The City

Finally after a long winter, it's begun to look and feel like spring, and we enjoyed it with a picnic near the pond in the Boston Public Garden.

 

	Last night I rode by Hope Cemetery for the first time and noticed the flags set up for the veterans. It seemed appropriate today to return for another look.

Earlier this week, Nancy M. pointed me to a new Google mashup called The Right Ride, designed to allow users to document dangers spots for bikers by adding annotations to a map. Chris Briaotta created the site in response to the recent death of two Boston cyclists, and it gives fellow bikers a way to share important information gleaned from their everyday experience of navigating through Boston's often mean streets.

Two articles describe the site:

• Cyclist deaths cause concern: Hub cyclists promoting safety with bike route Wiki
  
• For safe city biking, a wiki this way comes

I find it interesting that both articles refer to the site as a "wiki" though it seems clear that the site is more accurately described as a map-based mashup, since information is not editable by everyone and revision are not tracked, etc. This fudging of terms may not matter to the averager reader, but I find it curious that the term "wiki" is used here to denote any effort at collaborative knowledge-making online,when in fact there are many web-based tools that allow for this without them being wikis.

The comments on the Boston NOW article led me to Governor Deval Patrick's website where citizens are able to post issues and invite others show their support by "voting," in this case on the issues of bike lanes: http://devalpatrick.com/issue/bikes. In good social media fashion, the site enabled me, to create my account and post my vote: "I'm a daily bike commuter with a fairly safe route, but I ofter bike to other parts of the city that are much less safe. Until space for biking is built into the fabric of the city, motorists will continue to treat us like second-class citizens who don't belong on the road. Bike lanes are simply the civilized thing to do. It's time for Boston to begin making changes."

While it's often difficult to sort through the overblown "Web 2.0" hype, these sites make it easier to excited about the democratic potential of participatory media to help strengthen local communities. As long as I don't allow my "vote" on the bike lane issue to substitute for other, more more substantive forms of political action, I can see how this and the Right Ride site play their part in helping us work toward change in the places that matter to us.

I must be in the front row. That's what I keep thinking as I bike into spring this week, getting a great view of each gradation of change as I get to work and back.

Last week at this time I was facing 6 degree temperatures with a ferocious headwind, but I felt my body had fully adjusted to these conditions. I didn't even both to cover most of my face; I just let the frost tighten and tug on my beard as it collected throughout the ride. In this kind of weather, bikers have a love/hate relationship with speed: you have to get going fast enough to generate body heat, but the faster you go the colder it seems. Five minutes into the ride you can reach a place of equilibrium, but you feel the paradox acutely until that happens.

Yesterday I rode without my jacket at the end of the day and I experienced the wind as an amiable presence, much closer in kind to my own body than the alien adversary it's been most of the winter.

The ponds have been shedding their layers this week, which Thoreau describes in his journal today:

No sooner has the ice of Walden melted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the surface of the virgin water. It is affecting to see nature so tender, however old, and wearing none of the wrinkles of age. Ice dissolved is the next moment as perfect water as if it had been melted a million years. To see that which was lately so hard and immovable now so soft and impressible! What if our moods could dissolve thus completely? It is like a flush of life to a cheek that was dead.