n8han

"Half a decade of absolutely flat oil production — propaganda to the contrary —..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 23:41:00 -0400

“Half a decade of absolutely flat oil production — propaganda to the contrary — guarantees that the suburban project is finished. We’re done building things that way (even if we don’t quite realize it yet) so the New Urbanists have won the argument by default.”

- Still Standing Amid the Wreckage — kunstler.com

Photo

Sun, 20 May 2012 16:12:22 -0400

Photo

Sun, 20 May 2012 14:54:05 -0400

DUMBO plaza put to good use

Sat, 19 May 2012 12:14:12 -0400

DUMBO plaza put to good use

“our modeling indicates that the oil savings in goods...

Sat, 19 May 2012 12:12:36 -0400

“our modeling indicates that the oil savings in goods movement alone propelled by a carbon tax would be comparable to the oil delivered to this country by Keystone XL” (via Carbon Tax Center)

I am so 1337 right now I can’t stand it

Thu, 17 May 2012 21:19:12 -0400

I am so 1337 right now I can’t stand it

When someone around me is watching Downton Abbey

Thu, 17 May 2012 21:00:39 -0400

whatshouldwecallme:

I just wanna be like,

For Leland

Photo

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:51:33 -0400

lelands: (via Bike Lane Is a Car Killer on First Avenue! -...

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:33:05 -0400

lelands:

(via Bike Lane Is a Car Killer on First Avenue! - Car-nage - Curbed NY) A wonderful and unexpected side benefit to bike-lane barriers—they can really mess up cars.

NYC's First Car Accident In 1896 Involved A Bicycle : Gothamist

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:02:36 -0400

NYC's First Car Accident In 1896 Involved A Bicycle : Gothamist:

The Times reports that Wells was operating a “horseless wagon” in a “horseless wagon race” bound north, and that Thomas was riding south when, according to witnesses, “the motorman of the horseless wagon seemed to lose control of the wagon, which ran zig-zag and thus confused the bicyclist.” Thomas suffered a fractured leg, and Wells was “locked up” in the police station at West 125th Street. The article is refreshingly devoid of the phrase “no criminality suspected.”

"Why the headline of this article is “NZ warned over ‘body bombers,’” and not..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:31:07 -0400

“Why the headline of this article is “NZ warned over ‘body bombers,’” and not “Napolitano admits ‘no credible evidence’ of body bomber threat” is beyond me.”

- Schneier on Security: U.S. Exports Terrorism Fears

Are more cyclists getting hit from behind than ever before? | Bike Delaware

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:53:43 -0400

Are more cyclists getting hit from behind than ever before? | Bike Delaware:

More than one in four crashes we’ve documented involve cyclists getting hit from behind — that is quite a bit different from the 8 percent we’ve been telling people for years.

Another tenet of Vehicular Cycling bites the dust.

Portland Transport: "Portland creep" and the density debate

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:23:18 -0400

Portland Transport: "Portland creep" and the density debate:

In some cases, this fear is expressed in near-apocalyptic terms, with dire warnings about an urbanist tyranny literally forcing people out of homes and cars and into Soviet style block housing. (The term “Potemkin Village” gets used quite a bit as well—although the term originates from Tsarist Russia and has nothing to do with communism or forced living arrangements).

Awkward.

Meyer delay

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:24:24 -0400

Meyer delay

Who’s that guy?

Sat, 12 May 2012 19:53:14 -0400

Who’s that guy?

Waterfront

Sat, 12 May 2012 19:51:32 -0400

Waterfront

Sunny Heights

Sat, 12 May 2012 14:49:11 -0400

Sunny Heights

This hilariously biased quiz made by an AES tool (and hosted by...

Sat, 12 May 2012 13:04:00 -0400

This hilariously biased quiz made by an AES tool (and hosted by PBS, the standard bearer of Liberal Guilt) somehow forgot to include Occupy in its exclusion list of Real American Parades, so I honestly answered “yes”. But if Murray can’t see that gay pride parades are just as “celebratory” as ethnic pride parades (and nationalist parades), he’s the one living in a bubble.

An FRA-Compliant Bike Share Program

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:46:00 -0400

The shit has hit the fan with New York’s bike share pricing scheme. Whether or not you understand that bike share is for short trips—and that short trips are something less than 45 minutes or 30 minutes depending on your subscription—there’s no denying that we’re about to launch the most expensive bike share program on earth.

Apologists have claimed that everything is more expensive in New York. But everything is not 6 times more expensive than London. Only our bike share, for a 1-day subscription.

Apologists also claim that we’ll get more bikes and stations than in other systems. Inconveniently for this canard, it’s when compared against the larger systems in Paris and London that New York’s prices are the most obscene.

Only Montreal gives some sign that bike share with a high barrier to entry can work at scale. And maybe it can. But New Yorkers are right to blush at these record setting prices. Their dailies have gotten it all wrong, on purpose, but that doesn’t make the reality any better than it is.

I am disappointed to see the cycling and livable streets community circling the bicycles to defend every aspect of the program. It’s a good program on the whole, and it should succeed, but the lack of a cheap and simple way for locals to try it out is a flaw that can’t simply be glossed over by cheering louder for the home team.

A post about another North American city’s slightly less high prices inadvertently illustrates a funny assumption many people have. Daily rates are labeled “Tourists” and yearly rates “Residents”. What’s wrong with that picture?

In theory we don’t charge people prices based on who’s buying. It’s unfair. Sure, there can be discounts for student and seniors, but that’s the exception. You can’t charge Tourists and Residents different prices for the same hotdog. You pay for what you get, not who you are.

But in practice, we seem do quite a lot of that, and it’s not exactly a sign of integrity. Corner delis often don’t even display prices for six packs of beer, at all. This way, when you go to pay they can just say $16 and you might pay it. I’m told that when someone “from the neighborhood” buys, the price is drastically less. I’ve never found out because I’ve been too annoyed by the racket to frequent my own corner stores.

So this shit happens and we all know it, but I’m surprised to see it so openly embraced in bike share, which is supposed to be a little more high minded and egalitarian. Our program seems to be more about scamming tourists and getting you to sign up for year-long contract. A Verizon store has better vibes.

There’s a reason that it seems unfair to charge based on who is buying instead of what is being bought: a free market naturally destroys enterprises that employ such techniques. If I open an ice cream stand that sells cones at $6 for boys and $4 for girls, someone is going to open another that charges everyone $5. All the boys will shop there, and I’ll go out of business selling ice cream below cost to girls.

In a competitive market, prices are determined by a business’s costs. The simple cost of loaning a bicycle for 25 minutes would be the primary factor in how much is charged, and if the prices were out of whack a competitor would move in to serve, for example, “daily” customers at better rates.

But in a monopoly or oligopoly, anything goes. Businesses can be creative about coercing customers to buy more than they want or need, because they can’t just go next door and buy the simple and cheaper option. That’s why we have multi-year “cell phone plans” instead of just paying for what we use each month (but fractures have formed in that cabal).

And citibike is a monopoly for the particular service provided. The only thing it directly competes with is bike rental. But it’s supposed to be a program for radically transforming our streets by getting massive numbers of New Yorkers onto bicycles. It tries to serve its real purpose solely through the yearly plan, which goes a long way to explaining its schizophrenic pricing.

The tragedy is that day passes are not just for tourists—they are for everyone. They are for the New Yorker who needs to try bike share on five different occasions before committing, and they’re for the visitor in the city for a month. They’re for the people who don’t have $95 in the bank. And they’re for your skeptical co-workers.

When Paris was re-inventing and massively popularizing bike share, they did not mess around with sky high daily rates “for tourists”. Why not? Are they stupid? Did they just decide to leave untold millions on the table, as part of some weird charity for foreigners?

No. They recognized that bike share, like anything else, needs an entry level. You would no more radically distort bike share prices in the name of “milking” tourists than you would your bus and train systems: obviously, your own citizens are the collateral cows.

A day of citibike use is as impractically expensive for locals as anyone else. Who normally takes 4 or more “short trips” in a day? Unless you can do that, the subway is going to be cheaper. And you can go pretty far in a taxi for $10. It’s just enough money to discourage casual use—a funny objective for a so-called bike share program. Today’s casual user could be next month’s esteemed yearly pass holder.

So there is chatter about providing various discounts and promotions and whatnot. But instead of trying to come up with different “plans” for every permutation of usage scenarios, you could just sell small units of services at fair prices. If somebody wants to borrow a bike on ten different days out of the year, THAT’S GREAT. Jesus. It should not cost them a hundred dollars. They won’t be upsold on higher costs for greater use of the system than they expect to want, and they shouldn’t have to be. Why is this even a question?

We invented money to solve this very problem, a long time ago. If I want to buy a dozen turnips, I can just do that. I don’t have to enter into a long-term arrangement with a turnip farmer. I don’t have to adopt a new identity as a “turnipist”. I can just buy the things in a market at a decent price, various people make a profit (naturally limited by competition) and everybody wins.

The whole problem of subscriptions—how much they cost, how long they last, and whom they’re for—is artificial. I’ve been looking at different systems to see how New York’s compares, and I can’t even put the most interesting on the chart because it rejects the subscription model almost entirely.

Germany’s nextbike charges by the hour starting at 1€ with a cap of 8€ for the day 30€ for the week, and so on. It’s basically the opposite of the steeply increasing fares that other systems, including Paris’s gold standard Vélib, use to discourage long trips. It’s a more modern, cheaper, more customer friendly bike rental—exactly what loyal NYC cyclists are valiantly trying to convince NY Post readers that bike share can never be.

Beyond that, you can halve the use fees by getting a “RadCard” for 8€ a year (no that’s not missing a zero) and get further discounts for being a student. But that’s the extent of the wheeling and dealing: fundamentally, you pay for what you use and are gently encouraged to pay less by registering for a more efficient payment card.

The nextbike installations are fairly small, with the largest at 3,000 bikes in Munich. That’s bigger than the US systems that are being used to make citibike look less exhorbitant, but smaller than Montréal’s. So who knows, maybe that kind of system can’t scale up to the millions of trips per year that Vélib serves. It’s neat, anyway, that they are innovating in some way other than quadrupling certain price points.

The danger with citibike is that being dramatically less user friendly than successful European bike share models will condemn it to a slow start and very bad press. The Post is just clearing its throat at the moment.

Our railroad regulators think they know best about trains, demanding expensive modifications to international standards to satisfy their long discredited belief that heavier trains are safer. It’s a large part of why North American rail is garbage compared to rail in Europe and Japan. We pay the price for our arrogance and ignorance with every shitty train ride.

Now our bike share operators think they know best, that the system can be weighed down with costs of entry many times higher than what the big European bike share pioneers charge, and that all potential local users will take the leap for a yearly pass. And so we’ll see how that works out.

The best outcome I can foresee is that the system won’t fail to be popular, but it won’t succeed in the way that’s officially planned. In short: those yearly passes will indeed get a workout, just not necessarily from the one person subscribed.

Streetsblog Files TLC Complaint Over Reported West Village Fatality | Streetsblog New York City

Thu, 10 May 2012 17:01:27 -0400

Streetsblog Files TLC Complaint Over Reported West Village Fatality | Streetsblog New York City:

My pet thing is event recorders. I, perhaps naively, advocate their universal installation on all motor vehicles.

Maybe, probably for the wrong reasons (xenophobia?), the political class could be convinced to install them on TLC vehicles. Bring a little order from the chaos.