Category Archives: ecology & energy & climate

What I’m reading today

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[This started short and got quite lengthy. Maybe I’ll break off parts later.]

1. Citywide bike sharing arrives in the Midwest this week when Nice Ride launches in Minneapolis, using Bixi technology. (I had hoped to be there for the launch, but it looks like I’ll be there in July instead.) Interesting: (1) BCBS is the lead sponsor and (2) the city is not resting on its laurels (the article finds that the communitarian Minnesota culture is the key factor); the bikeway network is due to grow by 30% this year.

2. Jeff Speck in Architect uses the same taxonomy of New Urbanist critics — which he calls Lib[ertarian], Mod[ernist], and Saint — that I incompletely delineated in an earlier study of “Additional Myths About New Urbanism.” I used right, avant-garde, and left, but the themes are the same. Nice point in his final paragraph, addressing the Saints: new urbanism is a reform movement, not a revolutionary movement. We can’t fix everything all at once since we don’t aim to; it’s incremental change, not an entirely new world order.

Which reminds me: an offhand remark by Andres Duany about how crowds of suburban teenagers can “love the city to death” — suffocating the diversity of uses and people in the Sunbelt’s few-and-far-between urban oases — has drawn a storm of the same old Saint/Mod criticisms (only this time some bloggers are taking it personally!) about NU being exclusionary, authoritarian, static, hopelessly middle-class and middle-aged and middle-brow.

The answer to such critics is the same. Reform takes time, places evolve, and diversity must be managed as it’s actually not the natural order of human ecology. The same critics enthralled with “emergent, incremental, accretive” urbanism haven’t the patience to let Kentlands’ trees grow in, don’t understand that New Urbanists seek not to take away great places but to create new places that will, in time, evolve into great ones. Or, as I’ve said before, “today’s Old Urbanism was yesteryear’s New Urbanism, and therefore that today’s New Urbanism, in due time, will be tomorrow’s Old Urbanism… time is the most necessary ingredient to create the ‘authentic urbanism’ that many critics of New Urbanism cite in false opposition to NU.” In other words, give us a hundred years.

Of course, Duany doesn’t speak for the entire movement, and his admiration for civil libertarian’s bugaboo of Singapore — which actually does a better job than the USA of guaranteeing its citizens human rights like health, housing, education, and safety, not to mention protection from rights violations — is not exactly a plea for tyranny. I disagree with Duany about democracy’s utility: not a surfeit of democracy per se, but rather a fake populism that empowers a vocal [small-c] conservative minority, has impeded urban evolution.

3. Speaking of history and democracy, Charles Siegel writes about “Unplanning” over at Planetizen, arguing to some extent that planners caused the auto domination of American cities — whereas politicians should have kept them in check. While that may be true around the margins — different cities on the same continent have chosen rather different paths towards relative auto domination, as Patrick Condon (links to PDF) points out — my own reading of history (relying on Peter Norton here) says otherwise. Auto domination was a conscious political choice made in the 1920s, before the era of professional planning (or rather, traffic engineering), by political elites who sided with affluent auto drivers in their fight to claim road space from working-class pedestrians and middle-class transit riders. Indeed, overt attempts to politically legislate exactly the slow-traffic conditions that he outlines failed miserably: a 1923 initiative in Cincinnati (placed on the ballot with 42,000 petition signatures) that would have mechanically prohibited autos from going faster than 25MPH went down to defeat after a furious campaign by the Auto Club and newspapers.

4. More history: an oral history documentation project of LA Chinatown during my grandfather’s era.

5. From The Atlantic‘s special city issue, a reminder by Benjamin Schwarz that “Manhattan never was what we think it was” — or what Village writers like Sorkin and Zukin think it was. The bohemian, deindustrializing Lower Manhattan (itself hardly static) that so many exhibit a false nostalgia for was “pretty much limited to the years of the LaGuardia administration,” and itself was quite an exception within a vast urban “agglomeration of mostly self-sufficient, inward-looking, lower-middle-class communities.” Yes, Jane Jacobs wrote convincingly about how that city worked, because she lived in it. Yet many take the wrong message away from Jacobs: the look and feel of the industrial city were just the backdrop; her principles say nothing about post-industrial gentrification. Jacobs loved watching systems emerge and evolve from market interactions; heavy-handed intervention was most certainly not her style.

Yet the paralyzed political climate that has resulted from empowered neighborhood “activists” (see above) has stunted urban evolution — always driven by markets’ creative destruction — in the name of this faux “authenticity.” These “activists” don’t realize that the problem they seek to solve isn’t with architects or planners or even with developers, it’s with “all that is solid melts into air” capitalism itself. There are ways around this, and I’m excited to see that authors like Matt Hern get this and are doing something about this: shutting down streets and setting up collectives to reclaim space, not just a setting, for society. The planners, cops, and Tories he antagonizes turn out to be mostly reasonable people, doing pretty good work within a flawed system larger than all of them. Sure, he has his share of “can’t we all just get along” platitudes, but even those are grounded in a sense of possibility and progress. Perhaps it’s due to his base outside the Greenwich Village snowglobe, in a peripheral city simultaneously tossed about by globalization, blessed with a surprising degree of autonomy, and relatively unweighted by hidebound tradition. It’s a much fresher take on “finding real place” than I found in either Zukin or Sorkin’s books.

6. More authenticity: Hong Kong, which made an interesting decision to conserve and rehabilitate one of its original public housing blocks, will now preserve Wing Lee street. It gained notoriety principally for being an actual movie set, the only place where directors could recreate a feel of 1950s tenement life.

7. Just nudging urbanism along in California could cut CO2 emissions in half — and by 75% over a business as usual scenario, according to new research by Peter Calthorpe. The household savings angle is an interesting one to push: the less people spend on cars and oil, the more they’ll have to spend on houses — preserving the property values which are so incredibly paramount to California politics. Jarvis League, are you listening?

8. “You want to know who Sarah Palin is? She’s the False Maria in Metropolis! That’s who she is.” — Peter Trachtenberg

9. The world’s thirst for oil has outpaced humans’ capacity to “safely” (if we ever could) drill for (and burn) it. Sickening pollution is intrinsic to oil; the act of driving is drilling. And as we’re finding out, drilling technology has advanced faster than spill-cleanup technology. Boycotting one company won’t help; they all have tar and blood on their hands. Alexandra Paul at HuffPo:

There is a story about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if he stung the frog, the scorpion would drown as well. So the frog agrees to be carried on the scorpion’s back across the river. Mid-river, the scorpion stings the frog, dooming the two of them. As they are sinking, the scorpion explains, “I’m a scorpion; stinging is my nature.”

Ocean drilling is the nature of oil companies. It is what they do, even if it dooms us all. We can be angry about how they are ineffectively dealing with their mess, but in the end, BP is drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas for one reason only: we need the oil they provide.

Tidbits, 11 May

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  • In a classic case of Manhattan myopia, Ed Glaeser makes an oversimplified argument that high-rises can spur economic diversity in Economix. Two crucial shortcomings to the argument: (1) high-rises have inordinately high construction costs per unit, due to expensive steel/concrete structures and elevators; and (2) their highly standardized units and interiors, and high ratio of communal-but-not-common space, resist any efforts to meaningfully mix price points within.
  • “The Deepwater Horizon spill illustrates that every gallon of gas is a gallon of risks — risks of spills in production and transport, of worker deaths, of asthma-inducing air pollution and of climate change, to name a few. We should print these risks on every gasoline receipt, just as we label smoking’s risks on cigarette packs. And we should throw our newfound political will behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas — build cars that use less oil (or none at all) and figure out better ways to transport Americans.” — Lisa Margonelli in the NYT (h/t Ryan Avent)
  • Brookings (via TNR) unveiled an interesting new metro-area cluster typology. Larger growing regions can be low-education “border growth,” better educated and whiter “New Heartland” (Charlotte, Columbus, KC, MSP, SLC), or diverse and highly educated “Next Frontier” (they bet on Albuquerque, Austin, DC, Denver, DFW, Houston, Sacramento, Seattle, and Tucson). The “rust belt” divides into stable, better educated “Skilled Anchor” (Hartford, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh) and declining, less educated “Industrial Core” cities (Memphis, New Orleans, Toledo).
  • Seems like I’m not the only one who’s disappointed by the New United Airlines’ adoption of Continental’s whiffleball clip-art logo. It offers some peculiarly ugly typography — notably the stem on the uppercase U, which appears to be, in a sad twist on the false small caps of UA’s 90s look, an inverted and enlarged n. Contrast that with the “Helvetica on fast forward” look of the current wordmark, so clean and detailed that it draws attention to the angles snipped into the T. What also worries me is that the new company seems, so far, to be taking its design cues from Continental’s graphically blunt advertising, which features all-caps headlines, underlines (more appropriate for emphasis on typewriters than in digital media), high contrast colors, and predictable visuals — quite different from UA’s almost too elegant, soft-sell approach of spare watercolor illustration, in greys and pastels, set against lots of whitespace. In fact, Continental’s ad agency deliberately says about its strategy: “forgo the flowery imagery and messaging of typical airline ads and focus on what really matters to business travelers: getting basic needs met with consistency. Our campaign… talks to travelers in a simple, straightforward style and voice…” The visual contrast is nowhere more evident than in comparing their recent TV spots; particularly the parting shot that introduces the logo:


    (Interestingly, in choosing blue as the new airline color, it appears that US aviation is joining other duopoly markets that have coalesced around red vs. blue. Coke-Pepsi, Colgate-Crest, Labour-Tory, Republican-Democrat, TWA-Pan Am, and now Delta-United.) [originally posted to FT]

  • A recent article on “Chinglish” in the NYT reveals that the Shanghai government has been cracking down on poor English translations. That might explain why the amusing picture book cited in the article was one of the few English-language books widely available at most bookshops, gift shops, and the like — having it everywhere sure seemed strange given China’s strong aversion to embarrassment.

Off with their carpy heads

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[I’ll be behind the Great Firewall of China for the next two weeks, and the GFW is as fine an excuse as I can find to not blog.]

[Post adapted from TNR comment]

I’ve been watching with some fascination the steady march of Asian carp species up the Mississippi basin and now, with alarm bells blazing at the US Supreme Court, across the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal portage. Several news reports of the carp’s advances have been accompanied by mention of Louisiana Wildlife & Fisheries’ “silverfin campaign” to promote fishing of invasive carp.

This approach would certainly solve the “no natural predators” problem that carp pose to Midwestern ecosystems. They’re huge, fleshy fish with acceptable taste (after all, they’re farmed for a reason) and a favorable nutrition profile. However, it’s difficult to see this actually evolving into much:

1. Their network of intramuscular Y-bones require considerable preparation in order to create those clean filets that Americans expect. If we’re going the “retail” route, consumers and anglers would need to actually learn something — not likely, and the Louisiana campaign seems to acknowledge this. Even if one were to take the wholesale route with machinery, existing fish processing equipment would have to be upgraded accordingly at considerable cost.

2. The carp population in many Mississippi basin waterways (like the Missouri) appears to have begun collapsing, having overshot its carrying capacity, so the available stock might be smaller than expected and perhaps not worth costly infrastructure investments (like processing plants).

3. Even if industrial processing existed, there’s no good industrial-scale way of catching river carp for processing into fish meal (whether for pet food, farmed salmon food, or fish sticks). Fish meal swept into monstrous nets by oceangoing factory ships is probably cheaper and easier, on a per-ton basis. And there’s not much use selling fish back to China, since they can always farm fish cheaper than we can.

Good press

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1. Good press stunt: the Maldives held an underwater cabinet meeting. They’ll need to learn how to do that more often, since I’ll probably outlive the Maldives: at the rate we’re going, their islands will be inundated by rising seas in a few decades. The cabinet ratified a statement urging rapid global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — an SOS to be presented at COP15 in December.

2. Good coverage: there is a kind of awesome article in Crain’s this week by David Sterrett about the market for electric hand dryers, formerly controlled by Berkeley, Ill.-based World Dryer. Some choice phrases: “the local company that’s dominated the industry since its inception is seeing new business slip through its slightly damp fingers… dryer-industry arriviste Sir James Dyson… Timothy Griffin, acting village administrator, [says] ‘People have nothing to do when drying their hands, so they read the label and see Berkeley.’ ”

(I’ve tried to avoid paper towels since a visit to Japan, where they’re nonexistent. Some restrooms have hand dryers — often the Mitsubishi Jet Towel — but the general assumption is that you bring your own cloth towel.)

3. Not covered at all: among global scientific bodies, it’s not just IPCC (politically tainted by that Nobel Peace Prize!) that’s come to a consensus that we humans have royally changed the climate. In fact, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London states that we’ve actually managed to shape the vastness of geologic time by ushering in the Anthropocene, per a report from Mike Davis.

Of course, this being Davis, there’s a mention of slums: “While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai’s celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread.” There’s also the transmutation of said slums into a cynical, Blade Runner apocalypse:

Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened ‘solidarity’ without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential ‘exit’ option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living — none of which seems highly likely. And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity?… We’re talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet…

Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?

This is basic chemistry

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Few things get my goat more than global warming deniers. Here’s the basic science, which I learned in college from Nobel laureates — but this is paraphrased from none other than Shell Oil Company’s website:
1. Carbon dioxide’s chemical bonds trap heat (infrared radiation); this is called the greenhouse effect, and was proven in the 19th century.
2. Burning fossil fuels and trees increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Over the past 200 years or so, human activities have released ~350 gigatons (almost 800 quadrillion pounds) of carbon into the atmosphere. It is utterly, completely impossible to dispute this.
3. As a result, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased by 40% in 150 years, or in 0.000003% of earth’s history — if the earth was one year old, this would’ve happened in ~1 second. This concentration appears to be higher than it’s been in millions of years, and certainly since humans have been around. Projections based on current trends indicate that CO2 could go to ~300% above pre-industrial levels during this century, reaching levels considered toxic to human health. I’ve never seen a serious attempt to debunk these facts.
4. Numerous studies and models of climate systems, both micro and macro, of earth’s history and future and those of other planets, show that climate systems are sensitive to changes in carbon dioxide concentrations. That is, this stuff matters.
5. The earth’s climate is warmer today than it’s been in a very long while. Land, sea, and satellite records all independently verify this, despite recent attempts to spread FUD about individual data points.
6. Therefore, humans burning fossil fuels have enhanced the greenhouse effect and are warming the atmosphere. I find it very difficult to logically dispute this if one accepts the points above — which, as I’ve noted, are all well nigh impossible to dispute.

Many of the professional deniers have accepted #5 above, and now say, “so what?” Well, I don’t think it’s prudent to run an uncontrolled experiment on the only planet fit for human habitation. Systems often prove much more fragile than we might expect: a 40% increase in CO2 concentrations might not sound drastic, but consider that a mere 11% increase in the concentration of iron in your body can kill you. Given that the cost of heading off a climate catastrophe is (a) not that expensive, at perhaps a few percent of GGP, and (b) can move forward any number of wonderful side agendas, why should we not pursue these policies?

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

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[This is a letter I just sent over to my senators in response to the Inhofe and Bond amendments. Please, especially if you live in California, Missouri, or Oklahoma, contact your senators. This is the moment.]

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

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

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

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

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

October link roundup

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Relatively quick link roundup. I’ve been busy admiring the Republican party’s implosion and planning for a month of travel — I’ll be away for four of the next five weeks. If I wait much longer, though, some of these election-related links will be pointless.

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

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

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

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

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

Link dump

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A whole bunch of links, mostly transportation related.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Walk Score has published neighborhood rankings for most major U.S. cities. It’s subject to the usual Walk Score caveats, but the cross-city comparisons are pretty fascinating, as a baseline comparison of urbanity. For instance, LA edges out Portland, and Houston beats Austin.

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

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

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

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

Even less

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Even less Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

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

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

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

Playing chicken

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1. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because s/he has the right of way in the crosswalk, dang it! [Photo: Chris Brunn, via Flickr]

Northwest Chicago Drive with Care Rally-2.jpg

2. Something’s amiss here: Michigan’s governor now bikes to work, while Illinois’ governor still takes a private jet. [Tim Jones reporting in the Trib via bike blog]

3. How good is the bike business these days? Clever, a utility-focused shop in Portland, is going on a two-week hiatus — partly because they’ve plumb sold out.

4. Why is Mexican food ubiquitous in Chicago but scarce in NYC? The quick answer is that Illinois has the third-largest Mexican population of any state (after California and Texas) whereas New York is 11th, between Georgia and North Carolina. But this surprised me:

Hispanic/Latino population of New York City.: 2,267,827
Mexican: 260,622

Hispanic/Latino population of Santa Ana, Calif.: 351,894
Mexican: 254,794

(Source: 2006 Census ACS)

5. Of all the neighborhoods in Chicago, the office of tourism chooses to highlight Wicker Park in its Summer in Chicago promotion — and does a pretty good job of it.

6. “Broadway Boulevard” will add about 3,000 sq. ft. of open space per block (about half an acre in total) using semi-temporary treatments, at a cost of about $2M/mile. The Times describes the treatment thusly: “painting the bike lane green, buying the chairs, tables, benches, umbrellas and planters and applying a coat of small-grained gravel mixed with epoxy onto the pedestrian areas, which will set them off from both the street and the bicycle path.”

7. A recent Obama-on-the-trail puff pieces in the Times displayed this bit of transect-awareness on the candidate’s part:

Many of the regional distinctions in the United States, he said, “in terms of culture, politics, attitudes, people,” have been muted. After 18 months of traveling extensively across the country, he said, “the biggest differences have more to do with rural, suburban, urban, as opposed to north, south, east or west.”

8. Alderman, there might be a reason why you’re not in the real estate market research business — or, apparently, the “reality based community.” Tom Corfman in Crain’s:

Alderman Anthony Beale (9th) prefers a smaller development of about 200 homes with prices between $350,000 and $500,000, well above the 2007 median price of $124,500 in Pullman… “We are going to build a suburban community within the city,” says Mr. Beale, whose ward includes the Ryerson site. “We’re looking at curved (streets), a gated community, the attached three-car garage.”

9. Someone arrived at this blog yesterday looking for “why cities grow to the west.” What I had heard is that, in Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes at least, prevailing winds blow from the west. Therefore, the freshest air to be found in an industrial city would generally be found in the western part of town. Obviously, this is not always the case (in NYC, still fresher air can be found by the ocean, which is southeast, and many other cities there are still-stronger “nice” draws like lakes or hills to the east), but it might partially explain why the “favored quarter” often sits west of town.

Auto age deathwatch

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“For the moment, watching gas prices roll relentlessly higher, we’re transfixed by the slightly terrifying novelty of it all.” — Bill McKibben

reign of error

In even more earth-shattering news than the forthcoming fixed-gear apocalypse (now with its very own Facebook group!), the signs of the automobile’s waning hegemony continue to mount. “We’re on the edge of people changing their travel patterns,” says John Roberts Smith, mayor of Meridian, Miss., quoted by Damien Cave in the NYT, after years and years where “local officials never talked much about driving. It was just how everyone got around.”

Writes Nelson Schwartz: “The speed at which gas prices are climbing is forcing a seismic change in long-held American habits, from car-buying to commuting… A Ford spokeswoman says the market shift is ‘totally unprecedented and faster than anything we’ve ever seen.’ ” Echoes LA city planning commissioner (and former councilman and mayoral candidate) Michael Woo, in an LAT article by Martin Zimmerman, “throughout our history, we have grown on the assumption that energy costs would be low. Now that those assumptions are shifting, it changes assumptions about housing, cars and how cities grow… [it could be] the urban-planning equivalent of an earthquake.”

A nation which has long taken cheap gas (and unlimited automobility) for granted, where 5% of the world’s population gulps 44% of its gasoline, is now in the midst of whiplash.

The quick turnabout is particularly notable since the elasticity of oil prices typically requires a lengthy time delay:

In the short run, neither demand for nor supply of oil is very elastic. It takes time for people to replace their old guzzlers with more fuel-efficient cars, or to switch to jobs with shorter commutes, or to move closer to public transport… [according to U of C economist] Gary Becker… over periods of less than five years, oil consumption in the OECD dropped by only 2-9% when the price doubled… But over longer periods, consumption dropped by 60%. [The Economist]

Yet Americans have slammed on the antilock brakes, hard. Andrew Leopard, quoting a NYT article by Clifford Krauss, predicts that “2007 may end up being the peak year for gasoline consumption, ever, in the (past or future) history of the United States.” After decades of inexorable growth, VMT fell by 4.3% from March 2006-2007. The biggest monthly decline in driving ever (since record-keeping began in 1942) occurred in March 2008 — until May’s tumble beat it, and typically driving increases in May as “the summer driving season” begins.

The deepening plight of big SUVs, in particular, has me positively grinning with schadenfreude. Needless to say, I’m not disappointed in the least that the Hummer brand could die. In that WaPo article, Frank Ahrens notes, “it’s hard to imagine a product other than a handgun that so clearly splits the division between what some people perceive as a right and others perceive as social destruction… So, the Hummer may go the way of the brontosaurus and other lumbering herbivores, actual and metaphorical, all grazing peacefully in the growing shadow of the incoming meteor.”

Today, NPR listeners were treated to Yuki Noguchi’s report from a used-car dealership in suburban Virginia, where the owners of a year-old Escalade were shocked to learn that their vehicle had lost 60% of its value over a year. As an aside, this underscores just how fundamentally stupid SUV owners are — and exemplifies just how amazingly out of whack this misallocation of resources got. Even ignoring the marginal costs (much less the externalized social costs) of running the truck — the $100 tanks of gas, the $2,000+ annual insurance bill, the repairs and maintenance, the $40,000 or $30/day parking space — and even assuming that these guys paid cash and didn’t (shudder) borrow to buy it (much less lease it), the $40,000 in value they’ve lost in one year is nearly $110 a day that just went poof! Add in the $9.59 in daily interest (at 5%) forgone by spending the cash rather than keeping it in the bank (and, naturally, subtract any higher investment returns that one could reasonably expect), and that’s a loss of nearly $120 a day just to park that thing in the driveway, plus whatever it costs to run ($25/day, per Edmunds). Maybe $145 a day is worth it for some people, but I just don’t get it: own an Escalade or dine on a ten-course degustation every night? (Or even two hours in a limo [with full bar!] every day.) No contest. Nobody needs to spend that kind of money on a mere convenience, which is all that a big SUV amounts to in a city. (Another sign of how bad the market’s gotten: the latest wave of spam comments to this blog advertises used trucks.)

High gas prices have also particularly hit recreational driving (the sort that auto apologists always neglect to mention), and Americans are surprisingly willing to turn to alternatives. “In Nebraska, Ric Hines of the Omaha Hummer Owner Group — known as Omahog — stopped doing off-road trips this summer and started riding his recumbent bicycle instead,” reports Christopher Maag in the NYT. In another NYT article, Karen Ann Cullotta quotes Ewelina Smosna of Chicago: “We’re not cruising around anymore… We just park the car and walk around.”

The story’s similar in Chapel Hill, as reported by Bruce Siceloff in the 8 June N&O: “[Manny Opoku, 19, a UNC-CH junior, is] getting to know his neighborhood and getting to know his fellow students. In the era of $4 gas, lunch lasts longer and conversation runs deeper. ‘Before, you would just eat lunch and talk about sports, talk about girls — and then go, “Hey, I’m leaving.” And get in your car and leave. But now, because gas is so high, there’s nowhere to go… You run out of superficial things to say. If you want to keep the conversation going, you’ve got to talk about something deep. And you like it. Now we’re moving at a different pace.”

So at least in Chapel Hill, Garrison Keillor’s vision of the future has already come to pass:

So we will need to amuse ourselves in new ways. I predict that banjo sales will pick up. The screened porch will come back in style. And the art of storytelling will burgeon along with it. Stories are common currency in life but only to people on foot. Nobody ever told a story to a clerk at a drive-up window, but you can walk up to the lady at the check-out counter and make small talk and she might tell you, as a woman told me the other day as she rang up my groceries, that she had gotten a puppy that day to replace the old dog who had to be put down a month ago, and right there was a little exchange of humanity. Her willingness to tell me that made her real to me. People who aren’t real to each other are dangerous to each other. Stories give us the simple empathy that is the basis of the Golden Rule, which is the basis of civilized society.

Bill McKibben, the mightily eloquent proponent of localism, similarly writes about the hope ahead in a Post op-ed:

This spring, something… profound and defining has happened: Pulled back by the inescapable gravity of higher prices and the growing scarcity of fossil fuels, we’re starting a slow recoil into more dense and compact regions and localities. The frontier of endless mobility that we’ve known our entire lives is closing… We could debate whether those changes will be good or bad. I think, on balance, that they’re positive — that in the United States sprawl has eroded our sense of community, with grievous results.”

Even Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, appears to agree: “a society can work, can function and can grow even at higher fuel prices. It’s a way of life — you get used to it.”

How else might those changes prove positive? Time counts a few ways; among them:

We know that higher gas prices cause many of us to slow down and drive less — which means fewer people die. Early research into 2006 accident data suggests that many lives have already been spared. If gas remains at $4 per gal. for a year or more, expect as many as 1,000 fewer fatalities a month, according to professor Michael Morrisey at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and associate professor David Grabowski at Harvard Medical School, who calculated that estimate for TIME… A permanent $1 hike in prices may cut obesity 10%, saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars a year, estimates Charles Courtemanche, an assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

With obesity’s death toll in the U.S. estimated at 300,000, and an additional 2,000 lives saved from better air quality, that’s at least 44,000 American lives saved every year just by raising gas prices by $1 or so.

Our regret, of course, lies in the fact that this shift is sudden — “We have waited until we are at a crisis point to address transportation,” says Mr. Smith, the Meridian mayor — and that the direct gains are not accruing to Americans, to address our tremendous unmet social needs. As I’ve noted before, we’d be much better off if a “gas price escalator” had been installed in 2001; a $1 increase in gas prices yields $142 billion (“according to Stephen P. Brown, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas”), but right now $1 of that extra $1.50 per gallon flows directly to our overseas enemies.

In 2004, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign ran TV ads ridiculing John Kerry for supporting a $0.50/gallon increase in the gas tax. Gas prices have increased by nearly $2.50/gallon since then — but none of that increased cost can pay for needed infrastructure, help lower income families pay the bills, or address countless other national needs, since ALL of it is going to already scandalously wealthy oil producers and oil companies.

That gas prices will rise now seems a given; the question is whom those higher prices will benefit.

Quick links

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Every once in a while, I forget to update the blog — I posted all of twice last month. Sorry about that. (However, some inbound links meant that last month was actually a record for page-views — and I do have that annoying habit of rewriting old posts instead of writing new ones. Hey, it’s recycling!) Some bookmarks for future reference:

* Want a preview of the parking-based congestion pricing strategy that’s coming to downtown Chicago? Check out the SFpark Smart Parking Management Program, now being rolled out under the same USDOT Urban Partnership Program. SF MTA also focuses on the benefits to drivers, which (unfortunately) the press here has neglected. DC has also started a “performance parking” program around its new baseball stadium, although they’ve sensibly (per Shoup) taken the revenues and reinvested them locally rather than citywide. DC is also investigating similar ideas for its upcoming zoning rewrite. (h/t: PedShed)

* At first glance, a collapse in SUV demand (“Some desperate car dealers and consumers are willing to lose thousands of dollars just to get rid of their SUVs”) might seem like a boon for safety. And it will be, over the long run, as these monsters will make up a smaller proportion of vehicles on the road. (Engines tuned for efficiency rather than power should also dampen the deadly horsepower race.)

“The SUV craze was a bubble and now it is bursting,” said George Hoffer, an economics professor at Virginia Commonwealth University whose research focuses on the automotive industry. “It’s an irrational vehicle. It’ll never come back.”

As Keith Bradsher pointed out in High & Mighty, though, the bursting of that bubble will put cheap used SUVs into the hands of used-car buyers: a demographic group that is nowhere near as careful with their cars as the new-car buyers are. Millions of SUVs are reason enough to fear the roads; millions of SUVs with failing brakes and transmissions, driven by under/un-insured young drivers? Even worse.

One policy that could simultaneously (and rapidly) reduce gas demand and improve safety? A gas tax used (in part) to buy back and scrap gas guzzlers, as proposed by economist Philip Verleger and mentioned here in 2005. (Globe article via Streetsblog)

* Looking for inspiration in re-imagining ugly urban arterials like Ashland or Western? Take a look at the many “Avenue” corridor plans created throughout Toronto in recent years.

* The Dalai Lama is reputed to have once posed this koan: “What would the world be like if everyone drove a motor car?” Here’s a hint, from a Times article by Jad Mouawad:

William Chandler, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates that if the Chinese were using energy like Americans, global energy use would double overnight and five more Saudi Arabias would be needed just to meet oil demand. India isn’t far behind. By 2030, the two counties will import as much oil as the United States and Japan do today.

New oil “production” (extraction) is growing slowly, and yet demand is booming. Part of the result is skyrocketing prices, which will hopefully dampen demand. But will it dampen demand by the 11 billion of barrels annually we’ll need to restore market equilibrium?

global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United States and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And, of course, discouraging words about the US.

What about the United States? The country has shown little willingness to address its energy needs in a rational way. James Schlesinger, the nation’s first energy secretary in the 1970s, once said the United States was capable of only two approaches to its energy policy: “complacency or crisis.”

The United States is the only major industrialized nation to see its oil consumption surge since the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. This can partly be explained by the fact that the United States has some of the lowest gasoline prices in the world, the least fuel-efficient cars on the roads, the lowest energy taxes, and the longest daily commutes of any industrialized nation. The result: about a quarter of the world’s oil goes to the United States every day, and of that, more than half goes to its cars and trucks.

So, basically, America’s cars and trucks consume about as much oil as all of China and India (total population about 2.5 billion, more than eight times’ America’s) do. Now, who’s to blame here?

* Mobilizing the youth vote: “They organized a whole bunch of young kids in bars to vote,” he said. “It hurt, of course it hurt. But I’m over it.” — Burt Natarus [h/t: Trib/Clout Street]

* Newest estimate on SmartBikeDC’s launch is late May, just ahead of my next DC trip. Fingers crossed!

* I seem to get a lot of questions about bike parking. Quick answers: to have racks installed on city sidewalks or in CTA stations, call 311. For recommendations for racks on private property, see this PDF pamphlet from CDOT & CATS.

* More headlines from our warmer future, showing up in today’s papers: record energy prices sending truckers and pilots onto the dole, panicked stockpiling of food in California, food riots worldwide. Funny how more energy bouncing about in the atmosphere does not, perhaps due to entropy (dang it), result in cheaper energy for humans.

* Minneapolis joins the bike station movement next week with the Freewheel Midtown Bike Center, located on the greenway level at the Midtown Exchange.

* Seen in a Shell advertisement (Economist, 26 April), touting its gas-to-liquids and cellulosic ethanol:

More crowded cities means more fumes, more noise and more smog. So what to do?

At Shell, we believe the solution is a combination of cleaner fuels, cleaner engines, better public transport and better urban planning. We are doing our best with fuel improvements.