Catching up on last semester

Two semesters down!

I'm done with my first year! And I decided to add another year to my time at Michigan, so I'm still two years away from graduating. :-/ The third year will allow me to get a second master's degree, so I'll graduate with both a Master in Urban Planning (specializing in land use and transportation) and a M.S. in Natural Resources and Environment (with focus on Behavior, Education, and Communication).

The end of my semester was packed, from a trip to Chicago for the American Planning Association National Conference to all the papers and tests. From there, a quick trip to the East Coast followed by a nasty cold kept me busy. I'm only now catching up to things I've been meaning to do for the summer -- including two research projects, one I'll be paid for!

More on the summer research shortly. In the meantime, I'm catching up on some notes I've been planning to post here for a while.

Train trip to Chicago! April 13.

a.k.a., what I would have tweeted if I were a Twitter person. 

• I welcome the track upgrades that they're planning for the Michigan-Chicago line, but there's no way they'll even blow the whistle fast enough to cross that many railroad crossings at faster than 30mph.
• Train travel = time travel. Look out the window and it's back to the industrial age.
• Wish I could have hopped the tracks to the train starting out on the South Shore Line. Pretty sure I would have saved half an hour. 
• Wow, I'm actually in Chicago! ...oh great, it's snowing.
• I'm two blocks away. Let's play "spot the planner."

The conference, April 13-15

a.k.a., there are a lot of planners out there!

• Everyone and their sister is talking about sustainability. You have to ask a few more questions to find out what they're really after.
• Everyone and their brother is talking about complete streets, and it's not only (not usually?) the transportation folks taking the lead.
• For most suburban communities, density is still a bad word. For some, esp. in the South, even walkability is a bad word, where one planner had much better success with "people-friendly.
• Community acceptance of the term "climate change" varies. Many presenters seem to think that they no longer need to censor that word -- that the constituencies now accept that weather is changing and that we both need to mitigate further change and adapt to what's already on its way. Following this train of thought, where "climate change" still triggers outrage and protest, for example from the anti-Agenda 21 crowd, it's a fading trend. If true, this is a major good sign.
• I don't get much out of most workshops. That's "conference sessions" in APA lingo: "workshops" are what you pay extra for. A good workshop I'll learn from and I'll have a great conversation with a panelist. I had two of those so, on the first day. The next few days were, comparatively, a letdown.