These large daisy/sunflower seats in new York's Madison Square (in the new pedestrian areas in Broadway just outside the square) are actually ads for Prius. The 18ft high flowers feature solar-powered plugs at the base... and there was no shortage of pedestrians hovering around, waiting to charge their gadgets. It looks like this reclaimed public space is also producing ad dollars for the city.

Eric Miller on 07.29.09 @ 08:26 AM PST [link]  

I just received a mailer with that exact title. About to toss it, I decided it may make good bathroom reading. Apparently the cash for clunkers allows you to trade in a vehicle that gets 18 mpg or less for a Ford F-150, Mercury Mariner, E-Series van or a number of other large cars.

I looked up the Mercury Mariner and it apparently gets 20 mpg in the city. The Ford F-150 gets 15 mpg in the city. The E-Series gets 15 in the city and only 19 on the highway.

The Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) is a federal program that helps consumers purchase a new, more fuel efficient vehicles when they trade in less fuel efficient vehicles. Generally, trade-in vehicles must get 18 or less MPG and requires the trade-in vehicle must be scrapped.

The requirements of the new car are as follows: The new vehicle must have a manufacturer's suggested retail price of not more than $45,000. The new vehicle must also achieve minimum combined fuel economy levels. For passenger automobiles, that's a combined fuel economy value of at least 22 miles per gallon. For category 1 trucks, it's at least 18 miles per gallon. For category 2 trucks, it's 15 miles per gallon.

It's not clear to me whether I can trade in an 18 mph vehicle for a 15 mph vehicle, but I certainly question the value of sending a ton or so of materials into landfills in order to save one or two miles per gallon. The biggest loss to me however is why the program didn't require the purchase of truly fuel efficient vehicles. If it were my program, the only Fords that would qualify would be the Focus and Fusion Hybrid.

Eric Miller on 07.22.09 @ 08:29 AM PST [link]  

An unhappy experience with using Megabus was redeemed recently with a round of on-time and flawless performance. I rode the Megabus from New York's Penn Station to Hartford in order to visit the Wadsworth Atheneum. The bus left precisely at 8:15 a.m. as confirmed by the clock on the exterior wall of Penn Station and arrived as scheduled in Hartford (conveniently beside the museum). The return tip also departed on time, somewhat of a feat because the Hartford is a midway stop on the Boston to New York route.

A few brief notes on downtown Hartford, the city contains a number of attractive earlier buildings, but it seems most everything built after 1975 not only dwarfs the older structures, but lacks architectural merit. I could only find one moderately attractive newer building, a relatively recent residential building. Even newer brick buildings designed to "match" older facades were bland and uninviting.

Finding a coffee shop open after five on Saturday also proved to be an insurmountable challenge as Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts were both closed. Perhaps a beer was a more suitable afternoon drink, so Guinness proved an acceptable substitute (hey, they're both black). The downtown really needs more residential uses to keep the streets alive and stores open.

While the streets of downtown were quiet, Bushnell Park was a live with a jazz concert and vendor fair.

If you live in New York or Boston and want to get away for the day of art viewing, the Wadsworth Atheneum is a great destination and the museum cafe' even proved to be of both good quality and value.

If you go, you might consider bringing your own coffee, however.

Eric Miller on 07.19.09 @ 07:00 AM PST [link]  

Sometimes I wonder whether developers, especially corporate developers, really hate Los Angeles and its people, and strive to make their buildings purposely, extravagantly ugly--in fact, insulting to the very humanity of all who pass by.

Even the fact that on the street where I took the photo in this post, most people pass by at speed, in cars, does not excuse the filth, the careless "f*ck you" attitude, the willfull banality of the structure itself....

This is the Sports Authority building on Sepulveda Boulevard, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. Sports Authority purports to sell exercise and outdoor sports equipment...so you'd think they'd have a mind to what the outside of their store looks like.

Then again, when you get inside, you find that they've applied the "Home Depot Principle" with a vengeance; that is, they present many iterations of a relatively small number of low-quality items, giving the illusion of plenty but sidestepping its reality. (The next stop I made today, Koontz Hardware in West Hollywood, is a small family-owned operation that carries three times as many SKUs as a Home Depot!)

So it is with Sports Authority: they had a whole wall of bicycle helmets...but only four different models. They had half a shelf of bicycle inner tubes...but none in the very common size my bicycle uses. (I had received a gift card for the store, hence my presence there.)

And they had one of the ugliest street frontages I've ever seen in my life; I swear it is paradigmatically ugly, and should be enshrined as an example of what never to do in architectural design!

For the record, what you see in the photo fronts on Sepulveda Boulevard, one of LA's premier north-south boulevards, and the main arterial that connects the North Valley with West Los Angeles with the beach cities and ultimately the Palos Verdes Peninsula. This is no warehouse-district back-alley by any means!

The second photo shows the actual entrance of the store--what should be, in a culture not bitterly in thrall to motoring-constricted urban planning, the grand entry to this temple of commerce.

I suppose there's an entrance from the monolithic parking structure out behind, but I didn't see it while I was in the store. Possibly it's as ugly as the Sepulveda entrance, though it's hard to conceive of that possibility.

it constantly flabbergasts me what Americans will debase themselves to accept in urban structures (Eric's posting on Grand Army Plaza comes to mind as well).

I'll probably throw the gift card away....

Richard Risemberg on 07.17.09 @ 04:04 PM PST [link]  

The Slow Food movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy to combat fast food. The problem for many of us is there isn't time for it, but as we'll find out there are ways to move towards slow food, part of a larger "slow cities concept." Find out more by listening to our podcast

Eric Miller on 07.16.09 @ 08:31 AM PST [link]  

In an interview with Streetfilms, Jaime Lerner explains how, when he was mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, he transformed major downtown artery Rua XV de Novembro into the city's first pedestrian street in just three days, and how it has now become a major part of the city's commerce as well as its heart.



It's not the only, nor even the first, pedestrian street in South America; our photo essay "Pedestrian Streets" shows photos of long-established carfree streets in Buenos Aires (as well as Los Angeles and several cities in Japan).

Richard Risemberg on 07.16.09 @ 06:24 AM PST [link]  

The New Colonist is now available on Kindle. Just click and go! Order newcolonist.com for Kindle

Eric Miller on 07.15.09 @ 08:09 AM PST [link]  

Originally known as Prospect Park Plaza, Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn is an 11-acre oval plaza that forms the main entrance to Prospect Park. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1867.

Grand Army Plaza is quite different from what it was in 1867. The basic design and monuments are largely intact, however one important development has brought about the transformation of the plaza from a serene public space to the menacing traffic circle it is today. There were no cars in 1867.



Prospect Park Plaza was conceived by its designers simply as a grand entrance to the Park. It was meant as a gateway, to separate the noisy city from the calm of nature.

What was intended as a barrier today brings noise and danger right up to the park entrance. The area around the Arch forms the largest and busiest traffic circle in Brooklyn. Five major arteries including Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway come together at the circle. In decades past, the circle hosted Brooklyn's "Death-O-Meter," a sign updating drivers of the tally of traffic accident deaths in the borough.

In 2008 a competition was held for designs to reorganize Grand Army Plaza to make it a more integral part of Prospect Park and more accessible to pedestrians. At the same time the New York City Department of Transportation made improvements in accessibility adding putting sidewalks and planters at the South end of the plaza.

I'm not sure the grand alterations that resulted from the design competition are what's needed, however. More traffic calming devices at the North end of the park would be a more affordable measure that could make this circle a little more safe. More, there are a number of macadam areas that could immediatelty be converted to greenspace with little cost or planning, as we'll see as we make our way through Grand Army Plaza.

Eric Miller on 07.13.09 @ 07:13 PM PST [link]  

I am glad I finally have this in electronic version. It's a video from the 50s or 60s that tries to find a way into Altoona without encountering "urban blight." Of course the city is the problem as they see it, and all roads lead there. You'll enjoy the language: "What you are seeing is not impressive." It's in three parts on YouTube. This is the first.

Eric Miller on 07.13.09 @ 10:55 AM PST [link]  

Altoona has another tooth missing. It seems each time I de-board a train in my hometown I find another downtown building has fallen victim to shortsightedness, a lack of imagination and foresight, and, most definitively, the wrecking ball. This time it was a nucleus of sentimentality, the Woolworth building, that I arrived to find gone.

I had heard about the impending demise of Woolworth. The building's owner had bought it on spec and let the roof rot away until the building "couldn't be saved." I put that last part in quotes because I've seen many buildings brought back from severely deteriorated conditions.

Looking at the glass as half empty is hard. There'a sucking sound coming now as the straw scrapes the bottom of the glass. It's almost as if there's no return for Altoona. So much has been destroyed, it's almost as if the Altoona I remember ceases to exist. The Altoona Mirror buildings, the Wolf Furniture building, the Kaufman's building, these are just a few.

If any self-identifying central district is to exist again, Altoona has to make a pact with itself that no more buildings on 11th or 12th Avenues will be demolished.

READ MORE

Eric Miller on 07.06.09 @ 05:27 PM PST [link]  

David Seymour of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy lays bare the high financial, social, and environmental costs of free parking and minimum parking requirements for new buildings in the Montreal Gazette this week. Quoth he:

The cost of parking can be substantial. The Toronto Parking Authority estimated that the cost of providing a single parking space could be up to $40,000. U.S. researchers estimated that parking subsidies are several times the price of gas used by cars.

Perhaps the most insidious characteristic of parking regulations is their self-reinforcing nature that progressively molds the urban landscape into a gigantic parking lot. By taking up land, parking spots reduce density and make car travel more appealing, which leads to--surprise, surprise--greater demand for parking.

Read the entire article at There Is No Free parking.

Richard Risemberg on 07.02.09 @ 06:08 AM PST [link]  

by Chip Haynes
Thirteen years ago, in 1996, I bought a small folding bike and sold my old truck. On the first Monday in January of 1997 I began riding my folding bike to work, and still do, some thirteen years later. Fairly early on, as I searched for information on car-free communities around the US (I really got into that bike thing), I stumbled across information on peak oil instead. Now, you have to understand: in the late 1990's, peak oil was an event only a few fringe types were predicting would happen far, far into our misty distant future. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here. Just keep driving.

READ MORE

Eric Miller on 07.01.09 @ 01:00 PM PST [link]  

Wow. I remember The Living Room, but The Bicycle People was a little before my time. Ten years of The New Colonist is something to celebrate. That's a lot of electrons under the mouse. My congratulation to everyone at The New Colonist for a job well done for the last 3652 days (I'm figuring there had to be a couple of leap days in there some where). Keep up the great work, keep fighting the good fight and know that you really have made a difference. People do notice. They told me so.

Good job!

Chip Haynes
Clearwater, Florida

Eric Miller on 07.01.09 @ 10:28 AM PST [link]