Streetsblog San Francisco

I just finished an interesting journey that took me to the World Social Forum at the mouth of the Amazon River system in Belem, Brazil, and then to Los Angeles and finally home, just in time to attend a presentation last night at CounterPULSE of Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes III. The show consists of rare and obscure footage of life in San Francisco going back over 100 years. A few of the clips are striking reminders of how much the basic "technology" of roads and how we use them has evolved during the past century.

It's lost to most of our memories, but in the 1890s bicyclists took to the streets (pdf) by the thousands across the U.S. with a shared demand: Good Roads and asphalt! Sometimes you get what you ask for and it doesn't all work out quite the way anyone imagines! (It is worth noting in a brief digression that as we celebrate and promote the bicycle as an ecological alternative to the private automobile, the early breakthrough that made bicycling what it became was the invention of the air-filled rubber tube. That in turn made it possible to produce a smooth-riding vehicle in early industrial settings, but to produce such a device required a lot of raw material, like any industrial product. Rubber in the 19th century was not yet synthesized from hydrocarbons and the supply was garnered by imposing extremely barbaric slave-like conditions in the Amazon and the Congo, where tribal peoples were violently coerced into gathering ever-increasing amounts of wild rubber from the trees growing in the forest, all to meet the insatiable demand of bicyclists in Europe and the United States!) Read more...