A good overview of the cost of cars in terms of money, space, and time at Planetizen. Transportation costs are already unaffordable (>20% of household income) for the lowest income 40% of the US, and drivers only pay a minority of automotive costs directly. Over the last half of the 20th century, the proportion of household income dedicated to transportation doubled. Cars use ~20x as much spacetime (s*m^2) as bikes for the same commute, and ~200x as much as a pedestrian. Interestingly the direct car costs mentioned are only about half what AAA estimates ($4100 vs. $8500 per year).
The Motorist’s Identity Crisis
What are the social connotations of cycling? If you’re driving, and you see someone on a bike, are you more likely to think they’re a loser? That they’re poor? That they ride because they have no other choice? Or will you be irritated by their smug sense of superiority? Can the same drivers have both of these experiences? They only make sense when the drivers themselves never ride. When it’s us and them. The connotations of cycling are changing, and I think that’s a good sign.
Human Powered Comments on the Boulder County Transportation Master Plan
I went to one of the inaugural Boulder County Transportation Master Planning meetings… on January 13th. I took notes, but never wrote them up (bad blogger!). The process will probably take most of the year, and it’s looking out 25 years or so into the future, so really 6 weeks isn’t too big a deal, right? If you haven’t already, please do take the Boulder County TMP survey.
Before the meeting there was a mingling session with a bunch of poster board presentations (available here as PDFs), mostly maps showing a bunch of different current and projected data. Where people are, where jobs are, where trips go, both today and our imagining of 2035. I talked briefly to George Gerstle (whose bicycle parking spot is pictured above) about the current and projected population centers in the region.
Boulder County 2010: Blue=Households, Red=Jobs
The expectation is that there will be a lot of sprawling, suburban, car dependent development just beyond the southeast corner of Boulder County around Broomfield, in Jeffco, and also in the southwest corner of Weld County (which does not participate in RTD). Also, growth is projected along the I-25 corridor, and along US 36. By and large, what happens beyond the county’s borders is out of our control. There’s a little bit of open space out there that we own, and we can control what kind of infrastructure exists within the county, but barring sudden and sustained increases in gas prices, it seems unlikely that these communities are going to embrace transit oriented development and compact urban design. We’ve got sprawl at the gates, and we have to decide what to do about it. These bodies politic are apparently not interested in planning around the possibility of significantly higher fuel costs in the future.
Continue reading Human Powered Comments on the Boulder County Transportation Master Plan
Better Bicycle Marketing in Boulder a la Cycle Chic
I’ve been talking to friends and co-conspirators about how best to do bicycle propaganda marketing. There’s a tendency in Boulder — as well as more broadly in the US — to market transportation cycling on the basis of its environmental, health, economic, and even political benefits. These benefits are significant, and are part of why I and many others who already ride, do so. However, I don’t think that means they’re the right way to reach the other 99% of the US population (or even to the other 90% of the Boulder population). To use this rational, functional framing is to use the marketing techniques of the 19th century, which often assumed consumers to be rational beings, making their purchases on the basis of the relative functional merits of the products on offer. Some people behave rationally, in some purchases, but since the mid 20th century most corporations (and many governments) have realized that this is not actually the best way to move product. Ever since Edward Bernays, marketing and public relations has largely been about evoking an emotional response and associating your product with the aspirations of the consumer, regardless of whether those aspirations are attainable or pure fantasy. Most people with an analytical background are irritated by the idea that logical rhetoric and rational argument are not the best ways to convince people of something. I’ve seen this issue come up repeatedly with public science communication, especially in the context of climate change.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mindcaster-ezzolicious/4126008476/
Irritating or not, this seems to be the way most people work, most of the time. If we want cycling to become something everyone does, we have to work with people as they are, not as we wish they were. The benefits of the bicycle will be realized if lots of people decide to ride, regardless of whether they’ve made that decision rationally.
Continue reading Better Bicycle Marketing in Boulder a la Cycle Chic
Bicycle infrastructure progress along Goose Creek
I’ve been biking along the Goose Creek bike path a lot over the last few months. Boulder Aikikai is out there, and so is Community Cycles, and I’ll go for a short triangular on the Boulder Creek path, 13th St. and Goose Creek when I just need to get out in the sun for a little while. Throughout the summer I was repeatedly reminded that there’s no good way to get from the path up to the east side of 30th St, and crossing 30th kind of sucks, especially when there’s any traffic. A couple of times I went so far as to go under it and the nearby railroad tracks, and then up into the parking lot, and back over the railroad tracks and through another parking lot. I’m sure this involved trespassing. And I wasn’t the only one doing it either, there was a trail worn in the grass and the gravel.
So I was stoked to hear that a ramp connecting Goose Creek to the east side of 30th was in the works, and this fall the heavy equipment came out and started making it a reality. I’ve been taking pictures as it progresses:
Continue reading Bicycle infrastructure progress along Goose Creek
What can we do about the Arab revolutions?
It’s frustrating to feel like nothing you do matters. In isolation, we have very little effect on the world. It’s only in aggregate, by organizing with other people that large changes — social chain reactions — can happen. Sometimes it’s done purposefully, as in the case of universal suffrage or the civil rights movement. Sometimes we don’t even realize what we’ve been organized to do, as with our present efforts to terraform the Earth. A few weeks ago I was completely absorbed by the uprising in Egypt. I don’t watch live video much (and no TV), and I was glued to Al Jazeera, and temporarily subscribed to a dozen actively twittering people in Cairo. Then my sister sent me a link to a live hummingbird cam, which was jarringly disconnected from what I’d been immersed in, which looked more like this:
Egypt: The January 25 Uprising and Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy
Congressional Research Service report on the implications of the Egyptian revolution for US foreign policy (pdf). Also has good background on the nature of our relationship with Egypt, including our ongoing aid package and political pressures.
UNDP Report on Arab States in 2002
A warning from the UN Development Project in 2002 describing the problems and frustrations of the Arab world. Chief among them western support for their oppressive dictatorships. It’s not like we didn’t know there was a problem here. We just chose to ignore it. America FTW!
UNEP Green Cities Report
UN say cities are green, need to be greener (pdf). Cities provide higher standards of living, and more economic opportunity with less energy, materials, and land use. They house 50% of the world’s people, but account for 60-75% of the world’s emissions, not because they’re inefficient, but because city dwellers are disproportionately rich. Interesting data points: Tokyo and Paris dwellers emit half as much carbon as New Yorkers or Londoners. São Paulo is as rich as Mexico City but with 1/3 the emissions. Delhi is 1/3 as rich as São Paulo, but with the same emissions.
Leveraging digital design in synthetic biology
Automatic Design of Digital Synthetic Gene Circuits from PLoS Computational Biology. They seem to be saying look, real biology isn’t generally digital, and all that continuum behavior means we need a bunch of new and complex tools to do anything with it.  However, there are plenty of instances of pseudo-digital biological control systems, and we’ve already got a gigantic toolbox from EE/VLSI world for building very complex digital circuits, so why not limit ourselves to using an artificially digitized subset of biology so we can leverage the existing design tools, and see how far we get? Weird to think of this particular kind of very intimate digitization of life. Talk about historical effects. What would our post-dark-age descendants think, rediscovering a strange class of metabolic networks, in which everything is binary?