MyWHaT

Earlier this week a small brigade of guerrilla gardeners received a shipment of annuals for use in the battle against ugly public spaces. You’ll notice the small patches of flowers along the in-town TART Trail east of Grant St. With this heat, we may lose some, so if you have extra water give ‘em a drink.

This guerrilla campaign has no direct affiliation to the yarn bombing downtown (IPR)…but that’s pretty cool too.

Weekly Chatter

• More food trucks please (NYTimes)

• Let there be normal people!  (Planetizen) (But do they have to be naked?) and why ”there is more to making a city bike friendly than creating pathways, and part of that is changing attitudes.” (Environment 360)

“While Americans still view bicycling as a form of exercise or recreation, a tectonic shift in attitudes has taken place in many parts of Europe, where people now regard bicycling as a serious form of urban mass transportation.”

• Of course, not everyone sees the normalcy…and the heat is causing them to rant “Damn bicyclists!” (American Thinker)

• Busting Bureaucracy: ”Rather than surrender to bureaucracy, take it upon yourself to break it.” (99 Percent)

• Get this train a moving! A2 to Chi-town needs some speed (Economics of Place)

• Will the Millennials just grow old and boring and move back to the ‘burbs? (New Geography)

• WTF? The 11th most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians (Marietta, Georgia) convicts a pedestrian for vehicular manslaughter. (Examiner) This episode reminds some of #DangerousbyDesign mentioned by PBS’s Blue Print America(Grist) Sent to me with the question: “South Airport maybe?”

• And, we build complete streets in part because the more people bicycling, the safer our cities and communities (Planetizen)

“Having streets that are safer for pedestrians, and bicyclists, too, is not some ivory-tower dream of automobile-haters…Increasing pedestrian and bicycle traffic makes a city more livable, and hence more attractive and viable. Getting from here to there without being wrapped in a ton of steel and plastic creates a much more social environment.”

Retweets

• (Andybikes):  ”Moving from carmageddon to cyclotopia” says LA Council President Eric Garcetti.
• (tomvanderbilt):  Dueling drivers leave cyclist dead (when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers).
• (ccoletta): ”That’s what makes me a Democrat. I’ve accepted the idea that other pple exist, pple who want other things…& grasp that we are all joined together in a common purpose we call the United States of America” – Neil Steinberg