One-Car TownLogging the one-car lifestyle in new suburbia.

Though I haven’t been blogging the one-car life over the last few months, up until recently I was zipping along pretty well, all things considered. But I’m sad to report, even for the right reasons, that we are moving back to two cars.

Living in suburban Tucson as I do, some 16 miles from my office, by car I can get to work in about half an hour; sometimes quicker. By carpool and bus: 45 minutes to an hour. By bike and bus: 1.5 hours. When I don’t drive, as I haven’t for the last ten months, I have little flexibility when I’m at work but need to go beyond a standard bus route, such as home during the day or if working late. And therein lies the basis for our decision to return to a two-car family:

A situation has arisen that demands that I be “on call” — to stay late in the morning or to come home on a moment’s notice or to provide transportation to various appointments and errands. I won’t get into the details, but those close to our family are aware of what’s going on, and we are thankful for their support.

So the other day I purchased a parking pass for the nearby garage. And this weekend I’m looking for cars again. As with the Forester, I’ll be making payments, though considerably lower. And there’s gas to pay for again and insurance, as well.

So I’m not excited about the extra costs of owning a second car, or giving up the much-valued reading time, or pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. But I am relieved to be able to be available at a moment’s notice, and being the fan of spirited driving that I am, I have to admit my excitement for getting what I hope will be a sporty-ish car.

So this ends the one-car experiment, much sooner than I had hoped. But I still retain hope and commitment that I will be able to return to the one-car lifestyle again, though from where I view things now, that seems several years away. But as Aragorn says (The Lord of the Rings), “There is always hope.”

That seems a good quote to end on. Travel well, and thanks for checking in.

Alas, I’ve been negligent in updating this blog; not for lack of wanting to update it but for lack of time.

What to do?

As of this post, I’m moving my updates to Twitter: see sidebar —>

That way I can add quick hits, in 140 characters or less, making my one-car experience much more real-time for readers, and less burdensome for all of us. Is it the same? No, I recognize that. But it beats vacancy for months at a time, which I’m afraid this blog has become.

So check the tweets at the right, or follow me directly on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimmonsBuntin.

Ride well!

Simmons

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Playing on the Radio: “Big Bad World” by Authority Zero, Stories of Survival, KFMA
High Temperature: 89 F

My carpool buddy Michael Austin manages Southern Arizona Endodontics and, being the impossibly nice guy and successful manager that he is, is in high demand from other offices for speaking engagements on excellence in leading teams. He has a saying — more a phrase: “the cocoon of excellence.” What he strives to do is wrap himself and those around him in the cocoon of excellence. It’s become a kind of vernacular for us as we commute from our homes in Civano to Speedway/Craycroft, where he works and I catch the bus.

One retail business that he admires for its cocoon of excellence is QuikTrip, or QT, a service station and convenience store that is making a big push into the Tucson market. I’d never been before, so Michael insisted that we stop by on our commute. Since he drives, I couldn’t complain. And I wouldn’t, anyway. After all, QT’s motto is “Guaranteed Gasoline. Guaranteed Everything.” Plus, Fortune magazine has ranked QT high on the list of Best Companies To Work for the last nine years. QuikTrip also gives back to the communities it serves, donating 5% of net profits to charitable organizations.

Last week I skipped the commute with Michael to take the car in for a radio repair. I noticed the front tires were low and, knowing that QT provides free air — all a part of the cocoon of excellence — I stopped by the store on Speedway and Craycroft. There, a young woman in an old Ford Escort seemed to be having trouble filling one of her tires. I didn’t think much about it until five minutes passed and she was still working on the same tire, which seemed to have considerably less air than when I had arrived.

So I hopped out of the Accord to see if I could help. Turns out the air nozzle connected to the hose connected to QT’s air compressor was broken. Instead of filling the tire, all it did was force air to escape. When I said as much, she looked at me in an exasperated, I’m-already-running-way-behind kind of way, and started to get back in her car to drive away. The tire, mind you, was completely flat and cracking at the seam. It was bald and pretty useless anyway, but she couldn’t drive five feet safely on it, let alone wherever it was she was heading.

So I offered to change her tire, hoping that she had a decent, inflated spare in her trunk — a spare not mismatched to the car, as this flat tire obviously was. Fortunately, she did, and half an hour later she was ready to go with the pint-sized spare tire and my hands as black as the asphalt upon which we stood.

She thanked me over and over, amazed that someone would go out of his way to help, which all said made me kind of sad — sad that she has such low expectations of others, sad that her expectations are no doubt based on experience, sad that in many ways that’s the world we live in today.

After she left, I walked into the QT store to use the restroom and wash my hands. On the way in, I said to the attendant at the register, “Your air hose…”

“Is broken…,” he interrupted me. “I know.”

“If you know,” I said, looking at my grimy fingernails and feeling the sweat on my brow, “why didn’t you tape it off or put up a sign? The poor girl outside got a flat because the nozzle is broken, and I just spent half an hour changing her tire.”

He didn’t have much to say, but Michael sure did when I told him the story the next day. “Well that’s no cocoon of excellence,” he said, though he was a bit dumbstruck that his much-ballyhooed retail establishment could have such an oversight. I mean, how difficult is it to put up a sign, or tape over the nozzle, or do something to indicate it’s not only broken but will make things much worse for the unwitting sap who tries to fill up his or her tires?

And here’s something else that makes me sad: a postscript. This week, Michael stopped by to fill up his tires and noticed the air nozzle at that same QT is still broken — and still unmarked. He went in to complain, and the attendant told him that they’d discuss it at their next team meeting, noting that finding someone to fix it had been a challenge. I don’t doubt the latter, but what’s the excuse for not marking it as broken? Does it really take a team meeting to figure out a solution to that problem? Is that what “Guaranteed Everything” means?

They should hire Michael to advise them in what it truly means to be excellent — actually, give him free refills on soda for a year and he’d do it for free. Because inside the cocoon of excellence, there’s no room for groupthink as an excuse for doing the right thing right now. There’s only the snuggly goodness of a world that’s happy instead of sad, a world where a guarantee is backed up by action, a world where problems are solved before anyone or anything gets fully deflated.

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This isn’t a real post, per se, so I’m not including the song or temp. Yes, I’ve been a slacker as of late, as I work into the wee hours of the morning to get the next issue of Terrain.org ready for launch. I’ve got some fun posts all worked up (but not typed out) and those will happen in late September or early October.

Until then, I’m afraid it’ll be mostly quiet here. But I came across this little beauty on our glass future as envisioned by Corning, and thought the interactive bus stop was particularly compelling (though what to do about spray paint tagging…?):

The bus stop vision begins at 2:42.

Great mood music on this one, too: “Golden Sky” by Jan Cyrka and Toby Bricheno.

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Playing on the iPod: “Catch Fire” by George Huntley, Brain Junk
High Temperature: 93 F

A single-family home at Glenwood Park.

As those kind souls among you who frequent my blog have noticed, I’ve been delinquent this week in posting. That’s because I’ve been traveling for my UnSprawl book project – visiting Nashville, Atlanta, and points between.

I flew into Nashville to tour Lenox Village, the city’s first new traditional neighborhood development, or TND. From there, I drove down to Atlanta, where I visited Glenwood Park, which like Lenox Village will be included in the book, and Serenbe, which will not (though it will be featured in Terrain.org’s forthcoming issue). I now type this on a three-hour layover in Los Angeles. It’s one constructive way to pass the time, at least.

Atlanta is where I’d like to spend my attention, however, because it’s where I spent most of my time. And of my time in Atlanta, much of it was spent in traffic – on I-285 or I-75 or I-85 or State Road 400. Atlanta, you see, lives up to its reputation as perhaps the least-dense large city in the U.S. Which is to say, it’s among the country’s most sprawled cities, according to Smart Growth America. To wit, the Sierra Club reports that the Atlanta region doubled in size from 65 miles north to south to 110 miles N-S in the 1990s, and in 1998 the growth in Atlanta’s suburbs was 100 times that of growth in the city itself. Vehicle miles driven and air pollution likewise increased at among the highest rates in the nation.

Atlanta’s traffic, I must report, still sucks. It would therefore be a great place for a family to own just one car and take mass transit, whether a bus or the city’s light rail (both operated by MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transit Authority). Because I needed the flexibility of a car, however, I didn’t try Atlanta’s transit. It’s a sad regular occurrence for my travels of late, I realize.

Instead, I rented a new-fangled Ford Focus out of Nashville, which promised a spaceship-like cockpit, good gas mileage, and an annoying penchant for not being able to adequately shift between first and second gear. But it looked cool, and let’s be honest here, many people purchase a car for its image. How else to explain Range Rover?

In Atlanta, rush hour lasts a solid three hours. That doesn’t sound too bad if you think along the lines that I originally did: From, say, 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. traffic is kind of heavy. Turns out that’s an understatement. The three-hour rush is actually peak rush: from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., six to eight lanes of traffic in each direction – using I-285, the metro area’s perimeter highway loop, for example – run bumper-to-bumper at about 15 miles per hour. Tops.

Gallery and bakeshop storefronts at Serenbe.

Meanwhile, the light rail speeds by, seemingly crowded but at least making good time. Several times I had to allot three or four times the standard I am used to in Tucson for commuting in Atlanta. Strangely, even among my urban friends in Atlanta, this is acknowledged frankly and without much hope of change, even if they confirm with a certain desperation in their eyes.

That may be a bit of an overstatement, actually. There are some cool projects happening around the Atlanta BeltLine – a really promising 22-mile rails-to-trails loop + $2.8 billion urban redevelopment initiative ringing downtown – for example. But when I ask my brother Miles, who lives in a suburb north of Atlanta, about this astounding commute, he just shrugs his shoulders. Life in the suburban New South, I suppose.

So is there a solution in this rolling, lush landscape of finely bricked sprawl? A few initiatives, beyond the BeltLine redevelopment, stand out. First, there’s my old Auburn buddy Andrew Bone, who when I drove up to visit him in far-north suburb Cumming, met me at the restaurant in an electric golf cart, his primary mode of transportation for his mixed-use neighborhood center of Vickery Village.

Second, TND projects like Glenwood Park – which was developed in part by the developer of Vickery where Andy lives – offer the opportunity for suburbanites to move into a cool, pedestrian-oriented new development within the city, where they can easily catch a bus to a nearby light rail station. It’s an enviable and beautiful project, which you no doubt will want to read more about when the UnSprawl book publishes!

Redevelopment aligned to the BeltLine is taking place. Check out Atlanta’s Ponce City Market, right on the BeltLine (and here’s an article published in the New York Times just last week). And on a more regional scale, there’s the Atlanta Region Plan 2040, the area’s “comprehensive blueprint to sustain metro Atlanta’s livability and prosperity through mid-century, as the region is expected to add some three million residents.”

Front porches at Glenwood Park.

The funny thing about sprawling Atlanta, or the Los Angeles just beyond my laptop’s keyboard, is that there are lots of great, walkable neighborhoods which have decent transit access. Otherwise, however, the city and certainly the suburbs cater almost exclusively to cars. Except, of course, that you can’t really get very far very fast during rush hour – or the times just before and just after. And often otherwise, too. That’s because everybody drives. “Bottleneck” has become an art form in Atlanta, but it’s a slow suffocation for community and citizen alike.

And though the Ford Focus had an iPod integration (which I eventually figured out, strange steering wheel-based digital menus be damned), good music is not enough to offset strangling traffic. Not even the Southern alternative rock for which the Atlanta region (or at least Athens) is deservedly much-acclaimed.

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Playing on the iPod: “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed
High Temperature: 94 F

The ill-protected bus stop at Speedway and Swan on a lamb of a morning.

Yesterday was like the old adage, “In like a lion, out like a lamb,” an expression we used a lot when I lived up in Colorado to describe the month of March. Here in Tucson, however, the August day represented just the reverse: the morning was sunny – a climatological lamb if you will – and the afternoon was just the opposite: a lion’s fury of rain and thunder and lightning. It was, in short, a day to think about bus shelters, or the lack thereof.

On my normal commute day, I catch a ride in with neighbor Michael to his office (Southern Arizona Endodontics, if I may give a shout out in service to my kind carpooling driver), then walk a couple blocks to the Sun Tran stop at Craycroft and Speedway. There’s a covered bus shelter – one of the unique purple structures with tubing in the shape of a saguaro, providing a little sense of place as you wait for the bus, as well as shade.

Yesterday, though, Michael had a dentist appointment so dropped me off at the next major intersection west: Swan and Speedway. There I hopped out at a nearby parking lot and crossed the street only to find that the bus stop has no shelter, only a lonely, sun-baked bench next to the oversized Sir Veza’s Taco Garage sign. So I did what any logical person would do and waited beneath the restaurant’s awning, peeking out every now and then to see if the #4 was on its way. Before long I was joined by a few other riders, all avoiding the sad bench where the only shade was the sliver of shadow cast by the pole holding the iPad-sized bus route sign.

Yesterday afternoon, on the other hand, I raced from my office, beneath the Olive Street underpass, and up to the bus stop that does, thankfully, have a shelter. Then the rain began to roar – oh that typhoon-maned lion! The five of us huddling under the narrow shelter could only do so much to avoid getting wet, and by the time the bus arrived I was pretty well splattered.

For comparison's sake, a bus shelter at UA (also on a lamb of a sunny morning).

That was no problem, though – “just all part of the adventure” I quipped to the person next to me, who like the rest of us could only grin and bear it. By the time the bus reached the intersection of Speedway and Craycroft, where I would exit and then walk over to Michael’s office for the ride home, I had mostly dried off.

But as I looked out the windows, I saw we were in a verifiable gullywasher. The streets had become rivers, the bus a makeshift ferry.

And this is when the adventure truly began, for I had three significant tasks at hand once off the bus: 1) shelter myself from the rain, umbrella in hand; 2) avoid that wall of water raised by each passing car; and 3) actually cross Craycroft. By the time I reached the office five minutes later, I was drenched – from the thighs down. The rushing water on the street was well above my ankles, and between my awkward jog across the intersection and evasive maneuvers to avoid the hydroplaning cars in the lane next to me, I had become a fair likeness to a waterlogged duck, albeit a duck with a bright orange backpack, blue UA ballcap, and sad leather shoes.

So: the shelters. Why do some stops have shelters and others only unprotected benches? No doubt it’s a question of funding, but even there I’m not certain there’s a rhyme or reason to which stops afford protection. Of the 2,200 Sun Tran stops across the Old Pueblo, only one-third have shelters. Perhaps part of the challenge (or opportunity?) is that all of the stops are maintained by AdVision Outdoor, the “exclusive provider of unobstructed eye level, eye catching outdoor advertising in the Tucson metro area.” So who makes the decision on bench vs. shelter: Sun Tran or AdVision Outdoor? And is it a factor of vehicular traffic – the more traffic, the more likely there will be a shelter with its higher quantity of surface area and advertising space?

AdVision’s website provides some interesting factoids that imply shelter location is in fact based on traffic. For example, the average daily traffic volume at the 25 busiest Tucson intersections is over 85,000 vehicles. The busiest intersection is Broadway and Kolb, with an average daily traffic volume of over 102,000 vehicles. On the other hand, the intersection with the longest average recorded wait time is Broadway and Swan, at over 43 seconds. All this matters because 91% of employed Tucsonans drive to work each day. And all this matters too, of course, because of our market-based economy, where capitalism (and so advertising) is king. But I’ll (largely) keep my (far left-leaning) politics off this (let’s not kid ourselves, left-leaning regardless) blog.

Finally out of the rain: the view of Craycroft from a leaky porch during the downpour.

Well okay, let’s push that political boundary just a bit farther to ask one question: Would I be willing to trade large advertisements for a bus shelter?

Heck yes. I ignore the ads – they’re aimed at that 91% of other workers, anyway – and much appreciate the sun/rain/wind/dust protection. Besides, I work in marketing – one of the Eller College’s more successful MBA marketing campaigns is the shelter ad displays, in fact – so I get it.

Thus I say to the marketing powers that be: Get a bus shelter up at Swan and Speedway, won’t you? Lion or lamb, I think all of us riders appreciate the cover.

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Playing on the iPod: “Where Are You Going?” by Dave Matthews Band, Busted Stuff
High Temperature: 91 F

Packed bus this afternoon on the #4, so I made my way to the back and folded into a seat next to a woman disputing a credit card charge on her phone as rap music blared from the pack of kids behind me. I tuned out the call, but tuned into the rap.

Many argue that rap is the poetry of the next generation, and while I’m not sure I completely buy that, I don’t doubt its influence on performance poetry, or the larger realm of art – musical or otherwise.

What the rap music really got me thinking about, however, was the idea of bus poetry, particularly as we near the global poetry phenomenon on September 24th that is 100 Thousand Poets for Change (the big event around here will be a cross-border reading down in Nogales: not to be missed). Is there a platform for poetry on the bus? Could there be?

I’m familiar with some poetry about buses – read Philip Fries’ wonderful “Short Line Driver (in the Garden State)” appearing many years ago in Terrain.org, for example – but less so with poetry in buses, as either a form of literary inspiration and activism or as performance art.

Cue the Google.

From 1992 through 2007, Metro Transit – Seattle’s regional bus system – worked with 4Culture, a community arts organization, on the Poetry on Buses project. “Poetry on Buses presents poetry from our community,” notes the Metro Transit website, “written by that person across the aisle, that kid in the back, or the published poet – written by you and printed on the placards found right above the bus seats. Who knows, that poem up there may be the innermost dreams of the person sitting next to you. What is the poetry inside you?”

In 2007, 55 new poems were printed on Metro Transit bus placards, including this beautiful little number by Jennifer Kinard:

Pregnant Nights: Month Nine

Out of a vast gray calm you rise,
a lolling orca, to brush and glide
along the ribs of my canoe

a rippling hint of all you could capsize,
a singing current to carry me home.

It’s something that’s catching on in lots of places: from Charlottesville, Virginia to Madison, Wisconsin to the metro Denver area, and even up in Scottsdale.

Poetry performed on buses is a bit trickier to track down, but students at Syracuse University delighted (and perhaps shocked) bus riders with their “Poetry in Motion” project – SU’s only spoken-word poetry program – when four student poets recently recited poetry aloud to bus passengers.

Back in Tucson, I’d think the odds are in our favor, too. Surely with our literary community, the superb UA Poetry Center, and the good folks at the Tucson-Pima Arts Council, we’ve got something going on? I mean, all our buses can’t be limited to ad wraps for Jimmy John’s subs, right?

We could wrap a bus in the words and wild profile of Walt Whitman or even one of our local favorites like Alison Hawthorne Deming or Ofelia Zepeda.

I like the idea of introducing poetry and other art forms onto the buses. The public service announcements and advertisements are all good and fine and mostly important, I suppose. But art is what we thrive on, what brings us out of the daily rut of the bus commute – for long after reading a few couplets, the lines travel with us.

So what do you say? Is it time to get Tucson’s poetry in motion?

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Playing on the iPod: “(Nothing But) Flowers” by Talking Heads, Naked
High Temperature: 98 F

A tree-lined street in Civano: Thunder Sky Way.

“Walkability” is one of those terms urban planners use to describe how well a place supports people who walk in order to access daily services. A coffee shop, perhaps, or a bookstore. Out in Civano, where I live, we can walk tree-lined streets to get to the K-8 community school, to the dance studio, to a couple of hair salons, to an optometrist, to a garden center, to a bicycle shop, to a neighborhood center, to a fitness center with juice and coffee bar, and to several bed-and-breakfasts. On a scale of 1 to 100, however, Civano makes no better than a 9, according to Walk Score, an online service providing “a walkability score for any address.”

As Rhonda Bodfield reported in the Arizona Daily Star on Monday, Tucson overall scores just a titch above 48, which beats out Phoenix and Albuquerque, but falls well below cities such as San Francisco and New York.

But back to Civano, where I just typed my address into the Walk Score site and found out some interesting things: First, my Walk Score is actually 22, not 9 as the article reported. So there’s hope… I guess.

Second, the Walk Score site provides a wealth of data for one’s nearest amenities, for lack of a better word. For example, the closest restaurant is noted as Tucson McGraw’s Cantina, 1.13 miles away (up a high hill, I might add, but worth the extra effort particularly on cool evenings). The closest coffee, however, is reported as Sodexo Campus Services, 2.82 miles away. If my inkling is right, that’s the food service joint over at Pima Community College’s east campus. Better not tell the folks operating the coffee bar at Skin and Body Fitness, let alone the group of neighbors who every morning open our community center for a neighborhood coffee gathering. The closest groceries are available at the Valero Corner Store, 0.62 miles away. Is it wrong to grin at the irony of calling a gas station a corner store? It fooled Walk Score, anyway. And the closest park is Lincoln Regional Park, which is nearly three miles away. I suppose the half-dozen distinct parks at Civano don’t make the cut.

I sound bitter by Walk Score’s misrepresentations, but really I’m not. Rather, I’m fascinated, because there’s more clicking still to do, including a tab labeled “Your Commute”. Click the tab, enter a work address, and you’ll get a map, list of distances by commuting mode, and nifty chart of “hills between home and work.” Looks like about a 450-foot elevation difference between Civano and the UA, all downhill from here. Yet another reason commuting by bicycle all the way to work and back is not so enticing.

The walkable community of Civano.

If I were to walk the 16 miles from my home to McClelland Hall, where I work, the stroll would take about four hours and 52 minutes. A bike ride would take one hour and ten minutes, and driving a car about 35 minutes (in heavy traffic, I’d add).

The last list item is transit, but here my results say “No transit data.” When I click the Why? link I’m whooshed off to a site called City-Go-Round, subtitled “Apps that help you get around.” This is pretty cool stuff, but according to the site the City of Tucson does not support open data, or more specifically, “If you do not see transit data on Walk Score, then your transit agencies do not provide open data to software developers.” Agencies “with no open data” in our region are listed at two: Town of Oro Valley, and City of Tucson. I’m not entirely sure what that data is, nor whether the Town and City are the entities that should be tagged with providing that data, since bus service is provided here by a regional transit district. But I signed the “Support Open Data” petition, anyway, because open data is… well, open.

It turns out that, for Civano anyway, Walk Score’s take on transit data is right on, though the cause is different. We don’t have transit commuting data not just because the city doesn’t provide open data, but more directly because we don’t yet have transit service. Our nearest bus stop is still three miles away, though we have had a designated transit plaza since groundbreaking back in 1998. That’s 13 years now that our new urbanist community of Civano hasn’t had transit service. I’ve lamented about that plenty enough already, and now mostly I’m holding my tongue until the nearby road-widening project is complete. If we don’t get bus service then, I might just start my own website, something along the lines of Sun Tran Score, and like Walk Score’s rankings of Civano, my scores also won’t be so kind.

The funny thing about these websites is both how useful and completely wrong they can be, often at the same time. For those of you who have visited Civano, you’ll likely agree that there’s no question that it’s one of Tucson’s more walkable neighborhoods – walkable, that is, unless you hope to walk to a bookstore, or a real grocery store, or, for most of us, work.

So what, really, is walkable? According to Walk Score, it’s a measure of “how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle – not how pretty the area is for walking.” The score is based on a patent-pending system that uses an algorithm awarding points based on the address’s proximity to amenities. There’s even a white paper on the algorithm.

Eh, it’s too much work and far too late in the evening to be reading a white paper. Instead, I’ll continue to push for local bus service, continue to hope for and then frequent neighborhood businesses, and – in the service of this blog (if not myself) – continue to catch a ride with my neighbor to the bus stop. His house is just a short walk away.

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Playing on the iPod: “Clocks” by Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
High Temperature: 106 F

As you may know, I edit the online literary and technical publication Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, which includes an “UnSprawl” case study in each issue (Civano, where I live, for example). Recently I was contacted by a small press out of Los Angeles to put together an UnSprawl book project that will update eleven existing Terrain.org UnSprawl case studies, plus add a new one. Because the book contract doesn’t pay very much (just enough to visit one project, in fact), I’ve created a fundraising site on Kickstarter.com to raise funds for travel. My plan is to visit every project to rephotograph and meet with developers. Those travels have already started — hence my recent One-Car Town posts from San Francisco and Chicago — and will run through late October. The book is due November 1 to the press: Planetizen Press.

I have just launched the book’s Kickstarter.com fundraising site, and it will be live through September 5 with the goal of raising $2,500:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/635178095/unsprawl-case-study-book

Many of us contribute in countless ways to the local communities in which we live, and so the regional, national, and global landscapes of our built and natural environments. Now I ask that you consider contributing to this important creative and environmental book, one that will include case studies from across North America, from Victoria, British Columbia to Rockville, Maryland, and from Grayslake, Illinois, to Austin, Texas. For your contribution, you get something in return:

• Pledge $10 or more
  Terrain.org sticker
• Pledge $25 or more
  Above + electronic (PDF or e-reader) version of UnSprawl book
• Pledge $50 or more
  Above + print version of UnSprawl book
• Pledge $100 or more
  Above + name in book and on Terrain.org website
• Pledge $250 or more
  Above + limited-edition, signed and matted 11″ x 14″ photograph of one of the case study projects (photo by Simmons B. Buntin)
• Pledge $1,000 or more (3 max)
  Above + personal tour of one of the case studies, including onsite lunch (where available) with author Simmons Buntin or Ken Pirie

With Kickstarter.com, if I don’t reach my funding goal of $2,500, then no one’s credit card is charged. So please consider contributing today, and let me know if you have any questions or need additional information.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/635178095/unsprawl-case-study-book

By the way, while I’ll no doubt mention the project here throughout the summer and fall, I won’t use this venue as a fundraising source after posting this update — which is my way of saying: Even if you don’t support the book, please do support this blog by returning often!

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Playing on the iPod: “Train in Vain” by The Clash, London Calling
High Temperature: 87 F (in Chicago)

This morning my co-worker, who spent the weekend in San Francisco, lamented about what a hassle it was for her to take BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Her complaint was less about the location of stations than it was about the trains running on time. In her case, she had to wait an hour for an update on the train heading to the airport – only to learn she had to scramble and catch a cab to make her flight because the train was further delayed. I love those San Francisco cabs, as you may recall, but that’s not a promising story for the region’s mass transit system.

Viewing the beautiful Chicago skyline from a boat tour along the Chicago River.

Last week I traveled to Chicago, my first visit to that amazing city, but didn’t have a chance to critique the mass transit system because I never used it. Mostly I walked, or took the nifty architecture tour along the Chicago River (view my photo gallery), or my friends drove me around (hey, at least they drive a Prius). The one time I seriously considered taking the train I would have had to tug two bags of luggage eight blocks to the nearest Metra stop, then transfer halfway down in order to make it to the airport. So instead I shared a cab, which cost me $17. The train would have cost something like $2.25.

My complaint, such as it is, isn’t the cost or even the schedule, but rather the location of the Metra stops in downtown Chicago. When the concierge suggests you take a taxi to the Metra stop, that’s not a promising story for the region’s mass transit system.

Back in Tucson we have no commuter train or light rail station, though the trolley that runs from UA to Fourth Avenue is quaint. (It’ll be quite an upgrade when that line runs all the way to downtown, though that’s still only a four-mile route.) But between my bus commute and my series of trips to larger metro areas for my forthcoming UnSprawl case study book, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “promising story of mass transit.” Or rather, I’m thinking about the promises of mass transit, and what happens when transit doesn’t live up to the promises, particularly for visitors to cities like San Francisco and Chicago, with their long-established rail transit systems.

According to the American Public Transportation Association, 54 percent of summer vacationers heading to urban destinations will use the local public transportation system to get around during their stay. Additionally, APTA reports that 65 percent say public transportation played a role in their destination choice. In San Francisco, it’s 70 percent. In Chicago, 67 percent. Cost and convenience, according to APTA’s Green Travel Forecast, are the top reason visitors choose transit during the trip.

To a degree, mass transit availability played a role in how my co-worker and I planned to travel in our different destinations, as well. While cost is important, however, convenience is essential. Getting both of those right is no small matter.

It’s a critical pursuit, though, because a good transit experience during a vacation or business trip can only help when it comes time to support mass transit measures back home and nationally.

Does that mean the far distance between my downtown Chicago hotel and the Metra stop lessens my likelihood to support transit here in the Old Pueblo, or anywhere for that matter?

Mostly it makes me want to get a better suitcase with sturdy rollers for those long walks. And I sure wouldn’t mind a commuter rail line that runs more than four miles in Tucson. But there doesn’t appear to be much news of late on that matter, so I’ll continue to consider transit lines in other future travels.