WYEP Summer Music Festival & OpenStreetsPGH June 2022

The last weekend of June was also the first official weekend of Summer, and it was a busy one in Pittsburgh. On Saturday I headed into Oakland for the WYEP Summer Music Festival.

The concert was held in Schenley Plaza. It was nearly 90 degrees fahrenheit with lots of sun. When I arrived most of the shaded areas on the edges of the plaza were occupied, so I situated myself in a sunny spot in the grass.

The infrastructure and trailers behind the stage occupied Schenley Drive.

One of the event sponsors was Pittsburgh Regional Transit, the newly-rebranded name for Pittsburgh Port Authority. Their booth with free PRT hats was very popular.

They also had one of the newly-rebranded buses on site for viewing.

The streets of Oakland had responses to the recent Supreme Court ruling.

Sunday featured the second OpenStreets event of the summer. This course ran from Market Square down through the Strip District and Lawrenceville. I rode across the Hot Metal Bridge to the northern side of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail and took it to Downtown, riding surface streets to the Square.

The crossing from Market Square to Penn Ave was regulated by event volunteers, just as last month.

From Downtown the course continued up through the Strip District.

People were still doing their Sunday morning shopping, frequently having to traverse the gauntlet of OpenStreets riders to cross the street.

Even with the Sunday shoppers the Strip District never felt as congested as South Side did last month.

One of the dismount zones was demarcated by a pair of giant purple hands.

As with previous events there was also live music throughout the course.

Helpful chalk writing alerted riders to road hazards as well as dismount zones.

The course went past Allegheny Cemetery.

The Lawrenceville Doughboy looked over the proceedings.

My ride along Butler St was invigorating not only for building the speed that I did but also for gauging what had changed and what had stayed the same.

OpenStreetsPGH May 2022

Following several years of always being out-of-town or otherwise unable to attend an OpenStreets Pittsburgh session, last summer I returned to the city just in time for the sole event of 2021. I wrote about my experience cycling across the Mon to Hazelwood for that event around Mill 19 last summer. This year the organization is back to a full summer schedule with dates scheduled for May, June, and July. The inaugural route this summer ran from Downtown to the South Side, with the South Side terminus located nearby to where the Birmingham Bridge intersects Carson Street, which is practically at my front door. So on the last Saturday of May my roommate and I pedaled out onto Carson to join the crowds gathering to enjoy a day of (mostly) car-free streets.

After a week that was frequently overcast and occasionally rainy, it was a gorgeous Saturday. The day also provided a reminder of the importance of applying sunscreen: had I known I was going to be out and about for nearly five hours in vigorous sunshine, I might’ve prepared better. The route officially opened at 10 AM and, as with the Hazelwood event last summer, the streets steadily grew more populated over the course of the day. Below is a snapshot of the scene along Carson Street in the afternoon.

Among the various venders and activity stations scattered along Carson Street, stalwart South Side cycle shop Thick Bikes had a dedicated event area where visitors could ride a unicycle, drink a beer, and listen to live music.

We stopped a while to listen to the music, but did not take our chances on a unicycle.

Further down Carson we reached one of the great crossings of the route: the 10th Street Bridge. Unfortunately none of my photos can do justice to the experience of the actual crossing, which I can only crudely convey as both “cinematic” and “immersive.”

On the downtown-side of the expanse we approached the ostensible highlight of the entire course: what the OpenStreets web site described as “a magically car-free Armstrong Tunnel.”

The passage through the tunnel did indeed seem magical, in the sense of feeling out-of-the-ordinary to the point of nearly being otherworldly. During our initial transit the traffic was light enough to offer plenty of breathing room. On subsequent traversals the navigation around other moving bodies was a bit more harrowing, especially during the darkened portions of the tunnel where visibility was very low (an effect compounded by my sunglasses). While I was somewhat exacerbated by having to maneuver around perambulators and pram-pushers during these latter runs, I was also tempted to dismount and join these pedestrians who were savoring their time in the tunnel, walking through and examining the details of the wall tiles, inspecting the graffiti, etc.

The tunnel opened up on Forbes Avenue, emptying us out onto the streets of Downtown.

There were a couple of traffic crossings facilitated by event volunteers and city workers on the way to the Downtown-end of the course. Even during our first transit in the morning the streets on the Downtown side seemed more populated.

The Downtown terminus of the route was at Market Square, at the base of PPG Place and in the shadow of the Highmark building and Gateway Center. We surveyed the various booths and picked up some OpenStreets merch.

On our return trip from Downtown back to South Side my roommate and I both noticed a fountain in a courtyard that we hadn’t seen before. The fountain is in the courtyard of the Allegheny County Courthouse, and even though I have been in that complex multiple times (for various purposes of varying pleasantness) I had never noticed the fountain. Evidently many other riders were making a similar discovery on this Saturday afternoon, as several cyclists joined us in deviating from the route for a photo-op.

Back in the South Side we found Carson Street significantly more crowded than we had left it. Close to home we stopped and watched a stilt-wearing street performer’s show. He had amped-up energy and was doing great crowd work, but we decided to leave after he kept deferring his promised knife juggling routine.

We made the trip back Downtown. After arriving in Market Square we decided to continue on to the Point. This involved leaving the closed-streets car-free course and entering actual downtown traffic, which was a first for me. But it was a quick trip along the bike lane past the Gateway T Station and over to Point State Park. Once arrived at the central fountain we found that many other cyclists had decided to travel the extra distance.

From this point we decided to ride back to South Side along the river trail, cycling up to the Hot Metal Bridge to cross back over the Mon. We then made the round trip from South Side to Downtown and back a third time. All told we rode for nearly 20 miles and 5 hours. As I said before, it was a good reminder of the importance of sunscreen.

Urban Communication: media infrastructure, neighborhood narratives, rhetoric & rebranding, and more

• In Urban Media Ecology news, several recent studies reported correlations between characteristics of the built environment and human health. A study from the University of Kansas (in my birthplace of Lawrence) found that "neighborhoods that motivate walking can stave off cognitive decline in older adults":

The researcher judged walkability using geographic information systems — essentially maps that measure and analyze spatial data.

“GIS data can tell us about roads, sidewalks, elevation, terrain, distances between locations and a variety of other pieces of information,” Watts said. “We then use a process called Space Syntax to measure these features, including the number of intersections, distances between places or connections between a person’s home and other possible destinations they might walk to. We’re also interested in how complicated a route is to get from one place to another. For example, is it a straight line from point A to point B, or does it require a lot of turns to get there?”

Watts said easy-to-walk communities resulted in better outcomes both for physical health—such as lower body mass and blood pressure—and cognition (such as better memory) in the 25 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease and 39 older adults without cognitive impairment she tracked. She believes that older adults, health care professionals, caregivers, architects and urban planners could benefit from the findings.

• Another research paper from researchers at multiple institutions "suggests that street design may have a larger impact on public health than previously thought":

By studying 24 California cities with an array of street design characteristics and their associated health data, the authors find that living in cities with high intersection density—a measure of compactness—significantly reduces the risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. A full-grid street pattern also is a factor in lower risk of obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease, as compared with full treelike patterns.

• At CityLab, Richard Florida posted a roundup of recent research studies on the health benefits afforded by walkable communities:

If walkability has long been an “ideal,” a recent slew of studies provide increasingly compelling evidence of the positive effects of walkable neighborhoods on everything from housing values to crime and health, to creativity and more democratic cities.

[...]

Walkability is no longer just an ideal. The evidence from a growing body of research shows that walkable neighborhoods not only raise housing prices but reduce crime, improve health, spur creativity, and encourage more civic engagement in our communities.

• Another CityLab article by Emily Von Hoffman looked at what architecture is doing to your brain:

I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative “phenomenologies of our built environment”—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team’s research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.

• As part of a directed study this semester, I've been studying the role of communication infrastructure in urban design, and particularly the parallel developments of mass media and the modern metropolis. Urban explorer Bradley Garrett recently wrote a piece for The Guardian about the massive infrastructure of underground London, including not just tube stations but communication infrastructure including Britain's deepest telephone exchange: 

The urban exploration crew I had worked with, the London Consolidation Crew or LCC, had long graduated from ruins and skyscrapers – it was the city in the city they were after, the secrets buried deep underground where the line between construction site and ruin is very thin indeed. The Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the crème de la crème, more coveted even than abandoned Tube stations or possibly even the forgotten Post Office railway we accessed in 2011.

Kingsway was originally built as a second world war air-raid shelter under Chancery Lane. These deep level shelters were, at one time, connected to the Tube and citizens would have undoubtedly taken refuge here during Luftwaffe bombing runs. In 1949 the tunnels were sold to the General Post Office where they became the termination for the first submarine transatlantic phone cable – the £120m TAT1 project. The system, meant to protect the vital connective tissue of the city in the event of terror-from-the-air (including nuclear attack), stretched for miles. It only had three surface entrances and contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, rumoured to be the deepest in the UK at 60m below the street. Although the government employed a host of people to maintain the tunnels, Kingsway was a spatial secret of state - part a trio of the most secure and sensitive telephone exchanges in Britain, along with the Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester.

• These photos of subterranean communication infrastructure contrast with images of above ground cables covering the urban landscape, as featured in this io9 post, "photos from the days when thousands of cables crowded the skies":

Before most cables ran underground, all electrical, telephone and telegraph wires were suspended from high poles, creating strange and crowded streetscapes. Here are some typical views of late-19th century Boston, New York, Stockholm, and other wire-filled cities.

Wires over New York, 1887, via Retronaut, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/kb9dns2>

• Joseph Stromberg at Vox recently wrote about the "forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of 'jaywalking'":

Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.

This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word "jay" meant something like "rube" or "hick" — a person from the sticks, who didn't know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word "jay walker" as someone who didn't know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.

• William Eric Rinehart at Sweet Talk asks: Did a change in rhetoric give rise to cities?

Between the mega-village and the cities that came later lies the formation of the state. Ultimately, this is the world of stratification buttressed through religion. With it came the creation of differing social groups and distinctions based upon rank or property. Yet, the acceptance of social specialization required a new view of the world, a new rhetoric in the McCloskeyian sense. And once that jump was made, benefits followed. Clustered people allowed for more trade and specialization of work, leading to more wealth, prestige and better equipped armies. While still a brutal world, cities had the potential for stability, but it came at the expense of radical equality.

• Matt Stroud at The Verge recently wrote about the dream and the myth of the paperless city in Chicago:

But you can’t just flip a switch to reverse paper systems in place for hundreds of years, can you? Adobe first released its Portable Document Format nearly 20 years ago, yet many private companies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, law firms, courts — and yes, major city governments such as Chicago’s — have yet to embrace a world reliant on PDFs and devoid of paper records. Mayor Emanuel has agreed to change that. Or at least to try. In 2011, he announced plans to spend $20 million on efficiency improvements including changes to make the city less reliant on paper.

Will Mayor Rahm Emanuel change the way governments deal with paper? Or is the road toward a “completely paperless” government a long way off?

• At URBACT, Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller consider urban planning and the multi-dimensional communication era:

"Because urban planning has always been based on the gathering and exchange of information and – as a democratic process – on communication between different stakeholders, a change in the method of communication has a significant impact on decision-making throughout the process"

[...]

The quote at the beginning of this post was taken out of a paper by Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller, who set out to research how new medias were used for urban planning matters. They are refering to geographer Manuel Castells’ and Clay Shirky‘s work to describe the change from uni-dimentional communication towards a many-to-many exchange sphere that, so Shirky, is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Höffken and Haller provide interesting insights in how different tools can serve certain goals and complement each-other by surveying urban projects and institutions or civil society mobilizations on urban matters as different as Tulsa municipality and the Mediaspree campaign in Berlin.

• Emily Badger at the Washington Post reports that Uber is offering cities an olive branch in the form of their customers' trip data:

The company plans to partner first with Boston, sharing quarterly anonymized trip-level data with the city in a model that Uber says will become its national data-sharing policy. The data will include date, time, distance traveled and origin and destination locations for individual trips, identified only by zip code tabulation area to preserve privacy. Once held by cities, this information will be open to records requests, meaning that the public (and researchers) will have access to it, too.

Such data could help cities keep tabs on Uber and, for example, which neighborhoods the company is serving. Uber says, though, that it's primarily offering the data so that cities can better understand themselves.

A redesigned Los Angeles parking sign, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/nu5tr2z>

• Rosie Cima at priceonomics recently wrote about a designer's war on misleading parking signs:

Sylianteng first tried to redesign parking signs when she was living in LA and applying to grad school, in a project she called “To Park or Not to Park.” She reduced the usual jumble of signs and regulations to a single, holistic panel, which looked a lot like a Google Calendar – it was a grid of days of the week, broken into hours. The blocks of time when a parking spot was valid she shaded green, the blocks of time it was invalid she shaded red. She also simplified the rules she illustrated, working off the principle that people would much rather adhere to an overly restrictive regulation than get a parking ticket.

[...]

Her prototypes provoked a lot of commentary, discussion, and praise. She used this feedback to improve her designs. She printed out new prototypes, and taped those up. The feedback validated some of her central assumptions, among them: (1) a lot of current parking signs were very confusing, and (2) people didn’t care why they could or couldn’t park somewhere, they just didn’t want to be ticketed.

• At Tropics of Meta, South El Monte Arts Posse posted about mapping community narratives in El Monte and South El Monte:

The writing of social history needs to keep in mind the motivations and individual agency of the people participating in events as they happen. In interview after interview, people were aware of the larger structural forces, and yet made choices and actions in contradiction to expectations. Again and again we spoke with people who beat the odds, who pushed back against racism, and took it upon themselves to change circumstances and in many cases succeeded.

• Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian reports on neighborhood rebranding in London:

Similar semantic shifts are being attempted, with varying degrees of success, throughout the rest of London. Intrepid developers have discovered “Tyburnia”, an undervalued stretch of real estate between Paddington Station and Hyde Park. Meanwhile, the “Knowledge Quarter” is an attempt to rid King’s Cross of its association with prostitution by emphasising the new preponderance of cerebral institutions there. You could call it “brain-washing”. The Knowledge Quarter, incidentally, is one of 21 “Quarters” in London; there are also a dozen or so new “Villages”. Neighbourhood rebranding is often the linguistic leg of gentrification and, as such, follows a predictable pattern: “Villages” assert their legitimacy by emphasising community, while “Quarters” lend a gravitas to whatever noun they follow. Both have a cleansing effect on the associations that came before them.

• At NextCity, Nathan C. Martin considers why art, not Google, could revolutionize WiFi:

Remember a few years ago when television went digital and everyone had to get adapters or new TV sets? When that happened, what once were television channels became simply channels, a bulk of empty bandwidth that could host any variety of transmission. The Federal Communications Commission named it Super WiFi. The policies to regulate it are yet to be written, and a chorus is imploring the FCC to leave a large part of the spectrum open, or “unlicensed,” instead of auctioning it off. Those advocates tend to refer to the spectrum in spatial terms — a group of Stanford University economists likened the spectrum to a public park, a resource everyone should have access to. Mary Ellen Carroll speaks of it similarly. “It’s like public land,” she says. “It’s like Yosemite.”

• Finally, Emanuel Maiberg at Motherboard looks at homelessness in SimCity, and whether it is a bug or feature:

SimCity's homeless people are represented as yellow, two-dimensional, ungendered figures with bags in tow. Their presence makes SimCity residents unhappy, and reduces land value. Like many other players, Bittanti discovered the online discussions when he was searching for a way to deal with them.

At first, players wondered if they were having so much problems with the homeless in their cities because of a bug in the game. Like many of 2014's big-budget games that launched in broken or barely-functional states, SimCity originally would only work if players connected to EA's servers, which repeatedly crashed under the load of players. It seemed possible that the homeless problem in SimCity was simply a mistake.

"Has anyone figured out a easy way to handle the homeless ruining those beautiful parks you spend so much money on?" asks one player on EA' site. "Create jobs, either through zoning or upgrading road density near industry, that helped me a lot," another player suggests.