Feb 2023 - Update(s) from Josh
Hi there.
Josh here. Those of you reading this but not recalling from whence I hail, I write occasionally about zoning, or software development, or rock climbing, or Robert Moses, or riding a scooter, or anything else.
You probably got here via josh.works or intermediateruby.com. I'll get back to software things eventually, so if that's what you're interested in, stay tuned for future emails. This email is best thought of as 'an ecclectic newsletter', where nearly always after some standard disclaimers, things get strange. Consider yourself warned, Unsubscribe here. This email has 1200 words in it, which is about six minutes of reading time. Quite hefty, but this is the internet, so even 60 seconds of attention is noteworthy.
It's been a long time and a lot of life lived for all of us since I've last showed up in any of your inboxes. In prepping this email, I see that this haphazard schedule is conventional for me. The last three emails were june 24 2022, june 17 2022, oct 31, 2021
The haphazard nature of the updates make enough sense because of things like "parenthood" and "life". I don't "owe" anyone (other than, possibly, myself) any emails on any schedule. That said, the writing tends to do me good, and you might know what they say about consistency.
If you keep reading, you'll find a quote from a book, some pictures of pages, and three interesting-enough links.
Gosh it's been a tumultuous time.
For example, I am now divorced.
Yep.
I no longer live in Golden, the house belongs to Kristi and is being sold, she and Eden have moved as well. Those words might hit hard for some of you, may be hardly noteworthy for others, but for the life that I most closely attend to (my own), it "hits hard", and has been poingnantly painful.
A sentiment of "what happened" wouldn't be unreasonable. Some have been completely shocked and quite brought to tears upon learning the news.
I'll certainly talk more about it at some point, but in the mean time, this... *gestures at keyboard* satisfies today's small desire of writing, learning-in-public, and more.
A Long Quote
Again, some of you may remember reading some or lots from me about Robert Moses and the amazing book by Robert Caro,The Power Broker.
A friend recently told me it's become a "flex" to certain circles to place a copy of this book in one's background on video calls.
There's an NYT article that touches on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/nyregion/power-...
It's a great book. I've read it twice. If you've spent any time with me in person, you'll likely have experienced my strained references to Robert Moses, and it might strike some as strange.
And now you, dear reader, who has possibly read it, possibly not, can luxuriate in some quotes from the book. For example, the below quote from page 897. Pay special attention to the bold paragraph. I added links to the wikipedia pages for each of the mentioned bridges. The quote comes at the end of a longer section, which you can read in the following photos.
Even before the war, of course, some urban planners had begun to see - largely because of the effects of Moses' creations - that building more traffic facilities would not in itself cure traffic congestion.
These planners had said the Regional Plan Association had been saying it since 1929 and, after the opening of Moses' creations during the 1930's, with increasing urgency - that the movement of people and goods in a great metropolitan region required a balanced transportation system, one in which the construction of mass rapid transit facilities kept pace with the construction of roads.
During the last two or three years before the war, a few planners had even begun to understand that, without a balanced system, roads not only would not alleviate transportation congestion but would aggravate it.
Watching Moses open the Triborough Bridge to ease congestion on the Queensborough Bridge, open the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to ease congestion on the Triborough Bridge and then watching traffic counts on all three bridges mount until all three were as congested as one had been before, planners could hardly avoid the conclusion that "traffic generation" was no longer a theory but a proven fact: the more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour onto them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways-which would generate more traffic and become congested in their turn in an inexorably widening spiral that contained the most awesome implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas.
The only remedy that could check that vicious spiral was the coordination of new highways with new mass transit facilities - and not only was New York's Coordinator not planning any such facilities himself; his monopolization of construction funds and his hold over the city's government were making it impossible for anyone else to plan them either.
He was, in fact, destroying some of the old facilities, not only the trolley tracks which he was boasting about "ripping up all over town" but the Third Avenue elevated mass transit line, which he was moving to have torn down.
Viewed in this light, tearing tracks up and elevateds down was not an achievement but a disaster. And tearing them down was only one method of destroying mass transportation facilities. Moses - whether by design or out of ignorance of the effect of his policies - was employing other methods with equal effect [...]
Here's a photo of the page with the above quote, with some context:
These are three pages of the book. Only three pages! We'll discuss it more later.
Some of you might recall that I talk about Robert Moses around here, a lot. (example). He's kept cropping up in books I've been reading lately, too.
Interesting-enough links from around the internet:
If some of these are helpful to others, I'm glad to have shared them.
- How to Encourage Others (Sasha Chapin)
- Having Contradictory Beliefs Can Be Helpful (Sasha Chapin)
- About Face: Death and surrender to power in the clothing of men. (Popula, an entertaining cartoon that is difficult to un-see. It talks about 'the clothing of men' as truck culture and certain stylistic trappings of domination)
That's it for me, this time around.
-Josh
P.S. I've been working on 'making things', and have been in the routine of making mostly drone videos and posting them to TikTok. Often the videos are about topics adjacent to "mobility networks". Here's an example. If this kind of thing is your jam, there ya go. "Like and follow for more"
PPS next email will be all about scooters. For example, this summer I rode my scooter from Denver to Canada then Seattle, then back to Denver. We'll talk about it next time!