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Tuesday, November 6, 2007

cheaters

Cycling is a very popular hobby in Cary, but for all of the people riding around town in their ill-advised spandex outfits, we have seen little improvement with regard to cycling-friendly roadways and parks. Many of Cary's main roads are finally being expanded to meet the demands of last decade's population growth, but only a few of them have cycling lanes. I often encounter situations where people approach cyclists who are coasting in and out of the breakdown lane and then swerve around them at full speed, with barely a look to see what's happening alongside them. It's irritating and dangerous, all at the same time.

But unlike most residents, I'm not upset because our transportation department has failed to recognize the plight of the avid cyclist; I'm upset because I'm not a cyclist and I hate sharing the road with them. In fact, one of the things I hate most about sharing the road is the phrase sharing the road. I see this admonition on traffic signs and bumper stickers across Wake County, and it's one of the worst ideas I've ever encountered. The cyclist is traveling with a vehicle that he can lift off the ground with one finger; I am traveling with a two-ton steel bullet that's moving at twice his speed. We cannot share the road. Asking automobile drivers to share the road with cyclists is a red herring that pits cyclists against drivers and draws attention away from the fact that our civil engineers have dropped the ball.

Physics aside, there is another reason that I don't like sharing the road: cyclists are bad motorists. Every cycling enthusiast I've ever met[1] is quick to complain about automobile drivers that try to run them off the road, throw things at them, or otherwise treat them as second-class motorists. They talk about state laws that give equality to cyclists and other slow-moving vehicles, but they always gloss over the parts about cyclists being restricted by all of the same rules and signals. The same cyclists who want me to coast patiently behind their peloton as we try to conquer a hill at ten miles per hour are quick to pedal through a red light if there's no oncoming traffic. I also like it when they piggyback with cars that have been waiting at a stop sign; nothing says "responsible motorist" like hanging out in my blind spot through a busy intersection!

Ignoring traffic rules is fine for ten-year-old kids parading around town with their friends[2], but if you want equality in the eyes of the law, you had better sit at that red light and wait for it to change, even if traffic is low and you don't have a license plate. You had better wait your turn on the stop sign merry-go-round. And you had better hope I never run for office, because in Dan Jemiolo America, all cars will be equipped with high-powered lasers.

So much anger.

[1] An enthusiast is anyone who has one or more cycling-related bumper stickers on his car or wears cycling shoes to the office.

[2] Assuming they're smart enough to avoid my car.

Labels: cary, culture, narcissism

Friday, September 21, 2007

voracious

When I first moved to North Carolina, I was fortunate enough to live in apartment complexes that were surrounded by forests and swamp land. During the spring and summer months, I would sleep with bedroom windows open and listen to the crickets and the bullfrogs talk to each other. The only downside of doing this was that I couldn't sleep in on the weekends, because by 10:00 a.m. my apartment would be roasting in the Carolina heat; few things in life are perfect.

Anyway, it was always very serene, and it upset me greatly when the twenty acres of undeveloped land across from my last apartment was torn apart and turned into a Harris Teeter. Not only did it add an obnoxious amount of shopping center light to the night time sky, but it also eliminated most of the wildlife habitat and made it so the only sounds I heard at night were cars. I closed my windows after that.

Only now am I learning that my innocent bed time habits could have cost me my life. According to this article, bullfrogs are unstoppable predators that can threaten an entire ecosystem; people in Utah are terrified that the immigration of bullfrogs will cause a plague of Biblical proportions. I had no idea. I guess I'm just happy that I was on the third floor, and none of them ever made it up the wall before sunrise.

Labels: cary, narcissism

Thursday, July 19, 2007

greed

Pat Mueller: But honestly, I'd prefer to see none of these [Triangle cities] on any lists. We already know it's a good place to live. Until we start using impact fees or transfer taxes to help cover infrastructure required by all the new people coming in, problems like poor transportation options and overcrowded schools will only get worse.

Those familiar with my opinions on city planning already know that I despise the Triangle's unchecked growth and shameless conversion of trees into tax revenue. What was once a very pretty area is now overrun with shopping centers and McMansions, with road improvements and schools lagging far behind. The area continues to outperform most of the nation's cities when periodicals compile their Best Places to Live reports, but I think it may have jumped the shark. Le sigh.

Of course, for all of the complaints that residents make when they realize that there are now six grocery stores within a mile of their home, few of them show up to the town meetings that decide the fate of the surrounding land. I attended a meeting of Cary's Planning and Zone Board last month to support a group of citizens who are fighting against rampant growth at one of the town's most important intersections. When it came time for the public hearing, dozens of residents waited in line to voice their opposition to a developer's plan to add a significant amount of commercial buildings to his plot. I would estimate there were ten opponents for every supporter, and the supporters were all employed by the owner or the developer of the plot. It was clear that, as far as the citizens were concerned, the development was a bust.

Almost.

One of the last speakers at the meeting was the original owner of the land in question. For those of you who are not from Cary and do not drive through it on your way to work, this land includes a solid seventy acres of farm land and forest. There is a pretty white farm house on the corner of the intersection, and a beautiful red barn. From one side of the property, you can see a fishing pond at the bottom of a hill, about fifty yards from the house. The property is surrounded by white fencing and used to be home to a stable of horses. If I had to guess at the value (from the perspective of someone who will build dozens of residential and retail outfits on it), I'd peg it at ten million dollars[1].

The man who had sold his land and was guiding its fate came to the podium and introduced himself this way:

Hello. My name is Bill Sears. I was born at the corner of High House and Davis, just as my father before me, and my grandfather before him. If half as many people as are here tonight had shown up when the town decided to take my house for the widening of Davis Drive, I would still be living in it today, and we wouldn't be here.

Ouch. At that moment, I knew it was over. He went on to talk about his intentions, and how everything he was doing was legal and approved by the town, but it wasn't necessary. There was one last speaker that night who tried to bring the citizens' message back to life, but it paled in comparison to this man's bitter dismissal of an anti-growth message from the same people whose desire for faster roads had made his house uninhabitable. Final vote? 5 - 1 to go forth and build until you couldn't build anymore.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yes: first, community participation is not a part-time job. Second, I don't think that Pat's plan to use fees to prevent people from moving here will stop developers from building and/or paying the fees as "incentives"; losing a few thousand dollars on a sale isn't a big deal when you've got people chomping at the bit to pay $400,000 for half an acre of beige. Rather than fees, I think this county needs legislation requiring the development of entire schools, hospitals, and roads around the area of construction. Requirements such as the construction of a school could easily send costs soaring if not managed properly, and for some projects, the risk factor will be too high.

If you want to prevent greed from ruining our cities and towns, you have to target the source of the greed, and the source is not people who don't even live here yet. The new residents are easier to pick on, but they are just taking advantage of bad decisions made well before their time.

[1] This estimate is based on the development that has occurred on the other corners of the intersection, all of which is smaller than the proposal under debate.

Labels: cary, narcissism

who

dan jemiolo

where

chapel hill

elsewhere

recently

less recently

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history

I guess we should start with kindergarten. My parents enrolled me in a local Catholic school despite the fact that we a) had no money and b) weren't Catholic. It was a very tumultuous time in my life. My teacher was the meanest I would have until my sophomore year of college, when a stubborn Korean man tried to teach me formal languages and automata using only six words of English. While I was in kindergarten, I met a beautiful little blonde girl named Erica whom I adored for the entire year. She always seemed kind of interested in me, but I could never get her to commit to anything.

Every so often, our teacher would stop giving us condescending lectures about our relative intelligence and read to us. One day, she brought in a new book, Danny and the Dinosaur, and I fell in love with it before she had finished reading. I asked if I could borrow the book, and she agreed to lend it to me for a few days.

I took the book home and I never brought it back.

It never occurred to me to ask for my own copy of the book. At some point, I decided that if I mentioned the book to my parents, they would put the pieces together and figure out that I had already stolen it. I hid the book under my mattress so no one would find it; every so often I would sneak it out to read it, but it would never sit beside the many other dinosaur books that lined my bookshelf. I was a fugitive.

And I still couldn't get the girl, so I was a heart-broken fugitive. Erica and I would always end up playing with Mike Verville, and he would suck up all of her attention. Mike happened to be my best friend, so I couldn't bad-mouth him, but it seemed like Erica would fawn over him for even the slightest thing; I was a clear second place.

My only respite came from the other members of my class, who had no academic prospects at all (at least, that's what our teacher told them). When we read Stone Soup in class, the teacher decided it would be fun if we actually made stone soup; everyone brought in supplies, and we made a fairly bland chicken soup. Unfortunately, one kid (Philip) managed to get his part wrong; this was pretty hard to do, since the book described stone soup as a bunch of random stuff thrown into water. The teacher pointed this out to the rest of the class and chewed him out.

Stone soup may seem trivial compared to reading and arithmetic, but kids are very impressionable at that age, and you can't let them slip up. If you don't get stone soup right, you won't be able to pass the SSAT (Standard Soup Achievement Test), and if you don't pass that, then you won't get into the smart kids' reading group in first grade, and then you'll never make the honor roll, and then you will fail out of school and spend the rest of your life working at Dollar General, blowing all of your money on Keno and cheap European cigars.

At the end of kindergarten, I had learned three things:

Adults should not be trusted.
Uniforms were uncomfortable.
Girls will only pay attention to you if you ignore them.

The next twenty years served to more or less confirm all of this, so I'm just going to gloss over them:

I grew up in Rhode Island. There were five Dunkin' Donuts within a mile of my home. My town was filled with people who, at any given moment, were working at a strip mall or spending money at a strip mall. After almost two decades of eating donuts and buying things we didn't need, my friends and I graduated from high school. Diploma in hand, I moved to New York so I could learn about computers and develop a caffeine addiction.

By the time I was halfway through college, I had grown tired of the Northeast lifestyle. Too hectic, too greedy, too frustrating. Too damn cold. I moved to North Carolina after graduation, and it makes me happy. There are more trees here.

I currently work for a big, blue company, where I spend my days building air castles with imaginary Legos. It's a lot of sitting and typing. Sometimes just sitting, if I have a lot of meetings on my calendar.

When reading this blog, please keep in mind that I am but a lowly programmer, and nothing I say here reflects on the attitudes, decisions, or future plans of the other people working for my employer. You should not put stock in anything I say (literally), nor should you assume that corporate executives are reading this blog and making decisions based on my input. If I were that important, I wouldn't be sitting here typing to you people.