"Grey Paree"

Right now, people in Paris may be rubbing their eyes as they look at the Eiffel Tower.  But it wouldn’t be because of anything about the Tower.  It’s because of the air.

©Christonphe ENA/AP

It looks as if Paris, and several other French cities, are going through what I experienced growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s.  An inversion layer of air seems to be trapping automobile emissions and creating a familiar brownish haze across the city.

As a quick, short-term measure to get people out of their cars, government officials have made all forms of public transport free over this weekend.  Philippe Martin, the Minister of Ecology, estimates the cost at 3 million euros a day, a cost that he says will be shared by all levels of government and the private sector.

How did the City of Light end up with smog?  Commentators point towards cars generally, diesel-powered cars in particular, and agriculture (although it’s not clear exactly this last factor relates to the air pollution in Paris and the other cities).  Apparently, despite successful bike sharing programs and new tram lines in several cities, too little has been done to reduce the use of cars.  Drivers are considered a powerful political force by both the left and right and policy makers are loath to propose anything that would restrict what they consider is a right to free movement on all roads.

In addition, France is distinct in the incentives it provides to auto makers to encourage producing cars with diesel engines.  These cars now make up sixty percent of private cars in the country.  The fuel may cost less, but they are more polluting than normal gas engines, emitting large quantities of fine particulate matter.

Is this a wake up call for the government?  It wouldn’t appear to be.  Ecology Minister Martin talks about gathering other ministries and auto makers to talk about “the evolution of their production.”  But god forbid there should be any talk of reducing diesel’s fiscal benefits.  “That won’t be the issue,” said Martin.

France proposes incentive for bicycle commuting

Last week, Le Monde reported on a new Plan Vélo announced by the French Minister of Transport, Frédéric Cuvillier.  The plan, in fact, seems quite modest, but it includes an interesting idea.  The government wants to encourage employers to offer a financial incentive to employees who bike to work.

© rmounts

Under the program, Employers who sign up would pay bicycle commuting employees 25 cents (a quarter of a euro) per kilometer travelled.  So, for example, someone whose round-trip commute was 10 km per day would receive 2.50 euros, or 12.50 euros a week and 50 euros a month.

It’s not a lot, but if I were still working and lived in France (mixed emotions there), it would probably get me to ride to work.  I can think of several nice things I could buy with an extra 50 euros a month.  And maybe even a new bike every couple of years.

The incentive to the employers would be a reduction of certain employee-related payments currently made to the government.  The Transport Ministry estimates receipts from these payments would drop by about 110 million euros, an amount representing the public cost of the bicycle commuting proposal.  In addition to the incentive proposal, the Plan Vélo would encourage local governments to take advantage of a “tool box” of measures to facilitate bicycle use in urban areas.

As a measure to do something serious to reduce automobile use and carbon emissions, this Plan Vélo seems terribly limited.  In 2012, the Sarkozy government announced a similar plan with a target of having bicycles account for 10 percent of commuting trips by 2020.  According to the Le Monde article, bicycle commuting currently accounts for just 2 percent of such trips.   The Hollande government doesn't seem to be proposing any targets.   Still, the financial incentive idea is intriguing.  Assuming the government goes ahead and adopts the program, I’ll be interested to see how many employers sign up and what the response is among employees.

Return. Smog in Rome

I’ve been away from this for too long.  It’s still early in the year and probably still within an acceptable time period for making new year’s resolutions.  I maybe stretching that time, but I hope whoever regulates these things can give me a pass.  So my resolution is to return to writing here regularly.  That doesn’t mean every day, but at least a few times a week.

I’m working on a long-term writing project, a book I hope, on the Loire River.  I'm probably repeating something I've said earlier.  But in any case, it will be about things I saw while riding my bicycle along the river and things I want to know more about, especially environmental things.  I’m also interested in some of the history, certainly about the chateaux, but also about the commercial and industrial history of the river and canals.

So I’ll be posting little blurbs about those topics.  I also try to follow a couple of Italian newspapers and I’ll highlight environmental stories when I see them in those places; and, of course, similar stories in the U.S.

As it happens, the first post of the new year deals with Italy.  I probably should have know this, but Rome has a serious smog problem.  To try to cut down on auto emissions the local government has decreed a series of no-drive Sundays.  The next one will be this coming Sunday, 19 January.  Others are scheduled for 23 February and 23 March.

The government’s decision applies to the fascia verde or green zone, an area including about half of the city inside the GRA, the Rome “beltway.”  The restrictions don’t apply to the entire day, only the morning hours of 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and then again from 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

This may be a way of showing people they don’t need to be so dependent on their cars.  But I doubt it will do much to reduce the smog.

A new deal for cyclists in Italian cities?

Positive news from Italy this time.  The association representing Italian cities is proposing some really interesting ideas to make life easier for urban cyclists.  Earlier this week, the Associazione Nazionale Comuni Italiani (ANCI; National Association of Italian Municipalities) presented a set of draft ideas to the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Maurizio Lupi.

© Agence France Presse

Maybe the most remarkable of their proposals would be a change in the burden of proof in case of accidents.  In legal disputes. the "less vulnerable" vehicle would need to show that it was not responsible for damage to the "more vulnerable" vehicle, or injury to the latter's driver.  As a cyclist, it's amazing to think that if I was hit --god forbid! -- by a car in, say, Milan, the legal focus would be on the driver to show that he or she wasn't at fault.  What better way to get motorists pay more attention to cyclists.

Some other ANCI proposals would:

• Allow for bike lanes along the right side of each direction of roadways;

• Require, in certain cases, an additional light on traffic signals for cyclists giving them a head start in making right turns;

• Allow cyclists to travel in both directions on one-way streets; and

• Require apartment building owners to provide bicycle parking areas.

The city officials are taking advantage of the fact that the transportation committee in the Chamber of Deputies is preparing to revise the national traffic code (Codice della strada) and that the Minister will be submitting his ideas for revisions sometime before the end of the year.

It's thought that the bicycle measures stand a good chance of being included in the code revisions since the same officials proposing the ideas would be responsible for their implementation.

Back in Paris

This may be an odd way to maintain a blog.  It's supposed to be a more or less daily log of what you're doing or what's on your mind.  But what I'm going to do here, at least for a while, is to post notes on what I've been up to over the last nearly six weeks.  I'm catching up on what I'd hoped do do during my Loire bike ride, but didn't.  I have several reasons (excuses) for that, but mostly they have to do with being busy riding, recovering from a ride, or exploring a little of the area where I was staying.  Most days while traveling, I did well if I made a few notes at the end of the day or next morning with coffee.

In the middle of July, I was back in Paris.  It was only for a couple of days, but it was good to be back.  I didn't always feel that way about the city.  My relationship with Paris wasn't love at first sight.  I've never quite understand why everyone is so seduced.  My appreciation came grudgingly and over time, the same as it did with New York.  Maybe this comes, at least in part, from growing up in Iowa and Los Angeles, the Midwest and Far West.  As an "outlander" I think I mistrusted their reputations, couldn't believe they were all people said they were.  I didn't think I needed whatever it was they offered.

Also, in the case of Paris, I learned French before I ever knew very much about France the country.  I'd learned the language in the Peace Corps to be able to teach English in Senegal.  I only got to know the country later, mostly through the Tour de France bicycle race.  In the late 1980's, when I first got interested -- a time before Google maps -- I'd sit with the Michelin road atlas and trace out each day's stage.  I learned the geography of the country; and I got familiar with regional cities and small towns where the Tour stopped regularly.  When we started traveling to France, I was more interested in visiting these places than Paris.  But that changed.  The city grew on me.  Every time we went, I got a little more comfortable; it felt better.  

Bosco Verticale

These look almost real.  And, remarkably, they're about to be.  The two apartment towers, referred to as the "Bosco Verticale" (Vertical Forest), are currently under construction in the Porta Nuova neighborhood of Milan, Italy.  Hines Italia, the project developer, expects they'll be finished and ready for occupancy later this year, or perhaps early next year.  Already, they report that 60 percent of the units have been sold.  The neighborhood, about 10 minutes north of the landmark Duomo and between the Garibaldi and Centrale train stations, in the midst of a major redevelopment effort including new commercial and residential buildings and park space.

© Stefano Boeri Architects

 





Clearly, their distinctive feature is the greenery.   Could they have been inspired by the Torre Guinigi in Lucca (below)?  Maybe.

© Richard Mounts, 2006

More likely the inspiration would have come from a contemporary building like this one, the Royal Park on Pickering Hotel in Singapore.  Stefano Boeri, the architect for the Bosco Verticale, and a few others seem to be dramatically extending the idea of a green building.

© Singapore Air

Statistics for the Bosco Verticale are impressive.  Together the two towers, one 262 feet (80 meters) and the other 367 feet (112 meters), will include the equivalent of a two-and-a-half-acre woods.  Once planted, a gardening service will be responsible for some 730 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 groundcover plants.  To reduce the weight of normal dirt, gardeners developed a lightweight substrate material.  Besides the sense of being in the woods even at 300 feet over Milan, it's expected that all of this greenery should reduce building energy usage by nearly a third.

A complication developed at the end of May when the firm doing the construction filed for bankruptcy.  But it's reported the developers have found a new firm to take over and they should be able to finish construction more or less on schedule.

Building up protections

Give New York credit for its efforts to learn from last year's Hurricane Sandy.  Less a year after the storm that causing more than $19 billion in damage, New York City, following the State, has now announced proposals aimed at reducing risks of similar damage in future storms. 
 
Last Tuesday, NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg, described plans to protect vulnerable buildings along the city's 520-mile floodplain.  The proposals including modifying new and existing buildings to reinforce foundations, as well as raise the levels of critical equipment.  They also include proposals to build a system of flood walls, levees, and bulkheads at critical points around the city.  The total cost is estimated at $20 billion, although most expect it to go higher as measures would be implemented.

As I noted the other day, New York City currently has nearly 400,000 people living and working within its 100-year flood plain (which these days are often more like 50-year flood plains).  Generally, the mayor's proposals are aimed at protecting those residents, and in addition, allowing for that number to double over the next 30 years or so.

What's more, the proposals include one seemingly head-scratching idea to use new residential and office development as a means of protecting against storm surge.  The report describes a project the mayor referred to as Seaport City, a complex of apartments and office buildings to be built on landfill extending out from the shoreline below the Brooklyn Bridge.  Quite possibly I'm missing something, but it seems that, while the new development might protect existing territory along that part of the East Side, the new developments would themselves become the at-risk, exposed buildings. 

I know New York City is very different from coastal areas on Long Island where Governor Cuomo has proposed paying landowners to give up their houses and permit the coast to return to something like a natural protective system of dunes and marshes.  I suspect that there's little, if any, of the New York City floodplain where anything similar would be possible.  Still, as one researcher observed, you "can't guarantee protection for infrastructure that is in vulnerable locations."  Yet Mayor Bloomberg's proposals seem prepared to try. 

I'm hoping an interesting debate will follow since there's a lot I need to learn.

Waterfront property

What is it about living near water that's so attractive?  In the past it was easier to understand.  Waterways were sources of power for milling and early manufacture.  And oceans and rivers were transportation routes.  People lived near water probably without thinking too much about it.  They were simply living close to their work.  But why now when we have so many alternatives to water power and water-based transportation?  Nearly everywhere it seems developers push to offer more waterfront residences, local governments anxious about tax revenues approve them, and and people buy them, both as first and second homes.

And then come hurricanes and floods.  But somehow these disasters seem to have little effect on the waterfront development machine.  These thoughts come from reading a couple of recent New York Times articles.  One, on high water levels and flooding along the Danube in Austria and Hungary, noted that part of the reason for record high water levels was the reduced ability of river flood plains to absorb it. 

A Budapest neighborhood,  June 9, 2013. © Reuters/Laszlo Balogh

It cited a study from the Hungarian national water authority reporting that "the decreased drainage capacity of the Hungarian flood protection system was due largely to increased building on former floodplains along rivers."

The other was an article today on new warnings of risks posed to New york City from climate change, especially rising sea levels.  The City report noted that already some 398,000 people live within the 100-year flood plain.  But, rather than seeing that number reduced, the report expects it will more than double over the next 35 years or so.  It seems that mermaids' fatal siren songs are now sung by real estate developers.

Curbing urban sprawl

It's estimated that each year France loses over 300 square miles of farmland and open space.  That's about equal to the surface area of new York City; or about 4.5 times more than the size of the District of Columbia.  The same thing is happening in the U.S.  One report from a couple of years ago looked at land consumption in 274 U.S. metropolitan areas.  Researchers found that over the ten-year period 1990 to 2000 urban ooze had spread over something like 5,800 square miles.  And we have some idea of what this means for the environment -- lost farm lands and open spaces, more roads, more cars, etc.

© Sara Leen at environment.nationalgeographic.com

All of this creates interest (for me at least) in work going on in France's Ministry of Territorial Equality and Housing (Ministère de l'Égalité des Territoires et du Logement).  Cécile Duflot, the head of the ministry, has just made the first presentation of her agency's legislative project, a central part of which would be a series of measures meant to increase density in urban areas and limit this kind of land consumption.

The proposals, which are still being discussed within the government, could include the following:

• Make it easier to convert empty office buildings into residences.  It's estimated that France's stock of empty office space is about 54 million square feet (5 million square meters);
• Reduce parking requirements per unit;
• Allow residential buildings to increase height above connected, neighboring buildings;
• Reduce the minimum lot size in townhouse areas;
• Reclassify as natural lands after 10 years those lands eligible for development, but still undeveloped; and
• Transfer urban planning responsibilities from mayors to inter-communal bodies. 

Some of these could be enacted by governmental order; some, like the last, would require new legislation.

France's economy is having trouble generating much, if any, growth.  And François Hollande's government doesn't seem willing or able to do much to help.  With some justification, it's being criticized from all sides.  But here and there, with measures like the highly-visible same-sex marriage law, and this much less visible set of environmental proposals, the government is doing some good things and deserves credit.

Decongestion medicine

By some measures the Washington D.C. metropolitan area has the worst traffic congestion in the U.S.  And it's probably not going to get better any time soon.  But one project, already fairly advanced in its planning, could certainly help.

This the Purple Line light-rail project intended to run through suburban Maryland from Bethesda to New Carrollton across the northern portion of the metropolitan area.  The line would give riders an east-west commuting alternative to driving the Beltway or the Inter-County Connector, as well as giving them links to the Washington Metro subway system.

Federal funds have been earmarked for the project.  But before they can become available, the State of Maryland needs to come up with its own source of funding.  This is why Maryland governor Martin O'Malley's recent announcement of a funding proposal is so important.  On Monday of this week he said he would submit legislation to raise $3.4 billion over five years from a 2 percent wholesale tax on gasoline.  Besides the Purple Line, the funds would go to development of the Baltimore Red Line, another light-rail line, and the Corridor Cities Transitway, a possible mix of light-rail and dedicated bus lanes to serve in the outer suburban areas developing north of Washington D.C. along the I-270 highway.
 
It's reported that the governor's proposal will be co-sponsored by the heads of the state Senate and House of Delegates.  But it's also expected that Republicans will do all they can to defeat it.

Two cities' plans for cycling

Washington D.C. wants 25 percent of all trips to be taken by walking or bicycle by the year 2032.  The Sustainable DC Plan doesn't include data on current bicycle use, but from commuting data it might be inferred that about 3 or 4 percent of current trips are by bike and about 12 percent are on foot.  So the District wants to see these two forms of getting around grow by about nine or ten percent over two decades.  If the two increase proportionately that would mean about an 8 percent increase in walking and a 2 or 3 percent increase in bicycle use.  That's over twenty years!  I don't know about walking, but that's a terribly modest objective for bicycle use, if it's any objective at all.

If the District was really interested in building bicycles into transportation plans it might look to Strasbourg, France, a city in the eastern part of the country on the border with Germany.

© Frederick Florin/Getty

Over the next ten years the Strasbourg metropolitan urban council will be creating a network of bicycle lanes consisting of three concentric rings and nine connecting spokes.  These will be dedicated lanes designed to allow riders to maintain speeds of at least 12 mph (20 kph).  They will be wide enough for two cyclists riding abreast.  Already in Strasbourg cycling accounts for 8 percent of all trips.  And they're aiming to increase that to 16 percent by 2025.

Certainly there are differences in culture and local experience with cycling.  But even allowing for that, one city seems to offer an example of how bicycles can be made a real part of transportation planning.  The other, despite the flourish of a "sustainability plan," seems to be treating them as an afterthought.

Sustainability in the District of Columbia

The government of the District of Columbia, the place where I live, wants to move the city toward "sustainability."  Last week, it released the "Sustainable DC Plan," which it says "lays out a path forward to make the District the healthiest, greenest, most livable city in the nation over the next 20 years."  That's an excellent objective, but ambitious to say the least.

This ambition drew praised from David Alpert in his Greater, Greater DC blog, a site I've only recently discovered and enjoy reading.  But I'm not so sure the City's Plan merits quite so much praise.  As they say, the longest journey begins with the first steps, and it's not clear  that the Plan includes any specific commitment to taking them.

For example, in the transportation area, by 2032, the City Plan wants three-quarters of all trips to be by public transit, bicycle or walking.  Currently, based on commuting data, those account for about 54 percent of trips.  In other words, in the next two decades the City needs to find ways to reduce trips by car from about 46 percent at present to 25 percent.  That seems a real challenge.  Yet, as Alpert notes, most of the measures the Plan describes are thing the City is already planning -- streetcars, more bike lanes, and more performance parking (charging more in more desirable locales).

Similarly, the Plan hopes to see 250,000 more people living in the District in 20 years.  But it doesn't appear to say anything about where they'll live or whether new housing will have any relationship to transit systems.

I suppose it's useful to put the idea of sustainability out there.  (Of course, as the Plan notes, this is about "greenness" and "livability," not autarky.)  Among other things, it gives smart growth advocates something to push towards.  But if it's going to be more than a campaign document for the mayor's possible reelection effort, it's going to need a lot of pushing to translate targets into projects.

Remove or rebuild?

Hurricane Sandy's destruction was spread across a number of governmental jurisdictions in the New York area.  And each one seems to be coming up with different ideas on how to respond.  New York governor Andrew Cuomo is promoting a bold plan to spend up to $400 million to buy up homes damaged and destroyed by the hurricane.  The houses would be cleared out and the areas, mostly along the shore, would be allowed to revert to dunes and wetlands.  The governor's program would also offer incentives to people in at-risk zones to sell, even if their homes were not damaged.

Meanwhile, New York City seems to be acting in direct opposition to the governor's plan.  Michael Powell, in a recent New York Times article, quotes Brad Gair, director of the mayor's housing recovery operations, as saying that "[o]ur first priority to to build back."  Powell seems to agree. 

He mentions Arverne by the Sea, a middle income development in the Rockaway's that, when it was built around 2000, took account of higher sea levels.  The Arverne approach, Powell implies, could be the way to protect rebuilt communities along the coast.  But where does the money come from?  Who pays to raise the land and protect utilities?  It won't be individual homeowners.  Powell doesn't say it, but leaves the impression that state and federal funds should be available.  They have been in the past, he says.

Thus, the contest over land use policies for coastal areas takes shape -- remove settlement from coastland vs. rebuild with protections.  It looks like a lot of money is going to be spent no matter what.  It would be nice if it were spent wisely.

Infrastructure

In the early 1980s, when I worked for the National League of Cities,
we heard regularly that too little was being done to replace and modernize urban infrastructure -- roads, bridge, water systems, public transit, etc.  Thirty years later we hear pretty much the same thing.  Is this a continuing theme from the collective infrastructure lobby or is it a real problem that's getting worse?  My guess is that there's at least some truth to the former suspicion.  But my every-day experience with traffic, with electrical power failures, and with breakdowns on the Washington subway system tells me the infrastructure problem is real.

And William Galston, at Brookings, has gathered several recent reports that back this up.  He cites one with comparative country-by-country rankings showing that the U.S. ranks "18th in railroads, 19th in ports, 20th in roads, 30th in airports, and 33rd in the quality of our electrical system."  For a country claiming to be the world's leading economic power this is not good.

I'd like to think that federal, state, and local levels of government, all of them with public support, would be responding.  How can businesses operate efficiently and compete in world markets if things like deteriorating utilities and transportation systems keep raising costs?  Galston cites one report estimating that "in 2010, Americans spent a total of 4.8 billion hours stuck in traffic, wasting 1.9 billion gallons of fuel, at a total cost of $101 billion."   And from what I can tell these reports don't even include the challenges of adapting to changing climatic conditions, the kinds of massive infrastructure projects now being talked about to protect cities along coastal areas.

But at every levels of government here there's a political party dug in and insisting forever that the public sector should be shrinking, not getting larger; that taxes and public spending should be always lower.  I can only hope that some of the progressive winds apparently bringing changes in other policy areas can have an effect here, too.

Varieties of environmental action

I'm usually skimming through French and Italian newspapers on-line looking for environmental stories.  And I'm sometimes interested in how environmental organizations in those countries compare with those in the U.S.  There's a short article in yesterday's Corriere della Sera that's suggestive.  From the article, Legambiente, the largest Italian environmental organization, strikes me as seeing environmental action in rather broader terms than I imagine most similar organizations in the U.S. do.  Admittedly, it's been a while since I've been to a demonstration, so my experience may be out of date.  But I don't think of, for example, the Sierra Club, or the Nature Conservancy, or the World Wildlife Fund being out in the street with groups demonstrating for housing and smart growth.

In Rome, yesterday, Legambiente representatives joined with a number of other groups to protest the lack of affordable housing while, at the same time, the city is apparently planning to demolish several buildings to open up new development.  About 1,000 protesters carried banners through the streets for about 2 km from Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, near the Termini train station, to Piazza Santi Apostoli, just east of the Via del Corso and the Piazza Venezia.  Cristiana Avenali, the Legambiente director for the Lazio region and a candidate in the up-coming elections, told Corriere della Sera that "We're demonstrating to say no to cement projects, to say no to Alemanno's cement projects."  (Giani Alemanno, of Berlusconi's Popolo della Libertà (Pdl) party, is Rome's current mayor.)  Makes sense.

New environmental projects

Clearly almost anyone following Italian news right now is following stories about next month's election.  A lot is stake and there are any number of engaging angles.  But there are other news stories in Italy besides the election.  One recent bit of news with with intriguing possibilities comes from the Ministry of the Environment.
 
The vice-minister for Infrastructure, Mario Ciaccia, has just announced a "Piano Città."  The initiative means to provide 319 million euros to fund local projects to improve "aree urbane degradate" (deterioriated urban areas).  The projects appear likely to be a kind of urban renewal with an environmental orientation.  A committee comprised of government ministers, regional officials, and representatives from the Associazione Nationale dei Comuni Italini will screen the proposals.  Without being cynical, in Italy's present economic situation this kind of infrastructure spending can only be beneficial.  And if the project really do advance energy efficiency and sustainability that's all the better.

Meanwhile, Legambiante, the country's leading environmental organization, has just announced its own initiative called Italia Bellezza Futuro.  The objectives here would go much beyond those of the government's Piano Città.  But I imagine Legambient would be happy to influence the kinds of projects selected for Piano Città funding.
 
Legambiente's project starts with the premise that everyone has always appreciated Italy for it beauty -- the countryside, the historic cities, its food, fashion and industrial products, and its people.  This, the organization declares, is the country's principal resource, one to be preserved and developed, but developed in a sustainable way.

To promote the project, over the next several months the organization will be participating in events around the country.  For example, on the 19th of this month they'll be at Paestum in Campania to support broad protection for the Roman ruins there.  Over succeeding months they'll also be part of similar actions at Agrigento, Cinque Terre, Rome, Aquila, Naples, Turin, and Bari where activists are involved to protect natural resources and the country's cultural heritage.  They have also drafted a a legislative proposal meant to institutionalize means or protecting the country's cultural and environmental heritage.

More as these project develop -- and get reported on.

Rebuilding at Breezy Point

Post-Sandy calls to lower risks along the coasts are one thing; implementing them is always something else.  Today’s New York Times includes a good article illustrating the difficulties of moving people away from exposed coasts or enforcing new building rules.  Reporters visited Breezy Point in Queens, an area hit hard by the hurricane, as well as several other spots along the New York and New Jersey coast.  Just about two months after the storm, they wanted to get an idea of what residents were doing.  Were they rebuilding pretty much what they’d had before?  Were they rebuilding on pilings?  Were they leaving?

The reporters found some of each, but many seem determined to rebuild, on pilings if they could afford it, or simply some version of what they had before.  Meanwhile, state and local officials are considering new flood maps, stricter building codes, and revised land-use rules that, in some cases, could turn former beach front neighborhoods into parks.

The two activities -- the rebuilding and the building and land-use changes -- are proceeding at two different speeds; the first quickly and the second not so.  It will surely get complicated when they meet.  Why do I suspect the next storm will find nearly as many vulnerable structures in its path?

Cities and zoning and sustainability

Monday’s Le Monde includes a special supplement on sustainable growth and
one of the articles deals with the connection between urban life and environmental sustainability.  The article points out that by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas versus just over 50 percent today.  Already, however, 80 percent of CO2 emissions come from urban areas.

It’s hard to bring this to bear in settings like the current revisions of Washington, D.C.’s zoning regulations.  Yet this is one of the areas where positive steps could be taken to reduce those emissions.  Obviously, the more people use cars to get around, the more gas is being burned and the more CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere.  We should be doing everything we can to discourage cars and encourage Metro, right?  What happens, however, when planning officials, ever so carefully, suggest that new zoning rules might reduce on-street parking in some neighborhoods close to Metro stops?  Neighborhood list-serves start buzzing and people start mobilizing their neighbors against the idea.  In Northwest Washington, D.C. it seems almost any hint of higher density development around Metro stations provokes similar reactions.