The Oil Drum

Gasoline prices give a a clear measure of consequences of making oil the lifeblood of our economy. As our economic lifeblood, oil is giving us:

1. Heart attacks, unstable price spikes in this plateau of Peak Oil
2. Leukemia, undermining our planets ability to support us with Global Warming

Facing the facts and acting to resolve them can defeat peak Oil and Global Warming, both civilization killers. A primary fact is that our current infrastructure is the cause of these killers. We built the infrastructure. We can build better. The purpose of this essay is a call to action to defeat these civilization killers by changing the way we govern infrastructure from specifying HOW to build it, to stating WHAT is needed and allowing a free market to find the rare individuals with lucky breakthroughs that can build sustainable infrastructure. We must get lucky and discover the energy equivalents of lasers, personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, etc....

For those not familiar, Randy Cohen writes an advice column for the NY Times magazine on day-to-day ethical issues that people face, like what to do when some local fifth graders destroy your neighborhood organic garden or if you should not order food delivery in dangerous weather conditions.

The Open Planning Project’s Executive Director Mark Gorton recently interviewed Mr. Cohen on the ethics of urban automobility for Streetfilms. The result has been condensed here into a 9 minute talk that touches on a multitude of topics ranging from Congestion Pricing to Parking Policy in NYC. While this focuses on NYC, the discussion could apply to many of urban centers and the conflicts between different users of public space.

As always, TOD:Local is looking for local stories of interest to post here and on the main page. Please send in your articles - complete with video, photos and html is preferred.

Tonight, I will be serving on a panel discussion prior to the Transportation Alternatives film "Contested Streets". I previously wrote about my impressions of the film here.

Screening of Contested Streets: Breaking NYC Gridlock.

Time: 8pm Panel Discussion, Followed by the one hour film.

Location: Solar1, East 23rd Street at the East River

Contested Streets explores the history and culture of New York City streets from pre-automobile times to the present. This examination allows for an understanding of how the city - though the most well served by mass transit in the United States - has slowly relinquished what was a rich, multi-dimensional conception of the street as public space to a mindset that prioritizes the rapid movement of cars and trucks over all other functions.

A truly car free Central Park is severely in doubt after a last minute manuever by the Bloomberg Administration to completely water down the idea and preserve Central Park as what the City DOT calls "A vital transportation link" in Manhattan.

Transportation Alternatives has responded in kind:

Tomorrow, Tuesday May 9th, at 9:30 am T.A. and Elected Officials will hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall. We need you to be there to help win a car-free summer in Central Park and car-free summer afternoons in Prospect Park.

This afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg announced a reduction in car hours in Central and Prospect Parks. As of Monday June 5, 2006, vehicles will no longer be allowed to use Central Park's East Drive north of 72nd Street in the morning or the West Drive in the afternoon, or Prospect Park's West Drive in the morning.

Any reduction of car hours in these two parks is a step in the right direction. But this plan is a bit like a smoking ban that would only be in effect from nine am to noon. It improves the parks for relatively few users.

As the implications of peak oil starts to come closer to home, reducing NYC's dependence on  single occupancy vehicle automobile traffic (low value) and allowing higher volume (more valuable) traffic through is critical.

That's why I was glad to see that State Senator Liz Krueger's office is holding a forum on the proposed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) next Tuesday, April 18th at 7pm at 8th Floor Meeting Room at Marymount Manhattan College, 221 East 71st Street (between Second and Third Avenues). The proposed route would run the full length of First and Second Avenues and then across 125th Street in Harlem. They expect 65,000 passengers to take this everyday.

The problems with current bus service were outlined in a study by Bruce Schaller sponsored by Transportation Alternatives and the Straphanger's Campaign (who will also be at the forum next week):

1. Buses spend as much as 30% of their time waiting for passengers to board and exit.
   
2. Increased crowding on buses due to ridership growth has lengthened delays from boarding and exiting.
   
3. Traffic signals are not synchronized with bus speeds, so buses are delayed by red lights between bus stops.
   
4. Drivers often have to slow down to stay on schedule even when traffic is light.
   
5. Bus field supervisors lack the tools to prevent bus bunching.
   

So how does BRT fix these problems?

"Erosion of cities by automobiles entails so familiar a series of events that they hardly need describing. The erosion proceeds as a kind of nibbling, small nibbles at first, but eventually hefty bites. Because of vehicular congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow, staggered-signal systems are installed for faster movement, a bridge is double-decked as its capacity is reached, an expressway is cut through yonder, and finally whole webs of expressways. More and more land goes into parking, to accomodate the ever increasing numbers of vehicles while they are idle. No one step in this process is, in itself, crucial. But cumulatively the effect is enormous."
-Jane Jacobs 1961

And now the tide is turning against cars. One way we can start fighting back against cars in the urban areas is to reclaim our large parks. Help make Central Park Car Free on Sunday March 26, 2006 at noon at City Hall. RSVP Today for the event with Transportation Alternatives so they can give the media a good idea of how many people are coming to the event.

Quotable Quotes after the jump...

Despite some lip service against the evils of Robert Moses type highway building, public policy has focused on facilitating as many automobiles into the central business districts as technically possible. Great sums of money and planning effort are still spent on trying to allieviate traffic congestion, only to find that once one bottleneck is "fixed" many other arise. We see this in the timing of traffic lights, the widening of roads at the expense of sidewalks, pedestrian barricades, the number of traffic police used to facilitate traffic at bottlenecks, etc. And yet where has it all ended - more and more automobile traffic constantly congesting the scarce public space of our urban centers.

Building on the last post on 21st Century Urban Renewal, the new study "Necessity or Choice? Why People Drive in Manhattan" released by NYC's Transportation Alternatives and Interloafer's fairly detailed list of policy fixes (which I agree with 100%), I would like to start a conversation about auto-dependency by debunking many of the traditional assumptions about automobile traffic in the urban environment. It's time to revisit the thinking and assumptions that got us here.