Segway

Weaning human beings off their addiction to the wheel may be impossible. One case in point is the current Segway controversy in Boston's North End. The controversy entails public safety vs. exploitative tourism on one level. On a basic level, it is a battle for pedestrian rights over vehicular rights in the public space.

Old Boston is a city of ancient pedestrian lanes, turned into narrow streets with narrower sidewalks. As the 17th-century English settlers populated the landscape, their lives were centered on the shore line, their connection to their motherland. They jammed their houses as close to the waterfront as they could without much care for traffic patterns. It was a pedestrian settlement with little livestock and fewer wheeled vehicles.

Nearly four centuries later, people are still living and touring on the same streets. A local entrepreneur has decided that the best way for out-of-shape, car-addicted tourists to see Boston is on a Segway for a price. And, the out-of-shape and/or wheel-addicted tourists are eating it up. After all, it's much closer to reality than buzzing by on one of the scores of annoying, diesel-belching Duck Boats that plague the city. They can't navigate the North End's smaller lanes anyway.

Segways have now spilled out of the realm of quirky tourism and into the streets. Helmeted, yuppy couples are seen haughtily buzzing along the Esplanade on warm Sundays with little care for the crowded pedestrians, already harassed by skateboarders, bicyclists and roller bladders. Segways occasionally buzz along city sidewalks in the West End, where I have been squeezed to the curb by one on its urgent path to ever-green, techie Cambridge.

Ah, what a lovely thought: Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of battery-powered Segways turning the sidewalks of Boston into mini-expressways. So much for tackling the problem of obesity in the population. Perhaps the fantasy future, portrayed in the film Wall-E, is closer than we think.

What happened to the pride in Boston as America's most walkable city? The answer is simple: Greed, coupled with disregard for the public good, happened. The culture of "the newest thing" has replaced the culture of refining what is best in what you have. As Boston's native population has been squeezed out by high real estate prices, the traditional pride in its neighborhoods and its pedestrian accessibility by its citizens has also been exploited by tourist businesses. It is becoming a Disney confabulation of its former self, like Manhattan and other American places.

Segway may well be a segue to an impersonal theme park where a charming, walkable city once stood against the onslaught of crass commercial gimickry.

Panic

I have had a challenging Spring.

Two weeks after placing my house on the market, the rains came. Then the flooding came. My city was under water in some places, but I just had a skim coat of water in one part of my basement. Nothing serious really. But, the generalized panic, an all-too-common response in the media these days, crashed the local housing market and caused me to take my house off the market long enough to dry out and get the floor of my basement repainted. Now it's back to being dry as a bone.

The week after I placed my house back on the market, the state of Massachusetts began work on the bridge nearby, which connects my neighborhood with Boston. Suddenly, the pleasant, tree-lined boulevard where I live became a clogged commuter expressway, due to closed lanes and workmen in the road. Again, the media and the state whipped the whole thing into The End of Days. Now, after some trial and error by traffic planners, the traffic is moving along at a slightly slower pace, but the initial panic seems unwarranted.

Last weekend, the water system broke for 30 cities and towns around Boston. Other than boiling my water and adding some lemon juice, there was relatively little inconvenience. But the media again were talking to us like Ebola virus would be crawling out of our pipes and infecting us in our sleep. The supermarkets made a fortune on bottled water. The government did not supply imported water in tanker trucks as they could have. Nobody, so far, has died from the water. Now the taps are back to normal.

On a global scale, Icelandic volcano, Haitian earthquake, Chilean earthquake, Chinese earthquake are focused upon by media with enthusiastic shock and awe on a daily basis. Our eyes and ears are supplied with unrelenting fearsome stimuli, thanks to the insatiable appetite for news and its use as a forum for selling diapers, dog food and shampoo.

I am still sitting here in my house with its For Sale sign out front. The buyers are flowing through. Someone will come in and say, "I like this place. I could live here." I did. And, all around us, the world's normal events will continue and Wall Street will be trying to profit from them, whether we are paying attention or not.

I seem jaded to some, but the truth is that I have had to deal with my share of personal panic. It comes from living an eventful life. I have learned that taking deep breaths and just doing what makes sense, slowly and methodically, eventually gets me through. Like a Zen monk, raking gravel, I make my daily lists and check them off.

I recommend this approach to editors of media newsrooms. To those who sell shampoo and dog food by funding exploitative media, I have nothing to recommend at all.

Water

The urban water supply of Metropolitan Boston has failed, as of May 1st. Contractors associated with the infamous Big Dig tunnel project, a standard of corruption and lethally substandard construction, are rumored to be responsible for the supply pipe which failed after just 7 years, thus cutting off drinkable water for 2 million people. The system has, as yet, no back-up supply line. Brilliant, eh? Yes, we are boiling water in Boston, and it isn't for lobsters or clams. It's for giadia and cryptosporidia.

How did we get here from the proud days of the far-sighted Quabbin Reservoir project and elegantly designed granite pumping stations (as illustrated) on pristine back-up reservoirs, scattered around the city? How is it that we have some of the most plentiful watersheds in the world, yet pay nearly twice as much for water as people in Phoenix, AZ!

I am hoping time will tell all. However, the short attention span of the media and the voting public leaves me doubtful that anything will come of it. In the meantime, I suggest you take a leaf from the book of my independent 90-year-old mother, whom I called to make sure she was aware of the need to boil water for drinking. She said, "Doesn't really effect me at all. I've been boiling my water for decades." And, her practice is not naive. She was once the administrative assistant for her hometown's civil engineer, who, of course, was involved with the urban water supply.