The world’s attention swerved hard to Ukraine this month, and so did my news consumption. If you haven’t listened already, I especially commend Ezra Klein’s sequence of seven podcasts on the war. Klein is back from paternity leave in a big way. In particular, check out the episode on how ideas influence policy frameworks with Yale historian Timothy Synder, and the episode on global energy markets with Daniel Yergin. The tail of the Snyder interview and the entirety of the Yergin interview both point to energy policy—the issue area within the present geopolitical mess where I think the most long-term hope lies.
Energy policy also ties directly to urban planning and local governance, in other words, the central concerns of this blog. There are many things that can be done to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels at the urban level, but I can’t take on everything, so today’s post is going to focus centrally on a single area of urban transportation policy; namely, bicycle transportation. I also have some photographs to share that relate to historical (and potentially future) housing typologies for urban California. Finally, I will close with some quick thoughts on the Sacramento teachers’ strike.
But before moving away entirely from the geopolitical nexus between Ukraine and energy policy, I want to reference Madilyn Brand’s great interview for Santa Monica-based KCRW with environmentalist Bill McKibben. I love Brand’s show, and appreciate KCRW’s willingness to post so much of their great SoCal content for free (frankly, I need to donate). And while I have an edge with McKibben’s sometimes puritanical takes on environmental issues, he shines in this short radio piece. His claim that the four big U.S. banks (Citibank, Wells Fargo, Chase, and Bank of America) have funded more than $1 trillion in fossil fuel investment since the Paris Climate Accord, with much of this going to autocratic nations like Russia, is a very striking one.
Building Safer Streetscape for Bikes
If we want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and on foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin, transportation matters. According to the US EPA, transportation runs to 29 percent of total national greenhouse gas emissions. Of this amount, 58 percent is from light duty vehicles; in other words, my family’s two cars, and yours.
When it comes to reducing output from those light duty vehicles, I think bikes have big upside potential. In fact, I think they have huge upside potential. Here’s why bikes are brilliant:
- Bikes are easily the world’s most efficient transportation technology. According to the San Francisco-based Exploratorium (the grandmother and greatest of modern science museums) bicycles are the single most efficient means of converting energy to velocity ever invented. Bikes handily beat even walking in terms of the ratio of kilocalories expended to miles per hour, and of course crush the automobile in efficiency terms.
- Bikes get you from point to point. This U.S. Census publication provides some great data on transportation modes in the United States. It turns out that bicycling accounts for only about 0.5 percent of trips to work in this country. Public transit in all forms (everything from subway to bus to ferry boat) accounts for 5.0 percent, with the New York Metro region making up an outsized portion of these trips. But there is reason to believe that with adequate investment in streetscape and safety infrastructure, it could be much easier to increase the 0.5 percent bike figure than the 5.0 percent public transit figure. A primary reason for this is that bikes get you directly from point to point without waiting. For longer trips, there is also potential, as discussed in this study by the Mineta Institute at California State University San Jose, to find ways to better marry bicycling with public transit, including bus rapid transit.
- Bikes are an aspirational consumer product. Bikes, like cars, are consumer items a person owns. Like cars, bikes can sometimes be aspirational goods people actively love and flaunt. Unlike modern cars, bikes are relatively easy to repair, and people often lavish hours of free time on bike repair as a hobby. And as can be seen in this short analysis from the NPD group, Americans’ fondness for their bikes seems to be only increasing.
- Government plays a relatively hands-off role with bikes. A little discussed advantage of bicycling is that it shares similarities in its economic structure with car-based transportation, minus of course the fossil fuels. As mentioned above, both bikes and cars get you directly from point to point. But the similarities go beyond this. The role of the government with bikes, as with cars, is not to actively run a transportation bureaucracy (as with light rail or buses). Instead, the role is primarily to fund and maintain infrastructure. The car-based transportation system, of course, has proven utterly dominant in American society. I want to put out the claim that structural similarities between bike-based and car-based transportation suggest that that biking is vastly more scalable than traditional public transit. It’s just a question of making the right investments, and, critically, of improving bike safety.
Safety, truly, is the key, and an experience this March drove this point home. My younger son crashed his bike on the way to school, flying over his handlebars at speed. I feel enormously fortunate that he walked away from this accident with a “minor” concussion and a quick-healing fracture to a small bone behind his eye. I felt sick at heart about the incident, as did my wife. I greatly appreciate the help of his girlfriend, who arrived on the scene quickly, and of a caring neighbor who paid attention to a teenage stranger sitting bloodied and dazed on a curb and who eventually drove him to the hospital.
I tell this story because it’s still vivid in my mind, but also because I think that if local governments want to promote biking, they need to go very big. I’ll even say that there is a moral hazard to not going big. Small, incremental changes to bike transportation infrastructure are not enough to keep people safe. They will not be enough to induce many except the young and fearless and (typically) male to cycle to work on a regular basis. As this article from Professor John Rennie Short points out, the safety issue is particularly acute here in the US, where many cities have been building out bike infrastructure without adequately slowing down fast-moving arterial traffic or strongly separating bikes from cars.
Exactly how to build out a safe bike transportation infrastructure strikes me as an issue that needs more study. As a person who has spent many years commuting by bike myself, this technical paper from the Oregon Research and Transportation Consortium resonated strongly with me. The findings on route choice decisions struck me as particularly important. According to the paper, cyclists “are going out of their way to ride on facilities with bicycle infrastructure and on low traffic streets.” This has certainly been true for me, and I have always been careful as a parent to practice bicycle route finding with my children.
Finally, there is the problem of racial profiling and biking. This Sacramento Bee opinion piece, revealingly titled “Follow the Damn Law,” speaks eloquently to how Black cyclists can face profiling and intimidation from police.
Elegant, Eclectic, and Reproducible: Historical Housing Typologies in LA
On a recent spring break trip to Los Angeles I had the chance to fall in love with several neighborhoods in the northeast section of the vast city. Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Highland Park, and other neighborhoods in this hilly quadrant of LA have a gentrified but somehow still louche, sunbaked, and completely unique vibe. Visually they remind me of towns clinging to some vague, dreamlike Mediterranean hillside. But also certainly, lest we be too romantic, they sit astride downtown LA, home to the largest population of unhoused residents in the United States, an ongoing human tragedy at terrifying scale.
But I do not want to talk about the homelessness factor right now. Perhaps my interaction with a man literally crawling through a street gutter next to busy Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz still has me too upset. I offered him a hand to get on the sidewalk, which he refused, then continued on my path to a funky jewelry shop to buy a present and little thank you gift for my wife, only to find that said funky jewelry started at $3,000.
What I do want to talk about, or really hint at through photographs, is the incredible array of whimsical and functional and beautiful multi-family housing types in this part of Los Angeles. All these neighborhoods are chockablock full of fourplexes and duplexes and bungalow courts, some elegant, some seedy, all no doubt horrifyingly expensive, but also all a model for exactly how to bring gentle density to newer and more spread out suburbs everywhere. We used to know how to get this right in California!
And yes, I know that gentle density is not going to solve California’s housing problems by itself. Then again, as I’ve pointed out in a previous post, adding perhaps a third more residents to lower density single family neighborhoods can be done in a way that’s a win-win for everyone, except perhaps those who believe they have some kind of right to only see their own car in front of their own house (news flash: they do not).
Strike! Undiscussed Elephants in the Room Block Progress on Schools Talks
Perhaps the biggest local issue facing Sacramento this March has been the strike by Sacramento City Unified School District teachers. I have two quick thoughts about this issue.
First, it’s striking to me the degree to which such a huge local issue has generated such little stir. My younger son and his friends and more than 40,000 other students have as of this writing been home for three days, with the parties to the strike apparently not even talking for two of them. Fellow teachers at my site, in the adjacent Elk Grove Unified School District, are not discussing the issue in our lunchroom, to me a curious indicator of the isolation and particularity of the SCUSD conflict. The Sacramento Bee editorial board, for years an active combatant on school issues that rarely misses a chance to bash local teachers, has been remarkably quiet. Given the importance of public schools (schools and public safety are always the most important urban issues), this should be daily front page news. But the Bee gave no editorial coverage this Sunday and only published this relatively short article on page 7A. Mayor Steinberg has been remarkably quiet. Parents seem weary, and unsure what to do with a problem perceived, at least partly accurately, as rooted in years, even decades, of bad blood between subpar district management and an unusually pugilistic and resentful union leadership.
Second, I want to say that the grievances between SCUSD labor and management, and their solutions, may in fact be more structural and less personal than what is perceived or often discussed. The SCUSD agreed long ago to fund retiree health care costs and to give effectively free health care to its current teachers. This means, as noted in this excellent analysis by Carrie Hahnel and Hannah Melnicoe, that compared with its peers, the District “spends far more on health care and a smaller percent of its budget on pupil support personnel, teachers, classified instructional staff, and office staff.” Perhaps one key to success for negotiations will be for teachers and management to agree to jointly push back at ridiculous costs imposed by Kaiser, Sutter, UC Davis, and the US healthcare system writ large. This probably wouldn’t reduce the collective doctor bill imposed on mostly low-income Sacramento children, but at least that way labor and management could speak out together for justice with a common voice.
A second structural issue has to do with the fact that negotiations are taking place in the context of a trend toward long-term decline in student population. Difficult choices will probably need to be made to close weaker performing schools and integrate them with stronger performing ones. The SCUSD needs to grow its most successful programs (there are in fact many of these) and build new ones at fewer and larger campuses. To propose something very controversial, maybe West Campus High School and Sacramento High School (currently a charter) need to be integrated as one campus. Maybe a couple of small middle schools built for a time when the District had 60,000 students need to be closed, then sold at profit for market-rate housing. Maybe the precious “HISP” program at McClatchy High School needs to be either tripled in size or abandoned. The large, diverse, enormously successful Sutter Middle School in East Sacramento can be a model for what all District secondary schools might one day look and feel like. But hard choices will need to be made in order to replicate such success stories.