Share The Road?

Lumpkin Gets Bike 'Areas,' Too

Lumpkin Street will be restriped with bike lanes from UGA almost to Five Points as part of an innovative $2.8 million SPLOST-funded project to fix drainage problems. The street (originally two lanes) was re-striped to four extremely narrow vehicle lanes several decades ago, without actually being widened. The present lanes are under nine feet wide; the new design calls for re-striping from four lanes to three, each slightly narrower than the standard eleven feet.

The project will extend from Broad Street to Rutherford and may be completed by next fall. However, one block will remain four lanes. Between Baldwin and Baxter traffic volumes are too high for three-laning, according to Jason Peek of ACC Public Works. In that block, there will be no bike lanes, but there will be "sharrows" or share-the-lane markings on the pavement. The rest of the project will include four-foot-wide bike lanes on both sides of Lumpkin.

Because the bike lanes will be less than a standard five-feet width, ACC Public Works prefers to call them "bike areas" and will mark them with "skip stripes" twenty-five feet apart, rather than the standard continuous line. This does not please bicyclists like BikeAthens President Dorothy O'Niell. She said the bike areas "simply do not offer the safety of bike lanes," and she hopes to see "a better striping standard" for bike areas with more frequent stripes and more bike stencils on the pavement.

Still, O'Niell expects "bike areas" to be "the predominant type of bike facility we will be getting," since actually widening roads would require buying or condemning expensive additional land.

The drainage design developed by ACC public works staff includes 21 innovative "bio-retention basins" like small ponds which will hold rainwater long enough for it to soak into the ground. These small catch-basins, dotted alongside Lumpkin Street, will not exceed three feet deep and will be planted in vegetation that can tolerate both wet and dry conditions, according to Jason Peek. When it rains, they will fill, and the water won't flow down Lumpkin Street as is happening now. The basins are designed to hold up to 1.2 inches of rainfall.

Each basin also has an overflow pipe which will drain stormwater into Tanyard Branch (which runs under Sanford Stadium to the North Oconee) during heavier storms. Currently all stormwater in the area is draining into the branch. ACC Public Works Director David Clark says this may be Georgia's first bio-retention project that involves a roadway.

John Huie

John Huie is active in BikeAthens, Federation of Neighborhoods and ACC Community Tree Council.

Animal Control

This Week's Scorecard

Athens-Clarke County Animal Control responded to 74 calls:

10 complaints of animal cruelty

4 complaints of barking dogs

5 dogs running loose

29 animals impounded:

26 dogs

1 cat

1 pigeon

1 squirrel

24 dogs placed:

9 adopted

5 reclaimed

10 turned over to rescue agencies

9/11 + 2

Business As Usual

The doors of my New Jersey Transit train opened in Trenton, and a panicked madman scrambled aboard. "They're diving planes into both World Trade Centers! They've bombed the Pentagon!" he yelled. I'll always wonder whether it was because the guy looked a little disheveled or due to the information he conveyed, but my carload of New Yorkers stared at him silently, cynically, disbelieving. "It's upstairs on TV!" he shouted for emphasis.

I took my cell and called my wife back in New York. "I'm watching it right now," she confirmed. "Oh, my God!" she said as my train pulled out of the station. "One of the towers just collapsed." More than 50,000 worked in those buildings. As we'd learned during the 1993 bombing, there had never been a real evacuation plan. How many people had gotten out? How many had died on the streets surrounding the buildings? A lot depended on whether the towers had tipped over or imploded vertically.

I hoped that an old pal, who worked on the 99th floor of Tower 2, hadn't given up his slacking ways and arrived early at his desk.

Philadelphia was a surreal scene. Motorists parked and blasted their car radios for the benefit of small groups of passersby hungry for news of the horrific drama unfolding two hours north. Anxious cops shooed away tourists so they could cordon off the Liberty Bell. Half the population stood stunned while the other half shopped and gossiped like it was any other day. It was a slow-motion freak-out.

Distracted and trying to process the meaning of 9/11 - who? why? what next? - I muddled through the business meeting that had put my friend and me on the Philly-bound 8:11 a.m. train out of Penn Station. "Maybe we should get a hotel here until things calm down," he suggested before instantly changing his mind. We were both New Yorkers. He lived two and I lived six miles north of Ground Zero, and we knew our wives were safe. Still, we wanted to be home.

TV reported that people weren't being allowed into Manhattan, but we decided to get as close to the city as possible. "New York isn't organized enough to block every way in," I remember saying. "There's got to be a way in." Two trains running truncated routes got us as far north as Newark. Minutes later, a policeman announced that a PATH subway would become the first train allowed into Manhattan since the attacks. No one collected the fare.

The PATH offers a breathtaking view of lower Manhattan as it rattles across the postindustrial marshlands of northern New Jersey. At 5 p.m., what should have been the end of another long day for office workers in the Trade Center, the rubble was ablaze. Eight hours later. I had never looked at those buildings without imagining the damage they'd do if and when they fell, but the dreadful scale of the plume of smoke that drifted south over New York Harbor was incomprehensible.

On West 34th Street, a city bus stood where it had been abandoned that morning, its doors open, the engine left running. Some kids broke the glass at Macy's and halfheartedly looted the window display. As I walked to the West Side IRT on 7th Avenue, I was passed by a parade of fire engines and ambulances from the Long Island suburbs: Freeport, Hempstead, Babylon. New York's fire department never needed, nor requested, assistance. This was bad.

The subway was running uptown only. I lived uptown, so I got on. A uniformed police officer sat on the train directly across from me, half-covered with soot. He drank from an open gin bottle. I didn't blame him.

As I walked home that night, the wind shifted, carrying the smell of 9/11 - the familiar overheated electric odor of model trains mixed with burned flesh. It was a tiny hint of what Brooklyn got - the stench, dust and debris floated east for days. "Everything is different now," I remember thinking. "Partisan politics are out the window. Bush is gonna have to rise to the occasion, like FDR did after Pearl Harbor, and we're all going to fight the bastards who did this."

I wondered how this would affect my work. Critiquing the government is my job. That would be tough in a nation united against a common enemy.

A few hundred miles south, the administration of George W. Bush was deciding how to react to the murder of more than 3,000 Americans. Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, based on interviews with Bush and written with the cooperation of his top officials, explains how the White House saw 9/11 as an opportunity - not to pull us together, but to get its way on a long laundry list of partisan agenda items.

The Administration pinned the blame on Osama on the afternoon of 9/11, Woodward writes: "Al Qaeda was the only terrorist organization capable of such spectacular, well-coordinated attacks, [George] Tenet said." They didn't have hard evidence, and no one had claimed responsibility, yet Bush had already decided to attack Afghanistan.

At a 4 p.m. meeting of the National Security Council on September 12, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "raised the question of Iraq. Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just Al Qaeda? he asked." No one mentioned that secular Iraq and fundamentalist Al Qaeda were mortal enemies. On September 15, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz "estimated that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance Saddam was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks." More conjecture.

Despite an absence of evidence that Iraq had been involved with 9/11, Bush's men had decided to take out Saddam years before taking office. After floating a variety of excuses that all turned out to be lies, they got their way in March 2003. Neither America's allies, nor its people marching the streets, nor facts that contradicted Bush's baseless charges could stop them.

Instead of abandoning standard party-line politics, Bush cheapened the 9/11 attacks by using them to promote Republican platform planks like free trade and huge tax cuts for his rich contributors. Instead of uniting Americans, he smeared Democrats as unpatriotic. Instead of going after the Saudi and Pakistani government officials who contributed to 9/11, he called them allies in a "war on terrorism" that killed and maimed ordinary, innocent Muslims. And he ruined a feeling of post-9/11 national unity that had prevailed among all Americans.

9/11 sure as hell didn't change the politicians. When that became clear, I swore - despite my sadness - that it wouldn't change me either.

Ted Rall

Columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue To Afghanistan and Back.