Friday Grab Bag: How we commute, and why smart growth is healthier in so many ways

Did you know that if you walk or ride your bike to work, you will be fitter — and probably weigh less — than your counterpart who drives every day?

Did you know that in the U.S. in 2013, 76 percent of people still drive to work alone?

Did you know that since 2006, walking, riding a bike or taking public transit are seeing greater percentage increases than driving?

Well, now you do.

A recent Wall Street Journal article looked at the impacts of commute mode on health, and this is the story they told.

Here's the bad news: The top chart shows us just how bad our habits had become. Over 75% of us still drive alone to work.


Here's the good news: But if we look at the bottom chart, we can see how quickly the popularity of walking and biking and taking public transit to work is growing.





As I have said many times in other contexts, these modes of travel to work, walking, biking, public transit, are only possible when you live close enough to work to make it even feasible.  The popularity of these modes is both a reflection of the new-found popularity of urban centers as places to live, work and play, and it is reason to continue to focus our density on walkable, rideable communities near transit nodes.

[You can read the WSJ article here. Their data comes from the American Community Survey (ACS).]

Images of black and white from the 1970s

These two images below, one from the streets of New York, one from television, were taken within a few years of each other in the 1970s and represent quasi-idealized versions of urban poverty and suburban wealth. It strikes me as no mistake that the poor group in these photos is black and the rich group is white. It is more interesting still to see such a stark representation not just of wealth and poverty, race and class, but also of white flight and urban neglect and all the conversations we've been having about our cities since 1971. It is also very interesting to see the dominance of the visual storytelling cues we've been relying on ever since.  It is only recently, largely courtesy of the iPhone and its mobile cousins and their relentless ability to see, record and report the ingrained abusiveness of our system that a Second Civil Rights Revolution has been born in these past few years, attacking not only conservative antipathy but also white liberal sanctimony and hypocrisy. Oh yes, and everything I say about them also applies to me.

H.L. Mencken, philosopher, genius

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamoring to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Impractical Beauty, the Alfa 4C

The Alfa Romeo 4C is a car of great beauty. But given that it only has two seats, doesn’t even have a glove box, and trunk storage space is barely enough to carry one case of wine, the car doesn’t even pretend to be practical in any way, except for the joy driving it on empty, twisty country weekend roads undoubtedly gives.

Yesterday, I went out to Herb Chambers Fiat in Worcester to see the only Alfa 4C for sale in the whole Boston metro region. This newly arrived model is a sleek black number, a fit girl in a black party dress, with carbon fiber tub, 4-cylinder 1.7L turbocharged engine that produces 237hp, and a lovely exhaust note complete with crackle overrun. Its dimensions are low and short and wide, and like some other cars that sit down like that (the Lotus Exige comes to mind), it has a side-beam construction that requires some dexterity to get in (and out of) the seats.

Shifting is done either by the car’s computers in fully automatic mode, or by paddle-shifters on the steering column in manual mode. Drive options are Normal, Dynamic and Race. In this model, black leather covered interior surfaces including door panels, with a  bold red stitching to offset. Car and Driver’s website lists the car at $55K, but in the Herb Chambers showroom, they are asking $78K. Apparently, local demand is high for this gem, a car that reintroduces the Alfa brand to the American market after a long hiatus.

In one of the Top Gear specials, Jeremy Clarkson races Richard Hammond around a track outside Rome, Clarkson in the 4C, Hammond in a Corvette Stingray.  Clarkson makes the slightly bombastic but amusing claim that in the future, all sports cars will have to be like the Alfa, lightweight, small displacement, turbocharged. Perhaps, but it’s fair to say that in the Corvette, General Motors has built a car you could actually use for a multi-day road trip. In the Alfa, you’re simply beyond the car's limits by hopping in, picking up a friend and their luggage, doing a quick food shop before heading out of town on a weekend jaunt.  There just isn’t space in the vehicle, which may only make the point that this is not what the Alfa 4C is all about. Still, being a slave to your passions is nice in concept but the demands of daily life eventually always seem to exact their own concessions. When I rather sheepishly asked if there was a spare wheel in the car, the answer I got was “Not unless you want to drive around with it in the passenger seat.”

Make no mistake, the Alfa is a thing of beauty in the way only the Italians seem to be able to accomplish — simple yet subtle, musical yet muscular, with lines that sweep elegantly from the front grill up over a low-slung powerful body, air-cooling an engine mounted right behind the driver’s head. It is a joy to behold, but unless you already have a large garage for this work of art — in Massachusetts at least, the Alfa would be unusable from December to April because of its minuscule ground clearance — and have another car for everyday chores like food shopping, and lots of money to insure it and fix it, this 4C makes no sense at all. Which is probably why you should try to get it. I say try, because as far as I can tell, there’s only one, and bets are it will get snatched up fast.