Counterintuitive

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In a neat inversion of “time spent walking adds time to your life” (every minute spent walking adds three minutes to your life), time spent driving subtracts from your life. Twenty minutes of life lost per hour driven, in fact, just from the risk of dying in a car crash. This comes to us from a paper cheekily titled “Time Lost by Driving Fast,” by Donald A. Redelmeier and Ahmed M. Bayoumi.

That figure doesn’t even take into account the much higher risk of heart disease that drivers face. (h/t VTPI)

Crossing the line

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Metro briefs for today. (Whew, am I sick of food trucks, although I appreciate Jef Nickerson for saying what’s on my mind: “I’m not saying Food Trucks should be banned, far from it. What I would like to see is, the city thinking about ways to encourage other forms of street food, be they micro-storefronts, push carts, Food Trucks, or something else.”)

1. Chris Leinberger tries to make nice with Joel Kotkin by pointing out that the latter is stuck in the old city vs. suburb dichotomy, hung up on municipal boundaries. This is still necessary that many years after David Rusk‘s “elastic cities” hypothesis? And for a writer based in the southwest, with its highly elastic cities? I’m more inclined to chalk it up to willful ignorance.

(Since I grew up in an “elastic” city with a regional school district, all of which consisted principally of low-density sprawl that overran and embedded a few country towns, I’ve always thought this distinction was a complete canard. Of course “auto-dependent sprawl” and “walkable urbanism” can both exist in either city, suburb, town, or country. Duh.)

2. Delhi is following Singapore and writing traffic tickets based on photo evidence of infractions posted to Facebook. I typically would support measures to improve the ubiquity of traffic law enforcement, particularly as regards public safety, but this raises serious concerns about due process. I wonder how much supporting evidence would be necessary to verify that such photos haven’t been doctored: untampered EXIF data? GPS tracks showing that the car was at that location?

3. “Chicago taxpayers [will] cry” over the $11 billion that the Morgan Stanley joint venture [JV] will make over the term of the parking meter lease, according to Bloomberg’s Darrell Preston. (The JV also admits that the amount it spent on new meters amounts to a mere $40M.) Interesting that the JV is issuing what amounts to parking-meter revenue bonds — except priced as corporate bonds, not as tax-exempt municipal debt. (I’ve been saying all this time that an easier and more cost-effective way to tap into the future revenue stream would be for the city to jack the rates and issue revenue bonds. The primary reason for not doing this is that it would add debt to the city’s books, thereby lowering its credit rating — and that the proceeds from municipal bonds are subject to greater City Council scrutiny under Illinois law than the proceeds from a PPP. Well, the city got a downgrade anyways.)

Meanwhile, of course, San Francisco — which pioneered parking meter revenue bonds back in 1994 — has just launched SFpark, its municipally run advanced market-pricing scheme. The startup costs are underwritten via a loan from the MPO, interestingly, to be paid back with the enhanced revenues. And guess what else? The city still retains the flexibility to do cool things with its public space, like curbside bike parking. Imagine that!

4. An interesting participation exercise from the Next American City, sponsored by IBM’s Smarter Cities ad campaign: The Next American City Challenge on Tumblr.

5. Speaking of Tumblr, TakeMeWithYou is a WPB Make Believe project that used the “community disposable camera” model of storytelling. This was suggested as one idea for our WPB plan outreach process; glad to see that it came up with some fun results.

6. Great article by Fred Mayer on the Twin Cities (and Madison) bike economy, which he estimates at over $300M in revenues annually. One might think that the bike industry should prove to have a particularly lucrative local multiplier effect: it’s relatively light on capital and heavy on labor, and generates positive local externalities — quite unlike driving, which sucks money out of other sectors of the economy and sends almost all of its capital costs out of the local economy.

7. Park51, or the Cordoba Initiative, is obviously a local zoning matter — and as such, national Republicans have zero say. Perhaps that’s why they’re fast falling into line to “stand against the Ground Zero mosque,” since it’s completely painless: it will undoubtedly happen, and they can look like they’re doing something (paying lip service to the insane base) without actually affecting any real change. Yet watching this is frightening: for government to step in and “stop” Park51 wouldn’t just prohibit the free exercise of religion (1st Amendment) but also deprive the rightful landowners their property (5th Amendment). That this self-described “Don’t Tread on Me” crowd can show off that much contempt for personal freedoms just makes it all the more obvious that such “freedoms” only apply to their selfish selves.

8. Tom Philpott over at Grist notes that even most rural farms, much less urban farms, don’t make money. It frustrates me that so many people are so hopelessly naïve about farming’s poor economics: after the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars paving over farmland because it’s uneconomical, suddenly now farming will be profitable enough to underwrite demolition and infrastructure work to undo it all? This goes double for architects who concoct schemes featuring purpose-built “vertical ag” megastructures for agriculture (the very definition of a “factory farm”), or those positing urban farms as the solution for just about everything urban-decline related.

For instance, last year’s Re-Burbia competition finalists included exactly two approaches that comprehensively evolving suburbs through individual initiative. The rest of the schemes were a collection of inflexible (and therefore inherently unsustainable) megastructures (the sort of megalomaniacal thinking that got us into this mess of cloverleafs, malls, and McMansions), one-off tech gizmo wonder panaceas, or land-use transformations that betray a complete misunderstanding of economics (farms and wetlands are great, but they just don’t pay the rent).

As Alex Steffen (via Allison Arieff in Good) points out (and as SF Streetsblog commenters echo), it’s a folly to think that any vacant land (even in stagnant cities) should automatically be best thought of as agriculture, particularly permanently; in many cases, such land could best enhance regional sustainability (and the regional economy) if used to enhance walkability instead with more housing, retail, or workplaces. The difference between zero and ten food miles is nothing like the difference between ten and 2,000. Eliminating the first 99.5% of the food miles is easy and necessary, so let’s not obsess over the last 0.4%.

(And really, this has nothing to do with the orchard. Honest: that necessarily has to be open space of some kind.)

9. “[C]limatologists have long theorized that in a warming world, the added heat would cause more record highs and fewer record lows. The statistics suggest that is exactly what is happening. In the United States these days, about two record highs are being set for every record low, telltale evidence that amid all the random variation of weather, the trend is toward a warmer climate.” Justin Gillis [NYT]

Less serious:

10. Oh, how I’ve giggled at the now-repaired-again Milshire Ho sign. (Backup photo.) For the longest time, I just assumed it read “Wilshire.”

11. Oh, and while we’re in Logan Square, my friends’ HGTV makeover aired in June. Check this page for when it’ll re-run.

12. Not metro at all, but a recent party joke was about a theme band called “Ayn Rand Sex Scene.” Given her newfound popularity…

Food trucks, elaborated

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Responding to a challenge to my brief expression of puzzlement over why everyone’s suddenly infatuated with food trucks, to the point where some bloggers are gushing that they “can’t see the downside.” (Such expressions of skepticism have been met with exasperated astonishment, as if I’d attacked motherhood and apple pie. Geez, no. I haven’t even cancelled my Time Out subscription.)

First off, I’m not alone here. Plenty of people have already complained about food trucks causing pollution, unfair competition, and blocking parking or loading zones or no-standing fire lanes or crosswalks; this has been extensively covered by media in NYC [Brownstoner, Times, The L] and LA [LAist, Daily News, Daily Press, Times, YoVenice]. Even Mayor Bloomberg agrees [Daily News]: “The little [vendor] stand is now getting to be these enormous trucks with generators… We are moving stores into the street. And they sit there and they park and they take up parking places and they block traffic.” Placid PDX (where most food carts are in corrals on private land, bearing a striking resemblance to Singapore’s “hawker centres” or Hong Kong’s Cooked Food Centres) has seen battles, while DC has already enacted extensive regulations in advance of their arrival.

Second, my complaint isn’t about street food, or fast food, much less food (of course). It’s about trucks, which I’ve never loved. Food trucks, in particular, present a lot of external costs that threaten many great qualities about our urban retail districts: mixed uses, economic and social diversity, walkability, stability, fiscal sustainability, and livability. Street food existed for thousands of years before foam plates, diesel generators, and V8 engines.

I love street food, and adventurous stuff at that; I’ve spent weeks this year subsisting on the stuff: chestnuts in Guangzhou, durian shakes in Singapore, alfajores in Buenos Aires, currywurst in Vienna, scrapple in Philadelphia, lemonade in Glencoe. I’ve done more than most to advance local food in Chicago, as treasurer of its only food co-op, community gardener, champion of a public market in WPB and consistent advocate of its efforts to get food (particularly a coffee stand) and other vendors to enliven the Polish Triangle and Mautene Court, and even a supporter of an outdoor food market in my backyard. Immigrant street food entrepreneurship is even in my blood: my mother and her siblings used to sell Fall River chow mein sandwiches outdoors to lines of factory workers on no-meat Fridays.

Vendors in other cities pay ground rent to transit agencies (as in Vienna, where they’re at many tram stops) or public-market authorities (as in Hong Kong), which in turn pay for services that these businesses use, like trash pickup. These costs aren’t incidental; residents and businesses within the Wicker Park Bucktown SSA already spend $150,000 a year cleaning litter from its sidewalks, even without any food trucks — who will, because they don’t pay local property taxes, use those services and leave local taxpayers footing the bill. I’ve lived in the midst of really trendy neighborhoods like WPB for eight years now. I like having lots of shops and restaurants within walking distance, as long as they largely contain their noise and customers. Vendors with carts or booths or whatever already set up shop by the dozens outside my apartment, at a thronged weekly farmers’ market and with pushcarts selling elotes, ice cream, slushies, and fried dough every day. Food trucks with loud generators and littering crowds idling outside my window is not part of what I signed up for — Bloomberg’s quote above seems to indicate that he also sees the distinction — and noise and trash are not an integral part of city life. (You want more people living in cities? Make them pleasant to live in.) Call this a NIMBY reaction if you will — but recognize that I am no paper tiger, and have on multiple occasions done face-to-face combat against real NIMBYs on behalf of making Chicago more urban, walkable, and livable.

I want to see retail energy (and economic opportunity), round-the-clock mixed uses, and local economic diversity spread throughout the city, instead of hyperconcentrating even further in existing transient activity nodes. Innovative restaurants — started by exactly the same kind of person who might now just start a food truck instead — traditionally have catalyzed new retail districts and extended the activity hours of other districts (since a fixed-premise restaurant has the incentive of sunk capital costs to try extending hours). Merely piling more businesses into every available inch of, say, Clark & Belmont or Milwaukee & Damen won’t help (1) those of us who live nearby and enjoy sleeping on occasion, (2) people who legitimately need to pass through [including thousands of cyclists and pedestrians every day], (3) people who live a little further out who want more options over there. I’d love to live in a city where great food’s available around every corner, instead of falling all over the place at a few overwhelmed intersections.

Of course Chicago should certainly make it easier for people to open new businesses or try new business ideas: Singapore can get a food stall (it has nearly 20,000 on public premises alone) up and running in two weeks. Giving some people privileged access to commercialize choice bits of public space — as food trucks do by showing up around offices at lunch, around nightclubs at midnight, and otherwise feeding off a few little transient pockets of density — isn’t necessary. “Selling” that space at non-market-determined prices — parking meter rates here don’t reflect market clearing prices for retail square footage and in fact don’t accrue to the public — really gives the trucks an unfair edge on non-mobile businesses. (Maybe location franchises could be auctioned, instead of setting license fees by citywide fiat.) Enforcing the proposed rules requiring that food trucks keep their distance from existing businesses will by definition be difficult, and probably a low priority for cops who can’t be bothered with hundreds of existing laws.

Finally, as a cyclist and a pedestrian, I recognize that having more vehicles on the streets — particularly ones plying areas with high levels of foot traffic, and quite likely lots of drunk people stumbling around — will necessarily negatively impact road safety. (Deaths from cars and trucks outnumber gun deaths in much of the north side.) In a world where cities are finally now understanding the value of reducing vehicle traffic and returning public space to people, sending dozens more trucks out there just to feed a passing yuppie whimsy seems like a step back to me.

Orchard (2)

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As Lynn mentions, a public meeting regarding the proposal to build an orchard on Logan Square will take place on Tuesday evening at Logan Square Kitchen. She also points out that DPD (or whoever they are now) says they have an open mind about the proposal.

Again, I welcome the idea of an orchard on a different site, in an area where a quiet garden would be a net benefit to the neighbors. I would even welcome a (temporary) vegetable or flower garden at this site, until the community has a clearer vision for this parcel. (A playlot? An outdoor flea market, for the yard-sale crowd taking over Logan? A graffiti gallery? Who knows?) However, creating an orchard here is a pretty permanent move, and its impact on the neighborhood for the next few decades should be very carefully considered — particularly the opportunity costs of fencing off a good chunk of public space within a growing retail area, where the neighbors (shops, mostly) would derive greater benefit from people than from trees.

I’ve been told that CROP is the only group that’s come forward with a promise to clean/maintain the site (over what time period, I don’t know). In the absence of an SSA or other funding mechanism, the Chamber is unable to step into that role should the site be developed into a public park or plaza. Yet CROP has yet to conclusively demonstrate that they have sufficient organizational capacity in spite of their brief history and narrow funding base. At the very least, as a neighbor I need assurances that CROP has the capacity to keep vagrants and vermin away from the site — and this video doesn’t exactly show off a well-tended garden. By that very low standard of care, the existing informal parking lot at least doesn’t damage the immediate neighborhood and provides a convenience to the neighboring shops. It also doesn’t present much of an opportunity cost, since it could be ripped up tomorrow.

Are they really “relocated Yankees”?

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For an assignment last year, I crunched some numbers about migration to Wake County –as of this year, North Carolina’s most populous county thanks to plentiful in-migration. Three interesting findings:
1. Contrary to common perception, just under half of movers to Wake County are “Yankees” (moving from states north of the Mason-Dixon). Most out-state movers arrive from other largely suburban counties.
2. The largest sending counties to Wake are nearby rural or mill-town counties (consistent with “migration potential” theory), since the South in general is still rapidly urbanizing. North Carolina was still majority-rural until the 1970s. (Urban/rural population from 1900-1990 and 1990-2000 [xls], or 1970-2010 [html]. Note that North Carolina in 2000 was as urbanized as Illinois in 1910.)
3. Within the Triangle, the metropolitan migration dynamic (larger households flow to the periphery, smaller households towards the center) appears to place Durham & Orange at the center, Wake at both center and periphery, and the exurbs at the periphery.

Full presentation (1MB PDF)

Quick: 31 July

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A couple of recent thoughts:

1. “Chicago’s transit system–the country’s second largest with an average 1.8 million riders every weekday–faces some of the nation’s most dire challenges. It has more than $7 billion in unfunded maintenance needs. On parts of the system, for example, trains engineered to speed along at 70 mph now must slow to a 15 mph crawl because the fragile rails can’t handle faster speeds. ‘They’re going at the speed of a horse and buggy because the rails are literally eroding and coming loose from the ties,’ says Ben Forman, research director for MassINC, a nonpartisan, Boston-based public policy think tank. ‘When transit breaks down as it has in Chicago, cities lose a big part of their core.’ ” [Zach Patton in Governing]

2. Dig up the Deep Tunnel? The Philadelphia Water Department, faced with the prospect of an $8 billion bill to deal with combined sewer overflow, has instead presented the EPA with a $1.6 billion green infrastructure plan that seeks to effectively de-pave 1/3 of the city’s impervious surface. Shades of Growing Water here… [h/t Feather O’Connor Houstoun in the same issue of Governing]

3. I’m know it’s so very trendy, but I really don’t understand the fascination with littering Chicago with food trucks. I’ve found them quite annoying in NY and LA:
– they don’t pay rent for the valuable public space they take up
– they unfairly compete with fixed-premise restaurants, particularly since Chicago suffers from many miles of empty storefronts
– they only go to trendy areas which already have lots of shops and foot traffic, thereby merely overcrowding existing transient hotspots and potentially preventing new areas from emerging
– they leave clouds of diesel fumes and noise in their wake, since they run generators even when idling
– they generate mountains of trash in said areas’ already-overflowing trashcans, since there’s no capacity for onboard dishwashing and few sidewalk recycling bins
– they’d be yet more unwieldy vehicles careening through the streets, killing people in crashes.

I certainly don’t dispute the overall goals to have broadly available, inexpensive food and easing the way for entrepreneurs to open foodservice businesses. However, these goals frankly have nothing to do with adding more smelly trucks to already choked streets. Seems like we’d be better off making it easier for people to open small restaurants — perhaps through establishing public markets, or “hawker centres” as Singapore’s government (which counts getting rid of itinerant food vendors as a key public health victory) insists on calling them.

4. A recent conversation turned to imagining the office drama at the planning department in West Hollywood, “America’s First Gay City”: the setting almost seems worthy of a TV series on a gay cable channel. Perhaps a workplace sitcom riffing on “Parks and Rec,” with hilariously micromanaging interior decorators staffing the design review commission, or a drama combining the personal dramatics of [well, just about any gay drama] with a noirish view of (lightly fictionalized) viciously seamy municipal politics. Unlike popularizations of planning like SimCity, this would expose planning not as a bland technocracy, but as a bunch of jealous hacks playing out their inter-personal political dramas across a bigger stage.

Anyhow, the thought reoccured to me upon finding that the vice-chair of WeHo’s transportation commission is perhaps better known as the former author of Boi from Troy, a blog combining Log Cabin Republican political views with a passion for local college football(ers). Actually, I’m pretty sure that WeHo is a pretty well governed place, and its fussy attention is evident in some pretty thoughtful streetscapes — but it’s still funny to imagine.

5. Where in today’s Republican Party are honest-to-god “fiscal conservatives” like Peter Peterson and David Stockman and Bruce Bartlett? What I see on Capitol Hill now is a group of nihilist zombies, holding even the smallest of bills hostage as fiscal death (most notably the recent $34B unemployment extension) while simultaneously seeking to blast a 100X bigger hole in the budget with their sacreder-than-Jeebus tax cuts. These people can’t be serious, and yet they are.

Bartlett: “Republicans have a completely indefensible position on taxes. In their view, deficits cannot arise from tax cuts. No matter how much taxes are cut, no matter how low revenues go as a share of GDP, tax cuts are never a cause of deficits; they result ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY from spending—and never from spending put in place by Republicans, such as Medicare Part D, TARP, two unfunded wars, bridges to nowhere, etc—but ONLY from Democratic efforts to stimulate growth, help the unemployed, provide health insurance for those without it, etc. The monumental hypocrisy of the Republican Party is something amazing to behold.”

Even sitting inside cars kills

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Gretchen Reynolds, in NYT Well, references an article in “Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise” by TY Warren et al. “Well” focuses on one finding — that men who spent more than one full day a week sitting either in a car or on a couch (watching TV) had a 64% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD). And, as Alan Durning has noted in reporting findings from another study, the correlation holds regardless of whether the men regularly did high-impact exercise (e.g., team sports, gym workouts). Avoiding CVD appears to be more about staying in motion constantly, rather than sporadic bursts of activity interrupting otherwise sedentary behavior — exactly the patterns of activity that active communities and suburban sprawl respectively foster.

What I thought was even more interesting, though, is that the article notes a higher correlation between sitting in cars and CVD than watching TV and CVD. Indeed, it appears that hours spent watching TV aren’t significantly correlated with risk of death from CVD — but that spending more than 10h a week in a car (=2h/weekday) leads to an 82% (!) higher risk of death from CVD than spending less than 4h a week (=48min/weekday) in a car.

Bicycle boulevard entrance

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Bicycle boulevard entrance


Bicycle boulevard entrance Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Unlike in Chicago, where punitive traffic rules are imposed without any rhyme or reason or consideration, Vancouver, B.C. has given cyclists many thoughtfully planned routes through its neighborhoods. Here at Yukon & 10th Streets in front of City Hall, bicycles can enter the street via the cutout, but cars can only exit. Thus, the street functions as one-way for through car traffic but two-way for bikes and cars driving from this block. Click through to see the various elements that make this arrangement safer for all road users, and more convenient for the neighbors.

(Here’s a close-up of a nearby, curb-height example; it might be better suited to snowy areas since otherwise snow would accumulate in the channel between the curbs.)

Cycling Rantzausgade

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Cycling Rantzausgade

Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Click on the link for a video of a retail street in the Nørrebro area in western Copenhagen. About one block behind is a chokepoint (as it crosses a greenway) which doesn’t allow cars or motorcycles past — only buses and cyclists can go through — but the shops still do fine with just local traffic circulation. The video stops at the intersection with Aboulevard, the main artery into Copenhagen from the west: it’s not a freeway, it has separated bike lanes, and during my quick observation about 25% of the vehicles even there were bikes.

This is what I mean by cycling there being an "effortless revelation."

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.

Oh, please.

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Oh, please. Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

What purpose does this stop sign serve? There is no cross traffic to stop for at School & Clifton in Lakeview.

This stop sign, and thousands more throughout Chicago, exist not to promote traffic flow but to make drivers obey the speed limit and yield to pedestrians. Instead of creating more and useless rules (which do have consequences — like impacting the way bikes move through the city), how about honoring and enforcing the ones that we already have?

As a cyclist who respects safety and order, I resent being obligated to constantly break the law in order to stay safe. I find it unconscionable that regulations have turned cautious road users into outlaws, while rewarding dangerous behavior (like zooming between stop signs, something today’s cars do with ease). Street regulations — like laws about, say, marriage — should change to accommodate harmless and socially accepted behavior.