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When trees die, so do we

by Myrna Posted on January 25, 2013

When trees die, so do we

By Susie Cagle

Trees! Everyone loves trees. They soak up carbon, make stuff pretty, and have been shown to keep crime down in cities. It’s pretty clear our fates are tied to the trees’. Sooo, what happens when they all die? Uhh, so do we.

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Millions of ash trees in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. are being chomped to bits by a beetle called the emerald ash borer. But those beetles aren’t just hurting trees. From Discovery:

[I]n the neighborhoods hit by the beetle that kills ash trees, researchers noticed a stark rise in human mortality from cardiovascular and lower respiratory disease: there were 15,000 more deaths from cardiovascular disease, or 16.7 additional deaths per year per 100,000 adults, and 6,000 more deaths from lower respiratory disease than in unaffected areas, or 6.8 additional deaths per year per 100,000 adults.

Research forester Geoffrey Donovan, who headed up the study, said that tree death is tied to human death across places with very different demographics and other living conditions.

Our biggest, oldest trees are dying out worldwide, presenting problems not just for the animals that live in them, but the animals that live near them, who also like to breathe clean air. (You know, us.)

Pretty sure the Lorax would say: “I speak for the trees, for they have no tongues. But if they did they’d say ohhh god.”

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Could the sharing economy kill public transit?

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 24, 2013

Could the sharing economy kill public transit?

By Susie Cagle

Ken Schmier is a Bay Area transit guru. He’s essentially responsible for the limitless Muni Fast Pass in San Francisco, and created the NextBus application in the 2000s to help people catch those ever-elusive city buses. But now Schmier is thinking transit may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

“Frankly,” the Bay Area attorney and businessman told Next City, “I think transit agencies are obsolete.”

Blame that damn sharing economy.

Schmier is now all about what he calls “Micro-Transit” — in other words, ride-sharing, or turning regular cars into taxis.

The Bay Area already has Casual Car Pool, a long-standing ride-share project that relies on a vintage website and message board instead of the smartphones and big money of new ride-sharing ventures. It’s kind of an organized form of hitchhiking, and it really works.

Schmier wants to make this general idea more efficient, scalable, and tech-savvy. From Next City:

His vision, detailed in a white paper shared with Next City, is to put radio-frequency identification chips into the hands of passengers — in key fobs, transit cards or even driver’s licenses. Willing drivers, in turn, would be equipped with readers. When a potential passenger comes within scanning distance of a participating car, the driver’s picture would appear on an external display, and the rider’s on an internal one, confirming that both have gone through a background check.

Making the moment ripe for Micro-Transit, concludes Schmier, is that the technology is newly affordable: About $2 for the chip and $200 for the reader.

As for passengers getting where they need to go, drivers might opt for a signal showing the direction the car is heading. Longer trips could require hops between cars.

The program is good for cities, says Schmier. Tapping private cars’ “excess capacity,” i.e. empty seats, cuts down on underused public transportation, creates feeder lines to high-traffic trains and buses, and saves gas.

As for providing incentive enough to make drivers willing to let a stranger in their car, Schmier envisions a small fee — 50 cents or a dollar — that would be deposited in their Micro-Transit account for each rider picked up. Or, drivers might opt for high-occupancy vehicle credit.

Schmier’s plan might make sense for less dense regions full of cars, like the Bay. And in a lot of ways, it’s more in the spirit of the sharing economy than many of the new ride-share start-ups driven by a profit motive. But if our goal is more dense, livable, transitable cities, cars ain’t gonna cut it, no matter how many of us we try to cram into each one.

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How to get absolutely freaking (almost) everywhere in California without a car

by LeannqOsborn Posted on January 17, 2013

How to get absolutely freaking (almost) everywhere in California without a car

By Susie Cagle

Outside of its cities (and inside a lot of them, too), California is a typical car-happy American state, with about .84 cars for every person. With its miles and miles of looping roadway and ingrained car culture, it can be easy to forget how many other forms of transportation there are in the Golden State, too.

Enter the California Rail Map, one giant badass master map of California’s trains, buses, and ferries, showing routes to 500+ destinations throughout the state.

Click to embiggen.

Hey, look at that, you can take the train all the way from Oakland to Tijuana. Of course, it doesn’t say how long it’ll take to get there … See you guys next week!

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‘Soul Food Junkies’ digs into African American food history and habits

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 14, 2013

‘Soul Food Junkies’ digs into African American food history and habits

By Susie Cagle

Is soul food “the bane of African American health,” or is it a cuisine with a long and complex cultural history?

What if it’s both?

Filmmaker Byron Hurt’s documentary Soul Food Junkies premiering tonight on PBS aims to tell the history of soul food and contextualize collards, peas, and cornbread in the contemporary fight for food justice in communities of color, communities we often call “food deserts.”

Food deserts are by definition low-income communities without supermarkets or grocery stores, where fresh food is a rarity and people suffer from obesity, diabetes, and other health problems. We often blame food deserts themselves for those health problems, but that label can obscure culinary history, not to mention some basic facts. Many poor urban neighborhoods aren’t actually food deserts at all — they’re closer to food swamps full of ready-made and relatively cheap processed items. The “nutritional timberline,” as Karla Cornejo Villavicencio coins it at The New Inquiry, is a real thing.

In Hurt’s film, he interviews a woman who is upset that her local grocery only carries vegetables “that look like they’re having a nervous breakdown.” From PBS:

The idea is that if healthy choices are available, people will buy them. And that works to an extent. But old habits die hard. A 15-year longitudinal study found that upping the number of grocery stores in low-income areas didn’t result in people automatically buying healthier food.

“Just because you build it, doesn’t mean you will change people’s behavior,” study author Barry Popkin, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a Time magazine article. “Price, quality, accessibility, incentives, they matter too. Every community is different, but new efforts or supplementing existing infrastructure works if they’re accompanied with affordable prices, education, promotion or community collaboration.”

Efforts that only increase the availability of nice organic lettuce don’t do anything to address the personal food culture that drives mealtime choices in these communities. And let’s face it: A lot of food justice work in these communities is done by well-meaning but kind of patronizing white people.

Hurt hopes his film “will be used widely as a discussion starter in communities of color around food consumption, health, wellness, and fitness.” In an interview with the Smithsonian’s Food & Think blog, Hurt said, “I think the film is really resonating with people, especially among African American people because this is the first film that I know of that speaks directly to an African American audience in ways that Food, Inc., Supersize Me, King Corn, The Future of Food, Forks over Knives and other films don’t necessarily speak to people of color. So this is really making people talk.”

Soul Food Junkies airs tonight at 10 p.m. on PBS.

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California enjoys and/or suffers from a historic baby bust

by trasze2aja Posted on January 14, 2013

California enjoys and/or suffers from a historic baby bust

By Susie Cagle

Despite what my Facebook friend feed may be implying lately, California as a whole is not bursting at the seams with cute drooly babies. In fact, the Golden State is having a population crisis, at least by American standards. According to a new report from the University of Southern California, the state is making a “historic transition”: California’s fertility rate has dropped to 1.94 children per woman, below the 2.1 rate that replaces and grows the population and the economy. The U.S. birthrate was 2.06 children last year. Demographers are calling the drop, which has affected all racial and ethnic groups, “unprecedented” (and “European”).

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“Kids are no longer overrunning us. Now they’re in short supply,” demographer Dowell Myers told the San Jose Mercury News. “It changes the priorities for the state.”

Post-baby-boom, California had no population worries. In 1970, kids accounted for a third of the state’s population. Now they’re projected to make up one-fifth by 2030.

The Wall Street Journal is particularly hysterical about what a lower population might mean for California’s economic growth.

“Unless the birthrate picks up, we are going to need more immigrants. If neither happens, we are going to have less growth,” said [Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy]. The report wasn’t optimistic, saying that “with migration greatly reduced…outsiders are much less likely to come to the rescue.”

Investments in the state’s education system will be vital to meet labor-force needs and prevent the economy from contracting, said Mr. Levy. With less migration to the state, the skills and human capital necessary to keep California’s economy afloat will need to be homegrown, both Mr. Levy and Mr. Myers said.

With more than 90% of the state’s children under age 10 born in the state, “the majority of the next generation of workers will have been shaped by California’s health and education systems,” Mr. Myers said. “It’s essential that we nurture our human capital.”

Yes, nurturing, let’s do that. But all these people are talking like California’s population is shrinking, which it’s not at all: Between 2010 and 2012, it grew by nearly 700,000 people, in large part due to immigration. That’s just a lot less growth than before.

It may be historic, but it’s hardly surprising. California suffered some of the worst fall-out from the housing boom and bust, has filled its jails well over capacity, and has cut services across the board, while many of its municipalities, as the Wall Street Journal put it, are slouching toward insolvency. At least a fifth of California’s kids grow up in poverty. Why should we be sad there aren’t more of them?

California’s kids will unfortunately face a heavier burden in taking care of the state’s booming elderly population. But with more kids, they’d also face a heavier burden in competing for dwindling resources. A smaller population is a more sustainable one in the long run. Immediate economic concerns aside, a goal of perpetual, endless growth isn’t good for anyone, the cute and drooly among us included.

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RE-volv is making a community pot of solar gold

by olikellopas Posted on January 10, 2013

RE-volv is making a community pot of solar gold

By Susie Cagle

What if every dollar you donated to a worthy cause generated two, three, or more dollars? That’s the idea behind the RE-volv community solar fund project, currently closing in on the end of its first stage of fundraising.

Like Mosaic, RE-volv is tapping the collective for funding to back solar projects. But instead of individuals investing for their own individual good, RE-volv envisions a big pot-o-gold seed fund that would be invested and reinvested in community solar infrastructure. These are investments in solar’s future — essentially donations to RE-volv’s fund. Here’s how RE-volv explains it:

The Solar Seed Fund will use the donations to finance solar installations on community-serving organizations such as schools, universities, hospitals, and places of worship. RE-volv recoups the solar installation cost and earns a return on the investment through a 20-year solar lease agreement. The lease payments go back into the Solar Seed Fund allowing the fund to continuously grow, and finance an expanding number of solar installations.

According to the group’s numbers, once 14 RE-volv systems are in place, the revenue from those systems will be able to fund another solar-power system of roughly the same cost — and on, and on.

RE-volv has already raised almost $12,000 via its crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo, surpassing its initial goal by nearly $2,000. Combined with $20,000 raised from other sources, that’s more than enough funding to install its first solar project.

“This confirms our idea that lots of Americans support renewable energy, and are excited to have a tangible way to invest in neighborhood solar as part of a collective effort,” said Andreas Karelas, executive director of RE-volv.

If you’re looking to make your money back, Mosaic is a great, and feel-good, way to go. But RE-volv is kind of like a solar Rolling Jubilee, knocking out unsustainable energy by leveraging community cash. Collaborative consumption has become collaborative construction. Um, sharing economy, anyone?

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GMO labeling initiative gets rolling in Washington state

by olikellopas Posted on January 4, 2013

GMO labeling initiative gets rolling in Washington state

By Susie Cagle

Label It Yourself

A ballot measure that would have required labels on all genetically modified frankenfoods failed in California this past fall, but 2013 is a new year with new hope and a new roiling labeling movement, this time in Washington state.

Supporters of a GMO-labeling ballot measure have collected far more signatures than necessary, and if they’re certified, the proposal will hit the state legislature in the upcoming session and then likely be on the ballot in November. The movement’s colorful spokesperson is spreading the word, as The Seattle Times reports:

“Here we go, Round 2,” said the Washington initiative’s sponsor, Chris McManus, who owns a small advertising firm in Tacoma. “They got us the first time in Cali, but we’re stitched up, greased up and ready to go.”

McManus told the Spokane Spokesman-Review that the measure is not a scare tactic.

“A little bit more information never hurt anybody about the foods they eat.”

But opposition is beginning to coalesce. Farm industry representatives call the proposal an attempt to scare people away from food sources that have no known health risks. If the initiative wasn’t about scaring people, asked Heather Hansen of Washington Friends of Farms and Forests, why did supporters deliver their petitions in an old ambulance?

Because that’s awesome! I bet it doesn’t get great mileage, but sirens, wheee!

If anything is deserving of sirens, it’s the frankenfish that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently deemed safe, which would be labeled under such an initiative but likely not otherwise.

The initiative would require special labels on any raw or processed food sold in Washington with any genetically modified ingredients. That would include fruits and vegetables, processed foods and even some seafood like genetically modified salmon, McManus said …

Opponents said that would create big problems for farmers and food processors, who would have to put different labels on the same products if they’re sold in Washington and in other states.

It seems like threatening those of us who don’t live in Washington with unlabeled monster salmon is a real scare tactic. Get ready with those stickers, folks!

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Cash for Clunkers program drove right into a brick wall of waste

by kowalski099 Posted on January 3, 2013

Cash for Clunkers program drove right into a brick wall of waste

By Susie Cagle

Hey, remember back in 2009 when President Obama was saving the American car industry by whatever means necessary, including offering cash incentives for trading in old cars for newer, more efficient ones? And remember how a lot of people used that incentive to buy cars that were only marginally more efficient than their junked clunkers?

cynthia_leigh

Billed as stimulus both for automakers and the environment, the Car Allowance Rebates System, better known as Cash for Clunkers, turned out to be clunker itself. Besides fueling more unsustainable new-car-buying consumerism, the program also destroyed thousands of older, functional vehicles — vehicles that, according to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), were almost 100 percent recyclable. Through Cash for Clunkers, about 690,000 vehicles had their engines destroyed and many were sent to junkyards, bypassing recycling companies altogether.

E Magazine reports:

The ARA issued a report when the CARS program was announced saying that a much more efficient program would have been to encourage recycled parts usage. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration explained at the time that the engines must be destroyed to prevent the vehicles from being resold and taking the road again. For any dealer that did not follow that law, there was a hefty $15,000 fine per infraction against them.

CARS claims to have had a positive environmental impact by taking these old vehicles off the road, yet it required destroying the traded-in vehicle’s drive train and engine. The engines were destroyed with a sodium silicate solution, also known as liquid glass. The silicate causes the engine’s parts to freeze and ensures it never runs again … Many of the clunkers ended up at auctions where parts dealers bid on them. By the time all reusable parts are salvaged, the material left is the car’s frame. CARS mandated that the clunkers be crushed or shredded within 180 days, regardless of whether all the usable parts were salvaged or not. …

The Department of Transportation reported that Cash for Clunkers was an environmental success. The clunkers averaged 15.8 mpg, compared with the 25.4 mph for new vehicles being purchased, for an average fuel-economy increase of 61%. In general, drivers traded in inefficient SUVs and trucks for more efficient passenger cars. However, it’s quite easy to negate this small difference in gas mileage purely by the fact that people will be more likely to drive a vehicle that takes less money to fill up with gas. It’s an efficiency paradox: as we get more efficient at using energy, the overall cost of energy goes down, but we respond by using more of it.

So, H&M, about that clothes recycling program …

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Fiscal-cliff deal ups tax benefit for transit riders

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 3, 2013

Fiscal-cliff deal ups tax benefit for transit riders

By Susie Cagle

FISCAL CLIFF TRIGGER WARNING! Obviously there’s a lot to be annoyed about in this deal, but there are a few bright spots that aren’t getting much attention. Renewed tax credits for wind energy are cool, and even more people will benefit from a near-doubling of a tax benefit for transit riders.

The benefit is basically a tiny tax shelter for the dollars you’re spending on public transportation, available if your employer participates in a federal program. On Dec. 31, 2011, that shelter was shrunk from $230 a month to $125, while the benefit for people who drive to work and pay for parking was increased from $230 to $240 — meaning the government was incentivizing people to drive instead of take public transit. Now, thanks to the fiscal-cliff deal, tax benefits for transit takers and car parkers will be equalized — both will get a benefit of up to $240 a month.

From Transportation Nation:

Transit advocates hailed the legislation. “We’ve been pushing for transit equity for months,” said Rob Healy, vice president of the American Public Transportation Association. “From our perspective, we felt it was very, very important that the federal tax code not bias one mode versus another.” He added: “You shouldn’t be making your choices based on a tax code which treats parking better than it does transit.”

This should take a bit of the sting out of new fare hikes going into effect for transit systems (at least if you have a job …). That is, it’ll take the sting out for 2013. Because here’s the bad news, transportation lovers: This is only a one-year extension, set to expire on Dec. 31 unless it’s renewed.

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Peer-to-peer sharing went big in 2012 — and so did opposition

by johnsmithwindows Posted on December 29, 2012

Peer-to-peer sharing went big in 2012 — and so did opposition

By Susie Cagle

This year, ride-sharing services Lyft and Sidecar amassed millions in new funding. Uber, which lets passengers hail idle town cars with their smartphones, expanded to new cities from San Francisco to New York. And Airbnb, which makes it easy for people to rent out their homes or rooms for short periods, expects to be filling more rooms per night than Hilton by the end of the year.

And yet, in a number of cities across the country, these businesses are illegal. New things are scary. And new things that grow really fast are the scariest.

2012 saw increased acceptance and growth in sharing and peer-to-peer businesses, presenting new options for consumers and new problems for established businesses and government regulators. As these new businesses grew, so did their collective disruptive force.

As Tim Wu wrote at The New York Times, “Change isn’t always pretty, but a healthy city is one where old systems — even the hallowed taxi medallion — stand to be challenged by the winds of creative destruction.”

New tech makes these businesses possible, but their sustained success doesn’t hinge on advances in smartphone design or social networking. We’re choosing peer-to-peer because we want to do business differently. We actually kind of want to pretend like we’re not doing business at all.

Lyft and Sidecar enable individuals with their own cars to find and drive customers, keeping the majority of the fare with a small chunk going to the company.

LyftThe detachable pink mustache lets ride-seekers know this is a Lyft.

“The big difference between the Lyft experience and the cab experience is supposedly friendliness. That’s why they bill themselves as ‘your friend with a car,’” Lyft driver Kate Dollarhyde told me. “A lot of my customers tell me they prefer Lyft because they feel more safe than they do in cabs, and also because they feel they can talk to and make friends with drivers.”

In an increasingly inhospitable, unfriendly world, peer-to-peer business sells you on, well, your peers. Lyft, which launched in San Francisco this summer with plans to expand into Seattle and Los Angeles in 2013, is selling community. But it’s also selling savings. Dollarhyde says Lyft trains drivers to inform customers that the rides cost about $4 less than a cab.

Even with those lower fares, Lyft can be a real source of income for drivers: “I make more money driving for Lyft per hour than I have doing anything else,” said Dollarhyde.

Airbnb can also be a significant moneymaker for participants. ”Ultimately, we want to empower people and we have thousands of people around the world that are making an incredible, meaningful amount of revenue,” Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky told CBS. “We’ve helped thousands of people stay in their homes.”

Peer-to-peer business also empowers service providers to not provide services to clients with bad reputations; the companies let participants rate customers as well as car drivers and homeowners. ”At the end of every ride, passengers rate drivers and drivers rate passengers,” Dollarhyde tells me. “Five stars is the baseline; everyone starts out at the top. You deduct stars for rude behavior, like barfing in someone’s car, being a jerk, or generally making a ride uncomfortable.” If a barfy customer ends up with a bad rating, they’ll be peer-pressured out of the system by drivers who just won’t choose to pick them up.

But with great power comes great responsibility. (Sorry, had to.) While Airbnb helped a lot of houseless folks in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, with many people using the service to offer their homes and rooms for free, Uber was slammed for price-gouging during a difficult time.

A number of U.S. cities have banned different peer-to-peer businesses or tried to regulate them out of existence. Officials claim they’re protecting consumers, but Wu says complaints about the companies often “have the odor of industry protectionism.”

“Banning Airbnb helps hotels more than homeowners; banning Uber helps taxi companies more than passengers,” Wu writes. Owners of established businesses often have ties to local politicians, unlike the random guy who wants to rent out his studio while he’s out of town.

Wu suggests more flexible approaches to regulation that hinge on openness and real-time data. “Regulators could simply require Uber to disclose the prices it charged and where its cars were going. If cities wanted to ban rate hikes during emergencies, they could watch to see that the law was obeyed,” he writes. “This kind of precise, data-driven regulation could protect consumers while also protecting their right to pay for a valuable service.”

It could, but governments would have to put their fears aside first. So far, it’s baby steps. Earlier this month, California regulators began an inquiry into how to regulate ride-sharing services.

“We’re cautiously optimistic that the investigation will result in rules that will support innovation and support the benefits that Sidecar represents, which are reductions in emissions and congestion and more affordable transportation options,” Sidecar cofounder Sunil Paul told the San Francisco Examiner.

California’s regulatory commission will deliver its findings in six months — by which time a whole new corner of the peer-to-peer industry will likely be delighting new consumers and frustrating established business owners.

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