Blogs

(cross-posted with my personal blog)

Literally (i.e. in normal, non-jargon English) “sustainable” means that it is capable of being sustained over time, whether it is good or bad.

But in environmentalist jargon, “sustainable” means “environmentally friendly” or “non-polluting.”  It seems to me that this jargon creates a completely unnecessary barrier between professional environmentalists/planners and the rest of humanity. 

After CNU, I rode Tri-Rail and Miami-Dade transit to visit a friend in Miami Beach.  The Tri-Rail trip was fine; Miami-Dade transit, however, was more of an adventure.

CNU20 Dreams from First+Main Media on Vimeo.

CNU 20 Trailer Confessions / Dreams from First+Main Media on Vimeo.

What's your balloon story?

Share your CNU 20 Open Source Congress ideas now.

Richard Florida, author of the best-selling Rise of the Creative Class and The Great Reset, speaks at CNU 20 on May 11.

Florida is the founder of the Creative Class Group, currently heads the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and is a senior editor at Atlantic Magazine, having recently created the Atlantic Cities program.

Thank you for watching the live-stream. We will have the video archive available soon:

Peter Calthorpe spoke this morning on Chinese urbanism- the good and the bad. From a new urbanist perspective, the good includes density and transportation: Chinese cities tend to be more compact than ours, and the government seeks to limit car use to a 20% modal share (i.e. 20 percent of all trips by car- still an increase over the current 12 percent share).

The bad: lots of streets that are too wide to comfortably cross, and lots of blocks that tend to be on the long side.

Voting for the first-ever CNU Board Elections closes today sharply at Noon.

To vote, follow the instructions below:

1. Login to your CNU.org account at www.cnu.org/user.
2. Meet the Candidates by clicking here.
3. Cast your vote at www.cnu.org/2012boardelections/candidates.

This is your Congress. Vote now.

I just heard an amazing set of presentations by Eric Dumbaugh and  Peter Norton (author of a new book, Fighting Traffic). Dumbaugh begin with a statistical table listing causes of pedestrians being killed by cars; nearly every cause somehow showed pedestrians at fault (e.g. jaywalking, pedestrian using electronic device, etc.). In essence, our culture presumes that if a pedestrian is killed by a 2-ton vehicle, the pedestrian rather than the driver is generally at fault.