The Grid

The Grid: The Fraying Lines Between Americans and Our Energy Future
© 2016 Gretchen Bakke
384 pages

The Grid is a brief history of how our present electrical network evolved in the  United States,  an layman-friendly analysis of its weaknesses -- some inherent, some developed over time as demand soared and different areas of the country made their own adaptations -- and a look at the future of the grid. Bakke imagines nano- and micro-grids will become much more common -- in part because it's increasingly affordable to generate one's own power through solar panels,  and in part because as the system continues to age it will be necessary out of self-defense.  "But wait," you said, "Solar panels and wind turbines only work part of the time!"     Bakke acknowledges this, but is hopeful that the ever-evolving Internet of Things, and especially the allegedly inevitable rise of electronic cars,  will  allow for more evenly-dispersed power distribution, as we continue to contrive ways of storing electricity for future release.   In Alabama, for instance, one station uses electricity to compress air during the day, and then at night the compressed air is released and used to power turbines.  Said station uses nearby salt caverns for storage, and that's a rare enough resource that this station is literally the only one of its kind in the United States.  Not exactly a repeatable approach, but it's only one example of how determined engineers can flank the problem of 'storing' electricity.

I owe this one a re-read because  my brain checked out 70% through. Usually I enjoy reading about infrastructure, but I just tired of the subject here.

Related:

• Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electricity the World
• Energy Myths and Realities, Vaclav Smil. 
• The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of our Electrified World, Philip Schewe

Door to Door

Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation
© 2016 Edward Humes
384 pages

Are you interested in the Port of Los Angeles? Do you hate cars and find hushed reports of every auto death in a single day great reading?  Do you long for the day when you can sit in your Google or Uber shuttle doing your sodoku while it toodles down the road?  Well, here's your book -- Door to Door, a book which describes itself as being about transportation but which is mostly about the aforementioned port, with a few other essays grafted on, vaguely united in their common theme of complaining about cars and aging infrastructure.  What is here is enjoyable to read,  at least for people like myself who find  transportation fascinating, but it's not a good book; the organization and few topics chosen make it seem more like a collection of essays written by someone chiefly interested in Los Angeles.  I've read Humes before, in his Garbology, and according to my notes it was likewise a grab-bag of topics.

In the age of globalization, logistics is a growth industry. Even if robots take the jobs of cabbies and long-haul truck drivers,  the demand for consumer goods is such that more ships and trucks will be required to carry them.  At the Port of Los Angeles, which handles a third of all goods consumed in the United States (from bananas to smartphones),  the managers there are finding themselves in the position of the New York harbormasters in the late fifties:  the ships arriving are too large to handle easily.  When containerization first arrived,  they required infrastructure at so  different a scale than the old break-bulk shpping that it was  easier for cities like New York  and  London to build new docks altogether. But now the container ships have outgrown the commercial docks built especially for them.

The roads, too, are problematic, overburdened by the fact that  everyone drives everywhere; even highways built to link ports and industrial sections are now co-opted for ordinary through traffic, and the sheer number of cars makes it difficult for transit options like buses to take off. Why would people ride the bus when cars so so much faster? Some cities are exploring ways to create better transit efficiency, like creating bus-only lanes; logistics chiefs like a UPS director interviewed here believe a similar approach for freight traffic  would help the gridlock.  Humes deplores the relative spending of China, Europe, and the United States on transportation:  the US simply isn't keeping up, he says, with a gas tax stuck in the nineties and zero mass infrastructure ideas in the works.  If we are stuck with car-centered infrastructure, says Hume, the best alternative may to work to replace the consumer fleets with self-driving cars -- but cars that don't allow humans to take over, because the cars will eventually be better drivers than humans ever can be. And if you doubt that humans are crappy drivers, he has an entire chapter called "Friday the 13th" that tells the story of seemingly every single person killed in the US by automobiles that day.  (Auto deaths by year are usually around 40,000 in the US, averaging out  to 110 people a day.  Guns got nothin' on the automobile.)

A book called Door to Door: The World of Transportation should cover much more than it did.  The two paragraphs above give it far more organization than it had itself, because it was mostly about the port -- with odd chapters like the logistics of soda cans thrown in. There are better books written about infrastructure (Infrastructure: A Field Guide) better books written about transit  options (Straphanger), better books on shipping, ((90% Of Everything), and so on.  Again, this is enjoyable enough to read, it''s just not a good as a book on transportation.

Empires of Light

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World 
© 2004 Jill Jonnes
464 pages

Empires of Light is less a history of how the United States became electrified and more a biography of three electrical titans – Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse -- as they pursued their own electrical projects in cooperation and bitter conflict. All three were passionate, heedless inventors who loved plowing their money in money into new ideas, sometimes at the cost of bankruptcy. They differed sharply, however, on the best way to distribute electricity. Edison preferred the safe, expensive, and density-demanding direct current. Westinghouse and Tesla both viewed alternating current -- which was easy to ramp up the voltage or ‘speed’ of electricity, and transmit at long distances -- as far more promising, allowing them to reach places that didn’t have the population density of New York City or Pittsburgh. Alternating current was more dangerous to work with, however, and Edison used his rivals’ volatility for all it was worth. When the State of New York considered using electricity for the death penalty, Edison – borrowing a page from Marc Anthony’s funeral speech lauding Caesar’s assassins – praised the merits of Westinghouse’s AC for killing people. He hopefully speculated that perhaps in the future death row would be the “westinghouse”, and killing someone with electricity would be a verb – “He was westinghoused”. Sheer economics, however, shifted favor to AC’s court, and by 1930 even Midwest towns could count on the lights being on. Edison would return to his phonograph and open the doors for moving pictures and Hollywood, while Tesla – whose AC projects had made possible the electrification of Niagra Falls – would drift from idea to idea, all of which were ‘ahead of their time’, and none of which ever became realized. One that came close was a radio-controlled mini-boat.

Although Empires is often entertaining – between chapters on patent wars, anyway – the combination of biography and business/technical history didn’t quite click for me, possibly because I was chiefly interested in the electrification of the US and less so in the projects (The White City, Niagra) that allowed Westinghouse to prove AC’s worth. Readers will glean only a flicker of information about the pace of electrical expansion, chiefly through the cited sales of AC light bulbs. These men certainly merit reading about: Edison and Tesla are both legends, but Westinghouse made his reputation in brilliant but boring improvements to railroad brakes and such, and his and Teslas’ expansion of the AC system accomplished the same for the electrical infrastructure of the US.


Related:
Phillip Schewe's The Grid: A Journey into the Heart of Our Electrified World is more about national electrification, but its history jumped from Edison's early attempts at municipal power transmission to governments co-opting power companies as public utilities.

Infrastructure: A Field Guide

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
© 1999, 2014 Brian Hayes
544 pages

Here at last is a book for those of us who constantly gaze out the car window at the fixtures on utility poles, or drums mounted in the sky above the telephone building, and wonder: what are those and what do they do?  Chris Hayes offers in his introduction that there are many books for understanding the various kinds of trees and birds we see around us; his hope is to help readers understand the built environment which can be beautiful in own right. Hayes'  field guide is not a dry catalog of pipes and antennae, organized alphabetically. Instead, he offers a narrative laced with humor that explores the built world, system by system -- beginning with mining raw resources and ending with waste disposal.  In between are covered farming, waterworks, power production, the power grid, telecommunications, roads, bridges, railroads,  aviation, and shipping.  Hayes' writing combines history and description,  allowing the reader to understand not only how things work,  but how they got that way. Photographs abound, most of which were taken by the author himself and include unusual shots.

The fact that this book has gone through three editions indicates it has been a success with readers, and I'm not surprised.  We live in the midst of and are sustained by systems built with human hands, but which few understand. There's enormous appeal in opening the hood on modernity  and gaining even a little knowledge as to how it all works, especially when systems link together. Although this is a guide to the 'industrial landscape',  Hayes' writing brings a strong humanistic touch. The book is about the world humans have created for ourselves, for our needs;  reading the built landscape  is an act not just of technical analysis, but of human interest.   Admittedly,  there are topics in the book harder to appreciate; mining, for instance, usually happens far from where we live.  The majority of this book, however, is the stuff of everyday: traffic lights, radio towers,  food, and highways.  Although I've  done a good bit of reading on infrastructure, Hayes' book was full of interesting facts and stories. For instance,  in the early 1980s a network of eight radio towers were set up to aide in global navigation: one of the stations was maintained by the US Coast Guard in the middle of Nevada. The system only lasted ten years before being supplanted  totally by GPS.

I referred to Kate Asher's The Works as a dream of a book, and I can only repeat the statement here:  it's a gorgeous and helpful piece of work.

Hey, look, it's the Very Large Array!

Related:
The Works: Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher
On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work, Scott Huler
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum
The Grid: A Journey to the Heart of Our Electrified World, Phillip Schewe
Divided Highways: Building the Interstates, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis

The Works

The Works: Anatomy of a City
© 2005  Kate Ascher
240 pages

Cities are, for my money, mankind's most astonishing invention. Their complexity is stupefying -- system within system, handling tons of material at any given time, whether the subject is cars across a bridge or the contents of a thousand home's flushing toilets. And the stakes are always high, with the health and happiness of millions on the line -- or at least, thousands. The Works is a dream of a book, a visual-rich guide to the many systems that keep cities thriving.  Author Kate Ascher throws light not on just the expected -- roads and utilities, say -- but also minor things like the postal service.  Using New York City as case study, Ascher explores systems for transportation, energy, communication, and sanitation in turn.

The Works stunned me again and again with its visuals. Readers are treated to an astonishing array of informative little diagrams: cutaways that show what's inside the Holland tunnel, for instance, or the underbelly of a street-sweeper, or the waterworks inside your average skyscraper. The pictures also demonstrate systems -- the chain of equipment required to convey power from a generating station into the average home, the links involved in a cell phone conversation,  Some of the visuals are clever: for instance, to illustrate the variety of goods a train might carry,  a cartoon representation of a real train runs along the bottom of every page in the chapter, each car marked with its contents. The same tactic is used to illustrate the electromagnetic spectrum in the chapter on communication.  The bounty of visual information here is ludicrous -- showcasing fleets of sanitation vehicles and subway cars,  mapping out train yards and container ship docks, -- it's staggering, really.  Statistics are presented visually, too, and of course there are tons of maps -- including one that shows all the traffic cameras in the city. There are a few sample pages on Streetsblog, all from the chapter on streets.

That's not to say The Works is merely a picture book, because there's no small amount of text here explaining the importance of all these systems, reviewing their evolution within New York City, and sharing the particulars of their operation.  Reading this book is kind of like reading Gone Tomorrow, Picking Up, The Grid,  Flushed! On the Grid, etc, all at once, all rolled into one, and with gobs and gobs and gobs of illustration.   It does lack a chapter on  the infrastructure of the internet, which isn't an oversight that would be made if it were published today.

• Related:
• On The Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work, Scott Huler.  Kind of like this but on a smaller scale with more detail and sans pictures.
• Straphanger,  Tom Standage
• Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of NYC, Robin Nagle

The Road Taken

The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure
336 pages
© 2016 Henry Petroski

What, exactly, is The Road Taken?   Its title declares it a history, which is mostly true. It does have a bounty of historic sketches on the creation of paved roads and interstates in the United States, along with material on the evolution of traffic lights, curbs, and sidewalks. But there are loving tributes to bridges in New York and San Francisco here, with much chatter about cantilever versus suspension. There's even a chapter or two with a focus on finance, which is quite brave indeed -- there's a reason Jim Kunstler titled his own chapter on property taxes in Home from Nowhere, "A Mercifully Brief Chapter On A Frightening, Tedious, But Important Subject". The ending chapter looks to the future of infrastructure, but with the exception of cement mixtures that heal themselves (cracks open and expose bacteria to water, bacteria produce limestone), that's really more about the future of cars than roads.   It's all interesting, but the further along the reader gets the more miscellaneous  it all seems. The author obviously believes that interstates and bridges are a good thing and produce jobs, but the book itself isn't an argument.  He doesn't try to make any connections between infrastructure and economic growth; the jobs mentioned are always in building interstates.

I'd say this is for people who want to read a chapter about the history of interstates instead of a whole book. It's right between the chapter on asphalt and the chapter on stop signs.

Related:
Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton;  Divided Highways, Tom Lewis

Divided Highways

Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life
©  Tom Lewis 2007, 2013
416 pages

No engineering project in the United States is more impressive than the interstate system; dense with the connections of a street grid, it serves not blocks but an entire continent.  In Divided Highways,  Tom Lewis tells the story of that system's creation, inside a broader history of how motoring in general transformed American life.  Lewis principally concerns himself with the political rise of the highways, and the problems that followed once the ideal became a reality and people realized that reality comes with smells, noises, shadows, and bills.  Lewis connects the drama of the highways with ever-changing American society as a whole. though, integrating their story in which whatever else was happening (the oil crises of the 1970s, for instance) and commenting on the morphing nature of urbanism as downtowns bled out into the broad puddles of edge cities.  Though Lewis is enamored of the interstate, motoring, and the American dedication to constant motion, he doesn't shy away from giving critics a voice.

The story of the highways begins with the automobile, of course, since before then road building wasn't a priority: given the distances involved. water transportation dominated until the train made overland transit more competitive. The rising popularity of automobiles and bicycles -- an individualistic alternative to crowded trolleys and trains controlled by some of the more powerful corporations of the day-- led to a demand for places to  use them, and no road is worth much if it doesn't connect you to other  roads going other places. Enter Thomas Harris MacDonald,  an intensely thorough, dedicated,  and prudent fellow who would dominate the Bureau of Public Roads from the Wilson administration to that of Eisenhower's. MacDonald's prudence was such that he only built roads when they were deemed immediately necessary -- much different from today's build-it-and-they-will-come-and-pay-taxes attitude.  Although not aggressive,  his thoroughness did produce sketches of what a national highway system might look like, and how it might be ordered. Such a system was well underway when he died in retirement, his own fledging highways being supplanted by the limited access freeways that now create a massive asphalt circulatory system for the nation.

Building interstates involved a bit of juggling of responsibility between the state governments and D.C, and this became particularly thorny in regards to cities. The interstate system didn't just connect cities; from the beginning, many cut through cities themselves, becoming a kind of rapid transit system. When President Eisenhower became entangled in freeway construction enroute to Camp David, he made a few terse inquiries as to who was responsible for plowing this great road into the city, whereupon some Nathan-like figure informed him...Mr. President, thou art the man.  (Apparently, the interstate bill he signed was one of the 'we have to pass it to see what's in it' variety....) Running interstates through cities proved the source of most of the system's political problems, as the city spans became quickly congested, occupied large swathes of formerly tax-paying real estate, and functioned as a massive wall running through the cheapest real estate that could be found...that of the poor, who became poorer still when industry began following the interstate out of the city.  In New Orleans, the destruction of the French Quarter's charm by an interstate was narrowly avoided by citizen protests, and in our own time other cities (San Francisco, for instance) have gone to the mattresses to get rid of view-obstructing spurs.

As mentioned, Lewis also comments on the ongoing transformation of American society, the rise of franchise chain stores and the like. This was done with far more detail in Asphalt Nation, but presumably he wanted to write on something more than the exciting world of transportation finance. The connections made to broader US history -- the anti-interstate reaction concurring with the civil rights movement and youth rebellion --  not only make the history more 'personable', but provide welcome  context.  The subtitle of 'transforming American society' isn't a big component of the book, though, and he doesn't mention  influences of the freeway on other transportation infrastructure in general, like the worrisome tendency of larger roads to mimic interstates even though it's dangerous to encourage higher speeds in areas with pedestrians, buildings, and cross traffic.

Useful as a history of how the interstates happened, Divided Highways  deserves praise for hailing the interstate system  while simultaneously delivering the stories of people disrupted by it and rebelling against it.

"We could do anything, then, and do it to excess; our Interstates boldly proclaimed the triumph of engineering. Like our cars, whose fins could not be too high, they made a statement with adolescent vigor. We thought little of the Interstate's ability to rend the landscape, to divide communities, and to alienate citizens. The roads were a concrete snapshot of ourselves when we believed nothing was beyond our reach."

Related:

• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
• Getting There: the Epic Battle Between Road and Rails, Stephen Goddard
• The Geography of Nowhere, James Kunstler

Tubes

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
© 2012 Andrew Blum
303 pages

It turns out Ted Stevens was right: the Internet really is a series of tubes, connecting large boxes, and usually in nondescript warehouses that look like self-storage units.  Inspired by a squirrel depriving him of Internet by nibbling on his wires, Andrew Blum decided to investigate the physical infrastructure of the Internet.  The journey took him across the United States and into Germany and Britain, where he discovered that the internet is corporeal. Across the world are businesses devoted solely to housing space where regional networks can directly tie into one another.  Tubes gives a slight sense for how the internet developed, visiting the university where the first connections were made, and then the first commercial network center.  However ethereal the internet may seem to regular users -- a mysterious force that binds and penetrates our computer?  -- it is given life by not just the creative energy poured into it, but the physical substructure -- routers, wires, warehouses, tubes, and cables.  It's awe-inspiring to think that there are companies whose physical property literally wraps around the world, providing redundant connections in case of an earthquake, although after reading it I'm still a foggy how on all this is done. How do routers know where to send information?   At some level, even the people running the networks aren't fully aware of their mechanics because there's so much information to channel. When it comes to data storage, for instance, different bits of a given video could be posted in multiple data centers. It's rather like the hydro engineers in On the Grid not being able to tell exactly how water got to a specific neighborhood; there are too many possible paths   Blum's goal of visiting 'monuments' of the internet, some of the most pivotal spots --  Google's data centers, treated with Area 51-type secrecy, the point where the first cable connected New York  and London, the aforementioned networking warehouses --- provides general milestones, but they're disjointed.  If you're really into the internet and its history, it makes for mildly entertaining reading, but the pieces remain disconnected.

On the Grid

On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work
© 2010 Scott Huler
256 pages

If modern humans have retained a penchant for magical thinking, little wonder. Our homes accomplish marvels seemingly by the force of will. We want light, we flip a switch.   Thirsty? We turn a knob. Bored? Open a laptop, and hey presto – there’s the complete series of  Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation!  All of civilization is literally at our finger tips, but it’s not magic – it’s a mindboggling array of wires, pipes, routers, and other infrastructure,  put to work by a multitude of engineers.  On the Grid opens the door on the miracle that is the 20th century home. Through it, Huler follows pipes, wires, and garbage men to find out where they go, investigating the operations of water supply, sewage, road construction, traffic control, electricity, waste management, telecommunications, and – for good measure – bus stops and train stations.

The adventure is both social and technical; while  at the beginning he literally stalks a recycling truck and  pokes along in sewers, nearly being run over by a backhoe at one point,  most of his information is gleaned from guided tours by a variety of engineers. Getting inside a nuclear plant, let alone getting a handle on their operation, would be difficult without a guide! By and large the men consulted are enthusiastic about talking about their work, and as Huler learns the ins and outs of more systems, he begins to see commonalities.  Not only do some systems rely on the same infrastructure – power, cable, and telephone all being mounted on a shared utility pole – but the ‘hub and spokes’ model of distribution is commonplace.   This is a wonderfully varied book, in part because of Foley’s respectable ambition. His documentation, however, mixes  science, history, engineering, and a little politics.   He ends with a salute to all of the engineers whose constant vigilance and labor keep the wires buzzing, the pipes open, and the pavement smooth, and a warning to readers not to undervalue infrastructure when it comes to thinking about taxes and leadership.   If, like me, you have a fascinating for knowing how something as complex as a city – or even an ordinary house – operate from day to day, Huler’s sweep offers a beginning spot, and draws on numerous histories  that go into more detail.

Related:

• Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization (W. Hodding Carter IV)*
• The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of Our Electrified World (Phillip Schewe)
• Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, Elizabeth Royte
• Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, Susan Strasser*
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, Tom Vanderbilt*
• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay*
• Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail, Stephen Goddard*
• Picking Up: On the Streets with the Sanitation Workers of NYC, Robin Nagle
• Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Charles Marohn

* Included in Huler’s bibliography

Index

The Grid

The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World
© 2007 Phillip Schewe
310 pages

In every room there sits a caged beast waiting to cause mischief, but which most of the time  is put to honest work, instead.  When Thomas Edison began selling electrical service for artificial illumination in the close of the 19th century, did he realize how radically he would transform the world?  Steam engines went a long way, but they never took up residence in the house.  At the opening of the 21st century, homes are linked together not just by ribbons of asphalt but by buzzing wires overhead, and those are only the first part of a complicated apparatus that can sink an economy for days if it hiccoughs.  Phillip Schewe's The Grid is a layman's introduction to the world of the electrical grid,  an educational sampler.  He lightly touches on the grid's early history,   moves into the social relevance of electricity,  writes about some of the aspects of electrical infrastructure, and then looks to the future.

 It is as the author describes it, a "journey" -- rather like passing through a city on a bus and catching a sight of very interesting things but not being able to get out to spend time studying them. The early book is quite jumpy, as the reader passes from early electrical enterprise straight to electricity being seen as vital infrastructure that the government can't leave to the hands of the people who paid to create it.  The latter half is more integrated, especially as Schewe uses his chapter on the home's internal electric works to argue that the future of electricity may be more distributive,  with solar-paneled homes supplying much of their own electricity and sometimes contributing their excess into the grid. This is followed by a chapter on nuclear plants, the concentrated alternative.  The Grid has a frustrating lack of focus, though, and this is worsened by the author's creative gifts.  His subject may be mechanical infrastructure, but Schewe waxes lyrical about it -- literally,  at one point offering commentary in verse form and filling another paragraph with so many allusions to Hamlet that one wonders if he had a quota. Although electricity is regarded by most everyone in the book as an unmitigated good, Schewe vainly includes Lewis Mumford and Henry David Thoreau as counters, both being technological critics, but neither really bares their teeth;  it's as impact as someone musing on how over-much we depend on electricity when there's an outage, and then forgetting about it as soon as the lights pop back on.   It was a nice gesture, though.   The Grid is thus  tantalizingly incomplete,  offering just a taste and then charging ahead into China or Africa to look for different things to sample.

Related:

• Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, David Nye
• Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity,  David Bodanis

Waiting on a Train

Waiting on a Train: the Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service
© 2009 James McCommons
304 pages

You leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four,

Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore!

Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer

Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina!

("The Chattanooga Choo-Choo", Henry Warden & Mack Gordon)

Since 2000, U.S. gasoline prices have more than doubled  Not coincidentally, since 2000, ridership aboard the country's only nation-wide passenger rail service, Amtrak,  has risen 49%. In 2008, in the middle of an as-yet-unbroken sting of nine consecutive record-breaking years, James McCommons traveled  the length of Amtrak's many varied routes to gauge the state of the nation's passenger rails. In the wake of an ostensibly transit-friendly president being elected, and in anticipation of some stimulus money being applied toward improving rail infrastructure,  such a journey seemed timely. Chatter about rails is on the rise, and in Waiting on a Train, McCommons offers a sober -- sometimes bleak, sometimes hopeful -- evaluation of the passenger rail services in America, and advice on how restore a largely abandoned service.

There was a time when railroads were the default means of extensive travel for most Americans, every city and town of consequence linked in a network that covered the continent.  A casual glance at the Amtrak map now reveals how drastically the situation for passenger rail has declined: although the northeastern U.S., Chicago, and west coast  are seemingly well-covered,  the majority of the nation receives scant services, and some states none at all.  Throughout his yearlong journey, McCommons explains how this came to be: public distrust of the railroads as large, corporate entities, coupled with enthusiastic popular and governmental support for the automobile and airports relegated them to the sidelines, where stifling, archaic regulations drove them into moribundity until they sloughed off the need for passenger service and focused on freight.  Passenger service became the exclusive domain of Amtrak, a queer public-private corporation that was given access to the freight's rails...or was supposed to have been.

As McCommon's account shows, passenger service is very much the "red-headed stepchild"  of American railroading. Although the rail companies, now purely freight-haulers, are obligated to let Amtrak use their lines, freight is given priority more often than not. Time and again, McCommon's ride is driven into the sidings to allow freight trains to pass them. ("Make way for the cheap crap for Wal-Mart!" said one conductor, disgusted. European passengers were utterly aghast at the concept.) With demand for both freight and passenger services on the rise, limited infrastructure is a worsening impediment to expansion. Not only did railroad companies throw away hundreds of miles of lines in the 1970s in a leanness effort, but many current lines were built for an older generation of slower engines, and their curve ratios can't take speedier modern trains...and especially not the bullet trains which some rail advocates seem to think is the only kind of rail it is possible to enjoy. But the greatest problem is the scantness of the network itself, which a recent article from The Atlantic demonstrates nicely.

The good news is, despite of the weaknesses of the system, in spite of the work that needs to be done,  the situation can’t help but improve. A new generation of officials and service professionals are running Amtrak these days, and they’re not former freight employees who regard passengers as problems to be endured. Even if President Obama conforms to the longstanding Democrat tradition of giving trains lipservice and then ignoring them, states are beginning to take their rail systems into their own hands – and while that’s almost just as well, because local officials know their needs better.  Ultimately, though, McCommons believes restoring passenger rail service will require a substantial investment from the federal government, because the revival of passenger rail will depend on a network that serves the many, that reaches a multitude of destinations – not just one limited to parts of the coasts and Chicago. Forget profitability, McCommons writes; accept that passenger railroads are an investment in the future, a foundation to build around and not a revenue-producer by themselves. Unfortunately, that’s an argument we hear from the highways, too, and these days making investments without some idea of the returns isn’t going to sell well. What will sell well is the fact that since heavily subsidized highways and airports also don’t generate profits , we’re better off with the transportation option that loses the least money – trains.  Future rises in oil prices will help, as well.

 Waiting on a Train is part travelogue, part citizen-advocacy, but a travel tale wherein our guide gives more attention to the means of transportation than the landscape – except when he combines them by reminiscing about how lovely the Rockies looked from the dome-covered observation cars of old.  For Americans  with an interest in reviving passenger rail in the United States, Waiting on a Train is a solid beginning, sizing up the system’s current strengths and weaknesses and at the same time giving rail romantics like myself an appreciation for the practicalities of rail transportation; it is a lesson in railroad logistics. 

 

Flushed

Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization
© 2006 W. Hodding Carter
241 pages

So, plumbing.  You use it.  Chances are you wouldn't be alive without it, because civilizations without plumbing tend to be miserable places rife with disease. Despite its importance, not much fuss is made about plumbing; in fact, the topic is studiously avoided by various modern cultures, who have placed a taboo on the discussion of human waste. W. Hodding Carter rejects that taboo and his breezy account of plumbing’s contribution to civilization – both historically and presently – suggests that sparing a few thoughts for toilets would do us good, helping us not only appreciate the importance of good sanitation, but make use of it to create a more sustainable future.

          Carter is an author who is very much excited about plumbing, and he’d like dearly to pass on that passion to the reader. Although he reports on the storied past of plumbing with gusto (and, entertainingly, attempts to bring the past to life by forging a Roman pipe himself), this isn’t a comprehensive history of plumbing. Nor is it a detailed guide to the plumbing systems of modern homes, though Carter does explain how most systems set to work, information he obtains by giddily smashing through his own wall to follow the pipes.  And it’s not a guide to considering plumbing as a career, though Carter does follow plumbers around and describes the path to the toilet that each man took. And it’s not a consideration of human waste as a possible means of creating sustainability. Instead, Flushed! is a quick romp through all these subjects, Carter leading the reader to and fro like a crazed tour guide – but as frantic as it is,  his approach conveys the fact that plumbing can be genuinely interesting. It undergirds not only society, but our homes – and possibly our future.  Carter’s race through the pipes of modernity takes him across the world, where he sees the future of toiletry in India, with the invention of a “biogas digester” that uses excrement to create fuel; such an invention literally creates energy by eliminating waste. (David Owen would ask, of course, how much energy it takes to manufacture the digesters.)

          This is in short  a commendably fun book about a element part of civilization, which manages to be entertaining and amusing without resorting to a series of toilet jokes.    

Thoughts on Building Strong Towns

Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume I
© 2012 Chuck Marohn
174 pages
$9.95

 In California, school districts are being forced to suspend their bus routes. In Alabama,  Jefferson County – home to the state’s largest city, Birmingham – has gone bankrupt. Basic functions of the government are no longer available because the money simply isn’t there. Across the nation, cities and counties are struggling to make ends meet – and although contributing reasons vary from case to case, Chuck Marohn would argue that the fundamental cause is the same: we’re no longer building places that can maintain themselves. Worse, we've tried to finance the present with loans made with the promise of future growth. Now those bills are coming due. Since 2008, engineer and urban planner Chuck Marohn has been writing about the weaknesses of America's urban places, partially out of professional interest but also as a concerned citizen and father, who is casting an eye toward the America his girls will inhabit. Thoughts on Building Strong Towns collects some of the blog's most essential pieces in a compact volume. Marohn is passionately earnest, but reliant more on data and sober arguments than fiery rhetoric.

Marohn isn't alone in elaborating on the fiscal problems of American urbanism: Andrés Duany revealed the same in Suburban Nation, but Marohn's criticism cuts deeper to the bone, examining not only urban planning,  but its very financing, and the beliefs of growth-devoted politicians and the civil engineers who aid them.  His greatest contribution to the new urbanist cause is an analysis of "growth" as a Ponzi scheme, one wherein investors are paid not by productivity, but by more, future investment. Marohn puts forth a number of case studies which amply demonstrate how little return taxpayers receive on infrastructure spending, like the one below:

A small, rural road is paved, with the costs of the surfacing project split evenly between the property owners and the city. We asked a simple question: Based on the taxes being paid by the property owners along this road, how long will it take the city to recoup its 50% contribution  The answer: 37 years. Of course, the road is only expected to last 20 to 25 years. Who pays the difference and when?

Who pays the difference, or who paid, is the federal government: a reliable means of expansion for the past half-century has been dependence on the state for funds to build roads, pipes, and other infrastructure, with the municipality benefiting from them only having to assume the costs of maintenance. But the kind of development that springs up from these grandiose projects doesn't even generate enough tax revenue to meet upkeep, and cities are going broke in their attempt to meet these obligations. But the federal government's own obligations are too numerous for it to continue to cover everyone else's losses.

A new attitude is required. We can no longer buy casually into yesterday's dreams of easy returns: reality is not The Field of Dreams, and throughout the work Marohn advocates toughminded frugalism while lambasting the if-you-build-it-they-will-come  mentality that continues to pervade the minds of government officials and engineers. Instead of chasing growth  (or hunting it, as he puts it  elsewhere), we should maximize the value of what we have already, analyzing every project with the question: does this add value?

I've been a Strong Towns follower for the past couple of years now, being attracted to Marohn's work for its bluntness: while opponents to new urbanism can scoff at arguments made on aesthetic or quality-of-life grounds, Marohn's by-the-numbers criticism isn't partisan and can't be ignored. Like it or not,  the urban fabric of America will change in the coming decades: it is up to the people whether their towns and cities will survive as leaner and more productive, or be ruined.

Thoughts on Building Strong Towns is definitely recommended to the serious-minded citzen, although I did miss the inclusion of Marohn's "The High Cost of Automobile Orientation", which points out how much more productive traditional city blocks are to those used in recent decades.

Related:
StrongTowns.org
Review at National Resources Defense Council

Waste and Want

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
© 2000 Susan Strasser
368 pages

     Consider your trash can. In all likelihood, you cannot imagine not using it. What else would you do all with the trash generated in the course of day to day living? And yet trash cans haven't always been a fixture in our homes; until the 19th century, people invariably fond uses for whatever extraneous materials they produced, so much so that waste was an anomaly  But now,  disposing of it is a mammoth task, handled by the government and large corporations. In Waste and Want Susan Strasser reveals how waste rose to such heights, and despite its subject matter it manages to be charming rather than 'offal'.

Throughout most of human history, material goods have been too precious to waste. Every article represented hours of hard labor, where that work was invested in the sewing of clothing,  the milking of cows, or the manufacture of pottery. Economy forced prudence, not to mention self-reliance:  people made their own candles out of cooking fat because they needed candles, and like all skill made objects they were not easy to come by, being either rare or expensive. If an item broke, it was repaired; if beyond repair, it was put to future use. Clothes were extensively modified to extend their lives, and passed down through the generations (as were most household items). Cloth remains too small to be used in clothing could be sewn into quilts. Food scraps were fed to animals, who converted refuse into more food -- and if nothing else, the items were burned as fuel in the family hearth.  Even if a given family didn’t possess all the skills and time required to recapture the value of every scrap, local economies thrived on communal recycling. But all that changed with industrialization.

Although the first factories, like paper mills, inserted themselves into the garbage cycle seamlessly -- using refuse like rags to produce paper -- soon the industrial process broke a circle of endless reuse to the one-directional “waste stream”, the stream that has turned into a torrent by the 21st century and is fast filling up landfills, incinerators, and the open ocean. This disruption began as industrialization became increasingly efficient through economies of scale: large operations that relied on waste for their manufacturing (like the paper mills) demanded too much to be satisfied by communities: instead, they had to be fed by other factories, and the trash of the common people fond itself without an outlet. Transformations in the home (like gas stoves) removed the use of garbage as fuel. Factories also made consumer goods cheaply: as they became abundant, they lost value. Why repair when you can replace?  In the 20th century, companies seized on that idea and encouraged it, first through changes in fashion (cars replaced by new models every year, the only real distinction being aesthetics), and then through Planned Obsolescence, wherein items were manufactured with the intent of their breaking down within a relatively short time frame  and requiring replacement. (They could be repaired, at first, but then someone hit on the bright idea of engineering every part in a given machine so that they would all begin breaking down at roughly the same time…)

The results? Trash -- lots of it. Dealing with the trash has required new technologies and systems of organization to cope with it. The pressing demand for waste management is mitigated (ever so much) by recycling, but our pitiful attempts at reusing resources are nothing like those our ancestors managed. Recycling is a meager flame overwhelmed by the mighty ocean of garbage that consumerism encourages and our economy relies on. The amount of waste necessitated by modern life is staggering: next time you visit a grocery store or supermarket, consider how almost every item in the store comes in a cardboard box, and inside it may be goods wrapped in plastic. We cannot possibly find uses for so many boxes, and what on earth would we do with even one ice-cream wrapper, let alone the dozens or hundreds we are liable to rip off in a year?

Waste and Want is a fantastic little  bit of history and indirect social criticism.  While garbage is on the cover, it’s really a history of us, of how we relate to the world through our use of its material resources and how that has changed. It’s a fun read, sure, but by its end one can’t help but be impressed by the fact that waste is an issue we must think about. Environmentalism aside: in this era of austerity, how can we possibly justify throwing way so many resources and even consuming more resources to manage the waste?  It behooves us to act more responsibly, and as the 21st century progresses I can only hope that our worsening economic condition will force a rebirth the prudence of our forebears.

Related:
Cheap: the High Cost of Discount Culture; Ellen Shell
No Logo, Naomi Klein
 

The Green Metropolis

The Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
© 2009 David Owen
357 pages

Green is probably not the word that comes to mind at the mention of Manhattan, but to David Owen, few places on Earth are as environmentally friendly as the heart of New York City. Its towering skyscrapers and elevated train lines are in fact the very image of verdant. Such a contention is at the heart of Owen’s surprising take on sustainability and environmentalism, his approach as practical as it is counter-intuitive. Owen uses the lens of economy to reveal weaknesses of conventional environmental thinking while demonstrating that the most practical solution to making the most of our energy reserves is to live more intelligently together – in cities.

Owen establishes his work’s prevailing theme early on, declaring, “Sustainability is a context, not a gadget or a technology.”  All of our efforts to be environmentally responsible, to greenwash our lives, are insubstantive when examined against the way we routinely waste energy on a day to day basis, living as we do spread out in suburbs and making virtually every trip in a car. It’s not the Hummer’s gas mileage that makes it an environmental disaster, Owen writes, but the fact that owning a car encourages us to drive it all the time. In fact, he views the rising popularity of SmartCars as a disaster waiting to happen, because such efficient machines will only encourage us to drive more, putting delaying the real change we need to make…which is driving less, living closer, and moving out of our sprawling ranch homes and McMansions into something more sensibly-sized.  

Green Metropolis is a smartly-constructed book. After putting forth his premise, Owen establishes why adaptive thinking on our parts is required. In “Liquid Civilization”, he points out that the entirety of the global economy and our lives is based on burning oil or converting it into products like ever-ubiquitous plastics. Until the mid-20th century, however, only a fraction of the Earth’s population demanded the use of those oils –Europe, the United States, and their colonies, or the “western world”.  Resources were thus relatively abundant, and we have been positively spoiled by the surfeit, so much to the point that we have invented dozens of brands of disposable cups, spoons, forks, and plates that are meant to be thrown away after one use…presumably, because we can’t be bothered to wash a dish. But the days of plenty are over. Now the entire world is demanding a once exclusive lifestyle, and over a century of chronic use has sharply reduced available supplies of oil and natural gas. Unfortunately, the Chinese and Indians seem intent on  making the same mistakes that Americans did in regard to transforming their urban landscapes to make full use of the car, expanding the reaches of the automobile and ever-deepening their dependence on and use of, oil.

The Green Metropolis' argument's primary strength is that its proposed solution is both simple and fundamental. It doesn't require us to do anything we weren't doing already until a temporary bout of prosperity made us lose our collective minds -- people have lived in cities for thousands of years. City-dwellers don't make an effort to be "green": they simply live the way they're use to living. Efficiency is built into the fabric of the place, and that makes the eco-urbanist argument especially appealing to me because I've started to suspect that human beings are too short-sighted to put up a meaningful fight in any other way. This approach to environmentalism doesn't require Constant Vigilance, which I suspect is an impossibility -- it only requires us to return to our senses. Not only this, but returning to proper urbanism will provide immediate, short-term results, which are apparently the only thing we grasp. Restructure the suburbs -- make them walkable, increase density -- and we can add value to the urban landscape  and to our lives. We can free ourselves from fiscal disaster and chronic stress. The problem is motivating ourselves to start making the move.

The Green Metropolis not only makes a strong argument, but it leaves us with room for thought, challenging us to reconsider the way we live in terms of this kind of efficiency. Two areas where Owen especially provoked me were in traffic and food. We might believe that buying local food is more energy efficient, but the sad fact is that the big-box boxs have local grocers beat. I have seen this argument offered by Brian Dunning of Skeptoid as well, who did demonstrate to my satisfaction that a tomato from the supermarket is more "Green" than one from a local farm. However, I still buy from the farmer's market, because the issue of food is more complicated than energy efficiency:  I prefer supporting local economies, for instance, and have an aversion to food products that are more 'product' than food. After considering Owen and Dunning, I can't completely condemn the US food market, but neither can I condone it. We have much to consider, and the answers are not simple.

Related:

Suburban Nation, Andres Duany et. al
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
Your Prius Won't Save You, David Owen

Interview with David Owen on his book, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse

Suburban Nation

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
© 2000, 2010 Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
294 pages

Compare a modern American city to its European counterparts, or even an older American city, and the contrast is striking: American cities seem to have fallen apart, spewing their innards cross the landscape. Indeed, America has taken a radically abnormal approach to urbanism in the last fifty years, building out instead of up. Even while the city centers have been left to fall apart, ‘greater metropolitan areas’ – the mats of low-density sprawl surrounding those decaying centers – have grown. Why have Americans chosen to live this way, and what are the consequences? Suburban Nation is a citizen’s guide to understanding the new American landscape, a guide to what makes communities function, and a primer for setting our urban areas to rights again.

Duany and Zyberk, a team of urban planners, begin by breaking sprawl down into its five constituent parts. While traditional cities freely mix various kinds of buildings together – shops on a ground floor, apartments or offices above –  the suburban model separates  uses into separate pods. Anyone who lives in the United States can identify them; housing developments, commercial strips, office parks, and industrial parks.  These pods have no  direct connections to one another: navigating from one to the other necessitates traveling on a   ‘collector’ road, which is almost always congested because it is the sole carrier of traffic the pods are too widely spaced apart to make walking feasible or train transit efficient. Municipal buildings are the final element of sprawl, and like the rest are strictly separated and isolated except by cars.

Suburban Nation includes large, wide margins to the side of the text, making the book squarish instead of  rectangular. The authors use those margins for photographs, specifically sets of paragraphs, comparing traditional urban approaches to the new methods favored by modern planners. The contrast is potent, illustrating how wasteful and ugly suburban sprawl can be. But why has it become so popular?  The answer draws on numerous elements of American culture and history: the fact that most American cities came into being during the industrial age, and so Americans tend to associate them with the abuses of that period;  the coming of the automobile just as people were wanting to move away from the cities, the availability of wide open land for people to expand into, and government policies which saw in outward growth a foundation for the American economy – as in the Great Depression, when highway construction was used to put people to work. These elements each influence the other: people’s aversion to living near factories was the genesis of zoning codes, which segregated residential and industrial areas; the availability of automobiles allowed those zones to be far apart; and the generous government subsidies supporting the expansion of roads made such networks feasible. After World War 2, the FHA’s policies encouraged growth outside the cities, offering loans to families who wanted to buy new single-family homes but refusing any to people who wanted to move inside the cities. Banks followed suit.

            We left the cities in pursuit of a dream – a home of our own, far from the noise and pollution of the city. But if there’s a constant in history, it’s that no action is without unintended consequences. Not only did Americans manage to destroy their cities in a manner of decades (with the same money that Europeans were using to rebuild theirs), but suburbia has proven a fiscal nightmare. Its low densities don’t provide the tax base needed to maintain its infrastructure, and the widespread sprawl mires people in traffic, not only forcing everyone to drive everywhere but do so at a snail’s pace, wasting both time and gasoline. In addition, suburban sprawl fails to produce that vital element of human society, a community. There is no coherence in these suburban wastes, no 'place' for a community to coalesce around. Instead, people live apart from one another, and when they venture into society they only do so as part of a mass of strangers, either on the collector roads or in the big box stores.

            Since the mid-1990s, criticism of suburbia has been building steadily. As municipalies and states face budget crises and the threat of insolvency, more people are realizing the pattern of development we’ve been pursuing is no longer a viable option. Duany and Plater-Zyberk also offer steps we may take in getting a handle on these problems. There are ways we can redevelop some existing suburbs and make them livable, for instance, but the 60s-era zoning laws that make proper cities illegal need to be scrapped, as with subsidies which encouraged all that sprawl. Although restoring America's urban fabric seems a vast undertaking, it is doable, and necessary.

Suburban Nation  is the comprehensive book on America's landscape, and consequently a fundamental book for understanding many of our problems -- civic, economic, and social. Its ideal audience is the average American citizen; though Duany and Plater-Zyberk are urban planners by profession, the third author Jeff Speck served to introduce planning concepts in layman's terms -- and even if the text didn't make a particular idea clear, the illustrations do that amply.  This is in short a most excellent book. I doubt it will be rivaled by any others, but  there are more works in this genre (like Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier) which I intend to read in the future.

Related:

• StrongTowns.org
• The New Urbanism
• The Geography of Nowhere; Home from Nowhere; James Howard Kunstler
• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
• The KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler on the Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl, Duncan Crary
• Bowling Alone: The Decline and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam
• It's a Sprawl World After All: The Human Costs of Unplanned Growth, Douglas E. Morris

It's a Sprawl World After All

It's a Sprawl World After All: the Human Cost of Unplanned Growth -- and Visions of a Better Future
©  2005 Douglas E. Morris
245 pages

Shortly after the Second World War, the United States completely changed its approach to urbanism.  Abandoning concentrated city centers, the nation instead emphasized outward, horizontal growth, all low-density.  The automobile allowed cities to expand far beyond their original boundaries, and what technology allowed, government mandated. What followed is the scene that every American is familiar with: sprawl, the great mat of highways, housing developments, commercial strips, and office parks that goes on and on, seemingly without it. Sprawl has profoundly shaped American culture since then. It promised the solitude and beauty of the countryside coupled with the many attractions of the cities, but there is no action without an unintended consequence...and suburbia's are many. Suburbia has long had its critics, and a growing body of critical literature is gaining in strength and pointing out the variety of failures in the suburban plan, chief among them its financial unviability.   Douglas E. Morris takes a different tack, however, focusing on how this way of living impacts our quality of life. In particular, Morris sees sprawl as the chief destructor of community (which Robert Putnam hinted at in his Bowling Alone) and the reason why the United States is so fantastically violent as compared to other developed nations. While his account is not as meaty as the subject deserves,  he offers considerable food for thought, especially to those who have never considered that the environment in which they live might influence their happiness.

Morris' idea is that communities are defined by a sense of place: just as a family lives in the same house, so too does a community need to be centered about the same area. This is a need at odds with the design path Americans have chosen, which favors widespread expansion across the land. After over a half-century of this kind of development, American society has not only lost its focal points; it has become so diffuse as to lose cohesion altogether. Our lives are no longer connected, and this is a situation that social creatures such as ourselves cannot tolerate. Before sprawl, people walked the streets with one another; they saw their neighbors at the local stores.They congregated in the shared spaces -- the parks, the nearby cafes. Now we lie in homes distant from one another; we travel alone in our cars to work and on errands. We now travel to huge box stores where we are strangers to the hundreds of other people present -- where we are customers, not patrons. Robbed of the opportunities to fellowship with one another, we console ourselves with television, the Internet, and the creation of what Morris calls "niche communities" like book clubs. Because our lives no longer connect us to one another as a matter of course, we must purposely arrange meetings with one another. Niche communities hardly fill the void, however, and the result is chronic feelings of isolation, of depression and loneliness. Because our lives no longer connect to one another, the behaviors we used to improve those connections, like manners and civility, are lapsing...and the culture of anonymity allows violence impulses to go unchecked, to grow into violent actions.

In addition to this, the new auto dependency marginalizes great portions of the population: the elderly, who when their vision fails cannot go anywhere without assistance; young people, who are forced to rely on their parents for transportation anywhere and are robbed of opportunities to act like autonomous individuals, a necessary part of learning to be an adult; and the poor, who are separated from job opportunities if they happen to be carless, which is quite likely considering the cost of maintaining an automobile.

Morris points out that not only is the United States drastically more violent than any other developed nation, but the usual factors cited for this violence -- television, video games, and violent music -- are present in much safer nations. He doesn't mention America's unique relationship with gun ownership, though, and I'd question whether the saturation of violent music and television is the same in other nations. How much more television do Americans watch than Germans, for instance?

The section outlining the problems of sprawl is disappointingly short: a mere 92 pages. The rest of the book contains solutions for creating a more fulfilling life, which I did appreciate.This section's solution range from individual measures (creating niche communities, being mindful of others, emphasizing the need for manners, volunteering) to community-oriented actions, like removing zoning laws which mandate sprawl, increasing the gas tax to force people to confront the true cost of cars, and adjusting tax policies (for instance, not taxing farmers based on how much their land would be worth if it were developed commercially).  He also includes several lengthy appendices, one of which is a history of sprawl.

I'm left with mixed feelings after reading It's a Sprawl World After All. The subject fascinates me and demands more attention, especially considering the current state of America's economy, finances,  and national spirit.  The lengthy section how we might begin to rectify this sorry situation is commendable, and if someone is completely new to the subject I think it more than adequate to prompt them to think about their own experiences in the light of its criticism. I never realized how fulfilling living in a community could be until I did it -- and didn't realize what I had until I moved away again. Morris' account could provide this perspective to people who haven't experienced it for themselves. Although I would have preferred a more thorough approach, as Morris seems hurried, it's definitely worth reading for Americans. In a few weeks I'll see how it stacks up against Suburban Nation.

Related:

• StrongTowns
• Bowling Alone: the Decline and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam
• Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, Jane Holtz Kay
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and Decline of the American Dream; Andres Duany et. al
• Crabgrass Frontier

Nickle and Dimed

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
© 2001 Barbara Ehrenreich
221 pages

In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich asked her editor at Harpers Weekly a question for which neither had an answer: how do people get by on the meager wages available to the unskilled? To find out, Barbara reinvented herself as "Barb", a recently divorced homemaker with no work experience. Leaving her world of comfort and ease behind her, 'Barb' moved around the country, from Florida to Maine to Minneapolis, looking for the best work and cheapest rents available in a given area -- and attempting to make ends meet. She found out that 'unskilled' labor is anything but, for every job required a different set of physical, mental, and social skills, some so demanding as to be overwhelming -- especially after she was forced to take on second jobs just to break even. For despite the sneering retorts of politicans eager to dismantle social programs, simply finding a job isn't the answer to poverty -- the cost of living is so high that one job often isn't even enough to survive on, let alone serve as a foundation for fiscal success. Further, in her time spent in the trenches, Ehrenreich realized the conventional argument of these politicians is utterly reversed from reality. Far from those on welfare living off the work of others,  those who are comfortable maintain that existence only because of the treatment the working poor stoically endure,  doing jobs that no one appreciates but everyone demands, and receiving nothing -- not even a sense of security -- for their efforts. Ehrenreich's insights would have been damning in 1998: today, in a worsened situation, they demand reading.

Barb begins her existance in Florida, as a waitress. The experience is  a baptism by fire; introducing her to both impossible customers and hostile low-level managers, who seem to be paid just to ensure that the staff are miserable. She soon looks for additional work on the housekeeping staff of a local hotel, but the stress of two jobs proves more than she can take and soon 'Barb' makes her first move -- this time, to Maine, where she works as a maid, and later moves again to Minnesota to experience life as a Wal-Mart associate. While waitressing, cleaning, and sales are her primary occupations in these experienments,  invariably she has to look for supplemental work to meet her expenses, usually a part time job like the weekend gig she took in a nursing home, serving food and providing entertainment for a ward of patients with dementia.  Taking on a second job doesn't necessarily solve her problems: in fact, she usually decides to try another state soon after beginning a second job and realizing it's too much. Not only can she often not take the stress of two jobs -- of having to scurry from one to the other without a break in between -- but taking on a second job often adds additional financial burdens. While her first job might have been chosen for its relative proximity to cheap housing, the second is usually more distant, consuming more of her time and forcing more dependence on transportation.  Even when Barb pulls ahead, it's by so meager a count that the smallest disaster threatens to destroy her standing completely. Try accounting for a trip to the doctor or replacing a car part with $8.  Sadly, this is not hypothetical; while working as a maid, Barb witnesses one of her coworkers hobbling around on a bad ankle because she can't afford to lose a day of pay, let alone spend money at a physician's office.

There's voyeuristic appeal in Nickle and Dimed, but Ehrenreich combines a narrative of her experience with serious analysis,  picking apart the hiring, working, and living conditions, and pointing out that as strapped for time and cash as she is, "Barb" is getting off easy. Unlike her coworkers, she isn't trying to raise a family on these meager wages...and unlike them, her body hasn't been broken by a lifetime of motonous, labor-intensive work. Ehrenreich writes that if it is possible for her to pass as a fake, if productive, member of the working class, it is only thanks to a lifetime of above-average nutrition and plenty of time spent at the gym. Her coworkers make the most of what they can in a desperate situation -- attempting to survive on lunches of hot dog buns and nothing else, or living together to pool resources.

They shouldn't have to. The United States has been a fantastically wealthy country throughout most of the 20th century, and that conditions like this exist is outrageous -- an insult to what we are capable of. Although Ehrenreich's account dramatically establishes that the conditions of the working class which exist are unconscionable, she doesn't evaluate what went wrong or what can be done to change this. Her own experience does hint at part of the problem, though, the decentralization of American cities. The rents she can afford are generally far from the places which are hiring...and with no mass transit system in place, and with sprawl so extensive as to defy attempts to build such a system, she's forced to drive. In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay called this 'the geography of inequity'. Ehrenreich is alarmed at the prospect of $2/gallon gas, less than half of today's prices.

Nickle and Dimed must be read by Americans, because the problems Ehrenreich witnessed are still here and are more pronounced.  Witness the results of the National Low Income Housing Coalition's reports on the affordability of rent on a minimum-wage salary. Today, to afford a two-bedroom apartment on the minimum wage in Maine and Florida, "Barb" would have to work 81 and 97 hours respectively. Working two full-time jobs, "Barb" wouldn't make quite enough to pay rent -- let alone groceries, bills, transportation, or anything else. While 'Barb' doesn't  need a two-bedroom apartment, consider that two adults with kids would have the same problem. Even if both were fully employed, they couldn't afford rent -- or anything else, including daycare. Resolving this crisis will probably take work on both ends. Although the minimum wage should adjusted to be a living wage, more fundamentally the United States has to change to become a more livable nation. The zoning laws which prohibit mixed-used architecture -- a traditional source of cheap apartments -- need to be taken off the books. In addition to promoting sprawl, they have destroyed the ability of the poor to live recently. It is no accident that Transportation for America, a group advocating for a transportation system that can not only be paid for, but be used effectively by everyone, advocates for the restoration of mixed-used planning.

If only to convince you that a problem exists, this is a must read.The working class didn't create the miserable conditions they are stuck in, and no one should be forced to endure them.  I would also recommend the books in the related section.

Related:

• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
• Transportation for America's Route to Reform
• Out of Reach 2012: America's Forgotten Housing Crisis 
• Suburban Nation, Andres Duany et. al

Asphalt Nation

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back
© 1997 Jane Holtz Kay
418 pages

Lord, Mister Ford, I just wish you could see what your simple horseless carriage has become!

It seems your contribution to man has to say the least gotten a little out of hand --

Well, lord, Mister Ford, what have you done?

("Lord, Mister Ford", Jerry Reed)

The United States is in ways a nation without a history. Relatively young, it came of age in the early industrial period, where access to profoundly powerful technologies shaped its growth in a way not seen in Europe or Asia, where new influences worked against what was already there. This is most obviously seen in a comparison of dense, almost compact European cities, and their American counterparts, which sprawl out for mile after dreary mile and -- with some exceptions for cities which date to the 18th century --  often lack a distinctive center. This radically different urban landscape is the mark of the automobile: while Europe's cities were built for people, America's cities and now its sprawl are made for cars. Americans embraced the automobile like no other nation, and now after a century of giving it dominion, are slowly waking up to the price. No green and pleasant land, we are a nation covered in asphalt and mired in traffic. In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay examines the consequences of the United States' self-made dependency on the car,  explains how it came to be that way, and offers ways for recovering a sensible approach to urbanism.

Although some of the costs of the automobile are obvious -- pollution; the economic drain of cars on private households to pay for insurance, maintenance, and gas;  and thousands of lives each year -- the greatest harm is more subtle, in deforming the urban landscape. The automobile's effect on American urbanism has been marked by purposeful decentralization and the rise of sprawl, a disaster for the nation. Not only does sprawl create manifestly hideous cityscapes, but it drives cities into bankruptcy as they attempt to cover greater areas with less efficiency. Public transportation becomes especially inefficient. As jobs move away from city centers, those who can't afford transportation to get there are stuck living in areas with few opportunities for work, leading to inner city decay. Once vibrant city centers become home to nothing but poverty and despair.


It didn't have to be this way. After cataloguing the damage, Hay launches into a history of American car use and the rise of a "car-ridden" society.  Although the automobile matched the United States' strong individualistic tendencies nicely, the success of the automobile is far from a triumph of the free market.Cars and the roads they require have always been heavily subsidized by the government: in the 1930s, building the infrastructure for automobile transportation was seen as a way to put people to work. The car companies themselves were proactive about ensuring their dominance, as General Motors eagerly bought up trolley lines and promptly closed them down, allowing its line of buses to flourish. Holtz's history section  can be depressing, as it catalogs the slow decline of American urbanism and the rise of congestion, but it must be read. Every chapter is a lesson in where we went wrong, one that might allow us to find our way back. Interestingly, the rise of the automobile fits into the pattern Neil Postman identified regarding technology;  at first, it was merely a tool to be used, then one with a central role in our lives...and now, for Americans, one our society has become fundamentally dependent on.

The final chapters devote themselves on recovery. Reining in the automobile will be a difficult task, and may prove to be a long term challenge for the 21st century, just as establishing the car's preeminence marked the 20th. First, we stop the ever-increasing expansion of roads, reexamine zoning policies that encourage sprawl and the destruction of our cities; begin restoring transit like trolleys and trains; begin rolling sprawl back and restoring our urban centers; and finally, begin "depaving America",  beginning with the elevated highways that cut cities apart.  The car should also be put in its proper place by no longer being so heavily supported by the official policies of the government.

There's never been a timelier moment for this book, except for perhaps in the 1970s when the oil crisis offered Americans a chance to reconsider their relationship with the automobile. Today the United States is facing a prolonged recession and a difficult century ahead. The infrastructure required for our asphalt nation is an enormous economic liability, one we would do well to shed ourselves of. Ending sprawl and restoring life to the cities will allow government to function efficiently and restore that sense of community that Robert Putnam mentioned in his Bowling Alone. Asphalt Nation is thorough, its author never shrill. I not only recommend it: I think it a must-read.

Related:

• The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape; James Howard Kunstler
• Technopoly, Neil Postman
• Bowling Alone: the Decline and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam
• Crabgrass Frontier: the Surburbanization of the United States, Kenneth Jackson
• Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and Decline of the American Dream; Andres Duany,  Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
• "Lord, Mister Ford!"; Jerry Reed