Modeshift

It’s an odd sight to venture to the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s upper peninsula and see dry dirt where there used to be water. Lake Superior, which holds 14 percent more water than the four other Great Lakes combined, is 18 inches below normal, lower than it’s been since 1926.

We’re sort of used to low lake levels out here in the upper Midwest. Not long ago Lake Michigan was so low that the bones of an old shipwreck, slick and dark brown, emerged from the sand beach not far south of the Watervale, a nearly century old resort set between Lake Michigan and Lower Herring Lake here in Benzie County. On the Lake Huron side some shoreline owners got so anxious about the grass and water weed growing where there used to be a placid liquid surface that they sent bulldozers into the surf to clear what they viewed as a mess. It was illegal no matter how hard the conservatives in the Legislature complained about property rights.

Lake Superior, though, is a different matter. Scientists are convinced the up and down of the water levels is cyclical and that eventually the tub will fill. But a drought has gripped the upper Midwest for several years. Warmer winters prompted by global climate change are producing less snow and much less ice. Mighty Superior just isn’t as deliberately provocative as it was just a few years back. Dock owners can’t moor their boats along the shoreline in hundreds of places because of shallow water. Freighters set off for foreign ports over 10,000 tons lighter than they did a few years ago.

The upper Midwest is one of three regions in the United States that is feeling the burn from global climate change.  The other two are the Deep South and the Southwest, particularly around the Colorado Plateau. The Upper Midwest has the water. We have more clean fresh water than any place on earth.  The two other regions have all the people. The Deep South and the Southwest are growing faster than almost any other region of the nation. Now answer this one. Do the states of the Great Lakes, which are growing more slowly and gradually shedding electoral college votes and House members, also begin to lose the capacity to safeguard  their water supply? 

You may have missed this little note out of Wall Street last week but many of the renewable and alternative energy funds are doing very well. The New Alternatives fund is up nearly 37 percent the last 12 months and 20 percent so far this year. The Guinness Atkinson fund is up 17 percent and 27 percent while the Wilder Hill funds, which launched last fall, are each up about 11 percent this year. By comparison, reports CNN, the S&P 500 has climbed about 21 percent over the last 12 months and is up about 5 percent this year.

The surge in renewable funds is part of a much larger two-path conversation happening on energy in the United States. At the grassroots, and in the investment portfolios of folks with a little dough there’s a tremendously interesting discussion about what will replace fossil fuel in an era of climbing prices, escalating environmental contamination, and soaring temperatures. Over the weekend, for instance, 3,000 people and 120 clean energy vendors showed up at the second annual Michigan Energy Fair in Onekama, Michigan, which is about a driver and a three-wood long. From Vespa scoooters to hybrid vehicles of every make, to windmills and solar displays,  off the grid, and non-toxic energy efficiency, to design and architecture and much more, the energy fair offered a fine exploration of what’s available for an ordinary Joe to get tuned up to the new cost and supply realities of the 21st century. 

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You may recall that Veep Cheney once called conservation “a personal virtue” that had no place in a national energy strategy. Like almost everything else out of the current administration, what nonsense. In fact conservation represents an authentic response to scarce oil and high prices, as well as to global climate change. In essence, many of the products for sale at the fair framed sipping rather than slurping as a virtue. The market and consumers will steadily move conservation and alternative means for generating energy to the top of the national priority, regardless of what political folk think. That was perfectly plain in Onekama.

The big question is whether the elected leaders at the state and national level will catch up. That is not at all assured. Just before the Michigan Energy Fair got started the U.S. Senate approved an energy bill that significantly raised fuel mileage standards in cars and light trucks for the first time since 1975. The lawmakers also approved subsidizing 36 billion gallons of ethanol production at 51 cents a gallon. There was no new incentive for renewable energy, no shift from fossil fuels to clean sources, and fortunately no spending to turn coal into fuel, which is what the Nazis did in World War Two.

How much of the Senate bill will stick? Probably not much. The Michigan House delegation is determined to blow up the mileage standards, saying it threatens the domestic vehicle manufacturing industry. The industry has been dying for 30 years, so you have to wonder about that one. The Japanese don’t mind the higher standard. They’ve already reached 35 miles per gallon in Europe. And don’t be surprised if the coal boys in the South, West, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic somehow convince taxpayers to shell out billions to turn black rock into liquid diesel-like fuel. It’s a grim world when the grassroots go one way and the elected state and federal officials go another. Something about that campaign finance reform we ought to take a look at. 

So just in case you’ve been wondering where I been, you need look no further. I spent Monday night and half of Tuesday in the Munson Hospital ICU recovering from taking a pretty nasty spill — that I do not remember — off my road bike. The details aren’t grim. I apparently hit a patch of sand and went down hard enough for my helmeted head to bounce. A friend and witness who owns a couple of coffee shops in town was in the vicinity and said I never lost consciousness and was apparently moving around. I don’t remember a thing until I woke up in ER near dark and saw my wife and three teenage kids looking at me with that unmistakable mask that kids wear when you’ve given them a good fright. Injuries are a 5-stitch cut over my eye, a mild concussion, and literally four small road rash patches — one on my forehead, an elbow, a knee, and shoulder, all on my right side. My wife has gotten me to promise not to ride for another day or two. I still feel a little woozy, though not bad. If everything is better tomorrow I’ll go back out.

Earlier this month I attended the New York opening for The Unforeseen, Laura Dunn’s new documentary about the clash of values and struggle to protect Barton Springs in Austin from the consequences of sprawling exurban development. I also met Laura and her husband, Jef Sewell, a well-known executive for an entrepreneurial fulfilment company that serves entertainment Web sites. 

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David Brancaccio, the host of PBS’s Now program, also has taken an interest in Laura and the film and featured it and her in an online review for the show last week. It’s timely stuff, well worth watching, and includes a take with Robert Redford, who co-produced and appears in the film. I’ve been doing a little bit to help Laura get the film into the upcoming Traverse City Film Festival, Michael Moore’s three-year-old celluloid celebration that is now a much-awaited event on northern Michigan’s calendar. It occurs this year from July 31 to August 5.

The Unforeseen’s strength comes from its even-handedness and its universal qualities, displaying the drama of the contentiousness about how to grow in the United States, and the real pain suffered by advocates on every side. Lost in the center of the struggle, as in almost every important question about our future, is the Austin government and the state of Texas. Public officials have almost nothing useful to add to the much more thoughtful considerations offered by citizens and developers. There is, however, a telling moment in the film that spotlights George W. Bush, who was able to seize on one side of the argument about property rights and ride it to victory in the Texas governor’s race in 1994.   

Mike Moran, a journalist, editor, and multi-media specialist who spent nine years of his career at MSNBC.com, an incubator of great talent and technique in the late 1990s, has been executive editor since August 2005 of CFR.org, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Internet site. CFR.org, one of the best sites in the non-profit universe, is doing a lot of things very well in making the complex world of foreign affairs simpler to understand, easier to access, and a much more compelling narrative of our time. 

One of the more interesting sections of the site is the multi-media section, which presents the richest collection of first-rate multi-media productions I’ve come across on any news and information site managed by a non-profit, and among the best in any realm, mainstream media Web sites — NYTimes.com, Washingtonpost.com — included. The site publishes timelines, photographs, audio, and motion graphics about issues as diverse as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the conflict in Darfur. 

I spoke with Moran today for a piece I’m reporting for the New York Times on multi-media producer Brian Storm, another former MSNBC.com staffer who’s moved on to launch and oversee Mediastorm.org, the hottest independent multi-media production shop in American journalism. Mediastorm produced CFR.org’s first crisis guide on Korea in January, the Darfur piece  in April, and is working on another guide to the crisis in the Middle East. 

Moran also told me that the new multi-media productions, and several more features including podcasts and complete video of Council meetings and speakers, has helped to drive traffic to CFR.org from 109,000 visitors and just over 400,000 page views a month in May 2005, to 390,000 users and 1.4 million page views in May 2007. Moreover, visitors who used to spend an average of six or seven minutes on the site now typically spend 12 to 14 minutes. More evidence about the power and influence of new story telling tools.

Ruy Teixeira, a journalist who does a very good job keeping track of public opinion at the Center For American Progress in Washington, published this analysis of where citizens think the energy bill being debated in Congress ought to go. The verdict: Towards green, efficient, conservation measures and not to new production. 

The money quote: “The public is also quite clear on its priorities when it comes to promoting energy conservation versus increasing the supply of oil, coal, and natural gas. When asked which of these should be the higher priority, the public chooses energy conservation by a very wide 68 percent-to-21 percent margin.”

In 1954, the year that Detroit was busily completing the Lodge Freeway and starting construction on the city’s other major highways Toronto (see pix) opened 12 stations on the Yonge Street subway line, the city’s first. Since then Toronto has built three more regional rapid transit lines, 69 stations, and nearly 43 miles of subway and rapid transit track. The city’s subway and surface streetcar system carries 1.2 million passengers a day, many of whom also use the seven commuter train lines into town. Only New York and Mexico City have a more extensive rapid transit system than Toronto. Detroit, meanwhile, has none.

 The contrast between the two cities in economic competitiveness, quality of life, and opportunity is just as stark. Detroit’s population, now less than 900,000, is less than half of what it was in 1954, when the number of Detroit residents peaked. The Detroit metropolitan region, where 4.8 million people live, has grown by roughly 100,000 residents since 1970. The number of vehicles, meanwhile, has increased by 1.6 million during the same period. Southeast Michigan has the highest rates of racial and economic segregation, joblessness, income stagnation, home foreclosure, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity of any major metropolitan region in the United States.

Toronto, meanwhile, has steadily grown to a city of 2.5 million, and the population of the metropolitan region — 5.1 million — is nearly double what it was in 1970. The largest city in Canada, and the fifth largest city in North America, Toronto also challenges New York as the continent’s most racially diverse and most prosperous. 

Toronto’s economy is booming, and a great deal of its well-being has to do with how regional managers and residents view rapid transit as an excellent investment for responding to the new market signals of the 21st century. Canada was a signatory to the Kyoto Accord, which commits the country to reducing global climate change gases by 2012 to 6 percent less than the levels produced in 1990. Canada also has a national transit strategy that calls for:

• Improving the global competitiveness, quality of life, and environmental sustainability of Canada’s cities.
• Requiring cities to have land use and transportation plans that favor transit as the primary means of accommodating future travel demand.
• Providing funding necessary to maintain and expand Canada’s urban transit systems in order to accommodate population growth and to allow transit to attract a larger share of the total travel market.
• Providing increased mobility for people so that they can take advantage of the employment, educational, recreational, and many other opportunities cities offer.
• Improving air quality and, in doing so, improve people’s health and their ability to enjoy outdoor spaces and activities.
• Ensuring the long-term economic stability and environmental sustainability by reducing climate-changing emissions and reliance on fossil fuels.

These, by the way, aren’t just hopeful words. Canada means what it says, and nowhere is it more visible than in Toronto. On June 15, Ontario’s Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that the provincial and federal governments are teaming up to spend $17.5 billion to modernize and build roughly 550 miles of rapid transit lines throughout the Toronto metropolitan region by 2020. It is the largest and most extensive metropolitan rapid transit investment in North America since New York spent $24 billion from 1982 to 1999 to modernize its aged subway and bus system. That investment helped to spur an economic and demographic revival that reestablished New York as a choice place to live and do business.  

Toronto already is a grand place. Its downtown is a hub of activity 24/7 with outdoor cafes busy well into the evening. Its suburbs, though jammed with vehicles, are a display of gleaming office towers set amid a natural and agricultural landscape that the provincial government is determined to conserve. One of the region’s land use plans calls for preserving 1.8 million acres of open space and farmland in the region; one million acres already have been saved. 

Detroit turned down a $600 million federal transit grant in 1976 and can’t agree even now on using $100 million in federal funds to revive a heavy commuter rail line between Ann Arbor and the central city.  Toronto’s new transit construction plan, meanwhile, will reduce pollution, congestion, and travel costs in a world where temperatures are rising and gasoline is heading to $8 a gallon. If you were a young person, which city is more inviting?  

Democrat Bill  Richardson, a member of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet and the current governor of New Mexico, this week became the first 2008 presidential candidate to formally introduce a Mode Shift idea into the national race. Richardson was in West Hollywood on Monday, and according to the Associated Press promised “to create a partnership to build a light rail network and help untangle the Los Angeles region’s notorious traffic. With gas prices rising and roadways jammed, Richardson said it was time to rethink a federal transportation policy that pumps billions of dollars into new roads each year. Mass transit, he said, will be the best, cleanest way to move metropolitan residents in the future.”

If elected, Richardson said he would “make it a major effort to refocus transportation construction of roads into light rail and more energy efficient transportation,” the New Mexico governor told reporters at a news conference. I would make light rail at least an equal partner” with highways, he said. With more rail and clean-running buses, “it’s going to improve the quality of life in this country.”

Richardson, who’s not done nearly as well as he needed to in early national television interviews, is nevertheless no slouch on energy or transportation policy. Last July New Mexico opened the first stations and 15 miles of the Rail Runner Express, a new north-south heavy commuter rail line that is now a nine-station, 55-mile system that will extend next year to 117 miles and reach Santa Fe. The system is carrying 2,000 passengers a day now, and is expected to cost $393 million, according to the Albuquerque Tribune. 

We’ll see more such Mode Shift ideas from presidential candidates. Static incomes. High energy prices. Falling home sales and rising rate of foreclosure. Global climate change. Traffic congestion and declining quality of life in American suburbs. Issues too close to home for candidates to ignore. 

If you travel to Las Vegas, Knoxville, Chicago, and Salt Lake City one of the surprising trends you’ll see is the abrupt shift in housing markets. Downtowns in these and other cities are outpacing the suburbs in new home construction and existing home sales. Two of the critical reasons for both are the shrinking size of American households — not a new trend — and the fact that transportation costs exceed housing expenses in household budgets. Though builders are intent on constructing the 3,000 square foot McMansion in the distant suburb, the fact is that there are far fewer households than there once were capable of both filling them up and  being able to afford to get there in the first place. 

Let’s tease out both trends. The US Census Bureau noted earlier this year that the conventional American nuclear family — husband, wife, and kids under one roof — now composes less than a quarter of all households. The Census Bureau also reported that single people now make up the majority of US households. Long story short: the market for those cul-de-sac McMansions is shrinking. The downward slide in new suburban home sales is further exacerbated by reckless lending practices, static or shrinking family incomes, traffic congestion, and the growing popularity of downtown living shared by young people and retirees alike. 

The other major influence in the soaring interest in American downtowns and shrinking housing markets at metropolitan edges is the cost of transportation, now the number one expense in the majority of American households, according to a study by the Center For Housing Policy in Washngton, D.C.  Researchers evaluated households that earned from $20,000 to $50,000 — the majority of households, by the way — in 28 metropolitan regions. They found that on average households spent 30 percent of their monthly income on transportation and 28 percent on housing. Such supposedly low cost cities like Atlanta were actually very high cost places to live. Atlantans spent 32 percent of their income on transportation, more than supposedly high cost cities like New York (24 percent), and Washington, D.C. (28 percent). In fact, when transportation and housing costs were combined Atlanta — one of the most sprawled out, drive through places in the world — was the second most expensive metropolitan region in the nation, next to San Francisco.  Detroit, by the way, had among the highest transportation costs (31 percent) but also near the lowest housing costs (24 percent of household income), the researchers found.

What does it mean for patterns of American development? The old rules of the housing/income/time/distance game have changed.  Working people sacrificed their time in order to find decent housing distant from their jobs. Their commutes in relatively inexpensive vehicles with cheap fuel made it work economically. No more. Vehicles are expensive to buy and maintain and insure. Fuel prices are rising fast. For every dollar people spend each month on housing in the distant suburbs, they’re spending as much or more on transportation. Living far away just doesn’t cash flow like it once did. And that reality is translating into depressed suburban housing markets, downtown redevelopment, and Mode Shift projects occurring all over the nation to finance and build new forms of work force housing and rapid transit systems. Very soon researchers may find that the footprint of major American metropolitan regions has begun to stabilize and then shrink.

NEW YORK — Early this morning, before the sun peaked over the roofs of the grand old apartment buildings of the Upper East Side, I followed the road bikers and dog walkers and joggers over to Central Park for a splendid four-mile run. New York is full of young people now, bright, educated, trim, and ambitious. A whole bunch of them are up just after dawn to clear their minds and keep their bodies tuned sufficiently to compete in a global capital that is at the leading edge of what great cities are becoming in the 21st century — clean, green, energy efficient, safe, and beautiful. This is a different place than the polluted, crime ridden, deficit-panicked, dirty city that I grew up with when I came of age in the 1970s. New York, according to demographers, is young, younger than its suburbs. Traffic is barred from most of Central Park’s perimeter roadways in the morning, making it a surprisingly quiet green garden for thousands of them to exercise.  

This week, Democrats in the United States Senate introduced their version of an energy bill that the message guys in the party described as — hold your breaths — a plan to wean the country from foreign oil and promote domestic energy supplies. The bill has next to nothing in it that will produce more of the prosperous metropolitan regions, like New York, that are becoming ever more energy efficient, and not surprisingly, the strongest generators of jobs, income, and opportunity in the United States. Instead, the Democratic bill is almost solely intended to benefit the corn belt in the Midwest, keep the oil companies happy drilling for domestic oil supplies that no longer exist, and sustain what author Jim Kunstler describes as “America’s drive through economy.”

The 2007 Senate plan deploys almost precisely the same language used to advertise every energy bill introduced in Washington since the 1973 Arab Oil embargo, which produced long gas lines and helped a lot of teenage guys like myself bond with friends as we waited to fill our Dad’s cars. The bills did nothing to reduce America’s oil apetite, especially for foreign oil. In 1973, the United States consumed under 16 million barrels of oil daily, less than half of it imported. In 2006, oil consumption reached 21.9 million barrels a day, according to the Energy Information Administration, of which 13.21 million barrels or 60 percent was imported. At current prices, the US is sending roughly $800 million a day out of the country, nearly $300 billion in cold, hard, needed American cash sent overseas a year. 

What’s so dismaying about the Democratic plan, like the Republican plans before it, is that the hyped legislative exercise comes as home prices are falling in the suburbs, mortgage foreclosures are rising (they’ve nearly quintupled since 2000 in my corner of rural northwest Michigan), Walmart sales are static, gasoline prices are climbing to nearly $4 a gallon in some parts of the nation, incomes are static, and a war fought for oil in Iraq is not going well. These are the unmistakable signs of the new global order for the United States, still strung out on oil, unable to agree on a national response other than doing more of the same. Even Democrats are divided about plans to secure higher fuel mileage standards, conservation initiatives, and massive subsidies to the nation’s corn growers who already receive 51 cents a gallon from taxpayers to produce ethanol. Meanwhile energy consumption, especially gasoline, continues to rise despite record high prices.  

All of America is addicted to oil, of course, and there are no foreseeable substitutes. Which is precisely why Washington needs to pay attention to the places where the habit isn’t quite as strong. One of those is New York City, which has been doing a lot of very smart things for two decades to insulate its citizens from an oil shock and simultaneously produce a better place to live and do business. Yet none of things that New York did, or is thinking about now, is on the national energy agenda considered by lawmakers in Washington. They should be.

From 1982 to 1999, according to a study by Schaller Consulting, New York City spent $24 billion — an average of $1.41 billion annually — to modernize its mass transit system. The intent was to reduce congestion, improve transportation efficiency, provide alternatives for getting around town, lower family costs, and attract residents and businesses to the new  nodes of business activity around the 468 transit stations and hundreds more bus stops. The money was spent to replace or overhaul the system’s 4,500 buses, 1,200 subway cars, 530 of 660 miles of subway tracks, and a quarter of the subway stations.

The demographic and economic results are impressive in every way. Subway and bus ridership in the 1990s increased much faster than the rate of car ownership and use and has continued since. Between 1990 and 2000, for instance, the number of new vehicles in the city climbed by 104,000, from 1.695 million vehicles to 1.79 million, or less than 7 percent. But subway ridership increased by 353 million riders, from 1.028 billion riders to 1.381 billion, or more than 35 percent. Today the system serves over 2 billion riders annually. The effect on gasoline consumption also has been impressive. Drivers in New York City consume an average of 146 gallons a year, less than drivers in San Francisco (238 gallons), much less than drivers in Los Angeles (392) and much, much less than the national average of 463 gallons a year.

The city’s population, which plummeted to just over 7 million in 1980 has climbed to more than 8 million. The number of visitors reached 44 million last year, 11 million more than in 1998, attracting $23 billion in annual spending that employed 333,158 jobs and $5.44 billion in tax revenue, according to city figures. Hotel occupancy rates exceed 85 percent annually. The city’s subway system, which I ride during my trips here, is clean, cool, inexpensive ($2.00 a ride), and the fastest way to get anywhere during business hours. The system is so popular again that peak hour crowding has returned  as a major civic issue. 

Earlier this month the city’s moderate Republican mayor,  Michael Bloomberg, proposed further increasing residents’ reliance on transit, and diminishing the influence of cars and light trucks by emulating a “congestion pricing” traffic management program that has been used in London since 2003. If the plan is approved, the city could significantly raise tolls on Hudson and East River bridges and require motorists to purchase permits, monitored by a system of surveillance code readers, in order to charge drivers headed south of 86th street $8 a day. Those who don’t pay face fines.

On Earth Day, Mayor Bloomberg proposed a separate plan to make New York the best big city in the world to live and do business, principally by making it a much greener, energy efficient, and more beautiful place to live. Among its 127 steps is further reducing the use of private vehicles, cleaning up power plants, requiring more green roofs on major buildings, and investing in rapid transit. Congress continues to hug the 20th century. New York and other big cities understand they need to find their own path to the 21st.

“I make this promise to you: I will not spend my last 984 days in office pretending that all is fine and leaving these challenges to the next mayor, who may well pass them off to his or her successor,” Bloomberg said in April. “Residents of a city that is a beacon to the world will not abdicate our responsibility to that world. That’s not leadership. Leadership is about recognizing challenges and seizing opportunities. And we are going to seize this opportunity – to lead the way forward and create the first environmentally sustainable 21st century city.”