Art vs. Artifice

Look its dancing!

Maybe its just blowing in the wind

Sprouting up this Summer all over Mac-Grove have been the oddest things. At first I thought someone had dinged a car into a stop sign pole . . . and then using a Leatherman peeled parts of the metal away from it . . .and then rusted it? No, that can't be. As I sat staring at what was a perfectly good pole, now turned into a rusty scrap heap, I thought two thing, 1) why would someone do that to a Stop sign pole? and 2) when are they going to fix it? I am still asking.

Lo and behold, I find out that these pieces of recyclable matter are actually art. Well, how about that. Of course, what you want people who are approaching a controlled traffic intersection, driving a couple of tons of vehicular heft to do is to see (be distracted by?) art. I am hoping for the Mona Lisa Yield sign. A stop light that changes from Coolidge's Dogs Playing Poker (green go) to Monet's Haystacks (yellow slow) to Edvard Munch's The Scream (red Stop!). 

And art I guess it is. Art in the same way my child brings some twisted piece of metal rope and birch bark home from Scout camp that sits on the mantle for a couple of years. Art in the school of Detroit-abandoned-industrial-failed city-Robocop chic. My wife suggests they may have found the metal near some of the canyon-sized potholes we saw this Spring in our fair city. Maybe.

Alas, it is the usual story. While the City Parks department is losing $800,000.00 to a coffee shop because they couldn't find anyone to read a contract and while the City is whining about a 10 million dollar deficit (that's $10,000,000.00 for those who are visual), the City is paying an artist to molest its stop sign poles. Or maybe it's the State, or the Federal government or the UN. The only thing that is certain is it's you. Why does this happen? Well, in a one-party City there is no opposition. No one to complain about the potholes, the plowing, the deficit, the nutshell attorneys or the vandalism in the name of art to stop signs. There is only one thing left to say.

Stop.

Urban in the Suburban

I have been working the past few weeks in a Southwest suburb of the Twin Cities. I have had a chance to observe the driving behavior of the suburbanite in its natural habitat and I have to say, I have found it wanting.

What's with all the anger?

I hate love to stereotype, so, I will state the angriest species of driver is the 31-42 year old male, facial-haired, baseball-capped, driving a white pick-up truck. This particular animal likes to blow through a stop light, and not by a little, and then give you the finger. He zigs and zags from lane to lane on 494 or the Crosstown with an aggressiveness that is pathological. He acts like everyone in his way is an enemy and laws do not apply to him. Did I mention his truck is white.

Now I have long held that males between the age of 16 and 30 are mentally ill when it comes to driving. I suffered from the malady myself. But one does reach an age when driving becomes a sanctuary. It's not work, its not home. One looks forward to it. While driving you can listen to what you want, I prefer books on tape (more about that in a later post), you can listen to the radio or be alone with your own thoughts. I even know a guy who does the rosary every day on the way to work. God bless him, and I mean that, but that's too much bead work for me. The point is he is doing what he wants and I can do what I want before getting to the craziness of co-workers at work or being attacked by kids and wife at home. 

These suburban pips driving in there white symbols of generative power must have a better place to be then the truck, 494 or the Crosstown. Is it a man-cave (i.e. lower level of a split level hell). What do they do there? My guess: put on a baseball cap and play Call of World of Warcraft IX; the Legend of Duty (L.A. Pimp Edition). Or maybe its off to softball with the boys and a blooming onion at Chili's afterward. Or is it off to the Cineplex to see Marvel's Agents of DC Comics III, the Dark Pawn. Hard to say.

Either way, what is clear is they have not shed the mental illness of youth, or much else of youth come to think of it. They have no need to be alone with their thoughts, work does not stress them and family is not yet a responsibility. I wonder if these "men" will every take up the mantel of adulthood. I look around and wonder. 

They seem to be part of a generation of boy/men who watch comic book movies, dress in sports jerseys, storm off-world planets in video games and speed through life in their truck, deadened to the concern of others. Three generations ago, real boys, 18 year-olds, stormed the beaches on D-Day, fought through the Battle of the Bulge, island hopped across the Pacific and raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Hard to imagine those who came back, those whose buddy's died next to them, those who fought for others, being anything less than men. Hard to imagine the white pickup driver could understand. 

To one, the rosary was comfort in the dark. To the other its, at best, a rear-view mirror decoration.

“Danger, Will Robinson!”

Part of the un-joy of living in the City is the following: speeding through the neighborhood last night a car slowed down and smashed the back window out of our Suburban. It may have been with a gun or a bat or a golf club. 

Who knows?

We got the license plate number and call the police who were less than enthusiastic about pursuing the perps. This is the second time in a month I have had contact with the City's finest and the second time their response has been to talk me out of pursuing any action. 

Odd that is.

The first incident involved a gentlemen who swerved twice in front of my minivan on St. Clair almost hitting us, and jump out of his car and punched my window (what is it with windows?) The officer who arrived on the scene, when he looked up from his iPhone, said there was really nothing he could do. I said to him, go talk to the puncher, scare him a little and maybe do a warrant check. Its called community policing.

I love cops. I use to represent the Union that represented them, I was a prosecutor and have worked with police officers for over 20 years. I have raised my children to respect police officers. What I don't understand is why there now appears to be an ethos in the City police force to not pursue "minor" violent acts. Why not look up the licence plate of the perps who smashed my window, go to the house and using a little creative questioning find out who was in the car that night. Search the car. Do a warrant check.

Community policing means enforcing the nuisance crimes to make the quality of life better for everyone in the City. How about enforcing the low level violent crimes?

Who speaks for the minivan?

"Start seeing minivans" is a bell ringing. 

My hometown, Saint Paul, Minnesota, for the past couple of decades has spent its time and my treasure making sure pedestrians, bikers, joggers, skateboarders and any mode of traveler, other than the motor vehicle drivers, have had every whim, restricted lane, traffic circle and rabbit hole of expenditure met while forgetting about the father or mother coming home from work, going to a hockey game, Scout meeting, choir concert or science fair. This got me thinking:

Who speaks for the minivan? Who speaks for the Suburban full of kids? Who speaks for the Urban family?

Well I hope to. And not just about Saint Paul removing 70 miles of street lanes over the past 20 years but about the Urban family. Married 20 years, five kids, active in my Church, the kids schools, sports, scouts and other activities I hope to provide this prospective.

I love living in this City and hope to provide some reasons why. 

Onward!

Reason and Madness

Reason and Madness

By Stephen Kelly on Monday, March 19, 2012 at 5:34pm

MINUTES by Stephen Kelly
March 20, 2012

Reason and Madness
In his dense treaty on faith, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton said, “we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness.”  Well circle madness has taken over the City of Saint Paul Public Works Department. In their much revised plan for the Jefferson Bikeway, they have proposed adding three traffic circles, one at every intersection, between Snelling and Fairview and adding two more West of Fairview on Finn and Mount Curve. This, along with some signs, more of that pricey paint they use for sharrows and allowing additional parking, is the sum total of how they are going to spend the rest of our money.  I say our money because whether its the $250,000.00 of City money or $750,000.00 of Federal money laundered through Transit for Livable Communities, you paid for it.

First, a word on traffic circles. A traffic circle was added to the corner of Wellesley and Wheeler replacing the 4-way stop sign intersection. I drive through that intersection several times each day and to my surprise have found it to be less annoying than I thought. To be sure it is ugly. Also, this winter has not put the traffic circle to the test.  So what’s wrong with traffic circles?

Well . . . the in a document titled “Griggs Street Bikeway FAQ” (which proves they’re not just after us) the Department of Public Works admits, “[s]now plowing is more challenging with neighborhood traffic circles, but the division head for Street Maintenance has assured our engineers that his staff can handle sufficiently plowing around neighborhood traffic circles.” This is hard to believe when the City can’t “handle sufficiently” plowing 3” of snow off a straight street in front of my house. The City states these traffic circles cost $10,000.00-$15,000.00 to build and $450.00 per year for maintenance. Pardon my skepticism on City estimates on how much it will cost. The City has not made an estimate of how much it would cost to leave these intersections alone.

Further, the proposed plan for Jefferson, taken in its entirety, is to turn Jefferson into something that is not a street.  A street is by definition a thoroughfare which allows one to move easily from one point to another free from obstruction.  A driver who winds in and out of the proposed Jefferson traffic circles like a pinball to only be confronted by cars parked on both sides of the street will freely choose to avoid Jefferson. They will instead choose Juliet where there are no circles or Wellesley where there is one or choose Randolph and St. Clair.  In other words, so that a few citizens can recreationally ride bikes, residential streets will become thoroughfares and arterial streets will become four stop light cycle congested traffic jams. I would hate to be in charge of driving a big rig firetruck down a traffic circled Jefferson. The thing will tip over. Some thouroughfare.

And by a few citizens recreationally riding bikes I mean few. I kept count during this whole of this mild-mild winter and saw 8 bikers on Jefferson, four of whom I saw last Saturday when it was 70°F.  Is spending a million dollars on 8 bikers at the expense, inconvenience and safety of everyone else worth it? In a recent article in the The Oregonian newspaper, reporter Beth Slovic asked the question, “Why Can't Portland Repave Its Rutted Roads?” Portland has scrapped all future plans for road paving and street maintenance, primary functions of government, and will be cutting such services as “bridge monitoring, street cleaning and sidewalk inspections.”  “Why?” you ask. Well it turns out Portland's has a "’multimodal’ ethic” giving it other priorities such as:

1.    “$900,000 to build 13.5 miles of bike routes,”
2.    “$665,000 to add eight permanent employees to oversee streetcars,”
3.    “$15,000 to help sponsor a "Rail-Volution" conference in Los Angeles,”
4.    “$55 million toward the $1.5 billion MAX [lightrail] line”
5.    “$5,000” for the Portland Director of the Bureau of Transportation (salary $152,000.00) “to join Portland business leaders on a tour of thriving European cities,”
6.    “$2.1 million” for “consultants and staff time,” “to revamp [a] Street for ‘economic vitality,’"
7.    "$50,000 . . . to support handmade-bicycle shows and triathlons,” and
8.    “$250,000 . . . to buy fancy planters and streetlights for the downtown retail core.”

All this while “46 percent of neighborhood streets and 28 percent of major roads are in "poor" or "very poor" shape.”  It is fascinating how Portland’s Mayor defends the decision to stop maintaining the roads by highlighting recent “big capital projects”  “getting big chunks of federal funding.”  When asked how the Portland will pay “for long-term costs of maintaining the new projects when the city already has a road-repair backlog,” the good Mayor doesn’t answer and blames his predecessor for “an [in]accurate baseline."

The largest single asset the City of Saint Paul owns is its street system.  If Portland, Oregon,the model berg for City Planners, can’t pave or maintain its streets because of its “multimodal ethic” where do we stand? How about we save the $10,000.00 to $15,000.00+ x 5 for traffic circles and pave a street or buy a plow or pay someone to work overtime during the next snowzilla or (hold on to yer britches) not spend it and ask for less tax money next go round?

Chesterton said the circle was “perfect and infinite in its nature . . . but . . . is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller” and “returns upon itself and is bound.”  The cross, on the other hand, “can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape.”  It “opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.” I fear the City will soon bind us free travelers forever to these circles.

See http://www.stpaul.gov/DocumentView.aspx?DID=19612;
http://www.stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=4620;
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/insufferable-portland_631919.html;
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/road-hell-paved-people-who-dont-believe-road-paving_632940.html#read-more;
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704050204576218600999993800.html#printMode;
http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/stpaul-macgrove/messages/topic/1oQ2MBDxRzaeEpeVejDF5Z;http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/02/portlands_roads_to_ruin.html; andhttp://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/02/portlands_roads_to_ruin.html

for more information.
And be sure to submit your Sidewalk Poetry by April 13 at http://www.stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=2820.  My submission:

As I sit four traffic signal cycles deep
The Jefferson Bikeway makes me weep.
Home I could be with my little dog Pickles
If my lane hadn’t been co-opted by bicycles.

Oh where are the traffic lanes that carried me to my door?
And where are the bikes to which the new lane was made for?
To my dog I could be throwing a little green ball
And to think that my taxes paid for this all.

The Ninety-Nine

The Ninety-Nine

By Stephen Kelly on Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:56pm

MINUTES by Stephen Kelly
November 14, 2011

The Ninety-Nine
Several ideas have come out of the handful of protesters around the country calling themselves Occupy Wall Street.  For instance the value of scouting in teaching people how to properly set up a tent, cook outside and maintain personal hygiene.  Another is the concept of the one percent and the ninety-nine percent.  This bumper sticker slogan is meant to highlight that one percent of the people control the other ninety-nine percent’s money.

Never one to let a good catch phrase go to waste . . .

I have been fixating lately on just how many miles of car lanes the City of Saint Paul has lost over the years.  One thinks back nostalgically to the founding years of our fair town, when developers couldn’t build houses, buildings and roads fast enough for the masses streaming in.  This led to conflict, sometimes violent, between landowners, speculators, developers, builders and city politicians who were often on the take.  It also gave the City a wonderfully erratic street system.  There are not alphabetical streets.  One cannot pinpoint an address by using numbered cross streets like Minneapolis.  Developer arguments led to jumping streets, like Selby Avenue at Fairview, which jumps half a block before continuing on its merry way.  Five, six, and most famously, seven corner intersections are common in the older areas of town.  Things got so bad that a City commission standardized street names and addresses in the 1920’s.  However, the glorious randomness to Saint Paul’s streets remains to this day(1).  As I have often told citizens of the left side of the Twin Cities, Saint Paul is easy to get around, just memorize all the streets.

One thing which all of the scoundrels and dreamers, speculators and visionaries alike could not have imagined in all their imaginings of future Saint Paul, is that a small group, let’s say one percent, would remove the very thing they built: the streets.

Fairview Avenue north of Ford Parkway used to be a four lane road.  If you wanted to take a left hand turn, you went into the left lane and put your blinker on.  Cars behind you could go into the right lane and proceed on.  As we are reminded by bikers, State law allowed bikers the same “rights” to use Fairview as any car.

Then the one-percent came in.  They removed a lane of automobile traffic on Fairview.  Think about that.  After 150 years of building, progressing and developing, these experts decided to take a u-turn.  Now the City decided it was going to encourage anti-building, regress and un-development. Miles of traffic lane were removed.  What happened to the cars?  They didn’t go away.  In fact there numbers increased as always.

Now we have a Fairview with one lane going each way, a center turn lane and a strip on either side for bikes.  Left turning cars go into the center turn lane and the remaining lane becomes a speedway during non-rush hours and a parking lot during rush hour.

Think of a car as you waiting at the DMV.  There are 20 people ahead of you in line and two windows open.  Now they close a window.  What happens to your time?  Relatively, it will now take you twice as long for you to pay the license fee which no biker every pays.

Other examples of the removal of traffic lanes are Marshall Avenue and Summit Avenue where they replaced the vehicle lanes with bike lanes.

And who are we doing this anti-building and un-development action for?  Well bike riders by and large, the one percent, who already have the “right” to use the streets of Saint Paul.  The City proudly touts that it has put in 71 miles of bike lanes, bike routes and striped shoulders.  That’s 71 miles of road destroyed for biking.  How many more have been removed for medians, light rail, traffic circles and traffic “diverters?”

The one percent has gained control of the Federal government, government funded non-profits, the City Council, the City Transportation Committee, Public Works and the Community Councils.  They have orchestrated the spending of millions of dollars for their recreation.  And why should the one-percent pay for it themselves when they can make the ninety-nine percent pony up?

Just as insidious as their directing our money to their recreation, the one percent is tearing down our City founders’ endowment to us.  Like the slow boiling pot, miles and miles of vehicle lanes have been un-built, un-developed and erased from the City.  And imperceptible, every year, the quality of life becomes worse and worse for the ninety-nine percent.
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(1) Randomness of street names and addresses and the occasional jumping of streets should not be confused with an overall plan of a grid system which allows choice at every intersection.

The Problem that Wasn’t There.

The Problem that Wasn’t There.

By Stephen Kelly on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:08pm

MINUTES by Stephen Kelly
October 19, 2011

The Problem that Wasn’t There.

In her letter to the September 28, 2011 Villager, Barb Thoman, Executive Director of TLC said, “what kind of a street will make parents willing to send their 11-year-old son or daughter to soccer practice on bike or on foot?  What kind of street will encourage novice bicyclists - perhaps a mom and a small child - to make a trip across St. Paul?  What kind of street will be safe for an 80-year-old to walk to church?”[1]

Well Ms. Thoman, all of them.

For 157 years Saint Paulites have figured out how to cross a street without TLC’s help.  In fact, Saint Paulites are vigorous walkers, joggers, bikers and skateboarders.  At all hours of the early morning, day and late night you will see our good citizens taken to their sidewalk, street and alley.  Walking their kids, walking the dog or just out to get some fresh air and talk over the day’s activities with their spouse.  These active Saint Paulites have coexisted with cars for at least the last 90 years (and horses and carriages before that!).

We Saint Paulites also love our cars.  Look at what University Avenue used to be when it was the home of the car dealerships and cars cruised up and down it going to Porky’s and parking at Monkey Wards before the fun police shut them down.  Now we have the choo-choo.  Drive up and down Snelling Avenue when a car show is at the State Fair and you will see families parked on coolers and nylon strap lawn chairs enjoying the tricked-out masterpieces as the old beauties rumble by.

Look at what for 87 years has been the quite stalwart neighbor to all Saint Paulites, the oldest Ford plant still in operation where cars, trucks, and during WWII tanks, have steadily rolled off the line.

Cars and trucks on the road, walkers and bikers on the sidewalk, airplanes overhead and the distant sound of a train clacking down the tracks.  This is what city living is about.  We all co-exist because we are all car drivers, walker and bikers.  What and where is the problem?  Or maybe better said; why does someone think there is a problem to be solved?

Years ago, the great economist Friedrich von Hayek was asked why so many intellectuals were skeptical about and even hostile to capitalism.  Dr. Hayek answered, “Well, I’ve been puzzling about it for a long time . . . I think it’s . . . an intellectual attraction of a system you can deliberately control, which is fascinating to the intellectual.”

Surly the “intellectuals” at TLC are not attracted to a system of “deliberate control?”  They only want to make the driving public (that’s all of us) change our driving route to avoid the Jefferson Roadblock every day, times every driver, forever.  Fascinating.

To do this controlling TLC created a problem that was not there, “Bryce can’t cross Cleveland on his Cervelo bike at Jefferson!”  Then they propose a disconnected solution, “we must throw a roadblock up and stop all motor traffic!”

But why?  If there real goal was about biking, hey, you got your bikeway.  There are lanes and little bikes on the signs and sharrows, etc.  You won.  As D-Day said in Animal House, “War’s over man, Wormer dropped the big one.”  Why is this piece, the stopping of motor traffic, so very important?

In TLC’s own words, what they are after is to "[d]ecrease motor vehicle trips . . . [m]aximize bicycle use and walking for transportation resulting in mode shift out of motor vehicles [and to] . . . contribute to ongoing shift in attitudes and travel behavior."  Translate:  you get out of your car.

And what happens when TLC “mode shifts” us out of our cars?  Remember that when you are sending your 11-year-old son or daughter to practice on bike or on foot when it’s -20°F or an 80-year-old is walking to church in 20” of snow.  As for the novice bicyclists, stick to the sidewalk until the training wheels come off.

The real question is, what kind of street will Saint Paulites have when TLC is successful mode shifting us and we can’t drive our own cars on them?
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[1] One can’t help notice the similarity between Ms. Thoman’s list and a list that appeared in the Sept. 15 Minutes,https://www.facebook.com/groups/localtaxpayersforalivablecommunity/doc/247029292006281/