Robert David Sullivan

Don't shoot in the subway, darling

I have a new column at America magazine on why packing heat is a bad idea in big cities like New York. But the Supreme Court may soon force us urbanites to live with concealed weapons wherever we go.

The full essay is here.

Gun violence has rattled subway riders in New York this year. But a pistol for every straphanger is not the solution. https://t.co/Jl9sUgoic4

— Robert David Sullivan (@RobertDSullivan) June 3, 2022

Low-footprint infrastructure: The pedestrian staircases of Cincinnati and Brookline

Alarms about crumbling infrastructure usually concern big projects like highway overpasses and water mains. But the Atlantic Cities’ Sarah Goodyear found a relatively primeval transportation system that’s fallen into disrepair: the 400 pedestrian staircases on the steep hills of Cincinnati:

…the staircases of Cincinnati have long been in decline, with the city steadily reducing funding for their maintenance and eventually de-funding them altogether in 2011 as the municipal budget got squeezed. At the same time cities around the country are looking to build new pedestrian facilities in the urban core, or to improve what already exists, too many of Cincinnati's staircases are overgrown, littered with broken glass, and poorly lit. While steps in some neighborhoods attract runners looking to boost their heart rate, many others are perceived as dangerous places, incubators for drug dealing and prostitution.

Goodyear reports that a citizens’ group called Spring in Our Steps is advocating for repairs to the city’s sidewalks, alleys, and public staircases — many of them in lower-income neighborhoods. (Areas with both high altitudes and high incomes were not as interested in access to the streetcar stops at the bottoms of the hills.)

Boston is not noted for its pedestrian staircases (Beacon Hill residents make do with treacherously steep sidewalks). Next-door Brookline, however, has a plethora of them. WalkBoston catalogs many of them on “Brookline’s Secret Stairways and Paths,” a Google map.

Do you live near a pedestrian staircase in Boston or in any Bay State community? And is it in better shape than Cincinnati’s vertical drug markets?

Image from the Cincinnati Transportation and Engineering Department.

Getting around when you're over the hill

Here's one public transit problem that's not going to be solved by a smartphone app.

The Boston Globe reports that use of The Ride, the MBTA's door-to-door service for disabled passengers, has fallen sharply — not because of reduced demand, but because of higher fares:

Seven months after MBTA fare increases kicked in, travel on The Ride has declined more drastically than the 10.3 percent drop-off T officials predicted last March. Between July and December of 2012, registered passengers made 934,985 trips on The Ride, a 16.2 percent decrease from the same six-month period in 2011.

Seniors and disabled individuals say the jump in one-way fares from $2 to $4 has forced them to cut back on outings, spend more time at home, and in some instances, scrimp on life-sustaining trips such as grocery shopping and doctor visits.

As a Florida-hating, diehard city person*, one of my biggest fears is one day not being able to get around a big city on my own. The prospect is too depressing even for an episode of Louie. (Once he can't make it down those subway steps, the show is over.)

Winthrop heads Top 10 in usage of MBTA's "The Ride" program

At Universal Hub, John A. Keith alerts us to the arrival of the MBTA's "Blue Book," which contains data on ridership for all of the T's stations and services.

What caught my eye was the section on The RIDE, which is a door-to-door van service for the elderly and disabled. Costs for the program are soaring with increased usage, and the Boston Globe recently reported that the RIDE eats up almost 10 percent of the T's budget while accounting for less than 1 percent of all service. (Disclosure: My parents in Malden, who can no longer drive a car, use the RIDE and are generally very happy with it.)

I was curious about which communities depend most on the RIDE, so I compared the Blue Book data to the latest Census population figures to come up with a per-capita measure. The top 10 cities and towns are listed below.

Winthrop isn't a huge surprise at No. 1, since it's a small peninsular town with no train service. I wonder whether a regularly scheduled (and publicized) shuttle service to get people on and off the finger of land would take some pressure off the RIDE, which is a taxi-like appointment service. Of course, the RIDE might also become more efficient as more of its users become adept with smartphones and can schedule needed trips with a few keystrokes instead of calling the T a day in advance. (I don't see any RIDE apps on the T's website yet.)

Trains and skyscrapers go together like horses and carriages

Matt Yglesias has another in a series of posts making the same point: "Nobody Will Take Mass Transit To Work Unless You Build Tall Buildings Near The Stations."

I agree, which is why I suggest that one prerequsiste for rail expansion, whether it's high-speed or plain old commuter lines, should be zoning laws allowing greater density near stations. For example, I don't know if there will ever be a demand for more high-rises in Fall River or New Bedford, Massachusetts, but there's no way that South Coast rail makes sense unless those cities promise not to stand in the way of vertical development. Same thing goes for the extension of the Green Line into Medford.

Photo of Moscow from Our Surprising World.

 

"Big spending" and the deficit, cellphone cancer, and The Rockford Files

•Ezra Klein makes a good point about how difficult it is to dissuade voters of the ridiculous notion that the government should be run like a household, which leads to cutting back spending precisely when the economy needs it the most: "People ... have looked at the increase in the deficit and assumed it was the product primarily of new spending, as most people’s incomes don’t fluctuate very much and so big debts tend to imply big expenses."

That's true. In Massachusetts, a huge deficit opened up a few years ago because of a sudden drop in taxable capital gains income. But it was pretty much futile to explain that to most people, who thought the budget mess had to be because of a huge increase in state spending.

•Sunday's New York Times Magazine has a long piece by Columbia University professor Siddhartha Mukherjee, who gently and patiently tries to debunk the idea that cellphones cause brain cancer. (For one thing, the incidence of brain cancer hasn't risen with cellphone use.) But it's unlikely that anyone with a strong opinion on the subject will change his or her mind. Boing Boing's Glenn Fleishman explains why:

Mukherjee's article is intended to make a larger point: that there is a reasonable desire to want to find a true cause for an inexplicable illness or impairment, whether it's autism in your child or cancer in your partner's brain. We reach out for what we think are causative effects, whether or not the research ultimately backs this up.

•The AV Club's "Very Special Episode" feature has a nice appreciation of one of my favorite shows from childhood, The Rockford Files, though it concentrates on a rather atypical installment of the series. In retrospect, it's almost unbelievable that star James Garner didn't go insane during the production of Rockford; he's in almost every scene (no CSI-type team of sleuths), he gets beat up regularly, and he gives a nuanced performance at a time when most crime dramas had lead-weight leads. (Barnaby Jones, anyone?)

•Boing Boing reports that "shrooms" work by restricting blood flow to your brain. Caffeine also restricts blood flow, but I think it was a lack of caffeine that caused me to misread the headline as "Sitcoms limit brain blood flow and connections." If that were true, of course, I would have been dead at age 12.

•Andrew Sullivan hears from readers who find it difficult to accept Fung Wah buses as an acceptable substitute for high-speed trains.

Weak Broadway belting, Santorum leaks plans, and a fan of Fung Wah

Here's what to talk about if you're stranded on a highway on the way to New York tonight:

• Charles Isherwood complains in the New York Times that "television and movie exiles" are bringing down vocal standards on Broadway, calling Daniel Radcliffe "light" and "reedy," Sean Hayes "well-drilled" rather than "naturally gifted," and Catherine Zeta-Jones lacking in "delicacy and emotional truth." He does admit that this is not an entirely new phenomenon, pointing to the "modest singing abilities" of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. I have to confess a sympathetic response to the lead-throated movie stars in Isherwood's piece, as I have been relegated to tunelessly talking my way through "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" at more than one piano party.


• Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has made it semi-official that he's running for president, beginning what all headline writers hope is a long campaign with plenty of opportunities to sneak in references to the Dan Savage definition of his name (a "frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the anal sex"). JoeMyGod goes for the obvious, with "Frothy Mix Makes It Semi-Official," but Dave Weigel wins the day more subtly with "Santorum Makes Splash on 2012 Field." I await the report of "Santorum Fever Spreading in Iowa," hopefully accompanied by a color-coded map with Iowa's quilt-like county lines.


• The Daily's Reihan Salam praises the Fung Wah bus line, which runs between Boston and New York, as a cheap and efficient alternative to high-speed rail (a.k.a. "billions of dollars on routes to nowhere"), seemingly oblivious to Fung Wah's status as a punch line involving crashes, fires, and "comically calamatious ineptitude."

Tweet of the day

alltheseposes John Anthony

The #MBTA is on fire yet again. They'd easily balance their budget if they sold graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate in stations.

---

I think there should be some variety here: stir-fry in Chinatown, fondue in the Back Bay, and sizzling fajitas in East Boston. We could also make a play for the Republican National Convention by offering book-burning parties.

Sacre Bleu Line!

Note: I first ran this post in Spring 2007 on a now-defunct blog. I'm pleasantly surprised that it's still accurate. But I'm as confused as ever. See additions at bottom.

The MBTA's new Web site is in 15 different languages, but the translations, at least in French, are a bit too literal. I don't get why the station names are translated at all, since a French speaker who reads that "Coin de champs" is the closest station to where he wants to go would be better off knowing that all the signs at that station say "Fields Corner." And he would be better off asking a Bostonian "Does thees train go to Feeelds Cornair?" than saying the name of the station in French.

Here are some of my favorite stops:

BLUE LINE
Le Suffolk avale la station (Suffolk Downs, or "The Suffolk Swallows the Station"). Run for your lives!
Vénérez la station de plage (Revere Beach, or "Venerate the Beach's Station!"). The MBTA, naturally, prefers the imperative tense.
Station non-conformiste (Maverick). It spits on your bourgeois Charlie Cards.

UPDATE: I should have also mentioned Station du pays des merveilles (Wonderland) just because the French version leads to greater disappointment if you get off the train there.

GREEN LINE
Station de prudence (Prudential Center, or "Caution Station").
En arrière de la station de colline (Back of the Hill, or "The Back of the Station Called 'Hill'").

UPDATE: Note that the Heath Street stop on the E Line, which would seem pretty simple for a French speaker to remember, is translated to Station de rue de bruyère, which may make one wonder whether it's named after this guy.

RED LINE
Station carrée de bagagiste (Porter Square, or "Person Who Carries Bags Square").
Station de maître d'hôtel (Butler Street, or "Butler Whose Name Is Probably Not Butler Station")*

*Marilyn Monroe warned about this possible confusion in All About Eve:

[a butler passes by]
Miss Claudia Caswell: Oh, waiter!
Addison DeWitt: That is not a waiter, my dear, that is a butler.
Miss Claudia Caswell: Well, I can't yell "Oh butler!" can I? Maybe somebody's name is Butler.
Addison DeWitt: You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.

UPDATE: There have been a couple of changes since 2007. The Orange Line, which was kind of boring, now has Station de centre médical de touffes (Tufts Medical Center, needlessly translated to "Clumps of Grass Medical Center.") And the new Silver Line bus route can bring you to the Centre de conception (Design Center, which is actually an accurate translation but could sound racy to English ears, thanks to a partial faux ami.)

The (high-speed) money train won't be going to Tea Party states

The Obama administration can play tough when it's got the right cards. David Weigel reports that Republican governors who had hoped to divert high-speed rail money to less sissified uses (i.e., highways) can kiss the money goodbye:

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today announced that $1.195 billion in high-speed rail funds originally designated for Wisconsin and Ohio will be redirected to other states eager to develop high-speed rail corridors across the United States. Wisconsin has suspended work under its existing high-speed rail agreement and the incoming Governors in Wisconsin and Ohio have both indicated that they will not move forward to use high-speed rail money received under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). As a result, $1.195 billion will be redirected to high-speed rail projects already underway in other states.

The DOT press release indicates that Massachusetts will get "up to $2.8 million" that would have gone to Ohio and Wisconsin. California will get a rail windfall of "up to $624 million."

Thanks, elderly white voters in the Midwest!

UPDATE: I assume that Congress, if it so desires, can find a way to funnel federal money back to Wisconsin, but it would be a lot harder to reverse this. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Talgo Inc. will shut down its Milwaukee train manufacturing operations in 2012, leaving only a maintenance base, because plans for a high-speed rail line between Milwaukee and Madison have been abandoned, the company announced Friday.

The Spanish-owned company acted after the federal government withdrew nearly all of the $810 million in stimulus funding for the rail project, which Governor-elect Scott Walker had vowed to kill. Talgo had hoped to land contracts to build two trains for that line.

 

Obama Replaces Costly High-Speed Rail Plan With High-Speed Bus Plan

Suburbanites show lack of gratitude for commuter rail line

Seems kind of pointless to blog today about anything other than the election (which everyone is sick of, but you can see my snarky tweets here) or the World Series (which I know nothing about), but here's an item about a very expensive commuter rail in south suburban Boston that isn't exactly on fire. From the Boston Globe's Eric Moskowitz:

SCITUATE — Three years after the Greenbush train made its inaugural run, ridership on the $534 million commuter rail extension is far below the MBTA’s projections, and those who do take it are more likely to be former passengers of the T’s own commuter boats than motorists lured away from the South Shore’s congested highways.

Last week, according to the T, an average of 2,133 weekday customers rode the line toward Boston, about half the 4,200 riders the transit agency had expected within three to five years of opening Greenbush. Even more sobering for the T is the fact that ridership in each month from October 2009 to June 2010 — the most recent month for which complete statistics are available — had dropped below the levels in the same month a year earlier.

I'm a big mass-transit supporter, but the lack of return on the Greenbush line is especially disappointing given all the lower-income cities and neighborhoods (much of Dorchester, Chelsea, Lynn, etc.) that could have much better public transit and would be delighted to use it. (See my post on "The Gentrification of Mass Transit.")

But, of course, high-income suburbs have higher voter turnout than urban areas, so legislators are more interested in pleasing them. Which means that this is an election-related post after all.

Toronto unveils human-centipede subway trains

As someone who lives in the US -- where rail travel is considered elite, socialist, and just plain gay --  I'm frequently amazed by photos of trains from distant lands. Here's the latest, from Toronto, where new subway trains form a single digestive conveyance system. From blogTO:

The most noticeable change among the many -- and the reason they will hold more passengers -- is that the trains are now open-length, which means that a connecting passage allows riders to travel seamlessly from one car to the next (there are six cars in total). In an empty train, one can look straight from one end to the other.

Besides looking really cool, these trains seem more efficient, in that people can spread themselves out instead of remaining packed into the one or two cars that happen to stop near the stairs at the busiest subway stops. They also seem safer, since they make it harder for muggers to trap people in corners away from exits. Plus, passengers can see troublesome behavior at the other end of the train and act accordingly (scream, call the police, bolt out of the train at the next stop).

Look for them to arrive in the US when hell freezes over.