Trib editorial: raise (gas) taxes!

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Newsflash: the Tribune has editorialized not only in favor of higher taxes, but on behalf of the wildly unpopular (Bush’s people even called it “wacky,” in a 2004 anti-Kerry ad) notion that higher gas taxes would spur conservation. [“Link”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0508290118aug29,1,2292431.story?coll=chi-opinionfront-hed or full text after the jump]

Instead, they apply some common economic sense to the highly emotional subject of gas prices. Imagine if George W. Bush had applied a $1 per gallon “Oil Freedom Tax” on gasoline in September 2001, pegging gasoline to $3 a gallon and rebating based on the price of oil. Prices would be no higher than today, except that our nation could have invested hundreds of billions of dollars on a crash course in energy independence (and, oh, maybe paid for some of this war with revenue instead of debt). Instead of importing high-tech hybrid car engines, solar cells, and wind turbines from Japan or Denmark, Americans might have the leading edge on these technologies. Instead of skirting bankruptcy and cancelling orders for new equipment, Chicago’s transit agencies could be laying new track to bring a 19th-century transit system into the 21st century. Residents seeking to cut transportation costs would drive demand for new transit-oriented and walkable housing and commercial development, reinvesting in our region’s stagnating inner suburbs instead of sprawling over ethanol- or biodiesel-producing farm fields.

Instead, the coffers of Saudi oil sheiks and oil-corporation executives are overflowing, while the Treasury’s balance sheet plunges to new lows amidst seas of red ink.

In related news, thanks to the leadership of our beloved CBF for inserting a “conserve energy by bicycling”:http://biketraffic.org/biketraffic/bt0905/durbin.html provision into recent federal legislation, to study ways that communities can conserve energy by helping drivers switch to bikes

In less related news, but perhaps more pertinent to the current discussion, with your advocacy and interest Chicago may soon begin “weekly road closures”:http://biketraffic.org/biketraffic/bt0905/sundayparkways.html to promote walking and cycling on key routes. I have a hunch that the “60 mile” route includes a certain prominent lakefront highway.

In even less related news, Slate has “an article”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2124561/entry/2124562/nav/tap1 praising the Dutch for looking suave atop their cycles.

Continue reading →

Vanity

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Here’s a first for me: bought a pair of pants recently. (Being at the thin end of America’s ever-widening size spectrum makes this a considerable challenge; indeed, this was from one of the few chains which carry my size.) In the fitting room, I thought “these are definitely too wide” but otherwise thought them fine. Once home, brought out the measuring tape and — sure enough — the tape says they’re 3″ wider than the label!

I’d heard last year that a certain large apparel chain had begun inching up men’s pant sizes (34″ was really 34 1/2″), but that chain had already excised my size years ago. Oh well; instead of hopping to New York to buy clothes, I guess I’ll have to try London and Hong Kong.

Possible NY plan links quality of life to better public space

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“StreetsBlog”:http://www.streetsblog.org leaks a Sneak Preview of Bloomberg’s 21st Century Urban Vision, wherein consultant Alex Garvin (former czar of LMDC and author of the encyclopedic _The American City_) recommends that New York build upon its competitive advantage as a lively urban destination by enhancing public space — including reducing traffic through congestion pricing and street closures — and welcoming another million residents in new neighborhoods built in opportunity areas, like decked-over railyards. However, as with many Bloomberg initatives, the public process appears to be, well, lacking.

Also, trying to post proper (non-cameraphone) Flickr photos while I’m still in NYC.

Hoarding names

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The future looks bleak and lonely for Marshall Field & Co., according to “the Trib’s”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0607230300jul23,1,4982727.story?coll=chi-business-hed Sandra Jones:

bq. Federated, for the most part, isn’t using the mothballed brand names in any substantial way. And the retailer has expressed no interest in selling or licensing them. But it doesn’t want competitors to gain access to the names, either. It’s a common tactic, and one that has become more widespread, particularly in the technology industry, as American business consolidates.

“Clean” cars sprawling & wasteful

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I must have written this in 2001 or so; it was posted to the Critical Mass list.

My deep hatred of cars stems first from having grown up in ugly,
inaccessible suburban sprawl. (Only later did I realize the magnitude of
the environmental damage wrought by cars.) Sprawl was *enabled* (note: not
“caused”) by widespread automobility; cars allowed people to exponentially
increase the distance that they could live from train stations,
workplaces, shopping areas, even friends and family. “Clean” cars, even if
they have limited ranges, won’t do ANYTHING about traffic congestion,
about sprawl, about parking woes, about dooring. To fight those, we need
*fewer* cars, not necessarily *cleaner* cars.

Also, “clean” cars still require far more materials (for construction)
than mass transit or bikes or Rollerblades or scooters or even Manolo
Blahniks. “Clean” cars are still far heavier than the pedestrians they’ll
run into (and thus kill). “Clean” car motors are still nowhere near as
energy efficient as a pair of human feet. (Even a very efficient, tiny VW
is one-twentieth as efficient as a bike – mostly because of the added
weight, but also because car engines are notoriously inefficient. Only 1%
of the energy a car burns goes to move the driver!) “Clean” cars are
currently heavily reliant on nonrenewable fuels like methane (CNG), but
cyclists use renewable (and tasty) fuel.

this was my comment from another thread on this topic a few months ago
(thanks to Jim Redd for helpfully putting it on the CCM website): “Even if
every car on the road was powered by corn oil, cars (and SUVs) would still
be cutting us off, dooring us, running us over, recklessly accelerating,
clogging up city streets (in motion and while parked), consuming tons of
nonrenewable resources in their construction, fostering the continued
growth of suburban sprawl, shutting people off from each other and from
fresh air, leaking nasty fluids into parking lots, and in general making
life miserable. That’s why the only ‘clean’ car is… a bike.”

If we completely get rid of cars, what are you going to tell all those union
workers who want to preserve their automaker jobs?
What jobs are you going to give them if they aren’t going to make
alternative cars? The auto industry employs a lot of people.

they can make BICYCLES, naturally. I’m not kidding, either. This “what
about the economic impact?” straw-man argument is always held up whenever
someone wants to do something good for the environment. I’m sorry, but
economics is not a zero-sum game. If demand for a certain product suddenly
and precipitously drops, then the money spent on that product will
reappear elsewhere in the economy. Indeed, given the immense social
*costs* of automobiles, one could probably make a pretty good case that
their production and consumption is a net loss or (at best) only a
marginal gain to the U.S. economy — especially if one factors in the
enormous opportunity costs involved. The $billions that automakers spend
every year on advertising, for instance, could be more productively used
feeding the hungry — but the twisted logic of capitalism misallocates
those resources to an endeavor of dubious ethical or economic merit.
(Advertising, after all, exists to sell otherwise unnecessary goods to
otherwise unwilling consumers.)

Besides, auto production is not very labor-intensive. Hundreds of
thousands (if not millions) of American jobs in auto production have been
moved overseas or eliminated due to technological change. Bikes, solar
cells, and adobe walls (just three examples of sustainable technologies)
use less *energy* in production than cars, nuclear power plants, and
drywall, but are more labor-intensive. As energy prices increase from
their currently absurdly low levels, that trade-off will make more
economic sense. More jobs, less energy, a cleaner environment. Aaah.

1930 population density

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The Regenstein’s “Map Collection”:http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps, among a goodly number of assorted (mostly sociological) maps of Chicago from 1890-1935 and 1990-2000, has a population density map of Chicago, circa 1930 online. It appears to be based on section (mile grid), rather than community area. Four major sectors of the city had more than 50,000 persons per square mile, even before “high-rises”:http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps/chisoc/G4104-C6-1933-U5-o.html sprouted outside downtown: the north lakefront (east of Halsted/Clark to Lawrence); west and east Ukrainian Village/Wicker Park, from Humboldt Park to the river; Pilsen and Lawndale; and the Black Belt, Washington Park, and Woodlawn. Now, perhaps two CAs would come close; most of the above areas now average 20-30,000 per square mile, with the abandoned South Side much lower.

Meet the other end of your gas pump

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_Chicago Tribune_ reporter Paul Salopek spent the last year on “an energy safari,” working backwards from the customers and night-shift clerks at a single Marathon gas station in exurban Chicago (and the downstate refinery that supplies it) to the exact fields where the oil first left the ground. Last September, for instance, 71% of its gas came from the U.S., 20% from Africa, and 10% from Saudi Arabia.

The “eight stories”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-oilsafari2-htmlstory,0,3163462.special and related multimedia (photos from Iraq, Louisiana, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and a 12-part video documentary) neatly tie together the disparate lives on both ends of the petroleum pipe: an angry gang recruit in Itak Abasi, Nigeria, an oilfield manager in Basra living under what amounts to solitary confinement, fiercely Chavista village elders in Venezuela, the gas station manager who spends a third of her pay on gas, and a “concerned” Hummer-driving realtor in St. Charles, Illinois. The Tribune calls our “globe-spanning energy network” “so fragile, so beholden to hostile powers and so clearly unsustainable, that our car-centered lifestyle seems more at risk than ever” — a bit out of character for a Republican newspaper with a suburban circulation base.

[xpost: “gristmill”:http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/31/12236/0077%5D

Incidentally, I read the story during a brownout on Saturday, the second in a week. Talk about lack of energy…

Lane-miles

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This post on why Chicago doesn’t need more lane-miles got what I consider high praise on SkyscraperCity: _not a normal post._

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If widening highways to reduce congestion is like loosening your belt to reduce obesity, then widening highways just to say that “my number on some obscure lane-miles per capita computation is bigger than yours” is like, um, well, I won’t go there. Since when was the amount of pavement per capita indicative of high quality of life?

Point 1: St. Louis has *seven times* more freeway lane-miles per capita than Vancouver: 3’6″ vs. 0’6″ (and declining every day). Which city is the envy of the world?
(Thanks to Patrick Condon for the comparison: http://www.planetizen.com/node/132)

Point 2: Merely pouring money into suburban transit (a nice way to drive air around the suburbs) won’t fix anything. Land use and transportation changes must occur simultaneously. Note that the “nice” and “acceptable” parts of suburbia are those which grew up around rail: back then, before Big Government decided to engineer two cars into every garage, the two mutually reinforced one another. Now, not so much.

Point 3: Prior policy decisions shape today’s attitudes. The “overwhelming preference” for suburban living and/or for driving came about only because of decades of, yes, social engineering. So, what’s a little more in the other direction?

Point 4: Sure, we can rationalize existing road capacity better. Closing more ramps downtown will help, and will provide opportunities for decking over the freeway. A congestion charge might get more passing-through truckers to use the two bypasses, which is what they were built for. The latest trick is the High Occupancy/Toll (HOT) lane: reserving express lanes for carpools and toll-payers. We have the infrastructure — segregated express lanes, I-Pass, and a network of enforcement cameras — but not the political will. Think of traffic as a supply and demand problem: if demand exceeds supply, maybe it’s time to raise the price and reduce demand, particularly if the demand is for a good with negative social costs. Rationing road priority based on queue (whoever got there first), just like bread in a Soviet grocery, makes no sense whatsoever.

Point 5: Widening roads DOES materially injure those of us who don’t drive. All those cars need to go somewhere once they exit the freeway: onto the local streets and into parking lots that deaden the city. All those cars also belch toxic fumes, making my bike commute that much more unpleasant and unhealthful, and all of them abrade tires and the road surface, resulting in that nasty 2mm pile of black soot on my windowsills, just weeks after I cleaned them.

Point 6: Why do cagers always choose the most extreme examples for their trips? 24,800 cars a day drive in front of my apartment. Don’t tell me that all 24,800 drivers are taking their pregnant, paraplegic grandmothers to the ER. _Of course_ there are trips where driving makes much more sense than other modes, but for many people the number of such trips is vastly exaggerated.

Gushy eulogy

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_Harper’s_ this month has this excerpt from a Cambridge alumni bulletin:

bq. Simon made the most of the sexual opportunities Cambridge had to offer, and although his preference was for boys and young men, to his dismay he learned that Susan Kilner, a fellow undergraduate, was expecting his child. He agreed to marry her to placate her family, on the understanding that he qould never have to live with her. Susan accepted this; she was, in his word, “a brick.”

For shame, or pillories

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Greenpeace UK has a new PR campaign which seemingly encourages, well, minor vandalism of SUVs. (Note the final scene in “this TV spot”:http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/gasguzzler. They even have a success story to point to!

bq. Last year, [Thandie Newton,] the actor found a Greenpeace leaflet stuck to the windscreen of her family’s SUV. A short while later, she traded in her gas guzzling 4×4 for a fuel efficient Toyota Prius, which switches between petrol and electric to get nearly three times more miles to the gallon than her old BMW X5.

(via “Gristmill”:http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/21/124752/328)

Ravinia rides (late)

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This year, John from the CCC is leading a trio of Ravinia rides, including one on Sunday 23 July. I may also go on Friday 11 August; the CBF is also doing a ride on Saturday 19 August.

(I’ve been twice this year, and for some reason have been upgraded from lawn to pavilion both times. I doubt that’ll happen if I go with a big group, though.)