Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2013

The Transportation Planning Rule Every City Should Reform – Eric Jaffe – The Atlantic Cities

More on the transportation bias (it’s pro-car and pro-vehicle speed):
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The weight of this hidden hand doesn’t fall on San Francisco alone. “Intersection LOS [level of service] is one of the most widely-used traffic analysis tools in the U.S. and has a profound impact on how street space is allocated in U.S. cities,” writes Jason Henderson, geography professor at San Francisco State University, in the November issue of the Journal of Transport Geography. As Henderson argues, it’s about time cities addressed the problem, and San Francisco is doing just that. It’s currently in the process of drafting a new sustainable transportation metric that will replace LOS and promote livability. Still, the fight is far from over.

“Every city I’ve ever come across has some use of [LOS],” says Henderson, who has conducted an extensive review of LOS and is writing a book on the politics of mobility in San Francisco. “LOS and the privilege of the car is the incumbent. The way the political process is set up is you have to disprove the incumbent.”
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tags: transportation eric_jaffe atlantic_cities cars cities

3 Charts That Explain Why You Spend So Much on Transportation – Eric Jaffe – The Atlantic Cities

Important article. The following is a quote from Victoria BC’s Todd Litman of the Transport Policy Institute. Amazing…
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Because it [a vehicle-based planning method] evaluates transport system performance based primarily on travel speeds, conventional planning favor faster but more costly transport modes, such as automobile travel over slower but more affordable modes such as walking, cycling and public transit. This tends to create automobile dependent transport systems which increases total costs.
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tags: transportation planning todd_litman atlantic_cities eric_jaffe cars automobile

Share Everything: Why the Way We Consume Has Changed Forever – Emily Badger – The Atlantic Cities

Interesting article (and the usual vitriol in the comments). An aside: I had to laugh at the washing machines comparison (below) because it reminded me of a conversation between undergrads at UBC in 1981: One young woman (student) described renting a room from an older lady (yes, matron) in a really upscale Vancouver neighborhood. There was no washing machine in the house, and the older woman told the young student that she had objected when her husband wanted to buy her one back in the 40s. She told him, “If you bring that into the house, you’ll be wanting me to do the laundry next.” She always had someone pick it up and deliver. Now that’s an idea I can get behind. All these appliances at home also mean more work at home. Now back to the article:
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We’re used to the notion of sharing libraries, public parks, and train cars. But in many ways, American culture in particular drifted away from sharing as a value when we spread out from city centers and into the suburbs. Molly Turner, the director of public policy for short-term rental lodging website Airbnb, evokes the iconic image of Richard Nixon, in Moscow, introducing Nikita Khrushchev to the modern marvel of the state-of-the-art washing machine, available for private consumption in every American home. Beginning with the era of that washing machine, Turner argues, we forgot how to share.”

tags: atlantic_cities sharing_economy economies emily_badger

American Sociologist Eric Klinenberg on why The Suburbs Are Dead

Walkability. (But then again, the car’s not dead, either, and there are also signs that Millennials do move to suburbs when they want a bit more space to raise families. However, even those suburbs – which often are small cities ringing a larger metro – benefit from walkability…)
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There’s another important way that most suburbs remain suburban: They continue to lack walkable commercial districts, viable public spaces and public transit systems that allow people of all ages to be together without driving a car. Americans accepted this arrangement 60 years ago, when we valorized domestic life and stigmatized the street. Back then suburban kids played in backyards and culs-de-sac and their mothers spent most of their days around the house. These days, however, women work outside the home and children pursue their individual interests in specialized classes. Moreover, downtowns are desirable. People want to walk and shop and sip coffee on busy sidewalks, but suburbanites need automobiles to reach them. Walking requires driving, which means everyone winds up sitting in traffic or searching for parking.

Suburbia sentences all those who move there to an unending series of car rides: to school, to work, to the train station. To the grocery store, mall, car wash. To soccer practice, tennis lessons, music classes. To the Olive Garden, movie theater, mall. To go to the city, to come home from the city—and preferably not during rush hour, though these days it’s rush hour most of the time.

Suburbanites who have moved to the city are evangelical about their liberation from car culture. Parents are especially adamant about the virtues of city living, since they no longer spend afternoons and weekends chauffeuring children nor evenings praying that their teenagers don’t drink and drive. So are cash-strapped car owners who didn’t plan on spending $4 a gallon on gasoline and who know that in coming years $4 will seem cheap.
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tags: walkability playboy cities suburbs eric_klinenberg urbanism

RIP EveryBlock | Holovaty.com

Sadly, EveryBlock was shut down. Its founder, Adrian Holovaty, comments.
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More than six years ago, I wrote a blog post that got some attention about how newspaper (and, really, journalism) sites needed to change. EveryBlock was an attempt at that kind of change — in my eyes, a successful attempt. EveryBlock was among the more innovative and ambitious journalism projects at a time when journalism desperately needed innovation and ambition. RIP.
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tags: everyblock adrian_holovaty citizen_journalism local_news localnews

Urban Innovation And Density | Sustainable Cities Collective

And now, a contrarian view of density – it’s not magic after all? (But what about walkability in those sprawling places in TX or AB?)
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Cheaper condos may not be enough to save Toronto or San Francisco. More importantly, sprawling Texas metropolitan regions are becoming more productive. What’s all this fuss about the magic of density?

Alberta and Texas are attracting a lot of migrants. Birthplace diversity is increasing, rapidly. Up goes productivity and innovation. The magic is migration, not density.

We needn’t worry about cramming more people into Toronto or San Francisco. The spiraling cost of real estate is forcing relocation, across all incomes. People of modest means are fleeing Los Angeles and putting down roots in San Antonio. Yet the urban core is hollowing out in that Texas metro. San Antonio isn’t booming, converging in terms of productivity, because of density. Talent is pouring in from elsewhere. People develop, not places.
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tags: walkability urbanism density demographics population migration sustainable_cities jim_russell

Walkable Communities and Adolescent Weight – Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Walkability as a public health issue; lack of walkability as contributor to the obesity epidemic.
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Key Findings:
*The odds of a student being overweight or obese decreased if they lived in communities with higher walkability index scores.
*The average prevalence of adolescent overweight and obesity was 15 percent and 12 percent, respectively.
*The mean walkability index across communities was 6.38.
*Key street features associated with reduced prevalence of obesity included increased presence of sidewalks and public transit.
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tags: walkability urbanism communities public_health obesity

Why Walkability isn’t Just About Proximity to Shops | This Big City

More walkability.
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[Julie] Campoli acknowledges that having destinations nearby is essential for getting more people walking, but she adds to this several other key qualities of walkable urban neighbourhoods:

* Connections – a fine-grained network of sidewalks and footpaths with plenty of intersections;
*Tissue – Great architecture with small human-sized buildings, not big boxes!
* Density – of housing and population;
* Streetscape – well designed streets with wide sidewalks and crossings, that are easy and safe to walk in;
* Green networks – plenty of street trees and green spaces.
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tags: walkability thisbigcity urbanism

Book Club: Walking and Talking – Next City

Walkability. All over the web lately.
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As a follow-up to my review about Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, I invited Brendan Crain, communications manager for the Project for Public Spaces, to have an online chat about the new book. Crain has broad experience working to expand civic involvement in planning urban spaces and had his own review of Walkable City published today.
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tags: next_city walkability brendan_crain urbanism

A 70-Year-Old Documentary About Cities Shows We Haven’t Come Very Far – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities

I don’t know… I think Goodyear’s assessment of this film is too generous. It gave me the creeps: both ‘the city’ (which was a polluted, congested hell-hole) and ‘the suburb’ or planned ‘idyllic town,’ which was pure pablum, and unpleasant in its ‘everything has a place and a place for everything’ approach. Wayyy too tidy…
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What’s interesting is that the idealized suburb/cities presented in the film are all walkable and bikeable. Autos are part of the urban disaster that is to be left behind by progress. We see from the air the familiar cul-de-sacs of today’s America but there are no six-lane arterial roads, no massive shopping centers with enormous parking lots. Kids ride around on bicycles along paths that look very much like what you see in the Netherlands of today, and in a few American cities such as Boulder, Colorado, or Davis, California.
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tags: atlantic_cities video urban_development urbanism documentary cities suburbia

City Life Changes How Our Brains Deal With Distractions – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities

Makes sense…
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…a quick summary, for those readers on the verge of losing focus: the brains of people in remote places seem ready to focus on the task at hand, while the brains of their urban counterparts seem prepared to explore the ever-changing conditions of city life. Certainly explains why some country folk find the city overwhelming, and some city folk find the country a little dull.
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tags: urbanism cities atlantic_cities neuroscience brain environmental_psychology

Extremely Rare Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris « Curious Eggs Curious Eggs

Simply beautiful…
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All the images shown below were taken using Autochrome Lumière technology. It’s an early color photography process, patented in 1903 and invented by the famous French Auguste and Louis Lumière, populary known as Lumière Brothers. They were the earliest filmmakers in history.
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tags: paris photography 1900s

Government investment needed in new economies – latimes.com

Good article, a variant on “you didn’t build that,” but with an explanation of why government investment seeds the way, and how private investment can’t do it.
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At every stage, the innovation economy depends on sources of funding decoupled from concern for economic return. As economists have long recognized, such funding will not be delivered by competitive markets. Only an active state in pursuit of politically legitimate missions — national development, national security, conquering disease — can play the required role.
Thus, from the Erie Canal to the Internet by way of the transcontinental railroads and the Interstate Highway System, the American state has played a strategic role in the deployment of the transformational technologies that have created a succession of “new economies.” In disregard of this history, forces have been at work for a generation to delegitimize the state as an economic actor — even as the next new economy can already be defined in broad strokes.
(…)
Government cannot play the role either of entrepreneur or venture capitalist in creating the low-carbon economy. But entrepreneurs and venture capitalists cannot build this new economy by themselves.
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tags: climate_change innovation economy government_support latimes william_janeway investment

For business, food waste a ripe opportunity for savings | SmartPlanet

Great article.
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“If you are not in this conversation in the next two or three years, you are going to be increasingly less relevant to the buying public. Because it’s a mega-movement, not a trend, that is moving up the food chain and the age chain. The younger you are and the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to understand it. All types of corporations are going to figure it out or be left in the dust.”
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tags: recycling food_waste composting smartplanet

In the Wake of Aaron Swartz’s Death, Let’s Fix Draconian Computer Crime Law | Electronic Frontier Foundation

So many responses to Aaron Swartz’s untimely death by suicide (many posted to Twitter and/or Facebook), and here is the EFF’s piece, bookmarked to Diigo.
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The CFAA’s vague language, broad reach, and harsh punishments combine to create a powerful weapon for overeager prosecutors to unleash on people they don’t like. Aaron was facing the possibility of decades in prison for accessing the MIT network and downloading academic papers as part of his activism work for open access to knowledge. No prosecutor should have tools to threaten to end someone’s freedom for such actions, but the CFAA helped to make that fate a realistic fear for Aaron.

Aaron was a powerful force for change, and he would still be working toward that goal if he were here. His memory should challenge us to make the Internet, the law, and the world better. One place to start is the CFAA.
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tags: aaron_swartz

There’s More to Life Than Being Happy – Emily Esfahani Smith – The Atlantic

A wonderful article about Viktor Frankl, the pursuit of happiness, and the importance of a meaningful life.
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[Viktor Frankl:] “Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is.”

Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves — by devoting our lives to “giving” rather than “taking” — we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.
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tags: viktor_frankl happiness meaning atlantic_monthly psychology health

How guns became gadgets—lightweight, easy to use, and more effective than ever – Quartz

Such a good point…
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The AR-15 shows how guns have become gadgets, thanks to technological change and an army of fanboys connected over the Internet. It’s a military weapon in the hands of civilians, so exquisitely designed that it might as well have been invented in Cupertino by Apple. It’s the iPhone 5 of guns, only instead of an app ecosystem, it has an ecosystem of parts and ammunition designed to make it as effective as possible.
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tags: guns quartz gadgets socialcritique

12 Horrible Plans for New York That (Thankfully) Never Happened – Flavorwire

It seems every major city (and some not-so-major ones) has a catalog of nightmare plans like this. Here’s one for NYC:
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There have been some epically bad plans for New York City over the years, like drying up the rivers, building an underground city, and encasing Midtown in a bubble.
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Read on…

tags: nyc unbuilt urban_planning flavorwire

The Paperback Quest for Joy by Laura Vanderkam, City Journal Autumn 2012

Interesting survey and critique of the self-help category.
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Still, just because there’s plenty to criticize doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty that’s worthwhile, too. As Gretchen Rubin points out, all branches of knowledge have their quacks: “When you have your astronomy, then you get your astrology—and we have our own astrologers in this neck of the woods.” Nonetheless, “the greatest minds throughout history have thought about things like self-knowledge and self-control and how to live a good life. I don’t know why it’s now branded as snake-oil stuff.” Even the most over-the-top books offer a real benefit: they encourage the virtue of self-examination. To read self-help is to take stock of one’s self and to ask what kind of life one wants to lead.

These are profound issues, and what the genre’s critics sometimes miss, too, is that self-help readers are well equipped to explore them. That’s because the people who buy these books are, like all book buyers, “pretty comfortable,” says John Duff of Penguin. “It’s going to be that middle-class person, reasonably well-educated” and in “very rarefied” company, as “our market for all books is really very limited. Most people stop reading when they leave school.” Those who don’t stop probably have their acts together. Call it the paradox of self-help. “The type of person who values self-control and self-improvement is the type of person who would seek more of it in a self-help book,” Whelan says. “So it’s not the unemployed crazy lady sitting on the couch eating potato chips who reads self-help. It’s the educated, affluent, probably fairly successful person who wants to better themselves.”
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tags: self_esteem self_help city_journal laura_vanderkam

Resilience Is About Relationships, Not Just Infrastructure – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities

Resilience is the new (actually, old) black.
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As cities prepare for climate change in earnest, they’re going to need to harden infrastructure, change building patterns, and overhaul government emergency procedures. But they’re also going to have to put a greater value on the human connections that can be found in walkable neighborhoods where people know each other and support local businesses. It’s not just about quality of life. It’s about survival.
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tags: atlantic_cities resilience communities

Longer Days for Telecommuters ‹ Life and Letters

Being a “Lebenskuenstler” (life artist) is hard, regardless of technology (and sometimes because of it)…
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The authors conclude that telecommuting has not permeated the American workplace, and where it has become commonly used, it is not very helpful in reducing work-family conflicts. Instead, it appears to have allowed employers to impose longer workdays, facilitating workers’ needs to add hours to the standard workweek.
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tags: telecommuting working labor

From clicks to bricks: why some e-tailers now want actual storefronts | SmartPlanet

The body (and its many-splendored sensorium) isn’t dead yet. We want to touch, not just watch.
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The past decade has seen a non-stop discussion about the rise of online and virtual channels that are replacing physical storefronts. Now, it seems some e-tailers are getting into having a physical presence as well.
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tags: shopping smartplanet etail retail online_shopping storefronts economy

Gun violence in America | Harvard Gazette

So many great points in this interview with David Hemenway, but this one really stood out. It’s in response to the question, “What are the next steps to take to reduce gun violence when we already own nearly 300 million guns?”
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It may sound hard, but it’s not like we have to throw up our hands. In Boston, how do inner-city gang members get guns? They weren’t born with them. Their parents didn’t have them. They can’t burglarize houses and find many guns. The answer is, adults bring guns into the inner city and sell them, from western Mass., from New Hampshire and Vermont, from down South, where it’s easier to get guns. We just have to figure out a way to stop the trafficking, so that rather than always pointing at the individual who did something wrong — which typically doesn’t help anything — we can figure out a way to make it hard to behave inappropriately, rather than easy. When it’s easy to behave inappropriately, people will.
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tags: harvard_gazette david_hemenway guns social_disorder health public_health violence usa

So You Think You Know the Second Amendment? : The New Yorker

A fascinating must-read on the Second Amendment’s travels through 1970s and 80s America.
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Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.
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tags: second_amendment newyorker guns

The Science of Our Optimism Bias and the Life-Cycle of Happiness | Brain Pickings

Love this article, and also Tali Sharot’s talk.
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“To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities, and not just any old reality but a better one.”
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tags: brainpickings maria_popova tali_sharot optimism happiness video

The Rush to Build Walkable Urban Grocery Stores

Oh, how I wish my little downtown on the North Shore had an urban, walkable grocery store. (While I lived in Portland OR, I shopped at the 2 stores mentioned in the article. The New Seasons store isn’t downtown – it’s in a dense neighborhood – while the Safeway in the Pearl is indeed right downtown. Both stores work really well. For the New Seasons / not-quite-righ-downtown store, it’s always a question of appeasing the shoppers who drive. But it can be done: they put parking on the roof. PS I really dislike the 2 Safeways just outside of downtown here: they’re surrounded by ACRES of asphalt parking lot, and they’re too huge and incredibly sterile, really soulless. For the same reason, I dislike Shaw’s – the other supermarket on the suburban northern edge of town.)
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With a split between customers arriving on foot or by car, a key for the design of the store was to get one entrance to face the parking structure and the other to be an attractive pedestrian entrance off the street. Parking was reduced 40 percent versus a conventional suburban store, and the ratio is just 2.9 spaces per 1,000 square feet of store space. This works in a dense urban environment, not only with the 685 residential units within Cityvista itself but thousands of additional housing units providing substantial customers within walking distance. Moreover, the urban lifestyle that Safeway understands is that the urban shopper is more likely to shop once a day rather than once a week, and thus places a bigger emphasis on prepared foods and produce.
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tags: grocery_stores food parking urban_food cities

Salem Public Space Project | Past Stories, Present Narratives, Future Possibilities

An intriguing local project (Salem, Greater Boston, North Shore) that deserves attention.
Salem Public Space Project
Past Stories, Present Narratives, Future Possibilities

tags: salem public_space citizen_journalism

The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams – Design – The Atlantic Cities

Intriguing visuals, via an exhibition “Grand Reductions,” by SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association), excerpted in this article:
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The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.
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tags: emily_badger atlantic_cities urbanplanning maps cities

You Can’t Say That on the Internet – NYTimes.com

Evgeny Morozov nails it with this question:
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What is “objective” about such algorithmic “truths”?

Quaint prudishness, excessive enforcement of copyright, unneeded damage to our reputations: algorithmic gatekeeping is exacting a high toll on our public life. Instead of treating algorithms as a natural, objective reflection of reality, we must take them apart and closely examine each line of code.
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tags: nyt evgeny_morozov morality silicon_valley internet censorship

How to Make Privately Owned Public Spaces Truly Open to the Public – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities

Every city (at least any city that has allowed developer variances in exchange for publicly accessible private space) should have a tool like San Francisco’s, which allows the public to learn about where these POPOS are. Props to San Francisco.
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As for the public, the city unveiled on Friday a new web tool that will for the first time catalog the dozens of POPOS downtown and the amenities at each one (845 Market Street’s ninth-floor rooftop space has 59 chairs and welcomes food but doesn’t sell any; 301 Mission Street’s indoor atrium features extensive artwork and service from a bar and restaurant on-premises). The city’s legislative affairs office has mapped and photographed each space and linked to the original Planning Commission motion spelling out the individual property’s requirements under the city regulation. The updated ordinance, requiring clearer signs (both outdoors and indoors for those spaces accessed past security guards and up elevators) went into effect last week.
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tags: san_francisco public_space popos maps access atlantic_cities

A River in Retreat: In Two Weeks, the Mississippi Could Shut Down – Jobs & Economy – The Atlantic Cities

An example of over-engineering, and forcing nature to adapt to human use, vs. making human use meet nature at least half way? Please don’t let them drain the Missouri for the sake of Mississippi barge traffic (while starving those dependent on the Missouri)…
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The engineers are constantly dredging the river’s sandy bottom or building levees to keep barges moving. Those efforts to confine the river to a deep and narrow channel are believed to have made surrounding areas more vulnerable to extreme floods – as in 2011, when thousands were forced to flee their homes.

Such measures may also not make sense in the long-term use of the river.

Criss argues the long barge trains floating on the Mississippi are just too big for the upper reaches of the river anyway, and that the industry is unfairly subsidised compared with other transport providers such as rail.

“The whole system around here has been entirely reconfigured to accommodate these monstrous barges,” he said.

“This is the whole problem. We want to run boats on the river with 9ft drafts that are almost a quarter of a mile long. They are too big for the size of the river up here.”
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tags: environment rivers mississippi missouri atlantic_cities economy ecology drought climate

Twitter, Instagram, And The Internet of (Disconnected) Things | MIT Technology Review

Right on.
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Not being able to share photos seamlessly from one social network to another may be the epitome of a “first world problem;” getting lost in the Australian outback because your smartphone manufacturer replaced a bulletproof mapping app with its inferior homemade version is a bit more serious. But in either case, the essential value of these information technologies–their ability to seamlessly interface with each other as only bits, rather than atoms, can–is being purposely eroded. The vision is almost comically retrograde: Twitter, Google, Apple, and Facebook each seem to think that they can provide every conceivable digital functionality to the user all on their own at each other’s expense, much like GM’s “kitchen of tomorrow” at the 1964 World’s Fair promised to meet every need of a 20th-century housewife with one brand. Fifty years later, nobody has (or wants) a kitchen built solely out of General Motors products. So why do Twitter and Facebook act like there is a personal information-technology equivalent?
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tags: mit_techreview internet apps silos john_pavlus

Cyclists and Pedestrians Can End Up Spending More Each Month Than Drivers – Commute – The Atlantic Cities

Key point re. the dedicated once-a-week big grocery shop, versus the ability to pop into the neighborhood grocery store (or cafe or pub) for that quick, daily stock-up…
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But for all of the other business types examined, bikers actually out-consumed drivers over the course of a month. True, they often spent less per visit. But cyclists and pedestrians in particular made more frequent trips (by their own estimation) to these restaurants, bars and convenience stores, and those receipts added up. This finding is logical: It’s a lot easier to make an impulse pizza stop if you’re passing by an aromatic restaurant on foot or bike instead of in a passing car at 35 miles an hour. Such frequent visits are part of the walkable culture. Compare European communities – where it’s common to hit the bakery, butcher and fish market on the way home from work – to U.S. communities where the weekly drive to Walmart’s supermarket requires an hour of dedicated planning.
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tags: atlantic_cities emily_badger bicycles cycling economies cities walkability