{"id":53874,"date":"2015-06-18T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T17:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=53874"},"modified":"2015-06-18T07:29:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T12:29:27","slug":"john-edwards-was-only-23-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=53874","title":{"rendered":"John Edwards Was Only 2\/3 Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former Senator and two-time Presidential hopeful John Edwards was an immensely tragic figure, in a purely satirical sense, in that he may have been the only Democrat candidate in history to be derailed by violating conventional prole social mores.<\/p>\n

But he made one great contribution to American life; the phrase starting “There are Two Americas…”. \u00a0This is a gift that has kept on giving to satirists, and likely always will.<\/p>\n

But in some cases, it doesn’t go far enough.<\/p>\n

Because in cities like Saint Paul, at least in re the Met and City Councils’ ongoing plans to bike-ify the streets and make driving cars utterly unpalatable, there are three Saint Pauls:<\/p>\n

The Midway, Saint Anthony Park, Merriam Park, Battle Creek, Payne-Phalen, Summit-Uni and the like<\/strong>: \u00a0In these neighborhoods, there is a minority of bikers – and no real resistance to the idea of having the neighborhood’s streets whittled down to one lane plus bike lanes and, maybe, parking.<\/p>\n

The East Side, The North End, Frogtown, Dayton’s Bluff<\/strong>: \u00a0Nobody bikes, and nobody wants to build bike lanes through them.<\/p>\n

Highland<\/strong>: \u00a0A powerful minority of well-connected bikers went up against a powerful minority of well-organized NOMASs (“Not On My Arterial Steet!”) – and the NOMAS won a victory<\/a>, even if only temporary.<\/p>\n

The council voted 6-0 for Council Member Chris Tolbert\u2019s amendment to study possible bike lanes on Finn Street and Prior Avenue as well as Cleveland, and to ask the Public Works department to draw up \u201ca robust public engagement plan\u201d to get more input from residents, business owners, district councils and others before deciding by the end of the year where to put the lanes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Finn? \u00a0That’s narrow enough already!<\/p>\n

Prior? \u00a0That’s two blocks from Cleveland!<\/p>\n

And four blocks from already bike-friendly Fairview.<\/p>\n

\n

Tolbert said based on the feedback he had gotten \u2014 \u201cthe most public engagement I\u2019ve received since I\u2019ve been on the council\u201d \u2014 he wasn\u2019t sure the issue had been properly vetted. He represents the area south of St. Clair Avenue, where business and property owners said they had collected more than 1,000 signatures opposing bike lanes down Cleveland.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth sides have brought up a lot of good issues and a lot of issues that need to be resolved, and we haven\u2019t had a lot of time to let that happen,\u201d Tolbert said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now, in most cases – see “The Green Line”, the “Lebanon Hills Park Bike Path” – the “public engagement” is just a ticket the bureaucracy punches on the way to doing what it had planned all along.<\/p>\n

In this case? \u00a0NOMAS in Highland Park might actually bring some teeth to the issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former Senator and two-time Presidential hopeful John Edwards was an immensely tragic figure, in a purely satirical sense, in that he may have been the only Democrat candidate in history to be derailed by violating conventional prole social mores. But he made one great contribution to American life; the phrase starting “There are Two Americas…”. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biking","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53874"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53875,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53874\/revisions\/53875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}