Transportation

Our Hot Streets Are an Opportunity

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Appropriate Technology, Bikes, Design, Transportation, Water and Power
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I can’t remember where I got this idea from but I think it was Alissa Walker or someone she was writing about who had the bright idea to go out and check the temperature of our streets on a hot day with a IR thermometer. Since I have one of these handy gadgets for firing up my pizza oven, I thought I’d head out in the neighborhood at around 2:30 in the afternoon and take some temperature readings.

The asphalt in front of our house measured an egg-frying, temperature of 135.3º F (57.3 C).

A rare, tree-lined Los Angeles street one block over was a lot cooler at 80.9º F (27.1º C).

A few blocks north, and to much fanfare, our city coated an asphalt street with a gray coating as part of a “cool pavement” program. The temp on this street was 120.8º F (49.3º C).

Being a crank I have two conclusions:

1. Let’s plant trees.

2. How about instead of painting streets gray we do something really radical and pull them up entirely and start cooling people rather than serving cars?

According to the Los Angeles Times, “Recent research has found that when manufacturing emissions are taken into account, most cool pavements hurt the climate more than they help.”

So, as is typical for our mayor Eric Garcetti it’s all about the press conference and not so much about the actual science. The one glimmer of hope that I have is that people younger than myself are catching on to the empty gestures of neo-liberal, pseudo-environmental politicians like Garcetti and the rest of the Los Angeles City Council. They are beginning to see a more radical alternative to business as usual. As Mark Fisher says in a book everyone should read, Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative?,

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

So how about we tear a hole in these hot streets and plant some trees?

Hey New York Times Let’s Dump the Wheels Column

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Bikes, Transportation
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“Sacrifices to the Modern Moloch” a cartoon in the New York Times published January 1922.

Dear New York Times editors, you need to retire your “Wheels” column. At the very least you need to insert, in all automobile coverage, a disclaimer that cars cause climate change, asthma, lung cancer and over 1.2 million deaths around the world every year due to “accidents.” The ghost of your fellow New Yorker Jane Jacobs would also add ugliness and the death of communities, thanks to the insatiable hunger for space cars claim in our urban spaces. Failing to point out these objective facts makes your auto columns little more propaganda.

Where is your bike column? Where is your transit advice column? Where is your walk-ability coverage? Sure, you touch on these issues elsewhere but these subjects have no dedicated column like “Wheels.” Perhaps it’s time to start treating cars the way you might treat cigarettes. NYT editors, would you have a weekly column devoted to reviewing cigarettes? One could easily imagine such a column. I’m sure some cigarettes taste better than others. You’d also have a lot of vape devices (the Teslas of smoking) to review. But I’m guessing you won’t debut a “Smokes” column in the near future.

Taking the cigarette analogy further, your hypothetical “Smokes” column would be wise not to blame smokers for their addiction. Just like those tobacco CEOs, there are real villains in the auto addiction story. While I bike and take public transit I live in a city (Los Angeles) that yoked its future to the automobile in the 1920s. Mostly out of fear for my safety, I’m forced to drive more than I would like by the way the city is designed. So I don’t buy the “we’re all at fault” argument. As Hannah Arendt said, “When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”

German diplomats awarding The Grand Cross of the German Eagle to Henry Ford, Detroit, 1938.

If we’re looking for who to blame we might begin with Henry Ford. Adolf Hitler kept a framed portrait of Ford on his wall and mentions him by name in Mein Kampf, “Every year makes them [American Jews] more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions . . . Only a single great man, Ford, to their fury still maintains full independence.” Ford returned the favor by publishing a virulently racist and anti-Semitic newspaper that, among other editorial atrocities, serialized a set of articles entitled “The International Jew.” And the Nazi leadership’s ideology was inspired by the worst aspects of Fordism: the alienation of workers and the suppression of unions and democracy.

Speaking of Nazis, you’ve spent the past week breathlessly covering the pre-auction and post auction-kerfufle of the first Porsche. If I were the editor I would have insisted on a paragraph detailing the fact that the Porsche company went on to use Polish slave labor during WWII. Those laborers had a “P” sewn on their uniforms and that “P” stood for “Poland” not Porsche. And would it be snarky to include a paragraph about the tackiness of today’s oligarchs bidding millions on a Nazi car?

I have a proposal. How about a livable cities column? We have a terrific writer here in LA who covers alternative transportation named Alissa Walker. You should hire her and put your auto columnists on a bike in LA to see how it feels. I have an extra bike and helmet . . .

Scooters? Not a New Idea

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Transportation
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Sun, Oct 8, 1916 – Page 58 · New York Herald (New York, New York) · Newspapers.com

It turns out the urban scooter craze isn’t a new idea. From a story in an October 8, 1916 newspaper, “Skidding Through Fact and Fancy on an Autoped: Solo Devil Wagon Taken Up in a Serious Way Might Add New Terrors to City Life” is a description of motorized scooter not all that different than the ones we see today:

You stand on the cute platform and get your feet neatly fitted on the rubber mats which seem to have “Welcome, little stranger,” written all over them, grab the handle and away you go. First you careen like a lugger in a typhoon and then you lurch over until the lee scuppers are awash. You skim along the asphalt and say “Whoa!” just like that.

In your frenzy you give the handles a twist and then fall all over yourself and meet your spats coming back. The autoped has the disposition of a bronco and the guile of an eel. However, take heart of grace and go to it for one has but one neck and two legs and is likely to come away with some of them.

The autoped was patented in 1913 and manufactured by the Autoped Company of Long Island City, New York between 1915 to 1921. It was propelled by a 4-stroke, 155 cc engine. After the autoped company went out of business Krupp made a version in Germany between 1919 to 1922. I going to take a wild guess that it didn’t catch on for two reasons: car companies successfully bribed city governments to design our roads to favor cars and push out any competition and the fact that a motorcycle or bicycle, with their larger wheels, are more stable than standing on a scooter.

The 1916 article echos some of the contemporary paranoia about scooters. On that note, I’m happy to see anything that gets people out of cars which are the real, “Devil Wagons.” Let us remember that our auto addiction is responsible for 1.3 million deaths around the world every year. Here in Los Angeles, like many other cities, there is a “first mile/last mile” problem with using our subway/light rail system. That is, the trains here in LA work as reasonably as any train in our backwards country, but it can take a long time to get to the station if you don’t live within walking distance. I can definitely see something like rental bikes and scooters as part of a transportation solution that addresses climate change, first mile-last mile problems and congestion. I also have hope that the folks trying out the scooters will see how bad conditions on our streets are and will help fight for better infrastructure for alternative transportation.

That said, I’m not crazy about the companies that run the scooters. They are the same predatory tech bros who care nothing for their employees or for the niceties of working with communities and governments. I’m also skeptical about braving LA’s many potholes on something with small wheels but maybe that’s just cranky old risk-averse me. At least electric scooters are an improvement on the autoped’s internal combustion engine.

Thanks to @PessimistsArc for the tip.

On Moon Bases, Free Parking and One Hell of a Grim Swedish Science Fiction Movie

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Transportation
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My post Monday linking to the Streetsblog video on Amsterdam’s re-purposing 10,000 parking spaces seems to have touched a nerve and sparked a heated discussion. Collect a random assortment of Americans together and I actually think we could have easier conversations about politics and religion than about parking. But we need to start talking about parking and the hold automobile culture has taken on our lives, health and wallets. Many of us would like to bike more but are afraid to because of the dangerous car-centric way in which our streets are constructed. And why take the bus when it’s so easy to find a free parking space?

To the partisans of the unalienable right to free parking I ask that you consider the video above for a quick overview of the subject featuring the godfather of parking scholarship, Donald Shoup. To summarize the video, the absurdities of parking regulation play a partial role in the homelessness and housing affordability crisis in many big cities. We’d do well to consider alternatives to the parking craters that deface our cities and make it less likely that we’ll walk, bike or take public transit.

Now on to the tangentially related subject of moon bases. My primary objection to manned space travel in general is that it gives a false sense that there is something else in this universe for us other than the paradisaical planet we currently call home and that we can screw things up here and escape to space stations, mars or other solar systems. While space offers lots of free parking potential, the simple fact is that life outside earth is inhospitable in the extreme and the distances involved in reaching other solar systems make that travel impossible.

I can think of no better warning of the vastness and horror of space than a recent Swedish movie Aniara, based on an epic poem, which you can watch via Amazon. Let me warn you that this film, despite the lack of gore, is definitely not for kids or for a cozy date night. While I’m not a fan of the film’s nihilism and dismissal of the numinous it does an excellent job of parodying the political impasse we’re currently living in (the spaceship in the film is nothing more than a bland shopping mall lead by leaders who everyone knows are lying). To my point, Aniara portrays space for what it is: an endless, empty realm of eternal darkness. The lesson of the film is don’t screw things up on earth–it’s all we’ve got.

Colonizing space is delusional, but working on making our cities more livable is eminently achievable.

What Happens When You Remove 10,000 Parking Spaces

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Bikes, Transportation
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In response to Jeff Bezos’ assertion that he can’t think of anything better to do with his billions than build a moon base, let us collectively imagine a list of more worthwhile ideas he could fund. How about an organization that would gift all expenses paid trips to Amsterdam for any nay-saying, “We can’t possibly do that here” Angelino unable to imagine a future without gobs of free parking? Speak out in favor of parking at a community meeting and, congratulations, here’s your KLM ticket. Drop an angry I-can’t-find-parking-tweet? Get ready to smell the tulips.

This Streetfilms production shows what can happen when we de-clutter the cars from our cities. Here in LA, those cars no longer “spark joy.” Get rid of them and we could have gardens, playgrounds, space for public transit and so much more.