Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

Charlottesville had the privilege of hosting President Bush to speak at Monticello for the annual naturalization ceremony on July 4th. Our community made the news regrettably because a handful of people felt that their vocal disagreement with policies unrelated to naturalization deserved attention.

The whole matter is unfortunate. If prodded I’ll gladly detail where my politics differ from this (or any, for that matter) President but there is no point of disagreement that runs so deep that I would distract from another person’s event. I wonder if these hecklers would do the same thing at a wedding or funeral.

On another note — I’ve always found the American celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence to be fascinating. Most nations celebrate the date of final victory, but we celebrate the act of declaring. If we hold the truths to be self evident, we also hold in high esteem the power of words to enact destiny. Could there be anything more American than that?

I’ll take the raw optimism of those protesters in 1776 over the raw emotion of today’s protesters any day.

An Atlantic Monthly article makes a good effort to assuage the scorn of urbanites toward the chain store menace, but it falls short. The argument rests on the dullness of the varied store model of the past:

Big cities could, and still can, support more retail niches than small towns. And in a less competitive national market, there was certainly more variation in business efficiency — prices, service, and merchandise quality. But the range of retailing ideas in any given town was rarely that great. One deli or diner or lunch counter or cafeteria was pretty much like every other one. A hardware store was a hardware store, a pharmacy a pharmacy. Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.

The charm of those various stores was not that they were unique. It mattered not one iota that the place was called “Tom’s Hardware” while the place in the next town was called something else and the buildings were different. What mattered was that Tom lived and worked in your community. He was invested in the local culture and had no motive to change it. Tom’s participation, be it through sponsoring a little league team or advertising with the local paper, made him a pillar in the community.

Much less can be said for the McManagers of many franchises today whose products and mode of business is distinctly regional at best and rarely represents local values. Satellite businesses are tied to the logistics chain of the parent company and inherit a culture. Some people find it comforting when a Big Mac is the same everywhere, but there ought to be a way to have some threads of uniformity without mechanizing the process.

It is at this point that I can’t hide my luddism very well, but I like to think that I have a healthy skepticism for what should properly be called corporate central planning: a mode of capitalism whereby regional, national or international headquarters dictate the manner in which local businesses operate. If it is a logistic gain to consolidate business processes, rather than re-invent them in every community, it is therefore also a loss of culture to perpetuate homogeneity.

You can’t consider the issue in isolation of suburbia — the norm for community design. An Alternet article provides a scathing commentary on the state of suburbia and corporate central planning:

The public realm has two crucial roles in our collective existence. First, it is the physical manifestation of the common good. Second, is literally the dwelling place of civic life. And so if you fail to design the public realm with deliberate artistry, and by so doing degrade and dishonor the public realm by turning it into a uniform automobile slum simply to accommodate x-number of cars, you will automatically degrade the quality of civic life and the public’s collective ability to conceive of a common good beyond incessant motoring.

The article makes a strong case for why the popular appeal of chain stores and suburbia aren’t sufficient enough reasons for crafting public policy around their existence. No one holds a crystal ball but anyone can see that modern life’s comforts are predicated on cheap fuel and global stability. We’re heavily invested in the status quo but if history is any guide we may regret these assumptions.

Everything old is new again, or so it would seem. A new trend, called cohousing, aims to build communities with the intent of sharing resources and building a sense of community. In contrast to various made-up neighborhoods with kitsch names (olde pointe, anyone?), these communities aim to bring together people who wish to participate in the raising of children and making of meals. The movement is away from my yard to our yard, and I think it sounds fabulous.

It is like a commune without excessive communalism and you don’t need to change your religion. As it happens, a cohousing community is in the planning stages for Charlottesville. Community and true sprited neighborliness. What a novel concept.

Update (9 June 2006): A Mothering Magazine article features a first hand account of establishing a cohousing community and the benefits conferred. I find it particularly interesting how no developer is involved in the process and the community directs the construction.

A Commercial Alert bulletin warns about a new venue for advertising to children:

BusRadio, a start-up company in Massachusetts, wants to pipe into school buses around the country a private radio network that plays music, public-service announcements, contests and, of course, ads, aimed at kids as they travel to and from school.

It is shameful when we allow our public schools to become so impoverished that selling out children has become not only acceptable, but is called good policy in some circles. I was a student at a public school in 1990 when Channel One was introduced. Today the corporation has a direct conduit to 8 million students at 12,000 public schools, where they endorse soda and their own slant on the news. My efforts, naive as there were as a 16 year-old, to expose bias and propaganda fell on deaf ears. It is hard to make a principled objection to a school system when they have sold out.

More than ever we need to recognize the real harm done when school systems are bled dry or divert education funds into the pits of technology and sport.

A Time article explains how Mayor Daley plans to transform Chicago into the premier green city in the United States:

Chicago, a blue-collar city of asphalt and glass and concrete canyons, would seem an odd place for admitted tree-hugger Sadhu Johnston to think he could save the planet. But Johnston, Mayor Richard M. Daley’ s environmental commissioner, believes that cities are actually the answer to the earth’s environmental ills. And with that in mind, he is working to turn Chicago into what he claims will be the most environmentally friendly city in the U.S. — as well as the nation’s center for environmental design and the manufacturing of components for the production of alternative energy.

I lived two summers in Chicago and had the pleasure of recently returning. In a word, this is excellent news and I believe Chicago stands an excellent chance of making good on the commitment, given their high ratio of parks and public space.

Now, if they could just do something about those outrageously cold winters I just might consider it again.

A Richmond Times Dispatch article raises the oft-heard objection to rail service:

In its 34-year history, Amtrak has never turned a profit. It has debt of more than $3.5 billion and its operating loss for 2005 topped $550 million.

Curiously, when is the last time you heard someone exasperated over our non-profitable interstate highway system? In the last 25 years of transportation funding (1977 - 2001) , the federal government spent $782 billion on transportation, 48.4% of which went to highways, 22.4% to air, 12.3% to ports, 12.1% to transit, and only 4% to rail. Rail is the only modality held to the profit standard.

What most people intuitively realize is that all modes are profitable to society. Consider for a moment that the Virginia Railway Express eliminates one lane of traffic on Interstate-66 during rush hour. It is largely believed that gas taxes don’t account for the wear imposed by semi trucks on Interstate highways, but we presume that rapid and convenient transport of goods is a net benefit for society. Examples abound for qualitative value for all modes of transportation.

Why then, does Amtrak repeatedly get held to a means test? The short answer is that it is politically expedient, but this warrants more explanation:

• Rail closure affects the non-affluent
• The poor, to their disadvantage, generally don’t have the means or will to make their interests heard to Congress
• Even worse, the poor tend to not vote

While not exactly class-warfare, attempts to close rail service, under the auspices of cost-saving, is dishonest and is predicated on the appearance that no one cares about rail. I, and others, intend to counter both misconceptions.

Because I’m disposed to ironic behavior, I brought along a copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty essay to read on an airplane flight. What better place to witness the tension between security and liberty than the friendly skies? We are free to travel, but under restriction and investigation so numerous that shoeless men are icons of modern travel. But my point isn’t to argue that security restrictions are bad, but I think that we put inordinate attention to securing passengers at the expense of securing cargo. That remains a point for another day, and I don’t believe Mill envisioned this sort of tension.

After all, the Liberty that Mill speaks of is primarily that of speech, thought and privacy, of which the former two are in abundance and the latter has never had much of a foothold. As it happens, my luggage contained the now-familiar notice that its contents had been inspected, ostensibly for the good of all concerned. I wish I had thought of it myself, but a clever blogger has made his own 4th Amendment shipping tape, so that metaphorically the TSA can shred the 4th amendment as they conduct unreasonable searches. Mill would be amused, I think.

Fontana residents blast Pantops development

A roomful of angry Fontana neighborhood residents lambasted a proposed housing development at Tuesday’s meeting of the Albemarle County Planning Commission, arguing that through traffic could endanger their children who are used to quiet, rural streets.

I was at the above mentioned meeting and spoke to the Commission about my concerns, but the linked article paints something a black and white picture of the situation. Albemarle County, like many growing areas of the country, is wrestling with how to maintain its rural character while accommodating growth. To that end, the neighborhood model is the cornerstone of the master plan, which designates an urban ring around Charlottesville and is projected to keep 95% of the county rural.

The neighborhood model is a positive move, and among its various provisions requires that subdivisions interconnect, thereby decreasing the load of traffic on the main arteries. So far so good, except that my subdivision, Fontana, was permitted to have rural roads which are rather narrow and lack sidewalks.

The article implies that residents, like myself, are opposed to new developments in the area. On the contrary, the developer is ambivalent about interconnectivity and the County is trying to reconcile its master plan with Fontana.

In my testimony to the Commission, I explained my endorsement of the neighborhood model in concept; however, I believe it is predicated on the assumption that compatible neighborhoods are interconnected. To that end, I believe there are two primary solutions:

1. Don’t make a connector road between Fontana and new developments
2. Sharpen our pencils and raise the funds between the developers and the County to upgrade the Fontana roads, including sidewalks

The article didn’t catch much of this nuance, and I realize this issue is of interest only to a few hundred people, but there it is.

Last night I attended the ASAP meeting and was encouraged by some common ground between rail and slow growth advocates. In truth, “slow growth” may be a mischaracterization of the goals of ASAP, but I believe it encompasses the general concern about unchecked development in our rural community. See my previous notes about the issue for some background on my position. While I’m a member of C’ville Rail I don’t speak for the group in any official way. This is my personal summary of events and I’m sure others in attendance may have a different perspective.

I expected some friction but I’m pleased to say that some common ground emerged on the matter of transportation choices and priorities for activism.

Rail is something to be rediscovered, as Charlottesville used to have a wealth of choices for its citizens. As late as 1956 there were 22 passenger rail trips per day between Washington DC and Charlottesville. Today there are 2, serviced by Amtrak, and the service is unreliable to the extent that Amtrak willingly suggests that you not use the service if you really need to arrive at your destination. While we have invested in private transportation and roads over the past 50 years we have let our rail infrastructure fall apart. This leaves many people with fewer choices today than in previous years.

But is this a choice that encourages sprawl and turns Charlottesville into a bedroom community? Opinions varied at the meeting, but a vocal majority seemed to believe that this wasn’t the case for two reasons:

1. Bedroom communities seem to emerge out of a desire for affordable housing, as commuters move further outward from a metropolitan area. Charlottesville is expensive to live and it seems inconceivable that masses of people would opt to live here over more affordable communities closer to DC.
2. Charlottesville lacks professional employment opportunities to fulfill its present workforce, who commute occasionally to Washington. Rail service would make life more convenient for existing commuters, but it’s a stretch to claim that masses would move to Charlottesville when the commute time by rail would be 2.5 hours. The benefit serves those who are here, but it doesn’t seem attractive enough to draw newcomers.

Beyond the issue of choice, I think ASAP may see pragmatic reasons to not oppose rail in Charlottesville. There are higher priorities for activism, such as various connector roads and bypass proposals. Connections between rail and sprawl are tenuous, but are well established with other modes of transport. While I don’t sense that ASAP endorses intercity rail for Charlottesville, I believe the majority won’t oppose it.

This Thursday evening, February 16th, at 7:30 pm there will be a meeting of the Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population concerning a proposal to bring commuter rail to Charlottesville. The meeting will take place at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in the Library.

At issue will be how commuter rail and sustainable growth can work together, if at all. I’m of the view (as a member of C’ville Rail) that rail transportation tends to encourage density and discourages sprawl. The counter argument is that rail can turn Charlottesville into a bedroom community for commuters to Washington DC, as has been done to communities within a 50 mile perimeter of the DC-Metro area.

The discussion should be interesting, as I find myself solidly in the anti-sprawl and pro-rail camps. I expect to emerge with a view of the middle ground or cognitive dissonance.

The American Library Association is endorsing a political button for Librarians who object to the Patriot Act. I’ve met my share of radical Librarians, but militant? Not unless they are Conan the Librarian (also embodied in a Macintosh application).

As an aside, I work in a Library so this is all in jest.

PARK(ing) is a creative social experiment to transform parking spaces into short term public parks. From their description:

Feeding the meter of a parking space enables one to rent precious downtown real estate, typically on a 1/2 hour to 2 hour basis. What is the range of possible occupancy activities for this short-term lease?

PARK(ing) is an investigation into reprogramming a typical unit of private vehicular space by leasing a metered parking spot for public recreational activity.

The photos are particular interesting, including one which shows the sparse amount of public space in San Francisco.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition has put together its 2005 survey results. The study helps put some numbers on what is meant by affordable dwelling. In particular, it addresses the affordability of renting, which is often overshadowed by concerns about affordable housing. The results for Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville, where I live in Virginia, are interesting. The survey offers the following summary concerning Virginia:

In Virginia, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) for a two-bedroom apartment is $852. In order to afford this level of rent and utilities, without paying more than 30% of income on housing, a household must earn $2,842 monthly or $34,099 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into a Housing Wage of $16.39.

The rate for Charlottesville is $14.63. While not insurmountable, it is a wage that isn’t often found at employers such as walmart. What then of those who earn the minimum wage? The survey continues:

In Virginia, a minimum wage worker earns an hourly wage of $5.15. In order to afford the FMR for a two-bedroom apartment, a minimum wage earner must work 127 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. Or, a household must include 3.2 minimum wage earner(s) working 40 hours per week year-round in order to make the two bedroom FMR affordable.

This is sobering, and not just as a matter of social justice, but also in terms of the rental business. It is hard to offer affordable rent rates given current home prices. Of larger concern is the tendency of rents to increase along with interest rates. Solutions to the problem evade me, but my gut instinct says that reliable public transportation evens the playing field for property values, and consequently rents.

Delete is a fascinating project to depict Vienna without advertising. It is astounding to see how much of the public space is devoted to commercial interests. A similar project is The Untitled Project which strips text from photographs, thereby revealing the amount of textual advertising around us. Check out a good example or two.

I could easily go into a rant about the social ills of advertising, but I like how projects like this aim to make us more aware of the multitude of competing interests in public spaces.

After living in Charlottesville for almost three years I finally got around to riding the CTS Free Trolley from the University to the Downtown Mall. In a word, it is an excellent service that more people should know about. I’m a little embarrassed that I waited this long to use it. I think I’ll spend more of my lunch hours downtown from now on.

House Rejects Cuts in Amtrak Budget

The House yesterday rejected a proposal to make deep cuts in Amtrak’s budget, a blow to administration efforts to force major changes at the beleaguered passenger rail system by withholding federal funds.

This is very good news. In my neck of the woods this is particularly important, as noted in a Daily Progress article:

The cuts would have forced Amtrak to shut down two of its long-distance lines, the Cardinal and the Crescent, which are the only passenger trains that run through the Charlottesville station.

Roughly 36,000 riders pass through the local station each year, according to Amtrak estimates. The Cardinal runs from Chicago to New York three times a week in each direction; the Crescent runs daily from New Orleans to New York in both directions.

It looks like we avoided the axe this time, but every few years this comes up. I’ll confess a certain amount of sympathy with the “slash Amtrak” crowd when I hear of some dreadfully costly lines. The article mentions some that have a subsidy of over $400 per passenger. In some cases you buy each person a plane ticket for less. I really can’t defend such a subsidy as making sense, but I wonder if there are ways to make rail more attractive to use?

The first thing we could do would be to give priority to passenger rail. At present, freight rail gets priority. This means that passengers often sit idle for periods of about 15-30 minutes while a freight train get the right-of-way. This is pretty bad public relations and may well discourage people from using trains. I also think trains could become an attractive alternative, given their more sensible security policies. I could see Amtrak running a “leave your shoes on” campaign to lure people who are tired of jumping through TSA hoops, legitimate or not.

Last weekend I heard an interesting radio program concerning transportation issues in Central Virginia. I’m coming to a view that our problem is systemic. In America we build communities and then try to figure out how to address the transportation needs. This inversion of responsibility permits all sorts of sprawl and inefficient land use. If the transportation costs of building a community were placed on the developer, and by extension the people who plan to inhabit the homes, we would see less cul-de-sac neighborhoods in exurbia and more high density housing near the urban ring. As long as developers can walk away from transportation responsibilities, thereby leaving it to the public, it simply won’t get done right in my opinion.

Every few months I read about some sort of development proposal that would add hundreds of homes with one entry/exit, hung off of a main road. The problems with this approach are inevitable and inclusion of a traffic light is a band-aid solution. Extension or expansion of public transportation is rarely considered afterward, and as far as I can tell, it is never made a precondition to build.

Contrast my reflections on Italy with Coyote Blog’s impression back from France. We both felt overwhelmed and impressed by the art, but came away with dramatically different views on transportation. He doesn’t like European cars while I do. His claim is mostly about safety, saying the he “would feel safer in a golf cart than some of the cars here [france].”

I beg to differ, and it so happens that a Bureau of Transportation Statistics report (pdf) lends support to my suspicion. Page six of the report lists a table showing that traffic fatalities have decreased in the United States by 27% between 1975 and 1998 while in France they have decreased by 42%. However, I realize that a decrease alone doesn’t mean that driving is safer in France. As it happens, a International Road Traffic and Accident Database report (pdf) shows in this one page graph that US fatalities per 100,000 population is ~15 while in France it is ~11.

I have several theories for why this is so, but I’ll leave that for another time.

Flight Suits

For decades, the old fashioned have lamented the way young people - and now most people - dress for air travel. The advent of more stringent security measures in the nearly four years since the 9/11 attacks might have been expected to usher in a return to formal dressing, as a way of appearing respectable and drawing less scrutiny. But in fact the opposite seems to have happened.

I think it is a bit of a stretch to blame security policies for poor choice of clothing on flights, as I witnessed the decline of flight decorum well before terrorism became a household word. I’m in the minority when I dress in what I consider appropriate clothing for a public space, but I understand how many people are opting for loose-fitting shoes. Every time I fly a plane it makes me upset at the state of rail travel in America. Dressing well is a means to putting my mind in a better place to endure the indignities of security measures.

A Daily Progress article discusses a grassroots initiative by C’ville Rail to extend the Virginia Railway Express from Manassas to Charlottesville. Currently Amtrak services the area, but it stops infrequently and the line is more of a pass-through service, which means that it is often crowded, which speaks to demand for more rail service.

I plan on getting involved and encourage others in Central Virginia to participate as well.

In related news, a Washington Post article details some budget cuts to Amtrak which threaten its sustainability.

Amtrak would have to end all of its cross-country routes, service between Chicago and New Orleans and the Auto Train to Florida under big cuts in taxpayer subsidies approved Wednesday by a House subcommittee.

While I understand that some routes may not be practical, I certainly hope that we can apply some pressure on lawmakers to renew some of the funding for Amtrak.

Update: This is being covered on cvillenews.com as well.