Hello everyone,
For those of you who aren't on the carfree_network list, we've
recently announced the dates of Towards Carfree Cities VII in
Istanbul, Turkey (August 27-31, 2007) AND sent a call-out for
proposals to host the 2008 conference.
If you're interested in hosting the 2008 conference, please see
www.worldcarfree.net/conference/ for details on how to submit a
proposal (by December 15 this year). Proposals from North America
are especially encouraged this time.
Please contact me with any questions.
Thanks,
Randy
Randall Ghent
Membership & Conference Coordinator
WORLD CARFREE NETWORK
Kratka 26, 100 00 Prague 10
Czech Republic
tel/fax: +(420) 274 810 849
skype: wcn-icc / randallghent
rghent@...
> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-
> subway27nov27,0,1906479,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
> Beverly Hills doesn't want to miss the subway
>
> By Jean Guccione
> Times Staff Writer
>
> November 27, 2006
>
> Beverly Hills officials, sensing that a subway to the sea is
> inevitable, want to ensure the train doesn't pass them by.
>
> They are preparing to select a route and two station locations to
> best serve residents, as well as business owners and their employees.
>
> It doesn't seem to matter that the city has little say over the
> path of the proposed 13-mile subway that would travel between
> downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Or that the Los Angeles
> County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which would design,
> build and operate the subway, is still at least a year or two away
> from picking the route.
>
> Forget, too, that no money has been set aside for the $5-billion
> project. Or that using federal funds to tunnel under Wilshire
> Boulevard still is illegal.
>
> Beverly Hills residents, some of whom once opposed a subway, may be
> set to endorse a Wilshire Boulevard route from Western Avenue that
> would include one station at La Cienega Boulevard, and another
> between Beverly and Rodeo drives.
>
> At community meetings, city leaders have confronted residents'
> fears of subway crime and potential terrorism. They warn naysayers
> that, without a subway, traffic on the Westside will only get worse.
>
> "There is an incredible sea change of attitude from resistance to
> support for the subway," said Allan Alexander, a former Beverly
> Hills mayor who co-chairs the city's mass transit panel.
>
> Mayor Steve Webb is leading the charge.
>
> He's trying to put Beverly Hills in the best position to lobby
> federal, state and local officials for the money needed to build
> the rail line and to make sure it goes through his city.
>
> Webb directed Alexander's subway study committee to "determine
> what's in our best interest."
>
> The subway study committee's tentative endorsement of the route
> through the city is to be finalized next month and sent to the City
> Council for consideration at its January meeting.
>
> A consultant hired by Beverly Hills said Wilshire Boulevard was
> chosen because it is surrounded by high-density residential and
> commercial development. It is the county's most heavily traveled
> transit corridor, according to the MTA.
>
> The committee considered but rejected a route along Santa Monica
> Boulevard from the subway's Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue
> station.
>
> Last year, during his campaign for Los Angeles mayor, then-City
> Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa promised to restart the Westside
> subway project — more than two decades after it had been derailed.
>
> Longtime subway opponents Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles),
> whose district includes parts of West Los Angeles, and Los Angeles
> County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the Westside, now
> are working with Villaraigosa to try to complete the east-west rail
> line.
>
> But that's still several years away. First, the proposed subway
> must be added to the MTA's long-range plan — an essential element
> for federal funding — and given a high priority.
>
> Even with the MTA board's endorsement, the proposed Red Line subway
> extension faces stiff competition for construction money.
>
> It will have to vie with plans to extend the Expo Line from Culver
> City to Santa Monica, the Gold Line through the San Gabriel Valley
> to the Ontario International Airport and the Green Line from El
> Segundo to Los Angeles International Airport.
>
> Meanwhile, the agency's planners are dusting off old studies,
> dating to 1994. Planning alone could take up to two years to
> complete. The MTA board recently authorized a mere $100,000 to hire
> a full-time planner to oversee the project.
>
> That's all the money currently dedicated to building the subway to
> the sea. Efforts by Waxman to overturn a federal ban on subway
> funding along Wilshire are stalled in the U.S. Senate.
>
> Waxman introduced the measure after experts concluded last year
> that a subway could be built without risk of another methane
> explosion like the one that ripped through a Fairfax-area clothing
> store in 1985. Although no one was killed, concerns about the blast
> helped lead to the stopping of subway construction.
>
> There is another funding complication. In 1998, Los Angeles County
> voters, in a move led by Yaroslavsky, barred the use of
> transportation sales tax revenue for tunneling.
>
> No one is suggesting that ban be lifted. Instead, transit
> officials, including Yaroslavsky, believe local money may be used
> for non-tunneling parts of the subway project.
>
> Subway advocates are optimistic, especially with passage earlier
> this month of a $20-billion state infrastructure bond issue.
>
> But critics, such as the Bus Riders Union, argue that bond money
> should be used to improve bus service.
>
> To make it all happen, MTA officials, who rarely proceed without
> local support for regional transit projects, welcome the city of
> Beverly Hills' early efforts to rally support.
>
> "The seriousness and detail of their work shows their commitment
> for our common vision for improving transit service," Villaraigosa,
> an MTA board member, said in a statement last week.
>
> Alexander, a longtime subway advocate, believes mass transit is
> essential to conveniently ferrying many thousands of workers and
> visitors in and out of the city daily.
>
> "It will allow people to come to work in the city, shop in the
> city, visit the city without bringing more cars to the city," he said.
>
> The population of Beverly Hills, with just 35,000 residents, swells
> weekdays to 250,000. Nearly 28,000 people a day board buses along
> Wilshire Boulevard within the city's limits.
>
> "I'm hoping that by our taking the initiative in this regard that
> Century City, Mid-Wilshire, Westwood and even Santa Monica will
> begin focusing on this," Alexander said.
>
> Beverly Hills officials may still have to persuade some residents.
> At a recent public meeting, one resident fretted that subway stops
> create potential terrorist targets. Another expressed concern about
> transit-related crime.
>
> Overall, however, the tide seems to have turned.
>
> "Anything that we can do to get cars off of our streets will be a
> plus for the quality of the life for the residents as well as
> assist the businesses," resident Joe Safier said at a meeting this
> month.
>
> The business community also is on board.
>
> "Gridlock is such a problem on the Westside that it must be
> relieved, and we must be part of the equation," Dan Walsh, chief
> executive of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce, said Friday.
>
> Chamber members suspect the traffic congestion they encounter daily
> could someday discourage visitors from shopping, eating and doing
> other business in their city.
>
> It also could make it difficult to attract workers.
>
> "We have to make it a piece of cake to get here," Walsh said.
>
> *
>
>
> jean.guccione@...
--
Richard Risemberg
http://www.rickrise.comhttp://www.bicyclefixation.comhttp://www.newcolonist.com
With enormous respect to Martin Cassini and those who believe that human
nature and civil behaviour alone is going to do the trick, I would like
to add the following small variant for an eventual Light-Free, Car-Free
Day in your city. But first a caveat:
The very nature of the car is that it makes one impatient, and speed is
a natural, inevitable, almost universal expression of this impatience.
In all of us I am afraid, even those of us who stop and smile when a
pedestrian is waiting to cross. It is, irrevocably, the nature, the
pathology of the beast (the beast by the way in this case being that
particular combination of man and machine - the roaring centaur of the
20th century)
So, what to do in those places in 2007 where they decide to turn off the
traffic lights for the day and have a go at this interesting idea?
Bear in mind that - in our skeptical version of this at any rate - the
one thing that is needed to slow people down is to remove as many of
those long straight lines that usually they have to run in. What we
need to do is to make it physically impossible for them to speed. At
least at the learning stage.
So at every intersection on this one day, just before the lights go off,
someone smart puts in an agreed obstacle, a large visible obstacle that
everyone, every driver can see and be obliged to slow down for and creep
around.
Now this might for example be one or two parked cars in the middle of
the intersection - a sort of improved roundabout.
Even better perhaps if we can do something around whatever is the large
visible object we pop there. For example turn it into a bit of convivial
public space. Maybe with a couple of potted plants. An all day poetry
reading from a chair and media link. Maybe a get up like the following
from the terrific Rebar group --
http://www.rebargroup.org/projects/parkingday/index.html -- but this
time in the middle of the intersection.
Anyway, you get the idea.
Anybody ready to run with this?
Eric Britton
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
On Dec 2, 2006, at 2:46 AM, Eric Britton wrote:
> So, what to do in those places in 2007 where they decide to turn
> off the
> traffic lights for the day and have a go at this interesting idea?
We had an inadvertent light-free day in LA during the last big
earthquake. Watched cars just drive through now-uncontrolled
intersections and run into each other repeatedly. I'd suggest
putting giant yellow inflatable domes in the middle of each
crossing. Or park a D-50 there.
Doesn't a group in San Francisco regularly "rent" pay parking spaces
by the 25-cent piece and have lunches, concerts, readings, etc. in them?
> Even better perhaps if we can do something around whatever is the
> large
> visible object we pop there. For example turn it into a bit of
> convivial
> public space. Maybe with a couple of potted plants. An all day poetry
> reading from a chair and media link. Maybe a get up like the
> following
> from the terrific Rebar group --
> http://www.rebargroup.org/projects/parkingday/index.html -- but this
> time in the middle of the intersection.
>
>
>
> Anyway, you get the idea.
>
> Anybody ready to run with this?
You should see if you have local members of Reclaim the Streets!
handy. They do this sort of thing in England a bit, I believe.
http://rts.gn.apc.org/
Rick
--
Richard Risemberg
http://www.rickrise.comhttp://www.bicyclefixation.comhttp://www.newcolonist.com
> Doesn't a group in San Francisco regularly "rent" pay
> parking spaces by the 25-cent piece and have lunches,
> concerts, readings, etc. in them?
=v= Not regularly. That was done twice, by the Rebar Group
that was mentioned.
>> http://www.rebargroup.org/projects/parkingday/
<_Jym_>
--
The cars below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers
anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding.
-- Jonathan Lethem
_The_Fortress_of_Solitude_
I think we could do a series of flash mobs during CFD 2007 where people
would go to a specific place and set up a park, a playground, a beach, a
living room, etc. It may need some logistics, but it's not very difficult
when there's lots of people willing to help. It would renovate carfree days
to a certain extent and maybe it could generate greater awareness of the
many uses public space (and specifically streets) could have. Space
Hijackers in London have really done a lot in this respect as well.
Carlos F. Pardo
ps: basic info about flashmobs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob :
"In modern usage, flash mob describes a group of people who assemble
suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time,
and then quickly disperse. They are usually organized with the help of the
Internet or other digital communications networks."
From: LotsLessCars@yahoogroups.com [mailto:LotsLessCars@yahoogroups.com] On
Behalf Of Eric Britton
Sent: 02 December 2006 05:47 PM
To: LotsLessCars@yahoogroups.com
Cc: CarFree@yahoogroups.com; carfree_cities@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [LotsLessCars] Light-Free, Car-Free Day - Idea Factory
With enormous respect to Martin Cassini and those who believe that human
nature and civil behaviour alone is going to do the trick, I would like to
add the following small variant for an eventual Light-Free, Car-Free Day in
your city. But first a caveat:
The very nature of the car is that it makes one impatient, and speed is a
natural, inevitable, almost universal expression of this impatience. In all
of us I am afraid, even those of us who stop and smile when a pedestrian is
waiting to cross. It is, irrevocably, the nature, the pathology of the
beast (th! e beast by the way in this case being that particular combination
of man and machine - the roaring centaur of the 20th century)
So, what to do in those places in 2007 where they decide to turn off the
traffic lights for the day and have a go at this interesting idea?
Bear in mind that - in our skeptical version of this at any rate - the one
thing that is needed to slow people down is to remove as many of those long
straight lines that usually they have to run in. What we need to do is to
make it physically impossible for them to speed. At least at the learning
stage.
So at every intersection on this one day, just before the lights go off,
someone smart puts in an agreed obstacle, a large visible obstacle that
everyone, every driver can see and be obliged to slow down for and creep
around.
Now this might for example be one or two parked cars in the middle of the
intersection - a sort of improved roundabout.
Even better perhaps if we can do something around whatever is the large
visible object we pop there. For example turn it into a bit of convivial
public space. Maybe with a couple of potted plants. An all day poetry
reading from a chair and media link. Maybe a get up like the following from
the terrific Rebar group --
http://www.rebargroup.org/projects/parkingday/index.html -- but this time in
the middle of the intersection.
Anyway, you get the idea.
Anybody ready to run with this?
Eric Britton
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Bus Rapid Transit Planning course – Training Course
11th December, 2006. Mercure Hotel, Yogyakarta
Dear all
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is an innovative approach to solve the problems of
public transport in the developing cities. Cities such as Curitiba, Bogotá
and Jakarta have largely benefited by implementing BRT. The whole BRT system
would be worthless if there is no good planning involved.
With our experience in BRT planning and implementation, GTZ-SUTP, will be
offering a training course on Bus Rapid Transit Planning. The course will
describe the key components of a BRT system and give basic tools for
policymakers and technical staff of municipalities to start developing a
successful and high-impact system in their cities. The main objective of
this training course is to introduce participants to the features of BRT and
how it can be applied in their city.
The course will explain the criteria of demand analysis, corridor selection,
operational plan, customer service plan, infrastructure, modal integration,
technology, business and financing of a BRT system. It will also describe
the social, environmental and economic impacts of a BRT system. The course
will engage participants in exercises for their cities regarding Bus Rapid
Transit and then evaluate the potential application of a BRT system in each
city.
We hence warmly invite you to be a part of this training course. Please mail
Mr. Carlos F. Pardo at <mailto:carlos.pardo@...> carlos.pardo@...
for registering for the course. For more information please visit
<http://www.cleanairnet.org/baq2006/1757/article-71088.html>
http://www.cleanairnet.org/baq2006/1757/article-71088.html . Please note
that there are limited spaces available for this course, so register soon
before vacancies are finished!
Hoping to see you in Yogyakarta,
Yours sincerely
SUTP team
GTZ Sustainable Urban Transport Project (SUTP)
The United Nations Economic and
Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP)
Transport and Tourism Division
Room 0942, ESCAP UN Building,
Rajadamnern Nok Rd. Bangkok 10200, Thailand
Tel: +66 (0) 2 - 288 1321
Fax: +66 (0) 2 - 280 6042
Website: <http://www.sutp.org/> www.sutp.org
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is an innovative approach to solve the
> problems of public transport in the developing cities. Cities
> such as Curitiba, Bogotá and Jakarta have largely benefited
> by implementing BRT.
=v= Here in the United States, BRT serves to usurp LRT. Indeed,
its very name is an attempt to convince people that they can
have the benefits of LRT with a bus system. (This is only true
if you pretend that the many benefits of rail don't exist.)
All BRT "success stories" in the U.S. involve BRT running on
former LRT routes.
=v= Curitiba has moved on beyond BRT to demanding an upgrade
to rail. Why is it, then, that its BRT system continues to be
touted as a be-all and end-all for other parts of the world?
<_Jym_>
--- In carfree_cities@yahoogroups.com, Jym Dyer <jym@...> wrote:
> =v= Here in the United States, BRT serves to usurp LRT. Indeed,
> its very name is an attempt to convince people that they can
> have the benefits of LRT with a bus system. (This is only true
> if you pretend that the many benefits of rail don't exist.)
I agree, those arguments were made here in Cleveland, which is
currently building a BRT line.
> All BRT "success stories" in the U.S. involve BRT running on
> former LRT routes.
Cleveland once had an extensive trolley network. Some of the trolley
rails were recently uncovered (and discarded) during reconstruction of
Euclid Avenue as part of the BRT project. Buses are expected to be
running in 2008 or 2009. Whether it will be a success or not remains
to be seen, but are trolleys "light rail"?
Cleveland has a few light rail lines that have been around for up to
seventy-five years, but the network has not been expanded and does not
even cover the core of the city. Meanwhile the "city" has expanded
exponentially over the years, simultaneously increasing and diluting
the population.
Despite pleas from advocates of light rail in Cleveland, BRT was
adopted as a less expensive alternative. It will be interesting to
see what the local sentiment is in 2010, after a year or two of operation.
Some interesting words for the City Philosopher of Almere, the "new town"
near Amsterdam:
http://www.erasmuspc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=211&Itemid=77
I actually was Wiki-ing and Goggle-ing Almere about their underground
waste disposal system
<http://www.envac.net/docs/projects/383_Almere_ENG.webb.pdf> and ran into
that article.
Golly, in a few newly developing parts of Prague they could use that
system together with trains for collection and part or all of the
processing for trash and recycling...
- T
------------------------------------------------------
Todd Edelman
Director
Green Idea Factory
Korunní 72
CZ-10100 Praha 10
Czech Republic
++420 605 915 970
Skype: toddedelman
edelman@...
http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain
Green Idea Factory,
a member of World Carfree Network
> ... are trolleys "light rail"?
=v= Yes. Though they predate the phrase, they exemplify it.
> Despite pleas from advocates of light rail in Cleveland, BRT
> was adopted as a less expensive alternative.
=v= Yes, that's always the argument. However, it's only "less
expensive" in the short term, because buses require more fuel,
more maintenance, and more space on the road. They also damage
roads, but that cost is generally in a different accounting
ledger and is thus often ignored as a cost of BRT. Even so,
in the long herm a city budget finds itself facing all these
higher costs of "less expensive" BRT.
=v= There are of course higher environmental and health costs,
but the ledgers those show up on are so often never connected
to their sources. LRT also has the effect of attracting
economic development along its corridors, something BRT has
yet to demonstrate (though it does enjoy those benefits to
some degree when it usurps an LRT corridor).
=v= Penny-wise and pound foolish.
<_Jym_>
Sustainable Urban Transport Project (GTZ SUTP) update
August - December 2006
This newsletter gives updates on the SUTP activities, resources, website and
events related to our topic of interest. For more information or feedback,
please contact sutp@... , or visit our website at www.sutp.org (or
www.sutp.cn from China).
Note: You have been sent this update because you’ve registered in the SUTP
website and/or agreed to be part of the sutp yahoogroup
sutp-asia@yahoogroups.com . Please follow instructions in the group website
at www.yahoogroups.com/sutp-asia to unsubscribe.
*****Project related News*****
(For greater detail of these news, please go to www.sutp.org. Users from
China please visit www.sutp.cn)
* BRT Planning Traning Course at BAQ 2006, Yogyakarta (Indonesia)
Date: December 11, 8:00- 16:00
Venue: Mercure Phoenix 1, Mercure Hotel
Organizer:GTZ Sustainable Urban Transport Project
Based on the Bus Rapid Transit Planning Guide document developed by Lloyd
Wright for GTZ, the course will describe the key components of a BRT system
and give basic tools for policymakers and technical staff of municipalities
to start developing a successful and high-impact system in their cities. It
will emphasize on the necessary steps to develop a Bus Rapid Transit system,
comparing it with other mass transit options, and participants will be able
to analyze their situation with the trainer in order to see how they could
start planning for a system in their city. The main objective of this
training course is to introduce participants to the features of BRT and how
it can be applied in their city. In case a city would want to develop a full
BRT system in the future, a more comprehensive course (4-5 days) would be
developed with a specific municipality.
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=159&Itemid=40&
lang=en
* Public Awareness and Behaviour Change in Sustainable Transport – Training
Course at BAQ, Yogyakarta (Indonesia)
Schedule: 12 Dec (Tue) 2006 / 8:00-16:00
Venue: Mercure Museum Room, Mercure Hotel
Organizer: GTZ Sustainable Urban Transport Project
Based on the Public Awareness and Behavior Change training document
developed by GTZ SUTP, the course will emphasize on how to develop
comprehensive and effective strategies of behavior change in sustainable
transport, which will complement an existent transport policy and further
its potential in improving citizen’s awareness and habits while using one or
another mode of transport. The training course will describe why public
awareness is important in developing a complete transport strategy, and will
focus on specific measures that can be later applied in each participant’s
city. Participants will have the chance to develop a comprehensive public
awareness and behavior change strategy, along with a proper communications
scheme that will diffuse the strategy’s objectives and results. Strategies
will be developed based on proposed budgets depending on each city’s
possibilities, and all strategies will be evaluated and corrected throughout
the training course.
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=40&
lang=en
* Bus Rapid Transit planning training for Indonesian cities, Jakarta
(Indonesia)
55 participants from 10 cities in Indonesia attended the training course on
Bus Rapid Transit planning jointly organized by GTZ, ITDP, Ministry of
Transport, PUSTRAL and MTI on December 7 and 8, 2006. The training was
conducted by Mr. Ulises Navarro, and had inputs from Mr. Heru Sutomo from
PUSTRAL and Mr. Carlos F. Pardo from GTZ-SUTP. More information on this
training course will be available shortly at www.sutp.org .
* GTZ-SUTP website for China
Due to the great need of information on sustainable transport in Chinese,
the GTZ-SUTP project has developed a website specifically for China
accessible from www.sutp.cn . The content is both in Chinese and English,
and the website has the same features as the original sutp.org website.
Please visit www.sutp.cn and take a look!
* GTZ-SUTP in China: 3 training courses and diffusion
GTZ-SUTP delivered three training courses in Beijing in November, 2006. The
first was on Bus Rapid Transit on 2-4 November, while a course on
Sustainable Urban Transport was given to Chinese mayors on November 6. The
third training course was a four day course on Sustainable Urban Transport
given on November 7-10. This is the first exercise of a series of training
courses to be delivered in China within the next years, initially organized
with the cooperation of CUSTReC (BRT course) and Ministry of Transport,
Tsinghua University and Southeast University (SUT course). Participants for
all courses were between 30 and 50, from various cities all over China.
These efforts will be combined with the SUMA program (in partnership with
CAI Asia, WRI, ITDP, I-ce and UNCRD) which will be launched early 2007, and
will have a strong capacity building component led by GTZ-SUTP, which will
address Asian nationals who are willing to become trainers on sustainable
urban transport topics or those willing to implement specific project on
this topic.
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=147&Itemid=40&
lang=en
* Training course on Bus Rapid Transit in Mexico
The GTZ SUTP project developed a training course on Bus Rapid Transit in
Querétaro, Mexíco On October 19-21, 2006. The main trainer for the course
was Dr Darío Hidalgo, former Deputy Manager of TransMilenio in Bogotá. The
3-day training course had 47 participants, mainly from Mexican cities.
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=135&Itemid=40&
lang=en
* Three training courses in Sao Paulo
During and after the CAI LAC conference in Sao Paulo (24-27 July, 2006), the
GTZ SUTP project developed three training courses on Public Awareness, Bus
Rapid Transit and Non motorised transport in Sao Paulo during July 24-
August 3, 2006. The Public awareness (July 24) course was developed by
Carlos F. Pardo and had assistants from different cities in Brazil, and some
other Latin American cities. The course on Bus Rapid Transit (July 28) was
developed by Mr Lloyd Wright and had participants from cities in Brazil and
other cities in LAC. The 4-day non motorised transport training course (July
30- August 3) was directed specifically to Brazilian cities and was
coorganized by GTZ, I-ce, ITDP, Ministry of Cities in Brazil and the
Municipality of Guarulhos. The latter had 50 participants and 4 trainers
from all cooperating institutions.
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=40&l
ang=en
***** CURRENT AND UPCOMING EVENTS (organized by continent, starting date).
* Events in Latin America
Events: 1
05.02.2007 UITP - 5th International Bus Conference
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&Itemid=56&func=details&di
d=28&lang=en
26.2.2007 ANDINATRAFFIC 2007: 2nd International Exhibition for
Transport and Traffic Technologies
http://www.andinatraffic.com/sa3t/home/index.cfm
* Events in Asia
Events: 8
29.11.2006 2nd annual Asian Infrastructure Congress
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&Itemid=56&func=details&di
d=2&lang=en
02.12.2006 International colloquium in Shanghai
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&Itemid=56&func=details&di
d=34&lang=en
09.12.2006 11th Intl. Conf. of Hong Kong Society for Transport
Studies
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&Itemid=56&func=details&di
d=15&lang=en
13.12.2006 Better Air Quality Workshop, Yogyakarta (Indonesia)
http://www.baq2006.org
* Events in Europe
Events: 3
09.05.2007 NECTAR Conference Porto , FEUP
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&Itemid=56&func=details&di
d=25&lang=en
12.06.2007 Velo-city 2007 in Munich
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&Itemid=56&func=details&di
d=18&lang=en
25.06.2007 ENHR Sustainable Urban Areas Conference
http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&Itemid=56&func=details&di
d=33&lang=en
* Events in North America
Events: 1
21.01.2007 Transportation Research Board (TRB) 86th Annual Meeting
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Hello All--
There's a new article in Bicycle Fixation today: "My Travelling
History," by Simon J. Baddeley of Birmingham University, UK. It's a
pensive and evocative exploration of the evolution of Prof.
Baddeley's thinking about travel, culture, nature, and our place in
the world, and I recommend it highly to all.
See it at:
http://bicyclefixation.com/travelution.html
And enjoy the rest of the 'zine while you're there!
Cheers,
Rick
--
Richard Risemberg
http://www.rickrise.comhttp://www.bicyclefixation.comhttp://www.newcolonist.com
Nice video from Greenpeace, worth a look. See it at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMl9DOA_Dzg
Best regards,
Carlos F. Pardo
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Hi,
Hmmm... all the other people have left the office... by what means? I dont
like a message which oversimplifies the issue, as this ad does, by only
targeting SUV drivers.
I tend to like more absurd adverts, such as this one (the style, not the
content or portrayals):
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYH3nhTgaJs&mode=related&search=>
For more info: <http://www.lindqvist.com/index.php?ID=1831>
There are lots of real TV ads and also some parodies on You Tube so for
those of you who, like me, dont watch TV regularly it could be useful to
check some of them out...
T
------------------------------------------------------
Todd Edelman
Director
Green Idea Factory
Korunní 72
CZ-10100 Praha 10
Czech Republic
++420 605 915 970
Skype: toddedelman
edelman@...
http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain
Green Idea Factory,
a member of World Carfree Network
China set to enjoy a day without cars
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-04 09:59:54
BEIJING, Dec. 4 -- Shanghai will join more than 70 cities across China
next year to promote a no-car day and encourage commuters to use cleaner
forms of transport.
China has set aside the week of Sept. 16-22, 2007 as its first public
transport week. And on the final day, private car owners will be asked to
leave their vehicles at home and ride bikes, use mass transit or walk to
work, school and shopping, Qiu Baoxing, deputy minister of construction,
told a national meeting in Beijing on Saturday.
If all private cars stayed off the streets for 24 hours, China would
save 33 million liters of gasoline, reduce urban pollution by 90 percent and
prevent an untold number of deaths and injuries from traffic accidents,
authorities said.
In addition to Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Chongqing and Hangzhou have
also promised to join in.
Authorities said compliance by motorists will be voluntary but that some
streets in all the cities taking part will be blocked to private cars.
France initiated the no-car day in 1998, and two years later, the
European Union's environmental agency kicked off European Mobility Week on
Sept. 16-22, which also featured a car-free day. The environmental exercise
has since expanded to more than 1,000 cities across Europe.
Qiu said China's program is designed to raise public awareness about the
need for greater environmental protection by encouraging urbanites to use
less polluting forms of transport.
Rush-hour traffic jams often turn major roads in big cities into parking
lots, Qiu told the meeting.
In downtown Beijing, 60 percent of the 183 major intersections suffer
serious jam-ups, Qiu said.
China's capital has 2.82 million cars on its streets, and the number of
new ones is increasing by 1,000 a day, cutting vehicle speeds to about half
of what they were 10 years ago. Across China, a city bus commuter takes 10
minutes longer than it did a decade ago, and that's why 70 percent of urban
residents are dissatisfied with bus services, according to Qiu.
Traffic jams cost the country about 250 billion yuan (31.65 billion U.S.
dollars) in lost productivity in 2003, or two percent of that year's gross
domestic product, the official said.
Qiu urged city governments to improve public transport efficiency, give
priority to buses, shorten transfer time between buses and invest more funds
into the public transport system.
Fewer than 10 percent of city residents use public transport across the
country on average, he said.
In large cities the figure is about 20 percent, compared with 40 to 60
percent in major metropolitan areas in Europe, Japan and South America.
(Source: Shanghai Daily)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-12/04/content_5430687.htm
Ah yes, now China wakes up, after encouraging people to buy private
cars and building roadways to accommodate them.
When I was in China in 1990, there would have been no need for a
car-free day, because most people in most cities rode bicycles or took
transit.
However, recent Chinese films that I have seen portray cities choked
with automobile traffic. They should have quit while they were ahead.
In transit,
Karen Sandness
Maybe they'd like to replicate a carfree Brugges? Rothenburg ob der
Tauber? Vieux Lyon?
China Gets Its Own Slice of English Countryside
Morning Edition, December 12, 2006 · Shanghai's city planners are
carrying out an ambitious scheme to relieve population pressure: They
are resettling 500,000 people in nine new towns in the suburbs. Each
is built in a distinctive style, including an Italian town with
canals based on Venice and a German town designed by Albert Speer,
the son of Hitler's favorite architect.
Thames Town is one of these new settlements. It features cobbled
streets, half-timbered Tudor houses, Edwardian townhouses, and a
covered market with a clock tower and weather vane on top. Thames
Town looks like an English country town. And that was the whole idea,
to re-create Middle England in the Middle Kingdom.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6608596
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Hi All,
After a long delay, Carfree Times #44 is in near-final draft at:
http://www.carfree.com/cft/i044.html
I haven't formally published it yet, so if you see any mistakes in the
next day or two, please let me know OFF LIST.
Thanks,
Joel--
All looks good in CFT. Sorry to hear about your folks. Are you
coming back to the US to take care of them?
Cheers,
Rick
On Dec 12, 2006, at 8:45 AM, mailbox@... wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> After a long delay, Carfree Times #44 is in near-final draft at:
>
> http://www.carfree.com/cft/i044.html
>
> I haven't formally published it yet, so if you see any mistakes in the
> next day or two, please let me know OFF LIST.
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
--
Richard Risemberg
http://www.rickrise.comhttp://www.bicyclefixation.comhttp://www.newcolonist.com
Joel--
Sorry, I've been exhausted, and replied to the list. Gina's gotten a
very nice job in a horrible location and is driving 32 miles each
way, getting up at 4:30am to avoid traffic. The commute leaves her
completely drained, and life is pretty dull. During the weekend she
bicycles most places and livens up a little, but she's barely herself
anymore. Hopes to bail out after a year or about 5 more months.
I've started a small business making formal cut bicycle knickers of
my own design, so people who want to engage in transportational
bicycling will not feel that the only choice is to look like a geek
or a slob. It has been an education as I have no previous experience
in the rag trade. I do have experience in the Internet, and have
actually gone into profit with pre-production orders. I have some
other designs in mind--all oriented towards transportational cycling--
and if it takes off as a business I might be able to devote more time
to carfree activism.
Meanwhile, my mother, who is physically healthy, is impaired enough
in memory that she no longer leaves her property, and has come to
believe that she has no bills because she is retired. I've hired
someone to stay with her three days a week but am running her entire
financial life. I assume you are returning to the US to take care of
your folks, and I know the sort of thing that entails now. Yours
appear to be mentally competent so that helps, but it's still time-
consuming.
Two friends of mine were recently injured on their bicycles, one by
an intentional hit-and-run that the police refused to pursue despite
the testimony of witnesses in a Jeep who had chased the culprit and
gotten a license number and description; a concerted campaign of
phone calls and letters by LA bike activists got the ball rolling.
Another friend was hit-and-run by another bicyclist, and left with a
broken arm and paltry insurance. Both women. And with the holiday
frenzy upon us LA's already imbecilic drivers become downright
irrational.
Anyway, feel free to call or write to blow off steam or to ask for
any help I might be able to render at a distance. And be strong.
Rick
--
Richard Risemberg
http://www.rickrise.comhttp://www.bicyclefixation.comhttp://www.newcolonist.com
Spelling error. Go to "Active Safety Enforcement" and in the
paragraph just previous (in the "Smaller, Slower Cars" section)
"consequently reuctions in vehicle weight" -- "reuctions" should be
"reductions".
tnx!
Quoting chbuckeye <coleridge3150@...>:
> Spelling error. Go to "Active Safety Enforcement" and in the
> paragraph just previous (in the "Smaller, Slower Cars" section)
>
> "consequently reuctions in vehicle weight" -- "reuctions" should be
> "reductions".
>
>
>
>
Asia's greenhouse gas emissions will treble over the next 25 years,
according to a report commissioned by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
... a conference in Indonesia has heard that while some Asian governments
should be praised for toughening vehicle emissions standards, with many
phasing out leaded gasoline, much work still needs to be done.
"Transport is growing faster in most cities so transport emissions are a
big part of the problem," Lew Fulton, a transport expert with the UN
Environmental Programme, told the three-day Better Air Quality Conference
2006 in the city of Yogyakarta.
"We're not only seeing increases in pollutant emissions. We're seeing huge
increases in fuel consumption which is coupled tightly with (carbon
dioxide) emissions," he said.
"It's costing cities and countries ever increasing amounts of foreign
exchange with the high oil prices that we've got."
The World Health Organization said increased pollution in Asia is
estimated to cause as many as 537,000 premature deaths each year, as well
as a rise in cardiopulmonary and respiratory illnesses.
Full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6178683.stm
------------------------------------------------------
Todd Edelman
Director
Green Idea Factory
Korunní 72
CZ-10100 Praha 10
Czech Republic
++420 605 915 970
Skype: toddedelman
edelman@...
http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain
Green Idea Factory,
a member of World Carfree Network
Intimate strangers
There are people you see every day but never meet. Urban living is full of
these close encounters where we never make contact. A photographer decided
to talk to these "intimate strangers"
(The comments section which follows is particularly good...)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6176235.stm
- T
------------------------------------------------------
Todd Edelman
Director
Green Idea Factory
Korunní 72
CZ-10100 Praha 10
Czech Republic
++420 605 915 970
Skype: toddedelman
edelman@...
http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain
Green Idea Factory,
a member of World Carfree Network
This is what we are going up against:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndhGCZs7a_s&NR
------------------------------------------------------
Todd Edelman
Director
Green Idea Factory
Korunní 72
CZ-10100 Praha 10
Czech Republic
++420 605 915 970
Skype: toddedelman
edelman@...
http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain
Green Idea Factory,
a member of World Carfree Network
http://www.alternet.org/story/45389/?comments=view&cID=388973&pID=388965
Conservatives' Vision of an America Without Cities
By Jeremy Adam Smith, Public Eye. Posted December 12, 2006.
Rural Americans tend to see city culture as a haven for loose morals.
Lucky for them, the Electoral College, Senate and federal budget have
tilted power toward the heartland.
One Nation, Two Futures?
The formula that emerged from the 2000 and 2004 Presidential
elections was provocative: The less dense the population, the more
likely it was to vote Republican. Republicans appeared to have lost
the cities and inner suburbs, positioning themselves as the party of
country roads, small towns and traditional values. Though Bush was
often mocked for the time he spent on his ranch, sleeves rolled up,
gun in hand, the image was widely promoted and became a cornerstone
of his identity among Republican voters.
Conversely, it looked like Democrats had lost the country -- that is,
until November 2006 when Democrats won decisive victories in the
Midwest and Great Plains, often by leveraging their candidates' rural
identities against a national Democratic Party that local voters saw
as being overly urban, secular and affluent. By November 8, the
electoral map looked a whole lot bluer. Yet Democrats could not have
won without appealing to libertarian, anti-urban sensibilities.
"Millions of rural people have come to reject the larger framework of
urban life," writes public radio reporter Brian Mann in his
compelling new book Welcome to the Homeland: A Journey to the Heart
of America's Conservative Rural Rebellion. "They despise the liberal
modernism that shaped metro culture in the twentieth century and see
it as an ideology that is every bit as foreign and threatening as
communism."
Voting is just the tip of the iceberg. Antagonism toward cities is an
under-recognized, under-analyzed factor in right-wing organizing, but
now more and more writers are struggling to understand the rural/
urban divide, how it has shaped national politics, and what it means
for progressive organizing.
Mann coins the term "homelander" to describe largely white, anti-
urban conservatives and says the homeland is a state of mind. You
hear the homeland ethos not only in George W. Bush's acquired Texas
twang, but in the voices documented in recent books from Mann, Steve
Macek, and Juan Enriquez.
"Urban America breeds things that will probably never be here [in
Perryton, Texas], but it scares people," Jim Hudson, publisher of
Perryton Herald, tells Mann. What kinds of things? asks Mann. "Gay
culture," he replies. "HIV sure wasn't bred in rural America."
The City and the Tower
Homelander ideologues of all stripes, from religious to libertarian
to neoconservative, agree that cities, like governments, should be
small enough to drown in the bathtub. Their hostility has deep
cultural roots.
The homelander vision of the city starts with a story in Genesis
11:1-9. When God saw the first city of humankind and the tower its
residents had built, He destroyed the tower and confused their
language, "so that one will not understand the language of his
companion" and "scattered them from there upon the face of the entire
earth, and they ceased building the city."
Later in Genesis, God destroys the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah for
gross immorality, which many Christians have interpreted as
homosexuality. (Classical Jewish texts specify economic greed, not
sexuality, as the cause of God's wrath.) Thus begins the Christian
history of urban life.
Now let's skip ahead several thousand years, to the birth of the
American Republic. "Enthusiasm for the American city has not been
typical or predominant in our intellectual history," writes Morton
and Lucia White in their 1962 study, Intellectuals Against the City.
"Fear has been the more common reaction." Thomas Jefferson described
"great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the
liberties of man"; Henry David Thoreau preferred his cabin in the
woods to "the desperate city"; in 1907, the Rev. Josiah Strong called
the modern city "a Menace to State and Nation."
This is not to say rural politics was (or is) always conservative, or
even anti-urban. From the Sierra and Rocky Mountains to the
Appalachians, rural progressives built a great, creative tradition of
civil disobedience, multiracial organizing, and cultural dissent. Yet
in recent political history, that heritage was obscured by
conservative organizing that promoted a race-based depiction of the
city as "chaotic, ruined, and repellent, the exact inverse of the
orderly domestic idyll of the suburbs," as Steve Macek writes in his
recent book Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and Moral Panic
Over the City. In such a view, urban poverty is a natural byproduct
of unnatural urban life; it is slack morals, not racism or
capitalism, which create the urban underclass and its affluent
liberal enablers.
Thus the solution to urban poverty and lawlessness is not welfare and
economic development, which will "prolong the problems and perhaps
make them worse," but instead law enforcement, religious evangelism,
and market-driven ethnic cleansing.
Tilting Against Towers: The New Right's Common Ground
As America urbanized and conservatives resurrected the ancient image
of the city as dirty and dangerous, they simultaneously affirmed the
ideal of the small town and countryside. Religious and secular
conservatives alike found common ground in promoting the idea of an
urban/rural divide and, in the process, helped make it real.
When the New Right emerged as a political force in the early 1980s,
journalist Frances Fitzgerald paid a visit to Lynchburg, Virginia,
where Jerry Falwell founded one of the first suburban megachurches
and launched the Moral Majority, the first major organizational
expression of the modern religious Right. There, in 1981, Fitzgerald
found a homelander utopia with over one hundred churches.
"Lynchburg calls itself a city," she writes in Cities on a Hill, "but
it is really a collection of suburbs. In the fifties, its old
downtown was supplanted by a series of shopping plazas, leaving it
with no real center ... The automobile has cut too many swaths across
it, leaving gasoline stations and fast-food places to spring up in
parking-lot wastelands. But it is a clean city, full of quiet streets
and shade trees." She also found Falwell's congregation to be
astonishingly uniform in race, culture, and dress, despite a
substantial minority of African-Americans in the suburbs around them.
In his church sermons Falwell talked with his congregation about his
trips to New York "and the narrow escapes he has had among the
denizens of Sin City," hitting racial code words like "welfare
chiselers," "urban rioters," and "crime in the streets" -- all
phenomena with which his congregation had little or no personal
contact. These helped mobilize the homeland against the forces of
modernism that converged in the city.
The Right's Attack on Cities
Though the Religious Right bases its public policy agenda on the
authority of the Bible and the libertarian Right bases its on the
sovereignty of the individual, they converge in the same suburban
parking lot. As the Right gained power on a national level, their
policies and preconceptions have had a direct impact on cities.
"During the Reagan and Bush eras alone," Steve Macek writes, "federal
aid to local governments was slashed by 60 percent. Federal spending
on new public housing dropped from $28 billion in 1977 to just $7
billion eleven years later. Meanwhile, shrinking welfare benefits
have made it harder for the disproportionately urban recipients of
public assistance to make ends meet."
Conservative policies and the retreat of liberal commitment to ending
poverty combined to make cities increasingly unequal. But as Juan
Enriquez makes clear in the The Untied States of America:
Polarization, Fracturing and our Future, welfare didn't disappear --
the money just shifted from cities to the homeland in the form of
farm and corporate subsidies, price supports, military spending, and
pork-barrel projects. Reviewing a chart of tax benefits to states,
Enriquez notes that it is curious "that the most productive, high-
tech states tend to vote Democratic. The most dole-dependent tend to
be hard-line, antigovernment, antispending Republicans. Seventy-five
percent of Mr. Bush's votes came from taker states."
Conservative policy initiatives like California's Proposition 13
(which in 1978 slashed property taxes by more than two-thirds)
devastated urban school systems, to the benefit of suburban and
exurban homeowners. More recently we've seen public transportation
funding slashed, AIDS funding shift from Blue to Red States, and
homeland security funding distributed as a form of pork. "Low-
population states such as Wyoming and North Dakota received forty
dollars per person to arm themselves against the impending al-Qaeda
menace," Brian Mann notes. "Meanwhile, the big I-have-a-bulls-eye-on-
my-forehead states like California and New York managed to pocket
about five dollars per capita."
Mann points to the 9,000 residents of Ochiltree County, Texas, "the
most Republican place in America," who were graced by nearly $53
million in federal money in 2003 alone -- which is, by any standard,
a generous reward for their unstinting support of President Bush. The
state of Kansas went from losing $2 million a year in what it paid in
taxes, to making "a sweet profit of $1,200 per person" by 2004. When
Mann raises this fact to his conservative brother Allen, he is
enraged. "I don't believe it," Allen says. "No way. I know so many
people in my town who refuse to take government money. They'd rather
go hungry." Allen urges his brother to drop the issue. "You'll make
rural people so mad that they won't listen to anything else you have
to say."
The Popular Culture Divide
How have so many rural folks and their political allies gotten so
hostile to cities and cosmopolitan values? Part of the answer, as I
have suggested, lies in the particular cultural histories of
Christianity and America. Race is also a factor, as it has been from
the moment Europeans set foot on the continent.
But why has this front of the culture war suddenly gotten so
rhetorically violent, the rift so wide? Mann argues that, over the
past two decades, homelanders have succeeded in building their own
alternative mass culture -- separate and unshaped by urban
sensibilities. "When I was a kid," Mann writes, "you drank from the
spigot of urban culture or you went without." "Back when the three
media networks controlled everything and AP and UPI were the only
sources of news, that was our window on the world," says Jim Hudson,
the publisher of Perryton Herald. "Now I start my day with Fox and
Friends. Then I do a computer check, reading NewsMax.com, a very
conservative site."
"These days, rural Americans can get their news, books, art, movies,
and music from sources that more closely reflect their values,"
writes Mann. "The break isn't clean or absolute; small-town folks
still watch Everybody Loves Raymond and buy Stephen King novels ...
But now they can also get their news from Fox, Sinclair, or
NewsMax.com. They can buy top-notch thrillers and romance novels
written by evangelical Christians." In effect, homelanders are
bicultural; they can understand the language of urban popular
culture, but mainstream urbanites are often clueless about the
homeland lingo. "This media balkanization extends beyond politics and
journalism," Mann writes. "These days, for every Dr. Spock, there is
a Dr. Dobson. For every Stephen King, there's a Tim LaHaye."
Beyond the Myth: The Truth About Cities
"Modern liberalism was born in the big cities and died there," neocon
Fred Siegel writes in his 1977 book The Future Once Happened Here,
painting American cities as economic and moral dead zones. But as the
most recent elections reveal, nothing could be further from the
truth. For all the mistakes committed in the name of liberal and
progressive urban policy, an urban liberalism is flourishing; in
places like San Francisco and Portland, it has achieved a confident
hegemony. Though the San Francisco Bay Area has plenty of problems,
including profound wealth inequality and troubled public schools, it
remains a seat of technological and cultural innovation, with its low
fertility rates offset by immigration and emigration that keep the
city culturally diverse
Even families who flee from city centers take their urban values with
them into the increasingly diverse inner suburbs, where Democrats won
58 percent of the presidential vote in 2004. Both left and Right are
turning out to be wrong about the politics of sprawl, which is
emerging as the bleeding edge, rather than the death, of
urbanization. Today "edge" cities like Las Vegas and Miami have
turned deep blue, as their populations grow denser and more diverse.
Even the urban outposts of places like Montana and Oklahoma run
politically to the left.
According to the homelander urban narrative, such places should now
be pestilential, blighted dens of inequity. Yet, despite all the
conservative prophecies of urban apocalypse, the level and pace of
urbanization continues to accelerate, with complex economic and
social results.
Every year two million people move to American cities and inner
suburbs, adding islands to the archipelago, while America's homeland
population falls fast toward 56 million, "roughly the level of the
mid-1970s," notes Mann. Far from declining demographically, the
United Nations predicts that the percentage of the North American
population living in urban areas will rise to 84 percent of the
population by 2030.
Cornell researchers Barclay G. Jones and Solomane Koné found that
from 1970 to 1990, per capita income increased directly with
population size in metropolitan areas. Similar trends have been found
for social capital: A 2003 study by the General Social Survey found
that city dwellers were more likely to help each other out than their
rural counterparts. Such statistics -- there are many -- stand in
contrast to the Stygian alienation depicted in conservative "yuppie
horror films" like Judgment Night (1993) and Ransom (1996), which
show urbanites as antisocial and uncaring.
An Urban Backlash Is No Solution
Dumbfounded by the homeland ascendancy, many urbanites have embraced
a misguided strategy of rebranding progressivism as specifically
urban. In their influential 2004 manifesto "The Urban Archipelago,"
the editors of the Seattle weekly, The Stranger, argue that it's time
for urbanites to aggressively pursue their own self-interest on a
national stage. "We need a new identity politics," they write, "an
urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a
rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals
that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans
have created for their constituents ... To red-state voters, to the
rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and soulless sprawling
exburbs, we say this: Fuck off. Your issues are no longer our issues."
Yet cutting the Red States off the federal dole, ignoring the
downward-pressure on income created by Wal-Marting the homelander
economy, or leaving Red States out of environmental policymaking --
all steps recommended by The Stranger's editors -- ignores our mutual
interdependency and breeds self-destructive partitions.
"People are hurting in the countryside," Chris Kromm, executive
director of the Institute of Southern Studies, told me. "You go into
western North Carolina, and you see hundreds of thousands of people
whose lives are being shattered by economic dislocations. If
progressives turn their backs on those people, they're losing a huge
opportunity and they're failing to address this country's deepest
problems."
And as Brian Mann points out, even if The Stranger's strategy was
desirable, it would be extremely difficult to pursue on a national
level. The Senate, for example, gives each state two seats regardless
of population. "As a consequence, those lucky homelanders in Wyoming
and Alaska receive 72 times more clout per capita than do
California's metros," Mann writes. "It's a startling fact that half
of the American people live in just nine highly urbanized states --
most of them staunchly Democratic -- but they hold only 18 percent of
the Senate's power." Similarly, the structure of the Electoral
College has tilted power towards the rural states, while
gerrymandering has given Republicans an edge in the House of
Representatives.
"Put bluntly, our political system is no longer a neutral playing
field," Mann writes. "In ways our founding fathers could never have
imagined, the Electoral College and the Senate now favor one way of
life, one set of cultural and political values, over another. Because
those values are no longer shared by most Americans, the result is a
growing disconnect between our political elites and the people they
govern."
At this writing it's too early to tell, but November 2006 may stand
as a turning point, when rural liberals and progressives fought their
way back onto the electoral map. We still have a long, long way to
go, and we need more research, writing, and debates like the ones
found in Welcome to the Homeland and The Untied States of America.
There is more at work in the homeland ascendancy than pure ideology
and moral politics; we also have to respond to the self-interest of
people whose lives are being turned upside down by war and economic
change.
Too many liberals and progressives are isolated in their metropolitan
towers, looking down not only at the people The Stranger deem "rubes,
fools, and hatemongers," but also at the disenfranchised and
dispossessed of their own unequal cities. Even if the homelander
challenge fades to a historical footnote, metropolitans will still
need to face cities rived by class and race. Maybe it is time for
those of us who live in cities to come down from our towers, before
it's too late.
(A longer version of this essay appeared originally in Public Eye
magazine, which presents reports by scholars and journalists on
trends within the U.S. Right.)
Digg!
Tagged as: rural, urban, population, elections, homeland
For six years, Jeremy Adam Smith was a student and community activist
in North Central Florida. Today he lives in San Francisco and works
as the managing editor of Greater Good magazine. He blogs about the
politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic.
*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational
purposes only. ***
20700015071278
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
The article mentions in passing the critical point, namely that a
who/whose issue is being made of what ought properly to be what/how
issue. The consequent Us-Them distinction results in an ultimatum that
is in large measure a false ultimatum. We are told that, to enjoy the
benefits of true urbanity, we have to forfeit the desire for autonomy
and personal sovereignty that, however illusorily, generates the great
appeal of suburban land-ownership. We are told that we must choose
between living on our own terms and living in urban relationships with
our neighbours. We are told to choose between using a car daily and not
possessing a car at all. We are told to choose between economic
irrelevance in dormitory suburbs and intrusive overregulation in the
city. We are told that the price of the city is our unreserved
obedience, because reserving the right to withhold our obedience is
something that belongs to the countryside - and that simply does not
follow.
We are moreover tempted hereby to go on, much in the vein of the
Marxian notion of 'false consciousness', about 'territoriality' as some
sort of despicable bourgeois deviance, which attitude is anathema to
one so territorial as myself. For in many senses I am both Us and Them;
and it seems probable to me that more are thus than otherwise. And as
such I resent the ultimatum.
Is the challenge not precisely to generate urban forms that satisfy
valid desires for 'rural' autonomy in a tight, walkable form?
Dawie
--- In carfree_cities@yahoogroups.com, Claude Willey <claudewilley@...>
wrote:
>
> http://www.alternet.org/story/45389/?
comments=view&cID=388973&pID=388965
>
> Conservatives' Vision of an America Without Cities
>
> By Jeremy Adam Smith, Public Eye. Posted December 12, 2006.
>
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