new jersey geographer

Alcyon Lake

Brought my Blackberry with me on a bike ride around Glassboro and Pitman. I used beGPS One, a Blackberry GPS logging application to record my location every 30 seconds as an NMEA sentence. I then used GPSBabel to covert the file to KML format. You can view the KML of my route here. I also took the geotagged picture of Alcyon Lake at right. Finally, tweets during the trip are also geotagged.

Most of the information we deal with daily (or in this case, generate) has some geospatial component. Why not explicitly recognize the route I took or the places I photographed? Sure, some will feel that geotagging could be abused, but both Twitter and Flickr require you to explicitly allow geotagged information to be shown to other users. Facebook strips out geotagged information from uploaded photos. If there’s no real privacy concerns, you should share your pictures and tweets tagged with geographic coordinates.

Bing Maps now incorporate landmarks in their driving directions. This is a really great feature, as it will tell you what to look for while driving in unfamiliar territory. I experimented with incorporating landmarks into Google Maps driving directions about a year ago. You can take my demo for a spin here. Bing Maps goes a few steps further by identifying features ahead of turns to inform you that if you pass them, you’ve missed your turn. That and they have more than 6 points around New Brunswick as landmarks.

This is a great feature that should be incorporated into all the major routing and map providers. Considering Google and Microsoft are both catalogs of business and place name data, this additional functionality should not be difficult to keep up-to-date. They can take it even further by incorporating Street View and/or Birds’ Eye View – focused on the specific landmark – into the driving directions.

Kate and I recently visited her family in Estero, an unincorporated portion of Southwest Florida. While staying at her parents, we decided to take a walk over to the mall across US 41. Kate’s parents live in a “gated community,” a pod of residential development connected to the transportation network by (usually) one access point that is secured by an electronically controlled gate.

Now, there’s not many places to walk within the confines of the community. Most of these residential developments have a communal recreation area, typically containing a pool, tennis courts, and a clubhouse. Some, like the gated community my brother-in-law lives in, split the clubhouse in two and arranged the buildings to resemble a mini-Main Street, only about 150′ long. Due to the close proximity of the clubhouse and the cost of parking, there is usually only enough parking at the clubhouse for a few guests. Despite this, there are no sidewalks within many of these gated communities. It’s clear that you are to walk to the clubhouse, but rely on the car for all other trips.

So, back to the walk itself. You can follow along using a map of the pictures on Flickr.

We leave her parents' condo and begin walking down the asphalt towards the gate.

Approaching the gate. You'll notice that the gate only prevents automobile access.

The trampled grass clearly shows the demand for pedestrian access to US 41.

Now, once you make it up to US 41, you’ll find a typical (4 feet wide, plain concrete) residential sidewalk, however it’s set 10 feet from the roadway and slightly below grade. This is done because US 41 is a very wide, high speed county arterial. The majority of the retail within Lee County is on US 41. It’s the epitome of the new suburbs – all land uses carefully divided through Euclidean zoning, accessible only by car.

See? We're pedestrian friendly!

Detail of the Lee County Bike Map. Red denotes "dual facilities."

The Lee County Bike Map lists this section of US 41 as having “dual [cycling] facilities,” those being a sidewalk and a paved shoulder.We did pass one person utilizing the sidewalk as a bike path. This was the only other person we saw outside of a car. Cycling makes sense – given the distance between stores and residential developments, using a bike increases your range considerably. Walking two miles (or more) might be considered ridiculous for those with access to a car, however biking two, three, five or miles in Florida can be considered recreation. Encouraging cycling to work, the convenience store, etc. would help Southwest Florida reduce VMT and congestion by getting single-occupancy vehicles off the road. Despite “dual facilities” the physical configuration of the streetscape makes all forms of travel besides the personal automobile seem dangerous and inhospitable. There’s no pedestrian oriented signage, no signal prioritization, no shade or shelter and barely adequate sidewalks and crosswalks.

Cross at your own risk. The walk sign lasts about 3 seconds. The walk across at a casual but brisk pace takes around 10 seconds. The curbcuts are ADA accessible, but the timing of the light itself would cause problems for those with physical disabilities.

Once you cross US 41, there's no sidewalk to get into the shopping center. You're walking there? Who walks? What's wrong with you?

Just like the gated community across the street, this pod of retail development is connected to the world by asphalt and accessed by car. Coconut Point does have a residential component and unfortunately Simon took down the website they had up with a great map and detailed renderings, so I can’t point to you a nice package of evidence that they thought at least some of the project through. The interior walkways throughout the “lifestyle center” are actually pretty nice.

The interior walkways are wide, with a planting strip.

Too bad you cannot easily get to the more friendly pedestrian pathways without a car. The single use pods of commercial residential development set a mile or two apart inhibit easy pedestrian access. The mini-center within Coconut Point is a step in the right direction for future land development in Florida, however considering how much of the area has been built out, it will take serious planning and a change in the collective vision of Southwest Florida before we see true center-based development.

A Google Street View car hit a deer while imaging a road in upstate New York. You can still see the deer in the driveway in this Street View. The Register has the pictures of the incident. The pictures have already been removed by Google – considering the driver stopped and notified police, why were they even posted to begin with?

Automobile manufacturers are cutting back on production as they cannot sell what they have on hand. This results in the staging areas at the ports becoming crowded with new cars that have nowhere to go. I find this ironic (in the Alanis Morrisette kind-of way) in that the icon of mobility and freedom is now a immobile burden. How will the car dealers handle this back log? I sure hope it involves a man in a cowboy hat with a loud tie screaming that “everything must go!”

Seriously, I do hope that the industry realizes that bailouts are not a sustainable method of survival. They need to adapt to changing markets and lifestyles. And they should all be working to that goal, because I believe that the first one to the ring will be the only one to survive.

In my previous post, I mentioned the Central Railroad of New Jersey. The Blue Comet is likely the most memorable service from that fallen flag. Running from the Communipaw Terminal in Jersey City, across southern Newark Bay into Elizabeth, then down the Raritan Bay shore and the coast to Whiting, and then on to Winslow Junction, the Blue Comet provided quick, reliable service to Atlantic City. The line was legendary and any one that grew up in South Jersey with even a passing interest in rail has heard of the line. It’s often lauded by rail fans as an example of the Golden Age of Rail – dining car service, long (but comfortable) trips spent relaxing in style. It’s a sign of what we had and lost.

I’m sure someone will point out that the Aces Train is not the Blue Comet, likely dismissing it as a pale imitation. Aces does have a lounge car and cars different from the rest of NJ Transit’s rolling stock. It does manage to go through three states (NY, PA and NJ) but its route is surprisingly only 10 miles longer than that of the Blue Comet. Aces Train makes it all the way to New York Penn, while the Blue Comet required an initial ferry trip. The Blue Comet also made a new extra stops (Elizabeth, Shrewsbury, Whiting and more) than the one-stop-at-Newark Aces.

If rail fans want to see the golden age of rail return, they need to get out and embrace this line, whether they actually patronize the line or not. The introduction of services like Aces (run by public corps like NJ Transit and Amtrak, no less) are a sign that recreational rail patronage, once again, is a real possibility.

The Blue Comet and Aces Train in Google Earth

ACES, the express rail service between New York and Atlantic City begins operations on February 6th. NJ Transit is operating the service. The service will actually cross the river into Pennsylvania and get as far south as North Philadelphia before crossing over the Delair Bridge on to the same set of rails used to operate the Atlantic City Line. The former Central Railroad of New Jersey would have provied a shorter route for the service, however the track has been removed along portions of the right-of-way.