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Road Worriers
Matt Dellinger, The Atlantic
… These are hopeful times for mass-transit boosters. Public concern over gas prices and exurban home values has prompted voters in Los Angeles and Seattle, for example, to approve half-percent sales-tax hikes for new bus and rail lines. Not only is the federal transportation spending bill up for reauthorization in 2009, but Barack Obama (whose hometown of Honolulu just voted for its own local rail project) has explicitly supported smart-growth agendas, and plans to create a White House Office on Urban Policy.
How might the future look if the New Urbanists have their way? Like an idealized past, according to the suggested reforms they laid out in Charlotte, which they planned to present to Representative James Oberstar of Minnesota, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. John Norquist, the congress’s president, spoke of replacing elevated freeways through cities with boulevards for driving, biking, walking, and shopping. Geoff Anderson, the president of Smart Growth America, said it was time to build more rail—“the second half of our transportation system,” he called it.
Andres Duany, a co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, whose critiques on suburbia have often been dismissed as snobbery, told the group that the current synchronicity of the real-estate crash, global warming, and peak oil is not “some kind of cosmic punishment … But there is one connection, and that’s our urban pattern.” It’s not too late for Americans to change our ways, he said, but “it will be much harder to do better in the 21st century, because of the way we’ve built the 20th.”
(14 January 2009)
EB contributor SV writes:
I was shocked to read the article in my “Atlantic” magazine, and actually see “PEAK OIL” mentioned, in exactly those words (most of the time the language is changed to something like “current energy crisis). This is from my home town, Charlotte, NC, which has such a poor record of land use, with huge open spaces and the auto is king. This is slowly changing, as this article points out.
Choosing What Our Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil
Sarah Kuck, WorldChanging
As we draw nearer to reaching the point of Peak Oil, it benefits us to imagine what our cities will look like in a world without oil. Does this conjure up images of cities turned into urban farms just to produce enough food for us all? Do we devote all our energy to growing, bartering and trading the food we grow? Or will the city become divided, with the wealthy moving to the center while higher costs of living force lower-income families to the outer-ring suburbs, where access to goods, services and transport will be limited?
If we start now, we can choose what we want our cities to look like in the future. We can make them the resilient, sustainable centers of culture, justice, art and creativity that we hope they will become.
Author and Professor Peter Newman is asking us to imagine and then get to work building these urban centers. His book and talk, both titled Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, ask audiences to honestly look at what will happen to our cities when we reach Peak Oil. During his 90 minute presentation last night at Seattle’s City Hall, Newman explained to the full house how peak oil will soon change reality as we know it; and how if we choose to make it so, we can take this challenge as our opportunity to create a functional, just and sustainable world.
(13 January 2009)
Toward a New American Infrastructure
Julia Levitt, WorldChanging
The trillion dollar question: What will the next iteration of American infrastructure look like?
Yesterday I sat in on a press teleconference with the three co-chairs of the bipartisan coalition Building America’s Future: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The main topic of discussion: the results of a national poll, paid for by their group, which suggest that U.S. citizens across party lines overwhelmingly support infrastructure improvement, and that most would willingly approve a one percent increase in taxes to pay for the work.
… The real question is, what kind of infrastructure are we going to build? There are so many opportunities out there to rebuild in a forward-thinking, sustainable way that it’s understandably difficult to know where to begin.
When it comes to pouring concrete, our allies at Transportation for America are speaking out in favor of repairing existing bridges, roads and highways before we invest in new highway projects. And whether federal money should now go to new highways at all is in serious doubt, considering our need to wean the country off fossil fuels, and the negative social, psychological, economic and environmental consequences of long commutes in traffic, and the fact that studies have shown that new lanes of highway will only increase transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions (PDF). Improving existing roads to create complete streets that support cars, buses, bikes and pedestrians, however, will encourage alternative, healthier modes of mobility that our neighborhoods need.
And the ways in which we invest in the built environment will play an important role also. Suburban development in the United States – the large, single-family homes on large lots that we’ve seen much of since the end of World War II – is extremely costly when it comes to providing utilities and other municipal amenities to residents: as noted in this Brookings Institute study (PDF),
(9 January 2009)
