I've compared transit to meat before; today I'd like you to think of a bus ride as a hamburger. In the past, these ground-up mixtures were considered low class, in part because they were used to disguise undesirable cuts of meat. A hamburger was meat, which put it ahead of plain bread or beans, but it was the cheapest kind of meat available.
Because it was inexpensive and eaten by the working class, a hamburger was thought of as inherently inferior to just about anything else. Hamburgers were served at fast-food joints and diners. Some middle-class bars offered decent burgers, but they were still not high class. The idea that anyone would choose a hamburger over anything else was ludicrous. in an attempt to escape this pigeonhole, restaurants rebranded hamburgers as "Salisbury steak," but not too many people bought it.
Around the year 2000 that started to change. Some gourmet chefs set aside conventional wisdom and realized that you could make a hamburger with prime cuts of meat from well-fed cows and it would taste good. According to Time magazine, the first high-class burger was made by Sang Yoon in Santa Monica, but the fad took off the following year here in New York when Daniel Boulud sold a sandwich with ground sirloin stuffed with braised short ribs, foie gras and truffles for $27. That was followed in 2004 by Danny Meyer's Shake Shack in Madison Square, which attracted long lines of well-dressed professionals, and in 2006 by Laurent Tourondel's $62 Kobe beef burger. Nowadays there's hardly a high-class restaurant in the US that doesn't have some kind of fancy burger on the menu, and the trend does not seem to be fading yet.
So why is your Cap'n spending so much time talking about hamburgers? Mmm... burgers. Ahem! The point is that when burgers were low-class food, they were often made cheaply. When low-quality meat was thrown together by people who didn't care, the result was pretty crappy. A lot of people assumed that the form of the dish had something to do with its quality, and they couldn't imagine a burger made with good cuts of meat, let alone Kobe beef or truffles.
It is the same with transit. In many parts of the US, transit is used by poor people, and it's done on the cheap, with inconvenient routes and schedules, undependable service, bad-tempered drivers, hard plastic seats, no room for bags, infrequent cleanings, surly staff, drafty or nonexistent bus shelters and long maintenance cycles. That's the crappy burger that you get at an institutional cafeteria. Greyhound is the kind of burger you get at a highway rest stop. Chinatown buses are like cheap Chinese takeout: unsatisfying and unpredictable.
The New York City buses that are (nowadays) generally well-maintained, frequent and clean are kind of like a burger at a good diner. Free public buses in college towns like Amherst and Chapel Hill are dining hall burgers. The commuter lines running new buses with wifi to New Jersey and Upstate are pub burgers. Bolt Bus is Wendy's and Megabus is Five Guys. The Hampton Luxury Liner and the Limoliner are Father's Office or the Shake Shack.
What would the DB Burger look like? Maybe something like the Argentine double-decker cama suite service that includes a meal and champagne. The Kobe burger? I'll leave that to your imagination.
Showing posts with label obesity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obesity. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Sunday, January 18, 2009
The Failing Railbanks
At this point I think everyone understands the basics of the main mechanism underlying the current financial crisis: financial institutions lent money to people who really didn't have the ability to pay it back. The result was that when people tried to cash in on their investments with places like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, there wasn't enough money. Result: collapse.
A similar crisis is brewing in the railbanking sector. As I've discussed previously, with the intense government investment in competing road infrastructure over the past fifty years, one rail line after another has failed. In 1983 Congress passed a law that allowed the rights-of-way to be used as trails, with the explicit aim of preserving them for future rail use.
Well, the future is now. Across the country, people are thinking about rail travel again, and establishing - or re-establishing - light rail and commuter rail lines. Some, like New Jersey Transit's River Line, reestablish passenger service on active freight lines. Others, like the southern end of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, run on tracks within an active rail right-of-way, next to freight lines. The vast majority of new light rail systems, like the central portion of the Hudson-Bergen line, have at least some new construction along city streets.
Many systems obtain rail lines from existing freight operators: New Jersey Transit took over a section of the former West Shore Line from Conrail for the northern section of the Hudson-Bergen line. Some purchase the line years before any attempt to reestablish passenger service: Dallas and Fort Worth purchased the former Rock Island line between the two cities in 1983 and continued to allow freight trains to use it, but didn't start the Trinity Railway Express service until 1996.
To this day, the only attempt I know of to withdraw any right-of-way from a railbank has been successful - somewhat: according to a report by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (PDF), the Heritage Rail-Trail County Park in south central Pennsylvania allowed a company to reconstruct a single rail line and run a dinner train three times a week. According to a trail review on the Conservancy's website, though, the dinner train hasn't run since 2001. Almost every other rail-with-trail in the Conservancy's report seems to have come about by adding a trail to the rail right-of-way.
Now there are some attempts to reactivate rail lines. The most famous is the Georgetown Branch in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, which was railbanked by Montgomery County in 1988 and developed into the Capital Crescent Trail. There are currently plans to use the right-of-way for the Purple Line, a planned circumferential light-rail line, converting it to a "trail with rail." Opponents of the light rail have argued that it would endanger trail users, cut down old trees and disrupt the trail experience, but since much of their funding comes from the adjacent Columbia Country Club, rail advocates have suggested that their true motives are to avoid the restoration of active rail service through their golf course. The project has taken some steps forward recently, but its success is not guaranteed.
In other places like Bellevue, Washington and Humboldt County, California, there are abandoned rail lines with active groups pushing to see passenger service restored. Meanwhile, there are trail advocates pushing for formal abandonment and railbanking for trail use. They have stated that they believe rail service will not happen for many years, or perhaps never, and that the corridor should be converted to a trail, with the possibility of restoring the railroad at a later date.
Some rail activists have said that they don't want to see the rail lines taken out because it would be politically difficult to remove a trail, or even to restore the rail line, converting the structure to a rail-with-trail. Certainly, the existence of the trail is being used to cause problems for the Purple Line. To the extent that this is true, these railbanks are failing. By law, they were set up to preserve the line for transit service, but they may have the effect of preventing transit service.
A similar crisis is brewing in the railbanking sector. As I've discussed previously, with the intense government investment in competing road infrastructure over the past fifty years, one rail line after another has failed. In 1983 Congress passed a law that allowed the rights-of-way to be used as trails, with the explicit aim of preserving them for future rail use.
Well, the future is now. Across the country, people are thinking about rail travel again, and establishing - or re-establishing - light rail and commuter rail lines. Some, like New Jersey Transit's River Line, reestablish passenger service on active freight lines. Others, like the southern end of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, run on tracks within an active rail right-of-way, next to freight lines. The vast majority of new light rail systems, like the central portion of the Hudson-Bergen line, have at least some new construction along city streets.
Many systems obtain rail lines from existing freight operators: New Jersey Transit took over a section of the former West Shore Line from Conrail for the northern section of the Hudson-Bergen line. Some purchase the line years before any attempt to reestablish passenger service: Dallas and Fort Worth purchased the former Rock Island line between the two cities in 1983 and continued to allow freight trains to use it, but didn't start the Trinity Railway Express service until 1996.
To this day, the only attempt I know of to withdraw any right-of-way from a railbank has been successful - somewhat: according to a report by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (PDF), the Heritage Rail-Trail County Park in south central Pennsylvania allowed a company to reconstruct a single rail line and run a dinner train three times a week. According to a trail review on the Conservancy's website, though, the dinner train hasn't run since 2001. Almost every other rail-with-trail in the Conservancy's report seems to have come about by adding a trail to the rail right-of-way.
Now there are some attempts to reactivate rail lines. The most famous is the Georgetown Branch in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, which was railbanked by Montgomery County in 1988 and developed into the Capital Crescent Trail. There are currently plans to use the right-of-way for the Purple Line, a planned circumferential light-rail line, converting it to a "trail with rail." Opponents of the light rail have argued that it would endanger trail users, cut down old trees and disrupt the trail experience, but since much of their funding comes from the adjacent Columbia Country Club, rail advocates have suggested that their true motives are to avoid the restoration of active rail service through their golf course. The project has taken some steps forward recently, but its success is not guaranteed.
In other places like Bellevue, Washington and Humboldt County, California, there are abandoned rail lines with active groups pushing to see passenger service restored. Meanwhile, there are trail advocates pushing for formal abandonment and railbanking for trail use. They have stated that they believe rail service will not happen for many years, or perhaps never, and that the corridor should be converted to a trail, with the possibility of restoring the railroad at a later date.
Some rail activists have said that they don't want to see the rail lines taken out because it would be politically difficult to remove a trail, or even to restore the rail line, converting the structure to a rail-with-trail. Certainly, the existence of the trail is being used to cause problems for the Purple Line. To the extent that this is true, these railbanks are failing. By law, they were set up to preserve the line for transit service, but they may have the effect of preventing transit service.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
In Praise of Long Walks
In many parts of the world it's common for people to walk a lot. Sometimes they'll walk long distances - hours, days - to get where they need to go. It used to be pretty universal.
When I was younger I thought this just happened, that you could get up and start walking and just spend the night wherever you wound up. I was disappointed to discover that there are large sections of the country that are really very inhospitable to people on foot. To a large extent, it's because major roads have been built for cars with almost no thought to pedestrians. Outside of towns and cities, sidewalks are scarce, shoulders are narrow, and speeds are high. In some places, pedestrians are harassed, particularly outsiders.
My first reaction was to praise long-distance trail projects, like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Coast Trail. Certainly, people do take long walks on these trails, and they're great for spending time in nature, getting exercise and seeing pretty mountains. But if you've ever hiked on them, you'll know that they're not very practical for actually getting anywhere. They usually don't go through population centers: Harper's Ferry, West Virginia is one of the few towns that are actually on the Appalachian Trail.
The first reason for that is that land in towns is expensive, and walking trails didn't provide a good return on investment for either private companies or governments to spend the money to develop them. The second is that they piggyback on existing trails, many of which were made for visiting mountaintops. While it's great for hikers to climb Bear Mountain on their way through the Hudson Valley, it's not really the most convenient route to get from, say, Peekskill to Middletown.
I developed an interest in stories about people walking long distances, and looked for older ones that went back before all those roads were built and filled with cars. It turns out that in a lot of circumstances it wasn't much easier to get around on foot. There were weather problems, brigands, lack of food and difficulty finding or affording places to stay. There were also difficulties such as not having a good path to travel or losing the path.
One thing that's very striking about these narratives, particularly the more recent ones, is how many times the walkers get into cars, buses and trains. Especially cars. Five hundred years ago, if someone walked from Paris to Brussels they'd have had to walk from inn to inn, and once they left home they wouldn't see their families until they came back. Today, Appalachian trail hikers regularly hitch rides to grocery stores, or get visits from family members in cars. Just about every trail journal has an entry about getting a ride to a campsite further down the trail and then hitching another ride back to complete the skipped section.
What I learned from these stories is that walking too requires infrastructure. The paths and maps need to be created and maintained. There need to be bridges or boats to cross rivers and other obstacles. There need to be places to obtain food and places to stay, and they need to be affordable to walkers. This is a lot of work, and down through the ages it's something that people have spent years setting up. This infrastructure doesn't just happen.
The reason I've been talking about this stuff is that I feel it's very important to be able to walk just about anywhere we want to go. Not that the government should immediately go out and build straight, level walking paths for every city pair, with subsidized travelers' inns every five miles - although that would be a better use of the stimulus money than half the projects that are currently begging for it - but that we should aim ourselves in the general direction of making it easy to get places on foot, between towns as well as within them.
It's actually quite a tragedy that country roads used to be places where people could walk, and they still are to some extent, but with the number and speed of cars these days I wouldn't want to spend a month walking along them. When I was a kid I once visited coastal villages in Italy and Greece, and one thing that impressed me so much - impresses me to this day - is how they had well-maintained footpaths to other villages. I'm talking paths paved with stone, but too steep and narrow for cars. They were much more direct than the roads, because they didn't require all the hairpin turns. They weren't hiking trails or rail-trails or carriage roads. They were footpaths, built for people to get around.
When I was younger I thought this just happened, that you could get up and start walking and just spend the night wherever you wound up. I was disappointed to discover that there are large sections of the country that are really very inhospitable to people on foot. To a large extent, it's because major roads have been built for cars with almost no thought to pedestrians. Outside of towns and cities, sidewalks are scarce, shoulders are narrow, and speeds are high. In some places, pedestrians are harassed, particularly outsiders.
My first reaction was to praise long-distance trail projects, like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Coast Trail. Certainly, people do take long walks on these trails, and they're great for spending time in nature, getting exercise and seeing pretty mountains. But if you've ever hiked on them, you'll know that they're not very practical for actually getting anywhere. They usually don't go through population centers: Harper's Ferry, West Virginia is one of the few towns that are actually on the Appalachian Trail.
The first reason for that is that land in towns is expensive, and walking trails didn't provide a good return on investment for either private companies or governments to spend the money to develop them. The second is that they piggyback on existing trails, many of which were made for visiting mountaintops. While it's great for hikers to climb Bear Mountain on their way through the Hudson Valley, it's not really the most convenient route to get from, say, Peekskill to Middletown.
I developed an interest in stories about people walking long distances, and looked for older ones that went back before all those roads were built and filled with cars. It turns out that in a lot of circumstances it wasn't much easier to get around on foot. There were weather problems, brigands, lack of food and difficulty finding or affording places to stay. There were also difficulties such as not having a good path to travel or losing the path.
One thing that's very striking about these narratives, particularly the more recent ones, is how many times the walkers get into cars, buses and trains. Especially cars. Five hundred years ago, if someone walked from Paris to Brussels they'd have had to walk from inn to inn, and once they left home they wouldn't see their families until they came back. Today, Appalachian trail hikers regularly hitch rides to grocery stores, or get visits from family members in cars. Just about every trail journal has an entry about getting a ride to a campsite further down the trail and then hitching another ride back to complete the skipped section.
What I learned from these stories is that walking too requires infrastructure. The paths and maps need to be created and maintained. There need to be bridges or boats to cross rivers and other obstacles. There need to be places to obtain food and places to stay, and they need to be affordable to walkers. This is a lot of work, and down through the ages it's something that people have spent years setting up. This infrastructure doesn't just happen.
The reason I've been talking about this stuff is that I feel it's very important to be able to walk just about anywhere we want to go. Not that the government should immediately go out and build straight, level walking paths for every city pair, with subsidized travelers' inns every five miles - although that would be a better use of the stimulus money than half the projects that are currently begging for it - but that we should aim ourselves in the general direction of making it easy to get places on foot, between towns as well as within them.
It's actually quite a tragedy that country roads used to be places where people could walk, and they still are to some extent, but with the number and speed of cars these days I wouldn't want to spend a month walking along them. When I was a kid I once visited coastal villages in Italy and Greece, and one thing that impressed me so much - impresses me to this day - is how they had well-maintained footpaths to other villages. I'm talking paths paved with stone, but too steep and narrow for cars. They were much more direct than the roads, because they didn't require all the hairpin turns. They weren't hiking trails or rail-trails or carriage roads. They were footpaths, built for people to get around.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Getting our Goals Straight
It's nice to see people coming together in support of transit, but often there's a lot of misunderstanding. Some people come up with a particular "pro-transit" campaign and are suprised when not all the other transit advocates get behind it. Sometimes everyone agrees that the project is worthy, but they just differ as to the priority. Other people have deeper objections.
In the short term, better transit has very simple, tangible benefits: the ability to get from one place to another easier and quicker. Most people are in favor of improvements to the transit lines they use, or that their friends use, or that they could imagine using some day. People who don't use that line might want the resources used somewhere else.
It gets murkier when you take a longer-term look. How do I know how long I'll be around to enjoy my subway line? How do I know that my kid will live in this neighborhood when he grows up? Or my grandchildren? Similarly with the transit system in San Francisco: if I'm not planning to live there, why should I care what they have? It gets to be more philosophical, and transit becomes more of a means to an end.
In this post, I'm going to mention a few larger goals that people can have when they think about transit. I'm also going to mention how I feel about those goals. I think it's important for people to articulate feelings like these and to understand that everyone has different priorities.
If I'm missing any goals that are important to you, please feel free to post them in the comments.
Okay, now here's where it gets fun: notice how the last four goals (reducing deaths, injuries, sickness and fear; reducing pollution and global warming; using resources more efficiently; and promoting better social interaction) are all dependent on transportation choice? In other words, if in 2058 the transit-using population in the US is a million more but the car-driving population is three million more, we've failed. If we build or revitalize 1000 walkable neighborhoods, but other people build 5000 car-oriented subdivisions, we lose. That means that for those goals, it's not enough to build transit. We have to do the dreaded thing that motorists are always accusing us of: we have to change the choices people make. We have to get people out of their cars.
What does it take to get people out of their cars? Well, I wrote it right there above: transportation priorities, land use, marketing, the quality of transit, and reducing fear of death and injury from walking. And of course many of these are dependent on transportation choice, so it can be a "virtuous cycle."
More importantly, in the other direction it can be a vicious cycle. Every dollar spent on car facilities (roads, bridges, "free" parking), every unwalkable home, store or workplace, every positive mention of cars in the media encourages people to drive. This is why it's not enough to fight for transit. We need to be against road-building, against parking, against unwalkable land use, against positive depictions of cars. We need to go negative.
Even more importantly, we need to take the fight to the motorists. We need to show them that transit can be fun, exciting and prestigious. We need to take over the roads, bridges and parking, and convert them to transit and pedestrian use. We need to infill the unwalkable land so that it's walkable again. And if we can't convert the car facilities and unwalkable land, we need to destroy it. We need to tear down highways and garages, narrow roads, build over parking lots, and turn office parks, strip malls and subdivisions back into farmland or parkland.
I used to think that it was enough for me to just take care of my own transit needs, and my family's. But it's not. Our future, and the planet's, means that we have to get people out of their cars and onto the buses and trains.
Obviously I'm not suggesting using Great Leap Forward-style totalitarian tactics to force people to stop driving or to live, work and shop in transit-oriented places. I think it can be done without physical force. At the very minimum, our government should stop subsidizing car use as soon as possible. I know, it's like turning a battleship. But you can't even begin to turn the battleship if you don't convince the captain to give the order, and you can't convince the captain without talking about it.
I think that this factor of influencing transit choice is an extremely important one, and it has massive implications for transportation policy worldwide, nationwide and in the region. I'll be referring back to this in the future.
In the short term, better transit has very simple, tangible benefits: the ability to get from one place to another easier and quicker. Most people are in favor of improvements to the transit lines they use, or that their friends use, or that they could imagine using some day. People who don't use that line might want the resources used somewhere else.
It gets murkier when you take a longer-term look. How do I know how long I'll be around to enjoy my subway line? How do I know that my kid will live in this neighborhood when he grows up? Or my grandchildren? Similarly with the transit system in San Francisco: if I'm not planning to live there, why should I care what they have? It gets to be more philosophical, and transit becomes more of a means to an end.
In this post, I'm going to mention a few larger goals that people can have when they think about transit. I'm also going to mention how I feel about those goals. I think it's important for people to articulate feelings like these and to understand that everyone has different priorities.
- Economic revitalization: If people can get to and from an area easier, they are more likely to live there (raising rents and property values), and work and shop there (raising revenue for stores nearby, and tax revenue). Fron a local perspective, transit is as good for this as any other form of transportation, but from a global perspective, transit is more efficient and thus puts less of a burden on the economy when resources are scarce. This is dependent on the quality of transit.
- Revising transportation priorities: Transportation investment requires limited resources: land, money, publicity. In some cases, more land, money or publicity going to transit means less land, money or publicity going to roads.
- Influencing land use: Transit can encourage developers to build denser and more walkable neighborhoods, and can encourage people to build denser and more walkable buildings in existing neighborhoods. This is dependent on the quality of transit and transit-oriented development (which also includes pedestrian and cycling facilities, zoning, tax policies and subsidies).
- Influencing transportation choice: To the extent that transit, walking and cycling are more convenient and affordable than driving, people tend to choose them. This also depends on transportation priorities and land use (above) and reducing fear of death and injury from walking (see below). It is also dependent on marketing, and on the quality of transit.
- Serving non-drivers: Many people do not drive, because they are too young, too old, physically or mentally disabled, unable to afford the cost of driving, unable or unlikely to drive safely (due to alcohol or drug addiction, or cognitive competence), because they think it's bad (for any number of reasons), or because they simply don't like it. The more transit there is, the better this population is served. And that's just a matter of fairness.
- Reducing deaths, injuries and sickness, and fear thereof: Cars kill and injure vastly larger numbers of people than transit or walking, whether measured per passenger-mile, per passenger-minute, or in almost any other way. They require drivers and passengers to sit, virtually immobilized, for long periods of time, reducing physical fitness and contributing to obesity and disease. They also pollute the air, land and water, causing asthma and other diseases.
The more people choose to take transit instead of driving, and the more land devoted to transit instead of cars, the longer-lived and healthier people will be. One example of this is when the Tramway des Maréchaux in Paris was built in the middle of a series of wide, dangerous boulevards, reducing speeds and making it safer for pedestrians to cross the boulevard. - Reducing pollution and global warming: Transit produces lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions per passenger trip than car use. This is dependent on transportation choice.
- Using resources more efficiently: Transit uses less energy per passenger trip, which in turn can lead to less drag on the economy and less dependence on foreign resources. This is dependent on transportation choice.
- Promoting better social interaction: Many have argued that lifestyles oriented towards walking, cycling or transit promote higher quality social interaction than car-oriented lifestyles. This is hotly disputed and difficult to prove one way or another. This is dependent on land use and transportation choice.
If I'm missing any goals that are important to you, please feel free to post them in the comments.
Okay, now here's where it gets fun: notice how the last four goals (reducing deaths, injuries, sickness and fear; reducing pollution and global warming; using resources more efficiently; and promoting better social interaction) are all dependent on transportation choice? In other words, if in 2058 the transit-using population in the US is a million more but the car-driving population is three million more, we've failed. If we build or revitalize 1000 walkable neighborhoods, but other people build 5000 car-oriented subdivisions, we lose. That means that for those goals, it's not enough to build transit. We have to do the dreaded thing that motorists are always accusing us of: we have to change the choices people make. We have to get people out of their cars.
What does it take to get people out of their cars? Well, I wrote it right there above: transportation priorities, land use, marketing, the quality of transit, and reducing fear of death and injury from walking. And of course many of these are dependent on transportation choice, so it can be a "virtuous cycle."
More importantly, in the other direction it can be a vicious cycle. Every dollar spent on car facilities (roads, bridges, "free" parking), every unwalkable home, store or workplace, every positive mention of cars in the media encourages people to drive. This is why it's not enough to fight for transit. We need to be against road-building, against parking, against unwalkable land use, against positive depictions of cars. We need to go negative.
Even more importantly, we need to take the fight to the motorists. We need to show them that transit can be fun, exciting and prestigious. We need to take over the roads, bridges and parking, and convert them to transit and pedestrian use. We need to infill the unwalkable land so that it's walkable again. And if we can't convert the car facilities and unwalkable land, we need to destroy it. We need to tear down highways and garages, narrow roads, build over parking lots, and turn office parks, strip malls and subdivisions back into farmland or parkland.
I used to think that it was enough for me to just take care of my own transit needs, and my family's. But it's not. Our future, and the planet's, means that we have to get people out of their cars and onto the buses and trains.
Obviously I'm not suggesting using Great Leap Forward-style totalitarian tactics to force people to stop driving or to live, work and shop in transit-oriented places. I think it can be done without physical force. At the very minimum, our government should stop subsidizing car use as soon as possible. I know, it's like turning a battleship. But you can't even begin to turn the battleship if you don't convince the captain to give the order, and you can't convince the captain without talking about it.
I think that this factor of influencing transit choice is an extremely important one, and it has massive implications for transportation policy worldwide, nationwide and in the region. I'll be referring back to this in the future.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Towards a Million Fattie March
I first heard about Fat March in the magazine of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, to which I am a contributor. The RTC (no, not that RTC) helps to fund and lobby for the creation and maintenance of rail-trails throughought the country. They sponsor a useful database of rail-trails and other greenways throughout the country.
Rail-trails are good for a number of reasons. They give people a place to exercise and connect them to nature and parks. Overall, they provide a safe route for non-motorized travel, which can be hard to come by in many parts of the country. In many ways they're more useful than hiking trails, because they generally have low grades and wide curves, and many of them connect transit, residential areas and parks. There's something a little sad about them, though: once a right-of-way has been railbanked, it's very unlikely that train service will be restored.
Rail-trails are very well suited to long distance walking. The Fat March route used a number of trails in the Northeast, including the Hop River rail-trail in Connecticut and the Northern Central rail-trail in Maryland. The show's producers had help from the RTC in picking trails. Executive producer Julie Laughlin said this about rail-trails to Rails to Trails Magazine: "They're absolutely perfect for us. When you do a reality show, there is quite an entourage that goes with it. It's hard to be on city streets." By contrast, walking on roads is "nerve-wracking, it's noisy and it's hard to talk with one another." Fat March trainer Steve Pfiester told the magazine that the trails allowed the marchers to make the most progress. "When we get on [the rail-trails], we're just hauling butt."
Rail-trails and other greenways (and pedestrian infrastructure in general) could use some help. A large number of households are located in areas where it is not safe or comfortable for people to walk. By any measure, pedestrian projects receive only a tiny fraction of the public money spent on transportation. Many of the greenways are not connected to each other, or to transit, at more than one point, making them difficult, if not impossible, to access without a car. Many of the longer greenways do not have accessible hotels or campgrounds, making it difficult to arrange multi-day trips.
As a big fan of rail-trails and long-distance walking in general, I was thrilled to see them get exposure on a high-rated national prime-time television show. This will allow even more people to make the connection between rail-trails and health. I was disappointed that, although you see lots of trails on the show, the trails are never mentioned by name. Neither is the RTC or the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which has done a lot of work promoting trails in this area.
There isn't even a link to RTC or the ECGA on the Fat March website, and most surprisingly, there's no mention of it on the websites of those organizations. The RTC already had the product placement; I would have expected them to negotiate having the trails named on the show, or even buy an ad on the show or sponsor the website. A co-branded website could have brought in tons of donations and political support for rail-trails. I think they missed a big opportunity.
It's still not too late, though. Hopefully there will be another season of Fat March next year. In the meantime, I'll be that some of this year's Marchers are available for sponsorship. Imagine a commercial featuring Chantal or Matt saying "Donate to the Rails to Trails Conservancy. Because we all need a place to walk." Imagine a press release for a trail ribbon-cutting "featuring Sam from Fat March!" Imagine Anthony sending a letter to his fans asking them to write their representatives for more money for transportation enhancements.
In any case, this is your Cap'n speaking. I encourage you to donate to the RTC or the ECGA, and to write a letter to your representatives saying that you support greenways - for our health.
Rail-trails are good for a number of reasons. They give people a place to exercise and connect them to nature and parks. Overall, they provide a safe route for non-motorized travel, which can be hard to come by in many parts of the country. In many ways they're more useful than hiking trails, because they generally have low grades and wide curves, and many of them connect transit, residential areas and parks. There's something a little sad about them, though: once a right-of-way has been railbanked, it's very unlikely that train service will be restored.
Rail-trails are very well suited to long distance walking. The Fat March route used a number of trails in the Northeast, including the Hop River rail-trail in Connecticut and the Northern Central rail-trail in Maryland. The show's producers had help from the RTC in picking trails. Executive producer Julie Laughlin said this about rail-trails to Rails to Trails Magazine: "They're absolutely perfect for us. When you do a reality show, there is quite an entourage that goes with it. It's hard to be on city streets." By contrast, walking on roads is "nerve-wracking, it's noisy and it's hard to talk with one another." Fat March trainer Steve Pfiester told the magazine that the trails allowed the marchers to make the most progress. "When we get on [the rail-trails], we're just hauling butt."
Rail-trails and other greenways (and pedestrian infrastructure in general) could use some help. A large number of households are located in areas where it is not safe or comfortable for people to walk. By any measure, pedestrian projects receive only a tiny fraction of the public money spent on transportation. Many of the greenways are not connected to each other, or to transit, at more than one point, making them difficult, if not impossible, to access without a car. Many of the longer greenways do not have accessible hotels or campgrounds, making it difficult to arrange multi-day trips.
As a big fan of rail-trails and long-distance walking in general, I was thrilled to see them get exposure on a high-rated national prime-time television show. This will allow even more people to make the connection between rail-trails and health. I was disappointed that, although you see lots of trails on the show, the trails are never mentioned by name. Neither is the RTC or the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which has done a lot of work promoting trails in this area.
There isn't even a link to RTC or the ECGA on the Fat March website, and most surprisingly, there's no mention of it on the websites of those organizations. The RTC already had the product placement; I would have expected them to negotiate having the trails named on the show, or even buy an ad on the show or sponsor the website. A co-branded website could have brought in tons of donations and political support for rail-trails. I think they missed a big opportunity.
It's still not too late, though. Hopefully there will be another season of Fat March next year. In the meantime, I'll be that some of this year's Marchers are available for sponsorship. Imagine a commercial featuring Chantal or Matt saying "Donate to the Rails to Trails Conservancy. Because we all need a place to walk." Imagine a press release for a trail ribbon-cutting "featuring Sam from Fat March!" Imagine Anthony sending a letter to his fans asking them to write their representatives for more money for transportation enhancements.
In any case, this is your Cap'n speaking. I encourage you to donate to the RTC or the ECGA, and to write a letter to your representatives saying that you support greenways - for our health.
Too Fat to March?
I just finished watching the pilot season of a new reality TV show, Fat March. I actually watched the whole thing on streaming video from ABC's website, and I highly recommend it. This post contains spoilers, so watch it before you read beyond the third paragraph if you don't want your experience spoiled.
From what I understand, Fat March is based on Too Big to Walk?, a reality show produced by Channel 4 in Great Britain. I wanted to watch the British version, but Channel 4 doesn't even offer clips for free. I tried to pay to watch it, but they won't even allow you to do that if you don't live in the UK.
The show begins in Boston with twelve people, ranging in weight from 225 to 500 pounds, all classified as morbidly obese by their body-mass indices. Accompanied by a staff of forty people, including two personal trainers, production crew and medics, they set out on foot for Washington, DC, a distance of over 550 miles. The show was filmed over a ten-week period, divided into seven "stages," and an episode was broadcast devoted to each stage. The marchers slept in tents every night, but every stage featured a "challenge" where the participants had a chance to win additional prizes, usually including spa services and a night in a hotel.
Every marcher who made it to DC on schedule received a share of the prize money, and at the end of each stage the participants had a chance to "vote people off"; anyone who got at least one vote had to leave the show. The twist was that the prize money decreased by $10,000 per person for everyone who left the show, so the marchers had an incentive to cooperate.
I found the show to be entertaining and inspiring, and I'm hoping that ABC continues it, but there are a few things that I hope they do differently next season. The first is that the producers seemed to see interpersonal drama as a necessity to keep viewers hooked, so every episode devoted a significant amount of time to squabbles within the group. I was interested by the challenges of building and maintaining a team that could last through challenges like this, but I wasn't too interested by the "romantic" angles or the bickering. I would rather have seen less of this.
The next is that the guys who left the show were all the heaviest ones. I think that undermines the message of the show, and gives a contrary one: that some people are "too big to walk." Two of them had legitimate health problems that prevented them from participating, but the other two were voted off because their teammates thought they wouldn't be able to keep the pace set by the producers. To me that suggests that the pace was too tight. Can we imagine a show like this where the only reason people leave is because they're lazy or disruptive?
I've got a lot more to say about the show and long-distance walking, but this post is long enough, so I'll write about that soon.
From what I understand, Fat March is based on Too Big to Walk?, a reality show produced by Channel 4 in Great Britain. I wanted to watch the British version, but Channel 4 doesn't even offer clips for free. I tried to pay to watch it, but they won't even allow you to do that if you don't live in the UK.
The show begins in Boston with twelve people, ranging in weight from 225 to 500 pounds, all classified as morbidly obese by their body-mass indices. Accompanied by a staff of forty people, including two personal trainers, production crew and medics, they set out on foot for Washington, DC, a distance of over 550 miles. The show was filmed over a ten-week period, divided into seven "stages," and an episode was broadcast devoted to each stage. The marchers slept in tents every night, but every stage featured a "challenge" where the participants had a chance to win additional prizes, usually including spa services and a night in a hotel.
Every marcher who made it to DC on schedule received a share of the prize money, and at the end of each stage the participants had a chance to "vote people off"; anyone who got at least one vote had to leave the show. The twist was that the prize money decreased by $10,000 per person for everyone who left the show, so the marchers had an incentive to cooperate.
I found the show to be entertaining and inspiring, and I'm hoping that ABC continues it, but there are a few things that I hope they do differently next season. The first is that the producers seemed to see interpersonal drama as a necessity to keep viewers hooked, so every episode devoted a significant amount of time to squabbles within the group. I was interested by the challenges of building and maintaining a team that could last through challenges like this, but I wasn't too interested by the "romantic" angles or the bickering. I would rather have seen less of this.
The next is that the guys who left the show were all the heaviest ones. I think that undermines the message of the show, and gives a contrary one: that some people are "too big to walk." Two of them had legitimate health problems that prevented them from participating, but the other two were voted off because their teammates thought they wouldn't be able to keep the pace set by the producers. To me that suggests that the pace was too tight. Can we imagine a show like this where the only reason people leave is because they're lazy or disruptive?
I've got a lot more to say about the show and long-distance walking, but this post is long enough, so I'll write about that soon.
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