The Steampunk World
I biked the length of Lake Shore Drive. Rode my triple-high tallbike downtown at 5 AM and then joined 20,000 other cyclists in a ride down to the Museum at 57th, then up to Evanston, then back downtown. It was beautiful. Quiet, clean, and fun... I wish it could be that way all the way.
If you tried to put an 8-lane highway through central park, you'd get laughed out of town. Yet they pulled it off on our park. And traffic is still shitty. Take it away, traffic will still be shitty. This is the trap that city planners fall into, from Chicago down to my little Ohio hometown... traffic problems will expand to meet capacity, so the only way to reduce them is to make it WORSE to drive (so people are forced to consider other options).
Every fourth street in Chicago is extra-wide, because the city planners thought noone should have to walk more than two blocks to catch a trolley. Then GM bought up the trolley lines and replaced them with busses. Now the CTA is shutting down, basically boning the poor.
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In other news, the cops have done their "spring sweep", arresting gang leaders and leaving the jobs open for whoever fights their way into it. This also has a tendency to destabilize borders. Automatic weaponfire in my neighborhood every night. We creep home through the alleys (out of line-of-sight) and keep each other informed when the war's popped off. It's only four blocks to Western and then you're safe, you're in yuppieland. Fallujah, West Town, it's all the same... a world where the rich keep the poor in grinding poverty and that desperation begets violence. Every time you shop at Wal-mart, that's another machine gun blast outside my window.
If you tried to put an 8-lane highway through central park, you'd get laughed out of town. Yet they pulled it off on our park. And traffic is still shitty. Take it away, traffic will still be shitty. This is the trap that city planners fall into, from Chicago down to my little Ohio hometown... traffic problems will expand to meet capacity, so the only way to reduce them is to make it WORSE to drive (so people are forced to consider other options).
Every fourth street in Chicago is extra-wide, because the city planners thought noone should have to walk more than two blocks to catch a trolley. Then GM bought up the trolley lines and replaced them with busses. Now the CTA is shutting down, basically boning the poor.
---
In other news, the cops have done their "spring sweep", arresting gang leaders and leaving the jobs open for whoever fights their way into it. This also has a tendency to destabilize borders. Automatic weaponfire in my neighborhood every night. We creep home through the alleys (out of line-of-sight) and keep each other informed when the war's popped off. It's only four blocks to Western and then you're safe, you're in yuppieland. Fallujah, West Town, it's all the same... a world where the rich keep the poor in grinding poverty and that desperation begets violence. Every time you shop at Wal-mart, that's another machine gun blast outside my window.
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