Richard Florida - Richard Florida is the author of The Creative Class and founder of the Creative Class Group. Richard Florida is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and author of the forthcoming The Great Reset and also Rise of the Creative Class. He is founder of the Creative Class Group. Commuting is among life’s least enjoyable activities, according to research by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and others. The graph below shows the cities with the worst commutes in the world, according to IBM’s Commuter Pain Index (via Wired). The city with the world’s worst commute, according to the IBM study, is Beijing, followed by Mexico City, Johannesburg, Moscow, and New Delhi. London, New York, LA, and my adopted hometown of Toronto also rank in the top 20. Stockholm has the world’s best commute among the 20 cities in the IBM survey. Commuting is a waste of energy and time, and carries with it enormous economic costs. Commuting costs America an estimated $90 billion dollars per year in terms of lost productivity and wasted energy, according to the annual Urban Mobility Report. Our own detailed calculations by Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) research director Kevin Stolarick find that every minute shaved off America’s commuting time is worth an estimated $19.5 billion dollars. That translates into $97.7 billion for five minutes, $195 billion for 10 minutes, and $292 billion for every 15 minutes saved nationally. The chart below from the IBM study shows the percentage of drivers in each of the 20 surveyed cities who would work more if their commuting time was significantly reduced. The index is comprised of 10 issues: 1) commuting time, 2) time stuck in traffic, agreement that: 3) price of gas is already too high, 4) traffic has gotten worse, 5) start-stop traffic is a problem, 6) driving causes stress, 7) driving causes anger, 8) traffic affects work, 9) traffic so bad driving stopped, and 10) decided not to make trip due to traffic….
The MTA has a simple, not very expensive ticket for improving how the city gets around: Revolutionize the bus. But can even the most sensible ideas get implemented these days? By Robert Sullivan You would never guess it from the dispiriting news coming out of the MTA, but if you want to see the future of New York, then head up to the Bronx and take a bus. This is not the future of New York in which everyone has a solar-powered jet pack that takes them high over the city’s organic farmyards. Nor is this the apocalyptic future in which the final few New Yorkers with health care live just beyond the moat that surrounds what was once called Yankee Stadium. This is the future as seen in a new bus line: the Bx12 Select Bus Service, or SBS, for short. The future highlighted by the Bx12 SBS takes as a very depressing starting point the fact that the New York City subway system, once the envy of the world, is stalled. Not literally—as when we sat on dark, un-air-conditioned cars between stations on the way to Simon and Garfunkel reunion concerts—but still, our subways are strained under a ridership that has grown 60 percent since 1990 and a permanent budgetary crisis that has, over the past two years, only gotten worse. Last month, faced with an $800 million budget gap, the MTA canceled two subway lines and 37 bus lines and dramatically reduced late-night and weekend service. No one is expecting Albany’s fiscal situation to improve anytime soon. If this were, say, Shanghai, one could imagine the federal government sweeping in and not just restoring transit funding but modernizing and expanding our underground tracks. Shanghai didn’t even have a subway system until 1995, and it is now in the midst of dramatically expanding it to 22 lines. But this is not Shanghai; this is New York, where the first subway line was built in 1904 and many lines still use the antiquated (and sometimes dangerous) signal system that was installed about 25 years after Edison patented his lightbulb. The New York subway system’s grandest plan at the moment involves completing one new line on Second Avenue. It was proposed in 1929. It is currently scheduled to open its first branch in 2016. It will stretch 33 blocks, or just under two miles. So the future of movement in New York—how we get from home to work, how we navigate the city—is not going to be about subways. But what about the bus? True, buses are what most people think of when they think of not getting anywhere: senior citizens waiting in lines, guys counting out change, double-parked cars. They are less sexy than subways and tend to be ignored until the MTA announces another round of service cuts. The last time buses were new was in the forties, when they were installed around the city as a cheaper, more flexible alternative to streetcars. To a large extent, flexibility remains the bus’s chief advantage—unrailed, they can go wherever we want them to go—and they’re a relative bargain. But over the last decade, in a few transit-enlightened cities around the world, the bus has received a dramatic makeover. It has been reengineered to load passengers more quickly. It has become much more energy-efficient. And, most important, the bus system—the network of bus lines and its relationship to the city street—has been rethought. Buses that used to share the street with cars and trucks are now driving in lanes reserved exclusively for buses and are speeding through cities like trains in the street. They are becoming more like subways. One city that has transformed its bus system is London, which in 2001 hired a New Yorker named Jay Walder to help overhaul its transit system. At the time, Londontown was gridlocked. Walder looked at the Tube, then carrying about 3 million daily passengers, and then looked at the bus system, which was carrying almost 6 million. “The recognition was that it was virtually impossible to get anything done on the rail system quickly,” Walder recalls. “So we set out to work on the buses. And what you found was that buses were already the backbone, and you had the opportunity in a relatively short time to make them a lot better.” Last summer, Walder was tapped by Governor Paterson to become head of the MTA. This is not a good time to be in charge of a sprawling bureaucracy dependent on Albany money, and it’s a strange time to be doing so as an optimist. But Walder is a hopeful bureaucrat, and he believes that if there’s any way to grow New York transit, it’s through buses. The MTA and the city’s Department of Transportation recently unveiled plans to install dedicated bus lanes on First and Second Avenues this fall and on 34th Street in 2012. These, along with the Bx12 line in the Bronx, are being promoted as trial programs for what Walder hopes will be, by the end of his tenure, a reconfiguration of the city’s streets. “When the city adopts a world-class ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ system, people are going to have a tough time, efficiency-wise, telling a bus apart from a subway—it’s going to be like a subway with a view,” predicts Kyle Wiswall, general counsel for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign….
Sometimes it takes a stranger or a neighbor to praise your country to make you feel just a little bit proud of it. This is a video of a Spanish television hour-long overview of Portugal. Some pretty stunning images. Of course it could have been done by any Portuguese TV channel, but it would have raised eyebrows in Portugal. We’re not usually known for our “pride” or for showing off (except for football I guess). To my Portuguese friends: Imagine this would have been made by TVI or SIC or RTP, I can already imagine people calling it tasteless, nationalist, criticizing it because it missed this or that region/city/area… maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I see things. This is a very Portuguese “thing”… we like to criticize our country to the point we’re sometimes unable to see all the good stuff in it. For my Estonian friends, imagine how it would be, to have YLE make an hour long documentary about Estonia, where it’s not just about the cheap alcohol… To everyone else who hasn’t been to Portugal, has an hour to kill, and understand Spanish, enjoy it!
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. -Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne in Paris, France on April 23, 1910.
By John Mahoney Posted 05.06.2010 at 3:00 pm 11 Comments Many of the pavilions at the 2010 Expo in Shanghai are phenomenal, both inside and out. The USA pavilion, however, is neither. But far worse than being visually unimpressive (which it is), the essence of our representation at the largest World’s Fair carries an even sadder message. I’ve been inside some pretty mind-blowing pavilions this week, which makes the failings of the USA’s—the world’s largest economy—even more shameful. The pavilion consists of three eight-minute films shown in three different chambers, dubbed “Overture,” “Act One” and “Act Two.” The first, which visitors watch on a few smallish elevated screens while seated on the floor or standing, mostly consists of non-actors on city streets being coached through basic greetings and welcoming messages in Mandarin while they are filmed. Americans off the street are not the best Mandarin speakers, and this is played up in the film endearingly. Many Chinese folks get a kick out of westerners trying their broken Chinese, so the film’s numerous stumbles are received with some laughs from the audience. OK so far. Celebrity appearances are included amongst the Joe Blow…
“Deep down, tensions inside the euro-zone involve clashing social contracts and democratic preferences. Post-war German governments have won voters’ consent by offering thrift and monetary stability (a comfort for Germans with a folk memory of life savings lost to hyperinflation), plus an elaborately consensual capitalism. Greek governments have instead spent years buying social peace and votes with public spending, generous pensions, tax breaks, EU money and jobs for life, directed to an array of rent-seeking interest groups. This sort of social contract, lubricated by endemic corruption and lax law-enforcement, has evolved to suit a country emerging from a vile civil war and years of dictatorship in which consensus was painfully absent.” via The Economist
Tip of the day - STS for free postcard delivery (in Europe at least)
Tip of the day: If you have one of those days where it just doesn’t feel right to be stuck inside an office, a classroom, your room or whatever other boring place for the whole day, do the following (read it all before you start): a) Go to the city center b) Hop on to some bars, cafes, art shops, trendy places c) Grab those free postcards, one or two of each. They are free to take, grab at least 20, not all form the same place d) Head to a sunny, well ventilated place. Preferably where you can sit down and write (e.g. beach, public garden, patio, esplanade, outdoor bar…) e) Start writing to all of your friends from all over Europe f) You should have probably brought a pen with you g) And you should also have some way of getting their addresses from the internet… (Private Area, Facebook, Address book…) or just get them before leaving the boring place you’re in (I’m sure that boring place has internet… all boring places do) h) After you’re done writing the postcards write STS where the Stamp should go i) Enjoy the sunny day j) Put the postcards into several different post boxes all through the city that’s it… wait a few days / week and we’ll see who gets your postcard. The advantages of this method are that it’s free, you enjoy a sunny day outside instead of being stuck in an boring place, and you send a postcard to all of your friends, which is something I’m sure you keep thinking of doing, but never get around to actually doing…
The trouble with the Fed’s secret bailout - Federal Reserve - Salon…
The trouble with the Fed’s secret bailout The Federal Reserve has come clean about its covert actions. Now it’s time to look at the worrisome consequences The U.S. Federal Reserve Building in Washington The Federal Reserve has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns — taking on tens of billions of dollars of the — in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout. The losses from those deals still total tens of billions, and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook. But the public never knew. There was no congressional oversight. It was all done behind closed doors. And the New York Fed — then run by Tim Geithner — was very much in the center of the action. First, only Congress is supposed to risk taxpayer dollars. The Fed is not part of the legislative branch. Its secret deals, announced almost two years after they were done, violate the …
