The High Cost of Free Parking

Been reading and thinking a great deal about what’s wrong with the way we build our cities, spurred by Kunstler’s great books. Reminded me of an article I read a few years back about The High Cost of Free Parking. The article I remember was an op-ed piece from the SF Chronicle, written by the UCLA Professor Donald Shoup. Upon further research I found that he had written a book, which unfortunately is not at my library, and seems a bit too expensive for my blood. But he also wrote a NY Times op-ed piece, as well as a very good article in Salon.

Here’s the argument against free parking. There is obviously no such thing. Someone pays for it everywhere. Your employer does at work, leading to a lower salary for you. Your merchants do when you’re shopping, leading to higher costs. You do at home, leading to higher housing costs. But beyond the immediate costs (lower salary, higher shopping and housing costs) there are subtler costs as well. I happen to live in a community that, despite being fairly affluent, has commercial spaces populated solely by stunningly ugly strip malls. For miles and miles. Until you just want to move away and go somewhere else.

Moreover, we pay the cost of free parking whether we use it or not, leading to essentially an increased cost for public transportation, pedestrians, and cyclists. Why should I ride the bus if I’m already paying for a parking space at the mall? Back in my conservative Republican days I used to criticize public transportation, because these systems never broke even and were always subsidized by local governments. What I’ve come to realize since then is that driving itself is subsidized by governments on the local and federal level. We pay a great deal for highway interchanges. We pay a great deal for free parking. And we pay a great deal for what the automobile culture does to our cities and towns.

I moved from a place, Pasadena, California, that is a case study, literally, of how to handle downtown parking. When I moved to Pasadena in 1988, the Old Town area was nearly deserted. It had recently been designated a historical district, but its commercial spaces were empty. They had a law that required the facades of the building to be preserved during renovation, which meant that it was much more expensive to revamp the old buildings than tearing them down and starting afresh. Thank God. In any case, Old Town was filled with nothing but a movie theater and a great bagel store, and I looked enviously at Westwood and Burbank citizens for living in a hipper area. But slowly it came back, ultimately becoming the coolest Southern California shopping district. They have very limited parking spaces, regulated by parking meters, which encourages people to walk, ride, or take the bus to get there, rather than drive. As a consequence, it is a walkable downtown, and has a higher density of cool shops and restaurants, since each one doesn’t have to be surrounded by a sea of parking spaces.

Part of the problem, I have since learned, is that local zoning regulations require a certain number of parking spaces per commercial enterprise. Both Kunstler and Shoup agree that it is these zoning regulations that doom us to a suburban wasteland, and that they should be uniformly dumped in favor of a more intelligent consensus of what makes a livable, workable downtown area.

People pretty much agree on what constitute cool places to live. Very few people prefer West Covina to Pasadena or Pleasanton for any reason other than real estate prices. We need to start understanding the factors that make Pasadena and Pleasanton charming places to live, and rewrite our community laws to encourage these type of growth.

End Links:

• The High Cost of Free Parking at Amazon;
• We Paved Paradise, from Salon;
• An article on the parking problem in Old Pasadena;
• An op-ed piece by Shoup from the NY Times;
• An op-ed piece by Shoup from the SF Chronicle;
• Donald Shoup’s home page at UCLA;
• The first chapter of THCOFP, from Shoup’s website.

Beulah and Marah: The Best Bands You’ve Never Heard Of

I was thinking again of an NYTimes op-end piece I read years ago by Nick Hornby (yeah, him, the About a Boy guy) called Rock of Ages. Hornby writes about hearing Marah play a spectacular show in a pub in Kent, England, and then having to pass a hat around to help defray costs. Hornby muses about what success in the Rock world means, particularly in light of the fact that after one great album after another, Marah is still not a hit success.

The article had a huge effect on me, and launched me into my current obsession with alternative, indie music, the smaller the better. I downloaded a few songs (demos of East and Feather Boa) that Marah had provided on their websites (something that “unsuccessful” bands have to do), and realized that these songs were better than just about anything I had seen the mainstream music industry promote in years. If they weren’t telling me about bands like Marah, who else weren’t they telling me about?

At this point it’s also worth pointing out that Marah isn’t some edgy band that has a sound you have to listen to a million times before you appreciate it (*cough* Neutral Milk Hotel *cough*). Marah has as much of a mainstream, classic rock sound as any band I’ve heard. Replace Springsteen’s Jersey with Philly and you’ve got Marah. Yet I had never heard of them, much less listened to them.

I happen to like Neutral Milk Hotel, by the way, but I understand how the major labels might have a hard time promoting him. But Marah? Who can’t sell Marah.

In a classic article in Salon, Courtney Love Did The Math behind the music industry, showing that a system that I had always assumed was promoting artists was really only propping up an archaic croneyed system of music publishers. The invisible hand wasn’t working in this case, for whatever reason.

The intervening years have been filled with a great deal of great music, almost none of it mainstream, or, at least, none of it made its breakthrough on a mainstream label. Another band that is worth mentioning in the same breath with Marah is Beulah. Beulah was one of the bands from the legendary Elephant 6 Collective (that also produced Neutral Milk, BTW). Put out some spectacular albums, most notably When Your Heartstrings Break, but never hit it big, and ultimately broke up a few years ago. Ultimately because no one in the music industry could find a way to sell Heartstrings, whereas they could find a way of selling the crap out of Britney or whoever.

Marah has a new album out, Angels of Destruction. Haven’t heard anything more than a track off the album yet, but it sounds like the typically great stuff from them. I’m going to make a point of buying the album as soon as possible. Maybe my sale will be the one to finally put Marah into the mainstream.

Kunstler’s Home From Nowhere

Since I liked The Long Emergency so much, over the weekend I read Home From Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler’s follow up to his earlier magnum opus Geography of Nowhere. Very good book. Where The Long Emergency focused on the economic implications of suburban sprawl, particularly its non-sustainability, Home From Nowhere focuses on the social implications, on how suburbia is turning us from citizens into consumers, how it is sterilizing our culture and alienating our children and neighbors. Rather than simply bemoan the problem, Home From Nowhere also suggests ways that we can reclaim charming, meaningful places to live. Everyone enjoys vacationing in places like Nantucket or Paris or Boston, where one essentially has to abandon one’s car and proceed by foot or by bicycle. Kunstler urges us to dare to dream that we can actually live year-round in a community of this sort. Kunstler talks about how the zoning laws in place essentially all across America almost require us to develop single use “pods” rather than mixed use space where offices, storefronts, and residences coexist (which was the way that all towns were designed before World War II). He cites successful development projects, most notably Seaside, Florida, where developers were able to create charming, affordable mixed use communities. And he describes the New Urbanist movement of neotraditional urban design, that strives to reinvent the way we create cities and towns. Very good read.

Here’s an article Kunstler wrote for the Atlantic Monthly that summarizes some of the points in the book.

Wilco – Sky Blue Sky

It’s been a long time since the lyrics on an album grabbed me. Mostly what I look for in a record is catchy hooks, energy, a good pop sense, and something of an edge. I think I feel that I’m too old to get a meaningful message out of music. Gone are the days of listing to Exile on Main Street over and over again, or thinking that some hidden message in Pink Floyd or even Elvis Costello will give me direction in life.

This is why Wilco’s latest album, Sky Blue Sky, hit me like a bolt from the, well, Sky Blue Sky. Doubly so, perhaps, since I had first decided that I didn’t like Wilco (don’t know when I decided this, or what led me to this conclusion), and then I had heard somewhere that their latest album was bad. But then I was listening to All Songs Considered annual listeners pick the year’s best episode, and the Wilco song Hate It Here hit me.

Bought the album and spent the weekend with it. This is a very good album, although I wouldn’t say it’s a classic. But the lyrics and music are put together with thought and sensitivity, and it’s moving and creative.

You Used Perl to Write WHAT?!

Nice article entitled You Used Perl to Write WHAT?! Most of the pros/cons apply to Python as well. Python programmers like to feel all superior to their Perl counterparts, but knowing when not to use a language is as important as knowing how to use a language. IMO, the ease of using Pyrex to write a C extension, or the maturity of packages like numpy remove some of the limitations to high performance computing. And I think that CGI and web.py make the web a perfectly valid place for Python to play.

What Makes the Stars Shine?

What Makes the Stars Shine? Physical Review Focus has a brief note about Bethe’s two papers from 1939 that demonstrated that nuclear fusion causes the stars to shine, as well as having links to the original papers.

On a personal note, I saw Bethe speak once. He gave a talk at Caltech, and I ended up leaving a conference early to make it back in time to hear the man speak. Bethe spoke of the formation of black holes from twin stars. I’m not an astrophysicist, but I do quantum mechanics, where Bethe also made huge contributions. Bethe was very old at the time, and lost his place in his notes several times during his talk, but he had a packed room eating out of his hand. It was a wonderful experience.

Say Hi To Your Mom

What fun is being into indie rock if you can’t love a band that none of your friends have ever heard of? For several years, Say Hi To Your Mom has been one of my favorites for this very reason. Eric Elbogen, aka Say Hi, nee Say Hi To Your Mom, has put out some really great stuff, some of the best of which he gives away on his website. Let’s Talk About Spaceships and Hooplas Involving Circus Tricks are two of my favorite songs of all time, by any band, and they’re free on his website.

So the boy has a new album out, The Wishes and the Glitch. Three tracks are available for free from The Wishes. Northwestern Girls, Toil and Trouble, and Zero to Love. They’re all quite good: literate, well arranged, tuneful, fun songs. Admittedly nothing shakes my world, there isn’t that moment of discovery like the first time I heard Spaceships, that spark of who is that and why haven’t I heard of him before? Still, the boy is talented, and if you haven’t heard of him, give him a listen.

The Long Emergency

We like our scares compartmentalized. The Exorcist is fun because we can turn on the lights after watching the movie and remind ourselves it is fiction. We can threaten ourselves temporarily with a monstrous threat to everything we love and hold dear, and then return to our old life, without truly risking that which we cherish.

Just finished the scariest book I’ve ever read, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler, about the impact of the end of cheap oil on our society. An excerpt of the book is available at Rolling Stone, for whom Kunstler writes. To quote:

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life — not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense — you name it.

Kunstler’s point is that we are near, or have already passed, the peak of global oil production. This means that we have used half of the oil our planet contains. However, since the rate at which we are using the oil has been, and will continue to, rise exponentially, we will use the second half much faster than we have used the first half, in only 20-30 years, by some estimates.

If the end of cheap oil merely meant that we have to drive less it would be incovenient but survivable. But what makes Kunstler’s predictions terrifying that the core of our modern civilization depends upon cheap oil. We live in suburbs where we can’t walk anywhere. We eat more apples flown in from Chile than grown in the farmlands 50 miles away. The green revolution that produces so much food itself depends upon fertilizers and pesticides that derive from petroleum. We commute hundreds of miles to work each week. We live in deserts and thus require irrigation and air conditioning to survive.

One of the characteristics of our insecurity is that we ridicule anyone who points to the end of the good times as an unstable nutcase. Jimmy Carter, who told Americans to put on sweaters and turn down their thermostats, to drive slower so as to conserve fuel, was a laughing stock. Heck, I thought he was ridiculous, but, then, I was all of 12 years old. But he will go down in history as the first (and, to date, the only) President to understand the danger the oil boom poses to our civilization. We simply don’t want to hear that access to Wal-Mart hair driers (to pick one of Kunstler’s favorite whipping boys) might cause the erosion of our way of life and ultimately our civilization. Perhaps the scariest part is that Kunstler doesn’t seem like a nutcase now, what he says makes real sense, which means that culturally we’re already feeling the beginnings of the Long Emergency.

End Links:

• Kunstler has a blog here;
• David Goodstein, a Caltech Physics professor, wrote a technical analysis of Peak Oil entitled Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil;
• Life After The Oil Crash, a website that discusses what comes next;
• Kunstler is writing a new book, World Made by Hand, a fictional story set in upstate New York during the Long Emergency, due out in March, 2008.

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

Recently finished Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. The book, and the movie of the same name (which I have not yet seen) is about Chris McCandless, a young man who, upon graduating from Emory, gives away his possessions, rechristens himself “Alex Supertramp”, drives and then hitchhikes across the US, finally to disappear into the Alaskan wilderness.

The story is at the same time breathtaking and sobering. Sobering because, like many, I have too become tempted after reading too much Kerouac and Thoreau, push off and wander the earth. In fact, now a husband and a father in my 40’s, I find myself regretting my attachment to safety in my earlier travel, wishing I had actually taken that train ride through Mexico, or taken a courier flight to Hong Kong like I had planned. In this, I share a great deal with Krakauer, and the personal history that Krakauer adds to McCandless’s story, brings considerable depth and insight into what motivated the boy.

The book is wonderful, and I highly recommend it.

The Promise of Sleep

Recently finished The Promise of Sleep, by William C. Dement, who is perhaps the world’s leading researcher on sleep. Dement’s point, which he makes over and over again, is that people need more sleep than they regularly obtain, and this sleep debt causes many of our modern ills.

Dement points out that most people don’t realize that the Exxon Valdez spill was caused not by the drunken captain, as most people think, as the captain had left the bridge hours before the crash, but by a younger mate who had only 6 hours of sleep in the previous 48, and thus is more attributable to sleep debt than to drunken sailing.

However, I find little of practical value other than the point that “Americans need more sleep” in the massively long book, and, after several hundred pages, I felt like Dement was asking a bit of the reader to continue a book that has only a single message.

But maybe my objections come because this is a message that I don’t want to hear. The remnants of the graduate-school “sleep is no substitute for a good cup of coffee” mentality still in my system, or the hope that maybe polyphasic sleep could turn me into a superhero. I think to these hopes, Dement would tell me to grow up, and to make time for what is one of the most important human activities.