a cute little piece by Michael Gartner (formerly of NBC News)
My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should
>say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he
>was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
>
>"In those days," he told me, when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car
>you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet,
>and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life
>and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."
>
>At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
>"Oh, bull____!" she said. "He hit a horse."
>
>Well," my father said, "there was that, too."
>
>So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The
>neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941
>Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the
>Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.
>
>My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar
>to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home.  If he took the
>streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three
>blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
>
>My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and
>sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars
>but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would
>explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say,
>"But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one."  It was as
>if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
>
>But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my
>parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts
>department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white
>model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and,
>since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's
>car.
>
>Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father,
>but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43
>years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in
>a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following
>year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice
>driving.
>
>The cemetery probably was my father's idea.
>
>"Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying once.
>
>For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the
>driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of
>direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the
>city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
>
>Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout
>Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement
>that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of
>marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire
>time.)
>
>He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20
>years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's
>Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would
>wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was
>on duty that morning.
>
>If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile
>walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her
>home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk
>and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father
>Fast" and "Father Slow."
>
>After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother
>whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along.
>If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and
>read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the
>engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio.
>
>In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost
>again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the
>millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base
>scored."
>
>If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry
>the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.
>
>As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and
>she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know
>the secret of a long life?"
>
>"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.
>
>"No left turns," he said.
>
>"What?" I asked.
>
>"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I
>read an article that said most accidents that old people are in
>happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get
>older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth
>perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to
>make a left turn."  "What?" I said again.  "No left turns," he said.
>"Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a
>lot safer. So we always make three rights." "You're kidding!" I
>said, and I turned to my mother for support.
>
>"No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It
>works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."
>
>I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I
>started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted,
>"that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven
>rights, and you're okay again."  I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go
>for 11?" I asked.
>
>"No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call
>it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be
>put off another day or another week."
>
>My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me
>her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in
>1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My
>father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow
>they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000.
>(Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower
>put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father
>would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly
>three times what he paid for the house.)
>
>He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he
>was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but
>wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body
>until the moment he died.
>
>One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I
>had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all
>three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual
>wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things
>in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know,
>Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second
>hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You
>know, I'm probably not going to live much longer."  "You're probably
>right," I said. "Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat
>irritated. "Because you're 102 years old," I said. "Yes," he said,
>"you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day.
>
>That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with
>him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one
>point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to
>make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet."
>
>An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
>
>"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no
>pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as
>anyone on this earth could ever have." A short time later, he died.
>
>I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and
>then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so
>long.
>
>I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life.
>
>Or because he quit taking left turns..........

back to Jewish stuff

Normally I don't blog much anymore on Jewish stuff, but I am making an exception to review one book that I can't review on amazon.com for some reason (I think it is flat-out unavailable):  Rav Soloveitchik's Days of Deliverance: Essays on Purim and Hanukkah.  This well-done collection of lectures contains a variety of interesting points.  A few that I noticed:

1.  Why do observant Jews fast before Purim?  Because Purim involves misery and distress as well as joy - the misery of the Jews who were almost massacred before circumstances intervened.  This combination is why the Megillah is read in the evening as well as in the morning; the evening symbolizes both the negative and the positive.

2.   Exodus 33:22-23 (in which God tells Moses that God's "back" but not "face" may be seen) symbolizes that "while the event takes place, while the historical drama is being unfolded, one cannot understand what is happening.  However, after God's passing by, in retrospective meditation, you may begin to see God's back, or the contours of reasonableness of an event that you considered and classified as absurd and unreasonable."

3.  How is Purim different from the major festivals such as Rosh Hashanah, Passover, etc.?  Regarding other festivals, the Torah commands joy- a phrase that Soloveitchik describes as "awareness that one's existence has a purpose, that there is self-fulfillment and commtiment to a great objective."  This view is backed up by the idea that these festivals celebrate the Exodus from Egypt - a "permanent" miracle in that the Exodus essentially created the Jewish people. Purim merely celebrates a victory- but no total joy is possible because the victory of physical survival is not permanent or decisive; another massacre is always possible. 

4. How are Purim and Hanukkah different from Shabbat?  In Shabbat, work (which brings people together to exchange goods and services) is banned; on Shabbat, the single person withdraws from society.* By contrast, Purim and Hannukah involve the salvation of the community, and thus are celebrated collectively, through sharing goodies (Purim) or sharing in the joy of the miracle by lighting candles in public view (Hanukkah). 

5.  How are Purim and Hanukkah different from each other?  The first involves physical survival, the second involves spiritual survival against an enemy who sought to convert Jews rather than to kill them (at least as a first resort).  The prayers for Hanukkah mention human participation in the miracle, while those for Purim do not- evidently because it goes without saying that God is credited for spiritual victories such as Hankkah, while for Purim the point requires more emphasis. 

6. What is the real miracle of Hanukkah?  Not a military victory or the burning of oil for a few extra days, but the spiritual miracle that Judaism survived against missionary attacks by pagan kings.

 

 

*This claim troubles me; in reality Shabbat is often a collective experience, as Jews worship together more frequently and go to each other's homes more frequently.  

My comments on Sam Staley's Washington Post article on sprawl

 

http://www.cnu.org/node/705

blogging fom CNU Fla

Last week I went to a conference of the Florida chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU).  Two presentations were especially interesting.

 Billy Hattaway of Glatting Jackson (a traffic engineering firm) spoke about CNU's efforts to reform the Florida Green Book (guidelines governing street design).   These guidelines are apparently not pedestrian-friendly; for example, they call for streets to be designed for 50 mph traffic even if pedestrians are using them as well as drivers. I was aware of national traffic engineering guidelines put out by AASHTO (a national highway organization) but had no idea Florida had its own rules. 

 Engineers believe that compliance with these guidelines can immunize them from tort liability- often wrongly, because there's very little litigation against engineers when they are making discretionary policy choices.   Hattaway said that CNU is working to create special, more pedestrian-oriented guidelines for New Urbanist developments.  Unfortunately, these guidelines will be limited to Traditional Neighborhood Developments (TNDs- basically, New Urbanist developments, defined in the proposed guidebook) rather than applying to all developments. 

Another interesting speaker was Frank Starkey, a developer.  He said that New Urbanists face a difficult tradeoff: on the one hand, when developers borrow one or two elements of New Urbanism and wind up with something that is 99% conventional sprawl, this creates a backlash against New Urbanism as "prettied-up sprawl."

But on the other hand, New Urbanists' support of separate zoning disticts for TNDs with (in his words) "gold-plated design standards" was actually an obstacle to more pedestrian-friendly development,  in two ways.  First, the standards create an extra layer of bureaucracy for TNDs to go through, and often make TNDs more expensive.  Second, if TND is an "all or nothing" choice, developers are more likely to choose the familiar status quo.  My sense was (and maybe I'm projecting my own views onto his) that he thought New Urbanists should focus less on building the perfect TND code and more on improving the 99 percent of the market that is not TND.

 Someone from Palm Beach County spoke about how the city facilitated downtown development in West Palm Beach.  In addition to creating a form-based code, the city created one-stop review: an unelected commission could grant or deny permits within 45 minutes, and the commission was the only body a developer needed to go to. Result: a revitalized downtown (but also complaints about overdevelopment).

 

blogging from AALS

I went to the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) conference last week, and wanted to report on some of the interesting things I learned.

The state and local government section sponsored a session on the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina.  The most interesting speech, as far as I was concerned, was by Paul Boudreaux of Stetson, who compared New Orleans' recovery to Kobe's after an earthquake in the 1990s.  While there's been some discussion about New Urbanist design in New Orleans, Kobe has moved in a very different direction: tearing down much of the city's stock of woodframe houses and building high-rises surrounded by parks (the much-derided "Tower in the Park" design championed by Le Corbusier in the early 20th century).  Kobe's strategy doesn't sound that appealing from a community-building perspective, but I don't really know enough about earthquake preparation to evaluate the city's plans in detail.

The Jewish Law section was, as always, a joy.  The most memorable presentation was by Adam Chodorow of Arizona State.  He compared Jewish law with American tax law; Temple-era Judaism had a kind of tax system of tithes to priests and Levites, and the ancient sages labored over such modern issues as the definition of "income" for purposes of these tithes.  Just as we worry about the proper balance between tax simplicity and other values, they dealt with the proper balance between tithe simplicity and other values.

The Federalist Society "counter-conference" a few hotels away was also interesting.  Randy Barnett spoke about the convergence of views between liberals and conservatives over originalism.  While some liberals (such as Jack Balkin) claim to embrace originalism, Justice Scalia, a conservative originalist, has made it clear that he is willing to forsake originalist methodology for the sake of precedent, clarity, or avoiding absurd results.  To be sure, there are still divisions: liberals who claim to support originalism tend to define "original meaning" as broad, general values, so there will not be a consensus over Roe v. Wade anytime soon.

 David Stras of Minnesota discussed the Supreme Court's declining docket.  One might think that the Court's discussion to hear fewer cases is a left/right issue, with conservatives applauding the Court's lassitude and liberals complaining about it.  Stras argues that the Court's behavior should concern conservatives as well as liberals; the Supreme Court often refuses to resolve Circuit splits, which means national businesses have to follow one law in one region and another law in another region.

Stras also pointed out that the issue of declining dockets cuts across ideological lines: liberal Justice Ginsburg has been one of the most stingy justices in deciding whether to hear cases, voting to hear only 80 or so cases a year.  By contrast, her moderate-to-conservative predecessor Justice White voted to hear 200 cases per year.

Stras proposed that Congress expand the Court's mandatory jurisdiction, by allowing circuit judges to certify cases to the Supreme Court.  To prevent the Supreme Court from being flooded with cases, Congress could require a unanimous lower court vote to certify, or allow the Court to reject certifications by a supermajority.

That's not all I heard, but these were the most memorable presentations. (No offense to other people I heard!)   

some more pro-sprawl arguments debunked

This article debunks two common pro-sprawl arguments: 

1.  That sprawl in Europe proves sprawl is inevitable.  The article points out that European governments, like American ones, create sprawl by throwing money at expressways.

2.  That new cars don't increase pollution.  The article points out that emissions in Europe are soaring due to increased vehicle use. 

URL: http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?Linkid=66143 

Rebecca and Emmet O’Connell swear that they are not car people and that they worry about global warming. Indeed, they looked miserable one recent evening as they drove home to suburban Lucan from central Dublin, a crawling 8.5-mile journey that took an hour.

But in this booming city, where the number of cars has doubled in the last 15 years, there is little choice, they said. “Believe me — if there was an alternative we would use it,” said Ms. O’Connell, 40, a textile designer. “We care about the environment. It’s just hard to follow through here.”

No trains run to the new suburbs where hundreds of thousands of Dubliners now live, and the few buses going there overflow with people. So nearly everyone drives — to work, to shop, to take their children to school — in what seems like a constant smoggy, traffic jam. Since 1990, emissions from transportation in Ireland have risen about 140 percent, the most in Europe. But Ireland is not alone.

Vehicular emissions are rising in nearly every European country, and across the globe. Because of increasing car and truck use, greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing even where pollution from industry is waning.

The 23 percent growth in vehicular emissions in Europe since 1990 has “offset” the effect of cleaner factories, according to a recent report by the European Environment Agency. The growth has occurred despite the invention of far more environmentally friendly fuels and cars.

“What we gain by hybrid cars and ethanol buses, we more than lose because of sheer numbers of vehicles,” said Ronan Uhel, a senior scientist with the European Environment Agency, which is based in Copenhagen. Vehicles, mostly cars, create more than one-fifth of the greenhouse-gas emissions in Europe, where the problem has been extensively studied.

The few places that have aggressively sought to fight the trend have taken sometimes draconian measures. Denmark, for example, treats cars the way it treats yachts — as luxury items — imposing purchase taxes that are sometimes 200 percent of the cost of the vehicle. A simple Czech-made Skoda car that costs $18,400 in Italy or Sweden costs more than $34,000 in Denmark.

The number of bicycles on Danish streets has increased in recent years, and few people under the age of 30 own cars. Many families have turned to elaborate three-wheeled contraptions. (Beijing, meanwhile, has restricted the use of traditional three-wheeled bikes.)

On a recent morning in Copenhagen — which is flat, and has bike lanes — Cristian Eskelund, 35, a government lobbyist, hopped on a clunky bicycle with a big wooden cart attached to the front. The day before, he had used the vehicle, a local contraption called a Christiania bike, to carry a Christmas tree he had bought. This day, he was taking his two children to school, then heading to the hospital, where his wife was in labor.

“How many children do I have?” Mr. Eskelund said. “Two, perhaps three.”

There are high-end options, too. At $2,800, a three-wheeled Nihola bike costs as much as a used car, but many people insist it is far more practical. Sleek, lightweight, with a streamlined enclosed bubble in front, it is good for transporting groceries and children.

High taxes on cars or gasoline of the type levied in Copenhagen are effective in curbing traffic, experts say, but they scare voters, making even environmentalist politicians unlikely to propose them. When Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, revealed his “green” budget proposal, it included an increase in gas taxes of less than two and a half cents per quart.

Other cities have tried variations that require fewer absolute sacrifices from motorists. Rome allows only cars with low emissions ratings into its historic center. In London and Stockholm, drivers must pay a congestion charge to enter the city center. Such programs do reduce traffic and pollution at a city’s core, but evidence suggests that car use simply moves to the suburbs.

But Dublin is more typical of cities around the world, from Asia to Latin America, where road transport volumes are increasing in tandem with economic growth. Since 1997, Beijing has built a new ring road every two years, each new concentric superhighway giving rise to a host of malls and housing compounds.

In Ireland, car ownership has more than doubled since 1990 and car engines have grown steadily larger. Meanwhile, new environmental laws have meant that emissions from electrical plants, a major polluter, have been decreasing since 2001.

Urban sprawl and cars are the chicken and egg of the environmental debate. Cars make it easier for people to live and shop outside the center city. As traffic increases, governments build more roads, encouraging people to buy more cars and move yet farther away. In Europe alone, 6,200 miles of motorways were built from 1990 to 2003 and, with the European Union’s enlargement, 7,500 more are planned. Government enthusiasm for spending on public transportation, which is costly and takes years to build, generally lags far behind.

For instance, Dublin and Beijing are building trams and subways, but they will not reach out to the new commuter communities where so many people now live.

The trend is strongest in newly rich societies, where cars are “caught up in the aspirations of the 21st century,” said Peder Jensen, lead author of the European Environmental Agency report on traffic.


Peter Daley, a Dublin retiree who has five children, said: “We used to be a poor country and all the kids used to leave to find work. Now they stay and they need a car when they’re 17. So families that would have had one car 15 years ago, now have three or four.”

As a result, traffic limps around Dublin’s glorious St. Stephen’s Green. Just as skiers can check out the snow at St. Moritz on the Internet, drivers can monitor Dublin’s traffic through the City Council home page.

In the past two years, the city has completed two light-rail lines. During the holidays, the police provide extra officers to direct traffic at all major junctions. But nothing helps much.

When the O’Connells returned from London four years ago, and could not afford the prices of Dublin’s city center, they bought a wood and brick semi-detached house in one of hundreds of new developments. Today, it seems that every home has two or three cars out front.

“No one thought, ‘How will all these people get home from work?’ ” said Mr. O’Connell, an architectural technician, who said the commute took just 20 minutes at first. Ms. O’Connell’s job at the National College of Art and Design in downtown Dublin comes with a parking space. So their gray Toyota Yaris is their lifeline.

One day a week, Mr. O’Connell does take the bus. But if he does not leave home by 7:30 a.m., the buses are all full and simply speed by his stop. On a recent evening, their 18-year-old daughter, Imogen, missed her art class in town because the bus ride took two hours; when she tried to get home, all the buses were full, leaving her stranded.

So they drive. “I complain and I moan, but we continue,” Ms. O’Connell said. “I suppose if petrol got really expensive or I lost my free parking, we’d face up to the fact that we shouldn’t be driving so much, and try to figure something else out.”

John MacClain, a cabdriver in Dublin for 20 years, said that on a recent trip to Prague, he liked the architecture just fine. But what really impressed him, he said, was “the tram system.”

“Now that was beautiful,” he said. “I could get everywhere with ease.”

 

Books I read in 2006

 

1. Samson Raphael Hirsch (albeit heavily edited; the one volume version not the five volume set) Hirsch Chumash

2. Breyer, Active Liberty

3. Hoffman et. Al. My People’s Prayer Book: vol 7,

Shabbat at Home

4. Hirsch, Nineteen Letters

5. Epstein, A Conspectus of the Public Lectures of

Rabbi Joseph B. Solovetchik

6. Diamond, And I Will Dwell In Their Midst

7. Astren, Karaite Judaism and Historical

Understanding

8. Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish

State

9. Daniel Schiff, Abortion in Judaism

10. Robert Bruggeman, Sprawl

11. Crooks/Arsenault, Jacksonville

12. Bartley, Keeping The Faith: Race, Politics and

Social Development in Jacksonville, 1940_70

13. Soloveitchik, Festival of Freedom

14. Roth, The Halakhic Process

15. Fishkoff, The Rebbe’s Army

16. Breuer, Modernity within Tradition

17. Ginzberg, Students, Scholars and Saints

18. Steinsaltz, We Jews

19. Grant, The Jews in the Roman World

20. Kranzler, Hasidic Williamsburg

21. Solomon, Global City Blues

22. Sacks, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

23. Ortiz, Eva Peron

24. Kellner, Must A Jew Believe Anything?

25. Cowley, What Ifs of American History

26. Feagin, Free Enterprise City

27. Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine

28. Queenan, Queenan Country

29. Roth, Dona Gracia of the House of Nasi

30. Gilderbloom et al., Rethinking Rental Housing

31. Weiss, Vintage Wein

32. Glick, Abraham's Heirs

33. Hadas, Flavius Josephus

34. Paris, The End of Days

35. Soloveitchik, The Lord Is Righteous In All His Ways

36. Lew, One God Clapping

37. Eisen, Galut

38. Kafka, The Castle  (fiction)

39. Telushkin, You Shall Be Holy

40. Meir, The Jewish Ethicist

41. Sherwin, Jewish Ethics for the 21^st Century

42. Kleinman, Praying with Fire

43. Abraham, The Seventh Beggar (fiction) 

44. Alter, The Five Books of Moses

45. Lewis, Main Street (fiction)

46. Hartman, Love and Terror in the God Encounter

47. Soloveitchik, Fate and Destiny

48. Sacks, To Heal A Fractured World

49. Stern, How to Keep Kosher

50. Klinghoffer, Why The Jews Rejected Jesus

51. Stewart et al, America: The Book (Teachers’ Edition)

52. Ferrigno, Prayers for the Assassin (fiction)

my 15 minutes of Jacksonville celebrity

I was not just cited, but quoted in a Times-Union editorial yesterday.  The editorial is at

 http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/122706/opi_6072543.shtml

yet another in my empire of web pages

https://lewyn.tripod.com/carfreeinjacksonville

 The last words of the URL pretty much describe the site.

Conservative responsa on homosexuality

The long-awaited Conservative rabbinic papers on homosexuality are at   http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/law/new_teshuvot.html 

The papers that got enough votes to matter (i.e. that individual congregations may adopt) are the Roth, Levy and Dorff papers.  The most liberal paper is the Dorff paper; the others are more traditional.

bad urban schools: myth or reality?

There was a story in today's NY Times about science test scores in urban schools. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/education/16reportcard.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Most of the story parroted the conventional wisdom about how awful city schools are. 

But the story contained something a little different: a table breaking down the results by race.  And when the results are broken down by race, big city schools don't always do worse than the nation as a whole.

For example, in Atlanta white 4th graders outperformed the national average for whites; they were at the 86th percentile nationwide, while white 4th graders nationally were at the 62nd percentile. 

Nationally, 28% of white students were at the "below basic" level in science; but in four of nine big cities listed, the percentage of white students with below-basic scores was lower.  The major exceptions were cities with large white working class populations (e.g. Cleveland, Boston).

Urban blacks did a little worse relative to national scores, but even there most city systems were pretty close to the national black average.    Nationally, 73% of blacks were below basic; in 7 of 10 cities listed, the black "below basic" average was within five points of that (that is, no more than 78% of blacks were "below basic").

We don't have a problem with city schools.  We have a problem with race and schools- which, of course, doesn't make it any less difficult.  

 

 

  

interesting things about the election

I. Gerrymandering 

Conventional wisdom was that the Republicans had a "firewall" through gerrymandering.

 It looks right now like the Dems will have around 52.4% of the national House popular vote (the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate says the Dems have 36.5 million, the Reps have 33.2 million, so do the math yourself).  Assuming that the nine undecided races break in favor of the candidate who is winning, the Dems will have about 232 seats (or 53% of the seats).  So the gap between the Dems vote share and their seat share will be at most around 0.6%- pretty unusual in a single-member system.

In the last couple of elections, did Rs do any better? Not much.  In 2004 there was a 2% gap (Rs got 51.4% of national House vote, 53.3% of seats); in 2002, the first post-redistricting year, they got 52.4% of the vote and 52.6% of the seats.  So redistricting doesn't seem to create a system that favors Republicans per se very much  on the national level. 

Having said that, seats/votes gaps are much narrower today that in the 1990s.  Let's look at two elections after the 1990 redistricting:

 1992 Reps gave 47.3% of the votes, only 40.5% of the seats- a 6.8% seats/votes gap.

1994 Reps got 52.8% of votes, 53% of seats- basically no gap.

In 1990s, Dem gerrymanders clearly favored Ds, giving Ds a big surplus before 1994, and limiting their 1994 losses.

In 2000s, results much more ambiguous, so there's no reason to believe that gerrymandering consistently favors Republicans. 

At most, it may be the case that bipartisan gerrymanders, by limiting the number of swing districts, limited seat swings to either party, essentially creating a floor of 200 or so seats for each side.

II.  Exit polls

After 2004, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about exit polls and their D bias.  I compared the early evening exit polls (off wonkette.com) with actual results. 

Surprisingly, there wasn't a clear pro-D pattern.  In Senate races polled, Republicans did more than a point better than exit polls in Virginia (47% poll, almost 50% on Earth), Montana (46% poll, 48% Earth) and Arizona (50% poll, 53% Earth), worse in Maryland (46% poll, 44% Earth) and within a point of the exit poll showing in RI, Pa, Ohio, NJ, and Mo- and exactly at the exit poll showing in Tenn.

 Looks like the kinks may be out of the exit poll system.

my more or less final prognostications for the election

Governorships:  D 29 R 21.  A VERY good year for Democrats; voters are less partisan in gubernatorial elections than in congressional elections, so states that would never elect a Dem for Senate (e.g. Wyoming) have Democratic governors and states where Republicans are in trouble (e.g. Rhode Island) are going to reelect R governors by wide margins.

 (NOTE AFTER ELECTION: I got this almost 100% right; the only govenror's race I missed was Minnesota, where a R gov won 51-49 instead of losing 51-49 as I expected).

Senate: R 52 D 48  A few days ago I thought this would be 50-50 at worst for the Dems.  But the Dems only have two guaranteed gains (Ohio, Pa).

 Five more seats are more or less tossups- Montana, RI, Virginia and Missouri (all with R incumbents), Maryland (D open seat).  I think the Dems only win two of the five- if I had to guess, holding Maryland and winning one of the four GOP seats.

(AFTER ELECTION NOTE: Of course, the Dems won all five!  I thought that there would be a Republican surge that didn't happen; the same explains my error re the House, where the Dems look like they will have around 230).

 House- 219 D 216 R.  I think the Rs are closing fast and usually perform better than polls suggest in House races (for a wide variety of reasons).  I think the chances of the Ds winning the House are still slightly better than 50-50 (but only slightly, and only because a bunch of R seats are in trouble due to scandals).

 

In Honor of Yom Kippur (reposted)

AN AL CHET FOR ALL OUR POLITICIANS (Atlanta Jewish Times, 11-1-02)

It is appropriate that the political campaign season begins around Yom Kippur and ends with Election Dy since politicians have a lot for which to repent.
After watching a particularly reprehensible TV ad, I created a prayer to remind politicians of their campaign-season errors. Its modeled on the Al Chet prayer we say on Yom Kippur.
The politicians Al Chet would begin with the traditional opening for that prayer, which includes: Hide not Thyself from our supplication, for we are neither so arrogant nor so hardened as to say before thee, O Lord our God and God of our predecessors, `we are righteous and have not sinned; verily, we have sinned.
Then the politicians prayer would focus on sins commonly associated with liberals and those commonly associated with conservatives.
For the sin we committed by buying votes with taxpayers money, and for the sin we committed by putting future generations in debt to cut taxes today;
For the sin we committed by idolizing government, and for the sin we committed by making government the enemy;
For the sin we committed by comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted;
And for the sin we committed by afflicting the middle class to make ourselves feel better;
For the sin we committed by pandering to the middle classs desire to cut its commutes by a few minutes while ignoring the working poors interest in health insurance and decent bus service;
and for the sin we committed by pretending that government could help the poor by forcing everyone to pay each other higher wages;
For the sin we committed by pretending schools could be saved by throwing money at them,
and for the sin we committed by ignoring differences between rich and poor schools;
For the sin we committed by unchastity, and for the sin we committed by focusing on our opponents personal lives;
For the sin we committed by veiled appeals to racism and [for the sin we committed by] frivolous accusations of racism;
For the sin we committed by letting government support illegitimate childbirth and the sin we committed by pretending all government spending goes to unpopular programs like welfare and foreign aid;
For the sin we committed by refusing to acknowledge that an embryo in a test tube is different than an already born human, and for the sin we committed by refusing to acknowledge that a fetus with arms, legs and a heart is different from an embryo in a test tube; For the sins we committed by ignoring the environment;
For the sin we committed by war-mongering and by using patriotism to justify every war,
For the sin we committed by spurning the insights of religion, and for the sin we committed by using religious issues to distract voters from issues that their daily lives;
For the sin we committed by accepting bribes disguised as campaign contributions,
For the sin we committed by reckless partisanship and slandering our opponents,
For the sins we committed by pandering to labor unions; and for the sins we committed by pandering to business;
For the sins we committed in the name of liberty, and for the sins we committed in the name of equality;
For all these, O God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

And to all candidates, I say what I say to myself as the gates of prayer close: Please try to do better next year.

a thought about urban growth boundaries

One thing that has always troubled me against the question of urban growth boundaries around cities. It seems to me that the regions where growth boundaries are most necessary and least likely to be harmful are precisely the regions where they are least likely to be tried.

How so?  Because in a slow growth, Buffalo/Cleveland type region, the costs from growth boundaries are low.  Due to slack real estate demand, it is unlikely that growth boundaries in such a region will lead to inflated
housing prices.  And because the city may die without growth boundaries, the benefits of growth boundaries are high.

By contrast, in a growing region such as Portland or Seattle, there are enough affluent people for city and suburb alike, so even without growth boundaries the core city will be moderately prosperous (at least compared to most Rust Belt cities).  Thus, the major benefit of growth boundaries(i.e. preserving the core key and its older suburbs as decent places to live*) are smaller in a growing region.

And where thousands of people are moving into the region every year, there is a fairly significant risk of growth boundaries causing housing price inflation. Thus, the costs of growth boundaries are higher in a Seattle or Portland than in a Buffalo or a Cleveland.

And yet it is precisely the fast growth regions where growth boundaries and similar experiments are most feasible politically.  Why?

*See my article on growth boundaries (available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=816885 ) which points out that Portland's growth boundaries have been more successful in improving the core city than in solving other problems such as traffic congestion.

I have two new articles out on SSRN

"Five Myths About Sprawl" (a review of Robert Bruegmann's Sprawl: a compact history) at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=931251

 

"Planners Gone Wild" (a review of Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking) at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=931255

my article in today's Jacksonville paper

The URL is http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/090606/opl_4787662.shtml

(I added brackets because there are a couple of places where I think there may have been typos- ML) 

A recent article [in a neighborhood newspaper] praised the widening of Riverside Avenue just south of downtown to six lanes.

Says one local executive, the widening will make Riverside "the new gateway to Jacksonville."

Similarly, a local economic development official speculates that Brooklyn, a nearby residential area, might soon have "people who work in the area, live in the area, and take pride in the area."

In other words, our local businesspeople and planners seem to think that turning Riverside Avenue into a six-lane speedway will help developers turn Brooklyn into a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood.

But does anyone really want to walk across a six-lane street?

I certainly don't. When I have visited the six-lane part of Riverside Avenue, I don't feel particularly comfortable.

I feel like I am in a place that is made for cars rather than for people, and I feel like I have to be very careful before crossing the street. By contrast, I feel much more comfortable walking on the narrower streets in residential areas.

Narrower streets are more pedestrian-friendly for two reasons. First, a wide street takes longer for pedestrians to cross, thus increasing pedestrian commutes and increasing the amount of time a pedestrian is exposed to traffic.

Second, wide streets encourage cars to drive faster, thus increasing the frequency and severity of pedestrian injuries.

A motorist driving at high speeds has more difficulty paying attention to the surrounding environment: The faster you drive, the harder it is for you to slow down in time if you see a pedestrian in front of you.

And car crashes are more lethal as cars go faster:

 

The probability of a pedestrian being killed by an automobile is only 3.5 percent when the auto is traveling at 15 miles per hour.

 

The fatality rate increases to 37 percent if the auto is traveling at 31 miles per hour.

 

It jumps to 83 percent if the auto is traveling 44 miles per hour.

So what? Why should anyone care if Riverside Avenue is pedestrian-friendly, as long as traffic flows more quickly? Hasn't the growth of suburbia proved that most people would rather be surrounded by speeding cars?

Avondale and San Marco, two of Jacksonville's most walkable neighborhoods, are also two of its most expensive - evidence that some people are willing to pay more for the privilege of being able to walk across narrow streets rather than sprinting across six-lane boulevards.

Clearly, the demand for walkable neighborhoods outstrips the supply. By contrast, Jacksonville's supply of six-lane and eight-lane speedways is virtually unlimited, so we don't need any more of them.

It logically follows that by widening Riverside Avenue, the city may have actually made the surrounding neighborhood less appealing to would-be residents - bad news for the new residential developments slated for Brooklyn.

It could be argued that even if walkability will spur residential growth, traffic flow should be the city's first priority in commercial areas such as the northern part of Riverside Avenue. Since most commuters drive to work, anything that makes commuting faster for business.

But a look near downtown Jacksonville [shows that] vehicle-first street design and prosperity do not always go together.

The relatively narrow streets near City Hall and the new library have begun to attract residential development and are also thriving during work hours, while the wider, more auto-oriented streets further west are wastelands 24 hours a day.

[It follows that] Maybe a downtown neighborhood unfriendly to pedestrians will, in the long run, have difficulty competing for businesses.

So the next time the city wants to promote a downtown neighborhood, maybe it should make the streets narrower instead of wider, perhaps by widening sidewalks and medians, and by planting more trees to create additional shade for pedestrians.

Michael Lewyn teaches at Florida Coastal School of Law.

and ANOTHER myth to rebut - birth rates and density
Joel Kotkin wrote in a recent article for Newsweek,  "Once everyone is forced into a small city place, there's literally no room left for kids."

There might be densities where there is "no room left for kids." But not in America.  A recent New York Times article  notes that Kiryas Joel, NY (a Hasidic enclave) has 18,000 people in 3000 families on 1.1 square miles.  When you do the math, you find that this community has around 16,000 people per square mile (more than any American city but NYC) and 6 people per family, a lot more than most American households.  

Commuting times out of control in suburbia- or, another prosprawl myth rebutted

 

I've seen the argument made that sprawl doesn't increase commuting times because jobs follow people to suburbs, and so suburbanites have shorter commute times than they would if their jobs were in the city.

 But this article in today's Washington Post suggests otherwise. 

The article notes that in metro DC, residents of DC and Arlington had the shortest commutes (29 and 26 minutes respectively).  By contrast, residents of exurban Prince William County had the longest (41 minutes).   Other suburbs had in-between commuting times.

What's going on?

First, Prince William is not one of the more job-rich suburbs.  To the extent "job sprawl" benefits commuters, it benefits only the ones who live in the job-rich suburbs (in DC, Loudoun and Fairfax Counties more than Prince William).  If you live in a less job-rich suburb, your commute might be longer than if you worked downtown.

Second, even if moving to a job-rich suburb to follow your job reduces your commute, other people in your household may still have a downtown job- which means the increase in that person's commute cancels out the decrease in yours. 

For example, suppose my wife and I live downtown; my job is 8 miles out in suburbia and hers is a few yards away, so we have a total commute of 8 miles.

A year later, we move to suburbia, 2 miles from my job and 10 miles from my wife's downtown job.  I am better off, but our total commute is 12 miles- far worse than when we lived downtown.

another Jewish voice against sprawl

The prophet Zechariah states "Old men and old women will yet sit in the streets of Jerusalem."

R. Soloveitchik interprets this statement to mean that after the final redemption of the Jews, "Jerusalem will be densely populated, even by elderly men and women. A young man likes to be on the street, but an old man likes to be home. But the city was going to be so populous that there would be no room for the elderly at home, so they will have to sit on the street."

The Lord is Righteous in All His Ways, p. 47

Evidently, Messianic deliverance means MUCH more compact development!