In Praise of John Bolton

(I Never Thought I'd Say That)

I don't remember which demonstration this was.

One fine day not too long ago (probably a Tuesday, possibly in 2018), I was riding the Chestnut Street bus in Philadelphia. A couple was sitting across the aisle, chatting. After a bit, the man, on the aisle, turned to me and said, "By the way, has anyone ever told you that you look like John Bolton?"

The Chestnut Street bus, midday, not too crowded, can be a convivial place, and the man seemed friendly. I said, "Yes, actually."

It's true. We have a passing resemblance, based largely I think on the glasses and the mustache. When Mr. Bolton is in the news, I have received an occasional query.

I don't like John Bolton. There are so many reasons, but the one that sticks in my mind is the story of an irate Bolton chasing a woman down a hotel corridor in Moscow in 1994, yelling at her angrily, and then pounding on her hotel room door as he shouted insults.

Here is the curse of being old. I do remember. And here is the strength of democracy - I can link you to a story. It hasn't been erased. (Click here. Actually, here's another.)

Still, I do look a bit like John Bolton. It's a reminder of our common humanity.

And now he's acting like a patriot, telling the truth about Donald Trump and the quid pro quo in Ukraine. It doesn't change the past, but it does change the present.

There's a slightly inapropos quote from the old movie Casablanca. At the end Claude Rains says to Humphrey Bogart, who has just put Ingrid Bergman on the Lisbon plane with Paul Henreid and then shot a late-arriving Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), "Well, Rick, you're not only a sentimentalist, but you've become a patriot."

I don't think Bolton is a sentimentalist, and I don't think Ingrid Bergman would have had much interest in him. But it's just possible that he is a patriot.

And here's one more thing. Perhaps, after all this time, and so much prevarication, dissimulation, and outright bluster, Bolton may have come to the conclusion that facts matter.

See also Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil, Fascism, Jim Crow Was a Failed State.

Donald Trump Is Dangerous

Donald Trump reminds me of Ron Galati. A few years ago, I served on Grand Jury 25 in Philadelphia. My oath prevents me from talking about what happened in the jury room, but much of Ron's path is a matter of public record. (For a story, click here.) He was under investigation for insurance fraud, and as the net closed around him he got crazier and crazier. He started talking about killing people, and eventually one person was shot. Ron got locked up.

In another insurance conspiracy that came before Grand Jury 25, the principal committed suicide with a pistol that he had previously used to threaten other people.

Donald Trump loves to talk Mafia talk. He's a bit of a Mafia wannabe, as was Ron Galati.

It's easy enough to view Trump's behavior - and his language - as comical. I urge you to take it seriously. His orders to get rid of Ambassador Yovanovitch, and now his threat against his chief prosecutor, Adam Schiff, are not jokes.

Those Pesky Bike Lanes

They Just Don't Fit In

Pine at Tenth, in warmer weather.

Yeah, bike lanes really detract from the historic character of our neighborhood.

When people talk about historic character in this way, they are being typically ahistorical Americans, as I've discussed before. What they really mean is bikes don't conform to the existing paradigm.

And it's true. Bikes don't fit the existing paradigm. I think that's what I like most about them. As I wrote to a friend five years ago,  "I can't help thinking that bicycles, starting as a disruptive force, may well be the catalyst for a long-needed solution."

We hear a lot about disruptive forces these days - Uber, Trump - but many disrupters seem content to just keep throwing bombs.

A Word in Praise of Uber
I'd like to put in a word for Uber here. I think people, in Philadelphia at least, may be forgetting how terrible our taxicabs were before Uber showed up.

I remember years ago, calling for a cab to pick me up at my house and take me to the airport - about a 20-minute ride. It was a nice day, with the sun shining as I recall. Things started well enough; the cab showed up, not terribly late, and I hopped in. Like most cabs of the time, it was well-worn, with body dents and a shabby interior. As I pulled my creaky door closed, the driver told me that he wasn't sure the cab could make it to the airport; but, he said, if it broke down, he'd call for a replacement to take me the rest of the way. At this point I didn't have a lot of time to get to my flight, nor did I have a lot of confidence that a new cab would arrive at my house any time soon, so I told him to go ahead. In the end we got there in good order, but as you can see, I haven't forgotten the experience.

In the bad old days, you could never be sure a cab you had called would actually show up; you could never be sure that the car was in good operating order, but you could be pretty sure it would be run down and dirty; and you never knew whether your driver would know how to get to your destination, and you might well be called on to serve as a volunteer navigator.

When Uber arrived, the cars showed up when they said they would; the vehicles were clean and in good running order; and the driver didn't have to ask you for directions. And guess what? The cab companies, faced with some actual competition, have also raised their game. (As for the city government's interest in the customer experience, I think that may also have improved a bit.)

Uber was, and is, a highly disruptive force on our streets, and I'm not sure they have any intention of packing away their hand grenades, but it's worth pointing out that Uber and its cognates forced even the taxicabs to improve dramatically on basic blocking and tackling.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
I don't know which is worse: Defending the shop-worn old ways that the cab industry had clung to for so long, or showing up with a massive disruption and then refusing to move on from throwing hand grenades because it's so much fun. Scholars - and not just the Marxist ones - use the framework of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis as an analytical tool. When people say they want their politicians to get back to the work of producing solutions (and relative calm) instead of wallowing in strife, I think they're talking about the need to move on to synthesis.

People who are well insulated from it seem to have a high tolerance for strife. Those more exposed to the elements generally like it when the wind is down and the sun is shining.

Synthesis for Complete Streets
When it comes to designing streets for all users, including  pedestrians and bicyclists as well as motor vehicles, we seem to be mired. The forces for change (antithesis) are making some progress, but the forces for maintaining the present paradigm intact (thesis) still own not just the ball but also the entire playing field. Bicycling, in the view of these people, exists by sufferance and not by right.

There is only one precedent that I know of for the kind of struggle we're currently engaged in on our streets. It took place in the 1920s, and it is rightly described as a war for the streets. With dead people, grieving widows and mothers, the whole nine yards.

At the beginning of this war, pedestrians had the right-of-way on the street. At the end of it they were confined to sidewalks and crosswalks that they entered at their peril. (For more on all this, see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011. For a shorter read, see Cars & Bikes - The Back Story.)

Why? Here There Is No Why.
Looking back from the vantage of the twenty-first century, one of the truly weird things is the use of the word accident instead of crash. We had shipwrecks, and then we had train wrecks, and when the cars came we had traffic accidents. As if they just happened. An act of God, perhaps, but certainly having nothing to do with the agency of the driver of a large, heavy, fast vehicle (cue F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, from 1925).

It would be interesting to know more about how the word accident came to be used for car wrecks. (Chapter 8 of Norton's Fighting Traffic describes the radical reconceptualization of rights and responsibilities on our streets that took place in the 1920s. For a good article on the early history of the word accident, click here. And here's a nice story from Vox on the issue of crash v. accident.)

The Italian writer Primo Levi spent some time in Auschwitz during World War II and lived to tell the tale. Shortly after arriving he was sitting by a window in his barracks - his new home. It was cold, and he was very thirsty, and there was an icicle outside the window. He opened the window and broke off the icicle, but before he could slake his thirst a guard grabbed the icicle away from him. "Why?" Levi asked the guard in German. Who replied, "Hier ist kein warum." Here there is no why.

Auschwitz was an unfathomably worse place than the typical American street, but the principle is the same. It's pretty disabling. If you want to know why anxiety levels are so high in this country, one place to look is the local street corner.

A Discouraging Precedent
History does not really offer a lot of encouragement to bicyclists and other proponents of complete streets, at least in the United States. Other countries, particularly in Europe, are doing quite well redesigning their public spaces and reducing traffic casualties.

And there is a relatively small band of people in the United States who are dedicated to changing the status quo. Some of them even work for the city government in Philadelphia.

But the money and the preconceptions and the stereotypes are pretty much all against us, and the adherents to the existing paradigm seem basically impervious to rational suasion; and, in the rare event that we actually get something built that hasn't been crippled during the design process, these people appear unwilling to believe the evidence of their lying eyes.

I'll keep slogging on, and I expect that most of my brothers and sisters in Philadelphia will do the same. And perhaps we'll continue to make progress slowly. But without some kind of a game-changer, I don't think we'll ever get out of the strife and mire. Call it a marathon without the fun. The new synthesis seems beyond reach.

Park at Eighth Ave., Asbury Park, December 2019.

See also Reimagining Our Streets, Vision Zero in Philadelphia, It's the Road Design, Stupid, A New World Being Born.

Crunch Time

The women's march is coming back to DC this Saturday. On Monday, Martin Luther King Day, gun rights advocates are descending on Richmond, Va. The governor of Virginia has declared a state of emergency.

The president has the Third Infantry Regiment, which is best known for looking after the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery but is also available to help put down civil disturbances (in other words, when they're not marching around in very crisp uniforms, they're riot police). So where will President Trump send them? If Governor Northam asks for help, will the president say, Sorry, I need them to protect the White House from the women?

Meanwhile, of course, impeachment marches on; and it now appears that the president may have sponsored a plot to assassinate a U.S. ambassador. Come to think of it, a woman. Do you suppose Mr. Trump has a problem with women?

The old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

Something Missing?

Complete Streets Without Micromobility

Who could ask for anything more? 

Back in February 2019, the City of Philadelphia begged off on bringing a scooter-share program to the city, suggesting, among other things, that the topic was very new and required further observation as it developed and evolved in other places. And the City suggested that it might be willing to revisit the subject of a scooter share program in Philadelphia in about a year - that would be February 2020.

Well, guess what? February 2020 is right around the corner. Things have been remarkably quiet. So I wrote an article reviewing what I had learned and seen during the course of the year, and suggesting that it might be time to bring scooters to Philly. (To see the article, click here.)

The responses I've had from the City to that scooter article have been interesting. I'm told that at least a few Council members are cautiously favorable. The City administration, however, remains very concerned that the poor overall quality of Philly's streets creates serious safety risks. And, frankly, I do have sympathy for this position.

My main motivation for scooters, however, is to get more traffic onto our existing protected bike lanes - specifically, the Pine and Spruce lanes, which have recently been repaved and upgraded.

And so, as I was thinking about this, I came up with another of my bizarre ideas. Would it be possible to use Pine and Spruce as the two pieces of a kind of trolley line? The scooters would be geo-fenced so they could only run on these streets (and perhaps a few others). We could have the eastern terminal in Head House Square and the western terminal at 34th and Spruce, next to the University of Pennsylvania, HUP, and CHOP. There would also be intermediate stations with corrals, where people could either pick up or drop off a scooter.

I realize that a closed system like this is just about the opposite of the original Bird-Lime concept of go anywhere, park anywhere. But it might be a way to get scooters going in Philly, and it might relieve some of the congestion out by HUP - which, if you haven't been there recently, is quite horrific.

I don't want anyone to get hurt on a scooter. And I don't want anyone's feelings to get hurt. But if our repaved bike lanes on Pine and Spruce aren't safe enough for scooters, I think I'd like to know why.

What the curb looked like before parked cars drowned everything.

The photographs here were taken by Edwin Locke in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1937, for the Farm Security Administration.