The Gas Leak

There's a musty-smelling room in the basement of my apartment building where we go to do our laundry, push rent through a slot in the wall, and haphazardly store our bikes. Like everything in the building it's imperfect, but functional laundry machines and relatively secure bicycle storage is all I can ask for, really.

Last week I woke up early Sunday morning, intending to go to church. But when I opened the metal door leading to the basement the smell that greeted me was not must, it was gas. Very strong gas. I held my breath while extricating my bike and pulling it up the stairs. Noticed briefly that the dryers appeared to be pulled away from the wall. Gasped the fresh air once back outside!

Once in an over-occupied student house in Ann Arbor I thought we had a gas leak, woke up all my housemates, and called the fire department as we sat on the porch eating cereal. Their truck blocked the traffic on our one-lane street while they informed us that actually, our refrigerator had suffered a mini explosion. This crossed my mind as my fiance and I called the fire department and DTE. I'd feel pretty stupid if that happened again.

We first guessed that someone had walked into the room before me, smelled the gas leak, and then decided too unplug the dryers and call it good. Maddeningly irresponsible but not sinister. But the firefighters noticed something I had not - the glass punched in on the inner door to the room, just big enough to slip in a hand and turn the lock. Their first guess, which seriously freaked me out, was that somebody with a grudge had cut the line on purpose - perhaps intending to blow us up. I knew if that were the case we would move. Immediately. Pay two rents, live at my parents' - anything to get out of a targeted building.

But then they noticed that the coin boxes had been torn out, all the quarters gone. I don't think they're really ever emptied, so with $3 per resident per week that could have been a lot of cash. The new narrative that emerged was of serial thieves who target laundry rooms in beat-up looking apartments everywhere, who took the coins and then were in the process of stealing the appliances when something scared them off - maybe even the gas leak itself.

It still doesn't make me feel super comfortable, but at least it wasn't purely malicious and at least no one entered our personal apartment space. On the up side, the landlord  has been shocked into doing some landscaping to make this place look occupied. On the down side, who knows when we'll have laundry again? I don't know whether we'll keep living here after our lease is up. I'm mostly just happy they didn't take our bikes.

Has anybody else had this particular experience? Or gone through other property crimes that didn't directly affect your safety but made you feel squirmy nonetheless?

The Pious Prius Effect

Every day that I ride my bike I get rudely tailed/cut off/nearly run over by at least one car. It's something a cyclist expects and artfully maneuvers around. It occurred to me one day, though, that a number of those incidents have involved the drivers of Priuses, which is funny since ownership of such a vehicle is supposed to indicate moral superiority and a respect for the creatures of the earth. Granted, my sample is not random, since I've spend much time in Ann Arbor, the Prius capitol of the Midwest. But it got me thinking, why does that happen?

Maybe that sense of self-righteousness that comes from sinking into the energy-efficient seats makes drivers think they've somehow magicked away all the negative consequences of driving. And while they may have decreased some of those, they're still driving a vehicle that can kill, operating within and contributing to a system that allows some people freedom of movement and denies it to others.

I actually did drive a Prius once, when I had to grab a last-minute Zipcar.

Pedestrian safety / Roving Reads

Fall break - time to take a breath and write some things. I realized lately that I'm a kind of grumpy blogger and kind of get on a soapbox about things. Although I'm really a quite happy person, I find it hard to write cheery slice-of-life stuff when madness is always going on in this region. So, today I'm going to write about one thing that gets my goat and one super cool idea that I read about.


Walkable Ann Arbor?

 

The pedestrian and the car

Two weeks ago Ann Arbor saw two vehicle-pedestrian accidents, one of which was fatal and incredibly tragic. In the second, the Ann Arbor police chief exculpated the car involved because the runners in question were not using the crosswalk. This was at Beakes and Fifth, where I've run many a time, and anybody who's been a ped knows that whole area is a death trap, with cars whizzing over the bridge and taking sudden turns. The week before, a fellow urban planning student was clipped on her bicycle - and luckily not harmed - by a reckless right-turner at Glen and Fuller/Depot. In August, someone was hospitalized crossing W. Stadium. And of course, last year saw another tragedy of University of Michigan student killed at a crosswalk on Plymouth Rd.

Bicycle rides, race, and gentrification

My boyfriend is starting medical school at Wayne State, because he's awesome like that, and it means that I get to spend more time in Detroit visiting his apartment and meeting his friends. Since I really like Detroit, this is a win/win situation. He recently invited me to join his classmates on a bicycle tour of the city. Since I also really like bicycles, this seemed like a good plan. I managed to stuff my bike into a tiny Ford Focus and zoomed down the freeway towards the riverfront.

(Actually, I stopped zooming before I reached the riverfront, because being totally clueless about sports, I neglected to take into account the Tigers game traffic. Driving in downtown Detroit that day was actually worse than driving in southern Manhattan. Really. I've done both.)