west north

Take it from Dear Leader: “Our energy policy has not been very wise… we, frankly, have got policies that make it harder for us to become less dependent on oil.”

Well, five years ago (even six years ago), when the Dear Leader was obsessing with illegally invading a sovereign nation that posed no threat to our security, some of us were arguing that a better strategy, on many levels, would be an energy policy that released the United States’ dependence on oil. But no. Now the Dear Leader looks back and sees that “our energy policy has not been very wise.”

Higher oil prices will cost the U.S. economy approximately $200 billion in 2008. The war in Iraq has had direct costs approaching $1 trillion over five years, and ultimately may cost upwards of $3 trillion (including indirect costs, primarily borne by Iraqis). Now, suppose that an energy tax — equal, or nearly equal, to today’s energy prices, which appear to be at the limit in terms of the economy’s ability to readily handle — had been imposed in 2002, phased out if oil prices soared. Easily $1 trillion could have been raised over five years to support high-ROI investments in energy efficiency and renewables — and trillions of dollars could have been saved on an unnecessary endless war.

The bids for privatizing about 36,000 parking meters citywide were due yesterday. I talked with someone who feels that a private operator might be more flexible and open to working with neighborhoods, but personally I suspect that a private operator will be even more willing to jack rates and run with the money. There was a brief moment when neighborhoods realized the upside potential of underpriced street parking, but now the city’s caught on and wants to keep the money for itself (well, split with its private-sector partner).

Public assets, like streets and even street parking, should be managed for the public good, not solely for private financial gain.

18 March: Lorene Yue in Crain’s reports that ten bidders responded, ranging from locals like CPS Parking to the usual Cintra and Macquarie (on separate teams). Chicago CFO Paul Volpe called it a “strong response.”

The ordinance whose introduction by Daley gave rise to “Hello, Criminal” made its way through the legislative apparatus. The Tribune apparently thought it wise to celebrate by splashing my photo on the front page of its website yesterday. John Greenfield has the full story of the ordinance’s passage in Gapers Block. How this became controversial is beyond me; all that the ordinance does is codify penalties for rudely, dangerously, stupidly, and (already) illegally cutting people off in traffic. Anyone who speaks in favor of that deserves to be, well, cut off.

What motorists probably don’t know (but which astute readers here do) is that several detailed multiyear crash studies (Portland, NYC) have found that most bicycle crashes are caused by drivers breaking the law — not cyclists. The entire point of traffic regulations, historically, has been to defend against the deadly and reckless use of automobiles, and particularly against the shocking brutality of hit-and-runs. Even today, three generations after the first requirements that drivers and cars carry licenses, four Americans die every day in hit-and-run crashes.

Perry Duis’ Encyclopedia of Chicago article on “Street Life” notes that for the first half of their history, the parade of varied workaday activities — few of them related to speedy transportation — on Chicago’s streets even proved a tourist attraction:

In 1900, Scottish author William Archer proclaimed that “New York for a moment does not compare with Chicago in the roar and bustle and bewilderment of its street life.” Similarly, many of Chicago’s greatest writers—especially those of rural origin—wove their fascination with the energy and variety of the public spaces, especially downtown, into their works.

It all ends sadly.

[T]he automobile age… dramatically changed the relationship between Chicagoans and their streets. The auto not only benefited from the growing disdain for the street by providing the kind of isolation from street life that had once been enjoyed by only the wealthy… Drivers also demanded speed and the elimination of peddlers, plodding wagons, playing children, or any other street use that interfered with getting from here to there. By the 1920s the growing volume of fast-paced traffic produced intersection hazards that encouraged the introduction of mechanical traffic signals… The idea of the street as a place for getting from here to there was about to triumph… During the 1950s the press began to note a loss of neighborhood social life that had traditionally grown out of public places. The front porch or stoop, which had fostered neighboring on warm evenings, had begun to give way to air conditioning and television.

A bunch of bike/transportation related briefs.

* Bike sharing is moving forward, according to news items posted to the Bike Sharing Blog. Fran Spielman reports in the Sun-Times that JCDecaux has offered to trade ad panels for 1,000 downtown bikes here. (Any chance they’d offer a similar deal to neighborhoods?) Back East, Clear Channel still intends to be first in the USA by placing bike stations in DC this month [via DC Business Journal], with Arlington and Bethesda studying proposals for launch later this year.

* Bill Fulton in CP&DR notes that California officials, when pressed at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference on how they plan on cutting transportation-related carbon emissions (as part of their broader, likely unattainable CO2 goals), really didn’t know yet. Transportation claims an outsized share of California’s CO2 emissions, as is typical of the West Coast.

* A bit further north, British Columbia’s government has advanced a budget that includes a carbon tax of surprising magnitude. Marc Lee from the Progressive Economics Forum notes: “The government chose to stick to a narrow definition of revenue neutrality, with all carbon tax revenues recycled through low-income tax credits and tax cuts… a low-income carbon tax credit that will piggyback on the GST credit. The credit is worth $100 for adults and $30 for children with a phase-out period.”

(GST credit — hear that? Sales tax rate in Vancouver = 12%, includes free health care, spotless trains, and a $300 annual credit. Sales tax rate in Chicago = 10.25%, includes, well, what?)

* Greg Hinz in Crain’s notes that CMAP, fresh off its reorganization, intends for its 2040 plan to actually include real capital planning, not just the “grab bag” of projects that typified CATS capital plans in the past. (”Every agency submitted their plans to us, and we stapled them together.”) Hinz: “Of particular importance is how Mr. Blankenhorn says the new group will approach giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to requests for billions of dollars in federal aid for [infrastructure]… Mr. Blankenhorn says the region actually will use metrics — yardsticks to value each proposed project against an absolute standard — to allow the region to set its own priorities.” Of course, whether there will be capital funding to make such plans around hinges on the state’s willingness to back such an effort — now, we have the odd spectacle of suburban Republicans blasting the governor (and Daley joining in separately, on behalf of CTA, and apparently suggesting a bunch of pie-in-the-sky customer-facing ideas) for severely underfunding transit capital (albeit their pet appears to be Metra’s STAR Line).

* Not everyone is quite as blind to transportation finance woes as Springfield. I’ll try to follow the upcoming federal reauthorization fight as best I can; the first shot across the bow was recently issued by the Steve Breese’s greenway maps include a GIS viewer to see trail corridors that cross jurisdictions (like the Valley Line) and their progress to date.

* A recent Jon Hilkevitch column gives this astonishing example of car dependency:

in Aurora, where city building inspector Allen LaFan says he can stand at the bus stop near his house and watch his child get on and off the school bus, because the entire trip amounts to crossing a busy intersection that is not pedestrian-friendly.

“I can wave to the school,” LaFan said.

The situation represents an unending cycle. More children are being transported to school on buses or in private cars because the streets are not safe. But that leads to more vehicles and more traffic, increasing the potential danger to all pedestrians.

* Streetsblog gives a cite for the “the corn that could feed an SUV for a week could feed a human for a year” tidbit recently published in an Economist survey of food prices: Lester Brown from EPI.

* Civia Cycles, the new upper-end commuter bike brand from QBP (TPTB behind Surly) strives to make the morning commute easier with clothing recommendations, matched to your local weather forecast. Every winter, I think that I’ll scribble down notes on this topic, but never do — and, as a result, end up having to guess again each fall what I will need to wear. At first glance, this guy’s internal thermometer appears to be 10 degrees cooler than mine; I guess I overheat easily. It’s also all “bikey” clothing, unleavened by “real” clothes.

* And, okay, not transportation related, but Vince Michael notes the irony of redeveloping [Alby Gallun in Crain's covering the unveiling of the proposal] that paragon of “towers in the park” urban renewal, Lake Meadows. Now that the railyards and industrial lofts and public housing projects are gone, the only big privately held parcels left — and with deteriorating physical plants to boot — are the private housing projects. I’ll write more later on historic preservation and urban renewal.

A disturbing junk-science meme circulating out there on the internets — apparently propagated by misguided animal-rights campaigners who are trying to hitch a ride on the climate train — makes the specious (yet how alluringly contrarian!) claim that driving is somehow ecologically superior to omnivore walking. This claim ignores all kinds of inputs, some of which are deconstructed by Clark Williams-Derry and others by the commenters. (In particular, the calculation focuses on the “upstream” impact of producing food, but not of extracting oil and refining it into gasoline; ignores the substantial ecological costs of manufacturing cars; and appears to assume that cars are robots that drive around dead [or at least non-respirating, non-calorie consuming] people [zombies?], rather than living, breathing, likely meat-eating people.)

My first reaction, upon first seeing this claim last October, was thus: ” ‘We need to get rid of these “or” arguments, that we can either do this or do that. “Or” has got to become “and” because we need to do everything.’ [Lawrence Frank] I really wish that… animal-rights groups wouldn’t use this either/or angle. If they really cared about global warming [and are not just using it as convenient political cover for other agendas], they’d understand that our society needs very broad, systemic changes to address this monstrous challenge, and that mouthing little platitudes that further confuse the public does NOT help.” Yet another case of blindered, single-issue people who see a single tree, not an entire forest.

Of course, that warning was not heeded. Such a seductively specious claim will inevitably find its way into the lying, scorched-earth right-wing echo chamber (what Mother Jones helpfully terms “the cold earth society“), which will stretch and simplify what was already a tenuous claim, then shout it from the rooftops until it drowns out any reasoned debate. And guess what? It’s happening. No less a light than John Tierney, the original “Skeptical Environmentalist” (whose “exposé” on landfilled recyclables still gets spat out at me on occasion, a good twenty years later) brought it into his blog — ahem, Science Lab. He even issued some sort of reader challenge: can someone else pull numbers out of their ass to claim that a car taxi is superior to a bicycle taxi? Reader Julian Lamb responds:

If selected as the winner, instead of rewarding me with a book, I’d prefer you push me from my home to my office (8 miles and over the Brooklyn Bridge) in a TAXI cab without assistance from the engine. That ought to cure you of any skepticism. If you make it over the bridge I’ll even buy you breakfast.

Regardless of how efficient a car’s engine might be, it still has to move a huge vessel in addition to its payload — as evidenced by the ethanol claim below. And even the original, highly suspect “calculations” that Tierney references regard walking and driving alone — yet bicycling is far more efficient than walking, and being hauled around in a cab (in city traffic, no less!) is less efficient than even driving alone (since cabs’ time spent cruising for fares pulls their occupancy rates down below 1).

Last month, we heard Tom Lane, a Nissan executive, publicly lamenting that “people are losing interest in automobiles.” He ascribes the “ennui” about cars that surrounds him in Japan to irrevocable social factors: an aging society, the escalating cost of car ownership, newer and ever more pocketable gizmos. From a WSJ article by John Murphy:

Nissan designers interviewed 16-to-20-year-olds four years ago in Japan, the U.S., Europe and China to grasp how cars fit into their lives. They were surprised to find that many youths world-wide felt cars were unnecessary and even uncool because they pollute and cause congestion, Mr. Bancon says. The feeling was particularly strong in Tokyo, where computers and Internet access are widely available and where mass transit is inexpensive and reliable — making the car makers’ predicament worse here than in many other parts of the world.

A poll for Nihon Keizai Shimbun found only 25% of men in their 20s wanting cars, down from 48% in 2000 — and it shows in sales, which have slumped 30% since 1990, and actually began falling faster as Japan’s economy began growing again in recent years.

It appears that Lane could be on to something even bigger. I vaguely remember an L.A. Times article long ago about teens delaying their licenses, with a surprising number of California teens simply forgoing licenses, but Mary Chapman and Micheline Maynard report on the national trend in the Times:

In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration. Reasons vary, including tighter state laws governing when teenagers can drive, higher insurance costs and a shift… to expensive private driving academies… experts also add parents who are willing to chauffeur their children to activities, and pastimes like surfing the Web that keep them indoors and glued to computers…

“Oh, I guess I just haven’t done it yet, you know?” said Jaclyn [Frederick, 17], a senior at Ferndale High School, in Ferndale, Mich.

Hmm, eleven years later, I still just haven’t gotten around to it. And some parents evidently agree with the trend of further tightening licensing requirements for safety’s sake:

“This [delaying her daughter's full license] is in hope of instilling an element of fear,” [Teresa Sheffer, a pediatric nurse in Bethlehem, Ga.] said. “Cars are lethal weapons, and I want to make sure she has the experience she needs, and knows what can happen when you don’t pay attention.”

A Trib blog post (by Gary Washburn) about Da Mayor’s proposal to increase fines for drivers who break the law and endanger cyclists brought out the usual blame-the-cyclist crowd in the comments. I couldn’t resist snarking.

Hello, sanctimoniously angelic, devoutly law-abiding drivers! Ever gone 31 MPH on Ashland, 46 MPH on LSD, or 21 MPH in a school zone?* Criminal! Ever crept one inch past the stop line — much less into the crosswalk — while waiting at a stop? Criminal! Ever crept one inch into the sidewalk while waiting for a break in traffic as you exited an alley or driveway? Criminal! Ever made a left turn after that yellow light changed? Criminal! Ever made a right turn on red (even from an off-ramp) without first watching that speedometer hit zero or letting *all* pedestrians pass? Criminal! Ever double parked for two seconds, for instance at a valet stand? Criminal! Ever pulled into a bus stop to let someone out? Criminal! Ever turned right in front of a bus? Criminal! Ever honked a horn while stopped? Criminal! Ever driven right over a crosswalk without even looking to see if a pedestrian was waiting, much less stopping for same — even at the countless crosswalks that aren’t at stop signs or lights? Criminal!

These are just the traffic law violations that I see every time I walk two blocks to the “L.” Many of these crimes endanger cyclist or pedestrian lives. Your car is a lethal weapon; cars kill more Americans than guns do. That’s why we license drivers — but not bicycles, which kill fewer Americans each year than beds do. Yes, beds.

Oh yeah, and the cost of roads? Wear & tear on a road is proportional to the fourth power of a vehicle’s weight. Since an SUV pays $120 a year for a city sticker, that means that a fair price for my city sticker would be… $0.00005. Yup, one penny every 200 years. After 1,600 years, my payments would be worth the paper they’re printed on!

Yours truly,
A bicyclist who obeys most of the rules, and certainly all the rules necessary to ensure everyone’s safety.

* A 2005 study found that 80% of drivers on Chicago’s major streets speed in school zones!

Obviously, as someone who looks at sleeping cats with unabiding envy, my favorite bit is about beds. Here’s the truth about the vicious, deadly, hungry monster that lurks beneath you every single night! In 2004, 843 “pedalcyclists” were killed in the USA — most of them, we can surmise, were actually killed by cars, but a bicycle was still involved. That same year, 774 Americans were killed in falls “involving bed, chair, other furniture” and 596 from “accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed.” Attributing even 32% of the falls to beds (those instruments of terror are, after all, listed ahead of those wretched chairs) results in more deaths from beds than bikes.

[A prior post about traffic laws' ultimate origin, and why bicycles can follow the intent but violate the letter of the law.]

All this brouhaha, of course, relates to car drivers’ feeling that the world revolves around them, and that bicycles are toys and not vehicles — a notion that Alan Durning refers to as “car-head.” He gives a nice example of a car parked in a bike lane, but I can go one better: Mark Counselman’s wife opened her car door one day, only to have it blown away by a passing dump truck. Now, no one would argue who should pay for that smashed door. On the other hand, I once hit a car door and wrecked a fork; the driver first asserted that damage was my fault.

Durning writes:

[A]t some level, we do not consider bicycles real vehicles, and we do not consider bicycle lanes real roads. How could we, when we’ve been assimilated to the Car-head? [W]e don’t enforce traffic laws in ways that hold drivers accountable for the risks they impose on cyclists and pedestrians…

The presumption… seems to be that public roads are for cars, not bikers or pedestrians. You can test this yourself… by stepping up to any street corner… By law, every street corner has a cross walk (unless it’s specifically marked otherwise). The cross walk is there whether it’s painted on the asphalt or not. And any pedestrian standing in or at the entry to such a crosswalk has the first right to proceed (unless the intersection is regulated by a traffic light, in which case pedestrians must wait for the signal). As a pedestrian, all you should have to do to cross any street in Cascadia is go to the corner and stand at the curb. To a driver, the sight of you there should be, legally, the same as a red light. Drivers should halt immediately and wait until you’re on the opposite curb. If they don’t, any police officer who witnesses the act should write them a fine.

Instead, stopping for pedestrians is considered courteous, polite—not obligatory, not something to do or face punishment. Consequently, to cross many Cascadian streets is to run a gauntlet, and tickets for not stopping at crosswalks are rare… The lack of crosswalk enforcement—and the absence of outrage over that lack — is a manifestation of the same condition that prevents outrage over parking in bike lanes.

Andrew Martin in the New York Times notices a new study that adds a few wrinkles to the locavores’ “local is better” equation with food. As with any simple equation that attempts to summarize an endlessly complex system, it has nuances.

Gail Feenstra, a food system analyst at the [University of California at] Davis campus, says her group hopes the research will help consumers decide if buying local is better than buying organic food that has traveled hundreds of miles. “Maybe you can buy organic within a certain geographic range, and outside of that the trade-offs won’t work anymore,” Ms. Feenstra said.

At some point, the ethical maze can make you dizzy. But there was one line of inquiry from the California researchers that hit particularly close to home: the carbon impact of shoppers themselves.

Some people walk or take the subway to buy their groceries and then compost what they don’t use. But, let’s face it, most of us drive and toss the leftovers into the garbage disposal or the garbage can. In doing so, we may be contributing nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gases associated with our food, research has shown.

Here’s why: Instead of going to the grocery store once a week and stocking up, many consumers are driving for groceries several times a week, if not every day, to all sorts of different stores.

(BTW, UC Davis makes olive oil from street trees on campus. How cool is that?)

Okay, it’s official. If God (well, the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People) says so, it must be true. A new statement, “Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road,” issued by the Vatican on 19 June:

V. The Christian virtue of drivers and their “Ten Commandments”

49. Back in 1956 Pope Pius XII exhorted motorists: “Do not forget to respect other road users, be courteous and fair with other drivers and pedestrians and show them your obliging nature. Pride yourselves in being able to master an often natural impatience, in sometimes sacrificing a little of your sense of honour so that the courteousness that is a sign of true charity may prevail. Not only will you thus be able to avoid unpleasant accidents, but you will also help to make the car a more useful tool for yourselves and others that is capable of giving you a more genuine pleasure” [...]

61. In any case, with the request for motorists to exercise virtue, we
have drawn up a special “decalogue” for them, in analogy with the
Lord’s Ten Commandments. These are stated here below, as indications,
considering that they may also be formulated differently.

I. You shall not kill.
II. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and
not of mortal harm.
III. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with
unforeseen events.
IV Be charitable and help your neighbour in need, especially victims
of accidents.
V. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination,
and an occasion of sin.
VI. Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when
they are not in a fitting condition to do so.
VII. Support the families of accident victims.
VIII. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the
appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience
of forgiveness.
IX. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.
X. Feel responsible towards others.

A couple of car-culture blurbs for Monday. First, a report by Eric Pfanner in the Times:

Quick, what’s more dangerous: automobiles or cigarettes?

The European Parliament proposed last Wednesday that car advertisements in the European Union carry tobacco-style labels, warning of the environmental impact they cause.

Under the plan, 20 percent of the space or time of any auto ad would have to be set aside for information on a car’s fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, cited as a contributor to global climate change.

So, should we prepare for warnings along the lines of, “Driving this car may damage the health of the planet”?

The real goal is, as usual for Brussels, to scare the industry into “voluntary” submission — but also to counteract automakers’ more-is-better message. Perhaps they need some scare, though: Wendelin Wiedeking, the chairman of Porsche, was quoted by Mark Landler in an article covering the Frankfurt Auto Show as saying “We need to be a little realistic. People need transportation; we’re not all going to start riding bicycles.”

* The same Frankfurt Auto Show package of articles includes a ho-hum piece by Keith Schneider on Seattle’s livability initiatives (from the same mayor proposing a 50% widening of the waterfront freeway). “The result is that cleaner, greener, safer cities are attracting legions of new employees and residents. But municipal leaders in Seattle and elsewhere say they are determined not to turn their cities into warehouses for the vehicles that come with all the newcomers. However, there’s also this:

This November, residents of Seattle and other Puget Sound communities will vote on whether to raise the sales and vehicle excise taxes to generate $7.8 billion for road construction and $10 billion to build 50 more miles of light-rail lines and other transit projects.

Contrast that 56.2%-for-transit figure with the “casino capital” bill advanced by the Illinois Senate, as analyzed by Julie Hamos:

Within SB 1110 is funding for “transit capital”, pegged at $425 million in new state funds – only 1/10th the amount included for roads. This is quite a contrast to the last capital bond program in 1999, when roads received twice as much as transit – not 10 times as much!

* Word leaked last week that the administration is investigating privatizing the city’s parking meter operation, which brings in about $22 million in revenue each year. Unlike downtown garages or even the Skyway (which is paralleled closely by the Bishop Ford freeway), parking meters serve other social purposes besides revenue. Apparently, aldermen agree; from Fran Spielman’s story in last Monday’s Sun-Times:

Aldermen were intrigued by the idea. But, they were also concerned about the loss of control — over jobs, benefits and, most of all, parking meter rates.

“We saw that in the Skyway. Fees went up. If we lose control of that, the citizens have nobody to complain to. That’s like complaining to General Motors. They’re not going to listen to John Q. Citizen,” said Transportation Committee Chairman Tom Allen (38th).

Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd) called privatization of city assets a “slippery slope.Where do you stop? At what point does a for-profit hospital want to run our clinics?”

Parking meters, unlike the downtown park garages, reach deep into the neighborhoods (where they are often the only pay parking option) and serve (or could serve) policy purposes broader than simply raising revenues for the city. This move would come just as the city, prodded by some neighborhood groups, is embarking on significant and revenue enhancing price-optimization strategies (in fact, San Francisco estimates that it can quintuple revenues through better management) which would be stifled by this action. Worse yet, privatizing before the upside has been milked takes what could easily amount to $50 million in additional annual revenue and puts it in the bankers’ hands.

A private operator won’t have the same incentives to work with neighborhoods — to, for instance, put down free bike parking spaces in lieu of paid car parking (as in Brooklyn or Montreal, which also adds some scooter spaces).

And then, of course, there’s the fact that taking out second mortgages left and right is not exactly a sure sign of an organization’s fiscal health. Contracting out operations or management (writing in new incentives for higher yield — like how energy auditors get paid out of the net energy savings) could achieve the same end, but the net rewards would still accrue to the public instead.

* Fran Spielman also reported last week on Alderman Tom Tunney’s talking-while-driving ticket:

[Ald. Tunney] question[s] why officers in an “understaffed police district” with serious unsolved crimes are “assigned to pull people over solely for cell phone violations.”

Um, well, maybe that’s because cars kill more people in your ward than guns do, Alderman.

* Speaking of cars killing, Alan Durning continues his excellent Bicycle Neglect series of articles with an investigation of bicycle safety, finding naturally that not bicycling kills more people than the alternative. The good news: urban cycling is getting safer, at least one study shows that cycling is 40% safer than driving (using a strange per-hour measurement), and the cardiovascular health benefits of cycling vastly outweighs (by a factor of four) any health risk from crashes. Indeed, every minute spent walking or cycling adds three minutes to an individual’s life. In other words, don’t think of time spent walking; think of time invested walking, since that time will pay back interest later in life. (Quite literally, in fact!)

The bad news: cycling is three (per trip) to ten (per passenger km) times more dangerous than driving — although, to be fair, driving, in turn, is 10 times more dangerous than mass transportation (buses, trains, planes), and walking is three times still more dangerous than cycling per trip.

Still, bicycling could be much safer — and by making it safer, societies stand to gain immensely in terms of health, safety, environment, and energy security, not to mention livability. Indeed, Dutch cyclists are ten times safer per passenger-km; in other words, as safe from harm as American drivers. He also underlines that the key to this isn’t blaming cyclists for not wearing helmets — in other words, personalizing the problem of safety — but in taking collective action: facilities, law enforcement, education, and getting more people [and fewer cars] on the streets (a.k.a. “safety in numbers“).

(A quote from aspiring-Brit Noah Raford that “in numbers” article: “From a public policy standpoint, from a safety standpoint, the message is, if you want safer streets, have more people on them.”)

Reminds me of Tom Friedman last week: “But actually, the greenest thing you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.”

* Speaking of collective green action, the national Step it Up rally — intended by author Bill McKibben to create a mass movement around climate change — returns on 3 November.

A wrap-up of items from my latest week away:

* Paul Merrion in Crain’s points out that “intense opposition to [refinery] expansion plans following BP America Inc.’s scuttled proposal to dump more waste in Lake Michigan… raise the prospect of even higher prices at the pump if pollution-control technology makes refinery expansion unfeasible.” Well, duh (and that’s a good thing, IMO), but I wonder if all those drivers signing petitions against BP’s expansion realized that they, too, are part of the problem. Probably not, of course.

* Greg Hinz pre-emptively rued this week of fiscal crisis:

the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) will unveil a proposed 2008 budget that, unlike prior versions, almost certainly will be the real Doomsday thing… Mayor Richard M. Daley on Wednesday will unveil his own heaping helping of woes: service cuts and tax hikes that insiders have warned may include a stunning $100-million hike in the property tax… the Cook County Board considers an increase of 2% in the county’s sales tax proposed by county President Todd Stroger… as Springfield squabbles over a proposed property-tax hike that threatens to hit city homeowners with what County Assessor Jim Houlihan says would be an average 40% increase on bills due later this year… “It’s an all-out race to see who can raise taxes higher, faster than others in the race,” says Gerald Roper, president and CEO of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce.

My favorite: city water and sewer rates will go up by $65 million. This, in a city that (this never fails to astonish people elsewhere) has no water meters. That’s right, I of the paused showers and ultra-efficient dishwasher (hey, Californian parents will do that to you) pay the same rate as someone who runs the sprinkler 24/7. Maybe the infamously corrupt water department might consider adding meters, and charging people per use — instead of regressively raising rates across the board?

* Sadly, two fascinating trial balloons that went up last week amidst the tax-hike frenzy got shot down really fast. A tax on parking spaces, apparently floated by the governor (and discussed here last year), appears to have disappeared into the muck. A city gas tax hike, and parking-meter increase, disappeared between last week’s rumors and this week’s proposal. Not that Fran Spielman didn’t get a chance to get a great quote about it:

Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) said she’s all for doubling the gas tax, but only if the Chicago Transit Authority gets the money. “I don’t think we’re going to get the help we need from Springfield. (CTA funding is) a critical issue for me, and I don’t see anybody paying attention,” she said.

* Andrea Johnson in LiveScience reports on an aerial survey by Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University that found three surface parking spaces for each licensed driver around Purdue. Not quite the seven I’ve seen quoted elsewhere (where’d that come from?), but then again this didn’t count residential garages, on-street parking, or structures of any sort. However, the fact that such a survey was possible

* I scribbled this down about Interbike in Las Vegas, over on Flyertalk:

I’m (hardly) old enough to remember CABDA, the last of the regional bicycle trade shows (and right next to the UA hub at ORD!). Eurobike Portland sounded interesting while talk of that lasted, and with the industry’s recent growth perhaps a competitor could’ve survived.

My employer treats our convention as an honor bestowed upon cities that meet our standards, since our attendees expect to learn from the cities they visit. APBP, Thunderhead, and other bike groups do the same. Granted, I see everything through the lens of the built environment, but wouldn’t it be cool if bike dealers could walk out of the convention center and see… people bicycling, thanks to good facilities and a healthy local bike culture? Maybe then they’d start to get excited about the changes possible in the communities outside their own shops — a great way to build overall demand and sales.

* A photo of me by Hayley Graham accompanied this Chicago Journal article about the Pilsen Park(ing) Day action.

* Counterintuitive: facing losses in 2005, CalTrain (which has a unique combination of an hourly pay structure and nearly equally balanced loads) worked its way out of a deficit by expanding service, particularly faster express trains. Fewer stops = more runs with the same crews. A virtuous-cycle, revenue-growth approach to budgeting, rather than the vicious-cycle, cost-cutting approach — they’d be easier if only transit captured more of the value it created, of course.

* NYC’s public-service bike safety ads carry the simplest, stupidest, but most necessary message possible: Look.

* I typically dislike freeway-median transit — it inhibits the potential for pedestrian friendly, transit oriented development, since the stations are necessarily embedded amidst stinky cars — but I could get behind Mark Oberholzer’s idea:

integrating turbines into the barriers between highway lanes that would harness the wind generated by passing cars to create energy. “Opposing streams of traffic create really incredible potential in terms of a guaranteed wind source,” Oberholzer says… “The technical problems of tying into the grid and managing the flow made me think of putting the power to a different use,” he says. “I’m pretty excited about integrating a subway or light-rail train right where the barrier is. I love the idea of siphoning off electricity generated by private transportation to run public transportation.”

CarFree USA links to a video documenting how a busy Dutch intersection functions without any traffic controls:

Ted White explores the “shared space” concept in greater detail in Baltimore’s Urbanite. He points out that both the stop sign and stop light were invented in Detroit — ca. 1915 and 1920, respectively! The entire 1890s bicycle craze had passed by that point, and for decades urban streets had been happily and safely shared by pedestrians, cyclists, horses, and whatnot. Traffic regulations only became necessary once Model As began choking the streets, since cars’ size and speed makes them nearly incapable of civilly sharing the road.

As I’ve argued before, traffic controls were invented to tame automobiles — and requiring pedestrians and cyclists to follow the same rules is like playing a game of soccer on a polo field. The old rules don’t work when you change the underlying space. Remember, the term “critical mass” comes from another Ted White, describing how cyclists just randomly self-organize at uncontrolled Chinese intersections. (Since China has fewer cars, they also have fewer traffic controls. Funny that.)

Sure, some of this is possible thanks to that weird Dutch libertarian streak, and a little bit more to the much more stringent regulation of driving licenses in the Netherlands, but actually, even here in the U.S. studies have found that decades of over-engineering roads (wide lanes, soft curves, no trees or other visual distractions) have resulted in faster, less attentive driving.

A lot of people won’t believe that it works, but already:
- If you’ve ever driven in, say, Boston and Texas, you’d be sure that Boston has higher car crash and pedestrian fatality rates: Boston drivers are maniacs with death wishes, half the intersections don’t even have street signs, etc., yet the pedestrian death rate in Orlando (with extensive, suburban-style traffic controls everywhere) is three times higher than that in Boston.

- Another example of Dutch deregulation that did successfully translate to the U.S.: the self-checkout lanes in many big-box retailers today were brought to the U.S. by Royal Ahold, a supermarket operator based in the Netherlands. It’s counterintuitive, but self-checkout actually reduced shrinkage (theft): employees steal more than customers, and self-checkout puts fewer people in contact with cash drawers.

posted at Capitol Fax Blog

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CTA’s fares have been going up — in fact, since the 1984 RTA Act, much faster than either the rate of inflation or the cost of driving! That’s because Chicago sales tax revenue have trailed inflation (much less expense growth) since 1984, and the budget’s got to balance somehow. Oh yeah, and operating costs have declined over 10% in real dollars since 1984.

Just because the cost of gas is going up does not magically mean that the cost of transit service should increase at the same rate. Indeed, what you pay to drive is not at all indicative of the real cost of driving. Cars, collectively, are the #1 source of air pollution in our region — but even though asthma hospitalization rates along the Dan Ryan are four times higher than the national average, gas taxes don’t pay for the (also bankrupt) Cook County Hospital. Nor do your gas taxes pay to keep our troops guarding their oil, rebuilding taller levees to protect New Orleans against rising seas, or for funeral costs when children get killed in hit-and-runs. Nope, even we non-drivers pay those costs of your driving.

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In fact, some calculations: according to AAA’s annual cost-per-mile estimates, the real cost of driving has dropped 9.9% since 1997 (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile, as of next week, cash CTA fares will have increased 59.6%. (Not counting the 63% increase, the increase has been 17.6%.) We riders are already paying far more than our share.

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Sources:
* AAA, “Your Driving Costs 2007“
* CTA, “President’s Report on CTA’s Fares and Proposal for the FY2004 Budget“
* CTA, “Revised CTA Fare Structure Effective September 16, 2007“
* Motor Trend Auto News, “Despite Higher Gas Prices, 2005 Driving Costs Nearly Unchanged From 2004” (historical cost estimates from AAA)
* Westegg.com inflation calculator (to inflate to 2006 dollars) and BLS CPI projection (to inflate to 2007 dollars)

The federal “free parking” subsidy makes the front page of NYT.com with an article by William Neuman. The new spin on this: many of his interviewees are HR folks, who despite not being transportation geeks also seem to understand the silliness of this tax break.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” [Gerard Bridi, president of WiredCommute, a corporate benefits provider in Wellesley Hills, Mass.] said. “On the one hand you want to reduce congestion by encouraging people to take public transportation. On the other hand you give people who drive” a tax break… while the [tax-free] transit program is used by more than two million people nationally, according to estimates by benefit providers, the benefit is capped at $110 a month, giving transit riders a lower tax savings.

And no savings for those who walk or bike, of course — and, since it works like an income tax deduction, it (like all deductions) favors those in higher brackets who least need tax breaks. Wonderful!

“In general the efforts in this regard are at cross purposes,” said Jon Kessler, the chairman of WageWorks, a corporate benefits company in California. He said that while the tax break for parking helps promote jobs in cities by making it cheaper to get to work, it does nothing to reduce traffic. “People,” he said, “are trying to accomplish different things…” He estimated that because parking costs vary across the country and not everyone uses the full amount, the tax savings nationwide from the parking benefit add up to about $150 million each year.

On another topic, the last city of Chicago budget I read thoroughly was the 2004 proposed budget. Just out of curiosity, I compared that document’s 2003 figures to the new 2008 projections:

2003 actual: $4.719B total, $2.550B corporate fund
2003 inflated to 2007 using CPI: $5.342B total, $2.887B corporate
2007: $5.669B total (budgeted), $3.080B corporate (projected as of 30 July)
(2008 corporate fund expenditures are forecast at 6% above 2007)

The total budget is growing at a rate 52.5% above inflation and the corporate budget at a rate 57.3% above inflation. It might be interesting to compare these numbers to other large, slow-growth cities.

It’s too bad that the property tax figures are reported so poorly on both tax bills and in the budget books, although perhaps the county treasurer would have overall figures. I know that pension and health costs, which are the biggest users of the property tax, have increased substantially, but it’s hard to justify such a sustained increase over the general inflation rate when services have not appreciably improved.

Wonkette’s Anonymous Lobbyist, though not an ISTEA junkie like yours truly, kind of nails it on the head:

The current transportation funding mechanism is called SAFETEA-LU, which stands for “Safe Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users,” but the “Lu” is actually former Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young’s wife’s name, so he made his staff come up with a fucking acronym that used that because that’s how stupid and parochial transportation policy is… everyone gets to more or less keep ignoring our crumbling current infrastructure in favor of new roads (which are way more popular with constituents, since they don’t tie up traffic as much as that nasty roadwork). So, everyone won, sorta, and everyone lost, like usual.

In fact, a smart guy* presented a paper at TRB this year called “SAFETEA-LU Earmarks in Minnesota, a Rural Advantage: Minnesota’s Other Growing Pork Industry.” Among his conclusions: “the earmarking process is optimized for political stability, and not for public utility… earmarks are inefficient allocators of resources, in that they… do not explicitly consider long-range national transportation, social, economic, and environmental objectives.”

The paper goes into detail over Oberstar’s earmarks; one which I like is the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program, a $25M fund for bicycling and walking projects around the Twin Cities. (It mostly funded new bike lanes around Mpls in its first year.)

Not that the I-35W’s bridge “50 score… structurally deficient” means anything, really. A bridge scoring in the single digits on the same scale — Hillsborough Street over the CSX tracks, about a mile west of the Capitol — was part of my routine in Raleigh years ago. The last time someone was carried away from CCM in an ambulance was apparently from a fall on the 31st bridge over the IC tracks, which rates a 22; the famously awfully paved Chicago Ave bridge over the river gets an 11; and, perhaps most shockingly, Congress’s bridge over the river (as it emerges from under the Old PO) rates 2. Yes, two, on a 1-100 scale (apparently, Illinois uses 100, other states 120.)

* Michael Smart from UCLA, ha ha

A few posts made to Sightline, first on Alan Durning’s post about “bicycle shame” (and counterpart “bicycle respect“) debunking notions that bicycling isn’t to be taken “seriously” by government — notably about biking’s split social-class personality.

Thanks for the statistics on commuters’ earnings [bicycle commuters have middling incomes]. While biking to work today, a driver who “didn’t see” me yelled some “cheap-[obscenity]” insult — and it honestly puzzled me, since his used car and ragged T-shirt fairly screamed “proletarian.”

That said, I know that I spend well over 10c a mile on bicycling — tooling around town on a shiny steed doesn’t rack up that many miles, but costs a good many shiny pennies. All told, my “extravagant” non-car lifestyle amounts to getting around town on <$150/mo., including transit, sturdy walking shoes, and flashy bike gear.

@Arie: Sadly, the really big money’s still on driving. Just GM’s advertising budget is bigger than the entire American bicycling industry! That said, I read a business-mag article about how Shimano (one of bicycling’s biggest companies) did thorough market research into promoting bicycling in general in creating the Coasting marketing campaign. And smart but slick (and maybe cheap) ad campaigns actually attract city-dwellers’ attention better than carmakers’ airwave saturation strategy.

Durning writes that “a Bicycle-Respecting community is more equitable than a Bicycle Neglecting one… Like such democratizing social guarantees as public schools and unemployment insurance, Social Security and national parks, safe, separate, continuous facilities for cycling and walking put a common foundation under us. Such guarantees bind us together as one people, among whom—while many things are distributed by the competitive logic of the marketplace—certain necessities are available to all. We provide these things because we are not simply a collection of consumers who share a currency and a string of freeway exits. We are a community.” (emphasis added) Another response:

We, as a community, also provide public space within our cities for enjoyment and for circulation. “Sweet modes” (as the French say) like walking, cycling, and transit are incredibly space efficient: we could shrink our roads 80%+ overnight if everyone used them. It’s cars and trucks, those space hogs, who demand not only giant public expenditures but also the lion’s share of the public-space commons.

Since urban space is by definition an expensive and scarce resource, it makes perfect sense to charge those who waste (and lay waste to) it, while granting free access to those who use it wisely and graciously.

We already ration, price, and regulate urban transportation’s use of public space via like parking meters, residential parking permits, drivers’ licenses, and now congestion pricing — but we usually don’t think of it that way. Instead, we’ve been trained by decades of car-think to see “roads” as conveyances [or storage facilities] for private vehicles, rather than as shared community assets.

and on WalkScore.com:

89 at home in Wicker Park, Chicago; 98 at work in the Loop. (I’ve plugged a few Manhattan addresses in, and they max out at 98 as well.) My first upgrade would be to consider the street network. If my circa-2000 PalmPilot’s Vindigo software could calculate walking distances over the grid, then it shouldn’t be that hard to program.

A good bikeability map is a bit more complicated, since it involves adding data layers that aren’t already in GMaps. The routes I bike, even more so than the routes I walk, are often indirect and subject to more “quality of movement” factors. GoBikeBoulder includes off-street paths, signed on-street routes, and elevation in its calculations.

One of CNU’s members, Eliot Allen from Criterion Planners in Portland, has developed some really fantastically complex software that models and analyzes walkability, bikeability, transit, and driving in the context of land use and urban design conditions, like street network, use balance, and intersection safety. I still don’t quite understand everything about it, but J,M,& M might want to give it a look.

* I feel sick. Why? Earlier today, I was hit (no damage, at midday, in the middle of the Loop) by a driver who was clearly in the wrong — double parked, no signals, suddenly backing up without looking (through an illegally black-tinted rear window) — and suddenly found myself with four cagers all simultaneously screaming obscenity-laced insults at me. (None asked if I was all right.) One person on the sidewalk, a woman smoking, seemed to care, and told me to take down details for the cops. Of course, the cops arrived 22 minutes later, moments after the driver finished his business and pulled away, and there being no blood, there was no way to press charges.

Yet when there is blood, as with architect Steven O’Rourke (evidently a friend of a friend) — his body dragged for one mile through the streets of Jefferson Park, knocked out of his shoes just steps from the home where his wife and three small children were sound asleep — it’s too late. Your best witness is dead.

Not one week later, a child riding in the middle of Critical Mass was violently struck by a car fleeing the scene of a crash; his bike was dragged under the car for six blocks. Not just any kid, either, but a regular, an eager boy whom I’d seen graduate from trail-a-bike to his own two wheels, whom I’d fed cookies to. He’s shaken and bruised, but the gall!

Soon, I won’t be able to count the number of people I know — or have known — struck by hit-and-run drivers with mere single digits. This fact, and the utterly nonchalant attitude that countless drivers and the authorities have towards this most soulless, evil-hearted cowardice, fills me with toxic rage.

* A text ad on that O’Rourke story directs readers to the Campaign for Global Road Safety, which points out that worldwide, road deaths kill more people than malaria and diabetes, and as many as either of two lung diseases (tuberculosis and lung cancers) — and that every minute, a child is killed or maimed on the world’s roads. Worldwide, most of these deaths are of pedestrians. This is beginning to get attention from the UN, with a General Assembly session on road safety set for this fall.

* How to end our long national nightmare. [Wonkette]

* At a recent event, new alderman Brendan O’Reilly mentioned one idea worth grabbing from NYC: camera enforcement of Gridlock Sam’s “Don’t Block the Box” directive. Between these, the Natarus sound cameras, and various anti-terrorist cameras, downtown could have a pretty thick network of cameras — pretty useful for also ticketing double-parkers, or for London style cordon pricing.

* Recently viewed and highly recommended: the Criterion Collection release of Tati’s Play Time. No plot whatsoever, but the views of oppressively modernist, traffic-choked “Tativille” alternating with his gentle physical humor made for an enjoyable (if long winded) viewing.

* Speaking of oppressive modernism, I was amused to see that an “urban quarter” (named Quartier sur le Fleuve, but that name currently generates no Google hits) at the northeast corner of Montréal’s Île-des-Soeurs was submitted for the LEED-ND Pilot. The place really looked like a Tati nightmare. [PDF from earlier planning process]

* Québec also passed a “carbon tax” last month, amounting to 0.8c per liter. Curiously, part of Illinois’ gas tax is really an “environmental impact fee” (415 ILCS 125/310). I’d be curious to see what kind of interesting local projects could be funded under a CMAQ-like regional grant program to cut carbon emissions: car sharing, bike sharing, hybrid cabs, beater car trade-ins, electric peak load conservation, whatever.

* “Airplane security seems to forever be looking backwards.” So, billions of dollars in America’s most valuable workers’ time is wasted stuffing “Freedom baggies” and pulling off shoes, all to CYA over yesterday’s threats. [Schneier on Security]

* Pithy comment by Carrington Ward on the Obama-arugula flub:

It’s an interesting point about the price of arugula. One of the problems Iowa farmers face is a dependence on monocrop agriculture — corn, corn, corn.

It is a flipside of the problem that many urban neighborhoods face: bodies sculpted by corn syrup, corn syrup, corn syrup.

We’d be better off as a nation if Iowa farmers were paying attention to the price of Arugula (or apples) in Chicago.

* Portland has a Courtyard Housing Design Competition underway. I’ll be curious to see how they reconcile this type (among my favorites, as you probably already know) with parking. The jury is pretty solid; my sense is that they’ll tend towards the traditional, though.

[sent to CCM list, after someone brought up the discredited "hybrid worse than hummer" meme.]

The true costs of such a vehicle to society do not stop and end at
fuel consumption and/or battery manufacture (note that all cars have
poisonous batteries). An H2 weighs three times as much as a Prius, and
the manufacture and transport of those 2.5 additional tons of steel
(etc.) have a tremendous environmental cost as well.

As I’ve said in previous listserv discussions on similar subjects,
large SUVs tax our society in many other disastrous ways. Their heavy
weight exacts a tremendous toll on the roads we all pay to maintain:
an H2 puts 81 times more wear and tear on a road than a Prius. Their
ponderous heft further adds to maddening traffic congestion: a large
SUV takes up as much road space-time as 2.5 small cars, while probably
not carrying any more people. Their larger size requires more pavement
for parking; “van” parking spaces are 52% larger than “compact car”
spaces. Their huge engines run dirtier, spewing out more
lung-deadening particulate matter and requiring vastly greater
quantities of toxins like antifreeze. Their higher fuel consumption
doesn’t just emit carbon, it contributes that much more to the global
human and ecological calamities that accompany every single stage of
the petroleum “production” process, from “Cancer Alley” to drowned
seals in Prudhoe Bay to low-grade civil wars in Ogoniland and Basra.
Large SUVs have much higher “kill rates”: a single Chevy Tahoes will
kill as many people (per 1M vehicles) as six Honda Accords; they lack
basic safety features like bumpers, have exponentially larger blind
spots, and block visibility for other road users.

I find it particularly astonishing that a bicyclist would make excuses
on behalf of Hummers, since the high, flat, rigid fronts, heavy
weight, and powerful engines of these menaces make them nearly ideal
weapons for murdering pedestrians and bicyclists: at the same impact
speed, a large SUV is almost three times more likely to kill a
pedestrian upon impact than a regular car.

And then there’s the unquantifiable cost to our society’s bonds levied
by the sheer antisocial (nay, sociopathic) nature of the Hummer: its
cheap trivializing of this “war” thing, its coarse celebration of
vainglorious overconsumption, and the disturbing desire to market to
drivers seeking to strike (rightly deserved, given the “kill rate”)
fear into the hearts of those with whom s/he is supposedly “sharing
the road.”

(Let me interrupt this narrative to say that no one need doubt my
dislike of all cars, be they big, small, short, tall, whatever. I have
never driven a car, nor even learned how. However, I reserve greater
scorn for large SUVs — proportional, one might say, to the size and
the social cost of the car itself.)

On 5/15/06, T.C. O’Rourke wrote:
While young, idealistic Americans die in the process
of killing non-Americans to secure a dwindling
resource, Hummer drivers choose to squander said
resource needlessly.

…while simultaneously mocking said bravery, dressing up civilian
playthings (in this case, a Chevy Tahoe) as battlefield equipment,
even while hundreds of troops have died inside their Humvees for want
of adequate armor and equipment

A Hummer on its way to Vegas or the Hamptons “honors the troops” the
same way Marie Antoinette “honored” the starving peasants by playing a
shepherdess for the afternoon, then retired to a supper of foie gras
and cake.

“The distance between the war in Iraq and the absence of any trace of
it at home, which owning a Humvee is somehow meant to close, is in
fact epitomized by it. It is only in a nation that has been completely
insulated from war’s effects that a vehicle of war could become a
trophy for the rich. It’s not enough that those who most enjoy the
benefits and freedoms of this country serve it the least. Now they’ve
made leisure rides of the war machines used by those who serve. The
reluctance to abide any measure that might constrain personal
autonomy, the conflation of rights and duties — it’s all there in one
vehicle.” — Lawrence Kaplan, The New Republic, 22 Feb 2006

Gretchen Reynolds in the Times reports on new research showing fine particulate matter (PM) to be a significant cardiac hazard to athletes.

“Be sensible and try to cut back” on your exposure to particles, Dr. Rundell advised, but don’t use pollution as an excuse to cut back on exercise… “The bottom line is that running and cycling are healthy and, over all, good for the heart,” Dr. Newby said. With proper care, he said, outdoor exercise does not have to be harmful — and, done en masse, could even ease pollution.

The best part, though? One doc, taking the long view and putting this “Your Health” article back into the realm of policy:

“I ride my bike back and forth to work every day,” [David Newby, a cardiology professor at the University of Edinburgh] said. “If everyone else did that, too, we wouldn’t be having this problem at all, would we?”

• The current (July) issue of Builder has a fantastic cover package of articles on affordability — about two-thirds of which is New Urbanism. It addresses both design and policy (finance, finance, transportation, inclusionary, and more) solutions, without any right-wing NAHB complaining.
• PARK(ing) Day — a day to reclaim curbside parking back for the public realm — will be a national observation this September 21 (following on last September’s observation). My quick idea: perhaps some donated floorcoverings (carpet?* turf?) and a communal table, around which we will discuss The High Cost of Free Parking, perhaps not coincidentally APA’s Planners Book Club selection for August. I can think of a few sponsoring groups who could get behind that. Or perhaps two dozen kick stand-ed bicycles parked (and locked), plus work stands for two mechanics.
• Mike Davis has a heartwarming article in Sierra about the last time Americans banded together to collectively fight a mighty foe — and downshifted the whole economy in the process.
  

  Would Americans ever voluntarily give up their SUVs, McMansions, McDonald’s, and lawns?

  The surprisingly hopeful answer lies in living memory. In the 1940s, Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption and waste. The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation, called on Americans “to change from an economy of waste–and this country has been notorious for waste–to an economy of conservation.” A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others enthusiastically, answered the call…

  Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national “Food Fights for Freedom” campaign. By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables–freeing the nation’s farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia… Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if that concept didn’t yet exist) and self-reliance…

  With recreational driving curtailed by rationing, families toured and vacationed by bike. In June 1942, park officials reported that “never has bicycling been so popular in Yosemite Valley as it is this season.” Public health officials praised the dual contributions of victory gardening and bike riding to enhanced civilian vigor and well-being, even predicting that it might reduce the already ominously increasing cancer rate…

  The total mobilization of the time was dubbed the “People’s War,” and while it had no lack of conservative critics, there was remarkable consistency in the observation of journalists and visitors (as well as in later memoirs) that the combination of a world crisis, full employment, and mild austerity seemed to be a tonic for the American character. New York Times columnist Samuel Williamson… pointed out that American life had been revolutionized in a single generation and many good things seemingly lost forever; the war and the emphasis on conservation were now resurrecting some of the old values. “One of these,” he wrote, “may be the rediscovery of the home–not as a dormitory, but as a place where people live. Friendships will count for more.”

* Did you know that Interface FLOR is based in Chicago?