Delivering the goods ...

One more afterthought about our recent voyage on England's historic canals:

Adam Tooze points out: "The railway revolution of the 19th century in Britain really was not good for the canals which provided bulk transport in the early industrial revolution."

Click to enlarge.

 

England is honeycombed with canals that served as major modes of commerce -- until, precipitously, they didn't. 

Today these canals are curiosities enjoyed by pleasure boaters -- and in some areas the source of local water supplies.

Having grown up in proximity to New York State's Erie Canal, this is not hard to fathom.

Transit questions

I'll know my personal pandemic is over when I again feel I can ride a bus. Though I'm fully vaccinated, that time has not yet come for me.

I've used BART (our subway) for a short distance this month. It felt fine -- drafty and empty actually. But perhaps irrationally, I'm not ready to try the buses yet.

I came to my enthusiasm for our underfunded bus system (that's "MUNI" in this city) late in life. Though I used public buses to get to elementary school and occasionally to get to jobs, I never liked them. But in the last few years, like NY Times columnist Farhad Manjoo, I've had a bus epiphany. If the system were just a little better, I'd be a vigorous evangelist for buses. Even as it is, creaky and not always on schedule, I love that I can get pretty much anywhere in the city in two bus rides.

The irritating but sharp Matthew Yglesias offers some reflections on what makes for good bus systems and what practices might make them more desirable to more riders.

The truth is that people ride the bus when it makes sense. ... When good transit exists, it’s broadly beneficial and useful to all kinds of people who — for whatever reason — don’t want to drive a car for that particular trip.  

First, there has to be someplace to go where driving your car has some downsides. Second, there has to be a frequent bus that goes there.  

... the key thing about reforms that maximize ridership given a fixed pool of resources is that getting more riders is the way to get more resources.  ...On a political economy level, the biggest problem with U.S. mass transit policy is it’s always conceptualized as something that someone else is going to ride, which is good because it reduces traffic congestion and now it’s easier for you to drive your car.

This is a city, a genuine urban agglomeration. There's plenty of disincentive to driving for most of us, at least into crowded areas and even into neighborhoods with regulated parking. So that points to needing better bus service.

Yglesias argues that transit systems would become healthier if designed to maximize ridership rather than extensive coverage. Bus riders vote! More bus riders vote more! Maximizing means more frequent buses on some lines and doing away with infrequent satellite lines that go where demand is lowest.

Even though I benefit from living adjacent to one of this city's most active bus lines, I find it hard to accept this -- isn't there something wrong with a public utility neglecting what are most likely both the richest (say Seacliff) and the poorest (say Bayview) off-the-beaten path neighborhoods? I think so.

Another Yglesias suggestion is for more widely spaced bus stops, as much as a quarter mile apart. I get it -- the buses would run more smoothly. MUNI has implemented some of this, to a firestorm of upset from small merchants who claim they lose foot traffic. And what about disabled riders and elders who don't walk well? Again, transit is a public utility -- it has to be useful to as many as possible.

Yglesias does help me understand why I can be a MUNI fan -- quite a rarity among San Franciscans who use the system. Because I'm retired and can control my time, I can make a system with relatively infrequent  service convenient -- I just plan on trips taking however long they take. I like to listen to audio books while riding, as buses proceed along circuitous meandering routes to outlying areas. And with my senior fare, it's dirt cheap! Those systemic conveniences don't exist for everyone.

He asks whether pandemic changes that render "the future of the commute in doubt thanks to remote work" might make bus systems less relevant.  Perhaps.

I ask a different question at this fraught pandemic stage: will people who have any alternative come back to the buses when this is over? These days, the buses look empty. Nobody is riding who has another option.

Perenial Olympic rehash

At the Guardian, Lindy West offers a solid explainer: How to talk about female Olympians without being a regressive creep.

As ever, this year’s Olympics – an international bacchanal of physical perfection and triumphant will swaddled in human rights abuses and environmental catastrophe – are providing fuel for public delight and scorn in abundance. Making a strong showing in the “scorn” category already is the press, which, less than a week in, has managed to insult, demean and erase female athletes in a cornucopia of bungles.

... The Olympics offer up women’s bodies for public scrutiny on a massive scale, but to surprisingly constructive effect, relatively speaking: It’s one of the only hit TV shows that celebrates female strength, skill and excellence without sexualising female existence. ...

... I’ve put together a quick and easy template for your basic reporting needs (cribbed and adapted from a piece I wrote about coverage of female politicians in 2014, because you could basically have this conversation about any industry, and I do):

NEWS REPORT: [Female Athlete] did [sports] today. [Describe sports.] THE END. Sportswriting accomplished!

Solid advice that.

Meanwhile, via Grist, there's this cheery item. Enjoy.

For all the controversy over the Games’ hefty price tag, past Olympics have brought some marked improvement to cities’ transit and livability — and some downsides, too.

I recall seeing the result on the waterfront in Barcelona. Let's hope Rio benefits as well, though you probably need at least a center-left government, if not urban communists, to avoid the worst.

Warming Wednesdays: Ford goes light weight

If, like me, you've watched a lot of football on TV lately, you've probably seen this ad for the Ford F-150. There can be no doubt it is a butch ad -- addressed to the brotherhood of working men who get dirty every day and shower after work instead of before, who need to drive a truck as strong and tough as they are, who yearn to show the other guys they deserve to be in the tribe.


Subjected to a heavy dose of this pitch, I found it fascinating to learn that Ford has decided that in order to preserve its F-150 stud vehicle's market share, the truck needs to become more fuel efficient. And that in order to accomplish this feat, the company is going to make new models of the truck 700 pounds lighter by replacing its steel body with aluminum. Only, according to reporter Craig Trudell, the automaker doesn't much want to advertise this innovative break with automotive tradition.

The buzz entering the Detroit auto show that began today was that Ford Motor Co. would deliver one of the event’s most important introductions, an F-150 destined to be the first high-production vehicle with an aluminum body.

While Ford didn’t disappoint, its official presentation was almost absent any mention of the word “aluminum.” In prepared remarks as a series of new F-150s burst through paper walls onto the floor of Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena, Ford executives used “tough” to describe their newest pickup at least eight times. Raj Nair, the automaker’s product chief, underscored that the new vehicle’s frame is made of steel -- stronger, he said, than the steel the company’s competitors use in their heavy-duty models.

Only after that was the word aluminum uttered, and those in the stands heard it once.

I think what's going on here is representative of how this country will go about coming to grips with climate change. Established institutions -- the automakers, insurers of property, even utilities -- have begun to grasp that their future success is going to depend on adaptation to a changing climate. They aren't going to want talk about this, to engage in the ideological battle over global warming. But the more functional ones will take incremental measures to ensure their own survival. They'll evolve.

These measures probably aren't enough. The changes human societies have set in motion are too vast to be met by the smarter elements in an anarchic market. But all of us need to be flexible enough to look at where we might find allies in the climate crisis in unusual places. This challenge needs everyone's best energies.

Her "day in court" (she's barred) is Kafkaesque

Lately I've been writing rather cavalierly about the abusive treatment our post 9/11 Heimat Security regime inflicts on people in the process of trying to fly.

But thanks to Nell writing in the comments, I'm now following more closely Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim's ongoing challenge to her no-fly list status through the excellent series of accounts at Papers Please! (Should you follow this link and find that Dr. Ibrahim's story is no longer the lead item, just enter "Ibrahim" in the search box in the right column.)

Ibrahim is not some no-count, anonymous foreign Muslim. According to the Associated Press' trial coverage, she's

... 48, lives in Malaysia with her husband and four children and is dean of the architecture and engineering school at the University of Malaysia.

She was apparently added to the no-fly list when a graduate student at Stanford over ten years ago

The current trial is beyond Kafkaeque. Ibrahim can only testify on videotape. The U.S. government barred Ibrahim's U.S. citizen daughter from flying in from Malaysia to testify by putting the daughter on a no-fly list. This intervention was revealed by the Malaysian airline, then the U.S. spooks implausibly denied their actions. More here. Lawyers for Ibrahim were subjected to a clearance process under an order from the trial judge and thus allowed to learn what the government says is Ibrahim's watch list status -- but they are barred from telling their client.

The theory about what caused Ibrahim to be barred from flying that is presented in her legal briefs is that 1) linguistically-challenged Feds confused the similar names of a Malaysian academic association with an Islamic terrorist outfit and 2) the FBI wanted to recruit her to spy on Muslim mosques while she was grad student in California, but she stiffed them, so they stuck her on a barring list and still refuse to admit they screwed up.

The AP summarizes

"Once you're in the system it's almost impossible to get out," Ibrahim's lawyer Elizabeth Pipkin told the judge Monday during opening statements at the trial. Pipkin said Ibrahim landed on the no-fly list through inadequate training of list administrators and their bias regarding religious and national origin.

I find that totally plausible. We always refused to speculate on why the government once apparently briefly listed a couple of San Francisco peace activists. But it always seemed likely that our awkward detention was the product of a "round up the usual suspects" impulse after 9/11. Having made the initial mistake, the government was willing to devote huge resources to avoiding any kind of scrutiny, as much to avoid embarrassing itself as to maintain any legitimate "state secrets."

The judge in Dr. Ibrahim's case seems frustrated and appalled by the government's evasions of ordinary legal procedures. (Our judge, Charles Breyer, the brother of the Supreme Court judge, acted equally critical of the Feds. Experienced federal court judges don't like to be handed lies and gobbledegook.) Let's hope he forces this story into the open. He'll take a lot of shit if he does, but under our current surveillance state regime, only occasional courage on the part of fortuitously placed individuals seems to impede the rush to pervasive tyranny.

Meanwhile, testimony in this trial taught me that I better get hold of a copy of Jeffrey Kahn's book,Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists, to keep up on these issues. More to come.

Saturday scenes and scenery: along the tracks

The warnings are emphatic.


This is not a place to walk.


Light rail vehicles ply the tracks in this quiet neighborhood. Well, the area is as quiet as the often noisy Muni Metro braking allows.


Locals pay no attention to the warning signs.


The tracks make a convenient bypass for pedestrians.

Travel day today

I'll be flying out of here in one of these -- about 10 seats with luggage. Then to a standard size jet, then home.

Further posting will depend on how long I'm in airports with what kind of wifi. Travel is better when the former is brief and the latter is easy and free.

For what it is worth, it looks as if the FAA is considering retiring that iconic phrase, "Turn off your electronic devices." Good. I need all the distraction I can get while jammed in a plastic cylinder and translated across the country.

Transit in campaign organizing

Yesterday's post about transit policy racism reminded me that I learned a lot about shared transportation in the context of working on the Prop. 34 campaign. This was not something I expected.

• This was the first time in years that I've been able to use public transport to a job. Riding BART daily gave me a heightened appreciation of my fellow commuters; I enjoyed having the train deliver me to the job. I also experienced one of the contentions in the POWER report I wrote about yesterday: when fares go down, I become much more willing to ride. In my the cost of riding dropped precipitously on my birthday.

• Twenty years ago it was rare to hire a twenty-something organizer who didn't own a car. I remember one, but she was an odd ball. Today, many -- even most -- don't assume that owning a car is a necessary part of life. We even had two staff in Los Angeles who had no vehicle. (No, that didn't work very well.) Access to some by-the-day car sharing option has become a necessary campaign expense. This is almost certainly a planet-healthy cultural shift, but not one I'd anticipated.

• I proved it is possible to get to and from LAX (the main Los Angeles airport) to downtown on public transportation, but I can't say I'd recommend the effort. If you shop around for off-brand car rentals, you can get a rental for roughly the same cost. Something is wrong there, but that's the fact. I put energy into figuring out the most emission and energy efficient way to carry off one-day trips into and out of Los Angeles and kept coming back to car rentals.

Times and habits are changing.

Pink or Blue?

Okay, most all of us hate those stupid TSA "security" lines and intrusive searches that have become part of flying since 9/11. Most of us know this rigamarole is not really about keeping us safe. It is some kind of crazy mixture of jobs program for the 58,401 (Wikipedia) TSA employees, reminder from the government that we should huddle in fear and surrender all rights and dignity, and precaution against brain dead malcontents too dumb to evade our ham-handed "protectors."

But have you ever thought about what it would be like to try to fly if the gender on your birth certificate didn't match the gender your appearance presents to the world? I do think about this, though not a lot. I'm an old lady who has frequently been (mis)taken for male most of my life and I'm used to embarrassed apologies from people who've assigned me the wrong gender. I know the look when they realize they goofed when they called me "Sir." Most folks who make this mistake are more uncomfortable about it than I am.

But think what it might be like if you were transgendered, perhaps in the midst of transitioning, trying to find your way into the gender that you feel is you and you had to deal with "screening." Alissa Bohling has published a terrific article about this situation. Some bits:

Because gender has become one of the first markers in the technology-centric race for body-based data - known as "biometrics" in surveillance-speak - transgender and gender non-conforming people have been some of the first and most directly affected. …

Transgender people's experiences vary as widely as the human mind and body, but trans communities have mapped out some common ground in language, experience and even documents such as the Transgender Law Center's (TLC) fact sheet Trans 101. The title might be considered a nod to the ad hoc teaching gig some trans people are thrust into simply by virtue of their identities - Is that your real name? Did you have a sex change? Why should I let you onto this flight? - and for a two-page crash course, it goes a long way in dispelling gendered assumptions that underlie security measures like body scanners and Secure Flight. …

Millimeter wave machines are designed to locate any "anomalies" on a traveler's person and superimpose them onto a generic image of a human form, leaving the traveler's body on the safe side of the digital curtain. But before someone sets foot inside a millimeter wave machine, security staff must press one of two color-coded start buttons: pink for women, blue for men. ...

Yeah, even the machines get into the act of trying to pigeonhole people by gender -- and therefore highlight that gender is not as binary as many would like to assume. Go read the whole thing. It's mind-opening.

Photo by Elaine Thompson / AP

Saturday scenes and scenery: Road rage

I thought this might have serious consequences.

The driver of the red car was threading his way down the street and apparently brushed too close to the cyclist. When I first saw them, the bicycle guy was riding alongside the red car, screaming into the window: "I've got a right to the lane too."

I couldn't hear what the driver said in return, except that he seemed angry.

The cyclist threw down his bike where you see it here; the driver got out of his car. They stepped toward each other.

They yelled at each other -- then quite suddenly they seemed to become aware of the spectacle they were making and stepped back.

All this happened in the middle of a street where parents were dropping off children outside Horace Mann Middle School. Traffic becomes snarled here morning and evening as vehicles and pedestrians compete for terrain. It's a mess. Because of declining school funding, the district is doing away with school buses, so we can only expect this situation to get worse.

Warming Wednesdays: Free bus passes for a generation of "transit-first citizens"

Young people joined their parents and politicians yesterday on the steps of San Francisco City Hall to demand free bus passes for youth. With the school district forced by state austerity measures to cut its school bus service by 50 percent -- and with Muni (the local transit agency) raising youth fares 110 percent since July 2009 -- transportation costs have become one more hurdle in the way of low income families and families of color getting a good education for their kids. As the young guy's mock-up in the picture says, "Muni is my school bus."


Yeshan Banks from the community organization POWER introduced a parade of speakers.


James Ng, a recent graduate of the public schools and a youth leader at the Chinatown Community Development Center, spoke of his dependence on Muni throughout high school. "I love Muni -- but it costs too much."


And this wasn't just kids agitating for pie in the sky. School Superintendent Carlos Garcia pointed out what may be invisible to people who don't live here: not all San Franciscans are well-off. Over 60 percent of children in the schools are eligible for free or reduced price lunches; families genuinely struggle with transportation costs.


Thea Selby from the Transit Riders Union and a public school parent herself drew out the implications of a free youth bus pass: students who ride public buses to school will absorb the necessary lesson and gift of urban living in the 21st century: we don't have to choke ourselves and the planet on oil fumes in individually owned autos.


And Supervisor David Campos has a plan to pay for it. He is building cooperation between multiple city and county agencies, the Feds, and private interests to squeeze out funds for a pilot offering of a free Youth Fast Pass. So far Supervisors Avalos, Cohen, Kim, Mar and Mirkarimi have signed on. He points out that Portland Oregon and New York City have versions of this program. Campos insisted: "San Francisco likes to think of itself as a city that can get things done. We need to prove that by approving the free Youth Pass."



Full disclosure: I serve on the volunteer board of POWER and am proud to work with this imaginative community group.

A tale of two locations

Walkscore is a website that lets you enter a street address and tells you on a scale of 0-100 how "walkable" it is. (H/t Matt Yglesias.)

Try it; it's interesting.

And here's my tale. I plugged in the address where I am vacationing and received a bright red message: 2--Car Dependent. Now there's no arguing with that. The nearest store is nearly 2 miles away; most other facilities of modern life are further. In the language of Walkscore: "Almost all errands require a car."

After trying this cyber experiment, I launched off for a more than 10 mile run, less than a mile of which was on an asphalt road. The balance was wooded hills and trails. It would be hard to imagine a better setting for that form of pedestrian activity.

Later I plugged my home address into Walkscore and got "98--Walker's Paradise". I know what they mean. There's hardly anything I can't get or do on foot in my San Francisco Mission neighborhood. Hardly anything except run, that is. I don't run on pavement -- too broken down for that. So at home I drive from my Walker's Paradise to find running room. Contradictions abound.***Though I'm away from the Mission for a few weeks, it's been great to read that my 'hood is included in the SFpark pilot project zone. By installing smart meters, traffic management technicians hope to reduce the endless urban chase for elusive parking spots by adjusting the cost of parking to fill vacancies and encourage turnover. Sound complicated? Not really so bad. Here's an explanatory video.

SFpark Overview from SFpark on Vimeo.

I'm already benefiting from this program because a couple of weeks ago I bought one of its parking cards. No more hunting for quarters for the meter; I can stick in my prepaid card and bingo, I'm set. Now other jurisdictions (like for example "no there there" Oakland) let you do this with an ordinary credit card rather than something you have to order from a special San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. But hey, this is progress.

Meter fixes though probably won't do much for the times that I find myself driving around the Mission trying to find parking. I don't do this a lot; years of experience have made me very aware of where I can usually find a vacancy. But if I time a car trip wrongly and return in the early evening, I can count on an influx of community college students filling most of the street spots. That's after meter hours end at 6 pm. They'll leave later in the evening.

The other time I (and most everyone) has trouble is when we need to get our cars out of the path of the street sweepers, squeezing about 2/3 of the resident cars into 1/2 the spots. Are there technical answers to that problem, or is it simply a cost of urban life?

The latest in security theater

Last year the ACLU estimated that number of names on the U.S. government's watch list (people requiring special scrutiny when traveling) had reached one million. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said something like "oh no, not nearly so many..." They did say though they had a "terrorist watch list." Now they've apparently 'fessed up to the current number. USA Today reports

WASHINGTON -- The government's terrorist watch list has hit 1 million entries, up 32 percent since 2007.

Federal data show the rise comes despite the removal of 33,000 entries last year by the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center in an effort to purge the list of outdated information and remove people cleared in investigations.

It's unclear how many individuals those 33,000 records represent -- the center often uses multiple entries, or "identities," for a person to reflect variances in name spellings or other identifying information. The remaining million entries represent about 400,000 individuals, according to the center.

The new figures were provided by the screening center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to requests from USA TODAY.

At least under the new regime they answer some questions. There is still nothing to suggest that a list so large, based on so many suspect sources of information, assembled by a huge, inefficient, self-referential bureaucracy, serves any purpose except to remind air travelers to be very afraid of the terra-ists. ***
The stories of ordinary harmless people who find their travel impeded still surface too frequently. Here's a recent one.

Erich Scherfen was boarding a plane at Harrisburg International Airport to visit a sick friend in San Francisco when the ticket agent told him he was on "the list."

Days later, his wife, Rubina Tareen, was removed from a plane by a government agent, who went through her bags before letting her back on to travel back to Northeast Pennsylvania. Two months later, their vehicle was searched and they were questioned for hours before being allowed back into the United States after attending an Islamic conference in Canada.

The couple were never told why their names made it onto a terrorist watch list and their efforts to get an explanation have been largely unsuccessful, according to a lawsuit filed in Scranton's federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union.

New Haven Republican Herald,
Feb. 28, 2009

Scherfen is a veteran of 17 years in the U.S. military as a helicopter pilot. His wife, a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan, sells books on Islam from their home. Guess someone thought that was a threat. ***The people of rural Alaska think the whole TSA rigmarole is a threat -- to their way of life. If you want to get around in much of the state, you fly small planes. But the TSA wants to enforce the security theater we go through in big commercial airports on these small planes and tiny towns they serve. According to KTVA in Anchorage,

Proposed TSA regulations devastating for Alaska pilots
Imagine every time you got in your car having to check with police to see if your passengers have a clean record and if they have an ID all because you drive an SUV or truck and are going out for a joy ride. That's basically what will happen to pilots who fly larger planes in Alaska, where skies replace roads as the main form of travel, if new TSA regulations pass as they are.

The Alaska Air Carriers Association describes it as a "one size fit's all" approach to air safety.

The Transportation Security Administration says for planes over 12,500 pounds to fly into or take off anywhere, there needs to be proper security measures taken like checking passengers against the "No Fly List" and having security screeners on site.

It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade airports and hire personnel to implement a regulation that makes no sense. What's a small plane going to attack out there: a glacier? Alaskan pilots are furious and are pushing back through their legislature.

UPDATE: The link above went dead since this post went up, but the Fairbanks News Miner reports the same issues.***The TSA says they are going to fix the ongoing absurdities in the system -- by collecting more information from air travelers. Soon, you'll have to hand over your birth date and sex as well as a credit card to buy plane tickets. They say they'll erase the data after seven days -- still I can see some identity thieves finding a bonanza when they get into this stuff. Airlines will have to spend millions upgrading their reservation systems to capture the new data. The Chicago Tribune reports the some doubts:

However, some experts concerned about invasion of privacy contend that Secure Flight works from the misguided premise that Americans do not have the right to travel and, to receive permission to travel, they must be checked out by the government. They say one danger is the airline security rules could be expanded to Amtrak, intercity buses like the Greyhound Lines and other common carriers.

Sobel, of the Cyber Privacy Project, argued that "a first-time bad guy or bad woman is not going to be on the list. The better, more cost-effective approach is good police work, good intelligence work, not tarring everybody with the same bad intentions."

That would be too sensible for the massive collection of spooks and paranoid cranks now clustered in the security theater employment growth sector.

Traffic

This is a San Francisco story for a Labor Day weekend.

Once upon a time there was a freeway coming into the city that crossed Market Street and disgorged cars into a neighborhood called "Inner Haight" or "Hayes Valley" or just "north of Market." The cars mostly ended up on one-way Fell Street and streamed toward Golden Gate Park and points west. Coming east on Oak Street, cars entered the freeway at Laguna and headed off toward San Jose or the Bay Bridge.

The 1989 earthquake showed that all the local freeways needed shoring up to prepare for the next shake -- and provided an opportunity to the city's many devoted opponents of freeways to get a few torn down. Besides the collapsed Embarcadero freeway, we also got rid of the bit of the Central freeway that crossed Market as I've described in the previous paragraph.

After a couple of rounds of referenda that pitted commuters from the west side of the city against the progressive, anti-freeway east side including the residents of "Inner Haight" or "Hayes Valley," a new grooud-level Octavia Blvd. became the route across Market and onto a shored up Central freeway.

So, finally, here's my question: how do folks in the Octavia Blvd. area feel about the changes in traffic patterns? I'm a big user of Golden Gate Park who lives south of Market and (I admit shamefacedly) drives. I find that the back up on Oak leading to Octavia Blvd. encourages me to turn south on Laguna or Buchanan, or even Webster. That is, I'm part of a new traffic flow through what were previously far less trafficked residential streets.

Is the change bothering residents of the area? Does anyone have any suggestions for re-routing those of us who just pass through?

Trapped on the Dumb Growth Path

The most dangerous mode of transportation in the United State is walking according to a report by the Surface Transportation Policy Project. I assume that includes my favorite mode of locomotion: running. (Certainly on many occasions passersby have thought my dogged jog was a walk; so goes aging.)

When you get into the statistics, the findings about the dangers of perambulation are quite striking:

• In 2003, 4,827 Americans died while crossing the street, walking to school or work, going to a bus stop, or strolling to the grocery, among other daily activities. Although only 8.6 percent of all trips are made on foot, 11.4 percent of all traffic deaths are pedestrians.

• Senior citizens, African-American and Latino pedestrians suffer a fatality rate well in excess of the population at large. In particular, African-Americans make up 19 percent of pedestrian deaths, even though they represent just 12.7 percent of the total population.

• And the danger is getting greater, not less. The Orlando (FL) metropolitan area, which has seen an increase in pedestrian death rate of more than 117 percent in the last ten years, ranks as the most dangerous area today, as well as the place where danger increased most in the last 10 years.

What's going on here?

According to Paul Farmer of the American Planning Association, "Mean streets are produced by dumb growth… too much growth continues to be both dumb and unsafe."

We're making ourselves extensions of our cars, rather than using our cars to free us. According to the report, "Automobile-oriented transportation networks are sometimes so seamless that commuters can go directly from the garages of their homes to the basements in their worksites without so much as a short walk."

What about the rest of the world?

Europeans are also very concerned about rising pedestrian death tolls. About 8,000 pedestrians and cyclists are killed and a further 300,000 injured in the EU each year in road accidents. So what do they do? Call for redesign of cars so that people who are hit at speeds less than 40km (25 mph) will be less likely to be killed.

European Enterprise Commissioner Erkki Liikanen commented in 2003: "This proposal will ensure that vehicles are designed with the safety of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users in mind. I am pleased that the automotive industry has already committed itself to meeting the safety requirements…"

Sure isn't the UsofA! The automakers would be fighting these requirements for all they are worth -- and most of us couldn't imagine walking anywhere anyway.