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On this Memorial Day weekend, let’s check in with two former D Mag staffers who are quoted in the press today. First up is Eric Celeste in the Dallas Morning News:

Watkins spokesman Eric Celeste scoffed at the GOP criticism. “If they want to use an issue Craig has already addressed, that’s fine,” Celeste said. “It’s clear they don’t want to talk about what matters to voters: Craig Watkins’ record of making Dallas safer as district attorney — 99.4 percent conviction rate, crime in Dallas down, and freeing innocent people.”

Next up, Adam McGill in Bloomberg:

The filings in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fort Worth, Texas, “are intended to ensure that the bankruptcy proceedings meet the objective of maximizing value for all creditors,” Adam McGill, a spokesman for the lender group, said in an e-mailed statement.

Eric gets big points for scoffing, no doubt. But Adam’s quote is in Bloomberg, and he’s addressing a national matter that involves hundreds of millions of dollars. Eric’s quote is just about local politics. Advantage McGill.

On this Memorial Day weekend, let us pause, for a moment, and remember the CueCat.  For, you see, Time magazine has, nestling it next to Agent Orange and New Coke as one of the 50 worst inventions. No time period listed in the feature, so I’m going to say ever. It’s one of the 50 worst inventions ever.

So pour a 40 of your favorite adult beverage on the curb for CueCat. Long may he live in lists of really bad ideas.

Last week, I asked if this Friday feature should continue. The response seemed to be a tentative yes (with a few notable dissenters saying that they wished I would die). So by popular demand, here is this week’s installment, wherein I call an ad in the Dallas Observer. This one was listed in the “adult services” section and read:

BEAUTIFUL OLIVE-TONED EGYPTIAN GODDESS
is ready to play. Pet my sphinx!!
Squeeze my pyramids!

So what happens now that the “pink out” was scheduled for tomorrow and Phil Mickelson won’t even be there? You know what would be cool? If Mickelson showed up in the gallery and watched from behind the ropes for the day.

Greenville Ave. at Dyer.

Happy hour is at the Londoner Dallas, in the heart of the State-Thomas neighborhood in uptown. I’ll arrive bespectacled in a monocle riding a unicycle. How will you get there?
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If you ever come across someone from this City, expect to hit the pub and talk politics, where you’ll order a guiness and they’ll grab a bud heavy and proceed to discuss who they hate more than anybody you possibly could with an exquisite singularity of vision.

As they rant, your American conscious awareness drifts from the topic at hand to beverage of choice where you are struck by the irony, apparently indicative of their strong desire to americanize.

However, like any good copycat, they sought to mimic only what we did best:

• gutting core of their City for cars by way of parking garages;
• mindless if not potentially fraudulent commercial lending;
• and a rampant building spree marked by outward and upward growth completely independent of any demand.

Despite those on-goings, the City hasn’t changed enough to where you wouldn’t recognize it. But, don’t bother to ask how they’re doing or they might ask you for some change. Where, we will then reach into our pockets, find that the bottom has been cut out, and steal their change jar before sprinting down the street, around the bend, and out of sight.

We’re selling the view. Just look at it.

Of course, that view is supplied by buildings shockingly disconnected from the scale of the rest of the City. While a certain measure of real estate development is dependent upon a “visionary” intuition, it also needs to be tempered by some restraint occasionally. Or just reality. That works as well.

The irrepressible Terry Bradshaw agrees with Roger Staubach that the Cowboys have a legitimate shot at playing in next year’s Super Bowl in Arlington. “Absolutely” they do, the former Steelers QB-turned-Fox NFL Sunday broadcaster said in Dallas the other day. “Tony Romo will be better. Dez Bryant is gonna help. … Absolutely! Which will be nice, because we’re [Fox] gonna be here doing the game.” Bradshaw (photo here by Jeanne Prejean) was in town for a JCPenney fundraiser for after-school programs at the Dallas Sheraton.

Do you want to see the naughty puppet-featuring, Tony Award-winning musical for free on Sunday? Then get thee to FrontRow.

Last night I was able to attend the Dallas Bike Plan open house at City Hall for what was a standing room only house in the Council Chambers. At first that seems impressive until you think that a City of over 1 million only has about 200 people or so attending a public hearing. /200 is an estimate. I have no idea how many people the council chambers holds.

Having run a number of similar public workshops and open houses, I was well aware of what to expect. These things are always feel good moments for those running them. Why? Because everyone responsible for getting a particular study/proposal moving forward have a conception in their own mind of what the result could/should/or would be. The arguments are yet to be had when those various visions begin to intersect or compete. The challenge is always marshaling the various powers that be into one cohesive direction.

Since I don’t feel like organizing this into one cohesive narrative (and at this point it probably shouldn’t be until the plan gets some actual vision to it), I’ll leave you with the good and the bad from the evening:

THE GOOD:
The Mayor and the councilmembers who showed up, some of whom even stuck around until the end. This effort definitely seems to have their full support and the Mayor gets an A+ from me for acknowledging that this is one step towards densification and a more sustainable, prosperous City.

THE BAD:
The excruciating half hour of acknowledgements, back-patting, and self-congratulatory remarks before the presentation even started. I understand that some credit is due for steering the tremendous inertia of car-oriented commuting in the right direction, but let’s not count our chickens before their hatched. Will you stand up to transpo or DOT when they shrilly scream, “OMG, we won’t hit level of service A if you remove that lane of traffic! We have arbitrary formulas that prove it!!!!11” Hmm?

THE GOOD:
Toole Design. We hired the right people. I was very impressed when they stressed that this wasn’t a trails plan. We have trails and we have plans to connect them. This is a roads plan for bicycle lanes and cyclist safety.

THE BAD:
Don’t limit or censor yourself already Toole. More than a few times they showed a few examples of road treatments prioritizing the safety of cyclists and/or pedestrians over car movement where the setting was either foreign or the solution was deemed too radical for Dallas. Already. Push the envelope. Have no fear. We need a broad range of context-appropriate solutions to deal with our road network appropriately. When Dallas gets behind something it gets behind it all the way. Just look at our road and highway system. World class!!!

THE GOOD:
The crowd as mentioned before was enthusiastic, engaged, and well…there.

THE BAD:
I would guess at least 90% are the hardcore enthusiasts that bike already. The plan isn’t about them (although their safety is a part of it as well), although their enthusiasm is what made it happen in the first place and what have to sustain in order to carry it through to realization.

While education is an important part of safety, this isn’t about bringing all cyclists up to your level of expertise in navigating Dallas traffic. This is about winding Dallas traffic down while simultaneously supplying the accommodations so that everyone else that wasn’t there, or doesn’t currently bike because they are intimidated can feel safe cycling to work or wherever rather than using their car, the petrol to power that car, and the space to park that car.

THE GOOD:
Toole showed images of a number of concepts that I whole-heartily encourage, including:

• Sign Pollution – Signs are ugly and litter the landscape/streetscape. Signage should always be supplementary and good design and wayfinding should be largely intuitive. Otherwise, it just isn’t a good design and signage is what is used to cover up those faults. I loved the painted bicyclist on the stone paver. Yes, plz.
• Back-in Angled Parking – I was around this concept when it was first created while I interned with traffic calming gurus Walter Kulash and Ian Lockwood. Those two probably had as much of an impact on my understanding of cities as anybody. Lesson: no matter your field, it is always good to work with experts in other fields and it is your job to find the tangential relationship.
• Bike Green Lights at traffic signals. I like that they give at least equal priority to cyclists as a mode of traffic on the streets. My idealistic vision would be that they aren’t necessary however.
• Trail/Road Crossings – These are important and as Toole pointed out, sometimes the right-of-way is given to drivers and the yield to cyclists, sometimes vice versa. This is critical though, because our reflexive solution is always changing planes by way of bridges. Stupid.
• I like the idea of protected bike lanes uphill and shared lanes with cars downhill. We’re not exactly Seattle, but this was a good idea for how to smartly design when you only have a few feet to play with.
• Routine Accommodation – Much of this work can be done with simple restriping or repaving which occurs every few years anyway as part of the ordinary transpo budget ameliorating worries of increased cost. Of course, I say we just rip up all of the macadam and expose the brick under so many of our streets.

THE I’M NOT READY TO SAY GOOD OR BAD YET:
I saw a lot of mention of street sections, but as Toole pointed out the biggest conflict point, where accidents occur most often, is at intersections. Two things to this:

1. Sections are important, but too often a road gets one section and that section is then extruded for whatever length of the street. The section should vary based on context. For example, much of our city is based on 1-mile square arterial grid. The intersections are where neighborhood retail has clustered in the form of strip centers. These areas need to densify. The intersections are the nodes of place and changing the road section here should be different than the road section between it and the next node 1-mile away. This area between is the ‘link’ and should be designed as such.
2. I will be most interested to see if there are recommendations for intersections drawn in plan, or from above. Too many of our intersections are designed with curb radii that are too large allowing for “rolling stops” or cars to roll right thru stop signs or red lights when turning right. In the future cyclists very well might be there. I believe the idea of “cycle boxes” is meant to address this by putting cyclists’ stopping point out in front of cars where they are then moved further back from the intersection to ensure sight of the cyclists who are at greater risk of personal injury.

THE WHERE ARE WE GOING:
I want measurable goals. In fact, this City needs measurable outcomes. For example, Copenhagen established a goal that they want 0, that is ZERO traffic fatalities in a year. That is a clear, measurable outcome. In that way, we have something to weigh policy and approach. We get too driven by ideology that we lack the ability to go back and determine what worked or what didn’t. The lack of these is why we as a city tend to spin in circles like a spastic canine rather than in one concerted, positive direction (ya know other than council districts as vassal fiefdoms).

What those are yet I don’t know (the goals board was always too crowded so I couldn’t tell how specific they got), let’s let Toole arrive at those but here might be some examples:

• By xxxx year, Dallas will have the greatest percentage of bicycle commuters to work of any city in the country over 250,000 people; or
• By xxxx year, Dallas will have the highest percentage of bicycle/pedestrian/non-automobile commuters in the country per capita.
• By xxxx year, Dallas will have more protected bike lanes than any other city in the country.
• By xxxx year, Dallas will have removed more lanes of car-only traffic than any other country.
• By xxxx year, areas within 3-5 miles (logical bicycle commuting distance) Dallas has densified its core at a greater rate than any other City in the country.

Those are all long-term, and there need to be short- and mid-term goals as well, but without clear, measurable outcomes (on any policy or directive), we are like Sammy Jankis continually getting electro-shocked everytime we pick up the star-shaped metal object. Then we just end up killing our wife unwittingly, breaking out of a mental institution, and then “solving” the mystery of who killed our wife by going on a mass-murdering spree. And that would be no good.

Remember Sammy Jankis, ya effing quacks.

Get ready for the dreaded double-dip. $3 trillion in commercial real estate is about to go [poof]:

Why do you think banks have stopped lending in this arena? The market is completely saturated with vacant real estate. Commercial real estate either has a market or sits empty. At least with residential real estate if you drop prices low enough you will get buyers. With CRE if you built a complex with no foot traffic you can’t give the stuff away. The loan is only one aspect of costs. You have utilities and other fixed overhead. The fact that banks have pulled back from this market tells us no good deals are coming to the table.

How’s that sprawl working out for you? I’ve always loved the idea of business park. Not loved as in liked, but loved as in amused that people thought they might work. Banks lose. 🙁
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Charles Hugh Smith discusses that the root of the housing problem hasn’t been solved and reminds that housing ownership is really “ownership.” You’re still paying off debt. The banks own the house. Banks Win! 🙂
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Zero Hedge splashes cold water on people foolish, naive, or gullible enough to believe realtors who say “now is the time to buy!” Of course, they do. Their livelihood depends upon you buying. Except:

There are 140 million personal residences in the US. Today, there are 26 million homes either directly or indirectly for sale…Another 8 million mortgage owners are late on their payments and are on the verge of foreclosure, bringing the total overhang to 34 million homes.

Now, let’s look at the buy side. There are 35 million who are underwater on their mortgages and aren’t buying homes anytime soon, nor are the 35 million unemployed and underemployed. That knocks out 50% of the potential buyers.

Here is where it gets really interesting. There are 80 million baby boomers retiring at the rate of 10,000 a day. Assuming that they downsize over time from an average 2,500 sq ft. home to a 1,000 sq. ft. condo, and eventually to a 100 sq. ft. assisted living facility, the total shrinkage in demand is 4.3 billion sq.ft. per year, or 1.7 million average sized homes. That amounts to a shrinkage of aggregate demand for a city the size of San Francisco, every year. You can argue that the following Gen-Xer’s are going to take up the slack, but there are only 65 million of them with a much lower standard of living than their parents.

Ohhhh, frowny face. Banks lose. 🙁

Perhaps banks should be hiring urban experts to understand where true and lasting value is…
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Now, to the fun stuff…

Wired has an awesome article on NYC droppin’ the mathematics upside your head to deal with traffic. NYC (smartly) compiles just about every form of data imaginable; a painful reminder of just how far behind Dallas is. This was evident when New York Mag put together their neighborhood livability rankings based heavily upon various publicly available statistics the City has compiled. Dallas, nor the metro, has anything close to it.
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Lastly, Laurence Aurbach at Ped Shed links to a new study suggesting that intersection density is the single most critical factor for determining walkability, much moreso than density or diversity. I could have told them that. This was actually livability indicator #8. Perhaps, I should change the name.

Furthermore, Density is merely the response to desirability and walkable urban form is what accommodates a range of densities based on demand. Diversity, well that is simply a by-product of livability, which has at its root mobility where walkability is still the best mode with the most positive and least negative externalities.

Like all ‘alpha’ studies, I find the simple measure of intersections per square area, while helpful, overly abstract. In one instance, they seem to be saying that two-way intersections are better for walkability than four-way because they lead to denser intersections. What about dense network of four-way intersections?

This goes beyond walkability and more toward the “neural network” and interconnectivity of the grid in general, but as we all know a four-way intersection generates traffic from 4-directions rather than 2 creating a higher degree of traffic (by foot or car) which retailers need, which in turn can (dependent upon design) generate more foot traffic.

This study could get “smarter,” in my opinion if instead of merely counting intersections it assigned a rating system to each of those intersections. In a way measuring node density (or quality thereof) rather than just intersection density and the node rankings would be based on two factors off the top of my head:

1) amount of directions intersecting the intersection, ie a four-way is better than a two-way (distance of which is mitigated by the density calc) and then;

2) a professional subjective factor of quality of pedestrian experience.

This is actually something that I have been thinking about formulating for some time, I just haven’t had the time to get around to it yet. I know an academician is probably loathe to apply some subjective criteria, but what is the point of being a professional if you can’t add your expertise to an equation that by nature would always be a blunt abstraction.

You’re aware, of course, that our Best of Big D Readers’ Choice: Services poll is under way. You can vote once a day, every day through June 6 for your favorites in a host of categories.

Salon Three Thirty wasn’t among our nominees for best hair salon. But they’ve started a write-in campaign with this video explaining just how easy it is to vote:

Yes, the music is a little cheeseball. But I say, well done.  I don’t know anything about any salons, but I’m kind of pulling for them now.

Now, you go vote your own mind.