unintended irony, parking meter edition

It's great to see how seriously California and its cities are working to increase the state's sustainably generated electricity capacity, and to establish an infrastructure for charging electric cars. But you still see stuff like this: p/v-equipped parking meters with their panels pointed east (huh?), shading each other. Oy.

unintended irony, golf cart edition

photo by Adam Feinstein

Kudos to FIU for investing in golf carts with solar panels on the roof. Self-powering vehicles are an ingenious idea, especially in a sunny place like Miami. It will work more efficiently, though, when the drivers stop parking in the shade.

Our pursuit of more sustainable practices sometimes requires rethinking pretty good habits. Generally speaking, it's a good idea to park in the shade in Miami. Our black bicycle saddles reach osso-bucco-braising temperatures after just a minute in the sun, and the Prius gets hotter than an EasyBake oven if you leave it in the sunlight. It's probably hard to break these habits when you sit behind the wheel of an electric golf cart. And there are probably much bigger paradigms we need to change as we retool our civilization to prevent catastrophic climate change.

look both ways

One reason Florida leads the nation in pedestrian fatalities may be our poorly designed roads. But the streets don't (fail to) work in isolation. This photo shows a planted median between a Dadeland office building and the parking lot that serves it. The problem stems from the building's relationship to its site. The building is symmetrical, with a central entry leading out to the sidewalk, even though everyone exiting that door needs to walk to the corner to cross the street. The building's entry sequence simply doesn't take the connection to the parking lot into account, and as a result, people were crossing the street in mid-block, right in front of the entry.

Medians with plantings like this are popping up all over South Florida. They frequently use dense hedges as a kind of green fencing, which is a decent way to discourage people from jaywalking on roads like US 1. The palm trees are a real missed opportunity, though. As friend of tin box Gray Read points out, palms provide almost no shade, which is the amenity most needed by pedestrians on South Florida's hot streets.

n.b. On a related note, the Miami  Herald just published an article on the "best and worst intersections" in the region, based on the number of tickets issued by red-light cameras. Short version: be careful trying to cross US 1 in Coral Gables.

the most sincere form of flattery

Some multinational conglomerate based in the United Arab Emirates was so taken with our artfully composed photograph of steel rebar that they've used it in their web site. The best part is that the text that accompanies this little unauthorized cut-and-paste job includes the phrase "[w]e adhere to international standards of operation..."

Except, of course, for copyright infringement.

You can see the original photo here.

unintended irony

Miami has some quirky habits. One is parking on the lawn (or at least the strip of grass between street and sidewalk referred to as "parkway" on site surveys). Another is dumping big piles of trash and yard waste along the side of the road.

Our house used to have a big trash pile in front of it, but the neighbors have stopped using our lot as a dumping ground since we started construction. And to a large extent the construction has minimized the amount of dog poop accumulating in front of the house. But these ever-present dumping piles raise a good question: how much stuff do we throw away?

Is it necessary to generate so much refuse in the course of everyday life? What techniques can we use to stop bringing stuff into our homes just so we can dump it out front a few hours later? What does it say about our regard for public space that we don't hesitate to dump trash out on the street?

update: tin box just recorded its 2,500th page view. Thanks for your input so far. Let us know what topics you'd like us to cover in future posts.