Searching for one more hit of oil

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New approach: one topic per post! Let’s see if this helps me get things published in a more timely manner.

“Like a drunk ransacking the house in hours of unearthing one more bottle, we can pollute the beaches and invade the last wilderness areas, searching for just one more big deposit of oil.” — Donnella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, pg. 134

Indeed, opening all of America’s coasts to drilling would lower gas prices by 2¢. (Original EIA source is Table 9 here.) I’m sure that opening up America’s playgrounds and backyards to drilling won’t make a difference, either; this finite resource is largely gone from these shores, and no amount of wishing will bring cheap, easy, domestic oil back. Idiots like a certain presidential candidate who promise to halve gas prices remind me of a definition of insanity, from folks who might know about addiction: doing the same thing over again, but expecting different results.

Man behind the (sprawl) curtain

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“Your city has been making decisions for you for a long time. Those decisions have led to this point: You’re standing in your driveway, keys in hand, wondering why you don’t seem to have a choice. You need socks or cereal. You want to see a movie with a friend. Each of those mundane tasks seems to require a journey of some distance. Why are these things so separated?” — Susan Piedmont-Palladino, “Intelligent Cities”

Here’s the main problem I have with anti-government status-quo boosters: they’re somehow completely blind to how government created the existing situation, but then loudly whine about how government shouldn’t change anything! Not even removing its distortionary supports for the status quo!

That perspective completely ignores that the oil/sprawl status quo has suffered a sea change regardless of government’s (in)action. Consider:
– Miles driven plateaued in 2007 and is now declining, shrinking relative to all the factors that supposedly caused its growth (GDP, population, employment)
– Not only that, car ownership is actually declining in the USA
– Completions of the three iconic suburban building types (detached houses, malls, office parks) have fallen to post-1950 lows, or in some cases basically stopped*
– Along with that, migration to the suburbs has also passed an inflection point
– Rail freight transport is about two-thirds cheaper than trucking, per ton-mile
– If you’re going to cheerlead a fossil fuel, oil’s the wrong one: CNG is now 36% cheaper than gasoline per gallon equivalent

* Might be interesting to research this on the housing-starts front. Post adapted from a comment to GGW.

Homes vs. Parking, ca. 1954

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Homes vs Parking Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The Smithsonian’s American History museum had this fascinating photo (from the Chicago Historical Society’s collection) of a Chicago two-flat whose owners were very unhappy about being pushed aside by redevelopment. It appears that their house was eventually taken to be a parking lot for Post Office trucks, but the date indicates that this was actually years after the Blue Line subway portal opened.

This was taken on the very same Mautene Court that WPB has spent so much effort trying to reactivate, and I’ve written about my ideas for resurrecting this block before. I hope this year’s Open Streets event on Milwaukee will feature events on Mautene, introducing the space to a broader audience.

The signs: “Homes vs Parking,” “Houses not Parking Lots,” and “We Will Not Give Up Our Home for a Parking Lot.”

Shorts: Climate Ride, shouting, Reston, Toronto, brew boom

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Ah, 20° = shorts weather! (Celsius, of course.)

1. Speaking of great biking, I’ll be riding 300+ miles, from New York to Washington, as part of the Climate Ride in May.

Sponsor my ride and you’ll give to a host of organizations working to heal the earth — from global and national environmental organizations down to local bike advocates — by sponsoring me for the 2012 NYC-DC Climate Ride.
Your sponsorship will make a difference globally and locally: funds will underwrite bike/walk advocacy in DC, Chicago, and NYC, as well as the Alliance for Biking & Walking nationally, plus the great environmental news service Grist and the international agitators at 350.org. Upon arriving at the Capitol, I’ll be taking the message to NC’s Senators. (That covers most of where my friends live.) Thanks, all!

2. “PowerPoint presentations were no match tonight for good old-fashioned chanting” when anti-transit hacks were paid to speak in Honolulu recently. Oahu’s dense corridors (of sprawl) are uniquely suited to transit:
Fingers of sprawl

3. For a class project, I recently spent a day wandering around old and new Reston, Virginia: Lake Anne and Reston Town Center. The photos are here.

4. See 25km of streetcar urbanism — along Toronto’s famed 501 Queen Street line — in 1 minute of video Note the overwhelmingly low-rise densities (and it pretty much goes through the middle of “downtown”) but the very high mixed uses throughout.

5. No, it’s not just you; the number of craft breweries is growing exponentially. Per the Brewers Association:
craft breweries in USA

Promising developments

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Five new developments around town that will hopefully set new standards for welcoming pedestrians and cyclists:

1. Giant apartment REIT Archstone will outfit its new NoMa tower with a DIY bike maintenance facility and an outdoor movie screen. Evidently, these are the amenities that today’s luxury apartment renters want, and the REIT shareholders are going to give it to ’em.

2. A few blocks north, a “Metropolitan Branch Trail Atrium” will feature “an automatic bike pump for maintenance; a water fountain; a refreshment area with vending machines, tables and chairs; indoor bike parking and a natural ventilation system… stairs will have a bike trough” to encourage cycling to work from the elevated Met Branch Trail (which shares said Branch with the Metro and the Amtrak/MARC Northeast Corridor trains) to the Washington Gateway office complex.

Speaking of “NoMa,” everyone should quit complaining about the name. It’s not derivative of “SoHo,” and anyone who claims that obviously suffers from a goodly dose of NYC provincialism; SoHo itself was copied from Soho in London. Besides, no one seem to have no trouble with NoVa, at least written. Granted, I would have preferred a name like Union Quarter or Union Yards to reference its location behind Union Station, but maybe that would’ve kiboshed its appeal to Republican firms. Anyhow, elsewhere in northeast DC:

3. Over in Brookland, the new Bozzuto-Abdo “college town” connecting Catholic University down to the Metro will face the station with an “Arts Walk” pedestrian plaza lined with ground floor studios and convenience retail. The ground floor uses are flexible enough to work regardless of the level of foot traffic, and can evolve as the site develops.

The combination sounds like Liberties Walk in Philadelphia, whose scale and merchandising I’ve admired before:
west block
The emphasis on artisans also sounds like some of the “alleys” in LA’s Old Chinatown.

4. Speaking of pedestrian passages, a proposed Georgetown development would bring secondary retail entrances around to a 10′ wide alley, a la Cady’s Alley between M St and the C&O Canal. Developer Anthony Lanier from EastBanc: “We believe that today’s alleys can be tomorrow’s courtyards, shopping streets, or accesses.” (More on alleys, including a short history of DC coach houses’ removal and potential renaissance.)

5. Annals of ambitious private-sector redevelopment attempts: a developer has offered to buy out a full block of 1970s townhouses — purchased by the tenants as condos in 1998 — along 14th St near Logan Circle. The three-story townhouses now stick out as a relic along increasingly mid-rise, commercial 14th Street. (Heck, just the parking lots could be worth a lot if developed in situ.)

The buildings’ condo ownership structure makes redevelopment (in the absence of eminent domain) incredibly difficult. As Lydia DePillis writes, “each of the two separate condo associations would have to vote unanimously to dissolve themselves. Obviously, this would have been much easier with a single owner (whether a rental building or even a co-op, where only a majority of shares can dissolve the association), but condos’ recent proliferation as a way of making homeownership more attainable has the unintended consequence of hyper-fragmenting land ownership.

That challenge almost makes redeveloping a single-family subdivision, as at MetroWest at the Vienna Metro station, look like a picnic by comparison; in a single-family subdivision, a single hold-out can just be built around rather than holding up the entire process. Add into that contentiousness the added elements of class struggle and, inevitably, race — most of the current owners are moderate-income families of color, with some having lived there for a generation — and, well, I can’t imagine that the condo board meetings go very smoothly.

P.S. Post #1000!

Cool ideas from TRB (1)

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[Obviously, I heard a lot of interesting ideas at TRB, so I’ll try to let them speak for themselves with some brief paper excerpts.]

What would happen if the suburbs walked & biked as much as the cities did? How much healthier would retrofitting suburbia make suburbanites?

For the scenario with the highest levels of physical activity (ATC), I-THIM predicted a 15% reduction in disease burden due to cardiovascular diseases and diabetes and approximately 5% reductions each for breast cancer, colon cancer, dementia, and depression. Risk reduction of this magnitude would rank among the most notable public health achievements in the modern era, and reduce the estimated $34 billion in California annual costs from cardiovascular disease and other chronic conditions such as obesity.

In the most ambitious active transport scenario, this potential harm [from road traffic injuries] is approximately 14% of the benefit from physical activity. [i.e., benefits outweigh harm by 7X]

The other principal finding is that wide scale adoption of active transport could have as large an impact on carbon reduction as strategies based on… reengineering automobiles and fuels.

From the California Department of Public Health, “Health Co-Benefits and Transportation-Related Reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Bay Area” by Neil Maizlish with James Woodcock, Sean Co, Bart Ostro, Amir Fanai, and David Fairley.

Here on the south side

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Three shorts from the wrong side of the “city of magnificent intentions”:

1. Richard Layman correctly calls a proposed National Harbor casino an “enclave development,” but perhaps that’s the point.

Singapore recently legalized casino gambling, in a bid to keep business travelers amused — and so sought to minimize its impact on local residents by placing the casinos only within integrated resorts, far from local transit, and even requiring a passport check at the casino door (locals can enter for a $75 fee). That way, the city gets the tax revenue without having to deal with the external costs of residents’ gambling addictions.

The closest analogue to that situation in this area, or indeed in most any American city, would be… National Harbor. (The Maryland-waters casino boat at the pier in Chesapeake Beach, Virginia was a similarly inspired way of internalizing the benefits and externalizing the costs, but I doubt Virginia would be quite so happy with it.) I also don’t think that gambling will be all that sustainable a revenue stream, but I’d be hard pressed to find a more appropriately hidden-in-plain-sight site.

2. None other than Leon Krier, the eminence grise of classicism, weighed in on my (extended) neighborhood thusly [in Metropolis, curiously]:

“The post-war redevelopment of the Southwest D.C. neighborhood, beyond the human tragedy of wholesale clearing an entire urban community, replaced L’Enfant’s urban armature and network of streets and squares with a soulless nowhere. The gruesome operation was a crucible for imposing on Washington, D.C. the modernist vision so detested by Eisenhower, abhorred by the users and occasional visitors and avoided and ignored by those who have no obligatory business there… In my opinion [Gehry’s] expressionist design formulae would yet effect a welcome respite from the debilitating boredom of the area.”

He fondly mentions Francisco Ruiz’s counter-proposal, whose best feature by far is a statue astride the Maryland Avenue axis, entitled “The Republic Exhorts the Congress to Conscience.” I’ve thought about doing the same myself some days, but what’s the best costume?

3. I actually sorta relate to Mittens’ recent befuddling utterance that “trees are the right height” in Michigan. I grew up amidst trees, albeit too often trees marked for destruction, and after too many years at the edge of the prairie began to miss to trees. That’s one big reason why I moved back east.

Late November shorts

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Indeed, it hit 70F today, so I did indeed wear shorts!

1. mqVibe looks interesting: it rates neighborhoods “in terms of edginess, residential, burbiness (i.e., how many chain businesses dominate the blocks), and other dimensions,” according to John Hendel in TBD. The rankings of local neighborhoods appear about right; will have to check out other cities’ rankings to see how it differs vs. Walk Score.

2. Old news, but since Fox News has instituted a rule stating that any discussion of global warming should be preceded by a “discussion of the debate,” I suggest another new rule: any report about radio waves (like those involving mobile phones) must also include a segment where a man in a tin foil hat presents the debate about whether such devices are actually government mind control waves. Hey, if you’re going to distort the science…

3. Street enclosure ratios make all the difference in the world — they could make even the worst excesses of mini-mall LA avenues look human scale. (Original: David Yoon)

4. “[J]ust about every one is complaining about bikes and stop signs. But the fact of the matter is, those stop signs are there to regulate speed, not right of way; two way stops actually do a better job of that. And bikes have a hard time beating the speed limit.” – Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger. Indeed, the 4-way stop is actually a very poor way of regulating right of way. In many cases, it’s difficult to tell who has the right of way, since “first to approach the intersection” and “first to get to the stop bar” are often different.

Mexico City: thoughts

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First impressions that I scribbled down about Mexico City:
– Wow, it is indeed high up. Bring some nasal spray to combat the sniffles.
– A great number of buildings are indeed askew, which did not help my occasional difficulty in descending stairs.
– Speaking of stairs, their metro is the only place where I have ever seen metal escalator treads worn down by heavy pedestrian traffic. Stone, sure, but wow!
– Also the only other place, besides Tokyo, where subway passages are given lanes — and the arrows have been planned to point you in the most direct route, getting everyone out of one another’s way. (This confused me at first in Tokyo, since the directional markers often added to the general confusion over whether to walk on the left or right.)
– The only useful thing about Polanco is its street names — scientists and poets.
– After being thoroughly disgusted with Polanco, I had no appetite to venture even further out (half an hour past the subway!) to the manufactured Edge City of Santa Fe. I’m pretty sure that the Google Earth view is more interesting, anyhow. Of course, it’s classic sectoral urbanism — the favored quarter just follows Reforma out, and out, and out… and demands more infrastructure as it goes.
– Subsidized gasoline must explain, to some extent, the popularity of monster SUVs and ancient gas-guzzlers alike.
– Something about the scale of the blocks downtown, their early-20th-century stone architecture, the wall-to-wall commerce, and the nonstop crowds reminded me more of Shanghai than of other large Latin American cities I’ve been to.
– Note that it’s early 20th century architecture; even though the city was settled almost 800 years ago, it was tiny up until the 20th century (and the postwar years in particular). In 1900, it scarcely extended for a few blocks past the Alameda.
– The overhead cost of providing so many security guards everywhere must add considerably to the cost of doing business. It is pretty reassuring, though, to have a few cops standing around on every block downtown.
– Amusing photo: Martha on an Ecobici! It’s heartwarming that bike-sharing is what the mayor of Mexico City shows off to foreign celebrities.

October shorts

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It’s no longer shorts weather, but quick links endure!

1. Capital Bikeshare just turned one, and surprisingly has doubled its initial ridership projections and is currently running an operating surplus. [via GGW/WashCycle]

2. Economists like Ed Glaeser (and Ryan Avent, although I haven’t read his new treatise; reviewed by Rob Pitingolo in GGW and Lydia in CityPaper) often make the mistake of overly simplifying how housing markets work. Instead, numerous other important factors complicate matters, including:
– as Rob points out, housing is a bundle of goods whose utilities vary for different audiences
– housing construction can induce demand, particularly by adding amenities to a neighborhood
– housing construction can also remove amenities from a neighborhood, like a low-rise scale, thus changing other intangibles included in that bundle of goods
– construction costs don’t increase linearly; rather, costs jump at certain inflection points, like between low- and mid-rise
– housing and real estate in general are imperfect markets, since land is not a replicable commodity
– the substantial lag time for housing construction, even in less regulated markets, almost guarantees that supply will miss demand peaks

Pro-active planning remains the best and most time-honored way of pre-empting NIMBYs. Get the neighborhood to buy-in to neighborhood change early on, and then they won’t be surprised and upset when it happens.

3. Very interesting to see (via Dan Mihalopoulos/CNC) that Inspector General Joseph Ferguson has put a lot of sacred cows on the table for increasing revenue in Chicago — particularly several implicit subsidies to drivers. A downtown congestion charge, tolls on Lake Shore Drive, a commuter income tax, privatized parking enforcement, higher water/sewer fees, and higher garbage collection fees all would substantially impact suburbanites, single-family homeowners, and drivers.

4. How important are street enclosure ratios? As this gallery of reconstructed L.A. traffic sewers shows, they’re so important that almost nothing else matters if you get them right. (Photo-illustrations by David Yoon.) Back when I was reading comments on LEED-ND 1.0, a lot of complaints centered on the street enclosure requirement; I think that thinking about such urban design factors is just foreign to the architects & engineers who typically do LEED submittals. Yet it’s absolutely fundamental to defining urban rooms.