Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

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Current entries

Tuesday, August 26, 2003, 12:05 pm

Trick question. What city in Michigan has the highest percentage of no-car households?

Ah, you think, it must be a dense urban setting with a lot of very poor people. The city of Detroit, in other words. But Detroit only ranks 4th highest in the state; 21.9% of the housing units there have no vehicles available, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.

If you know the Detroit area well, you know that there are some old suburbs and enclaves which are denser than Detroit. And indeed, they are strong choices. The city of Ecorse has 19.8% no-car households, and ranks 8th; Hamtramck has 20.5% and ranks 7th; River Rouge has 21.1% and ranks 5th; and Highland Park has 39.4% and ranks 2nd highest in the state. But what city is 1st?

Another thought would be one of the poorest outstate cities. Muskegon Heights has 20.7% and ranks 11th; Benton Harbor has 31.5% and ranks 3rd. Still not the answer.

What of college towns? Most university students used to go without cars, but not any more. Of Michigan cities with state universities, Big Rapids (Ferris State University) ranks 25th with 14.3%, and all the others (Detroit excepted) are less. Ypsilanti (Eastern Michigan University) is 29th, Kalamazoo (Western Michigan University) is 44th, Marquette (Northern Michigan University) is 63rd, East Lansing (Michigan State University) is 102nd, and Ann Arbor (University of Michigan) is 108th, with only 9.5%. This is a dramatic change: as recently as the 1980 census, Ann Arbor was in the top ten!

Okay, enough teasing. The Michigan city which ranks #1 on this statistic, where 54.4% of households have no car, is the city of Mackinac Island. Which is pretty good, considering that it isn't legal to bring automobiles onto the island. (Presumably the residents who have cars garage them in nearby Mackinaw City or St. Ignace, accessible from the island by passenger ferries.)

I mention this because I just returned from a visit to the famous island (phonetically "Mackinaw"), just east of the Mackinac Bridge which connects Michigan's two distinct regions, the Upper Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula.

Mackinac Island is not the preserved 19th Century setting promised by tourist brochures. Most of the old houses have been crudely redone with vinyl siding, losing whatever architectural features they may have had, or demolished to make way for new condo complexes. The place has changed a lot since I last visited some thirty years ago.

But it is still a place where the horse rules transportation; even garbage is collected by horsedrawn vehicles. Motorized golf carts are permitted only within golf courses. There are three emergency vehicles on the island, but they are rarely seen.

Unlike the horses of New York City's Central Park, Mackinac Island horses work au naturel, with no diapers. The horse dung on the roads is quickly attended to. Even so, it's a reminder of how dirty every road and street used to be in the horsedrawn era. A citizen of 1900, suddenly transported to 1950, would have been astonished at the cleanliness of city streets. A citizen of 1950, suddenly transported to 2000, would also have been astonished by clean streets, because we no longer have cars which routinely drip oil everywhere they go. If you're as old as I am, you remember the greasy black stripe down the middle of every traffic lane. We think fondly of horsedrawn carriages and old-fashioned cars, and treasure places like Mackinac Island, but surely we are better off with cleaner technologies.

When you take the carriage tour of the island, the guide introduces the horses, and says a bit about their respective personalities. The horsedrawn tour has to make periodic stops, not just to see sights, but to rest the horses. Unlike a car, you can't just park a horse and leave it overnight; there has to be a stable, staffed with handlers to attend to feeding, watering, and cleaning.

A century ago, every city had this kind of infrastructure for routine horse care. In downtown Ann Arbor, Ashley Street (parallel with Main, one block west) was lined with livery stables and the like. Nowadays, it would probably be regarded as animal cruelty and a violation of zoning laws to keep horses in a downtown building.

But life on Mackinac Island still seems to revolve around horse handling, stabling, training, feeding, and so on. Seeing it makes clear just how much labor, how much time and effort, how many skilled people, are required to keep this all going day after day. No doubt it's a major reason why things on the island are so expensive.

More about my trip later.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Monday, August 11, 2003, 12:29 pm

It's The End Of The World As We Know It. Before R.E.M. came along with a catchy song that both satirized and popularized the phrase, it was already known to countless science fiction fans.

I still don't know specifically where it got started, but I imagine two grim-faced scientists in some cheesy 1950s b&w sci-fi movie, or novel, or maybe a comic book, with one saying to the other: "It's the end of the world—as we know it." In other words, the Earth is not actually exploding, but from now on, the giant cockroaches are the dominant life form, and it's humanity's turn to hide in the woodwork.

One source attributes the line, unspecifically, to a script in the Star Trek television series (presumably, the original series). I can believe that the words were spoken in an episode, but I am dubious that Star Trek was the original source. Indeed, I would not be very surprised if it turned out the phrase goes all the way back to Jules Verne. La fin du monde telle que nous la connaissons, perhaps?

Before the turn of the millenium, The End Of The World As We Know It was acronymed as TEOTWAWKI, as shorthand for the collapse of civilization which was anticipated when computer systems failed to cope with the rollover to the year 2000. The Usenet News frequency of both terms, from May 12, 1981 to August 11, 2003, can be tracked through Google Groups, as follows:

Year	end of the world as we know it	TEOTWAWKI
1981	-	-
1982	-	-
1983	-	-
1984	1	-
1985	4	-
1986	-	-
1987	1	-
1988	5	-
1989	34	-
1990	70	-
1991	96	-
1992	262	-
1993	456	-
1994	1,020	-
1995	984	2
1996	2,030	177
1997	2,220	2,060
1998	3,470	5,760
1999	5,650	8,560
2000	4,920	2,070
2001	4,100	723
2002	2,810	736
2003	1,860	486

August 26 update. I came across a book of political humor published in the mid-1960s, which referenced the phrase the end of civilization as we know it as a cliché. Further evidence that the line predates Star Trek.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Monday, August 6, 2003, 10:28 pm

Carnival of the Vanities. I found the 45th edition of this long-running weekly series at Dan Gelfand's Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. It's a kind of moveable feast (hosted at a different blog every week) of self-nominated best-of postings from the blogosphere. Hey, why not?

For the 46th edition, I nominated my article about the South Pennsylvania Railroad which preceded the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The 47th edition will be hosted at Right We Are.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

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