Friday, May 22, 2009 2 comments
(latest by Jamison)
The same day I arrived in Barcelona, my ex-boyfriend sent me a story about banning cars on San Francisco's Market Street. Despite a promising headline, the second paragraph states that actually banning cars (which are already outnumbered by bicycles) on Market Street is no longer on the table and seems to be a trial program which forces east-bound auto-traffic to turn at 8th Street and preventing cars turning onto Market at another intersection.
"It will feel pretty good to see some progress, albeit incremental progress on Market Street," said District Supervisor Chris Daly though the article doesn't make any mention that this is at least the third Market Street study conducted by the Transit Authority (TA) and the supervisors like Daly who also act as the TA Board of Directors have yet to act upon any of the previous recommendations yet. The article mentions some of those recommendations like colored bike lines, improved signs and lighting, bikes lanes and streetscape improvements might be implemented in 2013.
Despite having done for years and these safety improvements still being 4 years away, assistant deputy director of planning and development at the SFMTA Timothy Papandreou is already patting himself on the back, "We have the opportunity to make Market Street a world-class street".
Meanwhile, here in Barcelona they actually do have world class streets with bike only lanes, dedicated bus lanes (and busses free of interior advertising), and a citywide bike sharing program which had 90,000 members within six months of it's March 2007 opening. Today
Bicing (at just 20€ per year with unlimited use and no additional charges for the first 30 minutes) has grown to 186,000 daily users, or 9% of the population. The friend I am living with here, Edu, tells me the effect on the Metro bus and rail lines has been noticeable with less overcrowding and fewer cars on the streets causing delays. Along with the growth in bike ridership comes dedicated bike lanes and maybe as maybe as soon as next year Barcelona will complete a network of dedicated bike lanes on all the major streets of the city.
San Francisco has made little to no progress by comparison (under a legal injunction which prevents the city putting in so much as a bike rack without an environmental study) and while this non-ban-ban is a step forward anything short of true dedicated bus and bikes lanes is far from "world class" and politicians like Daly need to just shut the fuck up until they've actually made something happen instead of just commissioning studies.
Thursday, May 7, 2009 Post comment
I was invited to a preview of the new Star Trek film last night and having long ago given up on the series (I think everything after First Contact was crap, and even then it was a rare highlight in a minefield of technobabble and it's boringly utopian view of the future) I started watching some episodes of the original series online. At it's core there was a great show and interesting characters, but it was very much a product of it's time with computers that my iPhone puts to shame and a weird gender bias which had every close up of a women in soft focus.
In the new film, J.J. Abrams has done for Star Trek much what Ron Moore did for Battlestar Galactica, taking what was good about the original, leaving behind a lot of the baggage that brought it down in later years, and bringing it up to date with our contemporary expectations of more complex stories, imperfect characters and more realistic production values. For the first time in nearly 20 years, Star Trek feels new and fresh again. Abrams seems to have mastered the use of time travel, using it in Lost to create and intricate puzzle and here in a brilliant maneuver which frees him to go wherever he wants with this new series without contradicting what's already
My only real complaint is a slapstick scene with Mr. Scott and a ridiculously convoluted water pipe. I think the film did a much better job portraying Scott as a true genius (his expertise was more narrowly focused on transporter technology) I get annoyed when shows have characters who only seem to exist for comic relief and where they rounded out the rest of the characters with both serious and comic moments, I don't think Scott had a scene without a joke.
Overall: good movie, great scifi movie.
