port songs: I cover the waterfront

Billie Holiday: I Cover the Waterfront 

(this could be the new port halifax gateway anthem)

away from the city that hurts and knocks

I'm standing alone by the desolate docks

in the still and chill of the night

I see the horizon, the great unknown

my heart has an ache

it's heavy as stone

with the dawn coming on make it last

I cover the waterfront

I'm watching the sea

porque la vida puede ser maravillosa !

check out the extratime Italy / Germany clip from the 2006 World Cup. The Spanish commentating crew is absolutely amazing! I remember watching this game at a friend's house and our power went out with ten minutes left to go in the game and a friend gave play by play via cell phone. La vida puede ser maravillosa!

google earth as bragadoccio

old cribs I sold, y'all drive by like monuments

Google Earth Nas, I got flats in other continents

- Nas, success, American Gangster soundtrack

Metro unveils new designs for cars

introductions include carpetless cars and more bench seating. I would think both changes are a necessary evolution for the subway system with the second-highest ridership in the country. Here's the washington post article.

my friends got masters in planning from the University of Virginia and I'll I got was pictures of their transit halloween costumes

MIT sues Frank Gehry

somebody finally sues Frank Gehry. I would've sued him for doing the same design over and over again. Just kidding, Frank - we love the design!

festival of maps: chicago

a friend pointed me in the direction of the Festival of Maps - Chicago. It looks like an incredible event, well-located in perhaps the finest city in the United States.

drought songs: the seed song

living in North Carolina is a bit like the opposite of living in Macondo of 100 Years of Solitude, when Ursula is waiting for the rains to stop so that she can die. According to the highly reputable source www.gradesaver.com it rains in Macondo for four years, eleven months and two days. I did some research and found out that in September we received no rain that wasn't directly a result of a tropical storm. so, here's a classic fable of drought - the Seed Song, Atom and His Package

the rain didn't come for one calendar year
so when the man with the sunflower seeds in his hand came near
we sent him away, we sent him away, we sent him away

the rain didn't come for twelve months more
so when the man with the seed catalogue darkened our door
we sent him away, we sent him away, we sent him away

I know you're waiting for the ironic ending
I know you're waiting for the punch line
I know you're waiting for the rain to come by
well - so am I, so am I, so am I

for those in Portland, Maine this friday

I hear that one of the preeminent experts on... umm - hmm - transit t-shirts will be giving a talk on the history of park planning in Maine this Friday, October 26.

okay - how am I supposed to talk right before a presentation entitled: Space Aliens?

anyways, be there at the great Eastland Park Hotel this Friday from 4:30 to 6:30 pm.

SimCity as energy advertisement

for many of us current planning students, one of our first experiences with planning was playing the seminal computer game SimCity. Of course the original game instilled those transcendent planning concepts such as Euclidean zoning and greenfield (blank slate) development, but as we dutifully separated commercial from residential areas and attempted to make our own Brasilias we grew to love the idea of working in cities and working with cities.


Enter Chevron in 2007 who in conjunction with the Economist Group just released Energyville, a game which owes a lot to the original SimCity in design and appearance. In the goal of Energyville, you are the mayor who must choose how to "power" his or her city for the next few decades. Not surprisingly, you learn that oil is essential to the future of your city, and the most effective way of moving forward is by creating a balanced portfolio of energy sources. I did manage to complete the 'simulation' by powering my city with 50% solar electricity, which should win me some sort of award and/or worldwide acclaim.

So, pass a few hours in Energyville, or better yet, play the original SimCity for free on-line.

a great day for the Howlett's

the other day during the 2007 Rugby World Cup the great Doug Howlett broke the all-time New Zealand try record. Now, I have no idea what this means, but I'm a big supporter of Doug Howlett. Not only is he a tremendous rugby player, he also has great hair and a charitable foundation.


check out these headlines:

Happy Howlett vows there's more to come

Six Try Howlett to Grace Pool Five

the guatemalan elections

I read about the elections every day when I was in Guatemala this summer. Under Guatemalan law a president is limited to one 4 year term so that means a new president every four years. This year there were 14 or so candidates running and on September 9th it was no surprise that no one candidate garnered over 50% of the vote. To avoid having elected presidents who receive less than a majority of the vote, many countries have run-off elections between the top 2 candidates. In Guatemala, this matches the center-left Alvaro Colom who is running for his third straight time against former general Otto Perez Molina.

In Guatemala where 56% of the country lives in poverty and a large percentage of population is illiterate - the primary way of voting is putting an X through a political party's emblem. When I first arrived in Guatemala I thought that opposing factions had crossed out advertisements for competing political parties but only later did I learn that this tactic was trying to get people to vote for a particular party. This means that graphic design is a major component of elections in Guatemala. Here are the two emblems for UNE and Partido Patriota, the parties of the two remaining candidates in the election.


Are these images loaded with symbolism? You bet they are. UNE loosely translated into English is the National Hope Party. Partido Patriota is the Patriotic Party and their slogan is Mano Dura or the Strong Hand. Is it something to have a clinched white fist be a symbol of a dominant political party in a country where half of the population is indigenous Mayan? I would think so.

This has been a particularly bloody campaign in Guatemala. The 40+ year civil war there ended in the early 1990s. Running for a political position can be a very dangerous proposition. More than 50 candidates, activists, and their relatives were killed in the run-up to this election. Here's a Washington Post article on the violence in the months before the election and here's election reports from the Washington Post and the BBC. I'll be keeping track of the run-off election and will keep you all posted. If I were one to make political predictions, I am almost certain that Otto Perez Molina will win the election in November.

who's afraid of google?

well, I am - at least a little bit. Of course that doesn't stop me from using and thoroughly enjoying google applications such as Googe Earth, Google Maps, and of course this blog. I'm still waiting for Google Marc to come out to render what I do at least academically completely useless. Did you know that Google's motto is "don't be evil"? I sure didn't. Check out the article in the Economist.

the prescience of fall

It is an impressive feat to write a song or collection of songs that captures or expresses the emotions of a particular time. Bruce Springsteen's The Rising is a tremendous creation following in the wake of 11 September 2007. It is an entirely different accomplishment to write a song before an event occurs that comes to be inextricably connected to the subsequent event.

One that comes to mind is Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends. Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke and Kanye West's declaration "George Bush doesn't care about black people" televised live on NBC captured in many and varied ways the frustration, horror, and tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. I associate Green Day's song very closely with Hurricane Katrina. Wake Me Up When September Ends was released in Summer 2005 with a video depicting the horror of war and was still on the radio when Katrina hit, and while Katrina made landfall on August 29 it was the month of September that seemed to last forever.

summer has come and passed
the innocent can never last
wake me up when september ends

like my fathers come to pass
seven years has gone so fast
wake me up when september ends

here comes the rain again
falling from the stars
drenched in my pain again
becoming who we are

as my memory rests
but never forgets what I lost
wake me up when september ends

Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was released for free on the band's website in November 2001 and all of the songs had been written before September 11. For me the song Ashes of American Flags epitomizes the emotions of that time.

I would like to salute
the ashes of american flags
and all the fallen leaves
filling up shopping bags

Mbuji-Mayi: the Chicago of the 21st century?

As I was reading Mike Davis's Planet of Slums this summer I was struck by one particular paragraph. In discussing the rapid urbanization in much of the so-called third world, Davis wrote about the stunning growth of a city named Mbuji-Mayi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - the central African country formerly known as Zaire. Davis writes of this rapid growth: "Most spectacular, perhaps, has been the transformation of the bleak Congolese diamond-trading center of Mbuji-Mayi from a small town of 25,000 in 1960 into a contemporary metropolis of 2 million, with growth occurring mostly in the last decade" (8).

This growth pattern made me think immediately of Chicago. When it was founded in 1833 Chicago had a population of just over 300 people. By the 1893 Columbian Exposition the 'second city' of the United States had grown to well over 1 million people. Although Chicago and Mbuji-Mayi share similar patterns of metropolitan growth and both serve as centers of industry the differences between the two cities could not be greater. I can safely say that the vast majority of people in the world have never heard of Mbuji-Mayi. It is stunning how a difference of 100 years can render such incredible urban growth to relative obscurity.

Searching around the internet for information on the DRC city yields little additional insight. The wikipedia page for Mbuji-Mayi, a source which typically contains a decent amount of information, is just a few sentences long. The primary reason for the city's tremendous growth is because of the mining industry and in particular the diamond mines. One site claimed that Mbuji-Mayi is responsible for 10% of the world's diamond production by weight but I'm not sure how accurate that statistic is. Wikipedia notes: "The city remains extremely remote for its huge population, with little connection to the outside world." The lack of information is underscored by the uncertainty over the city's population. Mike Davis states that the metropolis of Mbuji-Mayi contains 2 million people, wikipedia has the stunning figure of 3.8 million, and answers.com says there are just over 1 million inhabitants.

As a formerly Belgian colony, there seems to be some information on this mining site. I still am baffled that there is a city that multiplied its population 80 times since 1960 to well over 2 million today that I had never heard of - but perhaps that is just life in the urban millennium.

guatemala: the working poor

This summer I spent a little over three weeks in Guatemala. I was primarily there to study Spanish, but I was also interested in learning about a country that is geographically very close to the United States but has a lot of differences as well.

While reading up on Guatemala through the always informative CIA World Fact Book (an interesting source of information given the agency's intimate role in Guatemalan history) I came across these pretty stunning and seemingly contradictory facts. Guatemala is an economically poor country with a very uneven income distribution. Over half of the country's population, 56 percent, live in poverty. While at the same time the unemployment rate in Guatemala is lower than that of the United States - Guatemala has the miniscule unemployment rate of 3.2 percent.

Here in the United States there is a common conception (whether it is accurate or not) that if you work and work hard that you will be able to make a decent living. This is a belief argued forcefully against by people like Barbara Ehrenreich. In Guatemala, however, there is a completely different understanding of what it means to be working poor.

Antigua, where I spent the majority of my time, is one of the wealthier areas of Guatemala. There are a number of middle class inhabitants that includes doctors, people that work in the flourishing tourist industry, and the many spanish teachers. There are a lot of other jobs as well, but for the most part they don't pay very much. Walking down the streets of Antigua you pass innumerable people handing out fliers, shoe shine boys, people selling all kinds of stuff. In the markets there are stands with all sorts of goods ranging from bootlegged dvds to goldfish in plastic bags. Many other people are employed as household help, doing the laundry or sweeping the floors.

Despite the low level of unemployment vast amounts of poverty persist. There are multiple explanations for this, including a generally low level of education, widespread discrimination against the indigenous Mayan population, and a very uneven distribution of both income and land ownership. According to a 2005 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report 2 percent of the population in Guatemala owns 76 percent of the agricultural land. The UNDP report also highlights some pretty interesting analysis from a 2003 World Bank study.

As Lenin would say: "what is to be done?" Well, if I knew that I'd be a lot more productive with my time. Certainly, the case of Guatemala reinforces the dangers of having a weak or non-existent middle class with huge chasms between the rich and poor. A strong middle class seems to me to be one of the primary prerequisites for maintaining a healthy democracy and improving economic conditions.

tomorrow is Pluto Day!

It's the day that you haven't been waiting for! But it's still pretty cool nonetheless. This Saturday August 25, 2007 is the first ever Pluto day. It is a day to commemerate the one year anniversary of Pluto being demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet. Talk about flip flopping! Anyways, at least here in Chapel Hill there are a variety of events occurring to celebrate Pluto. It's bound to be the social event of the season.

the port's back open for business!

hello everyone:

we here at the phg are excited t0 begin a brand new season. Keep it locked here at port halifax as there should be many updates featuring the always pithy phg commentary as well as some new features - I really hope to be doing some interviews this year with some big time people so keep an eye out for that as well. Okay - I don't want to give too much away but keep on coming back here for the scoop. Thanks!

travellin´ songs: transcendental blues

here´s a classic steve earle song

if I had it my way
everything would change
out here on the highway
the rules are still the same
back roads never carry you
where you want ´em to
leave you standing there
with them ol´transcendental blues

marc's guide to international eating

well, it's the fourth of July and I'm in Guatemala feeling pretty awful so I figure I might as well celebrate by sharing my guide to eating in foreign countries. It's not for the Atkin's Diet lovers out there, and if you have any suggestions please feel free to add them.

Essentials
coca-cola
beer
rice
potatos
chicken kebob
falafel
orange juice / orange drink
mineral water
pastries

Pretty safe bets
bread
pineapple
chicken breast
grilled chicken

Give a wide berth
seafood of all types
ice
pork
salad
prosciutto
milk
goat cheese

milenio urbano (the urban millenium)

It might not be apparent from most planning discussions in the United States which tend to inevitably focus on sprawl, the suburbs, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of this type of metropolitan form. However, in most of the rest of the world the trend is the opposite. More and more of the world is becoming urban. An op-ed piece entitled Milenio Urbano in the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre pointed me in the direction of a new study by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) which is the State of the World's Population for 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.

In 2007 for the first time in the history of the world more people will live in urban areas than in world areas. The most rapid urban growh is occuring in developing nations. For the planners and others who care about cities and the people who reside in them there is no shortage of work to be undertaken in the coming years.

maritime songs: calm

if the band Maritime wrote more songs about shipping, then they would probably be the official band of phg. as it is, they are still really good. this is from the song calm

shortened by the blasphemy
when the sun would warm the sea
and the Canary Islands are chasing me
we are powerful despite our injuries

the starting 5

if my favorite bands were a basketball team, this would be the starting lineup:

pg: the clash
g: the weakerthans
sf: steve earle
pf: the lawrence arms
c: johnny cash

coach: mike park

John Grisham addresses the field of planning

At the 2007 UVA graduation, mega-selling author John Grisham had some pointed words regarding the discipline of planning.

Dreaming is a worthy pastime. Planning is a waste.

Pretty harsh, John. You must not have liked it when we refused to widen the highway on the way to your country estate. Or when we installed parking meters downtown.

Here's the headline from the Charlottesville Daily Progress: Author John Grisham to UVa grads: 'Planning is a waste'

on hiatus

we here at PHG are going on hiatus for a few weeks. Upon return we'll be ready to go with (hopefully) more frequent and more pertinent posts. Take care!

poems: bratislava (untitled)

here's another poem I found stashed under my bed. It's also from 2001, but a little earlier in the year. This one's certainly not as successful as the last, and it's full of the melodrama of the early 20s. Not that melodrama fades all that much, but it does change in distinct ways.

Bratislava is where I saw you
or them or whatever I wanted to see
for years there's no other explanation
to account for premonitions
suddenly sprung like Slovakia
after decades of communism I too
need a new plaza or a faltering fountain
proclaiming independence of course
I make mistakes but the rows
of workers' housing are yours
I'll return to live here for months
traverse the bridge daily
the moment the square
the incessant glare
and I'm there in the courtyard
monumentally alone
I remember december

poems: the apology

moving is funny because you find all of these things that you've stuffed under your bed or pushed to the back of your closet. Today as I was looking through an old box of political stickers I found a poem I had written in 2001 just before starting my final year of college. Time is a trickster. It's called 'the apology' and looking back I can't remember to whom I was apologizing.

the apology

there might be an end
there might be a pause
or flicker or something I don't understand
on days when you feel so lucky
you could cry well I do but
I've always been sensitive I can
apologize for the rest of my life
never buy anything remain
in Virginia till the movie reel
runs out of film but I doubt you'll
even notice the difference in the distance
I feel the approach of Chicago
and there's one more year
and what else can I fear
I'm sorry I'm leaving
I'm sorry I'm sorry
the empty canister slid under the cabinet
collecting dust I wish everything could be
different but solutions erode with age

water transportation songs: big river

there aren't many songs (at least that I know of) that provide nautical directions. The Johnny Cash song Big River is one of them. This is truly a classic, documenting a trip south along the great Mississippi

big river - johnny cash

i met her accidentally in st. paul (minnesota)
and it tore me up every time I heard her drawl, southern drawl
then I heard my dream was back downstream cavortin' in davenport,
and I followed you, big river, when you called

then you took me to st. louis later on (down the river)
a freighter said she's been here but she's gone, boy, she's gone
i found her trail in memphis, but she just walked up the bluff
she raised a few eyebrows and then she went on down alone

now, won't you batter down by baton rouge, river queen, roll it on
take that woman on down to new orleans, new orleans
go on, i've had enough; dump my blues down in the gulf
she loves you, big river, more than me

segways on patrol!

who thought this was a good idea? The Washington Post is reporting that the DC police force will be introducing cops on segways!! They have some reasons why this might be a good idea but I can't think of any. It's one thing to patrol an airport or a shopping mall on a segway (I've seen both), but being in DC it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

One officer offerred this rationale: "People will come up to you and say, 'It's kinda silly,' But you know what they're doing? They're talking to the police on a human level. That's what we want."

hmmm... At a cost of $5,000 per segway I would think that mountain bikes would be much more cost effective and not to mention versatile.

Now, segways as a means of transportation for planning professors in the exurban southwest - that's a great idea!

re-branding

if there's one thing that MTV's Total Request Live or TRL taught us is that three letter acronyms rule! I axed the idea out of the title of this blog and so we are left with: port halifax gateway or PHG for short. Further re-branding might be in order as we move further on in the summer.

welcome to the DC summer!

I like how many different graphics NOAA has for possible thunderstorms. Some of them look almost Biblical in a Charlton Heston 10 Commandments kind of way.

checking in with Virgil Goode

it's the summer months and that typically means a slow political season. With some extra time on our politicians' hands I figured it would be good to check in with my local US Representative Virgil Goode. Hey, Virgil, how do you feel about the new immigration bill? Or how about immigration and the towns of your district?

Goode: "They've got a Mexican flag in these restaurants . . . They've got one on Main Street in Rocky Mount! They've got one on Tanyard Road in Rocky Mount! ... That riles me."

The Charlottesville Daily Progress has the story.

I have to agree with Virgil. You know what riles me? I was in Baltimore the other day, in a place called Little Italy. I mean, come on. And they were flying the Italian flag everywhere, especially on restaurants! Terrible. I wish that Italian Columbus had never sailed westward from Europe and had left us Americans alone. The worst, however, is St. Patrick's Day and all of those Irish flags everywhere. Kiss me I'm Irish? No, kiss me I'm American. I typically have to lock myself in my apartment because I am so outraged.

google street view

thanks AJD for the tip on this new feature in google maps. this is wild!

the 2007 (carolina) hurricanes

NOAA is predicting that there is a 75% chance of above normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean in 2007. They predict 13 to 17 named storms, with 3 to 5 storms being "major" hurricanes measuring a Category 3 or higher. In contrast, in a 'normal' hurricane season there are 2 major storms. yikes


In (much lighter and less forboding) hockey news, the 2007 Carolina Hurricanes didn't do nearly as well as the 2006 edition, who won the Stanley Cup!

graduation speech

The School of Architecture here at the University of Virginia very kindly allowed me to speak at graduation this year. I thought I would share the text of my speech here:


One afternoon about a year ago I was sitting in the computer lab exasperated after spending hours and hours trying to complete some basic task on the computer. I threw my hands in the air and turned to my fellow students sitting in the room with me and exclaimed in abject frustration: “What can I do in my entire life that Google cannot accomplish in two seconds.”

As a group we laughed, and a few smiled knowingly – having come face to face with their own technological deficiencies at some point in the past. In that moment of frustration, a glimmer of hope crept in, and I had an answer to my previous question.

Indeed, if it were all about shear computational prowess there would be little left to do in this world. But in those few seconds, where I had a connection with my fellow students, where I could feel the shaking in my stomach from laughing at my own insufficiencies – those moments of understanding are so magnificent and so powerful that they constitute the very foundation of life itself.

Most of us are here at the School of Architecture because we love places, we love buildings, we love the land around us. We talk fondly of our trips to Barcelona, to Yellowstone National Park, and to Savannah, Georgia. We participated just moments ago in a graduation ceremony on the beloved Lawn. We care deeply about the surrounding world.

I am here this afternoon, not to talk about places, but instead the people that live in these places and buildings. Here at the University of Virginia we talk about the “architecture of urgent matters” and an “architecture of urgent matters” must place people at the center of this effort. Buildings and places are of course important, but what would they be without individuals occupying the spaces, or without a history of the individuals that were part of their creation.

I think Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz had it right in a lot of ways. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. Home is a very interesting concept as it conjures up not only a residential location, a residential dwelling unit if you will, but it combines in this concept a series of relationships, personal histories, dreams, fears, moments of unbearable sadness, as well as times of unimaginable triumph.

My home for the past two years has been the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. Now, Campbell Hall is a decent building, but the reason why I have such powerful connections and feelings for this place is the group of individuals gathered here today. Each one of us is an essential component to the foundation of the School of Architecture community.

It is my view that as students of architecture we have a responsibility to life, a responsibility that includes people who live in our neighborhood and people who live halfway around the globe. I believe we have a responsibility to the lives of the plants and animals that we share this magnificent world with, as well as responsibility to care for the planet itself.

Our lives as humans are so profound that even a few seconds of laughing with friends in a computer lab can become moments of lasting significance. Upon reflection it is incredible, this life that I feel between my fingertips, the life that I see in your eyes, the lives of the people here today celebrating this momentous occasion, and the lives of those who are unable to be with us. After graduation as we disperse and take with us our love of places I would encourage us all to take along a love for people as well. A dedication to life is something that each one of us can accomplish and something that will have a profound and lasting effect on the world around us.

the great license plate debate

I am moving to North Carolina this summer. As part of that move, I will be personally entering the great license plate debate that has engulfed this country for many years. Ohio and North Carolina make similar yet differing claims on each of their plates. North Carolina's reads: "First in Flight." While Ohio has "Birthplace of Aviation."


The license plates are referencing the flight by the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. Both states are eager to claim this momentous event in history. While the flight occurred in North Carolina, the Wright Brothers were born in Ohio and developed most of their plans in the Buckeye State.

So which state is right when it comes to the great license plate debate? Perhaps neither. The first self-propelled flight in a heavier-than-air machine could very well have occurred 13 years earlier in France. Clement Ader built the Eole, a bat-winged plane, that apparently flew 160 feet in 1890. The Wright Brothers first flight, in contrast, went 120 feet. The Eole was wrecked after Ader's flight and there remains plenty of controversy surrounding him and whether or not he should be given the "first in flight" credit typically attributed to the Wright Brothers. One of the main reasons why there is so little known about Ader is that he was working for the French military and therefore his forays into flying were not highly publicized. The Wright Brothers' flights were very well documented. Also, the Wright Brothers plane looks a lot more similar to what we think of us as an aeroplane as opposed to the inventions of Ader.

Something that's cool that I ran into during my "research" for this blog is the Discovery Channel has simulations of the first flights of the Wright Brothers. More inexplicably, they also have computer simulations of the first flight in Kitty Hawk next to a line of T-Rex dinosaurs!

So, what I am going to do about the great license plate debate? I was hoping to abstain, and just pick a plate that didn't have the phrase "First in Flight" on it. But North Carolina likes putting that statement on almost all of their license plates. In my opinion, North Carolina doesn't have the speciality license plate selection of Virginia, but after poking around I did run into this classic! Maybe it's an "all's well that ends well" situation after all!

train movies (vol. 1)

a friend of mine suggested that I compile and analyze train movies in a similar manner in which I attempt to analyze train songs. The problem is, for whatever reason, my knowledge of train movies is extremely lacking. I am familiar with 4, count 'em 4, movies in which the Chicago 'L' is featured prominently: While You Were Sleeping, the Fugitive, High Fidelity, and of course the classic On the Line featuring N'Sync's Joey Fattone and Lance Bass.

But my train movie knowledge is lacking. I've seen Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, but remember not liking it too much. The incomparable North by Northwest includes trains but the story really doesn't revolve around them.

My friend recommends Sullivan's Travels (1941) and Closely Watched Trains (1966 from Czechoslovakia). I haven't seen either but I think I know what I'm doing over the next couple of weeks.

There's always Trainspotting (which I also haven't seen) and the classic celebration of multi-modal transportation: Trains, Planes and Automobiles.

Wait, I just thought of a classic train movie - Howlett favorite Dr. Zhivago. What a great movie! It includes everything you would want in a film: unrequited love, trains, Communism, the stunning Julie Christie, Russia, and Obi Wan Kenobi!!

What do you think? Any train movie suggestions?

news rodeo (bonus)

story: In praise of small transportation projects. The Washington Post ran a story the other day reporting that Northern Virginia was going to focus on small fixes that could result in big improvements for the area's drivers.
PHG take: I love it! In fact, at some point I want to do an in depth study on micro transportation planning. My interest in this subject goes back over a decade when some genius (and I'm being serious) added a second left turn lane off of the Interstate 66 exit near my childhood home. This small improvement that cost almost no money improved the transportation network for thousands of people who each day made this journey. I also love mini-planning because it requires planners to be intensely familiar with the areas they are working in and really understand what is going on. This is opposed to plopping down some grandiose plan without much regard to the daily experiences of the people who drive on the roads or utilize the transportation systems.

story: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposes congestion fee.

PHG take: Any billionaire that regularly rides the subway to work is A-ok in my book. In terms of the plan, Bloomberg is suggesting that cars would pay $8 and trucks $21 to enter Manhattan below 86th street during peak hours. Due to finals here at school I haven't been able to follow this story to see what the response has been, but if there is a place for a congestion fee 'starter project' in the United States it certainly is Manhattan.

news rodeo - April 29, 2007

We here at PHG have been busy as of late (or at least busy procrastinating from getting any 'real' work done). So to catch you all (all two of you!) up on what's been going on here is the first ever PHG news rodeo!

story: Ad on Bus Mocks Bus. In Grand Rapids, Michigan there will be an ad on the back of buses that openly mocks the transit system in Grand Rapids. According the news article: "The political ad shows a Rapid transit bus that has morphed into a pig. It's eating money and spewing pollution." The ad proclaims This Pig Stinks! in bold letters. A group paid $290 to place the ad for a month, and it is in opposition to an increase in revenue to expand service in Grand Rapids.

PHG take: This is exactly the opposite approach that CBS took when MoveOn.org and PETA tried to pay for advertisements during the Super Bowl two years ago. Even though these groups were willing to pay $2 million for a thirty second ad, CBS denied their ads stating that they refuse to air political ads. Grand Rapids certainly didn't have to accept this ad, but should be given some credit for accepting this controversial ad. I think the real story is: $290 for a 21 inch by 72 inch ad! PHG should scrape together some money, perhaps by selling Rice Krispy treats, to take our message of hope, transit, soccer, and transportation planning songs to Grand Rapids.

story: 'Gated Communities for the War-Ravaged." The Washington Post ran a story earlier this week with this precise headline! The article reports: "The U.S. military is walling off at least 10 of Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods and using biometric technology to track some of their residents, creating what officers call 'gated communities' in an attempt to carve out oases of safety in this war-ravaged city."

PHG take: The war must finally be taking a turn for the better if Iraqis are getting their own gated communities! The picture that the Washington Post ran of Iraqi children playing soccer in their new 'gated community' does in many ways resemble Belmont Country Club in Loudoun County, Virginia.


story: Russia Plans World's Longest Tunnel, Link to Alaska. I found this story on the Transportationist blog. The 64 mile tunnel connecting Siberia to Alaska would be primarily used to transport oil, natural gas, and electricity but would also contain a highway and a high speed railway.

PHG take: Finally, the land bridge across the Bering Strait returns! This world is getting increasingly smaller by the day. If this thing is built, you could technically drive from New York to London by car. This is a different route than suggested by Google Maps, which encourages people traveling from New York to London to "swim across the Atlantic Ocean."


story: Other new from Russia - Boris Yeltsin dies.

PHG take: Yelstin was the first ever popularly elected president of Russia, and a leader during the very critical time of transition out of Cold War politics. I don't know if the Washington Post has anything against Yeltsin, but this was the photograph they were running on the front page of their website after his death.

the intersection of soccer and transit

one of my favorite things in life is taking the Metro to a DC United game at Estadio RFK (in Goffer's parlance). This is especially magnificent if it is one of those beautiful summer evenings in Washington, DC where you are finally getting a break from the mid-day heat and humidity.

Major League Soccer has a new team this year and it is good old Toronto FC. As part of the promotional push for their new team, Toronto has decorated one of its streetcars to honor Toronto FC. Awesome!

transit makes density possible

The New Wembley stadium opened in London on March 24, 2007 with a soccer match between the under-21 squads of England and Italy. When everything is finalized, the massive stadium will hold over 90,000 people. Even with this large number of spectators, there will be no general parking at New Wembley. What makes this density possible? Transit. During soccer matches, the stadium will be served by over 100 trains an hour. 3 Tube lines and 2 national rail lines serve the stadium, and have the capacity to transport a whopping 70,000 persons per hour. The stadium is also served by an extensive network of buses.

In other news, the Tube carried more than 1 billion passengers last year! The Mayor of London, Ken Livingston, maintained that this strong transit ridership reflected the health of London's economy: "This new record of one billion passengers shows the strength of London's economy and how crucial the Tube is to that economic success."

Bush and The Google

another ardent supporter of Google Earth!

Cavalier Daily Letter

I wrote a letter to the UVA paper based on a previous blog entry of mine. Although I have to say, I very much prefer my headline: "a people's history of the University of Virginia" to their headline: "Whitewashing history."

Google Earth maps atrocities in Darfur

CNN is reporting that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in conjunction with Google Earth is providing a geospatial map of the atrocities in Darfur. We live in a world increasingly connected, and we can no longer hide from our responsibility to stop genocide.

Sara J. Bloomfield, Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, states: "Educating today’s generation about the atrocities of the past and present can be enhanced by technologies such as Google Earth. When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most."

a people's history of the University of Virginia

The University of Virginia has a recently revamped website. One new feature of this website is a section called U.VA. for Kids. In the history section, the University has a very interesting hypothesis for its more than a century of discrimination against women and minorities.

"In the days of Thomas Jefferson, no one thought that black people would want to attend a university. No one thought women would want to go to a university, either. One hundred years later, though, both black people and women made it clear that they wanted to be students at the University of Virginia, too."

U.VA. for kids makes no attempt at explaining Mr. Jefferson's connections to slavery. Or that it took, not 100, but 150 years for the University to admit women. For the first time UVA "would admit students without regard to sex in the Fall of 1972."

Greenland when it's Africa's size

the best cartography song ever written

upside down from here by Atom and His Package

from Antartica to the polar cap
try to fit a big orb on a little flat map
I'm not going to drive this time
I love Greenland when it's Africa's size
north is not up and east is not right
except for Milwaukee, Wisconsin that night
so take a look at a map and learn where you live at
learn where you live at, learn where you live at

I know what feels like to be upside down from here

charlottesville rules!

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has recently named Charlottesville as one of its dozen distinctive destinations for 2007! Now I like Charlottesville, but I think it is pretty amazing that whenever an organization is compiling lists of best places to live or visit that Charlottesville is consistently cited as a top location.

When visitors come to Charlottesville I hope they take some time to tour Route 29 North, which is an eight+ lane road with miles and miles of underutilized strip malls. The majority of the Charlottesville metro population lives in this section of Albemarle County, which is a much wealthier area than the City of Charlottesville.


UVA professor Tim Beatley in his recent book Native to Nowhere has a picture taken within Charlottesville city limits very similar to the one above. So when people visit Charlottesville they can be both in a distinctive destination and nowhere at approximately the same time! Given the vast amount of suburban sprawl and automobile-dominated landscape I would say that the Charlottesville metropolitan area is much more typical rather than distinctive in terms of predominate land use.

If I were recommending a distinctive destination in Virginia I would suggest South Boston. I happened to visit this small town while getting lost on the way down to Chapel Hill two weeks ago and was charmed by the place. South Boston, to its credit, won an award from the Virginia Chaper of the American Planning Association in 2006 for its restoration of the Prizery: a Community, Fine Arts, and Welcome Center. Now this is a distinctive destination.

the wreck of the old '97

One astute reader mentioned the song ‘Wreck of the Old 97’ so I must talk about it at some length. This is perhaps the finest song train song ever written. Why is it great? A) it’s about trains b) it’s about Virginia c) it’s about freight transportation d) it’s about transportation history e) it’s about supply chains. Okay, it’s not really about supply chains but I digress.

The Wreck of the Old 97 is a real deal historical event. Back in 1903, a mail train derailed off a 75 -foot trestle near Danville, Virginia killing 9 people. The reports from the scene were grisly, such as the person scalded to death by the steam. The train in question was a very recent model, the Old 97 (a name derived from the year 1897 I presume), which was known for its high speed. The train was late and was trying to make up time when it derailed. There was a centennial four years ago in Danville and it would have been really cool to go to.

The song based on the event is folk song legend. It was the first song in the United States to sell 1 million copies. Many artists have covered it including the legendary version by Johnny Cash from his Live at San Quentin album. On a side note, if anyone can think of a better opening to any musical set than Big River – Wreck of the Old 97 – I Still Miss Someone – I Walk the Line I would like to know because that four song lineup is almost incomprehensible to believe.

The Johnny Cash version of the song is great because the song actually sounds like a freight train. Now that is the height of thematic excellence. Listening to Live at San Quentin is the closest thing many of us Americans get to riding a train on a regular basis.

The song has been so successful that there is even a band named for it - the Old 97s. From their song Northern Line:

I'm dreaming on a night train 

It's only been a light rain, and a darkened sky and a starry night
I'm humming on a cold train 

I'm singing about the wreck of the Old 97

transportation songs: i want my city back

I am on a never ending search for songs with directions in them and a (re)acquaintance informed me of a Mighty Mighty Bosstones song with such directions. I remember seeing the Bosstones play in the Capitol Ballroom in DC back in 1996. That's over a decade ago! Wow. And now the area where the Capitol Ballroom used to is slated to become yuppie heaven, as I blogged about recently, as it was just north of the new DC baseball stadium.

To get around NIMBY'ism and zoning ordinances clubs like the Capitol Ballroom located in near SE as did many gay clubs. Now that they're on the way out, these establishments are having a difficult time finding new locations.

the song: I Want My City Back

Up around 95, sailing down Storrow Drive
Left exit into Kenmore Square
Slowed down when I got there
And that's when it was crystal clear
It wasn't there, it wasn't where
I left it, when I left it
I want my city back

diagonal conveyence as supreme insult

'I address the haters
and under estimators
and ride up on em like they escalators'

breathe - Fabolous


I wonder if this is more or less of an insult if he is referring to the much maligned escalators of the Washington Metro

train songs (vol 1)

'I still hear trains at night, when the wind is right'

this is a firedoor never leave open - the Weakerthans

'slept all night in the cedar grove
I was born to ramble, born to rove
some men are searchin for the holy grail
but there ain't nothin sweeter
than riding the rails'

cold water - Tom Waits

'this same goddamm train
glides soft through the rain
and I sit and dizzily wait'

minute - the Lawrence Arms

coming soon, 2008

www.smartusa.com

get your GIS gear!

these t-shirts are fabulous!! www.gisnuts.com where they're nuts about GIS!

Playing SimCity for Real

This article from the New York Times is notable for many things, including its headline: Playing SimCity for Real. Here is the author's take on the roles of planners in the Centennial project: "Planners like Jackson use an array of sophisticated software programs, based on demographic and market research, that enable them to calculate the population and density required to animate new neighborhoods. Such programs also help them figure out how many schools and police stations they may need. To see their work as a real-life version of the computer game SimCity isn’t far off."

'animate new neighhorhoods'? I'm not so sure about that.

In the article Robert Lang of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech states that the future of urban development is "remaking the postwar landscape" by transforming our automobile-oriented suburbs and that "Los Angeles is really the nation's largest infill project." LA and other western cities might just provide clues to the future of urban planning as they will run out of space long before the less geographically constrained eastern portions of the United States.

city poems: seattle

sometimes one word attaches
the paper begs for an addition
Seattle reading Moby Dick sipping coffee
rhythm of raindrops into Puget Sound
I should jump on a boat journey across the seas
instead I'll knock off your hat
as someone had in New Bedford
halfway across the century
the day of my dad's birth 1944
year's later my inheritance
grows in affinity for the port cities

soccer: the bastion of American communists?

Steven Wells of the Guardian UK has the very interesting article about how communists and anarachists in the United States are passionate about soccer. In a portion of the article, he details a major game between anarchists and communists in San Francisco, where some people in the crowd were chanting: "You say you look to Mao for salvation? What about the Xinjiang workers' situation?!"

One thing Wells doesn't get into is that the American left tends to favor almost anything that is unpopular in the United States and popular in Europe. I myself often look to Europe favorably but this tendency should be noted and examined in detail.

construction update: DC baseball stadium

I read somewhere that there was a webcam showing the construction of the new baseball stadium for the Washington Nationals, a stadium which the district government spent over $600 creating. After checking out the Clark Construction webcam I was surprised to see much progress had been made. One thing that struck me was how close the stadium will be to the Anacostia River. This gives me a good idea for a future post, which will contain a primer for Nats fans on what they need to know about the Anacostia River. Step 1: that it exists.

Even more astonishing are Monument Realty's plans for a Ballpark District. The Half Street Corridor will contain 775,000 sq ft of mixed-use retail, office space, a 200 room trendy W hotel, and 320 residential units. The District of Columbia it seems, even in SE, is ready for hyper upscale development. From an urban design standpoint, I really like those lights that arch over the corridor and provide definition for the space without being too confining. I hope they make the final design. Construction is scheduled for completion in 2009. For those unfamiliar with the area, most of this part of SE currently looks like this: