Light rail in Phoenix and Maricopa County
Originally uploaded by rllaymanToday's Arizona Republic reports on the value of connectedness via light rail, in "Light-rail corridor in Tempe fuels increase to businesses." When I was out there in October, I set up a meeting with the City of Tempe Transportation Department (they are as progressive as the Arlington County, Virginia operation) and in talking with them I was surprised to learn that the Scottsdale light rail station is the busiest in the system, with lots of retired people getting on the transit line and going to places like Tempe and Phoenix to shop.

According to one of the business owners in Tempe, who is quoted in the article, business is up, both because of riders from the light rail system, and from the improvements that are happening as a result of the light rail investment, which in turn has fostered residential development and other improvements.

From the article:

Raveen Arora doesn't need a researcher to tell him that development along Apache Boulevard has been a success in the wake of light rail's opening last year.

Arora has owned India Plaza, near Apache and McClintock Drive, since 2002. Since light rail's opening in December, Arora has seen his business increase by nearly 10 percent despite the recession.

He attributes much of the increase to the residential projects that have opened on Apache in the past year and to the light-rail commuters who have spotted his shopping center and decided to stop by for Indian food or groceries.

The area has experienced a major makeover since the days it was known to draw prostitution and nightly police sirens, he said.

"Crime has reduced. There were streetwalkers . . . they're gone," he said. "We're getting a lot more upwardly mobile people who are using light rail, and they are not shunning Apache."

Curved escalator at the Wynn
Originally uploaded by jonkneeThere is a big problem at Union Station with "articulation" between MARC and VRE trains and people transfering to the subway, because of the number of people moving from the train platform to the subway, and the capacity of the escalators.

(One way to deal would be to add one stairway, which I mentioned years ago. WMATA planners promoted the selective addition of stairways to this and other stations to improve throughput but it was shot down by the Board of Directors.)

By putting in a curved escalator at the First Street entrance (the first floor of Union Station, going down) it could be possible to drop lots of the passenger railroad riders to the other set of gates opposite the elevators, which are hardly used. This would allow for better egress of passengers up the escalators.

Not being an engineer, I am not sure this would work, and it is important to not block the elevators. It could require the re-siting of the kiosk for the station manager in a fashion that would focus on throughput.

Again, if these escalators are ever rebuilt, and/or the fare gates rebuilt, additional wide gates should be added, and wider escalators could be installed, to ease mobility for people with scads of luggage (although train riders are likely to have less luggage than airplane passengers).

Right now there is a scrum getting up and down the escalators if you are going against railroad passenger traffic. A refiguring of the escalators (plus stairs), the fare gates, and the location of the manager's kiosk could significantly fix things. DK if this was considered as part of the Union Station Intermodal Transit Center Feasibility Study. The Final Report is available but I haven't had a chance to read it.

Thanks to some quick work by our friends at Reconnecting America (before the 8-day window for Twitter's search engine expired), you can view several days' worth of tweets from CNU's 2009 Transportatio

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I'm a bit of a Frank Lloyd Wright junkie, and have visited at least a dozen of the homes he built. But I was especially struck by a visit two years ago to the Johnson Wax Building in Racine,...

If you had to bet, will China or the USA move first and make a credible commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions? Are there any benefits to being the first mover? Today, the New York Times explains why South Korea has been willing to unilaterally show some leadership on carbon mitigation. The answer in brief is thermal underwear. Comparative advantage is an apparently useful idea for understanding the willingness to lead in providing global public goods.

"While some of the pledges are conditioned on reaching a binding international agreement, some countries, like South Korea, have said they will act whether the world did or did not.

South Korea, whose emissions nearly doubled from 1990 to 2005, said it would cut emissions by investing in energy-efficient buildings and transportation, developing new green industries and changing patterns of consumption.

“Our industry is really energy-intensive, so this is very ambitious,” Sang-Hyup Kim, South Korea’s secretary to the president for national future and vision, said in a phone interview from Seoul. He noted that the president and cabinet ministers had made the pledge in a building with the thermostat set low, and while wearing thermal underwear."

Here's the NY Times article.

UPDATE: If you have ever thought that hypothesis testing is not funny, then here is a good counter-example.

Curious about what the building his great-great-grandfather lived in was like, ex-Brooklynite Zach van Schouwen was soon researching the history of the entire block. The result is “The Block,” a series pen-and-ink drawings of how the stretch of Eldridge Street, between Stanton and Rivington on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, looked in every year since 1795. [...]

The thing to know about Michael Rowe, food service director for Bronson Methodist Hospital, is that, in just two years, he’s taken the facility from zero locally produced food in patient and cafeteria meals to almost 12 percent. And he’s just getting started; by the end of this year, he hopes to bump that number up to 25 percent. And he has no plan to stop there, either.

Here's another little story about parks. I heard today of a London park where the friends group have struggled and failed to get their council to recognise as key stakeholders their own operational staff - meaning the two blokes who have looked after the place for the past 30 years.

They tend the flower beds, plant the bulbs, keep it neat and get to know people. If something has happened, they'd be the ones to ask, but they're not allowed to have a say in how the place is managed, in spite of requests from the friends committee.

I suppose this gets classified under 'people behind desks not recognising expertise if it doesn't wear a suit and tie'.

America should increase its regional food consumption. Each metropolitan area, the researchers say, should obtain most of its nutrition from its own “foodshed,” a term akin to “watershed” meaning the area that naturally supplies its kitchens. Moreover, in a novel suggestion, the MIT and Columbia team says these local efforts should form a larger “Integrated [...]

The following post is in regards to an interesting email interaction between the owner of Mediacy Inc. and PublicAdCampaign. I think it helps, at least on some level, to better explain how both sides of this argument feel about their use/abuse of public space, and how remarkably similar those feelings are. It also is interesting to see people consistently call advertising art in these contexts. It is amazing that some people can't see the difference between the two, their different motivations and because of this their different effects on society. Intention is a huge part of the equation that is consistently left out of the discussion.

After receiving an unsolicited press release for the company Mediacy Inc. regarding their newest form of OOH advertising, the Gatescape, we couldn't help but immediately publish our reaction. Within minutes we received a complaint from the owner of the company, Michael Gitter. This is not the first time we have been contacted by the heads of major outdoor advertising firms for taking them to task. About 6 months ago we sat down with Steve Birnhak of InWindow, at his request, to discuss his illegal Streetscape business and why PublicAdCampaign was keeping tabs on the companies activities. I am happy to report the last InWindow advertisement that I know of was removed only a few days ago from it's 13th street and University location.

photo of old InWindow Streetscape at 13th and University around 07-09.

At this point a bit of back story is required to give Mr. Gitter credit where credit is due. It turns out Mr. Gitter was one of two owners of the MaxRack company. The racks provided free postcards in bars and restaurants to anyone who wanted them, and appeared in New York City a few years back. About 3 weeks ago Mr. Gitter contacted me saying that the business was ceasing to operate and would I have any interest in using the racks for the PublicAdCampaign project. I pondered this offer and in the end declined, unable to find an appropriate use for the now unused equipment. When we posted our initial reaction to the Gatescape concept, I did not put two and two together to realize that Mr. Gitter was also the owner of this new company Mediacy. Considering the nature of the business the press release was proposing, I can't say this would have changed my reaction.

What follows is a series of communications between Mr. Gitter and I which he has given me permission to reproduce for you. I think they are interesting to read because they show the inherent lack of understanding by most people of how advertising negatively affects the community and our shared psyche. Mr. Gitter, obviously cares for the city, being a born and raised in New York. He also has a deep felt appreciation for the arts as is evidenced by Maxrack's support of local artists as well as his interest in using Gatescape locations that are idle to exhibit artwork. The problem is, support for the arts in this situation comes at a high cost and that is the overburdening of our collective subconscious with commercial messages which not only alter our individual desires and therefore our society at large, but also define the city as an inherently commercial space. This also does not address the issue that art in this situation might be used to legitimate what could be an illegal advertising business that will have to take advantage before it can "give back."

Michael to PublicAdCampaign:
Jordan,

I spoke with you only a few weeks ago about offering you my old Maxracks postcard racks for your arts projects. I was fine that you decided not to do this but now you have decided to criticize my Gatescape? C'mon.

What I was planning to do is offer your artists some of the real estate when vacant, and print their art on the banners at my cost, to really make a great impression.

I am in business and you might not like my product. But I am an artist (www.fountation.com), a New York native and I am sensitive to over-saturation of advertising.

You could have at least called me, or sent me an email. But to publicly try to threaten or humiliate me and my efforts on your blog?

I don't scare and I don't appreciate this and I wish you would have taken a different tact where we both could have been happy.

But I guess this is not the way you work.

Thanks,
MichaelPublicAdCampaign to Michael with responses in red:
michael, i did not realize you were the same person who offered me the max racks. that was generous of you and i appreciate it.

I must say im a little appalled that you think my reaction would be any different than what it was, and if so then i take it those racks were a bribe for my sympathies.

Jason, I'm not looking to bribe or for sympathies. This is an idea that isn't even in our Media Kit and was conceived only weeks ago. I offered those racks, not out of fear of what you will say about the gates - I hadn't even thought of doing them at that time. I offered them because I liked what you did and the racks were becoming unappealing to me.

clearly this gatescape idea is nearly identical to the InWindow concept and given the way i have attacked their illegal practices I would clearly take issue with your "new" idea. not to mention this "new" adform you are trying to push can be extended much further than InWindow considering they rely on abandoned buildings where you rely on any space with a rolldown.

That's true it could be bigger. But given the ugly way these gates look as opposed to a nice clean 57th St storefront with huge clear windows and white walls, we see the concepts as very different from the efforts of In Window. (as I understand it, the idea is that Gatescapes will clean the city by replacing graffiti scrawl with huge colorful advertising images. If graffiti, and unclean gates is the problem, I suggest we address why young boys want to write their names on the streets and that Mr. Gitter start a gate cleaning business because clean gates have nothing to do with advertising)

all of this comes on top of how I have been championing the no longer empty project and these spaces being used for art. as well i think my position on outdoor advertising continuing to find ways to abuse the public by pushing commercial concerns on them is clear.

Jason, you are not the first and nor am I to come up with these ideas. For yrs I worked with Tibor Kalman's group at M&Co. And I'm sure you know about the work they did concerning making Times Square more appealing by doing many things with empty storefronts and gates when Times Square was the city's blight.

Im glad you thought you could offer a few free vinyl prints to artists and this would make what is potentially an illegal advertising business viable.

Please don't humor me with your snarky sarcasm. I am not interested in your views on how little or how much I do to sponsor the arts.

I think the no longer empty project clearly shows artists are willing to pay for their own materials.

Ok, so? Are there no talented artists or fantastic non-profit organizations who would appreciate and be helped immensely by space and supplies?

in fact im sure they appreciate the opportunity to install their work themselves, spending time on the street interacting with pedestrians and others interested in their creative process. Im also surprised you didnt mention this act of altruism in your press release. seems like it would be a big selling point if you were serious about it.

Jason, I have anonymously supported artists with Maxracks cards for decades without saying a word to anyone. Its none of anyones business what I choose to do with extra resources, and it is ironic that you are suggesting I exploit artists and nonprofits wrapped around the idea of altruism. Altruism is handled individually and if you want dozens of these people and organizations I have helped over the last 15 years just let me know.

As far as being an artist, a new yorker... what can I say?

You can say it counts for something. Or it doesn't. You can maybe say I am just like you in that I lived here my whole life and I don't want this great city to look like shit.

As for being sensitive to the over-saturation of advertising...is that a joke? why if you are sensitive to saturation would you start a company which will be over saturating our environment?

Joke? Some might look at your gigantic black and white squiggle on the wall in Soho as nothing more than ugly visual noise. (I don't know exactly what he is referring to here but I'm assuming he is talking about the image on the corner of Howard and Broadway) But see that's not for me to judge. I went to the Guggenheim and saw modern art of the Marlboro Man photos. Is that art? Who cares. Someone does. (Here again the difference between art and advertising escapes us. Richard Prince rephotographing the Marlborough man was not to sell you cigarettes but to elucidate ideas about authorship and reproduction in art.)

As for threatening, or humiliating you on my site, I am sorry you feel that way. I really never called you out but rather the company.

I am the company, Jason.

I think advertising like this is a blight and a humiliation to the residents of this city.

Some people might say Christmas displays in October is horrible. Or the smell of bad perfume being pumped out of Hollister's store front door is a blight too. We all pick our battles.

it takes them for nothing but consumers and this is a travesty. It is also taking away from the possible space for murals done by no longer empty and putting store owners in the precarious position of having to decide on profit over public health.

You had years to do something with these gates. But now I'm doing something so you kvetch? Is it because you didn't think of it for your artists first?

My last question regarding what I assume you are calling the threats in regards to calling 311. and believe me i mean this sincerely as you have been nice to me in the past in our email communications

do you plan to get these permitted through the DOB? because if not you should know that they will be illegal and you should consider the possibility of fines not making this a viable business option.

i apologize for our differences and I hope you can understand my point of view.

Point noted.

Two last items. We have a website: www.mediacyNY.com. And if any of your artists wants some free Gatescapes exposure have them call me.

JordanAt this point Michael and I decided it better to sit down and discuss all of this in person. Because of this I did not respond to his email after this point although we continued the conversation where our lunch left off. I will relay these small communications below, Michael in Red and PublicAdCampaign in Black.

Michael: "Hey, walking home, and have already seen about 1000 ads on everything from buses and taxis to umbrellas and signs outside stores. Any interest in coming to the other side? Because Mediacy could use a salesperson like you. :)"

PublicAdCampaign: "I think we established the going rate for selling your soul at a million two right? make me an offer."

Michael: "Just like Cemusa, I'll pay it over 20 years!" (this is a refence to the crap deal the city took when it gave Cemusa control over the bus stop shelters and magazine stands in New York. The resulting deal would have Cemusa pay the city for control of these locations over a 20 year span.)

There was some very interesting discussion that happened over lunch which has resulted in Mr. Gitter contacting his friends at GenArt, FlavorPill and the likes, offering them the Gatescape format for artists when those locations are not rented for advertising. I will be sitting down with them all after thanksgiving to discuss how this situation might result in a more appropriate use of our public spaces. More to follow soon.

Written by Doug StanWiens

BAP students at the Save Our Schools rally.

Hi, this is Doug StanWiens coming to you from room 216 at Timberline High School once again. As we approach the holiday break, I’d like to take a moment to give thanks for a number of folks who have assisted our project over the last year. As so many of you know, preservation relies so much on volunteers who give time, organizations without much money but with a lot of enthusiasm, and driven individuals who support local causes. Teaching students about preservation is in part about introducing them to this community… and appreciating all of those who contribute to their education.

The Boise Architecture Project (BAP) exists first and foremost because our students have thoroughly embraced the fun and excitement of learning about architectural history and preservation in our community. We have grown from a small, end-of-the-year PowerPoint presentation to an important technological resource; from a contained student assignment to being lucky enough to blog for you here on PreservationNation. I would like to give thanks to the more than 600 students who have been involved in the project, the supporters in the community who have embraced the BAP, and the organizations that have respected and sought out what our students have to offer.

BAP volunteers at the Preservation Idaho Historic Homes Tour.

There are several specific groups and people that have been crucially important to the growth of the BAP over the last five years. First, I’d like to give thanks for the support of Dan, Janice, and the fine folks at Preservation Idaho who early on recognized the worth of our project and have welcomed student involvement in their activities. Second, I give thanks to the City of Boise Arts and History Department for inviting our project to participate in several great local events and for their recent grant to the project, allowing a redesign of the BAP website. Third, a big “thank you” to the Idaho Humanities Council whose grants the last two years have assisted the BAP in obtaining important technology to maintain the website and help students provide the wonderful digital images and video associated with the BAP. Finally, I give thanks for a variety of important folks in the community who have supported the BAP so much: Sheri with the National Trust, Barbara at TAG Historical Consulting, Shelby and Tricia at the State Historical Preservation Office, Todd at Boise State, Diane with Julia Davis Park Second Century, and Charles of Hummel Architects. All of these folks have been invaluable to the BAP and have contributed mightily to preservation education and the students of the BAP.

Preservation is important, takes a lot of work, but is a heck of a lot of fun! The BAP so appreciates the opportunity to get out in the Boise community and make an impact through our project. And, the experiences our students have received by working on the project with the local preservation community have been invaluable in return. I feel lucky to be working as a history educator in Boise and that is why I say THANKS to our history and preservation community!

Doug StanWiens teaches U.S. history at Boise’s Timberline High School and spearheads the Boise Architecture Project. This semester, his class of juniors and seniors are blogging about what they are doing in class and in the field to learn more about their community and its history. You can follow the students here on the PreservationNation blog and on their Flickr photostream. Also, get daily updates from the teacher himself on Twitter.

Are you an educator interested in teaching preservation in your classroom? Visit PreservationNation.org for resources, tips, and ideas to enhance your curriculum with lessons that will teach your students to recognize and appreciate the rich history that surrounds them.

In April of 2005, the Federal Government of then-Prime Minister Paul Martin authorized $100 million towards the establishment of The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and two years later current Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced it would be first national museum to be built outside of the National Capital Region in Ontario. Now under construction in Winnipeg, the Museum promises to become a "a centre of learning where Canadians and people from around the world can engage in discussion and commit to taking action against hate and oppression."

The significance of the museum and its potential impact on national and international human rights discourse is such that recently, Arthur Mauro, founder of the Centre for Peace and Justice at the University of Manitoba stated his belief that Winnipeg could become the Geneva for the 21st Century, as a centre for peace and cooperation.

However, Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin's disturbing allegations that bureaucrats and other officials in the the Harper government -- perhaps even the Prime Minister's office itself -- may be complicit in torture and war crimes, threaten to expose as fraudulent Canada's commitment to human rights in general and its newest museum in particular.

The allegations are shocking: that Canadian troops turned over all of their prisoners to Afghan security forces for whom torture was "standard operating procedure." Moreover, Canadian troops were widely known for capturing many times more prisoners than their American counterparts, and that many of these were not "high-value" combatants but rather, according to Colvin, "just local people: farmers; truck drivers; tailors, peasants – random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time...In other words, we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people." The Globe and Mail coverage, interestingly, omits Colvin's concluding statement: "Complicity in torture is a war crime."

Clearly these allegations must be independently investigated. If confirmed, they represent a profound betrayal of values Canadians have long held to be universal, and, most distressingly, principles that we have thought helped to define us as a nation and distinguish us from those we fought against -- namely the Taliban -- as well as the shameful history of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

That Canadian government officials would ignore, discourage and apparently seek to cover up Canadian complicity in torture and other human rights abuses is appalling and shameful. If those being accused of these crimes are not soundly and convincingly cleared of these allegations, or else appropriately punished, they will have undermined every positive thing Canada has declared itself committed to in Afghanistan and will probably destroy much of whatever trust remains in our forces there. They will also certainly embolden the Taliban and place our soldiers in greater danger.

However, this episode could have an even more lasting and shameful legacy. At this moment, the foundations of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights are being constructed at the Forks; in 2012 this fabulous building and the inspiring institution it contains will be operational. Yet in the eyes of the world Canada will have been exposed as a committer of war crimes, an abbettor to torture and atrocity. Regardless of official statements and millions of dollars in support of the Museum, our country will have shown itself to be unfit to build such a noble institution.

The only way we as a nation can show ourselves worthy of the Museum is to follow Colvin's accusations wherever they lead, investigate them to the full extent of our abilities and hold those responsible to justice. As citizens of this nation, we too must hold our elected leaders accountable; to dismiss this as another mere "scandal" that will eventually go away to be replaced by another will not do. To do anything less than a full accounting makes as all culpable as Canadians for what has been committed in our name.

For Winnipeg to truly become a Geneva for the 21st Century, all of us -- Winnipeggers and Canadians alike -- must face these allegations honestly. Only then can we prove to ourselves and the world that we are in fact civilized enough to warrant being home to a Museum for Human Rights.

If not, then in the eyes of the world the Museum will likely be seen as a monument to our hypocrisy.

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In April of 2005, the Federal Government of then-Prime Minister Paul Martin authorized $100 million towards the establishment of The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and two years later current Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced it would be first national museum to be built outside of the National Capital Region in Ontario. Now under construction in Winnipeg, the Museum promises to become a "a centre of learning where Canadians and people from around the world can engage in discussion and commit to taking action against hate and oppression."

The significance of the museum and its potential impact on national and international human rights discourse is such that recently, Arthur Mauro, founder of the Centre for Peace and Justice at the University of Manitoba stated his belief that Winnipeg could become the Geneva for the 21st Century, as a centre for peace and cooperation.

However, Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin's disturbing allegations that bureaucrats and other officials in the the Harper government -- perhaps even the Prime Minister's office itself -- may be complicit in torture and war crimes, threaten to expose as fraudulent Canada's commitment to human rights in general and its newest museum in particular.

The allegations are shocking: that Canadian troops turned over all of their prisoners to Afghan security forces for whom torture was "standard operating procedure." Moreover, Canadian troops were widely known for capturing many times more prisoners than their American counterparts, and that many of these were not "high-value" combatants but rather, according to Colvin, "just local people: farmers; truck drivers; tailors, peasants – random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time...In other words, we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people." The Globe and Mail article, interestingly, omits Colvin's concluding statement: "Complicity in torture is a war crime."

Clearly these allegations must be independently investigated. If confirmed, they represent a profound betrayal of values Canadians have long held to be universal, and, most distressingly, principles that we have thought helped to define us as a nation and distinguish us from those we fought against -- namely the Taliban -- as well as the shameful history of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

That Canadian government officials would ignore, discourage and apparently seek to cover up Canadian complicity in torture and other human rights abuses is appalling and shameful. If those being accused of these crimes are not soundly and convincingly cleared of these allegations, or else appropriately punished, they will have undermined every positive thing Canada has declared itself committed to in Afghanistan and will probably destroy much of whatever trust remains in our forces there. They will also certainly embolden the Taliban and place our soldiers in greater danger.

However, this episode could have an even more lasting and shameful legacy. At this moment, the foundations of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights are being constructed at the Forks; in 2012 this fabulous building and the inspiring institution it contains will be operational. Yet in the eyes of the world Canada will have been exposed as a committer of war crimes, an abbettor to torture and atrocity. Regardless of official statements and millions of dollars in support of the Museum, our country will have shown itself to be unfit to build such a noble institution.

The only way we as a nation can show ourselves worthy of the Museum is to follow Colvin's accusations wherever they lead, investigate them to the full extent of our abilities and hold those responsible to justice. As citizens of this nation, we too must hold our elected leaders accountable; to dismiss this as another mere "scandal" that will eventually go away to be replaced by another will not do. To do anything less than a full accounting makes as all culpable as Canadians for what has been committed in our name.

For Winnipeg to truly become a Geneva for the 21st Century, all of us -- Winnipeggers and Canadians alike -- must face these allegations honestly. Only then can we prove to ourselves and the world that we are in fact civilized enough to warrant being home to a Museum for Human Rights.

If not, then in the eyes of the world the Museum will likely be seen as a monument to our hypocrisy.

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[ For those who don't already read him, Ryan Avent is an editor at The Economist magazine who also writes for Streetsblog Capitol Hill and at his own blog The Bellows. Ryan is also an honest to goodness real economist too. He's great for getting a more progressivist take on urban issues from the perspective of an economist, and you'll often find him jousting with the likes of Ed Glaeser. I've been reading Ryan a while and he's great. It was also great to get to meet him and person and be part of a panel with him at Rail~Volution 2009. I recommend checking his blog out.

This post ran on his blog back in August. Though I subscribe, I somehow missed it until reminded of it by Jim Russell. I thought you all would find it interesting so I am reprinting it here with permission. ]

Disruptive Technologies by Ryan Avent

I’ve been enjoying Tim Lee’s posts discussing the introduction and impact of a disruptive technology. Let me quote some (a lot) of what he’s been writing:

The key characteristic of a disruptive technology is that at its introduction, it is markedly inferior to the then-dominant technology, as judged by the existing base of customers. A classic example is the microcomputer. When the first microcomputers were released in the late 1970s by Apple, Commodore, and others, they were inferior in almost every respect to the minicomputers and mainframes that then dominated the computer market. People bought microcomputers for one of two reasons: they couldn’t afford a minicomputer, or they had an application where the microcomputer’s unique advantages (i.e. smaller size) were a particular advantage.

It’s important to understand that the innovator’s dilemma is not that disruptive technologies are “so innovative” that incumbent firms can’t keep up with them. To the contrary, disruptive technologies are often relatively pedestrian from an engineering point of view. Minicomputer manufacturers would have had no difficulty entering the microcomputer market if they’d wanted to. Rather, the innovator’s dilemma is that incumbents find it extremely difficult to make disruptive technologies profitably.

He quotes Clayton Christensen:

A characteristic of each value network is a particular cost structure that firms within it must create if they are to provide the products and services in the priority their customers demand. Thus, as the disk drive makers became large and successful within their “home” value network, they developed a very specific economic character: tuning their levels of effort and expenses in research, development, sales, marketing, and administration to the needs of their customers and the challenges of their competitors. Gross margins tended to evolve in each value network to levels that enabled better disk drive makers to make money, given these costs of doing business.

In turn, this gave these companies a very specific model for improving profitability. Generally, they found it difficult to improve profitability by hacking out cost while steadfastly standing in their mainstream market: The research, development, marketing, and administrative costs they were incurring were critical to remaining competitive in their mainstream business. Moving upmarket toward higher-performance products that promised higher gross margins was usually a more straightforward path to profit improvement. Moving downmarket was anathema to that objective…

Four times between 1983 and 1995, DEC introduced lines of personal computers targeted at consumers, products that were technologically much simpler than DEC’s minicomputers. But four times it failed to build businesses in this value network that were perceived within the company as profitable. Four times it withdrew from the personal computer market. Why? DEC launched all four forays from within the mainstream company. For all the reasons so far recounted, even though executive-level decisions lay behind the move into the PC business, those who made the day-to-day resource allocation decisions in the company never saw the sense in investing the necessary money, time, and energy in low-margin products that their customers didn’t want. Higher-performance initiatives that promised upscale margins, such as DEC’s super-fast Alpha microprocessor and its adventure into mainframe computers, captured the resources instead.

Now, here’s Lee again:

But companies aren’t big people, and it’s a mistake to think of them that way. In 1983, any given engineer at DEC could have easily quit his job making minicomputers and taken a job at Apple or IBM making microcomputers. But it would have been much harder for DEC as an institution to make that same transition. Turning DEC into a microcomputer company would have required a wrenching, years-long struggle to essentially build a new company from the ground up. Indeed, as Christensen documents, the few firms that have successfully pulled off such a transition have done it by essentially growing a new company inside the existing one: senior management would start a subsidiary devoted to the disruptive technology and keep it insulated from the parent company’s managerial structure. The hope was that by the time the parent company fell on hard times, the subsidiary would hopefully have grown enough to sustain the overal company’s profitability. There are a few examples of this strategy working, but it’s an extremely risky and difficult process.

Me being me, I read this and instantly began thinking about cities. One of the things I’ve been puzzling over recently is the implosion of formerly successful metropolitan areas. In theory, there’s no reason why the decline of one of a city’s principle industries should lead to the decline of the city itself; cities have useful infrastructure, institutions, and human capital, and the decline of one industry should free up space that can be utilized by a new, growing industry.

In practice, things tend not to work out this way. Cities that face the loss of one of their main industries tend to suffer through a long period of decline before recovering, if in fact they manage to recover at all. Why is this? Why should all of the many things that go into the making of city come undone in one place just because one particular business failed, while all of the things that go into the making of a city are rebuilt from nothing elsewhere in the country? It makes no sense.

I have tended to focus on negative feedback loops as a primary explanation for this dynamic, and I feel certain they play an important role. Loss of part of a city’s tax base will lead to reductions in the quality of services and increasing tax rates, which will lead richer households to leave, further shrinking the tax base. Declining services lead to failing schools and high crime rates which accelerate depopulation and so on. A city’s most talented workers will have the most opportunity available elsewhere, and so they’ll be the first to leave, sharply reducing an area’s competitive attraction, thereby encouraging further talent to leave, and so on.

Ed Glaeser has argued that it’s very difficult to recover from depopulation because of the durability of the housing stock. Falling population alongside steady housing supply leads to falling home prices. This, in turn, attracts those who require cheap housing — the poor — which will further degrade housing values and attract more poverty. An increasing population of poor residents will also tax city services which will further imperil budgets, and so on.

That certainly seems like enough to destroy a city, but it isn’t. In real life, cities experience negative shocks all the time, but they don’t always enter into a major downward spiral. And some cities which do face a downward spiral manage to pull themselves out of it and enjoy an economic renaissance. Why?

I think Lee’s disruptive technology post offers us a glimpse at an explanation. When a metropolitan area has an old, successful, established industry as its economic driver, that area builds its infrastructure and institutions around that industry. These institutions are likely to be unwilling and unable to accomodate and support growth industries. We can think about legislators in a Rust Belt state who fight to protect old industries even when the protections they seek would undermine growth industries. Or banks in old manufacturing centers that are reluctant to invest in start-ups with sharply different practices from the old giants.

If you have a daring new idea, you don’t take it to someone who’s living fat off something which has worked for decades. You take it to someone who is hungry. Many of the Sunbelt boom towns which have sprung up over the past half century grew at the start by accepting what investment they could. I’m reminded of my hometown, where leaders were anxious to attract high-tech investments to their new Research Triangle Park. It was lack of better options that gave them the idea in the first place — something which might not have occured to leaders in a city where hundreds of thousands of people earned good union wages in manufacturing plants. And while leaders definitely wanted to craft a research environment, they took the investments they could get. Not having recently been on top of the world, they had the benefit of not suffering from wounded pride when less-than-glamorous operations came to invest.

And I think there’s something to the idea that new growth cities aren’t inherently superior to older, richer metropolitan areas. Rather, their advantages are fairly mundane — they’re cheap, accommodating, and ready to please. On the other hand, older, richer cities don’t realize that they have a problem until it’s clear their bread and butter industry won’t ever be the same, at which point they’re faced with serious problems and have few resources to attract new industries. At that point, there are few routes to recovery. A city might get lucky (by, say, enjoying proximity to another metropolitan area which enjoys a booming economy). It might manage to retain enough in the way of resources from niche industries, like tourism, to maintain a framework capable to supporting a new growth industry. Or it might find that one of its older and smaller industries is capable of growing large enough to fill in the missing economic strength.

There are tricky implications to this. It suggests, for instance, that the availability of new metropolitan areas is crucial in maintaining a flexible, growing economy. That creative destruction doesn’t just mean the scrapping of once-proud firms but of whole cities. It also suggests that my previous prescription for fighting urban decline — a program of temporary fiscal support — could be counterproductive. It might delay inevitable economic adjustments.

I don’t know that I accept that it’s necessary to destroy old cities and create new ones to keep an economy fresh. Revolutionary geography could be interchangeable with institutional or political revolution. That is, places that are less flexible geographically might instead face increased pressure to change institutions or otherwise accommodate disruptive economic change. Still, this seems to be an important part of the story of urban decline.

Related on The Urbanophile

Creative Destruction is Real
On Innovation
Resolving the Paradox of Success

This article is provided courtesy of the blogs feed at http://www.newstartmag.co.uk/blog

I often think of the guy who was designing the first passenger aeroplane, and how he might have tried explaining to his family over Sunday lunch that he was going to safely put 100 people into the air in an oversized tin can. Why couldn't he just have done something sensible like his brother Joseph and become a physician?

That's often how I feel when I try to explain to my family why I've given up my job and a settled life to dedicate myself full time this year to a charity I set up 5 years ago called Chilli Children Trust.

We are a small charity with no UK employees and we support a project in southwest Uganda helping 5000 disabled children and HIV/AIDS orphans through clinics, surgery, education, and access to income through chilli growing.

When you've made a commitment in your life to help people and then an opportunity comes along to do exactly that, it isn't crazy at all, it's actually the sanest thing to do.

Last week’s Chain Reaction was full of people who've had 'crazy' ideas to make the world a better place and are somewhere along the path of putting them into practice.

Rioch Edwards-Brown’s son was stabbed and shot but instead of seeking vengeance, she and her husband are seeking to re-engage disengaged youth through a project called 'So you want to be in TV?' After winning the coveted UnLtd Level 1 award to kick off their idea at the event, Rioch told the Chain Reaction attendees that she was so happy to have attended Chain Reaction: 'It feels like family,' she said.

And that's the thing. However crazy your family might think you are, there are other people out there who think you're perfectly sane, want to give you money and even help you to champion your cause.

A week after Chain Reaction I was sitting at the See the Difference offices on the London Wall at a briefing for charities on their forthcoming website, a sort of JustGiving meets the BigGive meets YouTube with ex-BBC media lovies thrown in for their ability to deliver big audience hitters from high profile collaborators (Microsoft, Virgin, LandTrillium).

It's full-on and scary, a sort of 'if we don't join them we'll get even more sidelined next to mega-corp charities' way. But meeting them at Chain Reaction made it all a bit less scary.

They also started as an idea with eight people and have grown into 300 largely on a pro bono basis it seems. So, as the Chain Reaction methodology goes, I've 'connected, collaborated, and committed' with See the Difference. But will this produce the chain reaction for my charity? Is it all optimism and no substance? Is it really the moon-on-a-stick that it appears to be?

In early December I'm heading back out to Uganda for two months. I'm hoping to keep that Chain Reaction optimism with me. Optimism while I try to get the Ugandan Project team to stop driving around the countryside helping children and sit in an office to write a grant application to boost our 2,000 families growing chilli.

Optimism while I make the stiff cultural translation from Bunyankore subsistance farmers to British bureaucrats. Can it be done? It has to be. Whilst there's now a mobile phone in every village, price rises shooting up over 20% for some items including petrol mean access to basics like water, education, food, hospitals and jobs is as hard as ever.

What I've got to do is tell the story. That's what it comes down to with Chilli Children, with See the Difference, at Chain Reaction and with the Bunyankore people. Stories connect people. It's innate within all cultures. It's what we did before TV, but it's supposed to be what we do now on TV and YouTube. See the Difference say all I need is a hand-held camera. Check. A story, check.

But there's one element missing between the story and the implementation, between the emotional plea and the grant application form. A silent link that goes untalked about. Dare I say it? Maths. There, I dared.

The guy who was designing the passenger aeroplane was sure it would fly because he'd done the maths. He proved it with the right curvature on the wing and the right balance of weight, the metal would lift off the ground and fly.

It's no different with any other idea. You've got to open up the back of the fag packet and get those numbers down - prove that if you just had this money you could do those things and produce these amazing outcomes. The good news is that it's not hard maths for getting social change ideas up and running.

It's mostly multiplication and addition, there's very little trigonometry and virtually no Metric Number Theory (which is a shame for me because that was my PhD thesis). So in conclusion, creating a chain reaction is primary school stuff: story telling and basic maths.

I wrote that last sentence and then got a phone call from Bisley Primary School in Surrey about going to talk to them next week about Chilli Children. Suddenly a surprising new opportunity has come to mind. I'm not just at the school to fundraise but to practice my story telling and basic maths on those who've just learnt it!

I'm going there to 'connect, collaborate, commit'. Who knows what could come out of it? A link between schools? An exchange visit for teachers? There's a world of chain reactions to be started. Now that's optimism!
 

What do you want from your streets? Clean-liness, safety and good lighting, and the ability to go where you want and do what you want. More…

Sunday
Originally uploaded by myriadianThis has been in the news, in the blogsphere ("Seven future improvements for the 15th Street bike lane" from Greater Greater Washington, the entry includes links to previous articles, and in Washcycle) plus the Washington Post, "D.C. bike lane worth pursuing but could stand some tweaking" as the Dr. Gridlock column, and an earlier article, "No doubt about it -- this lane is for bike traffic."

While I agree with GGW and the Post that this project should be looked at in terms of the power of experimentation, I do think that it might have been the wrong choice.

Apparently one of the options, and one that I had recommended years ago (before this project was even considered) was to revert 15th Street NW in this section back to a two way street.

Currently it is a one way street between Rhode Island Avenue to just a bit past W Street NW. It's very very wide, and it is what we would call "seriously underutilized." I don't know what the traffic counts are but they have to be low.

Were 15th Street once again a two way street, the overall street grid would become more robust, prevailing speeds (which can be high) would likely drop, and it would allow for some rebalancing of traffic between 14th, 15th and 16th Streets, making the overall road network function better.

And bicycle lanes could have been added on each side of the street, one for each direction. Possibly, some parking would have had to have been removed in this scenario. But DDOT chose the experimental contraflow bike lane instead, because it is cheaper.

(Note that the Washington Area Bicyclist Association supported the two way option. I didn't go to the public meetings in the process. I would surmise that residents were opposed to changing the street back to bi-directional.)

It's not all that much money to restrip and add signs. (Somewhere I have a link to a road improvements cost calculator, but I can't find it and I haven't yet added it to the links on the sidebar. Data I have that's five years old says it costs about $60,000 to restripe one mile of road, including bicycle lanes. But that presumes the road is already two way and wouldn't need additional traffic signals. A traffic signal costs at least $150,000, plus installation.)

But having to add equipment to the traffic signals on the street--as a one way street, there aren't signal lights in the westbound direction--apparently was more money than DDOT budgeted.

But I think in terms of building a more robust street network, and a better overall environment for bicycling, the harder, more expensive choice should have been made.

Today's Post has a letter to the editor on the subject, "Bike lanes should be two-way streets." He argues for making this contraflow bicycle lane two way, because bicyclists are "confused" by the sharrow line on the southmost side of the street. (Sharrow signage and markings mark a traffic lane that is used by both automobiles and bicycles.) And they are using the contraflow lane as a "flow" lane and riding in the eastbound direction.

But a lane this narrow to be used for two way bicycling would be a serious violation of the design standards for bicycle lanes. (The default standard is a 5 foot width for each direction, although some DC bicycle lanes are narrower.)

This is an indictator of a design flaw... a bad choice. Too bad DDOT didn't make the optimal, but more expensive, decision.

Written by Lolly Barnes

Leatrice Cain's house, before

Friday, November 13 was a big day for the “Good Neighbor” house painting project.  While members of the Keesler Air Force Base 335th Training Wing were gathering in Pascagoula to put the finishing touches on Harold and Jittaun Payne’s house, a group of more than 30 employees from Lockheed Martin and their families were hard at work in Bay Saint Louis.  These volunteers were recruited by the United Way of South Mississippi to take part in their “Day of Caring”, which helped hundreds of people coast-wide.

The volunteers began bright and early – when I arrived at Leatrice Cain’s house around 7:00 a.m., the volunteers had already mowed the lawn and were trimming back overgrown bushes.  The house was scraped, primed and painted in record time, with the lovely Jekyll Clubhouse Yellow from the National Trust’s Historic Color palette.  If you ever wondered how long it takes to paint a shotgun house, the answer is roughly eight hours, including a break for BBQ.  There is still some work to be done on the porch, so the folks from Lockheed Martin are planning another work day in December to complete the transformation.

Leatrice Cain's house, after

Leatrice is thrilled with the transformation – and the speed!  Many thanks to Valspar for donating the paint for the project; the National Trust for Historic Preservation; United Way of South Mississippi; and Lockheed Martin for ALL of their contributions!

Learn more:

Donation of Historic Paint Colors Makes for a “Good Neighbor” on the Gulf Coast

National Trust Partner Continues to Support Mississippi Gulf Coast Recovery

Lolly Barnes is the immediate past president of the Mississippi Heritage Trust Board of Trustees and a lifelong resident of Biloxi. The Mississippi Heritage Trust is a statewide organization dedicated to the preservation of the prehistoric and historic cultural resources of Mississippi.

Even as the economy improves, the unemployment rate continues to grow higher and job creation remains a central issue. Not only does unemployment vary widely across cities and regions, certain places have been able to generate many more new jobs than others.

A couple days ago, I posted a chart which compares the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings for America’s 50 largest metro areas. It’s a pretty good metric of the resilience of job markets in the face of our ongoing employment crisis. The most resilient metros on this score, Greater D.C. and Baltimore, generate about one new job opening for every unemployed person. The least resilient have much higher numbers of unemployed workers for every new opening. In Detroit, the ratio is 18 unemployed workers for each job opening, in Miami its 12 to 1, Las Vegas 8 to 1.

The question becomes: Does this just reflect random, idiosyncratic differences among metros, or might there be more systematic, identifiable factors that distinguish places with more resilient job markets from less resilient ones? To get a handle on this, Charlotta Mellander and I looked at whether and what regional economic factors might affect the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings. (As usual, I point out that our analysis identifies correlation or association between variables and does not in any way imply causality.)

The nature of the job market itself appears to play the most important role. The most highly correlated factor of all was the share of creative class employment (.6). There were also relatively strong correlations for three specific kinds of creative class jobs: science and engineering (.57), legal occupations (.53), and management (.5). We find more moderate correlations for arts, entertainment, and media jobs (.44), computer science and mathematics occupations (.44), and business and finance jobs (.42). Places with more resilient job markets also had higher levels of human capital (.46), measured as the percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree and above. There was no statistically significant association between resilient job markets and health care, education, and architecture and engineering jobs.  This is troubling since many believe “meds and eds” jobs to be among the most stable of all as well as being a major source of future employment growth. Job markets in places with higher shares of working class employment were more problematic, the correlation for this variable being negative and significant (.-46).

Not surprisingly, more resilient job markets were also associated with stronger, more higher-paying regional economies. Better ratios of unemployed workers to job openings were associated with higher regional income levels (.58), higher regional wages (.48), and greater regional economic output per person (.45).

By William W. Abbott

The Santa Barbara COG is the local transportation authority for Santa Barbara County. As authorized by statute, the COG approved Measure A, which consisted of a sales tax measure for voter approval for transportation improvements and an investment plan, which served as the statutory Expenditure Plan.  The COG then approved a resolution calling for the Board of Supervisors to put Measure A on the ballot. Petitioner challenged the COG approval on the basis that no CEQA review had been completed. The trial court ruled in favor of the COG, concluding that Measure A meets the criteria for an exemption from CEQA as the funding mechanism did not commit the COG to specific projects, notwithstanding the Expenditure Plan. Three months after COG approval of Measure A, but before the election, the COG certified an EIR for the 2008 Regional Transportation Plan.

On appeal, the appellate court first addressed mootness, saying the legal issue was not moot.  To the extent that the COG approval of Measure was not exempt, the after-the-fact certification of the EIR would not cure the CEQA defect if one existed.

As to the merits, the appellate court recognized the California Supreme Court’s holding in Save Tara v. City of West Hollywood (2008) 45 Cal.4th 116 supporting application of CEQA review prior to formal commitment to a project.  Notwithstanding Save Tara, the appellate court concluded that in approving Measure A, the COG did not significantly further the Expenditure Plan projects in a way which “forecloses alternatives or mitigation measures”. Additionally, the Expenditure Plan included a provision allowing amendment (including project deletion) by the participating cities and counties, thus signaling to the appellate court, another argument against finding an inappropriate level of commitment.  Other agencies looking at voter approved tax measures which are coupled with a wish list of projects would do well to review the tax measure/expenditure plan provisions viewed favorably by the appellate court. Sustainable Transportation Advocates of Santa Barbara v. Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (2009) Cal.App. LEXIS 1807.

William W. Abbott is a partner at Abbott & Kindermann, LLP.  For questions relating to this article or any other California land use, real estate, environmental and/or planning issues contact Abbott & Kindermann, LLP at (916) 456-9595.

The information presented in this article should not be construed to be formal legal advice by Abbott & Kindermann, LLP, nor the formation of a lawyer/client relationship. Because of the changing nature of this area of the law and the importance of individual facts, readers are encouraged to seek independent counsel for advice regarding their individual legal issues.