The picture above shows the urban space taken up by an equal number of single occupant automobiles, bus passengers and cyclists. For all you armchair urban theorists, Ped Shed’s Laurence Aurbach posts a three-parter about designing roads for better purposes than just driving faster and faster.

Towards a Functional Classification Replacement

In practice, functional classification results in three rigid postulates:

1: The longer the trip, the bigger the roadway 2: The bigger the roadway, the faster its traffic should travel 3: The faster the traffic on the roadway, the more isolated the roadway must be from its surroundings

The effect on transportation in America is obvious and immense: The large majority of traffic in urban areas is channeled into freeways and arterials.

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Meanwhile in the U.S. a pitched battle for control of urban streets was underway. Today we assume that automobile domination was the uncontroversial result of mass auto ownership. But until the 1920s, every street in America was a “shared space” street, where all pedestrians had the right to use the roadway at any time or at any place they desired. Many, including police, safety officers and traffic engineers, fought to keep it that way by strictly limiting autos to nonlethal speeds. The opposition — auto, oil and road-building industries — spearheaded a movement to ban pedestrians and dedicate streets to ever-faster motor vehicle traffic.

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The standard suburban arterial experience is long waits at a traffic signals, jack-rabbit races to next signal, followed by more long waits, repeated day after day. A better option is slower, more constant speeds. LaPlante (2008) points out that coordinated signals are easier to integrate into slow-speed networks and suggests that a 30 mph street with coordinated traffic signals can perform as well as a 45 mph street with stop and start movement.

Left Behind

No rapture, just very young children left with relatives by Southern Chinese parents needing to work in the city. 8 minute video

Fiery Grievance

Self-immolation would be my last choice for suicide, but:

… word came out that three people had set their own car afire in what appeared to be self-immolation. …

A police statement said that the three had come to Beijing as petitioners. That means that they had serious grievances and felt they could only get redress by coming to China’s capital. …

Self-immolation is a sign of fairly severe desperation. Frankly, I was a little surprised that the state Xinhua news agency would even carry a short item about this as sensitive as it is about China’s overseas image. Yet because of censorship, we may never know the full extent of the grievances of these three people.

• both from China Rises.

I couldn’t believe it when NBC Today host Matt Lauer trotted out Jim Cramer to talk about the economy this morning. Why does anyone take him seriously anymore? Josh Marshall just mentioned him, too.

In March 2008, Cramer got to sit next to the Donald on Celebrity Apprentice.

In July 2008, Cramer hosted a special trying to convince NASCAR fans to invest in the market.

By August he was claiming that someone knew what was going on, and that the market should be closed and screaming at Erin Burnett about Armageddon.

After the declines he was apologizing profusely for misleading his viewers and telling everyone (those who weren’t already wiped out) to take their money out now unless they could stand to ride out the market for five years.

So he comes out this morning to attack nationalizing banks. In what way is he a market guru? It seems to me that Cramer is paid to direct his viewers. I’d trust Kramer before Cramer.

Mother Jones talks to Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan about his activism and his latest book.

Mother Jones: What surprised you as you researched In Defense of Food?

Michael Pollan: One surprise is how deeply the food system is implicated in climate change. I don’t think that has really been on people’s radar until very recently. Al Gore didn’t talk about it at all; 25 to 33 percent of climate change gases can be traced to the food system. I was also surprised that those diseases that we take for granted as what will kill us—heart disease, cancer, diabetes—were virtually unknown 150 years ago, before we began eating this way.

…

MJ: So what do you think of Iowa governor Tom Vilsack heading Agriculture?

MP: There’s reason to be very concerned. He oversaw a tremendous expansion of feedlot agriculture and confinement hog production, ruining the Iowa countryside, ruining the lives of many farmers. He helped gut local control over the siting decisions. He has also been very friendly toward Monsanto and genetically modified products and was named governor of the year by bio, the big biotech trade organization. But people I respect say that he will listen to food activists and is interested in helping Iowa to feed itself. It’s a food desert, weirdly enough. All the raw material leaves the state and comes back in processed form. Putting the most positive spin I can on it: He’s no longer governor of Iowa, and I’m hoping that as a politician, when he senses where the wind is moving, he’ll move with it.

MJ: How much of our current agricultural policy can we lay at the feet of the Iowa caucuses?

MP: You can’t be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he got to Iowa he was singing a different tune. But this time around the candidates learned there is a progressive farm lobby. Iowa came close to electing a woman organic farmer as its agriculture secretary—until the Iowa Farm Bureau came after her. And Obama said he saw the importance of local control. That idea that there is a monolithic farm bloc—I wouldn’t say it’s starting to crumble, but there are interesting cracks. The challenge for the food reform movement is to make those cracks bigger.

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MJ: The food activism community is criticized as being elitist, blind to the issues of cost. How do we democratize better quality?

MP: It is the important question. One of the problems is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don’t have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.

Michael Pollan actually recommends that we, “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”

“… What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”

The response to President Obama’s inaugural call for a new era of responsibility has not been deafening. What I see is some people lining up with their hands out: Save our jobs, save our mortgages, give us health care, … I don’t see the ones that aren’t suffering looking to take on more responsibility, though.

While the Reps (suddenly) want a small government that does little, the Dems want a large government that does everything. Does Obama’s, “new era of responsibility” mean that government is going to be responsible for everything while we just spend, watch tv, get drunk, get high and consume, consume, consume?

Or should we be doing something else?

James Kunstler thinks Obama is trying to maintain an unsustainable status quo:

… Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. “Consumerism” is dead. … The wealth of several future generations has already been spent and there is no equity left there to re-finance.

Even if Kunstler is wrong, I think we have to stop waiting for government stimuli and step forward to provide what we, all of us, are going to need.