2030 Planning Challenge

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Recently, at CNU XV, 2030 °Challenge founder (and longtime solar advocate) Ed Mazria outlined the beginnings of a 2030 °Challenge for city planning — what we’re tentatively calling the 2030 Community Challenge. Elsewhere, I’ve brainstormed a few ideas on how planners can help to save the world from global warming. Mazria has been focusing on how architects can save energy for decades, so it’s taken a bit of education to get him to agree that planning can also have a huge impact on global warming. Here’s what Mazria had to say at CNU XV:

  • When planning a new or in an existing neighborhood, town, city, or region, planners should seek an immediate 50% reduction in fossil fuel consumption (greenhouse gas emitting energy), vehicle miles traveled (auto and freight), water consumption, materials (embodied energy), and “anything else you can think of that you deal with.”
  • Since planners are “larger scale folks,” they can have a broader impact than architects.
  • The targets should slide up: by 2010, a 60% reduction, etc., up to 100% (carbon neutral communities) by 2030.
  • How to get there? The first step is to implement a variety of design solutions [many of which are covered in LEED-ND]: density, infill, land reuse, location efficiency; transit- and pedestrian-oriented development and mixed-use; stormwater catchment and wastewater reuse; microclimate management; efficient infrastructure; and 2030 Architecture.
  • The second step is through community scale energy initiatives, particularly microgeneration.
  • The third step (a last resort) would be to purchase “green tags” or carbon credits. This, of course, is no substitute for real action.
  • Planners must also begin to think about many other environmental issues which architects haven’t had to consider, including wildlands conservation, wildlife migration corridors, and how to adapt to the major catastrophes (floods, hurricanes) that await us.
  • Most importantly, we have 5-10 years to start cutting emissions — or else we as a species probably won’t make it.

A follow-on speech by Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, added to the call for urgent action. Fully one-half of the built environment is infrastructure — that is, publicly built — and thus out of the reach of average architects, but well within the purview of planners. Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, in their influential Stabilization Wedges scheme [outlined here], have listed “doubling fuel efficiency from 30 to 60 MPG,” “decreasing VMT by half,” and “using best efficiency practices in all building” as three of their fifteen billion-ton wedges. (Seven of the fifteen need to be implemented to stabilize CO2 concentrations; another is “install 700X current solar capacity.”)

Although trends are moving in the wrong way — bigger homes house smaller households, VMT growth is still positive, although it has dropped off lately — groups like CNT have pioneered ways of combatting these trends. High-speed rail has the capability to displace many air trips. Research into last-mile connections (those highly dispersed trips between nodes and homes) has revealed a wide appetite for choices like car sharing — whose users “use the city, not just the cars” — and streetcars. Last-mile freight movement remains a challenge, but CNT is working with inner-ring suburbs around Chicago to capitalize on underused rail freight facilities. These tools and techniques could easily double the magnitude of Mazria’s 2030 °Challenge.

Beyond Austin (which we’ll undoubtedly cover in a future post), one city that has initiated a citywide dialogue about how New Urbanism is progressive, green, and responds to the environmental challenges of our day — not just global warming, but One Planet Living — is Vancouver, fittingly the birthplace of the ecological footprint concept. There, Mayor Sam Sullivan has moved his EcoDensity campaign into a new gear by hiring Brent Toderian as the new planning director, following on Larry Beasley. Bob Ransford writing in the Vancouver Sun:

The focus of new urbanists is changing, just as concern for global warming and peak oil is suddenly engulfing public opinion in all circles. New urbanist planners, like Toderian, are leading the way, reminding us that livability may be an important pursuit, but that livability means little if the planet no longer exists as a habitable environment for humans and all other creatures. Toderian has already come out and told developers, politicians and citizen advisors — and anyone else who wants to listen to his message — that livability will no longer be the first indicator used to measure the quality of development in Vancouver. He is leading the way in replacing that benchmark with what he believes is a more urgent measure of our commitment to sustainability. Ecological sustainability will now be the measure of expected performance when judging new proposed developments in Vancouver… neighbourhoods are going to change and change will be measured not by how much or how little they disrupt current lifestyle in a neighbourhood. Instead, proposed change will be measured by how much it influences future lifestyle decisions that have the potential to impact positively or negatively our natural environment and its ecosystems.

Bold moves and equally bold words are needed to jolt North Americans into the reality of our climate challenge. Canadian cities have set up informational sites, like One Day Vancouver and Zero Footprint Toronto, but will have to follow up these calls for citizen action with equal civic action. (Forthcoming posts will discuss cities’ efforts to date — but let’s just say that the US Conference of Mayors signed on to the 2030 °Challenge without implementing many action steps.)

One important final point to make about the wedges: they clearly demonstrate that humanity will need to use every possible approach to this leviathan challenge. Our lives will have to change; they will change regardless. No silver bullets, no magical breakthroughs, no panaceas will save us from ourselves; it’s far too late for those. We will not be able to choose between two different ways to cut emissions — that means no “either/or” arguments pitting factions against one another — because we will need to do “both/and” if we are to survive.

For Athletes, an Invisible Traffic Hazard – New York Times

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Gretchen Reynolds in the Times reports on new research showing fine particulate matter (PM) to be a significant cardiac hazard to athletes.

“Be sensible and try to cut back” on your exposure to particles, Dr. Rundell advised, but don’t use pollution as an excuse to cut back on exercise… “The bottom line is that running and cycling are healthy and, over all, good for the heart,” Dr. Newby said. With proper care, he said, outdoor exercise does not have to be harmful — and, done en masse, could even ease pollution.

The best part, though? One doc, taking the long view and putting this “Your Health” article back into the realm of policy:

“I ride my bike back and forth to work every day,” [David Newby, a cardiology professor at the University of Edinburgh] said. “If everyone else did that, too, we wouldn’t be having this problem at all, would we?”

Green city bites

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  • The current (July) issue of Builder has a fantastic cover package of articles on affordability — about two-thirds of which is New Urbanism. It addresses both design and policy (finance, finance, transportation, inclusionary, and more) solutions, without any right-wing NAHB complaining.
  • PARK(ing) Day — a day to reclaim curbside parking back for the public realm — will be a national observation this September 21 (following on last September’s observation). My quick idea: perhaps some donated floorcoverings (carpet?* turf?) and a communal table, around which we will discuss The High Cost of Free Parking, perhaps not coincidentally APA’s Planners Book Club selection for August. I can think of a few sponsoring groups who could get behind that. Or perhaps two dozen kick stand-ed bicycles parked (and locked), plus work stands for two mechanics.
  • Mike Davis has a heartwarming article in Sierra about the last time Americans banded together to collectively fight a mighty foe — and downshifted the whole economy in the process.

    Would Americans ever voluntarily give up their SUVs, McMansions, McDonald’s, and lawns?

    The surprisingly hopeful answer lies in living memory. In the 1940s, Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption and waste. The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation, called on Americans “to change from an economy of waste–and this country has been notorious for waste–to an economy of conservation.” A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others enthusiastically, answered the call…

    Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national “Food Fights for Freedom” campaign. By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables–freeing the nation’s farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia… Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if that concept didn’t yet exist) and self-reliance…

    With recreational driving curtailed by rationing, families toured and vacationed by bike. In June 1942, park officials reported that “never has bicycling been so popular in Yosemite Valley as it is this season.” Public health officials praised the dual contributions of victory gardening and bike riding to enhanced civilian vigor and well-being, even predicting that it might reduce the already ominously increasing cancer rate…

    The total mobilization of the time was dubbed the “People’s War,” and while it had no lack of conservative critics, there was remarkable consistency in the observation of journalists and visitors (as well as in later memoirs) that the combination of a world crisis, full employment, and mild austerity seemed to be a tonic for the American character. New York Times columnist Samuel Williamson… pointed out that American life had been revolutionized in a single generation and many good things seemingly lost forever; the war and the emphasis on conservation were now resurrecting some of the old values. “One of these,” he wrote, “may be the rediscovery of the home–not as a dormitory, but as a place where people live. Friendships will count for more.”

* Did you know that Interface FLOR is based in Chicago?

We can too give up our cars

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The high-profile launch of Paris’ Vélib’ [French] program (actually, one of several such schemes in Europe, but certainly the highest-profile implementation of a turnkey free bike-sharing system to date) has put mayor Delanoë’s strategy of reducing urban traffic — no, not reducing its supposedly inevitable growth, but actually getting people who currently drive to drop the keys and step away from the steering wheel — into the spotlight. Delanoë has promised to cut traffic by 40%, and making bicycling as easy as walking — first with bicycle facilities, now with bicycles — is a big part of that.

First, some info gleaned from Vélo’v, the pioneering bike share in Lyon. JCDecaux will launch seven new city-bike schemes [French] over the next year, with over 25,000 bicycles in Paris, Seville, Marseille, Dublin, Aix-en-Provence, Besançon, and Mulhouse. Barcelona has also launched an independent bike share company, Bicing [Spanish]. Bicycle traffic grew 44% from 2005-06. So far, Vélo’v customers [French] mostly fit the profile of bicyclists; nearly half are twentysomething, 60% are male, a full third are students. 85% of daytime trips are for work or school. More than one-third of Vélo’v users drive (even occasionally) in the city; over half of them drive less since the program’s start. 10% of Vélo’v’d trips would otherwise have been in cars. (You’ve got to love the French term for non-motorized transport: “déplacements doux.” Sweet, indeed. And the newsletter’s welcome is written by the municipal “vice-president in charge of new ways of using public space.” Now, that’s a title fit for me.)



Vélo’v Station, Lyon Uploaded to Flickr by laughtonb

Pasadena recently commissioned a report on traffic reduction strategies; the draft report and the appendices (with many case studies of municipalities that have lowered VMT or trips) are available online.

The July/August issue of New Urban News points out the tremendous success of transit oriented development in Arlington, Va. I recently had dinner in a smart new restaurant a few blocks from the Clarendon Metro, at the heart of Arlington’s booming Wilson Blvd./Orange Line corridor. In my lifetime, the three-mile corridor has added 19,000 DUs, 15 million sq. ft. of offices, and 1.9 million sq. ft. of retail, worth tens of billions of dollars — yet traffic on Wilson (at Clarendon) has fallen 16% since 1996. Over the same time, transit use grew 37.5%, with Metrorail ridership growing 43% and local ART bus ridership growing 926%. Of course, Arlington has an aggressive, holistic TDM strategy.

And then, there’s that most obvious way of dissuading driving: taxes. Another Tribune editorial endorsing a high gas tax, instead of those clunky CAFE standards:

The most efficient and straightforward way to persuade Americans to conserve gasoline would be to raise gas prices. A gas tax increase of, say, 50 cents per gallon would persuade people to drive fewer miles, without limiting their car-buying options. That’s preferable to the fix approved by the U.S. Senate: a mandated rise in fuel economy standards for automobiles.

Update 23 July: it appears that Steve Chapman wrote that one. From a 22 July opinion piece, a crisp distillation of how CAFE is not just poor policy, but it backloads economic costs and increases the social costs of driving:

Higher fuel economy standards, likewise, would have results that are not quite what we envision. The first is that they won’t reduce gasoline consumption much anytime soon. The reason is simple: The only vehicles affected by the change would be new ones…

The second is that among those people who buy the new, improved vehicles, higher mileage requirements won’t actually discourage driving. Just the opposite… A 2002 study by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies found that if Congress raised the fuel mandate to 35 m.p.g, the average new light truck “would log about 1,080 more miles per year.”

The result will be more congestion and more accidents. The more people drive, the worse the traffic jams. The higher the number of cars on the road at any given moment, the likelier it is that one of them will run into yours.

Economists almost unanimously agree that if you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions by curbing gasoline consumption, the sensible way to do it is not by dictating the design of cars but by influencing the behavior of drivers. If you want less of something, such as pollution from cars, the surest way is to charge people more for it.

A carbon tax or a higher gasoline tax would encourage every motorist, not just those with new vehicles, to burn less fuel — by taking the bus, carpooling, telecommuting, resorting to that free mode of transit known as walking, or buying a Prius.

Many people are inclined to resist a higher gas tax because it would cost them money. What they overlook is that a law requiring cars and trucks to be more fuel-efficient would not come free, either. You wouldn’t pay more for each visit to the pump. But you would pay more for a car. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over time, a gas tax would cost 27 percent less than a higher fuel-economy mandate.

None of these inconvenient truths, however, got much attention from the Senate. Raising mileage standards has great allure in Washington because the price inflicted on consumers is hidden from view, assuring that no blame will fall on our elected leaders.

P.S. two snarky phrases in my head lately: “gizmo green” and “tapas-based economy.”

Games people play

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Scott McLeemee at Crooked Timber takes note of a Wonkette post about Late Night Shots, a Georgetown “social” club apparently similar in intent to our own much-lamented Lincoln Park Trixie Society. The backlash within LNS against an unflattering article in a local alt-weekly is revealing:

[W]hat we have here is the opposite of the “theft of enjoyment”. It is the fear, rather, that one’s claim to have access to superior power and pleasure won’t be acknowledged at all.

The point of a club like Late Night Shots is, in large part, to keep other people out of it. That’s obvious. But those other people have to (be imagined to) want in.

The greatest terror is not that they will try to overthrow you—or even that they might somehow break through the barriers of exclusivity. It’s that the outsider might laugh at the exclusivity.

Even those in the ruling class suffer from class anxiety, as it were; the status-game lead that they’ve worked so hard to achieve has been exposed as a sham. So, of course, they reiterate their successes and ridicule the status games that others (namely, alt-weekly writers/readers, aka “hipsters”) play. The hipster vs. yuppie cycle of sniping perpetuates itself again.

Urban bites

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  • You know that loft living has gone mainstream when it appears in Rocky Mount and Clayton, N.C.
  • Residential parking districts in Boulder allow 2-3 hour free parking during the day and sell parking permits to businesses and commuters — at 5X and 18X the resident price, respectively. The system still favors residents without excluding other users. (The first breach in Chicago’s obscenely underpriced RPP is the $300 citywide permit, available to people like real estate agents and home health aides.)
  • Fred Camino at MetroRiderLA diagnoses the problem with TOD as practiced in LA: parking. “Providing ample parking for vehicles orients people away from transit. But the developers don’t care because they know they won’t be able to sell their units at a ridiculously high price to the Dr. Cosmatos of the world without providing ample parking for residents and their guests. Essentially they are saying fuck transit. So Transit Oriented Developments in Los Angeles, as they stand now, are indeed bullshit and do not help reduce traffic, pollution, congestion or incease transit usage.”
  • Denver appears to be the first city to have instituted a “label match-up” law requiring motorcycles to have exhaust systems that meet EPA noise control standards. (Current laws usually rely on decibel meters, which are expensive, time consuming, and hard to use.) Motorcycle groups inevitably cried foul, citing a “double standard,” but at least one publication agrees:

    Instead of basing the requirements on the actual equipment, [legislation] tend[s] to specify sound levels, but those are hard to measure properly and require enforcement agencies to buy the necessary equipment and train personnel in its use. If legislators started by requiring exhaust system to bear the same markings found on stock pipes that show they meet EPA sound-level requirements as well as a measured noise standard, it would be easier for police to enforce. It would also give aftermarket exhaust manufacturers reason to start creating legal systems. We believe that this would be the most effective tactic… At the moment, many law-enforcement agencies find their hands tied. They cite a motorcyclists for an obviously loud exhaust, but in court they lose because the wording of laws makes the standard unclear or the measurement requirements too difficult. Art Friedman, Motorcycle Cruiser, 30 June 2003

    Apparently, Alderman Natarus asked the city to investigate “sound cameras” to issue citations based on a built-in decibel meter — another problem with enforcement is that vehicle noise is always on the move and thus hard to track. Interesting idea, although avoiding cites for emergency vehicles, etc. might be a challenge.

The journey’s half the fun

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Transit: it’s just a way to get there. Many transportation projects become infrastructure driven, building rail for its own sake. In Charlotte, though, the leaders recognize that transit is only half the equation. What’s really needed is a different way of living, one that transit is an integral part of — and viewing transit as an isolated solution won’t get you there.

Debra Campbell, planning director for the city of Charlotte, interviewed by Zach Patton in Governing magazine:

Transit is a means; it’s not the end. The end is high-quality development and a way for us to promote better development to make sure we’re better stewards of our community and the environment.

It’s also about giving lifestyle choices. Charlotte had gotten to the point where there was really only one lifestyle: suburban half-acre lots. We will never ever do away with our suburban cul-de-sac communities. They’ll always be a choice for our residents…

We never, ever, ever said transit was going to be a panacea. It’s just about providing a choice. A big part of that was bringing in the transit folks, the engineers, the planners and the developers to talk to the public, so it wasn’t just seen as a transit project.

That monoculture of suburban half-acre lots will ultimately drive many more people away from Sunbelt cities — I’m certainly not the only one.

Virtually attend MPC lunches

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Video is now available for two recent MPC panels, courtesy of CAN-TV. No pre-registration and no insipid Corner Bakery box lunches. (They were much better when they had fresh chips.)

Fred Kent from the Project on Public Spaces, on Streets as Places, with a response by CDOT’s interim commissioner and Tom Samuels from the 48th Ward office. This was pretty good, but the local response paled in response to Kent’s inspiring (if generic — I’d heard it all before) call to action.

Parking 101, a panel discussion on district managing parking and update on the Parking Benefit District concept as it moves towards reality in Chicago. Haven’t yet had a chance to view this, but it got good reviews.

Buying our way to greenness

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An article by Alex Williams in the Sunday NYT talks about “light” and “deep” green, timely given the recent rocketing ascendance of pricey green gear:

“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.

“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.” […]

“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” [Michael] Shellenberger [of market research firm American Environics] said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”

Modest proposals dept.

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Wow, and I thought I was militant:

But I have a suggestion that would raise money for the city, reduce vehicular traffic in the Loop and not require a huge collection apparatus.

Every week we could have a pedestrian lottery. Those of us who are always on foot could send a ten-dollar check to City Hall. On Sunday night, one of our alderpersons would don a blindfold and pick a lucky pedestrian.

The winner would get no money. That would go to the City, the Park District, the CTA, whatever.

Instead of cash, though, the winning pedestrian would get a Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol and a license to kill (like James Bond).

For one week he or she could prowl our Loop streets looking for the most flagrant violators of pedestrian rights and blast away a no questions, no jail time, just a loud Ka-Pow and the guys from Streets and San would show up to haul away the mess.

Public transportation would never be more appealing.

Jack Zimmerman, one of the downtown Chicago Journal’s columnists, had that modest proposal for cutting traffic and improving pedestrian safety downtown.

And here’s a little gem about how there’s no romance to driving, at least not around here:

If I wanted interesting driving, I’d buy one of those nifty little Ferraris, some genuine kid driving gloves and pick up a skinny-ankled woman named Marcella who would sit beside me and look gorgeous as I tooled around the Italian Alps.

But this is Illinois, Land of Lincoln, a state full of flat land, straight roads and thick ankles. Marcella doesn’t live here.

I will say that even [despite having never learned to drive] I have experienced lovely moments in cars, mostly involving, yes, small cars hugging curves along winding roads in the countryside (and sometimes someone sitting beside me, looking gorgeous). That’s the romantic ideal of “driving as freedom,” not the grinding daily reality of bumper-to-bumper — but yet the caged masses soldier on. Sigh.