OPG (other people's garbage)

Rockville has a new trash and recycling program, and my neighborhood is part of the guinea pig program -- I mean, the pilot program. It's actually not so bad. One pickup a week, but they give you massive containers on wheels for garbage and recycling, and much more can be recycled than before.

But last week, after we had brought our containers back in, we noticed that some lovely person, presumably a neighbor, had deposited three bags of lawn clippings next to our driveway, where our garbage and recycling had been. A week later, I'm still pretty annoyed about it. I expect the City will take it away tomorrow, but leaving your junk on someone else's curbside is really low.

It reminded me of a commenter's remark at protein wisdom, which I quoted two years ago, and I'm going to quote again, because it cracks me up.

O, god. Don’t get me started.

When I lived in San Francisco, I was forced to sneak out around at midnight once a week to hide my excess trash in other peoples’ garbage cans. You run through the neighborhood looking here and there for someone with a little spare space in their can.

And people run past you in the dark doing the same thing. Often, I’d come home to find some asshole had abandoned a whole bag of his garbage next to my can, so I’d have to go back out again and find another place for it. You could sit up all night guarding your can. The alternative was to have to haul a can of someone else’s smelly garbage back into your house and keep it for a week.

And try getting rid of an old car. Just try.

So I guess things really could be worse for us. Sitting up all night on guard would be a pretty nasty assignment when the temperature's 15 degrees.

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Monday linkfest

What, another linkfest? Yes, another linkfest.

1. Major scoop: Supreme Court justices might be influenced by their clerks.

2. Baltimore efficiency: "Members of Baltimore's Board of Fire Commissioners will receive their final paychecks at the end of this month, after a recent discovery by the city's Finance Department that the members have not been eligible for a city stipend since 1996."

3. New doll: "I made a stinky."

4. Try it with a photo of Wolf Blitzer.

5. Talk about pollination!

6. Rockville in the news: If you get a speed camera ticket, you might be the victim of a prank; "students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that 'mimic' those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later."

(4 and 5 via The Corner, 6 via Ace)


UPDATE: 7. The Weekly Standard's parody imitates Pillage Idiot. ("**** them!")

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Economics 101 has lessons for Rockville

I live in Rockville, Maryland, which actually has one of the better managed governments I've seen. But everyone makes mistakes.

Until recently, one of the best-kept secrets had to do with parking at the Twinbrook Metro station. In the station parking lots, run by Metro, you would pay $4.75, assuming you've traveled on the subway. Outside the Metro, on the streets, the parking meters cost 25 cents an hour through 6 p.m. If you arrived at 8 a.m. and returned after 6, it would cost you only $2.50. A lot of people didn't know about this at all, and I told only close friends of mine. (Of course, some people knew about it and nevertheless avoided the meters, because they didn't want to keep rolls of quarters in their car or go to City Hall to pick up the electronic meter card.)

Recently, the City decided it needed more revenue from the meters, and effective last week, the price doubled to 25 cents a half hour (50 cents an hour). A 10-hour parking stint now costs $5.00, which makes the Metro parking lot a better deal by a slight margin.

Since the charge went up last week, almost no one has been parking at the meters near the Metro station. It used to be that at 8:00, there were still spaces available on the next block, but the two sides of the street right across from the lot were almost always full. Now, at 8:00, there are maybe four or five cars across from the lot, instead of roughly 30.

I suspect some people will eventually return, once they get over their annoyance at the price increase. But I wonder whether Rockville city council members realized that the City's revenue was going to drop when they raised the meter rates. Economics 101 suggests that there was an intermediate figure by which they could have maximized revenue. A charge of 25 cents for 45 minutes (33.3 cents an hour) or 25 cents for 40 minutes (37.5 cents an hour) might not have driven off all those parking customers.

So basic economics continues to work in Rockville. Increased fees, just like tax increases, can cause people to alter their behavior and reduce revenue in the process.

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It's that "stupid bug" time of the year again

If it's fall and sunny, it's time for the beetle I call the "stupid bug."

Technically, they're called box elder bugs, but I call them "stupid bugs," because you can remove them easily, if they get in your house, by encouraging them to walk onto an envelope or piece of stiff paper and simply carrying them outside. Even though they can fly, they stay on the paper until you deposit them outside. Hence, "stupid bugs."

Here are a couple of photos. Compare them with the photo from that link above.






Why do I bother removing them? Well, as I often say, I'm basically a pacifist, so I catch insects, take them outside, and release them with a warning. Mosquitos are one of the few exceptions to that practice.

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P.S. Your Snake is Dead

If I ever have a serious fire at my house, I most certainly do not want the newspaper account to lead with this: "A pet boa constrictor was the casualty of a Rockville house fire Tuesday morning." I want there to be a lot more melodrama -- like the fact that "Firefighters were able to rescue a cat that had been hiding in an upstairs bedroom."

I really don't mean to make light of this incident. Quite the contrary. I vicariously share the embarrassment of the owners who, besides suffering "thousands of dollars" of damage to their house and probably being scared half to death, have to endure the inevitable questions. "You keep a boa constrictor in your basement?" "Was the snake smoking?"

What's more, since this occurred in my home town, I have a source who informs me that not only did at least 5 fire engines arrive at the scene, along with two fire-rescue vehicles and a police car, but there was a helicopter hovering overhead. I know that if I had caused nearly the entire firefighting force of lower Montgomery County to show up at my house, I wouldn't want it to be so that they could find my live cat upstairs and dead snake downstairs. I would want them to have to save my own life. At least.

And, no, for the record, I don't keep a snake in my basement. It's in the guest bathroom.

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PSA: Ballet dancing

Public service announcement: Unless you're Baryshnikov, leave the ballet dancing to your daughters.

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Just say yes

Students in high school are sometimes a bunch of twerps, and students who run high-school newspapers are sometimes twerps squared. But this doesn't mean they're always wrong.

This fact is a useful one to keep in mind when you're a high-school administrator who's considering whether to permit an article to be published in the high-school newspaper.

Case in point: Moreno Carrasco, the principal of Richard Montgomery High School, one of the county high schools located in Rockville, has come under scrutiny for possibly running a consulting business on school time (and allegedly plagiarizing promotional materials for his training program). Carrasco is now on medical leave for an unspecified condition. The allegations have been the talk of the town.

So naturally the kids who run the school newspaper wanted to write an article about it. Veronica McCall, the acting principal, told them they couldn't publish the article while the investigation of Carrasco was continuing. The kids took it upstairs to the "Community Superintendent," who allowed the article to be published.

Why would the acting principal try to stop an article on what seems like a perfectly reasonable subject to write about?

McCall said she still disagrees with printing the article and thinks it is a "disruption to the instructional environment" with year-end exams coming up.

"I am not in support of publishing the article in The Tide newspaper," she said. "I want the students and staff to be focused on education."

This explanation makes no sense whatsoever. The matter has been discussed repeatedly in the local press. And why shouldn't students read about it in the school newspaper, assuming they read the school newspaper at all? It hardly seems to be a disruption to the educational environment.

I've actually had the opportunity to meet Ms. McCall in a professional situation, and I was very impressed with her. So I chalk this up to a simple error in judgment based on the uncomfortable position she must feel she's in.

But there's always going to be something uncomfortable for a school administrator, and there will always be a sense that students working for the school newspaper are annoying twerps. It's at precisely those times that a school administrator needs to keep this fact in mind: Sometimes the simplest and most correct answer is Yes.

UPDATE (4/30): The article in the student newspaper has been published. For the record, it contains one allegation involving Ms. McCall similar to the one I edited out of the first comment to this post.

UPDATE (6/12): Carrasco cleared, moved to another job.

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Traveling in pairs

One of the benefits of getting a ride home from the Metro earlier this week, instead of driving, as I usually do, is that I got to look around at what's happening around me. Sure, it's only Rockville Pike, a particularly hideous six-lane road that goes through Rockville, but still, it lets you can catch up on who's no longer in business, who's starting up, and so on.

You'll be happy to know that there's a new Hooters starting up along the Pike. But strangely enough, it's located only about a block south and across the street from the existing Hooters. To give you an idea of how close they are, here's a fragment of the map. The arrow represents the existing location (actually, the restaurant is set back from the road), and the X that I drew on the map represents the new location.


I forced myself to visit the Hooters website, and there's no indication that a second location exists in Rockville. Which I find puzzling.

In any event, you have to wonder about the strategy of locating two restaurants so close to each other. Unless the original site is closing and moving to the new site, this looks a lot like the Starbucks strategy, which is called "infill," defined thus: "adding stores in cities where its mermaid logo is already commonplace. In some cases, that means putting a Starbucks within a block of an existing store, if not closer."

Now, let your entrepreneurial imagination warm up for a minute. If you're thinking Starbucks and Hooters combined -- you know, coffee delivered by women in skimpy clothing -- forget about it. It's been done. It's called Cowgirls Espresso in Seattle. Go ahead. Click the link. It's to me, and I have the photo there.

So after all this, we're left to ponder two Hooters locations within, maybe, 200 yards of each other.

I think, though, that I have the answer. Remember the Woody Allen movie called "Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex *But Were Afraid To Ask"? There's a sketch in the movie in which Woody is pursued by a giant breast, which is trapped in . . . you got it, a giant brassiere. (Fragment here.) After it's trapped, he says he's still worried, because "these things usually travel in pairs."

Just like Hooters.

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They eventually found some at the refreshment stand

"Students searched for alcohol at game"

Rockville Gazette, Nov. 21, 2007

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Rockville's bike bridge to nowhere

Q: When you run a city that has a 12-lane interstate running through it, with four roads passing over the interstate, and three of those four roads have sidewalks or bike paths so that the interstate can safely be crossed by foot or bicycle, what do you do?

A: Naturally, you decide that the fourth of those roads must have its own hiker-bike path.

Q: And if there's no obvious way such a path can be built on the existing roadway, what do you do?

A: Naturally, you build a freestanding bike bridge over the interstate adjacent to the road overpass.


On October 20, the City of Rockville officially opened what I call, in homage to our Alaskan friends, the "bike bridge to nowhere" along MD28 (West Montgomery Ave.), over I-270, at Exit 6. The City calls it the "Sister City Friendship Bridge."

Bicyclists, pedestrians and skaters now have a connection between the east and west sides of Rockville that are divided by Interstate 270.

Rockville city officials and nearly 30 adults and children on bicycles, skateboards and scooters gathered on the west side of the Rockville Sister City Friendship Bridge, located between West Montgomery Avenue [MD28] and Watts Branch Parkway, for the official ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday morning.

"Finally, we have something to link our city and bring everybody together to one Rockville," Mayor Larry Giammo said.

If you don't read the entire article, however, you'll miss this interesting fact: The bridge cost $4.3 million to build.

The $4.3 million bridge was named in honor of the 50-year sister city relationship between Rockville and Pinneberg, Germany.

To be clear, the bulk of this funding wasn't from Rockville. The City received a federal grant for the project under the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (a/k/a the "TEA-21 Act") in the amount of $3,771,190. (Scroll down at the link.)

So for all of you who live outside Rockville, I'd like to thank you for paying for our bike bridge.




I didn't realize, by the way, that the TEA-21 included funding for bike paths, which it does, but considering what a pork-barrel racket the whole transportation funding regime is, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Now, I happen to be an avid biker, and I love having places to ride. I could give you a list of places around Montgomery County that need to be improved for bike riders.

But this new bike bridge.... I mean, sure, it's over three-tenths of a mile long, all told; the grading is difficult; and construction is generally very expensive. But I still find the sheer cost of it appalling.

Let me drop for a moment my objection to the cost, however, and focus on what's wrong with the concept.

First, there are three other Rockville bridges across I-270 for use by bikes: West Gude Drive, Falls Road, and Wootton Parkway, the first and last of which are part of the City's Millennium Trail, a wide paved trail that encircles most of Rockville. The new bridge at MD28 may make it easier for some people to go from the west to the east, but it's hardly essential. If you live near the western end of the bridge, you ride down Hurley Avenue, and across the trail on Wootton Parkway. If you're going downtown, you ride the length of Watts Branch Parkway, a road that's reasonably safe for riding, and up Falls Road and Maryland Avenue, where there are sidewalks. Your trip is a couple of miles longer, but it's $4.3 million cheaper.

Second, the new bridge connects portions of the City's layout that don't really provide much that's of value to bike riders. In particular, the eastern end of the bridge is across from the intersection of MD28 and Nelson Street. The City considers Nelson Street a bike route, but it's narrow and has a decent amount of car traffic. Not great for riding. MD28 itself leads into downtown Rockville, but it's a very heavily traveled two-lane road, on which biking is near-suicidal. The road has sidewalks, but they're narrow and paved in brick, and it's very bumpy riding on them. This is not enjoyable if you're a guy of the male persuasion, if you know what I mean. As the Duke says in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, "I do it, but I don't like it." Mind you, there are some beautiful old houses on this route, and I recommend you explore the area next time you're in Rockville, but I don't recommend it for bike riding.

Third, there isn't much on the west end of the bridge that people would need to ride to -- a fair number of houses, but that's about it. There are some office buildings across MD28, but those are accessible by way of Gude Drive and Research Blvd. In fact, I went over to visit the new bridge yesterday morning, during the height of rush hour, which is when I took the photos displayed here. During my 20-minute leisurely stroll the length of the bridge and back, I was all alone, except for one pair of joggers chatting with each other. To be fair, when I went back during the evening rush hour with my bike to see how well the bridge worked for riders, and I saw one other biker and two adults with strollers. (The answer, by the way, is that for bikers, it's a pretty good climb to get over the bridge from west to east; not a problem at all if you're in good shape, but casual riders and children may have a little trouble.)

Last, and above all, I have to return to the cost. Sure, it's mostly the yokels in the rest of the country (i.e., you) whose tax dollars are paying for it -- though we pay for yours, so I guess it's only fair. But $4.3 million for a bike bridge of limited utility? Isn't there a better use for that funding?

I can't really blame Rockville officials for seeking the TEA-21 money and running with it when it was granted. It's Congress's fault for having appropriated it in the first place. If we hadn't snagged a grant here, some other yokels (i.e., you) would have taken it.

Still, I can't help thinking back to one of my first experiences in Rockville when I moved here 20 years ago. I've written about this before.

When I moved to Rockville in 1987, we had a mayor named Steve van Grack, a trial lawyer (the mayor being a non-partisan, part-time official) who was infected by the dread federal-government disease. On Rockville Pike, Maryland Route 355, it was sometimes hard for pedestrians to have enough time to cross at the light, as it surely still is. Van Grack, rather than seeking an adjustment in the timing of the lights, rather than being extravagant and seeking funds to build pedestrian overpasses, was trying to drum up support for an expensive study to look into a "people mover" to take pedestrians up and down the Pike and across.

I remember being shocked at this grandiose plan, clearly motivated by the prospect of federal funding. I guess some things never change.

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Address unknown

"Homeless group close to getting post office"

Headline, Rockville Gazette, Aug. 15, 2007

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Scwewy wabbit

This fella was posing for me, sitting patiently in the drizzle, in front of my house.

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One day in Rockville...

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Visitor of the day -- 4/23

If you've ever had the pleasure of driving on Rockville Pike, MD 355, a six-lane road that runs through the heart of Rockville and is described in a Wikipedia entry as "home to many strip malls and ... notorious for its congestion," I think you may appreciate today's visitor of the day.

Two words: Forget it.

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