Quick thoughts on cars

Imagine that tomorrow a clean and cheap automobile fuel is discovered. Any car can be inexpensively modified to burn this new fuel. It has no emissions save water vapor. Perhaps also a mild lavender scent. It is a dream fuel and it will probably never exist, but this is a hypothetical scenario so that's okay. Imagine how liberated a ecologically conscientous car user would feel as their anxiety over global warming and oil wars vanish. The locus of so much angst would return to its pre-Fall (circa Carter administration) state of blissful freedom. We could all finally drive as much as we damn well pleased and not have to give a damn (god damnit!).

I admit it sounds pretty nice. But even with a miracle fuel under the hood, it's still the case that the car must go. The personal automobile is about much more than emissions; it is not even primarily about emissions. It is primarily about space. Nothing can change the fact that the personal automobile is a terrible use of space, and space is the scarcest urban resource.

Problem the first: traffic. André Gorz writes that the automobile is essentially a luxury good, "like a villa by the sea, it is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don't have one." This is abundantly clear to anyone who has experienced the agony of a daily commute through gridlock traffic. The inescapable fact is that, per passenger mile, cars take up vastly too much space for everyone to have one.

Problem the second: parking. Any place worth going to is going to attract lots of folks. If they all bring their cars, they have to park them somewhere. But building giant parking lots detracts from the pleasure of the place. So we kill it to make it "accessible."

Furthermore, the space taken up by cars (driving and parked) necessarily eats into the opportunities for pedestrians and bicycles. Traffic increases, streets are widened, soon neighborhood are traversed by freeway-sized thoroughfares that no one in their right mind would let a child cross on their way to school. Super-sized parking lots separate storefronts from the street, discouraging pedestrians from approaching on foot. Etc.

I think we want to believe the miracle fuel story because the (extremely real) threat of global warming has put attention on emissions. As it should. However, we can't lose sight of the fact that even the cleanest car is incompatible with a city friendly to pedestrians and cyclists. And the benefits to be reaped from encouraging walking and cycling are more* than just clean air.

* In fact, here's a study.

UC cuts; New Almodóvar movie

My alma mater (go Aggies) is being bled to death. The Texans smell the blood.

Almodóvar has a new movie! Does anyone know when it will get to us here in the hinterlands?

Bicycling, when it's not a subculture

From a New York Times piece on bikes at Stanford:

[F]ew people wear helmets, and everyone is wearing ordinary clothes — none of the sleek and gaudy costumes you see on cyclists pumping through the peninsular hills and whistling down Sand Hill Road to the Caltrain station. They are themselves on wheels.

Exactly. When riding a bicycle stops being countercultural and gains broad appeal (though: which causes which?), people ride as they are. We have to give up the exclusivity and the uniform to get there.

Also, it's funny how entrenched the Lyrca-warrior image of cyclists is in the Bay Area. Hence the almost surprised tone of the article.

Morning findings

The Senate has released their health care bill. Part of how it pays for itself is by taxing insurance policies that cost more than $8,500/yr per person. The AFL-CIO thinks this qualifies as "middle-class." Ezra Klein makes a two-birds-one-stone-argument that the tax not only funds health care, but puts pressure on costs.

It was partly the Army's fault that Katrina was so devastating. I did not know what the MRGO was before hearing this story.

I really want to go here, here, and here.

I can't get this stupid shit out of my head.

Term-limited legislators vs. interest groups in CA: a fair fight?

Michael B. Farrell of the Christian Science Monitor on the weakening effect of term limits in CA. Interesting take on a little-explored aspect of the budget crisis.

While lobbyists play a significant role in any state’s budget process, experts say California lawmakers have become uniquely prone to outside influence because of strict term limits approved by voters in 1990. Assembly members are limited to six years in office and senators are limited to eight years.

“Interest groups, which of course have no term limits, can wield influence disproportionately in this kind of environment,” says Larry Gerston, a political science professor at San José State University.

Limited terms mean that lawmakers don’t have time to build up the political clout needed to take on powerful lobbyists, experts say. The state’s budget crises have been brokered in the past by longer-serving legislators, but few of today’s politicians wield that sort of power.

“In a term-limited environment, with a lot of politicians who tend to operate out of fear more than foresight,” says Consumer Watchdog’s Mr. Heller, “the institutional memory resides in the lobbyist community.”

Source article.

Nietzsche and Calvino on education and reading

Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply. It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly. --Nietzsche, Human, all too Human.

Schools and universities should hammer home the idea that no book which discusses another book can ever say more than the original book under discussion; yet they actually do everything to make students believe the opposite. --Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?

Consumerism as "mass trait display"

from the TierneyLab via CreditBloggers via Boing Boing

Jeffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico:

Consumerist capitalism is the least oppressive system of mass trait display ever developed. It’s much better than a militaristic dominance-based society or a theocracy or lots of other ways in which you basically display your intelligence and conscientiousness and disagreeableness by how efficiently you can oppress slaves or minority groups. But I think we can still do better.

Fucking bankers

From Andrew Leonard's excellent blog How the World Works (emphasis mine):

...Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., so memorably noted two weeks ago, that banks "are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."

Debate continued Thursday in the Senate on a credit card reform bill that the White House is pushing to get enacted by Memorial Day. ... amendments to the bill aimed at helping consumers and small businesses are ... facing uphill battles. ...

I'm with Durbin, as is, I think, a large swath of the general public. How is it even possible that the banking industry could exert "heavy pressure" after having been bailed out by Congress to the tune of so many hundreds of billions? It is preposterous.

Um, good question, there, Andrew. Any one in the Party that ostensibly represents "consumer and small businesses" care to hazard a response?

Two views on obesity

Today in the news I read two new sets of findings on obesity. They are a revealing study in the contrast in attitudes towards the obesity epidemic. From the science pages, we get the typical breathless gee-whiz coverage of the discovery of a miracle fat that promised to make the arduous work of burning off excess pounds a thing of the past. While these types are busy cooking up the next phen-phen, in Vancouver they've found something that to me seems a vastly more useful type of knowledge: living close to a grocer makes you thinner.

My complaint is this. Whatever wonder drug the medical-scientific findings may yield will do nothing to address the underlying spatial reality of the Vancouver findings. I would argue it might even help perpetuate the underlying pattern. And why not? A morbidly obese person kept that way by an urban environment designed to trap them in their automobile is the ideal pharmaceutical consumer of such a drug.

At the level of policy, I think if we want to fight obesity in this country we ought to prioritize walkable urban spaces over drug research. To those struggling with weight yourselves, take the message of the Vancouver findings to heart next time you pick up the car keys instead of walk or bike, and if you really want to get down to nuts and bolts, next time you are picking a place to live.

SXSW

This week was SXSW! It is all it is cracked up to be, and more. Here's what I saw:

Wednesday
J. Tillman (of Fleet Foxes)
misc. bands doing Leonard Cohen tributes incl.: Herman Dune, Laura Gibson

A tame first day. J. Tillman was grumpy and insisted on doing his set without amplification. Promo for the new Leonard Cohen live CD at Waterloo Records. Praises from NPR music guy, who lamented that there are no more places like this "anymore" in D.C. Hooray Austin!

Thursday
Women
Micachu and the Shapes
Pete and the Pirates
Camera Obscura
The Rosebuds

Now we're talking. Women, MaTS, PatP are new and worth a listen. First time seeing Camera Obscura live -- so good! They rock harder than their dapper European attire might suggest. Lisa turned me on to The Rosebuds, sweet Carolina-drawl pop.

Friday
Health
The Mae Shi
Harlem Shakes
Dag for Dag
Ringo Deathstarr

Health voided the warranty on my eardrums and The Mae Shi made me laugh when they through a rainbow colored parachute over the crowd (think elementary school!). Harlem Shakes are slick. Dag for Dag we saw at the Swedish stage. It was surrounded by blonde people excitedly speaking Swedish. The band was fun to watch because the singer was dressed like a flapper but the sound was a bit of an 80s throwback. Ringo Deathstarr is New Gaze along the lines of Film School, but they achieve an unusually deep drone. Highly recommended if you're into that sort of thing. Caught the last band at a ridculously divey bar far from the madness of 6th Street, complete with a cement urinal and stern warnings posted about starting fights, "APD will be called." No venue is beyond the reach of SXSW, as was confirmed the following day ...

Saturday
Peggy Sue
Mumford and Sons
Desolation Wilderness
Mirah
Polka Dot Dot Dot

... which we started at some guy's house. Actually, some guy's sister's house, the story wasn't quite clear. At any rate, said house was the site of an all day party with lots of wonderful and strange bands. And somehow, they booked Mirah. We saw her play in some dude's garage 5 blocks down the street! For me this really was the coup de grace of my first SXSW. Saturday also saw us athletically popping around East Side venues (on bikes of course, and those hills hurt) to see Peggy Sue and Mumford and Sons, which together gave the morning a very folky feel. We met the guys from a cool Elephant-6-ish band called Amo Joy! at the house party, but just missed their set. They still gave us a CD and we gave them eggs from our chickies.

At the end of it all I'm pretty breathless. The festival is simply an overwhelming blast of awesome. Its also almost entirely free, including much of the beer and food. Surreal, really. The music is the best out there. Almost every band playing one of the coveted nighttime showcases also plays at least one daytime (free) party, so everyone has a chance to hear the same music that has been vetted by the festival. I had fallen into quite a listening rut and this has been a much-needed reminder that there is a lot of great new stuff being played out there. That, and a reminder that Austin is the envy of a good part of the music-loving world. Its good to be here.

PS Did you know that Twitter was debuted at SXSW 2007? It is still the proverbial grease on the gears two years later. Check out the #swsx tag on Twitter, it is astonishing. Anyway I finally got on board.

Home in Austin

If you've asked for pictures of where Lisa and I live: the fact you care is very special and I'm sorry it's taken me so long. Here is the complete set. Lisa took the photos on her sweet new SLR camera. To orient, what you are seeing is really the whole place. It's a large room with an open loft bedroom over the kitchen and bathroom. Through the picture window you get a view of our back deck, and the henhouse.

DIY ridesharing with social-network tech

From the excellent blog Worldchanging I have discovered DIYcity. What they want to figure out:

Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?

Of special interest is their Challenge #2, a DIY rideshare system. If you look, you'll find oh so many empty seats flying around our streets. Getting butts in those seats is something widely-available communication technology like text messaging and handheld internet might help us achieve.

UPDATE: NYT article about two implementations of the idea with a technology exceptionally well-equipped (GPS!) to pull it off, the iPhone.