"Transportation in the Post-Carbon World"

One of our guest speakers from yesterday's class, George Dondero, Director of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission, shared this reading titled Transportation in the Post-Carbon World to pass along to you all. It's optional, but it directly ties into the work of this class. You can access it online here by downloading the PDF or reading it online.

The excerpt on the site reads

"Successful post-carbon transitions will benefit from understanding the dynamics of transport revolutions. We define a transport revolution as being substantial change in a society's transport activity--moving people or freight, or both--that occurs in less than twenty five years."

And here's a video that gives you a sense of the topic being addressed in the reading:

Walk to Class Challenge & Dr. Paul Lee (February 7, 2014)

A few weeks ago on February 7, our class focused on walking. We had two guest speakers, Jessica Pearson (Provost's Sustainability Intern for Transportation and Parking Services) and Dr. Paul Lee (founder of the UCSC Chadwick Garden and Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project and former philosophy professor in the History of Consciousness department at UCSC in the 1960s).

After going over this presentation and talking about the readings, Jessica shared about her Walk to Class Challenge that's happening on April 22. There will be stations around campus and encouragement to walk to class that day instead of taking the bus. We look forward to the challenge, and we wish Jessica the best of luck in promoting it!

We were also fortunate enough that day to have a guest presentation by Dr. Paul Lee. We invited Dr. Lee because he supported the creation of a project called the Circle Trail Project and also helped preserve the land that is now Pogonip park.

Dr. Lee talked about the history of the Chadwick Garden and what it was like to work with Alan Chadwick. He shared that Alan Chadwick was "crazy" and the "hardest person to work with" but that he was integral to the organic movement. Dr. Lee called the Chadwick Garden "the spiritual center of the University" and said that "Chadwick taught students how to work" in a way that they hadn't been expected to do before.

He also shared about the Green Belt Initiative in 1977 to save Pogonip, explaining that he wanted it to become a botanic garden and horticulture belt along with the Chadwick Garden and Farm so close by. His original idea was to have the Homeless Garden Project (HGP) within Pogonip, though the HPG is now located near Long Marine Lab. The HPG came about because there were a number of homeless people in Santa Cruz in the 1980s and the first public homeless shelter was created. Dr. Lee said that there were 100s of homeless people then, but they only had room for 50. The question became what to have people do during the day, and the answer came in the form of the HPG, which provides a small stipend for working in the garden and is a safe haven for rehabilitation. Today, there are around 4000 homeless people in the area, according to Lee, and the HPG is thriving. Learn more about it here.

Side note & fun fact: Growing up in Los Gatos, my dad always saw signs that read "Save Pogonip" when he'd drive over the hill to Santa Cruz. He never knew what it meant until he grew up and realized it was the name of a land preserve. To him, it was just a funny name with no understanding behind it. I was able to tell him the other day that I met a man who helped support the "Save Pogonip" initiative. It's so fun going to college near where my dad grew up and be able to have common understandings of places that he explored when he was young.

Finally, Dr. Lee shared about the Circle Trail Project, which was the idea of a woman who approached Lee in the 1990s. The website for the Project states that "Sylvia Knapton conceived of a trail through the Santa Cruz Greenbelt that would showcase the area’s natural beauty and ecological diversity." Dr. Lee shared his experience trying to inaugurate the project, which essentially creates a walking trail between various destination points of interest in Santa Cruz, including the HGP, Long Marine Lab, the UCSC Arboretum, and Chadwick Garden, among others.

The pamphlet from Circle Trail Day in 1997.

The inauguration celebration was not as successful as he had hoped due to extremely hot weather. Despite this, Dr. Lee has been working on the Project again with a graduate student from the UCSC Digital Arts and New Media Department. They hope to design a phone application that people can install for a virtual tour of the Circle Trail so that when they visit these locations in Santa Cruz, they can learn the natural and human history of the sites. They are currently seeking people interested in working on this project You can learn more about the Circle Trail Project here and contact them through the website.

After presenting about these histories, one of the students in our class, Maryam, asked how we can pursue projects and plan things in the face of all of the red tape and obstacles to overcome in creating meaningful projects. Dr. Lee's answer was simple: "Ignore all that and just do it. Don't think about all the obstacles because if you do, you'll ask yourself 'are you out of your mind?' Don't plan, don't ask anybody first, just do it."

His point is well taken that we must take action on projects before we lose the courage to face the obstacles. My recommendation would be to take that mentality and pursue projects, finding those with the skills and ability to plan if you lack in those areas. It's about balance. In Dr. Lee's case, Alan Chadwick had the organic gardening knowledge to help design the garden. It was Dr. Lee's enthusiasm and ready-set-go attitude that got the project going. We could probably all do well with a measured dose of Dr. Lee's advice to "just do it."

Thanks, Jessica and Dr. Lee for visiting our class! We appreciated learning from both of you about projects that help support walking in Santa Cruz, and we wish you both the best of luck in your endeavors.

Recap of the Last Couple Weeks

We're overdue for a recap of class! Between reading for class and preparing the lesson plans and learning about the awesome projects everyone's doing, Alex and I haven't had a chance to write about what we've been doing in class--which is important so that people who aren't there can learn about the cool stuff we're doing.

Two weeks ago, Amelia Conlen, Director of People Power of Santa Cruz County, and Tawn Kennedy, Director of Green Ways to School, visited our class to talk about the work that they do in the community and how students in the class can get involved. It was awesome to learn about the projects they're currently working on. Both of them spoke about transportation issues in general, as well, which framed their work within the larger issues of transportation that we're facing. Tawn spoke about climate change and the importance of encouraging young people to bike. Thank you both for attending and sharing with us!

Tawn speaking about his work with Green Ways to School. 

After hearing from Tawn and Amelia, Alex presented about bikes, which is evidently our class's favorite topics since we talk about it every week even when we aren't focusing on bikes. The presentation that Alex showed is here if you want to review it.

Last week, we focused on public transportation. We started class by going around and sharing the funniest, best, or most interesting experiences we've had on public transportation. The stories ranged from drunk, boisterous men on buses in the Central Valley to silent connections made by eye contact on buses to realizations about socioeconomic inequalities and why we feel how we feel when we take public transportation. (If anyone from class wants to share what their story was, please do so in the comments!)

We transitioned into talking about the readings and reviewing a presentation that I put together the night before. You can review it here. We ended that portion of class with a TED Talk by Enrique Peñalosa titled "Why buses represent democracy in action."

After this, we welcomed a guest presentation by Erich Friedrich, Senior Transportation Planner with Santa Cruz METRO. He spoke about the history of METRO, current struggles the transit district faces, and exciting opportunities happening in the future. Students had many questions, and it led to an interesting conversation about Santa Cruz transportation issues and possible solutions. We may have more details on this coming soon in a blog post from Alex!

As always, you can look over our syllabus to see what readings we're doing each week and what the topic and plans are for future weeks. Tomorrow, we're discussing walking, and we have two guest speakers, Jessica Pearson from Transportation & Parking Services and Dr. Paul Lee, founder of the Chadwick Garden and Homeless Garden Project and advocate for trails like Pogonip. You're welcome to join us any Friday from 8 - 10:40 AM in the Kresge Seminar Room 159.

Enjoy this rain!

Streets of S.F. a road hazard as pedestrian deaths spike (SF Chronicle)

I came across this article in the SF Chronicle yesterday while eating at the 9/10 Dining Hall, and I thought it was particularly relevant to our class. The issue of bureaucratic sluggishness on moving projects ahead and the desire (and inability) to get everyone to agree on transportation projects is a huge problem for places like San Francisco. It becomes not only annoying but actually dangerous when the places that are supposed to be seeing these improvements are the site of numerous fatalities for people walking and biking.

Source here.

Perhaps this article could prompt some questions for us to explore on Feb 28 when we have a speaker panel of folks who have directly dealt with processing and implementing transportation changes like the ones discussed in this article… We can also discuss the pedestrian issues addressed in this article tomorrow, since this week's topic is walking.

Here's a snippet of the article, but you should check out the full story on the SF Chronicle website here.

"San Francisco has put together a lot of plans and budgeted a lot of money to reduce pedestrian and bike accidents and generally make its streets safer. 

"But people keep getting maimed and killed by cars - and some city officials and residents think part of the reason is that the city has been slow to follow through with its proposals to improve street designs and crack down on drivers who break traffic laws. 

"A spate of pedestrian fatalities at the end of 2013 and the beginning of this year - including the death of 6-year-old Sofia Liu on New Year's Eve and a man who was killed by a car in the Parkside neighborhood Tuesday - shows that the city's streets remain dangerous. Yet just 6 percent of San Francisco streets account for 60 percent of incidents in which pedestrians are severely injured or killed. On those streets, high-injury corridors representing 5.2 percent of the city's street miles are the site of more than half of all pedestrian deaths and injuries. 

"While the number of hazardous blocks isn't numerous, bringing down the number of deadly collisions hasn't been easy. The city has earmarked tens of millions of dollars for re-engineering dangerous corridors in recent years, but some seemingly simple projects can take years. In the meantime, bicycle and pedestrian fatalities spiked in 2013: 21 people were killed while walking, the most since 2007, and four bicyclists lost their lives, the highest number since 2001."

Engaged Discussions on Santa Cruz Transportation 1/17/14

Last Friday, our class met in the Common Ground Center, Kresge Room 166. Our normal classroom, the Kresge Seminar Room, was full of California Student Sustainability Coalition students who were at UC Santa Cruz for their winter convergence. Having class in the smaller space allowed for a more intimate discussion on Santa Cruz-specific transportation issues, and although we'll return to the Kresge Seminar Room for most other weeks, we may venture back into that space if we feel that our discussions on particular days require that closer intimacy.

We spoke about Santa Cruz transportation statistics, things to celebrate, issues to find solutions to, and also discussed our first blog post experience of writing our transportation histories, which can all be found on this blog. Students expressed having trouble getting started writing about transportation history because it's such an integral and typically changing history of our lives. Most people discussed the multiple modes they've used in their lives--cars, bikes, buses being the most common methods. We discussed how our experiences, comfortability, and perceptions of each mode affects how we view other modes and other people using other modes.

After spending some time reviewing local Santa Cruz information and hearing a brief presentation by Brenden Fant, a UCSC alum, former Impact Designs: Engineering & Sustainability through Student Service (IDEASS) bike transit intern, and former Student Environmental Center Transportation Campaign Coordinator. Brenden went through his report from his IDEASS project that surveyed people who bike to and from the UCSC campus to identify where people are riding and what the barriers are to people riding bikes more. Brenden had us brainstorm the benefits of cycling since we had touched upon the reasons why bicycling is an effective and healthy mode of transportation, but we hadn't articulated in one place what those reasons were. Here's what we came up with (click the image for a larger view):

Then we brainstormed as a class what kinds of visions we have for the future of transportation at UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz in general. This ranged from more people perceiving walking as a good way to get around to double decker bridges for bikes on campus to zip lines to less crowded buses. I took some photos of the board before class ended so we could review them later:

Thank you everyone for participating in great conversation and bringing your perspectives and experiences to class to share! We look forward to seeing you tomorrow, when we select project topics and hear from Amelia Conlen and Tawn Kennedy of People Power of Santa Cruz County about the work that they do and how you can get involved!

Documents from January 17 class:

• View the presentation slides from 1/17
• 2012-13 IDEASS Bicycle Transit Study (Brenden's project)
• Read the Community Assessment Project, which contains statistics about Santa Cruz issues