Parking Day 2009 - Boston!

 So this is my first post with so many pictures. It was a bit tedious to post all these photos and as a result I've put it off for quite some time. I'm just going to use my facebook comments on these. Here it is...

Parking Day Boston 2009

Trailer park at the start of the day. Notice the lack of real sod :-(

Parking day begins with a trip to Pemberton to pick up some loaner plants for our Inman park. I found the Porter sq. park on the way there, but they weren't setup yet. I'll drop by later to see how they're doing.

 Packed with our plants

 Our empty spot before we setup. Notice the ridiculous color scheme of my bike barricade!

 Our first patrons! We had a construction theme for the park.

 Doug and I are ready to roll out with the music playing on his trailer.

My sad Parking day bike flag.

Our first stop was Harvard!

Harvard had a bike parking theme going. (and balloons) They had a ton of these cards and I picked up some to distrubute.

A few parked bikes and of course the balloons.

More balloons to come.

Doug chillin'

Me chillin'

Here's the Porter sq. Parking spot. Quite a transformation from the morning.

They had a mix of different themes, one of which was homemade foods and drinks. Mmm ice cream!

This kid wanted to ride in the trailer

 

Hold on tight!

Side walk chalking!

Me rolling around on the grass.

Me hula-ing.

Homemade soda? (the first two flavors I tried were good, not sure about the passion fruit)

Here's their assortment of flavors!

Scribble on this one, yarr!

Trailer park at the start of the day. Notice the lack of real sod :-(

Hula action!

Government Center Parking spot

Quick visit from a dragonfly.

That's not lunch!

Hammock! Rock on! (and puppy)

People just haning out.

Government Center's sign

The government center spot was put together by walkBoston and Livable Streets Alliance.

After a quick lunch in Kenmore we head over to BU's parking spot!

As expected, it is quite busy!

They even have a bike repair center out front.

Jazz band! The guy I talked with said they had live music lined up for the whole day!

The BU spot involved people from a bunch of different student groups.

Just mingling.

Allston's parking spot.That's a gallery back there!

After a quick stop at ex-Herrells' we're heading back.

Harvard's balloons has increased! This is near the end of the day!

And finally, a final stop through at Porter sq. again!

There's no direct connection between parking day and bike culture, yet it seemed to be a huge theme throughout the day. I suppose it's just the similarities between both movements!

Counting Traffic pt 2

So here's my overdue post from my Harvard Bridge count. Tuesday afternoon, the same day as my Museum of Science Bridge Traffic count, I sat for another two hours, on another bridge, and counted traffic

My view to the right

My view to the left. What a beautiful day to waste!

I sat on the inbound side of the Harvard bridge, close to the Cambridge river bank, at approximately 360 smoots. Surprisingly, traffic was not at all bad (in both directions). Thus, Not only was I able to divide my counts into fairly precise bins of 7.5min, I also managed to record each wave of cars separately and differentiate between cars coming from Mass. Ave. and Memorial Dr.

My Tally Sheet

I'm dead tired so I don't think I'll be saying much. But briefly...

Open Office's Rendition of my Pie Chart

So it's interesting thing how the ratio for different modes of transportation changed. There were a lot more cyclists crossing the Harvard Bridge, and slightly fewer pedestrians. Harvard Bridge is a much longer bridge and it seemed unlikely that many of these people were commuting to and from work. Also, I should note that I was recording the inbound side of the bridge during the evening commute. If it included any commuters, they would be reverse commuters. Also, the plot isn't up yet, but vehicular traffic doesn't actually increase that much (maybe ~20%). Just from my observation, the outbound side of the bridge also didn't seem to increase much in volume.

Anyway, a lengthier review of the data should be coming soon, but not before Parking Day! We've moved location to Inman square now and the weather looks like it will be great! I'm quite excited! Please look forward to the next entry!

Park(ing) Day 2009 - Harvard sq.

Park(ing) day is coming Sept. 18th!

http://www.parkingday.org/

I first learned about Park(ing) day about a year ago. Unfortunately, I found out about it a couple weeks after it had past. At the time I had grandiose plans for the subsequent year. Well here we are now, less than 10 days from Park(ing) Day, and unsurprisingly, I have very little to show for it...well almost.

I am collaborating with a group to setup a Park(ing) Day park in Harvard sq. I think they must have a magnificent vision... which I know nothing about yet. Nevertheless, I believe that we will have a great time! We'll be setting up on Mass Ave. somewhere between Harvard Book Store and JP Licks. I think this will actually be the first Cambridge Park(ing) Day park!

Additionally, one of my ideas may actually come to fruition. In addition to the Harvard park, I will also be riding around the square with a miniature "trailer park". I found a bike trailer to rent in the area: Doug's bike trailer place. I will be laying down some sod and hopefully be able to place a small bench or potted plant within the confines of the trailer. While not the trailer park "brigade" that I had envisioned, I am still very excited about this project.


According to Boston's Park(ing) Day group, there are at least 4 other parks in the area. With the inclusion of our Harvard park that's only a meager 5 Parks. Now I'm sure there's an unannounced park here and there, but last year New York had an astonishing 53 parks! Presumably, that number will grow yet again by quite a bit this year. I realize that the population of NYC dwarfs the population of Boston. However, let's naively make a rough calculation comparing population ratio and park ratio. The urban population of Boston is about 1/5 of NYC's. That would still dictate at least 10 Park(ing) Day parks in Boston last year. C'mon people, let's step it up!

So maybe I'm being unfair. After all, you need the exposure in the first place to get people interested. There are plenty of other events in a similar vein that I have no idea about. (If you know of any, be sure to let me know!) For example, a large portion of people have no idea about the infamously rude Critical Mass ride, and likewise, I have no idea about many of these smaller late night rides. (again, let me know!) We'll get there eventually, but let's all do our best to get the word out about these things!