Stretching the truth about walking

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A disturbing junk-science meme circulating out there on the internets — apparently propagated by misguided animal-rights campaigners who are trying to hitch a ride on the climate train — makes the specious (yet how alluringly contrarian!) claim that driving is somehow ecologically superior to omnivore walking. This claim ignores all kinds of inputs, some of which are deconstructed by Clark Williams-Derry and others by the commenters. (In particular, the calculation focuses on the “upstream” impact of producing food, but not of extracting oil and refining it into gasoline; ignores the substantial ecological costs of manufacturing cars; and appears to assume that cars are robots that drive around dead [or at least non-respirating, non-calorie consuming] people [zombies?], rather than living, breathing, likely meat-eating people.)

My first reaction, upon first seeing this claim last October, was thus: ” ‘We need to get rid of these “or” arguments, that we can either do this or do that. “Or” has got to become “and” because we need to do everything.’ [Lawrence Frank] I really wish that… animal-rights groups wouldn’t use this either/or angle. If they really cared about global warming [and are not just using it as convenient political cover for other agendas], they’d understand that our society needs very broad, systemic changes to address this monstrous challenge, and that mouthing little platitudes that further confuse the public does NOT help.” Yet another case of blindered, single-issue people who see a single tree, not an entire forest.

Of course, that warning was not heeded. Such a seductively specious claim will inevitably find its way into the lying, scorched-earth right-wing echo chamber (what Mother Jones helpfully terms “the cold earth society“), which will stretch and simplify what was already a tenuous claim, then shout it from the rooftops until it drowns out any reasoned debate. And guess what? It’s happening. No less a light than John Tierney, the original “Skeptical Environmentalist” (whose “exposé” on landfilled recyclables still gets spat out at me on occasion, a good twenty years later) brought it into his blog — ahem, Science Lab. He even issued some sort of reader challenge: can someone else pull numbers out of their ass to claim that a car taxi is superior to a bicycle taxi? Reader Julian Lamb responds:

If selected as the winner, instead of rewarding me with a book, I’d prefer you push me from my home to my office (8 miles and over the Brooklyn Bridge) in a TAXI cab without assistance from the engine. That ought to cure you of any skepticism. If you make it over the bridge I’ll even buy you breakfast.

Regardless of how efficient a car’s engine might be, it still has to move a huge vessel in addition to its payload — as evidenced by the ethanol claim below. And even the original, highly suspect “calculations” that Tierney references regard walking and driving alone — yet bicycling is far more efficient than walking, and being hauled around in a cab (in city traffic, no less!) is less efficient than even driving alone (since cabs’ time spent cruising for fares pulls their occupancy rates down below 1).

That license can wait (updated)

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Last month, we heard Tom Lane, a Nissan executive, publicly lamenting that “people are losing interest in automobiles.” He ascribes the “ennui” about cars that surrounds him in Japan to irrevocable social factors: an aging society, the escalating cost of car ownership, newer and ever more pocketable gizmos. From a WSJ article by John Murphy:

Nissan designers interviewed 16-to-20-year-olds four years ago in Japan, the U.S., Europe and China to grasp how cars fit into their lives. They were surprised to find that many youths world-wide felt cars were unnecessary and even uncool because they pollute and cause congestion, Mr. Bancon says. The feeling was particularly strong in Tokyo, where computers and Internet access are widely available and where mass transit is inexpensive and reliable — making the car makers’ predicament worse here than in many other parts of the world.

A poll for Nihon Keizai Shimbun found only 25% of men in their 20s wanting cars, down from 48% in 2000 — and it shows in sales, which have slumped 30% since 1990, and actually began falling faster as Japan’s economy began growing again in recent years.

It appears that Lane could be on to something even bigger. I vaguely remember an L.A. Times article long ago about teens delaying their licenses, with a surprising number of California teens simply forgoing licenses, but Mary Chapman and Micheline Maynard report on the national trend in the Times:

In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration. Reasons vary, including tighter state laws governing when teenagers can drive, higher insurance costs and a shift… to expensive private driving academies… experts also add parents who are willing to chauffeur their children to activities, and pastimes like surfing the Web that keep them indoors and glued to computers…

“Oh, I guess I just haven’t done it yet, you know?” said Jaclyn [Frederick, 17], a senior at Ferndale High School, in Ferndale, Mich.

Hmm, eleven years later, I still just haven’t gotten around to it. And some parents evidently agree with the trend of further tightening licensing requirements for safety’s sake:

“This [delaying her daughter’s full license] is in hope of instilling an element of fear,” [Teresa Sheffer, a pediatric nurse in Bethlehem, Ga.] said. “Cars are lethal weapons, and I want to make sure she has the experience she needs, and knows what can happen when you don’t pay attention.”

Outfitted for the road

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Outfitters Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Steven listed out his winter kit, so I thought I’d share as well what I wore today, with riding temperatures around 15-20° F (-5° to -10° C). Two rules: first, block the wind with lots of windproof fuzzy stuff, especially around your toes, fingers, and ears. Second, hit up spring clearances: they’ve already started, people! Get moving!

Clockwise from upper left, into the spiral:
– Neos Overshoes, $29.95, Sierra Trading Post (online, clearance; Hanig’s sells them locally)
– MEC Urbane Composite windproof fleece jacket (Polartec Power Shield High Loft fabric), C$140, MEC
– Rudy Project Fobos prescription sunglasses, approximately $150 with lenses ($80 without)
– Patagonia fleece earflap hat, $12?, Patagonia clearance bin
– Kenneth Cole boots; the fey salesman on Michigan Ave probably remembers the price but I don’t
– Acorn fleece socks. $4, EMS clearance bin
– Orange Pryme BMX helmet. I wear a smaller, better vented, more expensive helmet in the summer. $25, Boulevard Bike Shop
– MEC fleece-lined gauntlet over-mitts, C$29, MEC
– Red fleece liner gloves, $3, Gap clearance bin
Hint: if you have ever gone skiing, chances are very good that you already own equipment comparable to anything in the right half of this photo.

Not shown, because I’m still wearing them (in addition to the usual trousers + shirt office garb):
– Long johns, $8, Target
– Grey sweater, $30, Club Monaco

Also not shown, since they’re on the bicycle, but which stay there year-round anyways:
– Zefal plastic fenders, C$9, MEC
– Planet Bike Blaze head light, C$20, MEC
– Filzer i-Beam LED tail light, C$7, MEC

Yesterday, when it hit single digits (-15° C), I kind of overdid it and ended up sweaty. In addition to the above, I wore:
– Anon kids’ ski goggles (REI clearance bin, $19.93) in place of the glasses
– Fleece mittens (MEC, C$6) over the gloves, as a hand midlayer
– Midweight fleece long johns instead of the basic ones
– Brooks Brothers wool sweater
– A fine wool scarf

I can’t say it’s any faster to bike to work in the winter: although traffic is thinner, it takes a good 10-15 minutes to suit up/down — doubling what’s usually a 25-minute ride that’s already time-competitive with my nearly door-to-door train service. I don’t have set rules about what weather I’ll rule out, but winds above 25 MPH (40 km/h), temperatures below 0° F (-20° C), or a 40%+ chance of precipitation will usually do it — even though I own a raincoat, rain pants, and a balaclava (face mask), I do have my limits.

The road up and ahead

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Last week, Kirk Johnson reported in the Times about the I-70 corridor that rises up into the mountains west of Denver — a four-lane rural road which now faces many of the same congestion issues as any urban commute corridor: crushing traffic loads for a few hours a week, with sort of capacity enhancement proving to be frightfully expensive. Much of this results from settlement patterns that resemble nothing so much as the old “pearls on a string” commuter rail towns: dense, pedestrian-friendly nodes clustered along a single corridor, although unfortunately a freeway rather than a railroad in this case.

Appropriately, many of the solutions that have been implemented to date are similarly incongruous urban fixtures dropped into stunning mountain wilderness: HOV lanes along Hwy 82 into Aspen, all-day transit equipped with advanced ITS, and even several proposals for rail service. (The principal difficulty: I-70 follows an available rail alignment west of Vail, but the section through Summit County and east to Denver is too steep for conventional rail service — and would likely require an additional tunnel at the continental divide.) Now, the ultimate in urban congestion solutions is on the table:

[Colorado State Senator Chris] Romer’s suggestion — congestion pricing using financial incentives to encourage people to drive or not drive at peak times on I-70 — drew 500 e-mail messages in the first 24 hours after it was reported in The Rocky Mountain News. About 70 percent opposed the plan, he said, and many of those called him exuberantly bad names… “But we’re not going to solve this problem by being cautious, which is what government does best,” he said, explaining that reliance on gasoline taxes and highway construction will not work… “We have to get creative,” Mr. Romer said. “And if we fail, we adjust and we try again.”

The long shadow haunting the Sunbelt’s growth (and any future long-term infrastructure investments), is the potentially disastrous changes in precipitation that will accompany global warming. Some climate models predict that snowpack in much of the Rockies could become un-skiable during my lifetime. (I’ll be 70 years old in 2050.) The result would destabilize existing ecosystems in an area where human settlements closely abut wilderness; increasingly catastrophic floods, mudslides, and wildfires would further threaten . Economically, the resulting economic losses could be monumental, similar to a hurricane wiping away another beach city.

Meanwhile, cities across the nation’s southern tier, like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Raleigh are all already sinking deeper straws to suck up even the pond scum from their drought-ravaged reservoirs. Georgia has resorted to desperate new lows, some of which actually date from the 18th century — not just praying for rain (perhaps more of a strong-arm tactic to embarrass Florida to reduce its claim to downriver flow), but recently seeking to move its Tennessee border. Yet these areas continue to grow; as with electricity, the expectation is just that water will be provided regardless of cost or future prospects — and reporting on the crisis continues to focus on such short-term thinking. Sure, conservation pricing has resulted in higher water bills for many (Mayor Franklin in Atlanta pays about $100 a month for water) — but how high would water bills have to go in order to dissuade new arrivals, or to convince non-water-intensive industries (e.g., not manufacturers) to begin looking elsewhere? My guess is that prices would have to go very high indeed.

It is about the bike, apparently

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Lance Armstrong decides to do his part by opening a bike station in Austin, although it won’t be open in time for my forthcoming visits (twice in a month!). He apparently really gets it, too, from the land use connection to the need for safe facilities to the importance of having a rich cycling culture. Pamela LeBlanc reports in the Austin American-Statesman; video of the interview is also available. Emphases added.

“This city is exploding downtown. Are all these people in high rises going to drive everywhere? We have to promote (bike) commuting,” Armstrong said Wednesday, gazing up at the towering 360 condos rising next to the site of his new shop. “This can be a hub for that…”

Armstrong said he’d like to see Austin evolve into a place like Portland, Ore., where biking is part of the culture and people pedal to work, to restaurants and to run errands. “Walk outside, and the streets are lined with bikes — because they have a safe place to ride,” Armstrong said of the city long known for its bicycle-friendly amenities and policies.

So how does Austin get to that point?

“The (Lance Armstrong Bikeway) is a big start,” he said. Armstrong and his general partner in the project, Bart Knaggs, said they’d like to see Austin create bike lanes separated from vehicle traffic and a system like a new one in Paris where people can use a credit card to rent a bicycle from a bike rack station and return it at any of the dozens of other stations around the city.

“There are times I ride in Austin, and I’m afraid of cars,” Armstrong said. “Imagine what the beginner cyclist must feel like? I think (Mayor) Will Wynn’s dream was this whole revitalization of downtown, which we’re getting, but it’s going to make it a lot easier if people can get around on bikes.”

Mellow Johnny’s… focus won’t be on selling the newest, lightest racer. The shop will celebrate the culture of biking, from the historic memorabilia hanging on the walls to a counter where customers can sip coffee and ask questions as they watch bike mechanics at work…

Showers and a locker room will allow commuters who don’t have facilities at their offices to ride downtown, store their bikes at the shop, bathe and catch a ride on a pedicab or walk the rest of the way to work…

Armstrong predicted that Mellow Johnny’s will be “the coolest bike shop in the world,” but said he’s not trying to put any other Austin bike shop out of business. “It’s not us versus them,” he said. “We’re all about the cycling culture.”

The mellow group hugs between spandexed roof-rackers, testy commuters, curious townies/gownies, lost tourists, dirty messengers, filthy hippies, and maybe even pedantic Vehicular Cyclists (“Afraid of cars? Weenie!”) will commence in May, on Republic Square in the southwest corner of downtown Austin.

Bright green suburbs

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There’s been a lot of press attention lately around the “green cities” theme, especially in regards to climate (which, of course, I’ve been writing about for years). Much of the attention has been heartening but sometimes it’s brought out some of the usual misconceptions.

Alex Steffens, who can be reliably counted on for wordy strokes of brilliance over at WorldChanging, posted a draft article (to be delivered to auto-design students, no less!) titled My Other Car is a Bright Green City. (A version appeared this week in BusinessWeek.) One of the more interesting gems: car ownership (and particularly SUV ownership) appears to be wholly incompatible with the notion of “one planet living”:

Teresa Zhang of UC Berkeley, in a recent environmental analysis of the average American car (PDF), found that the tailpipe emissions from the average car alone equal 50% of a one-planet footprint. “The actual footprint,” she notes, “may range from 30% to over 100% of one’s ecological budget, corresponding to fuel efficiencies between 55 mpg and 12 mpg.”

The response I posted.

I’d like to echo the praise and the caution: changing our settlement patterns requires collective action — which 20+ years of the Reagan/Thatcher Revolution has taught us to not just distrust, but to deny. You’ve written eloquently before about how environmental solutions inherently cannot rely solely on individual choices, and borrowing some of that language might help here. Similarly, it’s a challenge to juxtapose different potential solutions against one another; when faced with a crisis of global warming’s proportions, our society will need to learn to speak of “both/and” rather than “either/or.”

Thank you in particular for pointing out the rate at which our built environment changes. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived in fast-growing places for most of my life, but the cities I’ve seen have changed immensely in the past decade. In fact, our built environment will probably change more, 2008-2030, than our electric generating mix over the same time period — and although everyone has ideas for future inventions to revolutionize “the other people” who run the oligarchic electricity sector, we are overlooking a proven and cost-effective technology that we the people can use to effect similar change in the broadly-held building industry.

Density by itself is a necessary, but insufficient, part of a “bright green city.” I like to sum up the New Urbanist vision as “compact, diverse, and walkable,” and more alliterative sorts say “compact, connected, and complete.” Even I won’t walk if I have nowhere to walk to, nor a pleasant way to walk there. A thriving, resilient human ecosystem (err, community) must house a full range of people and a complete array of activities, all arrayed along streets designed to make walking enjoyable — both traits of which require density beforehand, but which do not necessarily follow from it.

I hope that those who understand this message, and perhaps who further understand that such communities do a superior job of fulfilling the triple bottom line, will help to fight NIMBYism on the ground. With some prodding from the citizenry, the vast machinery that churns out conventional suburban sprawl with breathtaking efficiency can be re-trained. However, even in the tiny slice of America where a developer can legally “do the right thing”, the political and social realities (from block-club politics to municipal infrastructure decisions) can still make doing so nearly impossible.

@Donald Jackson, the lower housing costs in far suburbia typically balance out against higher transportation costs, especially as fuel prices increase. Many residents of sprawling suburbs spend more on their cars than their houses, and those of us living closer in can ditch that money-pit of a car and spend more on housing instead.

@Brave New Leaf, yes, indeed, the American landscape is littered with dead malls, dead subdivisions, dead office parks, dead towns, dead cities, the works. Detroit is but the largest example of a city that’s been left to the dogs, but hardly alone; I’ve seen long stretches of abandonment and decay even in several Sunbelt boomtowns. If you thought disposable plastic bottles exact an immense environmental toll, how about throwaway cities?

Steffens’ post was referenced in Andrew Revkin’s NYT blog earlier this week, which (since it reaches a somewhat broader audience) drew some less favorable responses. Mine:

No torch-wielding mobs of Deep Greens are roaming the exurbs, setting fire to wastrels’ McMansions and forcing their occupants at knifepoint into dingy cement high-rises. However, from some comments here, you’d think that simply altering the immense social constructs that drive suburban growth would be tantamount to violence. For decades, government policies (or the lack thereof) have made low-density living seductively cheap and easy, partly by ignoring the plumes of pollution it created: most of America’s carbon dioxide emissions either come from buildings, or from people moving between buildings.

Sunday’s article by Alex Williams closes by noting that “the eco-friendly, futuristic, post-automobile suburb” interestingly resembles the old-fashioned city. I applaud Mr. D’Souza for recognizing that we don’t need to wait around for future technological breakthroughs to start fighting global warming. Instead of pondering a fuel cell car powered by cellulosic ethanol, he’s already largely switched to a clean, renewable (and tasty) fuel source: food, which powers walking. And instead of waiting for a fully automated personal rapid transit train to be built to his front door, he moved his door close to the existing, mostly-automated rapid transit. Amazing, huh?

Interestingly, this gradual re-urbanizing of the suburbs — with mixed uses, more transportation choices, and higher densities — is something championed by not only New Urbanist architects and planners, but also by many of their best-known critics. Joel Kotkin calls his version “New Suburbanism,” but it’s still the same.

Meanwhile, Trevor Boddy of the G&M sees Vancouver’s future as a walking-biking city tied to new crosstown transit corridors featuring a balanced mix of uses and an even more diverse array of housing types than downtown’s towers & townhouses. (One of EcoDensity’s most interesting features is its focus on dense low-rise housing.) The most obvious location for a first test seems to be the False Creek Flats, which is about as well transit-served as downtown.

“we have seriously erred in balancing job with living spaces downtown – with space running out there, arterials are where we can set things right. Copenhagen demands a fifty-fifty split of work and living spaces in its redeveloped zones, and putting both close together makes the walking and biking city so much easier, reducing costly transit investments.”

Many European and Asian cities have a form of dispersed, low/mid-rise style development which doesn’t focus all employment into a single core. It would be interesting to try such an approach on a corridor basis in North America.

Talk is cheap

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Certain prominent politicians have been touting their commitment to the environment (and thus to environmentally minded voters) by signing their governments up for carbon-cutting promises.

Of course, the instant those targets come due, the politicians have moved on to the next promise without any substantive action — because signing ceremonies are easy, but actually cutting carbon, the lifeblood of industrial economies, is not. Last summer, the Economist noted that California is nowhere near track to meet its self-imposed, easier-than-Kyoto targets, even though it does have a fairly thoughtful plan to achieve emissions reductions on several fronts:

Despite making some optimistic assumptions about future contracts, the public utilities commission has concluded that the state will miss its target for renewables. And the aim of cutting emissions from electricity production to 1990 levels by the end of the next decade may be just as unrealistic… It is a bad sign that California’s electricity suppliers are struggling, because electricity is something over which the state wields considerable control. It has less power over carmakers, who are fighting to prevent California imposing emissions standards on them. If they succeed, even temporarily, California’s goals will become unreachable… The state has even less power to slow the growth of its population, or to dictate where people live. It hopes “smart growth” policies (which encourage people to live closer together, and to take public transport) can get it a whopping 15% of the way towards its overall 2020 goal. But the news from that front is discouraging.

Even more off the mark, of course, is Chicago; the Tribune revealed city government’s energy use to be spiraling almost inexplicably, even as the mayor eagerly accepts awards touting his “pro-active steps to address climate change“:

Records show that officials fell well short of targets for curbing electricity usage by city buildings despite the construction of energy-efficient buildings and the installation of green roofs across the city.

Most recently hurricane-, drought-, and heatwave-stricken Florida has signed on to carbon reductions. We wish them the best of luck, but fully expect future journalists to expose the false promises therein.

Perhaps local action on climate change, while admirable, ultimately has to be ineffective; after all, the promises signed aren’t binding targets with penalties, and most state and local governments work in isolation, without control over broader issues like the electric grid or auto emissions standards. As Felicity Barringer in the Times points out, most localities don’t have the authority or resources to effect big changes requiring, yes, social engineering:

Constraints on budgets, legal restrictions by states, and people’s unwillingness to change sometimes put brakes on ambitious plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions… “It’s really hard,” Ms. Hancock said. “It’s like the dark night of the soul.” All the big items in the inventory of emissions — from tailpipes, from the energy needed to supply drinking water and treat waste water, from heating and cooling buildings — are the product of residents’ and businesses’ individual decisions about how and where to live and drive and shop.

Hello, criminal!

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A Trib blog post (by Gary Washburn) about Da Mayor’s proposal to increase fines for drivers who break the law and endanger cyclists brought out the usual blame-the-cyclist crowd in the comments. I couldn’t resist snarking.

Hello, sanctimoniously angelic, devoutly law-abiding drivers! Ever gone 31 MPH on Ashland, 46 MPH on LSD, or 21 MPH in a school zone or on a side street?* Criminal! Ever crept one inch over the stop line — much less into the crosswalk — while waiting at a stop? Criminal! Ever crept one inch into the sidewalk while waiting for a break in traffic as you exited an alley or driveway? Criminal! Ever made a turn, or even changed lanes, without engaging the turn signal 100′ beforehand? Criminal! Ever made a left turn after that yellow light changed? Criminal! Ever made a right turn on red (even from an off-ramp) without first watching that speedometer hit zero or letting *all* pedestrians pass? Criminal! Ever double parked for two seconds, for instance at a valet stand? Criminal! Ever pulled into a bus stop to let someone out? Criminal! Ever turned right in front of a bus? Criminal! Ever honked a horn while stopped? Criminal! Ever driven right over a crosswalk without even looking to see if a pedestrian was waiting, much less stopping for same — even at the countless crosswalks that aren’t at stop signs or lights? Criminal!

These are just the traffic law violations that I see every time I walk two blocks to the “L.” Many of these crimes endanger cyclist or pedestrian lives. Your car is a lethal weapon; cars kill more Americans than guns do. That’s why we license drivers — but not bicycles, which kill fewer Americans each year than beds do. Yes, beds.

Oh yeah, and the cost of roads? Wear & tear on a road is proportional to the fourth power of a vehicle’s weight. Since an SUV pays $120 a year for a city sticker, that means that a fair price for my city sticker would be… $0.00005. Yup, one penny every 200 years. After 1,600 years, my payments would be worth the paper they’re printed on!

Yours truly,
A bicyclist who obeys most of the rules, and certainly all the rules necessary to ensure everyone’s safety.

* A 2005 study found that 80% of drivers on Chicago’s major streets speed in school zones! Think of the children!

Obviously, as someone who looks at sleeping cats with unabiding envy, my favorite bit is about beds. Here’s the truth about the vicious, deadly, hungry monster that lurks beneath you every single night! In 2004, 843 “pedalcyclists” were killed in the USA — most of them [about 90%, by some estimates and studies], we can surmise, were actually killed by cars, but a bicycle was still involved. That same year, 774 Americans were killed in falls “involving bed, chair, other furniture” and 596 from “accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed.” Attributing even 32% of the falls to beds (those instruments of terror are, after all, listed ahead of those wretched chairs) results in more deaths from beds than bikes. Meanwhile, cars kill more than 50% more Americans every year than guns do.

[A prior post about traffic laws’ ultimate origin, and why bicycles can follow the intent but violate the letter of the law.]

All this brouhaha, of course, relates to car drivers’ feeling that the world revolves around them, and that bicycles are toys and not vehicles — a notion that Alan Durning refers to as “car-head.” He gives a nice example of a car parked in a bike lane, but I can go one better: Mark Counselman’s wife opened her car door one day, only to have it blown away by a passing dump truck. Now, no one would argue who should pay for that smashed door. On the other hand, I once hit a car door and wrecked a fork and wheel; the driver first asserted that damage was my fault (of course, she was squealing about the damage to her new car long before she got around to asking if I was alright), and relented only after the insurance adjuster gave her a talking-to.

Durning writes:

[A]t some level, we do not consider bicycles real vehicles, and we do not consider bicycle lanes real roads. How could we, when we’ve been assimilated to the Car-head? [W]e don’t enforce traffic laws in ways that hold drivers accountable for the risks they impose on cyclists and pedestrians…

The presumption… seems to be that public roads are for cars, not bikers or pedestrians. You can test this yourself… by stepping up to any street corner… By law, every street corner has a cross walk (unless it’s specifically marked otherwise). The cross walk is there whether it’s painted on the asphalt or not. And any pedestrian standing in or at the entry to such a crosswalk has the first right to proceed (unless the intersection is regulated by a traffic light, in which case pedestrians must wait for the signal). As a pedestrian, all you should have to do to cross any street in Cascadia is go to the corner and stand at the curb. To a driver, the sight of you there should be, legally, the same as a red light. Drivers should halt immediately and wait until you’re on the opposite curb. If they don’t, any police officer who witnesses the act should write them a fine.

Instead, stopping for pedestrians is considered courteous, polite—not obligatory, not something to do or face punishment. Consequently, to cross many Cascadian streets is to run a gauntlet, and tickets for not stopping at crosswalks are rare… The lack of crosswalk enforcement—and the absence of outrage over that lack — is a manifestation of the same condition that prevents outrage over parking in bike lanes.

Now, about that raise

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posted at The Swamp

It’s odd that people are surprised by the dollar figures involved. Michelle Obama is a VP of an organization with a $1.6 BILLION annual budget. The community that UCH addresses extends far beyond Hyde Park to the whole South Side, which usually views the university and its hospitals with a great deal of suspicion.

It doesn’t matter whether her employer is a for-profit — it does in fact clear operating income — or not-for-profit corporation; regardless, its a huge and complicated organization which requires great management talent, and that deserves proper compensation.

I say this as someone who quite willingly, and knowingly, earns about 60% less money at a non-profit than I could in the private sector.

Where we’re missed

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Years ago, when this kind of stuff was only in the back pages of the Reader (and when I was younger, less bitter, and more easily charmed by such romantic notions), I had the notion of totaling up and plotting out the location of Missed Connections. Perhaps it could provide an empirical alternative to the Tribune’s occasional christening of random bus lines (first the 151, more recently the 66) as “the Love Bus” — but more interestingly, one could see whether missed connections correlated with overall density of singles in a neighborhood (perhaps not, since shy singles might live apart from the gregarious types who don’t miss their connections), whether springtime really is for lovers, or whether we non-drivers really do interact more with our fellow (wo)mankind.

The internet makes such analysis much easier, of course. Sure enough, EveryBlock, the hyper-local aggregation service just launched in three cities, also includes the locations of Craigslist Missed Connections posts, plotting them based on business names. In the past 11 days, 60657 (Lake View) accounted for fully 50% more MCs than 60622 (Wicker Park) — which might follow, since 61% of 60657 households are non-family, vs. 29% in 60622.

The other way of looking at that, though, is that 60657 has fully twice the proportion of non-family households but only half again as many MCs. Thus, it appears that the highest density of “MCs per single” might actually be right here. Fancy that.

Also, probably for the same reason that call center volumes peak early in week (weekends are busy!), people tend to post MC ads on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.

Twenty years

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(The usual winter travel schedule means fewer updates. Flickr is probably the best way to follow me around; see the photostream at right.)

A follow-on. “Even if you don’t move, the city will move around you.” — Mary Schmich on Chicago Public Radio, 7 January 2008

1987. My mom looks up from under a wide straw hat to scan the horizon for her two sons, romping with buckets amidst rows of strawberries planted atop sandy little ridges. I grabbed fat berries, sure, but mostly focused on plucking out the vigorous, blossoming runners that had taken root in the aisles — the better for propagation at home. (To this day, the occasional strawberry pops up as a weed in the back lawn.) Scrubby pine trees frame the farm on all sides, except for an old farmhouse with a gravel apron, now serving as gas station and general store.

The year I was born, the census counted 21,763 people in Cary, the sleepy town four miles down the road from this strawberry patch. The strawberries themselves were a sign of creeping urbanization. Years ago, this land was so prized for tobacco that J.B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company built a short-line railroad down this way from their Durham factories. However, the land was now too valuable for commodity crops, so the Sears family went with strawberries instead — aiming to profit off the burgeoning numbers of young families swelling the school ranks in town.

While I was in middle school, the adjacent forests began melting away to make way for development: hundreds of culs-de-sac lined with thousands of houses with brick fronts and gas grills behind, sand traps lining 7,011 yards of golf links, brown stormwater detention ponds tinted an inviting blue on maps displayed on model-home walls; long lines of brake lights arrayed at stoplights, obstructing a daily stampede of network operations controllers, plant geneticists, and copy-machine repairers to and fro their respective cubicles.

All through the Bush I economic downturn, Wake County chugged along with unemployment below 3% — a siren song calling across the land. The moving trucks kept pulling up to driveways, with the cinder-block walls of supermarkets, banks, and schools following close behind. Magazines proclaimed its charms in cover stories; later, eager refugees sought out answers to their thousands of questions on online forums.

Today, the country crossroads that I vaguely remember sounds more fiction than distant memory. The town of 20,000 now finds itself in the middle of a vast metropolis with nearly two million residents. A clock tower, fountains splaying at its base, announces the completion of the second of a planned quartet of shopping “villages” arrayed around the corner of High House Road and Davis Drive. Stone Creek Village takes the elements of a small strip mall and explodes them into an array of one- and two-story buildings surrounding a traffic circle, a broad boulevard, and other finely detailed if overly geometric public spaces. The entire ensemble squeezes into narrow downslope between the street above and a retention basin below — hence, perhaps, the ostentatious clock tower.

Across the way, the same architect placed blue gables atop Cornerstone — the first, and least fancifully embellished with urban ambitions, strip mall here — recalling nothing so much as the Magic Kingdom as they peek out from over the now-mature trees out front.

At the southeast corner and directly on the strawberry farm’s site, SearStone takes a more integrated approach (they even splash “New Urbanism” across their web site) to a senior development — with a few shops, a small hotel, and a continuing care facility among the walking-distance amenities promised to residents.

The newest, perhaps to begin construction soon, even provoked some dramatic political intrigue in what I had remembered as a town so sleepy and well-governed that the cops did away-on-vacation courtesy checks and pulled people over if their brake lights didn’t work. Charlotte-based Crosland, whose success with the Birkdale Village lifestyle center in Huntersville led CEO Todd Mansfield (recently appointed chairman of ULI’s board) led it to embrace mixed-use development, has plans for a similar development, although lighter on retail, at the northeast corner of the intersection. It went through months of acrimonious hearings as neighbors objected to its size. Ultimately, the threat of political backlash predicted at the final hearing came true: the ultimately approved development, even though it largely conformed with the existing comprehensive plan, became a contentious issue in the town council election and helped to contribute to swing the town’s political pendulum back towards slow growth.

It all sounds, and sometimes feels, completely random — countless other farms just outside countless other American towns look almost the same as they did 20 years ago. These farmers hit the lottery; but actually, they didn’t: the “instant city” was the work of many thousands of hands over several decades. How did this one intersection get to be the way it is? Why do cities arise in the places they do? Why do some regions prosper while others falter; why Cary, N.C. and not Napoleon, Ohio? And if smart people (of which the Triangle has no shortage) could design an instant city to house one million residents, to be built over the span of 20 years, would it look anything like what the Triangle looks like today?

Brides

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Several complaints about downtown Coral Gables being chock-full of bridal shops brought this little story to mind:

Las Tunas Avenue (silly name, no?) in Temple City, Calif. is lined with Asian bridal shops with cheesy names like Love City. The Anglo neighbors began to get suspicious of drug fronts, not unexpectedly wondering where exactly the demand for bridal gowns was coming from.

What was happening, of course, was just a natural aggregation of businesses: the inevitable intersection of a young and growing immigrant population (many of whom spend quite lavishly on weddings) with time-pressed young brides who like to spend a lot of time comparison shopping. As word of the bridal shops began spreading, more began opening to cash in on the trend. And since bridal boutiques run high margins on low volume (and often do “house calls”), they appear to be “suspiciously” low on customers.