Metaphor #11: Twins Attendance / St. Paul Streets

[Target Field at minimal capacity, early summer 2026.]

I grew up on sparsely attended Twins games, spending a good percentage of my childhood being blown out of the Metronome with my dad and siblings. This was a time that spanned the Twins’ window of playoff success, but thinking back on it, most of the time the place seemed half empty (or half full, I suppose). Kids like myself had free reign to the building, wandering through the deserted upper deck, running around row after row of empty blue folding seats. 

Fast toward a decade or two into my 20s, not much had changed. The Twins had many lean seasons. Even when they were winning division championships, you could still find $5 tickets and dollar hot dogs. 

This year, too, Twins attendance is once again scraping the bottom of the AL Central's barrel. In a way, I like it! I wish they were winning, but I've been to a handful of games this year and tickets were cheaper than the beer. Once inside, I sit wherever I like outside of the luxury moat. Stadium lines were rare: not the ticket gate, the concessions, the bathrooms, the beer stands, nor even Kramarczuk’s delectable sausages.  

In a way, it’s amazing to move freely around a giant MLB stadium. What luxury! If it rains, go under an overhang. If it’s hot, move into the shade. If it’s cold, do the opposite. It’s nice to spread out, never sitting to next to someone unless you really want to. Being a fan of an unpopular team feels like the world is made just for you.

[Have a seat, anywhere you like.]

Of course, this isn’t the end of the story. If you’ve ever been to a playoff game, you know. The flip side of this life of half-full leisure is that sporting events are actually about shared experiences. Crowds intensity pay off exponentially. 

There’s nothing like a playoff baseball game. The stadium is sold out, and the crowd is electrics. Every pitch is a moment, alive with anticipation or crushing defeat. I remember the ‘23 playoffs, the '91 World Series, and a dozen other games packed to standing room. It doesn't compare to watching the Twins play the Royals in early May in 2026.

Cities are like going to a Twins game. A half-empty city is nice in lots of ways: it’s easy to park, there’s not much traffic, it’s relatively quiet, it’s affordable to be there in the first place. 

And yet...

Living St. Paul often feels like going to a Twins game during a losing season. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a playground in the middle of the day with my kid, and we’re the only ones there. Quite often, it’s a very nice playground, too: new equipment, well maintained, reflecting one of the best park systems in the country. 

On another day, I walk down a street where I’m the only one around. Downtown St. Paul often feels this way, deserted half the time. I take my kid to the downtown library at least once a month; more often than not, we have the place to ourselves. She likes it that way, but it’s the city’s main library branch. It shouldn’t be empty! 

Even if being in a half-empty stadium or city is comfortable, it ain’t good. Visit an urban playground in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago as I have in the last few years, and it’s wild to see how much use a see-saw receives in an average day. At any given moment, there are more kids playing in Brooklyn's Sunset Park than at every playground in St. Paul combined.  

[Sunset Park, Brooklyn, 2024.]

Dense cities brim with serendipity. Playgrounds and libraries are noisy, never boring. Likewise, other cites’ ball clubs sell out homestands against their division rivals. In other cities, stadia are crowded with people cheering, crackling with energy. There’s nothing like this feeling! 

Nobody wants the Twins to suck, but half the time it seems like locals are rooting for an empty city. It seems to me that there’s a vibe in the air: it’s worth the Twins losing, if it means people can save time on parking. Keep St. Paul Boring, after all. 

It isn’t worth it. Whether it's a ballpark or a downtown, it’s better to embrace crowds and excitement than to luxuriate in emptiness. I wish it was hard to get a Twins ticket! I wish St. Paul’s amazing playgrounds were well used, and our streets weren’t lined with vacant buildings. 

In short, I miss the crowds and the playoffs. 

Metaphor #10: Robot Car / Cigarette Filters

I'm just finishing up Peter Norton's excellent book, Autonorama, and came across this lovely metaphor: 

The worst news about AVs (automated vehicles) is not that they can't deliver on their promises. In two ways, AVs are not just disappointments by their own standards but actual threats. First, to the extent that they are indeed developed and deployed -- that is, to some fraction of the extent that promoters promise -- AVs are likely to worsen the very aspects of passenger transportation they are supposed to improve. Second, AVs are an attractive but expensive distraction from things we can do today at far less cost that yield affordable, sustainable, equitable, healthful, and efficient mobility. Much as elaborate but ineffectual cigarette filters were an attempt to perpetuate cigaret smoking when it was clear that smoking itself was the problem, AVs are, more than anything else, an attempt to perpetuate car dependency when car dependency itself is the problem. 

[See also my Cars are the new Tobacco post, or my post on why robot cars will fail.]

The Golf / Driving Metaphor

[Ninth in the highly unpopular "metaphor series." See also: New Orleans, Bicycling/Dancing, Vikings stadium/Star Wars, bikes/guns, gas/pop, NIMBY/Amtrak, soup/housing and Cat training / Driver training.]

[A golf course in Ramsey County.]

For a select segment of American society, a golf course presents the epitome of nature. The greens and fairways, the manicured lawns, the bespoke trees all greet the mind of the golfer, stately strolling through rolling hills. Everything assembles on the course. 

On the course, golf is nature at its most natural, a synonym for landscape. The course is the standard to which all parks, lawns, pastures, and horizons can only hope to meet.

[Filling in a Cozy Lake in 1929.]

And yet the golf course is the farthest thing from the land. Even five hundred years ago in Scotland, there was no little human intervention.  Today's elaborate holes are engineered to the extreme, roughs and traps and manicured lawns the result of thousands of hours of human labor, the movement of dirt on an epic scale, the manipulation of earth papered with a veneer of selected grasses.  The natural landscape that greets the golfer is anything but. This greens lay on a foundation of Earthen fabrication, standing in for land. An alien world with a garden facade. A fantastic landscape for a lifelong of game of pretended control.

The nature of the golfer and the sculpted golf course is the nature of the automobile and the driving landscape. Both worlds require extreme interventions, after which we treat them as natural. 

For the driver, there is nothing so mundane as the curve of the road, the asphalt path seen through the windshield. How normal to speed over the landscape, how boring that the trees out the window fade to a green blur. The undulations of the roadway unreeling unbroken like a film to which we can barely pay attention. How natural to hop to a waiting vehicle, drive to the store, and return in minutes with a bottle of wine, a box of cereal, and a bag of kitty litter.  

Yet these pavings, curbs, and 80-mile-per-hour freeways are the most extreme possible examples of re-engineering the land. The acres of concrete, asphalt, steel bridges over which we together speed untrammeled and blithe have been designed to the millimeter, each street carefully curved to reduce runoff, concrete formulated to reduce wear, and grooved to increase traction to a million rubber tires. Every inch of dirt under the blacktop has been sketched out, thought through, and placed by great machines. Every steel girder, metal abutment, gusset plate, or cantilevered concrete guardrail has been placed, at great expense, to facilitate the thoughtless trip through the city. Driving past the farm field marks the legacy of generations of painstaking struggle against the earth, the massive moving of land, the transcendence of floods, swamps, quakes, and snows.


The modern road is like a golf course. We act like these are natural spaces. We disregard their effort. We take them for granted as we play our expensive games. Nothing could be more natural.

The Cat Training / Driver Training Metaphor

[Eighth in the highly unpopular "metaphor series." See also: New Orleans, Bicycling/Dancing, Vikings stadium/Star Wars, bikes/guns, gas/pop, NIMBY/Amtrak, and soup/housing.]

[The guilty party.]

The other day, my cat peed in my sandal again. This happens about once every six months and each time I curse loudly and then begin cleaning up. I scrub the sandal with baking soda and soap and leave it out in the sun to dry. 

The one thing I don’t do is yell at my cat. 

(I think I did it once, years ago, when catching her in the act. She ran away of course, but she kept peeing.)

Yelling at the cat is pretty much the most useless possible reaction to the situation. It accomplishes nothing because cats do not speak english, nor do they comprehend human communication. Talking to your cat is a meaningless gesture*.

Instead, the only effective response to a cat peeing in the house is environmental. Re-double your efforts to keep the cat box clean and tidy. Keep things off the floor. Scrub and desensitize the affected areas of the house, using special anti-cat smell compounds available at any pet or hardware store. The only thing that works is to change and control the environment.

Here's the metaphor: this situation is exactly the same with car drivers. 

Yes, cats are just like car drivers.

For the most part, enforcement efforts (e.g. “stop for me”), safety campaigns on billboards, or televised PSAs are about as effective as yelling at your cat. When confronted with bad behavior, the vast majority of the problem — something like 90% — is environmental. Car drivers, just like cats, overwhelmingly respond to  behavioral cues rather than anything psychological or cognitive. 

This isn't to say you can't achieve anything with enforcement or public safety awareness campaigns. It’s possible to slightly tweak collective behavior at the very margins for a small percentage of drivers. There are some people who will put a “I STOP 4 PEDS” magnet on their car, or pay attention to a police enforcement effort.

[Like herding cats.]

In much the same way, it’s possible — though extremely difficult — to train cats.  

I know this because I’ve attended performances by The Amazing Acro-Cats of Chicago, Illinois on two different occasions. The Amazing Acro-Cats are the #1 trained cat circus in the United States, if not the world, and thanks to the tireless efforts of head trainer Samantha Martin, they perform somewhat amazing tricks like jumping on pedestals, pushing a small cylinder across a stage, and “playing" musical instruments. 

It's amazing, but more because of the efforts made by the trainer than the cats. The cats do these all of these tasks in response to a constant stimulus of positive feedback, the trainers using a “click stick" and cat treats.

(One warning at both shows: “Please do not be alarmed if the cats run off the stage and into the theater. They are cats after all.” Of course this happened; they are cats, after all.)

Training cats is like training drivers, pretty much impossible and only done with extreme dedication and continual attention. In both cases, the vast majority of the time, it’s not worth doing.

Instead, when there’s an accident [sic], the correct response is to change the environment. That’s the only thing that works. 

If the cat pees on your shoes, clean up the house and keep your shoes off the floor. If there’s a fatal crash at an intersection, remove a lane, install a bumpout, add green paint, or tighten the corners. 

Without changing the environment, nothing is accomplished. Yelling at drivers is like yelling at cats. “Training” drivers for a week or a month is next to useless. You might as well post a list of “house rules" in front of your cat’s food bowl. Just as with cats, the environment trumps everything else.


* Note: this does not keep people from talking to their cats. Though I try to avoid talking to my cat, in principle, sometimes my psychological need to anthropomorphize a furry animal with the brain the size of a walnut wins out. This says more about the owner than the cat.

The Soup / Housing Metaphor

[Seventh in the highly unpopular "metaphor series." See also: New Orleans, Bicycling/Dancing, Vikings stadium/Star Wars, bikes/guns, gas/pop, and NIMBY/Amtrak.]

[A booya.]

1. The soup is the entire region’s housing stock

Imagine you have just woken from a deep sleep. When you wake, it’s the middle of the morning, and you are a chef cooking a great pot of soup.

Imagine that you are in charge of the largest pot of soup you have ever seen, a pot to feed a crowd gathering in a vast room. You can tell that the people are very hungry, but your cauldron is very large, so you have hope. In a few hours the people must be fed, but the soup is before you in a huge iron cauldron, cooking on top of a giant fire. The soup is full of veggies (and/or delicious chunks of meat, depending on your dietary preferences). The soup stock is rich and tasty, and a savory smell wafts from its bubbling surface.

2. The cooking fire is the real estate market
 
You’re in charge of the stew, but surprisingly, you’re not in charge of the fire underneath the soup pot. Instead, the giant steaming cauldron sits on a great pile of wood and coals that have formed an impossibly hot, glowing bed of flame, flickering and gleaming in mesmerizing ways.

Meanwhile, all around you, a constantly changing energetic mix of people in sharp fashionable uniforms feed wood into the fire. They poke at it with long tongs, toss in new logs, and fan the flames. Your toes seem to be melting, yet they work at a frenzied pace that never ceases.

None of them seem speak your language, or at least, they ignore you whenever you speak. 

“The fire is fine! It’s hot enough! Leave it be!” you shout. 

One of the uniformed crew turns to you with a quizzical look. She hesitates for only a moment, before turning her back and retrieving another log for the roaring fire.

The fire gets hotter, and the stew madly boils.

3. Housing displacement is burning the bottom of the stew

The stew bubbling before you is thick and full of chunks, but they constantly sink to the bottom of the giant iron pot. The tender vegetables (and/or meat) end up resting on the bottom of the cauldron, but as the fire gets ever hotter, you smell burning. 

You imagine the bottom, the food burning into a blackening crust. With the fire growing hotter all the time, it happens more and more quickly.

4. Affordable housing policy is your giant wooden spoon

To stop the stew from burning, you stir the pot. You madly stir the pot.

The only problem? You don’t have the large wooden spatula that might be ideal for the job.

Instead, all you have is a thin wooden rod. It’s a thin stick, just long enough to reach the burning roux at the bottom of the stew, but only if you lean over the hot and steaming cauldron.

The bottom of the pot is burning. The thick stew and chunks keep burning. The smell won’t go away. It gets more intense with every passing minute. 

You grab your wooden rod, lean over the pot, and scrape the bottom again and again. You scrape it furiously in small and large circles, keeping the ingredients mixing, keeping the bottom of the pot from scalding into a black mess. 

You're failing. If only you had a better tool for the job, this would be so much easier.

5. New housing developments are the fresh food

The people are clearly hungry. You want there to be enough stew for everyone. The pot is huge, but so is the hungry crowd.

So you pour more ingredients into the stew. Behind you on a wooden platform, bags of fresh veggies are stacked. Carrots, potatoes, onions, celery (and maybe meat depending on your preferences). Every once in a while you take a break from stirring the pot, grab a bag, and pour it into the bubbling stew.

If you have time, on top of the new ingredients, you’ll add some new stock and thicken it up with some fresh gravy. But you don't have time.

6. Complicated governance is the other cooks and their recipes

As you cook the stew, you realize you’re not alone. At your left elbow, an intense woman closes in. With a serious face, she reaches out a thick arm, and adds spices and red onions into a part of the pot.

At your right elbow, a thin man appears and drops in some thyme and a big heap of pepper.

All around the stew pot, a dozen people are working around the brim. Each wears a special chef hat or color-coordinated witty apron. “New Hope Soup Squad.” “Edina Excellent Eaters.” Each of them treats a tiny portion of the soup pot as if it’s their own, adding spices but rarely anything more substantial.

Surprised, you make small talk.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Oh, this is an old family recipe. It was my grandmother’s favorite stew,” says the woman on your left, as adding a some sort of sauce into their part of the pot. She reaches into her apron pocket and pulls out a jar of salt, pouring it in.

“Actually, this is a low-sodium stew,” says the man on your right, stroking his beard. “Scientifically proven to be good for you. Believe me, I’ve been eating it for years and it’s kept me alive”

All around them a dozen people consult notebooks or talk to themselves, adding spices or garlic or different kinds of liquid. It’s all going into the same pot, but nobody seems to notice.

Meanwhile, you keep stirring with your puny wooden stick, failing to keep the bottom from burning over the intense fire.

7. The metro population are the hungry people

Behind you, the great room gets more crowded. You can tell, just from the sound of voices in the air, that people are hungry.

“When can we eat?” is the recurring refrain, spoken in a dozen languages.

You look up and see a family of five, a mother holding the hands of two of the children.  

“Just a bit longer, just wait a bit longer,” she says.

Next to her, a father bounces a baby up and down in his arms. Next to him, an old man quietly pounds his frail fist on a counter.

“I’ve been waiting here all day,” he says to nobody.

Next to him, an man in a hat chimes in.

“When I was a kid, you got your food right away, when you were hungry!” he agrees loudly.

The whole room is full of people.

“Excuse me, my child has not eaten since yesterday,” a quiet man says to you. “Can we get a little bit of soup while we wait?”

“I’m sorry,” you say. “That’s not allowed.”

The quiet man turns away.

There are dozens or hundreds or thousands of people in the room behind you, it’s hard to tell. They stand in groups or lean on the railing or camp out on the floor in the corner. A mother tucks a baby in the crook of her arm, and bounces up and down gently.

“Just a bit longer,” she says. “The soup’s almost done.”

A thousand voices fill the air. People seem patient, but you can feel the energy filling up the room, charging the spaces between the walls and coats and people.

All the while, more people are coming in through the big double doors along the far wall.

“Smells good,” says a man entering the room. “When do we eat?”

The folks who have been waiting look up. Some glare. Others return their gaze to their shoestrings.
 
8. Inequality is the soup line

You keep stirring, scraping and scraping the bottom of the pot with your thin stick. You manage to get a bit off each time, but you’re losing ground. There’s always more charred and burning chunks of vegetables and roux.

You stop and taste a bit of the stew. “Seems OK,” you say.

“I think it’s as good as it’ll get for now,” agrees the aproned woman to your left. “But it’s not like my grandmother made it. I don’t know what went wrong.”

“OK, let’s dish it out!” you say. Suddenly a group of people appears behind you. A team of uniformed men and women carry a big rack of bowls, spoons, and napkins. They must have been waiting for just this moment.

A woman with braids stands on a chair, and all at once the people in the room look up. She takes a deep breath and shouts in a clear, direct voice.

“OK LINE UP! FIRST CLASS TO THE FRONT! IF YOU PAID FOR A FIRST CLASS TICKET COME TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE!”

Along the wall, a door you didn’t see opens up. A new group of people appear, chatting and laughing with each other.

“Perfect,” says one of the new men man to the woman next to him. “I love the flavor, it’s such a deal.” 

“I don’t know, we had better soup last year," she says. “I remember when you’d get a much bigger bowl for the price.”

The people keep coming through the door, almost all of them white and well dressed. They line up and grab bowls from the table. You hear a murmuring mix of complaints and praise.

All around them, the others that have been waiting in the large room have quieted down. They watch the new line thinned lips.

“It’s OK honey, we’ll be up soon,” says the mom bouncing the baby.

The team with the bowls are using a large ladle, and each time they fill a bowl they scoop up a big helping of vegetables and spice in the broth. After about a half hour, the line starts to slow. Soon the pot is half the size.

The woman with braids gets back up on the chair.

“OK! LISTEN UP. ANYONE WITH A REGULAR TICKET, FORM A LINE TO THE LEFT.” The people seem to know what she is about to say.

“WE WILL START WITH THE LETTER A,” she shouts. “WE WILL MOVE THROUGH THE ALPHABET. NOW SERVING THE LETTER A.”

The woman dismounts the chair, and makes a gesture to a young man a few feet away. He is standing by an easel along  the railing. On the easel is a big pad of paper, and flips the page to reveals a big letter “A”.

You stir the pot, as the fire roars by your feet. The soup is getting thinner, as each new bowl is filled with the vegetables (and maybe meat). It continues to burn.

You watch as a thousand people look down at once. Each is examining a piece of paper they are holding. Groans drift through the room, sinking into the floorboards. Feet shuffle.

An hour goes by. The soup is going fast. 

A hundred more people come into the room. They look hopeful.

"NOW SERVING THE LETTER C," shouts the woman.

The New Orleans Metaphor

[Sixth in the highly unpopular "metaphor series" of blogposts. See also: Bicycling/Dancing, Vikings stadium/Star Wars, bikes/guns, gas/pop, and NIMBY/Amtrak.]

[Alec Soth photo.]

There's a way in which all cities, even Denver, are below sea level. All cities are surrounded by a sea of speed, an ocean of cars.

The sea of speed is an oceanic desire, the deep need for velocity. Because of the vast untapped potential of America's 300 million automobiles, each of which can travel 80 miles per hour at the drop of a right foot, there is effectively limitless demand for high-speed travel. This desire represents an ocean of need that surrounds our cities and towns, and explains the "fundamental law of road congestion" where any new road capacity is quickly "used up" by additional high-speed driving.

Meanwhile, speed is anathema to a walkable city. They simply cannot coexist. Even modest speeds -- say 40 miles per hour -- mean death to a human body. To accommodate the need for speed, a city must either build deadly roads or spend fortunes on massive grade-separated infrastructure. Either one of these choices destroys walkability.

So think of a walkable city as a place below-sea level, precarious and surrounded by the ocean. A  sidewalk is prone to calamity. A place like New Orleans or Amsterdam, inherently catastrophic.

[Building the Industrial Canal through New Orleans' Ninth Ward in 1918.]

The key point is that there's no meeting the demand for high-speed driving. For cities, even trying to do so offers a no-win scenario. The more you "let in" the surrounding speeding cars, the more you undermine your city. An urban freeway where cars travel at 50 or 60 miles per hour is like a dangerously engineered canal, an avenue to the ocean that could breach at any time, leaking speeding cars into the city at every on- and off-ramp. A highway through the heart of the city is like the MR-GO or the ill-fated Industrial Canal, crashes waiting to happen, leaks slowly eroding urban neighborhoods.

    The only solution for a city below sea level is to keep out the ocean altogether. The only answer is to take great pains, to fortify our borders with care. There's no accommodating the sea. It will win every time.

Instead, cities must be islands of stillness in the sea of speed. Walkable areas must protect themselves from cars on all sides by dikes, streets engineered to firmly keep gas pedals at bay, walls of design decisions demanding slowness and driver caution.

We must not let in the ocean. The alternative is an urban disaster.

The Bicycling / Dancing Metaphor

[Fifth in the highly unpopular "metaphor series" of blogposts. See also: Vikings stadium/Star Wars, bikes/guns, gas/pop, and NIMBY/Amtrak.]

[A room full of swing dancers.]

Have you ever walked into a room full of people dancing?

I’m not talking about your cousin's wedding. I'm talking about that kind of dancing where everyone seems to know the moves from some secret script?

I remember gazing at dancers once morning at at the Aster Café for brunch. The place featured swing music, a trio of accordion, guitar, and a drummer playing upbeat low-key jazz. Even better, there was a group of about a half-dozen swing dancers doing some West-coast Lindy hop. (Or at least that what I think it’s called.)

Watching them was magical. They seemed telepathic, fitting each other like lincoln logs. They seemed to sink into the music like your old aunt in her favorite armchair when she watches TV. I have no idea how they did it, but I was was wonderstruck, and couldn’t take my eyes of the young dancers flying on the tiny dance floor.

Another evening out, I walked into a room at the Minneapolis Eagles club and it was full of people doing the “texas two-step.” (Or at least that’s what I think it’s called.) Beautiful older women wearing skirts, graceful pairs of men in hats dancing in matching blue jeans, circling and spinning round the room while a country band played on the stage behind them. The place seemed alive, as if each couple was a wave of the same current, bobbing along like ducks, swirling together and rhythmically synced.

I have no idea how to texas two-step, but I tried anyway. That's unusual because, most of the time, watching good dancers simply invokes awe. We step back and wonder: "How do they do that? It’s beautiful. I could never do that."

["How do you do that?"]

It struck me the other day that, in this way, dancing is like riding a bike. When they see a bicyclist riding down the city street, many people think to themselves, “That’s nice but I could never to that.” It’s exactly the same reaction: appreciation, but also distance. A bit of wonder. A dash of fear.

Have you ever tried to get a reluctant n00b into the bike lane or onto the dance floor? In both cases there’s a steep learning curve.

For dancing, it’s not just about teaching people basic steps, though that’s certainly a difficult and important beginning. But it’s also about teaching people what it’s like to be dancing, how to hold your partner in just such a way. It’s getting people comfortable with subtle perspiration, with the idea of touching a stranger. It’s about when to spin, how to lead and follow, and learning how to occupy the space where you’re not always sure what to do next.

For urban bicycling, the learning curve can be equally trying. It’s not just about teaching people the basics of bicycling — how to turn, stop, or stay upright — though that’s certainly a difficult and important first step. But it’s also about teaching people what it’s like to ride on a street, to negotiate space with cars, to use ones body in the public eye. It’s about knowing when to go at a stop sign, how to lock your bike at the end, and how to occupy the ambiguous in-between spaces on which bicyclists so often rely.

In both cases, there’s a learning curve. And in both cases, once you become adept, it’s all too easy to forget about the stumbling first steps. Once you learn how to dance a waltz or some basic swing steps, you eventually become a seamless part of the dance floor, and it’s easy to forget how intimidating it once was. Instead, you’re part of the beautiful group, a dancer in tune with the music and the ever-changing elbow room.

The same holds for bicyclists, with the unspoken camaraderie of the bike lane. Spending time with other bicyclists, going on group rides, talking about which corners suck or what route to take, it’s easy to forget how foreign bicycling can look and feel for people who haven’t figured it out yet.

[Me at the Tapestry folk dance center in 1996.]

In many places around the world, old-school dancing is simply an everyday tradition. in the Balkans, young people quickly learn how to do intricate circle dances, and their steps are the last thing that old people forget. I’m sure that by the time my German ancestors were young adults they simply knew how to polka, that the “left-left right-right” rhythm comes naturally when you grow up with the music and the culture.

The same is true for urban bicycling. Just like people who grew up dancing, kids whose parents taught them to ride in the city come naturally to bicycling like a loon on a lake. There are entire countries where this is normal! In both cases, for dancing and bicycling, it’s because the urban ballet is a seamless part of the culture. In both cases, to an outsider, it seems impossible. To an insider, it’s natural.

Thankfully, as a kid I learned how to waltz. A few years later, I figured out how to ride a bike to the dance hall.

[Traditional German dancers teaching audience members some basic moves at the Deutsche Tag German Festival in Saint Paul, 2016.]

The Gas / Pop Metaphor

[Bendy tubes.]

"If you like cheap gasoline, this January is the month for you!" says the headline this morning.*

The framing reminds me of the recent Marathon gasoline advertisement, and its unforgettable bluegrass jingle: "With a full tank of freedom, find your own highway, we'll take you wherever you go."

The ad features magic American flag fumes, nostalgic images of gas pumps, and a close-up of a young white woman sipping the straw of a big cup of soda.

[Mmmm. Good ol' pop 'n' gas.]

[Ouch.]

The mistake that we make in framing articles about "people who like cheap gasoline" is to think about gasoline as a consumer choice. Sure there are "types" of gas -- high and low octane, I suppose. And maybe in some earlier era, when gas was young, there were differences between gas companies.

Filling your car with gasoline is like paying your taxes. Everyone hates doing it, everyone must do it.** It's not a choice, it's a curse.

The other side to the metaphor is that both gasoline and soda pop are 20th century mass market productions tied deeply to vast cultural and material infrastructures. Both the gasoline in your tank and the corn syrup that's the #1 ingredient in a big gulp rely on cheap energy, exploiting vast acres of land, shady conglomerates, and heavy government subsidies. And for both, these pernicious supply lines are hidden behind a patriotic, nostalgic, and shiny façade.

[Billions of dollars and lifetimes of work to convince us there's a difference.]

[From the NYC soda pop wars of 2013.]

And both gasoline and soda pop are terribly bad for your individual health. For a long time our culture was willfully naive about the effects of cheap pop, putting machines in schools or making the "super size" option a default choice. But then diabetes began sweeping the nation like a bad dance trend, and a few places began pushing back. There's a long way yet to go.

And apart from cigarettes, the only thing worse for you than soda pop is gasoline. Even if you don't drink gasoline -- and don't drink gasoline -- driving everywhere keeps hundreds of millions of Americans from getting any exercise in their everyday lives.

It would be nice if we stopped talking about "people who like cheap gas." For most people, gasoline isn't a question of taste. It's simply the most visible piece of an environmentally destructive transportation system that desperately needs reform.

Gas isn't pop. Gas isn't fun. It's a boring bad habit.

[Only an idiot has fun at the gas pump.]

* It's another article about gas prices, and articles about gas prices are about as useless they come. Never once do any of them mention tax structure, subsidies, or global oil markets. To simply report the price of gas is like reporting on the blowing of the wind. You might as well be an inanimate sign.

** PROTIP: Once you get rid of your car, you never buy gas any more.

[Pop has gotten cheaper, gas more expensive.]

Sidewalk Mailbox #6: High-speed One-ways are like Watering Your Garden with a Firehose

Here's a very lovely letter I just received:

Hi Bill,

I'm hoping you wouldn't mind helping me understand some City of Minneapolis street layouts/designs. The questions I have are regarding the bike lanes on 26th and 28th streets in Minneapolis. More info is here:
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/bicycles/projects/WCMS1P-133460

First and foremost, I want to say I support bike lanes. However, I think they're a tricky subject because most bikers do as they please on the roads and give a bad rap to all bikers. That being said, unfortunately, it only takes a few bad apples to ruin for everyone and create a stigma that bikers are a huge PITA. I fully support bike lanes but I'm fairly confident they can be implemented a lot better and make things more efficient for both bikers and vehicles.

I frequently use 26th and 28th streets because they're one ways and quick to get across town for my work - I work for a charitable gambling organization in Minneapolis whose main revenue source is pulltab sales at different bars so going from bar to bar is a big part of my time.

A few days ago, I was on one of the streets mentioned above and noticed that it is now 2 lanes instead of 3 - one full lane of traffic being devoted to a bike lane. This was during rush hour and traffic was backed up and it was backed up for at least a half mile (Hiawatha to ~Chicago). I noticed that once the road went back to 3 lanes (the original configuration), traffic suddenly flowed at a greater pace.

I'm having a hard time understanding why the city/planners/public works department takes a lane of automobile traffic away and dedicates it to bikes only. I was under the impression that streets were intended for cars. The amount of cars on a road vastly outnumbers bikes, so why are bikes taking lanes away from cars?

Consider this analogy: You have a container of water that holds 100 liters. It drains at a rate of 10 liters/minute but filling with water at a rate of 15 liters/minute. What's going to happen to in 20 minutes? The water will overflow. This is what's happening on those streets. You have streets that were meant to handle so much traffic and now there's even less room for that traffic so it backs up. Why would anyone consider this something viable?

We know the planet is warming because of CO2. Does anyone pay attention to that fact? It certainly doesn't seem that way to me. Why do bikes need to travel on 26th and 28th streets when 1 block North or South will accomplish the same thing? Are bike lanes put on busy streets so bikers don't have to stop for stop signs or cross busy streets as frequently? The amount of energy required to move a vehicle is much greater than a bike.

Adding bike lanes is complicated, but it seems that planners just put them wherever without considering all factors. Another good example is Portland and Park Avenues running from Minnehaha Creek to Downtown. Portland used to be 3 or 4 lanes and now it's only 2. And the speed limit was reduced from 35 to 30! A double whammy there!

I'm hoping you can provide a little insight into why bike lanes are added to somewhat busy streets. I really do not understand why bikes need to be on the same roads as vehicles. When bikes and vehicles collide, there's usually damage to the bike and sometimes the rider. If bike lanes were on less busy streets, would that eliminate a majority of accidents? Granted, you can't force bikers to ride on certain streets but vehicles will almost always follow the quickest route (I.E. using 26th or 28th instead of 27th or 29th).

Sincerely,

Impressionable Pulltab

Dear Impressionable,

Thanks for your thoughtful letter, particularly since it contains an analogy which I like a great deal. And first off, let me say that I'm a big fan of the actual physical pulltab industry, the ones where you pull a tab with your thumb and then stack the expired tabs into strange configurations. (It's these electronic pulltabs which are giving bars a bad name, and don't get me started on the gas station lottery.)

[My well-watered garden plot on the West Side.]

And fluid dynamics are interesting indeed! I was biking home last night with a friend and she wanted to stop by her community garden, which was on the way. At one point she asked me, "Can you go over to the hose and turn the water on?"

It took me a while to find it in the dark, but I did. and (lefty-loosey) uncranked the spigot.

"Woah, can you turn it down a bit?" She shouted back to me. So I turned the knob a bit to the right. She was holding the other end of the hose, and trying to water her flowers and beans.

"A bit more," she shouted, and I dialed it back just a bit.

"Is that OK?" I asked?

"Perfect," she said, and for the next five minutes she watered her three raised garden beds. She loves gardening, and later she said, "I feel so much better when I can come water the plants. They've perked up. Now they're all set for some great growing tomorrow."

[Stills from Arteries of New York City, 1941.]

You are certainly right about your "container of water" metaphor, as far as it goes. If our big goal as a city was to keep the most water flowing, then designing streets to maximize volume would be the obvious solution.

And in fact, that's how traffic engineers have traditionally thought of traffic, as cars circulating like blood through corporeal arteries. Just like cholesterol clogging arteries, congestion was seen as inherent vice. A lot of money, public space, and social resources were spent on unclogging our streets to maximizing the "flow" of cars.

But the problem is that cities aren't the hoses, they're the gardens. Just like you don't want to water your tomatoes with a firehose, you don't want to maximize traffic flow in a neighborhood. We need to stop focusing on the water, and start focusing on the plants. How much water do they need to grow? At what rate? Are we flooding them?

In the analogy, the garden is the city. Neighborhoods, sidewalks, streets, and even dive bars with pulltabs require more than just a stream of cars passing by their doorstep. The require public spaces for socializing. They require people to be able to easily stop, park, and cross the street. They require access to ways of getting around that aren't cars, so that after a you win at pulltabs and blow all your money on rounds of drinks for the house, you don't have to drive home drunk because you can catch the bus. And cities thrive when the flowing traffic is at a safe level, both for people in cars and for those on foot.

As I've written before, 26th and 28th have long been some of the most dangerous streets in Minneapolis. Their design dates back to the pre-freeway era, and worked well for the problem they were trying to solve. But the speedy convenience for South Minneapolis drivers comes at a high cost. For example, after a bicyclist named Jessica Hanson was killed on 28th Street, I pointed out how it was the #1 most dangerous street for bike crashes in the city. This isn't to mention the fact that the current high-speed one-way configuration is also dangerous for car drivers. (Here's a 2009 video showing the aftermath of one such accident.)

[From the 2013 Minneapolis Bike Crash Report.]

A while back, I dated a woman who lived in a first-floor apartment whose windows looked out directly onto 26th Street. Even when we were in her apartment, you could still hear (and feel) the traffic rushing by at 40 miles per hour. 26th and 28th are unpleasant places to spend time, and the feeling of danger permeates the neighborhoods on both sides of these roads.

In the big picture, the protected bike lanes are a dramatic positive change for both 26th and 28th, for people in and out of cars. In exchange for a decrease in speeds and a bit longer stacking times (noticeable mostly at rush hour), there is a much safer street with fewer accidents. As a bonus, the new design also creates a good bike route on Minneapolis' most dangerous street for bicyclists. And as one-way streets, they remain the best east-west routes through South Minneapolis, regardless of how many lanes there are.

The simple fact is that high-speed roads destroy walkable cities. It's like watering your garden with a firehose. Fixing these streets is long overdue, and I'm confident that South Minneapolis will flower.

Sincerely,
Bill

PS. I'm interested in how the pulltab business works. Maybe we can chat about that sometime!

[Today's 26th Street: a much safer design for cars and people, slightly diminished capacity.]