The Apple Store is a strange place. It does its very best to pretend it isn't a shop. There are no tills ringing or sour-faced shopgirls stacking shelves with garish product or hurrying along pretending they're too busy to help you, no groaning rails or higgledy-piggledy stacks of boxes. The Apple Store, especially the one in Covent Garden, London, is more of an 'experience'. Smiling pretty boys in skinny jeans loiter at the doorway with eager smiles and eyes so wide they can only be the result of a recently dropped ecstasy pill. They have youth, enthusiasm and a handy line in charming condescension. You could be excused for mistaking it for a bar or café, not a global corporation desperate to get its hands on your hard-earned cash - the more noughts at the end, the better.
But where there is wireless, hardware, oak beams and credit cards, there is retail; and here I am, wandering around it on a Saturday, looking for nothing in particular. I'm glad my own MacBook Pro, which wheezes like an asthmatic vuvuzela every time I turn it on, is at home and not here to see the sleek, steel-encased upstarts that will one day replace it both in my affections and upon my knee. The place is crammed with Apple fanatics in all shapes and sizes and with every variety of facial hair imaginable. Ageing computer geeks, tight-skinned students, emo girls, hipster grandmas, confused middle-class parents rife for a fleecing by their offspring and me, peeking over everybody's shoulder to get a look-in at a machine so I can check my email, as my ever-unreliable phone is about to gasp its last in battery power.
I'm having no luck, so decide to move upstairs to find a free computer. As I make my way to the staircase, I notice three younger people - two guys and a girl - standing at the foot of it and looking my way. One guy is whispering in the ear of the other guy and looking at me. It's making me a bit Hands free access, but I carry on - I'll leave being afraid of youths until I'm elderly. They're dressed in that young way where nothing seems to fit them properly and one of the guys looks like he hasn't taken his baseball cap off since he was a toddler. They are, of course, all beautiful in their own way. I walk past them and start up the steps. I only manage two or three paces before I feel someone rush past me and stop right in front of me. It is Guy 1, the whisperer, sans baseball cap. I don't have much time to take him in, but he is young, cute and staring quizzically at me.
"Excuse me?" he says, in an accent I immediately recognise as French. By stopping, I've already excused him, I guess, so I don't reply. He goes on: "Are you gay?"
I'm confused. It's not often I get asked this question in public, let alone in the middle of the day. And even though we're in the middle of the uber-liberal, peacenik outpost of sun-kissed California that is the Apple Store, I'm wary. Why would he be asking? Is he a homo or a homophobe? Is he going to kiss me or punch me on the nose?
The most recent draft of Swarthmore’s Campus Master Plan, presented to the College community at a meeting in March, works off of assumptions that faculty, students, and staff will grow, perhaps by the hundreds, over the next couple of decades. If the past is any proof, additional people will be accompanied by additional cars, as well as additional parking spaces. However, some faculty and staff are working to show that there are alternative means of managing transportation needs that can minimize the environmental impacts of the anticipated community growth.
The Parking and Transportation Master Plan Advisory Committee, which is tasked with developing policy recommendations by the beginning of the fall, will meet for their first policy discussion today. The Committee, whose work will be incorporated into the Master Planning process, will continue to meet through the summer so that the Master Plan can be finalized in September.
That committee, whose members include Executive Assistant for Facilities and Services Paula Dale, Senior Director of Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations Nadine Kolowrat, Provost Tom Stephenson, Public Safety Director Mike Hill, Vice President for Facilities and Services Stu Hain, Engineering Professor Erik Cheever, Jennifer Walsh ‘15, and eleven others, will work to find ways to accommodate future growth, and, some members say, encourage faculty, students, and staff to ditch their cars entirely in favor of walking or riding public transit to campus.
The Master Planning process, which began in earnest last fall, looks ahead over the next couple of decades to the potential construction projects–such as the Inn, a new Science Center II, and additions to Willets and McCabe–that may eventually change the face of campus. At a meeting in January, a number of faculty raised concerns that the building boom might be accompanied by what they believe is a reckless expansion of surface parking on campus.
The role of Chance Advisors, said Dale, “is to help us with the whole master plan, which includes studying parking and transportation existing conditions, making predictions for the future, and a piece of that is considering how [we] could shape and hopefully reduce the number of spaces that we need.” She said the group with “also look at some policy questions like do we want to discourage people from driving to campus or not.”
In the fall, when the TDM study is completed, Dale said, the Committee “will recommend to senior staff a series of policies that we feel are in the best interests of the College for parking and transportation and a series of procedures to support those policies. [...] We’ve made a conscious decision that nothing is firm [in Master Planning] until we’ve heard back” from those involved with the Parking and Transportation committee and the TDM study.
According to Kolowrat, those policy recommendations might include “incentivizing ride-sharing, carpooling, ZipCars, mass transit, biking, walking, and more–all of which would have the added benefit of helping the College meet its Climate Action Plan commitments for carbon reduction.” As of now, the Climate Action Plan calls to deal with the carbon impact of transportation solely through carbon offsets.
Central to these concerns is the fear that Swarthmore will add one new parking space for each new employee–or even more, to accommodate infrequent but high attendance at events–paving over what they some see as Swarthmore’s walkable paradise.
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