Category Archives: US politics

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.

Pass it now

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I was sufficiently alarmed by word that my Congresscritter planned to vote no on health insurance reform that I wrote the below letter and dropped it off at his office (conveniently, about a block away). Within a few hours, though, the news changed, and he announced his intention to vote yes: colleague Jose Serrano pointed out the obvious (as I did): “I’ve been a legislator for 35 years… Once you have a law on the books, you can amend it as time goes on.”

(Oh, and I’ve been quite amused to see how the current bill compares with the Nixon and Chaffee-Dole plans from 1974 and 1993, respectively. As usual, today’s Republicans have drifted far over into what was the lunatic fringe.)

Dear Mr. Gutierrez:

As your constituent, I was upset to find out that you plan to vote against the health care reform package advancing through the House this week. I find it absolutely incredible that you can show such disregard for the needs of the nearly one-third of your district (the 15th highest in the country!) which lacks health insurance, and the thousands of Fourth District residents (like me) who have health insurance but fear for it every day — here in a state where thousands have their health insurance policies disappear every year due to unfair industry practices like recession.

I am particularly insulted, as the son of immigrants, to find that you plan to use your vote on this crucial matter in order to complain to the President about the separate matter of immigration. Surely you understand how our political process works: that in order to pass legislation on crucial matters of national importance like health care reform requires that we sometimes put aside differences in the interest of the nation. I have my own reservations about this bill, and differences with the President on where priorities should be set — but would not wish for these differences to stop absolutely necessary reforms to our country’s ruinous health insurance system. Great tasks like health insurance or immigration reform cannot be accomplished alone; we Democrats need to work together to accomplish them.

I plead with you: be reasonable. Consider the interests of your constituents, your district (72% of whom are U.S. citizens and will directly benefit from this bill), and your nation, and please vote for health care reform.

Axis of warmth

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At a seminar this weekend, I heard from political consultant John Neffinger that “charisma = strength + warmth.” Warmth is the dimension that separates Dick Cheney from Bill Clinton — or, as I was thinking, Robert Moses from arch-nemesis Jane Jacobs. That’s the juxtaposition that makes “Boozy,” wherein Jacobs snarls and Moses tap-dances his way to success, such a brilliant inversion of history.

Anyhow, another key takeaway is that true charisma wears a peculiar expression: angrily-lidded eyes with a broad smile. (My attempt at constructing such a face sent a room into peals of laughter.)

High school officially a waste of time

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Just as I suspected, high school graduation requirements are all about keeping seats warm, not about actually teaching students anything. That will soon change in eight states, according to Sam Dillon in the NYT; as Kentucky education commissioner Terry Holliday says, “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach [to graduation] based… around move-on-when-ready.”

Those states will allow 10th-graders who pass a battery of subject examinations to proceed directly to postsecondary education — vaguely recalling the entrance examinations that Robert Hutchins’ administration applied to 16-year-olds applying to the University of Chicago in the 1940s.

I faced similar stupidity when I left high school after three years: at the time, North Carolina required four years of English credits. English classes from the local state university weren’t acceptable, either. A deal was struck wherein my high school would pre-print a diploma and hold it until I provided a transcript showing that I’d completed a year at university. (As far as I can remember, I never did pick up that diploma.) It appears that N.C. has lightened up and now allows students to complete English in four semesters, since it’s now a national leader in early college high schools.

Findings (23 Nov)

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Oh, all right, this’ll be another miscellany post.

1. I was reading Sunday’s Frank Rich column on Sarah Palin while walking down Lincoln Avenue — the sadly silenced “German Broadway.” The fiercely nativist, “politically incorrect,” anti-intellectual, non-reality-based far right certainly deserves the moniker “New Know Nothings”

Back in 1855, Chicago’s immigrants electorally vanquished the old Know-Nothings after the Lager Beer Riot. With that, the right-wing elite lost power over the city for centuries — over the right to drink beer. Which of today’s wedge issues is a sure loser for today’s right? Bear in mind that nationally, they ended up winning (and then losing) the war over beer.

2. I ran my new address through the magic new TIF Search. Even though the Fullerton/Milwaukee TIF was only authorized in 2000, it already takes over 2/3 of my tax bill. pie chart

3. Monée Fields-White has a cool profile in Crain’s this week about the Bensidoun public-market operation that’s coming to the C&NW concourse.

4. Hint from Tom Vanderbilt:

One recent study conducted by officials at the Paris Metro—which looked at “missed connection” ads placed by urbanites looking for love in the city—found that the Metro “is without doubt the foremost producer of urban tales about falling in love.” The seats closest to the door, it seemed, offered the best opportunities for falling in love with the proper stranger.

5. I keep meaning to finish off an essay on the parking privatization deal. One of these days…

Dollar; cities already below carbon cap?

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Two thoughts on larger themes:

1. The FT tells us that “Republican politicians have highlighted the dollar’s slide as evidence of waning US power,” going on to quote that superpower of economic analysis, Sarah Palin. Oh, that’s rich, especially seeing as how some of us had noticed years ago the “longstanding bearish case against the currency” (Economist), caused by the Bush era’s reckless-at-best inflation of a colossal debt-and-overconsumption bubble.

There is a lovely comeback from AEI’s Norm Ornstein, though: “there may be a legitimate debate to be had… but Sarah Palin is not qualified to participate in it.”

Of course, we also have reasonable voices on the left (here’s Chris Hayes) calling for “a forceful, unequivocal, ‘yes to inflation,’ ” so let’s just say that I’d like to get my international travel over with sooner rather than later.

2. The idea of a per-capita carbon cap — versus a per-country limit, the idea being that each of us humans has an equal right to the sky above all our heads — has apparently come back. “The authors suggest setting a cap on total emissions, and then converting that cap into a global per-person limit… The paper suggests that the personal emissions target would be set at around 10.8 tonnes of CO2 per year.” (Economist)

Getting everyone’s emissions down to urban levels would be a great start, of course: Chicago nearly clears the bar with 12 tons per capita, while NYC and London easily clear it with 7 and 6 tons apiece, respectively.

a highly suggestible setting

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How stupid! Why didn’t I just phone my internist or the person taking calls for him? When I didn’t do that and went to the ER instead, why didn’t I just answer the first physician, ‘No, that’s not necessary,’ when she suggested referring me to a couple of specialists?

In most settings, the doctor has far greater incentive than disincentive to order excessive services — that is, those that aren’t indicated by practice guidelines or evidence-based medicine. – Jack Coulehan in Health Affairs, reprinted in the WaPo

This reminds me of my own ER story.

I travel a lot for work. A few years ago, during a convention in Denver, I began feeling a little ill. I called off the evening plans and went to bed early. The next morning, I had incredible nausea which ended with projectile vomiting — think “Ren & Stimpy.” It was actually kind of funny, in the few clear-headed moments I had. All throughout the day, I attempted the usual things (principally ginger ale) but couldn’t keep anything down at all. By the end of the day, I was beyond lightheaded — I’d now gone 20 hours without fluids, my abdomen was sore from all the retching, and in the most recent episode (at a bagel shop) I’d noticed flecks of blood amidst the soup. I needed fluids, and fast. I somehow managed to pack up what I was doing and told a cab driver to take me to the nearest hospital.

That hospital turned out to be Denver Health, the recently privatized county general hospital — but still the city’s primary safety-net provider. (Where I was on 17th was actually a bit closer to St. Joseph’s or St. Luke’s, it turns out, but the drive down Speer is faster.) I walked into the ER and waited as the triage nurse saw patients. He was doing an admirable job: although his Spanish was no better than mine, he maintained his composure far better than I would’ve in the face of a parade of misery that included gunshots and gangrene among other ailments. Quite a lot of them looked to be in much worse shape than I, but when I was called up I pretty quickly gained admittance to the ER. I suspect that I might have been turned away had I been just another one of the uninsured out there.

Once in, I did get an I.V. drip for fluids and a couple pills of a strong antiemetic; after a brief nap, I felt okay. Yet the attending physician, not seeing any obvious cause for this, said that perhaps the abdominal pain was from appendicitis (when no, it was just sore after spending a day violently vomiting) and that a CT scan might be in order. Even at that moment, I highly doubted it, but ended up playing along. Soon after the CT scan, I was discharged and told to follow up back at home in a week. Several weeks later, I get some confusing statements from my insurance which clearly say “do not pay” — and soon thereafter, a notice from a collection agency, even before I was instructed to pay anything. Since I was out of state, the reimbursement rate was lower than it would have been at home, and that pointless little trip through the CT cost me $1,000.

Contrast this with my most in-depth experience with a single-payer system of sorts: Kaiser Permanente. A month before I left for college, my brother and I went mountain biking on some trails near home and I endo’d on a downhill — braked too suddenly up front, flipping myself over the handlebars, and breaking my right collarbone upon landing. (This is a common injury among cyclists, since the clavicle is a pretty wimpy bone.) I didn’t know it at the time; all I knew was that I couldn’t really move my right arm, and therefore couldn’t bike out of the park. We walked our bikes along a few miles of equestrian trails — the most direct, if muddy, way back out. It just happened that the Kaiser medical center was not far from the park entrance, so we stumbled in — bloody and smelling of horse shit — scanned the little ID cards that brought up our records, and waited a little while. I got called from the waiting room, got a bit of cleaning up and an X-ray, and got a bit of joking from the staff as they pointed to the fracture. There’s not much one can do about a clavicle, anyhow, but what was equally notable was how there weren’t huge bills afterwards. Our premiums (and co-pays) covered basic services like, well, X-rays for broken bones.

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.)

Globe

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Among the nice things about vacationing in Canada is seeing the Globe & Mail. Two fragments from Friday’s (5 September) issue:

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

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

Cross purposes

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The Twin Cities have an image problem. A national survey conducted by FutureBrand on behalf of the corporate community — facing the prospect of a critical labor shortage in a “creative class” economy — found that Americans have a fairly negative perception of the area. In particular, respondents “describe the area as quite conservative,” ranking it second most conservative, second least liberal, and last on an array of positive attributes like sophisticated, cultural and artistic, unique, multicultural, livable, youthful, economically vital, flourishing and vibrant, alive, fun and exciting, when compared to six peer areas (the others being Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Denver and Seattle). So, the corporations looked to the area’s large advertising industry to help with a comprehensive branding campaign, “aiming to change perceptions of our community, attract and retain talent as well as visitors.” Little & Company provided some fresh-looking, if somewhat predictably boosterish, creative to introduce the brand as Minneapolis Saint Paul: More to Life.

Looking up

Ironic, then, that the exact same ads which attempt to dispel “too conservative” prejudices by trumpeting the area’s performance artists (among other things) are being used as talking points for media covering… the Republican National Convention. Someone [h/t Wonkette] even amateurishly pasted an elephant into several of the spots in an effort to make the campaign relevant to the right-wing hoohah.