The DJ on WERS just said:

"Silver Line airport service is experiencing 10-15 minute delays due to traffic."

So, we have a transit line from downtown to the airport that takes 30+ to go two miles. Add another 10+ minutes if you're going to Terminal C or E, because the bus takes that long to board clueless tourists at the first two terminals, and you could have a 40-minute trip to the airport from downtown.

Massport executives, who must surely commute to work using the Silver Line, continue to assure us that "it takes 10 minutes to go from South Station on the Silver Line to any terminal at Logan."

Not only is that a physical impossibility, but it's hopelessly out of touch. I use the Silver Line whenever I can, and I can testify that its most ironic attribute is that it works at any time except rush hour.

The Next Round of Suburban Thought versus Boston

Downtown Crossing, Boston's once-vibrant central shopping district, is a resounding failure. Long-vacant storefronts line the sidewalks, and new stores seem to fail regularly. Lonely pushcart vendors never appear to sell anything. There is always a disturbingly high police presence. And by seven p.m., seven nights a week, twelve months a year, the heart of Downtown Boston is totally abandoned, a lonely and uninviting concrete tomb.

But the Globe has a solution: in the words of Universal Hub's Adam Gaffin, "turn Downtown Crossing into a parking lot."

That's right. Who needs a pedestrian mall to serve the shopping needs of city residents, when we can create a vehicular pipeline for suburbanites? We can safely assume that many city residents don't have cars--and the ones who do own cars are already using them to shop in the suburbs. The people who visit Downtown Crossing today are that strange breed of transit-using citizen, the uncanny mix of the working poor and the car-free by choice (the latter group includes me). The Globe seems to suggest that replacing these people with, yes, suburbanites, would make it all better. Never mind the tens of thousands of suburbanites who work blocks away but avoid the shops of Downtown Crossing at all costs, lured away by the malls of home.

Let's go ahead and reopen Downtown Crossing to vehicular traffic. We can then judge Downtown Crossing's success not by the tax revenue it generates or the quality of life offered there but by the number of suburbanites parking on the streets, dooring bikers, and standing in the middle of the sidewalks in large numbers. Or, once it's reopened to auto traffic, we can pretend that Washington Street is just another silent downtown street and put the failure of Downtown Crossing behind us.

I think the blight of Downtown Crossing is a real problem. After staying in the neighborhood during a conference, several of my colleagues vowed never to return to Boston again. Downtown Crossing has to do better, but the bottom line is that trying to compete with or emulate the suburbs is not going to make the city center work better. We need less suburban thought, and fewer bad ideas, from our elected officials and our newspapers.
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Now, here's a good idea. Back in 2005, I wrote about a Globe article comparing the number of Business Improvement Districts in Boston (zero) to the number in New York (over 50). In New York, these ideas really work, by helping local businesses invest in everything from neighborhood beautification to hiring the employees who beautify, maintain, and provide security on the streets. BIDs turn neighborhoods like Downtown Flushing in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx into tremendously successful shopping districts. Amazingly, Boston can't pull this off in the middle of downtown. But it's not like anyone's trying. It's all talk and millions of dollars spent on consultants.

Still More NCBBQII! Part 9: Knightdale, a North Carolina Town

Knightdale is one of many rural American towns caught in an identity crisis, and a perfect setting for serious American fiction. Formerly very rural, it's being subsumed into the suburbs of Durham. New money, sprawl, and housing subdivisions are encroaching on working farms. And the farms themselves are no longer staffed by American citizens. Mexican tiendas ("stores" in Spanish) serve as tiny bus terminals for the daily, 2,000-mile bus journeys that migrant workers take back to Mexico. They often pop up in former gas stations or general stores, sometimes right downtown.

So how does BBQ survive in this changing environment? It keeps up with the times. Knightdale Seafood and BBQ, first of all, has more than barbecue on its menu. And, it has moved from its downtown, small-town digs to a brick building out in the sprawlscape on a street called Money Court, next to a gas station and between two strip malls:



It's also open on Sunday, which is how we wound up there after waking up at noon in Chapel Hill and finding it to be damn near 100 degrees outside. We hadn't drank much at the concert the night before, but after eating nothing but smoked pork and vinegar for two days, we felt rather hung over anyway. Nonetheless, we started calling BBQ joints from our hotel to find out who was working on the sabbath. Most restaurants are family-run and closed on Sunday, so one has to be careful.

Knightdale was open, and serious hunger pangs set in on the 20-minute ride over. We found the place easily and were surprised by its Cracker-Barrel-like decor. After observing the huge, church-going family chowing down in their Sunday best, I took a look at the tattered menu...


...and against my better judgment ordered the chicken and pork combo with some type of potatoes and corn. We were back east: vinegar-pepper sauce appeared on the table along with the hushpuppies. The chicken and pork were good, but I could barely eat them. BBQ fatigue had set in after meals at B's (Greenville), Skylight Inn (Ayden), Roland's (Beaufort), Dillard's (Durham), A&M Grill (Mebane) and Lexington Barbecue No. 1 (Lexington).

I just sat there, dipping my hushpuppies in the vinegar sauce, chewing on cornmeal and ignoring my meat.


This would be the final new BBQ joint of the trip. From here, we set out on a sweltering Sunday afternoon land cruise of very rural eastern NC. I will remember some of the images we saw and created for a very long time.

Part X is next!

Major realization achieved through business travel no. 1: some cities aren't real.

Many Americans and Canadians who think that they live in cities actually live in large, suburban agglomerations ringed by highways, with little or no public transportation and nonfunctioning downtowns. This is bad for all involved.

If I had spent all my time in New York and Boston, I would have continued thinking that everyone thinks that a city is a city. Not so: geography usually doesn't lie. I currently rank Indianapolis, Houston, Dallas, and Calgary as pretend cities.

Why does it matter? It seems that people raised in suburbs and fake cities have an unrealistic perception of how the other half (actually, way more than half) lives. Bostonians frequently complain that the city's 200,000+ college students, many of them suburb-raised, lack street smarts, common sense, and understanding of how a/the city works. (They sound like farm-raised salmon.) I'm noticing that many members of our federal governments and their corporate overlords lack the same necessary education.


Cities visited since January 1: Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans (twice), Miami, Greensboro/Winston-Salem, Dallas, Houston.