Random musings

The blog post i had written, and was going to take photographs for this morning, got obsolesced while i was sleeping. So, time for a little a capella improv, maybe?

I've been enjoying the discussions on several open listservs and closed loops over the past 10 days or so about arts funding in the new city budget. Lots of very vocal people reminding each other that local support for home-grown culture is one of the main attractors for people moving to Durham. And it is.

On the other hand, don't basic city services come first? Aren't we still funding routine maintenance out of borrowed funds, rather than operating funds? Don't we still have a backlog of years of deferred maintenance on our parks, roads, water and sewer, and other infrastructure? I think this year's budget mess has opened the door for a smart politician to bring that discussion to the forefront. Here's a little experiment. Visit the city's home page a couple of times a week over the next year. Keep a little tally sheet for each visit, and make a mark every time you see a variation of this statement on the front page:
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
City Contains Lindbergh Street Sewer Spill. Let me know, say, in late September of 2009 how many of those you counted. We'll see if it's an issue in the next municipal election.

I was also thinking a bit about my upcoming West Coast trip. Since i left California for Durham in 1993, i've only been out to the Pacific twice. First for the Y2K celebrations in Seattle, which ended up being canceled anyway, and second to pick up Mrs D's vehicle and drive it back to NC, in the spring of 2001. Both trips were essentially long weekends, but this time i'm going to be there for two full weeks. (Unfortunately, it looks like i'll be missing the Bull Durham Blues Festival this year, but you don't have to. Special price 2 for 50 bucks tickets go on sale in a couple of weeks). We'll be renting an apartment in the Potrero Hill neighborhood. And unless we decide to do a midweek getaway to Mendocino, or Yosemite, we'll be carless while there. It's been a while since i've spent an extended period of time navigating a city without a car. But a Muni pass is 15 bucks for the week, or $60 for the two of us for the whole time we're there.

San Francisco is one of the few cities in the US that never got rid of its street car system. (Street cars are not the same as the famous, but touristy, cable cars). My first trip there, back in the late 70s, was a revelation on how to make a big city navigable, especially for someone who had never been there. I grew up on the NYC subway system, so it's second nature to me. But a lot of people who visit New York find it indecipherable. Not so much San Francisco, and maybe that's because so much of it is in the open and above ground. Here's what the Muni has to say for itself:

Welcome to San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni). Founded in 1912, the Muni is one of America’s oldest public transit agencies and today carries over 200 million riders per year. Muni provides transit service within the city and county of San Francisco 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Muni operates 80 routes throughout San Francisco with stops within 2 blocks of 90% of all residences in the city. Operating Historic streetcars, modern light rail vehicles, diesel buses, alternative fuel vehicles, electric trolley coaches, and the world famous cable cars, Muni’s fleet is among the most diverse in the world.

Thinking about that got me thinking about Durham. Once upon a time, Durham had a street car system. It's not too hard to imagine what an updated system could look like in the Durham of the mid-21st century.

One thing i remember about being a kid, is that whenever i'd be with the older relatives (and there were a lot more of that generation than my generation. I think all 4 of my grandparents had at least 4 or 5 siblings. I've got the one, and no first cousins) they'd all talk about the old trolley cars. There was a mixed emotion in those talks. On the one hand, the trolleys provided my then young relatives with a sense of freedom and mobility in the teeming New York of the early 20th century. On the other, though, they were associated with a grinding poverty that my family was pretty eager to escape.

And that, i think, is one of the reasons planners in the post-WWII period were so eager to leave that particular transit option behind in favor of the automobile. It basically reeked of poverty. In New York, in the 60s and 70s, even the subway system was in danger of becoming the transportation mode of people who simply couldn't afford any other option. Now, i think there's both an opportunity and a challenge in that there are very few people around who remember when the trolley or the street car was a primary means of navigating an urban area. The opportunity is that the association with poverty doesn't exist anymore, so reintroducing the street car is a fresh endeavor. The challenge arises in that very few people have any experience in the benefits of such a system. How would you do your shopping, for instance, especially for things like home improvement projects? You can run the trolley up Roxboro Road, for instance, to where Lowe's is, but then, how do you get all that sheetrock home?

Two years ago, i don't think it would have been possible to even have the conversation. But now, as people start realizing that the era of cheap gas may actually have ended, we should be able to start talking about what the Durham of 40 years from now is going to look like, and how people are going to be getting around. Unfortunately, many of the choices we've made over the past ten years are based on cheap gas, and we're going to be stuck with them for a generation or two. But maybe we shouldn't be continuing to make those same choices from here out. Maybe this is the month when we actually start changing our thinking.