WellCommons

Bicycle lanes by kansasplains1

These bikes and bike trails are for fun and work

When people see videos, have signs put up (like the ones I suggested for going around KU, for a starter - which I would call the Amos Lawrence trail), they really begin to respect biking and walking, and they change their view about having to have a car for going everywhere.

Here is the complete streets video for NYC.

You can see the green painted bike lanes in the above video.

The next video comes from Ottawa, Canada. It shows you how to drive with the bike lanes in place. This is part of the infrastructure Lawrence needs to adopt, or something similar.

There is an art to making bicycle videos

There is an art that goes with the making of bicycle videos. Recently in many cities people have been making videos with a lot of thought behind them, and original music.

Why can't that be done in Lawrence? Lawrence has plenty of budding filmmakers and musicians. And equally important, with good videos come more bike lanes and trails!

Below are several bicycling videos from American and European cities. You not only can see people biking and walking in the videos, but you have a great view of the cities, too. One of the great things about biking and walking is that you get to see things as you move along, instead of constantly having to keep your eyes peeled for traffic.

Here are completely segregated bike lanes in the Netherlands: What a shame we don't have that on I-10, but policymakers back then essentially didn't consider bicycle lanes at all.

Note the digital counter

This is a very impressive video of bicycle lanes in Copenhagen. Note the bicycle digital counter. It's one of the "extra" infrastructure items Lawrence could create if we had a number of bicycle lanes.

There are 750 places to pick up and leave bicycles in Paris, and there are thousands of bicycles for rent throughout the city at these locations.

If people can see small but great films and signs (graphics), then this helps to sell people on bicycling. It makes them get out of their cars, and it brings tourists to the towns, cities and parks. When something is done well, people will flock to it.

Tourists come to towns throughout Kansas

The tourists enjoy themselves, and at the same time they spend money. That will help all Kansas towns which incorporate bicycling and walking along trails, not to mention the health improvements which will take place for many people. See, for example, the video below on Iowa. This is what I hope for eventually in Kansas. Could you see trails linking up Kansas towns across the state?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tu-LCJZm0k

Some cities have made very nice videos. I've given a few below.

For example, bicycling in Seattle:

And here's a video from Ottawa, Kansas (nicely done by the Ottawa Herald):

Explore nature first hand

People can also explore nature through bike trails. It gets them close to wildlife, flowers, things that they never see while inside the house watching the TV. And it's great for kids, too!

This is the ElDorado Bike Trail in Kansas.

Here is an example of the Arkansas biking experience.

Here is the Oklahoma FreeWheel.

Even though it's cold in Chicago, there are people on bikes:

And here is biking and walking in Pittsburgh on a warm day:

All of the above offer some great views of each of the cities, as well.

And the last thing is perhaps the best thing...

Bicycles and people create the community. Once you have seen the video below, of Ciclovia, which takes place in Bogota, Columbia, you will have a completely different idea of what community is about. Lawrence has done this to some degree - but never this extensive. It is like the people say in the video, "We feel more connected with each other and with the city."

I have also put the video in Spanish here, because some day I hope we will have a day's or week's summary of news and especially local, creative items, in Spanish as well. There surely are people out there who speak Spanish (and even other languages well) who would volunteer for such an effort...

And the town would mean so much more to those people who know some English, but who know Spanish as their native language.

Please refer to my previous post,

and to the outstanding article by Karrey Britt,

We need to establish a bicycle and bicycle-community forum, on a separate page, on well commons!

And then we need to get out, and walk and bicycle!

An exhibit in San Francisco opens today

Today, an exhibit opened in San Francisco which is about women who have gone from homeless to finding new worth in their lives.

It seems to me that self-worth is one of the ultimate concepts that can make a tremendous difference in a person's life, at any age.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/28/MNU61OAC93.DTL

But I have wondered ... What happens to women, and men, in Kansas?

What I would really like to know is what about men in Kansas? Do they succeed in pulling themselves out of homelessness, as well as women? How are they being helped?

I know, for example, one person in San Francisco who was sleeping on the streets some years ago. He is now very successful at his job. What is it that makes some people able to overcome odds, while others never do?

I had a friend in Lawrence several years ago who killed himself. He was a wonderful artist, but odds overcame him.

What groups in Kansas help these men?

How about women and men in rural Kansas?

Kansas fell to the 26th spot in the annual America’s Health Rankings, which tracks the country’s overall health. Last year Kansas ranked 23.

Like the rest of the country, Kansas follows a troubling trend of increasing obesity, diabetes and children in poverty which offsets improvements that have been made in smoking cessation, premature deaths, preventable hospitalizations and cardiovascular deaths.

Here’s how Kansas fared in those categories:

• Kansas has 640,000 obese adults, which is 229,000 more than 10 years ago.
• In the past five years, diabetes in the adult population increased from 6.9 percent to 8.4 percent. Today, 179,000 Kansans have diabetes.
• In the past year, the child poverty rate increased from 18 percent to 23.1 percent.
• Smoking has decreased from 21 percent to 17 percent in the past 10 years. But 361,000 still smoke in Kansas.
• In the past year, rate of preventable hospitalizations decreased from 75.3 to 70.5 discharges per 1,000 Medicare enrollees.
• In the past 10 years, the rate of cardiovascular deaths in Kansas has decreased from 324.3 to 265.2 deaths per 100,000 population.

The report found some strengths in Kansas:

• Few poor mental and physical health days per month.
• Moderate use of early prenatal care.
• Low rate of uninsured population.

And, the report noted challenges the state faces:

• Low per capita public health funding.
• Limited availability of primary care physicians.
• High prevalence of obesity.

The report found that Vermont remains the nation’s healthiest state and New York and New Jersey showed the most improvement. America’s Health Rankings are complied each year by United Health Foundation in collaboration with the America Public Health Association and Partnership for Prevention.

By Roy Wenzl, Wichita Eagle

Taxpayers are footing the bill for treating indigent patients, like many of the intoxicated people treated at Wichta hospitals. by AlexParker

At the Warming Souls men's shelter at 13th and Broadway on Wednesday night, Sandy Swank, a veteran of dealing with the homeless, stood among the cots and confronted an angry man slumped against the wall, so drunk that he could not stand up.

"Settle down!" she told him. She told him she was going to kick him outside. She told him to stop yelling, to be nice, to quit raising his middle finger at one of the peaceable homeless men who was settling onto a nearby cot, getting ready to sleep.

The drunken man kept yelling.

Swank stepped quickly and grabbed his arm.

Minutes before this, as she had shuttled homeless people to the shelter, Swank said that since the financially struggling Parallax inpatient facility closed last year, the detoxing drunks who used to sleep in Parallax's 25 beds have had no place to go. Now they go not only to the homeless shelters but to local hospitals, where they detox and where the costs to the community are considerably higher, and where people lack the specialist experience to provide effective interventions. And they call 911 and have ambulances show up. "One guy I know was using EMS as his personal transportation service," she said.

At the homeless shelters, these afflicted and addicted souls disrupt others. "And those homeless are already so tired from a day on the streets or standing under the bridges that all they want to do is crawl into a cot and go to sleep at 7:30 p.m.," Swank said.

Where most of the drunken people go, Swank said, is deep into the pockets of local taxpayers. They go to emergency rooms, where one detoxing person can cost hospitals hundreds of dollars a day in free care. They go to jails, which cost less than the hospital but cost a lot more than Parallax ever did.

Local authorities say she is right.

Few publicly mourned in October 2010 when Parallax shut down, and most of the detoxing drunks went back on the streets. Parallax, which received tax dollars, shut down because of financial concerns after questions were raised about financial and operational improprieties. Nothing adequately replaced Parallax, local authorities say.

But now police, hospitals and substance abuse authorities are mourning, and not for the drunks.

With Parallax's 25 beds gone, most of the severely drunk chronic alcoholics, including those deathly ill and spitting up blood, including those scraped off street curbs on freezing winter nights by police patrol officers, are going to where the costs of their care are considerably higher, to places like the emergency department at Via Christi Hospital and often admitted. They are tying up the time of 911 emergency dispatchers. They are tying up ambulances.

Via Christi Behavioral Health Center takes them in, and not just to give them a place to detox, said Harold Casey, the CEO of the Substance Abuse Center of Kansas, based in Wichita. Many of these people are physically ill, having seizures. The hospitals give them not only medical care, but multiple tests to find out what else might be wrong. "And the hospitals are having to eat the costs," Casey said.

After Parallax closed, Casey and his center were asked by government authorities to take it over just long enough to find placement for the 275 inpatient and outpatient clients. He said that the city and state between them had provided more than $500,000 a year to Parallax to provide specialized care, at low cost, for substance abuse treatment.

But after Parallax closed, the state and city allocated the money that had gone to Parallax to other targeted services and programs, but did not target or offer enough money to attract any group to replace Parallax, Casey said.

One agency, DCCCA Inc., based in Lawrence, offers four detox beds at the Women's Recovery Center in Wichita, and four other beds for men at Options Adult Services in Wichita, said Sandra Dixon, DCCCA's director of addiction services.

While other nonprofits are offering detox beds, those groups combined do not offer as many beds as Parallax, police said.

How much Parallax's demise is costing the community is not known, but it's high, local authorities say. Here's a hint: Les Sperling, who runs a detox facility in Salina, says his Central Kansas Foundation can take care of a detoxing drunk for about $180 a day. Hospitals in Salina like the Salina Regional Health Center appreciate what his foundation is doing, he said, because a destitute person spending one day in a hospital can cost as much as $1,600.

Hospital officials, contacted by The Eagle, would not confirm that cost, saying they are still studying the issue.

"But we're very glad CKF is doing what it is doing," said Charles Grimwood, vice president for regional development at Salina Regional Health Center. Grimwood said Sperling's agency has been invaluable since it started in February, cutting down the number of severely drunk people coming to the hospital and cutting down repeat visits. This has saved the hospital money, reduced stress and workload, and kept the emergency room more free to deal with other patients, Grimwood said.

Sperling takes in 300 clients a year in an area with a population under 50,000. Parallax was taking in 1,500 clients a year in a population more than six times larger. Those Wichita clients, said Wichita authorities, are now going to hospitals or to local jails.

"Yeah, we all miss Parallax," said Tom Stolz, a deputy chief with the Wichita police. "Our officers are now ad-libbing about what to do when they find one of these people needing help. It's a hodge-podge, what to do now."

Why should a community give these chronically alcoholic people any care, especially expensive care?

"How low do you have to be, after all, when even the homeless shelters don't want to take you in?" Casey said.

But as he and Swank said, many of these people are not just drunks. Some have chronic alcoholism, which medical people increasingly see as a disease, and some are mentally ill, dysfunctional from severe depression, self-medicating by drinking cheap alcohol or even cheap, alcohol-laced mouthwash. And there are heavy drinkers who are also physically sick.

And winter is coming. Stolz said police are not ever going to let anybody freeze to death on a sidewalk, drunk or sober. No one is more hardened about drunken behavior than street cops, who often have to arrest drunks and sometimes have to fight them; but they don't like to see them suffer, Stolz said.

"Some of our officers sometimes dig into their own pockets to help these people get a meal," Stolz said. "We can't turn our backs on them; sometimes when our officers find them, the person has fallen down, has got an injury, a wound."

Stolz sent the Eagle several e-mails he obtained recently from Wichita street patrol commanders and officers, including this one:

"I had given the officer a little money to buy the person food (at) a drive thru. We could find no place that would take them, so we took them to the Lord's Diner to sit in their parking lot until they opened.It was well lighted and I found a blanket to give them.it was quite disheartening to think there was absolutely no place for the person but the street."

And there was this note, from a lieutenant based at Patrol West:

"I spoke to two of my officers who work near the river and are frequently confronted with dealing with drunks. They would use this (Parallax) resource if it was available today. The options are very limited now.The current options including taking the drunk home or to the hospital if they can convince the ambulance crew that the subject's drunken state is of a medical concern."

One police commander, writing to Stolz recently, told him that when he contacts agencies with detox beds, "100 percent of the time I have called they are full . So yes, nowhere to go. This is a HUGE problem as often, we continue to get 911 calls either for man downs or nuisance type calls or other crimes. ... Also, the homeless shelters often won't take someone who is so intoxicated they cause disturbances within the shelter.

"I fear we will have some issues this winter with the homeless drunks sleeping outside in the cold elements rather than in detox," the commander wrote.

One place that sees quite a few detoxing drunks now is the Via Christi Behavioral Health Center. Casey, whose agency evaluates people suffering from alcohol or substance abuse, said the behavioral health center gets as many as six to seven people a week that might have been cheaper to deal with at a detox facility. Lois Clendening, the director, said people from many agencies recognize there is a need here and have met for months to figure out how to meet it.

She said she didn't know how much these people are costing Via Christi when it gives them free medical care, but said it's likely substantial. The medical community won't turn its back on these sufferers any more than the police will, she said.

"It's an awful disease, the people suffering from it often don't know or believe they even need help; they even resist help," she said. "It's a disease, and a lot of people don't understand a lot about it."

In the homeless shelter, after Sandy Swank grabbed his arm and threatened to evict him "until you cool off," the drunken man subsided into muttering and lying on his cot. He was so drunk that he couldn't sit up straight.

Swank left the shelter for a few minutes to drive a few blocks south, to visit a downtown women's shelter where homeless women were settling in for the night. Swank, the director of housing and homeless services for Inter-Faith Ministries, said she had dealt with the drunk man for more than 10 years. When sober, she said, he's tough to deal with too, but he sometimes cries uncontrollably — distraught about his alcohol cravings and his depression. But then he gets drunk and disruptive, like tonight, Swank said.

"This is actually a quiet night," she said. "He's the only one acting out and drunk so far. At the first of the month, it's a lot worse, because that's when these folks get their Social Security and disability checks, and they burn through them by getting drunk, and we end up with eight or nine of these guys disrupting the shelter, scaring the residents."

Her visit to the women's shelter ended, Swank drove back to the shelter at 13th and Broadway.

She saw a body, wrapped in a blanket, lying on the dusty ground at the shelter entrance.

It was the drunken man.

He'd staggered to his feet after Swank left, and tried to pick a fight again.

The staff had grabbed his arms, helped him down three flights of stairs.

They told him to stay outside until he could be nice.

He lay down on the ground and wrapped himself in the blanket from head to toe, as in a shroud.