Choose Senility in Howard County

April 20, 2009

Updates and city developement

Filed under: Columbia, GGP, HoCo, Town Center — Chris Bachmann @ 9:57 pm

Urgh. Sorry for the lack of updates. As those close to me know, the new job in DC is keeping me fairly busy and I’m adjusting to a more “normal” schedule. However, the change of pace has been fairly stimulating as well as exhausting at times. So it’s just about time that I start addressing some more recent developments that have come out since not just my last post, but the brain dump that I had last summer on my personal blog.

My instinct has been telling me for a few years that GGP was probably going to have financial issues, but I never thought it would be as big as they are now. While I don’t want to start speculating about finances and the like (not my specialty, that’s for sure), I pretty much knew that with the current economic climate and demographic trends, Columbia has a few choices to make that could lead us into one way or another. Fortunately (or unfortunately if you which to view it so), the credit crunch and GGP’s financial difficulties may buy us some more time to talk things over a little more. This is not to say that some work should go ahead, but there’s still a bunch of things that can be done for later projects.

Matt Yglesias pointed out a Census report on the declining ratio of children under 18 per household (read the full report here), the reasons for it and it’s implications down the road. While I differ with Matt on the “cities are better” point, I do tend to agree with him about the advantages of walkable cities. For this, the GGP is fairly good about, but then, they do have a decent base to work off of. However, the car still reigns supreme in their designs. Let’s bring the worst part of cities to the new one, eh? Let’s bring the traffic and congestion to town center like what happened with Bethesda. Let’s build a town center that you need to drive to like Reston Town Center. That would really improve our quality of life.

Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are certainly coming out and there are some already on the market. The Tesla Model S is also a game changer in many respects for the future of the car industry. Therefore I should remind you, gentile readers, that electricity and parking garages that are exposed to the weather can and will cause a lot of problems over time and can have some shocking repercussions. Pun intended. Also, with “shared parking” constructs, it would make the implementation of auto plug-ins difficult billing wise. I would like to hear of GGP’s solution to that particular problem.

The target demographics is also important as well. As much as I disagree with Matt, he’s also emblematic of the best and brightest of my generation and the one that follows me. Getting away from the sterile, boring suburbs that are too expensive for the everyman and have little of interest to the post-post-modern adult. From what I can glean from the GGP proposal is a targeted plan for the Baby Boomers and the generation that preceded them, who will most likely be dead by the time this plan is completed. Sorry, had to say it. I know I’m harsh, but statistically…

…On another note… The lack of discussion on rail still irks me.

  1. Trains are way more energy efficient than cars.
  2. Trains mean less of a need for cars moving in and out of town center.
  3. There’s a significant portion of the population who commute into either Baltimore or DC.
  4. If we manage to attract more businesses to downtown, not all of those workers will live here.
  5. Rail lines are a cheap and easy way to run communication lines to other population centers.
  6. As DC is emblematic of, sought-after development is being centered around existing metro stations and those that are not near them are beginning to flounder.
  7. If development is booming around rail and car-based developments are not attracting the younger generations, we’ll be spending a lot of time building very expensive slums for future generations.

I understand the arguments of my hometown elders, but they’re inadvertently hurting the town that I grew up in and love so much. I’ve lived in the city and I both love and hate it. We have the opportunity to make a city the right way, but the short sightedness of those working and opposing the plan are both aiming for a very tragic end. The death of possibility.

–Chris

February 15, 2009

Government 2.0 and Howard County/Columbia

Filed under: Columbia, Government 2.0, HoCo — Chris Bachmann @ 5:24 pm
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This morning I went to a very good beta presentation by Ken Fisher from clickforhelp.com about how Government can make it’s way into the social media space. What was going to be a simple run through of his presentation became a quite active discussion concerning not only how he can improve his presentation for Wednesday, but also about government communications in general. This being a local oriented blog (although sparse so far — sorry guys and gals new job and the need to learn new rules that apply to me and lobbying), the question then becomes how to apply these concepts to the local government.

Let me step back for a while to give some background for why this event was going on in the first place.

With the new administration in the White House, the directive to the departments was that government will be transparent to the public. There are a phethora of software applications available to enable communication both within a department and to those outside of a department. But unfortunately, the mechanism of communication tends to get more debate than the actual content. Too often Government and other organizations see a new technology and say, “We really need to get into this so we look hip, cool and relevant.” The only problem with this is that if the focus is on the medium, then little thought gets put into what is actually communicated.

I’ve been a netizen since the days before the web browser. I was also in the BBS world before the Internet was really public. So I’ve seen a lot of good content and a ton of crappy content. Most gov sites are pretty bad. Unless you know what it is that you are looking for, it’s pretty confusing to get to real data. Usually you just get to some sorry excuses for a message. A lot of fluff and not a lot of depth. Zzzzz…

The good news is that there’s a lot of great content out there. Even from government agencies. Blogger Bob and the TSA is a great example of this. Bob has a great personality and he’s got a great way of delivering a message: Short, precise and to the point. The sheer force of his personality and willingness to show how new technology impacts the TSA and the public has made him semi-famous within the blogosphere on the whole. In fact, that was one of Ken’s points today. Putting a face to the message improves it’s reception. This is in contrast to other sites that are just a bunch of anonymous people that do not have a personal relationship with their audience.

Howard County also has the Snowplow Tracking site, which is a pure bundle of awesome that can use some improvement, but is basically done. More on that later.

On the other hand, more traditional reports and other authoritative communications should be from the department as a whole. These would be the dry, wonky reports that I personally get a kick out of, but a personality on top of it explaining what it means helps put some of that data into a digestible format.

The question becomes, how does government communicate with themselves and the public. More importantly, how do the people communicate back?

I can go on and on about methods of communication without getting down to actual content. The main point of my argument that was beginning to form this morning, but is beginning to gel into a more cohesive argument as I’m writing this, is that in order for a technology that is used to communicate to the public, needs to be used within an internal silo first.

Twitter? Build a Laconica server first for internal office communications. Let people use it within a department first. The benefit is that co-workers can post questions and get answers back from others in the department. This can be really useful for groups that are spread out over the country. And people absorb information differently, so someone can ask, “does anyone know about …” and someone can post a set of links to that very topic. If they’re the author of a particular document, they can also get some instant feedback and corrections. The point is that it’s easy to build and push out. It’s also a way to enable communication within the organization. The most important thing is it allows people to get used to a new technology within a familiar environment. That’s what pretty much happened with email. It starts locally then goes global. Once the mindset is established, then the PR folks can start disseminating info in a meaningful way because they worked out the bugs in communication within the org first.

Then there’s the idea of mashable content. Government is very good at collecting a ton of raw data and putting it into a manageable format. However, the raw data streams are often hard to get for those outside of that particular project. Transparency also means making that raw data available for people to create other views. This can be as simple as developing a common API so third parties can develop applications to display that data in new ways. With enough ingenuity, someone can create an app that correlates census data with unemployment rates for instance. And better yet, government workers can use those other apps to do their own work.

So how does this translate to the local government? Well let’s take my previous example of the HoCo Snowplow Tracker. The page uses it’s API internally and is not publicly accessible. If the API was released, not really knowing how the data is formatted, I can still surmise that a number of apps can be developed that takes in just the text data stream and use it’s own mapping software to display that data. I can then take that data and make an iPhone app, or one for the Nokia, or Google maps, or Yahoo! Maps. I could also overlay weather data within that map. Or I can also set up links to the traffic cameras and know when to watch te plow going past my local intersection. I can also send feedback to the crews with geotagged data and report icy conditions and other problem spots. It would also take off some of the load to the server when it comes to processing this data and pushing it off to the local client to make sense of the data.

Phew, that’s enough for today… I’m going to take a break and let more of this stuff digest in my mind. Stay tuned!

–Chris

October 21, 2008

GGP’s proposal for Columbia Town Center

Filed under: Columbia, GGP, Town Center — Chris Bachmann @ 9:27 pm
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In my email today, I got a letter from GGP saying that the general outline plan for Town Center is now released. Being that it’s my day off, I figured that I would give it a good read and post some initial thoughts. Many of the references that I make to my previous writing can still be found at my personal site where I did a mental dump of some thoughts concerning TC.

Most of my mental activity of late has been focused around two items. Environment and parking. So let me take on the parking and transportation aspects today.

There was a particular paragraph which was concerning to me. Maybe it’s just my own druthers, but I think it says a lot about where GGP’s focus remains.

“Complete streets” will be designed for motorists,
transit passengers, bicyclists and pedestrians within
the Town Center grid. These streets will be safe,
comfortable and attractive to all users, including
those in wheelchairs. Existing travel speeds will be
reduced to those more compatible with the speeds
traveled by pedestrians and bicyclists.

I found it interesting that motorists came first in the list. Given my particular druthers, motorists would be the last in the list. If we are really trying to make a livable, urban-like community, why should we encourage cars on these streets? I do recognize the need to fit current patterns, but we do need to plan ahead for a world to come as best we can.

That being said, the proposed intersection changes hold promise for being able to handle the expected influx of cars, but I’m also certain that without significant mass transportation improvements that we will be facing significant traffic jams in the years to come.

The pedestrian access to TC would be a significant improvement to potentially improving the traffic situation, but here I do see some more dreamy idealism rather than a practical assessment of human behavior. For those of us who already live in TC and even in Wilde Lake, driving to the Mall and other locations is just too convenient. While I usually make an effort to walk to the Mall, it’s just as easy to hop in the car and go. I would propose that we as a society are so used to “just getting in the car and go” that it would take some artificial stimulus to change that behavior patterns. With the transportation proposals that are currently in place, people will still drive to where they want to go, but this time, bitch about how hard it is to drive in the congestion, continue to drive through stop signs, not wait for pedestrians and the like. But they will continue to do it anyway because no one is encouraging them to get out of their cars and walk some. This is why I will continue to propose a pedestrian only area within LPP and GWP or at least driving within that area limited to actual residents.

With that being said, I do applaud GGP’s proposal to make some sense out of the walkways. Over the past few months, I’ve been walking though TC and it does take some mental gymnastics to navigate through the current setup. Walking from Wilde Lake to the Lakefront is not intuitive treacherous in places. Especially with the aforementioned habit of people in the county to not stop at red lights and stop signs. Also, having grown up here and experienced first hand how the Mall security treats young people, I am hesitant to walk through the area unless I need to hit the BoA ATM. Even now that I’m much older and “part of the establishment”, as my friend Stan told me, I still have that ingrained memory. Somehow, a lone person walking through the parking lot seems strange and I don’t want to be hassled by the “Rent-A-Pigs” as we used to call them. For this, I salute Columbia 2.0’s stunt a few months ago. The Mall area is not walkable.

The mass transit plan is also applause worthy. This particular statement stuck out to me.

In this regard, Columbia is not presently a strong
market for potential rapid transit extensions due
to its low density and dispersed, single-land uses.
However, the development recommended by this
Amendment and the anticipated private investment
in Town Center would provide a strong incentive to
the State and County to improve existing regional
bus transit service and to implement new services
due to the following:
■ Mixed uses (providing strong passenger demand
throughout the day in both directions)
■ Higher density (providing many more people –
jobs and residents – within walking distance)
■ Integrated local transit (Howard
Transit and Town Center Shuttle)
■ A relocated and enhanced transit hub

Bravo! Just what a few of us in the bloggoshpere have been talking about over the past week or so, but I am disappointed that this is given scant attention to detail that the new roadways were given. This leads me to assume that it’s more of an afterthought rather than a serious proposal. When will we see a more serious proposal come to light? What planning will need to go in place today to make future improvements easier? When can we expect a better answer before we give the plan our support?

The parking proposals are also interesting, but we are looking at more traditional above ground approaches to parking. I still have not heard about why we can not go downwards and utilize that real estate. It makes sense to me in that we can also utilize the underground space for other, more industrial type uses as well as a space to house geothermal heat pumps and, possibly, geothermal generators. I also do not see any proposals on where parking would be located “to foster a ‘park once’ approach” as the GGP proposal states. Once again, that would be necessary for this proposal to gain my support.

Overall, the proposal has made significant gains, but I still find it lacking in many key aspects. I certainly look forward to the next version that addresses these concerns of mine.

More next time,
Chris Bachmann

July 28, 2008

Welcome to Choose Senility!

Filed under: Introduction — Chris Bachmann @ 11:13 pm
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Welcome to the new site everyone! My name is Chris Bachmann and I’m going to start up a new weekly podcast focusing on local issues in Columbia, MD as well as Howard County in general. I’m looking for topics and guests to feature in future episodes, so if you have any suggestions, email me at showideas [at] choosesenility.com.

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