Obama for America, Durham office open

National attention is turning to the upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina; as Michael Bacon noted earlier, North Carolina’s primary will matter for the first time in recent memory.

Barack Obama’s national campaign folks are settling into their new digs in downtown Durham, spending the next few weeks registering voters. The headquarters officially opened today, and Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker came to Durham for the event. He was introduced by Durham resident and Durham Public Schools teacher Nancy O. Gallman, and you can see photos and listen to the opening message here — audio slideshow of the office opening.

(source)

wide angle lens

Just testing out shots with a borrowed wide-angle lens one morning…

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I’m impressed and am considering purchasing one.

Bikes for the World, tomorrow

Final reminder, the Triangle Bikes for the World event is this weekend.

While you’re thinking about which bike to donate, read an article about BfW.

Then print the flier (pdf linked from image) to remind you to bring that bike tomorrow.

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Raleigh developing bike plan

The City of Raleigh, like Durham and Chapel Hill/Carrboro before it, is developing a comprehensive bike plan. Read on…

The City of Raleigh is developing a Comprehensive Bicycle Plan that will guide future bicycle improvements in Raleigh and we want YOU to be part of the process.

The plan is intended to reflect the needs and wishes of the community; therefore, the City is asking for your input: the first public workshop will be held on April 2nd, 2008 at the Glen Eden Pilot Neighborhood Center (1500 Glen Eden Drive, Raleigh). Please stop by anytime between 4:00 – 7:00 PM to learn more about the project, talk to City staff and project consultants, and provide your input to the process. The City wants to hear the citizens’ priorities for bicycle facilities and programs. Attached is an advertisement flyer for that meeting. Please feel free to distribute this so that all Raleigh citizens are informed.

In addition, please take a few minutes to fill out an online comment form for the project.

Online Comment Form

Please pass the word along to any and all cyclists in the Raleigh Area!

Thank you for your time. Happy and safe bicycling!

Brian Scott Bergeler
Bicycle Planner
Greenways Incorporated

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tomorrow, reception for Bull City Bicycles

Tomorrow (Friday) evening, come look at the present through the past.

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Says Dave Wofford…

Reception — Friday, March 21; 6-9pm …
B U L L C I T Y B I C Y C L E S
by guest curator Phillip Barron.

Bull City Bicycles gathers historic and contemporary photography of bicycles in Durham. A celebration of the aesthetic simplicity, utility, and joy of bicycles, this exhibit documents Durham’s sense of place from two wheels. Phillip Barron is a writer and photographer living in Durham. His column on Durham’s bicycling community, The Outspokin’ Cyclist, appears monthly in The Herald Sun. Sources of photography include The Durham County Library, The Herald Sun, Duke University archives, The Smithsonian Institution, the North Carolina State Archives, as well as Barron’s own photographs.

Full press release with more details…
http://www.nicomachus.net/bcac/BCB_press_release.pdf

We are part of the official Smart Commute challenge. You bike here, you get a free beer.

Or, check out the website for the exhibit here.

Awareness Test

Keep your eye on the ball, as my uncle always told me.

Thanks to Michael for sending it to the durhambikeandped listserv.

Op-Ed: We can do better than widening Alston

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

A March 2007 report from the John Locke Foundation (JLF) encouraged NC DOT and cities around the state to widen roads as the primary transportation strategy for economic development and alleviating congestion.

In April that year, I wrote a column for the Herald Sun questioning the study’s findings, casting doubt in particular on whether the findings even applied to Durham. As I did then, I still encourage you to read it for yourself. I noted then,

By [David Hartgen’s] own admission, single-occupancy driving declined in Durham between 1990 and 2000, the time period at which his academic gaze is focused. The data show, and so he also admits, that carpooling and use of public transit increased. He notes further that “Durham is the only urbanized area in the state to report declining solo driving times and increased carpooling and transit shares between 1990 and 2000.” You might think, then, that the conclusions he reaches for Charlotte or Raleigh ought to differ from the conclusions he reaches for Durham’s future.

Across the state, however, it’s all the same. Eliminate transit. Widen roads. Pave early and often.

Concluding the article, I asked,

Whether DOT will side with the John Locke Foundation or Durham residents remains to be seen, but the question remains for each of us to consider.

Do roads exist to serve people or cars?

At the time I wrote that, I thought Durham had strong, visionary leadership that could see through the misguided Civitas/John Locke Foundation mindset which thinks of road widening as economic development.

The City still has an able Transportation department, and in November the people of Durham voted against the Art Pope-backed candidate for mayor. So, why is City Council considering toeing the JLF line? What happened to our leadership?

On his website Endangered Durham, Gary Kueber has some rich thoughts on why City Council may lack the self-confidence to send NC DOT back to the drawing board, but the bottom line is that it looks like City Council is afraid of giving up $28 million in planned development.

Even when that $28 million would make Alston Avenue more dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists, and arguably even for drivers.

If you don’t know this area well, you might need some help visualizing it. You might also need some help visualizing what a good redesign could look like. In his March 14th post, Kueber has satellite imagery of the current state of things, but I also encourage you to visit the intersection of Highway 55 and Highway 54 for perhaps the best case scenario of what could possibly come out of NC DOT’s design. Keep in mind, there’s no guarantee that Alston will magically develop as the intersection of 54 and 55 has, since this portion of Alston lacks the close proximity to RTP. I’m throwing it out there only as an example of very wide highways with “economic development” on all corners.

It’s also worth pointing out that the intersection of 54 and 55 doesn’t sit in the middle of a neighborhood. It’s light industrial and commercial. Alston Avenue, however, bisects several mill villages, and strip-mall development is about the best one can hope for.

But strip-malls are not the only form of economic development. Nor, when you offer people choices, are they the most desirable. Truly supporting a community is about encouraging the development of outlets that meet the community’s needs.

Paving and widening, then, is about as destructive as you can get.

Philosopher Joseph Raz says that the only way that governments can authoritatively act to preserve and enhance the freedom of the governed is if government decisions and policies create meaningful choices for citizens.

The choice between leaving Alston Avenue as it is and widening it beyond recognition, beyond the boundaries of safety, is not a meaningful choice. It’s also a false dichotomy.

So, you may still need more help visualizing what a meaningful redesign could look like.

A consulting group called Urban Advantage uses computer generated photo-realistic images to demonstrate how to transform roads like Alston Avenue with real economic development.

While the landscape in the photographs (below) is actually Richmond, Virginia, it might as well be east Durham. The images show a series of design changes a city (or private developer for that matter) can make to enhance the sense of community, bring economic development back to devastated areas, and create safe public environments for pedestrians and cyclists, for children and the elderly.

Will our City Council have the willingness and the guts to promote real change in Durham? Or is a six-lane freeway cutting through a neighborhood the most we can expect from them? And since we elect the Council, is this the most we can expect from ourselves?

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Existing conditions
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Underground utilities, new sidewalks and crosswalks, street tress, lamps, and on-street parking

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Renovation of older buildings, new work-live buildings

retread

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Gallery’s open…

C’mon in.

After last night’s Critical Mass, we invited folks back to check out the show.

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Stop by Bull City Arts Collaborative any Friday from 12 — 2pm or by appointment to see it in person. Call Dave Wofford, 949-4847, to set up a time.

OR, stop by on Friday, March 21st, 6 — 9pm for a Third Friday/Culture Crawl reception.

For those of you so unlucky as not to live in Durham, I’ve made a website. Check it out here…

The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Women’s liberation through bicycling

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

For many, the nineties were a time of political advancement and financial success. The economy was doing well, failed policies from previous administrations were being turned back, manufacturing was on the increase, and progress was the buzz-word in board rooms and parlors.

This national excitement had something, more than a little, to do with the fact that the 1890s were also the height of the bicycle boom in the United States. In 1897 alone, approximately three hundred manufacturers in the US sold more two million bicycles, doubling production from the previous year.

The bicycle had been invented only thirty years earlier, and the constant stream of improvements to its design was a celebrated sign of progress. The bicycle’s adoption by women of the era made the bicycle literally and metaphorically a vehicle of social change.

In the 1930s, local newspaper columnist Wyatt T. Dixon wrote a few articles reflecting on bicycles’ popularity in 1887. B.L. Duke and Company’s furniture store rented high wheelers (the kind of bikes with a front wheel nearly as tall as the rider and much smaller rear wheel) for ten cents an hour. If you could afford it, renting bicycles and learning to ride the wobbly contraptions was a popular form of entertainment in 1887. Watching the cyclists fall off the bikes was equally entertaining for the crowd that formed every weekend.

Cycling, as Dixon reports it, was a man’s activity.

dowd.jpgSource: Kostyu, Joel A. and Frank A. Kostyu. Durham: a Pictorial History. Norfolk, Va.: Donning, 1978 — purchase the book here.

Between 1887 and 1890, the number of cyclists in the US doubled. “The vast majority of new purchasers, many of whom were women, favored the new ‘safety bicycle,’” says David Herlihy in Bicycle. The safety bicycle resembles what we now think of as a bicycle: two wheels of equal size with a chain-driven rear axle and lever-operated brakes. Its invention and mass production propelled cycling’s popularity.

In a photograph dating to roughly 1895, young Durhamite Mamie Dowd poses proudly with an Overman Victoria bicycle. The Victoria, Overman’s drop frame woman’s model, was a fixed gear safety bicycle outfitted with solid rubber tires. According to The Smithsonian Institution, “the drop frame bicycle was developed so that women could ride while wearing a long skirt. It’s adoption greatly increased the popularity of the bicycle, and helped make cycling a popular sport for women, as well as, a means of transportation.”

Peter Zheutlin echoes the point in his biography of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bicycle around the world; “a woman with a bicycle no longer had to depend on a man for transportation.”

No wonder then that in 1896 Susan B. Anthony said that bicycling had done more than anything else to emancipate women.

durhamelectriclightingco_1890.jpgSource: Kostyu, Joel A. and Frank A. Kostyu. Durham: a Pictorial History. Norfolk, Va.: Donning, 1978 — purchase the book here.

Dowd claimed to be the first woman in Durham to own a bicycle, though the authenticity of her claim is challenged by another photograph. In the second, two men and a woman pose in front of the Durham Electric Lighting Company in 1890. The two men stand in suits and top hats, while the woman wears a Victorian dress and hat. Notably, she is sitting astride a bicycle. The photo itself is a celebration of two major innovations of the time: the bicycle as well as Durham’s first electricity provider.

We know from accounts that conservatives of the time saw the bicycle as a symbol of unwelcome social change. While it was a celebrated technological innovation and an admirable source of amusement for men (and even boys), the bicycle’s role in women’s liberation kept it mired in controversy.

In his 1901 memoir, traditionalist James Battle Avirett reminisces antebellum values and derides the bicycle for ruining “the grace of woman’s attractive movement.” His comments parallel a June 6, 1895 article in Statesville’s daily, The Landmark, which notes that while “the number of women who ride bicycles is growing with great rapidity… even in the best and prettiest of costumes, no woman looks dignified while riding a bicycle.”

For conservatives, what was unwelcome about women cycling had as much to do with the resulting changes in women’s clothing as it had to do with these so-called ‘new women’ traveling on their own.

Zheutlin explains that “cycling required a more practical, rational form of dress, and the large billowing skirts and corsets started to give way to bloomers.”

In short, when it came to women, “cycling, and the dress reform that accompanied it, challenged traditional gender norms,” says Zheutlin.

Durham embraced the progress perhaps more easily than other cities its size. Women were working in tobacco factories as early as the 1880s, and local historian Jean Anderson notes that in 1896 “continuing efforts toward independence” led Durham women to create their own literary and social clubs, splintering away from male-dominated groups.

morehead1.jpgImage courtesy of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

A third photograph from the era, this one also from 1895, shows a young boy and girl straddling bicycles in the driveway of the Morehead House on Duke Street.

Despite its high cost, the bicycle’s popularity transcended class. “Hundreds of thousands in the United States,” says Youth’s Companion magazine in the summer of 1896, “saved ‘every spare penny’ to buy a wheel,” and to the detriment of other businesses. As these photographs of turn of the century Durham show, bicycle fever transcended age and race as well.

Although it is unclear whether Dowd was the first woman in Durham to have a bike, later in life she did become the first judge of Durham’s Juvenile Court. Whether her bicycling days had anything to do with her later successful social reforms is up to you.

The photographs mentioned in this column are part of Bull City Bicycles, a month-long exhibit of bicycle related photography on display at Bull City Arts Collaborative, 401 Foster Street. Visit http://www.bullcityarts.org/ for more details.

This column is part of a ongoing research project into the history of Durham’s cycling community. If you have anything to share (photographs, memoirs, family lore, or personal stories) about cycling in Durham, I would love to hear from you.

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