memo.ryecroft

A Greener Pedestrian Friendly City

One of the biggest impressions left on me during my travels in Europe was the ease of walking around busy urban centers in pedestrian only zones. Some of the beautiful commercial areas in Barcelona and Munich were particularly striking.

Last year over Memorial Day weekend, New York City had closed off portions of Times Square and reduced traffic on selected stretches of Broadway in order to create pedestrian zones. My concern at the time was that the success of these efforts was going to

“depend on how they eventually begin linking Times Square with Harold Square and by extension Madison Square and Union Square.”

The response to the Times Square changes this past year has been positive overall. Following in the success of these changes, the city is looking to add more pedestrian zones to other high profile areas.

On 34th Street:

Automobiles would be banned on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, creating a pedestrian plaza bookended by Macy’s/Herald Square and the Empire State Building. The result would be a street effectively split in two.

On the west side of the pedestrian plaza, all car traffic would flow west, toward the Hudson River. On the east side, all car traffic would move east, toward the East River. Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier.

The dedicated bus lanes also appear to be taking a cue from a system in use in cities like Curtiba: transit buses using the lane would allow passengers to pay for bus tickets at sidewalk kiosks before boarding, and buses could signal traffic lights to remain green as the buses approach intersections. Be sure to read the comments at the original article.

And at Union Square (a move that will help the Greenmarket and ease confusion at a difficult corner):

Almost all traffic would be banned from the block of Broadway north of Union Square, between 17th and 18th Streets, under a proposal under consideration by the city’s Transportation Department.

Tables and chairs could be installed on the block, which would be open to pedestrians and bicycles in a design similar to the plazas now seen in Times and Herald Squares. A pedestrian plaza would also be installed on East 17th Street, which runs along the north side of Union Square, replacing a lane of traffic.

Again, check out the comments. The comment by Alan is a good one. While I’m in favor of these changes and partial towards developments on Manhattan because this is the borough that I live in, I am increasingly interested in seeing how these and other transit changes can benefit everyone in NYC. Especially in light of the MTA and their continued service cutbacks.

We Come Here to Remember

Dreams, Unbuilt

The original I.M. Pei plan and model from 1964 has been unearthed recently. Steve Lackmeyer at OKC Central had this to say:

Before the revival of the Oklahoma River and emergence of Boathouse Row, before MidTown and the Plaza District, before MAPS and Bricktown, there was the I.M. Pei Plan. The transformation of downtown OKC began, for good or bad, with an ambitious plan drawn up by internationally reknown architect and urban planner I.M. Pei.

He called for the clear-cutting of hundreds of downtown buildings, many historic, to make way for a “city of tomorrow.”  The plan was later reviled by locals, but are there lessons, good and bad, to be learned from this experiment?

Oklahoma City is just past 100, and as the civic leaders continue to define the city’s next phase of identity and growth, it might help to examine the good and the bad of the Urban Renewal experiment. As I’ve been digging into some of the reading and history associated with the I.M. Pei project, I’ve been thinking of other big development plans that promised to give us some version of a better tomorrow.

Intercon wrote a piece about Dubai recently. I’ve alway’s looked at Dubai as a sort of capitalist / developer Disney World. A version of Las Vegas, without a viable reason to exist beyond it being a realized mirage. It almost feels as if an attempt by man to flaunt its desires in the face of the reality of nature. (see my previous post Obtaining Unobtainium.) Islands can be created at will, snow can fall in desert heat and towers can be built on hills of sand. But now mortgages are going unpaid, and there’s a reported 3,000 cars abandoned at the airport as people leave the country and their debts behind.

I look at Dubuai, and its questionable success and I’m wondering about all of the other “dreams,” that got started, but didn’t fully live up to their envisioned glory. One that immediately comes to mind is California City, California. 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, California City and its miles of dusty streets were abandoned before it could even begin. Take a look. [Read more »]

All of You Undisturbed Cities

All of you undisturbed cities
haven’t you ever longed for the Enemy?
I’d like to see you besieged by him
for ten endless and groundshaking years.

Until you were desperate and mad with suffering;
finally in hunger you would feel his weight.
He lies outside the walls like a countryside.
And he knows very well how to endure
longer than the one that he comes to visit.

Climb up on your roofs and look out:
his camp is there and his morale doesn’t falter,
his numbers do not decrease; he will not grow weaker,
and he sends no one into the city to threaten
or promise and no one to negotiate.

He is the one who breaks down all walls,
and when he works, he works in silence.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Obtaining Unobtainium

Two items of news have surfaced recently…One through the TED Conference, and one through 60 Minutes.

via the amazing TED Talks: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal.” Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today’s reactors as fuel. “In terms of fuel this really solves the problem.” He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky — the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.

And on 60 Minutes: The Bloom Box

The Bloom box is a new kind of fuel cell that produces electricity by combining oxygen in the air with any fuel source, such as natural gas, bio-gas, and solar energy. Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes – each the size of a grapefruit – could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the power grid; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box.

Aside from the sheer far-feched coolness that both of these represent, and the social/political/cultural ramifications that could begin to be discussed, both of these made me recall a passage of C.S. Lewis’s in The Abolition of Man:

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique…

The way I read the selection is that the path of earlier age wisdom was to attempt to live in conformity with the unyielding reality. Modernity, or applied science, has approached reality as a malleable natural world – something we can shape to fit our desires. Our current mindset seems to be generally focused on a search for new power sources, and in the case of the Bloom Box we are truly creating power out of thin air. Now I realize I’m stretching by trying to connect these three things in my mind, but in very general ways C.S. Lewis’s passage is a reminder of the possible split between a mindset of efficient creation of power (using science to coax and mine every last bit of energy from our finite resources in our search for more than we have) versus using science to help us in our efficient use of power (an example would be the extended battery life in our phones due to more efficient software programming/resource allocation).

In the topic of a more sustainable future, I would have to say that I might fall more in the camp of the ‘earlier ages:’ we have a depleting amount of unobtainium, do more with less of it. I feel that the greatest success is going to occur when our advances in efficient creation of power is met with a broader cultural shift in thought away from consuming to conserving.