Steamships, Landlines, and the Decline of the Private Car

A fun little musing from the Atlantic Cities on the difficulty of envisioning a very different world, even when we all know that big changes do take place over time.  Old technologies slowly decay, and fade into the background, as a new normalcy takes over.  We will see Jane Jacobs’ attrition of cars by cities eventually.

A Moral Atmosphere

Bill McKibben rants eloquently about the need for more than individual actions to combat climate change — it’s a systemic problem, the solutions to which can only come with changes to the systems we are all embedded in.  Changing your light bulbs and riding a bike are the easy parts.  Organizing a devastating political campaign against the fossil fuel interests is much more challenging, and utterly necessary.

Share Everything

Share Everything: Why the Way We Consume Has Changed Forever.  Sharing material goods makes it cheaper to use high quality, durable, well designed things, and the higher utilization factor means that many fewer things need to exist to satisfy everyone’s needs.  It works especially well in urban areas where the geographic transactional overhead is small.  This is a big piece of the dematerialization of our economy, and one of the most underappreciated reasons cities are a core climate solution.

E.ON lobbied for stiff sentences against Kingsnorth activists

German energy giant E.ON apparently lobbied cabinet ministers for stiff sentences against Kingsnorth activists, according to papers released under a FOIA style request made by Greenpeace.  The company suggested that without “dissuasive” sentences, they might be less willing to invest in generation facilities in the UK in the future.  Light sentences for non-violent direct action, and no more coal investment?  Sounds like a win-win to me.

Cars and Robust Cities Are Fundamentally Incompatible

A writeup by The Atlantic Cities of a paper in the Transportation Research Board journal of the National Academies looking at the effects of parking on the vitality of urban centers.  It’s found that the detrimental effects of dedicating urban real-estate outweigh the potential benefits of making it easier for drivers to access your central business district.  Those cities that stopped adding parking to their urban cores after 1980 were found to have more jobs and higher incomes on average than those that continued adding parking.

Shifting Suburbs

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) has put together a study of suburban densification strategies called Shifting Suburbs: Reinventing Infrastructure for Compact Development.  I haven’t read it yet, but based on my experience of Belmar in Lakewood (which is one of their case studies) I’m not particularly optimistic.  Maybe Belmar is better now than it was a few years ago — further built out, etc… but back then it seemed like a weird Disneylandish island lost in a sea of cars.  Like a mall on steroids, ringed with parking structures.  Dunno.  Should be interesting reading.