Year: 2013

Commentary, Queens, Traffic calming

When Broadway is too broad

This past Saturday, a young college student was killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking on Broadway at 58th Street here in Woodside. I know the danger he felt. Just two weeks before I was walking home from a dinner date in Jackson Heights. At 59th Street, a block before the corner where Luis Bravo was killed, I said to my wife, “Let’s turn here. This stretch of Broadway always feels dangerous to me.”
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The width of this stretch of Broadway is puzzling. It’s a strange gap: years ago, before I moved to Queens, I walked most of the length of Broadway, from Elmhurst to Astoria, and this area almost made me regret my trip. A few blocks east, at 63rd Street, it’s seventy feet wide. A few blocks west, at 53rd Place, it’s also seventy feet wide. Between those two streets, the road widens to ninety feet, and from two travel lanes to four.

Maybe the people digging the subway needed a ditch that wide because the local and express tracks come together at Northern Boulevard. Maybe the city engineers thought that Broadway needed to be four lanes wide to bring cars from 34th and 35th Avenues to Northern Boulevard. If so, they were wrong. There is never a traffic jam on those blocks, even in the height of rush hour. There’s lots of room for the cars, which encourages drivers to speed.

We have already looked into ways to make this area safer. My City Council Member, Jimmy Van Bramer told Streetsblog that earlier this year, at the request of my neighbor Ed Surmenian, his staff asked the City Department of Transportation to study changing the timing of the traffic signals. The DOT responded that the signals were properly timed.

Stephen Miller of Streetsblog tells us that the DOT has proposed “road diets” for similarly overbuilt streets like Morningside Avenue, to take space away from cars. The Morningside Avenue proposed configuration would certainly be an improvement over what we have, but it would just waste that space on painted medians.

The sidewalks on Broadway should be widened, giving that space to pedestrians. The sidewalks on the south side are relatively comfortable, varying from ten to fifteen feet wide, but the ones on the north side are all under ten feet wide. The sidewalks on both sides should be a minimum of twenty feet wide.

You may say that you don’t see that many people walking on that part of Broadway, so why have twenty foot sidewalks? I say that people don’t walk because they don’t feel safe, just like my wife and I turned off when we got to 59th Street. With wider sidewalks and slower cars, more people will walk. It’s a natural connection between Jackson Heights and Astoria, after all.

Another thing that would bring people to walk in that area would be interesting stores and restaurants, but the zoning doesn’t encourage it. West of 63rd Street the avenue is zoned for residential construction, and west of 57th Street it’s manufacturing, but there’s very little manufacturing on Broadway itself. A C2-5 commercial overlay would allow people to build stores along Broadway in this section that look just like the ones west of 49th Street and east of 72nd Street.

I know that Jimmy Van Bramer and his staff have been working hard to make the district safer to walk in. I know that Borough Commissioner Maura McCarthy wants pedestrians to be safer in Queens. So let’s take away those extra lanes of Broadway and make the sidewalks wider. And let’s bring in the Department of City Planning and make it legal to build stores and restaurants right up to the sidewalk. Let’s make this part of Broadway a place where people can stroll in comfort.

by grvsmth
Commentary, Greenwich Village

Wittgensteinian villages

Last month I guessed that when Ari Wallach said that Hastings-on-Hudson is a village “in a Wittgensteinian sense,” he meant that it was part of a family of things that are called “villages,” but don’t all share the same set of criteria. Wallach confirmed on Twitter that this was what he meant.

Wittgenstein’s example came from the area of games, where poker is competitive and contains elements of chance, tic-tac-toe is competitive but involves no element of chance, and solitaire contains elements of chance but is not competitive. Meanwhile, there are things that are not games but are competitive, like war, and things that are not games but involve chance, like weather forecasting.

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In my previous post I had four criteria for “games,” but I chose to focus on two of them to make the diagrams easier to read.

Similarly, George Lakoff argued, a typical mother provides genetic material to her child and nurtures the child once it is born. A genetic mother does not necessarily nurture the child and an adoptive mother does not provide genetic material, but they are both considered to be mothers. A father can provide genetic material, and an teacher can nurture, but they are not mothers. Lakoff calls these radial categories.

mother1b

(Strictly speaking, war contains elements of chance, and fathers can nurture, so the diagrams don’t quite fit the way people think about these categories, but it’s hard to capture everything.)

Back to Hastings-on-Hudson: it is legally incorporated as a village, but it is more suburban than rural, bordering on the city of Yonkers. Greenwich Village and Queens Village were once villages, but are now neighborhoods in New York City, and may not be considered villages by anyone anymore. Meanwhile, Huntington Village on Long Island is more rural, but is not legally a village. A typical village, like New Paltz, is incorporated and rural. Then there are rural areas like Wittenberg (where I spent a good part of my childhood, essentially a crossroads with a general store), and incorporated areas like Buffalo, that are not villages.

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These “family resemblances” are everywhere in human categorization, and they are the basis for many of what I call “category fights.” The existence of this kind of polysemy is rarely acknowledged, unfortunately, and many people argue over these categories as though they were Platonic categories with necessary and sufficient conditions, when the actual facts are more complicated.

by grvsmth
Commentary, News

In a Wittgensteinian sort of way

This weekend the New York Times Styles section ran one of their periodic stories about kids growing up and moving to the suburbs, and changing both themselves and the suburbs in the process.  A while back the suburb in question (more of an exurb) was Rosendale, and this time it was Hastings-on-Hudson.  This particular article was notable for its sheer number of evocations of the wacky hipster frame, and specifically the description by “futurism consultant” (sorry, I have to put that in quotes) Ari Wallach that Hastings is a village “in a Wittgensteinian sort of way.”

Blogger Kieran Healy responded by posting the “Top Ten Ways that Hastings-on-Hudson might be a Village in a Wittgensteinian Sense.”  And of course he’s right that it is a very funny quote, name-dropping a philosopher that hardly anybody has read in the original, in a “Styles” article about real estate trends.  I would crack up if I ever found myself saying something like that, and I hope Wallach has enough of a sense of humor to do the same.

What’s funnier to me, as I just realized yesterday morning, is that I have an idea what Wallach was saying, and I agree with him.  In fact, on Sunday I was at the Lavender Languages Conference arguing that I am transgender in a Wittgensteinian sort of way.  I didn’t use those words; instead I referenced George Lakoff, who got the idea from Wittgenstein via Eleanor Rosch.

I learned about Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophy of Language class 22 years ago, but that class was so rich with theories that I couldn’t keep track of them all.  So now I’m catching up with the help of Wikipedia, which gives us this quote (Philosophical Investigations 66, 1953) about the idea of “family relationships”:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don’t say, “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games'”–but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! Look for example at board games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

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I made this Euler diagram (which is not a true Venn diagram, according to the Wikipedian who made this page). Some of the games that Wittgenstein mentions, like Olympic track and field games, are amusing (in the sense of not being boring) and involve competition among players, skill and chance.

Other games fit only some of these criteria. There is no element of luck in chess or tic-tac-toe.  There is no competition among players in solitaire or throwing a ball at the wall.  There is no skill involved in ring-around-the-rosie.  Tic-tac-toe is not “amusing.”  Nevertheless, we call these all “games,” and if we tried to say that any of the four were necessary criteria we would exclude some of the games.

Similarly, these cannot be sufficient criteria either.  Surgery involves skill, but it is not a game.  Weather forecasting involves chance.  War involves competition.  Theater is amusing.  That said, they are often compared to games, and described with game metaphors.

This is a good place to stop.  I’ll talk in another blog post about how Hastings might be a village in this way.

by grvsmth