You want to build a school, it's bad. A new bus facility is bad. A bike
path is a 'bike freeway,' and a four-story affordable housing project is a
'skyscraper.' . . . The future could look like Carmel, a nice place with no
services that nobody can afford to live in.
-- Mike Rotkin, UC Santa Cruz lecturer, SF Chronicle, 2001 Aug. 22.
In the past decade, highway construction in major American cities
outpaced population growth, and still congestion worsened-and
worsened most precisely where the most new roads and
highways were built.
-- U.S. News & World Report, 2001 May 28.
If environmentalists were leading the way, they would be doing more
advocacy work in our urban centers, marching for new buildings.
Instead, they have been leading the NIMBY wars.
The success of Formula One is that it follows the rules
of classical theater. It has unity of place, unity of action,
unity of time. It's a race that lasts one and a half to two
hours. It's always the same distance. It's always at the
same places. And it always has the same actors.
--Gilles Pernet of France's TF1 television network.
Exhaust Legislation May Hit a Red Light
SACRAMENTO -- Legislation to make California the first state to
regulate tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases, a suspected cause of
global warming, is foundering in the Assembly amid a lobbying and
advertising blitz by automakers, car dealers, oil companies and
organized labor.
The measure by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) has already
cleared both houses by rail-thin margins and needs only final
approval of the Assembly to reach the desk of Gov. Gray Davis. But to
the dismay of the environmental groups behind the legislation,
support is eroding, and the bill may now be defeated.
"All the Suburbans they don't sell here they will sell in Texas, and
there will be just as much emissions of CO2; only Californians will
have less choice and more expensive cars," said Peter Welch of the
California Motor Car Dealers Assn.
Even as places like Austin and Seattle are thriving, much of the
country is failing to adapt to the demands of the creative age. It is
not that struggling cities like Pittsburgh do not want to grow or
encourage high-tech industries. In most cases, their leaders are
doing everything they think they can to spur innovation and
high-tech growth.
But most of the time, they are either unwilling or unable to
do the things required to create an environment or habitat attractive
to the creative class. They pay lip service to the need to 'attract
talent,' but continue to pour resources into recruiting call centers,
underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls, and
squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium
complexes. Or they try to create facsi of neighborhoods or
retail districts, replacing the old and authentic with the new and
generic---and in doing so drive the creative class away.
-- Richard Florida.
[Also see City Life, and NYT coverage.]