Birth, death and shopping

The Economist looks at Birth, death and shopping, and the evolution of the modern shopping mall, which started with the Southdale shopping center in Minnesota:

Southdale's creator arrived in America as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Victor Gruen was a Jewish bohemian who began to design shops for fellow immigrants in New York after failing in cabaret theatre. His work was admired partly for its uncluttered, modernist look, which seemed revolutionary in 1930s America. But Gruen's secret was the way he used arcades and eye-level display cases to lure customers into stores almost against their will. As a critic complained, his shops were like mousetraps. A few years later the same would be said of his shopping malls.

By the 1940s department stores were already moving to the suburbs. Some had begun to build adjacent strips of shops, which they filled with boutiques in an attempt to re-create urban shopping districts. In 1947 a shopping centre opened in Los Angeles featuring two department stores, a cluster of small shops and a large car park. It was, in effect, an outdoor shopping mall. Fine for balmy southern California, perhaps, but not for Minnesota's harsh climate. Commissioned to build a shopping centre at Southdale in 1956, Gruen threw a roof over the structure and installed an air-conditioning system to keep the temperature at 75°F (24°C) — which a contemporary press release called “Eternal Spring”. The mall was born.

Gruen got an extraordinary number of things right first time. He built a sloping road around the perimeter of the mall, so that half of the shoppers entered on the ground floor and half on the first floor — something that became a standard feature of malls. Southdale's balconies were low, so that shoppers could see the shops on the floor above or below them. The car park had animal signs to help shoppers remember the way back to their vehicles. It was as though Orville and Wilbur Wright had not just discovered powered flight but had built a plane with tray tables and a duty-free service.

Oddly, this most suburban American invention was supposed to evoke a European city centre. Hence Southdale's density and its atrium, where shoppers were expected to sit and debate over cups of coffee, just as they do in the Piazza San Marco or the Place Dauphine. Gruen exiled cars, which he thought noisy and anti-social, to the outside of his mall. Most contemporary critics thought Gruen had succeeded in bringing urbanity to the suburbs. Southdale was “more like downtown than downtown itself”, claimed the Architectural Record. Another asserted, in a rare example of journalistic hyperbole that turned out to be absolutely right, that the indoor shopping mall was henceforth “part of the American way”.

In the US, two developments boosted their growth:

The first was a change in the tax code which allowed investors to write down a large proportion of a new building's cost as a loss. That made malls much more profitable. The second was a widespread property-tax revolt that deprived local governments of their most reliable source of income. Desperate, they tried to lure businesses that they could milk for taxes. They were particularly keen on shopping malls.

Now, of course, we've moved on to outdoor malls — or lifestyle centers, in the jargon of real-estate developers.

Traffic

Mary Roach reviews Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt, which argues, in her words, that traffic jams are not, by and large, caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature:

Vanderbilt cites a statistic that nearly 80 percent of crashes involve drivers not paying attention for up to three seconds. Thus the places that seem the most dangerous — narrow roads, hairpin turns — are rarely where people mess up. “Most crashes,” Vanderbilt writes, “happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.” For this reason, roads that could be straight are often constructed with curves — simply to keep drivers on the ball.

This basic truth — feeling safe kills — lies beneath many of the book’s insights. Americans think roundabouts are more dangerous than intersections with traffic lights. Roundabouts require you to adjust your speed, to merge, in short, to pay attention. At an intersection, we simply watch the light. And so we may not notice the red-light runner coming at us or the pedestrian stepping off the curb. A study that followed 24 intersections that had been converted from signals or stop signs to roundabouts showed an almost 90 percent drop in fatal crashes after the change.

For similar reasons, S.U.V.’s are more dangerous than cars. Not just because they’re slower to stop and harder to maneuver, but because — by conferring a sense of safety — they invite careless behavior. “The safer cars get,” Vanderbilt says, “the more risks drivers choose to take.” (S.U.V. drivers are more likely to not bother with their seat belts, to talk on cellphones, and to not wear seat belts while talking on cellphones.) So it goes for much of the driving universe. More people are killed while crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking. Drivers pass bicyclists more closely on a road with bike lanes than on one without.

Trading Places

In Trading Places, Alan Ehrenhalt of The New Republic longingly looks at the demographic inversion of the American city — hoping that American cities like Chicago might transform into nineteenth-century Vienna:

We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

Why has demographic inversion begun? For one thing, the deindustrialization of the central city, for all the tragic human dislocations it caused, has eliminated many of the things that made affluent people want to move away from it. Nothing much is manufactured downtown anymore (or anywhere near it), and that means that the noise and grime that prevailed for most of the twentieth century have gone away. Manhattan may seem like a loud and gritty place now, but it is nothing like the city of tenement manufacturing, rumbling elevated trains, and horses and coal dust in the streets that confronted inhabitants in the early 1900s. Third-floor factory lofts, whether in Soho or in St. Louis, can be marketed as attractive and stylish places to live. The urban historian Robert Bruegmann goes so far as to claim that deindustrialization has, on the whole, been good for downtowns because it has permitted so many opportunities for creative reuse of the buildings. I wouldn't go quite that far, and, given the massive job losses of recent years, I doubt most of the residents of Detroit would, either. But it is true that the environmental factors that made middle-class people leave the central city for streetcar suburbs in the 1900s and for station-wagon suburbs in the 1950s do not apply any more.

Nor, in general, does the scourge of urban life in the 1970s and '80s: random street violence. True, the murder rates in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland have climbed in the last few years, but this increase has been propelled in large part by gang- and drug-related violence. For the most part, middle-class people of all colors began to feel safe on the streets of urban America in the 1990s, and they still feel that way. The paralyzing fear that anyone of middle age can still recall vividly from the 1970s — that the shadowy figure passing by on a dark city street at night stands a good chance of being a mugger — is rare these days, and almost nonexistent among young people. Walk around the neighborhood of 14th and U streets in Washington, D.C. on a Saturday night, and you will find it perhaps the liveliest part of the city, at least for those under 25. This is a neighborhood where the riots of 1968 left physical scars that still have not disappeared, and where outsiders were afraid to venture for more than 30 years.

The young newcomers who have rejuvenated 14th and U believe that this recovering slum is the sort of place where they want to spend time and, increasingly, where they want to live. This is the generation that grew up watching "Seinfeld," "Friends," and "Sex and the City," mostly from the comfort of suburban sofas. We have gone from a sitcom world defined by "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" to one that offers a whole range of urban experiences and enticements. I do not claim that a handful of TV shows has somehow produced a new urbanist generation, but it is striking how pervasive the pro-city sensibility is within this generation, particularly among its elite. In recent years, teaching undergraduates at the University of Richmond, the majority of them from affluent suburban backgrounds, I made a point of asking where they would prefer to live in 15 years — in a suburb or in a neighborhood close to the center of the city. Few ever voted for suburban life.

Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth?

Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth? Yes, Brad Templeton discovers, after pulling numbers from the U.S. government bureau of transportation statistics and the Dept. of Energy Transportation Energy Data Book (especially table 2-12).

USA Transportation Energy Use
BTUs per passenger-mile


How can this be?

A full bus or trainload of people is more efficient than private cars, sometimes quite a bit more so. But transit systems never consist of nothing but full vehicles. They run most of their day with light loads. The above calculations came from figures citing the average city bus holding 9 passengers, and the average train (light or heavy) holds 22. If that seems low, remember that every packed train at rush hour tends to mean a near empty train returning down the track.

Transit vehicles also tend to stop and start a lot, which eats a lot of energy, even with regenerative braking. And most transit vehicles are just plain heavy, and not very aerodynamic. Indeed, you'll see tables in the DoE reports that show that over the past 30 years, private cars have gotten 30% more efficient, while buses have gotten 60% less efficient and trains about 25% worse. The market and government regulations have driven efforts to make cars more efficient, while transit vehicles have actually worsened.

In order to get people to ride transit, you must offer frequent service, all day long. They want to know they have the freedom to leave at different times. But that means emptier vehicles outside of rush hour. You've all seen those huge empty vehicles go by, you just haven't thought of how anti-green they were. It would be better if off-hours transit was done by much smaller vehicles, but that implies too much capital cost -- no transit agency will buy enough equipment for peak times and then buy a second set of equipment for light demand periods.

Transit planning is also driven by different economies. Often transit infrastructure (including vehicles) is paid for by state or federal money, while drivers (but also fuel) are paid from local city budgets. This seems to push local city transit agencies to get bigger vehicles and fewer drivers where they can, since drivers tend to be hired full-time and can't be kept idling in low-demand periods.

In Templeton's opinion, you should still take transit, because the marginal energy cost of one more transit passenger is much less than the energy cost of one more car, even if the average cost is no lower.

In fact, because transit systems have high fixed costs and low variable costs, they need high ridership to make sense, which has led to massive subsidies to reduce prices:

Transit fares are highly subsidized. It's not uncommon for a $1.50 transit ticket to offer a ride that costs the agency 3-4 times as much to provide. (In U.S. big cities, on average subsidies pay for 44% of rail cost and 69% of bus cost. Suburban buses can see almost 90%.) Cars are also subsidized of course, via roads (which also provide subsidy to buses, trucks and street cars, of course) and via free parking and forced parking construction requirements. To the extent that roads are funded by gasoline taxes — which varies from place to place — this is not a subsidy so much as a user fee.

Anyway, Templeton also provides his numbers in MPG-equivalents.

Manhattanhenge

Media-savvy astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about Manhattanhenge:

What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rose in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.

For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on Thursday, May 29h this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. The other day is Saturday, July 12th. These two days give you a photogenic view with half the Sun above and half the Sun below the horizon — on the grid. The day after May 29th (Friday, May 30th), and the day before July 12 (Friday, July 11) will also give you Manhattanhenge moments, but instead you will see the entire ball of the Sun on the horizon — on the grid. My personal preference is the half-Sun.

As you may know, had Manhattan's grid been perfectly aligned with the geographic north-south line, then the days of Manhattanhenge would be the spring and autumn equinoxes, the only two days on the calendar when the Sun rises due-east and sets due-west. But Manhattan's street grid is rotated 30 degrees east from geographic north, shifting the days of alignment elsewhere into the calendar.

The Slow Death of a City Block

The Slow Death of a City Block — 1900 Montgomery Street, St. Louis — demonstrates just how illiquid cities are:

In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Today it's ranked 48th.

In 1950, there were almost 900,000 people living inside the city limits. Today that same land is home to only 300,000. That's out of two and a half million people in the metro area.

In the 1990s, the metro population increased by 1 percent. The land consumed by that population went up fifty percent.

At any given time there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis. I say approximately because the old ones keep falling down and new ones keep taking their place. An entire industry has built up around the millions of red bricks that come from wrecked houses. They're stacked on pallets and shipped to other cities.

Long after the city has lost it's economic raison d'être, buildings still stand, crumbling slowly over the course of decades.

Inside Gate, India’s Good Life; Outside, the Servants’ Slums

I suppose some people find a headline like this — Inside Gate, India’s Good Life; Outside, the Servants’ Slums — profound and moving, a terrible indictment of a heartless system. I'll let them gnash their teeth at India's uneven economic growth:

When the scorch of summer hit this north Indian boomtown, and the municipal water supply worked only a few hours each day, inside a high-rise tower called Hamilton Court, Jaya Chand could turn on her kitchen tap around the clock, and water would gush out.

The same was true when the electricity went out in the city, which it did on average for 12 hours a day, something that once prompted residents elsewhere in Gurgaon to storm the local power office. All the while, the Chands’ flat screen television glowed, the air-conditioners hummed, and the elevators cruised up and down Hamilton Court’s 25 floors.

Hamilton Court — complete with a private school within its gates, groomed lawns and security guards — is just one of the exclusive gated communities that have blossomed across India in recent years. At least for the newly moneyed upper middle class, they offer at high prices what the government cannot, at least not to the liking of their residents.

These enclaves have emerged on the outskirts of prospering, overburdened cities, from this frontier town next to the capital to the edges of seam-splitting Bangalore. They allow their residents to buy their way out of the hardships that afflict vast multitudes in this country of more than one billion. And they reflect the desires of India’s small but growing ranks of wealthy professionals, giving them Western amenities along with Indian indulgences: an army of maids and chauffeurs live in a vast shantytown across the street.

I've been to Gurgaon, and it's obviously growing at a ludicrous pace, far faster then the government-provided infrastructure can grow:

The city’s population has nearly doubled in the last six years, to 1.5 million. The skyline is dotted with scaffolds. Glass towers house companies like American Express and Accenture. Not far from Hamilton Court, Burberry and BMW have set up shop.

State services, meanwhile, have barely kept pace. The city has neither enough water nor electricity for the population. There is no sewage treatment plant yet; construction is scheduled to begin this year.

Some odd commentary:

India has long lived with such inequities, and though a Maoist rebellion is building in the countryside, the nation has for the most part skirted social upheaval through a critical safety valve: giving the poor their chance to vent at the ballot box. Indeed, four years ago, voters threw out the incumbent government, with its “India Shining” slogan, because it was perceived to have neglected the poor.

I'm sure the "critical safety valve" of electoral politics will save India's poor. After all, it got them free color TVs.

The New, New City

Rome was not built in a day, but The New, New City is:

In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable in size to New York have sprouted up almost overnight. Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing village of a few thousand people, and Dubai had merely a quarter million people. Today Shenzhen has a population of eight million, and Dubai’s glittering towers, rising out of the desert in disorderly rows, have become playgrounds for wealthy expatriates from Riyadh and Moscow. Long-established cities like Beijing and Guangzhou have more than doubled in size in a few decades, their original outlines swallowed by rings of new development. Built at phenomenal speeds, these generic or instant cities, as they have been called, have no recognizable center, no single identity. It is sometimes hard to think of them as cities at all. Dubai, which lays claim to some of the world’s most expensive private islands, the tallest building and soon the largest theme park, has been derided as an urban tomb where the rich live walled off from the poor migrant workers who serve them. Shenzhen is often criticized as a product of unregulated development, better suited to the speculators that first spurred its growth than to the workers housed in huge complexes of factory-run barracks. Yet for architects these cities have also become vast fields of urban experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, who first envisioned the city as a field of gleaming towers, could have dreamed of.

Cities and Ambition

Paul Graham discusses Cities and Ambition. I enjoyed this footnote:

How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they're nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.

One sign of a city's potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat's there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 3 in DC, 7 in London, 11 in New York, and 20 in Paris.

(Zagat's lists the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in SF as requiring jackets but I couldn't believe it, so I called to check and in fact they don't. Apparently there's only one restaurant left on the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.)

Aztec Chinampas

Wayne C. Gramlich, Patri Friedman, and Andrew Houser open their Practical Guide to Seasteading with a review of previous seasteading-like efforts, including the Aztec Chinampas rafts:

The floating gardens of the Aztecs of Central America, a nomadic tribe, they were driven onto the marshy shore of Lake Tenochtitlan, located in the great central valley of what is now Mexico. Roughly treated by their more powerful neighbors, denied any arable land, the Aztecs survived by exercising remarkable powers of invention. Since they had no land on which to grow crops, they determined to manufacture it from the materials at hand.

In what must have been a long process of trial and error, they learned how to build rafts of rushes and reeds, lashing the stalks together with tough roots. Then they dredged up soil from the shallow bottom of the lake, piling it on the rafts. Because the soil came from the lake bottom, it was rich in a variety of organic debris, decomposing material that released large amounts of nutrients. These rafts, called Chinampas, had abundant crops of vegetables, flowers, and even trees planted on them. The roots of these plants, pushing down towards a source of water, would grow though the floor of the raft and down into the water.

These rafts, which never sank, were sometimes joined together to form floating islands as much as two hundred feet long. Some Chinampas even had a hut for a resident gardener. On market days, the gardener might pole his raft close to a market place, picking and handing over vegetables or flowers as shoppers purchased them.

By force of arms, the Aztecs defeated and conquered the peoples who had once oppressed them. Despite the great size their empire finally assumed, they never abondoned the site on the lake. Their once crude village became a huge, magnificent city and the rafts, invented in a gamble to stave off poverty, proliferated to keep pace with the demands of the capital city of Central Mexico.

Upon arriving to the New World in search of gold, the sight of these islands astonished the conquering Spainards. Indeed, the spectacle of an entire grove of trees seemingly suspended on the water must have been perplexing, even frightening in those 16th century days of the Spanish conquest.

Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit

Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit:

Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges — of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year — are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited.

So naturally the mass-transit business is booming, right? Well, no:

The cost of fuel and power for public transportation is about three times that of four years ago, and the slowing economy means local sales tax receipts are down, so there is less money available for transit services. Higher steel prices are making planned expansions more expensive.

Typically, mass transit systems rely on fares to cover about a third of their costs, so they depend on sales taxes and other government funding.

Fares cover about a third of their costs.

Presumably mass-transit systems require large up-front investments and fairly large fixed costs, but the marginal cost of each additional rider should be negligible. That's the promise of mass transit, after all. So when ridership jumps 5 percent, that should be free money — but they're having trouble making ends meet.

It's almost as if these mass-transit systems don't make economic sense...

They're Working on Their Own, Just Side by Side

They're Working on Their Own, Just Side by Side:

While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.

“It’s nourishing on a fundamental level,” said John Vlahides, the executive editor of 71miles.com, a travel site covering Northern California, who rents a desk for $175 a month at one of Mr. Neuberg’s original sites, the Hat Factory. “And if you’re not nourished, how can you be creative?”

Coworking sites are up and running from Argentina to Australia and many places in between, although a wiki site on coworking shows that most are in the United States. While some have grown-up-sounding names, most seem connected somewhere between the communalism of the 1960s and the whimsy of the dot-com days of the ’90s, like the Hive Cooperative in Denver, Office Nomads in Seattle, Nutopia Workspace in Lower Manhattan and Independents Hall in Philadelphia.

The coworkers, armed with Wi-Fi laptops and cellphones, are in some ways offering a techie twist on the age-old practice of artists or writers teaming up to rent studio space.

Most coworkers say they were drawn to the spaces for the same reasons that inspired Mr. Neuberg: they like working independently, but they are less effective when sitting home alone.

“Even people who are antisocial feel a need to be around other people for at least part of the day while they’re working,” said Laura Forlano, a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who has studied people working in communal offices and cafes.

The Next Slum?

The old slum was the inner city. Are our sprawling suburbs the next slum?

Sprawling, large-lot suburbs become less attractive as they become more densely built, but urban areas — especially those well served by public transit — become more appealing as they are filled in and built up. Crowded sidewalks tend to be safe and lively, and bigger crowds can support more shops, restaurants, art galleries.

Of course, developers are trying to produce the best of both worlds:

But developers are also starting to find ways to bring the city to newer suburbs — and provide an alternative to conventional, car-based suburban life. “Lifestyle centers” — walkable developments that create an urban feel, even when built in previously undeveloped places — are becoming popular with some builders. They feature narrow streets and small storefronts that come up to the sidewalk, mixed in with housing and office space. Parking is mostly hidden underground or in the interior of faux city blocks.

The granddaddy of all lifestyle centers is the Reston Town Center, located between Virginia’s Dulles International Airport and Washington, D.C. Since it opened in 1990, it has become the “downtown” for western Fairfax and eastern Loudoun counties; a place for the kids to see Santa and for teenagers to ice skate. People living in the town can stroll from the movie theater to restaurants and then back home. A 2006 study by the Brookings Institution showed that Reston’s apartments, condominiums, and office and retail space were all commanding about a 50 percent rent or price premium over the typically suburban houses, office parks, and strip malls nearby.

Housing at Belmar, the new “downtown” in Lakewood, Colorado, a middle-income inner suburb of Denver, commands a 60 percent premium per square foot over the single-family homes in the neighborhoods around it. The development covers about 20 small blocks in all. What’s most noteworthy is its history: it was built on the site of a razed mall.

Building lifestyle centers is far more complex than building McMansion developments (or malls). These new, faux-urban centers have many moving parts, and they need to achieve critical mass quickly to attract buyers and retailers. As a result, during the 1990s, lifestyle centers spread slowly. But real-estate developers are gaining more experience with this sort of building, and it is proliferating. Very few, if any, regional malls are being built these days — lifestyle centers are going up instead.

Lifestyle center may be an even worse term than sport utility vehicle.

Perhaps subtle zoning changes and the popularity of such lifestyle centers can sidestep the significant problem that "once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild":

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas — roads, sewer and water lines — cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade.

Detroit Public Schools Book Depository Roosevelt Warehouse

This scene from the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository Roosevelt Warehouse could come straight from a post-apocalyptic film — Escape from Detroit.

Of course, then it would be a scene of hope — A Tree Grows in Detroit. (In case you missed it, yes, that's a tree growing inside the book repository.)

Super-Green City of the Future

San Francisco's so-called Treasure Island may become the Super-Green City of the Future:

Built for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, Treasure Island was claimed as a Naval base during World War II. When the base was finally decommissioned 11 years ago, San Francisco began studying how to redevelop it. From nearly 300 meetings among city officials, engineers, architects and the public emerged a plan for the most ambitious new community in the United States—a 13,500-person "urban oasis" that will rise from the soil of reclaimed Superfund sites, combining cutting-edge technology with restored natural systems to leave a light footprint on the Earth. After ground is broken in 2009, Treas­ure Island will become a testbed for the newest ideas in energy efficiency, water conservation, waste management and low-impact living. Says Rogers, with idealism undaunted by the task ahead: "We want it to be the most ecological city in the world."
[...]
Turning Treasure Island into the archetype of an ideal city—one in which residents want to live, work and play—requires completely re-envisioning how it will be laid out. The single-family homes on cookie-cutter lots will disappear, Rogers explains, and current renters will be able to apply for new multifamily units and residential towers concentrated on the island's south and west edges. Housing density will increase from eight to 75 units per acre, allowing developers to double the amount of land left as open space while accommodating five times as many people.

The sprawling blocks, which now stretch up to 2000 ft. long, will shrink to a pedestrian-friendly 400 ft., and 90 percent of residents will be within a 10-minute walk of downtown. There, they will be able to access stores and services such as a post office and a new ferry terminal that will provide frequent shuttles to San Francisco. Bicycle lanes will connect residents to Yerba Buena Island and the east span of the Bay Bridge.

Similar "new urbanist" principles have been applied to communities across the country, such as Stapleton on the site of Denver's old airport. But Treasure Island's planners take the ideas one step further. After analyzing weather patterns, for example, they decided to reorient street grids 35 degrees west of due south to optimize solar exposure and protection from the wind. Not only will the diagonal alignment make outdoor spaces more comfortable throughout the year, it will save energy on heating, cooling and lighting structures.

All the buildings on Treasure Island will meet the gold standard of the U.S. Green Building Council, further reducing energy consumption. In the island's 220 acres of open space, a new, biologically diverse ecosystem—including plants found in coastal prairie and oak woodlands—will help offset the city's greenhouse gas emissions by locking up carbon dioxide. This natural sequestration, together with increased energy efficiency and a decreased reliance on automobiles, will drop per capita carbon emissions 60 percent, from 7740 to 3030 pounds per year.

Chaotic Furrballs

In Chaotic Furrballs, Kevin Meyer compares Italian traffic to lean manufacturing:

So with our [U.S.] "highly disciplined system" we have slugs (batches...) of traffic starting then stopping at the next traffic control, while in Italy it may move a little slower... but it is always moving. Very rarely did I come to a full stop. Those of us in the lean manufacturing would should immediately recognize the consequence of continual versus batch flow... steadier and higher output.

A Tale of Two Town Houses

In A Tale of Two Town Houses, Virginia Postrel explains how real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states:

In 2000, my husband and I moved out of our mid-1970s three-bedroom town house in Los Angeles and into a brand-new three-bedroom town house in Uptown Dallas. At the time, the two were worth about the same, but the Dallas place was 1,000 square feet bigger. We’ve moved back to L.A., and we’re glad we kept our old house. Over the past seven years, its value has roughly doubled. By contrast, we sold our Dallas place for $6,500 less than we paid for it.

It’s not that we bought into a declining Dallas neighborhood: Uptown is one of the hottest in the city, with block upon block of new construction. But the supply of housing in Dallas is elastic. When demand increases, because of growing population or rising incomes, so does the amount of housing; prices stay roughly the same. That’s true not only in the outlying suburbs, but also in old neighborhoods like ours, where dense clusters of town houses and multistory apartment buildings are replacing two-story fourplexes and single-family homes. It’s easy to build new housing in Dallas.

Not so in Los Angeles. There, increased demand generates little new supply. Even within zoning rules, it’s hard to get permission to build. When a local developer bought three small 1920s duplexes on our block, planning to replace them with a big condo building, neighbors campaigned to stop the proj­ect. The city declared the charming but architecturally undistinguished buildings historic landmarks, blocking demolition for a year. The developer gave up, leaving the neighborhood’s landscape — and its housing supply — unchanged. In Los Angeles, when demand for housing increases, prices rise.

Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle — the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It’s easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values — different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.

Magic Highway USA

It's been a while since I last watched Magic Highway USA, a beautiful and optimistic look at the future of travel from 1958.



You have to love the retro-futurism, with its assumption of ever larger public works projects. Why stop at paved highways when we can have illuminated interstate highways with radiant heat to melt away ice? Indeed, let's heat the countryside in case a car passes through.

Some ideas seem both reasonable and wild, like giant VTOL emergency aircraft, which can dash to a crash site and whisk away both injured victims and their damaged vehicles.

Of course, in 1958, the future is atomic. We'll use mobile atomic reactors to melt tunnels through mountains. Eventually we'll drive atomic cars. What could go wrong?

One of the biggest difference in attitude though involves not just an optimistic view of what we will be able to do, but of what we should do.

From 1958, lining a steep mountainside with high-tech highways seemed like a great idea. It's not just a beautiful natural scene; it's a beautiful natural scene with a beautiful high-tech marvel too!

I felt like some kind of Luddite when I got to the end and saw the highway of tomorrow passing right by the sphinx and off toward the pyramids. Of course, that's not too far from what ended up happening, only the intervening countryside is no longer pristine desert.

Guess Who's Building a Green City

Guess Who's Building a Green City — Abu Dhabi:

The whole effort is being dubbed Masdar—"the source" in Arabic—a reference to the sun. The city is also called Masdar and will look like a cross between The Arabian Nights and The Jetsons. It will draw on traditional Arabic architecture, using wind towers to funnel air through the city as natural air conditioning and splashing fountains in courtyards to dampen the dry heat. Like an ancient casbah, the buildings will be huddled close together on narrow streets to reduce demand for cooling power during Abu Dhabi's 120-degree summer days. But Masdar will also incorporate the most advanced technology available for refrigeration and other systems. "We will need the most extreme energy-efficiency standards from the beginning," explains Al Jaber.

The Urban Homestead

The Dervaes family's urban homestead supports four adults, who live and work full time on a 66’ x 132’ city lot (1/5 acre):

The yard has over 350 varieties of edible and useful plants. The homestead's productive 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds (3 tons) of produce annually. This provides fresh vegetables and fruit for the family’s vegetarian diet and a source of income.

The family operates a viable and lucrative home business, Dervaes Gardens, that supplies area restaurants and caterers with salad mix, edible flowers, heirloom variety tomatoes and other in-season vegetables. The income earned from produce sales offsets operating expenses and is invested in appropriate technologies, such as solar panels, energy efficient appliances, and biodiesel processor, to further decrease our homestead’s reliance on the earth’s non-renewable resources.

Over the years, by purchasing energy efficient appliances and using electricity conservatively, the modern homesteaders have cut their energy usage in half. Solar panels have reduced their dependence on electricity by two-thirds and have furthered their goal of energy independence. A solar oven is used to cook food on sunny days. And during the summer of 2005, the family built a cob oven, which is fueled by scraps of wood and twigs to create an energy source for cooking breads, pizzas, desserts, etc.

In 2003, the Dervaeses constructed a biodiesel processor from a discarded hot water heater, which enables them to brew low emissions biodiesel (a renewable, nontoxic, biodegradable replacement for petrol diesel) from used vegetable oil to fuel their diesel Suburban, reducing the vehicle's air toxins by 90%.

Charles Munger on Side-Stepping the Gangs, Pimps, and Dope-Dealers

I've already mentioned that Berkshire Hathaway's Charles Munger gave a speech at UCSB in 2003 that was chock-full of thought-provoking bits. Here's another such bit:

Berkshire had this former savings and loan company, and it had made this loan on a hotel right opposite the Hollywood Park Racetrack. In due time the neighborhood changed and it was full of gangs, pimps, and dope dealers. They tore copper pipe out of the wall for dope fixes, and there were people hanging around the hotel with guns, and nobody would come. We foreclosed on it two or three times, and the loan value went down to nothing. We seemed to have an insolvable economic problem — a microeconomic problem.

Now we could have gone to McKinsey, or maybe a bunch of professors from Harvard, and we would have gotten a report about 10 inches thick about the ways we could approach this failing hotel in this terrible neighborhood. But instead, we put a sign on the property that said: “For sale or rent.” And in came, in response to that sign, a man who said, “I’ll spend $200,000 fixing up your hotel, and buy it at a high price on credit, if you can get zoning so I can turn the parking lot into a putting green.” “You’ve got to have a parking lot in a hotel,” we said. “What do you have in mind?” He said. “No, my business is flying seniors in from Florida, putting them near the airport, and then letting them go out to Disneyland and various places by bus and coming back. And I don’t care how bad the neighborhood is going to be because my people are self-contained behind walls. All they have to do is get on the bus in the morning and come home in the evening, and they don’t need a parking lot; they need a putting green.” So we made the deal with the guy. The whole thing worked beautifully, and the loan got paid off, and it all worked out.

Geothermal Heat Pumps Make Sense for Homeowners

Geothermal Heat Pumps Make Sense for Homeowners:

On average, a geothermal heat pump system costs about $2,500 per ton of capacity, or roughly $7,500 for a 3-ton unit (typical residential size). In comparison, other systems would cost about $4,000 with air conditioning. When included in the mortgage, the homeowner has a positive cash flow from the beginning. For example, say that the extra $3,500 will add $30 per month to each mortgage payment. But the energy cost savings will easily exceed that added mortgage amount over the course of each year. On a retrofit, the GHP’s high efficiency typically means much lower utility bills, allowing the investment to be recouped in two to ten years.

One SimCity Per Child

One SimCity Per Child?

"Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name "Micropolis", which was SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create 'frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.' The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC's Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."

In SimCity, Carbon Counts

In SimCity, Carbon Counts:

Electronic Arts' SimCity is one of the best-selling PC games of all time. Its obsessively detailed model of how urban centers evolve is so realistic that, along the way, it has become a teaching tool for urban planners. The latest version, SimCity Societies, due out on Nov. 15 for $49.95, includes global warming among the variables it uses to guide how players plan and manage cities.

For power, a player can opt for clean windmills or solar, which cost more and have limited output. Or they can go for coal plants, which are cheaper to build but pollute heavily and lower residents' happiness. Having more cars and fewer buses boosts emissions, too.

Over time, rising CO₂ levels can trigger big catastrophes, such as droughts or heat waves, as well as subtler shifts like increasing rates of illness.

None of that is too terribly different from older versions of the game, but this is a new twist:

Real-world oil giant BP sponsored the game's energy systems. So when players build a renewable energy facility, these sport BP's yellow-green sunflower logo. Coal plants do not.

MIT sues Gehry, renowned architect of daring $300m Stata Center

MIT sues Gehry, renowned architect of daring $300m Stata Center:

The suit says that MIT paid Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners $15 million to design the Stata Center, which was hailed by critics as innovative and eye-catching with its unconventional walls and radical angles. But soon after its completion in spring 2004, the center's outdoor amphitheater began to crack due to drainage problems, the suit says. Snow and ice cascaded dangerously from window boxes and other projecting roof areas, blocking emergency exits and damaging other parts of the building, according to the suit. Mold grew on the center's brick exterior, the suit says, and there were persistent leaks throughout the building.

The suit says it cost MIT more than $1.5 million to hire another company to rebuild the amphitheater, with new bricks, seats, and a new drainage system.

Ah, modern architecture!

Chesterton on Living in a Small Community

This quote from Chesterton on Living in a Small Community seems increasingly relevant in our modern world of niche Net communities:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell.

When Downtown Is in the Suburbs

Suburban malls were designed to mimic traditional downtown shopping districts — but with air conditioning. Now they're taking the next step, becoming downtown in the suburbs:

On the site of the factory and a former Filene’s department store, once part of Natick Mall, 215 condominiums are under construction and set to be completed next year. Known as Nouvelle at Natick, they are believed to be the first built within an older enclosed shopping mall, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers; the original Natick Mall was built in 1965, then razed and rebuilt in 1994.

The transformation of the mall is less revolutionary than evolutionary. Almost no one builds malls anymore, or even calls them that. Only one enclosed shopping mall was built in 2006, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, and none are planned for this year. Many old malls, meanwhile, have added hotels, or residential developments have sprung up around them.

But General Growth Properties, a mall developer based in Chicago, believes the old paradigm for a mall can be transformed further. Applying the lifestyle-center model, where upscale retailers, sit-down restaurants and condos are built around what looks like a city street, General Growth Properties has embarked on a $370 million Natick Mall expansion and makeover.

Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Betsey Johnson are among several retailers that have set up shop there, along with restaurants like Prime Blue and Sel de la Terre, according to John Bucksbaum, the chief executive of General Growth.

Using the old mall as a place to redevelop has its advantages. “Malls were always placed at highway interchanges,” said Thomas J. D’Alesandro IV, a senior vice president of General Growth. “They’re the best regional transportation access of anything in the suburbs.”

What was once a lonely regional mall is now prime real estate. “The mall is the modern town square in most of America,” said Joel Kotkin, the author of “The City: A Global History” (Modern Library, 2006) and a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University.

But without enough 120-acre parcels to endlessly create lifestyle centers, and limited developable land left around existing malls, the only choices for developers of older malls are to reinvent them or raze them altogether.

The Triumph of Jane Jacobs

Francis Morrone looks at The Triumph of Jane Jacobs, not just her works, but the phenomenon surrounding them:

Troll the Internet for interviews with Jacobs (you'll find several) and you can't help being struck by the subtle ways she alters her apparent message for her audience. How else to explain why such diverse people and groups have claimed her for their own? Two of her books appear on the National Review's list of the 100 most important books of the 20th century. Yet she's hailed by *Tikkun,* a Jewish magazine. James Howard Kunstler, who believes our economy shall soon implode as a result of our being on the downward slope of "peak oil," reveres Jacobs; so does Virginia Postrel of "Dynamism" fame, who believes in the extraordinary capacities of technology and human ingenuity to make the future ever a better and a brighter place. Rod Dreher, a counter-culturally cultural-conservative Christian writer who wrote the book "Crunchy Cons," about "Birkenstock-wearing Burkeans," cites Jacobs as a principal influence, along with the agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry, whom Jacobs chastised in her last and perhaps most profound book, "Dark Age Ahead." When Jacobs's book "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" came out in 1984, with its blistering critique of transfer payments from rich to poor, the writer Richard Barnett, reviewing the book on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, bizarrely hailed it as a call for full-employment legislation. He so wanted to like the book, to like Mrs. Jacobs, that he heard her say things she did not say. What kind of writer has such an odd impact on her readers? How many books such as "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" come along that so many people think they've read but haven't, have read but misunderstood, or claim they've read though they haven't? How many writers write one big book (in this case, "Death and Life") that makes a huge splash, then follow it up with several books that brilliantly refine its central points, books that not even the writer's putatively most faithful followers have ever even heard of, let alone read?

Light and Crime

Bruce Schneier cites a New Yorker article on light pollution to discuss light and crime:

Much so-called security lighting is designed with little thought for how eyes — or criminals — operate. Marcus Felson, a professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, has concluded that lighting is effective in preventing crime mainly if it enables people to notice criminal activity as it's taking place, and if it doesn't help criminals to see what they're doing. Bright, unshielded floodlights — one of the most common types of outdoor security lighting in the country — often fail on both counts, as do all-night lights installed on isolated structures or on parts of buildings that can't be observed by passersby (such as back doors). A burglar who is forced to use a flashlight, or whose movement triggers a security light controlled by an infrared motion sensor, is much more likely to be spotted than one whose presence is masked by the blinding glare of a poorly placed metal halide 'wall pack.' In the early seventies, the public-school system in San Antonio, Texas, began leaving many of its school buildings, parking lots, and other property dark at night and found that the no-lights policy not only reduced energy costs but also dramatically cut vandalism.

Robot Buses Pull In to San Diego's Fastest Lane

Robot Buses Pull In to San Diego's Fastest Lane:

Over the next three years, workers will carve a narrow lane down the shoulder of the increasingly congested Interstate 805, exclusively for buses and commercial trucks modded with lane-keeping sensors and adaptive cruise control. Neither technology is new, but most automakers tune adaptive cruise control to keep cars farther apart than normal, making traffic worse. In the robot lane, vehicles will be packed like train cars. They'll still have drivers — everyone has to leave the freeway sometime — but they'll be out of the main flow. If the new lanes work, public transportation will move faster, trucks will speed safely along approximately 20 miles of the main US-Mexico shipping corridor (UPS has signed up for the test), and traffic on I-805 will be reduced. "Fixing this problem is going to require some radical thinking," says Jake Peters, founder of transportation startup Swoop Technology, which is designing the system. "And, hey, it could be a way to make a trillion dollars."

Pop-Up Cities

Rapidly growing China is looking to build Pop-Up Cities, "bright green metropolises" that don't make the mistakes of existing cities:

These new megacities could evolve into sprawling, polluting megaslums. Or they could define a new species of world city. Unlike New York or London, they are blank slates — less affluent, perhaps, but also free from legacy designs and technologies tailored to the world of the 19th and 20th centuries. That is a huge advantage. It took Boston 20 years and more than $14 billion just to reroute a freeway underground. New York can hardly install a second network of water pipes. Most of Los Angeles is too spread out for fast public transit or combined heat and power plants. And because these cities are so isolated from agricultural land, most of the food that locals eat gets shipped hundreds of miles. "Shanghai today is making 90 percent of the mistakes that American cities made," Burdett argues — spreading out, building up single-family homes, replacing naturally mixed-use neighborhoods with isolated zones for living, shopping, and working, and connecting it all with car travel. But fixing these problems is still possible.

Dongtan, outside of Shanghai, is meant to be such a green city:

Their first decision was big. Dongtan needed more people. Way more. Shanghai's planning bureau figured 50,000 people should live on the site — they assumed a green island should not be crowded — and the other international architects had agreed, drafting Dongtan as an American-style suburb with low-rise condos scattered across the plot and lots of lawns and parks in between. "It's all very nice to have little houses in a green field," Gutierrez says. But that would be an environmental disaster. If neighborhoods are spread out, then people need cars to get around. If population is low, then public transportation is a money loser.

But how many more people? Double? Triple? The team found research on energy consumption in cities around the world, plotted on a curve according to population density. Up to about 50 residents per acre, roughly equivalent to Stockholm or Copenhagen, per capita energy use falls fast. People walk and bike more, public transit makes economic sense, and there are ways to make heating and cooling more efficient. But then the curve flattens out. Pack in 120 people per acre, like Singapore, or 300 people, like Hong Kong, and the energy savings are negligible. Dongtan, the team decided, should try to hit that sweet spot around Stockholm.

Next, they had to figure out how high to build. A density rate of 50 people per acre could mean a lot of low buildings, or a handful of skyscrapers, or something in between. Here, the land made the decision for them. Dongtan's soil is squishy. Any building taller than about eight stories would need expensive work at the foundation to keep it upright. To give the place some variety and open up paths for summer wind and natural light, they settled on a range of four to eight stories across the city. Then, using CAD software, they started dropping blocks of buildings on the site and counting heads.

The results were startling. They could bump up Dongtan's population 10 times, to 500,000, and still build on a smaller share of the site than any of the other planners had suggested, leaving 65 percent of the land open for farms, parks, and wildlife habitat. A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor.

That was the easy part. From there they needed to design ways to make efficient use of resources:

A power scheme started to take shape. Dongtan's plant would burn plant matter to drive a steam turbine and generate electricity. What to burn, though? They could have planted miscanthus, a tall, feathery grass. It sprouts fast and burns clean. But if Arup planted miscanthus fields, it would sacrifice lots of land to a single purpose. Then it struck them: rice husks. China already grows mountains of rice, and farmers just trash the husks. Dongtan could take a useless byproduct and use it to light the city.

Instead of building the plant far away and out of sight, Arup would put it up near the city center, capture waste heat, and pipe it throughout the town. With good insulation and smart design, the plant could heat and cool every building in Dongtan. "We can get something like 80 percent efficiency in our fuel conversion," says Chris Twinn, the Dongtan team's energy chief. "The Prius is probably only 20 percent efficient. The rest is wasted. Why are we satisfied with that?"

I'm not sure how burning rice husks for energy will work out, but piping heat makes good sense in a dense, urban environment — as long as you maintain the pipes.

Some of the additional ideas seem perfectly reasonable; some do not:

Arup investigated hollowing out the hills at the edge of the city and installing underground "plant factories" — stacked trays of organic crops, growing under solar-powered LEDs, that seem to yield as much as six times more produce per acre than conventional farming. Arup would run twin water networks throughout the city: one that supplies drinking water to kitchens and another that supplies treated waste water for toilet flushing and farm irrigation. Trucks delivering goods from across China would park at consolidation warehouses on the edge of the city, then load up shared, zero- emission delivery trucks to reduce traffic and save gas. Waste would be either recycled or gasified for energy, and the captured heat would be converted into more power; no more than 10 percent of the city's trash would be permitted to end up as landfill. To invite in cooling summer breezes, block winter winds, and reduce demand for heat and air-conditioning, they would position trees strategically and persuade the client to twist the city grid slightly off a traditional north-south axis (a feng shui idea that has become an almost inviolable rule of Chinese city planning).

I'd love to see an analysis of the costs and benefits of some of these ideas.

Zipcar

Zipcar offers an interesting service:

In the fall of 1999, our two Zipcar founders were sitting in a café, excited about a concept they had seen in Berlin while on vacation. Cars were parked around the city for members to drive by the hour instead of owning their own vehicles. They had a Eureka! moment (or maybe it was more like, "Duh! What an obvious idea.") They put an American spin on it — outfitting the cars with wireless technology, creating a hassle-free reservation system and strategically placing the cars around key cities and neighborhoods. In June of 2000 the first Zipcars were on the road. The masses could now drive cars by the hour or day — on their terms.

They claim that 40% of their members decide against purchasing a car or end up selling their car, and that each Zipcar replaces over 20 privately-owned vehicles.

I have to wonder how a Zipcar gets treated by its drivers...

A Memphis Presence and Logistics Advantage

Even small service firms are establishing a A Memphis Presence and Logistics Advantage:

Kurtzman Carson Consultants LLC, an administrative-support service company in the legal and financial industry, has offices in Los Angeles, New York and, now, Memphis, Tenn.

Why Memphis?

KCC's Memphis office, which opened in August, is located within six miles of the Express Super Hub, FedEx Corp.'s overnight air-cargo facility. That proximity, and the company's 11:40 p.m. final FedEx package pickup, gives KCC's law-firm clients more time to send documents by email for printing and shipping. Previously, clients had to submit mailings by about 9 p.m. on the East and West coasts, respectively, to make next-day delivery.

The View From Ecotopia

Joseph White shares The View From Ecotopia, or Portland, Oregon:

Portland is a green place, surrounded by temperate, Douglas fir rainforests and dotted with lush gardens. Portland is also Green in the political sense, at least, more so than Detroit. Years ago, Portland's political leaders blocked construction of a freeway through the heart of downtown, and took other measures designed to limit suburban sprawl and put the automobile in its place as a servant rather than a master. In 1993, Portland was the first American city to craft a global-warming action plan, Mayor Tom Potter recently told a congressional committee. Mayor Potter said that per capita greenhouse gas emissions have dropped, and that since 1990, Portland's local greenhouse gas emissions are down 1%.

Portland isn't the Garden of Eden. I spent a half hour or so stuck in rush hour traffic, negotiating my way through a maze of intersecting highways where the freeways that ring Portland's downtown interconnect. Portland's streets have plenty of cars, and despite the complex land-use rules the region adopted to limit sprawl, there seemed to be no shortage of big-box stores and shopping centers along Highway 26 west of town. From the local press, it's clear there's tension between Portlanders who fit the city's Green image and those who want more freedom to do what they want with their property, including develop parking lots or office complexes.

Still, Portlanders who so choose can spend more of their time outside the confines of a car than I can as a resident of Metro Detroit. The city has a light-rail system that connects various neighborhoods to downtown offices and to the airport. At quitting time on a weekday, the MAX light rail connecting downtown to the neighborhoods west of town was full. The system has reported rising ridership. That said, the main highways are still jammed during rush hours. Portland has a long way to go to get the bulk of commuters to give up that "alone-time" in the car.

Portland's efforts to limit sprawl have helped to sustain the value of properties in the city's old neighborhoods, which in turn has encouraged people to renovate older homes and apartments within walking or biking distance of downtown businesses. To a tourist from Detroit, Portland feels like a super-sized college town, not a city as I know it. But guess what? Even Detroit is trying to revive the "walk to work" lifestyle, encouraging conversion of abandoned downtown buildings into loft apartments. Just last week, General Motors entered a partnership to develop residences along the city's riverfront, within walking distance of GM's headquarters.

In Suburbia, the nation where so many Americans live, homes and businesses are usually segregated. That segregation is viewed as desirable, even though it can turn a routine shopping trip into a 20-minute drive. The Ecotopian urbanite, by contrast, accepts that within walking distance of home there could be: A world-class bookstore, three coffee shops, a liquor mart, a grocery store, an art gallery, a service station, a chummy neighborhood restaurant, a concert hall, a designer furniture outlet and a sex-toy shop. That's a sample of what I found walking around my downtown hotel. The answer to your next question is: Because the shop had clever, PG-rated window displays facing the street, just like an old fashioned department store.

In this Ecotopian lifestyle, the car becomes an occasional means of escape to adventure, not a daily commuting appliance. I found my way, by rented Subaru Legacy sedan, to a walk on the beach, a roadside record store housed in a barn packed floor to ceiling with vinyl LPs and Elvis memorabilia, and a stand that sold elk jerky for $10 a package. I probably burned $20 or so of gas on this semi-authorized fact-finding mission for a new travel column for the Blackberry set, "Out of Office Assistant," that I intend to pitch to my editors some day.

Amsterdam Bicycles

An American tourist named Brian took 82 pictures of Amsterdam Bicycles over the course of 73 minutes and discovered some startling differences between Dutch bicyclists and Americans — who don't bicycle as a practical form of transportation:

1. Formally Dressed Bicyclists
2. Multiple Riders on One Bike
3. No Helmets EVER
4. Dogs on Bikes
5. Human Powered Generator (Dynamo) Bicycle Lights
6. Spectacular Gigantic Unbreakable Security Chains
7. And More...

SmartCode

The SmartCode is an attempt to provide a zoning code compatible with New Urbanism or Traditional Neighborhood Development:

The Traditional Neighborhood Developm