New and Old #93
Friday roundup and commentary
O Blessed Bus!, Commonweal, Eve Tushnet, December 28, 2022
This is a lovely piece (not because it quotes me, thought it does):
I used to think that my love of the bus was ironic and kind of obnoxious: a way of sending up my friends’ NPR-tote-bag paeans to Amtrak and high-speed rail. But when the lockdowns hit in 2020, I realized that I missed the bus more than I missed almost any other feature of city life. My bus love had always been much less ironic than I was willing to admit. The bus is simply the city on wheels. If you really love a place, you’ll love its buses.
For example:
One day the 70 was stopped at a long red light up by Gallery Place. The driver spotted a friend on the sidewalk, opened the bus doors and called him over. They exchanged a few pleasantries (“Are you having turkey for Thanksgiving?” “Naw, man, I’m having my jay-oh-bee!”) and then the friend began to talk about his faith. The incredulous driver said, “You’re a Muslim now? You were Christian last week! I know you!” And then the driver opened up his mouth and allowed this poem to take wing: “I see you on the corner saying, ‘Salaam alaikum.’ But when they give you pork chops—you take ’em!” Hey, Anna Karenina: Can your train do that?
Everything Tushnet writes here about the energy and social atmosphere of the bus is correct. It’s just that for some people, the whole point of transportation and land use policy is to stamp out this kind of thing. In a lot of ways we don’t disagree about what cities and urban life are; we disagree over whether those things are desirable.
Nobody loves the bus because nobody chooses the bus, not if they have other options. The bus rattles and lurches. The bus is cheap and so the bus is crowded, and the bus is probably late. (Amtrak is also probably late, but not cheap.) The seats are small. On an intercity bus there’s no café car, and there sure isn’t any quiet car. The bus isn’t a respite. It takes everything about your life that you wouldn’t have chosen and crams it right into your lap.
And this is how the bus brings people together. When I interviewed the urbanist writer Addison Del Mastro for an article in America magazine, he speculated that perhaps “what we think of as good urbanism is just an accident of having been poor.” When we have a choice, people usually choose privacy, control, and comfort—and then we’re shocked when we wind up lonely. We put up “privacy fences,” and then complain about how nobody knows their neighbors anymore. But communal bonds have always been tightened by necessity.
Read the whole thing!
The new law is meant to increase competition for repair work—and let consumers fix their gadgets themselves, if they feel technically capable of doing so.
This is an imperfect law that was weakened at the last minute over trumped-up industry “concerns,” but it is a landmark law too. Right to repair has gone from a marginal political issue to a major one, and it’s something I’ve been following a long time.
Its not surprising to me that PIRG, one of the old Ralph Nader groups, is a big proponent of right to repair. This is a consumer advocacy issue that cuts across partisan lines and brings to mind an old-fashioned economic populism with a long history in America. Good stuff.
Also this:
“This is the first broad sweeping right-to-repair bill passed in the U.S.,” says Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, a repair advocacy group that also sells repair parts on its website. “We have previously had manufacturers stop over 100 bills in over 40 states, but this one passed. This is a major marker in the sand.”
iFixit is a fascinating company/organization, and if you have any interest in any of this, you should check them out. My dad bought me a fantastic tool set from iFixit a couple of Christmases ago, full of bits for rare tiny screws and things like that.
How Two Alexandria Brothers Transformed an Abandoned Data Center into an Indoor Farm, Northern Virginia Magazine, Jill S. Devine, January 4, 2023
“Beanstalk Farms represents a return of sorts to Herndon’s agricultural roots, but with a technological twist,” said Herndon Mayor Sheila Olem at the farm’s opening.
This is a neat business/tech story from the land of data centers. They’re very difficult buildings to repurpose—windowless, huge, hulking—but this provides a neat alternative to abandonment or demolition.
So this is where the idea comes from that if you care about beautiful architecture, you’re a fascist! There may be people who use “beauty in architecture” as a Trojan horse for something nefarious, but overall this discourse is very strange to me.
What seems to happen is that a small far-right minority/left-wing overreaction come together to paint the preferences of many normal people—for broadly traditional architecture over broadly modern—as suspect. Read this article for a good idea of how this dynamic happens.
Related Reading:
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My "bus anecdote" to add to the pile is that after nearly a year of not riding because of covid (first because my son was at home all day with us, and then because we walked back and forth to his daycare to avoid extra risk of exposure), the first bus we got on the driver recognized us and greeted my son _by name_ and we chatted and showed him the picture of the "MBTA bus driver" costume he'd worn for Halloween that year.
My son truly does love riding the bus, he memorizes all the stops and then acts out the bus route with his toys at home, calling out the stops in the "robot voice" of the announcer. I really wish we could get the investment and reforms needed to make it reliable, as 15 minute headway during peak evening time (not to mention they often skip buses so that ends up being 30 minutes) keeps us from riding in the evening as much as he'd like and we instead just walk home from school.