Planners Using Twitter

As many of you know I tweet as @theoverheadwire. Same planning stuff with a bit of personal mish mash. It's interesting to see how we use blogs and twitter differently. As of late, I've stopped posting a lot of my Notes posts and left most of the articles to twitter. Sometimes that's annoying as it doesn't allow much editorializing due to the character limit, but it allows me to do more generally.

In any event, I think twitter can be used effectively. I recently had a phone chat with Kristen Carney (@cubitplanning) about how I got started on Twitter and why I use it. I'll admit, it's not for everyone, but it certainly is useful at finding lots of quality information and news. And no, you don't have to know whats going on with Britney Spears or Ashton Kutcher because you can choose not to follow them!

Also, Kristen has a post about twitter happenings at the APA conference.

Music Friday - Take the Light Rail

"If your cars too spendy and your bike is too slow, it will take you anywhere you want to go"

Music Monday - I'll Take My Board

You take your car to work, I'll take my board. And when you're out of fuel, I'm still afloat - Weezer

Frank Lloyd Wright the Villain?

There was an interesting Talk of the Nation episode on NPR about a month ago that discusses how Women as consumers are becoming a greater force and how smart businesses are changing to accommodate their needs. Keeping clean restrooms in auto dealerships and pointing to the room number on a sheet instead of saying it out loud in hotels are some of the changes that Paco Underhill writes about in his books that make a huge difference in safety and return business.

In this clip however, he talks about his belief that Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Ford were the greatest villains of the 20th century in their encouraged suburban development taking us away from the beneficial village community and pushing us to rely too heavily on automobiles and suburban development. It's an interesting listen and while we often think about Hummers as the suburban evil and now folks see them in that way, another thing is houses and their true needs. People often talk about McMansions but do people really need $30,000 Wolf Ranges as well? Likely not but I hadn't thought of these extra issues before. It makes me wonder what else we are McMansioning.

It also makes me think about the flat that my parents had in Rotterdam. It was a very nice place and livable. Everything was available close by and the fridge was smaller than most here given you could get to the store everyday. The washer and dryer were small by American standards but again very efficient. Not everyone really wants to live that way of course but again there is this need to have choices for people such that they can decide how they want their lifestyle to play out.

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But even though FLW and his broad acre city plan were something that some think led to a suburban ideal, there were obviously much larger forces at work (which we've discussed in many a post before). So I don't know if I would call him a villain, just someone who saw the car and suburban lifestyle coming before its time. If you had to pick just one villain, who or what would it be? Eisenhower Freeway System? Lending Practices? Zoning Laws?

The Discussion is Lacking

This exchange on Real Time with Bill Maher between Chris Matthews and Ross Douthat is the perfect example of why this country is so misinformed. While Chris goes on extolling the virtues of High Speed Rail, all you can hear Ross say is that Amtrak is heavily subsidized. No mention of highway subsidies or other market distortions, just the fact that Amtrak is government run. And no one really fights back. Never mind that most of the time it has to borrow tracks or has a higher operating recovery ratio than any other mode in this country.

Anyway, listen to the exchange and see how the country can be mislead so easily by people that don't discuss things with the facts. I always say this when I listen to people I think might be smart talk about a subject I know something about, but I need to remind myself that if they are this unintelligent about a subject I know about, how much do they know about things I don't know about, and what kind of misinformation am I getting on other subjects?

You can listen here before the flash uploads.

For some reason the embed feature wasn't working. The audio is still at the link above...

People of the Green Book

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The audio above is Andres Duany at this last weeks CNU Transportation Networks Summit. Now I don't agree with everything Andres says. A lot of times he drives me nuts when it comes to transit modes like streetcars because he'll go into a city and say something completely crazy like limiting streetcar distance or density before transit which are things I haven't agreed with. But in this instance he makes a lot of sense.

I often wonder if we're over engineering our light rail and streetcar lines as to render them so expensive that the BRT folks swoop in and say cheaper is better. The first lines we built in this country were on shoestring budgets with off the shelf vehicles and know how from folks that operated streetcars that were discontinued. As we get further away from that knowledge base, we continue to gold plate systems using super heavy catenary that is aesthetically displeasing and have been perhaps over lawyer-ed. But the technology remains basically the same, just as the automobile and we've lost a lot of that knowledge.

What Andres talks about in losing knowledge of how to build roads is seen in our cities where cars go too fast and road diets are often the new buzz word. What the engineer knows comes from the engineering manuals. Yet there is years of knowledge out there and best examples in our cities and existing rail lines that we can learn from. The clip is about 4 minutes. I cut out the part I thought was interesting from the 30 minute talk. So enjoy. I hope to do more of these audio things now that I have a recorder.