Philly Naked Bike Ride

Looks like Philly’s first Naked Bike Ride is going to be big.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR) is an effort to expose (quite literally) the environmental issues associated with cars, congestion, emissions, and the unfriendly traffic patterns we have constructed in attempt to move people from place to place.  On a micro level, urban centers should be designed with the intent that people can walk, bike, hop a bus, or even hail a cab when they’re running a few minutes behind.  However, much a city’s commuting and streets patterns still focus heavily on the car as the main mode of transportation.

This is somewhat of a “chicken or the egg” problem.  Do we design urban centers specifically with the intent to make it more pedestrian friendly, more convenient to use public transportation, more bikeable?  In other words, do we rely more heavily on other modes of public transportation and implement structures for their usage and thereby eliminate the space allotted for vehicle volume? (ie: Do we allot more space for bus and bike lanes by taking away car lanes and parking spaces?).  OR, do we wait for consumer preferences to change? Do we wait for the market to impact consumer behaivor?  In essence, do we wait for people to start abandoning a carbon-heavy lifestyle when they come to the realization that it just doesn’t add up?

I think WNBR has a valid issue to get across; I’m hesistant to say how effective it really is. Does WNBR do anything to change consumer preference, political decisions concerning emissions, climate change, urban development, etc.?  Or is it just excuse for hipster bikers to get naked and ride together en masse?  I couldn’t tell you as this is Philly’s first.

For more details and specifics about PNBR, check out their website or facebook page.

LightLane: DIY Bike Lane

With bike lane installation costs at $5,000 to$50,000 per square mile, why did it take so long for the conventional blinkers and flashers to transform into these DIY-type bike lanes? It’s the perfect solution!

Alex Tee and Evan Gant of Altitude designed these awesome, on-the-go virtual night bike lines using laser lights.

This is great for cities and city streets that weren’t designed with the biker in mind.  Instead of waiting for the urban planner/ streets to bring bike lanes to the biker, the biker can bring lanes to the street.

It will be interesting to see the type of response that LightLane generates.  I think the whole surge in biking in the past few years has led cyclists themselves to adopt more measures for safe commuting alternatives.  However, LightLane subtly suggests a redevelopment in city and street planning to accomodate more than just the car  and pedestrain.  And this is clearly something cities are going to need to look into with the rise in fossil fuels, a lingering recession, and a gradual influx of people migrating back to urban centers.

Greenworks Philadelphia: Part II

Target 11: Increase Canopy Cover toward 30 Percent in All Neighborhoods by 2025

Did you ever notice how it’s always ten times hotter in the city than the suburbs?  Okay, not ten times hotter, but there’s definitely a distinguishable difference in temperature.  I just got back from my mom’s place in Delaware County and it was noticeably cooler in the ‘burbs.  And a different type of cool too – not the dry type of heat we feel in the city; more of a moist, muggy type of heat.  Taking a quick comparison in accuweather.com the temperature in Delaware County is actually 3 degrees cooler than in the city (78 degrees versus 81 respectively).

Naturally, there’s more pavement and less vegetation in urban environments than in the city which contributes to the urban island heat effect and rise in temperatures we notice in Philadelphia.  While many factors contribute to urban island heat formations, the process can be simply explained through a city’s lack of vegetation and excess of urban structural materials such as pavement and rooftops.  Trees and vegetation provide shade and also reduce temperatures through a process of evapotranspiration, in which plants release water to the surrounding air reducing ambient heat.  This is explains the muggy, moist heat we feel in the suburbs versus the dry heat in the city.  On the other hand, city surfaces characterized mainly by sidewalks, pavement, conventional roofs, roads, and parking lots don’t promote evapotranspiration.  These dark surfaces also absorb solar energy, another reason why we feel so hot in the city’s center.

Trees aren’t just good for reducing temperature; they also remove air pollutants, reduce energy usage in adjacent buildings by lowering temperatures, contribute to a stormwater management system, and lower volatile organic compound emissions.  In essence, this is exactly why Philadelphia needs to be planting nearly 300,000 trees during the next seven years.

Philadelphia’s current canopy cover is at a staggering 16 percent – less than many other East Coast cities including New York, Boston, and Washington D.C. Initiative 11 aims to nearly double canopy cover, however, this still falls short of American Forests’ recommendation of 40% canopy cover for metropolitan areas East of the Mississippi.

What’s even more disturbing is the current distribution of canopy cover throughout the city.  High income neighborhoods like Roxborough, Manayunk, Germantown, Mount Airy, and Chestnut Hill enjoy a tree canopy of more than 34 percent while lower-income neighborhoods like South Philadelphia have less than 2.5 percent.  This is something that is of particular interest to me.  For my senior thesis in college in ArcGIS, I correlated urban green space within Philadelphia to factors such as income, education, race, and tenure, and found that there was disproportionate access to green space based on median income, tenure, African American communities, and populations who did not receive an education beyond the high school level.

Let’s really hope Greenworks’ plan does provide equitable access to positive environmental externalities, as this should be a right to all people and not just the select few.

R.I.P. MJ

This is a far stray from environmentalism, but Michael Jackson died and I’m a little at loss. This is the stuff my mom threw on our record player after dinners and would sit with my father and watch my sister and I, three and six respectively at the time, dance around to Thriller or Beat It.  Maybe the world didn’t loose the greatest human being, but we sure lost a hell of an artist.

Beat It was one of those videos that was groundbreaking for it’s time; Jackson stormed some of L.A.’s most dangerous street corners in the making of this music video which centers specifically around the gang warfare going on in the early 1980s.  He was even advised not to film in such places but was able to do so by allowing local residents and up to 80 gang members from warring gangs to appear as extras  and dancers.

What made Beat It so successful besides the whole unity through dance/music issue was the national exposure to black youth in urban centers.  Beat It’s fame is almost entirely based on creating a whole new genera of music videos which exposes the raw and edgy urban culture through a clash of violence, drugs, youths, and race. What before was only debased on the evening news Jackson had transformed into an art.  It would be easy to pinpoint the influences of many of today’s popular urban hip hop and rap musicians to Jackson’s Beat It.

I’m specifically interested in this video, because as it stands, it is in some sense a historical documentation of Los Angeles, of the gang wars, of a point in space and time of the city itself.  And I don’t think there’s been a lot of representation like MJ’s in the music scene since.

RIP.

Using All of the Cow

This is going to be a controversial post. I know that. However, I’d like to put that out there as I know there also two sides of any good discourse.

That said, I’m taking a rather primitive stance to the current food debate – there are cows, they are being slaughtered, and my consumption as an omnivore has little impact on how the current production of food will change in the next few years.  I mean, these are farm bills and agriculture lobbying power we’re talking about here, and I am not a large agribusiness.

What I mean to say is, if animals are going to be slaughtered, and we, the non-vegetarian/ non-vegan population are going to consume them, why do so with such waste?  Historically, all parts of the animal were used for consumptive and functional purposes. So why not do the same today?  Is it so gross to eat chicken feet or bone marrow as they do in Eastern cultures?  Or use beef knuckle and leg bones to make a beef broth?

I’ve said before that we are a culture of convenience – I can buy chicken bouillon cubes and have a broth ready in five minutes. I can go to the butcher shop and buy the parts of the meat I prefer, and have the remainder of the animal discarded in a landfill far from my sight.  But clearly, these aren’t sustainable options.

While a direct reform is necessary to agribuisness, we are years away from such an event.  So, essentially a transition needs to occur within consumers by eating less meat, more veggies, and by recognizing the amount of energy and water it takes to produce the chicken breast or pork chop or hamburger on our dinner plates.  And by, essentially, using all of the cow.