are you kidding me?

Imagine a super-freeway, an interstate highway wider than a football field is long (end zones included), boasting as many as 23 lanes! Sounds like science fiction, I know, but it's an actual plan for the expansion of I-75 on the northwest periphery of Atlanta--a highway that, at 15 lanes, is already ranked as the widest in the country. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the details; you can also read more about the project from the authorities themselves. I don't suppose that any one of those 23 lanes will be reserved for bicycles? Might make an interesting stage for the Ford (formerly Dodge) Tour "de" Georgia. By the way, what is an auto maker doing sponsoring a bike race anyway? At least the Tour of California keeps it in the family by going with EPO-producer Amgen. And Tour de Georgia? Now, Tour de Louisiana or Tour de Quebec, I would understand. Even Tour du Pont was pretty clever. But Georgia was named after British King George II, from the Germanic House of Hanover. Somehow the French "de" just doesn't fit, in the same way that, say, a Tour de Deutschland, Giro di England, or Vuelta a New Hampshire wouldn't work either. Thank you, Tour of California organizers, for having the courage and the common sense to just stick with English.

crash!

No, this is not a post about the recently crowned "best picture of the year". Instead, much for painfully, it's about my bike race on Sunday. Nothing quite like a good crash to begin the new season. Due to luck, conservative riding, and I'd like to think skillful riding, I've avoided racing crashes entirely since my partial return to the sport a few years ago. But that string came to a rude end yesterday morning on Westchester Parkway overlooking the north runways of LAX. Fortunately, the damage to my bike, my clothes, and most importantly, my body were minor. I actually rode home from the bike race! Some 24 hours later, though, I'm still upset about the incident--both at myself and my fellow crash victims. This particular race is run on a flat, boring 4-mile circuit where the wind and lack of hills almost guarantees a big group finish. Since this was my first race of the year, and I really only wanted to test my legs and refind that elusive racing rhythm--combined with the fact that I'm just not very good, especially in a sprint--I had zero ambition for a high placing. All I wanted to do was finish safely with the group and perhaps help out a teammate or two along the way. Everything went to plan for almost the entire race, but on the last lap, with an antsy pack still chaotically bunched together, it became clear that finish was going to be hairy. Rather than an agressive move, I was trying to stay safe and look for any openings that presented themselves. One such opening kind of emerged on the back straight, and I was able to move up to the middle of the pack rounding the final U-turn. Safely through that, I again cautiously looked for openings, neither sitting up nor truly gearing up a sprint. The pack was spread wide across all three lanes, from curb to curb. Guys were bunching up dangerously on both sides, so I moved to the middle and found a nice cushion of open space. Then the carnage began. A big crash on the left, and I happily pedalled away from perhaps the worst sound anyone will ever hear short of a true battlefield: aluminum, carbon, lycra, flesh, and pavement, all coming together in a very unsymphonic way. Shortly thereafter, I saw a teammate in my peripheral vision shoved into and over the curb on the right and take a very nasty tumble. With much of the field caught up in the mess or simply choosing to pull up, and no teammates nearby to assist, I decided to continue to ride hard but safely to the finish to perhaps grab a top-20 placing, which by my unambitious standards would be pretty good. No more than 150 meters from the line, though, my "safe" ride came to end. Maybe 5 or 10 meters in front of me, a guy goes down suddenly and hard. I didn't see what happened, but he must have been bumped and just lost control. I only had a split second to react--one of those slow-motion split seconds that you only experience in a time of danger; there was nowhere to go the right, and I sensed (perhaps wrongly) that there was nowhere on the left. Instead, I grabbed the brakes, scrubbed off some speed, and instinctively began my tuck as I plowed into the fallen rider. Then it's just another extended slow-motion moment in my head that is strangely blank and peaceful--no sound, no sight, and despite slamming into the ground, no feeling either--until sitting on the pavement, a couple of feet from my fallen bicycle and at least one other rider also taken down by the same guy, or perhaps by me, reality began to sank in all too quickly. After a brief check of my body (thankfully nothing broken or truly bleeding) and then my bike--only minor damage--anger set in and I start cussing in a brief angry rage that few who know me would ever think was possible. I mean: 150 frickin' meters from the finish, and we're "racing" for at best 20th place. And you let a little bump take you down?! Then again, what was I thinking? While not racing hard, I certainly could have sat up and truly ridden in safely. Here's the really stupid part: I can't wait to race again. Maybe not next week, or even the week after. But not too much later than that, I know I'll be itchin' to go--hopefully a little wiser for the experience.

life on the streets

It certainly has become cliche to bemoan traffic in big-city America, especially metro Los Angeles, where gridlock, "road rage", and just plain idiocy are accepted as the norm. As both a bicyclist and a motorist, I definitely tend to think this way, and recent stories of a spoiled playboy wrapping his million-dollar Ferrari around a telephone pole while doing 160 mph (!) down PCH in Malibu, or miscellaneous drivers plowing into my law-abiding cycling teammates on recent rides only confirms my sense of anarchy on the roads. But the geographer in me knows full well that our roads here in California and the USA are remarkably tame, orderly, and even safe when compared to so many other parts of the world. There was a piece last year in the Atlantic Monthly about Iraq, for example, contrasting the orderly traffic within the American-fortified "Green Zone" with the seemingly lawless jungle on the streets throughout the rest of Baghdad--not even taking roadside bombs into account. Admittedly, that's a special situation. But it really isn't all that exceptional. For example, I received the following tidbit this week in a free e-mail update from The Economist:

The migalka, a flashing blue siren that sits on top of sleek black cars, inspires road rage in even the calmest Moscow driver (of which there are few). Left over from Soviet times, migalkas are seemingly ubiquitous, a symbol of official privilege available to anyone with political connections or very deep pockets. Like the sirens of police cars, migalkas enable drivers to run red lights, rush down the wrong side of the road and even lurch onto sidewalks. Anger about these sirens boiled over in Moscow on February 12th, when 1,000 cars took to the streets in protest, many of them brandishing signs slamming the “hot rods with sirens”.

This ire is justified. In 2005 the governor of the Siberian Altai region was killed in an accident: armed with a migalka, he drove down the wrong side of the road at 200kmph and ran into a car making a left turn. In early February, a court found the other driver guilty of the governor's death, and sentenced him to four years in a labour colony. The verdict caused outrage across the country and inspired the Moscow demonstration. Participants said their action was part of a demand for fairness and equality before the law. Alas, the protest cars quickly got caught in Saturday traffic. Their route was further obstructed by traffic police, stationed every kilometre to break up the convoy.

Stories like these shouldn't keep us from observing and agitating against the very real problems that we face on the streets and highways of California and the USA. But they should at least give us pause for thought to appreciate how good we truly have it. Indeed, given how law- and rule-abiding the vast majority of American motorists are, it's really shameful that we have so far still to go in devising such rules and laws to make our streets safer and more convenient for all of us, no matter what mode of transport we're employing at the time.

new family blog

Looking ahead to 2006, I'm going to refine my blogging a little bit. Family-related news and notes will be posted to a new blog (californiamorris.blogspot.com) while this blog will remain--for the time being--a miscellaneous collection of comments and accounts of my life as both a cyclist and teaching geographer. Happy Holidays!

urban blight: a short primer

Widely used for more than half a century in the United States, the term "blight" carries a very loaded set of meanings in the context ofmodern urban planning and design setting--and how we define "blight" lies at the heart of much of the current controversy concerning eminent domain. The word "blight" stems from Old English origins, where it had the general meaning of a "rust" or a skin disease--the deterioration of something at the surface. This meaning became specifically applied to plants, and the various fungal diseases that didn't just kill the plant but caused its leaves, stems, etc. to become withered or discolored; the most (in)famous of these is the "potato blight" that triggered mass migration of Irish in the 1840s to the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. Over time, "blight" became used as a general term suggesting the spoilage or destruction of something, typically with the connotation that some sort of metaphorical "disease" was at work, resulting in, among other things, the "uglification" of something. Thus, in an urban area, blight is often taken to mean a "run down" neighborhood or building that has fallen into disuse and dilapidation due to a lack of maintenance. This degradation of the landscape is seen as representing a more profound degradation of the resident society. So far, so good; kind of like porn, while we might be hard-pressed to define urban blight in words, we certainly know it when we see it. But there's a catch. The Oxford Dictionary of Geography reminds us that in planning circles, "blight" refers to "the reduction of economic activity or property values in a particular area"--especially in terms of commercial activity as opposed to residential properties (where "slum" is the more commonly applied term). This is why the post-1949 shift in focus of urban renewal efforts in the United States away from "slums" to "blight" is significant; urban renewal ever since has been less about low-income housing and more about generating commercial activity and the increased property values and tax revenues that come with that activity. In other words, a planner's "blighted" building or neighborhood is often someone's beloved "home"--not the most prestigious of properties, but not necessarily something the residents perceive to be "run down". That was certainly the case with the plaintiffs in the recent Supreme Court case concerning New London (CT)'s use of eminent domain. As of yet, Wikipedia does not have an entry on "urban blight", but there is a very good discussion of "urban renewal". Also, you might wish to consult Robert Cowan's Dictionary of Urbanism. I only just now discovered this resource, so I'm not familiar with it. But it does contain an entry on "blight". It seems worth checking out, too.