A new day

Five issues that should be on Tulsa’s radar in 2015

1 // Re-ratify “PlaniTulsa”—or toss it
Overwhelming evidence suggests that a superior sidewalk network supports healthier kids and adults, adds appreciable value to residential subdivisions (when properly designed) and increases options for people with limited access to cars. These notions are foundational to PlaniTulsa, which resulted from an intensive citizen engagement process and consequently has extraordinary moral standing. With careful execution, appropriate funding and inventive private engagement, PlaniTulsa would make Tulsa profoundly better, healthier and more connected.

In addition to the Gathering Place sidewalk debate, there was an earlier fracas over downtown parking and the execution of PlaniTulsa elements in the Pearl District. With the exception of three city councilors, PlaniTulsa support from city leadership has not been great, despite that the plan has been formally adopted by the City Council and the Metro Planning Commision.

Public policy should be clear—if foundational aspects of the new comprehensive plan are going to be routinely trashed, why not formally “un-adopt” it?

If our elected officials want to throw out the work of thousands of Tulsans and disregard ideas from national innovators in planning and design, why don’t we just say so and be done with it?

2 // A critical river review 
We need sensible, achievable, affordable objectives for making the Arkansas River a greater asset. We also need clarity on the cross-impacts of the damming/engineering schemes under consideration, particularly as they affect Tulsa’s ever-present floodplain management challenge. Veteran engineer and former Public Works director Charlie Hart is also a hydrologist. Prior to his tenure at City Hall, Hart spent much of his career in engineering, consulting for flood management in U.S. cities. Along with land-use planner Ron Flanagan and writer and public policy expert Ann Patton, Hart has played a major role in Tulsa’s decades-long flood management efforts. Patton wrote the book, “The Tulsa River,” an extremely thoughtful meditation on Tulsa’s intimate and longstanding connection to the Arkansas River, which I highly recommend. Recently, Hart has spoken publicly about the dangers of over-developing the river. His conclusions are sobering and ought to play a hefty role in the ongoing deliberations about the future of the river and the various capital projects being discussed.

3 // Creature-friendly places
Recall a scene in the first “Star Wars” movie: Luke and company’s droids (the cuddly robots) are told they’re not welcome in a drinking establishment. Our heroes are told explicitly by the barkeep that “we don’t serve their kind here.” These events take place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—but a reconsideration of this sentiment is in order.

Pets are an obsession in the U.S. and certainly in Green Country. Statistics suggest that people in the U.S. have at least 80 million dogs and up to 90 million house cats. Of course, it costs billions to keep these animals happy, healthy and well-fed.

But for reasons historical and inertial, when it comes to most shopping, dining and entertainment opportunities, these legions of companions must stay at home or in the car while their human compadres “go in.” In part, this rigid separation stems from from longstanding conceptions about the hygienic necessity of keeping animals—even fully vaccinated and well-kept animals—away from food and other items. The actual role of domestic cats and dogs in food poisoning and related maladies should be re-examined. Many food, health and epidemiology experts have argued for years that inadequate worker training, careless agricultural practices and lax retail and grocery display and storage practices are the real vectors of food poisoning and contamination episodes in America. 

In any event, our obsession with animal companions is bringing about a healthy reconsideration of their exclusion that might lead to some imaginative “co-habitation” rules to welcome animals into more human spaces. A host of high-end retail and commercial spaces encourage people to bring their animals. Home-improvement operations like Lowe’s and Home Depot are “open,” but there’s also activity up-river. Oklahoma City’s Bleu Garden—a vibrant hub for food truck operators, allows patrons of the outdoor entertainment emporium to bring their animals, which are mostly dogs, of course. Bleu Garden is in a downtown peripheral area with what I suspect are minimal zoning constraints, but the experiment is an interesting one that could easily be replicated in Tulsa. 

Many health concerns can be relieved with affordable technology; in conjunction with compliance databases, we could equip vaccinated pets with smart tags that can be easily scanned by storefront devices. Experts in the U.S. service animal movement—which has helped to spark this reconsideration of animal exclusion—might be valuable guides for health officials, planners, designers and venture operators. Conversations between the Tulsa Health Department and some adventurous entrepreneurs might result in an awesome new dimension of “mixed use development.”

4 // Assisted thinking 
A new movement to link high-performance computing and artificial intelligence software very tightly to highly skilled or immensely creative human beings is afoot. In professional chess, world-ranked players are making use of supercomputers to contend with solo players and other so-called “centaur” competitors.

A November 2014 story in Wired Magazine gives an exciting glimpse into this world. Kevin Kelly writes that once chess computers’ edge over human players became evident in the late ’90s, master player Garry Kasparov pioneered “man-plus-machine matches, in which AI augments human chess players rather than competes against them.” The concept is now called freestyle chess, and it’s “like mixed martial arts fights, where players use whatever combat techniques they want,” according to Kelly. 

“A centaur player will listen to the moves whispered by the AI but will occasionally override them—much the way we use GPS navigation in our cars. In the championship Freestyle Battle in 2014, open to all modes of players, pure chess AI engines won 42 games, but centaurs won 53 games. Today the best chess player alive is a centaur: Intagrand, a team of humans and several different chess programs ...”

It would be surprising if energy industry players and folks in science, medicine, engineering, industrial design and even music and animation are not exploring this. I’ll be checking in with the pros who run Tulsa’s Community supercomputer at new City Hall early next year on prospects for “centaur”-like applications.

5 // Recoding the cops
The routine indignities and violence against people of color by law enforcement embody dysfunction and injustice. A police overhaul is necessary to create the unity America needs in a hyper-competitive world. Following the high-profile deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, policing practices are almost certainly in for a revisiting this year. Tulsans are having some constructive discussions to rethink community engagement with police, neighborhood patrols, police training in nonviolent conflict resolution and more. Reforms in these areas might dramatically improve police relations in Tulsa’s minority communities and across the board.

Tech solutions should be included in any city capital package connected to Green Country policing. Body-born video is a great tool for police transparency. The Tulsa Police Department would also benefit from gunshot detectors—distributed sensors that triangulate the origin of gunshots. This technology speeds up response times and provides a powerful data stream for city officials, police and interested citizens. The New York City Police Department reportedly plans to invest in this technology under Mayor Bill De Blasio. Tulsa would do well to follow suit.

For more from Ray, read his take on an OKC/Tulsa rail line and music + tech.