Postponing the inevitable

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inevitable Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Cook County has had a 7% annual cap on assessed value increases since 2002. (Said cap is also undergoing a scheduled phase-out, which will increase tax bills more steeply than assumed here.) Property tax bills will rise this year, despite falling property values; this graph explains why property taxes will in fact take a while to catch up with market values.

‘A cap, which gives homeowners comfort in a rising market, can, however, create the opposite effect in a down market. In Texas, which sets a 10 percent limit, property values rose by as much as 18 percent per year during the past decade, but assessed valuation could go up by only 10 percent per year. As a consequence, a large gap exists between real market value and taxable value. Because of that gap, assessed value may go up this year even though market value is coming down. Until the two come together — the market value falls to the level of the taxable value — 5 to 10 percent increases in assessments are a real possibility. “That’s going to be another contributory factor in taxpayer frustration,” says [Guy] Griscom, who is the assistant chief appraiser for Harris County. “Legislatures didn’t look at that side of it when they gave property owners the benefit of these caps. Ultimately you have to pay it back. This is not what people want to hear.” ‘ – Penelope Lemov, Governing magazine

(Assumed $100K property in year 2002 [and that assessed value equaled market value, which is probably not the case in Cook County], using 2002-2009 price appreciation trendline reported for zip code 60647 at Zillow.com, then assuming a 30% drop from 2008 peak by 2010.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A history of “jaywalking”

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Here’s a fascinating bit of etymology from the era of street commodification, showing how auto interests (which ultimately led to the city’s ruin at the hands of their road-hogging rural contraptions) turned city dwellers’ cosmopolitanism against themselves with the term. From Peter D. Norton’s Fighting Traffic (MIT, 2008), pp. 72-79:

A ‘jay’ was a hayseed, out of place in the city; a jaywalker was someone who did not know how to walk in a city. Originally the term applied as much or more to pedestrians who obstructed the path of other pedestrians—by failing, for example, to keep to the right on the sidewalk. As autos grew common on city streets, jaywalkers were more often pedestrians oblivious to the danger of city motor traffic… ‘Jaywalker’ carried the sting of ridicule, and many objected to branding independent-minded pedestrians with the term. In 1915 New York’s police commissioner, Arthur Woods, attempted to use it to describe anyone who crossed the street at mid-block. The New York Times objected, calling the word ‘highly opprobrious’ and ‘a truly shocking name.’ Any attempt to arrest pedestrians would be ’silly and intolerable.’ […]

In 1921 a National Safety Council member from Baltimore confessed to his colleagues that, at least in pedestrian control… ‘You are affecting personal liberty when you keep people from crossing the streets at certain places.’ […] The cleverest anti-jaywalking publicity effort was in Detroit in 1922, where the Packard Motor Car Company exploited the new fashion for monuments to traffic fatalities. Packard built an oversized imitation tombstone that closely resembled the monument to the innocent child victims of accidents in Baltimore. But Packard’s tombstone redirected blame to the victims. It was marked ‘Erected to the Memory of Mr. J. Walker: He Stepped from the Curb Without Looking.’ […]

A St. Louisan, defending pedestrians’ traditional rights to the street, tried to turn the ‘jaywalking’ label against those who promoted it. ‘We hear the shameful complaint of jay walkers, to console jay drivers,’ he wrote. ‘It is the self-conceited individual who thinks people are cattle and run upon them tooting a horn.’ ‘Make every machine stop and wait,’ he demanded, ‘until the road is clear, and give precedent to people who are walking. The streets belong to the people and not to any one class, and we have an equal right, in fact more right than the automobile.’ Nine months later the Washington Post argued that ‘the jay driver is even a greater menace to the public than the jay walker,’ and in 1925 Washington’s deputy traffic director I. C. Moller endorsed the term… But promoters of the epithet ‘jay driver’ failed. Critics of motorists could call them cold-hearted, tyrannical, or selfish, but a motorcar’s power, modernity, and worldly sophistication made its owner anything but a jay…

In 1920, when the wave of public safety campaigns was just beginning, ‘jaywalker’ was a rare and controversial term. Safety weeks, more than anything else, introduced the word to the millions. Frequent use wore down its sharp edge, and it passed into acceptable usage as a term for lawless pedestrians who would not concede their old rights to the streets, even in the dawning motor age.

What preceded the invention of jaywalking? A 1926 report notes “a Common Law principle which developed centuries ago… This ancient rule is that all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way.” (Miller McClintock for the Chicago Association of Commerce, “Report and Recommendations of the Metropolitan Street Traffic Survey,” p. 133, quoted by Norton on p. 289.)

Lemony fresh

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I have heard a lot over the years (particularly from one individual) about how Wicker Park-Bucktown should be like a neighborhood as well known for the arts as New Orleans’ French Quarter. While I empathize with the general concept, I’ve been skeptical of how pleasant it would be to actually live in the Quarter, and very much skeptical of the particulars that have been suggested. I think that the physical form of the Quarter — there being so few human-scale places, much less human-scale neighborhoods, in the USA — is a large part of its intrinsic appeal. (I would love to live amidst a skein of 38.5′ streets, but 2.5 FQ streets could easily fit into Ashland or Western.) It also has a very long (over a century older) and uniquely colorful social history that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

So I just got back from my first visit to New Orleans, and guess what? We’re doing something right, although not what this individual thinks. The French Quarter’s streets aren’t just swept and washed, they are deodorized every day by a private contractor, at a cost of $3.36 million a year. (Despite 2009 budget cuts in that sadly struggling city, the “popular” and “Disney-like” service is likely to remain in some form.)

There is also almost no notable public art to be seen on any of the sidewalks or squares, and likewise relatively few architectural monuments: just great background buildings, housing countless businesses both arts-related and otherwise. Oh, and you can stumble across some astonishing jazz.

One other aspect of efficient and effective municipal management where New Orleans (of all places!) seems to be ahead: deployment of the Pothole Killer machine, instead of three-man crews, requires 90% less labor for the same task — one-third the laborers and one-third the time. If faster turnaround leads to smaller potholes, the savings would increase further. It seems to leave a lot of gravel on the road, though.

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.

Pick your perfect place

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Travel + Leisure magazine’s America’s Favorite Cities online feature lets you choose your most-desired urban traits from an extensive list of 45 (ranging from “attractive people” to “plenty of vintage markets,” all ranked by 125,000 voters) and generate a list of matching cities. My usual beef with “Ten Best” lists, having grown up in and fled a place which too-regularly leads such lists, is that they rarely account for the vast differences in what people want out of a place.

Even most of the online “find your city ranking” calculators I’ve found — expressly intended to allow people to weight their own factors — still obsess over ways to objectively measure a host of subjective factors. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then what use is counting up performances and venue capacities to rank cities’ music scenes? Such things are better determined subjectively, and without concern for the strictures and vagaries of Census geography.

My five must-have factors — Cafés/coffee bars, Noteworthy neighborhoods, Public parks and access to the outdoors, Public transportation and pedestrian friendliness, Environmental awareness — yielded Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Not far off the mark.

a different Bucktown parking gripe

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The Bucktown Community Organization recently voted, 11-5, to support a zoning change requested by a developer proposing a retail and parking structure at 1615 N. Damen Ave. I stayed away since I’d had a long day at the office and didn’t particularly want to sprint back home just to get into a shouting match over parking, so now I’ll just vent like a typical paper-tiger blogger.

From a traffic, transportation demand management, land use, safety — from every single standpoint, this is a singularly awful place to put a parking garage. In fact, the forthcoming WPB plan unequivocally states: “In identifying locations for possible future parking lots, we concluded that the one location that is not appropriate is in the area of the Six Corners intersection.” We want people walking past our neighborhood’s shops to get to Milwaukee, North, & Damen [MN&D] — as opposed to driving right there; we can’t fit any more cars at the neighborhood’s most congested spot; and frankly, the neighborhood deserves better. State & Washington, or Michigan & Chicago, don’t have parking garages hulking over them, and neither should MN&D.

In the grand scheme of things, the number of spaces (around 100?) is pretty marginal; this is a good/bad or bad/good thing, depending on your perspective. It’s too small to materially affect “the parking problem,” and probably too small to really impact traffic flow in the area. (I guess the developer finally paid up and hired someone to do a traffic study, but no one’s actually read it — and of course the BCO couldn’t be bothered with such details.)

The “parking problem” is absolutely not one of under-supply. WPB’s plan recommends metering and better managing 1,200 on-street parking spaces and working with the owners of the 2,400 off-street parking spaces within WPB to better utilize their spaces. That’s 3,600 parking spaces right here in the neighborhood — the size of an 8 1/2-block parking lot, the size of a parking garage that could fill all 65 floors of 311 S. Wacker, twice the size of the Cumberland Avenue parking garage — and none of it is more than a 12-minute walk from MN&D. There’s very little economic rationale for standalone parking garages outside large downtowns and airports, and the same economic rules hold for Bucktown: construction costs are sky-high, and the competition is practically giving it away (free or for $0.25 an hour). The developer acknowledges this, and has claimed in earlier meetings that he wanted to do something better for the neighborhood than just another mixed-use building. I naturally stated that a mixed-use building would be ideal there and that there are many other ways to really give something back to the entire neighborhood.

Here are a couple of ideas, most of which are tax-deductible:
* Spruce up a nearby park, like Wicker, Ehrler, Churchill, Park #529 (Wabansia) — or create new parks, at a Bloomingdale Trail entrance or in one of the “living room” spaces identified along Milwaukee in WPB’s plan. This could be accomplished through a donation to the appropriate park Advisory Council (or TPL, for Bloomingdale) or to the Open Space Impact Fee fund for West Town.
* Help to establish a neighborhood bike share. Six locations would cost under $500K.
* Make retail space in the building available at below market rate for creative new businesses or neighborhood arts organizations; for example, moving the (nonprofit) Around the Coyote into a storefront gallery.
* Implement intersection improvements at MN&D, consistent with the recommendations of the WPB Plan, that will significantly enhance pedestrian safety and even traffic flow.
* Adopt the Damen station.

Use less… oil?

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Less Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

It’s come to this: an oil company (2nd largest American, 20th largest in the world) wants you to join them and "leave the car at home more."

Okay, this is surreal: Chevron has a a two-page spread version touting how 60% of its head-office employees are "riding bikes, and finding other ways to get to and from work." They even have a bus wrap in DC. Gee, I had no idea that I was doing Big Oil a favor by bicycling..?

(Chevron print ad in 15 Sep Wall Street Journal; obviously an expensive ad buy since it took up the four-page centerfold.)

Want to buy some swamp land?

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Not to denigrate the proud and sturdy neighborhood of Hegewisch, but this bothers me: a $28,000-per-house TIF subsidy (reported by Alby Gallun for Crain’s) to build nearly 1,000 houses in the Calumet swamps sounds like one of the worst wastes of taxpayer dollars ever. A TIF designed to bring industrial jobs back to a community slammed by de-industrialization is instead literally shoring up the sagging fortunes of some downtown developer. Said developer thinks that houses will sell for an average of $194,000 in an emptied-out neighborhood with foreclosures selling for $55,000, on the site of a trailer park that’s 80%+ vacant despite whole houses available for less than $28,000 — and just two miles from sites where the city spent funds from the same TIF to reclaim entire vacant subdivisions (apparently Everglades-style land speculation scams) for their proper use as wetland habitat.

Thank goodness that the golden age of TIF might just be coming to an end: the Central Loop TIF, “Daley’s favorite honey pot” (Greg Hinz for Crain’s), will indeed ride off into the sunset as planned this December. It’s not that TIF is a bad idea, but the city has short-sightedly used it to pay for individual development projects (for which many sources of private capital exist) and not for long-term, value-adding investments in neighborhood infrastructure (which requires public commitment).

In (resort) town without my car

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A good chunk of my vacation was spent in Jasper and Banff National Parks, the jewels of Canada’s Rocky Mountains. It was an interesting trip, partly because it was the first family vacation in a while that didn’t involve any cars — and in a very rural location, to boot. There were certainly troubles, but it turns out that, like Los Angeles (a streetcar metropolis which no longer has streetcars), the entire infrastructure for mass tourism in Banff was set up by and around the railroad. Especially in and around Banff, the Canadian Pacific built an extensive network of railroads, trolleys, hotels, resorts, towns — even a vast network of hiking trails leading uphill to refreshing teahouses. The rails now just carry Chinese container-loads, the trolley lines are now bike-and-bridle trails, and the roads are now crammed with lookalike rental RVs, but the spirit of William Cornelius van Horne’s railroad settlement hangs over the place just the same as Henry Huntington’s spirit permeates Santa Monica.

Our society will need to re-learn these techniques of place-making, not only to respond to a post-car future but also to a growing population that doesn’t want to drive while on vacation — or at least needs an antidote to the mind-numbing stress of the suburban daily grind. The century-old remnants of railroad tourism around Banff, though, are not unusual: many of North America’s resort towns were carved out of the scenery by (not just around!) railroads looking to drum up passengers; CPR’s president was not alone in declaring, “if I can’t export the scenery, I’ll import the tourists.” Many resort towns in the northeast retain their compact, railroad-era fabric: Kennebunkport, Wildwood, Key West, Santa Fe, and Santa Barbara, to name a few. Countless other American resorts grew up entirely in the sprawl era, as well — Daytona, Gatlinburg, Hilton Head Island, Palm Springs, Scottsdale, Branson — and higher gas prices have socked many of them, with Branson attractions (for example) reporting 10% declines.

Ski resort towns are the big exception to the postwar era’s resort sprawl, but possibly only due to basic practicality: the same challenging terrain that skiiers demand makes servicing sprawling development (almost) prohibitively expensive. Similarly, a lot of yesteryear’s resort towns were built on environmentally sensitive lands, and their ability to sprawl has been limited by environmental regulations or land protection. However, the ski towns just might offer us a way out of the mess. I know of at least one new consulting firm started by people who cut their teeth building (immensely profitable) ski towns — and have now moved on to the bigger challenge of building real towns in the suburbs.

Some early initiatives to promote wide-scale car-free travel have appeared in progressive (and scenic) jurisdictions. Quebec recently debuted, to much fanfare, a province-wide Route Verte network of scenic bike routes — complete with a network of certified-bike-friendly B&Bs along the way. Switzerland has gone even farther, incorporating walking and boating routes into a new national route network.

[Adapted from a comment left at TNAC Daily, title is a play on the Car-Free Day {yesterday!} slogan, In Town Without My Car]