Scott Huler's Blog

Greetings, readers. For some months now I've been doing my blogging at Plugged-In, on the Scientific American Bloggers Network, and at the site of the Piedmont Laureate, which I'm proud to be for 2011. So please check those sites for my most recent thoughts, though this site still provides thorough information about me, my books, and my other work.

Wednesday, July 15, is the deadline if you're entering the Raleigh Racks design competition. Sponsored by Architecture for Humanity, the City of Raleigh, Dr. Richard Adelman, and Accent Imaging, the contest hopes to improve both the utility and attractiveness of Raleigh's bike racks.

The Raleigh Department of Transportation Planning has an awesome updateable map in its enterprise to make the city more walkable. If you go to this map and log in (easy, free), you can use the CommjnityMap mapping application to show the city where its most significant problem spots are as it works to make the city much more walkable than it currently is. Yay City of Raleigh, trying to make things better!.

Nuclear power isn't the only issue that requires a little more consideration than we thought.April 22 is Earth Day, so naturally the "Great Cloth Diaper Change," an event looking to get so many people changing cloth diapers at the same time that they end up in the Guinness Book of World Records, takes place at 9 a.m. on Saturday, April 23. Lots of people changing lots of babies, all at once.

Yesterday was tax day, and as usual the Tea Party and others rallied against our supposedly unreasonable tax burden, even though United States citizens pay some of the lowest taxes in the developed world.But tax time is also a good time to consider what we get out of those twenty-seventh-highest taxes in the world.For instance. Raleigh gets trashed by a tornado, so we need an enormous response by public agencies to help those harmed and dig our way out. Thank you, fire department; thank you, police department; thank you, Department of Transportation; thank you, taxes.The continuing crisis at Fukushima Daiichi has lost its central status (first to Libya, then the NCAA men's basketball final, now to economic concerns, next to anything else we can think of to take our minds off it), so knees have ceased to jerk quite as spasmodically regarding nuclear power.

Can it just be me? Am I the only one noticing that at the very moment here in the United States we're trying to finish the job of killing off our unions for good, workers in Japan are risking their lives to save their people? It's not plant owners there in radiation suits pouring seawater onto fuel rods in a desperate hope to avoid complete meltdown. It's workers. And not the workers who make the big salaries, either.Anyhow, days after the earthquake and tsunami, Japan's crisis has become an infrastructure crisis.

 But you don't need me to tell you that. You can know exactly what the sun and wind are doing in Reno if you go to the Reno green energy dashboard, a Reno city project that puts eight different wind turbine models and several solar installations online so that you can see their output under the same conditions. It's a great idea, and I love that they're doing it. "The whole point is education," said the city's environmental services administrator in a brief story in the Wall Street Journal.

One of the kinds of infrastructure we commonly ignore is parks -- though Tim DeChant, author of "Per Square Mile," one of my favorite blogs, notes that he became highly aware of their importance when he moved to Berkeley. It's worth noting that according to his data, Raleigh has more parkland per square person than any of the cities he checked except Albuquerque. In Raleigh we appreciate our parks, though we could do a better job of funding them.  Other high-park-area-per-person cities were Portland, Phoenix, Houston, and Lincoln, Nebraska.

So the only thing stopping traffic in the Southeast this week is ice storms -- real and imagined -- but NC State University has produced some research about a way to keep traffic moving even when the ice is off the streets. Superstreets are a way to  eliminate traffic lights -- and almost all left turns -- from major streets. On superstreets, drivers on the main street often have a dedicated left-turn lane, but they never have to wait for a light -- just a break in oncoming traffic, because traffic on cross streets doesn't cross the superstreet.

Yep. According to NCSU design grad student Matt Tomasulo, the city-map t-shirts he and his partner created show "the buildings and infrastructure and stuff," not some sanitized PR image of a skyline or a park. "It's a shirt, but you're also holding a map and you can interact with it, and it's tactile," he told the Raleigh News & Observer.