ARTS & FARCES internet

Front Seat’s Walk Score has become something of a de-facto walkability index. My own neighborhood scores 75/100 (very walkable). And it is.

But public transportation is another story—and another useful metric in how livable a neighborhood is. Public transportation in the Twin Cities is roughly 15-20 years behind the rest of the US metropolitan areas, mostly because our electoral politics have gone from the Minnesota Miracle to the Minnesota Tragedy.

Walk Score has just added a new Public Transportation score and a Commute report to its offerings, both of which are quite useful. The free service is pretty close to becoming a de-facto livability index, at least for urbanites.

On my block, the only public transportation is one bus going North-South every 30 minutes, one bus going East-West every 30 minutes, and one bus going to Minneapolis every 30 minutes. Walk Score recognizes this as poor, and rates it a 48 (some transit). It accurately reports nine routes within a half-mile of my home.

When I click the Commute tab and input the address for my University of Minnesota office, it accurately reports that it takes about 1.25 hours to walk the 3.83 miles; a half-hour to bike the 4.21 miles; 11 minutes to drive; and suggests the appropriate bus route. I was especially impressed with the level of detail of hills between here and there (mostly flat; ~100 feet elevation difference)—a critical issue for bikers. But it fails to say how long the bus takes (~30 minutes depending on season).

A resource is said to be at “peak,” when it becomes so inaccessible that the extraction rate starts to decline. The Pacific Institute has published a paper, “Peak Water Limits to Freshwater Withdrawal and Use,” (.pdf; 32KB) finding that “peak water” was reached sometime around 1970 in the United States.

The paper’s authors, Peter Gleick and Meena Palaniappan, identify three classes of peak water:

• Peak renewable water: Where flow constraints limit total water availability over time. River basins and snow melt are the most common examples. No water from the Colorado River, for example, has reached the ocean since about 1960.
• Peak nonrenewable water: Where production rates substantially exceed natural recharge rates or where overpumping or contamination leads to a peak production followed by a decline (similar to peak oil curves). An example of nonrenewable water are aquifers. Aquifers in the US, China, and India are all being drained at a rate much faster than can be recharged. As these aquifers are depleted, use will drop to the recharge rate.
• Peak ecological water: The point beyond which the total costs of ecological disruptions and damages exceed the total value provided by human use of that water. Examples of ecological water are lakes and rivers.

While we’re not running out of water—use of which in the US paralleled gross domestic product (GDP) growth since the beginning of the 20th century until 1975 when it stabilized—we have reached the end of cheap and easy access to the resource.

The obvious, sustainable solution is to make more currently inaccessible water available by changing our dumping habits and cleaning up existing watersheds. But this is what’s called a “backstop” solution and, as Gleick and Palaniappan note, “the ultimate water backstop is still water.”

In his editorial in the March-April 2010 issue of Utne Reader, “When Growth Isn’t Good,” founding editor Eric Utne laments the growth and necessary relocation of his neighborhood food co-op. The Linden Hills Co-op, in southwest Minneapolis, is one of the co-op movement’s shining stars, doing more than US$9 million each year in business and boasting more than 5,000 member-owners.

Utne’s grief comes from the potential impact of the co-op’s relocation on other locally owned small businesses in the neighborhood. And from the move from a small 5,500 square foot intimate boutique-like retail space to a larger more impersonal, more commercial space. Utne’s also unhappy about the Co-op’s management not communicating effectively about its growth plans.

But as Barth Anderson, writing as El Dragon, points out in his “The Utne Reader: Small grocery stores too big” response, Utne is thinking only about the micro element of a much larger picture. Anderson quotes Greg Reynolds of Riverbend Organic Farm as saying, “It’ll be a good bump for the co-op and it’s going to be a good bump for everyone who sells to them.” Anderson reports the Linden Hills Co-op is Riverbend’s fifth biggest customer and bought 33% more produce last year than it did the year before. “As a customer of mine,” Reynolds told Anderson, “Linden Hills Co-op is growing fast, and after a big move like this, they’ll buy more. They’re a fast-growing co-op, and that’s good.”

What’s “enough” for Utne clearly isn’t for either Linden Hills Co-op or Riverbend Organic Farm. In order for the entire organic foodchain to be sustainable, co-ops like Linden Hills Co-op and organic farms like Riverbend have to grow larger than Utne would like. One of the primary principles of the co-op movement—as Elizabeth Archerd, member services manager for the Wedge Co-op (which has annual sales US$30 million and occupies 11,000 square feet), points out in the comments to Anderson’s article—is voluntary and open membership. Co-ops are forced to grow because they don’t turn member-owners away.

It’s entirely possible that the Linden Hills Co-op could have communicated more effectively with regard to its growth plans, but I’ve got to say that I live in Saint Paul, and I’ve been hearing about the Linden Hills Co-op wanting to relocate to larger space for several years.

Are big box co-ops coming? If they’re cooperatively owned and managed, it really shouldn’t matter. Bringing good, affordable, sustainably produced food to more people should be seen as a good thing.

Disclosure: From 2002-06 I was Utne Reader‘s online managing editor and webmaster. I know Eric Utne personally and consider him a friend. None of that makes him any less wrong about this issue.

Last July at the Aspen Ideas Festival, one of the sessions was Frank Gehry in conversation with Tom Pritzker. Gehry is one of the US’s top architects, if not the country’s leading architect, known for his iconic buildings.

At the end of Gehry’s converstation, Fred Kent, founder and president of Project for Public Spaces (PPS), rose to ask a question.

Kent asked Gehry if iconic architecture also succeed as public space (it’s about 54 minutes into the video clip). Gehry was dismissive of both the questioner and the question then, and has since refused to consider the question.

James Fallows was in the audience and noted the dismissal in his weblog for The Atlantic, referring to Gehry calling Kent “pompous” and waving him away as, “a dismissive gesture, much as Louis XIV might have used to wave away some offending underling.” Fallows followed-up with additional articles, and links to others. Fallows expressed interest in the question but doesn’t “know enough about the argument as it involves Gehry’s buildings to have a view right now.” Presumably he’s researching the issue.

Jay Walljasper, PPS senior fellow, wrote a piece on the PPS weblog about the exchange.

It’s surprising to me that this issue hasn’t come to the forefront in discussions about the role of architecture in society and in urban planning circles. Maybe it has and I haven’t noticed. To my way of thinking, this is one of the most pressing issues architects face and they should all—including Gehry—be answering the question posed by Kent. As Walljasper writes, “... discussions about how we create congenial public places where people can come together is a major issue of our times. Public space is not just an aesthetic detail, or minor sideshow for the design community. It’s central to the fabric of lives and future of our society….”

“Who among us wants US$50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM?” That’s the question asked by Michael Moore, writing for the Daily Beast, in a remarkably cogent article outlining what to do with General Motors.

In short, Moore recommends killing GM with utmost swiftness while making it a top priority to save the US industrial infrastructure. “And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear,” Moore writes. The solution isn’t a smaller GM; it’s a totally different GM.

Moore’s solution is to rapidly retool the former automaker and its remaining factories into modern manufacturing facilities used to build mass-transit vehicles and alternative-energy infrastructure. It’s already been done once and can certainly be done again: In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ordered GM to stop car production and start making planes, tanks, and other implements of war. GM completely retooled its factories in a matter of months.

Instead of pouring money into GM to build cars, instead use the money to keep the skilled workers primed and ready, “so that they can build the new modes of 21st-century transportation,” Moore writes. Let them start by retooling the existing GM factories.

There’s not only deep justice, but something deeply right about retrofitting GM to manufacture some of the modes of transport it worked so hard to obviate.