Unconvinced

I watched rather a lot of television in February, thanks to the Winter Olympics. So much, in fact, that I think I'm all TV'd up until the French Open. While it's not a hobby that I'm into, I do at least admire other people's resolve to sit still for that long. 

In the course of all that TV, I saw many, many car ads. That was a lot of car ads. Some of the tactics used to try to sell me a car are silly, some are funny, and some are downright wrong. For my amusement, I started keeping a mental list of all the people who were enlisted to sell me a car in the month of February:

Sharlie is not impressed by all these attempts to replace
her. She doesn't have anything to worry about, of course.
Oh, by the way, the Ohio River just had its biggest flood
in 20 years.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.;
Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad;
Real people, not actors;
Sesame Street Muppets;
Six women on snowboards;
Every Paralympian;
Ashley Wagner;
A high school band;
William Henry Harrison; and
(my personal favorite, by a car company that is a sponsor of USA Bicycling, for heaven's sake)
Bicycles.

Needless to say, they were unsuccessful. Better luck next time, advertisers. Don't worry; I'm sure you convinced someone. Just not this someone.

You want to see a great ad, one I never got tired of seeing in two weeks of Olympics? Check out this one from St. Elizabeth healthcare. My favorite is the young man struggling with his math homework who's ready to give it another shot after his dad says, "You got this." Love.

Just Be

I took a couple days off at the beginning of the week, which turned out to be a fantastic choice when Cincinnati got up to 79° on Tuesday. My bicycle was happy to finally go somewhere interesting after weeks of sitting around when we set out to run a few errands.

Despite my tendency to forget it from time to time, I was remembering well that I live in Cincinnati now, and this week's warm temps were not here to stay quite yet. So, to avoid bitter disappointment later, I kept reminding myself, "Don't get carried away. Just be here in this moment." Normally, that is a strategy that doesn't work well for me.

I ended one of my errands at an intersection of two one-way streets, both going the opposite direction from where I wanted to go, so I thought I'd just go a block and then turn.

Well. This is one of the few times in my life I've managed to convince myself of something and make it stick. A few blocks later, I realized I'd completely forgotten to turn because I was having such a good time rolling right along. There's a great deal to be said about being in the moment and ignoring everything else--not thinking about what I'm doing later or making a mental grocery list or imagining the stack of paper my coworkers were cooking up in my absence. From time to time, it's a good thing to just be.

It's less of a good thing when your sense of direction depends on you being able to think at least a couple minutes down the road, but one can't have everything. But going the wrong way meant I found a thing. Last spring, I did a Cincinnati-themed A to Z Challenge, and when I got to Union Terminal I learned about the mosaics that were specially commissioned for the building. I read at the time that some of them had landed at the Duke Energy Building, and I lodged it in the back of my mind to go look harder for them one day, since I'd been around and inside there a couple times and had never seen them. Guess where my wrong turn took me?

I had crossed the street and was admiring the Firefighters Memorial Park when I happened to glance over and, had I been walking, I would have stopped in my tracks. As it was, I said aloud to absolutely no one, "Wait! Is that them? It has to be!" And crossed back over to see them. They are every bit as amazing as I had imagined they would be.

I only took pics of these two, because the glare made them not look so great.
I'll head back on a cloudy day and get them all.

So there's one more thing to be said for being in the moment. You never know what you may find.

You Are Here

A couple months ago at work, I was expressing my difficulty in climbing stairs while carrying something that blocks my view of where I'm stepping. I asked, "What's the word for knowing where you are in space? Prio-something?" A coworker called back, "Proprioception!" I said, "Yes. That. I don't have it."

An exhibit in MOMA. I like it.

That's just a little story for you, and not really what this is about. No, this is about my ongoing struggle to build a map in my head. Places I go often--work, church, Kroger--I could find in my sleep, if necessary. Downtown has been a bit more tricky, even though I'm down there a lot. (Parts of downtown are tricky. I can find the Aronoff Center just from the excited twinge that comes over me when in range of live theatre.)

But when I try to visualize where things are in relation to other things in Cincinnati, I often realize I'm picturing a different city. Perhaps this is my brain rebelling against my forcing it to learn its way around a fifth city. How do people who move a lot do it?

There's research that suggests that people who walk and people who drive have similarly accurate mental maps of a place, while regular transit users lag behind them and folks who are exclusively passengers lag even farther still. And there's a cool study on how the brain changes and builds synapses on repeated exposure to the same route. The research mentions neither bikes nor how many cities you can pack into your brain before it explodes. Obviously that's a gap for academia to address.

I'd like to see more research on
Hemingway's experience of building a
mental map. I agree anecdotally, but I'm
all about gathering more data.

Here's one that's even more interesting: kids who live in walkable and bikeable neighborhoods have not only a better sense of place--as in, where things like the park or their school are--but they also feel better about the place they live. Kids who are driven more and rarely walk are they opposite--they have a harder time knowing where they are, and their neighborhood seems more scary. I wonder if being scared of their surroundings is entirely because they haven't gotten the chance to know them well, or if it's also from internalizing the fears of the adults around them. I'm not a kid and I absorb other people's feelings, so it's not hard to imagine that less emotionally developed people do it.

And one more before I go: many studies have found a connection between exercise and thinking/memory skills. So it is the right choice for your or your kids to walk rather than drive when the opportunity presents itself? Only you can answer that question, but even if you can never head out for school or errands car-free, at least try to build in a walk around the block a few times a week.

Your brain will thank you.

Better

Last summer at the Ohio State Fair, a young man was killed when the ride he was on broke apart and sent riders hurtling to the ground, resulting in the kind of blunt force trauma that the ER docs likened to car crashes. Several others were injured. The midway was immediately closed, all the rides were re-inspected, and the ride in question--the Fire Ball--was immediately shut down at fairs across the country, just in case.

I was unlucky enough to walk past a TV right when the news was showing social media video of the incident, and it nearly knocked me to the floor. It's horrifying. (Please be warned before you Google that you will not like what you find.)

All of this--closing everything down, re-inspecting, and so on--was absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, the correct course of action.

But why, then, don't we demand the same level of action when there is a car crash? Machines fail--we know this. Human error happens--we know that, too. But when machines fail and human error happens over and over again in exactly the same way, one begins to wonder if there isn't more that could be done. (There is, by the way. Traffic engineers have all sorts of tools they can use to make streets safer, and some of them are unpopular with the folks who are still alive, and that's why people keep getting killed.)

There was, and may still be, an intersection in Lubbock that was marked with a sign warning drivers (and bicyclists, and pedestrians) that it was a high-fatality intersection and to use caution. That was the city's response to the most deadly intersection in town. Not, "let's take a look at the design of this intersection." Not, "maybe there's an issue with the traffic signals that we can adjust." Not, "let's get officers and engineers out to find out why people are dying here on a weekly basis." No. The response was to put up a sign and leave everything else unchanged. Anyone want to guess how much good the sign does?

I'd love for there to never be a need for another one of
these. Wouldn't you? Source: Albuquerque Journal.

The young man at the state fair should not have died while out having a fun night with his friends. Nor should anyone die on their commute to work, or while taking their kids to school, or while picking up groceries, or on their way to a night out. Somehow we've decided that 35K traffic deaths per year in this country is the price of doing business. Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of child death (age 14 & younger) in the U.S. Our kids deserve better, our future deserves better, we deserve better.

If you've lost someone in an avoidable tragedy like this, my heart breaks for you. Please, please, please, let's demand better.

Exercise Caution

A few weeks ago, an outrageous, victim-blaming, simply awful supposed "PSA" appeared in Portland. The backlash against it was so swift and severe that agencies involved tripped over themselves in the scramble to get their names disassociated with it, and the video was soon taken down.

Many, many stills from it appeared on Twitter as advocates explained for what is surely the thousandth time why encouraging dangerous driving while blaming pedestrians for their own deaths is a terrible idea. For example, one of the personas created for a video was a woman who, when she gets the "Walk" signal at an intersection, immediately steps into the crosswalk.

There's another expression for that phenomenon: Working As Designed.

This light means something. I know, I know, we're all
surprised to hear that. Source: lou suSi on freeimages.com.

Seriously, that's what the signal is for. You get the light, you go. You know, like people do in cars? When the light turns green? Same idea. There's no excuse for ridiculing someone for using the traffic signals exactly as they were meant to be used. There are no buts about this. Red light = drivers stop behind the giant white line drawn on the road for that purpose. There should be no reason why a pedestrian can't enter the crosswalk immediately upon getting a signal.

But of course, as long as careless drivers are allowed to continue piloting fast and heavy machines around our streets, pedestrians will have to exercise a disproportionate amount of caution. This shouldn't be normalized into a PSA. This is a problem that cities need to be addressing, to find out why their pedestrians aren't safe and take steps to fix it.

By the way, this is exactly the reason why pedestrians cross midblock between intersections, or why we'll cross against the light if the street is empty. Drivers sitting at a red light are simply not to be trusted, especially right-turning drivers. At an intersection near my house, a right-turning driver never looking for pedestrians and nearly mowing someone down as a result happens dozens of times per day. Some of them never bother to stop for the red light as they try to coast through their turn. I wish the city would make that intersection "No Turn On Red," because it's a high pedestrian corridor (it's near bus stops, a Kroger, residences, schools, and a university) and the number of near-misses is scary-high.

I'm glad the video was taken down. I hope the producers, funders, etc. have learned something. And perhaps the next PSA should be about what those big lines on the ground are for.

Hazards

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has access to, and shares, vital data about safety on U.S. roads. They're spot on with things like speeding or distracted driving, although it should be said that they tend to come out not-swinging about those things and their recommendations can sound more like gentle suggestions which drivers are free to ignore. Still, the recommendations exist.

So it's frustrating to people who engage in active transportation that the same NHTSA (people who deal with them a lot pronounce it "nit-sa") does come out strongly in one area: victim-blaming people who aren't in cars. This week, it's kids riding their bikes to school, and how the "best" protection they have is wearing a helmet and obeying traffic laws. To be clear: kids should absolutely be doing those things, and parents should be modeling and teaching that behaviour.

To be clearer: both are as far as they can be from the best protection kids on bikes could have. See, for example, the hierarchy of hazard controls when it comes to active transportation:

Source: Don Kostelec on Twitter.

It's not like NHTSA doesn't have access to this data. If advocates have it, then certainly the U.S. Department of Transportation has it. The problem is what they do with it, which often is not a freaking thing.

It's bad enough that kids are bound to fall down sometimes while learning to ride a bike. (Those are exactly the kinds of falls helmets are designed for. Keep those little heads protected!) It's a lot worse that our transportation organizations are so unwilling to do anything to support those kids, and their families, and their entire communities, when the act of riding bikes to school is a simple solution to a wide range of issues.

I hope, although I'm not holding my breath, that NHTSA will eventually listen to the advocates who keep pressing them to do better things with their data than browbeat people who are already doing their part to make traffic less painful for all.

Inconvenience

A car being used as a weapon is nothing new to active transportation advocates. We all have stories of drivers intentionally endangering our lives, and have read folks on the internet, many times over, call for us all to be run over. Something about driving brings out the absolute worst in so many people.

We saw the worst on Saturday. But it was hardly the first time.

Active transportation advocates, and people on the side of the Constitution, raised an outcry early this year when North Dakota introduced a bill that would have shielded drivers from prosecution if they hit protesters with their cars. Fortunately, sense prevailed in ND and the legislation was defeated. At least five other state legislators have tried it, with similar results. I hope the graphic, real-time video we've all seen, and the tragic result, stand as a lesson to those who would (unwittingly, one hopes) embolden and encourage anyone to think this behavior is okay.

(By the way, drivers who unintentionally strike humans with cars already have tons of protections under the law. Driving toward a crowd of humans, even very slowly in the hopes that they'll move out of your way, is not exercising "due care." That's the opposite of care.)

Are protests inconvenient and disruptive? Of course they are--that's the point! Might someone blocking the road make drivers have to wait? Yes, that's certainly possible. But we have processes in place for that, which of course take some time to carry out. However, even protesters with whom one disagrees have, at least in theory, the right to the same due process under law as everyone else does. (Many protests, of course, are over the very reality that due process under law is not as equal as it ought to be.)

"But if they're standing in the road, they deserve what happens to them!" No no no no no no no NO. That's not how this works. Protesters who act in civil disobedience understand that they'll be arrested and charged. People who drive cars understand that sometimes things happen that block traffic, also including:

• Road construction
• Natural disasters
• Street-closure events
• Bad weather
• Infrastructure failures
• Public officials making terrible choices
• Thousands of people each driving home alone at the same time
• And of course, car crashes.

If every one of these things causes your blood to boil and your chill to be lost, then maybe for the sake of your own mental health you should reconsider your transportation.

We don't have to look far to find stories of people during the Civil Rights Movement who would say they were in favor of civil rights for all but would also ask why lunch counters had to be blocked to get there. Protests are not convenient. It's the price we pay for living in a democracy. Why would anyone want the alternative?

My friends, if you're on the side of vehicular violence, if you feel that driving through a crowd of protesters is a quicker and easier way to get to "justice" than allowing due process of law to work its course, if you'd prefer that people with whom you disagree not be allowed the same rights of speech and assembly as everyone else, then we have come to a parting of the ways. By the way, in case anyone has forgotten: 1) Incitement to violence is not protected speech; and 2) Freedom of speech does not preclude others from forming their own opinion about, and desire for association with, the speaker by the nature of his/her speech.

I would not want anyone with these attitudes thinking they have my tacit agreement by association.

Walk This Way

There's one traffic sign that I hate more than almost any others. It adds more inconvenience to the road users who already bear the most inconvenience anyway, and does not a freaking thing to improve safety. Which one is it?

This one. A plague upon the idiot inventor of this sign.

So here's a little background for folks who may not spend their spare time studying transportation stuff: Every intersection is a legal crosswalk. Every one. Even where a side street meets a major thoroughfare--every one of those corners is a legal crosswalk. It doesn't matter if it has lines for pedestrians or not; if two streets come together, pedestrians are allowed to cross there. Which is one reason why residential streets, especially those with short blocks, have low speed limits, and why drivers should always observe those speed limits even if they don't feel like it.

The only time an intersection is not a legal crosswalk is if it is specifically marked with one of these signs. Circumstances when this sign makes sense do exist--for example, there's an intersection I cross at least twice a week where the street goes from two-way traffic to one-way traffic, and there's a "no pedestrian" sign on the two-way side. (But not, it should be noted, on the cross street, where the traffic is two-way in both directions, so... huh?) The argument can be made that this intersection already has sufficient confusion for motorists that taking out one leg of pedestrian crossing makes it a touch easier. To which I say: meh. If that's what it takes, I suppose, but these situations are rare and as such, the signs should be used sparingly.

However, I'm pretty sure Cincinnati got a bunch of these signs in a sale and just puts them up whenever they have a traffic crew sitting around bored for a few minutes. ("Here, y'all run out and put up one of these signs. Doesn't matter where.") I see them in high-pedestrian areas all the time, which makes no sense--why force more people to cross the street just to cross the street?

A HAWK beacon in my beloved Austin. Source.

Unfortunately, the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which gives very detailed advice on crosswalks, traffic signals, and my favourite combination of the two, the Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon (or HAWK Beacon) (I seriously get very excited when I see those things in action. Just ask Jenna), is much more skimpy in its advice for use of the no pedestrian sign, which is what allows Cincinnati to put them up wherever they darn well please. Which forces pedestrians, already stuck with long "don't walk" periods and short "walk" periods, to endure up to three light cycles instead of just one to get across one street. Drivers wouldn't put up with that crap, and they're sitting in cushioned boxes with entertainment and climate control. People on foot shouldn't be expected to go through that much rigmarole just to get where they're going, either.

Take down most of those dumb signs and get serious about really protecting pedestrians, Cincinnati. There are plenty of ways to make a city a better place for pedestrians, but this is not one of them.

Seeing Red (Lights)

I don't know what causes road rage. I do know what I'd like to do to people who act on their road rage. But studying the root causes of this behaviour is well outside my areas of interest.

However, I do have my suspicions, every time I hear someone complain bitterly about heavy traffic or road construction or both. (Or, of course, hear them complain about having to slow down for a few seconds to safely pass a person on a bike. Here's a little tip that should be no surprise to anyone--if you complain to me about that, expect an earful. No one has ever made that mistake twice.) It seems some folks expect an easy-flowing, obstacle-free drive to everywhere, at all hours of the day, every day.

You're going to get stuck. It's going to happen.
Source: Lonnie Bradley on freeimages.com.

My friends, the automobile industry has sold us a bill of goods. And of course they have--it's in the interest of their own pockets to convince people that getting from A to B is easy peasy. No matter how many cupholders an SUV has, images of it stuck in a colossal traffic jam are not going to get many vehicles rolling out of the showroom.

As with so many other areas of our collective lives, it may be time to lower our expectations. No one is always going to get every green light. No street is exempt from folks crashing their cars into things and causing a snarl. Traffic lights fail, natural disasters don't care about your route to work, roads crumble and have to be repaired.

And if that weren't enough, when the majority of Americans own cars and the majority of Americans drive alone and the majority of Americans go to work at about the same time of day, traffic can't possibly flow right along. No matter how badly we want it to. No matter what it used to be like just a couple years ago. And as the saying goes, you aren't sitting in traffic--you are traffic.

If all of this is making your blood pressure rise just thinking about it, then maybe it's time to reconsider what you expect from your car. What do you get to control? The temperature, the music, who comes along with you. What can't you control? How many other people want to go the same place you do. What can you control? Your reaction to delays and detours and things generally going wrong. Cars aren't teleporters. They aren't magic. Other road users aren't your enemies. They're just people also trying to get on with their lives. And if you get into your car knowing ahead of time that something on your route will go awry, expecting that delays will happen and jams will get jammy, then maybe your reaction to it happening will be less outraged surprise and more "good thing I'm enjoying this podcast I'm listening to."

And a little less rage goes a long way toward a pleasant trip.

(Before my fellow active transportation users get out the pitchforks and torches--if you can avoid driving, by busing or walking or biking or even by taking turns carpooling, your trip is likely to be less rage-inducing and more relaxing. There's even some research about that.)

Upward

Have I mentioned that I live on top of a hill? A lot of places in Cincinnati are on top of hills, of course, and I live in one of them. Some of the ways up are steepish, others not so much. All of them are sweaty.

There are some advantages to all these hills, of course.

So it was that one day I had gone for a bit of a ramble round and was returning home via the steepest of the possible directions from my house. The hill before mine is not as high, but from the top of it I looked across to see that not only was I not level with the top of the next hill, but also that the top of the hill was obscured by trees, which made it look even worse than it really is. As I headed down and the next hill loomed ever larger, it continued to look steeper the closer I got to the bottom, and it was almost hard to believe this was the same hill I've been easily up and down dozens of times.

Guess what made the hill flatten out and not look so awful? Going up it, of course. Tackling something up close, taking it step by step and inch by inch, is rarely so insurmountable as trying to take in the whole thing at once. (Alas, those times when up close really is worse--well, that's why we have chocolates and friends. Friends with chocolates, if at all possible.) As Samwise Gamgee so wisely put it, "It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish." And a hill will never get smaller from standing at the bottom staring up at it.

I'm just going to go apply this thought to as many things as possible before I forget again.

Consistency Is Its Own Reward (but medals are nice, too)

In case anyone was wondering: training in Cincinnati and then racing in Indianapolis is a great strategy. I should do that again.

I got a couple short runs in this week, which I don't usually do after races more than 15K in length, so I guess my legs are fine. Probably. I'm not as well acquainted with my running muscles as I once was, and since that's something I should probably change, I have my running calendar laid out from now until the end of the year. Nothing major or dramatic, just rebuilding some consistency into my life that's been sorely lacking since I stopped being a member of my local running club.

Aside: y'all, never underestimate the power of other people in your life. As encouragers, as accountability partners, as friends who will mock you if you let things slide--whatever. Fill your life with those folks and don't let them go. And always be willing to be that person in someone else's life. Humans need other humans. Runners--some of us, anyway--need other runners.

I still don't have any more 2017 races on my calendar, although I'm debating the merits of Cincinnati's trail series, if for no other reason that it will be kinda like being in the running club again. Downside: getting anywhere that's more than a couple miles away without a car. Even low-cost races get expensive in a hurry if I have to get a Zipcar every time. So I'm pondering.

Today is a new day. Let's go.

Updated medal display. (Because what else am I going to do with them?)
The far right are Chadwick's finisher medals--the ones I could find, anyway.
Red, white, & blue ribbons to the left of those are our age-group medals.
The rest are my finisher medals. 

Z is for Zoo #AtoZChallenge

Last one! I hope you've enjoyed this little glimpse of Cincinnati with me. My favourite thing about this series has been all the locals who've read a post or two and then told me their personal histories with the things I wrote about. And the folks who, having read about one thing, asked if I'd been to another. And the ones who've filled in the gaps left after I read the info available on Wikipedia. Maybe the kindest thing I heard was from a coworker who said, "It's been fun rediscovering Cincinnati through your eyes." And that is, indeed, the most I could possibly have hoped for.

So! The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. You've probably heard of it. (And if you're not following the updates on Fiona the baby hippo, you're wrong.) As with many other posts in this series, I didn't go inside, but instead took a few pics of the entrance. And attracted the attention of a couple Zoo employees, who probably wondered what the heck I was doing. C'est la vie here in Su-Land.

The Zoo opened in 1875 and is the second-oldest zoo in the U.S. One of the original buildings still stands (it's the Reptile Building now), and is the oldest zoo building in the U.S. Admission on opening day was 25¢ for adults and 15¢ for children. I believe it's gone up a bit since then.

This historic entrance has an elevator inside, so colour me skeptical.
Also, at what point do you change your sign to read "Historic Entrance"
instead of just "entrance"? There have to be data on that.

The Zoo's first guidebook was printed in 1876 in German, because that's what a sizeable portion of the population at the time spoke, with the English guide coming in 1893. Clearly, the English-speaking folks weren't in too much of a hurry to print a guidebook.

Bike parking: approved.

Red Bike kiosk: thumbs up. Although riding one of these heavy bikes
back up the hill from here towards the University area cannot be pleasant.
Unless the rider has legs of steel, I suppose.  There are a couple more stations
further north than this one, but once you're at the Zoo you're closing in on
 the northern edge of the Red Bikes system.

Bike rack shaped like a snake: thumbs way up. I love it.
Not pictured: the Zoo is served by two local bus routes.
Public transit: also approved.

I'm not normally one to get excited by car parking, because why would I?, but this is pretty cool. The Zoo parking lot has solar panels on the covered parking roofs that provide 20% of the Zoo's energy annually. There was another sign describing it as a "demonstration project," but at that point the zoo dude was staring at me pretty intensely so I decided to skip that one and move on.

Sign describing the project + panels as seen from the pedestrian overpass.

I will probably save any actual visiting the Zoo for such a time as my sister comes to visit, because of the two of us, she's more of the Zoo one. (I'm the libraries and museums one.)

Plants at the entrance. As you can plainly see, this is the tulips' way of
telling me I should have come by a bit sooner.

And that, my friends, is the 2017 A to Z Challenge. Tomorrow I'll resume my usual nonsense. See you then.

Y is for Yeatman #AtoZChallenge

Join me on the A to Z Challenge: I'll share a different thing from my new home, Cincinnati, every day for 26 days in April.

Yeatman's Cove is, according to the sign I read while down there, the place the first settlers landed from the Ohio in what would become Cincinnati. However, good luck finding confirmation of that anywhere on the internet.

Yeatman's Cove these days is one of a string of linear parks that stretch for two miles along the river, and if I weren't still in mourning for my beloved Town Lake Trail I would probably appreciate those two miles a lot more. As it is, well, it's still a nice spot even if I am unfairly comparing it to something 1000 miles away.

At Yeatman's Cove, we have the Serpentine Wall:

So named because it looks like this: ~~~~~~~~ Except it doesn't have quite that many wiggles, but you get the idea. The wall, in addition to looking like a set of bleachers and therefore being a great place for sitting, is also for flood prevention--Cincinnati's past contains some historic floods that resulted in loss of life and property, and obviously that's not a thing we want repeated. So the wall is one of several levees that keep the city high and dry in case the river gets a bit antsy and overflows its banks.

There was some nasty-looking debris that had washed up here that I didn't
want Sharlie rolling through, so here's where I stopped. Incidentally,
here's where the water stopped, too. So it's working great.
That's the Taylor Southgate Bridge, which lies between the Purple People Bridge
and the Roebling Suspension Bridge. It has a bike/ped path, so I still like
it even though it's not my favourite.

Flood stage for the river is 52 feet, measured from the Roebling Bridge, and I don't really know how they do that (which is probably why I'm not in charge of it).

Yeatman's Cove got its name, not from the first settlers, but rather from Cincinnati's first tavern, which Yeatman built here near the river, presumably for easy access for the men who wanted to get drunk after working on the river all day.

It's a city park now, so getting drunk here is highly discouraged. There
are two sports stadiums just a mile up the road that can help with that.

V is for Vontz #AtoZChallenge

Join me on the A to Z Challenge: I'll share a different thing from my new home, Cincinnati, every day for 26 days in April.

On Easter Sunday my friend Susan willingly participated in a day of "hey, I need to gather some pics for my blog," and we drove past this building that I'd never properly looked at before. All I read of the sign was "molecular studies," so I asked, "Is that building supposed to be shaped like a molecule?"

From what I've read: no. It's just some cool Gehry architecture. 

So, because reading the entire sign is for other people, I said something about how it was too bad I hadn't seen it before my M day, and Susan said, "You can still use it. That's the Vontz building."

Hey, what do you know! It's right there in great big letters.

By the way, Susan and I have this recurring habit of introducing ourselves to visitors at church at the same time, after which I have an unfortunate tendency to say that we don't usually travel as a two-pack of Susans, because I have yet to learn the art of saying hello and then shutting up. Also this:

Anyway, I don't actually know anything about architecture--my appreciation for buildings mostly extends to, "hey, that one is pretty!"--so for further anaylsis you'll need someone else. The Vontz Building is part of the University of Cincinnati, and is across from the UC hospital, so lots of cool and smart things are happening here. The building is already in need of some repair/renovation, despite being less than 20 years old. Bummer.

But seriously, how great is a building that looks like it was built
by one of the Animaniacs?

Outside the building, there's this:

I saw it and thought, "Wait, that Sabin? The polio vaccine guy?"
So, good job, history teachers! I hadn't realised until now that
Cincinnati was Dr. Sabin's home.

And this:

Great plaza space that was being used by approximately zero students,
But since this area is where science students learn things, I presume they're all
studying hard for finals. Or maybe they just don't like going outdoors that much.

I want one of these:

It's a giant leaf. I can't believe no one was sitting on it.

In the department of less-spectacular things found nearby, there's this ridiculous sign right at the intersection where the Vontz building (and the hospital!) is. I certainly don't want to ascribe ill will to the hardworking city planners and traffic engineers of Cincinnati, but who looks at an intersection that will be serving thousands of students and transit-dependent folks and thinks, "Let's not bother with a crosswalk on this side"? I mean, seriously.

Welcome, pedestrians! Please enjoy your walk all the way around
the intersection instead of going in a straight line. We certainly
hope you're able-bodied and not at all in need of the hospital's services.

People cross midblock near this intersection all day long, and who can blame them? I did the same thing coming back because I couldn't be bothered waiting for three light cycles instead of just one. Get it together, Cincinnati.

It's all the more egregious when you consider these things are within
a few feet of the "no pedestrians" sign. Talk about your mixed messages.

U is for Union #AtoZChallenge

Join me on the A to Z Challenge: I'll share a different thing from my new home, Cincinnati, every day for 26 days in April.

On a trip to Cincy last summer, we were rolling along the interstate and my mother asked, "What's that building?" Being as I hadn't moved here yet, I said, "I don't know."

It's a much more impressive sight when it's not behind a fence and
heavy construction equipment. Not that I know that from personal
experience, but I've seen some lovely pictures.

That building is, or rather was, Cincinnati Union Terminal. These days it's the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, with the heyday of rail travel long behind it. Just one lonely train comes through three times per week (in the middle of the night in both directions--yes, I've looked into it), connecting Chicago to New York via many Midwest cities.

Poor dear looks like a kid that's had a bit of a skateboarding incident.
Renovation is meant to be finished in 2018.

Union Terminal first opened in 1933, unfortunately arriving just after rail travel had peaked in the U.S., so it came to be seen as a boondoggle before many years had gone by. Before the station was built, though, Wikipedia says: "intercity passenger traffic was split among no fewer than five stations in Downtown Cincinnati, requiring the many travelers who changed between railroads to navigate local transit themselves." Y'all. I can only hope local transit was easier to navigate in the early 20th century than it is now. I'm very good at transit and I find the local system nearly impossible.

Gotta love old train station font.

Union Terminal has been the subject of a few preservation movements in its many years, which is basically the only reason it's still standing. And thank goodness, because wow, what a loss that would be if it were gone. It was placed on the National Register in 1972.

I'm looking forward to getting a better pic of the mural and the rotunda
once the scaffolding comes down and I'm allowed inside.

So, here's a cool thing I just learned today: Winold Reiss created a bunch of mosaic murals just for Union Terminal, depicting life and industry in Cincinnati in the early 1930s. When part of the terminal was torn down in 1972, fourteen murals were moved to the airport (nine of them have just been moved back downtown in the past year because of demolition and construction at the airport), a couple were moved within the terminal itself and eventually made it to one of the museums, the ones in the rotunda remain, and alas... one was destroyed along with its home, being too large and expensive to move.

I wonder what's in there.

It has museums in it, so it's a safe bet this will not be my last trip to Union Terminal. Plus, y'all know how obsessed I am with transit. Sooner or later, I'll be getting on that train.

In the spirit of the word "union," here's a thing that has nothing to do with Union Terminal: the building where I go to work every day was the home of the International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink and Distillery Workers (a name which makes our org's somewhat convoluted name seem downright boring by comparison) before they merged with the Teamsters in 1973. Their legacy remains in the building, though:

Just one of many union touches.

S is for Smale #AtoZChallenge

Join me on the A to Z Challenge: I'll share a different thing from my new home, Cincinnati, every day for 26 days in April.

Today was going to be about Cincinnati Shakespeare, but being as I already gushed about them here and here, and shared a pic of their piggy here, I decided to go with this excellent park instead.

Sharlie was just happy to pose with all the things.
She's the best park-exploring buddy there is.
Behind her is the Labyrinth that appears to not be named after anyone,
which is unusual in public-private projects like this one.

Like most things that serve the public good but aren't for cars, this park was in the planning and funding stages for a looooong time. (In fact, if you look at Smale Riverfront Park on Google maps, the satellite images of the western side are still from when it was a parking lot & stretch of ugly dirt.) The first stages of the park opened in 2012 and it was finally completed in 2015.

Yeah, Cincinnati, I'm going to be needing a few more of these
around town. Great touch to an already awesome space.

Among other great things, Smale Riverfront Park is home to the Cincinnati Bike Center (that I have not yet been in), a playground I desperately want to try if I can find a time to visit when every kid in town isn't there, and restroom facilities that are called the Portland Loo. Y'all. I swear some days this entire city was purpose-designed for me. Then I remember all the miles of bike- and pedestrian-unfriendly, car-dependent sprawl, and all the places I can't get to unless I get a ZipCar, and that feeling passes.

More great stuff. I may spend my entire summer in this park.

Also in the neighbourhood: the Ohio River Trail, which will one day stretch all the way west to Indiana and all the way east to the Little Miami Scenic Trail (!!! Yes, please), and then onward to somewhere not important to me. (No offence meant to those who live farther east, of course. Please feel free to not care about where I live, either. It's only fair.)

This mural reads, "Hats off to Cincinnati," for the local support of the park.
At the far eastern end of the mural are the bike racks that serve
the Great American Ball Park. I don't think a lot of people ride to Reds
games, but enough do that the racks were full the night I was there.

P is for Purple #AtoZChallenge

Join me on the A to Z Challenge: I'll share a different thing from my new home, Cincinnati, every day for 26 days in April.

We made it all the way to the 19th without me mentioning bike/ped infrastructure once! And let's not talk about one of the reasons being that there's not much worth writing home about. (Cincinnati is a Bronze-level Bicycle Friendly Community, but I've no idea how they managed that.)

It's kind of a greyish-purple. I hear it used to be purpler.

But today's subject, the Purple People Bridge, is apparently worth writing something about. At various points in its lifespan, it's carried trains, horses and carts, streetcars, motor vehicles, and people. One by one, all conveyances except humans (and the bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards, etc. that carry us) were banned from the bridge, which was placed on the National Register in 2001.

My sister-in-law Jennie, who I naturally dragged onto the bridge when she was in town, says she remembers driving over it (or more accurately, being passengered over it) when she was a kid. I have no such remembrances, probably because on family trips we never went deep enough into Cincy to get to that bridge. My grandpa stuck to the interstate and hauled caravan as fast as he could through all population centers to get us to Somewhere On a Hill Where His Parents Lived, Kentucky. (I treasure the memories of my visits to my great-grandparents' home. I do not treasure any thought of the drives there and back again.)

Clockwise from top left: The ever-gorgeous Sharlie enjoying her bridge
visit; some people can't see a bridge and not put a lock on it;
unintentional selfie when I was trying to take a pic into the sun
without getting off  my bike and hadn't noticed that I'd flipped my camera;
evening sun over the Ohio River.

Where was I? Purple People Bridge, right. In addition to being a car-free passage between two entertainment districts, it also connects the bike/ped paths on either side, such as they are. Plus you get nice views of the Cincy skyline (sorry, Newport, but you don't have one of those) and the other bridges over the Ohio. Most importantly, it's a direct path to the nearest Barnes and Noble, on the rare occasion that Joseph-Beth doesn't have what I'm looking for.

K is for Kroger #AtoZChallenge

Join me on the A to Z Challenge: I'll share a different thing from my new home, Cincinnati, every day for 26 days in April.

There's a new Kroger in the neighborhood. That's not a euphemism; a new Kroger just opened a month ago and it's about a mile closer to me than my previous Kroger.

What's great about it: there's a bar and seating upstairs (yes, it has an upstairs!), an enormous prepared foods section if I ever need curry in a hurry--and let's be honest, when do I not?--and an outdoor patio with some fancy-looking artwork they're still installing.

I've always thought of myself as a Kroger kind of person, even all those years when the nearest Kroger was hundreds of miles away, but the truth is that I'm a nearest-supermarket-to-me-with-decent-bike-parking kind of person. Speaking of:

All this time as a bike advocate, I had no idea that's what bike racks
were for! Thanks for clearing that up for me, Kroger. ::eyeroll::

This is the nearest one to me now, so that's where I go, and I make it a point of locking up my bike right alongside the carts, in full view of an employee if I can manage it. (Not that I blame the employees. I'm sure they're following management's dumb instructions.) 

Cincinnati is Kroger's home base, or at least I think that's what the giant building downtown with "Kroger" on all four sides means. Which is admittedly not as cool as living in the home base of Whole Foods, but it is considerably cheaper.

I think this is Kroger's way of connecting to the neighborhood.
I admit it's working when I stop to take pics.

One more thing that is frustrating about this Kroger--they closed the old one that was a mile up the road the day before this one opened. When Kroger initially announced plans to close that store, the neighborhood rallied round to keep it, many of them making a point to shop more at their local Kroger to justify it staying... and it came to nothing when Kroger pulled up stakes anyway. Even more irritating is the number of transit-dependent folks who used to be in walking distance of a Kroger and now aren't. That neighborhood has not only been abandoned by their local store, but I've heard that Kroger's leaving has turned that area into a food desert. A couple friends live in the neighborhood that's been left behind and they're justifiably annoyed with the decision. Unfortunately, their anger is not enough to keep me from shopping at my neighborhood Kroger, because I'm not that good of a friend.

By the way, I've set up my Kroger Rewards to benefit IKRON Corporation, because that's part of the fun of working at a nonprofit. If you have Kroger Rewards and were wondering what to do with them, IKRON is a good choice. (Yes, this is a shameless self-promotion, but that's also part of the fun of working at a nonprofit.)

I is for Inclines #AtoZChallenge

Join me on the A to Z Challenge: I'll share a different thing from my new home, Cincinnati, every day for 26 days in April.

I'd never heard of inclines until one day I was wandering around the University of Cincinnati's local section and saw Melissa Kramer's book, The Inclines of Cincinnati. Cincinnati had five inclines (not all at once) hauling folks up some of our sizable hills from 1871 to 1948: Bellevue, Fairview, Mount Adams, Mount Auburn, and Price Hill. (They all also had a bunch of other names.) I have two thoughts about this: 1) This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to learn when I started this A to Z Challenge, so yay! and 2) Dang, I really wish these things still existed. They were already gone even before my grandma lived here as a young woman.

Here's what they looked like in action:


The Mount Adams Incline was also the star of a bunch of postcards from the era (see this and many, many more at Cincinnati Views):

I've heard that the Price Hill Incline is the only one with any kind of commemorative signage letting people know what used to be there. In fact, I-71 runs over the base of the former Mount Adams Incline, so it would have to be a pretty big sign to tell people what they're driving over. However. One of inclines was replaced by an even slower form of transport: stairs. Right here in my own neighborhood, the footprint of the Mount Auburn Incline is preserved in the form of the Main Street Steps. So naturally, I took a stroll down them. It's pretty cool, really; Main Street comes to a T in the road and the only way to continue on Main is to go up the steps.

What it looked like in the late 1800s:

Source: cincinnati-transit.net.

What it looked like Sunday morning:

I think this was on the second segment down.
The steps are .17 mile long in total, according to
 my preferred mapping site. I'm no expert,
but I'm pretty sure that's longer than
your average staircase. Even if you're Tevye.

There was a public house at the top of the hill when the Incline was in service. There's a park there now, but again--nothing to indicate whether the park was the site of Lookout House (I'm just guessing that it was), or that an Incline once ran here. I can't get over my astonishment that despite their existence being otherwise well documented, this pretty cool slice of Cincinnati history goes unremarked-upon in four out of five sites where it happened.

Mind you, people probably still drink here. Just not legally.

More of the Incline's former footprint (plus other sights on the way down). The steps cross three streets as they cut through the neighborhood toward downtown, and as you can see, even have their own street sign at one spot.

There are outdoor stairs all over the city, by the way, although I feel like I see as many "steps closed" signs as I see steps in active use. We have some hills, y'all. I imagine all the closed stairways will remain closed, given how much investment it would require to basically rebuild them.

This one is probably the saddest, although given the fence and the
fact that you can't even see steps there any longer, it's also
the most redundant.

Couple more cool artifacts from the Cincinnati Views site. Definitely drop by and give them a look.

Sources: Cincinnati Views: Inclines and Cable Cars, Cincinnati Transit.