Explaining U.S. infrastructure and how now is the time for a new New Deal

In my day job, I communicate about flashy topics like driverless vehicles, supply chains, e-bikes and e-scooters, and the psychology of how people think (or don't) about how they get around.

I also spend time trying to understand things like how culverts impact geology, more sustainable pavements, and how "accessible floating bus stops" can be safer for blind people or others with disabilities. These are parts of our highly complicated infrastructure network that allow us to get from point A to point B without batting an eyelid. But should anyone else want to try to figure out how this highly complex puzzle fits together, Deb Chachra's new book - How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World - is as good of a place to start as any.

In fact, many people should want to understand infrastructure better, whether it's transportation-related or how we get our water or electricity, because President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act is starting to funnel more money into the industry than has been done at any time since FDR's New Deal to combat the Great Depression nearly 100 years ago. Much of the future of the U.S. workforce will depend on how much a wider net of people knows how the system works.

Chachra is a materials science professor at Olin College in Massachusetts and is a great communicator about tough topics. She details how we drive or take transit on a highly integrated system, turn on lights from a complex grid, cook dinner with gas, and drink water from separate grids that might be bringing the materials from somewhere close but more likely quite far away.

The Washington Post's book review notes, "As Chachra explains, you are living in the lap of luxury without realizing it. The great gift of our infrastructure is that it gives us agency over our lives, liberating us from everyday drudgery."

This luxury, on the other hand, turns into a political liability in that we don't honor or consider "essential" our utility workers in the same ways that we do our firefighters and police officers, which leads us to forget and neglect these systems in ways that can result in catostrophic events like bridge collapses and river breaches.

Chachra says we need to think big, like they have done in Wales with a place called Electric Mountain, where, inside a beautiful, seemingly unperturbed mountain water flows down inside and is then sucked back up in a perpetual renewable energy turbine system generating power to nearby communities. She argues that these kinds of projects can be done both sustainably and humanely, unlike her example of Niagra Falls, which saw the U.S. governement using eminent domain to flood the land of the Tuscarora Nation.

She writes that this system of displacing apparently less powerful people in the name of progress for those living in higher and varying degrees of luxury has got to stop. Part of this could be accomplished by making electric grids much more local and not tied to the national grid, and also using the source (water, wind, solar, geothermal) that makes the most sense for their own situations.

The other major change needed that she writes about is the need to take profit motives out of the infrastructure equation. The systems need to be resilient to the many growing threats presented by increasingly regular natural disasters. That, over profits, needs to be the focus of the massive investment about to hopefully create a whole new revised infrastructure system for the country.

Taking Fewer Car Trips is the Best Thing You Can Do for the Environment

OPTION OPPORTUNITY

Reshaping our streets for all sorts of travelers will be relatively inexpensive and bring great economic and environmental rewards.

This article originally appeared on Triple Pundit.

As leaders from around the world are meeting over two weeks in Paris to advance collective action on climate change, it’s heartening to note that transportation continues to gain prominence as an accepted path to cleaning up pollution.

In order to keep global temperatures below levels that are dangerous to humans, transportation offers both the curse of being the fastest growing source of CO2 in the world and the blessing that offers significant hope: if we can reduce the number of cars on the road and, more importantly, the number of total trips, then we can cut the 27 percent of greenhouse gases that originate from transportation vehicles in the U.S.

Perhaps most crucial of all to transportation goals than the UN’s Conference of Parties 21 meeting is the parallel launch in Paris of the Climate Summit for Local Leaders. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and Michael Bloomberg, just named the first-ever UN Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, lead the group.

City officials in attendance are learning from each other what can be done. For example, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto is focused on the conversion of his city’s vehicle fleet to fossil-free fuel for a 50 percent reduction in GHG emissions. Olympia, Washington’s Mayor Stephen Buxbaum stresses the importance of consistent, public reporting of his city’s climate data as a way to show how action affects change. And Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has ambitious climate goals, which include engagement with employers to reduce commute and business trips.

Determining which modes to promote from an environmental standpoint

This isn’t about granola-crunching hippies with anti-car axes to grind. Cars are great. They can be beautiful. They can be a life-safer, like when you’re running late and have three kids to drop off at three different play dates. They can even – every great once in a while – truly take you away for a refreshing, exhilarating Sunday drive that’s mostly free from stressful, annoying traffic jams.

But those kinds of uses are becoming less and less commonplace in a landscape that is simply becoming too crowded to continue incentivizing people to use personal vehicles for all their trips.

The environmental benefits are clear for fewer drive-alone trips. The University of California and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy recently found that pollution in cities can be cut 40 percent by 2050 by more people switching from cars to taking trains or buses, bicycling, or walking. That, in turn, would put about $100 trillion back into the economy.

How universities (and maybe someday schools) are on the leading edge

It’s no accident that traffic seems considerably more pleasant the moment you enter many university campuses around the U.S. They have been some of the most forward-thinking entities on designing spaces that make it easier to get from place to place. For example:

• As part of its master plan, Lehigh University in Pennsylvania is moving car travel to the periphery to make it a more walkable campus.
• Free transit passes, a campus bikeshare program, and implemention of a $150 charge for an annual parking pass have helped Westminster College in Salt Lake City reduce its drive-alone rate for students and faculty from 77 percent to 57 percent in just four years.
• Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., added 40 electric golf carts to its fleet to improve the way employees move about campus.
• The University of Kentucky’s Lexington campus offered a $400 voucher for students to use at local bike shops if they agreed not to bring a car to campus for two years.

And, as researcher Todd Litman notes, these programs (which he lists in detail at his website) are often “particularly effective and appropriate in such settings. It is often more cost effective than other solutions to local traffic and parking problems, and students and employees often value having improved transportation choices.”

One area, however, where much improvement is needed is at elementary, middle and high schools throughout the country. The fact that Mobility Lab published an article with this headline – Arlington County First in Nation with Program to Ease Public-School Staff Commutes – earlier this year indicates a big problem.

“Jurisdictions have typically focused on reducing car trips for students – like under the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, which gets them thinking about walking or biking to school. But the drive-alone rate for Arlington Public Schools staff is a surprisingly high 88 percent, compared to 53 percent for the county overall,” said Elizabeth Denton, business-development manager for Arlington Transportation Partners, which partners with APS in the ATP Schools Champions program.

“Staff at Discovery Elementary School, which is brand new and is also one of three net zero schools in the nation, is forming carpools and establishing walking groups. H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program started a student after-school bicycle club. Other schools are conducting staff commute surveys and working with Safe Routes to Schools to start walking schools buses and to incorporate bicycle and pedestrian education into PE and health classes,” she said.

Denton promotes the Champions program using environmental messaging, which she says is an important motivational factor for school staff. APS is a “green” school system, ranked third nationally in green-energy usage by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The research presents a compelling path forward

Two studies by Susan Shaheen of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley have the data that could prove influential in getting more people to understand the power of reducing car trips as a way to save the economy and the environment.

She studied what the effects of the growing trend in ridesharing would be. Two of the positive factors include potential monthly savings for those who change from driving alone to pooling in some way of $154 to $435 and a decrease in their contribution of greenhouse gases.

And just recently, the Natural Resources Defense Council announced an upcoming study with Shaheen’s group to determine the environmental impact of major ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft and whether they are indeed – as these companies have hinted – removing the total number of car trips from the nation’s roads. The recent launches of uberPOOL and Lyft Line, which hold great potential for reducing car trips, could help change a long-held societal distaste for riding in cars with strangers.

Sure enough, the Mineta Transportation Institute recently found that uber and Lyft may be reducing vehicle miles traveled in the San Francisco region by as much as 23 percent.

Whether those numbers add up or pan out over time, at this point, it’s safe to say that we have reached an important period when truly realistic “future of transportation” scenarios like autonomous cars, electric vehicles, ridesharing, and an on-demand economy present an opportunity – a glimpse in time – when we have a chance to redefine and reinvent the ways we travel and go about our business.

How can leaders in business and policy connect the environment and transportation for people?

Bike advocates have been buzzing about it for a long time now, but truly, one of the best things company leaders and politicians can do is call for better bike infrastructure. Once that happens, it will be much easier for all those Americans with bikes sitting unused in their garages for the past two years to gain the confidence needed to ride sometimes instead of drive.

Some of the most compelling recent evidence for how much bicycling matters to local transportation networks comes from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. It found that if cities work harder to get people to bike, carbon emissions from urban transportation could be cut 11 percent.

The growing trend of bikeshare systems in cities, towns, and campuses is a really easy way for business and city leaders to influence the transportation system and increase everyday satisfaction and happiness of employees and constituents. Since 2009, when there were virtually no bikeshare systems in North America, more than 50 cities and towns – from New York City to Birmingham, Alabama – have added them to their transportation networks.

Other low-hanging fruit includes:

• bike parking and amenities like showers and lockers in office buildings
• policies and programs that consider increasing carsharing and ride-hailing and the subsequent decreasing need for parking, and
• education and outreach efforts to improve public-transportation ridership in low-income areas.

Many business executives may fail to focus on how their workforce gets to the office, but any company – big or small – can reap economic and social benefits of promoting the kind of perks provided by LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn has a handful of bikes on site that employees can take to meetings or even to their homes as a way to have healthier, happier workers and a cleaner environment. A similar program at Facebook – still in its early stages – actually helped increase the share of people who bike to work from 1 percent to 6 percent.

Further, streets present a huge opportunity for local transportation departments to do much more than simply patching potholes. With local governments strapped for cash and infrastructure getting worse, an easy sell for politicians ought to be: one mile of protected bike lanes is 100 times cheaper than one mile of roadway, and lots more environmentally friendly.

Transportation thought-leader Chris Hamilton notes, “If we make our streets more people centered, and if we help make it easy for more people to walk, bike, and take transit, our cities will be more prosperous. More physically healthy. More mentally healthy. And more green.”

Here are eight practical ways to help the environment through your personal transportation habits. What are other ways to help?

Photo: Metro riders board at NoMa-Gallaudet Station in Washington, D.C. (Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab, www.kittner.com)

Hushpuppy from Beasts of the Southern Wild Deserved the Best Actress Oscar

I already mentioned here that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained would have been my Oscar winner. But another nominee who should have won was Quvenzhane Wallis for her role as little tough Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild.

I've long held a strong distaste for Best Actress winner Anne Hathaway, which makes it even more bitter to swallow this Oscar crime. But award or not, Beasts is a treasure of 2012 and a classic worthy of being ranked comparatively well with the other greatest indie movies of all time.

The large themes of global warming and Hurricane Katrina and abject poverty are captured compellingly by telling the story of this young girl and her abusive but somehow likable and sympathetic father simply trying to get by in the swamps of Louisiana. Their community is called "The Bathtub" and it's an amazing insight into a fascinating way of life that has somehow been under-explored in pop culture.

There's also a small side story of beasts being released from the melting icecaps in the Arctic. This is fantastical, and works in powerful ways that the recent film version of Where the Wild Things didn't.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Welcome to My World for 15 Days: Durban, South Africa

So this is my fourth night in Durban, South Africa to attend the annual UN climate conference and I have yet to post a single blog post. I've been working the usual 18 hours a day and there's just no time.


I stayed in tonight to find some down time, but it's now 1 a.m. and I've finally just stopped working long enought to write this. Not that I'm complaining. It's fun and challenging work. And Durban is really interesting. Here's a little of what I've learned so far.

Durban is the third largest city in South Africa. A guy named Raj, who I met while pedaling bicylces that power up the lights on an art installation in front of my hotel, said it has a population of 6 million.

Durban has the biggest population of Indians anywhere outside of India, which probably explains why most of my meals have been Indian. In fact, Raj called in my meal for me at the delicious Jewel of India restaurant.

The Southern Sun North Beach lobby staff is the friendliest I've ever encountered at a hotel. I didn't really want to use my iPhone so Robert and Robert (their actual names) found an old phone in the lost-and-found and gave it to me to keep until I check out.

The city purports to be the busiest port in the country, which is why it's amazing that the entire beach front as far as the eye can see from my 22nd floor hotel room is so beautiful. There are restored sand dunes, an amazing skate park, a "minature things" park, and a promenade that stretches for miles along the beach.

Here's something amazing. I've jogged twice down the promenade on the beach in front of my hotel. I hate jogging. But it's nice breaking it up in the middle with some peddling on the aforementioned solar bicycles along the area in front of my hotel, which is called "The Golden Mile."

The rooftop pool, as you can see in the photo, is pretty sweet too. I filmed some interviews of my colleagues for our Planet Change blog there and took a short dip in the water as well.

Some of the bad things about Durban. The rate of HIV/AIDS is 38 percent. The air is polluted, and is especially harsh on those jogs. I'm told that it can be a violent city, and that people don't get mugged, they get mugged and then punched in the face. Luckily, I've only been affected by one of these three so far. I can't seem to get the smog-induced frog out of my throat that's been in there since my arrival.

The Beginning of Summer in Photos

I haven't been blogging as much as normal. And since a picture tells a few words, perhaps it's easiest to give you an update of how my summer is starting off with a few shots.

It's already somehow been three weeks since the family returned from our annual pilgrimage to Emerald Isle in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. Jackson had a great time this year getting to meet his cousins from Nashville: 3-year-old Andrew (pictured, watching Jackson ride his bike in front of our beach house, the same one we've rented out for the past three years) and 5-year-old Alexander.

Last week featured a lot of America's Pastime. My St. Louis Cardinals were in town. Unfortunately, the Washington Nationals were in the midst of a rare hot streak and swept the three-game series. Good thing I'm a Nats' fan as well. The Tuesday night game I saw with my friend Jeff included the return of Ryan Zimmerman to the Nationals' lineup after a lengthy injury. It didn't seem like it was going to make much a difference when the Cardinals were up 6-1 after homers from Albert Pujols and Lance Berkman. But the Nats rallied for an 8-6 win. It was one of the most exciting games I've ever seen. Luckily I skipped Wednesday's 10-0 game. I returned with Jeff again, as well as Rachel, Jackson, Theo, and others from Rachel's work crowd, for a thrilling walk-off win by the Nationals. And, as you can see in this photo, Jackson was happy to have met Screech and try his first cotton candy, which gave him plenty of energy to stay up well past the time when we got home, after 11 p.m.

And finally, I just returned from a quick trip to the Ohio office of The Nature Conservancy in Dublin, outside of Columbus. I didn't have time to explore the city (Ohio's largest), but did have some pretty good pad thai and ice cream in the 'burbs. We're exploring starting a public-education campaign on climate change in that state, which is experiencing more extreme drought conditions around its crown jewel, Lake Erie.

Hope everyone is having an equally busy and entertaining start to your summers.