What is the Sound of No Horn Honking?

It was Halloween morning on the warmest October 31 this New Yorker could remember, and he was pedaling his bike on the path past the block-sized supermarket within the Brooklyn Navy Yard when a gleaming white minivan turned from the road into the parking lot, not pausing to let him go as drivers normally did.

Habits dig and scratch, so the New Yorker yelled “Yo!” while seizing the brakes and pausing. Inside the car was invisible, coated in sunlight. Some force crawled up from the New Yorker’s shins to his shoulders. He pointed the back of his right hand toward the car and folded four fingers toward himself, a gesture that means “go ahead.” The driver had stopped and now had to back up, but then the gleaming white minivan sailed into the parking lot.

A woman stood nearby and seemed to smile moments earlier. The New Yorker made a summary comment about the moment, free of rancor, and looked again at the woman. She had earbuds in and, if she had been smiling, was now just squinting and not looking at the spot where no collision had happened.

Communication failed: it was instinctive reaction that saved drivers and the guy on the CitiBike from a crash.

A few blocks east at the entrance to Steiner Studios, nearly the same dance occurred - and nearly the same confusion clouded our New Yorker, as he thought people would smile or wrinkle their noses or comment. They always had before.

Now they all had buds in their ears. A few couples further along the path spoke quietly as they walked in workout clothes. But for most of the ride, two miles and some change to go, one heard no noise and saw no shared glimpses.

You can rightly fret that people don’t talk to people with whom they disagree. But nest that fret in a sob that it often just seems like people don’t talk.

Streetcars and Streetlamps

New York's Mayor has decided to find money for  a streetcar to run through the resurgent (ie, gentrifying) neighborhoods along the east side of the East River waterfront. I'm all for more mass transit and for more waterfront living, but it got me thinking about why streetcars feel so romantic to many folks who think about urban design. 

I think they strike the same note that streetlamps and neon signs do: they prove you're not alone, someone new is there, you can find your way. 

In a book proposal I'm working on, I’m going to argue here that urban design shows, in physical form, human efforts to shrink loneliness. When fossil fuel was cheap and we couldn't know its true cost, we flowed between that resistance to loneliness and a desire to settle. We got big cars, big tracts and big urban entertainment zones. 

Now, I'm going to show, the onset of climate change means that we have to couch our anti-loneliness surgery in a campaign to provide support to each other in disasters and in chronic shortages. 

It will get too hot, too chaotic, too crowded. That means our urban forms should guide patience, attention to the quiet, consideration for the old and young. 

And it means those forms should trace new lines - along the water and upland- now that we live in a century of weather we can’t predict and fuel we can’t treat as cheap.