Wednesday, 24 June 2009

Not as cosmopolitan as one might think

Posted by payton under chicagoland, urban affairs
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A rebuttal to two common conceits about NYC vs. Chicago, in an attempt to clarify.

1. “Chicago is more segregated than New York.”

From CensusScope analysis of 2000 Census data, this is false. The usual measure of segregation is called the dissimilarity index; an index of 100 implies total segregation between two groups. The New York PMSA in 2000 had a black-white dissimilarity index of 84.3 and a Latino-white dissimilarity index of 69.3. Chicago’s comparable indices are 83.6 for black-white and 64.8 for Latino-white.

2. “You only find Midwesterners in Chicago. New York draws from all over the country.”

An admittedly dated (from 1999, using 1990 Census data) analysis by USC professor Dowell Myers [PDF, pp. 934] found that a similar proportion of New York and Chicago region residents* were born within their respective tri-state areas. 57.6% of New Yorkers were born in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut; 60.5% of Chicagoans were born in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin. For all its claims to be a national draw, only 18% of New Yorkers moved from other states/territories, while 24.8% of Chicagoans moved from outside its region (but within the country). By comparison, in the Washington, D.C. region, “long believed to be a region of transient residents who came to town for short tours as students, military officers or federal workers” (as the WaPo wrote in 1991), only 34.5% of residents were born within D.C., Maryland, or Virginia.

This particular complaint is often levied against the Lincoln Park area, with its “Big 10 frat party” feel, although fewer than 1 in 120 Chicago region residents live there. Yet the New York region’s white population is even more provincial than the Chicago region’s: fully 73.4% of New York’s white residents were born within the tri-state area, vs. 71% of the Chicago region’s.

Far more of New York’s population was born abroad (24.5% vs. 14.7%), although Los Angeles easily beats both with 30.1% of its residents being foreign-born.

* Over 25.

 

Wednesday, 24 June 2009

Zoning bonus abused, again

Posted by payton under urban design
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It may come as a surprise to readers outside Chicago that the Sears Tower, still the tallest building in the Americas and longtime tallest building in the world, was built as-of-right. It required no planning approvals, no design review, no zoning change, no Planned Unit Development review. Yes, indeed, Chicago’s old zoning ordinance was so very generous with the bonuses for plazas and upper-floor setbacks that the tower achieves 110 stories and an FAR of about 40, with more floor space than the original Mall of America — all as of right. (Its construction did require that the city vacate an alley.)

Now, Todd J. Behme reports in Crain’s that the owners wish to replace the Wacker Drive plaza with what looks to be a 50-story hotel. Anywhere else, this would be a huge building, but next to the since-renamed Willis Tower’s heft it’s rather puny. Of course, there are already huge hotels down the street and vacant lots across the street, but no! This has to be on *our* property.

And the zoning bonus? The so-windy-it’s-useless public space that was our public payout for allowing an extra two million square feet of offices? Ah, screw it.

 

Wednesday, 27 May 2009

A hundred years later

Posted by payton under urban affairs, urban planning
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[Oh, wow, I've been seriously delinquent about blogging. I have dozens of links for a link dump, but in the past few months my life has gone topsy-turvy in quite a few ways. I apologize. Here was one neglected but substantially complete post that I'd saved as a draft.]

[A follow-on to Twenty Years]

Philip Nobel, writing in Metropolis in March 2007, banishes “all arguments based on ‘authenticity’… to the postmodern echo chamber” based on a comparison between two widely known examples of “fake places” and one of the world’s most-visited “authentic” places:

There’s really nothing wrong with Santana Row. There should be, of course: we’ve all been bred to hate malls, and what could be more hateful than a mall masquerading as a chic, vaguely European town? [...]

It was visiting [Santana Row and Easton Town Center,] those two sprawl-patching hot spots within a few months last year that began to erode my knee-jerk aversion to malls: fake places, captive minds, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah… in San Jose and exurban Ohio, there is scarcely a center to mourn, and the “malliers” should be credited for responding to a human urge that looks as if it will easily survive the decentralizing effects of multiuser gaming and Netflix[:] people like to gather and not just to shop…

Walking around the center of Munich for several days last winter, I found it increasingly untenable to prefer one form of regulated commercial experience to another, to damn the American solution and reflexively embrace the European.

This echoes, of course, the way elite Manhattanites nostalgically whine about the “Suburbanization of New York.” It’s only fitting, of course, that the city which rose as the United States coalesced from regional to a national economy — and which has long economically colonized the rest of the U.S. — should now feel threatened as the tide runs the other way. (Of course, it always has, as [for instance] regional food brands were replaced with national ones; it’s just that retail brands are that much more visible in everyday life.)

New Urbanists are often criticized for creating places which look “realistically urban” but feel antiseptically suburban. This criticism misunderstands the new urbanist intent: the intent is not to create an instantly authentic city, an impossible task since layers of human history and diverse interpretations thereof need to be laid down to create a city. (Honestly, think about it: creating instant authenticity would necessarily require exponentially more frightful social engineering.) What New Urbanists seek to do is to create places that will be able to ride the tides of history, to age well and to adapt to the necessarily shifting sands of urban history. Indeed, quite a few of today’s shining examples of urban authenticity were once themselves Planned Communities of a sort, relics of an earlier era of town planning which, at the time, must have seen more than a little contrived but which have grown into their roles with age.

 

Sunday, 5 April 2009

Shed some daylight

Posted by payton under chicagoland
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When riding north on N. Oakley, between St. Mary’s parking lot and Clemente High School’s playing fields, I always hear the sound of rushing water. Even in entirely dry months, a long-forgotten stream can be heard through a storm drain at the intersection with Potomac. Did this creek ever have a name? Does it flow more or less where it was, or has it been routed through the grid? Where are its headwaters, where does it meet the river?

Such lost streams have been well-documented in, say, London where countless old maps show the terrain as it existed centuries before industrialization wiped it all away. I haven’t spent much time looking (it’d be a great excuse to sit at the Newberry for a day), but it seems that many 19th century maps of pre-subdivision Chicago wanted to show the city as the speculators hawked it (a vast blank slate ready for development) rather than as it actually was.

(On a side note, I did find this 1898 bike map at the Regenstein’s web site. Back then, an “appropriate” road for cycling was a paved one.)

I’m also struck by how the buildings around it have been wiped away by urban renewal. I vaguely remember a presentation from years ago — I don’t remember by whom — which overlaid a map of abandoned properties in a Philadelphia neighborhood with a map of its subterranean stream. Homes located nearest the stream were much more likely to be abandoned, perhaps in part because of costly foundation troubles — but perhaps, also, the old hydrology’s “miasma” is taking revenge.

 

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Postponing the inevitable

Posted by payton under chicagoland
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inevitable Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Cook County has had a 7% annual cap on assessed value increases since 2002. Property tax bills will rise this year, despite falling property values; this graph explains why property taxes will in fact take a while to catch up with market values.

‘A cap, which gives homeowners comfort in a rising market, can, however, create the opposite effect in a down market. In Texas, which sets a 10 percent limit, property values rose by as much as 18 percent per year during the past decade, but assessed valuation could go up by only 10 percent per year. As a consequence, a large gap exists between real market value and taxable value. Because of that gap, assessed value may go up this year even though market value is coming down. Until the two come together — the market value falls to the level of the taxable value — 5 to 10 percent increases in assessments are a real possibility. “That’s going to be another contributory factor in taxpayer frustration,” says [Guy] Griscom, who is the assistant chief appraiser for Harris County. “Legislatures didn’t look at that side of it when they gave property owners the benefit of these caps. Ultimately you have to pay it back. This is not what people want to hear.” ‘ – Penelope Lemov, Governing magazine

(Assumed $100K property in year 2002 [and that assessed value equaled market value, which is probably not the case in Cook County], using 2002-2009 price appreciation trendline reported for zip code 60647 at Zillow.com, then assuming a 30% drop from 2008 peak by 2010.)

 

Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Don’t squander this opportunity. Invest in America’s transportation future.

Posted by payton under ecology, energy, climate, economy, business
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[This is a letter I just sent over to my senators in response to the Inhofe and Bond amendments. Please, especially if you live in California, Missouri, or Oklahoma, contact your senators. This is the moment.]

America has a golden opportunity to build the 21st century infrastructure that we so desperately need — and nowhere more so than in Illinois, the nation’s transportation crossroads. From David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal to The Nation, editorial pages overwhelmingly agree that new infrastructure spending should start America down a more sustainable path, not only jump-starting today’s moribund economy but also reducing energy waste and increasing long-term economic growth.

I was alarmed, then, to hear this morning that recent amendments to the Senate’s economic stimulus legislation will result in America squandering this moment — ant tens of billions in taxpayer dollars — in favor of building vast new roads to nowhere. New amendments advanced by Sen. Inhofe and Sen. Bond would send vast amounts of new cash down the same pathways that got us into our current infrastructure crisis.

Not only would this approach not help fix our woefully inadequate infrastructure, but it would ultimately harm our city, our state, and our nation. It would launch a new round of unsustainable growth — more of the same sprawl and oil dependence that our nation has already wasted trillions of dollars upon. After the countless, painful missed opportunities of the Bush administration, we cannot start a new era by pursuing more (indeed, much more) of the same.

Research shows that investments in mass transit and in repairing existing infrastructure yield greater benefits to the public, and create many more jobs, than building new highways. I urge you to work with your colleagues to ensure that the recovery bill doesn’t become a blank check for new highway construction. Without explicit language prioritizing a fix-it-first approach to infrastructure investment, and by raiding the funds for high-speed rail and the innovative projects we need for the 21st Century, this golden opportunity could go to waste. At this crucial moment, America can’t afford that.

Please work with your colleagues to ensure that new infrastructure dollars first prioritize maintenance and repair, help realize a clean energy future, and create the most job opportunities. Vote against the Bond and Inhofe amendments this week.

 

Sunday, 1 February 2009

A history of “jaywalking”

Posted by payton under car berater, public space
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Here’s a fascinating bit of etymology, showing how auto interests (which ultimately led to the city’s ruin at the hands of their road-hogging rural contraptions) turned city dwellers’ cosmopolitanism against themselves with the term. From Peter D. Norton’s Fighting Traffic (MIT, 2008), pp. 72-79:

A ‘jay’ was a hayseed, out of place in the city; a jaywalker was someone who did not know how to walk in a city. Originally the term applied as much or more to pedestrians who obstructed the path of other pedestrians—by failing, for example, to keep to the right on the sidewalk. As autos grew common on city streets, jaywalkers were more often pedestrians oblivious to the danger of city motor traffic… ‘Jaywalker’ carried the sting of ridicule, and many objected to branding independent-minded pedestrians with the term. In 1915 New York’s police commissioner, Arthur Woods, attempted to use it to describe anyone who crossed the street at mid-block. The New York Times objected, calling the word ‘highly opprobrious’ and ‘a truly shocking name.’ Any attempt to arrest pedestrians would be ’silly and intolerable.’ […]

In 1921 a National Safety Council member from Baltimore confessed to his colleagues that, at least in pedestrian control… ‘You are affecting personal liberty when you keep people from crossing the streets at certain places.’ […] The cleverest anti-jaywalking publicity effort was in Detroit in 1922, where the Packard Motor Car Company exploited the new fashion for monuments to traffic fatalities. Packard built an oversized imitation tombstone that closely resembled the monument to the innocent child victims of accidents in Baltimore. But Packard’s tombstone redirected blame to the victims. It was marked ‘Erected to the Memory of Mr. J. Walker: He Stepped from the Curb Without Looking.’ [...]

A St. Louisan, defending pedestrians’ traditional rights to the street, tried to turn the ‘jaywalking’ label against those who promoted it. ‘We hear the shameful complaint of jay walkers, to console jay drivers,’ he wrote. ‘It is the self-conceited individual who thinks people are cattle and run upon them tooting a horn.’ ‘Make every machine stop and wait,’ he demanded, ‘until the road is clear, and give precedent to people who are walking. The streets belong to the people and not to any one class, and we have an equal right, in fact more right than the automobile.’ Nine months later the Washington Post argued that ‘the jay driver is even a greater menace to the public than the jay walker,’ and in 1925 Washington’s deputy traffic director I. C. Moller endorsed the term… But promoters of the epithet ‘jay driver’ failed. Critics of motorists could call them cold-hearted, tyrannical, or selfish, but a motorcar’s power, modernity, and worldly sophistication made its owner anything but a jay…

In 1920, when the wave of public safety campaigns was just beginning, ‘jaywalker’ was a rare and controversial term. Safety weeks, more than anything else, introduced the word to the millions. Frequent use wore down its sharp edge, and it passed into acceptable usage as a term for lawless pedestrians who would not concede their old rights to the streets, even in the dawning motor age.

What preceded the invention of jaywalking? A 1926 report notes “a Common Law principle which developed centuries ago… This ancient rule is that all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way.” (Miller McClintock for the Chicago Association of Commerce, “Report and Recommendations of the Metropolitan Street Traffic Survey,” p. 133, quoted by Norton on p. 289.)

 

Wednesday, 21 January 2009

Lemony fresh

Posted by payton under arts & media, chicagoland
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I have heard a lot over the years (particularly from one individual) about how Wicker Park-Bucktown should be like a neighborhood as well known for the arts as New Orleans’ French Quarter. While I empathize with the general concept, I’ve been skeptical of how pleasant it would be to actually live in the Quarter, and very much skeptical of the particulars that have been suggested. I think that the physical form of the Quarter — there being so few human-scale places, much less human-scale neighborhoods, in the USA — is a large part of its intrinsic appeal. (I would love to live amidst a skein of 38.5′ streets, but 2.5 FQ streets could easily fit into Ashland or Western.) It also has a very long (over a century older) and uniquely colorful social history that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

So I just got back from my first visit to New Orleans, and guess what? We’re doing something right, although not what this individual thinks. The French Quarter’s streets aren’t just swept and washed, they are deodorized every day by a private contractor, at a cost of $3.36 million a year. (Despite 2009 budget cuts in that sadly struggling city, the “popular” and “Disney-like” service is likely to remain in some form.)

There is also almost no notable public art to be seen on any of the sidewalks or squares, and likewise relatively few architectural monuments: just great background buildings, housing countless businesses both arts-related and otherwise. Oh, and you can stumble across some astonishing jazz.

One other aspect of efficient and effective municipal management where New Orleans (of all places!) seems to be ahead: deployment of the Pothole Killer machine, instead of three-man crews, requires 90% less labor for the same task — one-third the laborers and one-third the time. If faster turnaround leads to smaller potholes, the savings would increase further. It seems to leave a lot of gravel on the road, though.

 

Thursday, 8 January 2009

Two days left to weigh in on WPB plan

Posted by payton under chicagoland
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[Hey! Is this still on? Good.]

If you have a few minutes today or Friday, take some time to vote for your favorite ideas from the innovative Wicker Park/Bucktown master plan. You’ll find out a bit about some of the recommendations, from gallery parties to bike parking — and have a shot at winning a gift certificate.

 

Sunday, 26 October 2008

October link roundup

Posted by payton under ecology, energy, climate, urban affairs, washington, US politics
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Relatively quick link roundup. I’ve been busy admiring the Republican party’s implosion and planning for a month of travel — I’ll be away for four of the next five weeks. If I wait much longer, though, some of these election-related links will be pointless.

  1. Jeffrey Ball in the WSJ notes some counter-intuitive findings from corporate carbon footprinting projects. Note that such analyses only consider the carbon impacts of products, not the whole ecological footprint. Major surprise: transportation is often not the biggest contributor to a product’s carbon footprint:
    - shipping shoes from China vs. making cowhide (or polyester)
    - powder detergent is lighter/easier to ship vs. the process energy of making liquid into powder
    - chilling beer at the store vs. trucking beer cross-country
    In all three cases, it turns out that manufacture (or storage, for beer) is still more carbon-intensive than transportation.
  2. How does “clean coal” work? Eric de Place from Sightline explains, in one word: unicorns!
  3. Compare: earlier this year, California advocates (Environment California) urged merely slowing VMT growth “by roughly half between 2008 and 2030″ — getting existing residents to stop driving more after 2010 and getting new, post-2010 residents to drive 20% less (consistent with how people in TODs live, and thereby assuming that new population growth will be steered to TODs).

    The Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group, on the other hand (the formal state policy advisory board) actually goes much further in its land use/transportation recommendations, aiming for a 15% reduction in existing per-capita VMT — and explicitly adopting the “three-legged stool” metaphor (vehicle efficiency, low-carbon fuels, and less driving) from “Growing Cooler.”

  4. Arlington has proposed a “bike station” for an indoor/outdoor transit plaza site outside the Ballston metro. Shades of the Polish Triangle?
  5. It was bound to happen: the GOP’s post-Joe-the-Plumber hysteria over “redistributive” “socialism” have, well, socialists scratching their heads. Katherine Marsh asks Brian Moore, running for president on the Socialist ticket, about it at TNR, while the Trib’s Rex Huppke (forever “that bald guy Daley made fun of“) went and talked to honest-to-god people from CPUSA, DSA, and Brookings (!). Timothy Noah, in Slate, goes and resurrects, um, Teddy Roosevelt.

    The shocker? Redistribution isn’t particularly “socialist” (as if that were a bad thing), it’s what our current tax code does, and the Obama plan goes no further than to restore Clinton-era marginal tax rates — which still resulted in astonishing economic growth, although arguably growth was even better under the 160%-higher-than-today upper-income tax brackets of the Eisenhower years.

  6. Brian Vickers, a Carolina-born NASCAR star, becomes a car-free urbanite on weekends. Dave Caldwell in the Times: “It’s also near a subway stop. This stock car driver does not keep a car in New York, and he hates the city’s ultra-heavy traffic. He does own a sturdy black bicycle, which he has used to explore Manhattan from tip to tip. ‘This city is so big, with so many neighborhoods,’ he said, ‘and until you get here, you don’t really understand that.’ “
  7. HOPE VI: the play, coming soon.
  8. Via Crain’s, Foreign Policy has an actually useful and competently researched city ranking: the 2008 Global Cities Index.
  9. I was skeptical when I got a call regarding this feature, but Nara Schoenberg’s “Greenest Chicagoan” pick (Ken Dunn) makes sense — and is backed up by actual analysis. Of course, Ken’s greatest contribution to minimizing his ecological footprint isn’t through his personal choices, but in what he does for a living — keeping tons of waste out of landfills through reuse, compost, or recycling.
  10. James Kotecki discovers that he, too, is “Living in Fake America” after a McCain adviser says that NoVa is apparently not “real Virginia.” Sure, American anti-urbanism is as old as Jefferson and Thoreau, but it makes little sense for politicians to insult and alienate the 84% of Americans who live in metro areas. The Philly Daily News takes issue with Palin’s “we believe that the best of America is in these small towns… in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation” speech: “the culture war between small towns and big cities… isn’t a war you can win… [Ben Franklin] also said that we must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. Think about that next time you dis our cities.”
  11. Michael Pollan’s latest Times Magazine slow-food polemic apparently reached its intended audience: presumed President-elect Barack Obama, who already has demonstrated an affinity for the locavore Rick Bayless’ food. (Bayless claims to raise most of his restaurant’s salad greens at his home, a few blocks from mine.) More heartening: Pollan’s critiques address the complex policy interlockings behind the food system (to name just one complex system), and the candidate (smart guy that he is) gets it!
 

Tuesday, 7 October 2008

Link dump

Posted by payton under bicycling biotically, car berater, chicagoland, ecology, energy, climate, economy, business, washington, US politics
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A whole bunch of links, mostly transportation related.

* Is the era of “TINA” market fundamentalism finally over? Let’s hope so. Howard Wolfson in TNR: “Just as President Bush’s failures in Iraq undermined his party’s historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets.” And then there’s this pretty astonishing Newsweek article from reformed neocon Francis Fukuyama: “Like all transformative movements, the Reagan revolution lost its way because for many followers it became an unimpeachable ideology, not a pragmatic response to the excesses of the welfare state… Already there is a growing consensus on the need to re-regulate many parts of the economy… And in many parts of the world, American ideas, advice and even aid will be less welcome than they are now.”

* The Pew Center has a new consumer-targeted site, Make an Impact, which offers useful information — but is curiously housed at Alcoa.com. I don’t see a whole lot of pro-aluminum propaganda, but it’s still an odd PR choice. Something that site links to which I wasn’t aware of: FHWA offers some mediocre transportation-alternatives PSAs at its site, under the banner It All Adds Up To Cleaner Air. Another somewhat curious instance of corporate PR: leading trainset manufacturer Bombardier has a jazzy new subsite proclaiming that the climate is right for trains. All your railfan arguments in one place, and constantly updated.

* A new study of the “virtuous cycle: safety in numbers” [blogged here in 2005] hypothesis has been issued by an Australian university.

* One city that offers safety in numbers is Montreal, where bicycling and style are both so ubiquitous that they’ve melded on the streets. [found in Momentum magazine]

* Eric de Place from Sightline quotes me in his roundup of Comprehensive Car-Free Hiking in the Northwest. (His original post, about a shuttle up to Snohomish Pass, got me thinking about car-free wilderness vacations.) And apparently, sightseeing by bike isn’t just for us dilettantes; it’s also good enough for Olympians in Beijing.

* Two Greg Hinz tidbits: (1) it turns out that a VP of bicycle-component maker SRAM, F. K. Day, is in the same six-figure Obama-fundraising league as Valerie Jarrett. I suspect that has something to do with this June bike-industry fundraiser that he hosted for Bikes Belong Coalition’s board. [Bikes Belong Coalition is a 501c6 that can participate in political activities, although it has an affiliated 501c3 foundation.] (2) Hinz wrote a column calling for “an armistice” between cyclists and drivers. Valiant, but still seems a touch “car-headed,” considering he talked to a major ER’s chairman who said he’s seeing “more than usual” numbers of injured bicyclists — nearly one a day, with most admitted to the hospital. I bet there aren’t nearly that many drivers checking in with bicycle-related injuries. I also bet that most of those crashes were the drivers’ fault; as is the case in bike-car crashes elsewhere.

* Walk Score has published neighborhood rankings for most major U.S. cities. It’s subject to the usual Walk Score caveats, but the cross-city comparisons are pretty fascinating.

* Apparently, I’m not the only one annoyed with how much power gyms hog — the blasting AC, dozens of fans, countless TVs, mountains of laundry, and yes, all those powered aerobics machines. All this fossil fuel burned so that people can replicate movements that (for the most part) people have done outdoors without fossil fuel for centuries (running, cycling, rowing, skiing, lifting heavy objects). A tiny new “green gym” in PDX generates its own electricity from yes, the machines (those wattage calculators actually mean something) and from solar panels. The techno-wizardry aside, it exudes the right “reduce” attitude: no towels, members living within walking distance.

* Civia Cycles (a/k/a Surly/Salsa/QBP) has released Greenlight, an online “league” for commuters who religiously note their bike-computer readouts. Sure, behavioral economics teaches us that the right amount of feedback, peer pressure, and competition can motivate people to change their habits — combined with incentives, of course. (I’ve argued that cycling creates positive externalities and thus should be incented by government. Yet somehow these programs seem a bit clumsy; I’ve never gotten the swing of bicycle computers (and I’ve owned two). Surely, in this day of ubiquitous computing, we can come up with seamless systems — like the Nike+iPod product. Humana’s on-campus bike sharing program (the same one brought to the DNC/RNC as Freewheelin‘) automatically uploads mileage information to a central computer; this can be linked to one’s individual account to measure progress towards fitness goals, but requires lots of fiddly hardware. Even more promising is the PEIR project from UCLA and Nokia; it uses mobiles’ GPS systems (and perhaps additional onboard sensors, like for air pollution) to follow users’ paths — and could extend to accommodate countless additional user inputs, from pollution to scenery, pavement quality, available alternate routes, the works. (Okay, so the privacy factor is a bit eerie.)

* Timothy Noah in Slate makes Brookings’ argument for them: the “authentic small town ‘main street’ ” that Sarah Palin and others fetishize is not where “real Americans” live. 84% of Americans, including the Palin family, live in metropolitan areas, and it’s far past time to get used to that reality. And speaking of metros and politics, interesting to note that The Big Sort’s author Bill Bishop now has a blog at Slate, just in time to provide some segmentation analysis for the election-sprint season. He notes that the #1 people-exporting county to Colorado in recent years has been Los Angeles County; I’d be willing to bet that it’s also the largest exporter to Nevada, another battleground. Northeastern relocatees are definitely a large factor in political shifts in Virginia and North Carolina. Yet these booming, transient communities are still finding their political identities — the tremendous Democratic field operation (I spent half my life there, but I’d never have guessed that Cary, N.C. would ever have a stripmall housing a black Democratic presidential candidate’s field office amid a row of curry shops) has an opportunity to lock in lasting gains.

* New site feature: click on the Dopplr link under Site News to get a rough idea of my travels. This also might help to explain occasional extended absences from the blog.

 

Wednesday, 1 October 2008

Pick your perfect place

Posted by payton under urban affairs
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Travel + Leisure magazine’s America’s Favorite Cities online feature lets you choose your most-desired urban traits from an extensive list of 45 (ranging from “attractive people” to “plenty of vintage markets,” all ranked by 125,000 voters) and generate a list of matching cities. My usual beef with “Ten Best” lists, having grown up in and fled a place which too-regularly leads such lists, is that they rarely account for the vast differences in what people want out of a place.

Even most of the online “find your city ranking” calculators I’ve found — expressly intended to allow people to weight their own factors — still obsess over ways to objectively measure a host of subjective factors. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then what use is counting up performances and venue capacities to rank cities’ music scenes? Such things are better determined subjectively, and without concern for the strictures and vagaries of Census geography.

My five must-have factors — Cafés/coffee bars, Noteworthy neighborhoods, Public parks and access to the outdoors, Public transportation and pedestrian friendliness, Environmental awareness — yielded Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Not far off the mark.

 

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Use less… oil?

Posted by payton under car berater
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Less Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

It’s come to this: an oil company (2nd largest American, 20th largest in the world) wants you to join them and "leave the car at home more."

Okay, this is surreal: Chevron has a a two-page spread version touting how 60% of its head-office employees are "riding bikes, and finding other ways to get to and from work." They even have a bus wrap in DC. Gee, I had no idea that I was doing Big Oil a favor by bicycling..?

(Chevron print ad in 15 Sep Wall Street Journal; obviously an expensive ad buy since it took up the four-page centerfold.)

 

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Want to buy some swamp land?

Posted by payton under chicagoland
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Not to denigrate the proud and sturdy neighborhood of Hegewisch, but this bothers me: a $28,000-per-house TIF subsidy (reported by Alby Gallun for Crain’s) to build nearly 1,000 houses in the Calumet swamps sounds like one of the worst wastes of taxpayer dollars ever. A TIF designed to bring industrial jobs back to a community slammed by de-industrialization is instead literally shoring up the sagging fortunes of some downtown developer. Said developer thinks that houses will sell for an average of $194,000 in an emptied-out neighborhood with foreclosures selling for $55,000, on the site of a trailer park that’s 80%+ vacant despite whole houses available for less than $28,000 — and just two miles from sites where the city spent funds from the same TIF to reclaim entire vacant subdivisions (apparently Everglades-style land speculation scams) for their proper use as wetland habitat.

Thank goodness that the golden age of TIF might just be coming to an end: the Central Loop TIF, “Daley’s favorite honey pot” (Greg Hinz for Crain’s), will indeed ride off into the sunset as planned this December. It’s not that TIF is a bad idea, but the city has short-sightedly used it to pay for individual development projects (for which many sources of private capital exist) and not for long-term, value-adding investments in neighborhood infrastructure (which requires public commitment).

 

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

In (resort) town without my car

Posted by payton under transit, urban design
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A good chunk of my vacation was spent in Jasper and Banff National Parks, the jewels of Canada’s Rocky Mountains. It was an interesting trip, partly because it was the first family vacation in a while that didn’t involve any cars — and in a very rural location, to boot. There were certainly troubles, but it turns out that, like Los Angeles (a streetcar metropolis which no longer has streetcars), the entire infrastructure for mass tourism in Banff was set up by and around the railroad. Especially in and around Banff, the Canadian Pacific built an extensive network of railroads, trolleys, hotels, resorts, towns — even a vast network of hiking trails leading uphill to refreshing teahouses. The rails now just carry Chinese container-loads, the trolley lines are now bike-and-bridle trails, and the roads are now crammed with lookalike rental RVs, but the spirit of William Cornelius van Horne’s railroad settlement hangs over the place just the same as Henry Huntington’s spirit permeates Santa Monica.

Our society will need to re-learn these techniques of place-making, not only to respond to a post-car future but also to a growing population that doesn’t want to drive while on vacation — or at least needs an antidote to the mind-numbing stress of the suburban daily grind. The century-old remnants of railroad tourism around Banff, though, are not unusual: many of North America’s resort towns were carved out of the scenery by (not just around!) railroads looking to drum up passengers; CPR’s president was not alone in declaring, “if I can’t export the scenery, I’ll import the tourists.” Many resort towns in the northeast retain their compact, railroad-era fabric: Kennebunkport, Wildwood, Key West, Santa Fe, and Santa Barbara, to name a few. Countless other American resorts grew up entirely in the sprawl era, as well — Daytona, Gatlinburg, Hilton Head Island, Palm Springs, Scottsdale, Branson — and higher gas prices have socked many of them, with Branson attractions (for example) reporting 10% declines.

Ski resort towns are the big exception to the postwar era’s resort sprawl, but possibly only due to basic practicality: the same challenging terrain that skiiers demand makes servicing sprawling development (almost) prohibitively expensive. Similarly, a lot of yesteryear’s resort towns were built on environmentally sensitive lands, and their ability to sprawl has been limited by environmental regulations or land protection. However, the ski towns just might offer us a way out of the mess. I know of at least one new consulting firm started by people who cut their teeth building (immensely profitable) ski towns — and have now moved on to the bigger challenge of building real towns in the suburbs.

Some early initiatives to promote wide-scale car-free travel have appeared in progressive (and scenic) jurisdictions. Quebec recently debuted, to much fanfare, a province-wide Route Verte network of scenic bike routes — complete with a network of certified-bike-friendly B&Bs along the way. Switzerland has gone even farther, incorporating walking and boating routes into a new national route network.

[Adapted from a comment left at TNAC Daily, title is a play on the Car-Free Day {yesterday!} slogan, In Town Without My Car]

 

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Even less

Posted by payton under ecology, energy, climate, urban affairs, washington, US politics
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Even less Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Hey there! Long time no blog. Well, I was away for about a month and such.

The U.S. government is about to spend $1,000,000,000,000 or so buying up "toxic sludge," much of which finds its physical form (in however convoluted a manner) as now-worthless suburban sprawl. What if the nation had, ten years ago, decided that we spend a trillion dollars along these principles instead? Would we be better off today? Now, just how efficient are markets at optimally allocating capital again?

(This poster is on the side of the Denver Dry Goods building, an early rehab completed by Jonathan Rose Companies.)

 

Monday, 8 September 2008

Globe

Posted by payton under chicagoland, washington, US politics
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Among the nice things about vacationing in Canada is seeing the Globe & Mail. Two fragments from Friday’s (5 September) issue:

Marcus Gee: “For years, the LDP [Japan's Liberal Democratic Party] has been less a political party than a machine for distributing patronage, rewarding supporters with subsidies, contracts, and other pork.” And how does this differ from the RDO?

John Ibbitson writes of the US election: “Karl Rove… got his former boss, President George W. Bush, re-elected in 2004 by persuading enough Americans that their nation was divided into two camps: Decent folks with conservative values and plenty of common sense; and dangerous, urban liberals who would impose Big Brother at home and expose the country to danger from abroad.” The choice in this election could not be clearer for America’s cities.

 

Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Protected: draft transportation doc

Posted by payton under chicagoland
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Saturday, 16 August 2008

Back to school

Posted by payton under bicycling biotically, chicagoland
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This somehow passed me by (although CBF did report on it): Saint Xavier University, on the southwest side, will launch a campus bike sharing scheme this fall.

“Over the summer, the University will install the SXU Green Bike Program, providing 65 European pedal bikes that can be automatically checked out 24 hours a day, seven days a week with a Cougar card and returned to any of several computerized docking stations around campus. The first 15 minutes between docking stations will be free, and patrons can use cell phone technology to more easily arrange for a bike.”

I’ll see how it works on an upcoming visit to London, where “OYBikes” are available throughout the west end. The procedure sounds a bit fiddly — check online for available bikes (stands only house three), push some buttons, call in, enter two randomly generated codes, tug on the lock — but the price is right (£10 initial deposit, first half-hour free, £8/day). One interesting bit: they’re shaft-driven (and thus chainless).

OYBike also sites bikes at many train stations run by French utilities group Veolia, which in turn has introduced its own sharing scheme.

Edit 1 October: the Sears Tower has started a free bike share scheme, with tenants reserving time online for three bikes — or two shared I-Go cars.

Edit 20 October: there are 75 campus bike-sharing/bike-lending programs nationally, according to the AASHE (protected link; Google cache here), but St. Xavier’s is the first such “smart” scheme. Most others rely on cheap student labor with manned check-out desks, which seriously impede spur-of-the-moment and short-trip use but which might be appropriate for occasional weekend use.)

 

Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Modest punishments

Posted by payton under public space
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Since the citizenry (as exhibited, for example, in blog comments following the incident at Seattle’s Critical Mass in July) is crying out for a vigilante response to the menace of bicyclists blocking traffic, I hear that state legislators have passed a bill declaring “inhibiting the free flow of traffic” to be a capital offense — punishable by cruel and unusual forms of the death penalty (like, for instance, having one’s bones crushed by a speeding car and then left to bleed to death in the middle of the road). Let’s see what kind of “appropriate” punishments have already been meted out just in the first few minutes after the new law’s passage:

double parking
Double parkers, like the violator being dealt with here, no longer receive “the Denver boot.” Instead, the “Spanish boot” was applied: “high boots made of spongy leather had been placed on the culprit’s feet, he was tied on to a table near a large fire, and a quantity of boiling water was poured on the boots, which penetrated the leather, ate away the flesh, and even dissolved the bones of the victim.”
(photo: toner/Flickr)

Tow Away Zone
For the crime of standing in a No Parking/No Standing/Tow Zone, the delivery truck driver was “estrapaded”: “they raised the victim, with two hundred and fifty pounds attached to his feet, to the ceiling by means of a capstan; he was then allowed to fall several times successively by jerks to the level of the ground, by which means his arms and legs were completely dislocated.”
(photo: Thingo/Flickr)

red light runner
The driver of this car, which ran a red light and caused a crash which tied up traffic, was executed by the wheel: “a rope was attached to each of the limbs of the criminal, one being bound round each leg from the foot to the knee, and round each arm from the wrist to the elbow. These ropes were then fastened to four bars, to each of which a strong horse was harnessed… These horses were first made to give short jerks; and when the agony had elicited heart-rending cries from the unfortunate man, who felt his limbs being dislocated without being broken, the four horses were all suddenly urged on with the whip in different directions…” You can guess how that ended.
(photo: SFPD via SF Weekly/The Snitch)

blocking the crosswalk
This driver drove past the stop line and into a crosswalk, thereby blocking the free flow of pedestrians through the intersection. The driver will be dragged “from the prison to the place of execution upon an hurdle or sled, where they are hanged till they be half dead, and then taken down, and quartered alive; after that, their members and bowels are cut from their bodies, and thrown into a fire, provided near hand and within their own sight, even for the same purpose.”
(photo: Brother Grimm/Flickr)

(Gory medieval execution details excerpted from The Middle Ages Website)

 

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