It’s entirely possible that in The Future, we’ll come to realize that slower cities are better than fast. A city in which the fastest thing on the street is a bicycle is a place for living, for being, for enjoying in its own right. Walking, chatting, stopping on a whim at any shop or park or patio. We were lulled into a view of the future that was all high speed and high energy by the explosive industrialization of the early 20th century. But our visions of the future can and do change. We get to define what progress means.
Tag: bicycles
Star CSP Hotline for Bicyclists
Bicyclists are encouraged to use the *CSP hotline to report aggressive drivers to the Colorado State Police (just dial *277 on your mobile). You must obtain the license plate of the vehicle and describe the aggressive behavior. Location, direction of travel, and a driver description are good too, but not mandatory. After 3 reports of the same vehicle, the registered owner gets a warning letter. Subsequent reports will result in a state trooper visiting them in person and taking “appropriate enforcement action”, whatever that means. If you’re not on a state highway, make sure you get them to enter the info into the database before you’re transferred to local law enforcement to make a report. Hopefully they’ll make some kind of annual report as to what actions this system has actually resulted in.
Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World
The Boulder Blue Line has a short post entitled This Law Cannot Be Repealed by Albert Bartlett, who is an emeritus professor of Physics at CU, and who is most well known for speaking about the absurdity of “sustainable” growth and what exponential growth really means. He’s also one of the original architects of Boulder’s “Blue Line”, which has limited growth beyond certain boundaries within the city and county.
I agree with Bartlett on a lot. Unconstrained population growth is undoubtedly, in a global context, an epic disaster. In his collection of essays Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley noted of overpopulation that “Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems.” Similarly, the unconstrained geographic growth of towns and cities is a catastrophe, resulting in very low-density, car-dependent development which exacerbates the consequences of population growth by increasing the amount of resources that each individual consumes, in terms of land and energy and material goods.
Urban density and good public space make scenes like this possible.
Continue reading Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World
Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World
The Boulder Blue Line has a short post entitled This Law Cannot Be Repealed by Albert Bartlett, who is an emeritus professor of Physics at CU, and who is most well known for speaking about the absurdity of “sustainable” growth and what exponential growth really means. He’s also one of the original architects of Boulder’s “Blue Line”, which has limited growth beyond certain boundaries within the city and county.
I agree with Bartlett on a lot. Unconstrained population growth is undoubtedly, in a global context, an epic disaster. In his collection of essays Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley noted of overpopulation that “Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems.” Similarly, the unconstrained geographic growth of towns and cities is a catastrophe, resulting in very low-density, car-dependent development which exacerbates the consequences of population growth by increasing the amount of resources that each individual consumes, in terms of land and energy and material goods.
Urban density and good public space make scenes like this possible.
Continue reading Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World
Do Roads Pay for Themselves?
A study from the US Public Research Interest Group (PDF) on transportation funding the US. The short answer is that only about half of highway funds come from “user fees” like the gas tax and vehicle registration fees. The rest is payed out of bonds, property taxes and other government revenues.
Shared Links for May 12th
- Forecast: On Climate Change, Cooler Temperatures Bring Hotter Air – Augh, we are prisoners to so many perceptual fallacies. Recency and narration loom large among them. It turns out that the average temperature of the last 12 months is a reasonably strong predictor of whether or not people think they'll personally experience the effects of climate change (a multi-decade to century-scale process). We are failing to deal with problems we didn't evolve to perceive clearly. (tagged: climate statistics fallacy propaganda science )
- In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars – Ah, the New York Times has discovered Vauban! Now if only it had happened when gas was $4/gallon, we might have had a chance. We desperately need more experimentation in urban design, so we can have working examples to look at and build on. (tagged: sustainability green urban design bicycles germany transportation parking architecture )
- Spuds in a Box – Build a box whose sides you can progressively remove from the bottom up, plant potatoes in the bottom, and fill with dirt as they grow. Remove lower slats to harvest spuds. I've certainly heard this suggestion from other people too. Will be interesting to see how well it works for these guys. Seems like you could also do this with some kind of bag, and if you sewed in sleeves/tubes periodically, that you could tie off, and then untie when you wanted to reach in and root around for a spud, you wouldn't have to worry about soil falling out when you pry off the boards. Others are supposedly reporting 50kg of potatoes from 0.5 m^2 area. (tagged: gardening green sustainability agriculture food urban design potatoes )
- How Much Do You Earn? – A great annotated visualization of income distribution in the US as of the year 2000. It would be awesome to see an animated version of this, and see how it evolves through time. Turns out I make just about the most likely income in America ($20k), which is far below the mean (and the median). As a "household" though, I suppose we're right about at the median ($40k). Interesting. (tagged: economics wealth taxes government policy visualization )
- The Capitalist Threat – Geoge Soros on Karl Popper's Open Society, from the mid-90s. He rails against the West's failure to extend a helping hand to the post-Soviet nations. He acknowledges that Truth may not be a strong enough motivator for most people, and that within a society that has decided to be Open, there are still many other choices to be made, but somehow fails to mention the way these two things end up pushing an Open Society closed with propaganda, apathy, and misinformation. Political evangelism – the process of deciding what (arbitrary) values your society is going to have – creates huge incentives for those who do not highly value truth to assert authority. I guess that's part of his point though, to robustly inoculate society against those assertions of perfect (authoritarian) knowledge. (tagged: economics politics popper society philosophy )
Support AB 1186 for transparent parking costs
Dear Assemblymember Portantino,
I would like to urge you to support AB 1186, an effort to enhance the transparency of parking costs for easing the enforcement of California’s parking cash-out legislation. This bill has been introduced by Assemblymember Bob Blumenfield (District 40), and is due for a hearing in the Assembly Transportation Committee on May 11th. The cost of parking is enormous, generally hidden, and heavily subsidized, producing significant distortions in the transportation choices made by Californians. Making the price of parking transparent, and enabling those who choose not to drive to recoup those costs, removing the hidden subsidies, is in the best interest of business, transit authorities, the citizens, and California in general. For instance, at my own institution in Pasadena, the California Institute of Technology, we are forced by city regulations to provide what would constitute a vast oversupply of parking were employees and students required to pay the true price of providing those spaces, wasting $3 million each year (approximately $1000 per person on the campus), that could be better spent on our core scientific research and education mission. While this bill unfortunately would not directly address this waste, it is a step in the right direction, and I strongly encourage you to consider other such steps.
Sincerely,
Zane Selvans