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1. pickpockets

2. capita

3. clarification

4. architects

5. flexisexuality

(Obviously, I have excluded proper nouns here, which I suppose I should have made clear in the headline. But I’m trying not to use my delete key today, in accordance with the wishes of my new life coach, Fran Pepperpaw. So, sorry. And, honestly, I’m not a giant fan of “flexisexuality” as a word; it’s, like, hey, do something first, right? But I feel like, oh, Daniel, or maybe Hein would have wondered why I didn’t pick that, in favor of, say, gingerbread, and then that would have become a thing. I guess what I’m saying is: I love the word pickpockets and will fight to the death anyone who disagrees.)

Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Gary Doer, likes to point out that his country is the biggest foreign supplier of energy to the U.S., as well as Texas’ second-largest trading partner, after Mexico. And that the relationship with Texas plays out in sometimes-surprising ways. “Did you know,” Doer said with a smile during a visit to Dallas yesterday, “that the highest per-capita consumers of [7-Eleven] Slurpees in North America is Manitoba? And that the highest per-capita consumers of Crown Royal–made in Gimli, Manitoba, with beautiful clean water–is Texas?”

Doer (pictured) was in town to make some more serious points, though. One was with a visit to–and a show of support for–Fort Worth’s Lockheed Martin facility, whose F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project is threatened by U.S. budget-cutters. Canadian companies are doing $16 billion worth of work on the F-35, and the Canadian government’s buying 65 of the planes. Doer said possible cuts to the program “concern” him.

The ambassador was also here to talk up Alberta’s oil sands–attacked as “dirty oil” by environmentalists–and TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil-sands crude through Texas to Houston. “There’s no question that in the alpha stage, oil-sands emissions were higher than they are today,” Doer said. “But emissions have since gone down 40 percent. They’re now lower than emissions from California thermal oil that was excluded from California’s light-crude standard. And, water utilization for oil-sands production has gone from 10-to-1 to 2-1.”

(That’s not the same water, presumably, that goes into the Crown Royal.)

The first article today is an interesting one from SmartPlanet about our cognitive maps and getting lost in buildings. They go on to blame architects who have incredibly advanced understanding of space in three-dimensions:

1. Florence

2. Paris

3. Dubrovnik

4. New York City

5. Vancouver

6. Munich

7. Edinburgh

8. Boston

9. Melbourne

10. Sydney

If you’re nothing like me, you’re getting your Christmas shopping done a little early this year, which means you might very well be visiting a local shopping center after work. If you’re in Plano, take Mr. Fluffy Tail (I’m referring to your dog, weirdo) to have his photo taken with Santa at the Shops at Willow Bend. If you’re willing to brave the well-groomed masses of Uptown, check out the West Village’s Winter Wonderland celebration. And if you’re buying a new coat for your wife at Burberry in NorthPark Center, stop by Gingertown Dallas, where you’ll find crews of architects, engineers, and designers building gingerbread houses.

Not ready to subject yourself to the holiday retail madness? Can’t say I blame you. Jump with me to the next page for more options.

Hey, remember the Dallas Cowboys? They’re in last place now, so you may have either just decided to pretend they’re not there, in that giant glass and steel building that, from aerial view, looks kind of like a hemorrhoid pillow. Or maybe you are are True Believer and are  on your computer right this very minute, working out mathematic schemes that would still get America’s Team to the Super Bowl, if pretty much every team got sucked into the ground, save maybe the Lions.

Well, there was a chance that their game against the  Eagles would get pulled by the NFL from the televisions this Sunday on account of mental cruelty and nobody caring. Only now the NFL says, “Nah, we won’t pull your game. Have fun watching it, Philadelphia.”

I plan on watching either like this, or like this. Just like I did when I originally wrote this post.

Here he is on Anderson Cooper’s show, talking about his “birther” bill. Yeah, I know Unfair Park already posted this. That’s where I saw it. I just wanted to make sure no one missed it.

In our November issue, Barrett Brown wrote a story that we labeled “a wholly unfair and sneaky takedown of Mark Davis, Dallas’ most influential conservative commentator.” The article occasioned a good-humored letter from Davis, which we published in the December issue. But hang on. We’re not done yet. Barrett read the letter, and he wishes to clarify a few points. To wit:

—

Davis writes the following about the process by which I prompted him to unknowingly attack Ronald Reagan in the course of answering my questions:

But I want to make sure readers understand how he played his catch-the-conservative game. In the first part of the game, he concocted a question about something fairly arcane, and I gave him an answer. But in the second part of the game, he applied as my “answer” a paragraph from a column I’d written about something else. Maybe if one admits to sneakiness up front, that is Teflon for whatever follows.

Contrary to what Davis writes here, the portion of his prior column which I introduce in the course of demonstrating its flaws was not portrayed as any sort of “answer” to the questions I asked him via e-mail; it was clearly marked as having been taken from that column. In fact, that portion of the article is introduced with the following two paragraphs:

Now, the reader may perhaps object that it is unfair to set someone up in such a fashion, akin to baiting deer in an effort to shoot them. If that is the case — and it is not — then let us do something more akin to sitting around in the woods and waiting for a deer to walk into a tree over and over again until it dies; let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan without any prompting from me. Better yet, let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan not only while himself bringing him up by name, but also in the course of lauding him for having refrained from doing several things that he actually quite famously did.

A few months ago, Davis took Obama to task for signing a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Russians. “The ignorant assertion that our nukes and their nukes are the same is not new,” Davis noted in a column for the Dallas Morning News. “Ronald Reagan ignored such droning 30 years ago, driving the Soviets to their knees by refusing to gut U.S. nuclear capability and by refusing to scrap missile defense technology.”

It would be impossible for any reasonable person or even an unreasonable person in the midst of a PCP binge to interpret this as a claim that what follows from Davis is in response to a question I had asked him. At any rate, I wanted to provide this clarification for the record, as anyone who read Davis’ letter without being familiar with my article might assume that I am in the habit of falsely presenting information as deriving from some particular context in some sort of devious effort to make a mainstream political pundit look incompetent, whereas such a trick would hardly be necessary in the current media environment, unfortunately. –Barrett Brown

1. This is something that actually occurred: “A Louisiana man was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for stealing a newborn calf and beating it to death with a shovel after the Saints lost to the Dallas Cowboys last season.”

2. The Mavericks are rolling, winning their sixth in a row last night against the Houston Rockets. Good way to celebrate Dirk Nowitzki being named Western Conference player of the week. And so I continue having a Google stranglehold on this phrase: I see you, big German!

3. Apparently, the Super Bowl will be a magnet for pickpockets. I called my usual pickpocket source, the Artful Dodger, but he would neither confirm nor deny the report, suggesting I try his boss, Fagin, instead.

4. Parents, be sure to talk to your teenage girls about flexisexuality, but maybe skip the reference to Madonna and Britney Spears kissing, because they probably won’t remember that happening or who those people are. Also, don’t talk to them about some made up word.

5. Also, Virgin America is almost here.

Ryan Avent has a post up at his personal blog, The Bellows, about wanting neighborhood scaled bars in DC after a recent visit to London, famed for its neighborhood pubs, not much unlike Cheers where it acts as a hub of the community. He goes on to both suggest that nightlife demands clustering while lamenting it from a personal standpoint. Can’t we have just a regular quiet bar that is able to make ends meet by local clientele?

This is a post I have been mulling over for some time. It was not until witnessing a related incident that I decided it was time to crank it out.

As anybody familiar with downtown Dallas streets knows, you must tread lightly. Particularly, during rush hours as you are rushing to catch that train or wherever. Cars dart in and out of parking garage with little remorse, restraint, or caution. It can be even worse when out for a dog walk and the distance between dog and self become dangerous enough that you worry fido might get run over at every garage exit.

The event I witnessed is one that presumably happens every day. Except this one office tower parking garage has a police officer directing traffic for a parking garage exit onto a one-way, barely used street. You would think this wouldn’t be necessary. I suppose like the presence of speed bumps, this is evidence of poor planning and design.

As I was walking up to this particular conflict point, I could foresee an issue arising. The police officer was having a distracted conversation with somebody while waving on cars that may or may not have been on their way up the exit ramp. From the opposite direction as myself, a woman was chatting on her cell phone.

Wouldn’t you know it, but a car burst from the invisible ramp and nearly hit the woman on the cell phone. An argument between the woman and cop ensued before the cop lost patience and suggested she get a move on before cuffs came out.

Was there fault to go around? Surely, probably on all counts. The woman on the cell phone acted afterwards like she knew a car was coming out, the car had no reason to slow down or give caution as the cop was waving it on, the cop probably shouldn’t be having random conversations when conducting traffic.

I’m left to wonder, what is a cop doing directing traffic from a private garage? Yes, yes, public safety and all that, but isn’t there a safer system than cars shooting out of buildings like this (ed. note: mute this awful music):

Now, let’s think about what ingress/egress/curb cuts/garage access points really are. They are no different than say, storefronts for pedestrians. They are the way a building interfaces with its transportation system.

I would argue that the best cities in the world are those where the building is accessed nearly universally by foot, except for a few transfer facilities such as bike parking, transit stations, and centralized parking facilities where stakeholders such as pedestrians and land owners have some sense, hey, I can expect to interact with cars around here. This also adds some measure of wayfinding for drivers, if they can find the clearly marked garages.

Like nearly all things in complex, interwoven systems like cities, curb cuts are both cause and effect, adding to or subtracting from the inertia of various processes. When blocks are carved up by curb cuts in order to deliver drivers directly to buildings, that is the effect. The by-product of a car-centric transportation system. The same one that shackles all of us willingly or unwillingly, affordably or unaffordably to participating in this system by owning and operating a car within it.

Curb cuts are a cause, inducing different actions, behaviors, and outcomes for a few reasons. One, I already mentioned, that it discourages pedestrian activity on the street by making it unsafe, and perhaps more detrimental, stressful. You can’t focus on other things like window shopping or whatever because you’re worried about Morpheus and his brand new Cadillac CTS to chop you off at your waist.

The other things all of these curb cuts do is takes up valuable square footage in buildings, 1) on the ground floor where you would typically like many different pedestrian access points to buildings, aka street friendly interfaces, and 2) these are obviously leading to either service docks, surface parking, or garage parking, ie even more space that is unsalable and costly to construct.

The resultant building or urban form is one that I would call self-interested, as in not enlightened self-interest. In anthropomorphic terms, this would be a selfish building block. It says, “I want my access to my garage, and I don’t care what it does to other buildings,” which is often a perfectly logical, and rational response. But, it isn’t an enlightened response.

The best neighborhoods are those where the valuable is greater than the sum of parts. This only happens when building blocks (used as short-hand for urban blocks that may or may not have more than one building on them) reach out and relate to the public realm and buildings around them. One building improves the value of those around it and it receives the same in kind from the 3, 5, or 10 building blocks nearby. The more building blocks that amplify the neighborhood, the return on enlightenment increases factorially based on 1)quality or value and 2) proximity.
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So I decided to map the curb cuts in downtown Dallas to see if any patterns emerged. Keep in mind that in the ideal city there would be very few ‘car interfaces’ as 1) transportation share is balanced better between modes (foot, bike, car, bus, train), and 2) parking would largely be relegated to on-street so there would be no curb cuts. Thus creating motive to develop real estate that is more valuable than housing cars, but in housing commerce and/or people. Pricing car storage out of downtown, parking is relegated to outside the city at transit facilities or pricey, centralized parking garages.

At first blush, they appear pretty balanced, spread across the city. Sparse only in two types of places, truly dead zones and truly alive zones. There is also an awful lot of them. Doubtful I’ll ever have the time to map a similar sized area in other cities, but you can bet there is a direct relationship of car-dominance to amount of curb cuts.

Here, I mapped a few of the denser clusters as well as Main Street in green. The sparse areas around the edges of downtown are due to surface parking lots not requiring many access points that would cut into value, aka more spots, and giant dead areas like around the convention center. Other sparse areas, would include around Belo and what are nominally known as parks in the southwest portion of downtown.

The most eggregious areas seem to act as buffers around the successful little pulse of Main Street. If Main Street is our living and dining room, the two big red blobs are our two-car garage. Like a conventional suburban house, the pride of place goes to the garage, rather than the welcoming embrace of a front porch or stoop (the pedestrian interface).

The red areas tended not to be the worst only because of vehicular egress points but loading and unloading areas where sidewalks were negligible at best. This is another case of a building being selfish, allowing for loading and unloading based on convenience for the loader and unloader rather than to the benefit of street life.

In Copenhagen and Rome for example, two places I have spent a decent amount of time, loading and unloading happens in the street early in the morning when there is very little pedestrian or car traffic (where cars are allowed in those cities). This is enlightened self-interest because you use the public infrastructure for loading rather than building it yourself and then having a hostile street presence, shutting off the amplified powers of a city that engages rather than withdraws.

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The concept applies to open space as well, as open space is no different in terms of access from ‘closed’ space except that it doesn’t have a roof. It still needs an interface. Main Street Gardens was intended to have parking below it originally and thankfully an operator couldn’t be found. We lucked out. Otherwise, we would have another Pershing Square in L.A. on our hands.

Here are a few pictures of Pershing Square. In the first two, notice the garage access ramps. These line all four sides.

The result is a barrier to pedestrian activity and perhaps even worse a barrier to visibility. It creates places that can’t be seen and when you do that, you get the kind of activity that likes to be in places that aren’t seen. The best of which is sleeping.

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Now here are examples of pedestrian-oriented building interfaces at varying scales and intensities:

or, the alternative:

(via The Come Up Show, via Mark Cuban’s Twitter feed, via Gorilla vs. Bear’s Twitter feed, via the modern magic of computers, via me wasting time, via me getting this job, via me graduating from college, via me being born)

For another local connect, the song was produced by our own S1.