Why Not Return Smoking to Flights?

With most places such as hospitals and office buildings taking the wise step to protect the health of occupants smokers in these places are forced outside — or into restaurants, bars casinos and such.  The place where you want to enjoy a meal is where they want to exercise their freedom. Take this line from a pro-smoking flier:

In many cases, the only place you would be legally able to smoke is in the middle of the road.

Cue the violin player.  You can smoke all you want in your private residence.  Where the public is invited — hospitals, airplanes or the local diner.  Of course Federal law prohibits smoking on planes.  I can’t imagine how horrible it must have been to fly with smokers.  The privately owned airlines were free to cut out smoking on their own but that would have set up confusing lists of non-smoking flights vs smoking flights.  Non-smokers would have been forced to breath the polluted air of the passenger next to them.  Again, I can’t imagine how horrible that must have been.

Should we lift the federal prohibition on smoking on planes and let the privately owned airlines make their own decision about smoking?  Of course not.  We all know how pleasant it is to fly without having the freedom to breath in the right of another.

Of course some would have suggested that airlines retrofit their planes, at great expense, with air filtration systems so they can continue to smoke anywhere they please.  Because for them, it is all about them and their “right” to smoke.  Screw the rest of us.

The same logic applies to restaurants, bars and casinos. If you don’t want St. Louis to go smoke-free then you must advocate a return to smoking on flights, right?

The smoke anywhere we like lobby says half the restaurants are voluntarily smoke-free.  I know many I want to visit are not.  I’d like to see the breakdown behind these claims.  But assuming it is right, then half the restaurant owners have nothing to fear from laws designed to clear the air for all.

Back to the flier quoted earlier.  I received a copy of a letter & flier sent out by the selfish we want to smoke anywhere lobby.  No, it was not mailed to me.  It was mailed to the owner of a couple of restaurants — non-smoking restaurants.  This owner passed the letter & flier to me saying he hopes the smoke-free ordinance passes.   Read for yourself:

Pro Smoking Letter & Flier

Alderman Lyda Krewson will introduce a bill tomorrow morning at the Board of Aldermen to clear the smoke in St. Louis.  One provision in the draft language has been removed —- the outdoor prohibition.  Smoke shops with a certain percentage of their sales from tobacco products will be exempted.  The revised language should be online next week.

And They’re Off..

Saturday is the 135th Kentucky Derby.  But that is not the race I’m alluding to.

I’m in a race of my own.  I’ve been challenged by Lindenwood University School of Communications Assistant Professor, Jill Falk,  to see who will first reach 400 followers on Twitter.  She was ahead when she challenged me on Tuesday.  She is still ahead and quickly closing in on 400. Falk is among a growing number of professors using Twitter in the college setting:

Facebook may be the social medium of choice for college students, but the microblogging Web tool Twitter has found adherents among professors, many of whom are starting to experiment with it as a teaching device.

Marquette University associate professor Gee Ekechai uses Twitter to discuss what she’s teaching in class with students and connect them with experts in the field of advertising and public relations.

Twitter is helping these professors build community in their classes in a way that appeals to some members of a Facebook-addicted generation. The phenomenon is certainly not ubiquitous, and some professors have found Twitter doesn’t do anything for them in the academic realm.

But others, particularly those who teach in communications fields, are finding that Twitter and other social media are key devices for students and faculty to include in their professional toolbox.

Ekechai started teaching Marquette’s first undergraduate class in social media this semester. She requires students to use the tool for a month. When guest speakers come to class, some students are responsible for publishing the speaker’s thoughts on Twitter during the presentation – called “live tweeting.”

The exercise helps students develop key skills: listening, information-gathering, multitasking and succinct writing. Twitter allows only 140 characters per tweet.

Twitter also allows faculty members to post links to what they’re reading. Students who “follow” a professor’s tweets can get a look at the news stories that help inform their professor’s lectures or connect with the experts their teachers are following.

“If I stumble upon something that’s relevant, I could post that up there, and then when we meet back again in class, I can say, ‘Make sure you look back again at last week’s Twitter posts,’ ” said Marc Tasman, a lecturer in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s journalism and mass communication department who uses Twitter.

Menck says Twitter has increased the amount of communication she has with students. She gets direct messages from students about the industry or the course. She also “listens” to the conversations students have with each other on Twitter to gauge what they’re interested in or what questions they have.

“I’ve been on this morning, and I see my students posting a lot of great links to information about social media, information about going on in the advertising industry, and how public relations is changing,” she said.

Ekechai and Menck see it as their responsibility to teach students about Twitter because social media knowledge is becoming essential to their future fields – communications, advertising, public relations and marketing.

The Internet in general has changed the practice of public relations, allowing companies or brands to communicate directly with consumers and, in some cases, bypass the media.

Connecting to students on Twitter can invite a more informal level of conversation – something Menck enjoys but that not all academics would be comfortable with. One student seemed shocked when Menck tweeted, “Going into 3 hour faculty meeting. Time to catch up on my sleep!”

Not everyone in academe is as comfortable using Twitter to interact with students.

John Jordan, an associate professor in UWM’s communication department, teaches students about social media but doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter with students, opting for more formal channels of communication.

“Not all of yourself can be public,” he said. “There are notions of professionalism. Just the little back and forth that you have with your friends – you may not want your students to ask you about that.”

Others have doubts about Twitter’s educational usefulness. McGee Young, assistant professor of political science at Marquette, experimented with Twitter this semester, posting links and encouraging students to follow him.

With the experiment nearly over, Young said he doesn’t see the tool as useful in an academic sense because he can’t restrict the conversation to people in his class, as he can when he uses Marquette’s online class organization tool, Desire2Learn.

“If there’s 25 of you there in a crowd of 500, and you’re trying to have a discussion in the midst of a large crowd, you can talk to two or three people at a time, but the other 25 aren’t going to be part of the conversation in any meaningful way. That’s what happens with Twitter,” he said.

Tasman, on the other hand, said he prefers Twitter to Desire2Learn because Twitter is immediate and has no barriers to posting links. Plus, he believes Twitter will inevitably become universal.  (source)

If you are on Twitter please help me whip the good professor from Lindenwood.  This is, of course, all in fun.  But I still want to win.  If you are on Twitter please follow me.

Crosswalks Work Better Without Trucks in Them

Last Saturday morning I went out for a walk…ur…stroll in my wheelchair. I had no issues until I reached 8th & Locust (map) – 8 blocks East of my place.

I was trying to continue Eastbound along Locust, crossing 8th.  One block of 8th from Washington Ave to Locust has been closed for a while now as construction crews for the Roberts Tower use the road for staging.  They left the sidewalk open on the East side of 8th.  That is where I was headed so I could get back to Washington Ave. Directly in my path is a big truck.  Parked.  Nobody in sight to yell at either.  I was able to go around and get to my destination but going out of the crosswalk lines does carry risks — even on a slow Saturday morning.

Other times I’ve seen the gate for their construction fence blocking the crosswalk.  Our sidewalks are not packed with pedestrians but we do exist.   Think before you park in a crosswalk!

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Stealing a Sidewalk

For decades the NW corner of 11th & Locust was known not for the parking lot that we see today, but Miss Hullings Cafeteria on the ground floor of the building. Miss Hullings closed in late 1993 and the building was razed.

But lately neighbors have questioned the line between the public sidewalk and surface parking lot:

Buildings were built up to the property line to maximize the land. Thus the public right-of-way was well defined by the fronts of the buildings.

Based on the photos you’d think the ROW made a jog at the alley line, but it doesn’t. From the city’s Geo St. Louis site we see the right-of-way is aligned with the adjacent blocks:

The boundaries of city blocks and the widths of public rights of way have been documented for years. So what happened here? Our public space has been stolen, that’s what. The same condition applies along Locust.

In the 1909 Sanborn map we can clearly see the consistent 60 foot right-of-way for both Locust & 11th. This map predates the Miss Hullings building on the NW corner as well as the Louderman building on the SW corner. The structures have changed but the line between public and private has not. Well, in practice it has.

This parking lot owner, an LLC based in Arizona, can park more cars by using part of the public right of way. It is bad enough we have these vast surface lots in our downtown. The lack of any sort of landscaping, wall or fence makes it worse. But to have the sidewalk area stolen from the public is just wrong.

The city now has better rules regarding the separation & screening. But we can’t go back and apply those rules retroactively. But couldn’t the city construct a wall or fence on the edge of the ROW? This surface parking lot is not the only one downtown lacking screening but as far as I know it is the only one that has stolen park of the public space. We need our sidewalk back and we need to keep cars off the public space intended for pedestrians.

I do not know if the current owner created this situation or not.  Maybe when it was done it was a ploy to take the public land through adverse possession? Although I don’t think private parties can get public land this way?

Several in the area have been working behind the scenes to adress the theft of this sidewalk for a while now. I found it an interesting situation worthy of being shared. I know we have bigger thibgs (economy, swine flu, etc) but someone has to look out for the little things. To me the theft of a public sidewalk is not so little.

Update 4/29/09 @ 12:30pm — Michael Allen of The Ecology of Absense just finished a post on the Miss Hullings building.  Check it out here.

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Book Review; Retrofitting Suburbia, Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs

I love books.  I have hundreds of them.  Many are great resources.  But none have proved as valuable as the recently published Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson ($75, Wiley).

The PR piece that came with my review copy describes the book a as a “comprehensive guidebook for architects, planners, urban designers, and developers….”  So true.  Dunham-Jones & Williamson have concisely identified the problems of suburbia and illustrated numerous real-world solutions.

The introduction does a wonderful job of explaining “urban versus suburban form.”  One example from the bullet point list:

Suburban form is characterized by buildings designed “in the round” to be viewed as objects set in a landscape they dominate; in urban form, a clear focus is on the fronts of buildings and how they line up to meet the sidewalk and shape the public space of the street.

Very straightforward, here is one more:

Suburban form tends to be lower-density and evenly spread out, while urban form tends to have a higher net density as well as a greater range of localized densities.  This is true for densities measured by population and by building area.

The book doesn’t try to convince anyone that all of suburbia can & should be turned into Manhattan.  It is about creating place and connections. The book is not so technical or academic that a lay person wouldn’t appreciate or understand the material presented.  Every elected official in every local of government needs to read this book cover to cover.

As the US population increases we need to find alternatives to just building on the edge.  As the authors show, we can infill existing suburbia effectively. Low-density single use corridors can get mixed use structures while leaving the existing single family subdivisions behind them alone.  Of course, zoning codes that created the mess we have today will need to be completely revamped.

From a recent review in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

“Retrofitting Suburbia,” a timely book co-written by Atlantan Ellen Dunham-Jones, proposes a way to turn dead malls —- as well as ailing office parks, older subdivisions and strip-center-lined arterial roads —- into lively places. Dunham-Jones, director of Georgia Tech’s architecture program, is a proponent of New Urbanism. The movement champions walkable streets, urban blocks, public spaces, mixed-use and density as keys to enduring and sustainable communities.

She and co-author June Williamson have adapted those principles to mint what you might call New Suburbanism.

The economic downturn has undoubtedly sparked some of the buzz surrounding the book. But, as the authors argue in their book, the old suburbanism is obsolete, recession or no, and for reasons that go beyond energy consumption.

Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in their cities and suburbs.

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