Today I went up with a couple members of Northfield's semi-official "Non-Motorized Transportation Task Force" to hear about "Safe Routes to School," a grant program run by the state department of transportation which passes federal money down to schools, cities, or other entities that want to make it safer and easier for kids to get to school on bike or foot. It's a nationwide program, and pretty well funded as these things go. We'll see what happens to our plans to work up a proposal.
While the program's interesting in and of itself, the sociology of yesterday's "workshop" - really, just a lecture - on the application process was basically WTF. The meeting was at the transportation department's training center, just off the freeway in a northern suburb of St. Paul. We could hardly find a parking spot for all the state trooper cars in the lot: literally a hundred of them - more brown vehicles than a UPS depot. Out front, a big group of troopers were getting some sort of CPR training (the dummy was lying on a picnic table), while another group of people was assembled around a portable smokestack which turned out to be part of a test of EPA employees' abilities to visually assess the thickness of smoke. Inside, the place was swarming with state troopers. I haven't seen so many guns in a public bathroom since the last time I was up in the U.P. during hunting season.
The presentation on the program was pretty good. The presenter had a 190-slide PowerPoint deck (a 95-page hardcopy! o rly?), but she didn't read them to us, thankfully. On the other hand, she also didn't ever say the first "r" in "infrastructure." And across the aisle from me sat a guy who was clearly attending only because his boss had instructed him to physically occupy a chair for the entire four hours of the workshop. This guy was methodically and openly working his way through a big backlog of Roads & Bridge magazine, paying not one whit of attention to the talk.
The things people do at "work."