[nfbmi-talk] Slightly Off Topic Pedestrians

[joe harcz Comcast]

I predict this:

Not only will there not be travel training at MCB TC, but there won't be an 
MCB TC if the pattern continues and if the commission is destroyed. This 
current government is stripping assets and going the privatization route 
while I write. As a matter of fact that is one thing on the table for mass 
transit in Detroit under the consent agreement.

Now like DTMB wishing to take Vocational Rehab funds ffrom the BEP I'm sure 
the state wouldn't mind seizing a federally funded asset like MCB TC and 
just shutting it down and selling it off.

If people think that is far fetched then I point to what was done with the 
School for the Blind, the School for the Deaf and now in Detroit Belle Isle, 
the State Fair Grounds, and even the entire Mass Transit System.

If people don't think it can happen here then they should look at other 
states where this has happened.

By the way MRS is orderred to go into an order of selection in October. If 
we are absorbed in to that general agency then we too will go in to an order 
of selection.

Get ready folks to wait forever for transition programs, residential rehab, 
and college funding if it will be there at all.

They'll likely send folks to MCBTI to learn how to be janitors for Peckham 
if you're lucky.

Thereare dark days on the horizon if these things go through, even darker 
days than we've been already experiencing under the tyranny and madness of 
Cannon.

Joe
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Wurtzel" <f.wurtzel at att.net>
To: "'NFB of Michigan Internet Mailing List'" <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 12:22 AM
Subject: [nfbmi-talk] Slightly Off Topic Pedestrians


> hello,
>
>
>
>
>
> More or less, we, as blind people, fall into the category of pedestrians
> more often than our sighted peers.  For my part, I do recognize the bias
> toward cars and away from pedestrians.  With our obesity epidemic and high
> gas prices, you would think walking would be more valued.  Just shows the
> hypocrisy of our culture.
>
>
>
> Just consider the Executive order and the obnoxious position of the MCBVI,
> clearly mitigates against good travel training and freedom and 
> independence
> for blind people in the form of the freedom to walk about independently 
> and
> safely.  We need 9 months of training at MCBTC.  After the EO supported by
> those uncle toms we will be lucky to get 9 days of travel training.
>
>
>
> Warmest Regards,
>
>
>
> Fred
>
>
>
>
>
> America's pedestrian problem.
>
> The Crisis in American Walking
>
> How we got off the pedestrian path.
>
> By
>
> Tom  Vanderbilt
>
> |
>
> Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2012, at 6:28 AM ET
>
> Crisis in American Walking
>
> Sidewalk Science
>
> A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I 
> drifted
> into
>
> a conference room where a sign told me a "Pedestrian Safety" panel was 
> being
> held.
>
> The speaker was Michael Ronkin, a French-born, Swiss-raised, Oregon-based
> transportation
>
> planner whose firm, as his website notes, "specializes in creating 
> walkable
> and bikeable
>
> streets." Ronkin began with a simple observation that has stayed with me
> since. Taking
>
> stock of the event-one of the few focused on walking, which gets scant
> attention
>
> at traffic safety conferences-he wondered about that inescapable word:
>
> pedestrian
>
> . If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied
> someone approaching
>
> at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, "Here comes 
> a
> pedestrian"?
>
> Of course we wouldn't. That approaching figure would simply be a person.
> Pedestrian
>
> is a word born from opposition to other modes of travel; the Latin
>
> pedester,
>
> on foot, gained currency by its semantic tension with
>
> equester, on horse.
>
> But there is an implied-indeed, synonymous-pejorative. This dates from
> Ancient Greece.
>
> As the
>
> Oxford English Dictionary
>
> notes, the Greekπεζός
>
> meant "prosaic, plain, commonplace, uninspired (sometimes contrasted with
> the winged
>
> flight of Pegasus)." Or, in the Latin,
>
> pedester
>
> could refer to foot soldiers (e.g,
>
> peons), "rather than cavalry."
>
> Advertisement
>
> In other words, not to be on a horse, flying or otherwise, was to be 
> utterly
> unremarkable
>
> and mundane. To this day, Ronkin was intimating, the word
>
> pedestrian
>
> bears not only that slightly alien whiff, but the scars of condescension.
> This became
>
> clear as we walked later that evening through the historic center of
> Savannah. As
>
> we moved through the squares, our rambling trajectory matched by our
> expansive conversation,
>
> we were simply people doing that most human of things, walking. But every
> once in
>
> a while, we would encounter a busy thoroughfare, and we became 
> pedestrians.
> We lurked
>
> under ridiculously large retroreflective signs, built not at our scale, 
> but
> to be
>
> seen by those moving at a distance and at speed. Other signs reinforced 
> the
> message,
>
> starkly announcing: "Stop for Pedestrians." I thought, "Wait, who's a
> pedestrian?
>
> Is that me?"
>
> Walking
>
> Pedestrian in Nashville, Tenn. in 2010
>
> Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos.
>
> Simply by going out for a walk, I had become a strange being, studied by
> engineers,
>
> inhabiting environments whose physical features are determined by a
> rulebook-enshrined
>
> average 3 foot-per-second walking speed, my rights codified by signs. (Why
> not just
>
> write: "Stop for People"?) On those same signs in Savannah were often
> attached
>
> additional
>
> signs, advising drivers not to give to panhandlers (and to call 911 if
> physically
>
> intimidated), subtly equating walking with being exposed to an urban
> menace-or perhaps
>
> being
>
> the menace. Having taken all this information in, we would gingerly step
> into the
>
> marked crosswalk, that declaration of rights in paint, and try to gauge
> whether approaching
>
> vehicles would yield. They typically did not. Even in one of America's 
> most
> "pedestrian-friendly"
>
> cities-a seemingly innocent phrase that itself suddenly seemed strange to
> me-one
>
> was always in danger of being relegated to a footnote.
>
> Which is what walking in America has become: An act dwelling in the 
> margins,
> an almost
>
> hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text. Indeed, the
> semantics of
>
> the term
>
> pedestrian
>
> would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has
> forgotten
>
> how to walk. Witness, for example, the existence of "
>
> Everybody Walk!
>
> ," the "Campaign to Get America Walking" (one of a number of such
> initiatives). While
>
> its aims are entirely legitimate, its motives no doubt earnest, the idea
> that that
>
> we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism
> nearly 4
>
> million years ago-for reasons that are still debated-should now need
> "walking tips,"
>
> have to make "walking plans" or use a "mobile app" to "discover" walking
> trails near
>
> us or build our "walking histories," strikes me as a world-historical
> tragedy.
>
> For walkingis
>
> the ultimate "mobile app." Here are just some of the benefits, physical,
> cognitive
>
> and otherwise, that it bestows: Walking six miles a week
>
> was associated with
>
> a lower risk of Alzheimer's (and I'm not just talking about walking in the
> "Walk
>
> to End Alzheimers"); walking can
>
> help improve
>
> your child's academic performance; make
>
> you smarter
>
> ;
>
> reduce depression
>
> ;
>
> lower blood pressure
>
> ; even
>
> raise one's self-esteem
>
> ." And, most important, though perhaps least appreciated in the modern 
> age,
> walking
>
> is the only travel mode that gets you from Point A to Point B on your own
> steam,
>
> with no additional equipment or fuel required, from the wobbly threshold 
> of
> toddlerhood
>
> to the wobbly cusp of senility.
>
> Despite these upsides, in an America enraptured by the cultural prosthesis
> that is
>
> the automobile, walking has become a lost mode, perceived as not a
> legitimate way
>
> to travel but a necessary adjunct to one's car journey, a hobby, or
> something that
>
> people without cars-those pitiable "vulnerable road users," as they are
> called with
>
> charitable condescension-do. To decry these facts-to examine, as I will in
> this series,
>
> how Americans might start walking more again- may seem like a hopelessly
> retrograde,
>
> romantic exercise: nostalgia for Thoreau's woodland ambles. But the need 
> is
> urgent.
>
> The decline of walking has become a full-blown public health nightmare.
>
> ***
>
> The United States walks the least of any industrialized nation.
>
> Studies employing pedometers
>
> have found that where the average Australian takes 9,695 steps per day 
> (just
> a few
>
> shy of the supposedly ideal "10,000 steps" plateau, itself the product,
> ironically,
>
> of a Japanese pedometer company's
>
> campaign in the 1960s
>
> ), the average Japanese 7,168, and the average Swiss 9,650, the average
> American
>
> manages only 5,117 steps. Where a child in Britain, according to one 
> study,
> takes
>
> 12,000 to 16,000 steps per day, a similar U.S. study found a range between
> 11,000
>
> and 13,000.
>
> Why do we walk so comparatively little? The first answer is one that 
> applies
> virtually
>
> everywhere in the modern world: As with many forms of physical activity,
> walking
>
> has been engineered out of existence. With an eye toward the proverbial
> grandfather
>
> who regales us with tales of walking five miles to school in the snow, 
> this
> makes
>
> instinctive sense. But how do we know how much people used to walk? There
> were no
>
> 18
>
> th-century pedometer studies.
>
> There are, however, proxies. One could, for example, study a group "whose
> lifestyle
>
> has not changed markedly in the last 150 years," which is precisely what
> David Bassett
>
> and colleagues did, in a study published in
>
> Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise
>
> . Equipping a Canadian group of Old Order Amish-who work in 
> labor-intensive
> farming-with
>
> pedometers, the researchers found walking levels on the order of 18,000
> steps per
>
> day (not to mention comparatively low obesity rates). And a study by Gary
> Egger,
>
> et al., in
>
> The Medical Journal of Australia
>
> compared the walking habits people who worked as actors portraying
> Australian settlers
>
> at a historical theme park near Sydney to those of a group of office
> workers. The
>
> re-enactors were 1.6 to 2.3 times more active than the cubicle dwellers. 
> To
> your
>
> pitchforks!
>
> walk drive
>
> Carlin Robinson, 12, walks from her grandmother's car to the school bus in
> Manchester,
>
> Ky. Her house can be seen in the background. A study published in 2010,
> investigating
>
> high obesity rates in the town found that residents used cars to minimize
> walking
>
> distance, to the detriment of their health.
>
> Photograph by Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images.
>
> If walking is a casualty of modern life the world over-the historian Joe
> Moran estimates,
>
> for instance, that in the last quarter century in the U.K., the amount of
> walking
>
> has declined by 25 percent-why then do Americans walk even less than 
> people
> in other
>
> countries? Here we need to look not at pedometers, but at the odometer: We
> drive
>
> more than anyone else in the world. (Hence a joke: In America a pedestrian
> is someone
>
> who has just parked their car.) Statistics on walking are more elusive 
> than
> those
>
> on driving, but from the latter one might infer the former: The National
> Household
>
> Travel Survey shows that the number of vehicle trips a person took and the
> miles
>
> they traveled per day rose from 2.32 trips and 20.64 miles in 1969 to 3.35
> and 32.73
>
> in 2001. More time spent driving means less time spent on other 
> activities,
> including
>
> walking. And part of the reason we are driving more is that we are living
> farther
>
> from the places we need to go; to take just one measure, in1969, roughly
> half of
>
> all children lived a mile or more from their school; by 2001 three out of
> four did.
>
> During that same period, unsurprisingly, the rates of children walking to
> school
>
> dropped from roughly half to approximately 13 percent.
>
> And since our uncommon commitment to the car is at least in part to blame
> for the
>
> new American inability to put one foot in front of the other, the
> transportation
>
> engineering profession's historical disdain for the pedestrian is all that
> much more
>
> pernicious. In modern traffic engineering the word has become
> institutionalized,
>
> by engineers who shorten pedestrian to the somehow even more condescending
> "peds";
>
> who for years have peppered their literature with phrases like "pedestrian
> impedance"
>
> (meaning people getting in the way of vehicle flow). In early versions of
> traffic
>
> modeling software, pedestrians were not included as a default, and even
> today, as
>
> one report
>
> notes, modeling software tends to treat them not as actual actors, but as 
> a
> mere
>
> "statistical distribution", or as implicit "vehicular delay." At traffic
> conferences
>
> like the one in Savannah, meanwhile, people doing "ped projects" tend to 
> be
> a small
>
> and insular, if well meaning, clique.
>
> Another problem: Almost everyone walks. In this ubiquity, paradoxically,
> lies a weakness:
>
> The very act is so common that we tend to forget about it, to remember 
> that
> it is
>
> something that needs to be nurtured, protected, encouraged. Save for 
> charity
> drives
>
> and recreational enthusiasts, there are few organized groups of
> self-identified walkers.
>
> Craig Tackaberry, the associate director of public works in Marin County
> told me
>
> that when the county received a federal grant specifically designed to 
> boost
> the
>
> number of people walking and cycling, they sought to partner with local
> advocacy
>
> groups. "It was difficult to find any pedestrian advocacy groups," he 
> says.
> Cyclists
>
> have elaborate equipment, they have passion, they have group rides and
> races-and
>
> they have political organizations. As Scott Bricker, director of the
> nonprofit organization
>
> America Walks told me, without a trace of irony in his voice, "Walking's 
> not
> something
>
> that people rally around - it's very pedestrian."
>
> Perhaps as a result, walking is a pastime that's not well studied. Walking
> in America
>
> is a bit like sex: Everybody's doing it, but nobody knows how much. 
> Bricker,
> of America
>
> Walks, adds that the "collection of information around walking is quite 
> poor
> and
>
> inconsistent." There are the problems of self-reporting-who can really
> remember,
>
> sans
>
> pedometer, how much one has walked, and who wants to admit on a survey 
> that
> they
>
> never walk? There's also little agreement, he says, on what, 
> statistically,
> constitutes
>
> a walking trip. "Is walking down the hall to the bathroom a walking trip? 
> Do
> you
>
> have to leave the house? Is walking to the park with your dog a walking
> trip? Is
>
> walking to and from the bus a walking trip? None of those things are
> counted." The
>
> most accurate source of information we have comes from the U.S. Census, in
> the so-called
>
> "Journey to Work" questions. But these only inquire about commuting trips.
> What's
>
> more,
>
> as researchers have noted
>
> , because the Census emphasizes the mode of transportation taken most 
> often,
> and
>
> for the longest part of the total journey, any number of walking trips may
> be obscured.
>
> People who take train transit, for example, have been shown in pedometer
> studies
>
> to walk much more than those who drive.
>
> This focus on work trips rather misses the point in a country where very 
> few
> people
>
> could walk to work, even if they wanted. Commuting (by any method) 
> accounts
> for less
>
> than 15 percent of all trips. What's more at stake is so-called
> "discretionary travel,"
>
> the trips to the grocery store, to soccer practice, to the bank, and these
> are where
>
> we logged our greatest increases in driving. "It's not just about how many
> people
>
> walk to work," says Bricker. "It's how many are willing to walk out the
> front door
>
> for any reason." Where walking has been lost is in these short trips of a
> mile or
>
> less-28 percent of all trips in America-the majority of which are now 
> taken
> in a
>
> car. "Let's take that stroll," says Bricker. "It's missing from the 
> cultural
> mindset."
>
> ***
>
> In her book
>
> Wanderlust: A History of Walking
>
> , Rebecca Solnit writes, "walking still covers the ground between cars and
> buildings
>
> and the short distances within the latter, but walking as a cultural
> activity, as
>
> a pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around, is fading, and with it
> goes an
>
> ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination."
> There is
>
> at once a loss, and a hunger. Look on online travelers forums and you'll 
> see
> one
>
> of the most common threads is people on the verge of visiting Europe (or 
> New
> York
>
> City), embarking on a panicked quest for "walking shoes"-as if they were
> taking up
>
> some exotic new sport, procuring strange equipment. For these people, one
> must assume,
>
> walking is as foreign as the place they are visiting. (N.B.: I have lived 
> in
> New
>
> York City, the most-walked city in the U.S., for more than two decades and
> have never
>
> owned a pair of Merrells.)
>
> Walking Club Real
>
> Blaine walking club, 1910
>
> Photograph courtesy Bain News Service/Library of Congress.
>
> Walking has become a boutique pastime: There is frantic weekend
> power-walking (making
>
> up for the week's lack of locomotion); there is the ostentatiously lo-fi
> commute
>
> (
>
> observes Geoff Manaugh
>
> : "people now think the very act of walking around makes them a kind of
> psychogeographic
>
> avant-garde"); there is walking-centric
>
> conceptual art
>
> ; and there are stylized, idealized, walkable "lifestyle centers" which
>
> themselves must be driven to
>
> (if you're lucky, you'll find one with an indoor "
>
> panoramic walking track
>
> "), where walking itself is as vaguely antique as the iron lamp-posts and
> cobble-stones.
>
> The writer Will Self, a dedicated walker, well captured the sense that the
> pedestrian
>
> life is one so removed from daily consciousness that to participate in it
> implies
>
> some higher purpose. "Whenever I tell people I'm going to walk somewhere
> utilitarian-like
>
> an airport; or even a long distance walk that seems quite prosaic to me,
> they always
>
> ask: 'Is it for charity?' "
>
> This question-what is
>
> walkingfor-
>
> is one of the many I will be exploring this week. There is a dual
> pedagogical imperative
>
> here: I aim to explore not only how people on foot behave as a class, but
> also how
>
> America lost its knack for walking, only now taking some stumbling steps 
> in
> the right
>
> direction. The newspapers have been filled of late, from coast to coast,
> from
>
> suburban Arizona
>
> to
>
> the Midwest
>
> to
>
> rural Mississippi
>
> , with a strikingly uniform narrative, couched in words like
> "sustainability" and
>
> "accessibility" but revolving around a simple appeal: Residents asking 
> that
> their
>
> towns be made more walkable. The almost
>
> Onion-
>
> worthy headline of
>
> one story
>
> , "Columbus residents see potential benefits of sidewalks," with that
> poisonous modifier
>
> "potential," hints at how far off the trail of common sense America has
> wandered
>
> in its headlong pursuit of the automotive life.
>
> Along the way, I will walk the streets of New York City with pedestrian
> experts,
>
> explore the curious patterns of mass pedestrian behavior, travel to the
> Seattle offices
>
> of "Walk Score," a Web startup that is quantifying "walkability," and then
> look at
>
> what happened to walking in America-and how we can put our right foot
> forward.
>
> More from this series: What scientists learn
>
> when they study pedestrians
>
> ; how Walk Score has put a number on walkability; how America can get 
> people
> walking
>
> again.
>
> \
>
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