Category: journal

The limits of personal action

I’ve realized recently that it is becoming difficult for us to continue marginally increasing the sustainability of our household.

Pasadena has a relatively enlightened “pay as you throw” garbage collection service.  You can choose one of three different sized garbage cans depending on how much trash you generate, and the smaller ones cost less.  Both the front house and the back house have the smallest size (32 gallons).  Last week when I wheeled the garbage out to the street for pickup one of the two containers was empty, and the other was only half full.  The previous week there had been no garbage whatsoever in the bins.  In two weeks, between two houses, we’d managed to half fill one container, and it was already the smallest size the City could imagine one house filling on a weekly basis, meaning we generated something like 1/8th as much garbage as we were “supposed to”.  Instead most of our refuse ends up either getting composted or recycled.  If only we could cancel the garbage service for one of the houses, or have them come only once a month.  Thankfully Pasadena does actually have a stated goal of zero waste-to-landfill and incinerators (by the year 2040), as does San Francisco (by 2020) and Vancouver (no firm date for zero yet… but a 40% reduction from their current, already low, levels by 2020).  Last year we “diverted” 66% of our solid waste as a city, and both the total amount of waste landfilled, and the per capita amount have decreased over the last several years (as reported in the 2009 Green City Indicators report), though as I’ve noted before “diversion” means some strange things in this context.  The city currently considers it likely that we will achieve this 2040 goal.  I wonder if the economic downturn has meant less purchasing and discarding of disposable crap.  It’s almost certainly responsible for much of the recent reduction in vehicle miles traveled.  I’m not sure what additional waste-reduction incentives have been put in place (but then, I’m clearly not the target audience… so maybe I just haven’t noticed).

Another similar strange experience recently was realizing that our natural gas usage, which goes exclusively to heat domestic hot water (we refuse to turn on the furnace in this fine Mediterranean climate…) hardly varies at all with our water usage.  The difference in our gas bill between both of us being here and neither of us being here is less than 10%.  About $1 out of $15 goes to heat in the water we actually use.  $14 out of $15 goes to heat that escapes from the water heater into the air in the crawlspace under the house.  Sadly, it was replaced two years ago (after the bottom of the old tank rusted out… that replacement dropped our monthly bill by 2/3, as leaking hot air is a lot better than leaking hot water!) and it could have been replaced with a European style tankless water heater like we had over winter break in the Earthships in Taos, where it’s just a backup for the solar hot water heater on the roof which would also work wonderfully here in SoCal.

I think there are about 6 big things you can do on your own, if you’re at all serious about sustainability:

  1. Have fewer than 2 offspring.
  2. Eat a vegan diet, or close to it.
  3. Don’t own a car, and dramatically reduce the number of miles you drive.
  4. Avoid flying.
  5. Live in a small, durable, energy efficient dwelling.
  6. Stop buying things that will eventually be sent to a landfill or incinerated.

If you’re not doing any of them, I don’t really see how you can say you care about sustainability with a straight face.  But what if you’re doing all of them?  And also volunteering for organizations that try to promote these behaviors in general?  And donating money to others, in a similar vein?  And writing your elected officials about the things you care about?

I’m not trying to go off on some holier-than-thou trip here: I haven’t really committed to stop flying (it’s just an idea at this point, one that Amtrak might well talk me out of), and I certainly enjoy eating an omnivorous diet (with the animal products coming as much as possible from discarded food).  I’m just saying that I’m starting to feel a little limited.  To go much further than the above list, infrastructure and society itself have to start changing, in North America anyway, and that’s an entirely different kind of problem.  An interpersonal problem, with which I’m much less comfortable.

Regarding the Sentencing of Dr. Christopher Thompson

Dear District Attorney Stone,

I have been a daily cyclist in LA County for more than 15 years, using my bike as my primary means of transportation.  As a result, I have experienced many instances of either reckless or malicious behavior by drivers on our streets and highways.  Teenagers “having fun” and people out to “teach me a lesson”, no doubt.  These are very serious offenses, which needlessly endanger me, and infringe upon my right to use our publicly funded infrastructure in a healthy, economical, fiscally responsible and environmentally friendly manner.

The case of Dr. Thompson is an extreme one, and I believe that he deserves the harshest penalty under the law for his violent act, which might well have ended the lives of one or more cyclists in Mandeville Canyon.  However, he is only one person, and there are many lesser and some greater offenses committed against cyclists in LA County every month, which go largely unnoticed by the media or law enforcement, or if noticed, are dealt with in a manner which does not appropriately apportion responsibility.  Drivers wield hundreds of times more power, in the literal sense, with their vehicles than cyclists do, and travel at much higher speeds, with much greater energies.  They have the ability to cause much more harm than cyclists.  This should result in greater responsibility.  “I didn’t see him”, as drivers often say after an accident involving a cyclist, is not a valid excuse; it is evidence of their dereliction of this responsibility, a responsibility that all road users have to be aware of their surroundings, and the potential consequences of their actions.

More than any particular sentence for Dr. Thompson, I would like to urge you to take less spectacularly reckless behavior by drivers more seriously.  For instance, driving while using a mobile phone, while now illegal, is not being aggressively ticketed, despite being an impairment on par with driving while under the influence of alcohol.  Drivers who do not take their responsibilities seriously, or worse, who use the power their wield with their vehicles as a means of intimidation against other more vulnerable road users, should have their drivers licenses revoked for a long period of time.  They need to be taken off the road.  Losing your license is often seen as an extreme punishment, because we have built our city, and more broadly our society, so entirely around the idea that everyone will own and drive a car on a daily basis.  But driving is not necessary, even in LA, as I can attest having never owned a car here, and I do not believe we should confer the right to operate a motor vehicle on every citizen when they turn 16.  It should be a privilege that is earned and maintained through consistently responsible actions.

Thank you for your time and attention,
Zane Selvans

Stop framing transportation and bicycles as identity politics

Hello Mr. Mason,

I just read your article For the Danes, city planning is all about the bike.  As a daily bicycle user and advocate in automobile dominated southern California, I couldn’t help but be disturbed by the tone which was set in the first two sentences:

From his second-floor office overlooking a Baltic-fed canal, Andreas Rohl ponders a daily question: How can he make life hell for the car drivers of this Scandinavian capital? Mr. Rohl, you see, is the bicycle program manager for the city government of Copenhagen.

Based on the quotes you took from him throughout the rest of the article I have a hard time believing that this is really how Rohl thinks about his job.  It seems like a much more North American perspective on bicycle planning to me. Making these the first words in the article creates an antagonistic lens through which the reader sees all the examples you point out of resources being shifted from cars to bikes, especially if the reader uses a car as their primary means of transportation, as I suspect most of your Canadian (and US) readers do.  It would be a very different article if instead you’d said “How can he make life easier for the bicycle riders of this Scandinavian capital?”  (I’m really curious, do you primarily drive, or ride a bike to get around?)

When there is a finite resource that has to be shared between cyclists and cars, such as lane width or timing priority on the “Green Wave” streets, a rational transportation planner would ask themselves “How can I allocate this resource between the competing modes to most effectively meet my transportation goals?”.  What cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam and Groningen have decided, I think correctly, is that quite often transportation goals can best be met by
allocating more of these finite resources to bikes than we do in the US and Canada.  In an urban environment, per unit transportation utility, bike infrastructure is much cheaper than automotive infrastructure to build and maintain.  The vehicles it supports (bikes) are also cheaper, safer, quieter, do not pollute or rely on imported fuels, and contribute to the health of the general population, reducing health care costs.  Parking for bikes takes up an order of magnitude less real estate and money, making multi-modal public transit much more feasible.  All of these are functional, dispassionate reasons to shift planning priorities toward bikes and away from cars.

The antagonistic framing that your introduction sets up, and which unfortunately also permeates a great deal of bike culture and bike advocacy in the US, does not help anybody make rational, dispassionate transportation decisions.  It encourages the reader to pick a side. It turns transportation choices into issues of identity.  Am I a driver, or am I a cyclist?  Really, we’re all just people trying to get somewhere, and I think the Dutch and the Danes understand that better than anyone, as your final sentence makes clear.

Sincerely,
Zane Selvans

CC: Andreas Rohl (Copenhagen Bicycle Planner), Mikael Colville-Anderson (Copenhagenize), Dale Benson (Caltrans District 7 BAC)

Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan Meeting October 1st

Message from the City below, linkage courtesy of yours truly.  Unfortunately I’ll be out of town, so hopefully others will be able to attend and take notes and post them on the web, as I have done here, and here, and here (okay, actually that third link goes to a rant…).  I’m posting the info here because strangely, it does not seem to be posted anywhere on the City’s website.  Funny that.

Ryan Snyder Associates, consultant, will provide a progress report on the development of the City’s new Bicycle Master Plan. An open forum will be held to gain public comment on the proposed improvements to the current bikeway system.

When:

Thursday, October 1, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Where:

Jackie Robinson Center
1020 N. Fair Oaks Ave.
Pasadena, CA

Hosted by Department of Transportation and
the Bicycle Master Plan Advisory Committee

More Info:

Contact Rich Dilluvio at (626) 744-7254 or rdilluvio@cityofpasadena.net.

An updated plan will look at the full range of actions (PDF) Pasadena could take to improve conditions and encourage bicycle riding

For Love of Information

An analog thread in the digital world

I’m a little bit of an information pack rat.  I started blogging before there were blogs, from UGCS.  It seemed mildly neurotic and self involved and exhibitionist at the time.  I mostly did it for my mom as a way to keep in touch without having to e-mail all the time.  I’ve lost information here and there, even digital information (which seems kind of unforgivable), but analog too.  Actually, I think more I just didn’t create much analog information.  Five intense months of life, bicycling across Europe in 1994.  Maybe 2 rolls of film total?  Almost no photos from my summer in Russia.  Both my parents were avid photographers.  My dad professionally (though eventually he tired of the weddings and quinceañeras, and retreated to a steady stream of passport and similar photos… para las micas rosas, y para amnestia…) and my mom (so far as I can tell) more personally.  Family pictures, documentarian style, wildflowers, and some prizes in the Fresno County Fair.  But I never got into it, until I got a digital camera in 1999.  My first piece of digital film was a 64 MB compact-flash card (incredibly, several times larger than the 20 MB hard disk in my first computer, which I got in 1993).  It cost about $100.  The camera was a Nikon Coolpix 700, with 2.1 MP sensor and no zoom.  I bought it in an online auction (at Yahoo!) for $425, but had the seller leave me feedback at eBay (you could leave anyone feedback for anything back then).  I mailed the check, and he mailed the camera, simultaneously, trusting each other.  I still have our e-mails.  The pictures could go directly to the web… via the web server I had running in my bedroom in Santa Cruz.  I still have those pictures.  No developing.  No cost-per-click of the shutter.  Kayaking through Southeast Alaska with Becky in the summer of 2000 I had to limit the resolution to 640 x 480 to avoid running out of space over 3 months, and I couldn’t use the LCD lest I run out of batteries, but at least I took the pictures, and kept them.

Continue reading For Love of Information

The Tragedy of the Marine Commons

I’ve made this parody before:

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat until the fish are extinct.

All indications are that our grandkids won’t be big fans of sashimi, as it will either be too expensive for them, or virtually non-existent, because we have driven the large fish species to (or near) extinction.  We’ve been making fish smaller, and less plentiful for millennia.  This is no huge surprise.  We ate all the tasty North American megafauna when we got here too.  We were hungry, and we didn’t know any better.  The world and its resources seemed vast beyond our comprehension.

Bluefin tuna in Tokyo fetch $25,000 each.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License by Sanctu

The situation today is tragic partly because we know exactly what we’re doing, and partly because we could be sustainably harvesting vastly more fish today than we are currently mining at an unsustainable rate, if only we could somehow contrive to let fish stocks rebound to their Pleistocene levels.  At those very high (pre-human) stocking rates, the sustainable take would be enormous, but we would have to manage the harvest carefully with quotas (which we didn’t do the first time around, and which we are much better equipped to do now).  Such quotas are sometimes discussed as if they were purely economic or political quantities, but in some important ways they are neither.

Continue reading The Tragedy of the Marine Commons

California traffic signals should detect bikes

Hello Mr. Singh,

As a person who uses a bicycle as almost my only form of transportation, not being detected by traffic signals often makes me feel like some kind of outlaw, even though I am very explicitly operating my vehicle within California law. This difference between the letter and the implementation of the law contributes to the mistaken perception, by drivers, law enforcement officials and cyclists alike, that bikes somehow have both fewer legal rights and less responsibility to obey the rules of the road.

It has come to my attention that there is nobody on the California Traffic Control Devices Committee (CTCDC) who represents the interests of the non-motorized elements of traffic, though there are multiple representatives from the state’s automobile clubs. Under AB 1581 (now CVC 21450.5) bicycles are entitled to be detected by the devices that CTCDC oversees, but with no representation on the committee it seems unlikely that the decisions it takes will reflect our needs. Many other jurisdictions (e.g. Copenhagen, Denmark) that have decided to incorporate cycling meaningfully into their transportation networks have successfully solved the technical problems associated with detecting and directing the flow of bicycle traffic, and so I do not feel that “we don’t have the technology” is really a viable excuse. What we lack is the political will, and I think that having some direct representation of non-motorized traffic on the CTCDC would help facilitate finding that political will.

Sincerely,
Zane Selvans

CC: Ken McGuire (Caltrans Bicycle Program Manager)

Green bike locked to cherry tree in Little Tokyo

Continue reading California traffic signals should detect bikes

Does this look Freegan to you?

Why are labels so attractive?  One word shortcuts for frugal thinkers.  Am I a freegan?  What would that mean exactly?  Who curates the definitions of our cultural -isms?

Do we look like freegans?

Reading through the Wikipedia article on Freeganism (which is as close to a cultural consensus on anything as I think we get these days), it seems like I’m close.  Except that I’m not fundamentally opposed to eating meat (it’s the environmental degradation, antibiotics resistance, health detriments, and massive resource consumption involved in meat production that get to me… but a little free meat from the dumpster?  Tasty!).  I also have a soft spot for shiny new laptops and other information technologies, and I believe in the greed based toolkit of money, markets, and open competition as a way to foster innovation.  But I also love composting, and creative re-use, and free non-materialist forms of entertainment and recreation like reading, and writing, and cooking from scratch, and I believe that unmitigated greed, and thus so-called laissez-faire (or perhaps in many cases more accurately crony) capitalism, left unchecked, are in the end destructive forces.  Greed and self-interest are kind of like dynamite: the right amount in the right place is a wonderful tool.  Too much, or even small amounts in bad places, and you’ve got a mess.  So how do I respond to an e-mail like this:

Continue reading Does this look Freegan to you?

Will there be no more public Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan meetings?

That’s what the advisory commission rumor mill is saying anyway.  I hope we can ensure that the gossip is wrong.

In February the Pasadena Department of Transportation said that we would have four (count ’em: 4) public meetings or workshops throughout the spring to get input on the Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan, and that a draft would be finished by around June.  I posted a summary of the meeting.

We have so far had one workshop, in May, which many people felt was not adequately publicized beforehand (the City did not, for instance, send an e-mail to the list of interested parties it had collected at the first meeting, which it did use to get more than 1000 responses to the online Pasadena cyclists survey).  At the workshop we were told that a second draft of the new plan’s goals, objectives, and actions would be posted on the web within one week, incorporating our feedback from the workshop.  I posted the first draft of these items with commentary.

No Cars In The CityNo Cars in the City (CC-BY Zane Selvans)

Continue reading Will there be no more public Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan meetings?