The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

[Sapiens]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

The idea of creating mass transit systems which can effectively replace the car is a great one, but the logistics of doing so are prohibitive.

Oh Ye of little faith.

I will let you in on a little secret; you know the talk about not granting amnesty to the illegal immigrant community?

It is just fluff.

Amnesty will be granted, although you may not call it amnesty.

Elliot Spitzer just "got schooled" in the finer points of national politics.

What does this has to do with mass-transit infrastructure?

You will find out soon enough.

Cheers,

-Sapiens

[c1ue]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

This could happen more quickly with a very gradual imposition of gasoline tax.

Quickly relative to what?

Imposition of a huge gasoline tax will provide some incentive, but such a move will also destroy the suburbs.

How many people will be happy when their $300K suburban mansion becomes increasingly uninhabitable due to heating/cooling and transportation costs rising? And of course the value of said home drops even faster than the housing recession would have done to it.

What about the related urbanization efforts? How many communities - even in the cities - will be open to having entire blocks and boroughs torn down and rebuilt to accommodate higher densities? For that matter, entire companies would be gutted by such a move - what happens to the big box stores and strip malls? The drive-thru?

Tokyo has something like an average of 4 level buildings across the city.

Moscow and St. Petersburg actually have higher level averages in the USSR era 'sleeping districts' where the majority of people live.

China also has very high density in its major cities.

More importantly, the average size of the Tokyo home (and most other world city residences) is small fractions of the average US home size.

It will take a long time, if ever, for this type of restructuring to occur.

Sapiens is correct that the infrastructure boost will likely occur as it is politically and financially motivated (for profit, not altruism), but I am much less sanguine on how successful it will be in actually materially changing average lifestyles in the next decade.

[Guest]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

I do believe C1ue is morphing into a doomer. Took a while, but he's definitely getting gloomier by the month. Give it a little while longer and Touchring will turn into a doomer as well. '

Anyone who reads around here long enough gets gloomy about our prospects in the next decade. It happens to the best of them!

[touchring]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

Gas been going up recently, it breaks the mood subconsciously, more than we realize.

[lobodelmar]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

I do believe C1ue is morphing into a doomer. Took a while, but he's definitely getting gloomier by the month. Give it a little while longer and Touchring will turn into a doomer as well. '

Anyone who reads around here long enough gets gloomy about our prospects in the next decade. It happens to the best of them!

And Lukester, what do you have to be so chipper about? With Peak oil and Climate change being your two favorite topics?

[Guest]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

Lobodelmar -

The worse things are, the chirpier I get. It's a defence mechanism of some obscure sort.

Dunno. Haven't figured out the logic yet. I've certainly got some things happening in my personal life to make me want to pack it in sometimes, and they are issues that have dogged me for twelve years (a bad health problem now jeopardizing my employment prospects) !

You gotta laugh about it, or you wind up embalmed before you even finish living.

[Sapiens]

Super Trains: Plans to Fix U.S. Rail Could End Road & Sky Gridlock

Super Trains: Plans to Fix U.S. Rail Could End Road & Sky Gridlock

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...n/4232548.html

With airports and highways more congested than ever, new steel-wheel and maglev lines that move millions in Europe and Japan have the potential to resurrect the age of American railroads.

[Sapiens]

The End of Sprawl?

The End of Sprawl?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...src=newsletter

By Eduardo M. Peñalver
Sunday, December 30, 2007; Page B07

The collapse in the housing market and high gasoline prices are bad news for middle-class homeowners left to sift through the wreckage. But if there is consolation to be found amid the rubble, it may be that the inexorable spreading out that has characterized American life since World War II might finally be coming to an end. Given the connections between car-dependent suburban development and social ills from climate change and the destruction of wetlands to obesity and social isolation, the end can come none too soon.

American sprawl was built on the twin pillars of low gas prices and a relentless demand for housing that, combined with the effects of restrictive zoning in existing suburbs, pushed new development outward toward cheap rural land. Middle-class Americans, not able to find housing they could afford in existing suburbs, kept driving farther out into the countryside until they did. Gridlock in the suburbs and the expense of providing municipal services to sparsely populated communities imposed their own limits on how far we could spread. As a result, the density of metropolitan areas, which fell steadily in the postwar years, had begun to creep back up in the 1990s. Despite these infrastructural restraints, however, the now-defunct housing boom and cheap gas kept exerting centrifugal pressure on living patterns, pushing the edge of new development farther out into rural America.

Over the past year or so, both of these forces have dramatically weakened. With credit tight and the demand for housing drying up (sales of new homes fell last month to the lowest level in 12 years) new construction in the exurbs is grinding to a halt. The result is a decline in the building industry's appetite for rural land on the urban edge. The question now is whether that decline will last. In the past, a sudden drop-off in demand for housing in the exurbs would have represented merely a hiatus. Builders would have bided their time until the housing market recovered, and the outward push would soon have begun again. But persistently high gas prices may mean that the next building boom will take place not at the edges of metropolitan areas but far closer to their cores. People are more willing to drive 20 miles each way to work every day, burning a couple of gallons of gas in the process, when gas costs less than milk. But as gas prices climb, long car commutes become a rising tax on exurban homeownership, and the price people are willing to pay for homes in remote areas will fall.


Increasing gas prices may not be enough to cause people to move, which is why demand for gas proves so inelastic in the short term, but it can influence where people choose to live when they are forced to relocate for other reasons. The evidence that this is already occurring is, at this point, still somewhat anecdotal, but it is very suggestive. As the New Urbanist News reported this fall, during the present downturn, accompanied as it has been by high gas prices, homes close to urban centers or that have convenient access to transit seem to be holding their value better than houses in car-dependent communities at the urban edge. A recent story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune blamed flagging growth in the Twin Cities' outer suburbs on rising gas prices. If prices at the pump continue to increase, as many analysts expect, the eventual recovery of demand for new housing may not be accompanied by a resumption of America's relentless march into the cornfields.

The death of sprawl will present enormous challenges, chief among them the need to provide affordable middle-class housing in areas that are already built up. Accommodating a growing population in the era of high gas prices will mean increasing density and mixing land uses to enhance walkability and public transit. And this must happen not just in urban centers but in existing suburbs, where growth is stymied by parochial and exclusionary zoning laws. Overcoming low-density, single-use zoning mandates so as to fairly allocate the costs of increased density will require coordination at regional levels. This in turn will require overcoming the balkanization of America's metropolitan areas. This shift toward a more regional outlook will force broad rethinking of how we fund and deliver services provided by local governments, most obviously (and explosively) public education.

Although the end of sprawl will require painful changes, it will also provide a badly needed opportunity to take stock of the car-dependent, privatized society that has evolved over the past 60 years and to begin imagining different ways of living and governing. We may discover that it's not so bad living closer to work, in transit- and pedestrian-friendly, diverse neighborhoods where we run into friends and neighbors as we walk to the store, school or the office. We may even find that we don't miss our cars and commutes, and the culture they created, nearly as much as we feared we would.

The writer is an associate professor at Cornell Law School, where he teaches property and land-use law.

Right on schedule...

[Verrocchio]

Re: The End of Sprawl?

In James Howard Kunstler's view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life -- the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about. Reengineering our cities will involve more radical change than we are prepared for, he believes, but our hand will be forced by earth crises stemming from our overconsuming lifestyle. "Life in the mid-21st century," Kunstler says, "is going to be about living locally." Passionate, profane and funny, this talk will make you think about the place where you live.

James Howard Kunstler calls suburban sprawl "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known." His arguments bring a new lens to urban development, drawing clear connections between physical spaces and cultural vitality.

Geography of Nowhere, published in 1993, presented a grim vision of America in decline -- a nation of cookie-cutter strip malls, vacuous city centers, and dead spaces wrought by what Kunstler calls the ethos of Happy Motoring: our society-wide dependence on the automobile.

The Long Emergency (2005) takes a hard look at energy dependency, arguing that the end of the fossil fuels era will force a return to smaller-scale, agrarian-focused communities and an overhaul of many of the most prominent and destructive features of postwar society.

His confrontational approach and propensity for doomsday scenarios make Kunstler a lightning rod for controversy and critics. But his magnificent rants are underscored with logic and his books are widely read, particularly by architectural critics and urban planners.

His TED talk begins "The immersive ugliness of our everyday environment in America is entropy made visible..." http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/121

[Spartacus]

Re: The End of Sprawl?

the one number I've never seen from Kunstler is the one number I think should come first for peak oilers -

total life cycle cost (money and energy and material, IOW "footprint") comparisons between high density apartment buildings (HDAB) versus identical - square-footage housing, and estimates of how much energy is __actually__ saved, if people move into HDAB but KEEP THE CARS.

Comparing low-density, car-loving US to a high-density Europe which never developed the same kind of attachment to cars, is an apples to oranges comparison

Apartment buildings are harder to insulate, which makes me think the total life cycle cost (for equal square footage) may be higher for buildings.

The TED talk was good

In
His TED talk begins "The immersive ugliness of our everyday environment in America is entropy made visible..." http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/121

[Rajiv]

Re: The End of Sprawl?

I am embedding the talk in the video section here

[c1ue]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

Spart,

I think you're making a couple of assumptions which are questionable:

1) assuming that high density apartments would have the same square footage as houses

Apartments are smaller than houses - at least houses built after 1970. Thus even a theoretically high energy footprint per square foot would not translate into an overall higher energy footprint per capita

2) Apartments are less energy efficient than houses

This I also highly question. In a typical suburban CA apartment where individual apartments tend to only share 2 or 3 walls/floors with others - also have individual water heaters, etc - this might be true.

For true high density apartments where at least 4 walls/floors are shared with a 5th being an internal corridor, I don't see how this could be less energy efficient.

Throw in central water heating and the like, and I would think overall efficiencies would be much higher.

[GRG55]

Re: The End of Sprawl?

In James Howard Kunstler's view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life -- the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about. Reengineering our cities will involve more radical change than we are prepared for, he believes, but our hand will be forced by earth crises stemming from our overconsuming lifestyle. "Life in the mid-21st century," Kunstler says, "is going to be about living locally." Passionate, profane and funny, this talk will make you think about the place where you live.

James Howard Kunstler calls suburban sprawl "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known." His arguments bring a new lens to urban development, drawing clear connections between physical spaces and cultural vitality.

Geography of Nowhere, published in 1993, presented a grim vision of America in decline -- a nation of cookie-cutter strip malls, vacuous city centers, and dead spaces wrought by what Kunstler calls the ethos of Happy Motoring: our society-wide dependence on the automobile.

The Long Emergency (2005) takes a hard look at energy dependency, arguing that the end of the fossil fuels era will force a return to smaller-scale, agrarian-focused communities and an overhaul of many of the most prominent and destructive features of postwar society.

His confrontational approach and propensity for doomsday scenarios make Kunstler a lightning rod for controversy and critics. But his magnificent rants are underscored with logic and his books are widely read, particularly by architectural critics and urban planners.

His TED talk begins "The immersive ugliness of our everyday environment in America is entropy made visible..." http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/121

No argument about the "ugliness" of much of modern North America's urban environment, especially the suburbs. But this result has very little to do with entropy, and a great deal to do with architects and urban planners trying to fight entropy. The uniform blandness of new subdivisions is influenced not just by planning regulations, but also factors such as emergency services regulations and the need to design around the now compulsory multi-car garage. This is how we end up with acres and acres of front drive garagescapes on enormous cul-de-sac's with enough pavement to allow the largest vehicle in the local fire department inventory to make a u-turn.

I can't wait to see how the urban planners, reading Kunstler, screw up his "smaller-scale, agrarian-focused communities". One thing we can be certain about...the planners and architects will give each other lots of awards for their brilliant, but unlivable, creations.

[Sapiens]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...1&cat=breaking

A special commission is urging the government to raise federal gasoline taxes by as much as 40 cents per gallon over five years as part of a sweeping overhaul designed to ease traffic congestion and repair the nation's decaying bridges and roads.

The two-year study being released Tuesday by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, the first to recommend broad changes after the devastating bridge collapse in Minneapolis last August, warns that urgent action is needed to avoid future disasters.

Subtlety and patience; you shall see your plans come to fruition.

[bill]

Re: The “Asianication” of US Infrastructure

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...1&cat=breaking




Subtlety and patience; you shall see your plans come to fruition.

They will present and discuss the study on 1-17-08 H.T.I.C.
http://transportation.house.gov/
Full Committee - National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission Report

Thursday, January 17, 2008
11:00AM
2167 Rayburn House Office Building