A look at the current state of Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing across the US. Legislation enabling this financing mechanism has been passed in half the country, and implemented at the city or county level in Berkeley and Boulder among others, but because the Federal Housing Finance Administration (Fannie and Freddie’s boss) chose to treat this particular property assessment as a lien, all the programs have been frozen since last July. Lawsuits and legislative fixes abound, but in the meantime, people are struggling to find other financing mechanisms for these financially (as well as ecologically) worthwhile investments. More background available at Pace Now.
Tag: policy
Boulder’s Passive Aggressive Building Standards
Usually when people say that “better is the enemy of good enough”, they’re pointing out that striving for perfection can be a distraction from just getting the job at hand done. There are other dynamics that involve these concepts too. As social animals, we tend to judge ourselves against those around us. Once our basic needs have been satisfied, our relative wealth or deprivation often becomes more important to us than our absolute level of well being. We have little concept of how much is enough. This can lead to the familiar runaway acquisitiveness (keeping up with the Joneses) when there is a well established (or constructed…) social norm favoring consumption. Less obviously, it can also lead to an inappropriate lack of ambition when faced with an objective task that is not supported by widespread social norms.
Over the last couple of years Boulder has upped its building energy efficiency standards. The new permitting regime requires buildings to perform better — net of on-site generation like photovoltaics — than the 2006 international building codes (IBC). Smaller dwellings (< 3000 square feet) have to use 30% less energy than the baseline. Medium homes (3000-5000 sq ft) need to do 50% better, and large ones (> 5000 sq ft) have to beat it by 75%. Obviously this is an improvement over the previous situation, but in comparison to what is possible, and what is necessary to combat climate change, it’s actually pretty unimpressive. Homes of all sizes built to the Passive House standard use 80-90% less energy than the baseline code, and they do it without counting any on-site power generation against the building’s energy consumption, whereas the HERS index that is used in the Boulder code does count on-site generation. This is an important distinction, because the atmosphere doesn’t cancel out your nighttime coal-fired emissions with the solar electricity that you sell onto the grid during the day. All it cares about is the total amount of CO2 released.
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The Economics of Changing Car Parking to Bike Parking
The Economics of Changing Car Parking to Bike Parking – A study demonstrating that in commercial districts where both bicycle and car parking space is scarce, it is in the best interests of the merchants to re-allocate car parking spaces to bicycles, because per unit area, bike parking spaces generate more sales revenue. Despite this, many commercial districts allocate public parking area at something like 100:1 cars:bikes.
Bike League Board Chair Resigns
Bill Hoffman just resigned from the board of the League of American Bicyclists, and based on what he has to say about it, I'm glad he did! He's apparently upset that the League is now advocating policies which will encourage more utilitarian cycling, better separated infrastructure for bikes, and generally getting *more* people on bikes, growing their base, instead of just pandering to the self-described "enthusiasts" that have made up their membership throughout the recent decades of the Bicycle Dark Ages in North America. Thank you for resigning Bill… I think I might just become a member of the League as a result!
Links for the week of December 9th, 2010
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Links for the week of November 26th, 2010
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Being Car Free in Boulder
Of the places I’ve lived in the US, Boulder makes car-free living the easiest and most enjoyable. For me, that means riding my bike. Yes, there’s a little snow, and a few times each winter bitter cold will slide down from Canada, and yes there’s a bit of topography coming out of the Boulder Creek floodplain. However, on balance the weather is very manageable with 300+ sunny days a year, and the terrain is varied enough to be interesting without daunting a healthy though unathletic cyclist. The city’s scale is also very accessible, with the longest possible trip taking about 45 minutes, between the northern and southern extrema. Most trips are 15 minutes or less. However, what really sets the city apart is the infrastructure and the burgeoning bicycle culture. Just watch Boulder Goes Bike Platinum from Streetfilms, and A Day in the Life of Community Cycles from Ryan Van Duzer.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but whereas being a dedicated cyclist in Southern California felt like a heroic or sometimes Sisyphean labor, and often felt lonely, using my bike to get around here mostly just feels wonderful. It’s convenient, fast, cheap, and feels relatively safe. They plow the bike paths when it snows. Something like 10% of commute trips are done by bike. We have climbing lanes paired with downhill sharrows. The separated 13th St. contra-flow bike lane is blissful. There are sometimes (gasp!) signs specifically for bikes, telling you where the path you’re on will take you. This fall we got a couple of bike corrals on Pearl. Our cycling infrastructure can and should continue to be improved, but I think it might actually be more important right now to get more people familiar with using it.
I’ve also talked to people who don’t currently bike for transportation, but would like to. These folks are often outside the usual American cycling subculture demographic, which tends to be skewed toward young to middle-aged athletic and/or rebellious spandex-clad and/or tattooed males without families. In Los Angeles, I never felt I could recommend living car-free without reservations. It was clearly possible — I did it for 11 years — but it wasn’t always enjoyable, at least not in the way I knew it could be from living in Japan and bike touring in Europe. In SoCal, we were happy if we could just get the Powers That Be to recognize bikes ought to be considered transportation instead of (or in addition to) recreation, never mind getting them to make investments of money and space. Here, the City has been making those investments slowly over the past few decades. There, I was only really comfortable advocating the car-free life and its many benefits to people I knew, and who had a temperament to deal with the associated trials and tribulations.  Here, I feel like I can unabashedly recommend utilitarian cycling to just about anyone. Here the personal costs are much lower, and the benefits — economic, bodily, environmental, etc. — are as great as ever.
Links for the week of October 26th, 2010
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Links for the week of October 5th, 2010
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Links for the week of September 28th, 2010
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