Archive for the “transportation” Category

Until the phone carriers and MBTA collude to spoil it, my daily subway commute is the only time that I’m completely unavailable to the outside world. No phone calls, no email, no social networks. At only three stops, the journey is too brief to really get into a novel or do serious work, so I’m happy when I find an abandoned newspaper on a seat, usually one of those free papers designed to be read in the span of a typical commute.

Why don’t I just take one of those papers from the box or the people handing them out? Well, that’s where it gets complicated. I don’t want to take a paper because I know I’m going to use it only ever so briefly and then I’ll feel responsible for either leaving it behind - arguably littering - or recycling it right away - which seems wasteful. Throwing it in the trash or using it in some art project don’t even make the list.

The free paper publishers know that litter is a big issue - they are banned for distributing on MBTA property and made a donation of hundreds of recycling bins (bags, really) to try and appease the transit people. So back to my eco-neurotic quandary: Is it littering to leave a newspaper on the subway so that others might read it, and does it make a difference if you originally picked up that paper or just found it on the seat?

If lots of people regularly left free papers on the seats, maybe some people would stop taking papers and the total amount of paper would go down. But if nobody ever took those papers off the train, there would be an awful lot of litter at the end of the day. Like a car that loses value when you drive it off the lot, a daily newspaper gets worthless fast.

I’m sure the law is clear: leaving stuff on the T, even nice clean stuff, even leaving it on the seat, is still littering. I’d also say that once you pick something up, you’re responsible for it, so leaving found stuff is littering again. But I still recoil at the waste of reading matter. Like many people (of the Book) I have a hard time throwing away or defacing books.

So here’s my wacky utopian proposal for the morning commute and reading time:

• If you were born on an even numbered day, you take papers on even numbered days, odd birthdays, odd paper days, and you leave those papers on the seat when you get off the train
• If its not your odd/even day, you pick up a left paper and are responsible for taking it off the train and recycling it
• After the main morning commute time, say 9:30am, alternate rules are off and any everybody is responsible for taking papers off the train

If everybody did this, we’d use only half as much paper for disposable free morning reading.  Fat chance of that.  The free paper people certainly don’t want to cut their circulation in half, and typical Americans aren’ t going to be interested in second-hand papers.

So until everybody switches to a more ecologically sound morning read, I will continue to be quietly grateful for minor littering, and will do my best to take my found paper with me on both odd and even days.

It happens a couple of times a year. Some ad salesman makes it through the phone screen into the ear of an impressionable person and suddenly we’re discussing advertising with in-flight magazines or worse yet, in-flight audio infotainment. Although the demographics of people why fly might be attractive to some businesses, the odds of somebody consuming this in-flight media and retaining any of it to an actionable place seem vanishingly small. I’ve sung this song before. Well, my lucky number came up yesterday when I made a point of carrying the entire May issue of Delta’s Sky magazine off the flight with me. After all, somebody had done the sudoku and I polished off one of the crossword puzzles. Why did I take the magazine? Almost entirely for this, which by the way is not paid advertising.

It was part of a feature on the fashionable shopping strip of Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale, FL. A dark chocolate duck. How cool is that? Even Lake Champlain Chocolates doesn’t have that. And the little tin, precious! As I write this I note that the chocoduck bears a peculiar resemblance to an antique silver bank we had around the house when I was little. It kinda creeped me out, actually.

Anyway, so I got home and scanned this page and set off to the Galler website (type it in yourself, I’m not giving them a link) and discovered that there’s no sign of the chocolately canard at all. No picture, no mention in the catalog. It’s the May issue of the magazine, how often do these things change? Not that I really want a chocolate duck, but I would feel better knowing that there really is one.

A few searches later, I found some feeble substitutes such as the loathsome white chocolate duckie embedded in the “nirvana chocolates summer gift basket.” I think not. But I also found evidence of somebody thinking outside the box with the application of Vahlrona chocolate to actual duck breasts. The link to the full recipe is a tease, but especially after MoleCanolli, I’m quite curious. (More on MoleCanolli soon, I’m still compiling my notes.)

From the excellent virtual pages of Strange Maps comes this ducky item.

On January 10 [1992], a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.

Apparently these buoyant and nearly indestructible little quackers have helped scientists track ocean currents and are showing up on beaches on several continents, and have become collectors items of a weird sort.  Here’s a link to the turgid wikipedia entry on the Friendly Floatees.  Keep your eyes peeled at the beach this summer.

With apologies to Ed Ruscha…

Look really closely at the top sign. See the bolt at the M of “EACH MONTH”? It says “SOMERVILLE” under there just inside the red margin. Ditto the no bikes sign - below the black border, SOMERVILLE.

Hmm. This sign is close to where I parked. It might say SOMERVILLE on the top sign like the one previous, but it’s covered up by the lower sign, which has no city designation.

A split decision here. The street cleaning sign does say SOMERVILLE in small letters, but the permit parking sign says nothing.

This pair has no city on it. Are we in Cambridge yet? Probably not, since the street cleaning days match the Somerville signs.

This is definitely the largest type size for the word SOMERVILLE so far.

Aha! Pretty clear lettering by Cambridge, plus a different street cleaning zone.

More Cambridge.

CITY OF CAMBRIDGE. Can’t miss that.

Ditto.

In sight of Mass Ave, if you weren’t sure yet, you should be now.

The tally: Five signs in Somerville, about half of them saying Somerville, and six signs in Cambridge, all unambiguous. A pretty poor showing by Somerville since only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the length of the street is Cambridge.  The facts aren’t in doubt, but it took some squinting to find them.

I while ago I heard a rumor that there was a border dispute between Cambridge and Somerville. I wasn’t able to get any confirmation, so I put it out of my mind. But now it appears that I might have fallen right into it. I know what you’re thinking. This is just the sort of thing that could happen only to me. Perhaps.

As you may know, I live in Central Square, Cambridge, and work in Davis Square, Somerville. My car is registered and permitted to park in Cambridge. I don’t normally drive to work, but sometimes if I have to drive somewhere after work, it makes sense to drive there and then hop in my car directly after work. So I decided to try and optimize things by finding the point in Cambridge closest to my office in Somerville, and parking there free. It was surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative map of the border, but I eventually dug up this street cleaning zone map on the Cambridge DPW web site.  For what it’s worth, the Somerville web site had zero helpful information.

Based on this, I decided that parking on the East side of Russell street near the corner of Elm would be the optimal location, just inside the Cambridge line, but about as close to Davis square as possible. In the past, I had parked lower down Russell street where both sides are clearly Cambridge. Today I got a spot in front of 44 Russell street, a couple of houses from the corner.

Officer Soares saw it differently.

For $20 I might have sucked it up, but for $40, I decided to stand by my city’s DPW map and look into this. I visited the Cambridge police station near my home and consulted the large map on the wall. It seemed to match the street sweeping map. An officer asked me what I was doing, and I explained the situation. He picked up a phone, called some number and asked, “44 Russell street, is that us or Somerville?” and told me that it was in fact a Cambridge address. He did note that it was possible that the city line existed between the house and the curb, but could not confirm one way or the other. One could argue that the DPW map above shows that, but I assumed it was sloppy illustration.  That’s what happens when you assume, but it still sounds like reasonable doubt to me.

The back of the ticket states, “This violation may also be appealed and adjudicated by mail if supporting documentation is mailed within 21 days of issuance.” I got home and began to assemble my case. I checked a source perhaps even more respected than the police. I searched “44 Russell Street, Cambridge, MA” and got a nice map. Just to make sure, I then tried “44 Russell Street, Somerville, MA” and look what I got:

Very interesting. I think I can say with certainty that #44 is in Cambridge. Now I have to go back to the scene and double check the signs to see if there are any clues to the ownership of the street itself. So far, I haven’t been able to see any “permit parking only” signs that say Cambridge or Somerville on them.

No doubt, this story is to be continued…