Pluto, car-free prizes…

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– Leon Wieseltier at TNR offers today’s neologism: pluto-porn. No, not a Disney ripoff, but obsequious coverage of the fantastically wealthy.

– Here’s a new approach to TDM: free beer, a free bicycle, and public adulation, just for handing over your car keys. Too bad this touring festival’s only out West this year. [New Belgium Brewing – Follow Your Folly]

– Oh, a man can dream. Paul Nussbaum’s report on Pennsylvania’s transit bailout, from the 19 July Inky:

Promising an end to the annual brinkmanship over SEPTA funding, Gov. Rendell yesterday signed a landmark transportation law to provide an average of almost $1 billion more a year for transit and highways over the next 10 years.

Surrounded by smiling legislators who a week earlier were at each others’ throats, Rendell signed the transportation bill in the warm confines of 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby as evening commuters rushed past…

The law will provide $300 million in new funding for mass transit and $450 million in new money for highways and bridges this fiscal year, with the total rising to $1.07 billion by 2016.

The money will come from future toll increases on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, anticipated new tolls on Interstate 80, and 4.4 percent of the revenue from the state sales tax…

State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.), the House Appropriations Committee chairman who vowed to block the state budget until mass transit was provided for, said yesterday: “I don’t know why this had to be so hard.”

“I’ve been fighting for this for decades,” said Evans, who said the measure would provide many new jobs, both directly and indirectly.

Not sure if SEPTA’s elimination of transfers (now in litigation) is an attempt to sell more passes or what.

– Carbon trading in Illinois could raise $2B a year for state government. [Redefining Progress: Climate Action Plan for Illinois]

– Flooded subways and tornadoes shut down NYC: a taste of headlines to come? [Environmental Defense] Not quite as dire as the forecast for the West, though: less snow, less water, more flooding, more drought and fires: boats stranded at dry marinas, ski towns engulfed by flame, cracked and dusty lettuce fields, cities browned out during heat waves. [Clear the Air] Fake headlines from the future describing localized effects of global warming could be a useful way to teach people about the issue — even here in the country’s sea-proof yet water-rich inland metropolis. [Prairie Home Companion]

– Last week’s Crain’s included an interesting package on four retail-starved new neighborhoods downtown: West Loop, South Loop, Streeterville, and (interestingly) University Village. [ChicagoBusiness]

– Gregg Easterbrook in an LA Times op-ed about his horsepower argument:

Please don’t counter that “no one can tell me what I can drive.” The Constitution says you’ve got a right to own a gun and to read a newspaper. Firearms and [speech] are the only categories of possessions given protected status by the Constitution; courts consistently rule that vehicles on public roads can be regulated for public purposes such as safety.

And, two related legal cites that will doubtless come in handy in the future:

“All property is acquired and held under the tacit condition that it shall not be used so as to injure the equal rights of others, or to destroy or greatly impair the public rights and interests of the community; under the maxim of the common law, Sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas.” (‘One must so use their property as not to injure that of another.’) – Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, Commonwealth vs. Tewksbury, 1846

And one on regulation; I like the reference to population density.

“Upon [the police power] depends the security of the social order, the life and health of the citizen, the comfort of an existence in a thickly populated community, the enjoyment of private and social life, and the beneficial use of property. As says another eminent judge, ‘Persons and property are subjected to all kinds of restraints and burdens in order to secure the general comfort, health, and prosperity of the State.’ (Thorpe vs. Rutland & Burlington R.R. Co., 27 Vt. 139, 1854).” (Slaughter House Cases, 1872)

justifying transit “subsidies”

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Dennis Byrne recently published an opinion piece in the Trib asking why taxpayers pay half of transit’s costs (but not half of drivers’ costs), and thus saying that fare increases are in order. Here’s a really long reply.

In the course of writing this, I found that Sweden’s carbon tax amounts to $1.61 per gallon of gas — far higher than the ~$0.49 in tax per gallon levied in Chicago (ostensibly to pay for roads). And now that I look at it, I should’ve used the “free rider” term to describe positive externalities — and used the example of how non-drivers subsidize parking at supermarkets, since the store just wouldn’t exist without those other customers. Oh well. A few more edits are in [brackets].

Simply looking at the line item figures for transit and driving does not provide an adequate accounting of the costs that we, as a society, will end up paying.

All economic actions have “externalities,” which are costs or benefits that are outside the direct transaction. For instance, let’s say that I run a paper mill next door to your house, and dump the sludge into a stream that runs downhill into your yard. The noise, smell, and sludge don’t bother me [or my customers], since I profit, but they will cost you dearly.

It turns out that driving is an activity which has low internal costs (once you own a car, gas is practically the only marginal cost) and very high external costs — whereas transit has high internal costs [principally labor] but even higher external benefits. Even worse for transit, its external benefits are very widely diffused, while driving directly and obviously benefits the driver.

For example, direct proximity to transit typically improves property values much more so than access to a road; this is especially the case in downtown Chicago, and you could even say that access to railroads is what built Chicago in the first place. Yet all that property value created by the railroads largely did not accrue to the railroads — it benefited third parties. Similarly, properties in the Loop (which generate untold billions in property, sales, income, payroll, and other taxes) wouldn’t be generating nearly as much economic activity in the absence of transit; after all, that’s how half the people get there. In fact, that’s why most of America’s streetcars were built by property speculators, and why the world’s only profitable subway system (in Hong Kong) is a subsidiary of a huge property corporation.

In the past, Dennis, you’ve doubted whether downtown Chicago is an anachronism. I’ll tell you that it’s not. Even as old face-to-face standbys like the trading pits disappear, industries remain concentrated downtown due to what are called “agglomeration economies.” More than half of the region’s office space is downtown, and that proportion is actually increasing — as it is in Washington and New York City, the nation’s two other “fortress downtowns.” More importantly, offices rent for 30% more downtown, and apparently firms think it’s worth the premium. In fact, transit is the big reason behind that: three-fourths of downtown executives surveyed in 2002 cited access to transit (and, more importantly, the huge labor pool it moves) as the biggest factor in their location.

Like participation in the arts, use of parks, or attendance at public schools, transit is a public service that all of us benefit from even if we do not consume the service. In particular, transit makes the compact urban form of downtown and of many neighborhoods possible — you could not re-create a great walking neighborhood like Lakeview or Wicker Park with adequate parking for every visitor, since the parking lots would push everything out of walking distance. Without transit, and without the compact urban form that transit generates (both downtown and in the neighborhoods), Chicago really has little to recommend it over Atlanta or Indianapolis or Phoenix. I don’t even usually commute by transit, but I appreciate that the endlessly fascinating city that’s right at my doorstep is made possible by transit. In LA, where my family lives, there are also two baseball teams, an opera house, and great restaurants — but they might as well not exist, since it takes hours of hand-to-hand combat on the freeways to get to any of them. That’s not so in Chicago, thanks to transit.

On the other hand, driving is an activity that benefits pretty much only the driver while imposing considerable costs on the rest of society. Every additional car on the road costs every car behind it time, and that adds up. Surely, as a transportation reporter, you’ve heard of the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual Urban Mobility Report. Well, those guys calculate that transit in the Chicago region saves every single rush-hour driver 22 hours of traffic jams a year — that’s time worth nearly $1.6 billion a year, just in productivity savings to rush-hour drivers! (As you might know, that figure is nearly twice the RTA’s annual taxpayer subsidy.)

Others have attempted to calculate the full external costs of driving to Americans, and to the Chicago region in particular. (Cars impose higher external costs in cities than in the countryside.) A 1995 study looking just at the rather direct fiscal costs of roads to local governments found that Chicago-area governments spent one-third more on roads than they received in taxes and fees from road users. A number of studies have attempted to quantify a number of fuzzier costs to the public purse, like health care (to treat crash victims or asthma sufferers like me), securing oil supplies from the Middle East and elsewhere, and environmental degradation (half of all tailpipe emissions worldwide come from American cars). Six different studies from the 1990s — before, I might note, we had a set price for carbon dioxide [and before our recent Iraq escapade!] — estimate that each car costs society anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 a year, over and above what the owner pays to operate it. On a per-gallon basis, those estimates range from $3 to $7 per gallon in social costs. So yes, in fact, we taxpayers do“pay half a motorist’s costs when he drives to work or goes shopping.”

So, there you go: one economic argument for why we “subsidize transit.”

Oh yeah, and NYC Transit and Metrorail cover more of their costs from the farebox because their boundaries are more tightly drawn — neither of them operate money-losing suburban buses.

Announcing Wicker Park Critical Mass

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Dear Chicago,

Many massers don’t realize that the first of the 118 Daley Plaza Critical Masses took place on 5 September 1997 — the FIRST Friday of that month.* After that first Daley Plaza mass, the ride quickly switched to the last Friday so as to coincide with other masses around the world.

To celebrate the actual 10th anniversary of the CCM ride, a group of massers will launch a Wicker Park Critical Mass ride, beginning on 7 September 2007 at 6pm. We’ll meet at the Polish Triangle (Division, Milwaukee, & Ashland), within blocks of where the first Daley Plaza ride ended up ten years ago.

Jim Redd, one of the founders of the Daley Plaza ride and now operator of an inn in Ecuador, has agreed to return to Chicago to help launch the Wicker Park CM and celebrate the actual 10th Anniversary of the Daley Plaza rides.

The Wicker Park mass, like other rides worldwide, will celebrate my neighborhood’s diverse and unique character. Jim will propose a “Taking Art to the Streets” route, with the final destination set for a big celebration at a local art gallery. Other local masses that ride on the first Friday (Evanston & Oak Park) are invited to join us as we bring another Critical Mass ride into the world.

As Sunday’s Sun-Times article asserts, it may never be possible to completely end the big downtown masses. However, just as the Taste of Chicago cannot capture the bonhomie of a simple block party, the elephantine Daley Plaza mass has become more crowd than community. Our increasing size now faces down the law of diminishing returns. Bicyclists citywide deserve better choices.

Over the years, neighborhoods throughout the city have welcomed and embraced Critical Mass — none more than Wicker Park — and I think Chicago’s ready to take this show on the road. Let’s show our own neighbors some Happy Friday love, while reclaiming the streets we know best. Ten years in the making, a renaissance — rebirth — of Chicago Critical Mass will create a citywide network of local, autonomous cycling communities. Humboldt Park residents have already started a local ride, and other neighborhoods will be joining Pilsen/Little Village, Oak Park, Evanston, and Wicker Park by launching their own rides.

This September, let a thousand points of bicycle light brighten the entire city! Join us at the real 10th Anniversary party: Friday, 7 September, at Division, Milwaukee, and Ashland.

Sincerely,

Payton

Hey, and while you’re waiting, Northwest Siders (and everyone else) can learn how to prepare for the decline and fall of summer (while savoring summer’s glorious fruits) at a free Bike Winter preview class:

Stay the Course: All-Season Cycling Made Simple
Sunday, August 19th, 12noon. FREE!
Logan Square Farmers Market, SE corner of Logan Blvd & Milwaukee Ave

Don’t banish your bike to the basement this fall. During this free workshop, winter cycling veterans will share Chicago’s best kept secret: with the proper equipment and a little determination, all-season cycling is no sweat!

More info at www.BikeWinter.org.

Everyone’s Fault

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Wonkette‘s Anonymous Lobbyist, though not an ISTEA junkie like yours truly, kind of nails it on the head:

The current transportation funding mechanism is called SAFETEA-LU, which stands for “Safe Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users,” but the “Lu” is actually former Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young’s wife’s name, so he made his staff come up with a fucking acronym that used that because that’s how stupid and parochial transportation policy is… everyone gets to more or less keep ignoring our crumbling current infrastructure in favor of new roads (which are way more popular with constituents, since they don’t tie up traffic as much as that nasty roadwork). So, everyone won, sorta, and everyone lost, like usual.

In fact, a smart guy* presented a paper at TRB this year called “SAFETEA-LU Earmarks in Minnesota, a Rural Advantage: Minnesota’s Other Growing Pork Industry.” Among his conclusions: “the earmarking process is optimized for political stability, and not for public utility… earmarks are inefficient allocators of resources, in that they… do not explicitly consider long-range national transportation, social, economic, and environmental objectives.”

The paper goes into detail over Oberstar’s earmarks; one which I like is the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program, a $25M fund for bicycling and walking projects around the Twin Cities. (It mostly funded new bike lanes around Mpls in its first year.)

Not that the I-35W’s bridge “50 score… structurally deficient” means anything, really. A bridge scoring in the single digits on the same scale — Hillsborough Street over the CSX tracks, about a mile west of the Capitol — was part of my routine in Raleigh years ago. The last time someone was carried away from CCM in an ambulance was apparently from a fall on the 31st bridge over the IC tracks, which rates a 22; the famously awfully paved Chicago Ave bridge over the river gets an 11; and, perhaps most shockingly, Congress’s bridge over the river (as it emerges from under the Old PO) rates 2. Yes, two, on a 1-100 scale (apparently, Illinois uses 100, other states 120.)

* Michael Smart from UCLA, ha ha

ragging on privatization

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posted at Knowledge Problem: Wanted: Economic Analysis of Urban Rail Transportation (five months’ belated thanks to Derek for the heads-up; a follow-on to Funding Redux‘s diss on privatization)

Privatization [of CTA] would hardly be a panacea; one of two companies hired in a privatization of the London Underground recently entered receivership, and taxpayers could be held responsible for its tremendous cost overruns. Our local “traction kings” hardly fared better: Insull made his fortune from energy, not the “L”; Yerkes profited off subterfuge and subdivisions, not the streetcars. In fact, both used securities fraud to cover the steep losses they faced on transit operations, which is why both were run out of town on the rails.

Those men faced no real competition, as their empires predated today’s heavily subsidized and regulated freeways, parking, sprawl, etc. By the end of Insull’s reign, the railroad industry had become the most regulated public utility in American history, wearing far heavier regulatory yokes than those which the cable, phone, and electric companies “toil” under these days.

This little history lesson hardly disproves that contracting out operations might reduce costs — particularly when public bureaucracies have ossified and become unresponsive to change — but do use caution before bandying about “PPP” without understanding its ramifications. One could even look back at the same Yerkes/Insull history and draw the conclusion that urban transit is a natural monopoly (thus enabling free transfers, for instance) and inherently requires local government involvement, or one might draw the conclusion that Illinois politics vis-a-vis transit have forever been poisoned by collusion and power-broking at the public’s expense.

In any case, I have it on good authority that a great many MBA-diseased minds (not least Rob Huberman, Chicago GSB ’00 and Carole Brown, Northwestern KSM ’89) are being put to work on the CTA’s problems now. This may not have quite the results that we bargained for.

Bike share not news to City Hall

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I discovered the old bids for the city’s 2002 street furniture RFP at the city’s website and skimmed over some of the info. On page 100 of Adshel (Clear Channel)’s proposal [giant scanned PDF] there’s this proposal. Note that this proposal was rejected (primarily, it would seem, because their bid provided the least cash revenue to the city), and that JCDecaux’s winning proposal included, among other things, a $500K annual contribution to those tourist trolleys. Again, Adshel did not win Chicago’s contract, but they did win D.C.’s, and so Smart Bikes will launch there this year. (I’ve written about European bike share schemes more generally before.) Retyped:

CYCLE CHICAGO… Adshel’s proven public bicycle fleet program, another value added amenity offering to the City…

This forward-looking Adshel innovation is known as “Plan Vélo” in the company’s programs across France, Norway and Sweden, but in now way should it be construed as a uniquely European phenomenon… Adshel’s Coordinated Street Furniture Program will supplement the [Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory] Council’s accomplishments… with an expandable system designed to minimize Loop grid crawl, called Cycle Chicago.

Cycle Chicago in Operation
Cycle Chicago will reduce traffic congestion and improve Loop air quality by introducing a vital new component to intermodal transit that provides an enjoyable alternative to short single occupancy vehicle trips. Cycle Chicago consists of 50 fully automated, attendant-free docking stations. 20 will be positions adjacent to subway, El, and Metra stations in the CBD, 20 located among office building concentrations in the Loop, and 10 distributed for more recreational use across the Museum Campus and lakeshore, a total of 750 bicycles.

Bike use is administered via credit card, debit card and smart card technology, smart cards vended in coordination with the CTA and RTA and through Adshel’s I+ Interactive Information Kiosks. A nominal fee is charged, typically $10/month for unlimited use, and an hourly rate of $1.50. We anticipate the program will be in full use from April 1 through October 31 each year. All costs associated with Adshel’s Cycle Chicago Program are borne by the company…

[operational details similar to existing systems]

Docking station capacity of 15 bicycles is maintained via perpetually circulating… redistribution trucks… In three years of operation… a total of two thefts have occurred. The bicycles are maintained in rotation in the Adshel repair shop and the entire fleet is warehoused by Adshel from November 1 through March 31… As further commitments to the success of biking in Chicago, Adshel will provide additional Cycle Chicago docking stations as requested by the City, up to six docking stations (90 bicycles) per year, contingent on thresholds of measured use and demand.

The total value quoted by the city’s auditor (Deloitte) is a suspiciously low $254,000 for all 50 — $338.67 per bicycle, including fixtures and installation? Nah.

Interestingly, page 228 shows a siting plan for bus shelters at Polish Triangle that also places… a vending kiosk along the Ashland side.

Mission Modern: a lovers’ tale

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Mission Modern: a lovers’ tale Originally uploaded by paytonc

Another literary entry for Guess Where Chicago.

During the depths of the Depression, a dowager California mission fell in love with a common-brick Chicago loft — he was so sturdy, so young, so brash. Despite the difficulties inherent in a long-distance romance between buildings, they managed to consummate their love; shortly thereafter, she gave birth to this homely concoction, whom they pressed into service with the Church so as to mask the indignity of a non-virgin birth. (Buildings in this era preferred to have immaculate origins, untainted by lineage.) Hint: the child predates large-scale Mexican immigration to Chicago.

Walking, biking

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A few posts made to Sightline, first on Alan Durning’s post about “bicycle shame” (and counterpart “bicycle respect“) debunking notions that bicycling isn’t to be taken “seriously” by government — notably about biking’s split social-class personality.

Thanks for the statistics on commuters’ earnings [bicycle commuters have middling incomes]. While biking to work today, a driver who “didn’t see” me yelled some “cheap-[obscenity]” insult — and it honestly puzzled me, since his used car and ragged T-shirt fairly screamed “proletarian.”

That said, I know that I spend well over 10c a mile on bicycling — tooling around town on a shiny steed doesn’t rack up that many miles, but costs a good many shiny pennies. All told, my “extravagant” non-car lifestyle amounts to getting around town on <$150/mo., including transit, sturdy walking shoes, and flashy bike gear.

@Arie: Sadly, the really big money’s still on driving. Just GM’s advertising budget is bigger than the entire American bicycling industry! That said, I read a business-mag article about how Shimano (one of bicycling’s biggest companies) did thorough market research into promoting bicycling in general in creating the Coasting marketing campaign. And smart but slick (and maybe cheap) ad campaigns actually attract city-dwellers’ attention better than carmakers’ airwave saturation strategy.

Durning writes that “a Bicycle-Respecting community is more equitable than a Bicycle Neglecting one… Like such democratizing social guarantees as public schools and unemployment insurance, Social Security and national parks, safe, separate, continuous facilities for cycling and walking put a common foundation under us. Such guarantees bind us together as one people, among whom—while many things are distributed by the competitive logic of the marketplace—certain necessities are available to all. We provide these things because we are not simply a collection of consumers who share a currency and a string of freeway exits. We are a community.” (emphasis added) Another response:

We, as a community, also provide public space within our cities for enjoyment and for circulation. “Sweet modes” (as the French say) like walking, cycling, and transit are incredibly space efficient: we could shrink our roads 80%+ overnight if everyone used them. It’s cars and trucks, those space hogs, who demand not only giant public expenditures but also the lion’s share of the public-space commons.

Since urban space is by definition an expensive and scarce resource, it makes perfect sense to charge those who waste (and lay waste to) it, while granting free access to those who use it wisely and graciously.

We already ration, price, and regulate urban transportation’s use of public space via like parking meters, residential parking permits, drivers’ licenses, and now congestion pricing — but we usually don’t think of it that way. Instead, we’ve been trained by decades of car-think to see “roads” as conveyances [or storage facilities] for private vehicles, rather than as shared community assets.

and on WalkScore.com:

89 at home in Wicker Park, Chicago; 98 at work in the Loop. (I’ve plugged a few Manhattan addresses in, and they max out at 98 as well.) My first upgrade would be to consider the street network. If my circa-2000 PalmPilot’s Vindigo software could calculate walking distances over the grid, then it shouldn’t be that hard to program.

A good bikeability map is a bit more complicated, since it involves adding data layers that aren’t already in GMaps. The routes I bike, even more so than the routes I walk, are often indirect and subject to more “quality of movement” factors. GoBikeBoulder includes off-street paths, signed on-street routes, and elevation in its calculations.

One of CNU’s members, Eliot Allen from Criterion Planners in Portland, has developed some really fantastically complex software that models and analyzes walkability, bikeability, transit, and driving in the context of land use and urban design conditions, like street network, use balance, and intersection safety. I still don’t quite understand everything about it, but J,M,& M might want to give it a look.

Morsels

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* I feel sick. Why? Earlier today, I was hit (no damage, at midday, in the middle of the Loop) by a driver who was clearly in the wrong — double parked, no signals, suddenly backing up without looking (through an illegally black-tinted rear window) — and suddenly found myself with four cagers all simultaneously screaming obscenity-laced insults at me. (None asked if I was all right.) One person on the sidewalk, a woman smoking, seemed to care, and told me to take down details for the cops. Of course, the cops arrived 22 minutes later, moments after the driver finished his business and pulled away, and there being no blood, there was no way to press charges.

Yet when there is blood, as with architect Steven O’Rourke (evidently a friend of a friend) — his body dragged for one mile through the streets of Jefferson Park, knocked out of his shoes just steps from the home where his wife and three small children were sound asleep — it’s too late. Your best witness is dead.

Not one week later, a child riding in the middle of Critical Mass was violently struck by a car fleeing the scene of a crash; his bike was dragged under the car for six blocks. Not just any kid, either, but a regular, an eager boy whom I’d seen graduate from trail-a-bike to his own two wheels, whom I’d fed cookies to. He’s shaken and bruised, but the gall!

Soon, I won’t be able to count the number of people I know — or have known — struck by hit-and-run drivers with mere single digits. This fact, and the utterly nonchalant attitude that countless drivers and the authorities have towards this most soulless, evil-hearted cowardice, fills me with toxic rage.

* A text ad on that O’Rourke story directs readers to the Campaign for Global Road Safety, which points out that worldwide, road deaths kill more people than malaria and diabetes, and as many as either of two lung diseases (tuberculosis and lung cancers) — and that every minute, a child is killed or maimed on the world’s roads. Worldwide, most of these deaths are of pedestrians. This is beginning to get attention from the UN, with a General Assembly session on road safety set for this fall.

* How to end our long national nightmare. [Wonkette]

* At a recent event, new alderman Brendan O’Reilly mentioned one idea worth grabbing from NYC: camera enforcement of Gridlock Sam’s “Don’t Block the Box” directive. Between these, the Natarus sound cameras, and various anti-terrorist cameras, downtown could have a pretty thick network of cameras — pretty useful for also ticketing double-parkers, or for London style cordon pricing.

* Recently viewed and highly recommended: the Criterion Collection release of Tati’s Play Time. No plot whatsoever, but the views of oppressively modernist, traffic-choked “Tativille” alternating with his gentle physical humor made for an enjoyable (if long winded) viewing.

* Speaking of oppressive modernism, I was amused to see that an “urban quarter” (named Quartier sur le Fleuve, but that name currently generates no Google hits) at the northeast corner of Montréal’s Île-des-Soeurs was submitted for the LEED-ND Pilot. The place really looked like a Tati nightmare. [PDF from earlier planning process]

* Québec also passed a “carbon tax” last month, amounting to 0.8c per liter. Curiously, part of Illinois’ gas tax is really an “environmental impact fee” (415 ILCS 125/310). I’d be curious to see what kind of interesting local projects could be funded under a CMAQ-like regional grant program to cut carbon emissions: car sharing, bike sharing, hybrid cabs, beater car trade-ins, electric peak load conservation, whatever.

* “Airplane security seems to forever be looking backwards.” So, billions of dollars in America’s most valuable workers’ time is wasted stuffing “Freedom baggies” and pulling off shoes, all to CYA over yesterday’s threats. [Schneier on Security]

* Pithy comment by Carrington Ward on the Obama-arugula flub:

It’s an interesting point about the price of arugula. One of the problems Iowa farmers face is a dependence on monocrop agriculture — corn, corn, corn.

It is a flipside of the problem that many urban neighborhoods face: bodies sculpted by corn syrup, corn syrup, corn syrup.

We’d be better off as a nation if Iowa farmers were paying attention to the price of Arugula (or apples) in Chicago.

* Portland has a Courtyard Housing Design Competition underway. I’ll be curious to see how they reconcile this type (among my favorites, as you probably already know) with parking. The jury is pretty solid; my sense is that they’ll tend towards the traditional, though.

Hummerdingers

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[sent to CCM list, after someone brought up the discredited “hybrid worse than hummer” meme.]

The true costs of such a vehicle to society do not stop and end at
fuel consumption and/or battery manufacture (note that all cars have
poisonous batteries). An H2 weighs three times as much as a Prius, and
the manufacture and transport of those 2.5 additional tons of steel
(etc.) have a tremendous environmental cost as well.

As I’ve said in previous listserv discussions on similar subjects,
large SUVs tax our society in many other disastrous ways. Their heavy
weight exacts a tremendous toll on the roads we all pay to maintain:
an H2 puts 81 times more wear and tear on a road than a Prius. Their
ponderous heft further adds to maddening traffic congestion: a large
SUV takes up as much road space-time as 2.5 small cars, while probably
not carrying any more people. Their larger size requires more pavement
for parking; “van” parking spaces are 52% larger than “compact car”
spaces. Their huge engines run dirtier, spewing out more
lung-deadening particulate matter and requiring vastly greater
quantities of toxins like antifreeze. Their higher fuel consumption
doesn’t just emit carbon, it contributes that much more to the global
human and ecological calamities that accompany every single stage of
the petroleum “production” process, from “Cancer Alley” to drowned
seals in Prudhoe Bay to low-grade civil wars in Ogoniland and Basra.
Large SUVs have much higher “kill rates”: a single Chevy Tahoes will
kill as many people (per 1M vehicles) as six Honda Accords; they lack
basic safety features like bumpers, have exponentially larger blind
spots, and block visibility for other road users.

I find it particularly astonishing that a bicyclist would make excuses
on behalf of Hummers, since the high, flat, rigid fronts, heavy
weight, and powerful engines of these menaces make them nearly ideal
weapons for murdering pedestrians and bicyclists: at the same impact
speed, a large SUV is almost three times more likely to kill a
pedestrian upon impact than a regular car.

And then there’s the unquantifiable cost to our society’s bonds levied
by the sheer antisocial (nay, sociopathic) nature of the Hummer: its
cheap trivializing of this “war” thing, its coarse celebration of
vainglorious overconsumption, and the disturbing desire to market to
drivers seeking to strike (rightly deserved, given the “kill rate”)
fear into the hearts of those with whom s/he is supposedly “sharing
the road.”

(Let me interrupt this narrative to say that no one need doubt my
dislike of all cars, be they big, small, short, tall, whatever. I have
never driven a car, nor even learned how. However, I reserve greater
scorn for large SUVs — proportional, one might say, to the size and
the social cost of the car itself.)

On 5/15/06, T.C. O’Rourke wrote:
While young, idealistic Americans die in the process
of killing non-Americans to secure a dwindling
resource, Hummer drivers choose to squander said
resource needlessly.

…while simultaneously mocking said bravery, dressing up civilian
playthings (in this case, a Chevy Tahoe) as battlefield equipment,
even while hundreds of troops have died inside their Humvees for want
of adequate armor and equipment

A Hummer on its way to Vegas or the Hamptons “honors the troops” the
same way Marie Antoinette “honored” the starving peasants by playing a
shepherdess for the afternoon, then retired to a supper of foie gras
and cake.

“The distance between the war in Iraq and the absence of any trace of
it at home, which owning a Humvee is somehow meant to close, is in
fact epitomized by it. It is only in a nation that has been completely
insulated from war’s effects that a vehicle of war could become a
trophy for the rich. It’s not enough that those who most enjoy the
benefits and freedoms of this country serve it the least. Now they’ve
made leisure rides of the war machines used by those who serve. The
reluctance to abide any measure that might constrain personal
autonomy, the conflation of rights and duties — it’s all there in one
vehicle.” — Lawrence Kaplan, The New Republic, 22 Feb 2006

Carbon plans

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City planners will have to directly address climate change whether they’re prepared to or not. New case law emerging in California, under AG Jerry Brown, will require municipalities (and developers) to bring their plans into accordance with state climate action goals (AB 32), say Steve Jones and Dustin Till from the Marten Law Group:

California’s adoption of statewide emission-reduction targets in 2006 supplied the basis for the State of California’s claims in State of California v. San Bernardino County. After San Bernardino County issued its CEQA analysis for a comprehensive planning update that would guide future development in the County, both the State and environmental groups sued, claiming that the County violated CEQA by failing to assess how the substantial development anticipated by the plan would contribute to climate change and by failing to adopt measures to mitigate the climate change impacts of future development in the County…

The City of Austin, Texas adopted a “Climate Action Plan” which contains strategic elements such as the use of a “Compact City” and “New Urbanism” development approaches…

These developments make it prudent for developers to begin to assess and be prepared to mitigate the climate change impacts of new projects. For their part, municipalities will need to take account of the impacts of climate change in their land use planning and development regulations – requiring mitigation of GHG emissions for new development, as well as adopting plans that are consistent with the states’ emission-reduction targets.

Interestingly, the San Bernandino case (reported by John Ritter in USA Today) is not the first CEQA challenge to a local planning decision on the basis of carbon dioxide pollution, according to law firm Bingham McCutchen:

It was only a matter of time before the issue reached CEQA actions. An early greenhouse gas challenge to a CEQA document came in November 2006. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the City of Banning, seeking to overturn the approval of a 1500 home development. The suit alleges that the project will result in large emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, because the project will increase vehicle trips, and the EIR prepared for the project fails to analyze those emissions or associated global warming impacts. That case remains pending. The Center filed a similar lawsuit on April 11, 2007, challenging San Bernardino County’s new General Plan. Two days later, the Attorney General also sued… In the short term, agencies and developers can expect lawsuits similar to those filed by the Center and the Attorney General. With no published case directly on point, the parties will seek to establish precedent that will shape California’s environmental future. (emphasis added)

It would be very interesting to see how court challenges under CEQA — particularly by third parties — will shape smart growth and/or transportation investments in California. One can see anyone planning a highway or coal power plant might be very worried indeed. Another question for the future might be whether California cases could be cited as precedent for similar challenges under NEPA, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s recent directive on EPA regulation of carbon dioxide. An EIS (or EIR) can say anything it wants to, of course, but municipalities will be in a much better position to respond to these cases if they have a binding climate action plan in place.

Of course, any analysis of American cities’ contribution to climate change must begin with automobiles. Julian Borger reports in the Guardian on a recent Environmetal Defense report on the magnitude of American cars’ pollution: nearly half of all tailpipe emissions worldwide come from American cars. “The amount of CO2 emitted from oil used for transportation in the United States is similar to the amount from coal used to generate electricity.”

Mayor Sam Sullivan of Vancouver’s EcoDensity initiative includes a call for provinces to tie capital spending decisions to big-picture ecological outcomes. From an editorial in the 13 Feb National Post:

As mayor of one of Canada’s biggest cities, Vancouver, I am frustrated with the nature of the debate on global climate change in this country.

Over the past several months, I have watched as environmental organizations, government agencies and the media provide advice on how Canadians can make small changes to our lifestyles, yet continue living in a fundamentally unsustainable fashion.

Instead of telling Canadians to simply check the air pressure in their tires to ensure better mileage, or put energy efficient light bulbs in their suburban homes, we should be talking about how better urban planning and densification of our cities can significantly reduce our impact on the environment.

Not once have I seen any prominent national news coverage on the link between increased urban density and the impact on our global ecology. It is time that we have this debate…

Prior to becoming mayor, in my 13 years as a Vancouver city councillor, the “D” word was not popular. In fact, the mere mention of increased density often meant the kiss of death for a civic politician’s career. But, with an ageing population, rising home prices and an increased public interest in protecting our local and global environment, the time has come for us to embrace density as a tool to make cities more sustainable and livable…

At a local level, cities should be seeking every opportunity to immediately use density as a tool to ensure we provide new and innovative forms of housing so that people can live closer to where they work. Through the creative use of our zoning powers, cities have a responsibility to become a major partner in the battle against climate change. But that will mean showing leadership beyond our three-year mandates and making the tough but necessary choices which may not always prove popular.

I also believe that provincial and federal governments should be demanding that cities commit to carbon-reducing strategies such as Eco Density before they provide infrastructure funding.

For too long, cities have built out to the far edges of our downtown cores, and then run cap in hand to senior levels of government demanding billions of new infrastructure dollars to fund these unsustainable planning and zoning decisions. Although it would be a departure from the status quo, future investments in infrastructure should be directly linked to the environment.

Update: Of course, some want to amend CEQA to pre-empt such challenges.

Sigh.

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Sigh, or grrr. Originally uploaded by paytonc

As long as people feel that it’s socially acceptable to drive four+ ton, gas-guzzling, pedestrian-slaughtering, road-hogging tank-ettes down city streets, we’re just kidding ourselves in one big sustainability charade. Achieving true sustainability will require deep changes to social, economic, and governmental systems, going far beyond window dressing.

Oh yeah, and this “sustainable site” sits right above a ROW that’s been reserved for future transit — for thirty years now. We the taxpayers, not they the developers who stand to make a fortune off it, will probably end up building the “riverbank” (Carroll Ave.) transit line, and it’ll be decades before it ever makes it onto the capital plans.

As bad as this situation is, at least Chicago isn’t yet building “green parking garages,” as the limousine liberals in Santa Monica are. (On the bright side, I suppose, said garage cost less than $33K per space, including $1.5M in solar panels, which seems in line with costs for “unsustainable” garages elsewhere.)