Caltrain Saved, For Now

Chronicle reports: Caltrain has found a way to stay afloat for the next two years. The Metropolitan Planning Organization, the closest thing the balkanized Bay Area transit/transpo landscape has to a arbiter, stepped in and pledged to divert monies slated for maintenance projects (!) and capital projects like electrifying the Caltrain tracks (who knew?) and building a "Dumbarton Bridge line." Again: who knew.

And raise fares. Natch.

And to think people thought Caltrain would stay solvent by closing stations or limiting hours.

It's hard to tell from either the Chronicle or the Examiner account whether the diverted funds are the MTO telling Caltrain what to do with its (Caltrain's) money, or whether it's the MTO throwing its own money at Caltrain. I lean toward the latter. The plan is for Caltrain to locate a dedicated funding source in the next two years--it is unique among all Bay Area transit agencies in lacking some kind of local tax revenue source. Because the current arrangement is hardly appealing, for anyone. And one of the craziest things is that Caltrain has one of the highest farebox recovery rates in the area; they get more of their budget from fares sold than BART or Muni do. Through the looking glass.

At least the new Transbay Terminal has some sweet public art commissions lined up: Tim Hawkinson plans to use rubble from the old Transbay Terminal to make a new sculpture. Previous work:

 

A bear!

And a "300-foot long sculpture was comprised largely of 13 bus-sized inflated bags", AKA a giant bagpipe.

Salem Photo-Essay: Bike Racks

Our Chief Bike Infrastructure Photography Editor, Pacific Northwest Division, AKA MRE, has turned in an eagle-eyed debut.

Below please find some quite wonderful bike racks Our Correspondent noticed whilst perambulating scenic downtown Salem, OR.

Proof that bike racks can be an enlightening, amusing part of the small-town streetscape, though some will inevitably disagree and move to convene task forces debating the issue.

Statue of Liberty

I think that every coffee shop should have steaming-coffee-cup shaped bike racks.

Some cursory internet searching turned up some other interesting examples. Courtesy of David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame), the following were temporary additions to New York City sidewalks:

 

Seriously: bike racks could be a great way to accentuate a business's street/sidewalk presence. And provide bike parking, and public art.

the car is a kind of shield that deflects empathy

So reads a line in the NYTimes write up of photographer Lee Friedlander's exhibit at the Whitney Museum, and accompanying coffee table book. I've wanted to write about this for a while, but since it's less directly an urban planning topic, and more broadly car-cultural, I hemmed and hawed. No more.

Friedlander's work draws upon photographs taken during roadtrips across the continental US in the past 15 years. Unlike most roadtrippers, he took all of his pictures from inside his car.

This innovation puts Mr. Friedlander in the company of all those who turn the landscape of our automotive consumer culture into art--the article links to Ed Ruscha, but anyone who ever dug Warhol's Campbell Soup cans probably gets Friedlander. They find their are by inverting and questioning the connotations we typically associate with familiar iconography. (This is fine art! This too!)

Friedlander's particular inversion questions the iconography of an American Landscape associated with scenic scenery, majestic vistas, and even the banalities/nostalgia of highway signage and roadside commerce, because these familiar portraits tell narratives that selectively omit the auto. Each image is a story, and the story told when a traveler steps out of a parked car to capture the Grand Canyon is a different story than taking the same picture inside the car. (Exhibit A.)

As the article notes:

[Friedlander] knows that cars are essentially illusion factories — to wit: “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”

Illusion factories--I think this gets to the heart of how Friedlander wants to portray the automobile: as a machine that enables much portraiture of things that are America, but simultaneously engineers its own absence from the story the picture tells. The picture, then, is an illusion, fictive, and in Friedlander's vision, courtesy of the automobile. So he unwinds the narrative, exposes the machinery, and leaves the car in the picture.

And this is why Friedlander belongs on a blog about urban planning: because cars create illusions beyond the photographs that chronicle our identities and our tourism. Relying exclusively on cars for our transportation grid creates unrealities where far things are closer (SF --> LA in 6 hours!), and close things are farther (corner store Supermarket behind a quarter mile of parking). Car accidents killed 37,000 people in 2008, yet <<insert demonized phenomena here>>. Cars seal us off from passed-through environments, and detach us from other drivers who become less demonstrably human, and more demonstrably an inconvenience preventing me from going as fast as I'd like to go. Crash weighed in on the phenomena, and I would argue car-centric environments help explain the decline in civic participation noted by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. Back in August, I posted my own reflections about how the car warps expectations.

But it took until reading the Friedlander article to read the line that bundled and explained these frustrations in one swoop: "the car is a kind of shield that deflects empathy." It's an illusion factory.