What Do You See In Your Wallet?

The American economy is coming back. At least according to most of the news reports that you hear. Wall Street is again climbing to within a thousand or two of its peak in October of 2007 and the corporate bigwigs are getting their outrageous bonuses, despite the so-called limitations that were enacted. It seems like these guys are winning the lottery every year. But I have not seen this recovery in my wallet.

In this recently completed first fiscal quarter, many of the railroad companies that I follow are now reporting that they have done very well. Over at CSX, the reported revenue climbed 13% to a record $2.8 billion, operating income at an all-time high of $773 million(up 22%) and an operating ratio at 72.5 compared with last year and also a record. Not bad for having many severe winter storms to deal with and a steep rise in diesel fuel prices.

Union Pacific also had problems with the weather and fuel prices but that didn't prevent them from chalking up some equally impressive record gains in revenue, operating income and ratio. Overall U.S. Rail volumes have remained above the typical carload growth rates for the first quarter. Shipments are up, revenues are up and profits are up, but I have not seen it in my wallet.

The workforce headcount for all 7 of the Class I railroads increased by 4.4% over last March's count and the majority of that came in the maintenance of way and structures group. Our railroads are beginning to upgrade and expand their infrastructure for the anticipated uptick in demand for freight. Remember that these guys are not interested in passenger rail, high speed or not. Rail travel of every kind is growing all across the U.S. But I don't see the benefits of that growth showing up in my wallet.

I read someplace the other day that the large multi-national corporations based in America have roughly $1.3 trillion in liquid assets which they are holding on to. That is trillion with a T, and yet they are not actively working on creating jobs or investing in America's growth. They are just sitting on it.

Are they waiting on the government to create to jobs? I don't think so. If the government began creating service jobs then the TEA Party would claim that they are expanding government. If the government began creating construction jobs then the taxes would have to help fund the building projects. Private industry will not create these service or construction jobs because the general public is unwilling to pay the full and unsubsidized cost of such a venture nor can the return on investment be fully realized in the now standard depreciation timetable. We have let the Wall St economy call the shots for so long that they can no longer help the little people while failing to maintain a reasonable, or sustainable growth rate. They have taken us to the brink in the past and we seem willing to let them continue an their merry way again.

Wall St has led an effort to subtly bring about a stealth redistribution of wealth and we have willingly bought into the apple. Mass production and automation have consistently brought lower production costs and cheaper prices but have also resulted in fewer jobs and social benefits are the first to be affected. We want the former and complain about the latter. And we go along with it. The Wall St CEOs eat from the big table and we wait for the trickle-down to reach us. I haven't seen it in my wallet.

I saw on the news this morning that John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate, was in Libya to meet with the rebel coalition and discuss some sort of aid. There was also some comment about using the frozen assets of Gadhafi and supplying weapons and medical aid. Is this not a redistribution of wealth in the country of Libya? From the rich and powerful to the working masses? I guess it is good enough for them but not for America. And what about the comments from The Donald the other day? That the Libyans PAY us for the moral support(and a few specially aimed Cruise missiles) so that when we win the war for them, we would take( not pay for) all the oil that we need. Don't you just love where Trump's heart is at? I'll bet that I never see that show up in my wallet either.

What I DO see in my wallet is a pending 10% (Mrs Sweeper says probable) pay cut in an effort to balance the budget.

Sometimes, One Can Make A Difference

I received a comment today to an older post about the trolleys and Chevy Chase. I infer that this reader found the scuttlebutt going around, concerning the alteration of the Blue Route trolley, was suspiciously the similar to what I had proposed. I too, thought the same thing when I read the 5th District newsletter which came out last week. Does the Councilman read my stuff or does he have friends that do. Either way, the thought of being useful gives me a good feeling.

Below is the text from the newsletter;

For the past several weeks, I have been working with LexTran to devise a Colt Trolley route that would circulate through Chevy Chase then back downtown with a stop by the Lexington Farmers Market. I am pleased to inform you that on April 30th, the Blue Route Chevy Chase “Hop” will do just that.

The trolley will run from 10:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m., and LexTran estimates that a full loop will take approximately 20 minutes, arriving at either end of the loop in 10-minute intervals. The Blue Route will maintain its Main and Vine Street course with the following deviations:
• Old Vine to Woodland Ave.
• Right on Woodland Ave.
• Left on Maxwell/High St. to Euclid
• Right on Euclid to Ashland Ave.
• Right on Ashland Ave.
• Left on Main St. to Jefferson St.
• Right on Jefferson St. to 2nd St.
• Left on 2nd St.
• Follow Regular Route to Old Vine at Woodland

There are some discrepancies in the newsletter and the posted trolley routes and times on the LexTran site. First, while April 30 is a Farmers Market day, if the route begins at 10 (the LexTran site says 11:30) those who get downtown after that will find far fewer good choices to pick from. Second, the route needs to go beyond 1:00 (LexTran says 2:00) if those who ride from downtown for lunch are to get back in a timely manner. And lastly, I hope that LexTran quickly updates their list of destinations along the route as this new alignment greatly expands the current list.

I guess that I can also claim at least a 66% success rate in being right about the Corman railroad display track at the corner of W. Main St and Oliver Lewis Way. I had theorized that they might place their existing large boxcar along with the two locomotive shells, or they might place the steam locomotive there. As it is they just put the two display units, so I was somewhat right.

Greying In Lexington

I read an interesting piece the other day out of St. Louis County, Mo. Interestingly enough, St. Louis County and the City of St. Louis are not a merged government nor is one inside the other. The city of St. Louis is called an independent city and is separate from any other city or county in Missouri. This story had to do with the suburbs and exurbs of the city of St. Louis and their governmental futures.

In the once bustling communities on the outskirts of the city proper, many aging baby boomers are now finding that their comfortable homes, designed for life built around the auto and deemed a safe place to raise kids, have become much more quiet in the last few years. Most of the kids have been raised and sent off to college, but the parents have remained and life has taken on a whole new set of challenges. These places are becoming the land of the empty-nesters.

Homeowners in communities like these seem to have just two choices when this happens, move downtown or move away completely. Rarely will it be in their best interest to remain as they are.

These homeowners will look much closer at the availability of shopping and the need to drive everywhere. They will be less inclined to vote for tax increases for schools and parks. Their need for medical services and transportation will increase. Their isolation will grow as their ranks thin and the look and feel of the neighborhood will change as they can participate in the daily activities of suburban life.

This environment is a product of the monoculture of development that has been the norm since the sixties. Building block upon block of cookie-cutter style houses, each one similar enough to its neighbor that they could be easily confused at night. All of the daily needs of the residents are carefully placed far enough away so as to not intrude on the calm residential feel of the area. There is no way to remain in the neighborhood while downsizing or even getting out to the market or community center to shop or visit friends. Such neighborhoods are designed and built for one thing, raising kids.

Think of it like you would a thoroughbred horse operation, laid out and developed for specific uses in a certain pattern. Very difficult to use for other crops be they animal or vegetable. Any change from one style to another is costly and unprofitable. And seldom do horses grow old on a typical breeding/racing based horse farm.

For many, this rollover of neighborhoods is natural and cyclical and has been going on for decades, but honestly the older neighborhoods (pre-1950) were not of such sweeping magnitude as those built in the '60s and later. The creation of Levitttown in New York brought examples of larger and larger subdivisions and the autos and Interstates made the possible. When you reached the end of particular phases of child rearing, you just moved. Today's economy will not allow such luxury.

The subdivisions of the last half of the last century also were built with housing stock which was designed for active families. They had great rooms and vaulted ceilings, three car garages and pools. Fine for raising a growing family or entertaining but way too much for an aging empty-nesters or a widow to take care of. Should we make our elderly move from their homes simply because we forgot to plan for their needs as they aged?

Other communities have begun to see their populations dwindle in these types of developments and with it a decline in tax revenue. This decline is accompanied with a rise in demand for services both of the transportation and emergency medical variety, many of them very specialized in nature. Lexington is fairly lucky in this regard as all of Fayette County is covered but the examples from St Louis County is a compilation of small cities and many unincorporated places. We shall see these same problems arise here but the impact should be lessened.

The upcoming Comprehensive Plan process will give us a chance to consider how we can set about to correct some of the possible problem areas and prepare solutions. Now is the time to begin thinking about it. How will you like to age in Lexington over the next ten years?

This Weeks Rail Thoughts

I have been kind of quiet on the subject lately, but the things that I have been reading in the past week have brought the regional rail idea more to the fore.

First off, the work that R. J. Corman Railroad is doing along side the Rupp parking lot and the intersection of W. Main St and Oliver Lewis Way is progressing smoothly. They have installed a fairly short (and steep) section of track that branches off of the main line just south of its crossing at Second St. This track then runs up a nearly 6% grade until it levels out parallel to the crest of the embankment which overlooks the rail yard.

This clearly has one sole purpose. To display some of the various rail equipment used by the Central Kentucky Lines portion of Corman rail group. They are also almost ready to place the rail under the new bridge now that the drainage and electrical line placements have been resolved. There is a location for a transformer pad and what I'm told will be a “glass house”. I am supposing that this will look similar to the architecture of the aviation facility in Nicholasville and will be used to protect some railcars (and /or people) should they establish a dinner train style operation. A Corman spokesman has continued to say that the railroad has “no formal plans for an excursion train”but all the construction, both here in Lexington and in Midway are some of the many pieces that “need to come together before an excursion train becomes reality.”

In Midway, if you don't know, the track runs right through the middle of Main St. and leaves little room for a long train to stop without blocking one of two city streets. The right of way for the railroad actually is wide enough for two parallel tracks without eliminating traffic or parking. The railroad is working with the City of Midway in building such a parallel track and doing some streetscape improvements.

Neither of these two track work projects are part of the TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grant recently awarded for track upgrading on several of the Corman lines in a few states. One more piece of the puzzle was the wye that they re-established near Christianburg and provides a beautiful place in which to turn a train.

Corman has nearly quadrupled the amount of rail traffic on the line to Louisville in the 5 or 6 years that he has controlled it and its soon-to-be-completed upgrading will allow more freight traffic just in time for the price of fuel to make long-haul trucking cost prohibitive. The trucking industry has not made their trucks any more fuel efficient than the auto industry has cars. That said, the idea of a regional commuter rail service to Louisville, though interesting, is made just a little bit harder.

I hear of many commuters who travel from Lexington to Frankfort or Louisville daily who say that they are willing to go by rail, but I am not sure that they have thought it completely through. Many of them have found their efficient route via auto, and many of them avoid the normal rush hour snarls of downtown. If they were to go by rail and the station is downtown, then they are now a part of the traffic that they have so far avoided. There is also an added level of commute time involved which needs to be considered. For all of their talk, we are still at least ten years late in beginning to think about commuter rail service.

On the topic of High Speed Rail, it now seem clear that the Republican majority in the House is set on erasing all gains that the present administration has attempted to make. Without requiring vastly more fuel efficiency in autos and trucks and better alternatives to the fossil fuels we currently use, I think that they are wanting the country to live in the status quo. Other countries are not so conservative about it.

We cannot let the market decide about these things. Consider this. Based on extensive research Airbus committed, back in 2000, to build a massive 4 engined aircraft seating 500-800 passengers. The demand would come from the Asian market and a large part of that from China. Boeing, interestingly enough, came to a eerily similar decision. With the emergence of the Chinese market and the need for large numbers of people to travel between China's major cities and internationally, this looked like a sound decision. Now, 11 years later, one and just one southeast Asian airline has taken delivery of any of these super jumbo jets. That is one A380 out of the five ordered. Boeing has sold none of the passenger models but has orders for the freight versions What, pray tell, is the difference in the past 11 years. China's high speed rail.

This decision was basically an economic one. One 16 car-long 300 km/h train set costs roughly $80 million and seats 1050 while one Airbus A380 costs $360 million and seats 650. You can do the math.

Although the A380 is perhaps the most fuel-efficient large airliner in the sky today on a per-seat/km or seat/mile basis, figures from Airbus and Siemens show that at A380 burns nearly six times as much energy per seat/km as a modern high-speed train. The Chinese will buy from the Western world, but not if what they can build is cheaper. The Chinese have built over 6300 miles of high speed rail line in the past 10 years and the Europeans are continuing to expand their high speed routes while we worry about who will or will not benefit from building it. The answer is definitely the Chinese, they win if the build their own and the win if we don't build ours.

We Need A Real Energy Policy

Once again, an American president has called for a reduction in oil imports. Once again the “leader of the free world” is making an effort toward energy independence, albeit a token one, that many are skeptical can succeed. I also do not believe that it will succeed because the American people have been told that we will succeed if we want to. Former President Bush said, “We are addicted to oil” and as true addicts, do we really want to get off of this addiction?

Funny thing about this new reduction plan, just like all the others before, it is short on details. It is not a road map to oil independence like some would like and it really doesn’t point to an eventual goal like the recently announced European Union plan. A one-third reduction of our 2008 import level would bring us down to 7.4 MBD, a possibly attainable level. It would be step one in our road to weaning ourselves off of our addiction.

"There are no quick fixes ... We will keep on being a victim to shifts in the oil market until we finally get serious about a long-term policy for secure, affordable energy," Obama said.

There are no quick fixes to addiction withdrawal and currently most Americans believe that any stepping down from the existing levels of consumption should be done by those who are the most hard core users. Man, see how much more bad off they are than I am?

We could also produce more of our own oil, but how is using more of a local drug any better that using somebody else’s product? In the end we are still addicted and we will need more, and more and more… More local drilling will not solve the problem, in fact, it will only make the problem worse. Currently, we rely on foreign imports for roughly half of our daily needs. American vs. Arabian oil or American vs. Colombian coke, does it make any difference?

Previous presidents have made similar promises on energy imports, calls for cut-backs, pleas for “voluntary restraint” in oil usage. In fact, all fossil fuels are being urged to cut-back since we know what it has done to our environment. That ecological damage is now so great that it will take nearly twice as long to undo as it took to get us to the point that we recognized the damage done. From the toxic bayous in Louisiana and Texas to the massive scars of mountain top removal in Kentucky and intermittent spills along the coasts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, the damage costs are so great that we now want to prevent the EPA from even trying.

Americans have allowed this situation to exist for far too long now. Either by ignoring the handwriting on the wall (the oil embargo, the wars in oil rich countries, etc) or believing that should we ever run out, that our technology will save us. It has now become a political football, each party has solutions to which the opposite party will object and neither can convince the American people to abide by. So on it goes, no long term goal and no short term changes in the rising status quo.

Of the four areas identified in the most recent proposal, no political party will endorse them all. More local production (drill, baby, drill) will not sit well with the democrats and environmentalists, while the fostering of natural gas vehicles will cause the cause a restructuring of the existing fuel delivery systems. More efficient cars and trucks is only thought of in the context of gas mileage and not better mass transit or high speed rail. Lastly, the alternative fuels card is aimed directly at the auto industry not any other fuel users. Oil is still used as home heating fuel in many areas of the Northeast and a changeover will cause much gnashing of teeth.

At roughly 20 million barrels a day (and half of that imported) we really should stop and think about how much of that is truly NEEDED. A great deal of it is abused, strictly by the decisions that we have made about where we choose to live and work. Those decisions are compounded by our choices of how we get between the two. How much of the travel that we do is really necessary and do we do it because it is cheap. Remember, the “drive till you qualify” method of looking for a place to live may really be a thing of the past.

Analysts and experts said Obama's goal is ambitious and that truly reforming U.S. energy use would involve sweeping changes, including possible fuel taxes to encourage Americans to change their habits, which could be politically toxic

The goal is certainly ambitious and sweeping change will be involved, but whether by governmental edict or by global demand for the remaining fossil fuel, our resulting energy needs will march to a new drum beat. The fact that it has NOT happened in our lifetime yet, in no way indicates that it will never happen. We continue to see polls where a high percentage do not approve of the sitting president’s actions/positions on energy so I feel that most of us would like to go back to the days of $.25 a gallon gas and an open road. The corporations that took us from there to here don’t want to go back and have made it difficult to do so.

The people are not wrong and the corporations are not wrong, so we will just have to blame the President. Good luck with that.

Power For The People?

Do you remember a few months back when the guys over at ProgressLex were complaining so vehemently about the power poles along Euclid and the new Oliver Lewis Way? Well, I hope that they don't get hold of the concept going around in New Jersey by their electric utility.

http://www.infrastructurist.com/wp-content/uploads/utilitypole.jpg

PSE&G for putting up solar panels on their power poles and tying into the grid as a way to supplement power production. They are aiming at 40 megawatts annually by 2013. And a number of whining NIMBY's in town are really up in arms about it.

Some want to whine about the fact that they are there, others about the fact that they are not on every pole and still others that they were not asked (or told) before the collector panels were put up. The Deputy Mayor in one town came out and said that they were just plain “horrible”. (Something about this sounds familiar.)

I can see the good behind an effort to “untie the sky” and try to get as many of the power lines underground as possible and we did just that under the Urban Renewal project along Main and Vine back in the '70s. Do you see the results of that in the controversy and demise of the CVS store this past year? A forgotten location of an underground power vault can mess up someones whole day.

What does this hold for the future in Lexington, on the placement of solar collectors or wind generators should a private entity wish to invest in them? Will they be allowed on roofs of our larger downtown buildings? Will a private homeowner be allowed a residential sized wind generating unit, either on the roof or in the back yard? Will they become as ubiquitous as the satellite dishes mounted all over town?

To me, the pole mounted collector is not a big problem. I may prefer to see them arranged in a more vertical shape to more conform to the height and scale of the pole. I would also like to see more research into the application of a spray-on paint type of collector which uses nanotechnology. Put that on the pole and blend it into the background. I find this to be a beginning of the design curve not dis-similar to the table top sized VCR's, the projection TV's and the 12' cable dishes in the yard. We need to install the first units and then refine down to the best possible end result. Before the next new system comes along.

We Don't Wage War On Things we Love

Google the phrase “war on cars” and you will surely find several references to ongoing diatribes from The Heritage Foundation written by Wendell Cox but there will also be some fine rebuttals and one of the best lately is by Todd Litman. Litman is the executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia,Ca.. and has done numerous studies on traffic not only in Canada and the U.S. but internationally. The real story is that those who are claiming that there is a concerted effort to eliminate the automobile are making this whole thing up.

As far back as the late 1990s, The Thoreau Institute and Randall O'Toole was writing that this so called “War” was roughly comparable to the earlier “Wars on Poverty, Drugs, Crime and (now) Terror” except that this was a war that the American people should NOT engage in. Considering how all of those other “wars” have gone (and with large amounts of direct funding from the government) this new “war” should be looked at as a failure from the outset.

One of the claims has been that the skirmishes in the “war” began back when the Interstate Highway System and High Trust Fund was created. The highways that were supposed to link cities without running through cities and funded from taxes imposed on ALL gasoline sales, but the social engineering (that they are so afraid of today) intervened took the major interchanges into the city centers and through many existing (low income) neighborhoods.

It is probably more accurate to say that the initial sniping was back in 1935 with Wheeler-Rayburn Act which intended to regulate the electric utility companies. Such utilities were also parts of holding companies which owned the streetcar and interurban systems of America. Strangely enough the streetcar companies were where the electric utilities got their start, providing power for the trolleys and selling off the extra to customers first along the lines and then to the rest of the area. By 1935, the electric companies “extra power” and sales far outstripped its usage by the trolleys. Streetcars, once they were torn away from their private subsidy, then had to compete with the automobile which was (and still is)subsidized by the government. We can see the results of that today.

Transit became the mode of choice for those who were either on the lower levels of society in most cities or the typical white collar worker in the larger metro areas. As these ranks have swollen with the growing sprawl and the continuing stagnation of wages(especially in the past decade or so) potential transit users have been left out due to the subsidy imbalance. Thus began the push for better transit in the mid-sized cities of the U.S.

Transit advocates persuasively argued that, due to youth, age, or disabilities, some people were simply unable to drive. Society owed these people as much mobility as the auto offered everyone else, so society should subsidize transit. But behind this argument lurked a belief that mass transit was better than personal autos and that we would all be better off if we could go back to the late-nineteenth century when most cities had streetcars but no one yet had cars.

The belief alluded to in the second sentence above does not include the idea that no one would be allowed to have autos but does provide for the choice to use one or the other, and even both.

It is the claims of social engineering against the automobile and its elimination from cities that fuels the rhetoric of today's battles. These claims may work in other communities, but Lexington is not actively working to eliminate the automobile. What we would like to do is balance the equation a bit and fund all modes on a more reasonable level.

All of America is not “at war” with the automobile, in fact most of us revere our car more that most all that we own.

The family car used to sit “out back” either in the driveway or in the garage. The garage was a small wooden shed type structure, unheated in the winter, some distance from the house and usually neglected to the point that it sometimes barely stood up by itself. Today it sits proudly on the driveway in front of the house, guarding the wide overhead door which dominates most facades and proclaims to all comers “our homes may be on par with each other, but I am the status symbol that you should be impressed with”. In the '50s, the good car was kept in the garage while the old workhorse auto was left in the drive or on the street and today it is the work vehicle that is hidden in the back and the show car on display. Americans love their cars.

American's buy cars, primarily due to marketing(another type of social engineering), not because they need to get from point “A” to point “B”, but to show just how far they have progressed up the social ladder. Today's autos are tricked out with so many extras, most of which we don't need, some we don't use and a few that we just don't know about, yet we buy them(at premium prices) because those just one step up the economic ladder have them. We buy cars that can go 130 mph. and are limited to 35 – 45 on most urban roadways. We buy cars with four wheel drive and never go off-road. We buy cars with all the comforts of our living rooms so that the 25 minute commutes will not inconvenience us and then use it less than 1/10 of the day on average.

It will not be the government planners or the social engineers who will wage the “war” on the driving habits of the American public. Most likely it will be those whom we have willingly thrown our support behind and our now hard earned money toward, the auto and petroleum corporations which have enticed us into this mess where we now find ourselves.

Where do you see yourself in the next stage of the situation?

A Surprise And A New School Of Thought

I received an email yesterday from a recent reader informing me that this blog had been included as an entry on one of their blog lists. The link that was supplied indicated that I was one of 40 international bloggers writing about living in the suburbs and a quick scan of the list revealed some blogs from which I have tried to take my inspiration. I was really quite flattered. I quickly passed on the good news to Mrs. Sweeper since I was feeling real good about myself.

Then, I spent a great deal of time last night reading most of the other links and I am not so sure that this is a good thing. To be sure, they do have a balance of positions. Everything from the rabid “we have to move to the suburbs” to the “man are they going to be sorry someday” type of blog post from around the world. From those selling the myths of suburbia by retelling the myths of downtown to those who claim to see the despair of massive decaying home tracts. I think that they may have done a Google search on the word “suburb” and took a random sample of them all.

Oh well, exposure is exposure. I will take the good with the bad.

One of their links did cause me to contemplate the continued, less than cost effective, manner in which we use our schools. Take for example, the use of buses to get our students to and from school. Can it or should it be done a better way?

The first thought was to find out which portion of the annual school budget is used for transporting students and is it required. Finding the Fayette County Schools annual budget online is not an easy task and even then it would be an old one, so I took another tack. I looked at their fast facts.

They have 250 buses on the road daily, burning an estimated 2,200 gallon of fuel, to haul an estimated 34,000 students to 50 separate locations (and back) and covering approximately 15,000 miles. That is in a day.

Their start of school year enrollment is stated as 36,900 so that means that an astounding 92.1% of all enrolled students ride the bus. Daily. That makes 7.9% who walk or are driven by parents.

Why is it then, that there is always a traffic nightmare when passing any and every one of the 50 individual schools, morning and afternoon. The number of parent driven autos dropping off and then picking up the non-bus riding students is impressive. It also makes it difficult on those others of us trying to get to work on time.

I suppose that the 34,000 number could be the total daily rides and not students and that would cut the amount of students carried to about 17,000. That results in 46% who ride the bus daily and 54% who arrive some other way. Now we are talking a more reasonable figure.

But, do we need to pick up and deliver students to school when their parents clearly demonstrate that they for the most part are willing to do it? Our state law says that a public education needs to be provided but I know of no requirement to provide for transportation to and from said education. Have you seen the long lines of idling autos lined up in front of and looping around most of the schools in the hour before dismissal time? The environment would benefit greatly if all these carbon belching vehicles could be held to a minimum. Would it not make sense to route at least some of the existing public transit services to the schools and have a portion of the trip accomplished that way?

The development patterns of the past 80 years, and particularly the last 40, have contributed more to the time and distance needed to provide the services like school buses and public transit than they have in the rest of recorded history. We seem to be working at crossed purposes when we build in a lack of connectivity and demand that a service, supposedly delivered as a courtesy, be extended through a convoluted, circuitous path and expect our streets to remain tranquil and serene. Good luck with that.

I guess, my whole point here is that with the school district spending over $11,500 per student and a great deal of that in transportation costs how much more effective could they be by spending that money on class room work instead? The cost of fuel will continue to rise and the distances could get longer, so now is the time to consider/plan for a viable alternative and all options should be on the table. What is the sense of burning 2,200 gallons of fuel a day for 46% of he students and the parents burning probably half again as much for a remaining 35-40% while being taxed for both the schools and Lextran.

As an aside (and final thought), this would also add some stability to the school calendar since the calling of school for snow would depend on the parents decision of whether their child attends in inclement weather or not. Classes will be held, it is up to you to get your child there.

Are There Also Suburban Myths?

Ann Bransom had a great column in Business Lexington on Dispelling the Downtown Myths which attempts to convince some our suburban residents that downtown is not so bad. I love being downtown and being part of the new vitality that has happened in the past decade.

I have worked downtown for nearly the past forty years and have seen a lot of changes over that time, most of the changes have been for the positive. Many of the old stores and restaurants that I frequented when I began working are gone, moved to the suburbs or replaced by others. Stores that I went to with my parents are long since sent to the mists of history. If I were to stop an calculate it, I feel that the decline began in the late'40s, at the end of the war, and any new stores after that time would stay in business only for 20 years or less. Those in the food and entertainment business probably lasted just 10 years, max.

I used to tell my friends that it took over 25 years to realize the downtown had fallen so far and that, even with Urban Renewal, it would take roughly twice as long for it to be brought back. It took no work at all to bring about the decline but it will take a huge effort to reverse it. Many who have grown up in the suburbs and have no knowledge of how it was, be it here or anywhere, may see it differently but the walkable sections which they call downtown were the epitome of the American dream in the early 20^th century.

The combination of zoning and cheap energy led to the development pattern which we all call auto-centric sprawl. The culture today feels that driving a mile or more to buy groceries or other goods, even gasoline, is an inconsequential situation and just a fact of life. At the turn of the last century, those living in subdivisions similar to Aylesford area, and later the area just the town side of Chevy Chase shopping center, could either walk or take the streetcar to adequate retail and usually not travel over a quarter of a mile. Most subdivisions were located within a 1 mile radius of the court house up until the mid '20s which is when both automobiles and zoning began to take a major hold on urban development.

Farm folk, the original rural dwellers, are used to traveling distances to get to town, either to purchase supplies or bring their products to market. Even going to church meant a bit of travel just to get to the meeting house, but there was an ebb and flow of goods and services between them and the city folk. The direction of the flow of services now appears, to me, to be one way-- out of town, because I don't see these commuters bringing and goods with them.

The goal of the current subdivision dweller is to have a house on a good sizes lot, a decent back yard on a quiet street. One commenter said “Many people like living where they have a big yard and quiet streets where their children can play. Their is nothing wrong with that.” but from what is can figure, the typical lot size is roughly one third smaller, the house is one third larger and the street, unless it is a cul-de-sac, is not as quiet as our older areas. Streets are not a place for children to play, either in places like Meadowthorpe, Castlewood or Gardenside, although looking at historical photos of the old days it was probably a lot safer then.

I don't have figures but if more neighborhoods had more retail sites within walking distance, then there wouldn't be as many cars on the road, not as many parking lots and all the streets would be safer. Would you believe that just about all the streets in the previously named subdivisions have a 50 foot right-of-way cross section? Meadowthorpe and Gardenside were done in the '50s and '60s but the others predate the invention of the automobile. Woodland Park and Loudon Park areas date from the 1880s and could not have anticipated the auto, but their streets are wide and I can't put my finger on the reason why.

Many a suburb dweller will claim the they are tired of paying for the upgrades to downtown since very few of them will spend large amounts of their time there. I will assert that more of us taxpayers in older areas are paying extra for the services being delivered to the new suburbs. Since we all are paying equally based on property values and our infrastructures are already paid for(probably twice or more times over), then our taxes are going for the newer services benefiting the newer areas. What has the EPA all bunched up is that we are accepting lesser quality new infrastructure for the taxes levied.

All in all, I think that those downtown enthusiasts have had to live with the evolving downtown myths while the suburban area myths have been perpetuated as a desirable lifestyle based on unsustainable situations.

Learning from Japan

By now we have all heard of, and been shocked by, the devastation of the natural disaster in Japan. We watch it daily on the nightly news and shake our heads at the images of utter destruction, human misery and suffering. Then, there is the added peril of the growing nuclear radiation threat from the damaged power plants.

I heard from a friend, that some folks on our west coast are fearful that enough fallout and radiation could drift over here and cause wide-spread damage to property, crops and people. I am not so sure that it will happen but it could. But what about Lexington's preparedness for a similar sized disaster.

Way back in 1967, when we were near (or at) the height of the Cold War, Lexington had a plan for community shelters to protect residents from the dangers of “fallout”. This plan had its own section in that year's Comprehensive Plan and Lexington had many buildings designated, signed and stocked for such emergencies. The plan was simple in concept, but really quite simplistic.

At the time (1965), there were only 185 buildings usable for shelters and they could hold approximately 140,000 people out of an average daily population of 155,000. In dealing with fallout, maybe there were too few public spaces allotted but what if we were considering a massive earthquake along the New Madrid? Where would we go for community shelters then?

The “plan” divided the city into four areas; Downtown, UK Campus, VA Hospital and US Public Hospital (now the Federal Prison). Now, here is the fun part, all people assigned to the first three areas were REQUIRED to walk to the shelters since the streets “must be left completely free for police, fire and other authorized emergency vehicles”. The people making their way to UK were coming from Loudon Ave., The Shriner's Hospital and nearly out to Turfland Mall. Those going to the VA (that is the old Va on Leestown Rd) had to get through all the industrial areas with limited connecting streets and sometimes no sidewalks.

All of them walking.

I remember the ice storm of 2003 and all the streets that for several days became impassable. Now consider that ,in the event of an earthquake, all the streets would be littered with not just trees and wires, but piles of rubble and trash with no stable structure in sight. What is the plan for community shelters at that point? Where would most people go if their whole subdivision were leveled and they had to walk? I don't think that most of us are prepared for any like that.

The 1973 update of the original plan did little more than revise the numbers and switch from the VA Hospital to all of the major medical centers in town. It appears that some driving would be allowed but that walking would still be the preferred mode to get there. Still, we are talking about “fallout” here and basically nothing else in the way of sheltering during a community disaster.

The Cold War waned and the global threat of nuclear war seems to have let us get beyond planning for such contingencies, so all subsequent Comprehensive Plans have let the idea of “community shelters” just fade into the mist. Nothing of such a magnitude as the events in Japan have happened in our lifetime, in Lexington. We do have to remember that most of our suburban housing is farther than 1/2 mile from the nearest major intersection or shopping center. Planning for major disasters is still ongoing and information is readily available through the Division of Emergency Management (DEM) but the idea of citywide community shelters being identified and easily reached by a the populace is NOT being done.

Where will you go for shelter in instances like these? What would do if it wasn't there? Will you be prepared?