Transportation technology

Aug 27 22:34 UTC 2003

Trick question. What city in Michigan has the highest percentage of no-car
households? 

Ah, you think, it must be a dense urban setting with a lot of very poor
people. The city of Detroit, in other words. But Detroit only ranks 4th
highest in the state; 21.9% of the housing units there have no vehicles
available, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. 

If you know the Detroit area well, you know that there are some old
suburbs and enclaves which are denser than Detroit. And indeed, they are
strong choices. The city of Ecorse has 19.8% no-car households, and ranks
8th; Hamtramck has 20.5% and ranks 7th; River Rouge has 21.1% and ranks
5th; and Highland Park has 39.4% and ranks 2nd highest in the state. But
what city is 1st? 

Another thought would be one of the poorest outstate cities. Muskegon
Heights has 20.7% and ranks 11th; Benton Harbor has 31.5% and ranks 3rd.
Still not the answer.

What of college towns? Most university students used to go without cars,
but not any more. Of Michigan cities with state universities, Big Rapids
(Ferris State University) ranks 25th with 14.3%, and all the others
(Detroit excepted) are less. Ypsilanti (Eastern Michigan University) is
29th, Kalamazoo (Western Michigan University) is 44th, Marquette (Northern
Michigan University) is 63rd, East Lansing (Michigan State University) is
102nd, and Ann Arbor (University of Michigan) is 108th, with only 9.5%.
This is a dramatic change: as recently as the 1980 census, Ann Arbor was
in the top ten!

Okay, enough teasing. The Michigan city which ranks #1 on this statistic,
where 54.4% of households have no car, is the city of Mackinac Island.
Which is pretty good, considering that it isn't legal to bring automobiles
onto the island. (Presumably the residents who have cars garage them in
nearby Mackinaw City or St. Ignace, accessible from the island by
passenger ferries.)

I mention this because I just returned from a visit to the famous island
(phonetically "Mackinaw"), just east of the Mackinac Bridge which connects
Michigan's two distinct regions, the Upper Peninsula and the Lower
Peninsula.

Mackinac Island is not the preserved 19th Century setting promised by
tourist brochures. Most of the old houses have been crudely redone with
vinyl siding, losing whatever architectural features they may have had, or
demolished to make way for new condo complexes. The place has changed a
lot since I last visited some thirty years ago.

But it is still a place where the horse rules transportation; even garbage
is collected by horsedrawn vehicles. Motorized golf carts are permitted
only within golf courses. There are three emergency vehicles on the
island, but they are rarely seen.

Unlike the horses of New York City's Central Park, Mackinac Island horses
work au naturel, with no diapers. The horse dung on the roads is quickly
attended to. Even so, it's a reminder of how dirty every road and street
used to be in the horsedrawn era. A citizen of 1900, suddenly transported
to 1950, would have been astonished at the cleanliness of city streets. A
citizen of 1950, suddenly transported to 2000, would also have been
astonished by clean streets, because we no longer have cars which
routinely drip oil everywhere they go. If you're as old as I am, you
remember the greasy black stripe down the middle of every traffic lane. We
think fondly of horsedrawn carriages and old-fashioned cars, and treasure
places like Mackinac Island, but surely we are better off with cleaner
technologies.

When you take the carriage tour of the island, the guide introduces the
horses, and says a bit about their respective personalities. The
horsedrawn tour has to make periodic stops, not just to see sights, but to
rest the horses. Unlike a car, you can't just park a horse and leave it
overnight; there has to be a stable, staffed with handlers to attend to
feeding, watering, and cleaning.

A century ago, every city had this kind of infrastructure for routine
horse care. In downtown Ann Arbor, Ashley Street (parallel with Main, one
block west) was lined with livery stables and the like. Nowadays, it would
probably be regarded as animal cruelty and a violation of zoning laws to
keep horses in a downtown building.

But life on Mackinac Island still seems to revolve around horse handling,
stabling, training, feeding, and so on. Seeing it makes clear just how
much labor, how much time and effort, how many skilled people, are
required to keep this all going day after day. No doubt it's a major
reason why things on the island are so expensive.

response 2 of 27:

Aug 28 00:32 UTC 2003

"how many skilled people".  Seems to me that it was less of a "skill" than
it appears.  Think about how many "skilled" people it takes to drive a car.
When horses were transportation, caring for them wasn't so much of a
specialty.  

What is awesome is that transporting people and goods has always taken a great
deal of the capital of a society.  The less transporting you have to do, the
closer to the source that food, entertainment, etc are consumed, the more
financial and social capital is available for other purposes.

response 4 of 27:

Aug 28 15:03 UTC 2003

It's so true, but I'm nostalgic for the stories I heard of carriages drawn
by horses so used to a routine that the driver could concentrate on getting
some drinking in before arriving at the barn.

response 6 of 27:

Aug 28 17:04 UTC 2003

You can't get lost anyway. The island is pretty small. It doesn't take
long to walk around it (eight miles), and there aren't many internal
roads. Of course, a bicycle makes it even "smaller".

response 8 of 27:

Aug 28 23:15 UTC 2003

But then it's all downhill to English Landing....(I've been there, done that).

response 10 of 27:

Aug 29 00:02 UTC 2003

I used to ride around Houghton on a road bike.  I was in considerably
better shape then than I am now.  I continually wished I had a mountain
bike, since they have much lower gearing, but was too cheap to actually
buy one.

response 12 of 27:

Aug 31 23:28 UTC 2003

Mine's a Schwinn LeTour.  A heavy bike by modern standards, but considerably
lighter than the cheap Roadmaster it replaced.  I paid $50 for it.

response 14 of 27:

Sep 1 15:02 UTC 2003

i love my bike. it's brown and small with pedal-backwards brakes. the chain
guard broke off the other day and it has 2 locks. when i bike home drunk and
accidentally crash into parked cars or the ground or wet tram tracks, it still
holds up fine. man i love my bike.

response 16 of 27:

Sep 1 23:37 UTC 2003

Thjose are called coaster brakes right.

response 18 of 27:

Sep 2 14:27 UTC 2003

(my bike's pretty old)

response 20 of 27:

Sep 2 23:02 UTC 2003

I have a Sears Free Spirit 10-speed in storage at my previous 
residence, i.e., a friend's house.

response 22 of 27:

Sep 3 04:40 UTC 2003

Pedal backwards brakes?  That might be a coaster brake, but there are
also bikes without a free wheel.  It's impossible to coast them, if the
wheel is turning then the pedals are turning.  If you're good, you can
"stand" in place with them, actually going backwards/forwards.  Slowing
down is difficult since you have to slow the motion of the pedals.  The
one I used to ride, built by my brother, had a hand brake to make it
possible to stop in a safe distance.  It just had a standard sprocket,
screwed on, and threaded so that it tended to tighten when pedalling. 
This was a potential problem, since if you tried to stop hard enough you
could unscrew the sprocket.  The only time that happened however was
when someone stole it from our house once.  We found it half a block
away, laying by the side of the road, with the sprocket unscrewed. 
Apparantly, someone grabbed it, pedaled away as fast as they could, and
half a block away, decided it was safe to coast a bit.  I've always
wondered exactly how far that person flew.

response 24 of 27:

Sep 9 19:06 UTC 2003

Mine has been locked up in the same place for several months.  The back tire
goes flat a lot, so I tend to drive or rollerblade rather than biking. (i've
changed the inner tube at least 4 times, checked for sharp things inside the
tire, and had it in to the shop twice where they found nothing wrong with
it.)  Shame, really--other than that it's not a bad bike.