What I've Been Reading and Watching This Week, 12/10

1. In this Grist article entitled "Confessions of a recovering engineer," Charles Marohn explains why the priorities of the general public when it comes to street design are fundamentally at odds with the factors first considered by the professionals who design them, and the consequences this disconnect has for road safety.



2. In this Brown Daily Herald Op-Ed, my good friend and fellow environmental leader at Brown, Spencer Lawrence, spells out why fighting climate change is the greatest challenge of the 21st Century and why you should pitch in even if you could care less about tree-hugging.



3. The CNN clip above highlights a small house in Tokyo the size of a parking space. In a city where density is already high and space is limited, seemingly extreme measures like these are necessary for further growth. (Seriously, it doesn't take long cruising around Google Earth to figure out that Tokyo may have just used about every square foot available.)



4. The above video is also about reducing something's typical scale, but instead of a house the size of a car, it's a car the size of a, well, small refrigerator. From the geniuses at TopGear (the BBC version, the US one is pretty awful), 6-foot-4 Jeremy Clarkson drives this Peel P50 microcar to, and through, BBC headquarters. You have to see it to believe it.



5. According to this TreeHugger article, Rhode Island may become home to the first offshore wind farm in the United States, boasting 200 turbines and a 1,000 Megawatt capacity with transmission lines stretching from Massachusetts to New York. This project is one of the largest in development anywhere in the world.

An Interview with Tom Vanderbilt

One of the first posts I ever wrote on The Green Lantern included commentary on Tom Vanderbilt's book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What it Says About Us. Late last month Vanderbilt was interviewed by Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, on Streetfilms, the visual media arm of the Livable Streets Initiative. Watch the full segment below:



Gorton does a good job of capturing some of the major points of Vanderbilt's work, and the author's comments shed additional light on what is already a groundbreaking book (Traffic was a National Bestseller, after all). One of the main points of the book, and something he outlines heavily in the interview, is the psychological complexities of automobile use on everything from lack of feedback while driving (we drive more and more recklessly because we've gotten away with it before) to the lack of eye contact between drivers and pedestrians above 20 or 25 miles per hour. As Vanderbilt argues, it is not until we understand these complexities that we will be able to fix our transportation system.

At the end of the clip, Gorton says, "And once again, an excellent book for anyone who is interested or having to deal with the topic of traffic." I'm going to take this a step further, well maybe a couple of steps further, and more directly state what I think Gorton was getting at. If you have driven or ridden in a car, ever, this book is relevant to you. Go read it!

What I'm Reading: 2/21/2010

1. In this New York Times Magazine feature article, Daniel Smith profiles the emerging field of eco-psychology. This form of psychological research explores how environmental degradation effects personal anxiety, despair, and depression.

2. As the World Burns: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most aggressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming. From Rolling Stone Magazine's Jeff Goodell. Your one-stop-shop for the complicated history of climate policy in the United States.

3. Plastic or Plastic? Brown University student Alyssa Ratledge beats me to the punch and writes an op-ed in the Brown Daily Herald (allbeit better written than anything I could have ever put together) expressing her bewilderment at a recent Bookstore's policy requiring, yes requiring patrons to take a plastic bag at the checkout counter. Don't want one? Already have a reusable cloth bag or backpack with you? Too bad...

4. Global Weirding is Here: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wonders "if we can have a serious discussion about the climate-energy issue anymore" and emphasizes four key arguments for a national response to climate change (mostly paraphrasing his book, Hot, Flat and Crowded with a climate-weather twist thrown in).


5. In this The American Prospect article, Grist.org writer David Roberts reviews two automobile-oriented books. One, Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us?) I read last winter and loved. The other, Reinventing the Automobile, is co-authored by William J. Mitchell, the head of the Smart Cities program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lawrence D. Burns, the recent vice president of research and development at General Motors, and Christopher Borroni-Bird, GM's current director of advanced vehicle-technology concepts. This trio attempts to address current transportation problems and argues that reinventing automobiles means reinventing cities (music to the ears of a sustainable urbanist).