dogtown commons

If you need an example of the mindset that public transportation supporters are up against, all you have to do is look at today’s San Francisco Chronicle article on parking around city schools. The gist of the story is that teachers and school staff around many SF schools park in public spots on streets near the school, and since most of those parking spaces are in one-hour residential-parking zones, they end up running out to their cars between every class, moving their cars to new spots, and then running back in time for the next class. Many end up getting tickets because they don’t move their cars in time.

Everyone seems to recognize that this is completely insane, yet the only solution anyone takes seriously is increasing the availability of parking, by distributing more city permits which allow teachers to park all day in residential zones for a small annual fee. Public transportation is mentioned only once in the article, in this paragraph reproduced in its entirety:

City and school officials encourage everyone to take public transportation, walk, ride a bike or carpool whenever possible. Teachers said that such options are often impossible or inconvenient with bags full of lesson plans, books, students’ homework and art supplies.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. It might shock the Chronicle reporter to hear this, but there are many teachers in cities all over the country — and in San Francisco — who get to work just fine without cars, lesson plans and all. And I would bet that a lot of the students in these San Francisco schools also get to school just fine without cars, often carrying more than a fifth of their body weight in textbooks on their back. Yet in two short sentences, the notion of mass transit, walking, or bicycling is dismissed as “often impossible or inconvenient” for teachers.

To get an idea of what lengths people will go to in order to avoid “inconvenient” public transit, here is one choice bit from the article:

On a recent morning, Buena Vista school secretary Judy Diaz abandoned the phones and the photocopier to run out to her van - again.

She stopped in her tracks just outside the building’s front doors.

“Where did I park?” she mumbled to herself before seeing the vehicle up the hill.

She then drove down up and down side streets where there are a limited number of all-day spots, but every one was taken. Some teachers arrive by 6:45 a.m. to get one of those spots before they fill even though classes start at 9:30 a.m.

Diaz grudgingly pulled into another one-hour space around the corner and checked the time.

Think about that: Some teachers arrive by 6:45 a.m. to get one of those spots before they fill even though classes start at 9:30 a.m. Yet these same teachers think that carrying homework and lesson plans on a bus or a bike would be too inconvenient? And Judy Diaz (who as a secretary probably doesn’t need to schlep lesson plans, art supplies, or homework to work with her) would rather run to her van and search in vain for a better parking spot several times a day, instead of finding an alternative to driving?

I don’t mean to pick on the teachers or other staff in San Francisco schools. They are surely no sillier than anyone else when it comes to transportation alternatives, and that is the most depressing aspect of this. No one — not the teachers, not the reporter who wrote the article, and not the city officials quoted in the article — seems to be able to break out of the mindset which assumes that the only possible solution is to increase the availability of parking, rather than to reduce the need for it.

This lack of imagination about transit options actually manages to take an advantage of urban life and twist it into something negative. For example:

School board members admitted this is a long-standing problem with no easy solution.

“In a neighborhood with crowded parking, we can’t expect them to put the teachers’ interests above all others,” said board member Jill Wynns. “This is just an ongoing problem of an urban school district. It’s a conundrum.”

This is exactly backwards. It is precisely in urban school districts where parking should be less of a problem, because unlike in suburban or rural areas, people in urban districts have access to buses and trains, or may be able to live close enough to walk or bike to work. One task that proponents of mass transit must work on is to reframe discussions over transportation, so that urban density is seen as an opportunity to eschew use of cars, rather than a problem of where to park them. The lack of vision shown by every single person involved in this Chronicle story demonstrates just how tough that task will be. If these teachers in San Fransisco can’t comprehend the possibility of getting to work without cars — and the benefits, personal and global, that would ensue — then the odds of getting people in most other parts of the country to leave their cars behind seem long indeed.

During all the rain we had in January, many people consoled themselves with the thought that California needs this rain and snow to fill our reservoirs. And given how low the water level in those reservoirs had been, the rain was indeed a blessing.

As with so many things, though, it all comes down to timing. Ideally, rain in the winter keeps the reservoirs in good shape through the spring, then snowmelt in the spring replenishes the reservoirs to get us through the summer and fall until the rains begin again. This requires rain at the right time, then snowmelt at the right time, or else you can end up with too much water in winter and spring or too little water in summer and fall.

A new study, described in Friday’s Los Angeles Times, has found that we have a timing problem — the balancing act we depend on to keep our water supply at manageable levels is no longer working out as well as it did when those reservoirs were built. The problem is that temperatures are rising, so snow is melting earlier than it used to. Instead of replenishing the reservoirs during late spring as mountain snow slowly melts, that water is flowing out of the mountains earlier, arriving in reservoirs when they are still flush with winter rain. As the Times story puts it:

But in California, reservoirs already operate on a delicate balance.

They are kept well below capacity during the winter as protection against flooding. After the rainy season, they are filled with the spring snowmelt, storing up water to be released during the dry summer months.

Heavier winter rains and earlier snowmelt are likely to overwhelm reservoirs, forcing an early release of water. That would leave too little water for the summer.

“The handwriting is on the wall,” said lead author Tim Barnett, a marine geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “Mother nature is going to stop being our water banker.”

Sometimes I wonder why I even read the news. Every day I discover a brand new way to worry about the future…

I don’t throw the word “evil” around lightly, but I think it may be the only word that conveys the enormity of the meat industry’s sins. While the videos secretly taken by the Humane Society and first written about in yesterday’s Washington Post provide particularly heinous and nauseating footage, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that even factory farms and slaughterhouses which obey the law are evil — the animals live unspeakably miserable lives, the meat produced by industrial farming is notably less healthy to consumers than meat produced humanely and naturally, and the industry is an ecological and economic disaster in all sorts of other ways.

The Los Angeles Times, in its Friday article on the Humane Society’s slaughterhouse expose, included this tidbit:

the society said it had turned over the results of its investigation to the “appropriate California law enforcement officials.” Local authorities, the society said, had asked for “extra time” before the information became public.

I hope reporters follow up on that. Which law enforcement agency was informed, and why did the state allow this slaughterhouse to continue going about its business while the authorities asked for “extra time” before the information became public? It sounds like not only was USDA inspection lax, but someone in a California law enforcement agency actually knew that a major public health risk was occurring, and did nothing.

As for the more general problems with the industry, I encourage people to read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, or at least to read his long 2002 article on beef in the New York Times Magazine (The NYTimes also had an article last Sunday on the energy and environmental problems with our meat-heavy diet). Pollan, like Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation fame, is still not a vegetarian. But Pollan took a closer look at the meat industry than most people would ever want to, and he came away wondering if he could ever eat beef again. He makes the case — persuasively — that there is a world of difference between eating animals raised on corn, hormones, steroids and antibiotics in an industrial feedlot and eating animals raised in a natural and sustainable manner with the dignity and respect befitting a sentient creature.

How much would I have to pay you to get you to push a Honda Civic about 30 miles on a flat surface?

Since pushing a small sedan is exhausting work, and it would take all day (at least!), I’m guessing that I would have to pay you more than 4 bucks to push the car a mile, never mind 30 miles. I think I’d be really lucky to find someone willing to push a Honda Civic 30 miles for 50 bucks, and if I had to pay minimum wage, it would surely cost more than that.

This thought experiment illustrates (I hope) just how energy-rich petroleum is, and how inexpensive. Just think — for a bit over $3 at street corners all over America, you can buy a gallon of fuel that will easily accomplish in half an hour what it would take a hard-working human being all day to do. It’s no wonder we’re addicted to fossil fuels, given how much energy they manage to store in such small packages. I don’t have any grand point here, but it’s something to think about next time someone says that gas is really expensive. You get a lot of bang for your buck even at 3 or 4 bucks a gallon. And when you think about it that way, it’s no longer a surprise that we are having trouble finding energy sources to replace hydrocarbons like oil — there are very few things, at least on this planet, that can pack as much punch into such a small, portable package.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Chinese officials are expected to cut Beijing’s automobile traffic in half during the summer Olympic Games, as part of their strategy to reduce the pollution that pervades the city’s air. (A separate article describes plans by athletes and their coaches to cope with the pollution, including doing their preparatory training outside the area and possibly even wearing masks during competitions.) Beijing did a test of this anti-smog tactic last August, when cars with license plates ending in odd and even numbers were only allowed to be driven on alternating days. Traffic delays were dramatically reduced, but it is not clear that there was much short-term effect on pollution levels.

The Beijing plan got me daydreaming earlier today about what would happen if for some bizarre political or environmental reason, all motorized vehicles were suddenly removed from roadways forever. (Yes, I know this is an absurd fantasy, and no, I am not proposing this as a goal.) What would become of our urban geography, if all those millions of acres of pavement were suddenly available for carfree use?

(An empty Bay Bridge shown during the closure of labor day weekend 2007. Flickr photo by The Artist™ used under a creative commons license.)

One model for imagining new uses for old spaces is the conversion of abandoned rail lines. Nationwide rail-to-trail conversions like the Iron Horse trail in Contra Costa county are one example, but more exciting, at least to me, is the high line project in New York. The high line is an abandoned elevated rail line that snakes for well over a mile down the far West side of Manhattan, where it used to bring freight to and from the area’s warehouses and factories. It marches unperturbed over busy surface streets and passes right through several buildings as it makes its way through 25 or so blocks of the city.

(The high line shown passing through a former Nabisco factory — now the gourmet Chelsea Market complex — at West 16th Street and 10th Avenue. Flickr photo by Zantony used under a creative commons license.)

(more…)

Depressing:

“If I’m driving all over the place, I’m going to buy the biggest car I can get,” said Senate minority leader Dick Ackerman, R-Tustin, as he drove out of Anaheim in “the gas guzzler” — a 2005 Ford Explorer that gets 16 mpg.

“Anybody can pick whatever car they want. I pay for part of this,” he said

So he believes that the more miles someone travels, the more justified they are in driving a large SUV that gets terrible gas mileage. And by extension, I suppose that means we should leave relatively high-MPG cars like hybrids and Toyota Corollas and Ford Focuses to people who don’t drive them very much. Makes a lot of sense! (At least, it would make a lot of sense if our goal was to maximize our petroleum consumption and our auto emissions, instead of minimizing them.)

But of course that’s not exactly what he was trying to say. What he really meant was that he spends a lot of time on the road, therefore he wants to spend that time in a commodious SUV instead of a perfectly functional but slightly less spacious midsize sedan or smaller SUV. That is at least a comprehensible rationale, but the obvious unspoken implication is that his personal comfort is the only factor he considers when he chooses a vehicle, because he don’t really care about our reliance on oil from the Middle East and Venezuela, and he doesn’t care about reducing the pollution and greenhouse gases that he emits when he drives “all over the place.”

His second sentence drives the point home. His logic seems to be that since he pays for “part of” his SUV, he has no responsibility to consider anything except his own comfort. This is like someone changing the oil in their car, then dumping the used oil into the nearest public park, and justifying it by saying “I paid for this motor oil, therefore all I need to consider is what is easiest for me, not whether my waste oil is polluting the park or draining into the bay.” Just because he pays for “part of it” doesn’t mean that he has no responsibility for the long-term consequences of his decision.

What is depressing is not just that one state Senator doesn’t “get it” — no surprise there at all. What is so depressing is that his me-first-and-me-only mindset is probably representative of most of his constituents, and perhaps even most Californians. And what is really depressing is that his attitude illustrates a major problem we have: The people most likely to take action to reduce oil consumption and tailpipe emissions are generally the people who are already causing the least damage, and the people least likely to take action are also the people who are causing the most damage, by driving less fuel-efficient vehicles and driving them more often.

In other words, the people choosing to commute by BART, bus or bicycle, or leaving their cars in the garage, or switching to hybrids, tend to be people who already spent less time in their cars, or who were already driving relatively fuel-efficient small sedans. This isn’t to say that it’s not helpful for these people to drive fewer miles and drive more fuel-efficient cars, but you don’t gain as much by switching from a Corolla to a Prius — even if the Prius gets 20 MPG more — as you would gain by convincing a 16-MPG SUV driver to switch to a 26-MPG midsize sedan. Even though the MPG differential between the Corolla and the Prius is twice as large as the MPG differential between the SUV and the mid-size sedan, when you calculate the actual amount of fuel saved, you gain more by the switch from a gas-guzzling truck to an average-MPG sedan. This is a bit counterintuitive, but when you do the math, it is not even close.

Where does this leave us, aside from being more depressed than we already were about the possibility of reducing our dependence on oil and our auto emissions? Well, for me it drives home the need for mandated action on fuel-efficiency, rather than relying on purely market-based solutions and voluntarily conservation to do the trick. In general, I favor policies that give people market-based incentives to change their behavior, rather than regulations that limit choice or artificially manipulate prices. Whenever possible, I would like to see policies that encourage housing density and carfree commuting, such as reforming the zoning and approval processes in order to encourage development closer to where most people work, even if a particular project isn’t perfect in everyone’s eyes (hello, Oak to Ninth!) or even if some neighbors have aesthetic issues with a project (hello, Emerald Views!).

But markets have limitations. In my opinion, one major limitation is that markets are lousy at factoring long-term costs into near-term prices, so even though almost everyone agrees that we are likely to face energy shortages and significant climate-related problems in the next 100 years, the price of oil reflects mostly nearer-term factors such as whether Saudi Arabia will increase production in the coming year, or how much petroleum central Asia will yield in the next decade. Like it or not, I think our policy-makers need to be more foresighted than the commodities markets about what the actual long-term costs of our current lifestyle is.

It’s important to face facts: No matter how much we encourage housing density in urban areas, or increase funding for mass transit, or raise consciousness about the adverse ramifications of oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, some people will still not be willing to sacrifice their “comfortable” SUV’s no matter how high gas prices get. So even if we could convince everyone within walking distance of a bus stop to give up their cars, it probably wouldn’t make an enormous difference unless we could also get drivers of incredibly-gas-guzzling vehicles to switch to to somewhat-less-gas-guzzling vehicles. That’s just not going to happen voluntarily, so I don’t see any choice but to pursue even more draconian fuel-efficiency mandates even stricter than those that California is already fighting with Washington to get implemented.

The Los Angeles Times had an article today that may be a harbinger of things to come, as California confronts the problems posed by a burgeoning population and a shrinking water supply. The headline is “Water laws may throttle growth” and this is how it begins:

The planned distribution center for the footwear firm Skechers USA would rise on 1.7 million square feet in the Inland Empire, making it one of the largest warehouses in the United States. It would anchor a new community called Rancho Belago, a variation of the Italian for “beautiful lake,” after nearby Lake Perris reservoir.

Now, in a sign of growing water anxieties, the Skechers warehouse and six other large projects in western Riverside County are on hold until March or later because the local water agency could not promise to deliver water to serve them.

The dilemma shows what can happen when construction and global trade, key drivers of the regional economy, are reined in by a potential lack of water.

“Just looking at the raw numbers, we kept coming up short,” said David J. Slawson, president of the board of directors of the Perris-based Eastern Municipal Water District, one of the largest districts in the state.

Slawson explains that his own livelihood as a land surveyor depends on growth, that no one on the board wants to hobble the economy. Still, he said, the restriction is “something we feel is necessary until we have some better numbers and we see some action statewide.”

The District’s decision was based on two laws passed in 2001 which require local agencies to assess future water needs when they are considering large development projects. As anyone who has seen Chinatown or read Cadillac Desert knows well, struggles over water resources are nothing new to California, and there’s reason to think that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Given the importance of water to the state’s future, it’s good to see the state’s biggest newspaper addressing the practical local consequences that result from limited statewide water supplies. However, the LA Times article seems strangely focused on the narrow matter of how the 2001 laws may “hobble” and “throttle” the region’s economy, rather than the larger questions of what kind of growth is feasible given the looming water crisis, with minimal economic damage. Call me crazy, or call me an urban snob, but I have a hunch that building thousands more green-lawned, swimming-pooled exurban homes in a desert may not be the best use of the state’s limited water.

While the reporter does explain the logic behind the two statutes, and does a service by publicizing the issue, much of the article is written as if laws and court rulings were to blame, rather than the lack of water. That unfortunate headline, “Water laws may throttle growth,” is symptomatic of the tone taken in much of the article — as if there would be no problem with millions of people moving to parched areas if only those pesky lawmakers would get out of the way.

Plenty has been written recently about coming water shortages, including a long New York Times Magazine cover story in October and books such as Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry and Ken Midkiff’s Not a Drop to Drink. Unfortunately, as with most issues, people will not pay attention until it starts affecting them and their neighbors. Like most Americans, I take the water coming out of my tap for granted, and I take the relatively inexpensive fresh produce at local markets for granted, but sometime soon fresh water may be a luxury here as it currently is in many other parts of the world. The LA Times had a perfect occasion to make the connections between the big picture and the local angle, and I wish the article had more deeply explored how California should plan for a future in which more and more people will share less and less water.

Via BLDGBLOG come these whimsical visions of a future San Francisco utopia — at least for those who prefer farming over football. The posters are displayed on kiosks along Market Street as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street program.

The full series of six posters, along with some photos of them in place on Market Street, can be found at Steve Lambert’s Flickr set or at his own website.

Lambert and co-creator Packard Jennings were also the people behind the Bus Stop Ad Bench Project in Oakland in early 2006, which I don’t remember noticing at the time. I generally prefer the posters, although I do like the “you don’t need it” bench ad, shown here on Grand Avenue near the corner of Telegraph. (I wonder how Ken Nwokedi felt about having his ad subverted by the neighboring bench.)

For those who are keeping score at home:

Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica
Sheets Melting in an Area Once Thought to Be Unaffected by Global Warming

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer

Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.

While the overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 percent of Earth’s ice, and until now, large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts out toward the tip of South America. In addition, researchers found that the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past 10 years — as it has on most glaciers and ice sheets around the world.

“Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly, and each year it’s losing more,” said Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

More from the Washington Post here.

The photo above, by Josh Landis of the National Science Foundation, shows an enormous iceberg that broke off from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000. Larger than Rhode Island and Delaware put together at over 11,000 square kilometers, Iceberg B-15 was the largest iceberg ever recorded.

China, like several Bay Area cities, has declared war on plastic bags. The campaign is described as follows on the government’s English-language website:

In a circular posted on the central government’s Web site (www.gov.cn) on Tuesday, the General Office of the State Council ordered a ban on the production, sale and use of ultra-thin bags (defined as less than 0.025 mm thick) as of June 1. Further, supermarkets and shops will be banned from giving free plastic bags to customers as of that date….

…Meanwhile, ultra-thin plastic bags are banned in passenger trains, vessels, buses, planes, stations, airports and scenic spots. Relevant supervisors must make sure their underlings would not offer such bags.

I hate to be so cynical (really, I do!), and I don’t mean to dismiss the problems caused by plastic bags, but this may just be the latest publicity effort by China to improve its environmental reputation in advance of the summer Olympic games in Beijing. In the photo below, by Flickrer rytc, the new Olympic stadium might look to coastal Californians as if it is shrouded in a familiar fog, but in fact the stadium is obscured by a miasma of “thick smelly smog”:

People are raising serious questions about whether athletes will be able to compete safely in air as polluted as Beijing’s. Chinese officials reportedly plan to take drastic measures to clean up the air by summer, including closing factories and limiting car use in Beijing, but it’s not clear that there is enough time to fundamentally change the city’s air quality. Chinese officials take pride in the number of “blue-sky days” that Beijing now has, but one recent visitor describes what it was like to go for a brisk run through Beijing even on a day when the air appeared to be clear of smog:

Well, apparently poor air quality doesn’t begin to engulf your lungs until they are stressed. I discovered this about a half mile into the run along this crowded six lane boulevard while jogging in the sparsly populated biking lane. The run came to its first grinding hault when a bus accelerated in front of me and I literally stopped to gag. Despite the move toward more restrictive auto emissions, at least half the cars on the road appear to have been built before the advent of the catalytic converter…

Nonetheless, after my first bus encounter I picked myself up and pressed on, making good time (6:55 to 7-minute pace) past the Forbidden City and across Tiennamen Square as Mao smiled down. Yet with each passing step it became more painfully obvious that the air had overtaken my lungs. For perspective, it was like a having a large man press against my chest and every attempt to gasp for more air only made him heavier.

It’s encouraging that China is taking its environmental problems more seriously, even if the government is motivated as much by a desire to host “Green Games” as to protect the health of its own citizens and the world’s climate. The problem with being motivated by Olympics-related scrutiny, however, is that it makes the efforts less likely to continue after the world’s athletes and journalists leave China. Permanent residents of Beijing, not to mention all the future residents of a world altered by manmade climate change, don’t have the luxury of packing their bags and moving to cleaner air after all the medals have been awarded.

(For a thorough report on Beijing’s efforts to clean up the air in time for the Olympics, see this New York Times article, part of an ongoing series on China’s pollution problem.)