Trains, Planes, and Bicycles

Edwin Chadwick on Public Transportation

2009-10-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

One-hundred and fifty years ago, Edwin Chadwick described the grim public transportation situation in Paris. He could have been writing about almost any Third-World urban center of today. His observations reveal a unique market failure: that transit operators don't compete on the basis of price. Rather, their competition results in inefficient, undesirable, and dangerous outcomes. As Andres Gomez-Lobo puts it, public transit operators should compete for the market instead of in the market.

“I Found at Paris that the attention of the Municipality had also been turned to the service of Public Conveyance, which was in a state analogous to that in London, of vehicles provided by numerous conflicting small capitalists giving inconvenient, and, in every way inferior, service to the public. By authoritative intervention an improvement was effected on the same principle as that effected in respect to the supplies of gas, and with like results… The separate Proprietors were allowed either to take money awarded as compensation, or shares to the amount in the one new Company, which had made the best offer for the whole field of service…The immediate gain to the public was increased convenience, regularity, and freedom of communication, and a general system of correspondence and increased responsibility. Instead of, as in London, streets encumbered and disturbed by nearly empty, or only partially filled inferior vehicles, sometimes crawling with a few passengers, annoyed by detentions for a full load, at other times racing, and dangerously over laden, the circulation throughout Paris was made regular from regularly appointed stations, at fixed charges, which excluded extortionate variations. But I was particularly struck with the necessary effect of the change in the social relations of the men engaged in the reformed service, in the immediate suppression of that antagonistic relation, and its consequences, which we see most fully developed in London, in perpetual wolfish conflict, engendering habits of ruffianism, with extortionate yet precarious earnings spent in dissipation and without reserves for sickness and old age."

Street Lighting In 17th-Century Amsterdam

2009-10-05T23:37:00.000-07:00

Lettie S. Multhauf, "The Light of Lamp-Lanterns: Street Lighting In 17th-Century Amsterdam" Technology and Culture 26 no. 2 (1985): 236-252.

"Van der Heyden's first oil lamps had apparently been quite unsatisfactory. Great amounts of oil had spilled, drenching the lanterns and posts. The lanterns had been so greasy that they had been difficult to handle and the lamplighters had raged against the manufactureres of the lamps, who, not realizing the cause of the spilling, had vainly searched for leaks. But van der Heyden had come to realize that the oil was veing pushed out by air, which was enclosed in a small space and expanded when warmed by the flame or by sunlight: "The air, as can be seen in weather glasses, is such that it shrinks by the cold and expandes by the heat." To solve this problem, he experimented with a glass lamp in which he could observe the displacement of oil by the expanding air. Figure 2 shows both the unsatisfactory initial model and the improved final design, whereas figure 3 shows mode of constructing the entire lantern.

"In his treatise, van der Heyden devoted considerable attention to the placement of the streetlights. At the begining of the installation, some large lanterns, each holding four lamps, had apparently been placed 300 feet apart. But he showed mathematically that less oil was consumed and the light was brighter when smaller lanterns with only one lamp were placed closer together. After a detailed calculation taking into account the price of oil, wages, and the cost of lanterns, repair, and interest, he concluded that the highest efficency was obtained with single lanterns spaced at a distance of 125 to 150 feet. He suggested that in the poorer districts the lanterns could be somewhat further apart, since "poor people usually have less light inside, so that their eyes are used to to it."

Interesting Seasonality

2009-08-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with Google trends more than usual lately.

Last fall, on September 15, when AIG and Lehman failed, we wanted to read about it in the Wall Street Journal. But for the election, we sought our coverage from Fox News. You can see that we thought a lot more about bankruptcy, but it seems to be calming. But not in Nevada. Even if we weren't worrying about bankruptcy, it many of us had to skip our vacations this year.

The recession can be sad stuff, but sadness can is also seasonal. In the winter, we are a little sad, but those who are really serious are not sad about the weather.

Other things have an internet seasonality that is, in some years, blown entirely out of proportion.

Some trends that have funny shaped but consistent seasonality:

jobs

we stop looking for the last third of the year, but come new years, it seems we don't do much else. It makes sense that spikes are sharper in the upward direction than the downward direction. It's a shame you can't zoom more because there are very detailed blips that are common to every year. This is especially distinctive in the UK, perhaps contractual employment is more common there and tends to follow a calendar year.

gyms

Exactly what you would think. New Years. Maybe we just use the internet more in December.

foreign service exam

Has a consistent structure that is interesting, pronounced, and which I in no way understand.

Soaring Rhetoric

2009-08-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

I left my office for lunch and as i looked up to note how the weather had improved i noticed something unusual in thw sky: indeed it was a batsllion of skydivers careening to the earth pulling behind them "T-Mobile" flags. Sure, somewhere in Korea there is a factory of workers and somewhere in Missouri there is a town with a call center of customer service representatives. The livelihoods of these communities and their families surely require the successful promotion of T-mobile's new touch phone with google, but even trying to take seriously the social value of their enterprise i lost the battle not to laugh when the announcer announced over fireworks, as the last of 100 skydivers landed, that the T-Mobile touch with google had, with his touchdown, officially launched. U2's "Beautiful Day" blasted over Justin Herman Plaza. We were encouraged not to leave, but to go meet the brand ambassadors as they untied their parachutes.

Monetizing Emma

2009-07-16T14:46:00.001-07:00

Someone has taken seriously the idea of securitizing investments in human capital. Gary Becker likes to explain that, were it not for the difficulty/immorality in collecting on the contracts, education and therefore earnings would be more equitably and efficiently allocated if there were a market for investments in human capital. Smart kids would borrow money against future earnings and be obligated to pay it back.

The returns to education are very high (Grossman, Becker, Murphy estimate an 18% return to an additional year of school for the marginal american highschool student (marginal here meaning one who has the lowest return of those staying in school---or the highest of those dropping out)). Even poor parents are better off investing in their children than in a savings account--assuming that they believe their children will 'repay' that debt. But they often can't borrow money to invest in their kids.

Why don't rich people/hedge funds/etc invest in the education of poor kids?

I am glad to see that Monetizing Emma has taken on the question.

Iranian Pro-Democracy Rally

2009-06-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

-- Post From My iPhone

Decided to go to the ocean at 7:10

2009-06-17T20:35:00.001-07:00

Arrived at 7:31

-- Post From My iPhone

In Praise of Complex Financial Instruments, Things in California Could Be Worse

2009-06-17T13:41:00.001-07:00

The State of California will be bankrupt in 44 days.

But it could be a lot worse. Perhaps the only redeeming quality of the financial crisis, or at least of the complicated MDS and MDS-derived securities that are blamed for the financial crisis, may be that they saved the state from a deeper, earlier, harder bankruptcy. Here is how I see it: This state, perhaps after Florida, has the highest home foreclosure rate in America. We made the most bad loans. We have the worst defaults. It's on a scale you can't imagine, especially in the southern half of the state.

Traditionally, home lending is local. If seven million Californians default on the mortgages (as they may), that was ten million write downs on local bank loans, which would basically destroy the entire state's network of banks, putting their assets under the receivership of the FDIC until they could sell them to another bank somewhere else, probably out of state. The loss, meanwhile, would be much worse than that seven billion in bad loans that are written down--it would be the leverage on that (if banks borrowed cash against assets to make the loans, which could be as much as 30xs the cost of the defaulted loans--around 210 billion dollars! All in CA!) and the cost of banks collapsing, which could be a true disaster for local economies, and would certainly be a disaster for savings of Californians, who traditionally owned all the interest in local banks. CALPERs would be done. Any anyone else who had any savings took a serious hit. The state would have collapsed a in the summer of 2007. The all-but-inevitable CA bailout could have cost a lot more.

Thank god for complicated financial instruments that distribute that risk geographically, such that it was shared around the world. Instead, an unsuspecting village in Norway is bankrupt and pension and sovereign wealth funds from Detroit to Dubi are eating it. Japanese elderly and trust funds on the Upper East side all take a slice of this. And California gets a pass, which we still manage to fuck up. But it could be a lot worse.

Be skeptical of financial regulation. Distributing risks can be a good thing.

My apartment is finally condemned...

2009-06-08T13:04:00.001-07:00

50 years too late. Long live the peperland, Built for the worlds fair.

-- Post From My Mobile

Racist Automated Phones in Harris County District Court

2009-05-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

At work today, I had to call the Harris County district courthouse. Harris County is the third most populous county in the US, and contains the city of Houston. Until 1848, it and the hundreds of miles surrounding it belonged to the Republic of Mexico.

Annoyed that it was taking so long to get a hold of a human--which I needed in this case--I thought I'd try in Spanish. I hang up and call back and am confronted with the menu of options: for Spanish press 7, for civil suits press 1, for press inquiries press 2, for department of records press 3, for criminal trials press 4, for family court press 5, etc... I press seven.

THE MENU IN SPANISH IS OUTLANDISHLY OFFENSIVE:

Press 1 for criminal trials

Press 2 to contact a parole officer

Press 3 for family court/child support

AND THAT IS IT.

In my best attempt at fairness to Harris County, if you are involved in a civil lawsuit in Harris County and you don't speak English, you probably have bigger problems. But even if it isn't efficient, shouldn't a court be trying to do something other than opperate efficiently? Is it difficult to furnish a Spanish speaking line in Houston?

Wow.

Recyclable: Boats

2009-05-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

From the Times:

HONG KONG — After more than five years of negotiations, delegates from 64 countries reached broad consensus here Thursday on a new international agreement regulating the recycling of ships. They scheduled a final meeting Friday to approve and sign the pact.

The dismantling of ships, so that their steel and other materials can be sold as scrap, is often done on or near beaches in poor countries, notably India and Bangladesh. Both nations have pledged to improve working conditions and environmental practices. But labor advocates contend that the process still kills and maims many workers each year and results in the contamination of shorelines with asbestos, oily waste, toxic paint and other dangerous materials.

Full Story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/business/energy-environment/15ship.html?ref=global-home

Bike to Work Day 2009, San Francisco

2009-05-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

So many people on bikes this morning, I have to believe many were not going to work.

The SFBC's energizer station on Market Street was a great place to drink coffee and people-watch. In this photo, two City Supervisors, on City Planning Director, and Gary Fisher.

Note that half of the Supervisors rode on tandem bikes with staff/partners. I joined Supervisors Dufty and Mirkirimi here to ride to City Hall. We led them down polk street, against the flow of traffic, without a bike lane to show them what their daily commute requires with the current state of SF Bike Lanes. Passing the Polk Contra-Flow Lane would fix this problem.

At City Hall Supervisors Duft and Mirkirimi joined Supervisors Chiu, Chu, Campos, Avalos, and Mar, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, DPW Head Ed Reskin, a spate of SF directors, and maybe 250 cyclists. Every one of the officials in attendence, all expressed enthusiastic and unconditional support for every one of the 56 proposed bike improvements that the city is considering. I look forward to them keeping their promises. If they do not vote for each one, they are liars.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera (picture, badly, below) had the best shirt: "One Less Lawer in a Car".

Celebratory drinks tonight at Rickshaw Stop. Gary Fisher told me he would be wearing his new tweed suit!

Unexpectedly in Petra

2009-05-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

This was not the plan.

-- Post From My Mobile

Goodbye Europe

2009-05-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

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My Mom is Crazy

2009-05-07T14:05:00.001-07:00

Albuquerque Journal
Monday, April 27, 2009

City's Chief Financial Officer Heading to Iraq

Journal Staff Report
Anna Lamberson is preparing to leave the political war zone for a real one.
She will head to

Iraq

this summer with a civilian contractor to help rebuild local governments there.
        "I'm very grateful to the mayor and city of Albuquerque for the opportunity," Lamberson said this week in an interview. "I've learned tons. I hope I can put it to good use."
        Lamberson, the city's chief financial officer, has served in the mayoral administrations of Martin Chávez and Jim Baca. She has a doctorate in economics from the University of Utah, where she focused on international trade and development.
        "This is like going back to what I wanted to do," she said. "This is an offer I can't refuse."
        Lamberson will work for the Research Triangle Institute. She will be located in

Iraq

but isn't sure where yet.
        It's a one-year assignment. She will be a public-finance adviser for a reconstruction team.
        Under Lamberson, the city has seen its bond rating climb to "AAA" — one of the highest in the country for a municipality.
        Chávez said Lamberson is one of only a few executives he hired from the Baca administration after succeeding him in 2001. Chávez said he "didn't have to worry" about finances with Lamberson keeping watch.
        "She's a star in any environment," he said.

Train to Belgrade

2009-05-07T03:06:00.000-07:00

We did not have high hopes of the overnight train from Budapest to Belgrade after seeing some of the trains in the Budapest station and reading a hysterical New York Times travel piece on how profoundly awful the train is ("the pastries were passable but the coffee was horrible") (I loathe the Times Travel section).

We are showed to our cabin (we ride first class because we are rappers in the former Yugoslavia) by a stern and disciplined Serb who had no English but good German, a language I speak famously well. Our cabin is great. Made better only after I pimp it out with a Budapest acquisition: a small iPod dock with speakers.

We have a bottle of Hungarian wine (pretty damn okay!) and jars of beautiful Hungarian preserved peaches. We listen to This American Life. We watch Hungary fly by. We are rappers. The NYT travel writers are fools. We sleep soundly.

We get to the Serbian border and police trained in a dictatorship pound at the door and turn the handle to find it locked. It's 3 AM! I contemplate putting pants on, more pounding and jostling the doorknob. Fuck. I open the door. Serbian police want my papers. Everything goes fine except that I have been in Serbia for 20 minutes and I already dislike the police.

5:30 AM and we are in Belgrade. Belgrade does not have a beautiful train station except maybe from this angle:

We seek out a hotel, picking a big, ugly, communist affair. Decidedly, it fits the city which could have been built by Stalin himself.

The view was very... Belgrade.

We can't check in yet, so we walk to the acropolis, a fort built most recently by the Austro-Hungarians and before them the Ottomans. It offers a view of the confluence of the Danube and Selva, rivers that have long sustained Belgrade's large population and ensured its status as a trade center. Situated atop the only hill in a town on the edges of the Pannonian plain and Balkan peninsula, the hill is the key to ruling a very large area. The forts atop this hill have been destroyed at least 42 times in recorded history.

The confluence

Now the fort is used as a park, Zoo, and military museum.

I climb on a soviet tank. A little boy arguing with his parents about why he was not allowed to climb on tanks cited my example. His parents explain to him that I an an American on a Russian tank, and that this is understandable.

These kids using the howitzer are at least old enough to drink. This scene would disturb me more after seeing what remains of Sarejevo, where most of these weapons on display were used by Serbs to starve and murder Sarejevans for 4 years.

On display inside the museum are the remains of a shot-down American Stealth Fighter.

I speculate that this is one act of vandalism, not two.

This is awkwardly right next to government buildings and the Russian embassy in downtown Belgrade (also close to the US Embassy, which makes a very small footprint and flies no flags). NATO planes did this. Note the trees growing in the rubble.

But they buy American. These are G-Plates.

A particularly polemical bookstore.

Budapest

2009-05-02T18:29:00.000-07:00

Critical Mass twice/year, 10,000 riders, city shuts down. Good poster.

Largest Synogogue in Europe, most Jews percapita in Europe, a stranger at the train station makes a point to tell me.

Czech Republik

2009-05-02T18:25:00.000-07:00

The border with Germany is mountainous, my theories of the world are confirmed. I drink the real Budwiser.

Berlin

2009-05-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

I am leaving AMS from an unusual station, Ams Zuid. To be sure I get it right for my early train, I dedicate several hours in my last day to locating the station. Still, I mannage to miss the high-speed ICE train, but in an unusual way: I was too early. I got on the train that was immediately before the ICE, a safe position to ask whether this is the train to Germany. As soon as I hear "I think not" the doors closed. I watched them announce the next train is to Berlin. I an trapped. After a fit of rage, the details of which are now irrelevant, I get off the train, see my error and head to Amsterdam Central station where I buy a new ticket and board a train from a conventional station. I am 2 hours late, violent. I only get over this failure days later.
I arrive in Berlin. Kreusburg is great. Weather is great.

Amsterdam!

2009-04-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

We survive.

Ranching the suburbs...

Salmon triangle on Easter...

And we rode along a Schipol runway..

A surprising number of people spent their Easter watching airplanes take off. Who knew?

Tulips!

2009-04-28T12:00:00.001-07:00

This is what we were thinking when we decided to ride through Holland.

Delft, Easter

2009-04-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

Delft might be the cutest town in Holland. We are here for Easter, near this great big, old church where William the silient is burried.

Tower is about to fall. Deserves more hype than that of Pisa.

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Rotterdam is the new brooklyn

2009-04-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

Left a literal tabula rasa by some german fascists, it's been re-planned as an architectural labratory. Proof that it was possible to build a well designed, bike and public transit based city starting in 1945. Compare to: Phoenix.
Below, the Erasmus draw bridge with bike lane.

I of course love draw bridges. And Renzo Piano buildings (right side).

We are taken in by a Dutch social worker.

Bike tunnel under the Maas river! From a late-night ride.

I've stopped wearing a helmet because the bike lanes are seperate from the car lanes.

From My Mobile

Netherlands!

2009-04-24T14:03:00.001-07:00

We made it at sun down!

-- Post From My Mobile

Antwerp to Rotterdam

2009-04-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

It was a long day and we got a late start. We are armed with a map of Belgium that includes bike routes. We want the feitzen route 5 to the Rotterdam. The good news is we have what seems to be a good map of Belgium's bike routes. The bad news: we don't have a map of the Netherlands. Literally, we will cross that bridge when we come to it-it crosses the maes river- but then well be off the map.

I like the train station at Antwerp.

I want to dispel any notion that 'they' eat better than us. Fast food in Antwerp's endless suburbs sucks. But it was a suburb and we were hungry. It reminded John of Indiana.

This is a bike lane in Suburban Antwerp. Red brick lanes all the way to Amsterdam. It's elevated above the street and often also below the sidewalk. The best ones allow parking Between cars and bikes, offering great protection to riders. I wish they would do this on Cesar Chavez street in San Francisco rather than the proposed huge median. Colored bike lanes are also novel but seemingly obvious and cheap.

It's not strictly good to have so many bike lanes. We got lost near Flanders field. We found a bridge and fort the Nazis destroyed. John contemplating the rubble. This railway bridge used to run to a nearby airfield.

While the Low Counrries are famous for beer, bikes, chocolate, refer, hookers, tollerance, and being bruralized in wars they also have an population of water fowl in both diversity and quantity. This is maybe a more banal example--and definately a bad photo--these birds snorted at us in a threatening way. I would not have noticed the birds had I traveled by train.

Bunker next to train tracks. It's important to protect your train tracks.

The blue is the bike route.

We saw so many spandex street gangs.

Everyone loves to show off their artillery, even if they surrendered in 8 days.

This was the most beautiful part of the ride, through a marsh in a national park. Note that this road is for only bicycles and pedestrians.

We were tired, cranky, and very hungry. We were blessed by an angel, a Flemish angel, who gave us bread, chocolate, meat, cheese, and beer. We ate and made ammends. We are not sure we will make it to Rotterdam. We are sure we can't do it before dark. We may spend the night in the town of Roosendal? It's on the map.

We got to Roosendal. It sucks. We would rather sleep in a pile of hay. We carry on, 60k from holland. Unfortunately, we don't have a map of the netherlands and don't know precisely where Rotterdam is. "there will be signs" we say. "I don't know where we will sleep tonight, but it will be a good story" we say. "you don't want to die without good stories" we say.

We push on. The sun is setting.

A bench, a bike lane, and SHEEP. Onward.

A suspension bridge across an irrigation canal? Onward.

-- Post From My Mobile

It might be cold and windy...

2009-04-24T08:09:00.001-07:00

...but at least it's raining.

We said goodbye to our Ghent hosts and set out a bit later than planned, stopping first to pick up gloves and then for some great coffee a chocolate duck (who was brought to slaughter in shprt order) and a beer to help weather the cold.

We set out, bravely, against the wind.

The entire route followed a canal. We will make the entire trip without getting lost. This feat we will not accomplish twice. The weather sslowly improved. We took a break in the only post industrial town I have seen in Belgium. We have a mad good snack: young gouda dipped in spicy Ghent mustard.

Because john has turned spainiard, he is ravenous by 2pm. We stop in st. Joris for a normandanische pannekoek.

And I accidentially got drunk.

Causality is tricky, but shortly thereafter, we were lost.

But the weather further improved and we found our way. We also found some old fortifeid bunkers from one of the many times Belgium was invaded. They were facing east. Here is john having his try at invading Belgium.

Not quite. Here you can see the trees that now grow atop these bunkers, which i want to csll abandon, but come to think of it probably got 8 only days of use by belgians before they surrendered to Germany.

From there, we made it to Brugge. Shortest ride of the trip.

If visiting Ghent was about understanding my countrrfactual life as an educated young Belgian, Brugge was about imaging the middle ages. The entire city is a UNESCO world herrirage site-it's the best preserved old city in Europe. Here is why: no one in the business of flattening Holland has ever cared enough to obliterate Brugge. Napolean, Charles V, Hitler just didn't care. Ironically, the city's historical irrelevance has made it one of the biggest tourist attractions in Europe.

The locals, so far as we can tell, are all juvenile delquients. We spent more time than we should have drinkng genevere with some kids who later snuck under a barbed-wire fence to climb the scaffolding around an old church tower. In a rare display of judgement, we didn't join them.

-- Post From My Mobile

Mustard

2009-04-08T01:13:00.000-07:00

Mmmmmm....

-- Post From My Mobile

Ghent

2009-04-06T23:47:00.001-07:00

We made it to Ghent. On the way here I realized that Belgium could be Illinois except the farmhouses are older, the architecture better, and there are bike lanes.

Ghent is lovely. It was the largest city in Europe through the middle ages save Paris, and now the tourists don't even come here. I have no idea why.

John and I are working on the details of a treaty whereby I carry some of his stuff and he buys me beer. Met some great and one less that great ghenters last night. I also have a new favorite beer, pictured below.

We played basketball with some kids last night. Belgians should probably stick to soccer. John owned them.

Beer, castles, and good people (all pictured below), that's what Ghent is about, so far as I can tell.

-- Post From My Mobile

Affligem

2009-04-06T23:47:00.000-07:00

Best beer ever.

-- Post From My Mobile

Brussels

2009-04-06T23:44:00.000-07:00

John is found! Here, he can be found peeing on a church.

-- Post From My Mobile

Beer

2009-04-04T18:24:00.001-07:00

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Schiphol Airport

2009-04-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Built at the baggage claim. Rode into town.

-- Post From My Mobile

Amsterdam

2009-04-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

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Bike in A Box

2009-04-03T13:46:00.000-07:00

Taped shut on the 5:12 Bart to SFO (so as to not wake the roommates with the soothing sounds of packing tape, which was actually soothing compared to the steal scraping of BART).

Air travel with bikes: I paid $100. They enter to charge $150. iPhone offered return in its investment when I was able to cite Continental's website. Their policy: bikes in boxes less then 62" in sum of dimensions are free. I offer $100 dollars to any adult who can put his frame in such a box. The couple ahead of me checked 4 strollers. Free. My bike weighed 30 Lbs.

On a domestic flight, I would bribe the curb baggage checker to put the bike through. I tried, but he can't check internationally. Let's hope it's still in four pieces in AMS.

-- Post From My Mobile

SF Bike Kitchen Rocks

2009-04-03T06:07:00.001-07:00

These guys helped me take my bike apart only to put it back together. And put it in a box.

It's a collective--sort of. You pay a modest annual fee ("donation") and you get access to tools (great tools), parts (not as great), and the wisdom of experts. they are great. My ride is ready to to to Europe now!

First step, cut a hole in the box.

-- Post From My Mobile

Live Through This

2009-03-31T08:30:00.000-07:00

Kiang Kek lew, better known by his nom de guerre "Dutch," plead guilty yesterday to directly overseeing the torture and murder of 14,000 people at the Khmer Rouge's Security Prison S-21 (Tuol Sleng), offering the Nuremburg defense that he was following orders and anything else would have resulted in his own death. Assuming that's probably true, it seeems the crime he is ultimately guilty of is performing well enough to get promoted to a place where those were his choices. I suspect the career track is rife with enough crimes against humanity to justify what modest punishment Dutch will receive. It was pointed out in trial that he carried out his order with a particular zeal.

He is the first Khmer Rouge official to confess. I think he may also have confessed to more murders than anyone anywhere ever has, except maybe in show trials, assuming the prosecution of a geriatric is something other than a show trial.

I've visited Toul Sleng. Few places have disturbed me more. To the right are the camp rules roughly translated into English and below is one of the many converted classrooms used as a torture chamber.

"Most Dramatic Government Intervention in Private Industry

2009-03-29T22:43:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal reports: that the Obama administration forced out Rick Wagoner by threatened to withhold more bailout money. They call this the "most dramatic government intervention in private industry since the economic crisis began last year."

Hang on. This isn't "intervention in private industry" which no doubt the WSJ and its readership regard as the tell tale sign of socialism. In the absence of government "intervention" GM would have been bankrupt in October. GM has always had a choice.

God Shoulda Put a Ring on IT

2009-03-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

This just increased my donation by at least 20% this year. I'm so proud of you, UChicago.

California Zephyr Amtrak Poster (no. 64/100)

2009-02-25T13:54:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on the Cesar Chavez Street Design Workshop

2009-02-25T12:36:00.000-08:00

First a disclaimer: while many have followed this process for years and have been pushing their deeply-held agendas, I am merely a spectator who lives a block from Chavez.

I attended last night’s workshop and while the planners did a fine job given their constraints, I think they and the city generally operate in a way to designed to produce mediocre streets and sidewalks. It was clear to everyone that having wide sidewalks was desirable and would solve many problems. The planners see that Chavez is currently built for cars and not humans. They agree this as a problem, using 60 feet of the street’s width for car traffic. I got the impression they would have been glad to make sidewalks wider, which would present, I think, much better small-scale commercial development opportunities that would give some life to the neighborhood. There would be more pedestrians, making the neighborhood safer, commerce more possible, which would bring even more people and more eyes on the street. It’s recursive. It would allow the blocks west of Mission to take advantage of the civic activity on Mission street and improve on their current deserted feel. This vapidity is the result of lack of humans, who don’t like narrow, empty, sidewalks beset by fast traffic. It’s not the lack of trees. The committee, I suspect, knew that was the good way to design an environment for humans.

But wide sidewalks are expensive ($2m/block). They don’t have the funding. And they value consistent street character so they don’t want to widen some but not all.

To a point, I see value in have consistent character along a street. But I fear we decided to make Chavez consistently and permanently mediocre. We could aim higher: build a stretch of the the street we want and finish the rest when funding comes around, whenever that happens (no one has ANY idea, problematically). Just because the PUC is going to do work from Guerrero to Hampshire doesn’t mean they need to extend this project that far, stretching the budget to afford only mediocrity. To those who argue for consistent character, I would point out that Hampshire is an arbitrary boundary to this ‘character’.

Of course, I am anything but prescient in making such points now. From here, the debate will focus on what kind of shrubbery to put in the (15 foot) median. Maybe there is some hope for putting a buffer between the street parking and the bike-lane. I see this as extremely important to the success of the bike lane, and relatively low cost since we have an enormous median from which we can borrow the space. It would also further separate the hypothetical pedestrians from the cars.

After the meeting, I better understand the big problems in the way we build San Francisco. First, this process of presenting posters to concerned citizens favors ideas that make for good sketches. But good urban planning may look terrible on posters while beautiful posters can depict horrible results (e.g. suburbia and urban housing projects look great on posters). There is so much more to good design. It requires us to imagine what the street will feel like for the next thirty years as we build. A median looks good on a poster, but it doesn’t do much to encourage civic life. If no one walks down Chavez, that fat median is in vain at best, and unsavory and neglected at worst. It also guarantees it would be even more expensive to expand the sidewalk in the future (because we would presumably need to narrow the median).

Second, the way the city funds projects–ear-marking cash for a street with no inkling as to when they intend to re-invest in the area–deprives us of a time-horizon for design. IF we knew the city would spend another 10 million in 10 years, we might want to widen half the sidewalks. After-all, in 10 years, the trees in the median won’t yet be in bloom. This process makes us build a mediocre city everywhere rather than a great city somewhere. And we are committed to this mediocrity for the long haul.

But at least we got a bike lane. Bravo to the planners for sticking to that even though it delays construction by a year, precluding the city from using stimulus funds to do this. (Another reason for my personal fatwa on Rob Anderson and his injunction on bicycle improvements.)

An e-mail to CCL

2009-02-25T12:32:00.000-08:00

CCL,

Global auto-industry freak-out is scary and foolish: everyone trying to do everything to protect their auto industries is the surest way to kill all of them. The world needs fewer cars and they need to be produced at a slower rate--the process by which that will be achieved is called a recession. The best way to make it bigger is to stupidly try to fight it by throwing hundreds of billions to save an ultimately unsalvable industry, allowing them to continue to build cars that no one wants to buy so that we don't have to lay people off. I'm happy to give up on the whole scheme and let them build trains. We simply can't prop-up every auto-maker at it's current size, it's like a very expensive game of chicken where the winner is the one stupid enough to feed his auto-industry the most hand-outs. We would all be better off if we would all agree not to subsidize our auto-industries so that no one fails for making the financially prudent decision.
I'm sort of interested in Detroit's near-term problem, that they are going to liquidate their inventories of big SUVs that no one wants in order to finance some re-tooling or at least to achieve bankruptcy. I suppose they are going to unleash those cars on the world at low prices in any event, but the best we can hope for is that the deluge of cheap cars be smaller. To some, this is the reason for a bailout--allow them to finance a re-tooling by other means. But I still don't see how a bailout saves us from this.

I really don't understand the position that we should give GM $16 billion. I think the argument that 'it may be a badly-run, too-large, inefficient company peddling obsolete technology in an already too-big industry that's destine to fail, but at least it's American' is about all I understand. (though technically speaking, their 'American' ownership is virtually irrelevant given that 'owners' will receive less than nothing for those shares they bought). I don't think I'm over-estimating the intellect or perspective of the average voter. This one seems obvious. First reaction to the reality that GM wants $16 Billion ought to be "why the fuck is anyone building cars on a day like today?" I. just. don't. get. it.

Scorecard: Rail: $8 billion, Automobiles: $22 billion a few months ago + $16 billion now + enormous highway subsidies in stimulus package (which are NOT limited to repairing existing infrastructure) + indirect fuel subsidies by way of a half-century of bad foreign policy
(priceless?).

But $8 Billion is better than nothing. The virtue of high speed rail is, all things considered, it's cheap.

Greatest Generation?

2009-02-25T12:26:00.000-08:00

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. encouraged his writing students to make awful things happen to their characters to show the reader what they’re made of. But this recession—and it will be bad—is not enough to prove our greatness.

First, this will be nothing compared to the Great Depression. Unemployment in some areas reached 40% and many people were unemployed for nearly a decade—breadlines and soup kitchens marked New York City and malnutrition was a serious concern. More than that, my grandparents' generation earned their greatness not simply by becoming wealthy again, but by leaving their depression-afflicted towns to fight in an enormous war and emerging in a world free of fascism as the singular super-power. They unlocked the power of nuclear chain reactions, rebuilt Europe and Japan, and—within a decade—saw the yokes of colonialism collapse. Sure, this was not entirely their doing. They watched historical trends come to fruition. But it was a time of greatness. It’s difficult to fathom the permanent and far-reaching consequences of their lives.

The point is greatness requires more than returning to 3% GDP growth. It is unlikely we will earn our greatness by expanding our geopolitical dominance. We have to offer permanent solutions to big problems and turn pages of history. I can think of a few goals that might enable us to earn our greatness:

First, and perhaps this is obvious, we ought to make it our national business to pioneer great technological progress. There was a time when the brightest minds and organizations of a generation worked to cure polio or put men on the moon. Now, they trade derivatives. I’ll be the first to argue that trading derivatives has social value up to a point, but only up to a point and maybe this depression will help us draw that line and reconsider the social norm of following all the other bright boys to Wall Street. There are great technological problems to be solved and it will take great-big subsidies, leadership, and creativity to solve them. Alternative energies, disease, climate change, global transportation are proper challenges for us to assert our greatness in a way that has a lasting impact around the world.

Second, our generation is well-positioned to earn its greatness bolstering international law. I am weakly optimistic that this will have renewed importance under the Obama administration and as the U.S. finds long-term solutions to our situation in Iraq. The first step to bolstering international law would be obeying it. And the first step there would be closing Guantanamo, which seems like it’s going to happen. The U.S. can hope to reclaim the moral high ground and strengthening international organizations—thinking beyond the pathetic shape of the UN or the IMF—would be an accomplishment we can point to in 60 years.

And third: the most important work Americans can do while we endure this depression is reflect on our lifestyles. We are the wealthiest nation around and we spend it living in great big houses in the suburbs, driving big pieces of steel that weigh thirty times our body weight to run quotidian errands. We support a medieval monarchy to afford this situation but even so it’s not easy to sustain what is probably the greatest misuse of resources in history. This model is being mimicked in the suburbs of Beijing today, Bombay tomorrow, and Brazzaville after that. It isn’t working and we need to admit it. Fixing this problem will require more than a miracle technology. We need to restructure the way we live and accomplish things.

All signs point to major government works under this administration both because we need them and because we need a massive stimulus package. Jason Furman says it will be on the scale of Eisenhower’s interstate highway project. But please, let’s not build more roads.

The Next Secretary of Transportation

2009-02-25T12:23:00.000-08:00

[Reposted from Whyroots.org, it's old]

While I have little time for it lately, I caught up on news today to find that the internet is full of discussion of the next Cabinet but there is no discussion of what should be a critical post in the next four years: Secretary of Transportation. Today, I want to world to think more about the invaluable role of the Department of Transportation and its Secretary (Sec Trans?).

Historically, this is among the least interesting cabinet positions reserved for political appointees whose names we will never remember unless you study trivia. The DOT isn't even in charge of the TSA anymore! But this is a cabinet-level position that could and should rock this term: everything is on the table with respect to how Americans go everywhere (and pause for a moment to consider how central to our lives going is). The auto industry is huge and going to be retooled, demolished, or bailed out and the government may own enough of it to sit in the driver's seat (perhaps uncomfortably). Detroit will try to finance its recovery by selling at fire-sale prices the huge stock of SUVs it built in recent years under the direction of myopic and uncreative fools whose idea of the future is the Detroit suburbs. Meanwhile, we live amid a climate crisis that seems out of sight on the back burner again, the probable return of an oil crisis as soon as we have an economy, and a certain political problem with how we get energy, most of which we use to move people and things from place to place.

It will be easy to make bad decisions (read: do nothing) because oil is, for now, cheap and we have a lot of SUVs that Detroit needs to dump on the market in order to keep the lights on.

I get the distinct feeling we are about to do something we will later regret. Remember when we said never again to the 8-cylinder engine in the 70s oil crisis? What if we had actually learned from our mistakes? Where would we be today? Not here! In as much as the government can help us, the Secretary of Transportation should lead the way.

Think about the central role of transportation in a nation and economy and even peoples' lives: when you retool your transportation plan, you change what people buy--fresher, more local food, for example--and how you live--I think the entire suburban lifestyle of moving a 4000 lbs piece of steel every time you want to do work or eat food is up for debate. But no one is talking about it and it's making me mad.

So far, the most comprehensive coverage of this debate comes from the WSJ, CNN, and the Huffington Post... no wait, no. I got that wrong. They haven't said a word! The most complete coverage is form a bike blog in Texas... WTF?So who should the Secretary of Transportation be and what should he or she aim to do? UPDATE: Current bailout talks are currently struggling with the idea of an government "Auto Czar."