Where there were no bad schools

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Well, this is disappointing. I’ve always been proud of the fact that I went to integrated public schools in a Southern inner city — especially since moving up north and seeing the damage that de-facto school segregation wreaks upon city and suburbs alike. What seemed normal as a kid was, as it turned out in my social-policy classes, a national model of how to do the right thing.

The magnet-school system in Raleigh not only provided remarkable education opportunities (my high school offered three orchestral programs, multivariate calculus, and Latin), but left me with enough street smarts to easily and respectfully navigate multiethnic city life. Getting bused across town for school also, in a way, taught me about educational opportunities across the entire city — museums, other libraries, the university. Although half of my peers lived in the lower-income, mostly African American neighborhoods of southeast Raleigh, nearly 90% of us went on to college. All this despite spending some 30% less per student than failing urban schools in the North.

The school system’s strong commitment to integration — suburban and city schools merged long after the courts had shifted away from forced busing — means that there are no bad schools, no schools worth fleeing or closing or “reconstituting,” in a county just shy of one million residents. Indeed, in Raleigh it’s the city schools which are better. This fact arguably played a huge role in making Raleigh one of the best-educated, most prosperous, fastest-growing cities in America:

For comparison’s sake, imagine that instead of merging in 1976, the Raleigh and Wake school systems had continued to be separate. And not only that, but Raleigh was one school district and every other town in Wake County had a separate school district of its own, like Wayne County [suburban Detroit]. Would Raleigh today be affluent? Or would the affluent people of Raleigh have long since moved to Cary, Apex and the rest of the suburbs, leaving a poor inner-city school system behind? [Bob Geary, Independent Weekly, writing about Gerald Grant’s new book Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh]

And yet there are others who inexplicably see such policies as failures, who insist that geography should be destiny. A small minority, likely drawn to Raleigh by its reputation for great schools, has consistently railed about the constant churn of school reassignments — necessary for a district that opens several costly new schools every single year. Maintaining integration has become more difficult as sprawl marched farther afield and as patterns of socioeconomic segregation ossified. (In this regard, the spread of suburban poverty and inner-city gentrification have actually helped to maintain some integration.) The usual right-wing hue and cry over “socialist social engineering” (never mind the right’s continual insistence on deeply interfering with private lives) becomes double-speak for perpetuating segregation. One school board member wants to have his cake and eat it, too — disband the magnets and somehow offer their programs at every single school, while decrying the “high cost” of busing. (Is there demand for AP Latin at every school? Even if there were, who could afford it?) Yet busing costs much less than trying to rescue failed schools with vast infusions of cash.

I’m only writing about this since, of course, the fringe has won a crucial battle: apparent control over the Wake County school board. NC Policy Watch argues that only 3% of voters — just over half, largely in the suburbs, in a poorly attended election — have come to dominate the debate, and that the considerable achievements should be better marketed; “the school system itself could do a better a job telling its impressive story and acknowledging the work it must do to address its problems.” I can only hope from afar that Wake County doesn’t turn its back on one of its few progressive policy achievements.

Easy street reclamation

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Reclaimed street stub Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The WPB plan calls for reclaiming street space along Wood and Hermitage, little stub-end streets on the 1300 block of N. Milwaukee that were cut off by the subway trench. They’re “the big empty streets to nowhere,” as the plan calls them, and their purpose could be served by just a single lane of traffic. (A similar opportunity exists at Milwaukee & Diversey.)

Here’s an example of how a similar street, off Washington Ave. in downtown St. Louis, was reclaimed through the simple addition of some planters. In theory, a car could still drive through here for emergency access, about where the people are standing. An even cheaper option — the ECObox temporary garden in Paris, built by ringing the site with discarded wooden pallets and backfilling with dirt — is profiled in the cool “Actions: What You Can Do With the City” exhibit up at the Graham Foundation right now.

Two other cool things I noted at the exhibit:
– The emotion map, which is kinda what happens when mood rings meet GPS and GIS. It locates “areas of communal arousal.”
– From Atelier Bow-Wow and firmly in the vein of chindogu, an idea for the “left bike battery charger”: that passerby could ride parked bicycles to feed electricity into their devices’ batteries. Maybe the “green gym” could offer such a service as an incentive for people to stop in and recharge daily.

“Scofflaws?” Scoff.

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Something else, posted as comment on Chris Swope’s Urban Notebook, in the vein of several other posts:

Traffic rules as we know them weren’t codified until car traffic overran cities in the 1920s, and even then were created to prevent cars from running over everything else. If the intent of a stop sign is to keep traffic from speeding through an urban neighborhood, then any 10MPH cyclist is observing the intent of that law even if she doesn’t follow the letter of the law. (Not that drivers do, either: stings here in Chicago found 80% speeding through school zones and almost none yielding at crosswalks.)

Cyclists in Amsterdam or Copenhagen get not just bikeways, but also a completely different set of road rules tailored around cyclists — even green lights are timed to move bike, not car, traffic. Actual full stops are relatively rare; instead, signs oblige vehicles to yield. Yet both driving and cycling there are much safer than in the US.

This “yield if it’s safe” approach exists in North America: in Idaho, cyclists may treat stop signs as yield signs; in British Columbia, pedestrians and cyclists may treat flashing-green stoplights as stop signs; and in Portland, stops have been replaced with yields along 100 miles of “bike boulevards.” These acknowledge that a full stop for a cyclist isn’t like tapping the brake pedal in a car, since the car wields 500X as much horsepower (and thus deadly force). It’s more like demanding that drivers stop, shift to park, engage the parking brake, turn off the ignition, remove the key, and start up again. It’s akin to asking pedestrians to sit down before getting back up and crossing the street.

Instead of more enforcement, better laws would go a long way towards improving safe and orderly traffic flow for everyone.

Edit: Here’s an interesting intervention. Installing a “bike scramble” at one intersection in PDX increased cyclist compliance with the signal from 21.9% to 95.8%. [PSU study, h/t Twin City Sidewalks]

Off-Milwaukee: a bike route

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Everybody loves Milwaukee Avenue — perhaps a little too much so. It’s the city’s busiest on-street bicycle route, with a bicyclist passing through Milwaukee, North, and Damen every six seconds during rush hour. 2009 counts indicate over 3000 a day (about 22% of all vehicles) at its southern end, a number that’s boomed in recent years. Besides all these bikes, it moves 15,000 cars and buses a day, and 70,000 passengers ride alongside on the O’Hare Blue Line.

It’s certainly the most direct route between the northwest side and downtown, but sometimes we cyclists want a route that involves less door zone and more trees. So, after years of living in Ukrainian Village, Wicker Park-Bucktown, and Logan Square, here’s one set of lightly trafficked routes which get me to and from downtown with minimum fuss (and often with stoplights as it crosses arterials). It’s 36% longer than a straight shot down Milwaukee from Logan Square to Wells/Monroe (22.7km vs 16.7km) and takes about 10 minutes longer.

route map

[A zoomable, turn-by-turn route can be found at Bikely.]

The route takes advantage of a few streets around Logan Square that were platted around Milwaukee’s diagonal axis, evidently before the gridiron was enforced. It also runs along the grid through scenic Ukrainian Village and the Kinzie-Carroll-Fulton industrial corridor on the near west side. For those times when a stop on the north side is necessary, I’ve found Kingsbury and Larrabee-Geneva to be good routes.

How can these streets become even better for bikes and for their residents? One approach, popular on the West Coast (and in the WPB plan!), is called the bicycle boulevard — radically traffic-calmed side streets that are optimized for bicyclists moving at a steady 10-15 MPH. They’re the mainstay of the bikeway networks in cities like Berkeley, Portland, and Vancouver, and take full advantage of the fact that Western cities have extensive street grids with good connectivity. Although they’re a key element of Chicago’s Bike 2015 Plan, none have been implemented yet here. When they are, there’s plenty of guidance out there, like this new Bicycle Boulevard Guidebook. Local residents get calmer traffic with fewer inconveniences, cyclists get faster and better routes, and everyone wins with more safety — similar interventions in Europe have resulted in 50% reductions in injuries.

A few of the elements found along bicycle boulevards:

chicane
Traffic calming features like chicanes (twisting the path of vehicle traffic, often using planting or curbside parking) and low speed humps.

Bicycle boulevard entrance
Cut-out sleeves and other curb features allowing bikes to go two ways on a street, but restricting car traffic to one-way or altogether. (This simple feature, already implemented by Dearborn Park in the South Loop after years of effort, could make a lot of the new culs-de-sac around town much easier on bikes.)

stop
Bicycle-friendly traffic signals give cyclists and pedestrians a protected way to continue where the bike boulevard crosses arterial streets. In some cities, like Brookline, Mass. and Davis, Calif., these are embedded sensors in the street; in other cities, like Vancouver (shown above), they’re pushbuttons by the road.

This still leaves the question of how to further improve Milwaukee Avenue for the thousands of cyclists who use it every day. After investing millions into the city’s busiest bike route, the Lakefront Path, some more attention should be paid to the city’s busiest inland bike route. Many incremental, and relatively cheap, improvements would improve bikeability on this street — improving safety for all users and further encouraging cycling’s amazing growth. A few relatively low-cost but high-impact ideas:
1. Perhaps there are enough cyclists — roughly half of peak-hour traffic, by some accounts — to justify creating timing the green lights so that bikes and other traffic at 12MPH gets a “green wave.” This has also been done in Denmark, downtown Portland, and San Francisco. I can never seem to hit the green lights in sequence, regardless of my speed; enhanced signal timing could speed the trip from Logan Square to Wicker Park by 25%. The “wave” improves safety by moving cyclists through intersections, which is where where conflicts and crashes occur, and by improving compliance with the law. (The usual argument against, particularly for CMAQ funds, is that the air quality benefits of encouraging bicycling rarely cancels out the AQ impacts of stopping cars/trucks, but perhaps we’ve reached a level of cycling where the balance has tipped into the bikes’ favor.)

2. At particularly complex intersections, a Leading Pedestrian Interval could dramatically improve pedestrian and cyclist safety. An LPI gives pedestrians a three-second head start over cars at an intersection (often used by bikes, but this could also be explicit), giving peds clear priority over turning vehicles. It’s like a mini-scramble signal, and it’s incredibly effective: a test in St. Petersburg, Fla. found conflicts diminished by 95%. The six-corner intersections have lots of turning movements and thus many conflicts; they’re also perhaps not best for scrambles, since few pedestrians would wait through the entire cycle to cross the street.

3. Speaking of turns, I would suggest that the protected left-turn signal phases (which I generally dislike: there’s no right to a left turn!) follow, not lead, the green phases. (Here’s another argument for it.) In other words, the left-arrow-green should come after the green light — which is, after all, usually when people sneak a left anyways (after getting stranded in the middle of the intersection by the “left turn trap“). Also, too often it seems that the drivers waiting in the left turn lane get distracted and don’t make their turns until their protected signal phase is almost over, which wastes precious signal time for everyone; this should be less of a problem with a trailing signal phase. Apparently, this is called “lag-lag (permissive-protected) left-turn phasing” in the traffic engineering literature, and I should probably ask a few engineers about it.

The above three signaling improvements could easily be accomplished within the scope of the upcoming Milwaukee Avenue reconstruction program, or even before. Perhaps they could together be called “Greenlight Milwaukee.”

4. I was going to write something about how more radical bike lane designs could revolutionize the way the street works and looks. Rue Rachel across Montréal’s Plateau, fits a bidirectional cycletrack, two-way traffic, and parallel parking into a ROW that could easily fit inside Milwaukee Avenue with ~10′ to spare, and these streets in NYC have protected bike lanes in streets with even less space and higher traffic volumes to work with. However, such approaches are impossible until the parking-meter contract ends; there’s no way to add much new bike space (or bus space, or pedestrian space) without subtracting at least some parking spaces. Oh well. File this one for the 2083 file.

In the meantime, the WPB plan offers up schemes for reclaiming excess road space at key intersections, which would slow down car traffic and make pedestrian crossings shorter and safer.

5. A while ago, I thought I saw a schematic plan for Logan Square which showed narrower roads, fewer crossings, and tighter curb radii, but I can’t seem to find it. It’s crazy that crossing the square requires crossing 20 lanes of 50MPH traffic at six different lights. There’s no reason whatsoever for the two-lane roads approaching the square to become four or six lanes through the square; the excess pavement could be returned as green space. In the future, the urban-fabric wounds left by the subway tunnel (the space over the portal, the principal subway entrance and the huge blank wall behind it, the underutilized former terminal [now Banco Popular and its parking lot], and the bus terminal) can be healed with new buildings or public amenities.

(All photos mine.)

Smarter shuttles for Silicon Valley

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The rise of Silicon Valley employee shuttles has been much covered by the press — with some finding solace in the fact that they grant an urban, car-light lifestyle option to formerly office-campus-bound techies. Since these are operated by private employers as an employee courtesy, they’re usually comfortable and sometimes have sophisticated IT backends that make them more demand-responsive than public transit options. A few disappointments, though:

1. They’re not quite the IT revolution we were promised, although that could certainly change. Given that all the users are well-wired (erm, well-wirelessed?) and that origins and destinations are relatively closely clustered together, this is one population that could conceivably pilot a fully demand responsive “smart jitney” system. Yet instead, fixed route buses (and all the wasted capacity they entail, especially with each company offering its own service) appear to be what even the savviest of techies are comfortable with.
2. The shuttles add even more layers of complexity to what’s already a mind-bendingly complicated transit network. I’m the sort of guy who loves figuring out puzzles, and again IT can do a lot to help sort out complex equations like “getting from A to B” — but Bay Area 511 already has to keep track of 41 different transit agencies. I remember one afternoon excursion, with two destinations, which sent me on six different agencies’ vehicles — each with different fares, transfer policies, hours of operation, whatever.
3. Their emergence really points up the failure of the last-mile solutions, in SF and particularly in the Valley. Muni is a poor crosstown solution to get to CalTrain, whose corridor is not particularly close to many trip origins. And in the Valley, auto-oriented development patterns make that last mile utterly impossible. It’s telling that (just to choose one example from biotech) Genentech’s South San Francisco facility is hidden in an office park 4000′ from a CalTrain commuter rail station, while its Cambridge University Park facility is a pleasant 1000′ walk from an MBTA rapid transit line.

In short: Silicon Valley needs to grow up at some point. Perhaps nowhere else in America is there a more clearly demonstrated need for transit-oriented development.

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?

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.

On 47th

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One of the more funny-if-it-weren’t-sad local tales of planning gone awry* is the “47th Street Blues District,” so christened in a strange economic development effort by former Ald. Dorothy Tillman and her odd version of an edifice complex. (Sometimes, it seemed more like a de-edifice complex, given the countless vacant lots in her ward.) 47th was the celebrated commercial artery of Bronzeville once upon a time, the retail cornerstone of “The Stroll” boulevardier circuit. This Trib article by Antonio Olivo gives some background about the grand plans for a street that’s not even a ghost of its old self, and how those plans are adjusting under a new, reality-based alderman. Here was a street which could have been a great case study for an incremental, historic preservation-based and transit-oriented approach to revitalization — these buildings tell great stories — but which fell victim to venal local politics which sucked away key resources (buildings, businesses, money, time), and now has that much further to go.

A few key foibles along the way:
1. Neighborhood historian Timuel Black insists that 47th was a street for jazz, not blues, so the entire premise rested on pretty thin ice.
2. The only remaining viable business from the street’s heyday as an entertainment destination, the Palm Tavern, was unceremoniously shuttered by eminent domain in 2001 and subsequently demolished using promised TIF funds — and replaced with nothing.
3. Now, we find out from Tom Corfman in Crain’s that the much-heralded, expensive, and strangely quiet cultural center which was to be the centerpiece around which the district would grow (pretty much from scratch, seeing as half the urban fabric thereabouts has disappeared) is not just in violation of its city grant terms, but in foreclosure as well.
4. And lest anyone forget, the Rosenwald Garden Apartments will soon face another long winter of abandonment and decay.

* even in a city where the feds launch investigations with names like “Crooked Code.”

quick hits

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Every once in a while, I try to remember that currency is the currency of the internet — and therefore that quick blog posts are just as worthy as detailed thoughts — but I still get hung up on doing justice to good ideas. Anyhow.

1. Good riddance, Olympic mania. A prime example of the worst possible “project planning” (to use Roberta Brandes Gratz‘s term) — for a temporary event, no less. What annoyed me most was that the organizers not only suckered local corporations and foundations out of millions of dollars (which did not, btw, fall from heaven but was ultimately taken from the pockets of other local charities), but that they sold some magical expectation that the Olympics would somehow magically solve the CTA’s woes. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only did the Bid Book explicitly state* that no transit improvements were planned (and you can’t get what you don’t ask for!), but even the most optimistic figures about what sort of money could indeed fall from the sky (i.e., the feds) fell far, far short of the region’s eye-popping $50 billion in unfunded transit capital needs. (If the broad outlines of what’s being discussed in Congress for TEA4 happen, we might have a good start on getting that funded — without the hassles of the Olympics.) Besides, if there really is money falling from the skies, let it fall upon Brazil — they need it more than we do.

* the comments on that story are actually pretty on-topic. Too bad that disillusionment didn’t spread as far as the implied lies did.

2. Proposition 13 really is a tax on newcomers and the young, according to research by Dowell Myers. Senior homeowners get an average of $1,000 a year, paid for by homeowners under 45.

3. Daimler’s car2go offers one-way car sharing, which sounds like an intriguing concept. That’s possible for bike sharing systems only due to their ubiquity; is that also the intent here?

4. Phoenix wants to be carbon neutral? “Dementia.”

5. Most of the examples of “circle lines” (circumferential rapid transit lines) that I’ve seen distribute passengers through sprawling downtowns from commuter rail terminals that, due to imperial dictate, have been located outside the CBD. (This is the pattern in Buenos Aires, London, Moscow, Paris, and Tokyo.) As I’ve argued before, the proposed CTA Circle line does not fit this model, and thus becomes “an expensive solution in search of a problem.” Even the Illinois Medical District isn’t that focused an employment center (the Longwood Medical Area packs twice the employees into half the space, and the Boston Urban Ring is projected to be a BRT project. It also won’t work as a Metra connector, since most Metra trains will never stop at the Circle Line — most Metra customers will continue to the downtown terminals. (The line also has limited TOD potential since it runs through many built-out neighborhoods; arguably, the Clinton subway has greater TOD bang for the buck.) The line also wouldn’t serve many circumferential trips well; changing from a single bus-rail transfer (or a single rail-rail transfer one mile down the line) to a double rail-rail-rail transfer wipes out any potential time savings.

One exception I found: in Santiago, L4/L4A (which require a transfer) link the Providencia-Las Condes business district, via a peripheral freeway median line, to the high-density southern suburbs — laden with Pinochet-era public housing. Not a great example.

6. Two impressions that I gathered from a quick look at Dallas:
– Ample illustrations of the problem with putting the right thing in the wrong place. Victory and West Village might have looked fine on the drawing boards, but in practice they’re difficult to reach from anywhere else (except by driving, of course). West Village, in particular, would be exactly the sort of development to place next to DART — not a few blocks away.
– The boom/bust cycle of Texas development results in some interesting half-built stuff. Local developers hitch on to the latest planning fads with great enthusiasm (and the local “BEAN: Build Everything, Anywhere, Now” planning culture encourages it), but the market collapses before anything actually gets completed. With proper phasing, you could have a few good blocks here and there, but no.

7. A scale comparison: HOPE VI spent $6 billion in total. The Livable Communities Act bill introduced by Sen. Dodd authorizes over $4 billion over the next 3-4 years. This could have a significant impact.

8. Filed under “fun endeavors that I wish I’d thought of”: Will Cycle For Charity, creators of events that exercise people and brains, while building goodwill for cycling and raising charitable donations.