Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Marquette Interchange to open early. In other news, Marquette Interchange will soon be declared too small to handle Milwaukee traffic.

Who needs sensible and attractive mass transit options when you can move one-person-per-car through asphalt spaghetti?

Furthermore, no one rides trains and light rail. Oops - I guess they do.

I imagine this dialogue in the near future somewhere in the United States.

"I'm think of moving to ... Milwaukee."

"Really? Why?"

"Dude, they have that fantastic INTERCHANGE!"

"But you don't have a car, and gas is $5.75 a gallon."

"Dude, c'mon - the Marquette freakin' Interchange! Who-hoo!"

Via Smart Growth America:

Optical illusion helps create fake speed bumps - CNN.com

Optical illusion helps create fake speed bumps - CNN.com:

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- Cathy Campbell did a double-take and tapped the brakes when she spotted what appeared to be a pointy-edged box lying in the road just ahead.

She got fooled.

It was a fake speed bump, a flat piece of blue, white and orange plastic that is designed to look like a 3-D pyramid from afar when applied to the pavement.

The optical illusion is one of the latest innovations being tested around the country to discourage speeding.

"It cautions you to slow down because you don't know what you are facing," Campbell said.

A smaller experiment two years ago in the Phoenix area found the faux speed bumps slowed traffic, at least temporarily.

Now, in a much bigger test that began earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants to find out if the markers can also reduce pedestrian accidents.

The fake bumps are being tested on a section of road in a business and residential area in Philadelphia's northeastern corner.

But soon they will also be popping up -- or looking that way -- on 60 to 90 more streets where speeding is a problem.

The 3-D markings are appealing because, at $60 to $80 each, they cost a fraction of real speed bumps (which can run $1,000 to $1,500) and require little maintenance, said Richard Simon, deputy regional administrator for the highway safety administration.

On one of three streets tested in the Phoenix trial, the percentage of drivers who obeyed the 25 mph speed limit nearly doubled. But the effect wore off after a few months.

"Initially they were great," said the Phoenix Police traffic coordinator, Officer Terry Sills. "Until people found out what they were."

Learning from the experience in Arizona, authorities are adding a publicity campaign in Philadelphia to let drivers know that the phony speed bumps will be followed by very real police officers, said Richard Blomberg, a contractor in charge of the study.

Even after motorists adjust, the fake bumps will act like flashing lights in a school zone, reminding drivers they are in an area where they should not be speeding, he said.

"After awhile the novelty wears off, but not the conspicuous effect," Blomberg said.

For increased nighttime visibility, the markers, made by Japan's Sekisui Jushi Corp., contain reflective glass beads.

They are the latest in a long list of traffic calming devices in use across the country, including various types of real bumps, dips, traffic circles and roundabouts.

Proponents say fake bumps require little engineering or planning and can work in places where real humps or dips in the road may not be acceptable -- such as near a firehouse.

Philadelphia officials said they at least want to give them a shot.

The Associated Press interviewed about two dozen people who have driven over the fake bumps, and only a few said they braked for them.

(Continued at CNN.com)

Oil Prices: Reality still hasn't descended upon mainstream media

Milwaukee isn't the only region in denial when it comes to the upcoming crisis. A confused nation waits for Dr. Phil to tell them how to feel:

All this reality content is beginning to penetrate the collective consciousness in the US, but the result is mostly panic or paralyzed disbelief rather than any set of intelligent responses. For example, I got a call from one of Katie Couric's producers at CBS news on Friday. Somehow, they had noticed that oil prices were becoming a problem in America. They called me for a comment. The scary part was they were clearly treating the issue as a "lifestyle" story. Did I think more suburbanites would move downtown? And would that be a good thing...?  They have no %$#ing clue how broadly and deeply these dynamics will affect the life of this nation, or even our ability to remain a nation. Also, by the way, this demonstrates how the nightly network news has become the equivalent of the old "women's pages" of the daily newspapers.

James Howard Kunstler, Cluster$%$ Nation

"The dismal failure of Milwaukee’s civic leaders to bring the region’s public transit infrastructure up to 21st-century standards is more than just another run-of-the-mill breakdown in leadership."

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Professor Marc. V. Levine gets it right in his op-ed from this Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Meanwhile, we have in County Executive Scott Walker a living example of willful obstinacy that is slowly and oh-so-surely killing Milwaukee and the surrounding region. This blind obstructionist is planning to proudly veto an advisory referendum on a (much-needed) 1-cent increase in the county sales tax! 

Read that again: Scott Walker is vetoing a vote in which the people decide - - in a nonbinding vote - -  whether it's worth a tax hike to fix the broken county.

He doesn't want to know how the citizens of his broken county feel about the current state of transit, parks, and other infrastructure?

Who does this sort of thing? A politician who is plotting a run for governor and who fears the likes of Mark Belling, that's who. Scott Walker is looking out for Scott Walker.

Once again, self-interest reigns, and Milwaukee's reputation as a non-starter that cowers under the clumsy brickbats of conservative radio talkers - - a cartoon-character breed that squeals in desperate search of attention and ratings and without regard to any larger truth - -  spreads across the nation as surely as this poorly formed, run-on sentence spreads across your screen.

It's time to ignore the talk-radio narcissists and pandering politicians and do what needs to be done. And if a County Executive fears an advisory vote by the people that may hinder his political future, his time is up.

Dim light at the end of the tunnel

The region needs higher wattage ideas for transit

By MARC V. LEVINE

The dismal failure of Milwaukee’s civic leaders to bring the region’s public transit infrastructure up to 21st-century standards is more than just another run-of-the-mill breakdown in leadership.

It is a public policy debacle that threatens the very economic viability of this city and region — and it comes at a time when we already are struggling with stagnant growth, spreading poverty and shockingly high rates of joblessness in the inner city.

Skyrocketing gas prices and awareness of climate change are reshaping the way Americans live, work and play. Mass transit ridership is surging in cities with rail transit systems, as commuters seek alternatives to $4.50-a-gallon gasoline. Suburban and exurban communities, whose growth was predicated on cars and cheap gas, are facing bursting housing bubbles and an uncertain future.

In this new era, the economic winners will be cities and regions that have invested in state-of-the-art mass transit. Unfortunately, few metropolitan areas are less prepared for these changes than Milwaukee.

Unlike in virtually all other large U.S. cities, leaders here have balked for two decades at building any form of regional rail transit.

By contrast, other cities, such as Baltimore, St. Louis and Minneapolis have built light rail systems since the 1990s (and ridership has soared by 15% this year in all three places). In 2004, Denver voters approved a $4.7 billion bond issue, underwritten by a sales tax, for a 119-mile expansion of their system, while Kansas City recently approved financing of a $1 billion, 27-mile light rail line.

Even in conservative, historically anti-tax “red states,” civic leaders and voters have understood the economic imperative of investing in rail transit. Salt Lake City recently raised the sales tax to expand regional rail. Phoenix is building a 20-mile, $1.3 billion light rail line. And in Texas, that bastion of big-government liberalism, Dallas is investing $4 billion to double the size of its regional light rail system to 90 miles.

In an era of expensive gas and pressures to reduce carbon footprints, it takes some magical thinking to believe that Milwaukee can remain economically competitive as one of the nation’s only large cities without such infrastructure.

The intransigence of Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, bolstered by know-nothing talk radio hosts, columnists and bloggers, is obviously the biggest impediment to sensible transit policy.

Fortunately, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett supports rail transit. Unfortunately, he has offered an inadequate plan: a streetcar Downtown Circulator that would run in a three-mile loop around downtown, which is too small and too slow to generate either of the two key economic benefits of rail transit — linking workers to employment hubs in the region or promoting development along rail corridors.

Barrett sees the Circulator as a “starter” investment toward a more elaborate rail system, touting its links to the vastly oversold KRM commuter rail proposal. But it’s likely that the mayor’s trolley to nowhere would draw meager ridership, thus providing more ammunition to the opponents of light rail, foreclosing future investments and leaving us with an underutilized white elephant ringing downtown.

Barrett, properly concerned about fiscal responsibility, notes that “advocates have failed to explain how to fund a more extensive system.”

Yes, public finances are tight everywhere. Yet leaders in places as varied as Denver, Baltimore, Dallas, Minneapolis and Charlotte have financed the construction or expansion of their systems in recent years. Moreover, even in fiscally strapped Milwaukee, we’ve found a way to spend billions in the past decade on a baseball stadium and a convention center, mega-projects that nearly all economists agree contribute precious little to regional economic growth.

Surely, then, given the existential importance of transit for metro Milwaukee, a financially sensible, $1 billion regional fixed-rail plan can be crafted:

• Using the $91.5 million in federal funds already allocated.

• Minimizing capital costs by extensively utilizing existing rail rights of way.

• Creatively deploying such tools as tax incremental financing.

• Selling station-area development rights.

• Receiving infrastructure support from the State of Wisconsin.

• And, yes, implementing a regional sales tax (with rebates to low-income residents) to fund transit improvements and operations.

If Sen. Barack Obama is elected president, more federal funding likely will be available for rail transit. Obama’s campaign platform calls for a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that could provide an infusion of funds to cities like Milwaukee to invest in transit (as well as in other infrastructure vital to economic development).

But the biggest problem is not fiscal but political.

Barrett and his allies should boldly confront the anti-rail demagogues, advocating a comprehensive fixed-rail plan for Milwaukee’s future that would link key hubs (downtown, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the County Grounds and the airport) and stretch from the North Shore suburbs through the central city, perhaps to Brookfield.

The region’s corporate leaders, represented by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and the Greater Milwaukee Committee, supposedly support regional rail transit. If that’s true, they should make it the centerpiece of the Milwaukee 7 initiative, turning it into a more muscular regionalism that could underpin an economic revitalization of the city and region.

Rail is not a panacea for Milwaukee’s economic woes: It will not single-handedly solve the crisis of inner city joblessness, end poverty or create a culture of economic innovation here (although it will help in all of those areas).

But imagine a future of $8-a-gallon gas, in which Milwaukee is one of the few large cities in the United States without rail transit.

Businesses increasingly will locate in transit-friendly regions that offer the efficient and economical flow of people, goods and services. A Milwaukee without rail transit runs the risk of becoming economically obsolete, a city whose leaders failed to invest in its economic future.

Investing in rail is not like flipping a switch; the lead time is substantial. We already are way behind other cities, and our economic viability is slipping away.

The time for action is now.

Marc V. Levine is a professor of history, economic development and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

For whom the road tolls

ABOVE: New York Times photo

James Rowen notes that SEWRPC leader Philip Evenson is OK with the idea of toll roads in Wisconsin.

The latest issue of THE WILSON QUARTERLY magazine contains a discussion of LEASED TOLL ROADS - - something Wisconsin will undoubtedly be tempted to look at.

Indiana has a state budget of $13 billion; they leased their tool road for about $4 billion to "a private Australian-Spanish consortium." Evidently, a few months of interest on that payment exceeded the amount Indiana had made in 50 years of tolling that road (a New York Times story says Indiana earned $287 million in interest from the $3.8 billion the state received last year).

However, the lease runs until 2081; that could be trouble according to critics who fear Indiana sold too low. And privatized public utilities are prone to break (witness the California power debacle).

As the New York Times notes:

“Early on, there was excitement about the big checks that came in,” Jonathan R. Peters, a finance professor at the City University of New York and an expert on toll roads, said of the arrangements in Indiana and Chicago. “But now academics and departments of transportation are starting to see that you can give away too much.”

Governor Jon S. Corzine was looking to privatize New Jersey’s toll roads as well - - including the iconic New Jersey Turnpike! - - but irony struck him particularly hard. A serious auto crash that almost killed the Governor took the wind out of his sails for a while.

Watch this issue bubble up in the near future.

The Decline of the Exurban Lifestyle: Still not convinced?

Though this blog is more concerned with improving present suburban communities than it is in seeing them wiped out, a story in today's New York Times paints a pretty dismal picture for those suburbs that are even more far-flung - - the so-called "exurbs"; collections of subdivisions that are utterly and completely dependent upon automobiles for their very existence.

Sure, people like having their space and their 5-car garages, but ...

... life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. Mr. Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, Mr. Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel fuel. In March, the last time he filled his propane tank to heat his spacious house, he paid $566, more than twice the price of 5 years ago.

Though Mr. Boyle finds city life unappealing, it is now up for reconsideration.
....

In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com.

Car-worshippers (and Bush-Cheney-Big Oil apologists) who constantly confound Milwaukee's efforts to get a sane light rail system built would do well to observe Denver, Colorado's experience:

A $6.1 billion commuter rail system has been in the works over the last four years, drawing people downtown without cars, while stimulating swift sales of densely clustered condos near stations.

Coors Field, the intimate, brick-fronted baseball stadium for the Colorado Rockies, has transformed the surrounding area from a desolate skid row into fashionable Lower Downtown, a neighborhood of restaurants and microbreweries in restored warehouses. Along the Platte River, new condos set on a park strip offer an arresting tableau of glass, steel, and futuristic geometry, attracting throngs of buyers at rising prices.

“This is a city where it’s fun to be in the center,” said Tim Burleigh, 56, who sold his house in the suburbs and now walks to Rockies games from his downtown condo.

But, alas, you gotta spend some real money and change the one-person-per-car paradigm to get out from under the thumb of Big Oil. The same "conservative" attitudes (and a few liberal ones as well) that have led to the current crumbling state of our national infrastructure and dismal community standards (optional sidewalks?) are raising the stakes of the upcoming crisis by obstinately denying the fact that we desperately need a mass transit re-fit program at the level of 1956's Federal Aid Highway Act.

And, what the heck, put the word "defense" in the name of whatever act we come up with (ala the Highway Act's alternate name, National Interstate and Highways Defense Act). Imagine a foreign policy scenario wherein OPEC-member nations observe an entire nation gearing up to drastically reduce consumption of their cash cow. Imagine NOT spending lives and money in Iraq (because that's an oil war, pure and simple).

The full NYT story is after the jump. (NYT story Via Calculated Risk:)

See also this entry from Calculated Risk linking to an LA Times story that describes a California community where 15%(!) of homes are bank-owned or in some level of foreclosure.

New York Times Graphic (click to enlarge)

Driving Toward Disaster

James Howard Kunstler, whose name pops up often in this blog, is currently promoting his new novel, World Made by Hand, thus his somewhat higher profile in mainstream media. Just in the nick of time, too.

From The Washington Post.:

Wake Up America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.

By James Howard Kunstler
Sunday, May 25, 2008

Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.

I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years -- inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.

Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.

The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.

These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped clean.

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.

Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.

We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere and, most recently, of World Made by Hand, a novel about America's post-oil future.

"Why are streets and land uses in postwar suburbs arranged so that everyone has to have a car to reach even the most routine daily destinations?"

From Planning Quote of the Day:

"Why do we lay out subdivisions that make it impossible for a ten-year old to walk to a store for a Popsicle or a loaf of bread? Why are streets and land uses in postwar suburbs arranged so that everyone has to have a car to reach even the most routine daily destinations? Wouldn't it be better if everyday necessities were easy to reach and if the streets and sidewalks were designed as convivial places for meeting friends and neighbors?"

-- Philip Langdon, "New Development, Traditional Patterns" (in Planning Commissioners Journal #36)

FLICKR set of Charlette, NC transit photos

PA130097, originally uploaded by davereid2.

Thanks to Dave Reid at UrbanMilwaukee.com for the great shots.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Excellent point made by a letter writer in the Journal Sentinel recently. Make transit an integral, pleasant part of infrastructure, and people will quickly incorporate it into their daily routines. We're about 12 years behind on this.

Habit-forming transit

Philosopher A.N. Whitehead's rule of thumb: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Applied to our ecologically threatened lives, this rule of thumb means that an effective green strategy has got to be one that doesn't require anyone ever to think green. Green has got to be built into the infrastructure that shapes our daily routines.

Roads and rails are just such routine-shapers and therefore deserve our full attention and wisest decisions. As we assess their impacts, we can see that a widened road encourages car-centered habits; mass transit encourages greener routines. Forecasting the long-term future, I contend that the road to ecological hell is paved with wide swaths of concrete - not with intentions of any sort.

William Washabaugh
UWM Professor of Anthropology
Milwaukee