Koman ou ye?*
And welcome to this newsletter.
It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & all their discontents: streets, environment, energy, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:
- The flaws of traffic engineering;
- Rats as our friends;
- Public works in times of public scandal;
& much, much more.
Climate in the classroom
Promising news from what might be my life’s one and only mission of getting journalists to care exponentially more about—and, in effect, write exponentially better on—cities and how they’re changing: I’m teaching a new class!
The Beat: Climate City is an intermediate reporting course I created this fall at NYU Journalism, where students, having absorbed the basics of hard (breaking) and soft (feature) news writing, apply said skills to the story of all stories: the climate crisis. And we’re using our backyard of New York City as a groundswell for story ideas, whether that’s a City Hall diluting an ambitious building emissions law, a generational rethinking of our streetscape, or our willingness to compost our food scraps. (The recent Climate Week is a deft reminder that there’s a lot going on.) We’re covering it all.
The cohort has hit the ground running with reportage that will take them to sustainable fashion shows, coastal cleanups, courthouses, and other frontlines of the climate debates happening today. Excited to see what they come up with, which we’ll broadcast to the world on Medium. Stay tuned.
Oh, rats!
Speaking of the semester: each class, I look forward to sharing “the rat story.” This was when I stumbled upon a niche community of New Yorkers who open their homes up to the rodents that make everyone else in the city squirm, and wrote about them for The New York Times. (I don’t work on these types of stories anymore, but listen, I didn’t say I was opposed to them either.) The lesson for students: go to community meetings—and if a neighbor there says “I’m going to adopt two rats in the morning,” you have the green light to ask wtf.
For some reason, that piece in 2017 has kept me in the ether of the rat-verse, which has seen a bit of a Great Awakening under the current mayor. Mayor Eric Adams is someone who is obsessed with rats. He appointed a rat czar. He recently convened the first-ever National Urban Rat Summit. His administration started a rat-mitigation volunteer program called (can you guess it?) the Rat Pack. And he gets his sanitation commissioner (and even some elected officials) to say some hilarious sound bites about rats at press conferences.
But read between the lines and you’ll find a full-bodied effort to drastically change the way New Yorkers throw away their trash. It’s a laudable public health mission masked by a loathed public nuisance. I went on Tortoise Media’s Sensemaker podcast to talk about that initiative, rats in New York’s mythology, and this strangely entertaining chapter of an otherwise vexing administration.
OSA: No Distractions
It is the point in the newsletter where I should probably mention that the sitting mayor of New York City, for the first time in modern history, was charged with federal crimes, which include bribery and wire fraud. And whether Eric Adams likes it or not, this dramatic ramp-up by law enforcement throws the city’s ability to govern itself into full-on existential territory. To put it plainly: our municipal body—made up of 400,000 people who have to regularly ensure the well-being of 8.5 million people—is now being led by someone who will spend the majority of his time fighting a 56-page federal indictment. And that is tough.
But in our little slice of Queens, some of that public work is continuing unfettered. Crews from NYCDOT are laying out paint, stencils, and traffic signs, rewriting how 31st Ave will look for years to come. Whatever is happening at City Hall feels distant from here—thankfully. This was an administration who played politics with street safety if a wealthy donor said so. Moving forward without interference, in that sense, feels like an act of defiance, even though it shouldn’t be. But hey, we’ll take the peace and quiet for as long as we can get it.
On that note: I want to give a special shout-out to a new report out from Open Plans, which lost a bit of flare in what has been a dizzying news cycle. It essentially calls for a much more holistic framework to public space management in New York City, rather than a piecemeal system that relies way too heavily on volunteers or people in the know. (31st Ave Open Street is cited a few times in the report—thank you!) The ideas contained in it can easily be exported elsewhere; one of my favorites is a ‘public space team’ for each district, who would corral institutional resources—funding, capital design, knowledge share—to expand and diversify the public realm at a hyper-local level.
You can read the whole thing here.
Bright Side: Smarter Drills
I rarely take the time to shout-out my partner here, in part because she hates the spotlight. (Even though Streetbeat is her IP.) But everyone who knows her also knows that she deserves it regularly. And so, apologies in advance, Ange.
In 2015, Angela wrote a widely shared feature for The Atlantic about the school shooting drills she grew up with in Coppell, Texas—ultra-realistic simulations that harrowingly re-enact the immense trauma and horror brought on by what is, unequivocally, one of America’s worst moral stains in modern times. They’re meant to prepare students for what could be the scariest minutes of their lives—know if your teacher has a gun; know where the shooter is; know where to hide; know when to escape—through the use of shock and awe. But in a country so allergic to any real gun regulation, Angela asked the question probably on most minds of students who, like her, experienced the drills firsthand: Does this work?
Almost a decade later, the President of the United States floated the same sentiment in an executive order signed this month. “These drills vary widely in their approach, and many parents, students, and educators have expressed concerns over the effectiveness of and trauma caused by some approaches to these drills,” Biden wrote. He directed his relevant agencies to extensively study the efficacy of active-shooter drills, and then share best practices with schools and educators—particularly around “how to prevent or limit trauma or psychological distress” that might come with them.
Again, it’s a centimeter of progress versus actually limiting access to firearms. But I’m proud to say my partner was on it years ago, demanding change.
On the Radar
Killed by a Traffic Engineer, by Wes Marshall
I live off of a corner that, planning-wise, doesn’t quite make sense.
It’s a diagonal road—which I’ve written about here before—so drivers have to inch way over any crosswalk to see if a car is coming. (That’s if they even stop.) We have what’s known as ‘daylighting,’ where intersections are made more visible through measures like curb extensions or enforcement, but only at one corner, which happens to be the corner most useful to the driver, not the pedestrian. The other two allow cars to park right up to the crosswalk, so if you’re shorter than an SUV or pick-up truck—like any child, older adult, or shorter person is—no car will see you unless you’re in the middle of the road.
This design can have deadly consequences. When I’ve asked NYCDOT to revisit the design (and I have, several times), I’ve gotten a response that the corner doesn’t qualify for this type of intervention, thanks to MUTCD—the federal engineering standards that underlie how our streets look, which prioritize traffic flow above all else. And so, we’re left with an unsafe corner as a result.
This is all to say: I’d like to thank Wes Marshall, an engineer at CU Denver, for dedicating over 300 pages of his latest book to dissecting how this system, which averages about 43,000 deadly car crashes each year in the U.S. and is somehow deemed ‘good to go,’ all came to be. Marshall has written one of the most alarming books in the planning world that I’ve read in some time—a remarkable takedown of his own profession as a pseudoscience based on shaky research and outdated concepts. (For example: we know billboards make driving less safe, and that removing them would save lives. Same goes for lowering speed limits. But we trust engineers when they say ‘No need to touch them.’) It’s a history lesson, a call to action, and a brutal accounting of what went wrong, which, together, reads like a mea culpa of our societal values. And it’ll really make your blood boil, which, to me, is the sign of a powerful read.
(A note: this is the subject of a book club put on by Sam Sklar and Jon Jon Wesolowski, aka the Happy Urbanist. Thanks for having me, guys.)
Streetbeat Gig Board
The City of Portland is hiring an urban freight coordinator, helping with initiatives like e-cargo bike uptake and low emissions zones. (Portland, OR)
The City of Hoboken—a city that hasn’t had a traffic fatality on its streets in years—is looking for a new director of transportation and parking. Due today. (Hoboken, NJ)
The good folks at Trust for Public Land are bringing on a research fellow to help lead their industry-leading City Parks Fact survey. (Remote/Flexible)
A new federal grant gave NYCDOT some bucks to hire a manager for its public e-bike charging program. (New York, NY)
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