Urban Transport

Architecture: Pan Gyo Housing / MACK Architect, Korea

2012-01-15T18:43:00.000-08:00

Photos were published at Archdaily. Additional article can be found in Inhabitat.

Architecture: Station Blu, Quebec, Canada

2012-01-15T18:35:00.000-08:00

Photos were published by Archello.

Architecture: Locarno House

2012-01-15T18:26:00.000-08:00

Photos were published by ArchDaily. Additional information can be found at Architecture Photography

Architects: designyougo
Location: Solduno, Switzerland
Project Year: 2011
Project Area: 178 sqm

Architecture: Czech Republic, Mimosa Architekti

2011-11-26T15:41:00.000-08:00

Published by inhabitat.
Czech Republic, mimosa architekti
Architects: mimosa architekti
Location: Bohumilec, Czech Republic
Project Year: 2010
This charming single family residence in the Czech Republic was carefully designed to respect its site and make the most of available solar exposure. Oriented to the east and the west, the home soaks up daylight while utilizing shade devices and recessed windows to prevent overheating in the summer. Designed by Prague-based Mimosa Architekti, the House in Bohumileč uses natural materials and a simple framework to help it fit into its rural setting.

Transportation, train: Germany's Longest Subway, Billions Upon Billions for Berlin-Munich Bullet Train

2011-10-27T20:48:00.000-07:00

Article and graphics published by Siegel.

High-Speed Rail

10/27/2011

Germany's Longest Subway, Billions Upon Billions for Berlin-Munich Bullet Train

By Christian Wüst

Tunnel work at Blessberg Mountain. The fact that so many tunnels are needed is for two reaons: To accommodate high-speed trains, the tracks can only have slight curves; and to accomodate much heavier freight trains, the maximum incline is only supposed to be 1.25 percent. But, to prevent more budget overruns, engineers have the tracks climb at a 2 percent gradiant at four points, causing some to worry that stopped freight trains might potentially clog up the line and present a danger when it is also being used by high-speed trains.

Once completed, the Silberberg tunnel will stretch more than 7 kilometers (4.4 miles), making it one of the longest tunnels on the new railway line between Erfurt, in eastern German state of Thuringia, and Ebensfeld, in the Bavarian region of Upper Franconia. With so many underground stretches, the line could be easily be referred to as Germany's longest subway.

However, rather than taking the most direct route, the train makes a detour to Erfurt and then continues south to Ebensfeld. The Erfurt-Ebensfeld stretch of track will cost taxpayers about €3 billion ($4.2 billion), or about €30 million per kilometer. It's probably the highest price ever paid for a single stretch of track.

The new rail route being built between Berlin and Munich is nothing if not ambitious -- as well as being the most expensive transportation project to take shape since reunification. But the line is yet another example of how France beats Germany in the high-speed rail game and critics say its costs may not justify the advantages it will bring.
Info
Silberberg (Silver Mountain) is a flashy name for a natural formation standing in the way. Getting rid of the mass of rock is out of the question. In fact, it's hard enough just digging a tunnel through it.
Miners are currently boring their way through the Silberberg, in the mountainous Thuringian Forest region of central Germany, using explosives and hydraulic excavators and a technique called the "New Austrian Tunneling Method." The air is full of the sharp odor of an ammonia compound contained in the explosives.
A wheel loader quickly gathers up the rubble. The driver is wearing a white mask over his mouth.
Once completed, the Silberberg tunnel will stretch more than 7 kilometers (4.4 miles), making it one of the longest tunnels on the new railway line between Erfurt, in eastern German state of Thuringia, and Ebensfeld, in the Bavarian region of Upper Franconia. When the route is finished, it will be capable of accommodating ICE trains traveling at 300 kilometers per hour (186 mph). Each day, the construction project advances an average of 6.5 meters (21.3 feet).
Of the total distance of 107 kilometers on the Erfurt-Ebensfeld route, 41 kilometers will pass through tunnels and 12 kilometers over bridges. Experts refer to tunnels and bridges as "engineering structures," and they will be more highly concentrated on the new route than in almost any other segment of the German rail system.
A Massive Effort to Reconnect Germany
The Erfurt-Ebensfeld stretch of track will cost taxpayers about €3 billion ($4.2 billion), or about €30 million per kilometer. It's probably the highest price ever paid for a single stretch of track -- and a figure that raises a number of questions, such as: Why Erfurt? And where on earth is Ebensfeld?
The answer requires a somewhat lengthy account. It begins with German reunification in 1990 and the discovery of an enormous infrastructure problem. Some 17 "German Reunification Transportation Projects" (abbreviated in German as VDE) were devised to help address the problem and to reconnect the former East Germany, which had been run into the ground by Socialist regimes, to the former West Germany, Europe's strongest economy.
There was a new autobahn to the Baltic Sea (VDE 10), a new canal near Magdeburg (VDE 17), and there were nine projects involving building new railway lines and expanding old ones. Among them was the largest and most expensive project, VDE 8, which the administration of then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), placed on the list.
Stop and Go
Building a high-speed rail connection from Berlin to southern Germany was meant to make the ICE train competitive with air travel between Munich and the German capital. The idea generated a lot of excitement, but it soon had its detractors.
In 1999, with a new ruling coalition in place made up of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party, Transportation Minister Franz Müntefering (SPD) announced a sweeping construction freeze for the "railroad line in Saxony." In saying that, Müntefering, a native of western Germany's Sauerland region, revealed his poor command of German geography, since no part of the new route would run through Saxony. Instead, it would be in the eastern states of Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia in addition to northern Bavaria. Erfurt and Ebensfeld were to be stops along the route.
The construction freeze was lifted in 2002, and the project's final budget plan was in place by 2006. The VDE 8 project is slated for completion by 2017, with an estimated total cost of €10 billion. Building it will reduce rail travel time between Berlin and Munich from about six hours to four.
Worth the Expense?
Although the difference will be noticeable, many wonder whether it really justifies the massive investment. Indeed, all leading transportation experts who have commented on the project to date have arrived at devastating conclusions. According to KCW, a Berlin transportation consulting firm that has prepared railroad assessments for clients including the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), the project is "not in keeping with transportation needs."
Sven Andersen, a railroad engineer once involved in the project's planning, says: "At no time was there a reliable operating concept that justified investing even a single euro in the VDE 8 project." He also argues that too few trains can realistically ever use the rail line.
Andersen points to publications by Deutsche Bahn and the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development in which the number of ICE trains expected to travel on the route has repeatedly been adjusted downward. In 1994, it was 32 trains per day in each direction. At a certain point, the estimate dropped to 24. Today, it lies at only 16.

Transportation: Pregnant mother killed by hit and run driver in San Marcos I-35

2011-10-27T20:32:00.000-07:00

Article published by kvue.

Pregnant mother killed by hit and run driver in San Marcos

by JIM BERGAMO / KVUE News

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 9:23 PM

SAN MARCOS -- A young mother-to-be is killed by a hit-and-run driver in San Marcos. The 22-year old died Thursday morning after the Tuesday night accident.
News of the death of Diann Ford, an expectant mother, spread quickly at the San Marcos apartment complex where she lived.
"It really does hurt to know that she is gone now, and there is nothing we can do about it now," said Paloma Lopez, one of Ford's neighbors.
Investigators say Ford had just finished her shift at a Long John Silver's around 11 p.m. Tuesday. As she walked across the IH-35 southbound access road near Hopkins, she was struck by a vehicle. Police say the driver did not stop.
"There was another car that came down the access road and saw her in the roadway and stopped and called police," said Sgt. Christopher Tureaud, with the San Marcos Police Department.
Fords' co-workers did not see nor hear the accident when it happened. When they were alerted to it about 10-15 minutes after, they came running out and found Ford sitting on the curb right near this I-35 sign about 100 yards from where she worked. Police arrived at the same time.
"She told the officers that the vehicle that hit her was a dark colored car with bright headlights," said Tureaud.
Police are hoping someone saw something that may help them track down the driver who is responsible.
"I mean that is a shock," said Lopez. "I do not know how somebody can just hit somebody and not stop."
"It is sad that she is not here anymore," said Jose Luis Uresti, one of Ford's neighbors. "The fact the baby is not going to have a mother to come home to anymore, its just sad."
The baby girl was delivered by cesarean section and is in good condition in the pediatric ICU at University Medical Center Brackenridge.
Neighbors say Ford didn't have any close relatives, and they didn't know anything about the baby's father. Investigators say at the moment it is uncertain where her daughter will end up.

Architecture: Metropol Parasol Sevilla, Spain

2011-10-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

The Metropol Parasol in Sevilla, Spain, is the result of a competition in 2004, awarded to Jürgen Mayer Architects

Source of photo below ArchDaily where additional photos can be found.

Environment, Mexico : Border Wall Causes Flood in Nogales, Sonora

2011-10-21T14:46:00.000-07:00

Following photo and article was published by No Border Wall

Monday, August 4, 2008
Border Wall Causes Flood in Nogales, Sonora
By Sean Sullivan
On July 12, monsoons washed through the Nogales, Sonora area and caused major flooding on the Mexican side of the border. In some places five feet of water was pooled up along the border wall and there were reports of cars floating away. What caused this flood?
As reported in the AZ Daily Star, Mexican officials blame an illegally built wall for the devastating flood. The Border Patrol built a 5 foot wall within a drainage tunnel near a port of entry without notifying the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC).
The IBWC is comprised of officials from Mexico and the U.S. They are charged with seeking solutions to issues pertaining to sanitation, water quality, and flood control in the border region. The 5 foot wall was built by Border Patrol in January of this year. Traditionally, the IBWC is consulted when projects built on either side of the border will have an impact on stormwater runoff. However, Border Patrol never contacted the IBWC.
Mexican officials with the IBWC have submitted a formal complaint claiming that the wall reduced water flows within the drainage tunnel. As a result, concrete drainage structures failed and released torrents of water into the streets of the Nogales, Sonora. U.S. officials are still investigating the matter.
Complete disregard for the law and respect for other agencies and communities within the border region is now rampant within the Department for Homeland Security (DHS). This year DHS waived over 30 federal laws in order to construct hundreds of miles of border walls. Now the Border Patrol has failed to consult with the organization responsible for bi-national flood control and has endangered the residents of Nogales.
We know that border infrastructure is having devastating impacts on wildlife and ecosystems. The Nogales flood shows us that border communities also face environmental injustices. The flood caused millions of dollars in damages and destroyed many businesses in a low income community. Floods such as this can soil drinking water, spread hazardous materials, and create breeding grounds for various types of mold that can pose a health risk to people.
The infrastructure being utilized by DHS along the U.S./Mexico border continues to result in devastating impacts not only to the natural environment, but to communities as well. The Nogales flood could very well be a portent of what could occur along the lower Rio Grande Valley. There are many communities in the vicinity of the walls being constructed along that stretch of the border. This incident is yet another tarnished example of how U.S. border policy fails and instead places people and the environment at risk.
Sean Sullivan is the Co-Chair for the Sierra Club's Rincon Group in southern Arizona.

Following picture and article was published by the Tucson Citizen Morgue

These mule deer, photographed in or near the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in late 2007, clearly won't be able to go farther, whether to reach food, water, other members of their herd or a known haven from predators.
Our Opinion: Environmental devastation
Saturday, April 4th, 2009
Border fence doesn’t keep out people or things it’s supposed to, but does impede wildlife
These mule deer, photographed in or near the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in late 2007, clearly won't be able to go farther, whether to reach food, water, other members of their herd or a known haven from predators.
A notorious waiver that allowed Homeland Security to run roughshod over pristine areas, ignoring every clean air, water and environmental law, marked its first anniversary this week – on April Fools’ Day, appropriately enough. But the lawbreaking waiver is worse than foolish; it has been extraordinarily expensive and extremely injurious.
The unprecedented free pass to ignore longstanding U.S. laws was pushed through by Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security chief. He was determined to erect a high wall along our border with Mexico, and damn the consequences.
And what consequences have been wrought? At least 601 miles of border fencing have been erected to date – at a cost averaging $3.9 million per mile. That’s more than $2.4 billion, and intrusions into our country continue unabated. Migrants hoist one another over the fence regularly and even a Border Patrol official quipped, “The border fence is a speed bump in the desert.”
Alas, while it may be a mere speed bump for migrating human beings, it’s a deadly blockade for migratory species, including one of Arizona’s most endangered animals. In the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, overlapping ecologies result in some of the richest biodiversity in the world.
But Chertoff fended off protests a-plenty to ensure that a 15-foot-high steel border wall would bifurcate the officially recognized conservation refuge.
That wall has stranded mule deer, javelina, mountain lions and others from reaching their water source or other destinations, photographs show. Indeed, wildlife biologists report, the border enforcement infrastructure and activities now join our long-running drought as the top two threats to Arizona’s endangered Sonoran pronghorn, the fastest land mammal in North America.
The problems aren’t confined to Arizona. El Paso, Texas, officials have urged President Obama to tear down the wall that bars endangered ocelots, jacarundi and other species from accessing the Rio Grande. The walls should be removed from areas where they threaten flora, fauna and waterways. But that’s only a start.
Congress must obliterate the ridiculous waiver it enacted. The very idea that one official could cavalierly waive our Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act and three dozen or so other laws is shocking, despite the alarmist attitudes over illegal immigration.
The rule of law must be upheld, and the Obama administration and Congress should waste no time righting this egregious wrong.

Transportation, bicycles: Bike sharing around the world

2011-10-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

Article and photo published by BBC.

Bike sharing around the world
09 September 2011

A Barclays Cycle Hire docking station in London. (Laurence Coss/BBC)

Bike sharing is on the verge of becoming an integral part of public transportation in cities across the globe.This system of impromptu bike renting is helping urban areas reduce automotive traffic and pollution while providing locals and tourists with a convenient, cheap and healthy means of transport.
Currently, there are nearly 300 organized bike sharing programs worldwide. That number is growing – and not just in the West. In India, for example, the Ministry of Urban Development is preparing to launch a 10-city public bike scheme as part of its “Mission for Sustainable Habitat”.
So how does bike sharing work? In most cities, visitors can purchase short-term subscriptions at bike stations themselves. Just walk up to a station’s electronic kiosk, choose the duration for which you need access to the service, and swipe your credit card. You will receive an unlocking code which you can then use to release a bike from the docking station. Then you can start exploring the city via bicycle. When you reach your destination, find a nearby station and return your bike. Make sure to lock the bike carefully by pushing the front wheel into an empty dock. Most docks will show a green light and/or make a beeping sound when bikes are correctly secured.
Long-term subscriptions can usually be purchased online. During the time of your subscription (however short or long), you can rent and return a bike as many times as you want.
Bike sharing is a fun, easy, environmentally friendly way to explore a new place. Here are eight cities with great 24-hour bike sharing programs that travellers should know about.
Paris
Although community bicycle sharing has been around since at least the 1960s, Paris’s Vélib’ became the first high-profile program to spark global interested in organized bike sharing when it launched to great success in 2007. The program currently has about 20,000 bikes and 1,800 bike stations (one located every 300 metres), yielding about 50 million unique rides annually.
The details: Vélib’ required subscriptions are available for 1.70 euros per day, 8 euros per week, or 29 euros per year. Once you’ve subscribed, half-hour rides are free but each additional half-hour costs 1 euro for up to one-and-a-half hours. After that, each additional half-hour costs 2 euros.
Hangzhou, China
With more than 50,000 bikes and 2,050 bike stations, the Chinese city of Hangzhou is home to the world’s largest bike sharing program. Bike sharing is well integrated with other forms of public transport, with bike stations available near bus and water taxi stops.
The details: For tourists, a refundable deposit of 300 yuan is required to take out Hangzhou Public Bikes. Hour-long rides are free. Each additional hour costs 1 yuan each, for up to three hours. After that, each additional hour costs 3 yuan.
Washington DC
Washington DC’s Capital Bikeshare program is the largest of its kind in the United States. Currently, demand for bikes outweighs supply.
The details: Capital Bikeshare memberships are available for $5 per day, $15 for five days, $25 per month or $75 per year. Once you’ve purchased a membership, half-hour rides are free and each additional half-hour costs $1.50 for up to one-and-a-half hours. After that, each additional half-hour costs $6.
Mumbai, India
There are two bike sharing programs in Bombay: FreMo, which stands for “Freedom to Move”, and the student-run Cycle Chalao!, which translates to “Come on, let’s cycle!”. Both are small programs, but they are growing into a movement. Cycle Chalao! has recently teamed up with India’s national government to launch citywide programs across the subcontinent.
The details: Find FreMo’s various membership and pricing options at its website. For Cycle Chalao!’s rates, visit its stations near universities in Mumbai.
London
London’s Barclays Cycle Hire has only been operating for about a year, but it’s already quite user friendly. Since launching, casual users have gone on more than one million unique rides. Its interactive map plots out the city’s docking stations, providing real-time information on the number of bikes and parking spaces available at each one.
The details: Barclays Cycle Hire costs 1 pound per day, 5 pounds per week or 45 pounds per year. Half-hour rides are free. For longer rides, additional usage charges apply.
Mexico City
Last year, the populous and traffic-heavy Mexico City surprised the world by launching the EcoBici bike sharing program. Despite the city’s lack of bike lanes, EcoBici has around 30,000 registered members – and reported accidents have fortunately been few and far between.
The details: EcoBici riders have just one option: a year-long subscription for 300 pesos, which grants them an unlimited number of 45-minute rides. For longer rides, additional usage charges apply. Remember to return your bike within 24 hours, though, or you will incur a penalty of 5,000 pesos.
Melbourne, Australia
To introduce tourists to a new way of exploring the city, Melbourne, Australia is offering a Bike Share Tour. If you are already accustomed to bike sharing, opt instead for a Bicycle Tour, including a trip to Swanston Street, the Yarra River and/or the Port Phillip Bay.
The details: Melbourne Bike Share mandatory subscriptions are available for 2.50 Australian dollars per day, 8 Australian dollars per week, or 50 Australian dollars per year. You can rent up to two bikes at the same time. If you need helmets, participating 7-11 stores sell them for 5 Australian dollars each (you can then return them to get 3 Australian dollars back each). Half-hour rides are free. For longer rides, additional usage charges apply.
Dublin
Exploring Dublin via bicycle is an age-old pastime for travellers to Ireland. Now, the dbs, or dublinbikes program has made this mode of transport even more convenient for visitors. While this bike share is currently modest in size, it is doing very well and has plans to expand rapidly.
The details: The dublinbikes program has 44 stations and 550 bikes. Visitors can either purchase a long-term hire card for 10 euros or a 3-day ticket for 2 euros. Only 15 bike stations have electronic kiosks for purchasing short-term tickets, though. Find those stations here. Half-hour rides are free. For longer rides, additional usage charges apply.

Urban Design: The secret world of Disneyland

2011-10-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

Article and photo published by the BBC.

The park's design uses optical illusions to make structures appear larger or smaller than they actually are. (Richard Cummins/LPI)

The secret world of Disneyland
17 October 2011
Disneyland may look like a straightforward theme park. But there is a secret world hidden behind the balloons, castles and cotton candy – a place where wild cats roam the park at midnight, Mickey Mouse hides in the wallpaper and movie stars sip martinis behind closed doors.
Feline security
It is not easy keeping the grounds of Disneyland utterly spotless and free of unwanted pests. Every night after closing time, 200 feral cats are released into the park to help keep the rodent population under control. Though Disney does not comment on the matter, rumour has it that the feline taskforce dates back to 1957, when renovations to Sleeping Beauty Castle revealed a colony of more than 100 stray cats. After unsuccessful attempts to chase them out of the park, Disney decided to put the cats to work instead. Today they spend their daylight hours resting in the park's well-concealed “cat houses”, though you can sometimes spot a furry face peeking out between the mechanical lions on the Jungle Cruise.
Hidden Mickeys
At Disneyland, the round-eared Mickey Mouse emblem is everywhere. But thanks to clever “Imagineers” (Disney's specially trained designers and engineers), hundreds of “Hidden Mickeys” are also scattered across the park. The subtle symbols are often difficult to spot; they are camouflaged in the architecture and landscaping as well as in the smallest stylistic details, from the floral wallpaper of the First Aid station and the rust marks atop a treasure chest in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, to the shapes of car speakers on Space Mountain. No one knows exactly how many exist.
Cocktails behind closed doors
Disneyland is dry - unless you can manage to get your name on the list at Club 33. The secret cocktail lounge, tucked away above the Blue Bayou in New Orleans Square, has a limited membership of just 487 and a waiting list of approximately 14 years. Walt Disney designed the club as an exclusive space to entertain possible investors; since then, the lounge, complete with an elegant dining room and a first-class wine cellar, has hosted US presidents, film stars, foreign dignitaries and lucky guests with connections. It is said that Robert Kennedy dined here on 3 June, 1968, two days before he was assassinated.
Trick of the eye
Things are not always as they appear at Disneyland. The park's design employs “forced perspective”, creating optical illusions that make structures appear larger or smaller than they actually are. Sleeping Beauty Castle, for example, looks much taller than its 189ft – that is because the “bricks” and other architectural features grow progressively smaller as the towers rise. The Matterhorn also appears more massive than it is, since the tallest trees are at the base of the mountain and the smallest are placed at the summit. Entering Main Street, thanks to clever angles and scaling techniques, the castle seems far away and the old-fashioned shops and ice cream parlours seem to be several stories tall. As you exit, the same Main Street seems much shorter. Walt Disney figured that families coming into the park would be filled with anticipation, but on leaving, they would be too tired for a leisurely stroll.
Always on stage
At Disneyland, a janitor is not a janitor – he is a “cast member”. So are the legions of cashiers, painters, ride operators, gardeners and performers, from the girl who portrays Cinderella to the guy pushing a broom around Frontierland. All cast members are trained to follow a specific code of etiquette that helps to preserve the Disney magic. On the list of dos and don'ts? Never break character. If wearing a costume that belongs in Fantasyland, do not set foot in Tomorrowland – it might confuse visitors or break the park's orderly image. When directing guests, point with two fingers or an open palm, never the index finger. Cast members are issued a Disney “look book” that details the fresh-faced ideal – no long fingernails, beards or unnaturally coloured hair allowed. It is a throwback to Walt Disney's All-American standards: when the park opened even guests with facial hair were not allowed entrance.
A light stays on
When construction was underway in the early 1950s, Walt didn't want to miss a moment of his dream coming to life, which is why he installed a small private apartment for his family above the Fire Department on Main Street. Decorated by one of Disney's set designers, the apartment featured turn-of-the-century decor; the apartment still contains Walt's tiled shower (fitted with multiple shower heads to soothe an old polo injury) and a ceramic bar set Walt used to serve his favourite hot drink, the rum- and brandy-based Tom & Jerry. The lamp in the window, visible from the park, was once illuminated to signal to cast members that the head honcho was on the premises. Today the lamp always stays lit in honour of the man behind the mouse.

Architects, Bolivia: Juan Carlos Calderón

2011-10-12T05:28:00.000-07:00

Juan Carlos Calderon, Bolivian architect and reason why I am an engineer

Article published by bolivia.com

Juan Carlos Calderón con una ciudad por recrear
(La Paz - La Razón)

Su visión organicista lucha contra la cacofonía arquitectónica. Juan Carlos Calderón, flamante Premio de Cultura, habla de crímenes y virtudes urbanas.
Un río Choqueyapu cristalino que, como columna vertebral, articule el crecimiento de la ciudad en sus orillas; puentes peatonales, amplios parques, edificios ubicados de acuerdo al cordón natural de las montañas. Así se debió concebir La Paz hace 450 años, de acuerdo al arquitecto Juan Carlos Calderón, flamante Premio Nacional de Cultura 2005.
Planos, escuadras, una mesa de dibujo y un curioso retrato en relieve de Frank Lloyd Wright, rescatado de un mercado de pulgas mexicano, acompañan la charla en el estudio del arquitecto, desde donde se admira todo el barrio de Sopocachi.
“¿Ve ese terreno en la Rosendo Gutiérrez? —señala—, hace tres semanas era una hermosa casa con cercas de pinos. Han derrumbado todo y sólo han dejado un cartel de embargado en la pared”, dice don Juan Carlos.
Entre esas preocupaciones urbanas, se confiesa feliz de haberse convertido en el primer arquitecto en ganar el Premio Nacional. “Y la satisfacción es doble al compartir el galardón con Julio de la Vega, un escritor muy importante con quien crecimos bajo el Montículo”, dice.
Al enterarse del Premio, reivindicó el carácter artístico de su profesión. Desde esa perspectiva, ¿dónde queda el ámbito técnico de la arquitectura?
Yo defino a la arquitectura como el arte de organizar el espacio físico (la construcción debe funcionar), el espacio psicológico (se debe crear una sensación agradable en el ambiente) y el espacio espiritual (esa cosa intangible que produce el verdadero arte: la trascendencia). Si la arquitectura logra organizar los tres espacios crea una obra de arte. Los arquitectos tenemos que saber la técnica, pero el arte es lo que prima.
Teniendo una carrera prometedora en Estados Unidos, ¿por qué volvió a Bolivia?
Tras recibirme de bachiller en el San Calixto me fui a la universidad de Oklahoma a estudiar Arquitectura. Después trabajé en Dallas y San Francisco, donde estuve con dos o tres firmas hasta quedar como asociado de otra empresa. Entonces una prima, recién casada con el ingeniero Luis Soria, me encargó el diseño de su casa en La Paz y vine a supervisar la obra pues creo que Dios está en los detalles que hacen o deshacen una casa. En ese momento se lanzó una licitación de antecedentes profesionales para los edificios Entel de La Paz y Oruro, presentamos papeles con el ingeniero Soria y ganamos. Entonces me quedé y al año siguiente gané el diseño del Palacio de Comunicaciones, que demoró 10 años en acabarse. Entonces, volví porque Bolivia es Bolivia para un boliviano y porque acá tenía grandes oportunidades de trabajo.
Regresó en plena dictadura. ¿Cómo le afectó ese contexto?
Llegué el 72 y venía después de trabajar años en Estados Unidos, donde la política casi no existe —quizás por eso Bush ha sido reelegido, es que la gente no está informada—. Sabía que había habido un golpe, que Banzer era el presidente, pero nada más. Una vez que me quedé, los envidiosos de siempre hicieron correr la voz de que yo era el arquitecto banzerista y que por ello me habían dado edificios importantes. La verdad es que yo había visto a Banzer un par de veces y nunca lo conocí cercanamente ni mucho menos. Hicieron correr esa voz y como los arquitectos somos por lo menos de centro izquierda nunca más me invitaron a ningún acontecimiento en Latinoamérica. Me ha tomado muchos años lograr que esa percepción cambie.
El organicismo ha recibido críticas en los últimos años, ¿sigue usted fiel a esta corriente?
El organicismo, creado por Frank Lloyd Wright, propone que el hombre es parte de la naturaleza y que, por lo tanto, la arquitectura debe ser como si hubiera crecido de la naturaleza en vez de imponerse a ella, porque si se le pelea se produce lo que está pasando: calentamiento del planeta, destrucción. La humanidad es el cáncer del mundo.
Hay maneras de encontrar la armonía organicista y que un edificio, por más gigantesco que sea, respete su entorno; por ejemplo, en el Palacio de Comunicaciones se ha logrado que con la escala baja del bloque de correos, uno pase por la avenida sin estar consciente del monstruo de cemento, sino de la escala humana que es el correo, que se complementa con el atrio que da paso al Obelisco.
¿Tiene solución arquitectónica el caos estético de La Paz?
Hay una cacofonía de volúmenes y edificios. No ha habido regulación y por ello se han cometido varios crímenes como el poner cemento sobre los adoquines de la ciudad en la gestión del alcalde Raúl Salmón, quien también decidió abrir calles y en este propósito hasta quiso derribar el muro colonial de la iglesia de La Merced. Esto es parte de un proceso que origina todos los problemas: primero está la falta de educación, dada y asimilada, que produce la ignorancia. La ignorancia ocasiona falta de cultura (prueba de ello son las horrorosas casas en la zona Sur). La falta de cultura provoca estupidez (como un Parlamento que pelea por cuatro escaños) y la estupidez origina la destrucción.
Hace años propongo a la Alcaldía que se construya una gran maqueta a escala de La Paz . Allí cada propuesta de edificio se colocaría donde corresponde para ver su proporción en relación a la ciudad. Además en la maqueta de seis metros se podría estudiar tráfico, áreas verdes, etc.
Profesión: arquitecto
Juan Carlos Calderón • Nació en el Montículo paceño en 1932. Estudió en el colegio San Calixto.
Formación superior • Estudió Arquitectura en la Oklahoma State University, de Estados Unidos, donde obtuvo un premio por el proyecto de un jardín botánico.
Sus obras • Juan Carlos Calderón diseñó los edificios de Entel de La Paz y Oruro, el Palacio de Comunicaciones, los edificios Soboce, Gisbert, Hansa, el Hotel Plaza, el museo Kusillo y el edificio de la Alianza Francesa, entre otras construcciones galardonadas en ciudades de Bolivia y Estados Unidos.
Correspondencia, sugerencias e informaciones a:
prensabolivia@interlatin.com
Fax : 591-2-225734

Transportation, bicycles: Are bicycles and cars in a war for American streets?

2011-10-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Article published by the BBC.

Are bicycles and cars in a war for American streets?
By Kate Dailey BBC News Magazine
As American cities attempt to make their streets more bicycle friendly, some tensions arise between cyclists and motorists.

When New York City installed a bike lane next to Brooklyn's Prospect Park West, cyclists rejoiced. The new lane was placed between parked cars and the sidewalk, providing them a safe place to cycle to and from work. It made it easier to circumvent the park, where cyclists heading towards Manhattan had to fight against the flow of bikes heading in the opposite direction.
The bike lanes were part of a larger city-wide initiative to increase bike access, one that found 66% support in the city. But not everyone was happy with the change. Two groups - Seniors for Safety and Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes - sued to have the Prospect Park lanes removed. They claimed that the city forced the lanes on residents, and that the bike lanes blocked traffic, created unsafe environments for pedestrians and were bad for commerce. "While bike lanes are a terrific idea and they have a lot of recreational value, they're just not a reasonable alternative for the overwhelming number of city dwellers," says James Walden, an attorney representing the two groups.
A judge recently rejected a suit put forth by the group to remove the lanes. Walden and his clients have filed an appeal. The lawsuit is an extreme example, but it's not an isolated one. As America becomes increasingly bike friendly, cities have had to find the best way to promote cycle-centric policies in a country where car is king.
Bikes on the rise
There's no denying that cycling popularity is on the rise in the US. Since 2001, the number of total bike trips has increased by more than 20%. While the levels of recreation bicycling trips remained steady, the share of bike trips taken for the purposes of commuting to work has increased by a third.

That rise has been aided in part by conscious policy decisions designed to get more bikes on the road. These include additional bike parking, more bike-friendly public transit, and the expansion of bike lanes - often at the expense of available motorways. "The whole point of these policies is to get people, to some extent, out of our cars and into transit, walking, or bicycling," says John Pucher, professor of urban planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "There's no way you're going to make car drivers happy with this sort of a policy."

Cyclists complain that drivers have showed their disdain in obvious, dangerous ways. In Washington DC, the city council has introduced a bill allowing residents to sue those who intentionally harm or distract cyclist. The law came in response to a video showing a motorist intentionally hitting a cyclist in a DC neighbourhood.

But unhappy motorists - very few of whom are reckless - worry that new rules give special privileges to an elite few at the expense of the driving masses.

Safer streets
Research shows that infrastructure changes made to accommodate bicycles more often than not have the net effect of making the streets safer for everyone. "This isn't a zero-sum game," says Janette Sadik-Khan, the commissioner of transportation for the city of New York. "You can make streets that work better for everyone. They can be safer for everyone, they can be more attractive. We can engineer a better environment for buses, a better environment for walking, and safer streets for driving."
In Portland, which has been a leader in promoting cycle-friendly streets, neighbourhoods have responded positively to changes made for cyclists. In large part, that's because the city works carefully to coordinate changes with communities. People also respond well after seeing the changes take effect. "Residents recognize that when we make improvements for bicyclists, often the biggest beneficiary are people who drive motor vehicles," says Mark Lear, Portland bureau of transportation traffic safety program manager. That's in part because bicycle lanes force cars to slow down, which reduces both accidents and injuries. Because city driving is already punctuated by stop-and-start driving, dictated by stop lights and stop signs, a reasonable reduction of speed doesn't affect overall commute time or result in noticeable congestion.
But even Portland is not without its cycle cynics. Lear heard a complaint familiar to cities with cycling policies: namely, that cyclists were biking recklessly without being held to the same standard of accountability as cars. In response, the city set up enforcement areas in places identified as frequent crash zones. Motorists, cyclists and pedestrians were ticketed for violations, and first time offenders were required to take a safety course. "Anyone running a red light on a busy street is a risky thing," says Mr Lear. "We've gotten positive support both from people who have gone through the program and those who thought we were going about enforcement unevenly."
Inflated rhetoric
As cities adapt, its citizens react - but the issue is not nearly as polarizing as it seems. "It's easy to find a quote from one side and a quote from the other and trump it up as a war," says Pete Stidman, the director of Boston's Urban Cyclists union. In reality, he said most people just want to work together to build a safer community.
The idea of "cyclist" versus "motorists" is shortsighted, says Gabe Klein, the commissioner of transportation for the city of Chicago. "We have to get away from this idea that people are in just one camp - that they are only a biker or a driver or a transit user," he says.
Even the most bike-friendly European cities required years to move towards pedal-and-engine harmony. "It took four decades to transform Copenhagen," says Mr Pucher.

Culture clash - Close up of bicycle gears
Across the North America, growing pains as cities become more bike friendly

Boston This September, the Boston Herald newspaper ran a string of articles on the city's "car-bike war" and "war of wheels"
New York City: In 2010, Hasidic residents of Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighbourhood successfully petitioned to have bike lanes removed, citing both the speed of cyclists through residential areas and the immodest dress of female cyclists
Seattle: Three cyclists killed in close succession have stirred a debate: some ask if the city is doing enough to make the city safe; some wonder if cyclists are being too reckless. In late September, the mayor called for a safety summit

Excerpt from BBC article Cycling surges in the land of the automobile:
Car-centric history
But Copenhagen cyclists have benefited from decades of pro-bike planning decisions, while US urban planners must overcome a century of energy politics and urban policy designed to promote vehicle use. "There was an enormous American economic engine built around the continuing expanded use of the automobile," said Prof Owen Gutfreund of the urban affairs faculty at Hunter College in New York, and author of Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape.

Beginning in the 1920s, American urban growth was planned to encourage residents to leave congested city centres and move to the peripheries or to newly created suburbs. There, homes, schools, shopping and the office were all too far away to walk or cycle.

“We are still a suburban nation. It's going to be tough to change the culture” Kenneth Jackson Columbia University historian

By the 1970s, many urban centres were nearly empty, their populations having evacuated to the suburbs. Detroit - the home of the US vehicle industry - has lost roughly half its population from its height in 1950, even as the surrounding region has grown. But since the 1990s the US has enjoyed an urban renaissance, with cities such as Little Rock in the state of Arkansas and Louisville in Kentucky embarking on ambitious programmes to draw residents and businesses back downtown.
And in Washington, areas devastated by urban rioting in the late 1960s have seen a resurgence, including some of the areas most popular with cycle commuters.
14th Street NW in Washington DC Officials say the city's high population density makes it convenient for cyclists to get around
"There's been a real renaissance in American cities in the past 10 to 15 years," said Kenneth Jackson, an urban historian at Columbia University. "On the other hand, we are still a suburban nation. Even though there's a move to walk and ride bikes... it's going to be tough to change the culture."
But in Washington, Mr Sebastian of the transportation department said cities should try. "There are a number of barriers to bicycling," he said, "and it's the job of the city... to try to knock down those barriers."

Transportation Safety: New Braunfels widow fights sleep apnea in transportation

2011-09-26T07:27:00.000-07:00

Article published by the American Statesman

TEXARKANA POLICE DEPARTMENT - Wanda and John Lindsay's car was demolished when an 18-wheeler ran into the back of it on May 7, 2010, while they were stopped by road construction on Interstate 30.

New Braunfels widow fights sleep apnea in transportation
By Helen Anders
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, Sept. 26, 2011
John and Wanda Lindsay of New Braunfels were enjoying a sunny day's road trip so much on May 7, 2010, that when they wound up parked in a construction traffic jam on Interstate 30 in Texarkana, they weren't irritated. "It was my turn to drive," Wanda Lindsay recalls, "but John wouldn't hear of it. We were saying, 'Well, we're not in any hurry. We'll just sit here,' " Lindsay said. "That was our last conversation."
Moments later, an 18-wheeler crashed into the back of the Lindsays' stopped car at more than 70 mph, fatally injuring John Lindsay. No charges were filed against the truck driver, who told police he glanced at a wreck on the service road, then looked back at I-30 too late to stop. But after seeing the truck driver's medical report during the course of a lawsuit, Wanda Lindsay doesn't think that's the whole story.
More than two months earlier, the Celadon Trucking Services driver had been diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. Celadon officials have said in court pleadings that at the time of the crash, they had not seen the test results. If they had, they said, the driver wouldn't have been on the road that day. Convinced that apnea played a role in the crash, Lindsay decided to turn her husband's death into a cause. "I am waging a war against sleep apnea in the trucking industry," she said.

In July, she set up the nonprofit John Lindsay Foundation to raise awareness of something many people might not know: Nearly a third of truckers and other commercial drivers suffer from a disease that increases their chances of falling asleep at the wheel.

Obstructive sleep apnea is a respiratory impairment caused when an airway blockage creates brief pauses in breathing. It makes people sleepy in the daytime, even if they think they've had a long night's sleep, and it's an acknowledged problem in the transportation industry. Since 2009, the National Transportation Safety Board has urged mandatory apnea testing and treatment for drivers of trucks, buses and trains, as well as airline pilots and ship captains.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which regulates commercial driving, has for several years been considering rules on testing and treating sleep apnea but hasn't imposed any yet. An advisory committee for the group will hear testimony on apnea in December, and Lindsay and her attorney, Jim Cole of Victoria, expect to testify.
"We were down in a ditch." Lindsay said that's the first thing she remembers after talking with her husband about the stalled traffic. "It was real confusing," she said. "I kept thinking I was home, but I couldn't reconcile the sounds of home." She finally realized she was in their shattered car. She looked over at her husband. "John was just sitting there," she said. "I thought he was stunned. He was unconscious. I thought, 'I have got to stand up.' I managed to get out of the car and stand up." Excruciating pain caused her to collapse and lose consciousness.
"The next time I woke up, they were putting on a neck brace, and I remember asking, 'How's John?' They said, 'Somebody's taking care of him.' " In the emergency room, she was found to have fractured vertebrae and ribs, a concussion and a broken nose.
"Somebody in the ER told me a tractor-trailer rig had smashed into the back of our car," Lindsay said. She was having trouble putting together what had happened. She and her husband had driven that route to Kentucky to see family for years without incident. Four months earlier, she had retired from her work as an accountant. Her husband was already retired from a Goliad power company. "We were traveling a lot, and we were loving it," she said.
The Lindsays were moved into rooms next to each other in intensive care. "I was able to get up twice to go see him," she said. "I remember standing next to his bed and touching his face. It was not real to me. I was not comprehending that John was going to die."

According to the National Institutes of Health, about 18 million Americans have some form of sleep apnea, and most don't know it. About 4 percent of men and 2 percent of women between the ages of 30 and 60 are affected, according to the American Sleep Apnea Association. The National Transportation Safety Board says sleepiness in general has played a role in 31 to 41 percent of crashes of commercial vehicles, resulting in 1,500 to 2,000 deaths a year.

Incidence of sleep apnea is higher in men, especially men who are obese. A 2007 presentation by the American Trucking Associations noted that most truckers are men — about 92 percent at that time — and the average body mass index is 31, above the obesity benchmark of 30. Some trucking and bus companies require that drivers with high risk factors such as obesity, snoring and chronic breathing problems stop driving until they can participate in a sleep study and, if diagnosed with apnea, be treated. Usually, the person is directed to wear a breathing apparatus over the nose and mouth at night to ease air flow.

Schneider National, a trucking company that has been lauded by the National Sleep Foundation for having a rigorous apnea testing, treating and monitoring program for its drivers, said that the average initial cost for testing and equipment is $3,500 per driver and that in many cases the driver can be tested, treated and put back on the road in 14 hours. Not every transportation company signs on for that sort of expense, though, and not every driver owns up to the health problems that can signal sleep apnea.

Because his medical condition fit the profile for apnea, the driver whose truck hit the Lindsays' car — David Downey, a 6-foot-1-inch, 315-pound man with a body mass index of 42 — was referred for a sleep study by Community Hospital, Celadon Trucking's on-site medical contractor. The hospital gave Downey a six-month approval to keep driving pending the outcome of the sleep test.
The sleep study's result — a diagnosis of severe, uncontrolled sleep apnea — was faxed to Community Hospital in April. Downey was given the sleep apnea apparatus to begin using. However, Celadon said in a pleading that the clinic did not pass along the diagnosis to company officials. "Had such results been conveyed, Celadon would have removed Downey from the operation of his vehicle and placed him on a safety hold pending successful treatment of his sleep apnea," stated the Aug. 31 pleading, asking that Community Hospital be designated a responsible third party in the lawsuit.
Sleep apnea is an issue in the bus industry as well. After a bus crashed in San Marcos in July, injuring 17 people, including a 4-year-old who lost her leg, police concluded that the driver had fallen asleep. It's not known whether the driver had sleep apnea. The bus company, Mares Bus Line of Dallas, does not require drivers to be tested for sleep apnea, according to Edgar Mares, although, he said, "we might do it in the future."
"Sunday was Mother's Day," Lindsay recalled. "They let me know we were going to have to shut John's machines off. That was not what John would have wanted, being hooked up to machines. The kids had been contacted by the transplant team, and they wanted to donate his organs. They said that if someone could use Daddy's organs, he can go on helping, and that's what John did.
"They took John on Monday morning. They rolled him past my room. The girls were next to his bed, just sobbing, saying, 'Wake up, Daddy. This is your last chance.' It still wasn't sinking into my brain that John was gone."
The evidence that sleep apnea is a dangerous disease continues to pile up. The National Institutes of Health have tied apnea to an increased risk of stroke. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that it increases a woman's risk of dementia. A Johns Hopkins study suggests that a person's chances of dying early increase 46 percent if he or she has severe apnea.
Fatigue, including medical conditions affecting sleep, is one of the transportation safety board's top targets. But all it can do is recommend, and despite its recommendations, testing for sleep apnea is not mandatory in any mode of commercial transportation. Airline pilots, for example, are required to be tested only if there is reason to believe they might have apnea, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Lynn Lunsford. If a commercial pilot is diagnosed with apnea, he cannot fly unless he is treated and tested annually to make sure the treatment is controlling the apnea. But, like truckers, pilots can dodge the test if they don't reveal symptoms.
"I remember them pushing me into a room with all these caskets, and I picked out a casket and flowers, but I don't remember doing it," Lindsay said. "I bought a black dress, but I don't remember that, either. We drove to the funeral home Friday night. I looked up and saw the casket and said, 'I can't do this.'" With her son's encouragement, she looked into the casket. The man in there, she said, didn't look like her husband.
"He always had these few little strands of hair that he combed over," she said. "I said, 'Close the casket.' The thing I remember most about the funeral was that nobody talked about what he did for a living. That isn't what defined him. John was just known for helping people."
A few weeks later, when she was back at home, she decided to go for a walk. "On the way back, I started crying," she said. "When I got back, I just collapsed and fell on my knees and said, 'I can't do this. I just want to die.' That was one of the worst days. I was finally accepting what had happened."
There has been no official acknowledgment that the trucker who hit the Lindsays' car was asleep or sleepy, but Wanda Lindsay remains convinced that sleep apnea is the reason her husband died.
A Texarkana police investigation showed 40 feet of brake skid marks before the 18-wheeler's impact with the Lindsays' car. The trucker told police that he had set cruise control on 65. Based on information from the truck's computer (the truck equivalent of an airplane's black box), police concluded that at the point of impact, the truck was going 73 mph. Lindsay's lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, contends that those statistics aren't consistent with glancing away from the highway, then back.
Celadon declined to be interviewed for this story because of the pending lawsuit. The case is scheduled for trial in November.
Regardless of the outcome, Lindsay said she plans to devote herself and her foundation to working for federal regulations to make sure commercial drivers are tested and treated promptly for sleep apnea.
"Why did I survive? That's why," she said. "I can do something. It gives me a purpose." A couple of months after the crash, Lindsay and her son drove back to Kentucky along the same route. "I had to finish what John and I started," she said. "When we got to that place where it happened, I guess I thought there should be a billboard with a flashing light or something saying, 'John Lindsay was killed here,' but, of course, everything was normal. Nobody knows what happened here."
handers@statesman.com; 912-2590

Transportation, Tunneling: The environmental case against the waterfront tunnel for Seattle

2011-09-19T07:49:00.000-07:00

Article and graphics published by CrossCut.com. A second article in favor of the tunnel alternative is posted below.

July 19, 2011

The environmental case against the waterfront tunnel for Seattle

Six prominent environmentalists argue against the proposed deep-bore tunnel under downtown Seattle. They maintain that a streets/transit/I-5 solution creates more jobs, addresses our mobility needs more quickly and cheaply, and sets us on the path to a livable, post-carbon future.

By Alan Durning, K.C. Golden, Denis Hayes, Cary Moon, David Roberts, and Jabe Blumenthal

Four of our friends and environmental colleagues recently made a case for tunneling under downtown Seattle to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. They, along with many of our friends in the labor and business communities, have concluded that the tunnel is the only viable path forward. It pains us to disagree, because we respect them and value the relationships and accomplishments that our work together has brought.
As a citywide vote on the deep-bore tunnel approaches, however, we cannot remain silent. Like many, we are frustrated by the seemingly endless delays and squabbles that have surrounded this issue. We empathize with the cries to “Just do something! Anything!” But we can’t go along with that “anything” when the chosen path—the deep-bore tunnel—is demonstrably inferior to the leading alternative.
The advantages of the package of smart investments called streets/transit/I-5 (“ST5”) are overwhelming. Compared with the tunnel, ST5 creates construction jobs for local workers more quickly, improves traffic flow downtown, yields the same beautiful waterfront, is faster to build, aligns with our civic values and climate goals, and saves us about $1 billion.
The new, 7,351-page Environmental Impact Statement gets us past the claims and counterclaims with a comprehensive analysis that clearly shows the tunnel’s failings. It shows, for example, that the tolled tunnel will put almost as much traffic on the streets of downtown Seattle as would just closing the viaduct and walking away. Repeat: spending billions on a tolled tunnel is barely better for downtown streets than letting the viaduct fall down.
By comparison, the major elements of the ST5 plan are straightforward and workable: reconfiguring I-5 ramps and restriping the freeway to add a new northbound lane in the existing right of way; wiring I-5 with smart traffic-flow management signs; adding transit service in key corridors; opening new freight and passenger capacity by removing bottlenecks in the existing street grid, especially at the north and south ends of downtown; and upgrading the infrastructure for walking and cycling.
ST5 developed over years, in city agencies and community meetings. In 2008, it emerged a winner from the joint decision-making process convened by the city, county, and state after city voters famously rejected both the elevated viaduct rebuild and the cut-and-cover tunnel. But the state pushed ahead with the deep-bore tunnel. At the time, the tunnel wasn’t much more than a napkin sketch with no known price tag. Perhaps without benefit of analysis, it seemed like a reasonable compromise. Now we know better.
ST5’s targeted, smart, decentralized investments deliver better mobility, according to several different analyses (editor's note: separate links for the studies are here, here, here, here, and here), and do it for just three quarters of the cost. ST5 puts fewer cars on downtown streets than the tolled tunnel and improves their flow, while eliminating traffic bottlenecks and prioritizing access for transit and freight. It also creates construction jobs for local workers more quickly than does the tunnel, because it’s easier to stage lots of small projects than one underground behemoth. ST5 is fairer to working families, because it expands transit service and avoids the pocketbook pinch of $5 tolls.
ST5’s pragmatic approach to simple, low-risk transportation investments is among its key virtues. Some $300-$700 million of tunnel funding is still not secured, and already, before the design and planning are done, escalating costs have eaten deeply into the state’s contingency fund. There’s a grave risk that the tunnel will cost more than budgeted, as do most tunnel projects near and far. As just one example, tunneling failure is a real danger. The tunnel will be dug by a 56-foot-wide boring machine with no reverse gear that can only be removed vertically, that is, up through a massive hole in downtown. Unlikely? Two of the tunneling machines working on King County’s Brightwater sewage treatment plant have broken down, triggering layoffs of more than 100 workers during repairs.
The tunnel has no financial guarantor, just an ongoing dispute between city and state about who must pay cost overruns. This situation ought to give Seattleites dry mouth, because state law assigns the bill for all tunnel overruns to city tax payers. Key state legislators are bound and determined to make sure that Seattle residents pick up what could be a blank check for a money pit.
Tunnel advocates argue that creating a spectacular waterfront requires putting traffic underground. We share their excitement for the waterfront vision. Indeed, many of us have devoted years to developing and fighting for it. The tunnel, however, is not essential to that vision. ST5 can deliver exactly the same waterfront design as the tunnel: the same four-lane Alaskan Way, the same parks and bike paths, the same reintegration of city and bay, and – above all – the same eradication of the elevated highway that has blighted our shoreline for half a century and more. The state’s Environmental Impact Statement predicts traffic on the central waterfront with a tolled tunnel or with a viaduct that’s suddenly closed. The difference in car numbers? Two percent or less. Other studies show a similar range of traffic outcomes (links: here and here) on the waterfront. The main lesson, however, is that traffic choosing Alaskan Way will be the result of city decisions about the roadway’s design and lane width, not state decisions about the tunnel.
At the end of the day, this multi-billion dollar project isn’t just about our waterfront or downtown traffic flow. It’s about our city’s future and identity.
At our best, we in Seattle invent new solutions that others copy, from airplanes to online retailing; we pioneer decentralized, green solutions that set an example for the world.
Three decades ago, Seattle said “No!” to WPPSS’ nuclear power, instead making ourselves world leaders in energy efficiency in our homes, offices, and factories. Two decades ago, we said “No!” to a massive burner to incinerate our garbage and showed the country how to make every kitchen and workplace a recycling center. One decade ago, after the California electricity crisis, we said “No!” to coal and natural gas plants; we turned to the wind and, again, efficiency. In fact, we made City Light the country’s premier carbon-neutral utility. We’ve also made some big mistakes. Four decades ago, for example, we turned our backs on federal transit funding that would have given us, by now, a world class light-rail system.
We now confront another pivotal decision.
ST5 not only delivers better transportation more cheaply, it also speeds us along the path to a livable, post-carbon future. Seattle is a leader for sustainable prosperity: a way of living well and durably on our only planet. We are moving toward that vision -- in fits and starts, yes, and often too slowly. Still, we are moving forward. Building a bypass freeway downtown would be a lurch backward, undercutting much of the progress we’ve made. Spending billions to bury it would do little to hide that tragic reversal.
We’ve already begun breaking our oil addiction by investing in new mass transit, calming traffic, and making room for bikes on our roadways. Block by block, we’re rebuilding our city, transforming our neighborhoods into complete, compact communities. Already, we’re driving less. Per-capita gasoline consumption has dropped since 1998 to the levels of the late 1960s, and traffic on Seattle’s freeways has been flat or declining for eight years or more. It’s a good—no, a great start! We are poised to step into the ranks of the world’s most innovative cities: places from Seoul to San Francisco that have demolished urban highways (links: here, here, here, and here) and replaced them with transit, better street connections, and thriving neighborhoods.
Some proponents candidly acknowledge the tunnel’s drawbacks. They support it because they feel the need to do something, and they see the tunnel as the only politically viable path. That is self-fulfilling defeatism. What our community needs now, in these dark economic and political times, is a brave and pragmatic, “Hell, yes! We can do better than a buried highway.”
Join us in rejecting the tunnel, by rejecting Referendum 1 on Aug. 16.

Alan Durning directs Sightline Institute, the Northwest’s largest progressive think tank, which has been studying this issue for years. K.C. Golden is a climate and energy activist and former director of the state’s energy policy office. Denis Hayes is a lifelong environmental leader who heads a local foundation, organized the first and most subsequent Earth Days, and serves on many boards. Cary Moon directs the People’s Waterfront Coalition, which works for a highway-free shore. David Roberts writes about energy, climate, and economics for national magazines, including Seattle-based Grist.org. He contributed to this article in his personal capacity. Jabe Blumenthal is a retired software executive and science teacher who co-chairs or serves on the boards of four progressive and environmental organizations.

Article published by crosscut.com.

July 07, 2011

The environmentalists' case for the waterfront tunnel

Four prominent environmentalists argue for protecting the waterfront from a new wall of cars and removing the unsafe viaduct. Approving the tunnel plan on the Aug. 16 ballot will give back the waterfront to the city, while improving the air and reducing noise.

By Peter Goldman, Russ Daggatt, Maryanne Tagney-Jones, and Kathy Fletcher

We are environmentalists who strongly believe that one of the ways to protect Washington’s farms and forests from urban sprawl is to make our cities as safe, affordable, accessible, and filled with beautiful public places and pedestrian-bicycle friendly amenities as possible.
With the obvious need to take down the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct, Seattle has an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a long-term investment in its waterfront that will improve the quality of our lives, and the lives of our children and grandchildren. That’s why we ask Seattle voters to approve Referendum 1, which will ensure that we can start construction on the downtown tunnel and waterfront improvements as soon as possible. It’s time to end the needless and costly delays that may jeopardize this important opportunity to rebuild our city.
We have come to our decision carefully, after considering all the facts. The tunnel is not simply a “new” highway project but is the rebuilding of an important state highway corridor that is today seismically unsafe. The tunnel will give back Seattle its waterfront and make it a place with fewer cars and less noise and exhaust. It will create an enormous people-friendly park. It will prevent stormwater that drains a busy roadway from entering Puget Sound.
Some of our friends and colleagues in the environmental community oppose the tunnel as a misplaced investment in roads. We share their view that, in light of global warming and our transportation crisis, our area needs massive investments in all forms of non-car transportation.
Ultimately, however, we believe the tunnel strikes the appropriate balance and is a reasonable policy decision. The Viaduct replacement project is funded, places the financing in part on motorists, and includes $32 million for transit to be spent during the major phases of south end construction. That’s a good thing. The original agreement between the city of Seattle, King County, and the state of Washington committed King County to $190 million in additional transit. We must all rally behind the county and make sure these improvements are forthcoming.
The cooperation between the local and state governments is another important reason to move forward. The City Council is behind the project by a margin of 8-1, and it has the support of King County Executive Dow Constantine and Gov. Chris Gregoire. That’s meaningful to us because we respect these political leaders. To hamstring the community with Eyman-esque, paid-signature campaigns and referendums second-guessing our elected leaders erodes our democratic process. Revisiting every policy decision with a popular vote dooms us to the status quo when the health of our economy and our standard of living depend on making expensive and long-term investments in our transportation system. And because there is no consensus around another alternative, killing the tunnel simply dooms us to political gridlock. With low interest rates and the construction business in a lull, now is the time to build.
Critics of the tunnel say the surface option is the best alternative. But it is our view that this option will put tens of thousands of cars on Alaskan Way, effectively cutting off our waterfront. That’s not good urban planning, and it’s not good for the environment. We know that tolls will lead many from using the tunnel but we think tunnel opponents are over-emphasizing this point; tolls can always be adjusted down over time. We also are not concerned about the cost overrun issue since preventing delay is among the best ways to prevent cost overruns and because we are confident the state and property owners whose property will skyrocket in value will pick up the tab.
What’s more, we need to remember that the project is paid for by state gas tax money, and that our state constitution restricts those funds to roads and highways. It’s not a bank account that opponents can raid for whatever purpose they wish. Far more likely, state legislators would direct the money to other projects, leaving Seattle taxpayers holding the bag for the entire Viaduct replacement.
Getting people out of their cars requires that our city streets be friendly to bikes and pedestrians. Sharing the surface streets with more trucks, buses, and autos is more likely to discourage bikes and pedestrians. The best place to put motor vehicles is underground.
The tunnel is a unique opportunity for the state, city, business, labor, and environmental communities to agree on a plan and move forward with something positive. That goodwill can be harnessed to accomplish more urban renewal projects in the future, including better bus service, building out Seattle’s master bike plan, and a walk-friendly downtown. Let’s approve Referendum 1.

This story has been updated since it first appeared to add Kathy Fletcher as a co-signer.

Peter Goldman is director and managing attorney with the Washington Forest Law Center. Russ Daggatt serves on the boards of Earthjustice, a national non-profit public interest law firm, and American Rivers, a leading conservation organization. Maryanne Tagney-Jones serves on the Council of Advisors at the Cascade Land Conservancy and is the former board chair of CLC. Kathy Fletcher is former executive director of People for Puget Sound.

Public Transit: Hard times ahead for Cap Metro; bus service cuts possible

2011-09-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

Article published by the Austin American Statesman.

Hard times ahead for Cap Metro; bus service cuts possible
By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, Sept. 19, 2011
The Capital Metro board, under a state mandate to increase its financial reserves, probably will approve a 2011-12 budget later this month that instead will decrease agency savings by $500,000 to $1.5 million. Then the real money problems start. The result could be further cuts in bus service.

The transit agency, beset by increasing fuel prices, stagnant bus ridership, a rail line with modest usage and a legislative requirement to change its labor structure, is facing something of a budgetary time bomb.A new federal requirement that freight railroads and commuter lines install "positive train controls" — much-expanded remote monitoring with capability of shutting down a train from afar — could cost the agency as much as $40 million over the next four years.

An aging bus fleet, with almost two-thirds of vehicles at or one year away from recommended retirement, will cost millions more in the next few years. And the financial impact of that agency restructuring, which will involve Capital Metro over the next year hiring private companies to operate all of its bus routes and was intended to save money, could boomerang into added costs instead if federal regulators side with Capital Metro's union in an ongoing dispute.

Board member Frank Fernandez, who leads the panel's finance and audit committee, said the new federal train mandate is the most immediate threat. "For 2013, that's what is going to destroy our budget," Fernandez said at a board meeting last week.

The proposed budget for 2011-12, which starts Oct. 1, is already a problem. The agency expects to bring in about $206.1 million, about three-fourths of that from the 1 percent sales tax that is the agency's financial bulwark. That's about $22.6 million less than this year's revenue, principally because of a $19 million drop in anticipated federal grants.

Spending, including a historically modest $20.6 million on long-term capital needs, would be $206.6 million. That would decrease the agency's current $21 million in savings to $20.5 million by next September.

The actual spending picture is worse, however, because the proposal budget contemplates pushing into 2012-13 about $1 million of spending for severance and payments for accrued vacation and sick leave to employees expected to be laid off in the restructuring by next August. Because that could cause those fired workers to lose or delay unemployment benefits, at least some board members said it would be better to take the hit this coming budget year instead. "I'd say that's not the way to go," board member John Langmore said. "We're not saving, we're just deferring."

Deciding against the deferral option would mean dipping into savings by $1.5 million in the coming fiscal year. But the Legislature, in a law passed this spring, required that Capital Metro by 2016 have at least two months of operating costs in reserve, or about $30 million. And because the law as written does not allow the agency to use any of that money for temporary cash flow shortages during the year, agency finance chief Billy Hamilton said Cap Metro would actually need as much as $45 million in reserves.

Hamilton anticipates a $4.7 million increase in fuel costs over what turned out to be an unrealistically low number in the current budget. It assumed fuel could be bought for $2.31 a gallon, whereas the actual cost for much of the past year was well above $3 a gallon.

Capital Metro also expects to spend about $2.4 million in the coming year on the labor restructuring effort, $15 million in commuter rail operating costs and train car debt service and — in a foreshadowing of the trouble to come — $500,000 for early engineering work on positive train controls.

Congress, in the wake of a collision between a freight train and passenger train in Southern California that killed 25 people, passed what was called the Rail Safety Act of 2008. Among the law's provisions, it required positive train control. The engineer of the commuter train in the California accident had sped past a track stop signal — he was found to have been texting at the time — and investigators concluded that remote control of both trains could have avoided the collision or minimized the speed at which it occurred.

Capital Metro, other commuter rail operators and freight railroads across the country now face what the agency's rail operations chief Melvin Clark calls an "unfunded mandate." Designing, buying, installing and debugging the cutting edge, wireless technology will cost $30 million to $40 million by the 2015 federal deadline, Capital Metro estimates. "It will be extremely difficult to get a waiver, or get it delayed," Capital Metro president and CEO Linda Watson told the board.

As for the buses, 126 of them are at least 12 years old, the typical lifespan of a transit bus, with another 130 within a year of retirement age. Watson said the agency intends to buy 20 to 30 buses a year for five years, starting with the 2013 budget year. Such buses typically cost $350,000 to $400,000 each, depending on the length of bus, with federal grants covering 80 percent and local agencies the rest. The cost to Capital Metro in local money, depending on what it buys, would be between $10 million and $20 million through 2017.

Like many other transit agencies, particularly those that have spent heavily on rail, Capital Metro will probably consider cutting the hours of bus services going forward as a way to trim spending. The proposed budget assumes a 0.6 percent decrease in hours for Capital Metro's main bus routes and a 4.2 percent cut in University of Texas shuttle bus hours, but a 3.3 percent increase in commuter rail hours.

"We are still at a place where we need to grow our reserves," Langmore said. "Forget the statute, just as a responsible public agency we need to do that. ... I would err on the side of cutting services."

bwear@statesman.com; 445-3698

Architecture: container summer residence - great for nature lovers

2011-09-05T06:35:00.000-07:00

Photo and article published by designboom.

DIY project of designboom - container office in sardinia, image © designboom

for some time designboom has been planning to transfer our office during the summertime months from the bustling city of milan to the seasides of sardinia (sardegna), an island off the western coast of italy. after all these years of publishing articles on exciting experimental and sustainable architecture, we've undertaken our own DIY shipping container home project, featuring adaptable living and work spaces. we wanted to share our experience as a starting point for readers who might be interested in creating similar structures of their own!
there is a high demand for summer residences on sardinia, and in order to stop over-development of its coastal line and countryside, the government has adopted extremely rigid criteria for building permits. receiving construction permission is a long and difficult process, but one means of getting around the waiting period is the use of temporary and modular structures for housing.
we envisioned a low impact dwelling, which could be placed on our ground without any planning permission,
and ultimately integrated into a traditional permanent edifice once the proper legal permissions have been obtained.
the area features an outdoor kitchen and dining area, covered with a straw canopy, adjacent to two live-work container spaces. these are arranged such that their external doors may be opened out from the container and latched together, creating a wall that protects the dining area from excess wind. all spaces feature opening or sliding glass doors installed within the container frame.
a separate shipping container serves as the bathroom, which has been fitted with a functioning toilet and shower.

the white ceramic paint is very effective, but we were forced to hide the containers, blending them perfectly into the surrounding nature. unfortunately mixing the white base with dark color pigments (green) reduces the product's efficiency of about 50%. nonetheless, although we installed air conditioning, we have never used it thanks to the SUPERTHERM® insulation. if anything, the paint works almost too well, making the containers feel almost like refrigerators at night!

the designboom office interior of one of our shipping containers with the corrugated steel frame, image © designboom

Economics: City of Austin 2012 budget

2011-09-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

Article and graphic published by the Austin Chronicle.

This Is Your City Budget
More police, vanishing grants, rising costs, and ... Jazzercise?
By Wells Dunbar, Fri., Sept. 2, 2011
More cops, fewer hoops?

Not too long ago, conventional wisdom held that once City Council received the city manager's proposed budget – that annual assessment of local revenues and expenses, timed to coincide with the city of Austin's fiscal year turnover in October – the heavy lifting was largely over, and council would comb through the crumbs come budget adoption. The budget process has become less opaque over the years, with City Manager Marc Ott releasing dozens of metrics, survey results, and spending proposals each season. So why is it that once Ott's proposal was released in late July, council attention turned to keeping two recreation centers open – the cost of which wouldn't even cover half a month of police overtime?

For starters, marking the rec centers for repurposing or closure is a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach that results in sparse savings over community benefit. Shuttering Dottie Jordan Recreation Center in Northeast Austin would result in a savings of $39,726 – a figure that barely qualifies as couch cushion change in an overall budget of $2.8 billion. The city cites lagging afterschool participation hours as one reason behind the change – 34,365 hours annually at comparably sized rec centers, to Dottie Jordan's 14,440 – and also the relative proximity of other recreation centers operated by the Parks and Recreation Department. However, opponents of the proposed change note both those alternate centers (Virginia L. Brown and Barbara Jordan Elementary School) are separated by major highways.

The Austin Recreation Center, located next to House Park near 12th Street and Lamar, is proposed to transition from its current use, where it's often leased out to partners like Austin Community College, to a fully leased venue; while specific tenants aren't yet nailed down, longtime tenant Jazzercise and potential Roller Derby newcomers had expressed interest in partnering. Aside from saving roughly $250,000, the city hopes to earn $100,000 in revenues from leasing out the facility.

Still, in the context of a municipal budget for a city doing financially better than most, it looks like council will find the extra funding to keep both centers open. Council Member Mike Martinez named preserving the two centers as a priority, noting "for the minor amount in the overall budget that's projected to be saved, [closing] would create a lot of hardship to the community that uses those rec centers." Mayor Pro Tem Sheryl Cole also proposes that council "add back some sums for the unmet needs in [PARD], especially Dottie Jordan and the Austin Recreation Center .... We can find it if we need to."

While council will likely scrub the budget to free up additional funds, the conversation doesn't end with keeping two rec centers afloat. Despite Austin's strong stance during the seemingly endless recession, cuts at the state and federal level – informed by the plutocratic austerity craze sending America and the Eurozone to the brink of a double dip, if not beyond – have upended funds the city's depended on and lent further scrutiny to every dollar spent.
Taken for Granted

"We see this impact problem playing out on the federal level and at the state level," noted Cole at a recent budget work session. "[We have] the refusal to fund social service contracts, and then we have an expense way above what we can pay for long-term." Federal and state funding reductions have left the city with huge gaps to fill. Neighborhood Housing and Community Development – the department tasked with creating and preserving affordable housing in Austin – was hit especially hard, as its federal Community Development Block Grant was cut by $1.3 million, and Housing and Urban Development's HOME program was scaled back by $500,000. The combination led to the termination of 11 unfilled positions. Health and Human Services saw grants shrink by $700,000, meaning reduced hours at neighborhood health centers. Libraries are seeing grants reduced by $900,000 before they disappear altogether next fiscal year. The results are plainly displayed in the reduced operating hours being floated for Faulk Central Library, which would slice out eight hours a week from its regular schedule.

NHCD was able to stanch the bleeding, partially with a $500,000 infusion from the city's Sustainability Fund, a reserve established in 2001 to advance environmental and economic equity. "The Sustainability Fund did have an adequate ending balance to do that transfer this year," budget officer Ed Van Eenoo told council in his presentation. "Certainly the revenues flowing into the Sustainability Fund are not sufficient to continue this level of outflow into the future. As we move ahead, we will find alternative funding sources or make program reductions in these areas."
A Smarter Cop Shop?

With every dollar the city spends de-leveraged, the costs of certain programs are receiving greater scrutiny – starting with Public Safety spending on police and the semisacrosanct "two cops per 1,000 citizens" directive the city has operated under for years. Bill Spelman made some minor waves when, at a recent session, he suggested the city revisit the policy, asking, "Is there any other place in this budget where we have mandated a level of service staffing that has to be dead-on?" He went on: "We might wish to revisit that policy to reallocate some of that General Fund, for example, from sworn officers to civilians, given the widespread understanding that we're having trouble answering all our 911 calls. ... It seems to me this might be a good time for us to revisit that policy and come up with a new one which provides a little additional flexibility."

It's not the first time Spelman has broached the issue. As he told the Chronicle following the adoption of last year's budget, "We've taken all the new money we've gotten from property taxes, sales taxes, and what have you, and put it all into public safety." His current call is for the Austin Police Department to spend smarter: instead of reflexively adding more sworn personnel to meet the two-per-1,000 ratio, assess how police services can best serve the community by adding nonuniformed members in support positions. "A big piece of the budget is being determined by a mechanistic formula rather than an examination of our needs," he says.

It's uncertain whether Spelman's call will get much traction. Mayor Lee Leffingwell's defended the staffing, saying, "The bar would be very high for me to want to even consider revisiting that ratio." Martinez says he's willing to at least discuss the issue. "If [Spelman's] teeing it up so we can have this conversation through the next year – then yeah, I think we need to have that conversation, and I'm fine with that. ... But I don't think you can just lay it on the table and say, 'There's no justification for two per 1,000, and we need to stop doing it'." Cole went a step further, suggesting it's time for a more thorough examination of the police ratio: "I think that that probably needs a deeper policy discussion," but it is "a conversation we have yet to have." And on the campaign trail, new Council Member Kathie Tovo indicated a willingness to think differently about police staffing. "The continuing growth of the public safety budget is limiting the ability of the city to deliver other services that are important to maintaining a high quality of life," she said.

"I think people understand the problem that I'm raising," Spelman says. "Fundamentally, the problem is you have one piece of a budget driven by a formula and the rest is driven by a more amorphous, holistic view of citizen need. In that scenario, the formula is gonna win every time."
The WTP4 Treatment

It's worth noting that, as of this writing, council has had approximately one week to examine estimates of the cost to suspend construction of Water Treatment Plant No. 4 for either five or 10 years. While opinion's still divided on whether the plant is a needed infrastructure upgrade that's too far along in construction to stop or an environmentally irresponsible money pit diverting conservation dollars, it's clearly affecting utility fees.

Austin Water has projected a 61.2% total rate increase over the next five years; over that period, utility officials say only 8.6% of that goes to WTP4-related costs. Regardless, the largest rate increase is scheduled for this coming budget year, a $8.33 increase for average water users. The largest component of that increase is a $6 "sustainability fee" that's drawn public ire, including from many WTP4 opponents. "There is substantial concern that the sustainability fee is a) misnamed and b) larger than expected or necessary," says Spelman, predicting further council discussion on the topic.

Solid Waste Services and Austin Energy haven't drawn as much attention with their rates holding steady for now; electricity rate increases – the first in 15 years – are coming early next calendar year once AE completes its cost-of-service study. But the specter of WTP4 will doubtlessly loom large over Austin Water as the utility seeks to reconcile conservation with economic solvency.
Hashing It Out

Addressing the perennial public safety fix, collapsing grant assistance, and the city's utility departments while meeting citizen needs – these will be a few of the items on council members' minds when they adopt a budget, starting Sept. 12. While council has traditionally scheduled three days for discussion and adoption, it's usually finished in less than three hours. That may not be the case this year, Martinez says. "This time you're gonna see us sit there maybe one, maybe two, maybe three days – sitting down and hashing out what should be amended, what should be added back. ... I think it's different because of the open meetings issues that we've been through this last year, where we don't meet and discuss items [one on one] prior to open sessions any longer, out of an abundance of caution. And obviously I don't think that's unhealthy."

At left, we've noted some of the major changes to transpire between the budget's initial springtime estimate and City Manager Ott's latest proposal. Take a look, and you'll agree – council will certainly have enough to discuss.

Money In, Money Out

The city's General Fund, money used to fund city services, stands at $690.2 million in revenues and expenses.
Per usual, property taxes make up the bulk of revenues; expenses-wise, Public Safety (police, fire, and EMS) again takes up two-thirds of General Fund revenue, prompting some on council to question the axiomatic directive of "two officers per 1,000 citizens."
New Spending ($2.9 Million, and Growing)

• Public Safety: 49 new police officers to maintain the city's 2-per-1,000-citizens ratio ($2.3 million for six months in FY 12 budget; cost grows to $4 million annually in 2013 and beyond), 18 new paramedics ($250,000 for three months in FY 12 budget; cost grows to $890,000 annually in 2013 and beyond)
• Austin Animal Center: Extra funds to implement Animal Services' live outcomes ("no-kill") plan ($300,000)
Cuts: $6.9 Million From Departmental Budgets
• Reduce Faulk Central Library hours ($102,000)
• Close Balcones and Dick Nichols pools during winter months ($243,000)
• Reduce number of playground sites with supervised programming from 27 to 10 ($184,000)
• Lease out or potentially shutter Dottie Jordan Recreation Center ($40,000), Austin Recreation Center ($250,000)
• Reduce unallocated funding for social service contracts ($200,000)
• Reduce APD overtime ($1 million)
Monthly Taxes and Fees
• Property Tax: 2.5-cent increase in tax rate, from $0.4571 to $0.4823 per $100 valuation, which given dropping valuations amounts to a $2.97 monthly increase to $73.24 on a median-priced home ($182,228)
• Austin Energy: $10.91 increase to $102.53 (pending City Council approval of AE's rate increase next year; a 12% increase is used for this estimate)
• Austin Water: $8.33 increase to $73.21
• Solid Waste Services: Unchanged at $23.75 (for a 64-gallon trash cart)
• Public Works: Unchanged at $7.29
• Watershed Protection: Unchanged at $7.75

Total increase of $22.21 (8.36%) to $287.77

Neuroscience: 1st Annual Austin Translational Neuroscience Symposium

2011-08-08T17:01:00.000-07:00

1st Annual Austin Translational Neuroscience Symposium

Hosted by NeuroTexas Institute Research Foundation & The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Neurosciences

April 2, 2011

TIME: 8:30am - 4:00pm

PLACE: St. David's Medical Office Building, 3000 N. IH-35, Austin, TX 78705

REGISTRATION: Physician CME Registration, Researcher/Healthcare Staff/Student/Public

Or Call: (888)868-2104 or (512)478-3627

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Steven Pinker

Dr. Steven Pinker is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received six honorary doctorates, several teaching awards, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is the Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New Republic, The New York Times, and other publications. He has been named Humanist of the Year, and is listed in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine's "The World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals" and in Time magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today." His latest book is The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature was a New York Times bestseller.

Symposium Agenda:

Engineering Therapies for Nerve Regeneration, Christine Schmidt, Ph.D., UT Austin
Opportunities for Technological Advances in Spine Surgery, K. Michael Webb, M.D., NeuroTexas Institute at St. David's HealthCare
Dendritic Channelopathies and Epilepsy, Daniel Johnston, Ph.D., UT Austin
Diagnosis & Treatment of Epilepsy & Future Avenue to Therapies, Sami Aboumatar, M.D., NeuroTexas Institute at St. David's HealthCare
Evolutionary Genetics of Glioblastoma, Claus O. Wilke, Ph.D. , UT Austin
Emerging Trends in Surgical & Post-Surgical Treatment of Brain Tumors, Douglas Fox, M.D. , NeuroTexas Institute at St. David's HealthCare

References:

Dr. Steven Pinker (Wikipedia)

Architecture: CMA CGM Tower, Marseille

2011-08-07T16:37:00.000-07:00

Photo and article published MapolisMagazin

CMA CGM Tower - Marseille

In 2004 already, the international architectural competition dealing with the new CGA CGM headquarters ended with Zaha Hadid as the winner.
A new Landmark
Marseille is the second largest city in France after Paris. Located at the picturesque Côte d’Azur, which is invaded by the rich and beautiful during summer. Apart from that, Marseille is the most important French and one of the most important European harbor cities. Documents from the 7th century already talk about this place being used as a harbor, occupied by numerous cultures throughout the centuries. Marseille is also a trendsetter with its large-scale infrastructural program, promoting the re-construction of abandoned industrial and storage wastelands into modern office and prospering business quarters. As a company, you take the chance to be a pioneer by erecting a lighthouse visible from afar next to the only vertical buildings in Marseille, the Notre Dame de la Garde basilica, the Fort St. Jean and the Château d'If.
Curved Arch
Being one of the world’s largest shipping companies with a fleet of 400 ships, CMA CGM started off with a few employees three decades ago and keeps expanding its transportation network. Situated within an unimpressive heterogeneous blend of post-war buildings and the highway resting on columns, which is typical for coastal regions, a metallic curved arch – reminding of a ship’s bow – slowly grows up from the ground and moves towards the skies with a bold turn. According to Zaha Hadid, this is a combination of plainness, efficiency and modernity, yet you could also call it a bold impressive landmark, which is going to be visible from afar from the streets of Marseilles.
The spatial program is integrated into the structure. 2,400 work places will be available on the upper floors. Within the expansion of urban space, entwined with the horizontal levels of mobility, you will find the company’s public and semi-public areas. The building’s cubature already calls for a number of technical and constructional challenges. The installation of the vertical framework’s elements of 1,172 geometries mirrors the diversity and multi-facetedness of CMA CGM. Not to be recognized from outside, since the elegant double-shell glass façade with its bright and dark elements brings the complex structure together to form a homogeneous entity. Step by step, more highrise buildings are going to be added to the skyline of Marseille, but none of them will be a maritime symbol as elegant as the CMA CGM Tower designed by Zaha Hadid. constructor: CMA CGM, Marseille, France
architect: Zaha Hadid Architects
status: Construction time: 2006 - 2011
size: GFA: 94,000 m²
References:
Wikipedia CMA CGM Tower

CMA CGM Headquarters|Zaha Hadid architects - Article

Public Transit: Cap Metro may get cash for naming rail lines, stations

2011-08-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

Article published by the Austin American Statesman

Cap Metro may get cash for naming rail lines, stations
Getting There: Ben Wear
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Take the Broad Street light rail line toward South Philadelphia, and the station names ticking by wouldn't draw much notice: Tasker-Morris, Snyder, Oregon. All of them named for east-west streets bisecting the line.

Until you get to the last stop: AT&T Station.

There is no AT&T Avenue there. What there was, instead, was $5 million — or more precisely, $1 million a year for five years. That's what the Dallas-based communications behemoth is paying the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority for the privilege of slapping the company name on the station.

Deals like that have put dollar signs in the eyes of officials who run the country's increasingly cash-strapped transit agencies. Including those at Capital Metro.

The agency's board today probably will award a $100,000 contract to a consultant who will be asked to figure out what, if anything, Capital Metro could harvest from naming rights for its rail stations, or the Red Line itself (which is not named for Texas business titan Red McCombs, just so you know — although he might get a call at some point). Or maybe even the two "rapid bus" routes the agency plans to start in the next couple of years.

The Cleveland transit authority was something of a pioneer in this arena, reaching a deal in 2008 with two hospitals to name its bus rapid transit route the Healthline (and include the hospitals' names on maps and other places). It had been called the Silver Line, the agency's marketing and communication director, Stephen Bitto, told me. The agency will get $250,000 a year for the next 25 years under that deal.

And it is offering naming rights to train stations for $30,000 a year, with a minimum 10-year commitment. A bank and an insurance company have ponied up so far for two stations, and Cleveland State University swapped some land for naming rights to a station.

You'll notice those Cleveland numbers are much lower than the one in Philadelphia. What you need to know about the AT&T station is that it is easy walking distance from the stadiums and arenas where the Phillies, 76ers, Flyers and Eagles play their games. In other words, several hundred thousand people a year disembark there in their team gear, all of them in a good mood as they get set to enjoy a game.

AT&T was willing to pay big-time to be associated with that.

The question here is, would anyone be willing to pay to put a name on, for instance, the Leander station, which has relatively light usage and is close to nothing other than the H-E-B grocery store across the highway? Or the Kramer station, which is surrounded by warehouses and industrial facilities? Only the Red Line's downtown station, a couple of blocks from East Sixth Street, is close to a popular commercial destination.

Capital Metro would be paying IMG Consulting Inc. to figure out the possibilities. And later, under the proposed deal, the company might get a 12 percent commission on any such agreements for naming rights it could rustle up. Getting There, however, is willing to offer some suggestions. Gratis.

Dell, of course, is the potential pot of gold that comes to mind first around here. A Capital Metro "overview of naming rights" presentation even features a photo of a Dell facility.

How about the Howard Lane/Dell Direct Station up there just west of the Loop 1 tollway? This is not only the closest station to Dell's Round Rock headquarters (though it's really more than two miles away, not all that close), but also the likely connecting spot for a (still unlikely) rail system in Round Rock.

The H-E-B/Leander Station? Well, perhaps proximity would help. Similarly, it would only make sense to have a Black Star Co-op/Crestview Station, given that the brewpub is about 100 feet from the train platform. If that doesn't work, well, there's always the Yellow Rose World Famous Cabaret up the street ...

The Lakeline station is already named for a mall. Would the owners be willing to pay for something they're getting for free now? And perhaps the Highland station could be named for a mall as well. Oh, wait, it sort of is already, or what's left of one.

Kramer could become the Sorta-near-the-Domain Station and the MLK Station the Sorta-near-Mueller Station.

As for Plaza Saltillo, located as it is among the burgeoning East Austin condoland (which could blossom even more if Capital Metro ever figures out how to sell its nearby 11 acres to developers), I'm thinking of something more descriptive: Gentrification Station. Might be hard to monetize that, however.

The biggest potential prize, of course, is the Red Line itself, although at less than 1,800 boardings a day, one has to temper revenue expectations. And who has more money than anyone else around here? The University of Texas athletic department, of course.

The Burnt Orange Line? We'll see if Capital Metro and its consultant can hook 'em.

For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.

Transportation Funding: Ready for an Obama gas tax break? TxDOT might not be

2011-08-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

Article published by the Austin American Statesmen

Ready for an Obama gas tax break? TxDOT might not be
Ben Wear: Getting There
Sunday, July 10, 2011
President Barack Obama wants to give you a 50 percent break on your gas taxes.

You may not have heard about this startling news of a massive Democrat-sponsored tax cut, or realized you did. What was actually reported by The New York Times a week ago was that the Obama administration would like to require that new American cars and light trucks average 56.2 miles per gallon by 2025. That's about double the current requirement under federal law.

The proposal — industry experts said achieving that kind of engine efficiency is feasible with electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius and plug-in hybrid electrics — is still under negotiation and subject to change, the Times reported. The automotive industry frets that the vehicles might cost so much that consumers would turn up their noses, presumably hanging onto older cars longer.

But the average standard, right now about 28 mpg, is already set to increase to 34.1 mpg by 2016 under an agreement reached two years ago between the Obama administration and the car manufacturers. That's a 25 percent increase in fuel efficiency. Going anywhere close to the 56.2 mpg target by 2025 would be an enormous change.

Including to what you pay each year in gas taxes. And what the Texas Department of Transportation and the U.S. Treasury collect in gas tax revenue.

Which brings us to our Texas legislators, who dragged their spent selves out of Austin in late June after almost six months of lawmaking.

Hang on first for some math.

Let's say a Pflugerville physics schoolteacher drives 15,000 miles a year and, by coincidence, has a car that averages right at that 28 mpg existing standard. She would need 536 gallons to do that.

She pays both a state gasoline tax of 20 cents a gallon (which hasn't increased since 1991) and a federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents a gallon (locked in since 1993). So her annual tax hit (paid invisibly at the pump) is $107 to the state and almost $99 to the feds. So, about $206 a year.

With a 56 mpg car, her total tax would be $103. Oh, and at $3.40 a gallon (and subtracting the gas taxes), she would save another $800 by buying half as much gasoline.

But here's the problem, from a statewide perspective. TxDOT, which gets about three-quarters of that state gas tax revenue and about the same percentage of what Texans pay in federal gas taxes (because a quarter of it, unfairly in the eyes of Texas officials, is then distributed to other states), would lose a couple of billion dollars a year. Ouch.

The gas tax has already lost about 50 percent of its purchasing power to inflation since the early 1990s. Now it would lose half of what's left to fuel efficiency. If you're scoring, that would mean TxDOT in 14 years could have, effectively, a quarter of what it was spending on Texas roads in 1990. Dodging potholes could become a sort of slalom sport.

The answer to all this, in the short run, would be to index the gas tax to some combination of inflation and fuel efficiency. The longer-term answer is to tax drivers based on mileage, rather than fuel usage, at a rate calculated to meet the state's transportation needs.

The current governor and the several legislatures he has presided over, however, have shown absolutely no inclination to do either of those things. But they are fond of building and repairing highways, so they've been patching over the shaky TxDOT revenue situation for the past decade by approving all sorts of borrowing. Billions of dollars of it.

Millions of 56 mpg vehicles rolling around Texas would make that dance much harder.

You think we've got a lot of toll roads now? Hang on. And squirrel away the money you save on the Obama gas tax cut and unbought gasoline.

You're going to need it.

For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.

Urban Streets: 'Great Streets' rehab project,, has Austin learned any lessons

2011-08-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

Article published by The Austin Chronicle

Arms on Brazos

As it nears completion of an extended 'Great Streets' rehab project, has Austin learned any lessons?

By Richard Whittaker, Fri., Aug. 5, 2011

There's good news for Downtown residents and regulars. After more than two years of ongoing construction, Brazos Street is scheduled to reopen in September. With that long-delayed conclusion, Brazos becomes the latest beneficiary of the city's Great Streets Program, designed to make the urban core more livable, walkable, and commercially viable. The big difference between this and other Great Streets projects is that this is the first time the city ran the project completely by itself – rehabbing an existing street, rather than cajoling or incentivizing developers to do the job for them.
So how did the city do?
Public Works supervising engineer Kevin Sweat's concern about the public response is apparent: He's concerned that the project's length will have overshadowed its achievements. Three years ago, Brazos was a mess. Narrow sidewalks at Sixth Street meant overcrowded bus stops, and there was no street-level sidewalk at the Eighth Street intersection. Some blocks sloped awkwardly into the roadway, others had steps at either end, and there was no cover from the sun. Considering this is all within a block of major state and federal offices, on a street that crosses Austin's central entertainment district, and with two major hotels and a cathedral on its length – well, that's embarrassing. Call that state of affairs Point A. The finished project – Point B – is now in sight. Sweat's best estimates have the final work crews finishing in August, September at the latest.
The Brazos Streetscape Improvement & Reconstruction Project is about more than prettying it up by adding a few benches and trees. It has meant a wholesale rebuilding of all 10 blocks from Cesar Chavez to the Capitol, with new gas mains, new water pipes, a redesigned roadway with new traffic patterns, a broadened sidewalk, and yes, benches and trees. There will even be an interactive art installation by the Sodalitas Art Group: ambient street noise will be collected with microphones, then remixed with notes triggered by infrared "keys" before being replayed in a listening area by the Whitley Building at Third Street.

The project became a lesson in time-consuming compromise driven by a number of surprises.

Photo by John Anderson

The result will be a complete transformation from the old, crumbling Brazos – but we're not there yet. When the city first green-lit the reconstruction, it scheduled 420 calendar days, starting in October 2009. That came after a round of prep work by private utilities, so, Sweat said, "The public has seen construction going on longer." However, that 420-day target passed more than six months ago, and the current estimate is for 680 days, leaving Brazos in construction limbo for almost two years. However, the project is still under budget. The design was originally budgeted at $17 million, but a cost-conscious city capped the contract at $12 million. Then the global economy collapsed, construction costs plummeted, and rather than cut the design, the city was able to rebid the contract for a bargain-basement $10.5 million. Even with the delays, Sweat said, the final price tag should still only be around $11.5 million.

Insert Plan A Into Urban Slot B

As anyone who has put do-it-yourself furniture together in the wrong order knows, the key to any engineering project is the sequencing. Get it right, and you have a chance of hitting the deadlines; get it wrong, and say goodbye to your weekend. Shutting the entire street for more than a year was a nonstarter, so the city and prime contractor Cash Construction had to find other ways to break the job down. The initial challenge, Sweat said, was "making sure that there was always enough work to keep all the subcontractors on-site and busy as opposed to having to remobilize." The city originally just wanted to work on one half of one block at a time, while Cash Construction proposed splitting the job east-west, shutting the entire 11-block stretch down one side, then the other. The city's plan meant risking the loss of subcontractors between stages; Cash Construction's plan would have been massively disruptive to tenants, pedestrians, drivers, and businesses. So they compromised on four blocks at a time. That way, Sweat said, "If something went horribly wrong, at least we would have both sides of the street completed up to Sixth Street."
So why the delay? There was no singular disaster, and in fact the final streetscape is pretty close to the 2009 designs. A few benches changed in orientation, some bike racks shifted, and cut-in parking bays were sacrificed so the project could move cover-creating trees from the shady west of the street to the more exposed east. However, the project became a lesson in time-consuming compromise, driven by unexpected surprises. Think of it like Schrödinger's Cat, the legendary scientific paradox: Until you open the cat's box, you don't know if it's alive or dead.
In this case, the engineers did not really know what they were facing until they opened the road surface. The first metaphorical cat surprise was a pedestrian tunnel between One Congress Plaza (just north of Cesar Chavez) and the parking garage on the other side of Brazos. That added 60 days to the contract as engineers hand-tunneled a storm drain underneath it. Add on 50 days for extra street furniture, 40 days for the new limestone retaining wall and sidewalk next to Central Presbyterian Church, 70 days for extra utility work, 10 days suspended around special events like the Pecan Street Festival, and 10 bad weather days for rain. Every single extension had to be requested by the contractor as a contract change order, recommended by the relevant board or commission, then approved by council. However, add it all together, and those sporadic extensions added up to grand total of 260 extra days – an almost two-thirds overrun.

The Art of the Possible

That is the kind of overrun that can be tough to explain to residents. Sweat praised the Downtown Austin Alliance for helping with the project, but in a way it was really the DAA's idea. The alliance's Streetscapes & Mobility Committee staff liaison Thomas Butler said, "We knew, maybe before the city did, that it was going to be done." The sidewalk was last upgraded in 1999 as part of a limited project around Sixth Street to meet Americans With Disabilities Act standards. When the city proposed similar upgrades for all of Brazos in 2003, he said: "There was no Great Streets sidewalk included. The Alliance convinced the city to add those improvements into the 2008 bond package, because we knew that if they reconstructed that street without doing the sidewalks, it would be a long time before they would go in and tear it back up." In turn, the DAA served as an intermediary, keeping the locals informed and bringing concerns to the project team.

Austin's traditional Downtown streets are 80 feet wide, with only 10 feet of sidewalk on each side. In a regular street renovation or rehab, that old design stays in place and the emphasis is on reconstructing the roadway for vehicles. The Great Streets Program puts more emphasis on the needs of pedestrians, upgrading the sidewalk and widening it to 18 feet by reducing the number of vehicle lanes. In the case of Brazos, project managers had to modify the standard Great Streets design, getting rid of some features like cut-in parking bays and using on-street parking instead. Brazos will remain one-way for the foreseeable future, but the roadway was designed so it can be converted to a two-way street if the city changes its traffic management plans.

Previous Great Streets projects, like Second Street, were tied to major condo and office developments already rearranging utilities – Brazos was about rehabbing an existing street. That meant working around a lot of existing utilities, like maintenance covers and electrical access panels, and that also meant compromising on street layout and furniture. Such things may not sound like a big deal, but a trash can or streetlight two feet from its ideal position can make a big difference on appearance and usability. Take the southeast corner at Brazos and 10th streets: At its narrowest, its walkable sidewalk is only about 40 inches – tough going for a pedestrian, near impossible for someone in a wheelchair.
Other compromises were about timing. Some were spur of the moment; for example, during South by Southwest 2010, digging behind the Paramount Theatre was quickly suspended when city staff realized that heavy equipment was shifting dirt within feet of long audience lines. Other compromises took some serious planning; rather than risk closing any of the structured parking garages midweek, contractors had to hustle through the weekend, picking materials that would be car-ready by Monday morning. That may have been an inconvenience for the garage owners, but it was the smaller businesses that suffered most. Sweat said: "I kept hearing people say, over and over, 'Even in a good year, we're month-to-month financially.' Then when our construction came in, typically there was at least a two-month period when they were directly affected." Financially, there was little Sweat could do since the city has no mechanism to reimburse businesses for lost revenue. But, he said, "Most of them seemed to endure it, and now that it's finished, they do seem to be reaping the benefits of a more pedestrian-friendly environment."
So does Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association President Michael McGill think the new Brazos is more pedestrian friendly? "I think so," he said. McGill lives at the Railyard Condominiums at Fourth and Brazos and has been on both sides of those construction compromises. For example, the city redesigned the corner near the condo's main entrance to get rid of an awkward step. Similarly, the Street Orchestra art installation was originally to be sited under the Railyard windows, but residents convinced the project managers to move it a block south, next to commercial properties. Yet they still had to contend with time-sensitive, late-night, and rescheduled weekend work. "That's something that doesn't get ruled into noise ordinance issues," he said. As a Downtown resident, he is used to noise: "Friday, Saturday night, I'll sleep with my windows open. I don't really care. But construction noise is a totally different matter – having a jackhammer at 5, 6 in the morning." While he understood that concrete pouring had to be done at night, "there was a lot of other stuff that doesn't have to happen at night or in the early morning hours that was certainly impacting people."
The lane closures meant drivers had to take their share of the inconvenience, too. For Capital Metro, which runs 12 routes along Brazos, a road reconstruction is a mix of pain and opportunity. The pain comes from rerouting, and over the last two years, staff could do little but shift buses to Congress and clock-watch. Cap Metro Principal Planner Roberto Gonzalez said, "We were told they'd be ready by the fall of 2010, and now we're slowly approaching the fall of 2011." However, Cap Metro played its own role in the construction. Gonzalez explained that a street redesign gives Cap Metro an opportunity to take "a second look at our bus stops and say, 'Are they all in the right places?'" Brazos was a particular headache: Some stops were right next to parking spots, meaning buses had to pick up passengers in the middle of the road. Between the agency's quarter-cent funding of the city's street reconstruction budget and its own contributions toward street furniture, Cap Metro was able to change the plan to fit its needs and add its own components. When talks with the city began, Gonzalez said Cap Metro only wanted stops at "a few key blocks." Those stops may be more user-friendly, but there will be fewer – dropping from six down to three.
And how well did Cap Metro handle the diversions? There are no signs on Brazos telling passengers where to go, and none on Congress saying which buses were diverted to which stops. Even the online trip planner still sends passengers to Brazos, with the uninformative coda of a blinking exclamation mark indicating "Route may be affected by detours." After two years, the obvious question becomes: How hard is it to print some new timetables? Gonzalez explained that even though routes are redrawn every six months, the "Brazos project hit us in the middle of the cycle. ... The way some of our systems handle times and time points and schedules, there were a handful that we could not change suitably."

Public Works supervising engineer Kevin Sweat

Photo by Jana Birchum

Once the project wraps, it is the permanent compromises that everybody will have to live with. Consider the trees, an essential part of the Great Streets design. On this project, they ran afoul of a different kind of trunk. Brazos is a main route for much of the Downtown telephone and data system, and the cables were replaced only two decades ago. But when city contractors opened up the road to expand the sidewalk, they found the telephone engineers had left the cables closer to the surface than anyone expected. Sweat said, "Because this wasn't a street-widening or transportation improvement project, we really didn't have the legal authority to get them to move." That meant the city could not simply plant every tree straight into the sidewalk, and instead had to design above-ground planters with enough drainage and irrigation to make sure they could survive Austin's erratic and punishing weather. The city could not even get enough of the trees it wanted; a national shortage of Bigtooth maple means most planters contain Texas Ash.

A History Lesson

Ironically, once this project is complete, Brazos will look like it did 50 years ago. There is a certain myth about Downtown Austin pre-Great Streets: dead in the daytime, deader at night. If you ever feel like busting that myth, just visit the Texas Film Commission's Texas Archive of the Moving Image website and type in "Congress Avenue." In the 1940s, Austin's main street looked like New York's 42nd Street on a busy Saturday. It was a dense throng of stores, each garlanded with advertising signs, many with awnings to keep the sun off the crowds. In fact, it kind of looked like what is being built now.

So what went wrong?
City Downtown Officer Mike Knox blames the rise of the suburbs. He said: "Everybody moved out. All that was really left in Downtown was offices, and back in the Eighties, even that was in bad shape." The exodus was reflected in the collapse of retail. At its height, there were 120 shops on Congress, including half a dozen major department stores. By the early Nineties, that had shrunk to 12 retailers, and "three of them were T-shirt shops and museum stores." In recent years, that number has trebled; the reversal began 14 years ago, when Kirk Watson became mayor and set the pieces in place to revive the area. Knox said, "We tend to like to say that we have this vision of Downtown and we've been building toward it, but the reality is that it's been a whole series of opportunities and ideas." The first big stage was easy: Over the prior three decades, the city had acquired several blocks to build a municipal government center around Second Street, "but that didn't pan out, so we had all this land." Add on some easily demolished, crumbling warehouses and underused parking lots, and the potential for development was obvious. Even Knox is amazed how fast the city has evolved: "We went from three- and four-story buildings to a 56-story building in 10 years."
However, unlike Second Street, Brazos was not a clean slate, and so the project had to work around those three- and four-story buildings. Many have tenants, and some have cellars extending under the sidewalk. Sweat's big fear was that they would be damaged by his construction teams, so he had vibration meters installed, and, he said, "That sometimes meant the contractor had to use smaller tools that take longer to do the job." Then there were the water lines; an expanding Downtown population means more water in and more waste out. So Austin Water took advantage of the open road to replace the mixture of 6-, 8-, and 12-inch cast-iron pipes with new 12-inch ductile iron pipes. Again, Schrödinger's Cat took a swat at the timetable: Only after the road was opened did Austin Water realize that several water meter vaults were in disrepair and needed replacing. While this was happening, Sweat said, "almost on a weekly basis, the old line was rupturing."

Sidewalks and newly planted trees add life to this once-drab street.

Photo by Jana Birchum

Increasingly, the new, dense Downtown Austin is running up against the old, dense Downtown. In Knox's City Hall office, there is a stack of color-coded maps that break down each Downtown lot. Red means no potential for redevelopment; green indicates short-term redevelopment. What may be surprising is how few blocks are one single hue; they are instead a mix of greens and reds, as well as orange for historic structure, blue for government buildings, and the more speculative yellow for long-term development opportunities. What that means, in simple terms, is that the city is running out of big, easy targets of opportunity for the Great Streets Program. Instead, future projects will look more and more like the Brazos experience, contending each time with the old infrastructure.

What Would Van Halen Do?

The new Brazos is getting close to its debut. The last major stretch of work – the west side of the street between Ninth and 11th – is nearly completed. There is also the smell of fresh tarmac at the northeast corner with Sixth (another concession: The project management team agreed to work around the Driskill Hotel's busiest times, coming back to finish this stretch out of season). The day the contractors seal the surface, Schrödinger's Cat is back in the box. The real test will only take place when all the barriers come down and Austinites can freely drive and walk up the street.
Ever hear the story about Van Halen and the brown M&Ms? The legend is that, out of rock star hubris, the band's contract rider requirements included a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. That clause was real, but it was said to really be a test determining whether the venue's management was paying attention. In his autobiography, vocalist David Lee Roth wrote that the first time they went to a venue and found brown M&Ms in the bowl, it turned out as well that the stage was not weight-rated for the band's equipment. End result? The stage set sank through the floor, causing $80,000 in damage.
In that vein, contractors and developers wonder whether this city-run Great Streets retrofit has been held to the same standards as their public/private versions. Meanwhile, the city and residents are watching to see if the design compromises really worked. Take, for example, the raised tree planters. During construction, McGill said, "these were empty pits, and they were just trash collectors. It was unpleasant, and they didn't really clear them out that much." However, he applauded their irrigation systems. "There's a lot of trees that are dying Downtown," he said. Sweat himself was unhappy that the compromise design – raised planters – reduces usable sidewalk space, making it difficult to open car doors or unload Cap Metro passengers. The planters' limestone is softer than Austin's trademark tough granite, and some are already chipped from everyday use. During June's heavy rain, many drained poorly, leaving roots waterlogged while overflowing water poured over the embedded light fittings. Several saplings have died already (although in this scorching summer, many trees planted directly into the ground are not faring much better). Three mature trees on the 400 block are already growing into the protective metal grills that surround their bases. These circular grills are designed to be cut back as the sapling matures, meaning the roots stay covered while the trunk gets thicker. That cutback has not happened, and now the metal is cutting into the trees' trunks. That's the sort of oversight that gets noticed by pedestrians and shopkeepers and could undermine the public image of the entire project.
With the last few items left to be finished before the city signs off, the Brazos project is now less about the engineering problems and more about learning opportunities. Even if every engineering glitch were unavoidable, a 62% schedule overrun could cast a long shadow over future projects. The next funded Great Streets targets – like Second Street running to the Austin Convention Center, and the upgrading of Colorado – could make Brazos look like a dig in a kid's sandbox and would be nothing compared to the recently proposed upgrades to Sixth Street. Even mentioning making Austin's busiest entertainment district temporarily less walkable makes every stakeholder blanch, and not just for the business losses: Drunken people and big holes in the ground are a bad combination. Still, those streets do need rehabbing. "All of that work is both important and disruptive, so there's a lot of balancing to do," Council Member Chris Riley said. "Before we dive into other Great Streets projects, we need to look at what has happened on Brazos and see if there are any lessons to be learned."
Sweat and Riley agree that Brazos shows the city may have been right in its originally proposed scheduling: smaller pieces, going block by block if necessary. Add that to the lessons learned from earlier projects. Take Congress Avenue, which, although not technically part of the Great Streets Program, was the city's first big Downtown rehab project. Riley said, "Today, when you walk down Congress, you see what we did, and it looks very different to what we would do today." No diagonal cut-in parking, for a start. As more restaurants and cafes start serving on the sidewalks, that lost pavement creates choke points for pedestrians. Yet simply removing those parking slots also means fewer places to park, and, as the resurgent controversy about meter hours proves, the city, developers, and Downtown businesses have a long way to go on a coherent parking policy. Great Streets, Riley pointed out, are never supposed to be anti-car, and he is frustrated that so much of Downtown remains one-way, blocked off, or just plain baffling to drivers. By the same measure, he was greatly disappointed that Cap Metro (on whose board he serves) seemed so ill-prepared to deal with long-term diversions.
As the Great Streets Program moves deeper into thriving areas, the city will find more challenges in hitting the balance between the long-term gains and short-term disruption. The Downtown Austin Alliance's Thomas Butler argues that the lessons from projects like Brazos are being learned by "both the executive-level staff and those down in the trenches." Sweat argues that should mean "having the hard conversations with the businesses about severely limiting their accessibility for shorter periods of time to get it done quickly, or [instead] trying to maintain their access, knowing that's going to affect the duration of the contract." If the Brazos experience is any guide, it's a balance that requires both long-term vision and short-term attention to detail.

Urban Planning: Car-free Zone of Maria-Theresian-Straße in Innsbruck, Austria

2011-08-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Article and photos published by Architecture List

Car-free Zone of Maria-Theresian-Straße in Innsbruck, Austria
by AllesWirdGut, August 7, 2011
After five years’ planning and construction, the car-free zone of Maria-Theresian-Straße in Innsbruck, AUSRTRIA is now completed. Converted into a pedestrian zone, the northern section of the street has already been in use for two years now and, with its choice of robust materials, has successfully withstood the daily rush of users. The granite paving now extends from the Triumph Gate to the Old Town, providing much room for urban strolls with a view of the mountains.

A redesigning of Maria-Theresien-Straße that does justice to the significance that the street has in the townscape of Innsbruck: the goal was to create an urban site with a rich atmosphere that invites strolling, hanging out, and meeting people.
The identity of the site derives from the tension between urbanity and a panoramic view into nature, between past and future, between a specific character and a connective function in the urban structure of Innsbruck.
Two defining materials, granite and brass, balance these dualities in the redesigning: a slab carpet of four different types of granite creates a coherent square surface, and a network of brass-colored ground plates with street furniture growing up from it defines the square area proper in the middle of the street.

At night, the walking zones alongside the house façades are brightly lit, while low-set lighting in the middle of the square enables a view of the mountain silhouette and the stars above.

References:
A Walk up Maria Theresien Strasse
Wikipedia - Maria-Theresien-Straße
Stadtplan - München - Maria-Theresia-Str Map

Panoramio

Wikimedia Commons

Maria-Theresien-Strasse

Austria-Forum

Architecture: Airy Architecture, Homes Open to Nature

2011-08-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

Article published by WebEcoist

Airy Architecture: 13 Homes Open to Nature

By Steph in Art & Design, Home & Garden

Imagine being able to temporarily remove an entire wall of your home – or maybe every wall – to let in cool, fresh air in the heat of summer. That’s the idea behind these 13 open-air houses, which utilize either sliding panels, garage doors or permanently perforated screens to take advantage of natural ventilation and cooling. These airy designs not only lower energy bills, but foster a connection to the outdoors.

The Paraty House by Marcio Kogan Architects

(images via: contemporist)
Truly blurring the lines between indoors and out, this incredible beach house in Paraty, Brazil features massive sliding windows that completely open the interior spaces to an infinity pool and the shore beyond it. The home is made up of two cantilevered concrete volumes which jut out of a mountainside; residents arrive by boat.

Kokopo House, Papua New Guinea

(images via: world architecture news)
With a form inspired by the flow of volcanic lava, the Kokopo House in Papua New Guinea is bold, futuristic and luxurious. Totally off-grid and open to the elements, the home contains no windows and has walls designed to encourage air flow. It also features rainwater collection, solar water heaters and low-wattage LED lights, and was made using local materials.

Fish House by Guz Architects

(images via: best of remodeling)
Mimicking the way the gills of a fish allow oxygen into its body, the Fish House by Guz Architects has openings in its layered roof to usher in fresh ocean air. Numerous large opening windows further open up the inside of the home, and the architects extended the living space into the outdoors with covered poolside pavilions and glassed-in cantilevered living spaces.

Minimalist White Home by Iwan Baan

(images via: iwan.com)
Japanese architect Iwan Baan does away with glass altogether in this minimalist white home, at least when it comes to the exterior volume. A white sheath extending all the way to the property line, punctuated with rectilinear openings that let in air and light. This provides a protected garden space between the outer volume and the interior space.

Leaf House, Rio de Janeiro

(images via: world architecture news)
Leaf-like coverings protect a maze of enclosed and open spaces in this luxury Rio de Janeiro home. Mareines + Patalano architects took inspiration from traditional Indian structures in Brazil, leaving much of the house open to trade winds from the sea which provide natural ventilation and passive cooling.

Costa Rican Home Made of Bamboo

(images vía: benjamín garcia saxe)
Made entirely of bamboo, this beautiful home in the jungle of Costa Rica was made by architect Benjamin Garcia Saxe for his mother. The angled bamboo lets in fresh air and cooling breezes without allowing water to drip inside.

Residencia RR, Sao Paulo

(images via: andrademorettin.com)
At Residencia RR in Sao Paulo, Brazil, massive windows are paired with sliding screens to allow plentiful ventilation and light without welcoming insects, snakes and other jungle creatures into the interior space. The home is contained within a primary ‘shell’ which shields it from the elements and provides shade.

The Bahia House by Marcio Kogan

(images via: archdaily)
Yet another home inspired by the traditional architecture of Brazil is the Bahia House by Marcio Kogan architects. The floor plan of this tropical home is organized around a central patio and the exterior walls are actually perforated wooden screens, which take advantage of north winds off the sea. This keeps the interior cool despite blazing hot summer temperatures.

Elm & Willow House by Architects EAT

(images via: dezeen)
This U-shaped extension to a home in Canterbury, Australia encloses new rooms in a sliding glass ‘skin’ that can open them up entirely to the outdoors. Built on steel columns, the addition is suspended to avoid damaging the roots of mature elm and willow trees around which the extensions are placed to create a courtyard. Opening both rooms creates two separate outdoor pavilions that keep the addition from crowding the yard.

Chicken Point Cabin in Idaho

(images via: olsonkundingarchitects.com)
“The idea for the cabin is that of a lakeside shelter in the woods―a little box with a big window that opens to the surrounding landscape,” says architecture firm Olson Kundig Architects of Chicken Point Cabin in Northern Idaho. The cabin has a massive wall of windows measuring 30 by 20 feet that opens like a garage door, exposing the living space to the wilderness. The chosen materials, including plywood, concrete and steel, were left unfinished to age naturally “and acquire a patina that fits in with the natural setting.”

The Green Village by Ibuku, Bali

(images via: green village bali)
Like many other jungle climates, Bali is warm and humid with cooling breezes that come in off the water. Local architecture takes advantage of these breezes with open-air designs that let residents luxuriate in the temperate climate. The Green Village, a collection of bamboo homes by Balinese firm Ibuku, is a prime example of the beauty of this approach.

Open-Air Outdoor Kitchen

(image via: kbculture)
Showcasing the ideal compromise between a space that’s open to the wind yet protected from the rain, this outdoor kitchen by McInturff Architects is covered by a slanted roof and walled in on three sides, but large openings retain the connection to its natural surroundings.

Public Art: Tampere, Aakash Nihalani, Julian Beever, Banksy

2011-07-16T06:32:00.000-07:00

Street art guerrillas in Tampere, pt I - Preparing the Attack, October 12th 2009

Street art guerrillas in Tampere pt II - The Attack, October 13th 2009

Tampere graffiti

Aakash Nihalani: Cuban (Street Art)

New York Times article: Now Showing | Aakash Nihalani
There’s a renegade romance to street art — sprinting from cops, working in the shadows, using an alias, all in the name of art. But Aakash Nihalani, who creates trompe l’oeil 3-D boxes using tape on sidewalks and public surfaces, isn’t so cloak and dagger about things. He takes his time creating installations in broad daylight, makes videos of the process and even uses his real name.

3D Street Art With Julian Beever

Banksy in the West Bank

Art: Painting Reality, painting of streets in Berlin

2011-07-16T06:05:00.000-07:00

Public Art Project 'Painting Reality' Paints The Streets Of Berlin With Cars
Painting Reality
500 liters of waterbased environmentally-friendly paint on asphalt spread by 2000 cars.
2010 Rosenthaler Platz, Berlin

References:
MOMA, Kirchner and the Berlin Street exhibit

Energy: Wind Power Without the Blades, Big Pics

2011-07-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

Article and graphics published by Discovery News.

Wind Power Without the Blades: Big Pics
By Alyssa Danigelis

The Windstalk concept (Graphic source:GizMag)

Noise from wind turbine blades, inadvertent bat and bird kills and even the way wind turbines look have made installing them anything but a breeze. New York design firm Atelier DNA has an alternative concept that ditches blades in favor of stalks. Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when the wind sets them waving. The designers came up with the idea for the planned city Masdar, a 2.3-square-mile, automobile-free area being built outside of Abu Dhabi. Atelier DNA’s “Windstalk” project came in second in the Land Art Generator competition a contest sponsored by Madsar to identify the best work of art that generates renewable energy from a pool of international submissions.

The proposed design calls for 1,203 “stalks,” each 180-feet high with concrete bases that are between about 33- and 66-feet wide. The carbon-fiber stalks, reinforced with resin, are about a foot wide at the base tapering to about 2 inches at the top. Each stalk will contain alternating layers of electrodes and ceramic discs made from piezoelectric material, which generates a current when put under pressure. In the case of the stalks, the discs will compress as they sway in the wind, creating a charge.
“The idea came from trying to find kinetic models in nature that could be tapped to produce energy,” explained Atelier DNA founding partner Darío Núñez-Ameni. In the proposal for Masdar, the Windstalk wind farm spans 280,000 square feet. Based on rough estimates, said Núñez-Ameni the output would be comparable to that of a conventional wind farm covering the same area.“Our system is very efficient in that there is no friction loss associated with more mechanical systems such as conventional wind turbines,” he said.

Each base is slightly different, and is sloped so that rain will funnel into the areas between the concrete to help plants grow wild. These bases form a sort of public park space and serve a technological purpose. Each one contains a torque generator that converts the kinetic energy from the stalk into energy using shock absorber cylinders similar to the kind being developed by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Levant Power .
Wind isn’t constant, though, so Núñez-Ameni says two large chambers below the whole site will work like a battery to store energy. The idea is based on existing hydroelectric pumped storage systems. Water in the upper chamber will flow through turbines to the lower chamber, releasing stored energy until the wind starts up again.

The top of each tall stalk has an LED lamp that glows when the wind is blowing -- more intensely during strong winds and not all when the air is still. The firm anticipates that the stalks will behave naturally, vibrating and fluttering in the air.
“Windstalk is completely silent, and the image associated with them is something we're already used to seeing in a field of wheat or reeds in a marsh. Our hope is that people living close to them will like to walk through the field -- especially at night -- under their own, private sky of swarming stars,” said Núñez-Ameni.
After completion, a Windstalk should be able to produce as much electricity as a single wind turbine, with the advantage that output could be increased with a denser array of stalks. Density is not possible with conventional turbines, which need to be spaced about three times the rotor's diameter in order to avoid air turbulence. But Windstalks work on chaos and turbulence so they can be installed much closer together, said Núñez-Ameni.
Núñez-Ameni also reports that the firm is currently working on taking the Windstalk idea underwater. Called Wavestalk, the whole system would be inverted to harness energy from the flow of ocean currents and waves. The firm’s long-term goal is to build a large system in the United States, either on land or in the water.

References:
Land Art Generator Initiative
Gemasolar Concentrated Solar Power (Torresol Energy)
Wind turbine placement

The Promise of Wave Power

The Promise of Wave Power from Big Picture Productions on Vimeo.

Transportation: Bicycles, Bike-sharing program hopes to reduce traffic congestion

2011-07-14T06:12:00.000-07:00

Article published by the Austin KVUE.
(Comment: Alternative modes of transportation is often thought of as an alternative to reduce traffic congestion. I am yet to read a study or perceive field observation that shows this. In fact transit intensive cities that I have visited with large use of mass transit still have traffic congestion. Alternative modes are necessary for maturing transportation systems but multimodalism is not a SOLUTION to traffic congestion.)

Bike-sharing program hopes to reduce traffic congestion
by JESSICA VESS
Posted on July 14, 2011 at 6:03 AM
AUSTIN, TX -- Austin could soon take transportation in a new direction. A new bike-sharing program hopes to reduce downtown traffic congestion. On Thursday, Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop at 4th Street and Nueces will host a demonstration and have bikes available for people to try out.
The idea is similar to car-sharing programs currently in operation in Austin such as Car 2 Go. To participate in the B-Cycle program members have to purchase a membership car. A one year membership will cost most adults $60. Then, with the membership card, people can visit a rental location, swipe the card on the kiosk style machine and a bike on the attached rack will unlock, allowing for rental. Rentals do not include helmets.
B-Cycle is currently in operation in about half a dozen cities across the U.S. including Denver, Washington D.C. and recently San Antonio. San Antonio launched the program this past March.
In hopes of getting B-Cycle to Austin, Mellow Johnny's is teaming up with private supporters to partner with the City of Austin. They want to pledge a financial match to apply for a transportation grant. Supporters want to use funds from that grant to establish a B-Cycle system in Downtown Austin. The system would include about 50 rental stations and 550 individuals bicycles.

While B-Cycle supporters believe the system will help alleviate downtown traffic congestion, those who oppose the project say the funds can be better used on other transportation needs and projects.

Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop hosts its first demonstration of B-Cycle at 6:30pm Thursday evening.

Urban Planning: Central Texas, Georgetown proposed budget to raise tax rate

2011-07-14T06:02:00.000-07:00

Article published by the Austin American Statesman

GEORGETOWN
Proposed budget would raise tax rate
The average homeowner in Georgetown will have to pay $57.26 more in taxes if a proposed city budget is passed.
The proposed budget, presented in a workshop to the Georgetown City Council on Tuesday, would raise the tax rate 3.13 cents from the current rate of 35.62 cents per $100 of assessed property value. The owner of the average-value home, worth $198,055, paid $652.08 this budget year but would pay $709.34 after exemptions under the proposed budget for 2012.
Public hearings on the proposed budget will be held Aug. 9  and Aug. 18 at the City Council chambers at 101 E. Seventh St.

"One factor for a property tax rate higher than 2011 is the bonds approved by the City Council for two projects: Fire Station 5 on DB Wood Road and a new Fire Station 2 on Williams Drive at Central Drive," city spokesman Keith Hutchinson said.

Other capital projects that affected the proposed tax rate were approved by voters in bond elections and include design work for a public safety operations and training facility on DB Wood Road, the construction of Southeast Arterial 1, the widening of FM 1460 and the extension of a hike-and-bike trail from Blue Hole Park to 17th Street, Hutchinson said.

Transportation: Central Texas, Capital Metro ponders selling rights

2011-07-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

Article published by Austin American Statesman

CAPITAL METRO
Agency ponders selling rights
Capital Metro will consider later this month whether to pay a consultant $100,000 to analyze what the transit agency could earn by selling naming rights to train stations, bus routes and other facilities. Such a program, the agency said, would be an extension of the longtime transit industry practice of selling advertising on buses and trains.
A board committee voted unanimously Wednesday in favor of hiring IMG Consulting Inc. to produce the report. If the full board approves the contract July 25,  the company would have about six months for its review. IMG additionally might become the agency's sales agent for naming rights, netting 12 percent of what Capital Metro gets under the program. Capital Metro would retain the option to perform that duty in-house or contract for it.

Urban Planning: What Makes A City Smart

2011-07-13T21:19:00.000-07:00

What Makes a City Smart?

Transportation: Intelligent Cities, Long Bus, Short Wait

2011-07-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

Article published by Time magazine.

Intelligent Cities

TIME explores the evolving, deep-rooted connections between technology and ever expanding cities — from education and energy to government, health care and transportation

Long Bus, Short Wait

By Ayesha and Parag Khanna Monday, May 02, 2011

On April 5, Luciano Ducci, the mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, boarded the world's largest urban bus on its inaugural ride across town, marking yet another coup for the city's transportation system. Powered exclusively by biofuels (made from soybeans), the 92-ft.-long (28 m) megabus can carry 250 passengers at a time and makes just four stops along a 6-mile (10 km) route. With a projected fleet of 24 vehicles, the system will ferry an average of 25,000 people per day. Curitiba may be the original smart city. In the early 1960s, it was plagued by sprawl and congestion. Architect Jaime Lerner responded with the Curitiba master plan, an urban-design strategy whose centerpiece was an affordable and efficient transportation system. Adopted in 1968, the master plan became the cornerstone of Curitiba's design — and Lerner went on to become mayor. One of the hallmarks of the city is its public-private partnerships. In the 1970s, for example, Curitiba was fast approaching 1 million residents, the typical threshold for installing a subway system. However, the price tag was an unaffordable $300 million. Lerner presented the private sector with a unique solution: with the government, build a rapid bus system that would have all the amenities of a subway — speed, reliability, affordability and frequency. Companies would invest in the fleet of buses, and the government would chart the itineraries. The result — the bus rapid transit (BRT) network — became the world's first metronized bus system. More than 2.3 million people per day now travel on it, and Curitiba has the lowest level of atmospheric pollution in Brazil. At least 83 cities worldwide have copied Curitiba's BRT system. As rural populations rush into urban areas, the challenges thousands of cities face are congestion and traffic. In China alone, 350 million people will migrate from villages to cities by 2030. In Guangzhou, one of the fastest-growing cities in China, the BRT system carries 800,000 passengers a day and has cut the average commuting time in half. Major cities in the U.S. are also paying attention. On April 15 the Chicago Transit Authority approved a $1.6 million grant to explore introducing a BRT system along Western Avenue. One can only hope that New York City will make a similar move. Ayesha and Parag Khanna are directors of the Hybrid Reality Institute, a think tank that explores the implications of emerging technologies Urban Lessons The World's Smartest Buses Curitiba's busy system actually resembles a subway, with exclusive transit lanes, prepaid-ticket counters and bus sensors that communicate with smart traffic lights, allowing buses to move along at continuous speeds. China Syndrome Heavy traffic is endemic in the Middle Kingdom. That's why fast-growing cities like Guangzhou are adopting the BRT system to carry hundreds of thousands of passengers a day more quickly. Waste Not, Want Not Public-private partnerships make things work in Curitiba, where young children are taught how to separate garbage from recyclables and then go home and teach their parents how to do it too. (As a result, over 75% of total city garbage gets recycled.)

Transportation: Intelligent Cities, Strategic Singapore

2011-07-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

Article published by Time magazine.

Intelligent Cities

TIME explores the evolving, deep-rooted connections between technology and ever expanding cities — from education and energy to government, health care and transportation

Arteries Fearful that it will become overrun with vehicles, the government has damped demand by making them expensive. The price of a BMW 320i sedan, for example, is around $140,000, more than three times its average U.S. sticker price.

Strategic Singapore

By Neel Chowdhury Thursday, Mar. 03, 2011

For decades, Singapore has been tackling the growing pains of a booming Asian city. Fearful that it will become overrun with vehicles, the government has damped demand by making them frightfully expensive. The price of a BMW 320i sedan, for example, is around $140,000, more than three times its average U.S. sticker price, in part because a buyer has to fork out about $55,000 for a "certificate of entitlement." To lessen its dependence on water piped in from its sometimes prickly neighbor Malaysia, the city-state has made its gutters, drains and rivulets a vast basin to catch rainfall. To curb runaway real estate prices, the government recently slapped higher taxes on speculators who try to flip properties and placed limits on loan amounts for second homes. (See pictures of Singapore's high-tech road map to the future.) These kinds of policies would be denounced as antigrowth or intrusive in the U.S. In Singapore, they represent part of an almost scientific approach to growth. Last year, Singapore's economy grew 14.5%. Direct foreign investment increased 123%, to $37.4 billion. As the country attempts to lift its population by a fifth over the next two decades, from 5.08 million to 6 million, it is linking with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to devise ways to manage its expansion — knowledge it plans to export to other cities. (See pictures of how cities are powered.) Singapore is a proponent of clustering — attracting an entire industry segment so it builds on itself — and has made money and media two of its priorities. As for the former, Singapore is rapidly becoming the Switzerland of Asia even as the Switzerland of Europe clamps down on its banks, which were running afoul of U.S. tax law. Singapore, while a signatory to international banking covenants, has attracted billions of offshore dollars into its banking system, in part by offering Swiss-like confidentiality. Near its airport sits FreePort, where the wealthy can store, buy and sell artworks and other precious items tax-free, no questions asked. Meanwhile, companies are renting space in Mediapolis, a "media ecosystem," as the government calls it, that broke ground Feb. 11. It will include digital production and broadcast facilities and soundstages for content creators, building on an existing animation-industry cluster. Nearby are two other developments, Fusionopolis and Biopolis, which are hubs for engineering and biomedical clusters. Singapore has also recently attracted companies like Procter & Gamble, which is building a $250 million innovation center. This projected growth is going to be a handful to manage, so Singapore has turned itself into a laboratory, teaming with MIT to form the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) center to examine the "future of urban mobility" as well as other growth issues. Its purpose? "To study how cities work and how they can work better," says Rohan Abeyaratne, director of the center. Funded by Singapore's National Research Foundation, SMART has drawn nearly 600 researchers. (See more about intelligent cities around the world.) "Smart apps," downloaded onto commuters' mobile phones, will be the first fruits of the center's research. That's already happening in other cities, but making the lives of commuters easier is only a part of Singapore's plan. As it has done with water conservation — a clutch of innovative Singapore-based companies in that field are doing business in China and the Middle East — Singapore aims to profit from its growing expertise in urban mobility by exporting the apps to traffic-crippled cities like Bangkok, Mumbai and New York. "They [Singapore] see an enormous potential market in the future for urban transportation solutions," says Amedeo Odoni, the leader of the MIT-Singapore urban-mobility team and a professor of engineering at the university. "The game plan is to become one of the originators of ideas for China, India and the rest of the world. It's a smart strategy." (See TIME's video "What Makes a City Smart?") Singapore is even shedding its fearsomely dowdy reputation. The city that banned chewing gum has become more liberal in its approach to art and culture and has allowed two multibillion-dollar gambling resorts to be built. Just don't expect Las Vegas — style decadence. In Singapore, even the fun is well managed.

References:
Intelligent Cities

Philosophy: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault

2011-07-11T04:39:00.000-07:00

Philosophical discourse between Noam Chomsky and Michael Foucault

Transportation: Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy

2011-06-27T23:46:00.000-07:00

Article and photos published by the NY Times.

Pedestrians and trams are given priority treatment in Zurich. Tram operators can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt.

Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, published June 26, 2011
ZURICH — While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.
Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.
“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”
To that end, the municipal Traffic Planning Department here in Zurich has been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers. Closely spaced red lights have been added on roads into town, causing delays and angst for commuters. Pedestrian underpasses that once allowed traffic to flow freely across major intersections have been removed. Operators in the city’s ever expanding tram system can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt.
Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time.
As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city’s chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. “Driving is a stop-and-go experience,” he said. “That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.”
While some American cities — notably San Francisco, which has “pedestrianized” parts of Market Street — have made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States, where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched, Dr. Schipper said.
Europe’s cities generally have stronger incentives to act. Built for the most part before the advent of cars, their narrow roads are poor at handling heavy traffic. Public transportation is generally better in Europe than in the United States, and gas often costs over $8 a gallon, contributing to driving costs that are two to three times greater per mile than in the United States, Dr. Schipper said.
What is more, European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United States never ratified that pact.
Globally, emissions from transportation continue a relentless rise, with half of them coming from personal cars. Yet an important impulse behind Europe’s traffic reforms will be familiar to mayors in Los Angeles and Vienna alike: to make cities more inviting, with cleaner air and less traffic.
Michael Kodransky, global research manager at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York, which works with cities to reduce transport emissions, said that Europe was previously “on the same trajectory as the United States, with more people wanting to own more cars.” But in the past decade, there had been “a conscious shift in thinking, and firm policy,” he said. And it is having an effect.
After two decades of car ownership, Hans Von Matt, 52, who works in the insurance industry, sold his vehicle and now gets around Zurich by tram or bicycle, using a car-sharing service for trips out of the city. Carless households have increased from 40 to 45 percent in the last decade, and car owners use their vehicles less, city statistics show.
“There were big fights over whether to close this road or not — but now it is closed, and people got used to it,” he said, alighting from his bicycle on Limmatquai, a riverside pedestrian zone lined with cafes that used to be two lanes of gridlock. Each major road closing has to be approved in a referendum.Today 91 percent of the delegates to the Swiss Parliament take the tram to work.
Still, there is grumbling. “There are all these zones where you can only drive 20 or 30 kilometers per hour [about 12 to 18 miles an hour], which is rather stressful,” Thomas Rickli, a consultant, said as he parked his Jaguar in a lot at the edge of town. “It’s useless.”
Urban planners generally agree that a rise in car commuting is not desirable for cities anywhere.
Mr. Fellmann calculated that a person using a car took up 115 cubic meters (roughly 4,000 cubic feet) of urban space in Zurich while a pedestrian took three. “So it’s not really fair to everyone else if you take the car,” he said.
European cities also realized they could not meet increasingly strict World Health Organization guidelines for fine-particulate air pollution if cars continued to reign. Many American cities are likewise in “nonattainment” of their Clean Air Act requirements, but that fact “is just accepted here,” said Mr. Kodransky of the New York-based transportation institute.
It often takes extreme measures to get people out of their cars, and providing good public transportation is a crucial first step. One novel strategy in Europe is intentionally making it harder and more costly to park. “Parking is everywhere in the United States, but it’s disappearing from the urban space in Europe,” said Mr. Kodransky, whose recent report “Europe’s Parking U-Turn” surveys the shift.
Sihl City, a new Zurich mall, is three times the size of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Mall but has only half the number of parking spaces, and as a result, 70 percent of visitors get there by public transport, Mr. Kodransky said.
In Copenhagen, Mr. Jensen, at the European Environment Agency, said that his office building had more than 150 spaces for bicycles and only one for a car, to accommodate a disabled person.
While many building codes in Europe cap the number of parking spaces in new buildings to discourage car ownership, American codes conversely tend to stipulate a minimum number. New apartment complexes built along the light rail line in Denver devote their bottom eight floors to parking, making it “too easy” to get in the car rather than take advantage of rail transit, Mr. Kodransky said.
While Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has generated controversy in New York by “pedestrianizing” a few areas like Times Square, many European cities have already closed vast areas to car traffic. Store owners in Zurich had worried that the closings would mean a drop in business, but that fear has proved unfounded, Mr. Fellmann said, because pedestrian traffic increased 30 to 40 percent where cars were banned.
With politicians and most citizens still largely behind them, Zurich’s planners continue their traffic-taming quest, shortening the green-light periods and lengthening the red with the goal that pedestrians wait no more than 20 seconds to cross.
“We would never synchronize green lights for cars with our philosophy,” said Pio Marzolini, a city official. “When I’m in other cities, I feel like I’m always waiting to cross a street. I can’t get used to the idea that I am worth less than a car.”

A view of Zurich's Limmatquai, a riverside pedestrian zone that used to be two lanes of gridlock.

Transportation: China high speed train in final testing

2011-06-27T23:32:00.000-07:00

Report published by Aljazeera.
China high speed train in final testing
27 Jun 2011
China's new high speed rail network to halve travel time between Beijing and Shanghai.

Urban Planning: Reinventing Urbanism in a Time of Economic Crisis

2011-06-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

CED 50th Anniversary - Visualizing the Future of Environmental Design, Reinventing Urbanism in a Time of Economic Crisis. Speaker: Manuel Castells, University Professor and Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communications and Society, University of Southern California

Urban planning: Street fight, Landscape Urbanism versus New Urbanism

2011-06-22T01:46:00.000-07:00

Article published by the New Urban Network.

Street fight: Landscape Urbanism versus New Urbanism
In their first substantive dialog, landscape urbanist Charles Waldheim and new urbanist Andres Duany reveal that the issue is less about sprawl than what lies beyond everybody’s front door: The street
Author: Robert Steuteville, New Urban Network
For the better part of a year, an Internet controversy has simmered over the relative merits of New Urbanism, the most influential urban design movement for the last two decades, and Landscape Urbanism, embraced by Harvard but still the “new kid on the block.” To many planners, developers, and public officials, the debate — if they are aware of it at all — must sound academic. Yet the outcome could shape the built environment for decades to come.
Much of the discussion has focused on whether Landscape Urbanism, which specializes in expansive open spaces that celebrate ecological features, represents a greener form of sprawl. Based on the comments by Harvard’s Charles Waldheim, the biggest name in Landscape Urbanism, and a response by Andres Duany, the biggest name in New Urbanism, at the Congress for the New Urbanism June 4, the sprawl accusation seems misplaced.
The real issue is the design of what lies just beyond everybody’s front door. A little history is needed to explain how much is at stake.

It was Jane Jacobs who in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, praised the urban street, with its regular building frontages — a form of development that had been under assault since the 1920s from automobile-oriented planning and street design. That assault nevertheless continued for nearly a half century longer — until the recent housing crash — as sprawl marched across the land, lining thoroughfares with parking lots and garage doors.

The new urbanists took up the cause in the 1980s, arguing that well-ordered streetscapes were essential for walkability. Although new urbanists, who are champions of compact communities, have not vanquished sprawl, they have had a good deal of success in popularizing their ideas about walkable streets. Waldheim, a product of the University of Pennsylvania architecture program in the 1980s, noted that “New Urbanism has emerged as the default setting for urbanism in North America” over the course of his career.
Now a professor and chair of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Waldheim addressed about 1,000 CNU attendees in Madison, Wisconsin. He joked that he was “traveling under diplomatic papers” — an acknowledgment of new urbanist hostility toward Landscape Urbanism. He assured CNU that he fully supports “dense, low-carbon, low-emission development.” Landscape urbanists are “not apologists for sprawl,” he said, in response to characterizations in blogs.
Waldheim presented a development called Lafayette Park — a 78-acre modernist undertaking built in Detroit from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s — that clarified the real argument between Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism. Despite looking vastly different from any new urban development, Lafayette Park meets many of the goals of the New Urbanism, Waldheim argued. It is compact, has a mixture of housing types and uses, and is built with a connected network of streets. But Lafayette Park, designed by modernists Ludwig Hilberseimer and Mies van der Rohe along with landscape architect Alfred Caldwell, turns its buildings away from the street in favor of frontages that consists mostly of greenery. Lafayette Park shows that you “can do without that one particular tool” of buildings facing the thoroughfare, Waldheim said. He explained that this is a “substantive difference” between new urbanists and landscape urbanists.

This remarkably straightforward assessment also provided Duany with an opening. Hilberseimer provided “neither a garden in back nor street life in front,” Duany said, adding that “Density and urbanism are not the same.” Duany explained: “Unless there is tremendous density, human beings will not walk” except when there is appealing street frontage. He criticized Landscape Urbanism renderings that show park-like settings full of pedestrians. “I really doubt that the humans that have been Photoshopped in will be there” in reality, he said.

Waldheim took a brief shot at new urbanists’ love for interconnected street networks. “To the extent that you co-opt good new ideas, that’s to your credit,” he said, “but if each one of them maps easily on the 19th century street grid,” it raises a question of shouldn’t there be friction between these ideas and the new urban vision.

Landscape urbanists’ determination to leave streams and wetlands undisturbed, regardless of location, “clips the grid,” Duany said, explaining that to landscape urbanists, “the pipe is anathema.” Manhattan has 2,700 streams in pipes, he said. If each of these streams were respected ecologically, the city would be unable to operate a taxi fleet and its residents would be scattered far and wide, he said. The refusal to move water through a pipe to be processed elsewhere negatively affects density and increases automobile use — especially in urban centers. “Is not the urban core achieving environmental performance by other means?” he asked.

The Harvard professor’s strongest charge was leveled at the retro design tendencies of many new urbanists. “Your cultural program is circa 1979,” he said. According to new urbanists, he said, “the 20th century was meant to be seen as a historical anomaly. ... There is still a latent and poor neoclassicism at the core of New Urbanism.” Waldheim argued that young architects have a right to be “engaged in architecture as culture at the highest level” but to nonetheless pursue an environmentally conscious urbanism.
Duany agreed that “our greatest deficiency is first-rate design.” He added that Waldheim “was astonishingly informed” about New Urbanism’s vulnerability on this front. Landscape Urbanism is self-indulgent at times, but it is “ almost universally better designed and better presented.”
In New Urbanism, there’s very little hostility to modernism except that it displeases the market and therefore modernism is generally avoided, Duany added. Devotees of classical and traditional architecture, who gravitate towards New Urbanism, may disagree with Duany on this point.
Proponents of the two “urbanisms” can agree on measuring greenhouse gases and other aspects of environmental performance, Waldheim said. One unbuilt project that he presented, the Lower Don Lands on the Toronto waterfront, included Ken Greenberg, generally thought of as a new urbanist, acting as urban designer under project leader Michael Van Valkenburgh — a landscape urbanist. “I would put the density and carbon metrics” of that project “against any project in this room,” Waldheim said.

Waldheim also presented The High Line in New York City, which Duany said that new urbanists “adore.” But costs are an issue — The High Line “cost $30,000 per lineal foot. A good street costs $700 a foot,” Duany explained. “There needs to be a [Landscape Urbanism] proposition that is cost-effective.”

Landscape Urbanism, with only a handful of projects completed and these mostly parks, is untested in dealing with the problems of broad metropolitan areas — including downtowns, urban neighborhoods, and smaller cities and towns, where new urbanists have worked for decades. “We don’t have any dots on the map in the State of Florida,” Waldheim said, referring to scores of new urban projects in that state. “We have a lot of work to do to get to the position of hegemony that you enjoy.”
“As nonideological pragmatists,” Duany said, new urbanists “will absorb what works from Landscape Urbanism.” But, he told Waldheim,” if you don’t absorb [from new urbanists] the sidewalk street frontage and the ability to put a stream in a pipe. The hegemony will be unchallenged.”
The decline and then revival — the Death and Life if you will — of cities is one of the big trends of our time. Much of this revival has focused on the urban street, as articulated by Jacobs and the new urbanists, who have driven home, to audiences of all kinds of citizens for the better part of three decades, the importance of building frontages to lively streets. As creative as the landscape urbanists are, the presentation by Waldheim will leave many in doubt as to whether this group has received the message — and the degree to which Landscape Urbanism will promote real urbanism.

References:
Wikipedia - Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a theory in the last fifteen years and is far from being a coherent doctrine. Landscape Urbanism describes "the ability to produce urban effects traditionally achieved through the construction of buildings simply through the organization of horizontal surfaces"[1] . Charles Waldheim coined the term "Landscape Urbanism" to describe the recent emergence of landscape as a medium of urban order for the contemporary city [1]. "The origins of Landscape Urbanism can be traced to postmodern critiques of modernist architecture and planning."[2] Charles Waldheim, James Corner, Chris Reed, and Mohsen Mostafavi are among the instructors, practitioners, and theorists who have been most responsible for articulating the terms of Landscape Urbanism.

Urban design after oil: Charles Waldheim on automobility

New York High Line

Detroit Lafayette Park

Excerpt about 50-year anniversary article by Detroit Free Press.
Many neighborhoods have their fans, but few districts have drawn such widespread praise for so long as the near-east-side Detroit neighborhood known as Lafayette Park. Begun 50 years ago next month with its groundbreaking, Lafayette Park became the ideal to which most other urban renewal projects aspired but failed. Attractive both for its architecture and its landscaping, Lafayette Park then and now is a racially diverse, economically stable, garden-like enclave in the middle of a major city.

Education and History: The Secret History of Western Education: The Scientific Destruction of Minds - Charlotte Iserbyt

2011-06-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

Text from Wikipedia:
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt is an American freelance writer, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education during the first term of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and staff employee of the US State Department (South Africa, Belgium, South Korea).^[1]^[2] She was born circa 1930. Her father and grandfather were Yale University graduates and members of the Skull and Bones secret society.
She is known for writing the book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America that itemizes changes gradually brought into the American public education system that attempt to both eliminate the influences of a child's parents (religion, morals, national patriotism), and mold the child into a member of the proletariat supposedly in preparation for a socialist-collectivist world of the future. She documents the changes (as originating from the plans formulated primarily by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education, Rockefeller General Education Board), and the psychological methods used to implement and effect the changes.
In an interview^[2] concerning secret societies and the elite agenda she disclosed that in the early 1980s she had a chance to meet with Norman Dodd who had been the chief investigator for the United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations commonly known as the B. Carroll Reece Committee. Dodd had stated that members of a 'network' of individuals including Carnegie had wanted to bring about world peace by means of rapid changes in society brought about by involving the profane citizens in various wars and military conflicts. Rowan Gaither, the president of the Ford Foundation at the time of the Reece Committee investigation, had told Dodd that directives originating from the US President had been in effect compelling various related foundations to direct their funding into bringing about the comfortable merger of the USA with the Soviet Union.

Preface from Alex Jones:
Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of Ronald Reagan. While working there she discovered a long term strategic plan by the tax exempt foundations to transform America from a nation of rugged individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed minions who simply regurgitate whatever they're told.
Part one of our exclusive interview with Iserbyt breaks down how conditioning/training under a corporate agenda has replaced traditional education, leading to a deliberate dumbing down of Americans. Iserbyt further explains how Reagan signed agreements merging the U.S. and Soviet systems under the United Nations banner, turning over education and many other areas of public policy to global control.
This 74 minute exposé is a must see for anyone who wants to truly know why the education system is deliberately crafted to produce human drones with no critical thinking whose only skills are to be subservient, trust authority and follow orders.
Visit Iserbyt's website at http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Transportation: What makes a community livable? How about getting rid of cars?

2011-06-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

Article published by Sierra Club.

What makes a community livable? How about getting rid of cars?

By Tom Vanderbilt | Illustrations by John Blanchard

At the risk of sounding like your grandfather, I am about to tell you how I walked to school when I was a kid. It may not have been three miles, through heavy snowdrifts (though, since I lived in Chicago, there were those), but on most days, I walked. It was just what most kids did.
I didn't grow up in a walking paradise--the Web site Walk Score rates my suburban childhood neighborhood a 38 out of 100 on the walkability scale, giving it the blunt designation "car-dependent." Yet my school was only a half mile away, and there were sidewalks, something that was beginning to seem superfluous--deemed too costly or simply unnecessary--to the new communities being built nearby. A tragic fait accompli was set in place.

> Urban Transport Note: Oak Forest, Illinois appears to be a far cry from Anytown, USA. Following data is from city-data.com. Estimated median household income in 2009 was $68,883 and estimated median house or condo value in 2009 was $216,956.

Ethnic background:

White alone - 23,064 (83.2%)

Hispanic - 3,201 (11.5%)

Asian alone - 775 (2.8%)

Black alone - 361 (1.3%)

Two or more races - 324 (1.2%)

That my own experience now smacks of an antique exoticism shows just how radically the American landscape has been altered in the past few decades: Our towns and cities cater to vehicles, not to people.

>Urban Transport Note: are vehicles not people? The separation of people and vehicles dismisses the need that people have for a vehicle to enhance their quality of life.

Schools provide one of the best examples. In the early 1970s, slightly more than half of all American children walked or biked to school; today, only 15 percent do. Some of that is attributable to fear, be it of "stranger danger" (although violent crimes per capita have dropped since the 1970s) or of traffic itself (even though vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death in children). And in many cases, new schools are simply too far from homes. In 1969, roughly half of all children lived a mile or more from their school; by 2001 three out of four did.

> Urban Transport Note: Percentages and numbers can give different interpretations of reality. Also schools are different based on whether these are urban or rural as well as the city of the city.

To imagine a foot-friendly approach, consider the P. L. Robertson Public School in Milton, Ontario, which serves a relatively dense new subdivision in suburban Toronto. Robertson, where virtually all students live within the one-mile boundary deemed walkable, was planned with the ambitious goal of being a "walk-only" school.
Despite the students' physical proximity to the school, getting them to walk there was no easy task, according to Jennifer Jenkins, who works with Canada's Active and Safe Routes to School program. It wasn't just a matter of adding sidewalks and bike racks near the school, or establishing no-stopping zones to discourage car drop-offs.

Jenkins says it was about shifting behavior: "We're trying to change the social norm from driving to walking." That her program--which essentially teaches children and parents how to walk to school--even exists, she says, is "kind of scary."

Other sweeping changes have rolled through our towns and cities since my childhood. Between 1969 and 2001, the number of vehicle miles traveled--how much the average American drives in a given year--increased more than 150 percent. It's as if our romance with the car has turned into a dependency. What's more, this isn't solely about commuting (which represents only 14.9 percent of all trips taken) but also about "discretionary" driving--optional car trips that we're increasingly coming to see as necessary. McDonald's, for example, began opening drive-throughs at its restaurants in the mid-1970s. The chain now derives 65 percent of its revenues from them.
Compare vehicle miles traveled over the past few decades with American obesity rates during the same period. You will see that they both began to spike upward at the same time and continue to rise in lockstep. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that male residents of Salt Lake City who lived in walkable (denser and older) sections of town weighed an average of 10 pounds less than those who lived in less-walkable (spread out and newer) sections.
All that extra driving--people using a gallon of gas to get a gallon of milk--has turned us into high-octane petro-vores. Between 1960 and '70, the U.S. population grew by 13 percent while gasoline demand rose by 54 percent; the next decade, with the same population growth, gas demand increased by 17 percent.
The shift to sprawling development patterns and the turning away from once-common practices like walking to school are often defended as a matter of "choice"--one, of course, fueled by decades of government laws and incentives. The irony is that many communities today have no choice when it comes to transportation: We have created a vehicular monoculture. But there are signs that this is changing. First, we seem to be maxing out on just how much driving we're willing to do.
The total number of vehicle miles traveled dropped in 2007 for the first time since 1980. Another sign of change comes from the government. (>Urban Transport Note: Prior two 2007 the price of oil peaked twice causing people to modify driving habits. It is unlikely it was do to government urban planning policies.) In what it called a "transformative policy shift," the U.S. Department of Transportation announced in 2009 that it would work to foster "livable communities," which were memorably summed up by Secretary Ray LaHood: "Livability means being able to take your kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, drop by the grocery or post office, go out to dinner and a movie, and play with your kids at the park--all without having to get in your car."
This idea of "livability" was immediately subjected to political scrutiny. What was it, and who was the government to decide how people should live? Of course, government already tells people how to live, through zoning regulations. Such laws prevent a chemical plant from setting up camp next to your cul-de-sac, but they may also prevent developers from building denser, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods in areas used to expansive lots. Even in my own walkable, transit-stocked neighborhood in Brooklyn (whose Walk Score rating is 98), new housing developments are required to add costly parking facilities. And studies show that guaranteed parking places, not surprisingly, lead to more driving.
So, "livability" is a fine program for big cities, but what about smaller communities? As Missouri senator Kit Bond notes, he's "got a lot of constituents for whom livability means having a decent highway." But Beth Osborne, assistant secretary of the Transportation Department, notes that livable-communities programs can benefit towns and smaller cities, citing the department's efforts to restore neglected Main Streets in Missouri and install traffic-relieving trolleys in Maine.
Too often, livability is narrowly defined by such things as house size or price. By this measure, New York City "may be the most unlivable city in the United States," rail and smart-growth opponent Wendell Cox argues. But people tend to downplay how they're getting to that house. As the Center for Neighborhood Technology has shown in its studies of Chicago, the affordability of housing in farther-flung areas is eaten away by higher transportation costs. Not that city dwellers have to renounce cars: Car-sharing programs allow planners to talk about vehicle miles not traveled.
Transportation planner Ian Lockwood once told me he thought it was curious that when people described ideal vacation destinations, they were always, in essence, "livable" communities--whether the Main Street of Disney World or the mossy squares of Savannah, Georgia. Why, then, he asked, do they not seem to want to live that way? But consider the housing market in Denver: According to one report, the value of homes within a half mile of a light-rail station rose by 17.6 percent between 2006 and 2008, while the value of those in the rest of the city dropped by an average of 7.5 percent. The National Association of Realtors, in an April survey of prospective home buyers, found that 77 percent of home shoppers "would look for neighborhoods with abundant sidewalks and other pedestrian-friendly features."
For too long, we've let livability take a backseat to mobility, with negative consequences for health, community strength, and the environment. The projects on these pages show how a sense of balance can be restored. Someday, you may be telling your grandchildren how you used to be driven five traffic-clogged miles to school every day, and they'll shake their heads in wonder.

With enough willpower, many of us could abandon the family car for a bicycle, a sturdy pair of walking shoes, or public transit. But the effort is made much easier (and safer) if our communities lay the groundwork. Here are a few ways that cities, towns, and even rural areas can reduce our dependence on automobiles and their polluting fossil fuels.

HIGH-SPEED RAIL
Sleek trains that race between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Tampa and Orlando, and Milwaukee and Madison remain paper dreams, buffeted by reactionary politics and budgetary woes: $2.5 billion for high-speed rail was recently axed from the federal budget. But these energy-efficient substitutes for private vehicles and short-haul jets remain a great investment for the planet. California's proposed high-speed trains could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 12 billion pounds per year by 2030.

LOCAL TRANSIT SYSTEMS
Efficient, reliable local transit is key to getting people out of cars. Nearly three dozen light-rail systems operate in North America today; Denver and Charlotte, North Carolina, have particularly good examples. "Bus rapid transit," in which buses run in dedicated lanes, is a low-cost alternative to building train lines. While not as efficient as trains, buses use significantly less energy per passenger mile than cars, provided the buses are at least half full. Simple programs pay off too: Redesigned routes and discounted bus passes dramatically increased ridership in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois (population 140,000).

INCENTIVES and FEES
Instead of giving the oil industry $4 billion in tax breaks every year, the United States could get financially creative and give people incentives to drive less. Also, offering tax breaks and rebates can steer them toward high-mpg cars. Other tactics include taxes based on annual miles driven and "congestion pricing" (charging higher tolls on crowded roadways and at in-demand parking meters). "Pay as you drive" insurance pricing also discourages driving by basing premiums on a vehicle's annual mileage, a policy supported by the state of California to reduce traffic, pollution, and gasoline consumption. Mobility Choice, an organization focused on national-security issues posed by oil dependence, proposes that an "oil security fee" be levied per barrel or at the fuel pump.

SMART GROWTH
While auto-dependent sprawl shaped the U.S. landscape over the past 50 years, policies that encourage "smart growth" and transit-oriented development seek to put people ahead of cars. Zoning laws that allow denser communities and a mix of residential and commercial uses adjacent to transit hubs make automobiles accessories rather than necessities. For example, at Sacramento Senior Homes in Berkeley, California, 40 residential units were built above ground-floor retail spaces, all adjacent to public transportation--and with solar panels on the roof to boot.

COMPLETE STREETS
Why not design streets for everyone who uses them, not just drivers? That's the thinking behind "complete streets" policies: roads should be made safe for, and attractive to, pedestrians, cyclists, and public-transit patrons. The National Complete Streets Coalition (completestreets.org) includes AARP, the American Heart Association, and environmental groups. Club activists recently helped pass complete streets policies in Minnesota, Dubuque, Iowa (population 57,000), and South Kingston, Rhode Island (population 30,000).

PEDALERS and PEDESTRIANS

Designing bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure helps reduce vehicle miles traveled on a large scale and affects residents on an immediate and personal scale. Sierra Club activists recently persuaded Minneapolis officials to stripe two critical corridors for bike lanes to make commuter cycling more appealing. Capital Bikeshare (capitalbikeshare.com) provides a fleet of 1,100 bicycles at 110 transit stations around Washington, D.C. In Memphis--which has a 34 percent obesity rate--a network of walking and biking trails called Greenline connects neighborhoods with downtown and helps residents stay healthy.

HIGH-MILEAGE ROLLERS
When you're paying around $4 a gallon for gas, wouldn't you like your car to get 60 miles a gallon? The Sierra Club has joined a coalition of organizations to urge federal lawmakers to establish that fuel-efficiency standard, which would cut U.S. oil dependence by at least 49 billion gallons in 2030. At the same time, new greenhouse-gas pollution standards could reduce heat-trapping carbon pollution by 535 million metric tons. Automakers can reach those goals affordably by using lighter materials as well as off-the-shelf technologies like direct injection, dual-clutch transmissions, and stop-start technology, which shuts off an engine when the vehicle isn't moving. For more information, check out go60mpg.org.

Tom Vanderbilt is the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (Knopf, 2008).
This article was funded by the Sierra Club's Green Transportation Campaign.

Transportation: Runner Scott Birk killed in crash

2011-06-16T03:25:00.000-07:00

Article published by the Austin American Statesman.

Runner Scott Birk killed in crash
By Patrick George and Pam LeBlanc
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
A renowned member of Austin's running community died Monday morning after being struck by a car in West Austin. Police did not release the runner's name Monday, but friends identified the man as 48-year-old Scott Birk, a stay-at-home dad and prolific competitor in marathons and other races who regularly placed at the top of his age group.
According to police, a Dodge Durango was traveling south on RM 2222 at River Place Boulevard about 9 a.m. when it struck a man who was attempting to cross FM 2222. The Dodge had the green light when the pedestrian ran out in front of it and was struck, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver, who has not been identified, stopped to offer aid, police said. No charges are expected to be filed, they said.
...
They said Birk would get his son ready for school and then train in his neighborhood. He ran the same hilly route along River Place Boulevard nearly every day, logging about 100 miles a week. Neighbors plan to hang yellow ribbons along the road in remembrance of him.
...
Rogue Running coach Paul Salazar said Birk was a fixture at the Austin Marathon, the 3M Half Marathon and all the races in the local Distance Challenge series. Other runners often made the assumption that because Birk was tall, well over 6 feet, that he was slow.
...
John Conley, race director of the LiveStrong Austin Marathon and Half Marathon, said Birk ran the Austin Marathon in 3 hours, 16 minutes in 2010. "I just think one of the truly great guys in the running community is gone, and he'll be missed," Conley said.
Leaders in the running community said that in order to stay safe while training, runners should wear brightly colored, high-visibility clothing, always assume the driver of a motor vehicle is distracted, and avoid crossing against traffic lights at intersections and jaywalking. They should run on a sidewalk if possible and run against traffic in order to see what's coming.

Monday's was the 25th traffic fatality of 2011. At this time last year, there were 20, police said.

In May, pedestrian Courtney Griffin was killed in her Tarrytown neighborhood when she was struck by a driver who fled the scene. Gabrielle Nestande has been charged with failing to stop and render aid in that case. Police said they suspect alcohol was involved in the case, which remains under investigation.

A recent study by Transportation for America, a Washington-based policy institute, ranked the Austin-Round Rock area as the 18th most dangerous in America for pedestrians. The study ranked the country's largest metropolitan areas according to their relative risk to walkers. Austin had 231 pedestrian fatalities between 2000 and 2009, according to the study. The Houston and Dallas metro areas ranked ninth and 10th on the list, respectively.

pgeorge@statesman.com; 445-3548

Reference: Transportation for America, Dangerous by Design (PDF)

Transportation: Reverse-angle parking not quite as easy as 1-2-3

2011-06-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

Article was published by the Austin American Statesman.
Reference: Back-in/Head-out Angle Parking PDF published January 2005.

Reverse-angle parking not quite as easy as 1-2-3
Ben Wear: Getting There
I decided, first of all, to leave at home the precious new Mazda3 I just purchased. No, for an initial attempt at an acrobatic move like back-in parking, best to call on my creaky old Taurus. I went to work Tuesday in the pre-scratched warhorse, which has 155,000 miles on it and soon will become my 16-year-old's starter car.
I decided to go first to East Dean Keeton Street, where the city two summers ago installed about 220 "reverse-angle" parking spaces on the University of Texas' northeast edge. I spotted a row that, with most of the students gone for summer, was basically empty of cars. I slowed down for what the City of Austin, on its cheery signs, says is an "easy as 1-2-3" maneuver. Signal, stop, reverse.
Why engage in this harrowing exercise? In case you missed it, the city is about to make a prominent addition to what has been a limited stable of these off-kilter parking slots. Aside from the spaces on Dean Keeton, there are 27 on West Sixth Street a couple of blocks west of North Lamar Boulevard. That's it, until this summer. After a repaving project is finished next month on South Congress Avenue in the bustling shopping and dining strip between Riverside Drive and Oltorf Street, asphalt artists will paint in about 380 new reverse-angle spaces.
If you like Güero's, Allen's Boots, trailer cupcakes or weird costumes, well, you'll probably soon be learning the hard way to back into an angled space.
The point of all this, the city insists, is safety for drivers — and cyclists, but more on that later. A person parked in a back-in space can see clearly to the left when it's time to leave. And the driver exits forward, rather in reverse, which is easier. And backing into an angled space, city officials argue, is easier than parallel parking.
City officials point to 24 accidents over the past five years on South Congress that involved parking (4.8 a year, not exactly a pandemic of parking pandemonium). And they say only one parking accident has occurred on Dean Keeton since the reverse angle spaces went in. Of course, fender-denter accidents aren't always reported, sometimes not even to the absent owner of the victimized car.

City officials say, also, that reverse-angle parking is much safer for passing cyclists in bike lanes installed between the traffic lanes and the angled spaces. Bike lanes run along West Sixth and Dean Keeton. After the repaving, a bike lane will be drawn on the southbound side of South Congress.

You didn't learn how to perform this parking maneuver in driver training, by the way, and neither will my daughter. I called Austin Driving School, which has eight Austin locations and 17 statewide. No, they don't teach back-in angle parking, the woman who answered the main phone line told me after doing some checking. They do teach the difficult art of parallel parking, however.
And Department of Public Safety driver's license examiners, although they do force applicants to prove they can parallel park, do not test them on reverse-angle parking, spokeswoman Tela Mange told me.
We're on our own.
I wasn't on my own, however, on Dean Keeton. As I slowed, a gray Lexus behind me had to jerk to a halt. Dang. Forgot Step 1: signal. The Lexus changed lanes and accelerated off in that tire-screeching way that usually means the driver is irritated.
I looked over my right shoulder — twisting to look backward at age 57 is not as easy as used to be — and began to back in.
First time in, I was badly off center, with far more space to the stripe on the car's left side than on the right. The second time, I ended up cock-eyed, with my right back wheel actually in the next space. This, it turns out, is a common flaw. Many of the cars on Dean Keeton and, I discovered later, on West Sixth had this back right tire problem.
On my third attempt — this time I took the chance of parking between two actual cars — I figured out that swiveling around after I began backing up and looking over my left shoulder helped. I ended up basically straight in and centered. But it felt weird.

Over on busy West Sixth Street, where the spots are opposite the Z'Tejas restaurant and a series of shops, it feels more than weird to some of the shoppers and storekeepers. It feels wrong. One woman pulled her SUV in frontward. "Is that not what I was supposed to do?" she said when informed of her mistake. "It's so confusing. I thought, ‘What in the world? Why would they do that?' I don't care for it."

The 10 spaces in the section near Wiggy's Liquor Store have remained mostly empty during afternoon rush hours since the reverse spaces were installed in August, said Wiggy's owner Tim Kutach. He estimates that his business is off 15 to 20 percent. "Right now, it's prime time for me," Kutach said late one afternoon last week. People seem to think of liquor after a hard day's work. "But rush hour has the most intense traffic, so people don't want to park here. Thank God I have the two spots on the side (on Blanco Street), or no one would come."

On a clipboard near the door, Kutach has a stack of petition forms calling for a purge of the reverse-angle spaces. It has more than 500 signatures on it, but Kutach no longer plans to turn it in to the city. He said he knows a done deal when he sees one.
If all this had been done with the commuting cyclists in mind, they haven't gotten the message. Between 5 and 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, seven bikes came by, or about one every 41/2 minutes. Cyclists headed west into Tarrytown, after all, have the nearby off-street alternatives of the Lance Armstrong Bikeway and the hike-and-bike trail. Meanwhile, car traffic averaged about 30 a minute, or one every two seconds.
Some people did pull up, tentatively, from time to time and reverse-angle park. Generally, they needed a couple of back-and-forths to get centered or nearly so. One woman almost hit the car to her right while backing in. She squeezed out of her driver door and made her way into a shop.
Laura Singleton, an interior designer from Tarrytown, came up in a black SUV for a visit to Shabby Slips furniture. Because of all the empty spaces, she cut across them and then did a little maneuvering into a space. It took her awhile. "That is difficult!" she said after getting out. "I don't know why they did it." I told her about the bike safety thing. "How many bikers do you see going by?" she asked. We gazed up the crowded street at a slug of cars rushing toward us. The bike lane was empty. Singleton cocked an eyebrow. "My point exactly."
For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.

Reverse angle parking problem on 6th Street

Back In Angle Parking

Reverse parking

Transportation: Portland Lloyd District TMA

2011-06-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

Lloyd District TMAThe Lloyd Transportation Management Association is an action-oriented association working with businesses and public agencies in the Lloyd District to improve access and mobility for those who work, reside, shop and commute in and to the Lloyd District.

Architecture: 10 Amazing Staircases Around the Globe

2011-06-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

Text and photo was found in oddee

The Loretto Chapel is a chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, known for its unusual spiral staircase that is an exceptional work of carpentry. The construction and builder of the staircase are considered a miracle by the Sisters of Loretto and many who visit it, because it had no central support (a support was added later). The resulting staircase is an impressive work of carpentry. It ascends twenty feet, making two complete revolutions up to the choir loft without the use of nails or apparent center support. It has been surmised that the central spiral of the staircase is narrow enough to serve as a central beam. Nonetheless there was no attachment unto any wall or pole in the original stairway. Instead of metal nails, the staircase was constructed using dowels or wooden pegs. The wood for the staircase cannot be found anywhere in the region. The stairs had 33 steps, the age of Jesus when he died. The mystery had never been satisfactorily solved as to who the carpenter was or where he got his lumber, since there were no reports of anyone seeing lumber delivered or even seeing the man come and go while the construction was being done. Since he left before the Mother Superior could pay him, the Sisters of Loretto offered a reward for the identity of the man, but it was never claimed.
Note: some historians claime that most of this story is a myth. (Thanks, drxwes)

(Link 1 | Link 2 | Photo)

Architecture: House Ocho, Santa Lucia Mountains

2011-06-07T02:11:00.000-07:00

Article and photos published by archello.
House Ocho
Mon , 6 June 2011
Located in a nature preserve in the Santa Lucia Mountains, the site of oak forests and steep meadows strongly impacted and inspired Feldman Architecture’s design for House Ocho. In order to reduce the impact of the home’s massing and to preserve site lines, the building settles into the ground and overhanging roofs are planted with tall native grasses. The house is also divided up into a series of pavilions to lessen its overall mass.
After passing through an entry grove, visitors can see distant views between and over the various building elements. As they are drawn into the widening view, they are led down from the tree-lined ridge to a large terrace that serves as an outdoor living room for the house. Nearly every room has wide doors that open to the land allowing the modest home to feel much more spacious.

Transportation: US 'must regulate car pollution'

2011-06-04T15:26:00.000-07:00

US 'must regulate car pollution'
The Bush administration opposes capping greenhouse gas emissions
The highest court in the US has ruled that the government was wrong to say it did not have the power to regulate exhaust gases from new cars and trucks. Twelve states and 13 campaign groups brought the landmark case against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The US Supreme Court said the EPA had offered "no reasoned explanation" for refusing to regulate carbon dioxide and other harmful gas emissions from cars. The ruling was close, with five judges voting in favour and four dissenting. The justices had been asked to consider whether carbon dioxide (CO2) should be defined as a pollutant and therefore subject to a law regulating emissions.
The states and environmental groups who brought the case said the US government had a legal duty, under the Clean Air Act, to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA had argued that the 1970 Act did not give it the powers to impose limits because CO2 was not deemed to be a pollutant.
Greenhouse gases - which occur naturally but which are also emitted by vehicles - have risen sharply over the past century, and many scientists believe they are contributing to global warming.

Vehement opposition
Observers say this is one of the most important environmental cases to reach the Supreme Court in decades. The EPA argued that CO2 was not a pollutant it could regulate.
BBC environment correspondent Richard Black says it settles a dispute which dates back eight years, since before George W Bush came to power. The ruling says that unless the EPA can show that carbon dioxide is not involved in the warming seen around the world, the EPA should regulate it - and if it tries to make the case that CO2 is not involved, it would have a hard time winning it, our correspondent says. By itself the ruling does not mean the Bush administration will change its approach to climate change, he adds.
But, combined with the turnaround in Congressional attitudes since the mid-term elections, growing state level legislation and the adoption of "climate care" by Evangelical churches, it makes significant action at national level within the next few years a lot more likely, he says.
The Bush administration has consistently rejected capping greenhouse gas emissions, saying such a move would be bad for business. The court action was also vehemently opposed by car manufacturers and states where the car-making industry is important.
The ruling has been welcomed by US environmental campaigners, however, who have been fighting for greater regulation in a nation which accounts for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.

'Capricious' position
In arguments before the court, the EPA, backed by 10 states, four motor trade associations and two coalitions of utility companies, argued that it did not have the authority to control greenhouse gas emissions.
However, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, giving the majority ruling, wrote that the EPA's position was "arbitrary, capricious or otherwise not in accordance with the law".
"Because greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act's capacious definition of 'air pollutant', we hold that the EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of such gases from new motor vehicles," the court ruled. The justices also rejected the administration's argument that the situation was so serious that it could not be resolved by a court ruling.
"While it may be true that regulating motor-vehicle emissions will not by itself reverse global warming, it by no means follows that we lack jurisdiction to decide whether the EPA has a duty to take steps to slow or reduce it." The EPA said it was reviewing the court's decision in order to determine the most appropriate course of action.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry group representing the chief car makers in the US, responded by calling for "a national, federal, economy-wide approach to addressing greenhouse gases".

Architecture: K/R Architects, Parque de Levante Master Plan

2011-06-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

Article and graphics published by designboom.

New York based office K/R architects (John Keenen, Terence Riley) has unveiled their master plan for Parque de Levante, a 400,000 m2 park in Murcia, Spain. Snaking along the Segura River close to the city's historic center, the design revisits the idea of a 'museum-park' and aims to become a major art destination for the region.

Photo source Murcia Daily Photo.

Art: Blanton director resigns

2011-06-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

Photo by Gonzalo Camacho, The Blanton Museum of ART

Article published by Austin360.
Blanton director resigns
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin | Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Ned Rifkin, director of the Blanton Museum of Art, announced today that he will resign from his position at the University of Texas museum effective May 31. Director of the Blanton for just two years, Rifkin also holds a position as professor of art and art history.
Steven Leslie, UT executive vice president and provost, has appointed Simone Wicha, the Blanton Museum’s deputy director for external affairs and operations, as the new director, effective June 1. Wicha has been The Blanton’s deputy director for external affairs and operations since last year. Prior to that she was the museum’s director of development.
From the UT press release: “I began my professional career in 1977 as an assistant professor of art at The University of Texas at Arlington,” Rifkin said. “Currently, I have been leading a junior seminar in the Plan II Program here at UT Austin and I had forgotten how much I love to work closely with students on developing their learning skills.
“Much as I will miss working with the outstanding staff at The Blanton, I believe my eagerness to teach more and my desire to pursue meaningful research on a variety of topics will better suit me. I wish every possible success to The Blanton as it continues to offer quality programs to transform lives through art.”
Prior to his role at The Blanton, Rifkin was undersecretary for art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and directed the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Menil Collection and Foundation in Houston and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Article published by the Austin American StatesmanBlanton gears up for higher profile
After year on job, director hopes to boost image, add money for acquisitions.
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Saturday, July 10, 2010
The art at the Blanton Museum's "New Works for the Collection" exhibit tells a story. But that story isn't necessarily about art. It's about money — or the lack thereof. Of the 84 works on exhibit, only 20 were purchased with museum funds. The rest were donated.
Ned Rifkin, who took over as the director of the University of Texas museum one year ago this month, faces a big challenge on this anniversary: how to expand and raise the museum's status amid university budget cuts and the worst economic downturn in a generation.
"It's a very odd time to be trying to implement discernible change," Rifkin said. But that's what he plans to do. He and his staff have come up with a five-year strategic plan that he hopes will steer the nation's largest university art museum in terms of square footage into a new era.
The strategy centers on more fundraising from a wider base of donors. It also calls for streamlining programs and exhibits, altering the tradition-laden exterior of the building to better immediately identify it as an art museum, improving the visitor experience and positioning the Blanton to be the region's flagship museum.
"All museums are having to rethink themselves now," Rifkin said. "The times call for it."
The Blanton's plan comes as Austin's visual art scene is poised for major realignment.
In September, UT's art department will open the Visual Arts Center, a 22,000-square-foot space in the Art Building that will feature five galleries and host exhibits not just by UT art faculty members and students, but also by visiting international artists. The center is taking over the space that housed the Blanton until 2006.
Then in October, Arthouse, the arts center on Congress Avenue, will reopen after a $6.6 million architecturally adventurous renovation that will triple the gallery space to more than 20,000 square feet. Arthouse is known for presenting cutting-edge contemporary international art. (Meanwhile, the Austin Museum of Art remains in its temporary home in the lobby of an office building while its plans for a major facility of its own are on hold.)
It's time for the Blanton to raise its profile, Rifkin suggests. "We can't do this without Austin, and we want (the city's) engagement," Rifkin said. "But (does Austin) really want a dynamic, vital art museum, and is that museum the Blanton? I want to make a case for the Blanton."
However, Rifkin wonders whether Austin is ready and willing to return the interest. "I think as Austin grows and deepens, hopefully people will see what (the Blanton) can offer and want to take a leadership role in supporting it," he said. "Yes, we're UT's museum of art, but that doesn't mean UT or the state is really supporting us to the extent that it also fully serves the community of Austin."
The museum's current budget is $5.8 million, down from $6.4 million in 2006, the year the Blanton opened the doors to the first building of its new two-building, $83.5 million complex, prominently perched on the south edge of campus.
About $2.1 million, or 36 percent, of the Blanton's budget comes from UT and the state. But the museum has to come up with the rest. About $1.6 million comes from grants, memberships and contributions. About $1.4 million comes from revenue generated by the Blanton's endowment of $30 million. And about $700,000 comes from admissions, museum shop sales and facility rentals.
Museum attendance held steady in 2009 at about 130,000, and the Blanton's membership roll totals 5,667. "We don't necessarily have fewer donors, just substantially lower donations than we've had in the past," Rifkin said. "And UT has already gone through one across-the-board budget cut, and we've been warned to anticipate another. How that will affect the museum is hard to know until we know what the (budget cut) might be."
It's relatively rare for a university-based museum to aspire to be a city's flagship art destination. And the Blanton isn't directly comparable to many university art museums, much less flagship city museums such as the Kimbell in Fort Worth or Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.
Collegiate museums usually start as modest student-focused affairs within an existing art department, rely almost wholly on gifts of art and money from alumni and hence develop with collections that usually lack depth and are sometimes even eccentric.
"University museums aren't typically the places filled with great masterpieces," Rifkin said. They're "usually very idiosyncratic institutions."
The Blanton has fared better in its 47 years than many other university art museums and not just in terms of its big, new home, the biggest donation to which, $15 million, came from the Houston Endowment Inc. in honor of oilman and UT alum Jack S. Blanton. Blanton himself donated $5 million toward the new facility, and the late novelist James A. Michener donated $10 million.
The Blanton's collection of modern Latin American art is recognized as one of the best in the nation. Its collection of prints and drawings is one the finest in the region. And the museum has strong holdings in European art from the 14th century to the 18th.
But in financial terms, its status shrinks. Currently, endowment funds earmarked for acquisitions provide just a little more than $100,000 per year — small change in a global art market.
The Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque art, valued at $35 million, ranks as the Blanton's most important single acquisition to date. The Blanton paid $22 million for the collection in 1998, with descendants of the Suida-Manning family counting the remaining $13 million as a donation.
More recently, the Blanton has found support from a few philanthropists such as Austin residents and UT alumni Jeanne and Michael Klein, who have begun to make significant gifts of contemporary art. The Kleins, who made their fortune in oil, are recognized as some of the top private collectors in the world.
But even given the recent generosity of a few supporters, the Blanton can't compare to such collegiate museums as Harvard University's Art Museum, where in 2008 Emily Rauh Pulitzer, widow of newspaper scion Joseph Pulitzer Jr., gave $45 million in cash and nearly $200 million worth of paintings by Picasso, Modigliani, Giacometti and other top artists.
In Texas, the Blanton's resources also don't compare. Houston's Museum of Fine Art has an endowment of about $780 million, down from nearly $1 billion before the 2008 stock market crash. Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum derives about 65 percent of its $12 million annual budget from an endowment that currently stands at about $398 million. And last year, the Kimbell made world headlines when it purchased — for an undisclosed sum — Michelangelo's first known painting, "The Torment of Saint Anthony," a work so rare no expert in the art world would put a value on it.
"We're severely undercapitalized," Rifkin said. And he knows it's his job to find more money. "This is a more challenging job than I've ever had before."
Rifkin, 60, came to the Blanton from Washington, where he had been the undersecretary for art at the Smithsonian Institution, the top administrator overseeing eight museums. He resigned from the Smithsonian in 2008 and was taking a year to pursue independent projects when he accepted the Blanton job. He replaced Jesse Otto Hite, who retired in 2008 after 30 years with the Blanton.
Earlier jobs included stints as director at Houston's Menil Collection and Atlanta's High Museum and as an art professor at UT-Arlington. At the University of Michigan in the 1970s, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on avant-garde filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. In addition to his position at the Blanton, Rifkin holds a professorship in UT's art and art history department. He plans to teach a seminar this year.
Rifkin has spent much of his first year getting to know the myriad social circles that orbit around UT. He is a sports fan, having played basketball as an undergraduate at Syracuse University. So rubbing elbows with alumni at UT home games has been part of his circuit.
Still, Rifkin admits there is much to learn about his new hometown, where live music and film dominate the arts scene. "Austin's visual arts have the potential to be as important as the music scene here, but it will take some time," he said. "My goal is to make a reach into the community and make the case for why (art) is valuable for the community to support."
Rifkin also realizes that much of what people know about the Blanton is the storied architectural controversy that resulted in the museum's conventional Spanish Revival style and a building many don't recognize as an art museum. Architectural experts advocated a modern design, but university regents favored a more traditional style in line with the campus's older buildings.
Rifkin acknowledges that in terms of a building, he has to make do with what's already been done. "Some of the feedback we got (during interviews with visitors) is that people don't even know this is an art museum," Rifkin said. "And that's the aftermath of the decision of the regents to make (the building) look integrated with the rest of the campus. What (the regents) might not have realized is that they were taking away one of the major levers a museum can offer: a sensational building."
To address that issue, the strategic plan calls for more visible banners on the building's exterior and better signs on nearby streets. Rifkin and the Blanton curators also will begin to consider what kind of sculpture or multimedia artwork such as video projections might be suitable for the plaza or other outside areas.
"This building really needs some élan," Rifkin said. "We need to ... make it more inviting and visible."
Inside, Rifkin wants to step up efforts to make museum information immediately available to visitors. He also has asked curators to rethink how and where exhibits can be presented, as well as make better use of hallways and other spaces. Rifkin said the popular Petrobelli Altarpiece exhibit in last fall became a case study for future efforts. It featured a large-scale reconstructed multipiece Italian Renaissance altarpiece painting by Veronese, on loan from several museums. It was a one-painting blockbuster that drew in crowds.
"It may be time for doing fewer things, but with more creativity," Rifkin said. "I want the Blanton to be not just a place but a force for creativity and culture."

Architecture: Hand-Build an Earth Sheltered House For $5,000

2011-06-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

Article and photos published by Green Buildings.

Hand-Build an Earth Sheltered House For $5,000
December 1, 2008 in Energy, Energy Efficiency, Green Construction, Green Design

Cash, that most basic element of our economy, can be in abysmally short supply for new young families scraping by on marginal jobs. Sustainable housebuilding may not be foremost in their minds. But one young couple in Wales managing on an annual income of just $10,000 went ahead and built their own cheap home anyway, sustainably, mostly out of materials from “a rubbish pile somewhere.”
They had wanted to spend as much time as possible at home while their two children were young. Their nearby woodlands ecological management work would have been impractical if they were paying a mortgage.

So they enlisted some help from family, and sometimes just from people passing by, and from any of their friends who stopped by to visit: The result was their very low impact homemade house. A hand built unique setting for a charmed life for their two young toddlers. I’ll bet they’ll remember this first home for the rest of their lives.

Four months of hard work and they were all 4 moved in and cozy.

Total expenditure? $5,000. Tools? A chisel, a chainsaw and a hammer. Building expertise? Simon Dale says: “My experience is only having a go at one similar house 2yrs before and a bit of mucking around in-between. This kind of building is accessible to anyone. My main relevant skills were being able bodied, having self belief and perseverance and a mate or two to give a lift now and again.”

Sustainable design and construction:
Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
Frame constructed of fallen trees from surrounding woodland
Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally very easy to do
Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture compared to cement
Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
Other items were reclaimed from “a rubbish pile somewhere”: windows, wiring, plumbing
(Maybe there should be a new LEED rating just for building so inexpensively: Sustainable Financing. This is one mortgage bill that’s not going to be haunting their mum and dad for years.) Inside there’s a wood-burner for heating – waste wood in the old-growth forest is locally plentiful.To get the most of the heat, the flue goes through a big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly releases the warmth.
There are just a couple of solar panels – just enough for for lighting, music and computing. It’s a simple life. A skylight in the roof lets in enough natural feeling light, and water is fed by gravity downhill from a nearby spring. There’s a compost toilet. Roof water collects in a pond for gardening.
Says Simon: “Our house is unusual but the aesthetic appeals to lots of people and perhaps touches something innate in us that evolved in forests.”
Want to try making one too? Simon will show you how or check out other green homes for more ideas and inspiration like this post on building a cob house.
Images: www.SimonDale.net

Related stories:
Berkeley’s Homeless Build Paleolithic Barbecue Pit
Earthsheltered Home Construction Work Exchange
Wildfire-Proof Prefab Camp Closes Up When You’re Gone
Hard Lessons in Sustainable Living

Transportation: Before Bike-Share Effort Starts, Concerns Are Raised About How It Will Work

2011-06-04T14:43:00.000-07:00

Photo and article published by the NY Times.

Yannick Grandmont for The New York Times. In Montreal, a kiosk operated by Bixi, the city's bike-share program.

Before Bike-Share Effort Starts, Concerns Are Raised About How It Will Work
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: June 3, 2011
The Bloomberg administration is only months away from rolling out an ambitious bike-share program intended eventually to rival ones in London, Paris and Washington, yet the proposal has already been plagued by questions of its viability. Community board members have raised concerns about whether bike-share kiosks and racks would encroach on precious sidewalk areas, or swallow parking spaces. Some of the more seasoned bike-share companies did not bid on the project.
And Alta Bicycle Share, one of the two finalists vying to run the operation, has run into financial problems in Montreal. Government officials there eventually provided $108 million in financing to Alta’s partner, Public Bike System Company, in part to cover losses incurred by Bixi, the city’s bike-share program.
All things considered, it has been somewhat of a bumpy start for a program that could help shape Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s legacy of leaving a more environmentally friendly city.
When the city issued its request for proposals last November, it called for “financially self-sustaining, 24-hour transportation that complements existing transit and transportation options.”
The city called for a 30-station test program to start later this summer and for the official program, featuring 10,000 bicycles at 600 stations, to start on April 1, 2012. The city emphasized that not only would it not finance any part of the program, but it also expected the winning bidder to share its profits.
With each news conference and public event, the mayor’s enthusiasm has grown.
“Every city that I’ve talked to mayors in around the world, it’s one the most popular things they’ve ever done,” Mr. Bloomberg said last month. “I would expect it to be popular here in the city.”
Sean Sweeney, who runs the SoHo Alliance and is chairman of the landmarks committee for Community Board 2, said he liked the idea of a bike-share program. But he fears that the Transportation Department will just add the kiosks to the packed streets of SoHo with little feedback from the community.
“We want our sidewalks back; the sidewalks in SoHo are not for sale,” Mr. Sweeney said. “Our sidewalks are precious to us because they are so narrow.”
Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, declined to comment on the city’s plans.
Many leading bike-share companies expressed early interest in the city’s proposal. Wayne Sosin, president of Worksman Cycles, a bicycle manufacturer based in Queens that placed an unsuccessful bid for the contract, said representatives from some of the biggest bike-share companies in the world were at a meeting in December about the program: Cemusa, responsible for the Barcelona and Madrid programs; J. C. Decaux, which designed the Paris program; and Clear Channel, which started the Washington program but later abandoned it.
But while other cities have given advertising companies unlimited opportunities to use the bike-share program, New York specified there could be only one advertising sponsor per bicycle and on each station computer unit.
Mr. Sosin said that when Worksman approached Cemusa, J. C. Decaux and Clear Channel to possibly team up with them on a proposal, they all declined and did not bid. Risa B. Heller, a spokeswoman for Cemusa, said the company passed it up because “right now we are focused on our street furniture contract in New York City.” J. C. Decaux did not return calls and e-mails; Nancy Zakhary, a spokeswoman for Clear Channel Outdoor, said she could not “comment on prospective bids and strategies.”
In March, the city narrowed its field from six bidders to two: Alta and B-Cycle, which is affiliated with the manufacturer Trek, and has done programs in Chicago and Denver. Trek did not respond to requests for an interview.
Roger Plamondon, the board chairman of Public Bike System, said his company had the financial resources to come to New York, despite its issues in Montreal. In 2009, Bixi’s first year, the program lost $5.5 million; last year, it lost $7 million, Mr. Plamondon said.
The City of Montreal lent $37 million to Public Bike System to be repaid over 12 years and guaranteed a $71 million private loan to help finance the expansion of its programs.
Mayor Gérald Tremblay of Montreal said he supported the bailout because it would help preserve a popular program, and because Public Bike System showed promise in developing international programs patterned after Bixi.
“My intent is not for Bixi to make money,” Mr. Tremblay said. “But it is for Bixi not to lose money.”
Mr. Plamondon said he underestimated how long it would take to secure financing to help pay for its expansion.
“I can guarantee you we are not on the brink of bankruptcy,” he said.

Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.

Education & Funding: Austin Indidendent School District Budget

2011-05-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

Austin ISD 2010 annual budget report

Page 41
Table 33. 2010-2011 GENERAL FUND REVENUE
Local Sources $628,727,327 (75.03%)
State Sources $172,890,382 (20.63%)
Federal Sources $36,357,018 (4.34%)
TOTAL $837,974,727 100%
Local Property tax provides the greatest revenue by far.
Table 34. 2010-2011 GENERAL FUND EXPENDITURES
Instruction $453,324,501 (53.7%)
Instructional Leadership $58,084,782 (6.88%)
Student Support $68,006,394 (8.06%)
Administration $17,390,323 (2.06%)
Plant Maintenance & Operations $105,677,742 (12.52%)
Ancillary Services $5,765,867 (0.68%)
Debt Services $1,194,300 (0.14%)
Capital Outlay $1,320,000 (0.16%)
Intergovernment $133,466,818 (15.81%)
TOTAL $844,230,727 (100%)
Instruction tops spending categories.
Quote from AISD: "AISD will face major budget challenges for 2011-12, and expects those difficulties to continue for the next few budget cycles. However, we remain committed to redirecting costs to balance the budget. But, given the state's fiscal condition, we do not expect any relief from the Texas Legislature. In fact, we are bracing ourselves for a shortfall that could reach as high as $100 million."

AISD faces $95M cut over 2 years
planned cuts shown in article for next two years
Austin
YEAR 1 - $37,275,473
YEAR 2 - $58,387,240

Urban Planning: Saint Petersburg Unveils Primorskiy Zoological Park Studded With Geodesic Domes

2011-05-30T07:16:00.000-07:00

Article and renderings published by Inhabitat

Saint Petersburg Unveils Primorskiy Zoological Park Studded With Geodesic Domes
by Lori Zimmer, 04/23/11
Bruno Tanant and Jean Christophe Nani of TN Plus recently teamed up with Aldric Beckmann and Françoise N’Thépé of Beckmann N’Thépé to unveil a stunning new zoo for Saint Petersburg, Russia. The architects' proposal moves the zoo outside of the town, creating a sprawling series of wildlife preserves that cover 300 hectares of land. Inspired by Pangea, the zoo was designed to represent a reunion of South East Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, North America and Eurasia.
As population density in Saint Petersburg has risen over the years, city’s roads and sidewalks have become increasingly crowded. The city decided one way to ease this congestion was to relocate the historic zoo, so they created an international competition to design the best zoo possible.
The architects’ proposal moves the zoo outside of the town, creating a sprawling escape that covers 300 hectares of land. Inspired by Pangea, the zoo was designed to represent a reunion of South East Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, North America and Eurasia. The area chosen has an ample water supply, so the team designed a lake-like zoo, with each “continent” represented by islands. Each island will contain ecological samples and animals indigenous to each continent. “North America” and “Eurasia” will be connected by a pack of ice from the Arctic Pole. Bubbled steel and glass domes cap the animal pavilions, and lush greenery and foliage surrounds the entire park.
The zoological park was also designed to be respectful of the environment and green consciousness. In the past, zoos have looked almost like prisons for animals. Tanat, Nani, Beckmann and N’Thépé eschew that stereotype, creating an oasis that offers a bit of respite from congested city life.

Education: David Icke, How to change our Reality 2011

2011-05-28T05:56:00.000-07:00

Exposing the dreamworld we believe to be real - David Icke web page

David Vaughan Icke (born April 29, 1952) is an English writer and public speaker best known for his views on what he calls "who and what is really controlling the world." Describing himself as the most controversial speaker in the world, he has written 18 books explaining his position, dubbed New Age–conspiracism, and has attracted a substantial following across the political spectrum. His 533-page The Biggest Secret (1999) has been called the conspiracy theorist's Rosetta Stone.^[1]
Icke was a well-known BBC television sports presenter and spokesman for the Green Party, when he had an encounter in 1990 with a psychic who told him he was a healer placed on Earth for a purpose. In April 1991 he announced on the BBC's Terry Wogan show that he was the son of God, and predicted that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. The show changed his life, turning him practically overnight from a respected household name into an object of public ridicule.^[2]

Art: AMOA, Arthouse to start merger talks

2011-05-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

Article and photo published by the American Statesman.

AMOA, Arthouse to start merger talks
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Signaling a possible major shift in the cultural landscape, the Austin Museum of Art and Arthouse are to begin discussions of merging, leaders from both institutions announced Thursday.
Lynn Sherman, board president of the Austin Museum of Art, said that a task force involving board members from both institutions has been formed but that discussions have not yet begun. Sherman said no timetable has been set for any decisions. "We're not going to do anything rash, but we're committed to moving discussions along," he said. "We've gotten enthusiastic response from both boards to move ahead with the task force."
Both AMOA and Arthouse are private nonprofit organizations funded by a combination of private, foundation and corporate donations as well as public grants. Artistically, the two institutions have missions that could be compatible. And each organization has something the other wants.
AMOA presents exhibits that essentially span the past century of art, and it has a modest permanent collection. It also operates Laguna Gloria, a historic home that shows small exhibits and has a 12-acre site in West Austin. But after October, it will leave its temporary downtown space at 823 Congress Ave.
Arthouse has a permanent downtown home and presents strictly contemporary art, but does not maintain a permanent collection.
Issues that would need to be addressed might include how the two organizations would financially merge and what name such an institution would bear. The possibility of a merger has the support of one major Austin philanthropist and world-recognized art collector. "I think it's a natural," said Mickey Klein, who sits on the board of Arthouse and, with his wife, Jeanne, has amassed one of the best private contemporary art collections in the country. "We're in a small city with a limited base of donors for the arts, and we're all after the same dollar, which is diminishing. We don't need competition. We need collaboration."
Late last year, AMOA became arguably the most cash-rich arts institution in Austin when it ended its nearly three-decade bid to build a museum of its own downtown and sold its vacant lot adjacent to Republic Square Park to Travis County for $21.75 million. AMOA also has an endowment of $3.5 million.
The contemporary arts center Arthouse, in turn, recently emerged as a trendy downtown cultural destination after a $6.6 million architecturally sophisticated renovation of its historic building at Congress Avenue and Seventh Street. But each organization has had its share of problems recently.
The sale of its lot in December capped AMOA's expansion efforts that since the early 1980s included scrapping designs by two prominent architects and spending more than $16 million in two lengthy attempts to build downtown, leaving arts supporters cautious about the museum's ambition. In January, museum officials announced that Dana Friis-Hansen had left as executive director. And in February, AMOA decided that it would not renew its lease at 823 Congress Ave., a gallery space it has rented since 1995 in order to have a downtown presence.
Arthouse, meanwhile, reopened its Congress Avenue building in October after a much-celebrated renovation. The new facility expanded Arthouse's galleries by nearly threefold, and the organization's programs were ramped up. On reopening, Arthouse also doubled its staff and its budget. But when the building opened, Arthouse leaders reported that they had raised only $5.4 million toward a $6.6 million goal, and rumors of financial difficulties swelled. It has since reduced its budget to $1.1 million and eliminated staff positions.
In April, the organization's artistic credibility came under the art world's scrutiny when it was revealed that Arthouse leaders had allowed Warner Music Group to modify British artist Graham Hudson's installation "Rehearsal at the Astoria" for a promotional event during the South by Southwest Music Festival. Arthouse officials did not seek Hudson's permission, which raised the specter that the organization was in violation of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which grants artists the right to prevent modification to their work. Several board members, including prominent Texas artist Dario Robleto, resigned in the wake of the dustup.

Any merger between AMOA and Arthouse would follow a recent national trend as museums try to sustain their operations amid an economic downturn. Earlier this month, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art said that it would take over the Whitney Museum of American Art building after the Whitney moves to a new location in 2015. Also in New York, the Museum of Modern Art recently announced that it was buying the neighboring building of the struggling American Folk Art Museum.
A merger of AMOA and Arthouse would reunite two organizations born as one a century ago. Formed in 1911, the Texas Fine Arts Association hosted exhibitions and promoted art. In 1943, Clara Driscoll deeded her mansion and property known as Laguna Gloria to TFAA. In 1961, Laguna Gloria Art Museum Inc. was made a separate entity. TFAA continued to office in an outbuilding on the Laguna Gloria property until 1997, when it moved downtown. About the same time, Laguna Gloria Art Museum changed its name to the Austin Museum of Art. In 2002, TFAA rebranded itself as Arthouse.
jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

Arthouse
Organizes its own exhibits by national and international contemporary artists.
Has no permanent collection of art.
Sponsors triennial $30,000 Texas Prize, awarded to a Texas-based artist.
Offers artist members access to creative and professional-development opportunities.
Hosts art education programs for teens.
Location:700 Congress Ave.
Annual budget: $1.1 million

Austin Museum of Art
Organizes its own exhibits and hosts traveling exhibits focusing on 20th-century and contemporary art.
Has a modest permanent collection of modern and contemporary art from the United States.
Sponsors triennial "New Art in Austin" exhibit.
Operates a community art school
Hosts art education programs for elementary schoolchildren.
Location: Laguna Gloria, 3806 W. 35th St., and currently leases galleries at 823 Congress Ave.
Annual budget: $3.1 million

Education: Some Austin students struggle to meet graduation requirements, including 29% at Eastside Memorial

2011-05-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

Article published by the American Statesman.

Some Austin students struggle to meet graduation requirements, including 29% at Eastside Memorial
By Melissa B. Taboada and Laura Heinauer
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Austin school district officials changed Johnston High School's name, redesigned its approach to teaching the curriculum and were required to replace more than three-quarters of its faculty, but it appears the campus, which has struggled for years to meet state academic standards, again will rank among Austin's most troubled schools.
More than 29 percent of students at what's now Eastside Memorial Green Tech High School at the Johnston Campus will be ineligible to graduate next week after failing state-mandated exit exams.
Overall, 92 percent of Austin students passed the exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, which matches the statewide average, according to figures released Thursday. The numbers varied from school to school: 21 percent of seniors from Reagan and LBJ high schools failed to pass; the highest exit-level passing rate, 100 percent, came from the Liberal Arts and Science Academy .
Students must pass all four parts of the exit-level exam, and pass their classes, to receive a diploma from Texas public schools. Students had five chances, beginning their junior year, to pass the exams before graduation, but 194 Austin students did not pass one test, and 117 needed two or more tests, district documents show. In all, 33 Eastside students didn't pass in time for graduation, although they can continue to test to get their diplomas.
Austin school district officials didn't respond to repeated requests for more information or comment Thursday.
In a statement, officials said preliminary results from the first 2011 TAKS administration show that in four of five test subjects, districtwide passing rates for all grades will either improve or remain the same. Passing rates for reading fell 1 percentage point — the statement wasn't more specific — in four grades.
The district's statement did not mention the exit-level exam at all.
"As another school year comes to a close, it's rewarding to know that the hard work of our teachers and students has paid off," Superintendent Meria Carstarphen said in the statement. "There is little doubt, that rule changes announced by the (Texas Education Agency) Commissioner on April 23 (regarding not using a formula that boosted some campus accountability ratings in the past) will have a significant negative impact on campus ratings."
An Austin school district spokeswoman said late Thursday afternoon that she couldn't speak on the exit-level results and that at least one administrator who could was away from the office at a retirement party.
A performance administrator, when questioned Thursday via cellphone text messages, replied that he couldn't comment because he didn't have the district's data on hand.
Statewide, passing rates on the TAKS test have ticked up since 2003, when the test was first administered. Passing standards have gotten tougher over the years as well.
State accountability ratings won't come out until the end of July. How the district and its individual campuses rate this year is significant, because state ratings may stick for two years. The Texas Education Agency is moving from the TAKS to the new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, starting with third- to ninth-graders in 2011-12. And during the transition, the state won't count results from that test for accountability ratings.
Also, the state this year won't use the Texas Projection Measure, which counts as passing the TAKS some students who didn't, based on past and anticipated improvement. "With the changes that are occurring we do expect to see a decrease in ratings, not just for schools but also for school districts," said Round Rock school district Superintendent Jesús Chávez. He said scores in his district — where 91 percent of 11th-graders passed the TAKS on the first try — may be lower this year because teacher layoff announcements came just as testing was getting under way.
"It has impact (on) the mental state of teachers and students who were very worried that their teacher had been let go. It's probably not in the best state of mind in performing your best," Chávez said. "It's not an excuse for lower scores, but it does have an impact."
Not all area districts had a chance to analyze their data as of Thursday. Last year, the projection measure, boosted three Austin schools from "academically unacceptable," the state's lowest rating, to "academically acceptable."
Despite the curve last year, Eastside Memorial has failed to meet state standards for the past two years. The campus was Austin's only unacceptable school in 2010.
Schools that received the rating for three years in a row can be repurposed, turned over to alternative management or closed . A law passed by the state House and Senate this session also allows parents students in chronically underperforming schools to request that the state education commissioner order closure.
Johnston was previously closed in 2008. The so-called accountability clock started over when it reopened as Eastside.
Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said the school's fate won't be decided until final test scores and completion rate data are available in the next few months. She said it would be unusual for a school that had only three years of low performance to be closed but added that Eastside Memorial does have a unique history.
Austin district officials, meanwhile, already have made plans to strengthen the school. Eastside Memorial, which houses the Green Tech and Global Tech academies under the same roof, will be consolidated under a new principal and could get yet another new name , according to plans the school board approved Monday .
The district has plans to increase instruction time, place teachers and staff on improvement plans and use more data-driven instruction. The district may use an outside group to help reform the school, district documents show.
mtaboada@statesman.com; 445-3620

Austin district 2011 results
High school Students who failed the   exit-level TAKS
Akins 9%
Anderson 1%
Austin 7%
Bowie 2%
Crockett 4%
Eastside Memorial Green Tech 29%
Garza Independence 7%
Lanier 16%
Liberal Arts and Science Academy 0%
LBJ 21%
McCallum 3%
Reagan 21%
Travis 13%
Districtwide 8%
Texas 8%
Source: Austin school district

Transportation: Bicycles, Bike Hanger

2011-05-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

Article and photos published by Manifesto Architecture. Concept under development in Soul, Korea and London, England.

Bike Hanger

Art: The astonishing 3D murals painted on the sides of buildings by a trompe l'oeil artist

2011-05-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

Photos published by Daily Mail.

Off the wall: The astonishing 3D murals painted on the sides of buildings by a trompe l'oeil artist

By Daily Mail Reporter
15th July 2009

Treasure trove: An Egyptian style mural adorns a wall in Los Gatos, California. Pugh paints people into the mural to heighten the 3D effect

Wonder wave: John Pugh's Mana Nalu mural in Honolulu. Fire crews rushed to save the children from the mighty wave - before realising it was an optical illusion

Having a cow: Valentine's Day, a mural unveiled during the Global Mural Conference in Twentynine Palms, California