Alex's Weblog

Shilling for Scrubs In the last week, probably because I’m home from vacation, I’ve been back to my old habits of watching television on the subway, using my Iphone and shows I’ve downloaded from the Internet (at a cost of a $1.99 a pop.) My favorite and old reliable is Scrubs, the comedy with Zach Braff set in a hospital with residents and such. This show is simply great. These guys sing, they dance, they do physical comedy, they have great characters to embody, and great lines to read (the writing on this show is excellent). They must be the hardest working folks in show business. After many many seasons, they are still going strong, not lagging at all, rarely if ever jumping the shark (okay, there was that one show recently where the whole show was reviewing moments from past shows. That was pretty lame.) My experience of the show is thoroughly post-modern, meaning fractured, unhinged, removed from most common contexts. I was not even aware of the show’s existence till about a year ago. This despite huge numbers of people being saturated with show to excess in reruns on network TV. But Kristi and I have been without cable television for almost 10 years now, and even though we got digital antenna reception recently for the basic networks, we rarely use it. Most of our television is downloaded from the Internet or received from Netflix. I found out about the show through a new, post-modern medium (okay I’ve officially overused that word): the television in the back of the taxis in New York City. Although these devises irritate me and prompt me to compose long internal monologues about the need for quiet, on this particularly day there were advertisements or a pseudo news item about the upcoming season of Scrubs. Zach Braff was dancing around in a silly suit. It looked interesting. I was looking for more TV to watch. I downloaded some shows. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve watched a lot of Scrubs! I’m nearing the end of the Sixth season. Almost all of it watched on my Iphone, in little bite-sized chunks. One show, 20 minutes long roughly, is perfect for a subway ride home from work. So here’s to you Scrubs. You’re beautiful.

David Brooks of The New York Times really captured something in today's column that I was thinking about as well, which was of the sadness of Judge Sotomayor's life and how it was similar to many of the more recent high achievers. No marriage, no children, little home life. I think this applies particularly strongly to high achieving women, but also to men as well. I've noticed more and more that both men and women now almost seem to have to make a choice: you can be a high achieving, high ambition person, or you can get married and have children. You no longer can do both. I'm overstating it to be sure, but I have married friends here in New York that are at the top of their profession, and being childless seems like a career decision with them. At some point, they had to choose. I think Brooks is onto something that we've purified our meritocracy so much that we've started to become specialized, like insects.

As a former newspaper reporter myself, I like to think I have an eye for what goes on a newspaper story, particularly a really good one like the one this morning in the Times on Europe's contrasting approach to a stagnant economy. 

The reporter obviously knows a lot and has done a lot of work. Less obviously, he has a strong point of view, probably gained from all that work. He weaves it into the story without being too obvious about it. The subtext of this story is the reporter practically screaming,"Jees, these guys system is working a lot better and with more subtlety than ours."

This point of view comes out a bit more obviously in paragraphs like this:

"Without knowing it, Mr. Koppe’s 25 employees are playing their small part in keeping the German economy afloat. But nearly 70,000 employees of the automaker Daimler have been placed on short-hour status. On the bright side, it means they are able to play with their children, tend to their gardens or — with further government incentives — receive the kind of advanced training that will make them even more skilled when orders pick up again."

This "On the bright side" line is where the reporter takes a step more obviously into the story.

I'm okay with that. Particularly given that I used to do it myself a lot. It's a tricky game, because do it too obviously, and an editor will slap you down. "Objective journalists" aren't supposed to say what they think. Sort of.

Particularly good and unusual is that the reporter, Nicholas Kulish, is getting into competitiveness. The story closes with this laid off worker, or actually worker on half time, using his free time to learn new skills. This implies what I know: Germany remains competitive because its workers are encouraged to go back and learn new skills. The system is set up that way. Ours are encouraged to go home and watch TV.

 

I've started teaching a class on infrastructure at the architecture school at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. See here for more info: NJIT Architecture School The two courses I teach, Elements of Infrastructure and History of Infrastructure, are a perfect fit for me. For whatever reason, I've gradually become obsessed with the pipes, rails, tubes and other stuff that lie generally beneath our feet. Everyone has got to believe in something; I believe in infrastructure.

Increasingly, the country is too. It and its new leader, President Barack Obama, are turning to infrastructure as the key to lifting ourselves out of bad times and paving the way for future ones. Might work. Here's a recent column of mine on the subject. Infrastructure column.

"You never know when you're living in a golden age," remarked one of the subjects in the great documentary about the small influential cable channel in Los Angeles, "The Z Channel." And I think that applies to television these days. After a decade or so now of thinking of television as being mostly a wasteland, save for the glory and high quality of HBO, I turn around and find there is great television everywhere. Here's a sample:

Friday Night Lights, the network TV show about the small high school football team, has incredible heart and is just amazingly good. It feels like it should be on HBO. But it's network TV. I'm watching the first season now on DVD.

Mad Men, the amc drama about ad executives in 1960, is amazingly done, a stylistic and analytical tour de force.

Chuck, the sci-fi farce about the CIA and such, is slapstick to be sure, but good slapstick. I've watched every episode.

And so on. And I haven't even gone into all the good HBO stuff, which doesn't count because I knew about that already.

The amazing thing to me about good TV is that it exists in very post-modern fashion. There seems to be no dominant universe. No one talks about TV anymore around the water cooler, as far as I can tell, because they are all watching different shows. If they are watching at all. Instead you hear about good TV here and there, from friends, relations or an odd news story. You have to inquire to watch good TV. My brother in law told me about this show called The Unit, produced by David Mamet. It wasn't exactly to my liking, but it was certainly of high quaity. I had never heard of it before.

The other amazing TV is that all this great TV isn't just on TV. It's on DVD, and ITunes, Iphones, and your laptop. I watched Chuck on either my Iphone or my Mac laptop. Same with Mad Men. As for Friday Night Lights, I watched it all on DVD, a year after it came out. Get this. I don't even have cable television. Television for me has become about Netflix and  downloads from Itunes at $1.99 a pop. It's a good way to live. Don't you think?

 

 

 

I've been contributing to Streetsblog.org a lot lately, which is a blog about the ongoing fight to make city streets more liveable and fertile. It's edited by the virtuoso Aaron Naperstak. You can check it out at streetsblog.org

Camille Paglia likes the Who, my old favorite band, Salon magazine informs me. Salonwww.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/10/10/britney/

Her observations brought to mind something that sprang into my head a few years ago, unbidden, about the basic existential stance by the three greatest rock bands of all time (excepting the Beatles of course.) Here it is:

 

The Who: What does it all mean? 

The Rolling Stones: Who cares what it all means? 

The Grateful Dead: We know what it all means. 

 

Speaking of Rock and Roll, did you notice how Paul Krugman in The New York Times a few days ago riffed off a Talking Heads song, Same as it Ever Was, without even mentioning it overtly? Wild, when gray-bearded economists are alluding to the Talking Heads. We've come a long way, baby.

I went to the New Urbanism conference last weekend in Philly, which was rapprochement of sorts. For years I felt I had almost been actively urged not to come to these annual events, whereas this time I was invited as a speaker on one of the panels. I enjoyed being there. Despite all my criticisms of the movement, I felt mostly at home there, and ran into all sorts of people I knew.

I was on a panel with Inga Saffron of the Philadelphia Inquirer on managing the media. Inga, the architecture critic for the Inky, follows a long tradition within newspapers of writers migrating to specialties they at first seem to have no particular background for. Before architecture critic, Inga was a foreign correspondent and covered two quite dangerous wars in Chechnya and Bosnia. I suspect her experience in such areas grounds her in covering subjects like contemporary architecture that are high in passion but short in actual danger, except to people’s egos.

Inga is hardly alone in making such transitions. Frank Bruni, a classmate of mine at Columbia Journalism School, went from covering George Bush during his 2000 presidential race, to covering Italy as bureau chief, to the current Food Critic at The New York Times. Quite a journey. I envy his legs. Alessandra Stanley, the Times current television critic, used to be a Moscow bureau chief where she got to know Inga Saffron, I was told. Stephen Kinzer, author of Bitter Fruit and an acclaimed writer on Central America and the world, frequently writes about art for the Times. And so on.

In my own much smaller way, I’m an example of this phenomena. I went from wanting and sometimes being a foreign correspondent early in my career in places like Central America, to being mostly a local political and city hall reporter, to then writing a lot about development, before gradually focusing primarily on the squishier subjects of urban planning, design, architecture, culture, economics and everything else that goes into human development. It’s certainly a valid accusation that we generalists lack something in depth by having such an eclectic background, but we gain something as well. By getting a broader taste of the world, we may able to judge and weigh things with a greater dollop of truth per word. Let’s hope so.

Coolness, as every high schooler knows, is one of those things that’s hard to define but easy to spot among one’s peers.

With cities, being cool depends in part on being economically robust and vibrant, but also on other qualities, such as having a vibrant art scene, good restaurants and interesting local music.

For various reasons, these days almost any city can become a cool city, converting itself from has been to hipness in a relative blink of the eye. It has something to do with the Internet economy, which has a hop, skip and a jump quality about it, alighting in strange places for hard to predict reasons.

I was in Fargo, ND recently, giving a talk on What is Design to the architectural department of North Dakota State University, and it seems to me that this small city is one of those places that has suddenly become “cool.” 

Fargo, as most people know, is known to outsiders principally for giving title to the movie by the Coen brothers about murder and Scandinavian accents and very cold weather. Fargo, to the extent that it stood for anything in that movie, stood for cold and dreary white people sitting in bars with not much to do.

I found some of that in Fargo, which to me was a nice break from New York. But I also found little restaurants, a very chic “boutique-style” hotel, and smart people doing interesting work. Most of this came through the eyes of architecture students and professors, who impressed me with the solidness and creativity. Fargo, I could see, could be a pretty good place to live, even though it does get to be 20 below zero in the Winter. (Which global warming has eased, the locals tell me: it used to be 30 below zero.)

Why has this city on the plains ascended the ladder of coolness? Some luck, some planning. Located at the intersection of freight and river lines, the city has always been a hub of manufacturing and industry, some of which is still there. The city was founded around the railroad lines in the late 19th century.

Some of the city’s coolness rests on a local boy making good, a certain Douglas Burgum who was the owner of Great Plains Software – until Microsoft purchased it for $1.1 billion in 2001. Now a top executive at the Redmond company, Burgam is still located in Fargo – and he and his ex-wife Karen Burgum has put money into a number of interesting projects. Just to name two, his wife started the boutique Hotel Donaldson, where I stayed very comfortable, while Mr. Burgum gave the architecture school the money to renovate the old warehouse that is its new downtown center. www.ndsu.nodak.edu/arch/

Of course, it’s not all Burgum money that’s making Fargo. And I’m just giving you my quick impressions after a quick speaking trip. Still, when I’ve gone to cities that are experiencing a comeback, it’s sobering how often I get the impression that private money plays a major part in their resurgence. That’s the case in Chattanooga, where a lot of old Coca-Cola, New York Times and other money has played a part in the city’s betterment. www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.phpIn this country, with government less active than in Western Europe, it’s often left up to private people – rich ones – to carry out what is in effect urban policy and design.

With a distinguished history and at least two and a half million people, Brooklyn likes to proclaim itself "a real city," one that would be the nation’s second largest – well actually the fourth largest – if only it hadn’t merged with New York City in 1898.

How ironic and sad then, that the borough where I live often comports itself like a distant suburb of shopping malls and subdivisions, seeking to keep newcomers out while in contrast accommodating new automobiles as much as possible. While there are many ways the borough does this, in the interest of brevity this article will focus on only one of these: parking. I focus on Brooklyn here because its policies and situation are particularly poignant, but the argument applies to all boroughs and many parts of Manhattan.

Here’s the problem: New York City in its zoning codes essentially requires all new buildings, whether residential or commercial, to provide parking spaces for their denizens. The City basically has a sliding scale of parking requirements, with more parking required the less dense the zoning area is. Only in the Manhattan core is this requirement completely lifted. This policy has the most impact in places like Jackson Heights in Queens, or Crown Heights in Brooklyn, places that are at a crossroads and set to become either more urban or suburban in character as new development increases.

The parking requirement follows the theory that new buildings generate new demand for parking, and so the businesses should provide that parking. While this theory is flawed even in the suburbs, it’s particularly so in a dense urban city equipped with mass transit and good sidewalks.

What apparently most people don’t realize is that the more parking you provide, the more cars there will be on the street. Period. Parking breeds automobiles. By requiring the construction of parking, the city is essentially ordering that automobile use be subsidized. And by promoting parking construction, the city is helping break up the urban fabric and making its mass transit system, on which billions of public money is spent annually, less workable.

The city should scrap its parking requirements. An even better, more pro-active, policy would be to put a cap on the number of spaces a developer can provide. Essentially, this would impose a parking maximum on new construction, rather than a parking minimum, which is what we have now.

As a way of taming streets, controlling parking has a lot to be said for it. As Josh Brustein of Streetsblog.com pointed out recently in a three-part series on parking there, New York City does not need state authority to control parking. That’s not the case with more publicized efforts, worthy though they may be, like congestion pricing. New York City could substantially reduce traffic and make streets more pedestrian-friendly by implementing market-rate parking on the streets and implementing caps on the amount of new parking that can be constructed. As an additional agenda item, it could copy Copenhagen and start a policy of actively reducing the total number of parking spaces a few percentage points each year.

Absent policies such as these, we are likely to see a rise in hostility toward new residents. This is unfortunate. Although I am personally critical of many aspects of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, I was dismayed to read a recent op-ed by the novelist Jennifer Egan in The New York Times who, despite some excellent points, often sounded like the quintessentially suburban citizen as she criticized the project on the grounds that it would bring a rise in population to the borough, and thus more problems with traffic and parking. She apparently failed to see that if the state and city insisted that the project not provide parking, much of these problems would be eliminated.

The Atlantic Yards project is set to provide about 4,000 parking spaces, or the equivalent of a 40-story parking garage as big around as the World Trade Center. This includes a controversial "temporary" surface parking lot for about 1000 cars that would be in place for a decade or more. Since these spaces will be used multiple times, that means many thousands of additional cars on the streets of Brooklyn, and an urban fabric that has been torn rather than mended.

But with good policies and good urban design, the influx of new people into Brooklyn and other boroughs can improve, not degrade the overall quality of life. Unlike automobile-based suburbs, urban cities generally work better with more people in them. More people means more money for more public services, from mass transit to better sidewalks. While our streets are at capacity for cars, they have plenty of room for more pedestrians and cyclists. Our mass transit system, given decent funding, also can easily be stretched to accommodate newcomers, especially in the boroughs. Imagine if instead of requiring developers to build parking, we required them to fund the mass transit system that their residents would use?

The city needs to reevaluate its policies toward parking. Through this tool alone, the city could make the streets more livable and in the process make newcomers more welcome.

The retrospective on Robert Moses here in New York City has inspired a wealth of re-evaluations of the big man who did so much to alter, build and destroy New York City and its environs. I felt compelled to add my two cents, after seeing the marvelous exihibts at the Museum of the City of New York, where you can see the huge models from Moses' day that showed how he would have, for example, tore a freeway through midtown Manhattan. Here's what I wrote, after seeing the exhibit: 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a model might be worth a million. This is the thought that came to me as I stared in fascination and horror at Robert Moses’ planned freeway across Manhattan on display at the Museum of the City of New York.

The elevated freeway would have gone from the Lincoln Tunnel across to the Midtown Tunnel and cut just beside the Empire State Building. Robert Olmsted, former planning director for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who happened to be at my elbow, told me that the original plan was for a tunnel. Accommodating it is why the Sixth Avenue line dips going uptown out of Herald Square for no apparent reason, Olmsted said. But Moses got a four-lane tunnel converted into a six-lane above ground freeway – on the drawing board. Neither was ever built.

The model on view is part of the big exhibit on the big builder that is taking place this and coming months at MCNY, the Queens Museum of Art and Columbia University Wallach Art Gallery. Hilary Ballon is the curator and has edited a fascinating accompanying book on Moses with historian Kenneth Jackson of Columbia University.

The core of the exhibition at MCNY is many of Moses’ actual transportation models. They range from coffee-table to room sized. For decades gathering dust in a room under a bridge, the models were rescued from decay or destruction by Laura Rosen, the archivist for MTA Bridges and Tunnels.

The exhibition as a whole is pitched as a reevaluation of Moses, which is certainly welcome. If the exhibition had a motto, it might be “He wasn’t all bad.” Which, of course, he wasn’t. Along with plowing down neighborhoods for freeways and soulless high rises, he also built some elegantly designed bridges and parkways, and hundreds of recreation centers and parks, including Riverside Park on the Upper West Side.

But the models on view at MCNY should serve to remind us that Moses’ transportation and related visions of housing and work were not just poorly or cruelly executed. They were fundamentally flawed, even on their own terms. If Moses had had his way, Manhattan would be crisscrossed with freeways and studded with new parking lots and garages. Which not only would have destroyed many people’s homes and businesses, it would have made the city less prosperous, and ultimately put less money in both private and public pocketbooks.

It all comes down to capacity. Like many people of his generation, I’m convinced, Moses essentially didn’t understand the different capabilities of different modes of transportation, despite his learning and education. A freeway at top capacity can move only a few thousand vehicles per hour, and all those vehicles have to be put somewhere once they arrive where they’re going. That means many lanes of freeways and many parking lots and garages chewing up prime real estate.

By comparison, a subway or commuter train can move tens of thousands of people per hour, and they all arrive without the need to store a vehicle. This essential fact is why Manhattan can have dozens of skyscrapers, which not incidentally produce millions in salaries, profits and taxes, crammed right next to each other without any parking lots.

Moses’ vision of New York, if he had completed it, would have essentially downsized large parts of the city. At the MCNY exhibit, there’s one artist’s conception of what Soho would look like after the highway was cut through it. It essentially looked like Dallas or Houston – a broad boulevard lined with Edge City style office buildings. And whether you love or hate Dallas, it’s a far less productive city than New York, when calculated on a per square foot basis.

This is what happened to much of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which are still recovering from the damage Moses did. The boroughs are not only less hospitable because of the worst of Moses’ freeways; they are also less productive.

Moses thought he was modernizing Manhattan and the boroughs by adjusting them to accommodate the car and the highway. It’s true that on a conceptual level, he was acting similarly to those of the 19th century, who had put in train lines into New York and other cities, adjusting them to that then new mode of transportation.

But what Moses apparently didn’t see is that the car and the highway operate by different rules than modes of transportation past. Despite its behemoth-like size, a highway is actually a low-capacity mode of transportation, particularly when compared to trains.

Moses can’t be forgiven his intellectual errors by the observation that “everyone was doing it.” For one thing, everyone wasn’t. Lewis Mumford, who in the 1950s was a prominent and respected critic, laid out in painstaking fashion just exactly why plowing freeways into cities would not improve overall transportation, even while destroying so much of what was worthwhile in urban centers.

Secondly, Moses was not just part of the pack; he led the pack. Before World War II, the general plan was to put freeways beside major cities, not through them. Moses helped convince the federal government otherwise.

This capacity question still is with us today. It is the governing factor on how much New York City and the region can grow. It is the promise of the three major transit projects on the stage today: East Side Access, which would enable Long Islanders to reach Grand Central Terminal; Second Avenue Subway, which would deliver a long promised second subway line along the East Side with the potential to extend it to the Bronx and Brooklyn; and ARC, which would be another tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey.

The region’s transit system is above or at capacity on most of its key lines. These new lines will add new capacity, and thus create the potential for new growth. Adding them would increase the city’s amazing ability to handle more people comfortably.

I attended a briefing on the Olympics in early 2000 by the urban planner Alex Garvin. He talked about how the 2012 Olympics, if it were held in New York, would need to handle an estimated 500,000 visitors a day. That had crippled sprawling cities like Atlanta and the system of buses and satellite parking lots it set up to handle its Olympics. Oddly enough, Garvin said, New York, with its 8 million people, could swallow an additional half million without a hiccup. Its huge transit system could handle them without any problem, particularly given them most of them would be traveling at off-peak hours.

It was a fascinating display of the logic of New York. Where is the best place to put a lot of people? Where there already are a lot of people. That’s why if we do it right, the city can expand from 8 million to 9 million people over the next 25 years, which many predict, without sacrificing comfort or livability.

So as we evaluate Moses, we should remember that it wasn’t just his means that were unsound; many of his ends were too.
[first published in the newsletter Spotlight on the Region of the Regional Plan Association in New York City. Available at www.rpa.org]

 

I tackle Robert Bruegmann's influential book "Sprawl" in two places this month. First in my column in Governing Magazine, , and then in the newsletter I edit, Spotlight on the Region. I'm quite critical of Bruegmann's views, which to my mind think of development too organically, and either downplay or ignore the role of government, particularly in building infrastructure. He seems to be a Libertarian in his views, although he has said he isn't one in published articles. Whatever you call it, he seems to idealize the free market, which to my mind is a greviously flawed concept.

Farm policy in this country, or the world for that matter, is one of the most tempting things to write about, but also the most frustrating because there are so many inputs and outputs. It’s hard to write about what we grow and eat without eventually discussing environmentalism, economics, transportation and full smorgasbord of larger issues.

In my last Governing Magazine column,, I wrote about proposals to build a new Bay Bridge from Maryland over to the Eastern Shore and some of the issues that raised. But despite the huge implications such a new bridge would have for farming, which is a big industry on the Eastern Shore, I didn’t have a chance to raise any of them precisely because it is so hard to do so in small column.

I’m not going to raise them fully here, but I did want to mention one thing that didn’t see the light of day in the published column. Trent Kittleman, executive director of the Maryland Transportation Authority, told me in an interview that it made little sense to worry about the effect of a new bridge on farming because it was an industry headed downhill.

Her exact quote from my notes is: “The big thing with farming is that it is obviously a declining industry, and can’t provide the jobs that young people need to stay in the area.”

Is this really true? Is farming on the fertile tidal plains of the Eastern Shores not competitive any more? Could young people really not expect to work on farms? Another interview I did for the story, which also didn’t fit in the column, was with John E. Hall , executive director and founder of Chesapeake Fields Institute and the Chesapeake Fields Farmers Cooperative. Hall and his groups were working to keep farming competitive, in part by vertically integrating the industry by having the farmers make and sell their own products with the crops they had grown, like chips made from soybeans, special breads made from their own wheat, and specialty popcorns.

“We figured if we can keep farming profitable, it will help reduce sprawl,” Hall said. “Here, there is a real movement because people are starting to realize we’re screwing up this country, and we’re not leaving anything for our kids.”

Hall opposed a new bridge because the increased traffic, residents and land values would make it difficult for farmers to stay in farming. Pretty soon, subdivisions would be mixing with soybean fields, and no one would be happy.

So who is right, and who is actually leaving something for the kids? Kittleman, who says a new bridge would bring more jobs to young people, or Hall, who says keeping a new bridge out would help young people have a chance to stay on the farm. It’s a good question.

As a longtime Apple Macintosh user, I’ve found that the merits and limitations of the Apple universe have started to serve as a general metaphor that I apply to other less computer-oriented fields. I’m going to give an example of this, but first I’m going to digress and tell a bit about my history with Apple.

I didn’t always use Apple. I switched back in about 1992, relatively late in the computer revolution. In retrospect, it was kind of dumb to switch, because as a writer, I had little need for the more graphically oriented universe that composed Macintosh. The MS-DOS, command-line language, sans mouse at that time, suited writers pretty well. It was or is a language, after all. You talk to the computer with words, rather than moving things around spatially. Windows had not come out yet, or at least it hadn’t affected my home computer, a Leading Edge (remember that company!), and the newspaper where I worked (The Virginian-Pilot), whose computer system, ATEX, was basically similar to MS-DOS. The home software I used, Xywrite, was basically a copy of ATEX. (ATEX would go bankrupt eventually. I think Xywrite is still published, because of its small hard-core base of professional writers that depend on it.) Trained at the newspaper, writing dozens of stories per week or month, I achieved a swiftness of editing that I still have yet to achieve on a mouse-based Macintosh or Windows environment. My hands would fly over the keyboard when I was editing a story. Using the F1, F2, etc buttons, with a thumb on the alt or option keys, I could eliminate a word or sentence with a key stroke, without my hands leaving the keyboards. When I wrote my first book, “How Cities Work”, on my little Macintosh Classic, I found I was having to sneak into the newspaper at night and edit chapters on the company’s computers, because I was so much faster on their system.

But all that is neither here nor there, because Windows, which is essentially a copy of the Macintosh universe, now dominates. There essentially is no MS-DOS based universe left, at least if you are, like me, not a computer geek. I know, or think I know, that MS-DOS is still buried underneath the Windows operating system, but we can’t see it much, at least I can’t, when I use Windows at the Regional Plan Association, where I have an office and Windows computer. We are all Macintosh users now, in a sense. Although a copy of Macintosh, the Windows system has inelegance and blunt, aggressiveness in its structure that reminds me of why I originally switched to Macintosh. There is this take it or leave it quality to it, an imperial back of the hand. I couldn’t see all that back in 1992 as clearly, but I did see that the Macintosh users were a group I wanted to be a part of. They were cooler, more progressive, freer thinking, and artier. Is it dumb to switch to a world you identify with, even if it’s actually less practical? Maybe not in the long run, in this case, because now the Mac system is easier to use, and less free of problems, than the Windows world. Perhaps the Linux world offers something better, but I haven’t ventured there.

Now let’s get back to my original purpose in starting this post. I was talking about how Macintosh, and in comparison Microsoft, have started to serve as a metaphor that my mind applies to other parts of the world.

The big example that I’ve been thinking about recently are the European Union and the United States of America. They are two capitalist systems. Both are democratic. Yet, like Apple and Microsoft, they are different. Different systems. So which is which? I’m sure most readers will see this coming. The European Union is Apple. It is more closed system, but because of that, the architecture of it is more elegant, and importantly, more equitable. It is a free trade system, but not just anybody can join it. To do so, you have to meet a set of standards, including being democratic and respecting human rights. Once a member, you are not just allowed to trade, you are given financial help in building infrastructure, and in getting your population up to speed economically. It is a different model of free trade. With a better-educated population, and one that is promised some degree of security and equity, it is no accident that Europe generally makes better stuff than we do, whether it be cars, kitchen scales or machine tools.

This all reminds me of Apple somehow. Like the European Union, it is a more closed system, almost completely closed. I don’t understand the specifics, but I generally hear that you can only make software or hardware for Apple with its approval. Because of that, software or hardware for Apple, even if made by a third party, generally works better, and is cleaner and more elegant.

America, and Microsoft, are different. They have the appearance at first, of openness. Okay, this post is getting too long. I'll come back soon -- maybe even next week! -- and say just how America, and Microsoft, are different.

At age 46, I’m old enough now to have experienced some things that are part of history. This feels a little weird, but it’s also a nice thing, I realize. One of those things is in this case a person, namely Fred Friendly, the former producer of CBS news, former producer and partner of Edward. R. Murrow, and former professor of journalism at Columbia Journalism School, my alma mater. Friendly, who died about ten years ago, was in his last few years at the school when I was there in 1987 and 1988. He was a big, larger than life man, who consistently challenged the class in his “Media and Society” class to look at the big picture and to not dodge the responsibility one has to make the world a better place. He took a liking to me because I asked direct impertinent questions, and that made me feel special.

I mention all this because I saw the movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck” last night, which is about Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow and their decision to take on Joe McCarthy in 1954. George Clooney plays Friendly, and Edward Straighthairn(sp) plays Murrow. I expected to find the movie a little hoaky, because I know a lot about this episode and the characters, and so I thought I would find the movie superficial and overly simplified. Instead, I found it excellent. The movie is in black and white, and they really did a good job of making you feel like you are back in the 1950s, when everyone smoked and the style of the times, at least in historical memory, seemed more black and white. They also treated the subject with a great deal of complexity and subtlety and told me several things I didn’t know. They got into the dynamics of CBS news, and showed how Murrow’s famous show attacking McCarthy grew out of an earlier show that took on the case of an army man who was being persecuted because of some relatives that were lefties. The show really made me feel for the first time what it might have been like to be around in that era, where there was this constant suspicion of friends and colleagues, and everyone felt the need to prove that they were not “soft” on Communism. Probably intentionally, this atmosphere of fear and distrust reminded me of what exists now around the subject of terrorism. I’m prompted to think that we as a society are prone to these paroxysms of paranoia and hysteria. Of course, terrorism does exist as a threat, as did nuclear war in the 1950s. But the movie prompts me to think that we can’t use that as an excuse for losing our center of balance and our favored values. I recommend the movie. George Clooney, who looked nothing like the Fred Friendly I knew, directed. The actor who played Murrow, Edward whathisname, just nailed him. You got this sense of this thoughtful man under an intense amount of pressure who among other things, smoked himself to death. (Murrow died of lung cancer in the early 1960s.) The movie uses lots of old footage that is mixed in well with the recreated stuff. Check it out. And my hat goes off to Mr. Clooney.

Can America send a man to the moon? Check. Build a swift, stealthy bomber that can evade radar in pursuit of enemies? Check. Write creative software that will fish through billions of bytes and pull out relevant few facts? Check.

But can America routinely build light, airy bridges that cross streams or gorges beautifully and sturdily, like Germany? Build high speed train lines like France, or giant gates that shut out the sea, like Holland? Set up a universal tolling system that allows trucks to travel without using toll gates, like Switzerland?

So far, the answer is “No,” or at least, “Not yet.” It’s clear that this country now routinely lags behind Europe and Asia in the construction of advanced infrastructure systems. Americans like to think of their country as excelling in everything, but many of the nation’s roads, bridges and general infrastructure have a kind of crudity that is shocking for such an advanced and rich country. As we continue to think about rebuilding New Orleans, and why the levees there failed, all this is something to think about.

In recent decades, examples of what might be called "our infrastructure gap" have proliferated. It’s no longer a question as to whether we lag behind, but how far. China, still a developing nation, is building a high-speed, high altitude train with a pressurized cabin, like a jet. The Malmo-Copenhagen bridge that arcs from Denmark to Sweden, the Chunnel between England and France, and simply the average automobile tunnel or pedestrian escalator in Western Europe are routinely more refined than in this country. Although we are a wealthy nation, our relatively poor infrastructure systems make the quality of life poorer in many respects for the average citizen.

This is particularly true when disaster strikes. A front page New York Times story on Sept. 21, 2005 by Christopher Drew and Andrew Revkin suggests that the levees failed around New Orleans principally because they were poorly installed and designed, not because of unexpected wind and water. Hurricane Katrina, although a category four to five storm overall, did not directly hit New Orleans and its winds near the levees did not exceed 100 mph, the authors said. Such winds were substantially below the Category 3 specifications of the levees. Although the story was a great example of hard-hitting journalism, the photograph that accompanied it said a lot in even fewer words. A broken concrete flood wall shown next to a canal looked more like sections of the infamous Jersey barriers had been plopped down next to a river bank than an advanced infrastructure system.

If the United States lags in its infrastructure – and to me there is no question that it does – than the natural question is, Why? One reason is that we as a nation resist higher levels of taxation. The percentage of our economy dedicated to government expenditures is among the lowest of any industrialized country. So things are often done on the cheap, if at all, even though this ultimately costs us money. In Louisiana, the failure to spend around $10 billion to strengthen levees and control the Mississippi River means that the federal government is now contemplating spending up to $200 billion to rebuild New Orleans and other affected areas. And this doesn’t include the huge costs that insurance companies and private businesses and residents will incur.

But less taxation isn’t the only reason. A full investigation would delve into things like our procurement systems, which favor the lowest bidder rather than the most skilled. Fitting in with this is a general lack of respect for skilled, blue-collar labor. This shows in our education and training systems. Although this country has probably the best higher education system in the world at the top levels, it’s not as good at churning out highly trained and highly-paid mid level engineers, technicians and skilled laborers that would erect a bridge or build a road or levee. The workers who construct the light airy bridges common around Europe are highly skilled, and highly paid. In the United States the more brutish concrete slab and heavy steel bridges are the default option in part because we choose not to invest in the systems that would create skilled and well-paid workers to erect the alternatives to them.

It appears we are paying a price for our education system and an economy that is tilted toward winner-take-all outcomes. If true, this is sobering because such problems are not changed easily. They take decades to fix. Such questions are of particular concern to the region around New York City, where I work and live. We have the most infrastructure intensive region in the country, and our prosperity depends in the long run on upgrading that infrastructure. Our cities don’t have levees like New Orleans’, although we may need some additional storm protection, but our train system, bridges and water pipes keep our region humming and prosperous and need to be continually maintained and upgraded.

The question of whether governments should push or require people on a bicycle to wear helmets is an awfully delicate subject; the Internet is filled with angry partisans on both side. In my latest column for Governing Magazine,"Zen and the Art of Bicycling" I give my take on the subject. I basically say that pushing bicycle helmets is not the way to make cycling safer, and may even make it more dangerous.

One of the dangerous possibilities in writing is to see an avenue that is sort of true, and then to follow it, in an attempt to wrap up a complex situation with a simple but wrong analysis. This comes to mind after reading Julia Powell's op-ed in The New York Times recently called "Don't Get Fresh With me." She got some things right: it's certainly worrisome that more and more people are buying their ways out of the regular food system with $2 tomatoes and whathave you. But Powell missed something in her perceptive but muddled essay: government regulation. If the states or federal government required chickens to be raised with more light and air, cows to be given fewer hormones, vegetables to be grown with fewer pesticides, and instituted policies that supported rather than penalized local agriculture, then people of all incomes would have a chance to buy more wholesome food, in the fullest sense of the word. If food production were regulated more closely, the price of foodstuffs would rise some, but not immensely because economies of scale would kick in. We could substantially end the bi-furcated food system we have now, where a wealthy elite buy food of almost total purity, and the masses buy tainted and often tasteless goods. We should require all food to be "almost organic." There's a way to split the difference between what is now two unappetizing extremes. Until then though, we can't blame those who can afford it to seek out tastier and healthier food, in all senses.

I had a realization today after reading the story in tomorrow's Sunday New York Times Magazine, which is out on the streets but not yet online, about the preservation of Modernist architecture. Which is this. Architectural styles are not about politics or political styles; they are about emotion.

There is often attempt by commentators and critics to label a particular political style peculiar or particularly to one type of politics. Thus we have frequent references to “Stalinist Apartment blocks,” even though these tall towers on plazas or parks were also built in Sweden, France and New York City. We don’t think of Art-deco, such a fun, swirly, sexy style, as something Communist would adopt, but there is actually quite a bit of in Russia. Maybe Stalin loved Art Deco. Similarly, we think of neo-classicism, sometimes, as fascist because Hitler and the Nazis loved it. But of course, so did lots of others.

These architectural styles, it hit me, are about emotion. Modernism is cool and rational. Art-deco is buoyant and sexy. Neo-classicism can be stern and powerful. These are emotions that all humans, and all political persuasions, like to tap into. The great thing about a new architectural style is that it a sense invents a new human emotion, or at least an expression of it.

To be sure, different political persuasions may be more inclined than others to like different type of architecture. But an architectural style cannot be branded as coming out of a particularly political movement, or inherently “socialist” or “democratic.” That misunderstands the nature of the art. Whether we are fascists, Republicans or Green party members, we are all human, and we want a range of emotions to tap into for our built environment.

Am I right? I write this in the first wave of realization. Maybe I’ll reconsider, but that’s how it appears now.

Can Highways pay? This writer Timothy Egan for the Times, who often writes about the Pacific Northwest and growth management, in a story about new toll roads today, suggests that yes, they can. If this is indeed a trend, it's 'an interesting one. From my historical research I've come to the conclusion that roads rarely can pay for themselves through tolls. They may be able to meet operating costs. If this Texas consortium tries to make money through building a highway across the state, it will be interesting to watch. Will they really have to pay for the entire cost of the road through tolls? Or will the government be helping out in some way? If they do try to pay for the whole thing, will they go broke? I bet they will. You heard it here first.