February 28, 2026

Why Give Barack a Pass on Energy?

by Keith Schneider2

It’s understandable that many Democrats are enthused about Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He’s young, hip, smart, and charismatic. He’s an African American in a race that also features a woman and a Hispanic man. And he talks a good line about energy, the environment, the economy, national security and global climate change that intelligent progressives have accepted uncritically, including those at ThinkProgress.com. But from this vantage his candidacy feels like it’s wrapped too …

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My Friend Harriet Tregoning

by Keith Schneider1

Harriet Tregoning, who’s one of the smartest and most capable Smart Growth advocates in the United States, just took command of Washington, D.C.’s Office of Planning, among the most visible planning jobs in the country. And as the better half of the uniquely well-positioned leading couple of Smart Growth — her husband of 17 months is Geoffrey Anderson, the director of the EPA’s development, community and environment division — Harriet brings her brain and moxie to positioning …

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Flip: Seizing The Message and Messenger

by Keith Schneider0

I can see already that one of the principal activities of Mode Shift is to make a difference in the 2008 presidential campaign, not by convincing readers to vote for a particular candidate but by helping to make the case for public priorities that deserve to be treated seriously. Resource conservation, public transportation, metropolitan patterns of development, global climate change, healthy food, and land conservation merit attention. And it’s our responsiblity as writers to frame the issues in a way …

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What Is Al Gore Up To?

by Keith Schneider2

In case you missed it, Al Gore spoke to both houses of Congress today about global climate change, calling it a “planetary emergency.” As a reputation boosting, global elevating, and upcoming book promoting exercise, Gore’s confident stroll through the various hearing rooms that he once occupied as a sitting member was terrific theater. But having been a Gore watcher since the 1980s, when he was a young congressman and I was a young correspondent, I just have this …

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Flip: Curating the City

by Keith Schneider3

The Los Angeles Conservancy, the largest local historic preservation group in the United States, produced a terrific online multi-media exhibit of Wilshire Boulevard called Curating the City. Using motion graphics, mapping, text, photographs, and digital hotspots, the program explores the history and geography of one of the nation’s iconic roadways, the West Coast equivalent of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue or Philadelphia’s Broad Street.  What’s so cool about this example of multi-media storytelling is how quickly it loads …

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About Those Car Keys

by Keith Schneider0

Not long ago, in Denver, a Douglas County Commissioner told me that one of the impediments voters faced in approving a nearly $5 billion sales tax increase in 2004 to build the West’s most extensive regional rapid transit system was old attitudes about trains. “The critics, including our governor, kept saying nobody would ride a train,” she said. “This is the West. You have to pry the keys out of people’s hands before they’d get out of their cars.” Well, …

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New Quality of Life Measure: Retail Percentage

by Keith Schneider1

Last week the Traverse City Record-Eagle, which does a decent job reporting on northwest Michigan’s population growth and business development, published an article with these facts. In 1997, shoppers in Grand Traverse County spent 58 percent of their money for retail sales in the Traverse City. Last year, according to a new economic analysis, the city attracted just 12 percent of those sales. As a measure of the quality of life, the percentage of retail sales held …

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Cleaning Up Those Coal Plants

by Keith Schneider1

Tom Friedman has a very interesting piece in the March 16 edition of the New York Times that reports the back story of the announcement last month that TXU would not build eight high-polluting coal plants in Texas. Turns out that the new owners of the utility were concerned about the public relations fallout from the battle they’d been engaged in with grassroots groups in Texas, and national environmental organizations, particularly Environmental Defense and the …

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Mode Shift News and the Net

by Keith Schneider0

One of the rules of journalism that I learned a long time ago is that it’s okay to be ahead, but not okay to be too far out front. Another rule  is conflict sells better than cooperation.  Mode Shift, which describes the political, cultural, and economic context of a civic movement that is changing patterns of metropolitan development, is ahead of most other forums in covering these stories. But it’s not too far ahead, which is probably …

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Flip: Scarlet A With Invitations in Age of Social Media

by Keith Schneider3

Ryan Burke is a student at the University of North Carolina who until Valentine’s Day this year rolled through his undergraduate career in a veil of unmistakable obscurity. But this is the age of social media, when ubiquitous video cameras, email, and the Internet can vault creative instinct to unimaginable heights of notoriety. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and legions of video file-sharing sites have enabled young people to reveal, expose, share, and broadcast every aspect of their lives. Social media is responsible for …

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