The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along

Would You Buy a Used Car from Mr. Sincerity?

Mr. Sincerity

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!" Donald Trump never tweeted this. I think his familiarity with Shakespeare rivals his familiarity with the Bible.  

But the sentiment is clearly there. He's trying to foment a civil war between - who? A lot of his followers think it should be a race war. And of course his Aryan supermen will crush the blacks, and I suppose the browns, and the yellows and the reds. And of course the white race-traitors - the ones that people like Trump used to call commie faggots, back in the 1950s.

Unfortunately for Trump, as he tries mightily to blow hot air into this balloon, the dogs of war are already loose, and have been for a while. Of course, I'm talking about the war between the coronavirus and humanity.

By the way, the coronavirus is winning. In case you hadn't noticed. 

Trump is frantically waving a bloody shirt that has remarkably little blood on it, and much of that has been spilled by his people - fascist cops and boogaloo anarchists.

We'll probably never know for sure, but it seems that a great deal of the property damage may also have been at the hands of such as the boogaloos. Trump's people. We used to call them agents provocateurs.

Anyway, the coronavirus trundles on: 180,000+ dead, 6 million+ infected. Actually, the number of infected is almost certainly much higher. And an economic catastrophe where the numbers - eye-popping as they are - simply don't tell the story. Despair does not have a number.

The coronavirus will not kill us all. But it has the capacity to destroy American society as we have known it. It's already made a good start.

The people know this. Even the people who will vote for Trump know this. A lot of them have been staring at the death of the American Dream for a long time.

I think, at this point, there's a touch of the Stockholm syndrome about the Trumpies. They may have started as avid soldiers in a race war, but now I'm getting a whiff of desperate hostages who wouldn't know what to do without their captor.

And they may pull us all down with them as they fight a magical war and refuse to face the real war. 

If Trump says grandma has to die, then grandma has to die.

And, at this point, it's baked in.  A lot of grandmas have already died, and many more certainly will. Along with a bunch of children and - gasp - healthy young adults. And many of them will be Trumpies.

How do we get out if this nightmare?

See also Quagmire, The Problem with Dystopia.

Bruce Springsteen Almost Didn't Happen

Springsteen Father Hit By Car When Little

Sunset Pavilion, Asbury Park.

It turns out that somebody forgot to childproof the streets of Freehold, N.J., where the Springsteen family was living when Bruce's father, Douglas, was a child. Those new-fangled horseless carriages were just about everywhere, and people were still wrestling with the idea that cars and trucks didn't behave at all like a horse pulling a carriage or a wagon.

Anyway, Douglas, nine years old at the time, was on the way to the movies with his grandmother on a Friday evening in September 1933 "when he ran into the side of a car" and was knocked down, according to a report in a local newspaper. A researcher looking into the history of Freehold found the story in the Freehold Transcript, and the Asbury Park Press shared the news with the world on Bruce Springsteen's birthday in 2018. (For the APP story, click here.)

Fortunately, Douglas was not seriously injured. He was taken to a doctor, who determined that the boy "had suffered nothing more than a bump on his head and a severe shaking up."

His older sister had not been so lucky. In 1927, when Bruce's Aunt Virginia was five years old, she was riding her tricycle when a truck backing out of a gas station ran over her and killed her.

It seems fair to say that the Springsteen family never recovered from this little girl's death. Bruce Springsteen tells the story on pages 5 and 6 of his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run.

As a teenager, Bruce Springsteen had his own brush with vehicular death. This also happened in Freehold. "In 1967, I would crush my leg and suffer a concussion after being T-boned on my small Yamaha motorcycle by a '63 Caddy on my way home up South Street. The bike crunched and slid under the car's front end. I went sailing (no helmet law, no helmet) twenty feet into the air, landing on the hard-ass blacktop on the corner of Institute and South Street. I was knocked out cold for thirty minutes, all the way from Freehold to the hospital in Neptune." (Born to Run, p. 86.)

The good news is that the concussion got him out of the draft. The draft board in Newark classified him 4F (pp. 101-102).

See also Springsteen's Bill of Rights.

One-Eighties

Doing U-Turns in the Oval Office

Schuylkill Banks, in the brief interval between Isaias and the flood.

I think I detect a new wrinkle in the president's modus operandi. It involves doing a u-turn. The first time I noticed this was with the Republican National Convention, which started in North Carolina and then moved (mostly) to Florida and is now back to North Carolina (maybe).

Then he did something similar with mail-in voting. First it was terrible (except when he does it himself). Then it was wonderful in Florida, although it continued to be terrible in Nevada. 

I'm now waiting for a 180-degree turn on his demolition derby at the post office.

(You'll notice, by the way, that none of his one-eighties are clean. The turn always involves some splintering. Everything this man touches becomes a chaotic jumble.) 

I do think the U-ey is a new move for him. I may have missed some earlier examples, and I'd be happy to be corrected. But I do think it's new. And I think it's dangerous for him.

The president has had a couple of standard moves.

Usually, he does something for a while and then just drops it. And then he may pick it up again later on. This is what happened with the coronavirus briefings, now resumed after a hiatus that may have had something to do with the ingestion of bleach. 

For a quicker and apparently more permanent drop, have a look at his proposal to postpone the election. A quick and noisy flash followed by - nothing. An old, old term for this is "flash in the pan." 

The four executive orders, or memoranda, are still playing out, but I think they will also be a flash in the pan. 

I think launch-and-drop is his go-to move. After all, he has the attention span of a gnat, so it fits well with his psychological profile.

Sometimes he does stick with an initiative, slogging ahead in a famous corporate bad move - attempting to make a failure look like a mediocre success. The management consultants will tell you not to try to save face. Just kill the turkey, and spend your time working on stuff that may indeed be a real success.

An example of the president as slogger would be his dogged pursuit of a border wall with Mexico.

He may have some other moves, but I'm not seeing them right now.

And that brings us back to the 180. I mentioned that it was dangerous for him. Why is that? Because it's going to piss off the people who work for him. 

I understand the fascist goal of keeping the people in a state of permanent anxiety - angry, frustrated, uncertain. The 180 is different. The people most disoriented and eventually annoyed are the leader's own troops.

In the army it's called marching and countermarching. As a bright-eyed second lieutenant you line up your platoon and march them down a dirt road from one little village to an identical village five miles away. Then you get a call from headquarters, informing you that you were in the right village in the first place, and you should get back there tout de suite.

And so your soldiers get to walk ten miles in one day, and wind up exactly where they started. This results in sore feet and what the army calls "poor morale."

The army has an old saying: Move with a purpose. The troops know when they're being jerked around, and they don't like it. Meanwhile the people, who are supposed to be "all wee-weed up," as President Obama put it, are actually starting to laugh. (Mr. Obama's phrase, by the way, dates back to Chaucer and puts in an appearance with Shakespeare. For a story, click here.)

Is the president capable of moving with a purpose? I don't think so. Not with his inartful turns, his splintering focus, his tendency to unbalance himself as well as all those around him. What I see most consistently is an impulsive reaction to some outside stimulus and then an ocean of semi-coherent blather. And then on to the next one.

See also Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil.

Setting Speed Limits for Safety

After 100 Years, the Need for Speed Meets Another Idea

Car show, Ocean Grove, N.J., 2019.

I'm hopeful that NACTO has finally driven a stake through the heart of the old 85 percent rule for setting speed limits. NACTO is the National Association of City Transportation Officials, and it has been doing very good work for a number of years, but this one is near and dear to my heart. The 85 percent rule got its start with some traffic studies on rural roads in the 1940's, and it says you should set the speed limit at a level where 85 percent of drivers are going under the limit, and 15 percent are speeding. You'll notice the concept of safety does not enter into this little construct. In fact, the 85 percent rule essentially lets drivers vote with their wheels, and effectively decide what the speed limit should be on a particular road.

Here's the text from City Limits: Setting Safe Speed Limits on Urban Streets (summer 2020). To see the whole document, click here.

"Current speed limit setting practice in the US uses a percentile-based method, typically set at the 85th percentile, to determine speeds. Traffic engineers record how fast vehicles are traveling on a road, determine the speed that 85 percent of drivers are traveling at or below, then set the new speed limit by rounding from that speed to the nearest 5 mph increment. Traffic engineers who use the 85th percentile method are instructed to raise the speed limit when more than 15% of drivers are driving faster than posted signs. This method forces engineers to adjust speed limits to match observed driver behavior instead of bringing driver behavior in line with safety goals and the law. When it comes to safety, this method is designed to fail.

"Percentile-based speed limit setting methods fail at keeping people safe because they set a permanently moving target based on current human behavior, not safety.

"Two issues are at play. First, percentile-based models are designed to respond to extremes. When enough people drive faster than the set percentile, the model rewards them by instructing traffic engineers to increase the posted speed.

"Second, people decide how fast to drive based on both the street’s design and cues such as the posted speed and other drivers’ speeds. Researchers originally recommended using the 85th percentile approach to determine posted speeds, assuming that drivers always travel at reasonable speeds. But a growing body of research shows that drivers base their decisions at least partially on the posted speed limit. When they see higher posted limits, and see the resulting increased speed of their peers, they drive faster too, which results in an increased speed of the street overall.

"Posting higher speed limits does not increase compliance with the law. Even when higher speed limit signs are posted, some number of people will still choose to drive 5-15 mph faster than the posted limit. These “highend” speeders travel even faster as speed limits rise and typically spread out over a wider range of speeds. This can increase the likelihood of crashes because people are traveling at increasingly different speeds, and increases the likelihood that crashes will be fatal because they occur at higher speeds.

"In cities and other urban contexts, percentile-based speed limit setting methods are particularly dangerous because they are based on outdated research that is inapplicable in urban settings. The 1940s-era research supporting the 85th percentile relied on self-reported crash data and was conducted on two-lane rural highways, devoid of multimodal activity. But these historic roads are a far cry from the vibrant streets and arterials that typify city streets today. In particular, rural roads and highways lack the type or volume of conflicts found in cities, such as people crossing the street, and people biking, walking, or rolling at a variety of speeds. They also lack driveways, loading, parking, and double-parking. 

"Los Angeles’ experience with Zelzah Avenue provides a telling example of the dangers of percentile-based speed limit setting. In 2009, Los Angeles conducted a traffic speed study and raised the speed limit on Zelzah Avenue from 35 mph to 40 mph. In 2018, the city again studied existing traffic speeds, and again raised the speed limit, this time to 45 mph. While other additional factors may also have played a role in speeds inching up over time, absent any design or land use changes, the increase suggests that the 85th percentile operating speed can shift over time in accordance with the posted speed limit. Notably, this time period in LA corresponded to a 92 percent increase in pedestrian fatalities.

"The most commonly cited alternative for the 85th percentile is USLIMITS2, an online tool developed by the Federal Highway Administration that incorporates other factors when determining speed limits. USLIMITS2 is a step forward in that it allows practitioners to also consider the street’s most exposed users. However, it still relies on the 85th or, more commonly in urban areas, the 50th percentile operating speed, which is often still much higher than is safe. Relying on a percentile based system focused on current drive behavior, rather than a defined safety target to set speed limits, significantly limits cities’ ability to reduce traffic deaths." (Pages 18-20. Footnotes omitted.)

The overall report is about how you should set a speed limit, particularly in urban areas. It's nearly 100 pages long, and I've only read a bit of it. Perhaps I will write another story, but I won't keep you in suspense about the main conclusions. NACTO recommends the following speed limits for urban areas: main streets 25 mph, neighborhood streets 20 mph, shared streets (pedestrians and others in street, mixing with cars) 10 mph. 

I think NACTO may have done for speed limits what Professor Donald Shoup did for parking minimums in his 2005 The High Cost of Free Parking - proving intellectual, if not moral, bankruptcy. This makes me very happy. 

See also Death as an Acceptable Outcome; It's the Road Design, Stupid; We Should Not Overestimate the Driving Skills of the Typical Philadelphia Motorist; Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?

Quagmire

Portland Is Donald Trump's Vietnam

Asbury Park, a sunset in July.

If Donald Trump leaves Portland, he loses. If he stays in Portland, he loses.

George Washington's great strategic insight in the Revolutionary War was that, as long as he maintained a force in being (the Continental Army), the British could not win.

We got to look at this little paradigm of insurgency warfare from the other side, during the Vietnam War. It was not pretty.

In Portland the resistance does not carry guns. They don't need them. Their job is not to beat the goons but to win the American people. Which they are doing.

Their job is made easier because they are the American people - the kids, of course, as well as older activists, and Portland's mayor, and the moms in yellow t-shirts, and the vets in their baseball caps and t-shirts. 

And then one night the goddess Athena paid a visit. She showed up, took off her clothes, ran through a yoga routine, stared down the goons, and left.

I have a word of advice for the goons. I've read Homer's Iliad. Do not annoy the goddess Athena.

As for the goons in Portland, they are an apparently small group of ambiguously uniformed myrmidons who seem to think that graffiti should be a capital offense. I have questions about their training, discipline, and leadership.

Trump has had trouble pulling together his version of Mussolini's squadristi. His search for an army began in Charlottesville in 2017. The Unite the Right rally brought together a wide variety of right-wing groups, including right-wing militias. Firearms were present in abundance. Then antifa showed up, and they also had guns. I think this perplexed the right-wingers. I'm sure they were willing enough to shoot people, but perhaps it had never occurred them that their opponents might shoot back.

This year, in Lafayette Square, we had an army raised by Bill Barr, mainly from the Department of Justice. The thugs from the Bureau of Prisons seem to have been the worst. Elements of the National Guard got dragged into the mud, and then did their best to extricate themselves.

The actual military took a pass, and even the defense secretary, Mark Esper, slithered away from his boss. After some hesitation.

Barr also backed out of his role of generalissimo, and in strode Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security. So now, in Portland, it appears the goons are largely from DHS subsidiaries like the border patrol. 

But perhaps not entirely. There are rumors that some of these swamp creatures are actually mercenaries. One of the firms that DHS hires rent-a-thugs from is a descendant of Blackwater. Ah, Blackwater. Will we ever forget their exploits in Iraq?

My sense is that Trump is close to running out of armies to do his bidding.

And he has definitely lost control of the narrative. He was always a clown, but now he is a buffoon and a laughing-stock.

Robert and Rebekah Mercer have apparently backed away from Trump. Is there time for the Republicans to dump Trump, go with Pence, and try to save the Senate? At this point, I think the answer is no.

See also The Problem with Dystopia.

Liberate Cookman Avenue!

Asbury Park Says Be All You Can Be

Cookman Avenue, the old Woolworth's building on the right.

This is what happens when you make an outdoor dining room. The people like it. The merchants like it. And the motorists have to choose among half a dozen alternate routes, all of which will get you to the same place at the same time.

With the arrival of the liberated zone, a certain number of parking spaces have gone away. However, as a number of observers have noted, without restaurants on Cookman Avenue, how much demand for parking would there be?

Asbury Park (born in 1871) is a small city laid out more or less on a grid. Cookman Avenue lies on the south side of the city and runs essentially from the train station in the west to the beach in the east. The three blocks just east of the train station have always been Asbury Park's commercial core. In the old days these three blocks and the immediate area sported Steinbach's department store, Woolworth's, the phone company, the Asbury Park Press, Eidelsberg's shoe store, and a truly spectacular bank building at the intersection of Cookman, Mattison, and Emory. (I mentioned that the layout was more or less a grid - in this case three streets do mash together at some truly odd angles.)

Nowadays the main business of Cookman Avenue is restaurants. There are also quite a few shops selling antiques, clothes, books, you name it. And they've all taken to the new outdoor dining room like fish to water. 

Here's the Asbury Book Cooperative.

Paranormal Books & Curiosities is next door.

You'll see there's a customer not wearing a face mask. He also arrived by riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. I can't say that everything is perfect on Cookman Avenue. But I will tell you this: It's alive.

Here's a display of locally meaningful merchandise from a knick-knack shop. These non-food merchants are definitely bringing something to the street.

Tillie, the smiling face, is Asbury's mascot.

Still, the liberated zone is basically about plein air dining.

The old Steinbach's in background.

Outside the liberated zone, the stream of motor vehicles continues to flow. But - there are islands in the stream. Here's Cardinal Provisions on Bangs Avenue.

And here's Pascal & Sabine on Emory.

Aside from helping these restaurants keep their heads above water, the islands have a perceptible calming effect on traffic. Even the most hardened motorist will have trouble believing he's on an Interstate while he's passing one of these emplacements.

Further afield, there have been other changes. At several locations throughout Asbury Park, neighborhood streets have been turned into Slow Streets, where through traffic is discouraged and recreation is encouraged for people young and old. These streets join other recent innovations, including lower speed limits and a strong and expanding network of bicycle lanes, to send motorists a message that is permeating the whole city: Go slow and expect to share the road.

For more on Asbury Park's ReOPEN program, click here.

See also What Streets Can Learn From Boardwalks, Striping Webb Street,  When Will Philly Get Scooters?

A Moment in Time

And Some Deep Resonances

Vine Street Expressway, June 1.

I keep coming back to this picture. It's from June 1, during the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Protesters had walked onto the Vine Street Expressway, which runs east-west in a trench through the center of Philadelphia, and the police tried to do - what?

If they were trying to remove the protesters from the roadway (it's actually an Interstate, with the designation I-676), they were remarkably maladroit. After all, the protesters had no way out. They wound up on an embankment topped by a concrete retaining wall, which in turn was topped by a fence. The police had the protesters pinned, and they were using them for target practice.

The story behind the picture has been well covered. For an article and an editorial in the Inquirer, click here and here. For a video story in the Times, click here. For the City's response to the Times piece, click here. 

I lived through the sixties, so police riots are hardly a novelty for me - Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965, Chicago in 1968. I was expecting those images to come back to me. But the resonances went deeper. At first they were fuzzy, but as I kept coming back to the photo, they became clearer and clearer. 

First was the wall. In 2013, I was in Terezin, in the Czech Republic. Also called Theresienstadt, it's a small fortified city built in the eighteenth century to help protect the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire from unwanted visitors. It's named after the Empress Maria Theresa.

Fast forward to World War II, and the Nazis are using Terezin as a concentration camp. You can use walls to keep people out, or you can use them to keep people in. 

Terezin was a prison but not an extermination camp. Still, lots of people did die here, mainly of diseases fostered by malnutrition and overcrowding. Towards the end of our tour we came to yet another blank wall. It looked like all the others, but it was here that difficult prisoners were shot to death. (For more, click here.)

And as I looked at the photo of the Vine Street Expressway for the umpteenth time, I finally knew why I found the embankment and the wall so creepy. It reminded me of the execution wall in Terezin.

The tear gas didn't help. Gas means Auschwitz, it means the Western Front during World War I. My God. How many of my buttons is this photograph going to push?

One more. I sometimes call I-676 a trench, but more often I think of it as a dry moat. When I look at Vine Street today, and think of its unbuilt southern twin that apparently would have bulldozed the house that I now live in, the desire to separate, to divide, is what jumps out at me. (The use of Interstates to separate people is well documented in Atlanta. For a story, click here.) 

Back when people were actually using moats and city walls - hey, let's throw in some turrets, and don't forget those massive gatehouses - back then, separation served a useful purpose. It helped city dwellers stay alive when the four horsemen of the apocalypse were stalking the land.

We don't do city walls anymore, but I think the impulse to exclude remains alive and well. Usually, though, it doesn't reveal itself quite so dramatically as it did on the Vine Street Expressway on June 1. 

One angle is obvious. Peaceful demonstrators were protesting police brutality, and the police responded with a demonstration of police brutality. 

There's a second angle that's less obvious. I-676 is an Interstate, and it is actually illegal for people to walk on its pavement. It's also illegal for horses and bicycles. Only motor vehicles are allowed into this inner sanctum of the car culture. Walking onto the Vine Street Expressway was a highly transgressive act.

I'm sure the police would say they were just trying to maintain the traffic flow; but there's a little something else going on here.

I wish we could get over the impulse to exclude. I don't think that's going to happen. But I do think we need to find a way to rein it in. 

Tearing down the walls and filling in the moats should have been a liberating moment in the history of cities. All of a sudden, the other great force behind cities - the desire of people to be with other people - had the field to itself.

Things haven't worked out that way, at least not so far. But perhaps the idea of an open, inclusive, and welcoming society has a better future than its past.

I hope so. 

Terezin, 2013.

See also Lidice and the Power of Nothing, Getting From Here to There, How Do We Put This Back Together?