Carnival of the Green

The air is thick this morning, my first day back to work since vacation. It’s dense with water vapor and a stagnant quality that makes it hard to breathe. It feels like the air trapped by plastic wrapped tight over the top of a bowl of left-overs that mistakenly sat overnight on the kitchen counter.

I was noticing the unusually thick smell of auto-exhaust when the three dump trucks passed me, each blowing an opaque cloud of soot. These clouds hung in the asphalt corridor between the trees as I made my way through them. Consciously, I tried to breathe shallow, but instinctively, I breathed deeply — I was in middle of a two-mile climb with more than 40lbs of gear and bike to haul.

A gray and brown swirl of soot and grime circles the drain of the shower at work. The same particulate dulls the brightness of my otherwise yellow jersey. I wonder what breathing that stuff does to my lungs, then wonder why I ride in a place where days like today are the norm.

Durham’s air is thick for the same reason that exhaust clouds hang in the Cornwallis Rd corridor — the wind just doesn’t blow.

In the three cities I visited recently there was a constant breeze. The Gulf-born winds across Tampa and Jacksonville, Florida constantly scrub the air. Residents of those cities can exercise outdoors without concern for ozone pollution. Even Atlanta, a city that seems more red — Republicans, Coca-Cola, banking — than green, enjoys the benefits of clean air because the wind is constantly moving across the sky.

So, why not move to one of those places? If I am going to bike commute, then, in Durham, that means filling my lungs with voluminous amounts of toxins every morning and evening. And even though public health officials think that the benefits of a regimen of exercise outweighs the individual costs of exposure to poor air quality, just think how much better it would be to ride every day in clean air. Such thoughts are immanent on my daily ride to work.

But to bail on Durham and move someplace else is to give up on the work that needs doing here. It’s the moral equivalent of abandonment: rather than take responsibility for the mess you’ve made, just move somewhere else and start over. Communities are not fungible. If I don’t do what I can to create a clean environment here in Durham, I’ll not likely appreciate Tampa’s environment either.

A better idea is to love the place where you are. Durham’s Greenhouse Gas Plan needs support, and I’m sure there’s something in your town, in your place, that needs your support too. (Link updated; thanks Ellen)

This week’s Carnival of the Green includes submissions from others who are rolling up their sleeves, unafraid of real work.

At Behavioral Ecology, Matt MacManes asks whether the Moss Landing power plant (near San Francisco) is killing marine mammals? “The power plant releases 900,000 tons of CO2, 60 tons of NOx and 4 tons of SO2 into the atmosphere yearly, and 1.2 billion gallons of hot water (50C) DAILY into the ocean,” he says. “ Why do we continue to operate it? Will darkness fall upon San Francisco if we closed it?”

Nina at Queercents asks us to consider the effects of congestion pricing in major metropolitan areas of the United States. “Have you heard the buzz about congestion pricing?” she asks. “What can $8 a day buy you? Soon, the right to drive into NYC.”

The Coding Grasshopper has a follow up to a documentary about Carbon offsetting and whether it actually works.

Leon, at Sox First, takes a look at ways that climate change is affected corporate board room discussions. “Climate change is shaping up the big corporate governance issue of the 21st Century,” he says.

David at The Good Human asks a question I’ve wondered myself — “Why In The World Do Businesses Leave Their Lights On At Night?”

One more corporate concern is whether Burning Man is selling out?

Arvind Devalia submits an urgent plea to save the greenery of Regents Park in Central London for future generations.

Chris Baskind at Lighter Footstep reminds homeowners that traditional milk-based paints are a safe, non-toxic alternative to interior paints containing petroleum products and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

GP presents Present Simplicity posted at Fish Creek House - INNside Innkeeping.

Tracy at Eco Street offers tips to give your garden a green makeover.

and Tiffany Washko presents Eco Friendly Birthday Party posted at Natural Family Living Blog.

The finale for this week’s Carnival is an entry that wasn’t submitted — just one I came across while reading. The author asks a pertinent question that bears repeating in this new wave of popular environmentalism: whether the green aspects of green consumerism outweigh the costs of consumerism itself. Like her, I too am skeptical. Living green is about simplifying one’s demands of the world, and green consumerism is still consumerism. How do we get out of this box?

Thanks to everyone who submitted entries, and thanks for the work you all do to raise the profile of environmental issues. Enjoy this week’s Carnival. Next week’s host is the Organic Researcher.

atlanta at night

atlanta at night; view from the marriott marquis
It’s good to get away, and it’s nice to be back in town.

functionless bollards

why couldn’t these have been bike racks?

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Bike Lane point/counter-point

A few weeks ago, a local listserv debate over the Constitutionality of bike lanes devolved into a rather asinine comparison between vehicular separation and racial segregation. In an effort to raise the level of discussion over whether bike lanes are good for cyclists, local cyclist Steve Goodridge and I wrote point/counter-point Op-Eds for the Herald Sun. Enjoy.

Lanes do their job
Phillip Barron
Guest columnist, The Herald-Sun

Just two weeks ago, Main Street was one-way through downtown Durham. City officials closed the street Saturday and reopened it for traffic going in both directions. How do drivers know the difference?

City leaders ceremoniously proclaimed its transformation from the stage at Durham Rising, the party celebrating downtown’s rebirth. Several newspaper articles and TV news broadcasts have mentioned it. Maps of downtown Durham will be redrawn at some point. But many people will simply discover that Main Street is now a two-way street when they drive downtown and see the fresh yellow double line separating the lanes.

Lines on the road serve a purpose.

The yellow and white strips of reflective paint that city and state governments use on asphalt help to guide traffic. Drivers respond well to these guidelines, and that’s exactly why there are lanes to facilitate the safe flow of traffic. We live (and drive) in an era when competition for drivers’ attention revolves around anything but keeping the driver’s eyes on the road. Cell phones, iPods, DVD players, and even video games have found a home inside automobiles. Lanes assist drivers whose attention may be split between Gnarls Barkley on the radio, Mortal Kombat in the back seat, a dentist on the other end of the phone and traffic.

Bike lanes do the same thing for drivers and cyclists that other lanes do. They guide all vehicles into predictable places on the road so that each person can safely go where she or he needs to go. The Pedestrian and Bicycling Information Center at UNC-Chapel Hill defines bike lanes as “a portion of the roadway which has been designated by striping , signing and pavement marking for the preferential or exclusive use by bicyclists.”

By carving out a dedicated space on the road for bicycles, bike lanes remind drivers that they share the road with all different kinds of vehicles. As Nancy Gallman of Durham put it, “bike lanes create the expectation that bikes will be on the road, even if they aren’t there right now.” They train drivers to expect cyclists, and they welcome cyclists onto the road.

Bike lanes are critical for creating a bike-friendly community in one more way — they calm traffic. A typical outer lane is 14-feet wide. A 14-foot outer lane looks pretty wide, and traffic engineers know that drivers speed on wide roads. A 10-foot outer lane, however, looks a lot more narrow, and drivers naturally (if not subconsciously) drive more slowly. It simply requires more concentration to keep your car in your lane if your lane is narrow.

We can reduce outer-lane width to ten feet by using the remaining four feet for a bike lane. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials sets their minimum bike lane width at four feet. Those four feet have to be asphalt — the bike lane can’t push cyclists into the gutter. Nor would a well-designed bike lane be painted next to parked cars where cyclists would be forced to ride in the “door zone”.

Granted, there are many examples of poorly designed bike lanes, some of which make riding more dangerous for cyclists than it would be without a bike lane. Just look at Duke University’s Campus Drive bike lane for a local example. But poorly designed bike lanes are unsafe because they are poorly designed.

Further, cyclists are permitted full use of the road in North Carolina. If the bike lane is unsafe — because of gravel, pot holes, or any other reason — then cyclists are free to move out of it. Cyclists, like drivers, are expected to choose the safest means of travel.

Well-designed bike lanes foster safe riding; they do this best when bike lanes are part of a larger network of safe roads and greenways. Durham’s new bike plan is a master plan for how Durham can use bike lanes safely and effectively. When designing them, let’s make sure they go somewhere and they are safe, because cyclists are likely to use bike lanes when they connect to neighborhoods, workplaces, and recreation centers.

As a recent Herald-Sun editorial noted, Durham will see more cyclists hit the streets as gas prices continue to rise. The most important thing the city and county can do to foster Durham’s growing bike community is to adopt design standards that take cyclists into consideration when designing and maintaining all roads.

Phillip Barron is a member of the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, a citizens group advising local government how to make Durham more bike- and pedestrian-friendly. He can be reached at pbarron@gmail.com.

URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/columnists/guests/68-862926.cfm

Please hold the stripes
Steven Goodridge, Guest columnist

“Get in the &@$# bike lane!” yelled the driver of a pickup as I approached my left turn at the stop sign, my bike a few feet right of the centerline. It wasn’t the first time that a motorist had harassed me for riding outside of a bike lane since the city had striped them on the otherwise quiet residential streets near my home. But it was a clear indication of just how little some people understand about bicycle operation in traffic, and how striping separate pavement for bicycles can have an unfriendly effect on cyclists.

Literally billions of miles of bicycling by experienced cyclists and countless studies of crash data have shown that, as noted cycling educator John Forester has written, “cyclists fare best when they act, and are treated, as drivers of vehicles.” This is why cyclists are classified as drivers by the traffic laws in all 50 states. If you, the cyclist, want to get to your destination efficiently and in one piece, the best approach is to follow the basic rules of the road for drivers. Among these rules are destination positioning at intersections (making left turns from near the center of the road, right turns from right edge of the road, straight travel in between), speed positioning between intersections (faster traffic overtakes on the left, slower traffic operates to the right), and looking back and yielding to nearby traffic before changing lane position. With a little practice, these rules and related defensive driving skills make it possible to travel by bike virtually anywhere, safely and efficiently.

The trouble with marking part of the roadway surface as “bikes-only” is that this type of separation often conflicts with the best positioning of vehicle traffic under the rules of the road. If the motorist is turning right, he should approach the intersection from a position as far to the right as practicable. If the cyclist is passing slower traffic, he should do so on the left, not on the right. Curbside bike lanes encourage both parties to use the wrong positions, too often leading to tragic consequences like the December collision between a right-turning dump truck and a cyclist in a bike lane at Duke University. For their own safety, cyclists must often leave the bike lane and take a position farther left in order align themselves with their destination and improve their visibility to other drivers at intersections and driveways, where over 95 percent of urban car-bike collisions occur due to turning and crossing movements. Cyclists who drive defensively must also leave bike lanes that are striped where parked cars’ doors can extend, or that have accumulated hazardous debris. (Bike lanes are notorious for collecting debris because motor traffic then no longer blows it off that portion of the roadway.)

“OK,” some might say, “so maybe the stripes cause some problems. But don’t they protect cyclists from cars and trucks between intersections?” Surprisingly, no. I’ve tried for years to uncover a documented safety benefit for cyclists. Only about 4 to 5 percent of car-bike collisions involve overtaking traffic, and there is no evidence that these collisions are made less likely by a stripe. According to police reports, most of these overtaking-type collisions involve roads that are too narrow to add bike lane stripes, where drivers overtook too closely to cyclists who were hugging the edge of a narrow lane. (In narrow lanes, traveling near the center of the lane reduces close passing by prompting overtaking drivers to slow down or to “unstuck” from the lane and move left.) These collisions are practically nonexistent where the lanes are wider — 14 feet to 16 feet or more is recommended — making it easy for motor vehicle operators to pass cyclists safely. Meanwhile, striping the edges of streets often increases motor traffic speeds by better delineating the clear roadway — a phenomenon some traffic engineers call the “gun-barrel effect.”

Bike lane striping is the only traffic control device that cyclists must routinely disregard for their own safety. Instead of reducing dangerous passing or harassment — which rarely occur if the roadway is wide enough — separation of traffic by vehicle type confuses the public about proper driving and where cyclists belong. Cyclists benefit most if the public understands that every street — including those not wide enough for bike lanes — is a legitimate bicycle facility. We don’t need to separate drivers by class to share the road more effectively. We need wider pavement for passing, and better public understanding of cyclists’ rights and responsibilities as drivers.

Steven Goodridge is an avid bike commuter and a League of American Bicyclists certified cycling instructor.

URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/columnists/guests/68-862928.cfm.

Durham, ca. 1939

Below is a clip showing what traffic looked like on Main St. in either 1939 or 1941. I first saw this clip when Main St. was a one-way street, and it looked odd to me. Only the volume of traffic in the flim looks odd to me now that Durham has re-opened Main St. to traffic in both directions.

This clip is shot from two angles but both (I believe) are from what is now the Self-Help building at the corner of Main and Corcoran. The first half is looking west, and the building on the right (north) side of the street with the arches is the Trust Building. In the second half of the clip, the camera is pointed at “the Angier corner,” the intersection of Main and Mangum.

Filmed by H. Lee Waters, this clip is from “Durham: 1939-1943″

H. Lee Waters was a studio photographer from Lexington, NC in the early part of the 20th century. During the Great Depression, he shuttered his studio and hit the road to earn a living. He owned a 16mm video camera and a projector. He traveled to towns (117 in all) throughout NC, SC, VA, and TN; set up his camera; and captured street life on film. He would return home to edit the film, then revisit the town with a final cut. He presented his films in local movie houses, charging admission for townsfolk to see themselves on the silver screen.

OBO

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