Photo: Don Maxwell/Flickr

Shaken but apparently not badly hurt, the rider, a young woman in a light blouse and wearing a helmet, stood up to be greeted by the streetcar conductor, who offered not sympathy but angry hectoring. Didn’t she know that cyclists were not supposed to cycle in the streetcar lane?

Standing by and watching all this while preparing to board the streetcar in Seattle, I could only shake my head in sadness. We have such a hard time doing mass transit right in this country, particularly outside New York City. Seattle's shiny new streetcar “system” was essentially brand new, but its flaws were already readily apparent.

Let’s start with the tracks. Isn’t there some system possible that does not leave what looked like a three or four inch gap between the track and the street it is imbedded in? I’m sure loyal Streetblog readers will supply me with the make and model of something. I remember seeing that old footage from Barcelona that showed all those cyclists swerving this way and that in front of the streetcar, with apparently no fear of getting caught in the track gap. Can’t we do that today? It certainly doesn’t make sense to exclude cyclists from a whole lane of a street, one that could actually double as a bike lane if built correctly.

Then there are the other problems.

The streetcar line itself is only a little more than a mile long. (The website says the line is 2.6 miles, but I think they are counting both directions.) And it’s pretty expensive -- two dollars for what can be a very short ride. I boarded for what turned out to be only half a mile or so, in part because I’m still on a cane from my scooter accident. Otherwise I would have walked. No sooner had I boarded and paid my two dollars than we were there. I felt cheated. Minimal payment (or even no fare) would be better, which of course would require better government funding.

I feel guilty complaining about something that obviously took a lot of effort. The streetcars themselves are quite nice. I’m sure the organization is trying to do things well.

The central problem, as an official with a California transit agency recently told me, is that American cities and states tend to pursue transit in a fragmented and uncoordinated fashion. Different agencies representing different cities or states build different lines that often connect to each other badly, if at all. Imagine if highways were built as incoherently as rail systems. Somehow, the federal, state and local highway agencies manage to work with each other at least enough to have their projects connect.

Seattle has battled and warred over its transit systems. The city often supports transit in general but not in the particulars. Voters have approved a monorail system several times, only to see the transit establishment and political establishment help kill it. The city is nearing completion of an extensive light rail system, but it is one of the most expensive in the world. Downtown has this enormous bus tunnel -- the product of one compromise between various interests. And now there’s the tiny new streetcar system, which, to be fair, may expand and become much more comprehensive. You have to start somewhere. Maybe they will figure out a way to make it more compatible with biking, which certainly should be the friend and not the enemy.

This film, as featured on YouTube via Infrastructurist, shows the streets of Barcelona a century ago, taken from the front window of a tram going down the street. It's an amazing film. The central avenues of this Catalan city are so vital, so alive, a mix of every activity. Then the film compares the old streets to the same streets today. Quite a comparison.

The streets a century ago illustrate the principal of “tout a la rue,” meaning everything into the street. Cyclists, cars, pedestrians, streetcars, kids. And of course horses. Seems to work.

Interesting how bold the cyclists are in 1907. I wonder why they don’t seem to fear being tipped over by the streetcar tracks? They ride right across them, often at only a slight angle, and don’t get channeled into them. Were tracks built somehow with less of a gap between track and street? Were the tires of the bicycles fatter?

The views of the same streets today are distressing. I love Barcelona. It's one of my favorite cities. But the streets of today seem lifeless and sterile. Could they really be that barren today? Maybe the films from today were shot in the early morning, when few people were around. The streets certainly seemed very alive when I was there in 1994. Still, it's no doubt true that even the most active streets today are less so than those of a century ago. It's mostly the fault of the car, which we have given our streets over to so completely.

The 1907 scenes from Barcelona capture an era where so many transportation modes were either beginning, ending or right in their heyday, and mixing all together. Modern cycling as we know it developed in the 1880s and was really at its height in 1907. Streetcars, electric ones, were relatively new then but completely dominant. Cars were just beginning. There were still many, many horse-drawn wagons, and would be for another half century. Walking was there as well of course.

Could we get back to some modern version of that, an amazing lively mix of different ways of getting around, all in busy public streets? I'd like to think so.

One thing that comes to mind watching this old film are these incredibly expensive contemporary light rail systems, now built from San Diego to Charlotte to New Jersey. I tend to support their construction, but I can't help noticing how little subtlety they display in relation to their surroundings. They are typically grade separated and their presence is like a big stream of concrete squeezed out into the middle of a street. Even modern streetcar systems usually do not blend so seamlessly as this Barcelona one did. Why is this? Can we change it?

Denver's FasTracks transit expansion will add more than 100 miles of rail and BRT service.

The core of his argument that Americans don’t like cities rested on this survey by Pew Research Center. The survey found that Americans, when asked where they would most like to move to, named Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio as their top ten, in that order of preference. Because these cities are mostly in the west and the south, Brooks concluded that Americans are interested in living in, well, the west and the south. But then he went further, citing it as general evidence of America’s anti-urban tastes.

What Brooks didn't address -- and which I have a hard time believing he didn’t know, given his usual informedness -- was that most of the 10 cities in the poll are pursuing pro-urban agendas with a vengeance. They are building lots of light rail lines. They are re-configuring streets to make them more walkable and bikeable. They are steering clear of policies and projects that would encourage more driving.

Nowhere is that more true than Denver, the number one city in the poll, which supplied the headline to Brooks' column, "I Dream of Denver." Well, a few years ago, this object of American aspirations voted to approve what is probably the largest new mass transit system in the United States. The city of Denver and a bunch of neighboring political jurisdictions managed to come together and agree to build a half dozen light rail and commuter rail lines at once. The metro area will end up with a complete rail-based transit system in one fell swoop, without having to proceed line-by-line over decades, like most cities.

Portland, of course, has been the most aggressively pro-urban city in the country for three decades, with its mix of pro-transit, pro-biking policies all set in a state that employs some of the most cohesive growth-management practices in the country. In Portland, as readers of Streetsblog know, you can now ride a bike and have priority over cars when you come to a red light, just like in Amsterdam, the place Brooks posits as the epitome of un-American living. If Americans don't want to be urban, why are they putting Portland in their top ten list?

Essentially all the other cities on this list are pursuing pro-urban policies, even if they aren’t all urban yet. Hell, even Tampa, in the belly of a state that defined suburban sprawl, opened a downtown streetcar line a few years ago.

Before posting this piece, I went back and re-read Brooks' column, just to see if I had gotten everything right or missed anything. Upon review, it's actually astonishing how misleading it is. It's such a textbook example of selectively using facts and figures to advance faulty logic that it's worth doing a blow-by-blow here.

First Brooks starts with an arguably true statement, that many urban planners would like Americans to live in denser, more urban places. Then he condenses that into the hyperbole that urban planners want Americans to live in Amsterdam. This is not quite the case, but it’s okay to over-simplify to make a point and to make a column easier to understand.

But then, having set up this over-simple argument, Brooks goes about arguing that the places where Americans want to live are not Amsterdam. As I think I’ve demonstrated, even going by that absurd criteria, Brooks can’t prove his point. Because Denver, Portland, and other cities on America’s top ten list are moving in the direction of "Amsterdam." Plenty of Americans do “want the Dutch option,” or an American version of it.

Every columnist must at times simply pull one out of the air, using whatever is lying around on the desk. I wonder if this was one of those times with Brooks.

My second thought was, "It's not like you didn't know this could happen."

As readers of this Conscious Commuter column will remember, my very first day on a Xootr scooter -- about a year ago -- began with a near back-breaking accident. I realized then that scooters, despite being amazingly fun and really practical transportation devices for short distances, are inherently unstable, especially if you are six foot seven. They are tippy. Although they roll along easily, and are easily steered, small movements up top can tip them backward, forward or to the side. In addition, their tiny wheels can be stopped dead by a small piece of debris or a rock in the road, causing a major spill.

None of this is matters much if you are three and a half feet tall. My four-year-old son Max has no problem, and seems to recover easily from near catastrophic accidents. And if he does go down, it's not that big a deal. But when I went down, it was a much bigger deal.

I thought of all this as I lay on the icy asphalt last Friday morning, in 18-degree weather, waiting for the ambulance to come.

My son Max performed admirably in the crisis. We had been on our way to his school, our usual morning routine: him on his Razor scooter, me on my much larger Xootr. We weren't far from our building, an old converted warehouse in Prospect Heights, when I hit a patch of ice that I failed to notice while rounding a curve. I went down.

Max turned around and came back to see what was wrong. At first he thought I was joking. But then I told him, "Go to the front door of our building, ring our bell, and tell Mama that Papa is hurt and needs her help." He proceeded to do all that. My wife came out and found me. After some consultation, she called the ambulance. It came in about 10 minutes, I would say.

Meanwhile, various people were milling around me. I was beginning to shiver uncontrollably from the cold, and possibly the shock of the accident. People were helpful. Someone collected the contents of my bag. My wife found some neighbors, a couple she barely knew, to walk my son to school. Life is good that way.

Me, I am left to contemplate how you get what you foresee. While I hadn't foreseen a broken hip exactly, I knew I was risking some sort of bad injury by continuing to scooter. But I simply ignored my own foresight. I didn't want to stop. Scootering was fun. It was also a very efficient means of travel for a short distance, say less than two miles. And it was something that I did with my son, together.

Would I do it all again? Will I scooter again? Talk to me in a couple of months, but I'd like to think the answer is "Yes." You have to get back on that old horse and everything. I will certainly be more careful, but I would like to think that scootering would continue to be some part of my life.

As I write this, I'm in bed, my home for the next six weeks. I have three metal pins in my hip which connect the neck of my femur bone to its head. I must keep all weight off of that leg for six weeks. I got out of Methodist Hospital in Park Slope on Wednesday after five days there. While at home, I'm working on my patience, and humility.

My guitar saved my spine.

I was scootering along on my new Cruz Ultra Xootr scooter, mentally writing this column about how incredible this new (to me) mode of transportation was, how it was even better than a bicycle in many ways, how it showed how graduated transportation is or should be, how it showed we need to travel at different velocities and in different vehicle sizes, and how thoroughfares should support this, when suddenly I was flying in the air, soon to land on my posterior.

I had bought the Xootr just the night before at Paragon Sports by Union Square for $199, largely to accompany my three-and-a-half year old son who had already (proud parent here) learned to ride a two-wheel Razor scooter, the kind big kids ride. He had learned this because his wise parents had bought him a two-wheel model when he was all of three, rather than the training kind of three-wheel model. And he had taken to it.

At the time of my calamity I was rolling along Sixth Avenue between Sterling and St. John’s Place in Brooklyn toward my son's school, having gone about a mile and thoroughly delighted with my new mode of travel. You barely had to give a push with your foot, and you were coasting along for a good block or so. It was fun. You didn't have the feeling, like on a bike, of being trapped with and on this large device. And perhaps best of all, you didn't feel like you were about to be killed at any moment by large metal objects weighing many times what you did. You rode on the sidewalk, where you were the biggest guy in terms of mass and speed. (More on this later. Or maybe not.)

So there I was, mentally composing, when I approached a broken sidewalk corner at St. John’s Place and Sixth Avenue, right where the sidewalk dipped to go down into the street. Having already successfully negotiated a few cracks and bumps, I decided to risk these. I leaned and pulled back on the handle of the scooter, thinking a slight lift of the front wheel would help me negotiate this rough terrain. Suddenly, without warning, probably just as my back wheel descended into one of the ruts, my scooter flipped up and went flying into the air, the front wheel going vertical and the back wheel going underneath. Now underneath my scooter, I landed on my ass.

Or actually, my guitar. Luckily, in retrospect, I had been scootering along with my Taylor mini travel guitar strapped around my back, open air, troubadour style. I didn't just want to make a romantic figure. I had been invited to play "Farmer in the Dell" at my son's daycare center, as the accompanist for their year-end play. Wanting to ride my new Xootr there, but not wanting to carry the case, I thought at the last minute to carry the guitar by itself, solely by its strap.

So when I came down on the broken asphalt, I landed not on my coccyx or L-5 vertebrae, but on the convex bottom side of my guitar. Which came out quite the worse for wear. A corner of it was crushed, two strings broke and a peg popped out. But better it than me.

My crash caused quite a reverberation around me. Drivers stopped and asked if they should call someone. Passersby approached me. This being Park Slope, a mother with a child in a stroller asked if I wanted some Arnica. I accepted it, placing the white pellets under my tongue directly from the case with her admonition not to touch them with my hands. Any port in a storm.

As I sat there feeling what I suspected would be a major bruise, I reflected that my guitar might have saved me from breaking my 49-year-old back. Not a good way to go.

I haven't spoken much of weighty transportation matters. I still am a very enthusiastic proponent of my new mode of travel. But I rode home much more cautiously. I'll have to leave for another day debates such as whether scooters belong on sidewalks, the merits of them versus bicycles, and what they say about our need for many modes. For now, I'm content to live to ride another day.

Photo: ephramjames / Flickr

A Spanish tortilla, unlike the Mexican version, is essentially a potato omelet. You fry some diced-up onions and potatoes in oil, and then pour in some beaten egg. Flip it over, and voila, you have a tasty, round golden thing to cut into slices and eat.

Back when I was living in Spain some 25 years ago, I made them all the time and my American friends and I marveled at what a tasty, nutritious and cheap food it was. We vowed, when we returned to the states, to make them often. When I returned to the states, I made a Spanish tortilla probably once, maybe twice, and then never again.

Why? I still love Spanish tortillas. The ingredients are readily abundant. And I love to cook. But something about the context I’m in, the culture to use the C word, does not induce or encourage me to do so.

I think about Spanish tortillas, and my lack of making them, when I have repeatedly chosen not to do something else these last few months, which is ride my bicycle around in the dead of winter. Somehow mounting my wheeled steed is just too big a hurdle when the air is freezing and the skies often gray. Very quickly over the winter, I stopped even thinking about riding my bicycle to work or to drop my son at daycare or to shop. I began walking and taking the subway more.

But would I make these same choices if my fellow citizens here in New York were making different choices?

In December 2004 I spent the holidays in Amsterdam during an unusually cold spell. I marveled at how Amsterdamers of all ages and genders cycled through the streets in the bitter cold. Hands on the handlebars, heads held high, they seemed not only willing to cycle in such weather but enjoying it. Eventually I joined them, and I have a photo of my wife and I on bikes, our faces bright red.

What these actions of mine and others lead me to conclude is that culture matters. I’m not shirking the fact of my own laziness; it’s a real observation about how the world works. If my friends and family members were riding off to work in the cold, I likely would to, without complaint. But alone, when few other people are, it’s easy to decline the invitation my bicycle offers me, or not even see it.

As we head into spring and the warmer months, this point will become moot. I’m sure I will once again start riding regularly. But maybe next winter, or the one after, I may make different choices. Cycling as transportation is increasingly popular in New York, and as this popularity grows, I suspect we will reach a tipping point, to use Malcom Gladwell’s famous phrase. I look forward to a future, perhaps not so long away, when even the fairest-weather riders like me venture out in even the worst of weather, doing so as easily as taking a bite of an easily-made potato omelet.

Photo: Nadya Peek / Flickr 

Portland, Oregon, which has ascended the ranks of cities judged most walkable, bikable, and urbane, benefits mightily from its small 200-foot square blocks, which provide businesses more street frontage and people more streets on which to bike, cycle and walk. These short blocks did not create Oregon's and Portland's growth management and pro-transit policies, but they gave them terrain on which these policies could take root.

Contrast that to Salt Lake City. Its founder Brigham Young for some reason opted for one of the widest urban grids anywhere. (I've read he wanted teams of cattle to be able to turn around?) Its streets are laid out in a grid where each blocks is 660 feet square - which means that nine Portland blocks to fill up one Salt Lake superblock. This makes getting around Salt Lake City on foot very difficult, as I can personally attest.

New York City is somewhere in the middle, at least in Manhattan. Its numbered streets are set at a pedestrian friendly 200 feet apart while its avenues are set at a pedestrian unfriendly 800 feet apart, except where broken in two by Lexington, Madison or other mid-grid streets. This deficiency has long been noted, so if anything the city should have a set policy creating new streets when possible, and so to create shorter, more pedestrian friendly blocks.

But that is not the case. Instead the city and state often encourage one of the deadest institutions, the Superblock. Not content with blocks that are too large already, the city and state often team up to create even bigger blocks, and not even pedestrian friendly versions of those.

What exactly is a superblock? This term came into vogue in planning circles more than a half century ago to describe the then fashionable idea of demapping older street grid and creating one large blocks where before many blocks had been. It was thought that the old small blocks were outmoded, and did not fit a car-friendly culture. Jane Jacobs, among others, fired a stake into the heart of this idea, and now, theoretically at least, the superblock is dead. There are few defenders of it -- theoretically.

But practice is different than theory. Let's look at a few examples.

There's the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. While there are a lot of reasons to criticize this project, starting with the process that seemed to reverse the normal way development of a public parcel should proceed. But when you get down to urban design of the plan itself, it has entirely too few streets. Not only does it de-map some existing ones, it doesn't pick up the possibility of creating new ones so that this big area could be divided into smaller, pedestrian friendly blocks.

The Hudson Yards Development on the Far West Side of Manhattan is still evolving and it's far from clear what exactly will emerge there. But most of the proposed plans submitted by developers for the new area atop the West Side Rail Yards show towers set in parks or plazas. They seem more appropriate to an Edge City outside Dallas than in a dense urban city. Only the Brookfield plan, in its words, "honors the Manhattan street grid" by drawing several new streets across the site, and puts an emphasis on urban style buildings that front on streets.

Brookfield's Hudson Yards project plan essentially maintains Midtown Manhattan's street grid.

Why do developers haul out the superblock so quickly when designing current projects, and why do public officials let them, despite its near death in academic circles?

One common answer these days is terrorism concerns. Setbacks for more prominent buildings are often larger now, to allow for the placement of bollards and other protective measures. But there is a certain lack of logic here. After all, most New York City buildings do not have enormous setbacks from the street, so pushing that for newer buildings hardly deprives a terrorist of potential targets.

A stronger explanation to me lies in finance and issues of political power. Large concentrations of money affect development in New York City disproportionately, and such large concentrations of money often favor having large concentrations of land to work with. While it may be a disservice to the city to have a large, island-like superblock - traffic flow is disrupted, walking and bicycling trips are made more difficult -- to the developer, a superblock allows for wide floor plates, campus-like settings and a level of land use control that would not otherwise be possible. And since the government sector is weak, large developers often end up doing what suits them first, not the public.

I'm not expecting to get rid of all superblocks. But it is a fair question whether the city should make creating a pedestrian friendly city of short blocks with buildings close to the street a priority. We have the most pedestrian oriented city in the country, but too often we chip away at its essential attributes in this regard, rather than seeking to add to them.

Photosim by Eric McNatt and Jason Lee for New York Magazine.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a bicycle courier.

It was in the fall of 1979, during the semester I took off from college to start a rock band in Washington DC with friends. When not playing guitar in a roach-infested apartment in Takoma Park, Md., I cruised the streets for a courier company, picking up thick envelopes from the American Petroleum Institute and other public-spirited institutions and taking them over to Capitol Hill. Stuff like that.

I think about that sometimes these days, as I poke along Bergen Street Brooklyn, or Lafayette Avenue in Manhattan, on my mountain bike with my bad back, weak right knee, and other afflictions.

Bicycle messengering had a certain cachet back then, although fewer people know about it. It had not evolved into the almost cult-like institution I sense it has become now.

Does bicycle couriering teach you anything practical? A little, although not much.

What it does mostly is to acquaint one with cycling in traffic, which is useful in New York City. You either become comfortable with cycling amid a herd of cars, or you stop. Despite two minor accidents with cars while being a courier, I came to love mixing it up with city traffic.

I can still feel that urge to merge now course through my middle-aged body, when a car cuts me off or I'm jockeying for position at a traffic light. It's something to watch out for. Through the lens of age, I can see now that good cycling, safe cycling and civil cycling comes from striking a balance between aggression and passivity. Too much of either is not healthy or safe for the people around you.

I did get better at simply steering and staying on a bike. I used to be amazed at my ability to keep the two wheels of my bicycle inside the white stripe on the edge of a road, when I felt like it.

Also, sort of like a fish being accustomed to the water, you became very accustomed to balancing on the two wheels of a bike. At day's end when I lay down to sleep on the mattress on the floor in our roach-infested pad, I would close my eyes and start to drift off to sleep. Then I would often jerk awake, because I would catch myself losing my balance and falling off my bicycle. I was still mentally on the bike. In a curious way, I got to like this feeling and would sometimes imagine falling off my bicycle as a way to put myself to sleep.

Most lessons I learned while being a courier did not have much applicability outside the industry. Like how to get in and out of a building quickly. This was more important to one's total daily commissions -- and one did work by commission -- than riding fast on the streets.

The principal time sucker at buildings was waiting for an elevator. To avoid this, I learned a few tricks, one being that one can actually often pull the doors of an elevator open after it has closed, if only a second or two or has passed. This led to frequent scenes of a car full of people seeing the doors that had just closed on them being pulled apart by a tall, scruffy looking youngster.

All in all, it was a fun job. And I made a lot of money, or what seemed like a lot of money at age 19. But eventually I left it and went back to college. Our rock band didn't get far. But I retained my love of cycling in traffic, which I still do, albeit in a more middle-aged fashion.

Photo: Aaron Naparstek, Drachten, Netherlands.  

Cycling intimately acquaints you with every bump, slice, crease, divot, ledge, ripple and of course pothole in a street, because not noticing means you might get thrown off your steed into bone-breaking and life ending car traffic.

While riding along Lafayette Street in Manhattan, or Bergen Street in Brooklyn, or essentially anywhere in New York City, what I notice is surfaces that can only be described as poor and frankly dangerous for someone on a bike.

New York City is not the exception in this. It's been true in every city I have ever lived in in the United States, which includes some geographic and cultural diversity. Abroad, that's not so much the case, particularly in the prosperous countries of Western Europe. They notice the difference when the travel here, let me assure you. A few years ago when I was living in Boston a friend from Germany surveyed the pot-holed streets in Cambridge around the prestigious university of Harvard with some amazement.

"It reminds me of a Third-world country," he said with a grin. "Apparently no one cares!"

I don't think that's the case, but streets here do seem unusually bad. Why is that so?

When I swerved to avoid a pothole, I would tend to curse City Hall, and particularly the Department of Transportation. It's responsible for the streets. Why doesn't it do a better job maintaining them?

Then it hit me that my logic really wasn't inclusive enough. Most of the bumps and bruises on city streets relate to what is underneath the streets, because most of the bumps and bruises are caused by repairs after the streets have been opened up for some kind of work on electrical, gas, steam, water, phone or subway lines. And DOT doesn't own these utilities; other institutions do, including private companies. When Verizon puts in a new phone cable, or Con Edison repairs a gas line, its crews tear up the street, and its crews repair them. And not surprisingly, their crews may not put as high a priority on repairing streets as they do on installing phone cables or gas lines.

Then there are the other public agencies with interest below the street, like the water lines managed by the city's water department, and the subway and train lines managed by big public agencies that answer to the state.

What it adds up to is many institutions, all working beneath the streets, and then repairing them afterward, often with private subcontractors, which then adds an additional variable to the task of keeping streets neat.

If you look at the relatively smooth streets of places like Germany, France or Scandinavia, what you generally find is fewer private companies laying public infrastructure like water, gas and electric lines, and more public ones.

New York City and American cities follow the Anglo-Saxon model, derived from Great Britain, of letting private companies do much of the primary work in installing infrastructure. This saves taxes in the short run, but can create inefficiencies and bumpy streets in the long run. As I said in my latest book that just came out in paperback, Beneath the Metropolis, London didn't even have a public water system until early in the 20^th century. Before that it had a half dozen competing private water companies, all tearing up streets to lay their own lines, (and sometimes sabotaging their competitors). New York had a similar condition with its gas and electric lines before a company with the name Edison "consolidated" them into one corporation.

Having multiple private companies and public agencies responsible for the care of the street creates many opportunities for miscommunications and poor or faulty work. Folks I know at DOT tell me quite a few horror stories.

Is there a way we can make our streets better, without completely reorganizing our economy? There is, and that is better public oversight. As I have talked about regarding other issues in the city, an important but relatively neglected part of government is diligent and conscientious oversight of private companies doing public work. This can be making sure a developer puts in the right kind of escalator in a subway station, to making sure there are good paving standards for private companies to follow, and having enough resources to make sure those paving standards are met.

While Mayor Bloomberg's recent plan to send out squads of folks on foot and bike to methodically inspect the quality of the streets is a good one, what is needed even more is rigorous enforcement of standards that already exist for the care and maintenance of streets, regardless of who is doing the work.

Flickr photos by JSSchumacher and Susan NYC

Take the hat, for example. The wonderful broad-brimmed, high-peaked bowlers, boaters, derbies and fedoras worn by men, and the even more extensive variety worn by women, some with precarious architectural acrobatics. What happened to them? Why did they generally disappear?

The answer is the car. In the 1950s and 1960s, as most people began to drive almost everywhere, wearing any kind of hat that sat tall on one's head just no longer worked. Think about it.

If you're wearing a fedora or a Sunday bonnet and you step into a car, what happens to the hat? It hits the roof. You have to take it off. Where do you put it? On the seat beside you. But someone may be sitting there. And so on. The hat becomes a superfluous, a dead appendage, rather than an envied accessory.

So people stopped wearing them. Plus, they weren't as necessary practically. If you're driving everywhere, you don't need a hat to keep your head warm just to walk across the parking lot. If you had to have some head warmth, you wore the utilitarian hood or cap.

RIP, the hat.

Another fashion item endangered by the automobile, but not quite dead, is the top coat, that tube of wool or cashmere that stretches from neck to calves, and which is worn by both men and women. You still see quite a lot of them around New York City, but that's because we still walk.

A top coat is a wonderful accessory for wintertime urban walking. So bedecked, one has protection across one's waist and legs against the cold wind, and one paints an imposing and more beautiful silhouette. For both men and women, a top coat slims and shapes.

But the car has shrunk the habitat of the topcoat. Step into an automobile wearing a top coat, as I sometimes do, and something practical converts itself into something cumbersome. The long hems of the jacket drag on the floor, and the belt and folds get caught in the door unless one is careful. It's a hassle, and like the hat, not really necessary because if you're driving, you're not walking much anyway.

One of the pleasures for me of living in New York City is that I get to wear my long black top coat a lot.

So it was with some dismay that I realized that urban cycling, something I have been doing more of as late, may not mesh with wearing a top coat. Would I have to choose between two loves?

As I have said in previous posts, I like the idea that bicycling can be elegant and urbane, separated from sweaty, sports-oriented cycling. So, wearing a top coat while riding would fit right in with that. If it worked.

I gave it a try the other day. It didn't, at least not very well.

For one, the long folds risked being caught in the gears and tires. This is partly because my bicycle lacked chain guards and fenders, as so many do here in the city. But even if I were to trade in my begrimed mountain bike for a more urbane one, it still might not work well, wearing a top coat. I either had to sit on the top coat, or let the bottom half of the jacket spill around the seat and top part of the back wheel. That might work with fenders, or might not.

On the plus side, I did cut a nice figure, if I do say so myself. When I caught glimpses of myself in store windows, I saw this monk-like form gliding past, my semi-bald head poking out of this long robe. To name a different, more manly comparison, I at times felt like those dangerous villains in The Long Riders, that pretty good Western starring the Carradines, the Keaches and other brothers, who always wore those long dusters as they rode horses and robbed banks.

But getting back to the minuses, another problem was simply color. Most top coats are black, including mine. And as I road home from Union Square to Prospect Heights in Brooklyn at 5 p.m., and thus in the pitch dark, I quickly realized I was just about invisible due to my sartorial choice. True, I did have several flashers attached to my body and bike, but I didn't like the fact that the rest of me was black. What to do?

I'm not sure. I may ride again, top coated, or I may leave it at home. I like being able to wear it, once I dismount. One should be able to walk off a bicycle and into say, an elegant party, wearing a topcoat over say a nice suit or dress. But it may take some work.

-- Alex Marshall, The Conscious Commuter

Flickr Photo: JEKemp

Devotees of the Red Hook, Brooklyn Fairway grocery store can have the pleasure, after loading up on gourmet salt and other essentials, of sipping coffee on their back veranda over looking the river. It's a wonderful view. On your right is the Statue of Liberty, flame aloft, and to your left, about ten feet away, a decrepit old green streetcar.

This old trolley, which adds a rough urban charm to the spot, is about all that remains of an admirable effort that ended a few years ago by Bob Diamond and cohorts to bring streetcars back to Brooklyn.

Diamond, renowned for his discovery of the old Atlantic Avenue tunnel -- one of the oldest rail tunnels in the world - may have simply been peaking too soon, for streetcars are coming back. While they aren't back in Brooklyn yet, they are in many cities. Dozens of cities have built, or are building, new streetcar lines. They include Portland, Kenosha, Charlotte, Little Rock, Lowell, Memphis, Tampa, San Diego and Charlotte. Some of them are installing vintage or antique cars; some are installing brand new ones. They join cities like New Orleans, Toronto, Melbourne and San Francisco that kept or revived existing lines.

Paris, France launched a sleek, modern streetcar system last year. More Paris photos below...

This trend is a good one, for streetcars can be one more way to give people alternative to driving, and thus enabling more walkable, bikeable streets. Perhaps most important, streetcar lines are the most urban of transit systems, at least those that run above ground. Unlike their competitor, the so-called "light rail line," streetcars mesh almost seamlessly into a street without bulky grade-separating apparatus and stations that can end up making a street less walkable. Streetcars are also less polluting, more energy-efficient and cheaper to maintain than their other big competitor, freewheeling buses.

Before World War II and the complete domination of the private car, streetcars used to run on virtually every major street New York City and indeed, every major street in every city in the United States. These old lines, although long gone, have left their mark on streets in big and small ways.

For example, most local shopping streets tend to be where the old trolley lines ran, like 5th Avenue or 7th Avenue in Brooklyn. That's because commerce tends to congregate around transportation lines. Those shopping streets are still there, even though the streetcar lines are not. Most of New York City's current bus lines run along the same routes as the old trolleys.

Another marker is in names, which, as in shopping streets, tend to persist. The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, formerly of Brooklyn, derives its name from the hundreds of streetcars that used to roll down the streets of this New York City borough, and the "trolley dodgers" who had to jump out of their way. The name was apt, for the number of streetcar lines that once were in Brooklyn is truly astonishing. It is indeed a subject for an entire field of research.

Could Brooklyn or other boroughs ever have anything like the dozens of different lines they once had? I don't want to rule it out, even though it's clearly a dream. What's not just a dream is that streetcars are coming back, perhaps even in this region. Stamford solicited proposals just last week to examine the potential for a new four-mile line that would connect major nodes within the city. Whether this would qualify as a streetcar or a light rail line might be a matter of semantics.

I could see streetcars playing a substantial role within many cities in the region, even Manhattan. The Regional Plan Association's (where I'm a Senior Fellow) Third Regional Plan recommended a Midtown light rail loop, which is essentially just a streetcar loop. Vision42 has been pushing for years for a Midtown light rail loop part of its plan to pedestrianize 42nd Street. Vision42 argues that light rail loop could be built at far less cost than the proposed #7 subway line extension while providing many of the same benefits in helping to improve mobility and galvanizing development on Midtown Manhattan's far west side.

As a "mode," to use a planneresque word, streetcars have a lot to offer. They are better than buses, which are the usual lower cost alternative, because they provide a smoother ride, even while traveling at higher speeds, and being more beloved by customers. One study showed that streetcars travel faster than buses, because drivers tend to defer to a train-like vehicle and get out of their way. As significant, they tend to attract more private development because rails in the street have a permanence that inspires confidence in commercial and residential developers.

The usual competitor to streetcars is light rail lines. Interestingly, there is no clear distinction between a light rail line and a streetcar line, although there are general ones. Light rail lines tend to have dedicated and separate right of way, tend to travel out of town rather than within town, tend to have longer trains, and tend to have fewer stops. And most significantly, tend to cost a lot, lot more to build, often three times as much per mile.

A good place to start looking at the possibilities of streetcar revival is Street Smart: Streetcars and Cities in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Gloria Ohland and Shelley Poticha of Reconnecting America. In a series of separately authored articles, it provides a range of both broad overview and technical analysis of the options involved. They look at vintage cars, new lines, even things like the "rapid streetcar," that blends the best of both the streetcar and light rail styles.

Some combination of the above could clearly work in Brooklyn, to name my own favorite borough and dwelling one. If that were to happen, then the lonely streetcar in Red Hook could be a reminder of what is to come, rather than just of what was.

Photos: Aaron Naparstek, Paris, France, March 21, 2007

The latest subsidy I've encountered most viscerally is the requirement that exists, even in most parts of New York City, to build parking when you construct a building. This is nothing more than an enforced subsidy of driving, for if you require parking, you are encouraging people to buy cars to fill up those spaces.

I've been thinking about development these days more, and it struck me that the severity of this requirement would be demonstrated if we thought of it a different way.

What if we required that developers subsidize mass transit the same way we require them to subsidize car use? What if we required property owners and developers to kick in say, $25,000 for every unit of housing they built and give it to New York City Transit as compensation for the riders the new development would generate?

So if you built a 40 unit apartment building, you would hand the Metropolitan Transportation Authority a $1 million check. With private developers constructing tens of thousands of units of housing every year, that would soon add up to a nice additional source of revenue for the region's mass transit system.

This may sound absurd, but we already do that with car use by requiring the construction of parking in most parts of the city. There are some exceptions, like in Midtown Manhattan, but in the boroughs and even much of Manhattan -- including the new Hudson Yards redevelopment zone on Manhattan's west side -- constructing parking is a requirement.

This gets expensive, very quickly, particularly in the higher-density areas that also have the best mass transit access, and so don't need the parking.

For example around Prospect Park in Brooklyn where I live, many areas require one unit of parking built for every two units of housing. So a 40 unit apartment building would have to build 20 parking spaces. Twenty parking spaces do not come cheap.

Because land itself is so valuable, a developer in Crown Heights or Park Slope often choose to pack these spaces underground. This is a good thing urbanistically, or at least less of a bad thing, but very expensive. It costs about $150 per square foot to build below grade, my developer friends tell me, and a parking spot including necessary accompanying space takes up about 300 square feet. So one parking spot might cost $45,000, or even more in higher construction costs areas.

In lower density areas farther out in Brooklyn, Queens and the other boroughs, developers will build surface lots. These cost less, but they have their own ill effects. They take away land that could have been used as yards, and help insure that street design is less urbanistic and thus less compatible with a mass transit system.

Let me ask a simple question: At a time when our roads are crammed, when we need open space, when we need lower cost housing and more recreational areas, when our climate is changing because of exhaust from cars, why are we demanding developers construct parking that jacks up housing prices, spews more cars onto burdened streets, takes away land that could be used for either housing or open space, and contributes to global warming?

This is such a crazy policy that I would like any planner out there, and to step forward and defend it.

Someone may ask what all this has to do with livable streets. The answer is a lot. The more we encourage and subsidize car use, the more our streets will be filled with cars, and which will push out other users. The more we require parking, the more our urban fabric will be torn with curb cuts and driveways. I'm not against cars, but I do believe that in urban settings they should be in their rightful place, which is basically last in line.

One day it hit me: Why not erase the white line? Why not end the separation of cycles and pedestrians from each other, and allow them to mix freely on the curved arc across the East River. After all, under the "Shared Street" philosophy, pioneered in Holland and spreading around the world under the proselytizing of folks like my colleague Ben Hamilton-Baillie of Bristol, England, a number of good things might happen.

First of all, walkers would have more space. That's an obvious benefit. As the bottom and most important base of the pyramid of uses that occupy a public space, it's right that walkers should have as much space as possible in a public right of way. They are using the most efficient form of transportation ever devised in terms of moving people from point A to B.

Secondly, bikers would slow down. Just as the "Shared Street" studies show with drivers when faced with a street devoid of traffic signs and lines and full of kids playing and people walking, bikers would slow down when faced with the task of slowly navigating through the crowds of locals and tourists making their way from one shore to another. The bikers would not have some line on the sidewalk essentially giving them a thumbs up to speed along, shouting at pedestrians to get out of their way.

It's a problem now that quite a few cyclists feel no restraint in zooming down one side or another of the walkway. They risk collisions should a person on foot take a step the wrong way, and at the very least it's scary to have a cyclist hurtle past you while you're on a scenic stroll.

I can practically hear cyclists screaming "No" at my suggestion. It might turn what is an efficient morning commute for cyclists including myself into something much slower and less practical. That is a possibility. But I suspect if the lines were erased on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, and pedestrians, cyclists and other forms of non-motorized traffic were allowed to mix, the people on wheels would still move at a reasonable pace.

It's a leftover legacy of modernist urban planning and design that separating things somehow makes them more efficient or more productive. It's being increasingly discovered that's not the case. New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has been very astute in trying things. How about erasing that line for a while on the bridge, and seeing what happens?

Photo: twharris 

Which probably explains how the guy on Avenue B over near 10^th Street opened his door directly in front of me, just after sticking his head out the window and looking back. He wasn't looking for a thin vertical line, i.e. a man on a bicycle. He was looking for a big bulky object that might be a car or a truck. He "edited out" all visual information that wasn't that.

I let out an involuntary scream, squeezed my handlebar brakes, swiveled to one side, half fell off my bike but did not completely lose control. I was not injured. I was happy about that, but shaken that such an incident could occur.

I was angry at the guy, but my anger really didn't make sense. After all, the guy had looked. He just didn't see me.

It's in this situation that I think the now studied "Safety in Numbers" phenomena will gradually help cyclists. Over time, and cyclists grow in number on New York City streets, drivers, whether parked or otherwise, will start looking for them. They will expect to see cyclists, and thus will see them. We, as objects, will start to exist.

I look forward to the day.

The ragged, angry tear on the woman's jeans at ankle level was matched by her angry expression on her face as she looked in vain for some sort of consolation or advice from the bike shop attendant, to whom she explained how the front sprocket on her new bicycle had repeatedly caught and tore her pants leg.

No dice. The attendant at the bike store at 5^th Avenue and St. Johns looked at her as she were complaining about aliens visiting from the moon.

I approached them and offered my perspective that it was absurd that most bikes lacked chain guards, and that one could not even buy a simple chain guard for most bicycles, and thus one was condemned to spoil one's clothes.

"Thank you, thank you," the young woman said to me repeatedly, as if I had actually helped her in some way. She was apparently deeply grateful that someone was taking her complaint seriously. "I saved up money to buy this bicycle, and now I find that it tears my clothes. It has caused me to fall when my pants legs gets tangled. He tells me there is nothing I can do" .

I sympathized. A wise bike shop attendant in Cambridge, Mass once succinctly said to me some years ago that bike design and manufacturing in this country is "overly influenced by the sports market." How right that is. First it was the rage for 10-speed style racing bicycles that shaped casual bicycling; then it was mountain biking. Neither has much to do with simple bicycling for transportation, particularly in towns and cities.

I have a love/hate affair with my own bike, a mountain bike with an absurdly large frame and long seat post to fit my 6'7'' body. The big tires and springy suspension really help riding in the city, particularly one like ours that has standard-grade American-style infrastructure, which means lots of pot holes and dangerous bumps to jump over or roll across.

But I've long loved the ideal of urban cycling being actually urbane, which in my book means dignified, civilized, unhurried and even elegant. One should not appear as if one were either in the Olympics or bouncing down a cliff-face when one is pedaling along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan or Brooklyn. One of my favorite memories of Amsterdam is seeing an older gentleman cycling down the street, wearing not only a suit and hat, but puffing on a pipe as well. He looked like a steamboat gently chugging along the street.

That's what makes the recent trends of young woman riding in dresses and with long hair flowing, often on bikes where they sit upright and with dainty wicker baskets attached, such a good thing. These intrepid females are actually civilizing the street. What driver could be quite as aggressive after passing one of these delicate denizens of the street?

I myself would like to join this trend and trade in my hybridized mountain bike for a true urban bicycle, something gentle and civilized. But I hesitate. For one thing, I now keep my bicycle on the street, which makes hopping on it very convenient. I wouldn't risk doing that with a new bicycle. Still, I would like to encourage the growing trend of bicycles being designed for in-town riding, as opposed to racing or off-road riding. My first choice right now is a "Dynamic Bicycle," which don't even have chains and use a "shaft drive" instead.

But until that day, I rely on my rusty metal pants clip to keep my trousers from being snagged. It doesn't work very well. Most of my pants now sport tears and stains on the lower right leg. It's simply too much to remember and do every time you hop on a bicycle to take on and off this little metal clip, which is also quite uncomfortable as well as dorky looking.

I suspect I will eventually move on to a more civilized bicycle, as will many others. We have nothing to lose but our stained, ripped clothes.

Photo: Amsterdam Bicyclists 

Not getting flattened by a 50,000 pound "big rig" is a good reason to stop at a red light if you're on a bicycle. But how about less skin-saving reasons? Are there in fact, good reasons to ignore traffic regulations when you can, because after all, they are really meant just for cars?

It's a question that comes readily to mind at times, particularly say when pedaling up a steep hill or going down one, and having to stop at a red light in the middle. Many of us often just cruise through with a careful glance in each direction, but we feel guilty about it. Should we?

Maybe not. If you look historically, you'll find that there were practically no traffic regulations as we know them before cars. No stop signs. No traffic lights. No left turn lanes. In the 19th century, the streets of New York were a seething mass of horse drawn wagons, walking adults, playing children and yes, in the late 19th century, bicyclists.

Cars changed this. In the 1930s, traffic congestion became a serious and unanticipated problem. How to handle it? Enter the new "science" of traffic engineering. With the addition of stop signs, street lights and all the other accoutrements that are common today, traffic congestion would soon be a thing of the past, the new professionals assured the public.

Of course, this wasn't true at all. What it did do was make that street much less convenient for someone on a bicycle or using any other form of non-motorized travel.

So here's my point. Given that most traffic controls were put into place solely for the benefit of drivers, why should the rest of us have to obey them? They're not helping us. In fact, they're impeding us.

What we may need to move toward is some sort of system where cyclists, non-motorized scooter riders, skaters or users of any other kind of self-propelled vehicle are exempted or partially exempted from traffic controls. It could be understood that a red light is there to control the car or truck, not everyone else.

There are a number of options. What Montreal does on some streets is to let cyclists proceed six seconds before the cars do at some red lights. This frees cyclists from being lost in a swirl of drivers going around them. In many Dutch cities, drivers are bound by one way streets, but not cyclists. Imagine such a thing here.

Most effectively, the state could rule, as most Scandinavians have, that in any collision between a pedestrian, a cyclists or a driver, the largest, heaviest vehicle is at fault. This means that pedestrians take precedence over cyclists, and cyclists take precedence over drivers. This would be a de-facto way of exempting cyclists and pedestrians from most automobile-oriented traffic regulation.

One particular regulatory device we could consider having cyclists relate differently to is one way thoroughfares, which are so ubiquitous in New York City.

One way streets are a fairly recent "innovation," many being put into place in the 1950s and 1960s, and again solely for the supposed benefit of drivers. There were many ill effects, and not just for cyclists. Jane Jacobs commented in her classic 1961 "Death and Life of Great American Cities" that every time New York City converted an avenue to being one way, bus traffic would take a significant drop, because people now often had to walk an avenue over to catch a bus traveling in the right direction.

I may be digressing here, but people give those poor delivery guys hunched over their bicycles so much grief for going the wrong way down one-way streets. But rather than penalize their employers, something currently proposed by the New York City Council, how about getting rid of a lot of the one way streets? Or even exempting cyclists from having to obey one way regulations?

This may sound insane, but the fact is it's often irresistible to a biker to go the wrong way down a one way street. If I'm at 15th and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, for example, to get to 14th and Eighth Avenue would require a very long journey if done legally. I would have to cycle down 15th to Ninth Avenue, and then up 14th Street back to Eighth Avenue. That's almost a half mile, given how long Manhattan blocks are. Or, I could travel illegally a 100 feet or so down Eighth Avenue. You can understand why a delivery person, or I, for example, would be so tempted.

There's a school of cycling called "vehicular" or "integrated" cycling that advocates that cyclists in essence act like motorists. That is, they should take up a whole lane of traffic, and obey all traffic regulations. While this may make sense tactically at times, for example to avoid getting squeezed out by city bus, it's a stupid philosophy. A bicycle is not a car, much less a truck. It's a very different device, and it needs a different set of regulations, one that can be looser and more permissive, given its less substantive nature.

Photo: hen power/Flickr

"Necessity is the mother of convenience" is what I found to be true this morning as I rode for the very first time from my home in Crown Heights all the way to Union Square in Manhattan.

To experienced bike commuters, this would be nothing to brag about. But while a frequent cycler around my home in Brooklyn, I had always been intimidated by the thought of crossing the big river into "the city." I had envisioned hours of pedaling, perhaps too much for my weak back. I saw little old me being crushed by unfriendly Manhattan traffic, (even though when I lived in Chelsea I cycled without a problem.)

I was able to do it this morning because I didn't plan to. Down with planning! As I should know as a parent, big tasks are easier when broken into parts.

First I cycled my almost three year old son Max to his daycare center at 5th Avenue and St. Johns Place. Then I cycled over to Brooklyn Heights to drop off something that had to be there today. Then the plan was, I'd lock my bike up and take the subway to my office at Union Square.

But once in Brooklyn Heights near Borough Hall, I said to myself, "Gee, you're so close now. Why not try cycling to work?" As is my tendency, I talked myself into it despite still feeling intimidate, and I soon found myself pedaling across the Brooklyn Bridge, having remembered where the somewhat obscure pedestrian entrance is.

It was a lifetime moment, seeing the stony double naves of the historic Brooklyn Bridge above my handlebars as I pedaled on that wooden path, the towers of Wall Street off to my left. What a glorious moment!

After that, on the advice of a fellow cycler beside me, I pedaled up Centre Street to 4th Avenue and then up to Union Square, (after a quick detour for a first-time stop at Ninth Street Expresso, whose coffee was really as amazing as I had read about.) Once at the Con Edison building where the Regional Plan Association have their offices, I locked my bike to a lousy bike rack Con Ed provides inside their fenced-in parking lot, and walked inside. Piece of cake!

I could definitely see doing it again. It takes me about 45 minutes on the subway, including walking time. I could see cycling being very competitive with that. What other challenges have I been putting off because I supersized them in my mind?

Photo: Seth Holladay / Flickr

The feminine part of "women and children first" has, perhaps, been dropped in our more equitable and less chivalrous times, but the kid side of the sum has not, at least that's my sense of things. As a society, we generally try to put children first knowing they are our world's future, not to mention payers of our future social security checks.

Which is why we should make way for that twin-filled, double-wide stroller driven by a firm-handed mom down the sidewalk of the Upper West Side, Park Slope or even in some other less mom-oriented part of the city. Or should we?

Whatever the answer, it's hard to stifle a feeling of irritation when parents use their strollers like battering rams to make way through crowds. And in New York City crowded environment, it's simply a fact that space is scarce, and strollers take up a lot of it. Even a small stroller takes up a disproportionate amount of space because it and an attached care giver act like a blocker on a sidewalk, impeding the free flow of traffic in, out and across a sidewalk.

I write as a parent who is behind a stroller for often more than an hour a day, so I've been both sides of the equation. As I wrote in a recent essay, before becoming a parent, I swore that I would not use a stroller, particularly a really big one. And then I found that I did. The stroller my partner and I use can only be called an SUV-style stroller -- a wide three-wheel jogging stroller with a wider than average width and footprint. It's so large, it can't fit through most supermarket check out lanes.

The story of how we ended up with our very large stroller, despite firm convictions the other way, is perhaps illustrative at how one learns that one's personal needs are not always consistent with one societal convictions or of one personal opinions in a previous incarnation. Seeds vary depending on where one stands. Or strolls.

Because we had so personally disliked "the stroller people," as we called them back on the Upper West Side where my wife had lived while single, when our bundle of joy arrived, we were ready with... slings!

I'm sure you seen these bandolier-style garments, which make moms and dads like the Frito Bandito. We first fell in love with slings -- conceptually that is -- when a few years before having children we saw a woman carrying a beautiful baby in a very attractive sling down a sidewalk near Chelsea. She and the baby looked so snug, and they were so space efficient as a package. We resolved then and there to be sling people if we even had kids, despite the sling's hippie associations we didn't really want in our personal brands.

So, prior to our little guy coming, we bought slings and actually took classes in how to wear them after he arrived. I ended up buying three separate slings. The one I used looked more like a piece of camping equipment with its clips and shiny nylon material, and I convinced myself I looked almost rugged wearing it.

But for us, they didn't work. Carrying a baby in them was like carrying a large stone around your neck at a bad angle. We had optimistically hoped that using slings would improve our bad backs, which we both had. Instead, they made them worse, much worse. Soon we were not only dealing with lack of sleep, but with back problems too. Finally after about two or three months (my memory of that time is hazy because of sleep deprivation), my wife broke down my resistance and we bought a Maclaren Techno Stroller, which is sort of your basic yuppie stroller. Expensive -- $350, as I recall -- but not outrageous, like the $800 or $900 Bugaboo.

Our lives instantly got better. In probably a week, we had stopped using slings entirely. We went from hating strollers, to loving them. They saved our lives.

But why did we move from a medium-sized stroller to a really big one? The short answer, no pun intended, is that we're really tall. REALLY tall. I'm six foot seven, and my wife is six foot two. That's tall. And we both have back problems. This meant, particularly for me, an average stroller, while better than a sling, was still really hard on our backs because you had to hunch over while using it.

It wasn't like we didn't try to make do. For a while we had used this really light weight stroller, a Chico, which we had equipped with handle extensions we found on the Internet. But the extensions soon fell apart and the Chico became worthless to us.

There were only a handful of strollers whose handles went up high enough for me to walk comfortably behind them. We nixed the $950 Bugaboo Chameleon, despite my love of its sleek design, and eventually bought the mere $400 or so Baby Jogger City Series. We Craigslisted away our other strollers.

So now, with our son approaching three, we walk behind our Baby Jogger or sometimes leave it at home, now that he's walking more. But it should be said that I can't imagine living without using a stroller a lot, at least for a year or two more. Those posters who declare that one can abandon strollers are talking through their noses. How can you walk 20 or more blocks with a toddler on errands that have some degree of time pressure without using a stroller? You can't. Unless you use a bicycle, but that's a different essay.

So, to sum up, we are left with our big SUV stroller, and the people around us on the sidewalks are left to adjust to us. But the point of this story is not to carve out an exemption to ourselves to the rules of polite road and sidewalk conduct. It's to again remind ourselves and others what's appropriate conduct is to some degree relative and individual. When you get down to specifics, it's hard to say for sure what is and isn't selfish or unselfish conduct on the road or anywhere else, even if making rules is unavoidable.

It ultimately gets down to what we value as a society and how to encourage or allow for it. Given their size and prominence, I start to consider whether there should be some size limit to strollers or devices in general that are allowed to be wielded down the street. Congestion pricing for strollers anyone? That's a joke, by the way.

A better direction for public policy to go in is to ask how can we gain more space on sidewalks for everyone? After all, in the most crowded sidewalks like along Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, the bulk of the public right of way is still given over to moving and stationary motor vehicles. We could change this by say, widening the sidewalks by five feet, and pushing the cars a little closer together. The extra space is certainly there -- down on Park Slope's Fifth Avenue the street is narrowed by two five-foot bike lanes. There are cheap ways to do this as an initial try out phase, like the pedestrian reclamation projects in Midtown.

With wider sidewalks, even an SUV stroller like mine would be less obnoxious.

Photo: Stroller parking at a Dan Zanes concert in Prospect Park. The Brooklyn Paper / Julie Rosenberg

This is the third essay from Alex Marshall, who has written extensively on transportation issues as a journalist and author. He is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association, where he edits the bi-weekly Spotlight on the Region newsletter.

"All SUV drivers are assholes," I've frequently found myself thinking as I face the grille of a Cadillac Escalade while crossing a street on foot or from the perch of my bicycle seat. Why would anyone drive such a vehicle in New York City, hardly a brutal wilderness calling for four-wheel drive? They sure don't need the space to haul a load of firewood.

It's undeniable that SUVs make life difficult for the rest of us street dwellers, simply by virtue of their sheer size. Their height impinges on the sight lines of everyone, even other drivers. And because SUV drivers can't see as well themselves -- the action is literally too far below them -- they are more dangerous.

But I try to keep an open mind. Who's an asshole depends on where one sits, and to the SUV drivers, I'm probably the asshole, darting in front of them on my bike like a pesky gnat they would like to swat away, while they are trying to savor another sip of coffee.

I am served a dose of humility when I remember my experience with strollers. Before having a child myself, I would chafe at the legions of "stroller people," as my now wife and I called them, who took up all the sidewalk space on the Upper West Side, using their child carriers like battering rams to get ahead of the pack. I swore not to become one of them.

But now, with toddler, I have an SUV-style stroller, the very type I swore never to have. Why? Because, well, it's necessary for various reasons I won't go into now. And frankly, when I'm trying to get around with my kid and worrying about the hundreds of things parents worry about, I probably crowd out some humble pedestrians with nary a second thought.

So, as the "asshole" thought creeps into my head when I'm out on the streets, I think that maybe there are good reasons to drive an SUV in New York City. I should ask them. And I'm trying.

To nudge my consciousness toward more openness, I've been attempting for the past few weeks to interview SUV drivers. But I've been unable to catch one yet. I've found that that brief minute we have while waiting at a traffic light together is not enough to do a good interview. And so far I've not been able to catch a driver in that crucial interval when they are exiting their car and might have a few minutes to talk.

The statistics on SUV purchasing suggest some answers, though. Although I had trouble finding a fresh set on the web, what I remember from a few years ago is that consumer charts showed that people in Manhattan actually bought SUVs at twice the rate of the average American. This makes little sense, given the lack of practical need for an SUV in a dense urban city, until you remember that Manhattanites are rich. And then it snaps into place.

SUVs have become the key signifiers of status. They have little if anything to do with struggling up a slippery dirt road using four-wheel drive. For various reasons, perhaps fitting in with my previous musings about American's inclination for domination and armor, SUVs signify that one has been able to remove him or herself from the troubles of the masses walking, bicycling or even driving below them.

But hey, I could be wrong. I promise to report back here about the answers SUV drivers give as to why they drive their vehicles in our grid of streets, while, inadvertently I'm sure, making life difficult for the rest of us.

Photo: Jason Varone

This is the second essay from Alex Marshall. As a journalist and author Alex has written extensively on transportation issues, he is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association where he edits the bi-weekly Spotlight on the Region newsletter.

A guy on a Segway rolled by me the other day on 15th street to the east side of Union Square. I can't remember whether he was wearing a helmet, but I do remember his pursed lips and worried eyes. He seemed to fear a judgmental gaze or remark, and to be preemptively avoiding that by staring straight ahead.

Whatever the actual reason for it, his tense expression metaphorically indicated to me the somewhat beleaguered place Segways occupy on our streets and sidewalks. Although tiny in actual number, in mind-share the Segway has occupied a lot of space due to the successful publicity blow-out before the machines were introduced in late 2001.

As part of this juggernaut, its inventor Dean Kamen spent many millions getting them approved for sidewalk use in most places, but he hit a snag in New York State and in the city particularly, where he found sidewalks and streets more contested ground. Here cycling and pedestrian advocates have managed to keep it in limbo legally, neither completely denied but definitely not completely permitted. That hasn't stopped the police from trying them out though. The Segway made news recently because the NYPD bought ten of them for officers to use in Central Park and other areas.

From a practical standpoint, the Segway's current legal status might be okay. But as a precedent, the hostility against the Segway from the "street" community troubles me. I'm reminded that one discriminated or beleaguered minority is supposedly more likely to discriminate against another minority rather than embrace them. There's not enough room for all of us, seems to be the view of many cycling and pedestrian advocates.

This is a pity, for it's not the right approach to the use of streets. Rather than enshrining particular devices, there should be an attitude of "Everyone into the pool" when it comes to streets. With some exceptions at either end of the scale, generally streets within urban areas should accommodate all types of traffic. Urban designer and writer Michael Sorkin, in a class of his I spoke at CUNY, talked of the streets of Bangladesh and how they contained animals, cyclists, cars and other traffic, all moving along at about 12 mph, absent any particular rules or regulations.

A New York equivalent of this might be a good thing. The very act of encouraging everyone to use the street will slow down and tame automobile traffic, which is the primary threat to all other users. At least in streets, Segway users should mix easily.

Sidewalks however might be a different story. Sidewalks are narrower than streets, and consist now just of walkers, at least legally. Well actually, there are joggers. And conventional scooter riders. And wheelchair rollers. Can Segways be added to this list?

I speak as someone who has ridden a Segway a few times and fallen in love with them, at least a little. The technology is simply amazing. They operate as if by magic. They roll where you want with no audible noise or power source. While I don't see them replacing bicycles or any other transportation medium, I do see them being potentially part of the urban street mix. Which is precisely where they have been most opposed.

For the moment, Segways are a specialized product. But as promoters of street and sidewalk use, cyclists and pedestrians should welcome, and not fear, such newcomers.

Photo: Kyle Jones/Flickr