who should you vote for?

So there's a primary election coming up here in Howard County.

Now's the time to get edumacated on the field of candidates for our local elections-- the school board, for Congress, and for the judges of the Circuit Court.  And there are a variety of ways to do it.  I'm most familiar with what the League of Women Voters of Howard County has been planning, and that's the majority of what I'll be pulling from below.  Please feel free to comment below on other forums that will educate folks on who to vote for.

Photo credit to Theresa Thompson.

Voter's Guide
Most people are probably familiar with the printed Voters Guide that comes in the newspaper shortly before the election.  It's a good source of information about our candidates straight from them, and that'll be coming out as we get closer to the election.

This year, it is also available online and expanded.  The League of Women Voters has a website where you can look up the candidate statements and answers online called Vote411.  Since there isn't a print limit, we've also been able to ask more questions of our candidates.  The best part is that most of the heavy lifting is done for you.  Visit http://onyourballot.vote411.org, enter in your address and registered political party and BAM!  All the races you can vote in with submitted candidate statements are available to you.

Trevor over at HoCoPolitico has a set of online Board of Education interviews going on and I would certainly encourage folks to check that out as well for another source of information.

Candidate Forums
The League is putting on their Candidate Forums again, much like in previous years.  The date for the Board of Education forum is Monday, March 5 at 6:00 pm and will be held at the Board of Education building at 10910 Route 108, Ellicott City.

The Forum for our Congressional and Judicial candidates will be held on Thursday, March 8 at 7:00 pm.  It will take place in the Banneker Room at the George Howard Building at 3430 Courthouse Drive, Ellicott City.

Both forums will be rebroadcast on TV as well as available online for your at-home viewing convenience (more info on that forthcoming).

A few notes...
Tuesday, April 3 is the primary election day.  Early voting will take place Saturday, March 24 through Thursday, March 29.   Check out the Maryland Elections Center for personalized information about where and when to vote.

You can register to vote or change your party and still vote in the primary election until Tuesday, March 13, so it's not too late.

Independent/unaffiliated voters CAN vote in the primaries for school board elections because they are nonpartisan.

With all the craziness over the past few months about the school board, it's important for us to go out and exercise the right that people fought for, testified on, and opined about.  We have a wide, diverse field of candidates to choose from, all with their own viewpoint, experience, and opinions to offer.  Let's ensure that best candidates move onto the general election in all the elections.

(And of course, disclosure: I'm on the board of the League of Women Voters and am the Voter services chair.)

new project!

I wanted to share a new project I've been helping with.  My husband, Chris, who I mention on here from time to time, is making a movie.  His last short was called For Us, and is best described as a sci-fi/film noir.

His new project, a space sci-fi short called Reunion, has been ramping up over the past few months.  Most of my weekends have been at least partially occupied with helping with shoots.  Since I have no video skills, I help out where I can, usually by taking photos of the shoot, keeping track of the shots, and managing "craft services," aka food and drinks for all the people.  Though, this past weekend, I hit "record" buttons on cameras and audio equipment, quipping "this video stuff is so easy," much to the chagrin of the professionals involved.

So, somehow I got roped into managing the website and blog for this movie.  (I wonder why, right?)  The whole site is still a work in progress but it could be fun to follow along.  I'm hoping to get posts up weekly during this shooting phase (though I'm gratefully on a bit of a delay/lag between actual shooting and actual posting).  Once Chris gets into editing and animation with his folks, I'm thinking there will still be a good bit to write about on a regular basis.

So head on over there to check out a low-budget movie that's being written and directed by a Howard County resident.  My blogging priority is still here (hence the limited posting schedule over there).  I've been doing okay since getting back from Costa Rica and my goal is to keep that up!  Onward.

reimagining Route 29

Photo credit to Dougkerr.

As most folks that read this blog probably know, Route 29 runs straight through Columbia, separating the town in eastern and western halves.  The east side of 29 includes the villages of Long Reach, Owen Brown, Oakland Mills, and Kings Contrivance, while the west side of Columbia contains Hickory Ridge, Town Center, Wilde Lake, Harper’s Choice, River Hill, and Dorsey’s Search.  The limited access highway (i.e. a high-speed road that has exits and on-ramps rather than intersections) can make crossing between the two sides somewhat roundabout in a car, and very difficult on foot or on bike.  (Though Route 29 does “share the road” signs on it… I have no idea why.)

To help connect east and west, the Bridge Columbia group proposes an attractive, welcoming bridge over Route 29 for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit vehicles to help improve connectivity for those who might struggle with it now.  There is currently a ped/bike bridge in place now, but as Bridge Columbia’s website points out, it’s not particularly pleasant and has been compared to Guantanamo Bay.

But what if we rethought Route 29 itself?

Could it be an attractive boulevard instead?  It could feature lanes for bicycles, transit vehicles, and cars, and sidewalks for pedestrians.  We could connect our villages and neighborhoods in fantastic ways.  Downtown Columbia would be a town center for the whole of Columbia.  Lake Kittamaqundi could actually be vibrant with the Lakefront Park on one side and a vibrant, multi-modal boulevard on the other.

(I can’t be the only person who finds passing the Lakefront on Route 29 during the winter-- when it’s visible from the road-- depressing.)

I know it’s a highway now, and it holds volumes of traffic in our area that would seem to demand highway speeds and clover leafs.  To that effect, Maryland State Highway Administration has an average daily traffic count of hundreds of thousands of cars daily in the Columbia/Ellicott City area on Route 29.  Before we deem it impossible without a traffic nightmare, other areas around the country are experimenting with tearing down their highways that had similar automobile traffic, and they’ve had some spectacular results.

The Congress for New Urbanism, the folks that have been (at least partially) credited with the recent resurgence of interest in walkable, sustainable, mixed-use neighborhoods and re/development, have a Highways-to-Boulevards campaign.  They offer success stories from Portland, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Seoul of highways that carried hundreds of thousands of cars every day that are now boulevards with parks, retail hot spots, and burgeoning redevelopment districts.

I could shoddily recap the good work they've done to save you a click but I really encourage readers to head over there and read at least one case study of a successful highway-to-boulevard story.  I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again-- Gil Peñalosa's "city for the people, not for the cars" idea rings in here.  Beyond the stories on CNU's website, the city of New Haven, CT has recently been awarded federal funds to replace route 32 through the city, and clicking around their website is interesting, too.

But what about people who use those highways, who have bought houses and accepted jobs based on a commute time that involves highways?  Even then, a recent snappy article about the highway teardown concept by Will Doig in Salon addresses the experience of the car commuter on highways:

Where do these grand plans leave the lowly car commuter? In pretty good shape, as it turns out. In case you haven’t been on an urban freeway lately, allow me to blow your mind: They don’t work like they’re supposed to. They’re quick to deteriorate, clogged at all the wrong times and offer little versatility when problems arise — one collision can make 10,000 people late for work. In fact, the dirty secret of freeways is that they don’t reduce traffic, they create it. 

The effects of Route 29 aren’t as stark as some urban neighborhoods that were decimated to make way for freeways that would allow cars to fly past cities as fast as possible, to be sure.  But at the same time, we are struggling with a lot of the same connectivity and mobility challenges.  Seeing the successes that other areas have had in reconnecting neighborhoods and increasing mobility is encouraging and plants the question: is that something that could work here?

exposure and access

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson has a great piece at Grist that offers a theory about where the disconnect is in including minorities in architecture and design.  She offers a jarring statistic to get the ball rolling:

Take architecture. There are about 105,000 registered architects in the United States. According to The Directory of African American Architects, a database sponsored by the Center for the Study of Practice at the University of Cincinnati, there are 1,829 licensed African American architects in the country. Of those, less than 300 are women.

Why? Dickinson asks.

She interviews Michelle White, principal of Detroit's Henry Ford Academy School for Creative Studies, who believes it comes down to two elements: exposure and access.

Exposure and access.  Incredibly simple, but I think White is correct, and I think these two elements are just as applicable in a discussion why someone would or would not get involved in local initiatives.

Photo credit to _jennieMarie.  (Get it?  Exposure? ...sorry.)

A lot of what we do is a result of exposure.  We do what we know.  For folks who grew up in households with a high level of community involvement, they might see it as normal, even expected, to do the same.

But what about households where that isn't the case, whatever the reason?  A household that struggles with long commutes and little time for much else.  A single parent that is trying to balance a number of plates on his/her own, let alone adding another for "local issues."  A low-income household where any free time goes toward a second job.  A first-generation immigrant household whose idea of community involvement differs from what we have here in the United States.  A household that feels it is just too busy.  Kids who grow up in households without an involvement in local issues may not have an awareness of what volunteering for a board, attending a presubmission meeting, or getting involved in a PTA means, entails, or accomplishes.

And while the level of community involvement we have in Columbia and Howard County is high, my feeling is that really more of a narrow and deep distribution of involvement, and not one that is broad.  Or for that matter, diverse.

So what?  Do we teach community involvement in schools?  Personally, I think it's more important than calculus.  Though I might admittedly be annoyed that I took two years of calc in high school only to never use it again, while community issues affect my life every day.  (Sorry to any math teachers out there.)  That being said, we can't teach everything in the classroom.

So perhaps we start by expanding "exposure and access" in our own daily lives, and chat about community issues with our friends and family.  Exposure.  If something hits a chord, maybe bring them along to an event or meeting or show them where they can get more information.  Access.  And we go from there.

a quest leads to the new Family Market!

So our last-minute-Sarah-has-a-craving-Valentine's-dinner was to be mussels.  Frank's Seafood tweeted a buy-one-get-one-free deal and I was excited.  I stopped by after work, and, alas, they were sold out.  Boo.

My second try was Costco.  Strike two.  Though in typical Costco fashion, I did leave with Cetaphil and rechargeable batteries.

My third attempt to get mussels-- so HowChow recently blogged about the new Family Market at the Long Reach Village Center, and I figured if any place would have a varied seafood counter, it would be an international grocery.

Bingo.  Two pounds for four bucks.  Winding my way back to the front to check out, I also grabbed some onions and bananas at fantastic prices.  I didn't have a whole lot of time to browse, but I think Chris and I going to head back soon to check it out more throughly.

While there, I ran into Wordbones, which was a nice surprise.  Clearly, we said, we both read HowChow's post and had to check the new store out.

The parking lot was much busier than when Safeway was dying in the village center.  The store is brightly lit, and feels much bigger than the Safeway ever did.  It's very exciting.  Go visit.

Oh, here's our dinner.  Plus a baguette (not pictured).  Yum.

Happy Valentine's Day.

hocofood@@@

on unplugging, and coming back

Sorry for the quiet spell.  Chris and I went on vacation to Costa Rica this past week and the week before that was spent basically prepping things for said week of vacation on all fronts.

I tend to try to spend vacations unplugging from anything I can get away from, and it's always nice.  My cell phone didn't work, I checked work email only once per day, and I checked my personal email(s) once daily as well.  It also forces me to reassess what's important and what I should be making time for (going outside, relaxing with my husband) and what can be skipped (Facebook, often).

Nice words and all, but while I stayed away from Facebook completely for a week while on vacation, I updated my status and uploaded photos from our trip already while in our hotel in Newark.

Oh well.  Hey, I could have updated all that when we got in last night...?  It's a work in progress.  In any case, I'm back!

In other news, I hope a lot of folks come on out to the HocoBlogs party tomorrow evening-- looks like a lot of folks have already RSVP'd yes.  Unfortunately, I have a work thing tomorrow night and won't be able to make it.

on my CA gym membership

So I've been a Package Plus member for almost year now, and a regular Package member of the CA gyms for a little over a year.  I got my renewal notice in the mail, due in late March.

I've been happy enough with the CA gyms-- predominately the Supreme Sports Club, since it's on my way home.  I stop in most evenings for at least a half hour, longer on weekends and when I sign up for classes.

But I don't know that my use of the facilities is worth the amount I'm paying.  That's not to say that it's too high for the amenities that CA offers, but I think it's more just too high for what I use.  Rarely do I go anywhere but the SSC.  Heck, maybe I just need to drop to a single-facility membership.

I'd really like more classes, and I'd like more opportunities to drop-in on classes rather than having to sign up hours in advance.

(And I have a few other small annoyances that just kick in when I'm considering whether or not to stay with CA, but they are really minor, so, y'know, insert miscelleny here, I guess.)

Either way, I figure if now's the time to try out other gyms in the area, if only to reconfirm that I should stick with where I am.  Maybe I'm expecting too much.

So anyone have any gym recommendations?

biking facilities in Columbia are awesome in comparison to major US cities

The Alliance for Biking and Walking recently released their 2012 Benchmarking report.  At nearly 300 pages, it's a hefty read, but there's a wealth of information in here on a variety of measures that convey the state of biking and walking in the United States-- both by state as well as in major cities.

One interesting diagram charts out miles of bicycle facilities (defined as bike lanes, multi-use paths, and signed bicycle routes) per square mile in major US cities.  San Francisco and Austin top the chart.  San Francisco has 263 miles of bicycle facilities for a ratio of 5.6, while Austin has 1,345 miles for a ratio of 4.5.  (See page 98 - 99 of the report.  Link above.)

Let’s assume Columbia’s area is 27.7 square miles (which is what Wikipedia says, so it must be true).  I know Columbia has a few bike lanes, and some signed bicycle routes (though one of those is Route 29, something I cannot wrap my head around), but I can’t seem to find the mileage of these facilities, so let’s skip them for now to make this quick and dirty.

Assuming 94 miles of pathways, Columbia has a ratio of 3.4, well above the average of American cities (1.8), well above Baltimore’s ratio is (1.1), and equal to DC’s ratio of 3.4.  DC is ranked tenth in the country among large US cities, and we are freakin' equal to that.

Well, damn.

(And actually we might score a little higher due to leaving out other less easily counted bicycle facilities.)

I mean, we all know the pathways are a great resource we have but laying the numbers out is interesting, especially considering the number of trips that are considered bikeable-- man, we are in a good place.  Sure, critics could say that 94 miles of trailways doesn't mean they go where we want them too, but heck, the same could be said of bike lanes in the comparison cities when we're talking raw numbers.

Bring on the bikeshare.

Columbia according to Google Maps

Google Maps has tossed its hat in the jurisdiction definition ring by recently highlighting the border of the place a user types in, whether it's city, county, or zip code.

In many cases, this is fairly straight forward.  Baltimore, for example, has specific boundaries where Baltimore City ends and Baltimore County begins and that

But Google has gone beyond jurisdictions that have solid boundaries and waded into the somewhat murkier territory of unincorporated areas.

Did somebody mention Columbia?

To be fair, Columbia's a weird example.  If you define it by zip code (21044 - 21046), you'd get a different map than if you define it by CA-assessed property or areas that are subject to New Town zoning, where you'd get a map that would include parts of Ellicott City and Clarksville but would omit some areas on a parcel-by-parcel basis.  Then you have people's nebulous ideas of where Columbia ends and where Ellicott City, Clarksville, or Elkridge begin and end.

Be that as it may, here's Google's stab at what Columbia is.

I would have just embedded the map here, but the Columbia outline didn't show up on that for some reason.  Feel free to explore the actual map here.

Doesn't look too bad at first glance.  Route 108 is the northern/western boundary, Guilford Road and the Patuxent (yes?) form the western/southern boundary.

The eastern boundary is totally wonky, though.  Closer look:

It's a little hard to see, but we're looking at the dotted line.  Apparently at the intersection of 108 and Tamar Drive, the line cuts through a subdivision (zoom in at the link above to confirm!), around Columbia Crossing and part of Snowden River Parkway, and apparently one side of Snowden but not the other as you move further south.   Very odd.  It doesn't seem to follow zip codes lines as 21045 follows Waterloo Road around until 175.

I guess the line had to be somewhere, right?  But it's interesting.  This is more than simply a few pixels-- it's distinguishing a place where people live and along with that place comes an identity, in theory.

It's funny how maps shape the way we perceive things.  Think back to learning about map projections, and how Greenland dwarfs Africa in the Mercator projection, even though in real life, Africa is seventeen times bigger.  Tools like Google Maps (or any maps) can command authority, and we assume they reflect reality in some sort of objective sense.  Y'know, even if that's not the case.  I mean, anyone who's relied on Google Maps in the past has likely been led astray at least once in their lives.

(Via and spun off of a post by Nate Berg at the excellent Atlantic Cities blog.)

A closer look at the pedestrian-wearing-headphones crash study

Those unpredictable headphone wearing pedestrians!  They're just asking to get hit.  And now a study from the University of Maryland proves it.

Brad Aaron from Streetsblog tears the headline-making study apart.  While reports latched onto the "pedestrian fatalities increased three-fold over the last seven years due to increased headphone use" snippet, they failed to include some other crucial information that was included in the report.

From the study: "...neither causation nor correlation can be established between headphone use and pedestrian risk."  How far are they willing to take the conclusions from their study?  "However, we believe our grading system shows strong circumstantial evidence that headphones may have played a role in most injuries and deaths in the case series."  Not super strong.

A few large holes in the study (both from Aaron's excellent post as well as from the study itself):

• The researchers looked at 116 cases between 2004 and 2011, while total pedestrian deaths during the same time frame numbered in the tens of thousands.

• They mostly used media reports to glean information from the crashes-- not the best source of information for a comprehensive picture of pedestrian fatalities.  This limitation is something that researchers acknowledge and discuss throughout the in the study.

• The majority of victims in the study were not struck by cars, but by trains (55%).  First off, car-pedestrian crashes are completely different from train-pedestrian crashes.  Aaron writes that this high train-pedestrian crash rate in the whole study could just "as much as anything could call into question the perils of walking on train tracks — or the need for safer pedestrian thoroughfares."  Or, as the study says, more media attention paid to these kinds of instances.

• Secondly, from the study itself-- there are 4,000 to 5,000 pedestrian crashes per year, and about 50 train-pedestrian crashes per year.  The proportion of crashes studied by the researchers doesn't reflect this reality in the least.

• The study does not account for other factors like driver error, pedestrian intoxication, suicidal intentions, etc.

• Nor could it account for the number of incidents where pedestrians were wearing headphones and did not get hit by a car, or near-misses, or the like (that doesn't make the news), so it's impossible to draw solid conclusions about pedestrian inattentiveness due to headphones.

I highly highly highly recommend reading the study.  It's only four pages long and is a much more balanced and unclear picture than reported snippets would have you believe .  There are a lot of limitations to the study and a great deal of researcher speculation.

Being attentive and alert while walking, biking, and driving is important.  There are a whole host of things to draw our attention away from concentrating on the road, and that can be dangerous.  I find it really annoying when people have headphones in to the point of inattentiveness when they really need to be paying attention.  (My personal pet peeve-- people in the grocery store with headphones who can't hear me when I say "excuse me" to get that can of tomatoes or whatever they're blocking.  People with headphones in while interacting at a counter-- grocery, takeout, bank, or otherwise.  Come on!)

Seatbelts, airbags, shocks, climate control, and quiet rides help detach drivers from the reality that driving is the most dangerous thing we do (both to ourselves and others) on a consistent, daily basis.  While people in a car have the protection that the car affords us, pedestrians have little or nothing, and they are dependent on those of us who are steering thousands of pounds of metal at high speeds to do so responsibly--especially in an area like ours where major throughfares are lacking sidewalks and other pedestrian infrastructure.  Not everyone is a driver, but everyone is a pedestrian -- even if it's just walking from your car to the door of your destination.