Living car free 26 February 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Live car free, Mass transit, Sustainable living.add a comment
Assuming I’ve made it to New York for the IAM Encounter conference by now, I’ve flown, taken the bus into the city and then a train (subway) to the apartment I’m calling my temporary home. All of this after being dropped off at the airport by my wife — at an ungodly hour of the morning, sorry dear — in our car.
Earlier this week TechCrunch posted a letter from Todd Dagres,
Founder and General Partner of Spark Capital, to the President. From the letter:
It’s time to face the truth: The people running the US auto companies are officious bumblers, the products stink, and the unions are a parasitic drain on the business. And yet the Government seems content to throw billions of dollars at the problem.
He goes on to suggest President Obama put Steve Jobs in charge of American automakers. Makes sense to me, although it wasn’t well-received by readers who thought Dagres didn’t know the first thing about the automobile industry. True as that may be (or might not; I doubt many of the commenters really know that much about Dagres), one of the earlier comments noted that many CEOs don’t necessarily have extensive knowledge of the products or processes of their company.
Today’s Wordle is from the Carfree USA blog.
The Gilmore Girls and community 9 January 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Community planning, Live car free, Living incarnationally, New Urbanism.4 comments
For Christmas, I gave my wife the first four seasons of Gilmore Girls.
We’ve already seen all of the episodes on DVD, but the wife has talked for a couple years about buying the series for background candy while she’s knitting or crocheting. And, as emasculating as it may be to admit this, I’m O.K. with owning the show too. Really, it’s darn good television.
Over the past week we’ve watched quite a few of the episodes already, as part of a regimen to recuperate from our trip (I’m still not completely over that evil mega-cold). Seeing the shows again reminds me of the incredible sense of community portrayed in Stars Hollow.
Stars Hollow, the small fictional town of 10,000 people 30 minutes outside of Hartford, Connecticut, was loosely based on the community of Washington, Connecticut. The Hollow is a tight little ville centered around a square with a gazebo. Most — if not all — of the businesses in the show are on the town square, and pedestrianism seems to be a way of life for the program’s characters. Lorelai and Rory, the two main characters, are rarely seen driving around town. They walk to Doose’s Market. They walk to the Luke’s diner. They walk to the bookstore to watch old films in the evening.
What an enviable lifestyle in so many ways.
It’s difficult for me to imagine a modern town of 10,000 (roughly the population of Siloam Springs when I moved here almost six years ago) actually functioning like this. Particularly, it’s hard to believe that there would be such a variety of useful businesses on the town square. Wouldn’t there be a Walmart along a highway that runs through town? (There is a Walmart in Stars Hollow per a third season show.) How could Doose’s Market, a tiny little corner grocer, compete with that? (There are ways, I know, for small businesses to survive in the midst of grossly large chains. I’m speaking in stereotypes here, as well as from my own experience.)
However, Stars Hollow apparently depicts a fairly typical small New England community, at least according to a Hartford Courant writer in 2002 (quote from Wikipedia):
Unlike the Hartford depicted on Judging Amy, the Stars Hollow of The Gilmore Girls rings true. The town’s antiques shops, small businesses, schools, government and infrastructure look the part. But where Sherman-Palladino has truly excelled, despite her Clueless origins, is in her drawing of colorful Connecticut characters. The populace of Stars Hollow, from the town busybody to the town troubadour, is familiar to any Nutmegger who ever attended a town meeting.
117,000 employees and 17,000 residents 11 December 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Community planning, Live car free, Living incarnationally, Mass transit, Modern culture, New Urbanism, Sustainable living.1 comment so far
From an All Things Considered story on Tyson’s Corner, just outside of Washington D.C.:
“About 17,000 live here and about 117,000 — give or take — come to work here every day,” Lecos says. “So that incredible imbalance is why you have the absolute commuter nightmare of trying to get 117,000 people in, in one period of time in the morning, and out again at 5 o’clock.”
Commuter nightmare I’d say. The interview also calls Tyson’s Corner, which offers a whopping 167,000 parking spaces, a traffic engineer’s worst nightmare. The All Things Considered story focuses on a potential remodel for the community, trying to raise it’s population to 100,000 and cut down on the number of commuters. The key to that, it appears, is building up instead of out. This is a piece of advice my grandfather has suggested for years, long before the term New Urbanism was coined.
Sounds like a plan. Illustration from the Tyson’s Tomorrow website.
Sustainability and the Democratic leadership 5 December 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Mass transit, New Urbanism, Sustainable living.3 comments
I’ve been mulling over the potential for an Obama presidency to render a positive result for sustainable energy in our country. Understand this is a brainstorm on my part. I’d love to possess deeper knowledge about alternative energy technologies than I do, but presently my understanding of them is fledgling.
Everybody’s favorite treehugger, Al-Gore, was interviewed by NPR yesterday afternoon. The conversation focused on coal power plants and the potential for “clean coal.” I was amazed that Gore merely went along with the conversation instead of breaking out and mentioning the fact that coal is a fossil fuel, and not sustainable in the long-term. If you’re a vision casting celebrity like Al-Gore, why not move the conversation ahead by acknowledging the reality of coal in the short-term and pressing for sustainable energy solutions as soon as possible?
Regardless of Al Gore’s celebrity stump for the environment, the Democrats are typically strong in the green category. They are more likely to create green policy, and they are also more likely to spend money on environmental incentives, programs and research.
Also on the radio yesterday were reports of the big three automakers’ return to Washington D.C., this time in hybrids, sans the corporate jets. Their change of heart, a direct result of being laughed out of the city last month, is humorous.
I’d personally prefer some tough years and a recession to more federal debt, be it for bailouts or alternative energy. Further, letting the automakers fail has the potential to bring about more lasting cultural change than new policies and more federal money for green research. The high gas prices of this year already did that to a degree; more people are riding bicycles and taking public transit. A few more years of this and there might be an even broader openness to New Urbanism, to well designed cities that don’t use the automobile as a crutch. I’m also generally a fan of letting the automakers reap from their own short-sighted business models. Washington bureaucrats bailing out industries is no more a sustainable model of government than coal is a sustainable means of creating electricity.
Will it be worthwhile to sink billions into alternative energy sources as the Democrats might do? Where will the money come from? When will we have a balanced budget? I was horrified to hear Obama’s upcoming economic adviser say something to the effect that “balancing the budget isn’t important” in a recent interview. It was in the context of the current financial crisis, but I don’t care. The federal government should be able to balance the budget, or that government should be replaced with leadership that can. The one exception I might allow for is a time of war (particularly something like a World War, when our own soil is threatened, as opposed to whatever it is that’s happening in Iraq right now).
I hope that the United States will achieve energy independence in the near future. Our country should be self-sustaining. Trade is all well and good, but the strings that come with things like oil dependence are anything but good. See the current Iraq conflict. I would rather see our nation’s role in the oil-rich Middle East as peacemaker.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
A multitude of energy options already exist. Coal, natural gas, oil, hydro, wind, nuclear and solar for starters. There is no energy production that is completely free of environmental impact; sorry, Al-Gore. In a conversation with a friend a few years ago he pointed out that wind turbines desertify surrounding land. Solar involves development of panels and batteries that wear out. Fossil fuels bother the global warming crowd, and besides that they just aren’t going to last indefinitely. Development always bears a certain impact that can be viewed as negative, but that’s part of humanity subduing the earth as God intended. We just have to do it in the best way possible. We cut down trees, we plant more. We create a hydroelectric dam, we do it in the most enduring and least invasive way possible.
Simply put, we act as good stewards of all of our resources, as a country, as states and as individuals.
Image from PostSecret.
Advice to Car Companies: Stop making cars 1 December 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Community planning, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Mass transit, Sustainable living.add a comment
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has an interesting angle on the whole automobile manufacturing fiasco. His message to the Big Three in Detroit: Stop making cars.
The fact that the car companies of today not only do the R&D for their industry but also run the factories that put the cars together and manage huge networks of dealerships put them at an economic disadvantage. He compares this to Apple, who does all of the R&D in house but outsources all of the manufacturing.
Where’s the iPhone of the car world, Arrington asks?
Conditions for an auto bailout 20 November 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Beauty, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Modern culture, Sustainable living.1 comment so far
NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu suggests that we should bail the automakers out this time, but not next. Give them one more chance to do it right, to embrace alternative fuels or become the dinosaurs they’re so close to becoming already.
And to make beautiful cars. Codrescu stresses the importance of beauty in an automobile. Good for him.
Give the brief spot a listen via this link.
The plastic arts in a small town 3 November 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Business of art, Craft, Live car free, Siloam Springs.7 comments
This is an idea that I wrote up in an email to Sarah Hempel. Sarah — a sculptor — is selling her house and moving to a small town in Western Pennsylvania.
For a while now I’ve been intrigued at how to make the arts work, or how to survive as an artist, in a rural community. There are pros and cons to both the big city and the small ville for artists. Cities have galleries and networks. Smaller towns are usually much affordable.
My parents live in a town of 45,000, not too small but not large enough (especially given its locale) to expect anything significant from the arts, at least not on the plains. The idea is to buy a building downtown (one is for sale two doors down from my dad’s shop for 80k) that we would live in upstairs and run an art and craft studio out of downstairs, my wife crocheting/knitting/spinning and me woodworking and sculpting in clay. The hope would be that we’d be able to make some money from sales of our wares, supplemented by teaching crafts to local home-schooled or private school students — and probably holding regular classes in the studio for any bloke off the street.
This probably isn’t an entirely novel idea. In fact, friends of ours in the small town we live in now (of about 14,000 residents) had a very similar idea. The problem in Siloam Springs is that real estate is a lot higher and the buildings downtown generally in a lot worse shape to begin with. One that’s in very nice shape, having previously been a framing gallery and doctor’s office, is on the market for something like $250,000 as I recall. It doesn’t have a second floor for living space, and none of us have capital to get going anyway.
The whole thing is only feasible if we can live in the same building as the studio. We can’t afford mortgage/rent on a house and mortgage/rent on a public building for a studio. And I’m skeptical that, even in the best of scenarios, this idea would provide a very livable wage, unless my sculptures really take off or my wife’s scarves are picked up by Nordstrom’s. Thus, were we to go this route, I’d have to be willing to find a reasonable day job or get some good paying part-time design work.
The city of 45,000 has many more opportunities for part-time jobs than our little Siloam Springs, which is something to note as well. Were decent paying part-time jobs more available here we might not be thinking of moving at all.
Does the idea hold water?
LinkLuv: Cycling, art, architecture and money 26 August 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Art, Business of art, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Sustainable living.5 comments
Ride The City is a new website that helps its visitors navigate New York City on two wheels. It maps out the quickest and safest routes for cyclists. Story and screenshot via TechCrunch.
Damien Hirst is bypassing his gallery representation and selling his work directly through Sotheby’s. Some wonder if this could be a big change in the art market, others assume the only artists that can get away with this are superstars like Hirst.
A brutalist church in D.C. tries to tear itself down, but the city won’t let it. The Christian Science church congregants are worried the concrete box, designed by an understudy of I.M. Pei, isn’t inviting, and they want to rebuild.
Cathy, the perennial comic strip, is in the midst of a witty series pointing out differences in how generations approach sustainable living and wise use of finances. It’s worth reading the last two weeks worth of material.
Bike lanes cause pollution 21 August 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Community planning, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, New Urbanism.Tags: bicycle, cycling, San Francisco
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A San Francisco man who hasn’t owned a car in more than 20 years is spearheading a legal ruling contesting a significant new cycling initiative on the grounds that it will cause more traffic jams and therefore more pollution. He complains about nearly being run over by bicyclists as he crosses the street (he’s never had the same experience with an automobile?), and wrote on his blog that “Regardless of the obvious dangers, some people will ride bikes in San Francisco for the same reason Islamic fanatics will engage in suicide bombings — because they are politically motivated to do so.”
Did he really say that? Yup, on May twenty-first of this year.
The man in question, 65 year old Rob Anderson, also laments the holier-than-thou attitude San Francisco cyclists carrier around in their panniers. This is believable based on what we know, stereotypically, of this city, but it’s not a good reason to file a suit.
Regardless, the whole thing is amusing and reeks of irony. Bicycling encouraged to reduce pollution. Additional bike lanes presumed to create more pollution. Man who hasn’t driven in two decades spearheads litigation to keep traffic flowing freely.
Modified photo from Wikipedia by Agnieszka Kwiecień
Bicycles replace trucks in Boston 20 June 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Sustainable living.add a comment
I’ve thought in the past that I might enjoy being a bicycle courier in a large city. New Amsterdam Project is taking two-wheeled couriering to the next level.
This is a good idea regardless of gas prices. An NPR story on the company says they aren’t turning a profit yet, but I hope they manage to stick around in the long run.
