Energy and Equity is an essay from the energy crisis of the 1970s. It’s got a socialist bent, but I don’t think that’s actually vital to the point being made. As the speeds at which we travel and the distances traversed have increased, the cost of that transportation as a fraction of personal income has also gone up. Going further faster isn’t really an improvement, if one has to work longer hours to pay for the privilege. Thoreau made a similar point with respect to trains. Bicycles are a notable exception to this trend. With them you can travel much further and faster, even including the time it takes to earn the bicycle and pay for the infrastructure it requires.
Tag: politics
Nothing will change until greens mount some primary challenges and collect some scalps | Grist
Nothing will change until greens mount some primary challenges and collect some scalps. I agree. I would join, give money to, and vote for a Green Party that was organized around this proposal. We shouldn’t get all Lawrence of Arabia until we’ve actually tried real, dirty politics. Which we haven’t. Because we’re sissies.
Can competitive cyclists help the face of bike advocacy?
Tim Johnson, apparently a prominent cyclocross racer, recently got into bike advocacy. Says he:
Bike advocacy is about as far away from ‘cool’ as one can get. It’s a world full of recumbents, Day-Glo yellow, helmet mirrors, wool and tweed; the stereotypes that make self-important racers and hardcore enthusiasts cringe.
I’ve often been confused by the question “Are you a serious cyclist?”. I don’t own a car, and bike virtually everywhere I go. I’ve spent a year or so cumulatively living on my bike touring. In eastern Europe, in Mexico. To my mind, this makes me serious. But not so in some other minds. To many it seems that only competition can make one “serious”, and I just don’t understand. But then, I’ve never watched a SuperBowl either.
Continue reading Can competitive cyclists help the face of bike advocacy?
New York’s Bike Lane Battle is a Sham
New York’s streets are safer and more livable than ever. More than half the households in NYC do not own a car. Polls show conclusively that the public supports the bike lanes, traffic calming, and pedestrian plazas. They also make economic sense. Unfortunately, most decisionmakers in the city do own cars, drive regularly and get free parking everywhere, so they have a clear conflict of interest with the people they supposedly represent.
Funding local transportation locally
Whenever Tax Day approaches, I end up thinking about where that money goes, and what it buys, and whether I really wanted any of it. Increasingly, it seems to me that the larger the governing jurisdiction, the less democratic it is, and the more despairing I am of having any influence over it. More than any other realm of policy, the way we build our cities — and thus our buildings and our transportation systems — influences our energy use and other impacts on the world around us. Land use is nominally controlled by local government (city planning boards, zoning commissions, etc). However, in many important ways the actions that local governments can take are limited by the state and federal policymakers. In particular, they’re limited by what they can get funded. The large jurisdictions take your tax dollars, and then set up hoops for small jurisdictions to jump through in order to get it back. This leads to an unfortunate homogeneity of policy, and discourages experimentation, or even imitation of things known to work in other places. At best you end up playing accounting games, doing things like building bike paths with federal flood mitigation money.
How exactly does this mitigate flooding again?
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.
Cities and Revolution
Another thing that cities do is make revolution possible. Which is interesting to think about, given that more than half the humans now live in cities, many of them in relatively poor, relatively un-free conditions.
Understanding the Republican Party’s Reluctance to Invest in Transit Infrastructure
A great look at the geography behind the Republican demonization of mass transit. To a large degree in the US cities are democratic and the exurbs and hinterlands are republican. Since so much of our transportation funding gets funneled through the federal government, this means cites spend a lot of time getting screwed. Policy decentralization would help a lot.
Markets and Morals
A good talk from Chautauqua on the interaction between markets and morals. Some interesting examples of morally ambiguous markets: countries paying one another to take on refugee acceptance obligations and the outsourcing pregnancy to impoverished surrogate mothers in Gujarat, India. Sandel argues that in the last few decades we have gone from having a market economy to being a market society. Markets are now a large portion of our governance, and it’s unclear whether this is really a good thing.
Fluid norms or Meta-ideology
Steve Randy Waldman takes Krugman and the US left-of-center more generally to task for their implicit assumption that our national ideological stage is somehow not subject to being shaped over time. Casino games and sport have fixed rules. Politics does not. Somehow, many positions that even Nixon was supportive of in 1970 would now be laughed out of congress as socialist. Trying to get things done within the apparent current constraints is not necessarily as pragmatic as trying to change the rules over time.