A Celebration of Public Trans

While sampling some music on lala tonight as I read for class, I came across a great song by Art Brut from their new album, Art Brut v. Satan.  The song is called “The Passenger.”  It’s about the pleasure that can be found in taking public trans.

[I'm having serious trouble embedding media lately, so here is the link to the song on lala.]

Here are the lyrics:

I’m a determined passenger
I never learnt to drive
But don’t worry, I’m not asking for a ride

Some people hate the bus
Not me, I can’t get enough
Some people live in the fast lane
Not me, I take the train
I love public transportation
Train or bus, they’re both amazing

I don’t take a book
I’ve no time to read
It’s a long journey but there’s a lot to see
Back left window, upstairs
The view alone is worth the fare
If I wanna sleep
Gonna miss my stop
I use my phone as an alarm clock

Some people hate the bus
[ Art Brut Lyrics are found on www.songlyrics.com ] 
Not me, I can’t get enough
Some people live in the fast lane
Not me, I take the train
I love public transportation
Train or bus, they’re both amazing

I know there’s somewhere I’m supposed to be
And I’m gonna get there eventually
But when I’m travelling from A to B
I’m avoiding my responsibility
And I love the thrill of being last
Bus and trains don’t go that fast

Some people hate the bus
Not me, I can’t get enough
Some people live in the fast lane
Not me, I take the train
I love public transportation
Train or bus, they’re both amazing

Was Ford Prefect Right?

At the beginning of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ford Prefect recounts how he met Arthur Dent, the protagonist. Ford Prefect is an alien, and when he first came to Earth, he tried to introduce himself to a car because he thought they were the dominant species. Arthur saved him by pushing him out of the path of the speeding car.

This picture is from right across from where I work In the suburbs. Look at the land use! Look at those parking lots! More space is explicitly delegated to cars than to people. There are no walkways for pedestrians; if you walk through or across the entry, you look and feel like a pest because you aren’t in a car. The suburbs are littered with places like this.

It makes you think Ford Prefect was right.

Nothing is more appealing to a capitalist than a full mall parking lot, and nothing is more crushing than an empty one.

(Sorry for the poor lighting in the photo)

Jane Jacobs’ Requirements for Urban Diversity, Part 1

I’m slowly but surely working through my first reading of Jacobs’ seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities {buy it here}. I’ve been reading it bit by bit for the past five months or so.  I have reached the point where she has described the four main tenants needed for a city district to be considered successful.  Over the past few months, Emily and I have/had been looking at moving to a different area of the city.  Just as we were ramping up our search, I came to this point in the book.  I was planning on using Jacob’s principles to help decide which area(s) would be good to move to in Chicago.  Since then, two things have happened: 1. We have decided not to move, and 2. I have started school again, so I haven’t read any further in the book since when I wrote the first draft of this post two months ago.   Nonetheless, in a number of upcoming posts I am going to try to apply Jacobs’ “generators of diversity” to our current neighborhood, Lakeview.

Here are Jacobs’ four conditions to generate diversity:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two.  These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.
2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.
3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including  a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce.  This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there.  This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.

Below is a short video of Jane Jacobs I found on YouTube:

Shoulders of Giants #3

“A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it. The same might be said of streets, in the sense that they serve other purposes beside carrying wheeled traffic in their middles. Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs. Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city is dull.

More than that, and here we get to the first problem, if a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear. When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks.”

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

Urban Composting

Emily and I recently began attending First Free (website: www.firstfree.com) here in Chicago. It is in the Andersonville neighborhood, and so far we have been very pleased.

This past weekend FF had an urban composting workshop that taught you how to start your own indoor vermiculture (read: worm) composting in your apartment. They were even kind enough to provide the means to make one, and at the end we took one home with us. That’s it in the picture below.

Now, we haven’t yet purchased the worms we need to start, and the worms that thrive in this controlled environment are not native to the area so we can’t just go out and dig in the soil for earthworms. So the compost bin you see hasn’t gone “live” just yet. Nevertheless, we are excited to start.

A significant portion of the waste in our home is from food, and once we begin compostig we should be able to reduce between 10-30 percent of our waste (this is an estimate, based in part on information from the workshop and experience). The process will also yield wonderful compost that can in turn be used to fertilize more plants. We have very minimal natural light in our apartment and can’t grow most house plants successfully, nor do we have a yard or any land, so if you are in the need of some good compost on 3-6 months, I’m your guy.

More and more I appreciate things such as this that increase my awareness of nature and its processes. I realize that composting in an apartment with worms alien to the native environment is by no means wholly natural. But it replaces the need for an artificial disposal of waste–putting used food into a bag and having it transported to a landfill somewhere–with a biological one that has tangible benefits. And as a city dweller, I am often removed from direct contact with nature or the land. Anything that helps to bridge that distance is appreciated.