On the Move

On the road to Bigfoot, Texas

T Fords of Texas at the Bigfoot museum

Last Saturday, March 6, I had the great pleasure of taking part in a ”T Fords of Texas” club cruise around Medina County.  Led by Castroville residents Tom Campbell and Wayne McBryde, a group of nine Ts traversed the area’s handsome back roads under a glowering sky, dense with dark and darker grey clouds, too high to actually rain, but very dramatic.  In an open runabout T driven by Gary Bethke, I had the full opportunity to take in the wintry landscape with occasional hints of spring, such as isolated peach and red bud trees in delightfully unexpected full bloom.

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The only thing to look forward to is the past

Omnibus soaking its wheels in the SA river

With all the zippidy-doo-dah hoopla over the possibility of a return to streetcars, why not go the whole hog and bring back mule drawn omnibuses?  I mean, who else is doing that?  Let’s think outside the box and get out of Portland, Oregon’s shadow once and for all.  Think of the benefits.  No expensive overhead or the need to tear up streets for miles on end and tourists will love it.

Mule drawn streetcars were introduced in San Antonio in 1878 but omnibus service has that beat by seven years.  It cost 5 cents to go from Main Square to Alamo Plaza.  With all the money we’ll save by not installing staggeringly expensive streetcar systems and their unsightly overhead power lines, we could go back and charge the same fare in 2010 that it was in 1871.  I guess there is a flaw in my logic somewhere but, you know, I’ll be d****d if I know what it is.

“Whoever put traffic lights on Loop 1604 needs to be punched”

The oft-maligned 1604/Braun intersection

Well, once again, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here.  I’ve been working on what I think will be an exciting new addition to my website (stay tuned for more on that soon.)  However, as I was watching the Sunday morning political talk shows, my wife mentioned something that motivated me to write this post, which is one that I’ve been meaning to do for a while.  While Facebooking (can that really be a verb?), she came across a new Facebook group with the same title as this post.  After rolling my eyes (as I often do in these situations), I realized (also as I often do in these situations) that the creator of that group– and those who subscribe to the explicit as well as implicit sentiment of it– probably just doesn’t have the back-story to understand why things are the way they are and that my initial reaction made me just as guilty of jumping to conclusions as that person was.  Whoever created the group is obviously frustrated– they even say they’re “pissed off” at the “stupid” traffic lights, and I sympathize with their frustration.  But, as is often the case, there’s more to the story than meets the eye, and maybe if folks understood how things got to be as they are, they might be more forgiving.  This posting is an attempt at that.

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San Antonio transportation history talks

Beginning Saturday February 20 at 9:30 AM, I will be be giving a series of four talks on local transportation history at the main public library downtown.   Technology willing, they will be accompanied with PowerPoint slide shows.  Admission is free.  I will have copies of my two local transportation history books available for sale.

Here is the topic schedule:

Saturday February 20, 9:30 – 11;30 AM – Ox, mule and horse drawn transportation.

Saturday February 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM – Railroads; 1850 to the present

Saturday February 27, 9:30 – 11:30 AM – Public transportation, streetcars, jitneys and buses

Saturday February 27, 1:30 – 3:30 PM – Private transportation, from the bicycle to the present.

Live steam coming to San Antonio

1925 Baldwin steam locomotive at Pearl Brewery

Question:  How do you return a long dormant steam locomotive back to active passenger service in 2010, with all the heightened concerns about safety?  Answer:  Very, very carefully.  This ain’t 1964.  Way back then early Texas Transportation Museum members including one Dave Wallace, acquired the 1925 Baldwin 0-4-0 steam locomotive from New Braunfels where it had sat idled in a shed since being retired around 1928, brought it to San Antonio, placed it on tracks adjacent to Pearl Brewery, simply filled the boiler with water and fired it up.  While it didn’t explode, it sent out enough smuts and soot that those same volunteers ended up cleaning car windshields for several blocks around. more »

When cars came to San Antonio

The first San Antonio car dealership was a bike, photo and typewriter repair shop that started selling 1902 Curved Dash Oldsmobiles.

It’s amazing to see today’s rush of technologies, ragged edges and all, bump and grind in the marketplace in a race to reconfigure how we work and play.

But the dizzying pace really isn’t all that new. Consider the shock of the first horseless carriages rumbling over rutted streets more than a century ago, stirring up dust, dropping jaws and spooking horses.  

Giving us a glimpse into those strange and heady times is “San Antonio on Wheels,” a book written by fellow OnTheMoveBlog.com blogger Hugh Hemphill.

Just as tech ventures come and go in a slippery market – producing epic battles among giants such as Netscape and Explorer, Google and Bing, iPhone and BlackBerry – so too did early auto experiments.

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100th anniversary of San Antonio’s first traffic laws

Lewis bzirdsong in a 1910 Franklin on College Street, San Antonio

It is, of course, one of the more minor centennial occasions.  You probably won’t celebrate it but you will, without noticing, except for this little reminder, observe it.  February 7, 2010 is the 100^th anniversary of San Antonio’s first traffic ordinance.  Nine years after the first gasoline powered horseless carriage, eight years after the city gained its first automobile agency, seven after the creation of the San Antonio Automobile Club, and six years after the city mandated that all vehicles be registered and display ID plates or numbers, the city introduced written rules for all road users. more »

2010 prospects for the Texas Transportation Museum

1925 Baldwin 0-4-0 steam locomotive

I thought I might take a moment to let y’all know about how things are going at the Texas Transportation Museum here in San Antonio.  Founded on January 1, 1964, TTM is gearing up for its 50^th Anniversary.  There are a number of projects that have the potential to elevate the institution from a relatively small city concern to a statewide attraction. more »

My first year as a born again cyclist in San Antonio

Around four o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday December 31^st, zooming alongside the old San Antonio & Aransas Pass railroad tracks on Villamain between Mission San Juan and Mission Espada, in top gear and the wind at my back, I reached my own personal milestone by completing one thousand miles in the first year of owning a bicycle since I left Scotland in 1991.  Today, Jnauary 9^th, also around 4:00 PM, on De Zavala Road at Clark High school I reached by personal goal of 1,040 miles.  That, of course, may seem like an obscure number, so let me explain. more »

Book review: Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt

I’ve just finished reading “TRAFFIC,” by Tom Vanderbilt, published by Vintage Books in 2009.  It is subtitled, “Why we drive the way we do and what it says about us.”  I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in trying to understand the mundane yet highly complex activity we call driving.