CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

Winnipeg's Proposed Inland Port and Energy Futures

The Winnipeg Free Press is reporting that the government of Manitoba has introduced legislation to build an "inland port" around Winnipeg's James Armstrong Richardson International Airport. Intended to take advantage of the city's proximity to the geographic centre of North America, the CentrePort Canada Act would authorize the creation of a corporation to oversee the "port", and to fast track "investment and economic development decisions based upon a single, comprehensive transportation, infrastructure and land-use plan" for approximately 20,000 acres of land around the airport. These improvements would emphasize highway and rail linkages, which would facilitate the shipping of goods flown into Winnipeg on massive cargo planes. In the same paper, Chris Lorenc points out that Winnipeg's rail assets make this proposal so promising: "two major Canadian railways -- Canadian National and Canadian Pacific -- the American railway Burlington Northern Santa Fe and OmniTRAX (serving the North and the Port of Churchill) all converge [here]."

Yet, it is the prospect of those huge cargo planes flying over the pole -- unable to make the flight from Anchorage to Alaska without a fuel stopover in Winnipeg -- which is driving the push to build the "port" around the airport.

However, with rising jet fuel prices challenging the entire business model for the airlines to the point of threatening many of them with bankruptcy, it does beg the question about the long-term viability of this plan. Air cargo carriers are trucking firms are both suffering from spiking fuel costs. This August Gemini Air Cargo filed for Chapter 11 protection citing inflated fuel costs, and this past summer fuelling costs rose so much that hundreds of truckers protested in Washington and it was reported that almost 1,000 trucking firms had gone under in the first quarter of the year alone.

Peak Oil theorists such as James Howard Kunstler have been warning about this for some time. In a posting from earlier this summer, Kunstler wrote,

"Perhaps more ominous is the discontent on the trucking scene. Truckers are going broke in droves, unable to carry on their business while getting paid $2000 for loads that cost them $3000 to deliver. In Europe last week, enraged truckers paralyzed the food distribution networks of Spain and Portugal. The passivity of US truckers so far has been a striking feature of the general zombification of American life. They might continue to just crawl off one-by-one and die. But it's also possible that, at some point, they'll mount a Night-of-the-Living-Dead offensive and take their vengeance out on 'the system' that has brought them to ruin.."

Winnipeg does have great rail assets which will serve the city (and Canada) well in an energy-poor future, and we should do everything we can to build on these. Passenger rail in particular will need a big boost, as Kunstler and others have argued. But, given the city's geographic isolation, there may not be much of a role for its airport in such a future. Air travel -- and in particular air cargo -- will simply not make economic sense when jet fuel costs soar far beyond where they are now. We may in the not-to-distant future be living in a world where air travel is a luxury. As Tom Whipple writes:

"Over the longer run, the development of hydrogen powered aircraft might prove feasible or perhaps lighter-than-air dirigibles might be developed to the point where they can move people and goods efficiently over long distances. In any case, the day of the ubiquitous kerosene-powered jet transport which revolutionized travel for many of us in the second half of the 20th century is likely to be shorter than most realize."

In other words, perhaps Manitoba should think carefully before we invest too heavily in infrastructure designed primarily to facilitate air cargo and trucking. An "inland port" should be built with a long-term future in mind -- and that future may not be up in the air.

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Rapid Transit and Winnipeg's "Urban Culture"

The City of Winnipeg has a very long history of rapid transit...or, more accurately, a history of debating rapid transit. After incoming Mayor Sam Katz cancelled his predecessor's Bus Rapid Transit plans in 2004, that debating only got more intense.

Now the years of studies, op-eds and lobbying are over: on September 8th a joint press conference was held with Premier Gary Doer and Mayor Katz to announce the development of a rapid transit corridor from downtown to the University of Manitoba. According to the press release,

"The first stage of the Southwest Rapid Transit Corridor will receive a $138-million investment and will extend from Jubilee Avenue to The Forks with a second, future stage to run from Jubilee Avenue to Bison Drive with both stages incorporating bike paths into their construction. Winnipeg will contribute $30.75 million which includes $17.5 million from the 2008 Federal Transit Trust. The province will match the federal transit trust contribution of $17.5 million and will fund 50 per cent of the net operating costs of the rapid transit system through its existing 50-50 transit funding agreement, fulfilling its legislative commitment under the Climate Change Act passed earlier this spring."

The route will stretch from the University of Winnipeg near downtown, and travel along the Graham Avenue bus corridor before leaving downtown on Main Street/Queen Elizabeth way before beginning travel on a dedicated corridor along the river and through the Fort  Rouge rail yards. From there it will proceed along Pembina to the University of Manitoba. While it will be a Bus Rapid Transit (or BRT) provisions will be made to transition to Light Rail Transit in subsequent years.

The press conference was accompanied by a slick DVD featuring images of urbanites sitting at street cafes, riding bicycles and enjoying city life -- the message being that this was more than just about a new way to travel, it was about a new way to think about our city. This is largely because of what is being promised alongside the BRT: an off-street cycling corridor and high-density Transit-Oriented Development in the Fort Rouge Yards, as the Winnipeg Free Press reports:

"Newly introduced provincial legislation will allow property and education taxes from new highrise towers and retail stores within the bus-corridor zone to pay back the cash that must  be borrowed to build the project. City property director Phil Sheegl said the city hopes to see 700 new apartment or condo units eventually rise alongside each of 12 new busway stations on the entire corridor. Based on $1,000 of taxes per unit, that could generate $8.4 million a year for the city, he said."

But not everyone is satisfied. The lobby group Transit Rider's Union (TRU) (which favours a subway) was quick to post on the website some key criticisms: that while eventual conversion to Light Rail Transit (LRT) was part of the announcement, this might never transpire (as has been the case for Ottawa's BRT); that the route through downtown will be no great change from the present bus system; and that the location of the stations will be inconvenient to walk to from existing major corridors, especially in cold weather. Paul Hesse of the Winnipeg Rapid Transit Coalition was more positive, but stressed that corridors to other parts of the city also needed to be built.

It should also be noted that this announcement is only for the first leg of the system -- a mere 3.6 kms of what is hoped to eventually be 9.6 km route to the University of Manitoba. The route of the next phase is not even secure, as it would require negotiating with CN rail for the use of its line which runs parallel to Pembina highway.

For all these shortcomings however, I believe that the importance of this announcement cannot be overstated: after decades of dithering and inaction, Winnipeg has made rapid transit a political reality, even if it will take three years to become a reality on the ground. But having this political will behind it can only serve to boost the perception of public transit as a desirable transportation option.

I also think this is going to be a significant boost to Winnipeg's concept of itself. After all, this is a place where a recent Free Press op-ed questioned whether or not Winnipeg was even a city, and that it needed to develop an "urban culture."

With rapid transit now on the way, and with high-density "smart growth" development promised alongside the line, as well as dedicated bicycle routes, I think it's fair to say that Winnipeg's urban culture is about to get a whole new identity.

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A Matter of Balance: The World's First Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) Conference

I'm standing for the first time on the platform of a Segway Personal Transporter provided by Manitoba's own Velocity Advertising. The act of adjusting to the sensation of its gently swaying movement is distracting me from paying full attention to Velocity's Susanna Harrison, who is helpfully supervising my trial. "The slightest shift in body weight will send you forward" she warns. I respond immediately, unconsciously, and begin to roll back. "See? And any shift backwards will send you rolling backwards."

Backwards. Towards the display table, passersby and several other Segways.

All of a sudden, the words of H.G. Wells seem awfully and personally apropos: "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." Not wanting to test at what stage I was in that particular race, I thank Susanna and step off.

The Wells quote had been shared that afternoon at a session of the conference "Where the Grid Meets the Road", the world's first conference devoted to exploring the potentials of the Plug-In Electric Hybrid Vehicle. The conference, organized by the Plug-In Highway Network had attracted an international collection of experts in the field, including Chelsea Sexton, the star of the film, Who Killed the Electric Car?

While there was plenty of eye-candy on hand in the form of a veritable "world of wheels" of hybrid, electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles (including Segways) the conference emphasized the technical attributes and requirements, from advances in battery storage to cutting-edge ultracapacitors.

But the conference wasn't just a technical one: the social and environmental imperatives for more "green" automobile technologies were very much on the agenda: climate change, "peak oil", skyrocketing oil prices and air pollution.

The premise of the Plug-in Hybrid is that the country's vehicle fleet -- while largely idle at night -- can be recharging while we sleep and are making lower demands on the grid; and carried further, any surplus generation stored in the vehicles can also be used to flow back into the grid, making for a fully integrated energy and transportation system. While this may sound infeasible, the U.S. Department of Energy has found in fact that 84% of a national fleet of PHEVs in the United States could be charged overnight without overloading the grid.

The very efficiency of PHEVs is an economic gain that can be used, without unduly penalizing drivers for necessary "driving tasks", to fully fund our "Active Transport" and transit needs. The excuse so often raised why progress cannot take place on these fronts -- "where will the money come from?" is gone. PHEVs make renewable energy generation valuable and achievable. But the need for political will and savvy remains.

While promising, these technologies face some serious obstacles, not the least of which is inertia in the auto industry. To explain these challenges, the conference situated the PHEV in the context of automobile innovation in general and made clear how costly and complex the R&D process can be. Just to develop a new vehicle based on an existing platform can cost 2-5 billion dollars; to create an entirely new platform is much more expensive still. This is exacerbated by the fact that a new automobile isn't just "made" at a factory: it is the assembled product of parts produced by dozens of manufacturers, who reside at various "tiers" of the automobile manufacturing hierarchy.

Given the huge costs and the narrow profit margins involved, the auto industry remains a conservative one, for there are no small problems: if things go wrong with new technology investments, they can go very wrong indeed. Recent rumblings of bankruptcy surrounding General Motors are a sign not only that previous assumptions in the auto industry are crumbling (e.g., that there's an unlimited market for SUVs) but that the radical changes needed face huge institutional and cultural stumbling blocks.

While the conference was ostensibly about PHEVs, the theme that we heard repeatedly was that there is no single, simple solution to the problems we face: no "magic bullet" in terms of modes, fuels, platforms or technologies. Indeed, we were warned by conference organizer and Centre for Sustainable Transportation Director Arne Elias that the very attractiveness of PHEVs -- and the strong likelihood that electric energy will be far more affordable than gasoline in the years to come -- may be a recipe for a "traffic congestion nightmare" if they reach mass consumer acceptance.

(It reminded me of a cartoon I saw years ago in which a man who invents a clean electric car says, "Now we can all drive as much as we want!" Then, realizing what he has just said, rolls the thing off a cliff, while a narrative caption intoned, "And so the world was saved.")

What is needed, Elias stated, is a culture that encourages a hierarchy of transportation modes: that people need to live in cities in which they can walk or cycle to some of their needs; to take transit to others; and that the last option should be the PHEV. Such a scenario, of course, goes against all present expectations, in which households which have cars use them for almost all their daily trips.

We need to find the right "pathway" to PHEVs; yet at the same time we need to anticipate the day when we will need to rethink our use of this technology too. While hailing PHEVs as a means of averting catastrophe, the conference also recognized the incremental nature of this technology, with one speaker going so far as to question if incrementalism is even appropriate given the scale and complexity of the issues at hand.

But a technological and social movement to promote new automotive paradigms is needed, if only for the rhetorical function of changing the terms of debate. And if the enthusiastic crowd at the Winnipeg PHEV conference is any indication, momentum is indeed building behind the concept. With additional conferences scheduled for 2008 and 2009, the "Plug-In Highway" appears to be well on its way. What price oil will be at by that point is anyone's guess, but I'm expecting the conference to be very closely watched indeed.

As for my Segway lessons, I guess I'll have to take an incremental approach and wait until then.

[Many thanks to Susan Mulligan for the photographs]

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Superhighway to Nowhere

The meeting of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America in Montebello Quebec has generated a lot of heat in the blogospheres on both the left and the right concerning a supposed conspiracy to eliminate the borders of the three countries , unify under a single currency and surrender their sovereignties.

Key to this NAU is the construction of a massive Superhighway from Mexico to Winnipeg that would help funnel cheap goods from China -- to say nothing of enabling bulk water exports. According to the Council of Canadians:

"The Trans Texas Corridor has been called 'the largest engineering project ever proposed' for George Bush’s home state. At its widest, the 'multi-modal' transit corridor will be four football fields wide and include lanes for cars, trains and trucks headed from the Mexican coast through Texas and into America’s heartland. But the track doesn’t end there. Through public-private consortia like the North American Super Corridor Coalition, which counts the province of Manitoba as a proud participant, plans are underway to extend this Texas pet-project right up past the Canadian border to an expanded port in Churchill. This proposed mega-highway has been dubbed the 'NAFTA Superhighway' because it is designed to speed up the flow of goods between the three signatory countries."

While I share the opponent's concerns over the intense and troubling secrecy surrounding these summits, I have my doubts over the prospects for the superhighway. Quite apart from the fact that the authorities are denying it is even being planned, considering that the U.S. can't even keep the bridges it already has from collapsing, and the outstanding bill for infrastructure upgrades exceeds $1 trillion, just how would such a project ever be justified politically?

When one considers the state of the American economy -- particularly over the past few weeks as markets struggled to cope with the global credit crunch brought about by the American subprime mortgage debacle -- there would seem to be little reason to believe that such a project could ever be funded.

And as the price of oil tops $100.00 -- as it is expected to -- the cost of even using such a superhighway would be too expensive for the fleets of tractor trailers bound for Wal-Mart.

So even if the conspiracy theorists are correct, I don't see a Superhighway being a part of a North American Union. There won't be the money, will or reason to build it.

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Planetizen Op-Ed: Paved Paradigm

If regular readers are wondering why there has been little activity on this site of late, it's because I was working on an op-ed for the Planetizen website concerning libertarian critiques of public transit, which was just posted on their website this morning.

Lewis Mumford vs. Lightning McQueen

I find Lewis Mumford's classic The City in History to be an endlessly dependable well: regardless of what's going on in the world or what it is I'm reflecting on, I can generally rely on Mumford's brilliantly poetic and humanistic observations to be astonishingly apropos to the matter at hand.

So it was this weekend, when I finally got around to watching Pixar/Disney's latest digital animated movie, Cars -- and at the same time, reading through Mumford as a core text for the history course I'm teaching. Mumford, who never drove a car in his life, railed against auto-dependent planning in much of his writing, and in the City in History chapter called "Suburbia -- and Beyond" (and who can't help but hear Buzz Lightyear's voice on that one?), he pays particularly close attention to the grotesque erosion of America's cities that the auto monoculture has wrought:

"At the bottom of this miscarriage of modern technics lies a fallacy that goes to the very heart of the whole underlying ideology: the notion that power and speed are desirable for their own sake, and that the latest type of fast-moving vehicle must replace every other form of transportation. The fact is that speed in locomotion should be a function of human purpose." (p. 507).

It should be noted that Mumford's modernism was tempered by his fervent humanism, with the result that he was not predisposed to reject new technologies out of hand, but rather sought to marry them to enriching the human enterprise. To the extent that any technology could achieve this, he embraced it; but cautioned against allowing any form of modern "technics" to overshadow or obviate human needs.

So it was with the car: he stressed that the modern city must plan for the car, but only insofar as it was appropriate and did not smother the city's primary function, which in his mind was a social one. By allowing cars to go absolutely everywhere and in limitless numbers, they were in danger of replacing people altogether:

"The last stage of the process already beckons...to evict the remaining inhabitants and turn the entire area over to automatically propelled vehicles, completely emancipated from any human purpose." (p. 510)

Which, sadly, pretty much sums up what we see in Pixar/Disney's Cars.

Most critics agreed that the film was not one of the studio's better efforts: Pixar's visual brilliance and wit could not disguise the film's hackneyed plot. Only during the final credits does the film jump to life, by hilariously referencing its previous films -- serving to remind the audience just how dull Cars actually was. What fewer reviewers mentioned, however, (but see here and here) is that there is something not right about the world of Cars -- indeed, it is a decidedly creepy film, as reviewer Katherine Monk explains:

"The cars in Cars don't need any humans. In fact, this whole world that looks and acts much like our own doesn't contain any humans and that's what makes the whole experience just a little unsettling. Moreover, the underlying message of the film celebrates the automobile and the internal combustion engine as noble human achievements that should be celebrated with more highway driving, more gas stations, more back roads and car-friendly activities for the whole family...In this day and age, celebrating the car just feels wrong...We're on the verge of rethinking our relationship with the automobile, and this flag-waving remnant from the scrap heap of American culture feels like a desperate attempt to resuscitate the romance of a dying industry."

The fish of Finding Nemo, the monsters of Monsters, Inc. and the toys of Toy Story all must interact with human beings -- indeed their relationships with people drive (no pun intended) their respective stories, so within the realm of their fantasy universes, the ecology of the films' characters made internal sense (OK, maybe Dory the fish being able to read was a bit of a stretch).

Here, of course, the cars have no people inside them, naturally begging the question -- who built them? Who built the buildings? Printed the newspapers and magazines the characters appear on? Wrote and performed the music they listen to? Hell, even drilled and refine the gas the cars drink? While such criticisms may be dismissed as annoying nitpicking, they do -- in light of Mumford's analysis -- reveal a deeper (albeit unconscious) message in the film: that cars need no human purpose. Worse: even where such purposes exist, they no longer matter. Even something as essentially human as the wish to observe and be entertained is also usurped by the cars in the film -- hundreds of thousands of which crowd stadiums to watch other cars. In the world according to Pixar, cars are their own raison d'etre; they need serve no human purpose.

From a city planning perspective, the disingenuousness of the film's subplot also cannot escape comment. The film's primary setting is the town of Radiator Springs, which like so many other (real-life) towns and cities was eviscerated by the impacts of a nearby Interstate. The few remaining shops (run by cars, of course) are struggling to remain open. The characters are nostalgic for the days when cars used to come via the iconic Route 66, and use local services. Nostalgia is a key theme here: most of the vehicles are of the "classic" variety, bespeaking reference to the film-makers' own memories rather than to the interests of its presumed (youthful) audience.

Yet such nostalgia cannot hold. The film's ostensible valorization of localism, of community, of family-owned shopping is belied by its very fetishization of the car, which in real life (you know, the one with people in it) has led to the gutting of cities and the atomization of community. They cannot have it both ways.

There is even something approaching the post-apocalyptic in the film, as if neutron bombs have killed all the people and left the world to run itself (much like Ray Bradbury's classic story "There Will Come Soft Rains.") And the cars don't even miss us.

As the review above notes, the timing of the film is curious: there is a growing recognition that car culture has gone too far, and that serious remedial measures are needed to save our cities from becoming parking lots. Cars, not surprisingly, is free of such concerns and deliberations, so much so that it is practically reactionary, almost desperate. Its world could not long survive a Smart Growth regime -- even something as simple as a bus (public transportation, after all) would shatter it completely.

I will be curious to see how this film ages; what will children raised in an an oil-scarce time think of this impossible, oil-drenched and flesh-free world on which its makers lavished such love? My hope -- gleaned from Mumford -- is that by that time we will have "restore[d] to the city the maternal, life-nurturing functions...that have long been neglected or suppressed. For the city should be an organ of love; and the best economy of cities is the care and culture of men." (p. 575)

Not, I hasten to add, cars.

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The Rhetorical Usefulness of the "War on the Car"

Margaret Wente, whom (based on readers' responses) must surely rank as the Globe and Mail's most infuriating editorial writer, has once again come out with an op-ed piece opposing public transit. Last year she riled the G & M readership by saying that gas prices couldn't go high enough to pry her away from her SUV . Now she's saying that current planning objectives that promote public transit and more dense settlements constitute a "war" on the car, but that it will "never succeed."

There's a number of things about her position -- which is hardly original -- that require debunking.

First off, it's simply ahistorical and nonsensical to say that something social and technological will never come to pass: it is unlikely in the extreme that we will still be driving cars 500 years from now, whatever the fuel source.

Secondly though, I want to comment on the rhetorical and ideological fluidity of "war."

If conservatives oppose something in society they find repugnant -- like drugs -- then it mobilizes their base to call for a "war" on that thing. Thus the legitimacy of the "war on terror" is taken for granted and is beyond questioning.

However, if liberals are pursuing some social goal that conservatives find threatening -- like rights for homosexuals, for instance -- then liberals are "waging a war on the family." This usage of war evokes barbarians at the gates -- or at the very least, ideologues beyond the edge of reasonableness.

Because of this, I find planning critics who speak of a "war on the car" highly suspect. It makes public and active transport advocates sound like fanatics, when their agenda is merely to increase the options available to people -- choice ostensibly being one of the great benefits of living in a capitalist, liberal democracy.

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Dissent into Terror: Why the Clampdown on Critical Mass?

The venerable Critical Mass movement has become an international phenomenon: in cities all around the world, without benefit of leadership, groups of local cyclists will take over a lane of traffic to demonstrate the validity of human-powered transportation -- the CM motto is, "We're not blocking traffic; we are traffic."

This otherwise peaceful activity has, however, exposed an ugly underside to local policing. On May 27th, a critical mass ride in Winnipeg ended in chaos and charges of police brutality -- in spite of being officially escorted by police. And it wasn't the first time. A similarly violent response from the Winnipeg police occurred in 2002. A local environment advocacy group, Resource Conservation Manitoba, has already written an open letter to Winnipeg's Mayor Sam Katz to protest the police action.

But the Winnipeg experience is not unique. Critical Mass rides have been facing increasingly brutal police tactics in cities across North America, including San Francisco, Montreal, New York City and supposedly bike-friendly Portland.

What's going on here? Do groups of cyclists really represent so serious a threat to peace and order that they deserve batons, handcuffs and group arrests? Or is there something deeper at stake that is working towards the suppression of legitimate dissent?

The WTO Gives Bicycles a Push

One of the myths about cars use is that auto dependency is simply an expression of the free market: in fact, automobile use is highly subsidized. As Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute points out, in order to move to sustainable transportation, market reforms are necessary to redress these subsidies.

A good example of this concerns bicycles: even though bicyclists pay their taxes to support road repairs just like car drivers do, they are generally considered second-class users on most north american city streets. And as affordable as they already are when compared to cars, bicycles have simply not been able to compete with cars in the public eye. This is spite of being the most energy-efficient form of transportation ever devised, and the leading "sustainable wonder of the world."

There are signs that this economic imbalance may be changing. Bicycles are now being recognized for their advantages by one the highest economic authorities on Earth: The World Trade Organization is opening discussions on classifying bicyles as an "environmental good" free from tariffs.

An OECD Report, The Liberalisation of Trade in Enviromentally Preferable Products states that

"The environmental and developmental benefits of bicycles as a flexible, affordable and non-motorised form of transportation have long been recognised, although their full potential is yet to be realised. The largest exporter of assembled bicycles and delivery tricycles is China, followed by OECD countries. Production of bicycle parts is less geographically concentrated, and includes a number of developing countries. Countries tend to levy higher tariffs on assembled units than on individual parts.

The environmental benefits of bicycles include, but are not limited to, reducing congestion, avoiding air pollution and CO2 emissions, and conserving fuels. A bicycle places fewer demands on space than a motorised vehicle, in terms of both operation and parking. Among the developmental benefits are: empowerment of vulnerable groups, increased income-generating opportunities, accessibility, low capital investment and low maintenance costs. Health-care and social workers and their patients also benefit: for example, bikes are helping HIV/AIDS educators in Ghana reach 50% more people than they would if they travelled by foot."

Bicycles need more of an even playing field with cars, and not just in terms of economics. But this World Bank initiative is an important step in this direction, one that will hopefully have ripple effects other parts of the political economy.

On my wish list? A return to the golden age of bicycle advertising in newspapers and magazines!

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VeloCity: Path to Nowhere

As a commuting cyclist, I am in favour of any measure that better integrates bicycles as a part of a balanced "transportation ecosystem." Generally, I am an "integrationist," in that I support -- like John Forester -- the notion of vehicular cycling: in other words, bicycles belong on the streets, just like cars.

Which is why I find a new proposal called VeloCity, a futuristic elevated freeway for bicycles in Toronto so wrong-headed.