What to do with the Big Three? What to do with Chrysler, Ford, and GM, who have repeatedly proven themselves arrogant and incompetent over seven decades; who have steadfastly opposed innovation in the name of short-term profit; who consistently have insisted on making a product that directly kills 45,000 Americans per year (and many more worldwide), kills millions more through pollution, requires huge indirect subsidies in the form of roads, highways, bridges, and parking, and which is now killing the very planet itself, while engaging us in vicious and unjustifiable wars?

Now their CEOs are asking the US public to hand them billions of dollars so they can continue on the same course a little longer, and line their pockets a little thicker, all in the name of jobs--jobs they have been slashing away at for decades anyhow.

Yet the jobs that remain are real, and they might amount to as much as 10% of the employment in the country.

Is the only possible way to save those jobs simply to throw more money at those pinstriped pirates who have mismanaged the industry into the dilapidated state in which we now see it?

If we let them go bust, what will all those workers do? Certainly Toyota, Honda, and BMW's US plants can't absorb them all.

Is there nothing to do but throw big money at the Big Three CEOs, and watch them fail their way into oblivion just a few years later?

Maybe what we need is a re-training program...no, not the sort that teaches machinists how to do data entry. I mean something else altogether.

Years ago, GM and a number of other companies were convicted in Federal court of a conspiracy to buy up and dismantle the urban rail systems that used to serve this country so well, even unto the magnificent Pacific Electric Red Cars of Los Angeles (whose routes the freeways still follow).

If we still had those rail lines, we might now have compact, efficient, and elegant cities where residents would have a choice of whether to drive or not, whether to travel in clean conviviality, or to grind alone through traffic if they felt they must drive. People, despite decades of Big Three agitprop, still want that choice, and so our cities are re-building, at great expense, those rail lines that GM and its cohorts had destroyed. Even cities such as Los Angeles, the Ground Zero of Carmageddon, and Denver, and Salt Lake City, and Dallas, and others where the warlordism of a car-only culture has so long reigned.

In each of these cities, money to rebuild the rails is in eternally short supply. And once the rails are built, the trains that run on them must be bought from Italy, Canada, Japan--anywhere, it seems, but here.

The re-training we need is the rebuilding of a native urban railroad system, with its components sourced within our own economy.

Let's use the money that the Big Three are begging for to accelerate all the urban rail transit projects now in progress, and to jump-start new ones anywhere they're wanted!

And let's re-tool the Big Three so they, and their workers, can make the rolling stock these systems need now, and will need in the future.

Think of all the orders they could receive if America were to rebuild, and expand, the 1500 urban rail transit systems the National City Lines conspirators destroyed! And even more once high-speed rail finally comes (half a century late) to the US!

And instead of making something that destroys community, sucks up public funds, and poisons the earth we depend on, they'd be supplying the country with clean and convivial mobility, and strengthening communities while reducing to a minimum the acreage needed to accommodate the daily travels of our citizens--leaving more room for housing and businesses, and more money for schools, squares, and libraries as well.

Don't bail the Big Three out--retrain them, so they can re-train America!

Richard Risemberg on 11.30.08 @ 10:30 AM PST [link]  

I was fine for a few days away from my computer, but on the train home today I read something I couldn’t wait to respond to. With a short delay at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, I went upstairs and bought a Washington Post. The article “Want to Shrink Your Carbon Footprint? Think Food” caught my attention, and left me conjuring up a response of sorts.

The writer is apparently spending some time in New York from Ann Arbor, a place with a population density of 4,185 people per square mile and a place I’ve never been. For comparison, in 2000 New York had a population density of 26,517 per square mile.

The writer laments the absence of a car in New York saying it only took three minutes to get groceries in Ann Arbor, but takes 15 minutes to walk to get groceries in New York. (Gee’z, I must walk past a half-dozen grocery stores in the course of my regularly-scheduled activities in Brooklyn.)

As a recent transplant from Pittsburgh, this seemed a bit of a curiosity. It took me 15 minutes to walk to get groceries in Pittsburgh, and about five in New York. If I drove to a better store in Pittsburgh, it took more than 20 minutes each way. More, in New York, I have learned to combine grocery shopping and laundry, dropping off the laundry, picking up groceries, returning to get the laundry (all with the metal granny cart), making the entirety of laundry and groceries each week just over one hour. That’s far less than I spent each week in Pittsburgh, and in New York I even get some reading and exercise done in that hour.

I also have to think that if groceries were within a three-minute drive in Ann Arbor, that may amount to the same fifteen minute walk, perhaps even less in Michigan- so it would seem there was little excuse to drive!

The writer says the New York lifestyle and the 15-minute walk negated “last minute cuisine.” It’s not true at all from my experience--I walk past a store most anywhere I go! Even so, if she does spend 15 minutes walking to the grocery and ten minutes shopping, using a car in Michigan would make the total 16 minutes and in New York 40 minutes. I’m not sure if the three minutes in Michigan includes parking, moving cars, etc, but I’d venture the three minute to gourmet is a bit of an understatement.

The writer also mentions moving to New York and not being able to get back-and-forth to Home Depot for supplies. I also found accessing Home Depot difficult when I moved to Brooklyn, but quickly learned the small stores right around me have everything and more (with the exception of milled lumber) Home Depot does (often for less) and there are numerous options within a short walk.

The point of her article didn’t seem to be a criticism of car-free life as much as a promotion of buying locally-grown food. A grand notion, and one I do agree with. However, the point she missed is that a car-focused life makes growing food locally more difficult.

Take Medina County, Ohio for example. According to the web site Eco-City Cleveland, each week Medina County grows a new 40-acre crop of houses, businesses and roads. That's the amount of farmland being converted to other uses every week in Northeast Ohio's fastest growing county. Much of it is due to sprawl without population growth!

According to the American Farmland Trust, America is losing 1.2 million acres of farmland annually, much of it the best and most productive farmland near where most Americans live. There’s also plenty of farmland at risk in Michigan.

Where there are houses, there can’t be farms. Spreading things out so a quick drive for “last-minute-cuisine” prevents a healthy stroll to the market means the feasibility of locally-produced food is all the less possible. The more people live in dense, urban environments, the more room there is elsewhere for both growing food, and consuming it in large, local markets. Washington Post Article

Eric Miller on 11.29.08 @ 02:00 PM PST [link]  

It seems that the anti-city, anti-community types--you know, those who scorn mass transit, public squares, street life, "community organizers," and anything that strays even remotely from the isolated family in the suburban-plan house, dutifully watching Fox News on the widescreen--it turns out they might be literal knuckle-draggers after all.

We were reading an article in the National Geographic magazine describing how archeological and genetic analysis had combined to provide a more accurate picture of Neanderthal society in Europe at the end of our brutish cousins' reign. Their big question was, Why did the Neanderthals die out, and our direct ancestors come to dominate the globe?

The genetic evidence showed no inherent weaknesses in Neanderthal conformation: their brains were actually bigger than ours, and they were physically superior.

The strongest hypothesis presented in Stephen S. Hall's article was that the Neanderthals, who lived only in small family groups, had fewer of what the researchers called "cultural buffers," social practices that established reserves of skills and knowledge which helped the populations through hard times. From the article:

Of all possible cultural buffers, perhaps the most important was the cushion of society itself. According to Erik Trinkaus, a Neanderthal social unit would have been about the size of an extended family. But in early modern human sites in Europe, Trinkaus said, "we start getting sites that represent larger populations." Simply living in a larger group has biological as well as social repercussions. Larger groups inevitably demand more social interactions, which goads the brain into greater activity during childhood and adolescence, creates pressure to increase the sophistication of language, and indirectly increases the average life span of group members. Longevity, in turn, increases intergenerational transmission of knowledge and creates what Chris Stringer calls a "culture of innovation"--the passage of practical survival skills and toolmaking technology from one generation to the next, and later between one group and another.

So it just may be that what makes us human is not the desire to hunker down in a wood-framed replica of the primordial cave, seeing only our immediate family. What made us human in the way we are--creative, lively, makers of machines, music, poetry, art, and universities, of treaties and hopes--was the cities we began to form before we even knew who we were, the relationships outside ourselves that take us beyond the fear and mistrust of strangers that characterize all primitive and violent societies, wherever they may be.

Reactionary hogwash aside, it does take a village--and more than that, it takes a city, with all its diversity and richness of accidental meetings--to bring out the best in us. As Albert Einstein said, "A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others."

Come home to the city! It's good for you!

Richard Risemberg on 11.25.08 @ 04:25 AM PST [link]  

by G. S. Morey
My urban landscape is in a drought. Not of water (that stuff is only good for sustaining life), but of a more fundamental element: coffee. Black gold.

Yes, sure, I can make the stuff at home, but I shouldn't have to be bothered with doing it myself. I'm an American, after all. No, my logic dictates that coffee is found in coffeehouses, just as water is found in watering holes.

Besides, how can creativity truly flourish without a coffeehouse? How can artists maintain their midnight intensity, screenwriters write between their restaurant shifts, or fixie punks sober-up after an alleycat? How do you expect this writer to type a coherent sentence without a coffeehouse? A community deserves to have its moniker as such called into question if it doesn't have a coffeehouse.

Read More!

Eric Miller on 11.22.08 @ 06:07 AM PST [link]  

While waiting in line to eat, I spent a few minutes taking a variety of photos of a trash can. Enjoy...

Eric Miller on 11.22.08 @ 05:55 AM PST [link]  

Change.gov, president-elect Barack Obama's transition team website, is specifically requesting input from you regarding what he should do about energy and other environmental issues. Go to the website to watch a short video and fill out a form which will send your ideas to his transition team:

Change.gov

Richard Risemberg on 11.21.08 @ 06:36 PM PST [link]  

Mark Gorton interviews Janette Sadik-Kahn, NYC's commissioner of the DOT, about some brilliant, and brilliantly successful, transformations of key New York City streets from mere drainpipes for car traffic to living spaces shared among drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists.

From Streetfilms:

Richard Risemberg on 11.19.08 @ 10:51 AM PST [link]  

Detroit's gas-hog manufacturers are now lobbying to get even bigger handouts from the public treasury than had been offered. Congress.org asked citizens to sign a petition to the White House and their senators and congress member expressing their opinions on this matter. This is what I wrote:

The auto industry has been swilling at the public trough for too long. As (conservative) Walter Lippman wrote in 1939, "G.M. has spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and highways by public enterprise."

Now they want a direct subsidy to reward them for resisting innovation for the last seventy years, and for making stupid decisions? I say No.

The personal automobile is a dangerous paradigm, and a fading one too. It's the car that made sprawl and global warming what they are--and sprawl also contributed to the housing crisis. We need to move towards more appropriate means of travel that are not damaging to the earth, our culture, and our economy. Subsidize trains, mass transit, solar energy, infill development, bicycle infrastructure--those improve life. Let the Big 3 fade. Support the technology and businesses of the future, not the past.

Add your own signature and opinion to the list, using the following links:

• Support the bailout with conditions
• Support the bailout without conditions
• Oppose the bailout

Richard Risemberg on 11.18.08 @ 06:58 AM PST [link]  

I walked outside this morning to find a slight drizzle. I could have turned back, but hoped for the best and continued into Prospect Park. The end of fall is an excellent time to walk around. The rain did come, weighed the leaves and pulled many more off the trees. The last breath of color before winter.
Photo Gallery

Eric Miller on 11.15.08 @ 05:52 AM PST [link]  

Drivers may hate them, but cyclists love them: parking meters have long provided a nearly-universal supply of adequate, though not ideal, bike racks in cities all over the US, and probably elsewhere as well. (By the way, drivers' spite of parking meters is misplaced: it costs around $2,000.00 just to build an on-street parking space, and then it must be cleaned and maintained, and of course it forces the street to be wider, which contributes to sprawl and takes yet more square footage off the property tax rolls, costing your city money.)

But the highest, noblest use of a parking meter is the securing of a bicycle--that refined machine that brings grace to the streets, strength to hearts and legs, and clarity to our burdened atmosphere....

That's why I was concerned when I stopped at a nearby shopping street recently and saw that DOT was preparing to replace the parking meters with pay stations.

I wrote to my local concilmember, who is himself a cyclist. And I got back good news!

It turns out that the DOT "is in the process of getting a contractor to install bicycle racks that fit over the parking meter posts once the parking meters are removed."

And it turns out that we are not alone in this: Seattle has already had such a program in place, which you can see at Seattle.gov.

Richard Risemberg on 11.15.08 @ 04:53 AM PST [link]  

Regarding my post "The Balancing Act of Wall Street and Oil" October 29, there's more testimony out today that the lower oil prices brought on by the economic troubles will be short lived. More, the bulls may face a battle with oil prices when the market begins on the road to recovery.

In an AP Businesswire article based on a new report released by the Iinternational Energy Agency, former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham says...

"While macroeconomic conditions have lowered oil prices for the moment, there is nothing in the underlying economic picture that suggests this slowdown will be long-lived, maybe a year or more out. There was not enough production even when we were in triple-digit oil markets over the summer, and there's going to be a lot of pressure on the system when economies recover.

The report also says that current trends in energy supply and consumption are "patently unsustainable – environmentally, economically and socially"

"Rising imports of oil and gas into OECD regions and developing Asia, together with the growing concentration of production in a small number of countries, would increase our susceptibility to supply disruptions and sharp price hikes. At the same time, greenhouse-gas emissions would be driven up inexorably, putting the world on track for an eventual global temperature increase of up to 6°C."

See the Report

Eric Miller on 11.12.08 @ 02:33 PM PST [link]  

If you've ever pondered the power of a place to shape people and cultures, you probably find election maps interesting. Of course living in a culture influences our political opinions and cultural norms. Today this idea went far outside the usual scope when I looked at a map of American Indian culture. I knew I had seen it somewhere before, like on the cover of the 1981 book The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau. This book is not about Indians, it's about North American Cultural regions--in 1981. The American Indian Map appeared almost identical. Here we have cultures that developed hundreds of years apart forming the same basic boundaries as cultures made up of entirely different people with entirely different cultural traditions did hundreds of year's later. I'll have to ponder a bit more about what exactly it means, but on the surface it would seem that landscape, climate and resources may have significant power to influence human culture. Find This Book

Eric Miller on 11.09.08 @ 01:44 PM PST [link]  

The New Colonist will celebrate ten years in 2009 and we're planning some refinements to celebrate. We're currently exploring some new logos and slogans. We'd like your input. Click to view some of the ideas and feel free to comment or suggest others. click here

Eric Miller on 11.08.08 @ 10:49 AM PST [link]  

Wondering around in Cobble Hill on a rainy Saturday I stumbled upon the recently-opened Trader Joe's. I wasn't sure what to expect. Chain stores often bring a round of opposition when they're announced, but the protestors are eventually converted and seduced by low prices and consistent merchandise quality. I didn't come in to shop exactly; having noticed the store was in an old bank building, I wanted to go in and take a look. I found the store to be nicely done and, like chain stores or not, I can't imagine many mom-and-pops being able to restore the large vaulted space enough to open a market. Trader Joe's did prevent such a space from having a suspended office ceiling and flourescent tube lights with plastic covers. The space seems to work great too, having the feel of an old market house. Looking at the crowded street, I'd venture there are enough customers to go around and the neighboring businesses may find new customers, bought in by the lure of this retailer.

Eric Miller on 11.08.08 @ 10:37 AM PST [link]  

I'm not a typical Obama voter. I grew up with an affinity for Ronald Reagan. I didn't much care for the first Bush, Clinton was over-all a good president, but not inspiring, and the second Bush was (and is) a complete disaster. My self also has a libertarian (with a little l as I am registered independent, with a little i) side. I don't like the big political parties. I like to encourage folks not to vote outside the parties, but register outside the parties, in an attempt to remove the assurance of power.

I don't have a particular liking for anything Obama has proposed. I do think he is inspirational, and will bring some sort of uniting effect to the country. He'll also bring a new look at the United States from the world. There are some issues where I tend to agree... healthcare. "Socialized medicine" is not where ideally I want things to head, but right now there's no incentive for prevention, and that costs, in money and lives.

I don't look forward to a Senate majority, some balance of power is positive.

Tonight I saw a statistic that thirty percent of white folk who said race is important in the election supported Obama. I am one of those voters. We've reached the point where almost as many in America are non-white as white. In order to bring the country together, we need to have a multi-racial government. The world thinks of America as race-concious. We need to show the world that we can be concious of race and vote for a person of another race.

No longer will the world see America as a place that suppresses minorities. Not everything will be equal tomorrow, but we'll have a black, or at least mixed-race president. Barack Obama will be a mixed-race president elected by whites. And I don't know off-hand where that's happened before except in America's cities. Willie Brown as mayor in San Francisco and Tom Bradley for four terms in LA.

Tomorrow I will wake up in an America with a new president. Tomorrow I wake up in an America, where more is possible.

Eric Miller on 11.04.08 @ 05:59 PM PST [link]  

In 1932, the United States, and indeed much of the world, was in the midst of the Great Depression, an economic "correction" that overcorrected the abuses that battered our nation's economy in the years leading up to 1929: unfettered speculation, oppresson of labor, and "bubbles" of every description. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs and their life savings as banks collapsed from overleveraging in search of profit and operating capital that businesses depended on vanished like the ghostly image of real cash that it was.

In 1932, then, Americans elected a liberal democrat to the presidency, a man who had been a Wall Street lawyer and knew his way around a deal. A man who was physically different from the mainstream, in this case a cripple in a wheelchair.

This man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man who saved the US economy; and later, when faced with a enemy more ruthless and more powerful than any civilization had faced before, or has faced since, he teamed up with monarchical England and dictatorial Russia to defeat the Nazi Reich.

FDR established the SEC, the FDIC, and Social Security, created jobs for the unemployed that in turn created a legacy of art and infrastructure that enriches our nation to this day, and revived the economy quickly enough that by the time World War II began, the US was ready to do its part in saving the world from Hitler.

Today, we once again face an economic crash brought on by corporate greed, shortsightedness, and over-leveraging; jobs are vanishing, banks failing, and businesses unable to find credit. Once again we face a deadly enemy--not a man and his minions this time, for bin Laden and his followers are small potatoes compared to Hitler and his Nazis, who were allied with Mussolini's Fascists and Hirohito's Imperialists.

The enemy we face is Global Warming, itself, like our current economic despondency, an enemy of our own making.

And now we have elected another liberal Democrat, a Chicago pol who knows his way around a deal, an educated, intelligent man, like FDR, who, like FDR, is physically "different"--a black man, or really as much a white man as a black man, being exactly 50/50--a man who is a melting pot all in himself.

A man who has has demonstrated he cares for the poor and the middle classes as well as the rich. A man who knows the Constitution. A man who will be a friend to labor, the actual creators of wealth. A man who will ask us all to be responsible in our business doings, and to carry our fair shares of the national burdens.

The election results are in now, and Barack Obama has won a landslide in electoral college votes, and a solid majority in the popular vote. For the sake of the nation, we're glad he won.

Richard Risemberg on 11.04.08 @ 03:42 PM PST [link]  

The day started by going to the polls at the Brooklyn Museum. The crowd was too large so I headed to the office. The financial markets seemed to be up for no apparent reason other than a good mood, expecting an Obama victory. I heard durning the day folks were lined up waiting six hours in St. Louis. Tonight the polls weren't crowded. The Statue of Liberty in the Museum courtyard looked over voters. I stopped at the apartment to see if anything might be going on. Kentucky and Indiana were close. The talking heads also said South Carolina was "too close to call." That could make things interesting! I headed to the wine store and while nothing like the polls this morning, there was a line. The woman at the counter said they couldn't keep champagne in the fridge. I wonder the extent of celebration in the city later. I don't think I've lived through an election comparable to this.

Eric Miller on 11.04.08 @ 02:42 PM PST [link]  

The National Association of Railroad Passengers has urged the campaigns of both major parties to make greater federal investments in our national passenger train system a key part of plans to address economic, environmental, and energy challenges. NARP also asked “the candidates to make the same case to your colleagues on Capitol Hill” and to explain how the candidates, “as president, would ensure greater funding for passenger trains.”

In letters to Senators Barack Obama (D-IL) and John McCain (R-AZ), NARP Executive Director Ross B. Capon noted that, “Passenger trains are one positive response to this confluence of national dilemmas,” of increasing oil prices and economic challenges.

“Americans are flocking to trains as airline and private vehicle travel becomes more expensive and less convenient. July 2008 was the highest ridership month in Amtrak’s 37-year history, with 14% more passengers than in July 2007. Individual routes recorded up to 43% even as Americans drove and flew less. Similarly, domestic travel over the Labor Day weekend this year increased on Amtrak but declined on other modes.

“Amtrak is reaching capacity limits on its…inadequate fleet. Federal policy must empower Amtrak to invest in a renewed, expanded fleet. Amtrak will need at least $1.9 billion in Fiscal Year 2009 – including $100 million to repair sidelined rolling stock – to meet immediate growth needs.”

He also noted the superior energy efficiency of passenger trains—even with Amtrak’s aging fleet—and urged rapid expansion of the newly-created federal program to match state intercity passenger train investments.

The letter noted that Congress last week quickly approved putting “$8 billion of general funds into the Highway Trust Fund and now is seriously considering a huge favored lending program for the Big Three [automakers]. Surely, therefore, Congress also can increase intercity passenger train funding by $600 million in fiscal 2009 and send S. 294 to the White House.

“The highway and automaker efforts are understandable…but they reinforce dependence on energy-intensive automobiles and make it even more important for a balancing action that puts people to work building energy-efficient passenger train systems.”

The House and Senate both passed the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act, a five-year passenger rail reauthorization, by veto-proof margins. S. 294 authorizes a longer term funding framework, including more state matching grants.

Eric Miller on 11.02.08 @ 02:47 PM PST [link]