August 2008

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Support Mass Transit

By Frank on August 12, 2008

Now in internet form. The web site’s pretty bare-bones right now. I hope they take a page from Honolulu’s playbook.

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Encircling the City

By Frank on August 12, 2008

Zillow’s housing sale data for Q2 2008. Darker, bluer colors represent steeper declines in home value. Notice anything? Home prices have held their value better the closer you get to the city. It’s uncanny.

Picture 4.png

(via Seattle Bubble)

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Long-Term Investments

By Frank on August 11, 2008

Andrew has the must-read rebuttal to Sims. Money graf:

For an example of how rail can more more people more cheaply, we need only look to Washington DC. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the operator of DC Metro, spends almost exactly the same amount of money as King Country Metro does, $560 million to $580 million. Except for that $560 million DC metro moves almost a million people a day on rail (three times what KC metro moves per day with its buses) and the WMATA agency provides buses that carry another 120,000! It’s only possible because of the investment put in place years ago, and residents there can reap the benefit of a reliable, traffic-separated transit system that’s relatively cheap.

And DC’s population density is roughly the same as Seattle’s, so it’s not like they’ve achieved this amazing transit ridership simply by crushing everyone into Manhattan-style apartments.

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Buses

By Frank on August 11, 2008

Good to see that Ron Sims has taken up the mantle of go-to anti-rail crank for the local media. Thanks, Ron!

Sims is peeved that the buses stuck in traffic downtown only stack up three deep. He’d like to see them going at least five deep.

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New York – cars = awesome

By Matt the Engineer on August 11, 2008

Check out the StreetsBlog story about New York’s Summer Streets event. They closed down 7 miles of streets and let people live car-free for two Saturdays. The street aerobics class reminds me of ballroom dancing classes on the pedestian streets of Shanghai.

Of course our turn is coming. I just hope we embrace the idea as well as they have.

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A Good Idea Gone Bad

By serial catowner on August 11, 2008

At first, Americans replaced Old Dobbin with a car, and that was good. We soon noticed you could use a car as a sort of small home temporarily, a happy alternative to dubious hotel bedsheets. But then we began substituting cars for transit, liveable city cores, and other amenities, until we reached our current state of regarding a car as the one essential item to own. Today, nursing home aides making $9 an hour make payments of $400 a month to get to work in a car- a bad bargain.

In a sense, cars really are like cigarettes. I have asthma. I smoke handrolled cigarettes with good tobacco- no problem. I walk past a guy on the street smoking a crap ready-made cigarette and I start coughing and choking. Those things aren’t good for you.

People with real muscle cars or classic cars don’t drive them every day. Believe me, if you have 14 coats of hand-rubbed metal-flake paint job, or you’re driving a 1932 Packard, you don’t want to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi.

Some liberals do carry their feelings of natural goodness too far. It’s important to remember that if you’re a liberal. Mistakes were made. Prohibition was in part an effort to clean up municipal politics, but actually created mobs which outlived Prohibition by a good 40 years.

Make housing as affordable as car payments, on a functional transit line, and people will buy condos instead of cars. Visit Seattle- they already do, and the transit there is just barely functional.

The problem is not with any individual car- it is with the substitution of car ownership for a transit system to get to work, or an emergency response system to get you to the hospital, or local parks you can walk to. For decades to come some people will own cars even if they can only buy enough gas to drive around the block once a year.

Most of us, however, will be vastly relieved when we don’t need to own a car.

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Express Elevator to Hell- Going Down!

By serial catowner on August 9, 2008

For most of our history Americans had the best standard of living in the world. This may not have been actually true, but we wanted to believe it, and there was enough truth in it to make other stuff, like American medicine, “work”. Our doctors were, and are, largely greedy numbnuts, but we survived because of good food and, yes, the clean air of the suburbs, as it turns out.

Americans still believe we have the best healthcare, but eventually we’ll notice that if you’re #39 on one list and #32 on another and #22 on a list that only has 24 countries, you’re not #1.

While it lasted, our belief that “all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds” had one major practical (or impractical) result- if it wasn’t broke, we had no intention of fixing it. Americans didn’t join unions and were the last to create public pension plans, workman’s comp, or national approaches to national problems.

In short, we’re the rubes, the noobies, the people who, lacking experience, simply lack the know-how build a public health service, provide low income housing, cluster growth on transportation nodes, build innovative tech industries that export goods instead of jobs- and the list could go on.

Fortunately, there’s one thing we’re really good at- admitting that we are bankrupted addicts who need to change or die. And we all know that the first step on the road to recovery is admitting we were wrong.

Most of these twelve-step programs advise you to leave the heavy lifting up to God, but our Constitution endows our government with powers derived from the consent of the governed- rather a good thing, really, as God has built no trolley lines that I am aware of. Turning the powers of government to solving problems instead of creating them will be easier as people realize that we are not actually Number One.

Still, like our roads, our infrastructure of self-government has suffered neglect. Expect some major washouts and bridge failures as we journey towards the future.

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Finally

By Frank on August 8, 2008

Finally, the chattering class in Washington DC is making the connection between climate change, transit, and land use patterns:

In their recent book, Growing Cooler, Ewing and four co-authors calculate that if the number of miles we drive remains constant, the increase in fuel-efficiency standards Congress mandated in 2007 would cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions from cars and trucks by nearly one-quarter through 2030. But, in fact, they project that emissions won’t decline at all over that period, because an expected increase of nearly 50 percent in miles traveled will offset the efficiency gains. The same dynamic could prevent better fuel efficiency from reducing our reliance on foreign oil. “If we don’t change the way we live, the way we build our communities … we are going to fall way short of our goal of energy independence,” says Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del.

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Slowing Down Your Car

By Frank on August 6, 2008

I like this new gas pedal idea from Nissan. It increases resistance when you’ve gone beyond optimal fuel consumption. You also get feedback in the dashboard. It could increase fuel consumption by 5-10%.

Aside from simply building smaller, lighter cars, there are a whole host of things we can be doing to improve fuel efficiency, given sufficient motivation. But helping people adjust their driving habits is a big part of it.

This is particularly true for hybrids. I know hybrid owners accelerate like hell and run the car with the A/C cranked all the time. Then they wonder why they’re not getting 50mpg. If you really want to make the best use of a hybrid, you have to learn how to keep the gas engine from engaging, which means driving slower, starting up slowly, and braking more gradually.

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Bus Fares

By Frank on August 6, 2008

I was working up a response to Matt Rosenberg’s piece in Crosscut on buses, but Erica Barnett got there first and says what needed to be said.

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