Smith Level Road has loads of potential for biking and pedestrians because is underneath Highway 54! The problem is that Smith Level Road can be up to 8 lanes across!
Technically lane one (1) and lane eight (8) in the picture above are bus drop offs, but I often see cars using them to merge, and pedestrians still have to cross them just like any other lane. As stated in the picture, a Boeing 737 can literally fit between the two curbs.
This type of road is quite common in the triangle region, and its awful for pedestrians to cross, and currently has no bike lanes (not even unprotected ones). The more I bike or walk, the more I really hate turn lanes, especially right turn lanes. This particular road is even more annoying because 200 feet behind this picture, Smith Level Road has only two lanes. The road also shrinks back to two lanes right past the overpass seen in the picture. I will try to draw this out:
This means that the additional lanes of traffic really are not doing anything. The car throughput is exactly the same. There is also traffic circles both south and north of highway 54 meaning that it would be prohibitively expensive for Smith Level Road to ever be expanded to four lanes. Even without the traffic circles, I would wager that it will never happen because it would require demolishing many houses.
You will also notice there is only sidewalk on one side of the road. Not pictured is the elementary school in the bottom right corner of this picture. Early in the morning you will see families try to cross this intersection to walk to school. It is insanely dangerous and I can only imagine that some of these families only have one car that is already in use by another parent, or both parents are working and kids are walking themselves to school. As a parent, I would not let my family walk to school given the current conditions of this road.
My proposal is that we perform something called a road diet. A road diet is a technique where the number of travel lanes and/or width of the road is reduced in order to achieve systemic improvements. Durham has already performed road diets on many roads, so there is a track record of success already in the triangle. You can actually see this on Durham-Chapel Hill Blvd near Foster’s Market where they reduced four lanes to two car lanes with bike lanes. I commute to Durham on this road and have noticed no additional delay at all.
I can’t imagine a better place for a road diet that Smith Level road. There is already bike lanes on the two-lane section of road south of Highway 54 connecting to the numerous neighborhoods, Culbreth Middle school and Carrboro High school. On the north side, when they complete the South Green shopping complex, there is already an existing separated bike path (named the Robertson Bike Path) that connects through neighborhoods up to Franklin Street via the Libba Cotten Bikeway. There is also an effort to complete the Morgan Creek Trail all the way to Smith Level Road. This means if we created a road-diet via my proposal, someone living in Southern Village could bike in protected bike lanes all the way to downtown Carrboro! Finally a holistic bike path from huge dense neighborhoods to downtown.
I am not a city planner, architect or civil engineer, but I pulled out Photoshop to try and envision what this could look like. I added trees as well to my protected bike lanes because I think shade will encourage both bikers and pedestrians. Imagine something like tree-lined protected bike lanes.
I am not 100% sure about how to encourage my city leaders to achieve my fantasy of a more bikeable Carrboro & Chapel Hill, but I figured I would at least write down my thoughts so others could read and comment. I hope others are as interested in this as I am. Thank you for reading.
]]>After lunch we decided to explore a path behind Babalu’s to see if they had connected the Eastgate shopping center to Berkshire Chapel Hill Apartments near Whole Foods. I have been pretty impressed with a lot of the new developments and how Chapel Hill has been prioritizing walkability and pedestrians. There was a connecting path, including a flight of outdoor stairs, that came up right behind Red Pepper.
This makes Eastgate pretty walkable to anything on S. Elliot Rd. We kept venturing behind Eastgate to see if there was any new development on the Fordham Blvd Apartments (which are adjacent to 15-501) and how it could possibly connect and create a walkable path to Eastgate. I remember reading something about a greenway trail possibly going in along Booker creek. As we were walking behind Stein Mart we noticed that Booker creek literally seemed to go underneath Eastgate…
Yup… literally underneath.
I know this shopping center has a history of flooding, but I never realized that they built the entire shopping center on top of the creek. It is literally the most ridiculous thing I have seen in the triangle (building wise?). The culvert (or whatever you would call this monster) is over 30 feet wide or so, and you can’t see the other side. It is literally so long and dark you can’t see the light, or where it comes out. It is deep enough right there I might come back with a kayak and see if I can float the whole way through.
You can notice the culvert from Google maps! That long skinny concrete strip right down the middle.
We walked back out front to figure out where the creek came out, and the parking lot suddenly made sense. There is a long skinny aisle that is a different color from the rest of the parking lot. This section of parking lot is concrete versus asphalt and I just never thought about it before. The culvert stretches the entirety of the parking lot and literally goes underneath Starbucks. Someone thought it was a good idea to build a Starbucks on top of Booker creek.
The Starbucks has been so badly flooded that it is still not open after 4 months since the storm happened. It doesn’t even look close to opening.
I highly recommend reading this article from the Durham Herald Sun that covers the most recent flooding. I really like the idea of daylighting this creek and creating more green space. This parking lot has got to go.
]]>I am not saying that owning networking hardware is a bad idea, its just not exactly scalable, and doesn’t work for everyone’s situation. Imagine the network engineer living in New York City in the super small apartment. I was lucky enough while studying for my CCIE to have access to a lab at work where I had all the equipment I needed to play with, and didn’t have to deal with the heat, noise and power bills. I was a Cisco employee at the time so I also had access to virtual Cisco images.
Luckily networking vendors (including Cisco) are finally realizing that these virtual images are super important for education and control plane testing. While we can’t replace line-rate hardware with virtual images, we can test configurations, bring up routing protocols, test connectivity. Of course testing Ansible Networking Playbooks is perfect for a virtual environment. The worst thing about automation is I can automate a mistake across hundreds of nodes at the same time.
Arista has a common NOS (network operating system) amongst their hardware called EOS (Extensible Operating System). If you create a free account on their website, they will allow you to download a virtual EOS (vEOS) for free. The only limitation with this free VM is the amount of ports (I think by default it is limited to 4). For the testing I was doing it worked great on my laptop.
Cisco Systems has three main platforms that I use: Cisco IOS, Cisco NX-OS and Cisco IOS-XR. All three of them have virtual images, but they require entitlement on your account. From what I have seen, if you own the physical gear you automatically can get the virtual image. Another option is using Cisco VIRL.
I wrote a Knowledge Base article for Red Hat Ansible Engine: Getting Cisco NX-OSv up and running. This is a super simple guide on just getting Cisco NX-OSv up and running on your laptop.
For Cumulus Linux they have a free version called Cumulus VX (for virtual experience). Unlike Arista, there is no port limitation, so you can add as many ports as you want (depending on the underlying platform, e.g. VirtualBox vs KVM).
Another cool tool that Cumulus Networks provides for free is called topology converter. This python script creates a virtual topology (using Vagrant) from a network map (in the form of dot notation). This allows users of Cumulus Linux (or really any Linux operating system) to build complex topologies. While I was working at Cumulus Networks I could run well over a hundred Cumulus VX instances on a single server.
Juniper Networks has a few different virtual images floating around, including vSRX and vQFX. They have published a Vagrant image that is not behind a login wall or paywall: vqfx10k-vagrant
VyOS is an open source fork of Vyatta routing software. While VyOS might be one of the networking platforms on here you have never heard of, many people use VyOS in production as a vRouter. Their use-case is often peering to a service provider where they already have limited bandwidth out of the data center, so not having 100Gbps line-rate is not a problem. Check out their website: vyos.io
While I am sure many other networking platforms are out there (e.g. F5 Networks) these are some of the ones I play with the most. I am super excited about all the virtual networks people are creating, because it means that network operators can test network changes on a virtual topology versus messing up their production network. I am sure we will see people implement really interesting CI/CD pipelines in the future, where they can automate changes into their virtual development environment before touching any production equipment.
]]>For network professionals, this means that existing networking Ansible Playbooks can utilize existing Infoblox infrastructure for IP Address Management (IPAM), using Infoblox for tracking inventory and more.
]]>A few highlighted features include:
connection: network_cli, I often find myself troubleshooting playbooks running pre-Ansible 2.5. The message you can get can be super frustrating:
fatal: [eos]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "failed": true, "msg": "unable to open shell. Please see: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/network_debug_troubleshooting.html#unable-to-open-shell"}
But rest assured, the problem is probably easy to fix!
If you use the verbose mode with -vvvv on a networking module you can see all the provider methods being used. This will give you the knobs you need to adjust settings on the provider:
"provider": {
"auth_pass": null,
"authorize": true,
"host": null,
"password": "VALUE_SPECIFIED_IN_NO_LOG_PARAMETER",
"port": null,
"ssh_keyfile": null,
"timeout": null,
"transport": "cli",
"use_ssl": null,
"username": "admin",
"validate_certs": null
}
Here are the two most common problems I see:
Good luck and happy automating! Also please go join my repo at github.com/network-automation.
]]>apt-get install ansible, you get the NCLU module pre-installed! This blog post will focus on using the NCLU module to backup and restore configs on Cumulus Linux.
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