Richard Reep at New Geography critiques some of Central Florida's original New Urbanist communities and concludes that they display "a glaring lack of employment, raising questions about their sustainability and long-term viability."

Reep intends his analysis to be an indictment of New Urbanism in general.  Does it hold up? 

For one, have NU communities within existing metropolitan areas ever promised to be entirely self-sufficient?

Moreover, do these places even fit the definition of New Urbanism?  I've never been to Florida, but it doesn't sound like the communities Reep talks about quite adhere to NU's stated intent to develop "within walking distance of transit stops, permitting public transit to become a viable alternative to the automobile," nor to create "transit, pedestrian, and bicycle systems" to "maximize access and mobility throughout the region while reducing dependence upon the automobile."  And the NU charter promotes "infill development within existing urban areas" (emphasis mine), which doesn't seem to be the case with at least Celebration.  Plus, Celebration (and others?) isn't zoned as particularly dense; an aerial shot of it (right) actually makes it look kind of, well, sprawly.

Thoughts?

While still an undergrad at the University of Florida, first-year UEPer Gabe Lopez-Bernal created a website called Transit Miami to, in his words, "expose the potential for intelligent growth in a community crippled by urban sprawl, imprudent transit-oriented development, congestion, and an abusive development policy."

A fantastic idea.  But has it worked?  Well, because of his website (and the traffic it has generated), Gabe has been asked to participate in think tanks.  He has attended conferences.  He has given speeches on behalf of Miami's mayor.  And Gabe and his writing team (all current or former transportation engineering and urban planning students) have been featured in numerous newspapers and websites.  So, I think the it's safe to say the answer is yes. 

 Just take a quick look and you'll understand why.

In this week's New Yorker online, Hendrik Hertzberg offers up a delightful morsel of food for thought on his blog in the Talk of the Town section: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/11/03/081103taco_talk_hertzberg

As has been the case throughout this election, when it comes to making a mockery (or at least attempting to do so) of Barack Obama, and to a great degree our intelligence as a nation, semantics has once again proven to be the tool of choice in the Republican arsenal.

This week's word of choice: SOCIALIST. As in Obama is a SOCIALIST (duhduhdone!) and thus a vote for Obama is a scary, unpatriotic vote for SOCIALISM. Egads!

Because let's face it, everyone knows socialism is the same thing as being a Communist and that's synonymous with being a Nazi, a dictator, a Red sympathizer, a - well you catch my drift. It's bad, really, really, really bad.

But wait...what does this really mean? 

According to The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy socialism is a cooperative economic system not necessarily synonymous with communism. "There are many varieties of socialism. Some socialists tolerate caoitalism, as long as the government maintains the dominant influence over the economy; others insist on an abolition of private enterprise. All communists are socialists, but not all socialists are communists."

Wait a second! Run that last bit by me again! "All communists are socialists, but not all socialists are communists." An economic system and responsible approach to national spending that promotes regulation and possibly more equitable outcomes?! What kind of crazy talk is this?

Now I’m not promoting socialism, but I am suggesting, perhaps optimistically, that the Republicans have taken a misstep on this one. Surely in the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union we as a culture have come to disassociate spending to benefit the greater social welfare from fear of the collapse of capitalism and the onset of a Bolshevik Revolution, American style.  

Have we evolved so little since McCarthyism that words like "equal", "distribution", "wealth", and dare I say it, "share" (God NO!) are capable of sending chills up and down the spines of a nation when used together in a sentence, or even in a series of sentences where "socialism/t" has also been sprinkled about?

Do Americans today even have an emotional response to the idea of Socialism and even if they do, is it actually powerful enough to sway a voter?  

More than 60 years later, does the whole "He's a Commie!" ploy still work?

- Um...yeah, and there are more than a few right-leaning politicos banking on this fact.

As Hertzberg points out in the debate over income tax and the fight to capture the Oval Office, it all comes down to the interpretation of words. Throw in a dash of fear mongering, a few stretched truths and minced words and you've got yourself a moderately successful recipe for Republican Campaign Strategy 2008.

Accusing Obama, with his "terrorist links" and foreign-sounding name of being a socialist, and by default a communist, is an assertion laden with ideological connotations. A fact made all the more intriguing when you consider we’re really only talking about a few percentage points difference between one side’s income tax plan and the other’s.

But how can this be? Why? 

It's a game of semantics folks! 

It's the intentional manipulation of a potential meaning of a word for ideological purposes.

The stakes are high, but at the end of the day it's all come down to a politicized version of tomAYto, tomAHto.

1 socialism. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/socialism (accessed: October 27, 2008).

It’s not too late to spread the word about voting NO on Question 1 

Volunteer at either of the two Somerville locations hosting VOTE NO phone banks: 

Somerville Community Development Corporation in Union Square

Tuesday, October 28th and Wednesday, October 29th

To volunteer, RSVP to Danny LeBlanc (CEO)

P: 617-776-5931 x223

E: dleblanc@somervillecdc.org


Somerville Homeless Coalition in Davis Square (basement of CVS building)

Thursday, October 30th from 6:30pm-8:30pm

To volunteer, please contact Mark Alston-Follansbee

P: 617-623-6111

E: maf@SomervilleHomelessCoalition.org  

(Thanks to Laurie Goldman, Shannon Moriarty, and Liz Carver for providing/forwarding this information.)

Last Saturday on his excellent website FiveThirtyEight.com (seriously, if you're as obsessed with presidential politics as I am and haven't yet bookmarked/RSS-feeded that site, you must do so now) Nate Silver looked at the demographics of the places Barack Obama and Sarah Palin have visited since August 29th, and, in what may well constitute your Unsurprising News Item of the Day, he found that Obama has spoken to much more racially diverse areas than has Palin.  From this one could deduce that Obama has been paying attention to larger municipalities, and without looking up the actual numbers, I'd guess that Detroit, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Denver, St. Louis and Milwaukee are in fact bigger than anywhere Palin has been. Choose your own set of implications here. 

Of course, this analysis has a shortcoming: Sarah Palin is not John McCain.  Minor detail, right? 

Well, the next day the Philadelphia Daily News wondered explicitly: "Do the candidates have an urban agenda?"

Here's the short answer they were given:

"John McCain basically has one underlying proposal," said Ed Schwartz, president of the Institute for Civic Values in Philadelphia. "Cut taxes and things will get better. There is no urban policy built into that, because urban policy involves an investment."

Schwartz said Obama's plans are very different.

"You look now at Obama's proposals and they are responsive to the things that cities need," he said. "He talks about community development. He talks about a transition to work and re-entry. He's saying that this is an absolute priority."

When two different people who read the blog you write for alert you to the same news item, it's probably something worth posting about.  So it is with Sunday's NY Times article about campus bike sharing programs.

It's (almost) all good news, but I think this passage is particularly astounding (emphasis mine):

The University of New England here in Biddeford had a similar problem — too many cars, not enough space and a desire to make the campus greener. So it copied the Ripon program, handing out 105 bikes in the first week of school. Because of the program, only 25 percent of freshmen brought cars with them this year, officials said, compared with 75 percent last year.

The article's campus sample is by no means exhaustive; my undergrad alma mater just started a bike loan program, too.  Fortunately cars don't seem to be a huge problem on this (Tufts) campus (mind you, I say this as someone who never has to search for parking).  But what campus wouldn't welcome reduced auto traffic?

Now if only municipalities would follow suit; so far DC is the only US city with a similar program available to the general public.

(Thanks Joe and Laurie)

Update (10/24): Adam Knoff notes that Fort Collins has a Bike Library that actually opened before DC's bike share program did.

Once upon a time Boston's Orange Line ran on elevated tracks above Washington Street from Chinatown all the way to its southern terminus at Forest Hills.  In 1987, 16 years after several Boston neighborhoods organized to prevent I-95 from cutting through the city, the Orange Line moved to the sunken Southwest Corridor (which had been cleared for the highway) and the elevated tracks were taken down.

If, like me, you never exprienced the old elevated Orange Line, I came across some cool clips on Youtube that'll give you a pretty good idea of what it was like.  Honestly, it looks pretty fun.  Also, bear in mind that this is the same route that the MBTA claims is now equally served by the Silver Line BRT.

Orange Line inbound (Forest Hills to Chinatown):

Outbound (Chinatown to Forest Hills):

And going much further back...taken from a trolley in 1903, I believe this next clip begins at about the intersection of State St. and Washington St. and heads toward Downtown Crossing (let me know if you think I'm wrong here) before skipping ahead to Boylston St. and cutting through Copley Sq. (thanks to Loaded Gun via Universal Hub):

Going forward I'd like to occasionally highlight cool projects that other UEPers are involved in. 

Today I'll direct you to Change.org's End Homelessness, which is written by fellow first-year Shannon Moriarty.  Shannon came to UEP to pursue her interests in housing and welfare policy, and her blog, which she just launched earlier this month (and usually posts to a couple times a day), is really a fantastic source of news and information.  If you share her interests, I highly recommend you go there and click on the little orange RSS feed button.

Shannon is also a heck of a candlepin bowler.

It's really starting to seem like all of the good stuff happens when I'm in class Thursday nights.  Tonight it's Nic Marks from the New Economics Foundation talking on campus about their Happy Planet Index.

I'd love for someone to go and report back, perhaps in blog post form.  Let me know if you feel like doing that.

The topic of earmarks has come up a lot in this presidential campaign.  As we know, federal bills often end up, as John McCain might say, "festooned with Christmas tree ornaments" that have tenuous (if any) relationships to the heart of the bill.  It turns out the recent $700 billion bailout plan -- officially known as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 -- was no different.  All kinds of stuff, we're learning, was snuck in to that thing at the last minute. 

One earmark in particular has received a lot of attention from some of the blogs and news sources I frequent -- Rep. Earl Blumenauer's (D-OR) Bike Commuter Act, as part of the larger Renewable Energy Tax Credit legislation (which was extended for one more year).  What does the Bike Commuter Act do?  The San Francisco Chronicle summarized it nicely:

"...workers who use two-wheelers as their primary transportation mode to get to and from work will be eligible for a $20-a-month, tax-free reimbursement from their employers for bicycle-related expenses. In return, employers will be able to deduct the expense from their federal taxes."  

Sounds pretty good, right? 

Rep. Blumenauer is a former City Commissioner of Transportation in Portland and long time biking advocate (heck, he's even wearing a bicycle lapel pin in the banner of his website) who's generally lauded by anti-sprawl, pro-transit, clean energy types like myself.  But attempting to look at this objectively, it could spark a potentially interesting debate: What does the Bike Commuter Act really have to do with the credit crisis?  Aren't we always told that tangental earmarks are...bad?  The Renewable Energy Tax Credit seems to have given "a small jolt" to at least the solar industry, perhaps justifying its general inclusion in a financial bailout package.  But paying people to bike?  Honestly, I'm not sure I see the connection.

It all just goes to show one way that policy proposals can, and often do, become enacted at the federal level.  Whether or not you agree with the system largely depends on if the earmarks reflect your passions, which is no guarantee.  I happen to think the Bike Commuter Act is quite good.  It's just disappointing that it was apparently sufficiently unpopular to have had to be pushed through ornamentally.