The war we ought to fight

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Matt Yglesias points out in an American Prospect article that the ultimate $1+ trillion cost of the “Iraq misadventure” could have gone a long way towards making America safer, but for… well, that thought’s too depressing. What’s most shocking, though:

In a May 10 Washington Post op-ed piece, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein argued that “the economic burden of the Iraq War is on the verge of exceeding the total anticipated burden of the Kyoto Protocol.” Sunstein’s argument, predictably, came under attack from the right, but in fact he seriously understated his case. The estimated $325 billion cost of Kyoto refers not to direct budgetary costs — most academic studies have concluded that these would be extremely small. Instead, the figure refers to indirect costs to economic growth. This is a large price to pay, but as with the rest it’s significantly less than the economic impact of the war. On top of the $1.27 trillion in direct expenditures, however, Bilmes and Stiglitz also anticipate an additional trillion or so in indirect reduced economic growth. Without the invasion, in other words, we could have both gotten a jump on the emerging challenge of global warming and enjoyed higher levels of overall prosperity than we’re seeing today.

The same blithering administration idiots who claim that meeting our Kyoto Protocol targets will prove too expensive have no problem asking Congress for blank checks towards the war — when, in fact, the cost of the former comes to a small fraction of the latter. Our descendants will not smile upon us for this.

NU myths

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Jeff Speck, “in an interview”:http://www.metropolismag.com/html/urbanjournal_0903/speckinterview.html ostensibly about his (then-new) role in NEA’s urban design program, reverts back to the role of _Suburban Nation_ co-author (and incidentally, initial pencil pusher for many of CNU’s original incorporation papers) as he politely (as he always is) debunks several myths that Julie Taraska of _Metropolis_ had back in 2003:

bq. The New Urbanists have a bad reputation among Modernists because many NU projects use traditional architecture, which is considered reactionary. In fact, it’s subversive: Traditional architecture is used to mask progressive social ideals that Modernism, by manifesting them, can sabotage. But there is nothing in the Charter of the New Urbanism that privileges any architectural style, and I would be very discouraged if my appointment were seen as anti-Modernist, or if the most progressive Modernists stopped applying for grants…

_Q. The NU principles of walkability, denser layout, and mixed-income housing apply less to urban cores than to edge cities and suburbs…_

bq. Forgive me for disagreeing, but the principles you describe are the very essence of good city design, particularly at the urban core. The New Urbanists are perhaps best known for applying these principles, leaned from urban cores, to other parts of the metropolis. But half of the work of DPZ and of the New Urbanists is in cities, and much of that is downtown. I personally worked on a good half-dozen downtown revitalization master plans while at DPZ… The U.S. Conference of Mayors could benefit from an Urbanism 101 class, in which as many mayors as will listen are taught the basics of good design–the items you mention, plus mixed-use, the “24-hour city” concept, improving transit, form-based building codes, Main Street preservation, etc…

And a closing word on social justice:

bq. We must acknowledge and fight the ways that planning has actually created or exacerbated inequality. In the new suburbs, where kids can’t walk to activities, it’s usually the mom who becomes the soccer mom. And when jobs flee the city for cheaper land in the office park, the non-driving poor can’t get to work. Myron Orfield has demonstrated how the inner-city poor subsidize Minneapolis’ ex-urban expansion. These are inequalities caused by planning, and they pose a larger target for our efforts.

What we do know can hurt us

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A recent Pew Center poll done just as _An Inconvenient Truth_ was opening nationally finds, not surprisingly, that Americans don’t care about global warming. Or does it?

bq. “41% say global warming is a very serious problem, 33% see it as somewhat serious and roughly a quarter (24%) think it is either not too serious or not a problem at all.”

That puts global warming 19th among 20 issues ranked. However, a very strong partisan pattern emerges here: although it’s dead last among Republicans, it ranks 14th for both Democrats and independents, above such “hot button” issues as government surveillance, flag burning, abortion, the inheritance tax, and gay marriage, and about the same as the budget deficit and immigration.

However, there’s still hope: the better informed people are about global warming, the more likely they are to take it seriously. (Perhaps that’s tautological, but I sure hope not.)

bq. But across party lines, those who say human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels has driven global warming rate the issue as far more serious. Fully 71% of Democrats who say human activity has caused temperatures to rise rate it as a very serious problem, along with 54% of Republicans who hold the same belief… [Overall,]fully two-thirds of those who say human activity has made the earth hotter rate it as a very serious problem, compared with just 31% who see the earth warming but attribute it to natural patterns in the earth’s environment.

What’s more, those “on our side” believe that we can do something about it:

bq. Fully 80% of those who attribute climate change to human activity say the effects can be reduced, compared with just 48% of those who say rising temperatures are a natural pattern in the earth’s environment.

The public also strongly disapproves of how Bush is handling global warming, giving him a 26% approval rating on the subject — below his 32-33% approval rating on immigration, the economy, and the environment as a whole. In fact, the 26% approval rating neatly matches his approval rating on energy policy (which could easily be tied to global warming) and the 30% of Americans who either don’t believe in global warming or don’t know about it.

(Edit: this is post # “888”:http://www.feng-shui-architects.com/articles-fengshuinumerology.htm. Doesn’t make me feel any wealthier.)

The big vote today

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Inside the dark, smoky room today, Cook County’s Democratic committeemen voted (surprise) to slot Stroger Jr. into Stroger Sr.’s ballot slot. Most of the votes for Danny Davis came from the West Side and the near-west towns, in or around Davis’ Congressional district. Only two (15th and 16th wards) came from the South Side, heart of the Stroger machine. A few votes came from the north lakefront and north suburbs, according to an anonymous spy posting at The Capitol Fax Blog.

On car-freedom

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“Nice quote”:http://sfcityscape.com/features/TLC_interview.html from former SFBC president Dave Snyder about the importance of car-freedom (via SF Cityscape):

bq. Our transit system cannot be oriented to just serve commute trips, because then you still need a car to live a full life. Because you don’t just work; nobody just works… And so what we’re saying is that in order to live a full life as a member of our society, you need to incur the costs of operating and storing and buying that car. For purposes of social justice, it should be easier to live a car-free life… It’s not some radical ideology that ‘cars are bad, and they cause wars and pollution, and therefore they’re evil and no one should ever drive them.’ It has to do with the quality of life and economic and social justice.

CTA cash crunch redux, preview

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Recent noises from Madigan’s office have pointed the way towards an even steeper CTA funding crisis this fall. A “Trib editorial”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0607030175jul03,1,1899216.story?coll=chi-opinionfront-hed sums it up:

bq. The CTA created the problem by financing operations with money that should have gone to pensions. That avoided a shutdown of mass transit, but only deepened the agency’s financial problems. The CTA won’t get out of this mess just by pinching pennies. That $200 million is an annual obligation nearly four times as big as the 2006 deficit that caused the CTA to threaten doomsday cuts. It represents about 20 percent of the CTA’s $1.04 billion operating budget for this year.

The proximate causes of CTA’s funding problems are higher labor costs, in the form of the distinctly un-sexy pension and health care budgets. The pension crisis isn’t unique by any means to CTA or even to “Illinois”:http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17026, which has only managed to balance its past few budgets by raiding its own pension funds. Public pension funds across the country “are foundering”:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_24/b3937081.htm. If new reporting requirements that give a fuller (or perhaps unnecessarily dire) view of liabilities are correct, the total obligations that state/local taxpayers owe to public sector retirees could dwarf the much better publicized crisis in Social Security. Meanwhile, health care costs (particularly for retirees) are hamstringing not just governments, but Corporate America as well; hence Obama’s idea of “a federal bailout of the Big Three’s retiree health plans”:http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/8/1392/77402 in return for stricter environmental standards. In short, the problem isn’t unique to CTA or even to transit; these are systemic problems endemic to America’s half-baked social welfare system. It’s just that this time, they affect a public utility necessary to the region’s economic life.

Last year, Livable City in San Francisco brainstormed “a list of potential funding mechanisms”:http://livablecity.org/campaigns/munifunding.html that could be used to close Muni’s operating budget deficit. Muni benefits from being a part of the SF City/County government, so many of Livable City’s strategies center around increasing parking rates. Others, however, note local governments’ statutory abilities to raise vehicle registration fees and gas taxes.

In Boston last month, the MBTA was distributing “a booklet”:http://www.mbta.com/traveling_t/fare_increase_information.asp outlining a steep fare hike in the works for T riders. Ever since I last lived in Boston, the T has been on a downward spiral of fare hikes and funding cuts, precipitated by “a reform of its funding formula”:http://www.pihp.com/pihp/archives/2006/05/forward_funding.php that amounted to a steep cut in state subsidies. What seems to be different in Boston, though, is that the level of cynicism, animosity, and distrust among the media and the community toward the transit authority seems much lower than in Chicago; even “Boston Magazine”:http://bostonmagazine.com/articles/boston_magazine_fare_and_balanced (like most city magazines, read mostly in the prosperous suburbs) carried a satirical op-ed suggesting that fares for “urban commuters who’ve been watching, with something approaching horror, their beloved public transit system fall apart before their eyes” remain static while jacking suburbanites’ commuter rail fares 80%. The suburbanites would be “pacified with free crap… baubles, shiny things, whatever.” Maybe it’s because their tolerance of taxes is higher, or because the T has a more open process, or something.

Row-to-work pool

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At CNU XIV, someone mentioned a “yellow kayak club” in Baltimore that works like a paid lending library for kayaks around Baltimore Harbor, allowing people to share a pool of kayaks and row to work. Turns out that this curious little TDM program (uniquely suited for Baltimore, as the center city wraps around a long harbor) is funded by a new urbanist developer:

bq. Canton Kayak Club, a nonprofit organization started by a group of local kayaking devotees/evangelists, including restaurant owner Charlie Gjerde and developer Bill Struever. For our membership fee, we get unlimited summer-long access to the kayaks, paddles, and life vests stationed at four docks around the harbor, and a cursory but adequate bit of training in the basics of kayaking. (Baltimore City Paper)

Three of the kayak launches are at mixed-use waterfront developments; the fourth is at a restaurant. What’s cool about this:
* sharing transportation equipment amortizes high capital costs that would otherwise exclude people
* garnering attention for an underappreciated form of human powered transportation
* developers and others should always be willing to pay for access improvements. Most cities require this in the form of on-site parking; why not allow people to buy out of those onerous requirements in interesting new ways?

50 easy ways to improve bike safety

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The site’s geared towards engineers (and written just as poorly), but USDOT’s new “BikeSafe site”:http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/index.cfm features pretty comprehensive lists of “engineering, education, and enforcement countermeasures”:http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/treatments.cfm (with “case studies”:http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/case_studies.cfm) and, well, “ways bike crashes happen”:http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/crash_factors.cfm.

L for Loser

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Eric Zorn gripes about the stale retort that is “get a life”:

“Get a life!”–translation: “Go devote your energies to something real and productive!”–may well be useful advice to science-fiction cultists, but very few of us are entitled to dispense it with scorn, given the way we spend OUR leisure time… [Saying] “get a life” reveals such a paucity of wit, lack of imagination and inability to offer a reasoned response that I was moved, on the spot, to announce a new rule of engagement: “In any debate, the first person to hurl the insult `Get a life!’ is the loser.”

I’ve been told this a few times when screaming “shut up” at loud motorcycles aimlessly revving at intersections. Well, no, I have a life; it’s not like I’m aimlessly driving up and down the street just to annoy people.

Dallas growing up

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The Dallas Morning News is running an ongoing series called “Uptown Aspirations,” on the sudden emergence of a high-style mixed-use quarter — “emphasizing streets, blocks and squares”:http://www.guidelive.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-victory_0625gl.State.Bulldog.2125c9.html — adjacent to its 9-to-5 downtown of gaudy PoMo contraptions. Some articles are appropriately critical of developers’ hesitant first steps to learn an urban language; others fawningly gush over the arrivistes (particularly “the W hotel”:http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/pt/slideshows/2006/06/whotel_2006) with the boosterism you’d expect from Big D. Still, Victory Park’s concept of a $4 billion new luxury neighborhood (with a plan by Elkus/Manfredi of point towers atop streetwall blocks) that “embraces density, clustering buildings together that relate to each other and to their surroundings… where individual buildings talk to one another in a shared language instead of shouting at the top of their lungs” sounds like a big step forward for one of America’s paragons of sprawl. As David Dillon, the architecture critic writes, “It’s basic stuff, yet so rare in Dallas that it seems exotic.”

The package is a rare comprehensive review of a case study of how urbanism has a way of showing up even where it’s least expected — namely, in sprawling, polycentric Sunbelt cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and L.A., who supposedly owe their appeal to their rejection of traditional urbanism — and thus, why we need New Urbanism more than ever. Showy modernism has not worked for Dallas, riddled with freeways and one-off look-at-me architectural statements; indeed, only a wealthy impresario can afford to take a financial risk on something as basic as building a public square. (In contrast, the developer of a nearby shopping center claims that his lenders required parking in front, an urban mistake that will be with the area for decades to come.) The spontaneous flowering of urbanism in the Sprawl Belt shows why the attitude of some anti-New Urbanists (“why do we need new urbanism? doesn’t the old urbanism suffice?”) smacks so much of élitist Eastern Establishment provincialism: most Americans live in an environment where there is NO urbanism, where old urbanism simply does not exist; 75% of America was built within the past fifty years. The alternative to New Urbanism isn’t old urbanism, it’s sprawl.

Three side notes:
1. Ross Perot, Jr. is the developer; EDS, the company founded by his father, developed Legacy Town Center north of Dallas. Now, which former presidential candidate has done more for NU: Gore or Perot?

2. The earlier plan described by Dillon’s article (low-rise, brick, still around an arena) somewhat reminds me of the Arena District in Columbus: essentially two stadia, an office campus, an entertainment complex, and many apartments/condos, but wrapped up in brick and placed on nicely sized blocks adjacent to downtown. That project’s patron is Nationwide Insurance, wanting to build an urban neighborhood to retain its own workforce. Like Victory, it’s pretty relentlessly upscale and sanitized.

3. Victory was running ads for condos in Dwell magazine a few months ago.

Why CCM has maps

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[posted to CCM list]

Me to this list, 24 April 2003:

Hear, hear! I don’t think “anarchy routes” are ANY fun. There’s always
dilly-dallying about where the ride’s going to go, the ride ends up going
in circles and ends up in the same old parts of town that pretty much
replicate my daily commute. (We live surrounded by architectural splendor!
Let’s go and see it!) We end up being really antagonistic, inertia keeps us
on streets for really long and boring (and bus-schedule-wreaking)
stretches. The ride loses its energy fast as people who don’t have anything
to look forward to make other plans and ditch the ride — not that there
was much energy to start with, since the ride has no common (or consensus)
vision to begin with. “Anarchy” is capricious, frustrating, and boring.

This is not to say that a lot of planning has to go into a ride to make it
great. Gareth’s totally impromptu, sketched-on-a-paper-napkin map the time
the French Cycling Sisters showed up a few summers back totally rocked.

Okay, so maybe I’m a stickler for order and responsibility and planning.
But hey, in my experience, those sure beat the alternative.

Also, the “anarchy map” privileges the individuals up front; no one else gets any say in where the mass goes. With pre-printed maps, the entire group gets a chance to read, vet, and vote on the maps.