Richard K. Rein

August 12, 2019

The Case for Being a Defensive Pedestrian

Pedestrians are becoming bold, and they should be. They are boldly speaking out at council meetings and planning board sessions, demanding more and safer pedestrian crossings. They are, in some cases, joining forces with bicyclists and advocating for bike lanes that will give cyclists a safe alternative to sidewalks.

Bold is good. But there is one place where being bold is not good for pedestrians. That’s inside those zebra-striped walkways that mark designated pedestrian crossings. Inside those crossings, the ones often marked by signs proclaiming that motorists must yield to pedestrians, bold is not good. As they approach and enter those crossings pedestrians should be tentative, defensive, and wary. The law says motorists must yield, but it doesn’t say they will yield.

A pedestrian was walking from the right in the crosswalk occupied by a car in this photo when he was struck by a pickup truck turning left from Prospect onto Washington.

On July 30 that point was demonstrated once again in Princeton, NJ. A 68-year-old man was in the marked crosswalk leading from the Princeton University campus across Washington Road to Prospect Avenue. Traffic in either direction on Washington was stopped by a red light. But a Ford F350 pickup truck on Prospect Avenue facing Washington had a green light, and the truck was turning left onto Washington Road, a path that led directly across that crosswalk. For whatever reason (I’ve made inquiries to both town and county officials for more information) the truck hit the pedestrian. He went flying, hit his head on the pavement, and died of his injuries on August 1.

The phrase “once again” deserves some context. > Read More …

July 30, 2019

Seeking an Oasis in a News Desert

Richard K. Rein Miscellany 1 Comment

One day in June, a 26-year-old woman working for a marketing and advertising firm in the prestigious Carnegie Center in the Princeton-Route 1 business corridor went home for lunch at her nearby apartment. She never returned. Her colleagues, alarmed at her absence, called police. They discovered the woman’s body at about 6 p.m. She had been murdered. According to news stories, some neighbors may have heard muffled screams coming from the apartment that afternoon. But no neighbors called the police.

The Packet was once Princeton’s pre-eminent community newspaper. Now circulation has fallen and a sidewalk neatnik calls its news box an ‘eyesore.’

There was a time, not so long ago, when the murder of a young white woman in an affluent community would have caused a flood of media coverage. The unconfirmed reports that neighbors heard something but reported nothing would have invoked the infamous killing of Kitty Genovese in Kew Gardens, Queens, in 1964, while neighbors watched silently. Today in central New Jersey you would have expected a reporter to go door to door in the apartment complex, asking everyone who heard what and when.

But in the case of Carolyn Byington, a 26-year-old Lafayette College graduate from Basking Ridge, NJ, found murdered June 10 in her apartment in the Hunters Glen section of Plainsboro, NJ, there was no flood of media coverage. In fact, after the initial reports of her death the news dried up. Her hometown paper, the West Windsor-Plainsboro News, did issue a follow up on June 28, noting that local police and the county prosecutor had enlisted the help of federal law enforcement agencies, as well, in their investigation. Even then the authorities declined to reveal the manner in which the victim had been killed.

Beyond that, there was not a peep – at least nothing found in a recent Google search – regarding the murder.

Why not? Possibly the police have asked reporters not to dig too much because the digging might compromise the investigation. More likely it’s because the media in central New Jersey is understaffed, overworked, short on resources, and more than willing to settle for stories that are handed to them by local governing bodies and police departments. Here in relatively affluent central New Jersey, as well as in many other places around the country, we are living in a “news desert,” roughly akin to the “food deserts” created when the last supermarket closes up in an urban neighborhood. > Read More …

July 23, 2019

The Trains Ran On Time! Sadly, That’s News

Richard K. Rein Miscellany 2 Comments

It shouldn’t be a news story when someone leaves his house in a suburb, jumps on a train to Manhattan, walks to a meeting on the upper East Side, and then returns to the suburb, all on the appointed schedule of the train company.

Creepy: The Hudson River tunnels are 108 years old, and they move up and down in the mud.

I did just that a few weeks ago, traveling from my home in Princeton, New Jersey, to an interview at the Cosmopolitan Club on East 66^THStreet with an acquaintance of the late urbanist William H. Whyte, the subject of a biography I’m writing. And I did so in the aftermath of weeks, months, and even years of horrendous news about NJ Transit, the tracks it travels on, the 108-year-old tunnels it uses to get under the Hudson River, and the overcrowded Penn Station where it makes its final stop.

Just a few months before my train commute, I heard a presentation by Tom Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, painting a grim picture of the beleaguered NJ Transit and the “precarious” condition of the tunnels. NJTV just reported that in the past four years NJ Transit and Amtrak trains have been stuck a total of 1,800 hours in the tunnels and on the nearby Portal Bridge. If you have an iota of claustrophobia in your psyche, Wright’s description of the 108-year-old tunnels – undulating up and down in the slime below the Hudson River — will give you the creeps.

In addition to the tunnels and the ongoing problems on the Northeast Corridor, commuters in Princeton had a more basic problem: The connecting line from Princeton to Princeton Junction had been shut down for nearly half a year so that NJ Transit could concentrate its resources on installation of a mandated safety equipment system. By the time I was ready to head into the city the “Dinky” line, as it is known, was back in service.

With the only alternative a bus to the Port Authority or a drive into the city, I decided to take my chances with the train. It was a wise choice, with an unexpected bonus at the end — a perfect example of why even occasional commuters such as myself should appreciate the July 22 announcement by the governors of New Jersey and New York to move ahead with a project (despite continued resistance from the Trump administration) to replace the tunnels, drawing on money not just from rail commuters but from all taxpayers. > Read More …

July 1, 2019

How many officials does it take to change a traffic light?

Richard K. Rein Princetoniana 3 Comments

Even in a college town things need explaining. This sign in Princeton, NJ, is in English, Spanish, and Chinese, but it never says that pedestrians must push the ‘beg button’ to make the new signal work.

A recent major change in a dangerous pedestrian crossing in downtown Princeton, NJ, begun June 10, has been extended beyond its two-week initial trial period. Even though everyone – motorists and pedestrians alike – are inconvenienced by the change, few horns have been honked in the longer than usual lines of traffic at the intersection and no angry letters have appeared in the community newspapers. Maybe this change, while not a significant improvement, will turn out to be a moment of enlightenment for the state Department of Transportation, which controls the intersection and which until now has greeted every proposal for increased pedestrian safety with the refrain that the proposed change better not impede traffic – and by traffic they don’t mean foot traffic.

Some background: The intersection in question is on the town’s main street, Nassau Street, where two cross streets, Vandeventer Avenue and Washington Road, meet Nassau. In 2016 a change was made to the traffic lights to make the intersection safer for motorists. It also had one small improvement for pedestrians — a three-second lead time that gave pedestrians a head start in a crosswalk before turning traffic could cut them off.

But I warned in a community newspaper at the time that there was one small problem for pedestrians: Activation of the walk/don’t walk signals depended on someone pushing a “beg button.” Often no one did – everyone no doubt assumed that the signal would change at the appropriate time. As a nearby resident who drove through the intersection twice a day and used it often as a pedestrian, I witnessed many platoons of confused pedestrians, with looks of desperation asking “when will it be our turn.” The answer: Never, if you don’t push the button.

My 2016 concern took a tragic turn in October, 2017, when a pedestrian in the crosswalk was struck and killed by a cement mixer. (Amazingly, the resolution of the case has not yet been made public, even almost a year after I wrote a major story on that accident and several other near-fatal crashes involving pedestrians. We have sent e-mails requesting follow-up information to the investigating agency.) > Read More …

June 11, 2019

Review: Ballpark – Baseball in the American City

Richard K. Rein Book Review 1 Comment

Author: Paul Goldberger. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

With Father’s Day just around the corner, you might view Paul Goldberger’s new book, “Ballpark – Baseball in the American City,” as a well timed merchandising move, as well as a publishing event. But “Ballpark” is much more than another sports book aimed at the nostalgic male who yearns for the good old days of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn or Shibe Park in Philadelphia, and revels in the modern-day vestiges of that era at Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago. It is also a study in urbanism, using the history of the ballpark as an avenue to show the inner workings of American cities.

Authenticity in baseball, Goldberger writes, “should mean that each ballpark is a world unto itself, a place different from all the other places in which baseball is played: that all ballparks are not the same, and that the game played within them is therefore different in subtle ways from ballpark to ballpark.” The best ballparks, he adds, are the ones in which “the rural and the urban, the natural and the man-made, are in harmonic balance.”

Goldberger expresses the history of the ballpark in American cities through four phases, ones that urbanists will appreciate perhaps even more than baseball fans. “The ballpark is one of the greatest of all American building types, and it reveals as much about how we treat our cities today as it ever has in the past,” he writes. > Read More …