Ben and I had come up with a way to make our regular hikes in Seoul a little more exciting. Each station has a number allocated to them, so what we did was used those numbers to decide where to go. For the generation of our numbers we used a 12 sided dice. The results so far, have been based around the Han river. Something that we’d specifically been trying to get away from.

Jamwon wasn’t exactly close to the Han (nothing really is) but we did end up walking along it and along untrodden ground, and filling in the grey areas that of ground seen, but not covered per se.

I guess the more times I do this sort of thing, the more blasé I get about the whole process of taking photographs. I mean, nothing pegs out my weird-freak-o-meter any more. Walking through Jamwon we discovered it well established, with all the ammenities at hand.

I would have to say that crossing the two-tiered bridge (반포대교) was the most interesting part of the journey. It was colourfull, curved and unusual.

After crossing that bridge, we saw some cops trying to catch traffic violators on camera. So I caught them on my camera. I didn’t think they minded.

Onwards to Yongsan, and by my veto, we walked through some of the more delapidated areas. Ben told me that there had been some riots over surrendering real estate to developers. To which the government, sided with the developers resulting in a rather notable ruckus.

After reaching Yongsan we settled in for some beer sipping and snack munching, all the while fending off bums. This particular one had a shaved head, and perhaps was a monk. I say this because in all the time he worked the area where we sat he didn’t utter a word. To Ben and I, this situation wasn’t new, so we decided to play a game of statues. Ben cast his eyes down, while I naïvely gazed ahead. I had this silly smirk on my face, and the bum though not talking, used gestures amounting to motioning an outstretch palm about the place. The giggles became laughter, and soon the belly laughter was unstoppable. We were lucky that bum/ monk had since gone while Ben and I continued our lapse into insanity for about 5 minutes. Looking at us, Koreans must have perceived foreigners as a little bit stranger that day.

Honestly, that title can be used for almost anything. Health care, broadband, transit, you name it. So it really isn’t surprising when you see Fortune magazine’s Jeffrey O’Brien feeling ripped off at the sight of American broadband. In South Florida, AT&T offers the following speeds and prices for DSL without a phone line, aka naked DSL.

• FastAccess DSL Direct 768 Kilobit: $19.95 per month
• FastAccess DSL Direct 1.5 Megabit: $37.95 per month
• FastAccess DSL Direct 3.0 Megabit: $42.95 per month
• FastAccess DSL Direct 6.0 Megabit: $47.95 per month

Well Jeffrey met with the CFO of Hong Kong’s City Telecom while he was in San Francisco and learned that customers of City Telecom pay only $13 a month for 100 megabit (Mbps from now on) synchronous broadband. That means 100 Mbit uploading and download. That’s absolutely disgusting in terms of dollar per Mbps and pure speed. As a side note, in the US that’s called a porn pipe by geeks. Using anecdotal evidence from just asking the people I know, most households have 3 megabit connections. 3 Mbps / $40 = $13.33 per Mbps while residents using Hong Kong’s City Telecom pay just $7.69 per Mbps. The closest thing we have to that kind of a connection is U-verse and those lucky enough to get FIOS. $145 a month (if you don’t have phone service with Verizon) nets you a 50 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up. U-verse isn’t any better at $65 for 18 Mbps.

Can you imagine paying about $40 one month, then paying $13 the next for nearly 100x the speed? Annual savings alone would be $324 per household. Consumers can then take that savings and invest or spend it elsewhere driving economic growth.

The neat thing about City Telecom is that if you don’t get 80% of the advertised speed, they refund you twice the monthly $13 bill. There is no way in holy hell AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, et all would ever do that. You’re lucky if any of those companies gave a damn about your slow speed because their service is best effort. Have you ever heard of such bullshit? If a 747 with 400 passengers only landed safely 20% of the time, you bet your ass that the FAA, NTSB and Congress would get involved. Why do we expect anything differently from utility providers?

During the early years of DSL (2002 – 2004) in my neighborhood, if you connection worked at 20% speed, AT&T techs on the phone would tell you there is nothing they could do because the service they provide is best effort. No other industry to my knowledge can get away with such a ridiculous contradiction compared to what is advertised. I am not even counting overhead, I’ll give ISP’s that much leeway.

Sadly I don’t think there is a way to fix that here in South Florida unless we just start the whole city over. We are just not dense enough to compete with City Telecom and Hong Kong. As the Fortune article points out, Hong Kong has a population density is 16,380 people per square mile while we in Dade county are at 1,158/sq mi and Broward at 1,347/sq mi. City Telecom spends about $200 per home to wire it up while Verizon says they pay $1,000 per home. So unless we stop urban sprawl, hold the UDB, and encourage smart growth with infill, we will never have anything as good.

I’ll leave the closing to a better writer, Jefferey O’Brien from Fortune. Take it away.

Innovation trumps incumbency

Lai insists the company already has. “The network is cash flow positive since 07. We’re debt free with 10% revenue growth and 30% EBITDA growth,” he says. “Our stock is up 200% in 12 months, and the market is starting to realize what we’re doing.”

All that success, Lia adds, is a result of having a Big Hairy Audacious Goal and doing everything possible to achieve it. “The telecom industry tends to commoditize people. Our strategy is to commoditize bandwidth, to make 100 megabits the industry norm in Hong Kong,” he says. “Our plan is to win by offering the best service at the lowest possible cost structure. Thirteen dollars is not a lot, but if you scale it and drive your cost base down, it’s a beautiful business to be in.”

If only some US telecom executives felt likewise.

Fortune via DSL Reports.

I’m on my way back to Raleigh today after a fantastic week in San Diego at the NAR (National Association of REALTORS®) annual conference, along with about 20,000 attendees.

One of the hottest topics this year was “smart growth,” the concept of concentrating growth in the center of a city to avoid urban sprawl. The idea is to make land use as compact, transit-oriented, walkable, and bicycle-friendly as possible. To achieve the goal of long-term sustainability, smart growth policies expand the range of transportation, employment, and housing choices; equitably distribute the costs and benefits of development; preserve and enhance natural and cultural resources; and promote public health.

The NAR has gathered survey data on this subject to see how the general public feels about smart growth policies and how they would work locally. The 2009 transportation survey found strong support for smart growth. In fact, says the NAR, “An overwhelming majority of Americans believe restoring existing roads and bridges and expanding transportation options should take precedence over building new roads.”

Survey results from 30 states show that…

• 47% want to improve public transportation
• 25% support developing communities that require less driving
• 20% want to build new roads

So I’m curious, Breeze Blog readers… What do you think? Post your comments here, and let’s get a discussion going on smart growth!

It’s the first snow here in Topeka, KS, and I love winter.  I love all the seasons really, and I’m fascinated by science learning because we can explore what we observe.  The weather does not have to be at our comfort level in order for us to explore what kind of effect today’s weather will have on tomorrow.  No, not because the roads may be slick or because I may be put out (trying to drag my patooty out of bed earlier) but because this snowy winter will be beneficial for the spring plow & sow.  I hope this is not the last snow, but the first of many.

I suppose this is why I could never truly be a pessimist: I have Hope.  Not hope in any Diety per se, but hope that we (mankind) can someday find Nature’s balance between our knowledge & our intuition.  It is the Human Condition to understand both Science and Philosophy.  It is unnatural to put a Wall between the two, when we homo sapiens are both.  So when I catch another thread about Creationism v. Darwin’s theory I wonder: aren’t we done with this bit yet?

I mean, seriously,why couldn’t God have given us Evolution?  I personally think it was the other way around, but that’s my belief.   Can we move on and accept that It is what It is no matter if It was Created or not.  Religion is to the World stage as Opinions are to you and me.  Isn’t it enough that we are here?  Think about the Experience of life, and not so much about Who or What it came from.

I had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Richard Jackson, of UCLA, speak in Topeka in October, and he shared plenty of new information on Nature’s role in human health and wellness.  Dr. Jackson is an advocate for walkable communities and limiting urban sprawl, but our group spent almost two hours discussing how & why to get children and adults outdoors away from the TV (and here I sit at the other Zombie Box).  Our group mostly consisted of folks from KDHE, and one of the points we discovered about society today is that parents do not know how to be outdoors.  This fact is one that is quite disturbing to me as an educator.  Part of my professional duty is to educate parents as well as their children, and I cannot stress enough how simple it is to spend 30 minutes outdoors with your children, everyday.  Do not fear your neighborhood; it takes good people to make a neighborhood good.  As to what to do with your children once you do get to the park or to the backyard: explore.  No toys necessary.  If you do have a backyard, or even a balcony: garden.  While I understand there are some neighborhoods, even here in Topeka, KS, where one should not take their children outdoors, I’ve seen some poor slums thrive with children outdoors in the afternoons and evening hours.  Parents, if you need to relieve stress for a moment go outdoors with your children.  Grow flowers.  Grow herbs on a balcony.  And all you brown thumb naysayers I tell you this: growing a plant, or a garden, is as simple as caring for pets.  More simple, really.  And its food.  It is this inter-dependent relationship we Humans have with Flora & Fauna that make our existence truly unique, as a creature on this Earth.  Savor Life.

A strong and vocal crowd greeted the Planning Minister Mr Paul Holloway at a protest rally against urban sprawl and the draft 30 year plan at  Mt Barker on the 8^th of November.

The Minister addressed the meeting with the take home message that the 30 year plan was designed to concentrate urban growth in designated areas. He also said the plan was designed to stop unregulated sprawl and ultimately protect agricultural land.

 In response, the people of Mt Barker voiced their concerns about the rapid increase in population in the region. In particular about the loss of valuable agricultural land to housing, damage to the environment, the supply of water and power and the lack of general infrastructure.

A number of other speakers also voiced similar concerns. In particular the South Australian  Farmers Federation are very concerned about the loss of prime agricultural land, the effects of climate change and shifting rainfall patterns and the threat to food security if agricultural land is lost.

 Gawler resident Paul Koch also spoke at the meeting about the concerns the Gawler Community have over the 30 Year plan which mirrored most of the concerns identified by the Mt Barker community.

 Mr Koch spoke on the  70:30 ratio for infill over green field developments. He highlighted the fact the development between Gawler and Roseworthy seems to be considered as infill. He felt that this was simply changing a definition to suit the planners.

“ it is difficult to agree that development between the two towns is considered as infill where presently there is only prime productive land. It seems an attempt to make it appear there is more infill than green field development. For the majority of people they would see this as greenfield development”

“ To most people in Gawler and surrounding region the 30 year plan is a recipe for urban sprawl with excessive population growth. There does not seem too much appetite from developers to take on serious infill projects – they seem to prefer the easy option of sprawling into agricultural land’

 Mr Koch also said that it is important that the different residents groups work together as the issues are exactly the same. By working together they collectively have a stronger voice when talking to the Government. 

The rally helped to highlight the growing concerns about the 30 year plan and its net result of moving development to the fringes of the city and the detrimental effects this will have on existing communities.

A new NBER paper by Zhenxiang Zhao and Robert Kaestner examines the effects of urban sprawl on obesity:

In this paper, we examine the effect of changes in population density—urban sprawl—between 1970 and 2000 on BMI and obesity of residents in metropolitan areas in the US. We address the possible endogeneity of population density by using a two-step instrumental variables approach. We exploit the plausibly exogenous variation in population density caused by the expansion of the U.S. Interstate Highway System, which largely followed the original 1947 plan for the Interstate Highway System. We find a negative association between population density and obesity and estimates are robust across a wide range of specifications. Estimates indicate that if the average metropolitan area had not experienced the decline in the proportion of population living in dense areas over the last 30 years, the rate of obesity would have been reduced by approximately 13%.

In eighth grade Mr. Chomskey made my class memorize parts of The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. The poem begins:

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

I can still hear that click-clack rhythm of hoofs beating in some recess of my memory.  For those of you familiar with the poem, the tale of two Revolutionary War era lovers torn asunder by King George’s Army, you know that the Highway Man comes to an untimely end on the road in the glow of a midnight moon.

This was my first literary exposure to the danger of transportation, but we all grow up knowing that transportation is an inherently dangerous activity.  Transportation will always be dangerous as long as human actors are making decisions about rapid movement and operating fast-moving and heavy vehicles.  However, there should be an imperative to make transportation as safe as possible.

Two pieces of news strike this chord.  First, Britain has outlawed texting while driving.

Britain’s new guidelines state that using a hand-held phone when causing a death will “always make the offense more serious” in terms of punishment and lead to prison time. Texting is given special treatment.

I hope that Britain’s action is a lead for federal US legislation.  Some states have already begun down this path, but the feds can outlaw texting while driving as easily as they create a national drinking age of 21.  Simply connect federal transportation (namely highway) money to laws banning texting while driving.  That certainly passes constitutional muster.

Second, Transportation 4 America has reported that 76,000 Americans have died in the last 15 years while walking in or along a street.  The FDA wants to ban summer oysters because 15 people (largely people with liver problems) a year die from food poisoning but this nation has yet to take pedestrian and road safety seriously.

This report also analyzes state and regional spending of federal transportation dollars on pedestrian safety, finding that many of the metropolitan areas in greatest need of improvement are spending the least amount on pedestrian safety projects. Nationwide, less than 1.5 percent of funds authorized under the federal transportation law, SAFETEA-LU, have been allocated for projects to improve the safety of walking and bicycling, even though pedestrians comprise 11.8 percent of all traffic deaths and trips made on foot account for almost 9 percent of total trips. SAFETEA-LU created a new safety program and changed regulations to make it easier to use what were once “highway funds” on a wider variety of transportation projects, including public transportation and pedestrian facilities.

At the state and local levels, no state spends more than 5 percent of federal transportation funds on sidewalks, crosswalks, traffic calming, speed humps, multi-use paths, or safety programs for pedestrians or cyclists. This is in spite of a more than 30 percent increase in total federal transportation dollars to states with the passage of SAFETEA-LU in 2005. The 52 largest metro areas averaged annual spending of federal funds on bicycle and pedestrian projects of just $1.39 per person. The average metro area spends 2.2 percent of their federal transportation funds on projects to improve conditions for walking and bicycling.

I’m not really sure when we will wake up to the fact that we are a multi-modal nation and that our culture of depending on cars to get us everywhere actually gets us nowhere.  The number of deaths to pedestrians is downright unacceptable.  It is a sign that we do not encourage walking enough, that we subsidize driving to an unhealthy degree, and that our development and growth has poorly prioritized the types of communities where people can travel safely without turning on a motor.

Transportation is about getting people from one place to another, and all people should have the right to expect to arrive at their destination safely.  That should especially apply to those taking the least dangerous means of conveyance, their feet.  Or else we may end up metaphorically like the highwayman:

Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i’ the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an “international organization helping governments tackle the economic, social and governance challenges of a globalized economy,” released some startling facts about Toronto this week.

Apparently, traffic congestion in the region costs the entire country of Canada $3.3 billion in lost productivity each year. This comes as a result of several factors:

• Urban sprawl
• A disjointed public transit system
• Decades of underinvestment in public transit by Ottawa

We sit in traffic, unproductive and idle. Meanwhile, our idling cars emit noxious gases into the atmosphere, decaying the ozone layer and lining lungs everywhere with air pollution. And that’s just in Toronto.

If we’re to be more productive in our cars, Ontario erred in passing a law restricting the usage of cell phones in automobiles. That is also notwithstanding the fact that if the provincial government were serious about its efforts to keep drivers’ “eyes on the road and hands on the wheel,” it would have completely banned cell phone usage while driving. After all, according to the Ministry of Transport, “driver distraction is a factor in 20 per cent of all road accidents.” But I digress.

I’m not even quite sure what kind of productivity we are expected to produce while driving, but whatever it is must surely be easier done with a phone in hand.

The fact is, if we are to be more productive in our cars, Ontario erred in passing the law restricting the usage of cell phones in automobiles. If the aim is to increase productivity while driving (which also defeats the purpose of attempting to eliminate driver distraction), let us use cell phones.

Better still, offer us a reasonable alternative to driving.

Realistically, the TTC is not a reasonable alternative to driving. Nor is any public transit system in Toronto, as the OECD notes that “transit service in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area has not kept pace with population growth.”

Don’t tell us to use the TTC. Instead, make it more attractive to potential riders. Transit City is on the right track, though light years behind, and – given the bureaucracy inherent in Toronto and the TTC – indefinitely ongoing. Hell, I’d sit through 10 years of traffic congestion, construction, and closed roads if it meant my kids would grow up with a transit system on par with those in New York, Hong Kong or London.

We don’t want to be told to use the TTC, we want to want to use the TTC.

Green Metropolis - By: David Owen

Last Thursday, I purchased the book Green Metropolis, written by David Owen. This book was an incredibly well thought out, well researched book. Contrary to the popular held opinion that ‘being green’ involves CFLs and recycling, Owen argues that the greenest city in America is not in Maine or Oregon, but rather New York. In fact, he argues that New York City is the greenest city in America. I was confused too, at first, because the image that I (and most people) have of NYC is a dirty, concrete jungle full of traffic jams and smog. According to Owen’s research, despite the dirty nature of NYC, the city uses less energy per person than any other city in the USA. He uses gasoline as an example and compares NYC to Vermont. Most would agree that wehn you think ‘green,’ you are thinking about something that looks like Vermont: trees, clean air, clean water, etc. According to Owen’s statistics, Vermont residents, on average use 545 gallons of gasoline per person per year, whereas Manhattan residents use only 90 gallons of gasoline per person per year.

It is an interesting theory that the more compact a city is, the more energy efficient it is. There are many examples in this book that I think are important lessons for area, especially since the light rail will be opening next year and we want to expand it and we want it to succeed. Owen talks about light rail. He references it in multiple places. First, in order to be successful, he reinforces the fact that the area served by light rail (or any transit system) needs to be dense.  He references a specific density of seven people per acre. This gives us something to think about if we want to have a regional mass transit system. Hampton Road’s overall density is .625 people per acre. Of course that includes rural counties such as Surry and Isle of Wight. Norfolk’s density is 6.82; much closer to the 7/acre number referenced by Owen as essential for successful transit.  When you consider that there are many places in Norfolk that are not ever going to be ‘dense’ (such as the 1300 acre Norfolk International Airport), we really do have a good start. Virginia Beach has a little bit to go. Their density is only 2.67 people per acre. Granted, half of the city is rural, we will give them the benefit of the doubt and give them 5.4 people per acre. That takes into consideration that most of their people live above the self-imposed ‘green-line.’ In the past few years, they have made great strides increasing density. Town Center is a good example. The recently proposed redevelopment of the Newtown Road ‘Strategic Growth Area’ is another good start (also an attempt to capitalize off of light rail without officially supporting it). We must continue to make the corridors around the light rail lines and proposed light rail lines more dense. I specifically emphasize proposed because if we can make these corridors dense now, it will be easier to get funding and ridership once they are built.

Another thing that Owen’s emphasizes in his book is that, in order to make density and transit more effective, we have to stop catering to cars. If we keep building new roads and highways, we are only reinforcing the automobile’s ease of use. If it is cheaper and easier to drive to work than use transit, why would you bother? Instead, we should use a combination of tolls, gas taxes, congestion pricing, etc. to make driving more costly and less inviting. The proceeds from these revenue streams could be used to expand the transit system. We have to remember, though, that while we want to make driving more uninviting, we do not want to make transporting goods more costly, which would only raise prices of everything and hurt the economy. Truck traffic could face free tolls, lower diesel taxes, or designated lanes (these lanes would be removed from regular lanes, increasing congestion and making car travel even more uninviting). I am not saying to do this overnight, but it is certainly worth it. With a denser area that focused on efficient transit rather than wasteful suburbanism, Hampton Roads would be more likely to compete with other areas.

These are just some of the ideas that would be useful in creating a more efficient, more environmentally friendly metropolitan area. I strongly suggest that everyone reads this book. Especially those who identify themselves as environmentalists. Current ‘environmentalism’ is destroying the planet. Hybrid cars are terrible ideas and only firm up and strengthen our dependence on oil. Read this book. No matter who you are, you will gain something. No matter who you are, your opinions on environmentalism will change.

…in the long run, a car’s fuel gauge is far less significant, environmentally speaking, than its odometer. In the same way that life in Manhattan is inherently energy-efficient, whether or not residents consciously try to conserve, life in the suburbs and beyond is inherently wasteful, no matter what kind of cars the residents park in their garage, or how assidously they swap incandescent lightbulbs for compact fluorescents. It’s miles traveled, not miles per gallon, that make the difference. A sprawling suburb is a fuel-burning, carbon-belching, waste-producing, water-guzzling, pollution-spewing, toxic-leaking machine, and, unlike a Hummer, it can’t be easily abandoned for something smaller and less destructive. We’ve spent a century erecting our way of life. Now we must reconfigure it.

-Excerpt: Green Metropolis – By: David Owen

Ok so im going a little nuts this morning with the posts.. but one more before I pry myself away from this interconnectivity machine..

I was hoping to stay away from the world of video but i can’t resist this one, its a nicely put togther and it’s right up the alley of yours truly  (especially in terms of my current ’self-directed’ studies).

My parents house where i grew up is on a cul-de-sac, so i found this particularly amusing. You can see some of our retrofit efforts by clicking the ‘retrofit’ tag on the right side of this page.

Main organisation seems to be here

I just found this too: Australia Council for New Urbanism

Is there a correlation between successful public transportation systems and white population of a city? One of the most provocative and intriguing pieces of urban theory I have read in a while was posted by Aaron Renn of Urbanophile at New Geography.  Renn’s thesis is that what unites “progressive” cities that are dense and emphasizing public transit, like Minneapolis, Austin and Portland, is that they are incredibly white.

Renn points out that the average American city is 12.8% black, some cities much more so, such as Cleveland (29.3%), Nashville (27.4%) and Indianapolis (25.9%).  These cities are compared to said “progressive” cities, such as Austin (8.8%), Portland (6.0%) and Seattle (6.2%).

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip? Many of the policies of Portland are not that dissimilar from those of upscale suburbs in their effects. Urban growth boundaries and other mechanisms raise land prices and render housing less affordable exactly the same as large lot zoning and building codes that mandate brick and other expensive materials do. They both contribute to reducing housing affordability for historically disadvantaged communities. Just like the most exclusive suburbs.

…

In fact, lack of ethnic diversity may have much to do with what allows these places to be “progressive”. It’s easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics. Minneapolis-St. Paul, of course, is notable in its Scandinavian heritage; Seattle and Portland received much of their initial migrants from the northern tier of America, which has always been heavily Germanic and Scandinavian.

In comparison to the great cities of the Rust Belt, the Northeast, California and Texas, these cities have relatively homogenous populations. Lack of diversity in culture makes it far easier to implement “progressive” policies that cater to populations with similar values; much the same can be seen in such celebrated urban model cultures in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Their relative wealth also leads to a natural adoption of the default strategy of the upscale suburb: the nicest stuff for the people with the most money. It is much more difficult when you have more racially and economically diverse populations with different needs, interests, and desires to reconcile.

Having lived and worked in Philadelphia, New York and Boston I have spent plenty of time pondering the different attitudes and expectations toward transit in those various cities.  Through those experiences I have come to the conclusion that transportation systems work best when there is investment and ridership from the privileged, educated and economically well-off, i.e. white people.

When public transportation is perceived as charity for those who are poor it will never be invested in and respected by those who throw their weight around cities; business leaders, government employees, professors and doctors. Rather, when public transportation is utilized by people throughout a city and when privileged people depend on transit to get them from place-to-place the system will be invested in and respected.

I am frequently taken aback at the differences between the MBTA in Boston and SEPTA in Philadelphia (beyond the propensity to strike).  In Boston public transportation serves such wealthy and privileged places as Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Massachusetts General Hospital, Newton, and Beacon Hill.  In Philadelphia, where most of the wealth resides outside the city or in suburb-like areas within the cities, the public transportation system primarily serves poorer black residents in North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia.  In Boston I’ve never seen anyone smoke on a platform or leave tons of trash behind on a train, whereas I see it happen all the time in Philadelphia.

Perception and attitude have as much to do with those riding the buses and trains as with those funding the buses and trains.  There must be a correlation between the two, where those invested see the dividends in daily experience.  Perhaps that is why systems like those in Portland and Seattle are succeeding whereas for those in Cleveland and Indianapolis transit may be seen as nothing more as welfare for those not strong enough to pull themselves up by the bootstraps for a car.

The most critical change in thinking that must occur nationwide is that transit is neither progressive nor liberal, but sound policy for all people regardless of race or class.

THE AWARD GOES TO..... *80

My how time moves on. Has it already been a year? Will must be since the Center for Biological Diversity has announced this years winner of the Third Annual Rubber Dodo Award. The 2008 winner was Sarah Palin and now the award is passed on to another well deserving person.  The award goes to Michael Winer for 2009. Press release from the CBD Endangered earth online at http://www.BiologicalDiversity.org  reads “Says Center Senior Counsel Adam Keats:”Under Winer’s money-obsessed leadership, TAREX has become the poster child for unsustainable, endangered species-killing sprawl… There is good reason that even Wall Street commonly calls TAREX a ‘real estate vulture.’” For more information and the full press release click on the link in this post or the one on my blog roll for the Center for Biological Diversity to the home page and then click on press releases at the top of the home page. Please feel free to read and take a good look around the site. You can always jump in and help at what ever level you like….. and just reading and passing on the information is a good way to start to help. One day we may not find anyone to give the Rubber Dodo Award. Wouldn’t that be great? Pass on an act of kindness to just one person and see how you feel and may you walk on the trail of hope and peace until our paths cross again….. Lila

Don't Fence Me In

I live in North West Arkansas which is known for the beautiful Ozark mountains. There is a lot of beautiful county. But there is something else that NWA is known for…I call it urban sprawl. Where there were once pastures full of cattle and horses there are now asphalt parking lots and shopping malls. I suppose some folks need places to shop. But I need a place where I can saddle up and ride amongst the cattle without hearing the constant roar of traffic. I need a place where folks still wave at you when you drive to town.  My roots involved living on a ranch where my work day started with saddling up a horse and riding the beautiful country to check the cows.  It was a rural lifestyle that I appreciate now much more than I did back then.

Now I live on 5 acres next to a busy highway, as I am writing, the sounds of motorcycles and vehicles with no mufflers are invading what should be a quiet home.  We have a huge yard but when we decide to go outside to work in the yard or to play we literally can not hear each other becasue of the traffic.

Now I’m not trying to complain about our current living situation.  In fact I feel very blessed.  We lived in an apartment complex before the Lord provided this house that sits on 1 acre and has 4 acres of pasture for our horses.  Thank you Lord for what you provided!  But I still have this suffocating feeling of being fenced in as urban sprawl has taken over.

I think it’s O.K. to feel this way.  After all, God created Adam and Eve and put them in the middle of the Garden of Eden.  The Garden of Eden was not a nice little quaint flower garden with a bird bath in the middle and a park bench or two to sit while you feed the pigeons.  When you think of the Garden of Eden think of Yellowstone National Park on steroids.  This is where God intended man to live.  No noise except the sounds of birds animals, water and wind blowing through the trees. It is a place where never is heard a discouraging word as folks talk and laugh together

So I believe in that in each of us God has put this “homing device” to call us back to Eden-like conditions.  This is why you find flower gardens on the roof tops of tall buildings in the concrete jungle.   This is why cowboys feel fenced in when their space is being gobbled up by developers.  So they yearn for open spaces.  This cowboy’s prayer is that God will cut the fence and let this cowboy and his family get back to Eden where there is land lots of land neath the starry skies above…

But no matter where you are in the city or the country that is where God has you for now.  So bloom where you are planted and whereever you are always ride tall in the saddle!

It is important that the draft “commitment” deed for Gawler East has finally been released.

Although it is a working document it does provide a very good indication of the possible make up of the final deed.

What is very interesting is the lack of financial commitment by Delfin Lend Lease.

 In fact Delfin is quite upfront about their primary objective: achieve commercially acceptable returns.

Reading the document it sounds that Government departments and the community become de-facto agents of Delfin to ensure they turn a profit.

Issues like undergrounding the power and water (which are vital for Delfin to ensure the housing density they need) are placed at the feet of the organisations that own them. It is proposed they are pay for the upfront cost. An ‘equitable portion’ will be recouped from, for example Delfin, in a manner to be agreed with Delfin after the site  is developed. There is no commitment to pay all of the cost, just a proportion sometime in the future.

The connector road from the north to the south of the development is proposed to be funded by the State Government and the Gawler Council. It will be a local road and is therefore unlikely to provide any long-term solutions to general traffic congestion in the town

A very worrying point is the proposed location of a waste water treatment plant, water storage dams and power generation within the Para Woodlands Conservation Park. The Para Woodlands, with funds to manage it, was generously donated to the whole community for revegetation and as a sanctuary for animal life. This Park is an important element in the State’s program to halt species loss, ensuing the long-term survival of plants and animals.

Proposing to site infrastructure in Para Woodlands shows a total disregard for the value the community places on its conservation area over the need for profit.

The document shows how a situation can be skewed towards one entity at the expense of others.  The document highlights the problems that are generated when projects are rushed. It looks more and more like Delfin has not done its home work before bidding for the site and now is trying to reduce its financial obligations to ensure its profitability.

 Surely this process is not healthy for the developer or the community. If a structure plan had been completed originally, developers would be able to bid for land knowing full well the cost  to develop the site.

We currently have a developer who at the beginning of the process was promising a lot of outcomes. They propose to back away from many of them and are relying on the community to fill the gaps in their plans.

 The whole approval process should be halted until all the issues around the development are resolved.  The State Government and Gawler and Barossa councils need to avoid  a rushed process favoured by a powerful corporation that believes it can bring pressure to bear politically

In a recent op-ed piece in the Sunday New York Times, a phenomenon was described that was exciting and interesting. The bed-room suburb communities of Long Island are beginning to dwindle in population, and house-builders are beginning to slow their pace. What seems to be happening, intones the article, is an ever quickening movement out of the suburbs and into multilevel apartment buildings. The positive effects of this development might one day mean an opening up of all the land that had previously been developed and used as suburban neighborhoods being given back to farm lands. And the city would begin to grow taller, with more high rises and residential buildings replacing the many suburban houses of the past.

The question is this: Is Re-Urbanization desirable? What are the pros and cons? What are the challenges?

This is an essay by George Wuerther on the topic whether we have to choose cows or housing development. I put it up in reponse to Wilderness Muse’s query on another post.

Note: this was written in 2003.

Condos or Cows? Neither! (1-20-03 edit)

by © George Wuerthner
Box 839
Richmond, Vermont

FLAWED STRATEGY

Ranching advocates present a false choice when they assert we must preserve ranching or suffer unrestricted sprawl.

Their ranching-as- land- preservation strategy is flawed in several ways.

First, livestock proponents vastly underestimate the ecological costs of livestock production. Growing cows in the West involves more than grazing grass, and the environmental impacts are countless and cumulative.

Second, livestock proponents ignore the vast differences between development and livestock production in the physical, geographical footprint. Livestock production affects nearly all of the non-forested landscape in the West in one fashion or another, whereas sprawl and its impacts remain relatively concentrated.

Third, livestock proponents often eschew mechanisms that succeed in preventing sprawl in order to promote livestock as the only viable alternative to full-scale development..

SPRAWL AND ITS IMPACTS

There is no denying that sprawl is socially and ecologically detrimental to human and wildlife communities. Sprawl fragments wildlife habitat, raises costs for services, increases energy use, forces longer commutes, requires more roads, spreads weeds and causes many other negative impacts that affect everything from taxes to wildlife migration patterns.

Fortunately, sprawl is relatively concentrated. Development is not the dominant feature of the West. The West is dominated by open space, as anyone who bothers to look can attest.

The majority of development in the West occurs around urban centers, where jobs, educational opportunities and amenities are found. Or it occurs in resort areas.  Real estate developers aren’t rushing to North Dakota or many other parts of the West to cash in on the next bonanza. Rural towns such as Burns, Oregon, and Jordan, Montana, only wish they were a developer’s dream.

RANCHING ISN’T BENIGN

While ranching advocates are quick to point out the negative impacts of sprawl—as they should—they fail to apply the same critical analysis to the social and ecological effects of livestock production.

Livestock production involves crop production, water diversions, predator control, fences and many other activities that carry tremendous ecological costs. Livestock spread weeds, fragment wildlife habitat (particularly aquatic ecosystems because of water diversions for irrigation), transmit diseases to native wildlife, consume forage that would otherwise support native herbivores, trample soils, pollute water sources, degrade riparian areas and truncate nutrient flows.

The cumulative impact of livestock production across the West explains why it is responsible for more endangered species than any other land use. Livestock production is the largest source of non-point water pollution and soil erosion, the greatest consumer of water and a major contributor to wildfires. It’s also a chief reason why predators such as wolves and grizzlies have been reduced to token populations.

GEOGRAPHICAL FOOTPRINT

Though sprawl is consuming more and more land in the U.S., particularly in the West, animal agriculture affects 20 times more of the American landscape. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 3.5 percent of the lower 48 states is developed, whereas livestock production impacts 70-75 percent of all land area in the U.S. This figure includes public and private lands that are grazed, and farmland used for forage crop.

Looking at the West, we see the same disparity between developed land and lands affected by animal agriculture. For instance, a GAP analysis conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey shows that only 530,000 of Colorado’s 66 million acres are affected by development, whereas 33 million acres are grazed by livestock.

Worse yet, more than 4.5 million acres of Colorado’s farmland are devoted to livestock forage crops such as feeder corn and alfalfa. These agricultural fields are every bit as disastrous as shopping malls for most wildlife. Hay or corn fields typically consist of exotic plants that are removed annually. Many of these crops are irrigated and guzzle precious water. Such fields effectively fragment and degrade more terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems than all urbanization and sprawl.

Open space is not the same as effective wildlife habitat. Even lands that are grazed rather than farmed remain unsuitable for many species. This becomes clear when you study a low-population state such as Montana. As anyone who has flown over Montana or driven along its empty highways can attest that there’s a lot of undeveloped land in the state. Recent population figures indicate that 87 percent of Montana’s land area has fewer than 6 people per square mile!

Only 0.17 percent of the state is affected by development. In contrast, nearly 70 percent of the land is grazed, and more than 5.5 million acres consist of irrigated crops that feed livestock.

For all intents and purposes, most of Montana is still uninhabited. So why are prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, wolves, grizzly bears, swift foxes, sage grouse, Columbian sharp-tail grouse, Montana graylings and countless other threatened or endangered species unable to thrive in a place that’s practically deserted? If “open space” were synonymous with good wildlife habitat, there would be no endangered species in Montana.

The problem is clear. Animal agriculture has devastating effects on species and ecological processes such as predation, fire and nutrient flow.

LANDSCAPE SCALE CONSERVATION

Turning a blind eye to ranching impacts won’t prevent sprawl. At best, the hope that livestock production can contain sprawl is a blunt tool. It is a passive, unfocused approach that occasionally results in “coincidental conservation.”

Sprawl is driven by demand, a land grab that ranching does not guide or limit. Given the rapidly growing populations of many western states, relying on livestock producers to maintain open space and critical wildlife habitat is like playing Russian roulette. Such a strategy depends almost entirely on the whim of a landowner and rarely works to safeguard the ecological integrity of a landscape.

If we want to control sprawl, there are effective, active methods that work: zoning, planning, conservation easements and outright acquisition. Though all have drawbacks, they can restrict or guide development.

Many states realize they cannot count on low-value land uses such as farming, ranching and timber production to prevent development. Thus they have embarked on more aggressive land-acquisition programs. Florida, California, New York and New Jersey, among others, have instituted large-scale acquisition programs designed to permanently protect lands from development. Florida, for instance, hopes to protect at least 50 percent of its land through this program.

Some western states have taken halfhearted steps in the same direction. Voters in Nevada, Colorado and Arizona have approved bond issues to fund land acquisition. States such as Oregon, New York (in the Adirondacks), and California (through the Coastal Commission) have instituted statewide or regional zoning that has dramatically reduced sprawl. In New England, large-scale conservation easements have spared more than 1.8 million acres from development in the past few years alone.

FALSE CHOICE

The argument that we must choose between condos and cows is a false one. Neither is desirable, and both should be restricted as much as possible. If we enact proven land conservation policies and reduce the amount of land devoted to livestock production, I believe –the West will be a better place than it is today, even as more people discover its wonders and desire to live there.

By Andrew J Thompson

The Carmel Smart Code was designed around a set of development principles that are very popular in certain circles of policy advocates.

“Smart Growth” is a community planning concept promoting concentration of growth in the center of a city to avoid the kind of sprawl that has dominated American development since World War II.   It is highlighted by a preference for “walkable communities” that are bicycle friendly, favor neighborhood schools, mixed use development and a variety of housing choices.   Smart Growth views every community as a holistic organism, capable of supporting itself without long commutes, remote agricultural support or sterile, cul de sac neighborhoods.

Smart Growth advocates include land use planners, traditional neighborhood developers, single family home and neighborhood protectionists, and rabid environmentalists.  Thus, the range of the political spectrum, from far left environmentalists to far right homeschooling families is touched by the advocacy of smart growth.

Its detractors come from similarly divergent perspectives.  Contemporary subdivision, mall and power center developers, suburban families with suburban lifestyles, and a smattering of hard core libertarians and community organizers, find fault with or sense they are hurt by the implementation of Smart Growth criteria.

Yet as seriously as its principles have been debated over the past generation, the whole concept of Smart Growth remains unheard of by the majority of Americans.  And yet again, its principles have been codified and brought to life in Carmel, IN, which stands as an example to anyone who cares to observe, of how a well planned community looks and functions after Smart Growth redevelopment takes hold.

Carmel has implemented “a consistent set of rules for walkable, compact, development and redevelopment of quality design and with a mix of uses in areas where retail, commercial, office and other functions make sense….”  The results are truly worthy of a closer look.

My professor today showed us this, and I could not stop laughing- Enjoy!

Sustainability: social, environmental and economic justice.

This video shows an interview with Carl Anthony, Founder of the Earth House Leadership Center in Detroit, talking about the problems of structural racism in our urban centers.  Anthony also talks about how groups in Detroit are working to abate urban sprawl through an inner city land bank initiative similar to Cleveland’s “Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland” initiative and a statewide proposal for a transportation bill limiting the construction of new highways into existing farmland.  Cleveland could use a transportation bill like that.

Click “Continue Reading” to view the rest of the interview about community empowerment and using federal Stimulus dollars to re-invest in whole metropolitan regions.

“Communities need to organize for the long term.” – Carl Anthony

http://www.jorymon.com/toys/dispatchwork-berlin/

That was the headline in Sunday’s ‘Hampton Roads’ section of the Virginian-Pilot. It is also a headline that I have hoped to see for a long time. I think that even the leaders of Virginia Beach are starting to admit that the project is not exactly a viable option now or in the future. The road would destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands in multiple fragile watersheds so that area residents have the possibility of shaving 7 minutes off of their commute. That’s $385 million per minute saved. Is it really worth it? If the residents are that concerned about the need for a highway, they would have purchased a home closer to an existing highway. There was a resident quoted in the article as saying, “I don’t think it will ever get built.” Thank you EPA. Thank you for sparing the taxpayers the cost of this incredibly overpriced parking lot.

“On average, each American spends the equivalent of 42 workdays every year stuck behind the wheel of a car. Suburban moms spend more time driving than they do feeding, bathing or otherwise caring for their children. That’s because we as a nation have been spreading out rapidly and often irrationally with new land development during the past half-century, on the assumption that gasoline will always be plentiful and cheap.” Fascinating but sad lifestyle facts from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

My own commute to and from work accounts for much more time than I would like. No one is paid for their time spent getting to work, and that time is essentially wasted, unproductive, sitting in a metal box, polluting the atmosphere. There are many days that the air over Phoenix looks dirty, and our tens of thousands of cars and trucks are a major part of this. Phoenix now has a wonderful light rail system, which helps take some cars off the roads. The light rail lines have to be expanded in a big way though in order to have the type of ridership that will truly help address some of the negative environmental impacts of urban sprawl.

Expanding light rail will require billions of dollars and many years of work. In the mean time, the highways are being widened and expanded – easing things for more cars. Much of the work is being done in outlaying sprawl areas though, so all the downtown bottlenecks (like the one seen above) will still exist. The current highway expansion work will simply allow a greater number of cars from the sprawl areas to arrive to the downtown bottleneck together.

The NRDC article linked above highlights Smart Growth neighborhoods, an alternative to urban sprawl. Smart Growth neighborhoods are designed much like communities were many years ago, with a central core of businesses that provide jobs, shopping, and essential services. This means that many residents would not be required to make a daily commute outside of their local area. The idea of a five minute commute sounds really nice.

This idea is not new to Arizona at all; architect Paolo Soleri and his colleagues have spent decades building Arcosanti, a wonderful community in the desert just north of here. This is an architecture experiment though and not residences. More approachable for families perhaps is Verrado, a community of attractive homes on the outskirts of Phoenix. It was built around a small core of businesses and also allows some degree of reduced commuting.

If my job allowed it I would much prefer to telecommute. Imagine not only the reduced environmental footprint, but also the money saved by me in car-related expense and by my employer in facility-related expense. Quite honestly, to be able to control my work environment (i.e. to be able to concentrate in peace and quiet) I anticipate would also benefit my productivity enormously.

Taking a bigger picture view of our place in the world means looking beyond our job. We need to also consider the impact on the environment of all aspects of our job, such as our commutes, the the supplies used, the products offered, the marketing, the operations, the billing, etc. It is highly likely that there are things we can do to control costs in our companies that also mean less environmental degradation, like paperless billing for example. Now, about our commute…

Great Basin Water Network tells the “real reason” why Utah politicians laid down for Las Vegas water steal-

The Great Basin Water Network says Utah will give up Snake Valley and state’s air quality to Las Vegas for support of their own urban sprawl pipeline — Lake Powell to St. George, UT.

Pat Mulroy (image), the Southern Nevada Water Authority executive director (said to be the most powerful woman in Nevada).

Ok, I’ve given it a few days, taken a brief hiatus from the intensity of the imminent, yet immanent, issue at hand, intimacy. “Why?” you ask, well I wanted to collect my thoughts, see if it was just a passing odd, fanciful, or capricious idea or topic.  But to my gratification and even great merriment, my focussed (yes it is spelled correctly, it is just a variation of the typical form of spelling it focused, I just like the curious way of spelling it this way) any way, yes my mental prowess have remained converged on the central matter at hand.  In fact, it has not only remained upon the subject matter, but it has extended in both scope and range. 

As I have reflected deeply on the subject, much like a bovine who ruminates on their pasturage, I have asked myself why the riveted attention on sex, as in my previous post.  Hmmm … well quite frankly I don’t feel that the previous post was sex centered, but all the while, there was a reason for its discussion.  You see, for me, the culmination, or climax if you will (pun definitely intended), of intimacy is sex.  Now not the kind of sex that you can see flippantly displayed for all to see along the freeways of our American portion of our terra firma, or broadcasted over the now high definition airwaves.  No, I am referring to the act of two, not only consenting, but desiring souls, converging into one.  I call that making love, but that too has digressed to culturally be merely defined as “sex.”  But before I divagate to the cultural woes and loss of clarity in our didactic cognitions and frames of reference, I want to clarify . . . for me, making love, whether it is between blankets or while walking though the autumn leaves that blanket the ground at the nearby park hand in hand, yes making love is the culmination of intimacy, when two become one.

Over the course of human existence, we hominian beings tend to sophisticate, that is not necessarily to we make thing better, but we tend to make things less natural or distorted, take for instance as a gross example the matter of urban sprawl.  That being a normative example though, we tend to find counterfeit substitutions for an original e.g. the tremendous excitement caused by a chemical substance in place of genuine joy or even credit for riches; we often take what seems plausible in our own mind’s eye but in the end lead down a sorrow filled pathway.  These spurious ways have blindly led many to ruin.  Sex has become cheapened to the point that many attempt to find fulfillment in fantasized images leading to the objectification of their counterpart. Fantasy nor objectifying an individual will not lead to intimacy; it only leads to heartache for the perpetrator and also the individual that has been exploited, ill-used, and quite honestly … victimized.  I know of many, countless, examples of individuals who have expressed with great disgust the sickening discounted feelings they are left with after some perve “checks them out” from head to toe, maybe even with a wry smile parking their penetrating eyes on their victims nether regions.  Hominids for eons have tended to malign one another for the sake of our own pleasures, even if it leads them to futile emptiness.  This cheapening has led to a faulty understanding of sex yes, but more grievous than that, an erroneous understanding of intimacy.

What does intimacy look like in relationship to friends or lovers? How would one recognize such ethereal behaviors? Is it in fact ethereal or “of another world”? Is such a practice, exemplified anywhere throughout the annals of time in this world or some other? These types of questions I purpose to address within these next few posts.  They are of critical importance as intimacy is, or should be, the goal within flourishing relationships.  In fact, I would say that it is impossible to have a thriving fulfilling relationship and NOT be intimate.  Intimacy, remember I am not saying that to be intimate you must be sexually active, quite the contrary actually, so again, intimacy is continually yearned for and occasionally achieved.   These question plus the limiting factors of intimacy we will be exploring together.

Until later . . .

Why would the government choose to house 15,000 people in Concordia when one of its own studies as far back as 1997 in this

Rural land assessment 1997 concluded that most of Concordia had ‘class 1′  ‘high productive potential’ ‘requiring only simple management practices to maintain productivity’.  Here’s something that is sustainable without having to try!