A recurring theme that I keep hearing about in 2013 is that cities — linked together through national and global networks — must assert a leadership role in conceiving and implementing the policy changes necessary to adapt to the 21st century. Not only have these changes become too great to ignore, but the federal government that led America through the last great era of socioeconomic upheaval (the consolidation of the United States into the world’s industrial superpower) is mired in deep paralysis. Although states are meant to be the “laboratories of democracy,” they suffer from the same hyper-partisan paralysis and an institutional bias against metropolitan regions.

As a recent Economist editorial put it: “the rest of the country is starting to tackle some of its deeper competitive problems. Businesses and politicians are not waiting for the federal government to ride to their rescue… Pressed for cash, states are adopting sweeping reforms as they vie to attract investments and migrants… creative policymaking is being applied to the very problems Congress runs away from, like infrastructure spending.”

Taking a cue from a sharply partisan 2004-election postmortem by Dan Savage and the editors of The Stranger, we live in an era of The Urban Archipelago:

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that’s as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents…We’re going to demand that the Democrats focus on building their party in the cities while at the same time advancing a smart urban-growth agenda that builds the cities themselves. The more attractive we make the cities–politically, aesthetically, socially–the more residents and voters cities will attract, gradually increasing the electoral clout of liberals and progressives.

This approach was plainly evident in the closing panel at NACTO’s Designing Cities conference, where as Angie Schmitt reports, “transportation chiefs from Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and New York all talked about the progress their cities have made and shared their frustration at the lack of attention to cities and transportation in the state and national political arenas.”

“Why aren’t state governments and Congress keeping up with cities? Chicago DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein proposed that it’s because city residents — especially younger residents and entrepreneurs — expect their mayors and city governments to move at a much, much faster pace. City governments have to be much more creative and nimble to respond to these demands or else risk losing the residents and businesses that power their economies.” Yet, that agility doesn’t extend to the federal level: as Randy Neufeld said, “the disconnect seems to be Congress being out of touch with the good stuff happening on the ground.”

At the conference’s opening keynote, USDOT secretary Ray LaHood bemoaned that he would have preferred to do even more to support local government innovation, but that Congress had always “taken care of our infrastructure needs, right up to this moment in history” — indeed, singling out “this particular Congress,” which has a peculiarly awful track record at passing transportation legislation.

As further proof, the bond analysts at S&P agree with the overall devolution trend, reports Ashley Halsey in the Post: “The burden to finance infrastructure projects will fall more heavily on local government entities or users in the form of higher rates or tolls.”

A natural follow-up to the NACTO meeting came at TRB a few months later, where Bruce Katz addressed a substantially similar crowd at the Transportation Issues in Major Cities committee meeting. In summing up his forthcoming book, he strenuously argued that federal government are paralyzed by dysfunction, states refuse to adapt to the new metropolitan reality (and indeed, many state legislatures are backsliding), and need to be bypassed if cities are to successfully adapt to new global realities. The good news is that cities are in fact stepping up — even though they usually haven’t been empowered to do so.

(This comes with a huge caveat: ultimately, even a paralyzed state is a sovereign unit — quite unlike a city, whose municipal charter [particularly in a Dillon's Rule state] may be tremendously limiting. And it is much more difficult to do a 50-state campaign, or even a 20-state campaign, than a single national campaign.)

How can citizens and local government officials respond? We can set up peer-to-peer innovation networks so that innovations can spread more quickly and easily between cities. States and national governments can no longer be counted on to scale up innovations, but we also no longer need them to do so.

We won’t be able to innovate our way out of every intractable problem, but a fresh understanding of the problems, we may be able to find new resources to bring to bear. For example, Janette Sadik-Khan summed up her department’s super-effective work in three broad steps:
1. Leveraging existing assets: a holistic approach to street space manages to do more with less; “back to basics” means that feet come first; local & state governments already spend $2 in general funds on transportation for every $1 in road user fees and should expect greater accountability
2. Working nimbly: in times of austerity, we can’t afford not to work smarter, not harder (echoed by Rina Cutler from Philadelphia as “we cannot not fix” urban infrastructure, and by Gabe Klein, who contrasted the old capital-intensive approach with new ways that resemble “marketing, change management, public relations, and sales”)
3. Transforming the city: Mayor Bloomberg noted that the city has surpassed records for population & GRP, but has experienced the safest five-year period in its history and has successfully directed all new travel demand onto transit.

(About the title: a friend of mine grew up in Windward, the collection of damp suburbs east of Honolulu. There, TV and radio signals from Honolulu, just five miles away, are blocked by a mountain range, so instead residents watched TV from Maui, a hundred miles away across the flat ocean. Such is life in an archipelago: sometimes we have more in common with people far away than those just on the other side of the ridge. Our cities have more to learn from one another than from their hinterlands.)

“The idea that McMillan could be Washington’s Millennium Park or High Line, that kind of creativity has never come to the project,” [John] Salatti [of Bloomingdale] says.

Not only does he want a free park instead of taxpaying development on a decrepit old industrial site that the District needs to develop to meet its own revenue projections. Not only that, but he wants a park on par with two fabulously expensive parks: $475 million and $250 million apiece just for construction, plus ~$9 million a year apiece in maintenance, and all even though his neighborhood is a half-hour stroll from the National Mall, which is not only about as big as Grant Park and Central Park combined, but might have a few world-class attractions of its own.

No, the real stupidity lies in his ignorance of park financing. Both of those parks were largely paid for by lining said parks with skyscrapers: Millennium Park with revenue from the Central Loop TIF, bolstered by 80-story towers that boast park views, and parking garages underneath it that serve the adjacent downtown; the High Line only became possible by selling its underlying development rights and upzoning some adjacent areas by 50% to permit residential towers in an industrial zone.

Population-wide interventions (in this case severe austerity) reduced chronic disease burden in the very unique case of Cuba’s “special period,” an economic catastrophe that struck a society that is peculiarly undemocratic, resilient, and underpinned by strong public health resources (and thus has excellent data). From Richard Schiffman in The Atlantic, summarizing an article by Manuel Franco, Usama Bilal, et al in BMJ:

that the health of Cubans actually improved dramatically during the years of austerity… based on nationwide statistics from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, together with surveys conducted with about 6,000 participants in the city of Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba, between 1991 and 2011. The data showed that, during the period of the economic crisis, deaths from cardiovascular disease and adult-onset type 2 diabetes fell by a third and a half, respectively. Strokes declined more modestly, and overall mortality rates went down… The Cuban experience suggests that to seriously make a dent in these problems, we’ll have to change the lifestyle that helps to cause them. The study’s authors recommend “educational efforts, redesign of built environments to promote physical activity, changes in food systems, restrictions on aggressive promotion of unhealthy drinks and foods to children, and economic strategies such as taxation.” [...] If the United States want to stem the rise of diabetes and heart disease, either we get serious about finding ways for to become more physically active and to eat fewer empty calories — or we wait for economic collapse to do that work for us.

The authors (and I) do not condone replicating the Special Period crisis, but as a data-collection exercise it is unique in providing a look at the effects of unprecedented, population-scale, sudden change in both diet and exercise. The primary cause of removing fossil energy had a secondary effect of removing food energy from the economic system, as well, and increasing its expenditure to make up for the lost fossil fuel. The accompanying video (at the BMJ site) has interesting graphs of how the entire population’s BMI shifted both during and after the Special Period.

For those arriving/departing DCA on beautiful days like today, you might be interested in walking or cycling (perhaps using the marvelous Capital Bikeshare system) to DCA. It’s not just possible, it’s really pretty easy and fairly well signed. Indeed, it may be America’s most pedestrian friendly major airport. Note that there are multiple approaches, depending on where you’re coming from and where you’re going.

Where you’re going:
Concourse A is at the south end, Concourse C is at the north end, and B is closer to the north. Higher gate numbers are north.

As of this writing, US Airways is at the north end (C/B), American and Delta and United in B, and everyone else in A.

Where you’re coming from:
1. From northern Crystal City, via the Mount Vernon Trail access at the Water Park/18th St. S., this map shows two route options:

The yellow route is the signed route from the Mount Vernon Trail, without any grade crossings. It’s reasonably direct for cyclists approaching from the south, but for pedestrians from the north it adds almost 1/2 mile (and even more for people headed to the south pier or Terminal A).

The red route is much more direct for those coming from Crystal City (to the north) but requires jaywalking across a three high-speed roads, each one 1-2 lanes and with okay sight lines.

2. From southern Crystal City, or for the south end of the airport (Terminal A, south parking garage & car rentals), start at the sand volleyball courts and walk along the northbound exit ramp, over the Airport Access Road bridge, and follow the signs around the offices to the terminal.

3. From points north along the Mount Vernon Trail, like Rosslyn and D.C., you can also exit the Mount Vernon Trail into the airport employee parking lot at the airport’s north end. (There are usually US Airways Express regional jets parked behind the fence here, right next to the trail.) Just follow the sidewalk alongside the airport offices to Concourse C.

4. From points south along the Mount Vernon Trail, the trail directly crosses a spur to Aviation Circle at the airport’s south end, by the Signature Flight Support building. Just exit the trail there and head north along Aviation to the concourses.

Once you’re on airport grounds, there’s adequate signage along the walkways, several outdoor bike racks, and a shuttle bus connecting the concourses, rental car center, and Metro entrance. In most cases, walking is just as fast as the shuttle.

Driving away

DCA’s easy accessibility opens up another multimodal possibility: car rentals. In particular, Hotwire and CarRentals.com weekend-special rates from DCA can often be found for around $10-15 (+ required fees = $30); these rates are generally available Friday morning to Monday morning, and sometimes at the last minute on weekdays.

If you prepay online, check-in takes a few minutes at an automated kiosk, and the cars are parked upstairs; the entire process takes about 10 minutes. The car rental center is in the south parking garage, across from Concourse A.

Washington is a huge destination for business travelers, so hotels tend to be expensive. If you are at all flexible in the times that you can visit, you can find much better prices on hotels on weekends and during Congressional holidays — particularly in August and around Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other major holidays. Transient Washingtonians tend to leave town to visit families elsewhere during major holidays and even summer weekends.

The most reliably affordable, quality (3* to 5*) hotels are those in Arlington’s Crystal City neighborhood, often marketed as being near National Airport. There are thousands of hotel rooms there, with most major U.S. chains represented, and except during conventions or other big events (cherry blossoms, Independence Day, Memorial Day) they rarely sell out. That means that you can often use Hotwire or Priceline to get low rates.*

What’s more, Crystal City is very conveniently located right on two Metro lines, less than 15 minutes from the Mall. It’s also just off I-395 and offers free weekend garage parking. Capital Bikeshare docks around the neighborhood make it easy to get onto local trails or to shops in neighboring Pentagon City. Arlington is almost laughably safe.

The downside is that it’s not the most scenic neighborhood: it’s almost entirely concrete towers from the 1970s and 1980s, and interior renovations haven’t appreciably improved that aesthetic. Since the surroundings are mostly offices, it’s really quiet on evenings and weekends. There are a few restaurants there, so you won’t go hungry, and there’s a mall half a mile away at Pentagon City, but most locals will stifle a yawn at the very mention of “Crystal City.”

Just on the other side of the city, Silver Spring has a few hotels. It’s a livelier area than Crystal City, but historically their rates have been higher as well.

Within the city, the prime neighborhoods within or adjacent to downtown (including Dupont, West End, and Georgetown) often move in lockstep, so there are few bargains to be found. Dupont has some quirkier boutique options; Kimpton Hotels, in particular, has converted several 1960s studio apartment buildings in the neighborhood into themed hotels that have quite spacious rooms, if spare common facilities.

There’s a cluster of cheap motels along New York Avenue NE; these hotels often market themselves as “near Union Station.” Beware of the low prices: NY Avenue is a loud, busy highway that offers little connection to the rest of the city, and some of these hotels have a seedy reputation.

Similarly, there are dozens of hotels around the other two large airports, Dulles and Baltimore-Washington. These are generally very inconvenient to D.C.: getting to/from town requires going to the airport, then paying extra for transit service into town. I’d book a room near BWI before Dulles, and even then it would have to be at a steep ($50+) discount to justify the added travel time and cost.

You can also, of course, look for alternative lodging arrangements like AirBNB** and Couchsurfing.

* Affiliate link to BetterBidding, a useful site if you want to try and discern the identity of a hotel before you bid
** Affiliate link that could benefit me, but probably won’t

Holland faced the same crisis in the 1970s — after feminism, environmentalism, historic preservation, and the bike boom had emerged — and arrived at a radically different and much safer solution for both humans and our planet. London Cyclist magazine has the full story on how “Stop de Kindermoord” (yes, the unsubtle “Stop Killing Kids”) catalyzed these movements and created one of the world’s safest road cultures.

If you’re now inspired to rearrange the streets that you traverse — add some trees, a turning lane, a cycle track, wider sidewalks — you can go ahead and easily try out a new street section at StreetMix. (Hint: you can easily measure street widths using the ruler in Google Earth.)

(H/t to Eli at Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.)

Per Downtown DC BID, “In 2006 the Washington Parking Association (WPA) estimated that there were 199 parking garage locations in the Downtown and Golden Triangle BID areas providing 45,721 spaces.” That does not include the 17,000 street parking spaces that even AAA acknowledges still exist. Therefore, the 150 parking spaces removed to build the “controversial” L Street bike lane pictured above = 0.2% of downtown parking supply. In other words, 417 out of every 418 downtown parking spaces remain even after AAA whines that “The bike lanes have taken up all the parking spaces.” [posted to TheWashCycle]

Also, calendar note: the JITI Urban Transportation Seminar on February 6 will feature speakers from Tokyo Metro and Tokyu Corporation. Tokyu is notable for being one of the more profitable commuter rail + real estate + retail conglomerates in metro Tokyo.

CMD East Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The building in the middle of this ensemble — directly below the street sign — burned in a recent fire and is now being demolished. It was built a century ago as part of the Central Manufacturing District, and provided part of the original industrial park’s regal face to the city along Ashland Avenue. (The CMD’s front door was its better-known, mile-long streetwall along Pershing Avenue.) Together, they defined two of the few well-defined streetscapes on Chicago’s south side.

Hey, anyone else remember this photo? I used to squeeze through fast-moving traffic on Dearborn daily and recall more than a few close calls that resulted with cabs, buses, cars, even pedestrians.

Well now, thanks to a new cycle track, those bad old days are just a memory.

Unlike other cities, you’re here in Washington not to understand a city, but to understand a country, so there’s no way that I would recommend that someone skip the usual monumental sights. Let’s start with what the experts recommend.

• Lonely Planet’s 2 days (the Mid-Atlantic Trips book has an edgier 2-day itinerary)
• Jennifer Barger’s 2 days for National Geographic Traveler
• Neal Learner’s 3 days for United Airlines’ Hemispheres
• The Washington Post’s online visitor guide includes three different 3-day itineraries: monuments, city neighborhoods, and suburbs
• TripAdvisor has a comprehensive list of attractions
• AirBNB has an up-to-date photo tour of local neighborhoods

To which I’d add these personal favorites among the monuments, memorials, and museums:

• the Smithsonian American Art Museum: be sure to spend time curating your own art experience at the library-like Luce Center on the third floor, and stop in to admire the magnificent Renwick Gallery across from the White House
• the Library of Congress has consistently fascinating public exhibits, and getting a reader card to explore the reading rooms’ vast reference collections — and just maybe request a book, any book — takes just a few minutes
• the National Gallery of Art’s East Wing has a tremendous collection of Calder mobiles, housed in a soaring space tucked into a corner of the concourse-level gallery
• most assume that the Smithsonian’s collections of Americana would overshadow its collections about the rest of the world, but in fact its connected Freer, Sackler, and African Art museums have some of the finest collections in their respective fields anywhere
• whenever I’m feeling homesick for Chicago, the simulated “L” ride at the American History museum takes me right back to the Loop
• between the Kennedy Center, nearby cinemas (from Hollywood blockbusters at Georgetown AMC Loews to indie documentaries at West End), natural Theodore Roosevelt Island, and a waterfront park boasting both pubs and boathouses, there’s something for all tastes along the Foggy Bottom-Georgetown waterfront
• if a Hollywood blockbuster is showing at the Smithsonian’s [true] Imax screens, it’s really not worth seeing anywhere else (plus, these are the closest cinemas to my house)

Personally, I also find the monuments at the west end of the Mall to be too widely spaced for a comfortable walk. Instead, use bike share and this handy Monuments by Bikeshare route, which uses  off-street paths or low-traffic roads.

1. I’d earlier mentioned that a tax swap proposal was actually warmly received by Republicans in at least one poll. A September (pre-Sandy!) update to said poll showed even stronger support:

A majority of Americans say they would vote for a candidate who supports a revenue neutral carbon tax if it created more American jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries (61% would support such a candidate), decreased pollution by encouraging companies to find less polluting alternatives (58%), or was used to pay down the national debt (52%). A large majority of Americans (88%) say the U.S. should make an effort to reduce global warming, even if it has economic costs.

And, in Mitt Romney (!), there was a candidate who at one point (you never know with that guy) put pen to paper and seemed to like the idea (from his book “No Apologies”):

a tax swap… would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens. It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth. And profit incentives–rather than government subsidies–would stimulate the development of oil substitutes and carbon-reducing technologies… a tax swap may be the best among the four alternatives currently under consideration…

And Al Gore agrees: “It will be difficult for sure but we can back away from the fiscal cliff and the climate cliff at the same time,” [Gore] said. “One way is with a carbon tax.”

That said, David Roberts discounts the possibility of a carbon tax swap, as does the White House. Oh well.

2. Even if there isn’t a carbon tax in our near future, and even if global warming was hardly mentioned at all during the entire Presidential campaign, Joe Mendelson at NWF notes two more promising takeaways from 2012: Big Fossil’s huge “I’m an Energy Voter” campaign flopped in a huge way, and the year’s numerous weather disasters have perhaps reminded Americans that adapting to climate change will be neither easy nor cheap.

3. Sure, the right-wing spin machine’s anti-empiricism (or, as Noam Scheiber calls it, “intellectual nihilism”) got its just desserts with their embarrassingly wrong election forecasts. However, I doubt that this will have a lasting impact on other important policy topics, notably the climate.

What I worry about is:
(a) the time scale differential between an election prediction (results are splashed across every newspaper within weeks, and a new cycle begins the day after) and a global warming prediction (when the result slowly reveals itself over decades, and is irreversible by then) is like the difference between a cornstalk and a sequoia. With humans’ short attention spans, by the time the former is over and done with, we can still maintain plausible deniability about whether the latter has changed at all.

(b) that the Right has shown little interest in empiricism before — when they’ve been objectively proven wrong, they instead retreat even further into their bubble. We’ve seen it before on, say, supply side economics, where the top marginal rate has fallen by half since 1980 but where (to hear Romney say it) the already-dubious Laffer curve theory is apparently stronger than ever — even though few academic economists agree.
That said, I am really excited about a future in which Nate Silver-esque analytics can help to more broadly inform decision-making from the individual to the national level. All the buzz about “smart cities” is just the beginning.

[Adapted from a comment posted to Grist]

4. A nice quote about said anti-empiricism, by Mark Potok of the SPLC:

“It just seems that on issue after issue after issue we are no longer having disagreements about a certain set of facts. Instead we have two sides presenting absolute alternative realities. And the bottom line, I think, is that from the political right, or the far right, that we are seeing almost nothing but a string of conspiracy theories that have virtually nothing to do with reality. So we cannot even have a rational debate about things that we admittedly disagree about. Instead, we spend our time fending off utterly baseless, fear-mongering conspiracy theories that prevent us moving forward in any way as a society.

“At the turn of the 21st century we are facing very major problems. We are at a time of great social and environmental change and we need to seriously address them — not poison ourselves with the conspiracy theories and baseless fear-mongering that we see today.

5. As if to confirm 3(a) above, I was recently frightened by the documentary “Chasing Ice” (very similar clips are viewable for free at National Geographic). Even though the documentary covers land glaciers, the most dramatic story over the past year has been the collapsing sea ice cap in the Arctic Ocean: ‘experts say that recent data on plummeting ice extent and volume show that the Arctic has entered a “new normal” in which ice decline seems irreversible.’ Over my lifetime, 15,000 cubic kilometers of ice has disappeared from the Arctic Ocean. That’s enough to fill 6,003,910,273 Olympic swimming pools with molten ice!

This kind of change doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. Reshaping the face of the earth on this scale seriously matters. It will permanently shift weather patterns, particularly the jet stream that sets medium-range weather for the Northern Hemisphere, and could be to blame for the very long cold/hot/wet/dry patterns that many of us have seen lately.

6. Curiously, right after I attended the “Do The Math” tour program, none other than the IEA confirmed McKibben’s arithmetic: “No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 °C goal.”

The world can’t wait for Peak Oil. (I never really liked that too-tidy eschatological scenario, anyhow.) We can’t wait for the fossil age to end by running out of fossil fuels. We will have to will its end, or it will end our age.

2. The tidal wave of Big Money and a House map spectacularly gerrymandered in their favor only downgraded the Republicans from a stern rebuke to a slap on the wrist. As a geography nerd, I’m particularly concerned about the electoral map: “the ridigity of the gerrymander is more impressive when you see it hold off a minor wave,” says Dave Weigel in Slate. He points to several states, particularly Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the House delegation and the Presidential vote diverge sharply. One could also look at the average winning margin across Democratic and Republican districts, or, as Princeton Election Consortium’s Sam Wang points out, that the total national vote may go to Democrats even as the actual House went to Republicans. (Put another way, if there were national, or even state-level proportional representation, the House would be balanced or slightly Dem.) Update: Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress points to a preliminary House tally of 53,952,240 (50.3%) Democratic votes vs. 53,402,643 (49.7%) Republican, with the caveat that West Coast vote-by-mail states have incomplete results and that uncontested races were excluded.

Another indication: the opposite may well be true at the Presidential level, which is tied to House representation but at a slightly more macro level. Republicans rack up huge margins in their core red states, but Democrats seem to have a persistent edge in several of the battlegrounds.

3. Sommer Mathis ties the ascendant demographics to the “urban archipelago,” a theme from the 2000 campaign that I heard echoed recently in discussions at NACTO (an event I’ll be posting notes from soon). Interesting to note that Romney’s largest county margins so far appear to have been in Maricopa at 131,770, Utah County (Provo) at 126,546, and Tarrant County, Texas (Fort Worth) at 95,897. Obama pulled six-figure margins even in suburban and second-tier counties like Contra Costa, Hartford, and Mecklenburg (Charlotte, a traditionally Republican city whose former mayor won N.C.’s governorship in a rare GOP pickup) — never mind the nearly million-vote margins in population centers like Los Angeles and Cook.