Category Archives: On The Road

Wine (Myth) Making

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(A little change of pace today, for all you oenophiles out there who thought the California wine industry started with Ernest and Julio Gallo. From our Los Angeles correspondent, Ned Teitelbaum, Executive Director of Plant The Vine, an urban landscape history and public memory project intending to create a greater awareness of L.A.’s wine-making past through the establishment of small community vineyards. Viticulture?! Everybody knows L.A. has no culture.)

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I had been researching a public-history project about Los Angeles’ first truly dominant industry, that of winegrowing and winemaking, when I realized that I’d been running across quite a lot of what I can only describe as an open and obvious bias against Los Angeles terroir. Continue reading →

Letting Go The Wheel

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I spent the better part of 5 hours this holiday weekend behind the wheel of a Dodge Journey, apparently the auto aficionado’s choice of SUV or… dodgejourneyminivan or whatever thing this thing is called. How would I know the vehicle’s desirability? As soon as I returned it to the rental counter, it was summoned away to be washed and sent back out immediately upon request from another customer.

I did not sign up for a Dodge Journey, nor any other SUV or minivan. With just the 3 of us heading out of town for a couple days, figured a 4-door intermediate sized car would do the trick. But when I arrived at the rental place, there wasn’t a car on the lot. Just everything on steroids. My request for the smallest one they had delivered up the Journey. Yeah, the Journey. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to park it in our tiny garage. (Spoiler alert: Mission Accomplished, with room to spare.)

Once out on the highway, the Dodge Journey drove like in a car commercial. If you closed your eyes and pretended all those other cars weren’t there. dodgejourney1Only, not for too long. That’s kind of dangerous driving.

Seats as comfortable as any in my living room. Sound system better than mine at home. A/C keeping us cool on demand. Plenty of room for all the stuff we’ve packed in to make a summer long weekend complete.

Eventually, when traffic did thin out, after a couple hours, the Dodge Journey hit 140, 145 without me even really noticing. This, as the ad man’s copy reads, was a smooth ride. Enjoyable even, to a man who, at the best of times, hates being in a car.

It all got me to thinking about the not-too-distant future when we’d be handing over the task of driving fully to computers. Autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars and the like.openroad1

The visuals we’re presented, Jetson’s style, are tiny pods, moving us around efficiently, not careening here and there, zipping back and forth, but almost assembly line like. Everyone travelling in orderly fashion at the same speed, a speed conducive, one would assume, to street life. So, not at crazy breakneck speeds.

Even out on the highways where the private automobile and trucking of goods rule, at what speed will our self-driving cars be allowed to haul it? Around these parts with a posted speed limit of 100 km/h but in practice, more like 120 before anyone really starts to notice, how fast will be deemed too fast? Eliminating driver error through computer control would, presumably, notch it up somewhat. What number will be practical, feasible or desirable?

A bigger question might be: will drivers who are used to determining their driving speed for themselves, within the constraints of using our streets with fellow travellers, of course, be willing to hand over the controls to the machine? Are we really going to be content to stick with the posted limits along with everyone else? selfdrivingcarsIsn’t the appeal (at least theoretically) of driving yourself the individualism to it? We’ve known almost since the private vehicle made its first appearance that speed kills yet we’ve proven ourselves unwilling to regulate their speed in any short of resolute way outside of road sign limits. Why are we still allowing cars on our streets and roads that are capable of going well over 300km/h, and building the infrastructure to accommodate such speeds?

Are we really to believe that with the advent of autonomous vehicles, we’re simply going to take our collective foot off the gas? Not to mention, give up the luxury something like the Dodge Journey offers up now for the confined space of the prototypical self-driving car that we’re seeing on the news reels. I have my doubts. Being in traffic is being in traffic whether you’re driving or not. selfdrivingcars1It’s hard to imagine giving up all the mod cons that we’ve become accustomed to if we’re still spending an inordinate amount of time in our cars in return for someonething else assuming control of the wheel.

Our relationship with our cars has never been that kind of rational. You could argue that car dependence and the building of our environment for the primacy of private automobile use is the very definition of irrational. Yet the assumption now seems to be technology will bring a sense of order, logic and reason to our road use. The machines will save us!

Only if they rewire our thinking about how we move around our cities and places, changing our priorities, will they. Because if the easiest, most reliable and comfortable way to get to where you want to go is still from inside a car, nothing much is going to change. selfdrivingcars2Fewer collisions and fatalities, which is not to be sniffed at, but cars first, cars foremost.

Unless, of course there are none remaining in the lot. Then we’ll all be moving around in Dodge Journeys. Riding in extreme comfort but still stuck in traffic despite the machine’s best efforts.

— semi-autonomously submitted by Cityslikr

The Streets Of New York

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I’m walking through the Battery the other day, a part of New York I’m not very familiar with, aside from it being the down to the Bronx’s up. It’s the southern tip of Manhattan, where you catch the Staten Island ferry. onthetownYou can see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island from the Battery Park City Esplanade here. The 9/11 memorial, where the World Trade Centre buildings stood, sits just a few blocks north.

While much of this tiny part of the city is all business, Wall Street and the financial district proper, City Hall are situated nearby, Battery City Park itself is part of a planned, mixed use community, developed and built through the 1970s and 80s. This is where I’m strolling through when I stop at an intersection with the pedestrian crossing light counting down from about 7…6…5…4… I’ve got no particular place I need to be any time soon.

Evidently that’s not the case for a couple kids who dawdle and meander past me across the street with the light turning yellow and then red before they get to the sidewalk on the other side. I’m terrible guessing anyone’s age, especially the grade school types. So, I don’t know, 8, 10, the oldest one? The brother, I’m thinking, one of those scooters lugged up over a shoulder. His sister’s a couple years younger maybe? 6…7…8? They continue a few steps down the street before turning into the lobby of an apartment building.

Now, here’s the thing that strikes me as I begin walking again with the green light. mayberryThese two kids are young enough to these old eyes of mine for me to be surprised they aren’t being accompanied by an adult. So maybe they’re both older than I think. Or, and here’s my preferred hope, they’re old enough not to be supervised crossing the street because crossing a street isn’t supposed to require adult supervision.

Now, anybody who’s spent any time at all in New York City knows that crossing most streets here is something of a competition. And this particular street I crossed would not be considered a typical New York City street. Still, it wasn’t Main Street Mayberry. There were cars waiting at the red light. Cabs were all over the place, never what you would consider predictable. These two kids had to have come from somewhere where the streets were typically New York, busy, loud, not entirely orderly. Neither one seemed the least bit fussed about negotiating their way through it all.

As it should be.

That city streets need to be designed for children to easily make their way through without much more than the occasional look over their shoulder is something so obvious it shouldn’t even need stating. newyorkpictureThat they aren’t says a lot about our priorities. When streets, neighbourhoods, communities, cities are focussed on moving motorized vehicles, kids are raised inside cars.

It is surprising to me during my time here in New York just how many people insist on driving, at least in the parts of Manhattan I’ve made my way around so far, let’s say 140th Street down. Driving seems like the worst mobility choice. Unlike many, many other places, there are viable options to driving. Most spots that I’ve Google mapped to figure out routes to have shown public transit as fast or faster than driving to get there.

Still, vehicular traffic dominates the flow in this city, it seems to me. The streets bursting at the seams with pedestrians prove it. There is not the proper allocation of space for them.

On the eventful ride I took down the Columbus Street bike lane to 9th Avenue, from Central Park, winding up eventually in Soho, people fairly regularly stepped into my path, pushcart vendors used the lanes to get to where they were going. Why not? imwalkinghereIt’s street space opened up to them, recently reclaimed from automobiles. Intermingling with cyclists seems like a much safer prospect than contending with cars.

Walking in New York does come with a certain amount of pedestrian boldness you find on foot in very few other big cities. In recent years, they’ve begun the conversation in earnest of divvying up the public space that the streets and roads are in a more equitable fashion. It’s a start, is all it is. Until every street is safe enough for kids like the two I saw in Battery Park to navigate without so much as a second thought, we still have a long way to go, a long road ahead.

— moseyingly submitted by Cityslikr