I always start my week with a dose of dystopia from James Kunstler’s blog.
Really, we’re right back where we were last year about this time, only worse. Oil has doubled, food is outasight, the levees have broken, the people who run things are shitting their pants, and everybody is waiting for a whole lotta other shoes to drop.
Kunstler must be so annoying to moderates: seemingly extreme, fringy and eccentric, sometimes obscene, he increasingly appears to have cast an accurate light on the dark side of the American (and our) way of life – something that, as George Bush the First proclaimed, is “non-negotiable.” For which Kunstler has nothing but contempt.
The mainstream media, however, are catching up.
And for transit wonks, Seattle’s Crosscut (their Tyee) is starting a series on “the case against more light rail”:
The recent former state secretary of transportation has been riding buses a lot lately and crunching numbers, and he’s convinced light rail to the Eastside and more Sounder service has no place in a big new transit plan. He thinks an advanced bus rapid transit system is the best way to serve millions of people and smartly manage urban growth
I’m not a big fan of Kunstler – he has a flare for the over-dramatic, without providing much in the way of evidence. I read a lot more “I think” and “I feel” from him than hard numbers.
Case in point – he believes highrises (and dense cities) will go the way of the dodo due to higher elevator energy usage: http://www.kunstler.com/mags_cities_of_the_future.html
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/how-should-we-be-thinking-about-urbanization-a-freakonomics-quorum/
One’s daily usage of elevators takes only roughly the same amount of energy as one’s daily desktop PC activities. Elevators could probably be powered by a solar panel and battery system, if the need ever arose.
Let’s not forget the vast transportation & heating energy saving advantages which highrises can help make possible. I’ve seen figures of savings of roughly 70% compared to single family homes, when all is taken into account. I’m quite certain highrises must have a significant energy advantage over the New Urbanism he advocates, as New Urbanism also tends to include detached housing. New Urbanism, in my opinion, is not so far removed from the suburbia (which he bashes along with “skyscrapers”) that there would be a night-and-day difference in sustainability, as he implies.
I completely question his understanding of the sustainable density issue.
Thank you, Bert — I completely agree with you. Kunstler should stick to science fiction, which I understand is what he used to write. What bothers me about his “non-fiction” is its one-trick pony aspect: it’s like he has found this shtick, and he takes it on tour. Once you “get” it, there’s nothing else there.
He conducted an interview with Jane Jacobs in 2000, where she makes it pretty clear how and why she disagrees with many of his …*insights*, in particular his claim to predict our future. See:
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs1.htm
and
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs2.htm
Kunstler infuriates some because of his lack of research, and he does not deviate when speaking about light rail recently. He is not alone on this issue – people who hate cars feel that light rail is much better than buses because buses are more like cars. The Crosscut series is excellent and the recent Tyee article about Patrick Condon who obliquely criticizes lrt systems are great. I would go further than Condon though and ditch streetcars too for newer European guided transit such as the Phileas from the Netherlands being built in Douai, France and Istanbul.
The lrt in Seattle makes Skytrain and the Canada Line look good indeed. A pantograph and rail lines do not a transit system make.