Author Archives: WD

Obama inspires a little theorizing.

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Tomorrow I take my first law school exam. Yay. In other news, I am very pleased with what Obama had to say about the automobile industry. He was tough on ‘government oversight,’ and clear about protecting the people (we’re largely less well off these days if you haven’t noticed.)

I like the way he speaks (except for the clearly affected dropped g’s (who’d of thunk?) For instance, he used the term ‘fleet’ while discussing the American automobile industry. Fleet is a technical, if somewhat militaristic term. Talk to any transportation buff and you’ll soon end up in a discussion about the fleet. Fleet is rolling stock, ‘rolling’ of course in a very Ike & Tina style. The kicker is that America is far behind at this level.

Example: While I was in the Peace Corps in Romania, CFR (the Romanian national railroad,) greatly expanded its offerings of IC level trains. IC is a European train standard for longer distance express trains (both domestic and international,) which mandates certain levels of service. Many Western countries have express interstate systems (more or less,) through their high speed rail-lines. Romania was not yet there but it was getting massive new tracking, electrical infrastructure and trainsets.

Fast forward two years to a trip from New York to New Orleans by rail. The only upgrade from cattle car coach is overnight accommodation. Unless you get a full size bedroom (which runs in the hundreds,) you get a ‘roomette.’ … Pause… time out… since when was it fashionable to brand anything with the suffix ‘ette’ ? That’s right, maybe the early to mid 1970’s, right when most of passenger rail was jettisoned by the freight carriers into an agency run by an inherently hostile governmental regime. The result was, now with apparent parallel in Detroit, lack of innovation; grudging governmental management sold with a side of diminishing returns. The American fleet is out of date. Remember how the Enterprise would sometimes come upon far more primitive species and its ships?

Since Obama is wise, he articulates that our national concept of our fleet must range beyond our military apparatus. While military driven hardware is an important segment of our fleet that generates great (and frightening) technologies, it can not be nurtured at the cost of the rest of the fleet.

3 Basic Components:

Rail – Huge re-conceptualization of the role of modern rail networks in our urban and inter-urban infrastructure. Major city pairs need new tracks, for both freight and passenger. Don’t forget: the freight railroads dumped passenger service, it was not profitable! They are separate businesses and with some major outlays they can be separately tracked. A dedicated passenger network, perhaps funded by freight taxes, would be tremendously beneficial. First, massive heavy labor public works. Creating major electrified railroads is an extremely labor intensive endeavor. The system will be a stimulus to alternative energy, perhaps through a mandate to meet X% of the system’s energy needs through region-appropriate renewables. Second, it would encourage widespread use of transportation systems that are much kinder to their surroundings. Major ancillary and wide reaching businesses implications.

Road – The Eisenhower Interstate System was a bold and not entirely unsuccessful project. I highly admire some of our major pre-interstate highways (such as Moses’ feeder Parkways in New York and Connecticut.) They were bold and radical by betting on our adoption of the automobile. Some interstates are also very important, especially for large states and regions with scattered urban and rural population centers. However, all this connectivity has its downsides; sprawl has ruined much of the interstate experience. Interstates are not kind to local enterprise, especially in urban cores. While highways were sold as great connectors, they instead became great dividers… observe the relationship between highways and public housing projects. They decreased the quality of the urban experience thereby fostering the increasing ghettoization of American urban cores.

The suburb was triumphal piece of propaganda that spoke to a real need. The problem was that it just kept going; there was no master plan, so things just sprawled. We now face an interesting demographic shift. Urban, somewhat more collective an efficient living will command a premium. Some cities will shape a nice mix: Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Boston. Others, such as New Orleans and Las Vegas, may end up as a kind of Terry Gilliam / Mike Davis hybrid city of the future. My observation, (which I stated earlier in response to a Newsweek column dedicated to the indulgences of the nouveau-billionaire class,) is that extreme bifurcation is detrimental to any system. Though I have never been to Vegas and I have only lived in New Orleans for six months, I imagine that they might be somewhat similar in terms of fate if not character. In both, tourism is a primary engine of the economy; tourism, however, is a notoriously poor contributor to civic vitality. These cities often have grand urban cores, or at least some stately areas. These areas are often developed as privately run high security havens for the super-rich. This militarization of public space eschews a human scale and thus discourages civic interaction (just take a look at ‘brutalist’ style concrete plazas and terraces from buildings of the 1960s.) This bifurcation between indulgent fantasy and grinding poverty is an illness, and particularly un-American.

Wow, that was tangential, got to remind myself not to do that tomorrow! The point I was getting at is that road and rail are both integral to our infrastructure but must re-negotiate some precious spaces.

Fleet – So let’s have at it! Develop an electric automobile fleet with battery changing stations and strive to improve that battery technology exponentially. Lay new track and develop new rail systems which help lessen our over-dependence on the car and cheap air. And, yes, let’s still build the best damn commercial airliners. We must and can be competitive on all three fronts, but it’s going to take some pretty radical restructuring, especially for all you former Reagan Democrats. If done well, this basic stimulus will do much to improve both our operating efficiency and quality of life.

Must See: Michael Pollan on Bill Moyers Journal

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Brilliant Treatise on the Future of Suburbia by James Knustler

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There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

I say this because American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life. Having poured a half-century of our national wealth into a living arrangement with no future — and linked our very identity with it — we have provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment that will make it difficult for us to let go, change our behavior, and make other arrangements.

Compounding the problem is the fact that we ditched our manufacturing economy for a suburban sprawl building economy (a.k.a. “the housing bubble”), meaning we came to base our economy on building even more stuff with no future.

This is a hell of a problem, since it is at once economic, socio-political, and circumstantial.

Here’s what I think will happen: First, we are in great danger of mounting a futile campaign to sustain the unsustainable, that is, of defending suburbia at all costs.

In fact, it is already underway. One symptom of this is that the only subject under discussion about our energy predicament is how can we keep running all our cars by other means. Even the leading environmentalists talk of little else. We don’t get it. The Happy Motoring era is over. No combination of “alt” fuels — solar, wind, nuclear, tar sands, oil-shale, offshore drilling, used French-fry oil — will allow us to keep running the interstate highway system, Wal-Marts, and Walt Disney World.

The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives, whether we like it or not. Further proof of our obdurate cluelessness in these matters is the absence of any public discussion about restoring the passenger railroad system — even as the airline industry is also visibly dying. The campaign to sustain suburbia and all its entitlements will result in a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources and capital.

The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins. In any case, the suburbs will lose value dramatically, both in terms of usefulness and financial investment. Most of the fabric of suburbia will not be “fixed” or retrofitted, in particular the residential subdivisions. They were built badly in the wrong places. We will have to return to traditional modes of inhabiting the landscape — villages, towns, and cities, composed of walkable neighborhoods and business districts — and the successful ones will have to exist in relation to a productive agricultural hinterland, because petro-agriculture (as represented by the infamous 3000-mile Caesar salad) is also now coming to an end. Fortunately, we have many under-activated small towns and small cities in favorable locations near waterways. This will be increasingly important as transport of goods by water regains importance.

We face an epochal demographic shift, but not the one that is commonly expected: from suburbs to big cities. Rather, we are in for a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and small towns to the big cities. People will be moving to the smaller towns and smaller cities because they are more appropriately scaled to the limited energy diet of the future. I believe our big cities will contract substantially — even if they densify back around their old cores and waterfronts. They are products, largely, of the 20th-century cheap energy fiesta and they will be starved in the decades ahead.

One popular current fantasy I hear often is that apartment towers are the “greenest” mode of human habitation. On the contrary, we will discover that the skyscraper is an obsolete building type, and that cities overburdened with them will suffer a huge liability — Manhattan and Chicago being the primary examples. Cities composed mostly of suburban-type fabric — Houston, Atlanta, Orlando, et al — will also depreciate sharply. The process of urban contraction is likely to be complicated by ethnic tensions and social disorder.

As petro-agriculture implodes, we’ll have to raise our food differently, closer to home, and at a finer and smaller scale. This new agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, since farming will require more human attention. The places that are not able to grow enough food locally are not likely to make it. Phoenix and Las Vegas will be shadows of what they are now, if they exist at all.

These days, an awful lot of people — the production builders, the realtors — are waiting for the “bottom” in the real-estate industry with hopes that the suburban house-building orgy will resume. They are waiting in vain. The project of suburbia is over. We will build no more of it. Now we’re stuck with what’s there. Sometimes whole societies make unfortunate decisions or go down tragic pathways. Suburbia was ours.

From The New York Times