Food: Urban Gardening

 Ron Finley: A guerrilla gardener in South Central LA

 

26.5 Million Americans live in a food desert. 

Wikipedia defines Food Desert as "a geographic area where affordable and nutritious food is difficult to obtain, particularly for those without access to an automobile."

This made me think: the year I spent in Duluth, I lived in a food desert, so I know what it's like. Yet there was an amaaaazing local restaurant a few blocks from me that was doing something different - being an early adopter of sustainability. Yesterday, my grandma reminded me about Duluth Grill after she caught the feature below on the local news. Through my Clover Valley farm internship I even got to meet the owner of Duluth Grill and work a bit with the urban garden manager, Francois. You can find the vinegar I helped start at the farm on the tables and shelves at the Grill too!

  Duluth Grill on the Food Network!

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RON FINLEY empowers through urban gardening!!!

Twin City Rapid Transit

Yesterday I returned to SF from a short stay at "home" in St. Paul, Minnesota. Being with my family and friends certainly makes me feel the love for where I was born and raised, but I can't help compare the two places. I love it here, and while it's not the place where my "people" happen to be, it is the place where I don't spend 25% or more of my time in a car getting around from place to place, person to person. 

In celebration of the Twin Cities, I'm sharing this map from 1913 showing the "Rapid Transit" streetcars of Minneapolis and St. Paul. 

Timeline
1872: The first streetcars were pulled by horses, starting off in St. Paul
1875: The city of Minneapolis joins in
1887: Upgrades to the system allowed the cars to be pulled by cable loops
1892: Cars hit the electric grid
1920: Peak ridership occurred, carrying an estimated 238 million people
1929 - 1930's: The Great Depression saw ridership leveling off
1939 - 1945: There was a climb in passengers as World War II brought gas rationing
1954: The Twin Cities had its last streetcar journey in Minneapolis

The system stretched from Stillwater to Lake Minnetonka, with a total of 523 miles of streetcar!

The pink pin is Excelsior, on Lake Minnetonka. Stillwater in the northeast corner, located on the St. Croix River which separates Minnesota and Wisconsin here.

Is it ironic that streetcars in cities today are tourist attractions; we get entertainment out of these transportation units that are a thing of the past, yet technically speaking, very efficient? And had all the routes lasted longer, without the interfering competition from automobiles, they could have been a huge factor in the continued creation of what I imagine to be extraordinary urban and inter-urban transportation, spaces, and places. 

For example, San Francisco is famous for having streetcars that tourists will wait hours to ride. San Franciscans don't ride them unless you hop on to hop off, or, you find yourself in these situations: 

"These situations," being visits from family, are the best, by the way!

Even in Minnesota, we have a museum dedicated to our historic streetcar. Though they are a thing of the past in terms of getting people from point A to point B on a daily basis, I believe they will make a comeback by influencing future transportation services of the future!

Today in SF you find a convergence of the historical streetcar and a modern US city's bus system: buses that are (typically) connected to above electricity. The buses run absolutely everywhere, and are pretty reliable. Technology has helped with that :)

I didn't want to find something off the web, so I looked out my window and took one for myself! Notice the electric wires across the image; buses connect to these. Although an extensive bus system requires lots of energy, transportation connected to electricity reduces pollution, which is a concern in terms of air quality in denser cities.

Sources & Links:
MN Historical Society YouTube video 
Top 10 Trolly Rides
Minnesota History Center 
Minnesota Streetcar Museum

Good Transit and Well Being

The journal Transportation published relevant and interesting research done by professor Jason Cao from the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The article "The association between light rail transit and satisfactions with travel and life: evidence from Twin Cities" was published March 2013. The research looks at the light rail line that runs from downtown Minneapolis to the airport and Mall of America. The Hiawatha Light Rail/METRO Blue Line opened in 2004 and has been followed up by the METRO Green Line running from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul via University Avenue that opened up last June 2014.
CityLab did an article based on Cao's study entitled "Living Near Good Transit May Make You Happier". 

Cao wanted to find out if the new transit line was contributing to the well-being of nearby residents. A survey was sent out to 4 communities with varying access to transit. The findings: "People in the Hiawatha corridor had higher ratings on questions related to the quality of their lives compared to people in the other four corridors." Cao's idea is that no matter the reason, more life satisfactions comes from a higher level of mobility that the light rail provides.

In conclusion, these publications back up a claim that I have always have felt to be true. Since experiencing my first round of a great public transit system in Germany in 2001, and the second round in Copenhagen in 2012, and then most recently this past fall, once again in Munich, Germany, it has always seemed that a quality transit system somehow just makes life better. I felt it personally, but I also felt it among the communities I was living in. It's almost impossible to describe unless you've felt it for yourself, but it seems right that accessibility, equity, mobility, etc., all improve around good transit, and that in turn puts people more at ease in some way. Once you really stop to think about it, it makes sense. I may have sounded crazy to have come out and said this on my own, and since I'm not currently conducting any official research, I was thrilled to have found CityLab's and Cao's publications that prove that quality transit can help influence a high quality of life. 

The METRO Green Line generated at least $2.5 billion worth of economic development within half a mile of the new transit system

Original Jason Cao study (access to full article is not available)

Access and Outcomes: Transportation, Location, and Subjective Well-Being - Eric Andrew Morris UCLA Dissertation