Defending His Daffodils, an Eighth Avenue Gardener Keeps a Busy City at Bay

Donald Wolfe said he would walk there from his apartment on West 50th Street in Manhattan — 38 steps to the elevator, 54 steps through the lobby, 75 steps down the block to the corner and 37 steps across Eighth Avenue.

First he put the jug with the water on his wheelchair. His oxygen tank was already in place, on the back. Off he went, pushing the wheelchair, a transport device for the garden supplies if not, at the moment, the gardener. He was not shuffling. Not shambling. But not speedwalking, either.

He paused halfway down the block, breathing noticeably. In a moment or two, he would suck on a tube that functioned like a siphon to start the water flowing, this man in a windbreaker who said he had only 18 percent of his lung capacity. But he was not there yet.

The garden, in the distance, stood out in a neighborhood aspiring to stylishness. The little flower bed was a patch of land created a couple of years ago when a median was put in to separate bicycles from cars, trucks and buses. “It was just there,” he said. “Whenever I see an empty spot of dirt, I think, what could you grow in it?”

But this is not Park Avenue, with its wide medians and tulips. This is Eighth Avenue, where Mr. Wolfe was once cursed out by a woman who accused him of stealing the flowers. “She was not about to hear me trying to explain, ‘We’re planting them, we’re not stealing them,’” he said. The “we” referred to him and his home health aide, who had accompanied him that day.

Someone who cares about nature and the natural environment makes it happen with his own sweat blood and money. I have no respect for the so-called environmentalists who think they are so superior because of their political views and think their voting and advocacy is superior to others who do not share their political causes; in the mean time my family and I have planted over 8000 trees with our own labor. Yet I don’t count as an environmentalist because I vote with my hands in the soil, instead of voting for regulations on other people. HA!

Thank you, thank you for your efforts.

We have idiot “environmentalists” around here who do nothing but impose their demands on others. A couple of years ago some ivory tower consultant from the local university tried to get our city council to impose extra taxes on the farmers and large landowners around here by trying to argue that drainage from the large pieces of land was causing flooding in town without taking into consideration the difference between permeable surfaces and impermeable surfaces (roofs, streets, parking lots, etc.)Luckily we had enough people speak up and enough common sense council members to shoot the proposal down — but not after they had paid this idiot $60,000 of taxpayer money for his advice.

Unfortunately, some of those common sense council members were defeated at the last election and the crazies are taking over.

Pavement?

I suppose so. My earlier question is still open for anyone who's familiar with the area to answer, but a picture of the area suggests that a normal traffic lane--or enough room for one--has been removed in favor of a "protected bike lane." If you haven't seen one of those yet, they're coming soon to a progressive city near you.

Maybe I'm just really cynical, but I can see this news story as an attempt to justify those things: not only do these take space from those evil cars, they can be planted with flowers, and who can possibly hate flowers?

Probably better than a right hand lane with cars swerving in and out to the center lane to avoid cyclers. The real fallacy to bike lanes is that they’ll keep the cyclist out of regular traffic and confine the cyclist to the approved routes. Not so, in my experience. Around here they ride 2 and 3 abreast on all the main roads in their cycling events on weekends, clogging up all the auto traffic, despite the fact that we have a cycle only lane (formerly the site of a defunct rail road track) that cuts right through 3 towns and doesn’t disrupt anything. Probably because the RR track route is hilly, and the cyclists prefer the more level routes. I think they just like to show off their lycra suits.

RR rights of way are always far less hilly/undulating than automobile roads. Always.

Steel wheels on steel tracks don’t have quite the grip of rubber tires on asphalt. Add to that the literally thousands of tons being pulled along by the one or two locomotives, and hilly becomes impossible.

In North America, gradient is expressed in terms of the number of feet of rise per 100 feet of horizontal distance. Two examples: if a track rises 1 foot over a distance of 100 feet, the gradient is said to be “1 percent;” a rise of 2 and-a-half feet would be a grade of “2.5 percent.” In other parts of the world, particularly Britain and places with heavy British influence, gradients are expressed in terms of the horizontal distance required to achieve a 1-foot rise. This system would term the above examples “1 in 100” and “1 in 40,” respectively.

On main lines, grades are generally 1 percent or less, and grades steeper than about 2.2 percent are rare.

The steepest grade on a major railroad’s main track (as opposed to industrial spurs) was historically said to be on the Pennsylvania Railroad north of Madison, Ind. Now operated by short line Madison Railroad, the track rises 413 feet over a distance of 7012 feet - a 5.89-percent grade. The title for steepest main-line grade long rested with Norfolk Southern (and predecessor Southern Railway) for its 4.7-percent grade south of Saluda, N.C. With Saluda’s closing in 2002, BNSF’s 3.3-percent Raton Pass grade in New Mexico became the steepest main-line grade in North America.

The effect of grades on train operations is significant. For each percent of ascending grade, there is an additional resistance to constant-speed movement of 20 lbs. per ton of train. This compares with a resistance on level, straight track of about 5 lbs. per ton of train. A given locomotive, then, can haul only half the tonnage up a .25-percent grade that it can on the level.

In North America, Congress set the Standard Grade as the Ruling Grade for railroads eligible for subsidies and grants in the 1850s. They took as that standard the one adopted by the Cumberland - Wheeling Railway, and that grade was 2.2%, the maximum a single locomotive could negotiate with typical trailing tonnage. Later when charters were drawn up for the Union Pacific Railroad and the Canadian Pacific Railway in Canada, the national governments imposed the Standard Ruling Grade on the two lines because both received federal assistance and regulation. (Vance, JE Jr.,1995)

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