Auto age deathwatch

by

“For the moment, watching gas prices roll relentlessly higher, we’re transfixed by the slightly terrifying novelty of it all.” — Bill McKibben

reign of error

In even more earth-shattering news than the forthcoming fixed-gear apocalypse (now with its very own Facebook group!), the signs of the automobile’s waning hegemony continue to mount. “We’re on the edge of people changing their travel patterns,” says John Roberts Smith, mayor of Meridian, Miss., quoted by Damien Cave in the NYT, after years and years where “local officials never talked much about driving. It was just how everyone got around.”

Writes Nelson Schwartz: “The speed at which gas prices are climbing is forcing a seismic change in long-held American habits, from car-buying to commuting… A Ford spokeswoman says the market shift is ‘totally unprecedented and faster than anything we’ve ever seen.’ ” Echoes LA city planning commissioner (and former councilman and mayoral candidate) Michael Woo, in an LAT article by Martin Zimmerman, “throughout our history, we have grown on the assumption that energy costs would be low. Now that those assumptions are shifting, it changes assumptions about housing, cars and how cities grow… [it could be] the urban-planning equivalent of an earthquake.”

A nation which has long taken cheap gas (and unlimited automobility) for granted, where 5% of the world’s population gulps 44% of its gasoline, is now in the midst of whiplash.

The quick turnabout is particularly notable since the elasticity of oil prices typically requires a lengthy time delay:

In the short run, neither demand for nor supply of oil is very elastic. It takes time for people to replace their old guzzlers with more fuel-efficient cars, or to switch to jobs with shorter commutes, or to move closer to public transport… [according to U of C economist] Gary Becker… over periods of less than five years, oil consumption in the OECD dropped by only 2-9% when the price doubled… But over longer periods, consumption dropped by 60%. [The Economist]

Yet Americans have slammed on the antilock brakes, hard. Andrew Leopard, quoting a NYT article by Clifford Krauss, predicts that “2007 may end up being the peak year for gasoline consumption, ever, in the (past or future) history of the United States.” After decades of inexorable growth, VMT fell by 4.3% from March 2006-2007. The biggest monthly decline in driving ever (since record-keeping began in 1942) occurred in March 2008 — until May’s tumble beat it, and typically driving increases in May as “the summer driving season” begins.

The deepening plight of big SUVs, in particular, has me positively grinning with schadenfreude. Needless to say, I’m not disappointed in the least that the Hummer brand could die. In that WaPo article, Frank Ahrens notes, “it’s hard to imagine a product other than a handgun that so clearly splits the division between what some people perceive as a right and others perceive as social destruction… So, the Hummer may go the way of the brontosaurus and other lumbering herbivores, actual and metaphorical, all grazing peacefully in the growing shadow of the incoming meteor.”

Today, NPR listeners were treated to Yuki Noguchi’s report from a used-car dealership in suburban Virginia, where the owners of a year-old Escalade were shocked to learn that their vehicle had lost 60% of its value over a year. As an aside, this underscores just how fundamentally stupid SUV owners are — and exemplifies just how amazingly out of whack this misallocation of resources got. Even ignoring the marginal costs (much less the externalized social costs) of running the truck — the $100 tanks of gas, the $2,000+ annual insurance bill, the repairs and maintenance, the $40,000 or $30/day parking space — and even assuming that these guys paid cash and didn’t (shudder) borrow to buy it (much less lease it), the $40,000 in value they’ve lost in one year is nearly $110 a day that just went poof! Add in the $9.59 in daily interest (at 5%) forgone by spending the cash rather than keeping it in the bank (and, naturally, subtract any higher investment returns that one could reasonably expect), and that’s a loss of nearly $120 a day just to park that thing in the driveway, plus whatever it costs to run ($25/day, per Edmunds). Maybe $145 a day is worth it for some people, but I just don’t get it: own an Escalade or dine on a ten-course degustation every night? (Or even two hours in a limo [with full bar!] every day.) No contest. Nobody needs to spend that kind of money on a mere convenience, which is all that a big SUV amounts to in a city. (Another sign of how bad the market’s gotten: the latest wave of spam comments to this blog advertises used trucks.)

High gas prices have also particularly hit recreational driving (the sort that auto apologists always neglect to mention), and Americans are surprisingly willing to turn to alternatives. “In Nebraska, Ric Hines of the Omaha Hummer Owner Group — known as Omahog — stopped doing off-road trips this summer and started riding his recumbent bicycle instead,” reports Christopher Maag in the NYT. In another NYT article, Karen Ann Cullotta quotes Ewelina Smosna of Chicago: “We’re not cruising around anymore… We just park the car and walk around.”

The story’s similar in Chapel Hill, as reported by Bruce Siceloff in the 8 June N&O: “[Manny Opoku, 19, a UNC-CH junior, is] getting to know his neighborhood and getting to know his fellow students. In the era of $4 gas, lunch lasts longer and conversation runs deeper. ‘Before, you would just eat lunch and talk about sports, talk about girls — and then go, “Hey, I’m leaving.” And get in your car and leave. But now, because gas is so high, there’s nowhere to go… You run out of superficial things to say. If you want to keep the conversation going, you’ve got to talk about something deep. And you like it. Now we’re moving at a different pace.”

So at least in Chapel Hill, Garrison Keillor’s vision of the future has already come to pass:

So we will need to amuse ourselves in new ways. I predict that banjo sales will pick up. The screened porch will come back in style. And the art of storytelling will burgeon along with it. Stories are common currency in life but only to people on foot. Nobody ever told a story to a clerk at a drive-up window, but you can walk up to the lady at the check-out counter and make small talk and she might tell you, as a woman told me the other day as she rang up my groceries, that she had gotten a puppy that day to replace the old dog who had to be put down a month ago, and right there was a little exchange of humanity. Her willingness to tell me that made her real to me. People who aren’t real to each other are dangerous to each other. Stories give us the simple empathy that is the basis of the Golden Rule, which is the basis of civilized society.

Bill McKibben, the mightily eloquent proponent of localism, similarly writes about the hope ahead in a Post op-ed:

This spring, something… profound and defining has happened: Pulled back by the inescapable gravity of higher prices and the growing scarcity of fossil fuels, we’re starting a slow recoil into more dense and compact regions and localities. The frontier of endless mobility that we’ve known our entire lives is closing… We could debate whether those changes will be good or bad. I think, on balance, that they’re positive — that in the United States sprawl has eroded our sense of community, with grievous results.”

Even Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, appears to agree: “a society can work, can function and can grow even at higher fuel prices. It’s a way of life — you get used to it.”

How else might those changes prove positive? Time counts a few ways; among them:

We know that higher gas prices cause many of us to slow down and drive less — which means fewer people die. Early research into 2006 accident data suggests that many lives have already been spared. If gas remains at $4 per gal. for a year or more, expect as many as 1,000 fewer fatalities a month, according to professor Michael Morrisey at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and associate professor David Grabowski at Harvard Medical School, who calculated that estimate for TIME… A permanent $1 hike in prices may cut obesity 10%, saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars a year, estimates Charles Courtemanche, an assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

With obesity’s death toll in the U.S. estimated at 300,000, and an additional 2,000 lives saved from better air quality, that’s at least 44,000 American lives saved every year just by raising gas prices by $1 or so.

Our regret, of course, lies in the fact that this shift is sudden — “We have waited until we are at a crisis point to address transportation,” says Mr. Smith, the Meridian mayor — and that the direct gains are not accruing to Americans, to address our tremendous unmet social needs. As I’ve noted before, we’d be much better off if a “gas price escalator” had been installed in 2001; a $1 increase in gas prices yields $142 billion (“according to Stephen P. Brown, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas”), but right now $1 of that extra $1.50 per gallon flows directly to our overseas enemies.

In 2004, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign ran TV ads ridiculing John Kerry for supporting a $0.50/gallon increase in the gas tax. Gas prices have increased by nearly $2.50/gallon since then — but none of that increased cost can pay for needed infrastructure, help lower income families pay the bills, or address countless other national needs, since ALL of it is going to already scandalously wealthy oil producers and oil companies.

That gas prices will rise now seems a given; the question is whom those higher prices will benefit.

Not fair!

by

State Sen. Gary Forby and State Rep. Brandon Phelps make it absolutely clear in a Southern editorial whom Blago’s “Illinois Works” would benefit:

The capital bill would have yielded $1,763 per person to Southern Illinois and only $645 per person for Chicago. Did Glenn let us down? We think not.

And just where will this magical windfall of money come from? Oh, duh. Not from Southern Illinois: instead, we’ll just steal the money from Chicago, just like we always have! After all, it would be unfair to just let those Chicago scoundrels keep the money from their businesses, leaving us free-loaders with nothing.

Under this bill, gambling would only be expanded in Chicago, and we believe it eventually will be anyway, with these new revenues now only benefitting Chicago, leaving Southern Illinois with nothing.

And just why do Southern Illinoisans deserve 273% more money than we Chicagoans, even though our votes theoretically count the same? Do I count as just one-third of a citizen of Illinois? After all, Chicago has bike lanes which serve more people than entire Interstates downstate. We deserve our fair share, and it’s obscene that the state’s leaders (like Blago and Jones, both of whom seem to spend an awful lot of taxpayer money to access Chicago’s transportation infrastructure) would allow such an unbalanced program (which threatens Chicago’s, and thus the state’s, future prosperity) to get this far.

Going the distance [updated]

by

High gas and jet-fuel prices have fueled a lot of interest lately in high-speed rail. The usual counter-argument to “why can’t America have the same train service that Europe has?” focuses on population density, which happens to be something I know too much about. Surprisingly, it isn’t just the Northeast Corridor which has city pairs close enough to rival the TGV. I’ve also provided aggregate populations of the central cities (not metro areas*) connected; the TGV’s success is not because French cities are all that large.

Chicago-Milwaukee: 86 miles; 3,421,405
Paris-Brussels: 193 miles; 2,257,784
Chicago-Indianapolis: 196 miles; 3,626,636
Atlanta-Charlotte: 258 miles; 1,190,733
Paris-Lyon: 267 miles; 2,557,100
Chicago-Detroit: 281 miles; 3,729,189
Chicago-St. Louis: 284 miles; 3,196,355**
Chicago-Cincinnati: 319 miles; 3,173,828
Paris-Bordeaux: 354 miles; 2,329,600
San Francisco-Los Angeles: 390 miles (via I-5)
Chicago-St. Paul: 417 miles; 3,490,479***
Paris-Marseille: 490 miles; 2,928,100
Chicago-Kansas City: 567 miles; 3,287,483

Paris-Lyon, the first TGV line, has consistently run an operational profit. Within three years of its introduction, it had increased rail’s mode split by nearly 60%, from 47% to 74%. Paris-Bordeaux takes three hours (vs. 8:15 to St. Paul), and the TGV has a 60% mode split (vs. 40% by air). Such mode splits are even possible in the Midwest: for Chicago-Milwaukee, rail ridership in 2007 was 617,799 vs. 282,000 by air (already accounting for onward connections).

The TGV has proven so successful that Air France (with a putative air travel monopoly at home, and sometimes called “the world’s most profitable airline”) has decided “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” The IHT reports that it and Veolia have begun the process of launching a passenger rail operation; the article quotes several analysts who laud the decision.

* I’m usually not a fan of using municipal boundaries to define things — e.g., Indianapolis-Marion County [capital of Indiana] has 784,118 residents vs. la Ville de Bruxelles [capital of Europe] with a mere 144,784 — but one could argue that greater suburbanization in the U.S. would impact rail ridership, since origins and destinations are likely to be scattered throughout large metro areas. For reference: population of Chicago is 2,842,518; Paris, 2,113,000. Estimates for U.S. 2005, France 2002, and Belgium 2006.
** 2006 St. Louis special census
*** includes Minneapolis; the train station sits near the border

Downriver

by

This seemed strange at first glance — although as an “Easterner,” I do get a bit prickly when Westerners (as in Texas) call creeks (or worse yet, dry beds) “rivers” and boast about “lakes” that you can easily holler across.

I spent my early years back East, in what an Easterner might call the land of “real rivers.” French Creek, which joins the Allegheny River in my Pennsylvania hometown, is about as big on average as the Colorado River gets in Colorado; and the Allegheny River, at its junction with the Monongahela to create the Ohio River — still more than a thousand miles from the ocean — runs as much water on average as the entire Colorado river.

(George Sibley, “Does a River care if it doesn’t get to the Ocean?”, Mountain Gazette, May 2008, p. 26)

However, it’s true. The average flow of the Colorado, over the past 300 years, has been around 13.5 million acre-feet, or 18,630 cfs (1 acre-foot/year [AFA] = 0.00138 cfs). The Allegheny, at Pittsburgh, has a mean discharge of 20,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). The Mississippi surpasses the Colorado’s flow at about Red Wing (below L&D 3), within its home state of Minnesota — over 1,700 miles from the sea.

Now, that’s not a small river by any means — the Allegheny is 800′ wide at the Ft. Duquesne Bridge, and the spring flow over mighty St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis is just 10,000 cfs — but 25 million Americans depend on Colorado River water. In a final irony, the Colorado/Great Basin will likely see flows drop by over 10% over the next generation, while the Ohio basin could see flows increase by over 10%.

Yet we in the Great Lakes are truly spoiled. The “Chicago diversion” draws 2.4 billion gallons from Lake Michigan every day, dumping all of it down the Mississippi (via the Chicago and Illinois rivers). That’s 2,688,240 acre-feet, close to the 2.8 maf that the entire state of Arizona receives under the Colorado River Compact.

Gaaah.

by

I had another hard disk die on me this week. Luckily, more of my life has been drifting onto the cloud recently, but it still puts me out of commission for a few days while I piece together various backups and such. (Most annoying: backing up your user data doesn’t always capture the various settings for this and that.)

Oh yeah, and no bike-sharing news to report from DC. Drat.

It’ll cost ya

by

Every once in a long while, users might have a pleasant experience with America’s infrastructure, but by and large we Americans take for granted that our daily interactions with public works will be miserable. Perhaps we need a sharp reminder (from John Gapper, writing in the FT) that subpar infrastructure impacts our economic well-being by forcing us to forego productivity:

The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness… At times I wonder whether the world’s biggest economy has the will to solve its challenges or will end up wandering self-indulgently into the minor economic leagues. I expect it will get serious when the crisis is too blatant to ignore, but it has not done so yet…

There are lots of ways in which infrastructure inadequacy matters to the US but I would focus on two.

First, it imposes a drag on economic growth. The private infrastructure is poor enough – broadband speeds lag behind other countries and mobile coverage is spotty. But much of the public infrastructure is unfit, a fact that was becoming clear even before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and a Minneapolis bridge collapsed during rush hour last year.

Second, it presents an awful image of the US to investors and other visitors. The state of transport and communications infrastructure is a symbol of a nation’s economic development and the US is starting to look like a third world country. In fact, scratch that. Many developing countries look and feel better.

Of course, they are in a different phase of development. The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s as it built the interstate highway system – at the time, the envy of the world. While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record.

The bigger problem is that, unlike European countries including the UK, the US shows little sign of finding the will or the funding mechanisms to maintain what it has or to build anew.

As the recent failure of congestion pricing in NYC demonstrates, we Americans would rather pay with our time than pay with our dollars.

In a jam, etc.

by

* The new issue of the Chicago Reporter looks at the familiar challenges facing transit around here: $315 million in capital funds diverted to operations, fragmented decision-making leading to duplicitous planning efforts, elected leaders who just don’t care. Two interesting tidbits from the sidebars: Singapore’s 1975 congestion pricing scheme cut congestion 45% — and crashes by 25%, notable since the social cost of crashes might well exceed that of congestion. Also, a work mode split chart evidently derived from the new, annual American Community Survey shows some interesting trends. Drive-to-work shares appears to have declined in many large cities from 2000-2006, while bus ridership is up broadly. And a few cities are seeing pretty broad mode shifts: in DC, transit is up 3% while driving is down 7%; in PDX, bus ridership increased 6% and walk/bike 5% while driving plunged 14%.

* A “Revised Charter and Initial Actions” for Vancouver’s EcoDensity planning initiative have been posted. I’m quite impressed with the action steps — they’re thoughtful, bold, and really show evolution over the course of consultation. The revisions have been improvements in most cases and hedges in only a few cases.

* Went to Paul Goldberger’s “conversation” about preservation on Thursday. Nice quote: “In a city, time becomes visible” – Lewis Mumford. He praised tall & thin buildings, saying that the beauty of 1920s skylines stemmed from their tallness and thinness. Weird coincidence: Penn Station was 52 years old when it was demolished; Crown Hall is 52 years old in 2008.

He also made an analogy about preservation as resonance — I’ll have to think more about that acoustic angle.

* [posted at Overhead Wire] New Urbanism (as I’m sure you’ll recognize from the heated arguments at Congresses) is a forum, not a formula, and New Urbanists have differing ideas on many topics — particularly in how we prioritize the many elements of New Urbanism. Peter Calthorpe, just as equal a co-founder of CNU as Andres Duany, probably coined the phrase “transit oriented development.” I would argue that transit, and transportation choice more generally, sits at the core of New Urbanism; indeed, that commitment is what drew me to it as an urban design movement. That commitment is enshrined not only in the Charter, but in documents like LEED-ND — the first certification scheme advanced by the CNU — which goes so far as to nearly require projects to locate along transit or in low-VMT areas. There was even discussion at CNU XVI of adopting a VMT reduction strategy as a principal goal for the organization.

Observation bias might explain why so many people feel that New Urbanism is “just window dressing.” Many prominent built examples of New Urbanism exists at the Charter’s smaller scales — the neighborhood and block, not the region — since regional changes take much longer, and many more participants, to realize. (Although most built NU today is actually infill, those 20-year-old greenfield projects are still more famous.) Part of the goal in establishing various recognition programs for New Urbanism over the years, like the Charter Awards and LEED-ND (and some other initiatives that are coming soon) is to let people know that NU isn’t just Seaside and Kentlands. Indeed, the number of Charter Award-winning urban infill plans or projects far outnumbers the number that could qualify as “walkable sprawl” — and the resident population of the former dwarfs the population of the latter. Observation bias comes into play again here: “walkable sprawl” stands out amidst its surroundings, whereas walkable urbanism blends in quite nicely. We notice the former, but take the latter for granted — when, in fact, the latter is actually much more difficult to build given our current regulatory climate.

One key fact I’d like to underline for transit advocates: most of the difference in mode split between American and European cities is not in transit trips, but in walking and cycling trips. (With better data collection, I also believe the same differential would also hold for American and wealthy Asian cities.) We focus on transit infrastructure alone at our peril: a mixed human habitat centered around pedestrians creates the kind of urban fabric that supports transit ridership. A transit line alone won’t generate ridership in the absence of a supportive environment.

I personally can’t defend “walkable sprawl,” since I can’t visit it — I’ve never had a driving license. I also am among the school of bike commuters who thinks showers are a nice idea, but hardly crucial; after all, most bike commuters don’t shower at their destinations. And it’s not even like I live in naturally air-conditioned San Francisco.

* [posted at SSC about Dearborn Park’s urban design.] Forgive your forebears, for they knew not what they did. When Dearborn Park was planned in the 1970s, how could anyone have predicted what the South Loop would look like in the late 2000s?

Take some time to read plans and predictions from that era; very little of it had any prescience whatsoever. (And no, even though I work in the planning biz, I’m afraid to say that we probably haven’t gotten much better at crystal-ball-gazing since then.) And even if City Hall actually did write binding, official City Plans, and the Central Area is the only part of town where it even pretends to do so, what were the chances that its ideas would come to fruition? Distributor subway, anyone?

In the 1970s, some people genuinely planned for River City to become an inwardly focused monster complex three times as big as Presidential Towers — or half again as large as Robert Taylor Homes. (Note how wonderfully River City, as built, meets the street. And yes, the original plan would have used a Section 8 mortgage, which could have filled it with public housing tenants.) The demographic trends were perilous: the city’s population dropped over 10% in the 1970s, with a net loss of 300,000 people (the population of Pittsburgh or Tampa!), all while the city’s poverty rate increased 24%.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Quick links

by

Every once in a while, I forget to update the blog — I posted all of twice last month. Sorry about that. (However, some inbound links meant that last month was actually a record for page-views — and I do have that annoying habit of rewriting old posts instead of writing new ones. Hey, it’s recycling!) Some bookmarks for future reference:

* Want a preview of the parking-based congestion pricing strategy that’s coming to downtown Chicago? Check out the SFpark Smart Parking Management Program, now being rolled out under the same USDOT Urban Partnership Program. SF MTA also focuses on the benefits to drivers, which (unfortunately) the press here has neglected. DC has also started a “performance parking” program around its new baseball stadium, although they’ve sensibly (per Shoup) taken the revenues and reinvested them locally rather than citywide. DC is also investigating similar ideas for its upcoming zoning rewrite. (h/t: PedShed)

* At first glance, a collapse in SUV demand (“Some desperate car dealers and consumers are willing to lose thousands of dollars just to get rid of their SUVs”) might seem like a boon for safety. And it will be, over the long run, as these monsters will make up a smaller proportion of vehicles on the road. (Engines tuned for efficiency rather than power should also dampen the deadly horsepower race.)

“The SUV craze was a bubble and now it is bursting,” said George Hoffer, an economics professor at Virginia Commonwealth University whose research focuses on the automotive industry. “It’s an irrational vehicle. It’ll never come back.”

As Keith Bradsher pointed out in High & Mighty, though, the bursting of that bubble will put cheap used SUVs into the hands of used-car buyers: a demographic group that is nowhere near as careful with their cars as the new-car buyers are. Millions of SUVs are reason enough to fear the roads; millions of SUVs with failing brakes and transmissions, driven by under/un-insured young drivers? Even worse.

One policy that could simultaneously (and rapidly) reduce gas demand and improve safety? A gas tax used (in part) to buy back and scrap gas guzzlers, as proposed by economist Philip Verleger and mentioned here in 2005. (Globe article via Streetsblog)

* Looking for inspiration in re-imagining ugly urban arterials like Ashland or Western? Take a look at the many “Avenue” corridor plans created throughout Toronto in recent years.

* The Dalai Lama is reputed to have once posed this koan: “What would the world be like if everyone drove a motor car?” Here’s a hint, from a Times article by Jad Mouawad:

William Chandler, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates that if the Chinese were using energy like Americans, global energy use would double overnight and five more Saudi Arabias would be needed just to meet oil demand. India isn’t far behind. By 2030, the two counties will import as much oil as the United States and Japan do today.

New oil “production” (extraction) is growing slowly, and yet demand is booming. Part of the result is skyrocketing prices, which will hopefully dampen demand. But will it dampen demand by the 11 billion of barrels annually we’ll need to restore market equilibrium?

global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United States and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And, of course, discouraging words about the US.

What about the United States? The country has shown little willingness to address its energy needs in a rational way. James Schlesinger, the nation’s first energy secretary in the 1970s, once said the United States was capable of only two approaches to its energy policy: “complacency or crisis.”

The United States is the only major industrialized nation to see its oil consumption surge since the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. This can partly be explained by the fact that the United States has some of the lowest gasoline prices in the world, the least fuel-efficient cars on the roads, the lowest energy taxes, and the longest daily commutes of any industrialized nation. The result: about a quarter of the world’s oil goes to the United States every day, and of that, more than half goes to its cars and trucks.

So, basically, America’s cars and trucks consume about as much oil as all of China and India (total population about 2.5 billion, more than eight times’ America’s) do. Now, who’s to blame here?

* Mobilizing the youth vote: “They organized a whole bunch of young kids in bars to vote,” he said. “It hurt, of course it hurt. But I’m over it.” — Burt Natarus [h/t: Trib/Clout Street]

* Newest estimate on SmartBikeDC’s launch is late May, just ahead of my next DC trip. Fingers crossed!

* I seem to get a lot of questions about bike parking. Quick answers: to have racks installed on city sidewalks or in CTA stations, call 311. For recommendations for racks on private property, see this PDF pamphlet from CDOT & CATS.

* More headlines from our warmer future, showing up in today’s papers: record energy prices sending truckers and pilots onto the dole, panicked stockpiling of food in California, food riots worldwide. Funny how more energy bouncing about in the atmosphere does not, perhaps due to entropy (dang it), result in cheaper energy for humans.

* Minneapolis joins the bike station movement next week with the Freewheel Midtown Bike Center, located on the greenway level at the Midtown Exchange.

* Seen in a Shell advertisement (Economist, 26 April), touting its gas-to-liquids and cellulosic ethanol:

More crowded cities means more fumes, more noise and more smog. So what to do?

At Shell, we believe the solution is a combination of cleaner fuels, cleaner engines, better public transport and better urban planning. We are doing our best with fuel improvements.

Wholesome walk score

by

Who knew that walkable neighborhoods were so All-American? The Brady Bunch house gets an astonishing Walk Score of 80, according to the site’s blog.

Yet America’s landscape has changed for the worse since then: adults’ daily walking trips have fallen by nearly half just within my lifetime. Restoring just one or two daily walking trips to everyone’s lives could cut CO2 emissions by the equivalent of 16 coal power plants — and help Americans lose three billion pounds of fat. [Dashka Slater in NYT].

Also of interest: how well are you living up to the Charter’s principles? (I got to trumpet a rare 100, which led to several accusations of cheating. However, I do go to my building’s outdoor movie nights, which, with nearly 40 units, should count as a block party — and about as good as we’ll get on a state highway.)

Your ideas for WPB

by

Over the course of three WPB Community Open House weekends, 88 people gave us their Big Ideas on what Wicker Park & Bucktown need. Take a look at what people wanted during Week 1 [try the extra-fun slideshow], Week 2 [slideshow], and Week 3 [slideshow]. (You’ll see me a few times on Week 3.) And attention, entrepreneurs: there appear to be a lot of unserved market niches!

Have your own idea? Take a few moments to tell us via a Virtual Postcard From WPB’s Future.