Trend-setting Tulsa

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This somehow passed me by: although I knew that SmartBikeDC is set to launch Real Soon Now (apparently permitting problems have delayed its launch from March) and will therefore probably be the first bike-sharing program I’ll get to use, the real prize for the first “smart bike sharing” system in the country goes to… the Tulsa Townies, which launched last spring.

Visitors pick up bikes (Trek Limes) by swiping a credit card at one of four automated, 24-hour Cyclestation locationsalong the Tulsa River greenway.

The off-the-shelf technology from QI Systems Inc. cost its sponsor a mere $300,000. Even more interestingly, the sponsor is a local health foundation and hospital started by “a pioneer Oklahoma oilman.” QI has also helped to launch a bike-sharing scheme at Humana headquarters in downtown Louisville, which may expand to the general public.

Arlington, using a $200,000 VDOT grant, is going with Nextbike, which uses mobile phone payments and offered its services to Arlington at $750 per bike [PDF of staff recommendation memo]. (via WashCycle)

Update 25 Sep 08: Montreal’s parking authority, Stationnement de Montréal, is also offering up its Bixi system as a turnkey solution for other cities. One key advantage: solar-powered kiosks, which prevents the nasty electric-company issues that delayed SmartBikeDC for months.

Look into the future of Wicker Park & Bucktown: Mar 29-Apr 5

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kitty

You’ve got ideas on how to make Wicker Park & Bucktown better. WPB is listening. Tell us your stories, show us your local hangouts, gaze into our crystal ball, see our neighborhood in new ways, meet our neighbors — even spend our money and eat our food.

Come and shape our neighborhoods’ future at WPB’s Open House: Saturdays, March 29, April 5, April 12, 10AM-4PM, at 1275 N. Milwaukee. We’ll even have door prizes and cool coupons. Check it out.

For more info, visit http://wickerparkbucktownssa.org/?p=242. If you can’t attend, send us a Postcard From WPB’s Future!

Gilt spires

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Ouroussoff‘s latest column gets one thing right: the overwrought starchitect-designed condo towers sprouting up around cities, while glittery, are ultimately a depressing indictment of our own “lost opportunity” economic era: “we may look back at these condo buildings as our generation’s chief contribution to the city’s history: gorgeous tokens of a rampantly narcissistic age.”

The towers’ timing, just as the financial markets have stumbled into an unknowable abyss, might seem odd at first, but surely an architecture critic knows that real estate cycles (encased, as they are, in slow-moving cement) lag general economic cycles by a few years. Just as the Empire State building was financed just as the Roaring Twenties came to an end (and didn’t actually begin construction until the Depression had begun — which might explain the rich interior finishes), cranes topping off new towers will continue to grace our skyline for years after the crash.

The bland interiors he laments? More financial machinations at work. The lords of capitalism profit by commodifying everything, making even the most obtuse product interchangeable — and are doing the same with their condos. Just as the Lords of the Universe exhort companies to “unlock value” by conforming to the tried-and-true, condo interiors reflect that same aversion to (interior-decorating) idiosyncrasy: such risks could hurt the all-important resale value.

Regrets, Mr. President?

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Take it from Dear Leader: “Our energy policy has not been very wise… we, frankly, have got policies that make it harder for us to become less dependent on oil.”

Well, five years ago (even six years ago), when the Dear Leader was obsessing with illegally invading a sovereign nation that posed no threat to our security, some of us were arguing that a better strategy, on many levels, would be an energy policy that released the United States’ dependence on oil. But no. Now the Dear Leader looks back and sees that “our energy policy has not been very wise.”

Higher oil prices will cost the U.S. economy approximately $200 billion in 2008. The war in Iraq has had direct costs approaching $1 trillion over five years, and ultimately may cost upwards of $3 trillion (including indirect costs, primarily borne by Iraqis). Now, suppose that an energy tax — equal, or nearly equal, to today’s energy prices, which appear to be at the limit in terms of the economy’s ability to readily handle — had been imposed in 2002, phased out if oil prices soared. Easily $1 trillion could have been raised over five years to support high-ROI investments in energy efficiency and renewables — and trillions of dollars could have been saved on an unnecessary endless war.

Thou shalt have no historic sites before me

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And I thought the Japanese had a curious philosophical approach to historic preservation. Zvika Krieger in the New Republic reports on the shockingly nihilist attitude of Saudi authorities toward maintaining countless historic sites, including many directly connected to Mohammed:

“It is not permitted to glorify buildings and historical sites,” proclaimed Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, then the kingdom’s highest religious authority, in a much-publicized fatwa in 1994. “Such action would lead to polytheism.” […] The clerics’ stance permits the Saudi government to play it both ways, in a perfect marriage of the secular and spiritual. It can destroy ancient sites and still maintain doctrinal credibility; the massive, capitalistic accumulation of wealth becomes a religious necessity, not an evil. “The government has finally woken up to the commercial value of religious tourism,” Sfakianakis says, “and they are really the ones driving this construction boom in Mecca.”

Super hotel!

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An NY Times article about urban hotels incorporating green construction technologies mentioned the first in what could be a chain of ALT Hotels, now under construction in Brossard, as part of a lifestyle center on Montréal’s South Shore. Several features — the building’s straightforwardly boxy look and uniform, $129-per-room pricing — raised my suspicions, confirmed by this:

In order to offer a quality hotel at the lowest possible prices, Groupe Germain and its Quebec partners have developed a totally new construction concept: the prefabricated room. Prefabricated rooms are currently being built at Rénova in Plessisville, one of the Group’s long-standing partners.

Finally! A modular hotel! A “Super Hotel” saved me late one night in Matsumoto: a tidy and super-efficient (bunk beds!) room for $67. All rooms were exactly identical, and the hotel appeared to have been built, Lego-like, from modular blocks; only the ground floor differed, and it housed a walk-through lobby, a continental-breakfast bar with lunchroom style seats, a business center, a little onsen and locker room, and the ubiquitous vending machines. The bathrooms, in particular, were definitely prefab, but still incorporated the latest in Japanese integrated bidet technology.

Super Hotel modular bath

Not only the prefab construction cut costs, but the relative lack of unnecessary frills: the front desk staff doles out towels and toiletries upon check-in; a keycode printed on your receipt replaces actual keys; and everyone’s forced out of the hotel for cleaning during midday. (This being Japan, robots were undoubtedly involved.) I’ve always been an undemanding but cheap traveler, and this no-frills approach matches that pretty well.

Wait and see (updated)

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The bids for privatizing about 36,000 parking meters citywide were due yesterday. I talked with someone who feels that a private operator might be more flexible and open to working with neighborhoods, but personally I suspect that a private operator will be even more willing to jack rates and run with the money. There was a brief moment when neighborhoods realized the upside potential of underpriced street parking, but now the city’s caught on and wants to keep the money for itself (well, split with its private-sector partner).

Public assets, like streets and even street parking, should be managed for the public good, not solely for private financial gain.

18 March: Lorene Yue in Crain’s reports that ten bidders responded, ranging from locals like CPS Parking to the usual Cintra and Macquarie (on separate teams). Chicago CFO Paul Volpe called it a “strong response.”

Which lawbreakers are at fault (updated)

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The ordinance whose introduction by Daley inspired “Hello, Criminal” made its way through the legislative apparatus. The Tribune apparently thought it wise to celebrate by splashing my photo on the front page of its website yesterday. John Greenfield has the full story of the ordinance’s passage in Gapers Block. How this became controversial is beyond me; all that the ordinance does is codify penalties for rudely, dangerously, stupidly, and (already) illegally cutting people off in traffic. Anyone who speaks in favor of that deserves to be, well, cut off.

What motorists probably don’t know (but which astute readers here do) is that several detailed multiyear crash studies (Portland, NYC) have found that most bicycle crashes are caused by drivers breaking the law — not cyclists. The entire point of traffic regulations, historically, has been to defend against the deadly and reckless use of automobiles, and particularly against the shocking brutality of hit-and-runs. Even today, three generations after the first requirements that drivers and cars carry licenses, four Americans die every day in hit-and-run crashes.

Perry Duis’ Encyclopedia of Chicago article on “Street Life” notes that for the first half of their history, the parade of varied workaday activities — few of them related to speedy transportation — on Chicago’s streets even proved a tourist attraction:

In 1900, Scottish author William Archer proclaimed that “New York for a moment does not compare with Chicago in the roar and bustle and bewilderment of its street life.” Similarly, many of Chicago’s greatest writers—especially those of rural origin—wove their fascination with the energy and variety of the public spaces, especially downtown, into their works.

It all ends sadly.

[T]he automobile age… dramatically changed the relationship between Chicagoans and their streets. The auto not only benefited from the growing disdain for the street by providing the kind of isolation from street life that had once been enjoyed by only the wealthy… Drivers also demanded speed and the elimination of peddlers, plodding wagons, playing children, or any other street use that interfered with getting from here to there. By the 1920s the growing volume of fast-paced traffic produced intersection hazards that encouraged the introduction of mechanical traffic signals… The idea of the street as a place for getting from here to there was about to triumph… During the 1950s the press began to note a loss of neighborhood social life that had traditionally grown out of public places. The front porch or stoop, which had fostered neighboring on warm evenings, had begun to give way to air conditioning and television.

Assorted collected

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Recent quotables. No common theme.

Bill McKibbenin Yes! Magazine:

The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

From the Baffler, “The flight of the creative class: a bohemian rhapsody” (satire), Paul Maliszewski and Thomas Frank:

“Creative people do have certain needs, however, They require hip entertainment, organic street-level culture, and artistic environments—from restaurants serving mind-boggling fusions of world cuisines, like Thai and Tex-Mex or Indian and Australian, to experimental theaters, avant-garde galleries, and authentic coffee shops with mismatched cups and saucers and deteriorating couches. Creative people crave lively street scenes and late-night music venues serving up pricey energy drinks in test tubes. In short, creative people insist they lead the sort of lives that feed their creativity, inspiring them.”

Thomas Geoghegan, “The Law in Shambles” (Prickly Paradigm, 2005), excerpted in same Baffler:

“In a plutocracy, we don’t trust the government. Why should we? It does nothing for us, it is underfunded, and it’s unreliable. This attitude, in turn, makes the problem worse. The more arbitrary and unfair we think things are, the more we drop out. We don’t simply stop voting. We stop reading the paper. Stop following it at all…

“Remember the teaching of the great law professor Clyde Summers: ‘It costs a lot of money for people to have “rights.”‘ […]

“Where I live, in Chicago, I’m in a ring of nuclear power plants. I’d be in terrible danger if we ever successfully muzzled the trial lawyers. It’s only the tort system that saves us from another Three Mile Island. Yes, I agree, it might be nice if we had more nuclear plants. We could cut down on Mideast oil. We could slow down global warming. And if I lived in France, with all its nuclear energy, I might think it was a good thing. So why do I oppose it here?

“Because France has a real administrative state, a real civil service, and the best and brightest do the regulating. In America, we can’t even keep the trains on the tracks. And so, sure, as a citizen, Id like to curb the trial lawyers.

“But I also want to live.”

Some bits from the January 2007 SMARTRAQ report, about the market demand for sprawl vs. walkable neighborhoods, for my future reference:

page 9. Residents of the least walkable neighborhoods generated 20% more CO2 from travel then residents of the most walkable neighborhoods, about 2 kg more CO2 per person per weekday.

Residents of the most walkable areas are 2.4X more likely to get the level of daily activity necessary to maintain health (30 minutes): 37% vs. 18% in the least walkable neighborhoods.

page 10. About a third of metro Atlantans living in conventional suburban development would have preferred a more walkable environment, but apparently traded it off for other reasons such as affordability, school quality, or perception of crime in addition to lack of supply. It is likely that this mismatch between community preference and choice is due to an undersupply of walkable environments.

page 32. 55% of survey respondents preferred a shorter commute, even if residential densities were higher and lot sizes smaller. 33% of respondents preferred such an option, but did not currently live in this type of neighborhood.

56% of respondents would prefer a neighborhood where they had easy travel choices, even if it meant a smaller house, over a house in a neighborhood where they had to drive for everything. 37% would prefer such an area, but did not currently.

Smash society

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From Michael Tomasky’s review in The New Republic of Jonah Goldberg’s latest waste of a tree carcass:

Here is where Liberal Fascism gets simply ridiculous. For Goldberg, the fact that Progressivism and totalitarianism shared certain traits–a belief in the possibility of collective action through the state, basically–tells him all he needs to know about both creeds. Ipso facto, any totalitarian impulse must therefore have leftish origins. Never mind that there actually was a totalitarianism for which the left was responsible–the one called communism… [O]nce you start implementing public pension systems, well, how far away can the execution of political opponents really be? Government, planning, centralized administration, social engineering, fascism, totalitarianism: for Goldberg they are all finally the same. Why isn’t he an anarchist? And when you get to this point, what isn’t fascist?

So, for a leading scribe of today’s neo-nihilist (dare I say “libertarian”?) Right, the mere acknowledgment that there is such a thing as “the public” (much less “public interest”) amounts to totalitarianism, a term he thinks equivalent to Fascism. Forget “smash the state,” today’s right really does agree with Maggie Thatcher: “there is no such thing” as society, except perhaps when it comes time when “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Now, that sort of talk (from one of Goldberg’s former esteemed colleagues), through is use of that most totalitarian of pronouns (beginning with W) pronoun, seems to suggest belief in some kind of common project. Hmm.

Transit in brief (updated)

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A bunch of bike/transportation related briefs.

* Bike sharing is moving forward, according to news items posted to the Bike Sharing Blog. Fran Spielman reports in the Sun-Times that JCDecaux has offered to trade ad panels for 1,000 downtown bikes here. (Any chance they’d offer a similar deal to neighborhoods?) Back East, Clear Channel still intends to be first in the USA by placing bike stations in DC this month [via DC Business Journal], with Arlington and Bethesda studying proposals for launch later this year.

* Bill Fulton in CP&DR notes that California officials, when pressed at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference on how they plan on cutting transportation-related carbon emissions (as part of their broader, likely unattainable CO2 goals), really didn’t know yet. Transportation claims an outsized share of California’s CO2 emissions, as is typical of the West Coast.

* A bit further north, British Columbia’s government has advanced a budget that includes a carbon tax of surprising magnitude. Marc Lee from the Progressive Economics Forum notes: “The government chose to stick to a narrow definition of revenue neutrality, with all carbon tax revenues recycled through low-income tax credits and tax cuts… a low-income carbon tax credit that will piggyback on the GST credit. The credit is worth $100 for adults and $30 for children with a phase-out period.”

(GST credit — hear that? Sales tax rate in Vancouver = 12%, includes free health care, spotless trains, and a $300 annual credit. Sales tax rate in Chicago = 10.25%, includes, well, what?)

* Greg Hinz in Crain’s notes that CMAP, fresh off its reorganization, intends for its 2040 plan to actually include real capital planning, not just the “grab bag” of projects that typified CATS capital plans in the past. (“Every agency submitted their plans to us, and we stapled them together.”) Hinz: “Of particular importance is how Mr. Blankenhorn says the new group will approach giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to requests for billions of dollars in federal aid for [infrastructure]… Mr. Blankenhorn says the region actually will use metrics — yardsticks to value each proposed project against an absolute standard — to allow the region to set its own priorities.” Of course, whether there will be capital funding to make such plans around hinges on the state’s willingness to back such an effort — now, we have the odd spectacle of suburban Republicans blasting the governor (and Daley joining in separately, on behalf of CTA, and apparently suggesting a bunch of pie-in-the-sky customer-facing ideas) for severely underfunding transit capital (albeit their pet appears to be Metra’s STAR Line).

* Not everyone is quite as blind to transportation finance woes as Springfield. I’ll try to follow the upcoming federal reauthorization fight as best I can; the first shot across the bow was recently issued by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission‘s Report to Congress.

* I’m always suspicious of AAA’s motives, but I do appreciate their hiring of Cambridge Systematics to look at the cost of car crashes to society each year — and the attendant call to focus on safety (and a little less on congestion) in the next transportation reauthorization bill. Note that Chicago’s tab for crashes is well below the national average, perhaps because of a more balanced transportation system?

The societal cost of crashes is a staggering $164.2 billion annually, nearly two and a half times greater than the $67.6 billion price tag for congestion, according to a new report released today by AAA. Furthermore, the cost in Chicagoland, is $8.378 billion for crashes, which amounts to an annual per person cost of $887. The total cost per person for congestion in Chicagoland was $487… the $164.2 billion cost for crashes [nationally] equates to an annual per person cost of $1,051, compared to $430 per person annually for congestion…

If there were two jumbo jets crashing every week, the government would ground all planes until we fixed the problem. Yet, we’ve come to accept this sort of death toll with car crashes.”

* Hadn’t seen these before: Steve Breese’s greenway maps include a GIS viewer to see trail corridors that cross jurisdictions (like the Valley Line) and their progress to date.

* A recent Jon Hilkevitch column gives this astonishing example of car dependency:

in Aurora, where city building inspector Allen LaFan says he can stand at the bus stop near his house and watch his child get on and off the school bus, because the entire trip amounts to crossing a busy intersection that is not pedestrian-friendly.

“I can wave to the school,” LaFan said.

The situation represents an unending cycle. More children are being transported to school on buses or in private cars because the streets are not safe. But that leads to more vehicles and more traffic, increasing the potential danger to all pedestrians.

* Streetsblog gives a cite for the “the corn that could feed an SUV for a week could feed a human for a year” tidbit recently published in an Economist survey of food prices: Lester Brown from EPI.

* Civia Cycles, the new upper-end commuter bike brand from QBP (TPTB behind Surly) strives to make the morning commute easier with clothing recommendations, matched to your local weather forecast. Every winter, I think that I’ll scribble down notes on this topic (using dewpoint and wind speed, though, rather than temperature), but never do — and, as a result, end up having to guess again each fall what I will need to wear. At first glance, this guy’s internal thermometer appears to be 10 degrees cooler than mine; I guess I overheat easily. It’s also all “bikey” clothing, unleavened by “real” clothes.

* And, okay, not transportation related, but Vince Michael notes the irony of redeveloping [Alby Gallun in Crain’s covering the unveiling of the proposal] that paragon of “towers in the park” urban renewal, Lake Meadows. Now that the railyards and industrial lofts and public housing projects are gone, the only big privately held parcels left — and with deteriorating physical plants to boot — are the private housing projects. I’ll write more later on historic preservation and urban renewal.