start in the Eighteenth and Twentieth arrondissements in mid-February, according to the Mayor's office.

Two-way cycle routes consist of two lanes, one open to both cars and bicycles, the other available only to cyclists. Bicycles are thus allowed to ride in directions that are illegal for cars, giving them greater mobility.

After the Second, Eleventh, Eighteenth and Twentieth arrondissements, all the other neighborhoods of the French capital will benefit in turn from this improvement and special dispensation. All in all, more than 60 neighborhoods will introduce two-way cycle routes by the end of the year.

The mayor's office is taking advantage of an interpretation of the traffic laws allowing cyclists to ride in either direction on streets where the speed limit is 30 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour) or less, when authorized by law enforcement agencies. Many other municipalities in France have already adopted this arrangement, including Bordeaux, Nantes, Strasbourg and the Paris suburbs of Colombes, Montreuil and Issy-les-Moulineaux.

Two-way cycle traffic is also found in other countries, particularly in Canada (Montreal), Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, Germany and Denmark.

Paris's campaign to encourage cycling is bearing fruit. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of cyclists on the streets of the capital jumped 93%. The arrival of Velib' in July 2007 fit with this pattern: according to surveys conducted by the city, on June 19, 2007 there were 36,396 bicycles ridden on the streets of Paris, and 57,846 on October 16 of that year, of which 37% were Velib' bicycles.

Since that date, on average 30% of the bicycles ridden in Paris have belonged to the bicycle rental system, and the number of bicycles has consistently grown month after month.

The MTA is doing track work on the #7 line to improve speed and reliability. That's good. As they have done for previous track work projects, they will be shutting down the line between Queensboro Plaza and Times Square for the next seven weekends. That's bad.

The N, R and E trains will be running, and people coming from points east will be able to transfer. The MTA usually runs shuttle buses for people to get to and from the three stations in Long Island City with no service. That's good. But the transfers can add five to ten minutes to a trip. Worse, the shuttle buses don't go to Manhattan; they stop at Queensboro Plaza, where passengers have to change for the N. For the next several weekends, people who are normally fifteen minutes from Grand Central will spend fifteen minutes on the bus just to get to the N, which doesn't even go to Grand Central. That's bad.

Photo: bitchcakesny / Flickr

What's especially frustrating for LIC residents is that many of them live only five minutes by car from the Queens Midtown Tunnel. If they could walk through the tunnel, they could get to Manhattan faster than by taking the shuttle bus. Those who own cars can drive into Manhattan if they want to deal with the traffic and the hassle of finding parking. Those who don't own cars are stuck with the shuttle bus.

Last year, in response to a previous service disruption, Councilmember Eric Gioia held a rally asking the MTA to run buses through the tunnel to Grand Central. Cap'n Transit took that a step further and suggested running the buses on the 34th Street bus lanes to Penn Station, so that travelers could switch to the subway at Penn Station, Herald Square or Park Avenue. He produced maps showing that, according to Google directions, when there is no traffic (as on weekends), buses can get to Penn Station in ten minutes from Ravenswood, Dutch Kills, Sunnyside or Greenpoint. In fifteen minutes they can get to Penn Station from the Triboro Bridge, Jackson Heights, Maspeth, Bushwick or Williamsburg. Of course, if they made stops in between it would take a little longer; the point is that lots of people want to go to Manhattan, and a bus could get them there pretty darn quick.

Map: Cap'n Transit

As far as I know, the MTA never responded to Gioia or to Cap'n Transit. They ran the inconvenient shuttle buses, and that was it. Now they're planning to do it again. This morning, Gioia's successor, Jimmy Van Bramer, held another rally asking for a tunnel bus. He was joined by Astoria Assemblymember Mike Gianaris (who has announced that he is running to represent this area in the State Senate next year), Assemblymember Cathy Nolan and Council Chair Christine Quinn.

WNYC's Brian Zumhagen was actually able to get a response from the MTA. An unnamed spokesman says that "shuttle buses directly to Grand Central would create big traffic tie-ups in Long Island City and on the East Side of Manhattan." It's not clear why they would cause any more tie-ups in LIC than the buses to Queens Plaza, or why they would cause any significant tie-ups in weekend traffic. That comment shows that the MTA is looking for reasons not to accommodate riders.

At this point it remains to be seen whether all that star power will have the desired effect. If you care about this issue, I suggest that you contact Jimmy or Cathy and ask how you can help.

Jarrett Walker has another thought-provoking post up, this time on spatial vs. narrative navigators, linking to a magazine article that gives more background. In the comments, Russ links to a paper(PDF) about the effect that the Tube Map has on people's mental maps of London.

The distinction between spatial and narrative navigation makes a lot of sense to me, but disagree with the way that Jarrett seems to set them up as a zero-sum game - either you're good at mental maps, or you're good at remembering narratives, or you're mediocre at both. This portrayal is supported by the Maguire study discussed in the article that indicated that London cabbies who create too big of a mental map wind up with hippocampi that are shrunk in the front. But I feel like I'm relatively good at spatial navigation and not so bad at narrative navigation, so I think it's possible to develop both - at the expense of whatever else you could be learning, of course, like how to pick up women.

An interesting point in that area: when I developed my prototype English to American Sign Language machine translation system (PDF), the biggest obstacle were phrases like "winds SSW 30 mph gusty near canyons."

I asked a native signer and professional interpreter the best way to say "gusty near canyons" in ASL, and she drew a map of Albuquerque in the air, pointed to the canyons with a topic marking nonmanual, and made the sign for "wind" with emphasis. I asked her if it could be said another way, just with the sign for "canyon," but she said that the map would be much more natural for a native signer.

To get a machine translation system to handle that would not only require a kind of sophisticated mapping subsystem that's not usually found in these programs, but also a lot of background knowledge of geographic features - for every locale that has weather reports. It made me realize that not only is ASL much more complicated than I had given it credit for, but it's a lot harder to write down than spoken languages. In the terms of Jarrett's post, it seems clear that the National Weather Service was using narrative description, while the interpreter I consulted was using spatial description.

While I would agree with the comment left by Pantheon that spatial navigation is more effective than narrative navigation, particularly when it's done by computers, I strongly disagree with his condemnation of narrative navigators, or of inferior navigators in general. Complaining about people who have difficulty finding their way across town is like complaining about bad spelling or malapropisms. In some cases you can make the case that people should develop these skills betters, but for a lot of them it's too late to learn. There's a range of ability along both axes, and a transit agency that only caters to riders within certain limits will run the risk of alienating riders.

I found this book in the library. To be honest I didn't get into it enough to finish it before I had to bring it back, but there were a few good quotes. The first one relates to this post from the Streetsblog Network.

There are two things that french animals do not do, cats do not fight much and do not howl much and chickens do not get flustered running across the road, if they start to cross the road they keep on going which is what french people do too.
Anybody driving a car in Paris must know that. Anybody leaving the sidewalk to go on or walking anywhere goes on at a certain pace and that pace keeps up and nothing startles them nothing frightens them nothing makes them go faster or slower nothing not the most violent or unexpected noise makes them jump, or change their pace or their direction. If anybody jumps back or jumps at all in the streets of Paris you can be sure they are foreign not french. That is peaceful and exciting.

It turns out that the behavior Stein observes in the second quote is affected by economics:

Sarah Bernhardt made me see the thin arms of frenchwomen. When I came to Paris and saw the little midinettes and Montmartoises they all had them. It was only many years later when the styles changed, in those days they wore long skirts, that I realised what sturdy legs went with those thin arms. That is what makes the french such good soldiers the sturdy legs, thin arms and sturdy legs, if you see what I mean, peaceful and exciting.

That is what makes all the french able to ride up hill on bicycles the way they do, no hill is so steep but that slowly pedalling up and up they go, men and girls and little children, the sturdy legs and thin arms.