Classic Vehicle Channel
Published 15 May 2020A lovely documentary telling the story of the development of the London transport system from 1914 to 1939 — The heyday of London Transport. This film features awesome archive footage of buses, trams and London street scenes from the time. It’s one of a number of episodes this one featuring London’s transport system.
I’ve cut out the LWT adverts but I have left two in that I think you’ll love!
This film was broadcast by London Weekend Television in 1984 and later by CH4.
Written, Directed & Narrated by Gavin Weightman
October 29, 2025
The Making Of Modern London – The Heyday of London Transport 1914 – 1939
Comments Off on The Making Of Modern London – The Heyday of London Transport 1914 – 1939
September 15, 2025
When folks built their houses from Sears, Roebuck & Co. kits
I thought I’d discussed the Sears kit homes about a decade back, but perhaps it wasn’t for the blog. Anyway, there’s a nice summary by Katrina Gulliver of how Sears and other companies made home-building great a century ago:
A hundred years ago, kit homes were more common in the US. Sold by Sears, Montgomery Ward, and other local firms, buyers received the plans and the pieces for a house and put it together themselves. Economies of scale made these a viable option for someone looking to build a house in the expanding suburbs.
The 1914 Sears Modern Homes catalog shows three homes that could each be bought for $656 (in the small print, they admit your outlay would be more like $1,250 all-in, including brick, cement, plaster — which they don’t supply — and labor). Your kit house would be delivered by rail; it was generally assumed householders would be handy enough (or know whom to hire) to put it all together from the supplied plans.
According to a 1930 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, National Income and Its Purchasing Power, in 1914, the average clerk could be making $1,000, and a factory manager earning $2,300. That means these houses were within reach of lots of people — especially bearing in mind that land costs in many cities were also relatively low. In Chicago, lots within 5 miles of downtown were available for less than 50¢/square foot in 1914.
Those kit homes included wood, metal, and glass, and reflected both the tastes of consumers and the economies of bulk production. The various styles in the catalog over the years included craftsman, Dutch colonial, Federal, and cottage — styles that have continued to be popular in residential architecture of the US.
The Sears catalog of 1936 states: “This is the age of modern efficiency. No longer can human hands compete with machine precision and production. ‘Speed with accuracy’ is the watchword in any department of our great factories.”
(For those curious about such houses, fans of Sears kit homes put together lists of examples still standing.)
Comments Off on When folks built their houses from Sears, Roebuck & Co. kits
September 12, 2025
Britain’s network of weather stations is becoming less and less reliable
Well-sited weather stations can provide useful raw data on temperature ranges, wind speed, precipitation, and other measurables, but that “well-sited” makes a huge difference. Older weather stations situated in areas of rapid urban expansion will often be less reliable as they become part of the urban heat island and report higher temperatures due to locally generated heat sources rather than the ambient temperature they were able to record before. This is what has apparently happened to far too many of the UK’s temperature measuring sites, according to Chris Morrison in The Daily Sceptic:
The latest WMO Class figures at the Met Office shown in block graph form. The higher the class number, the less reliable the station reports become.
Image from The Daily Sceptic
In March 2024 the Daily Sceptic shocked the science and political world by disclosing that nearly 80% of the UK Met Office’s temperature measuring sites were so poorly located that potential “uncertainties” could corrupt the readings by a numbers of degrees of centigrade. World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Classes 4 and 5 in its CIMO scale come with “uncertainties” up to 2°C and 5°C respectively, and a Freedom of Information (FOI) request found that 77.9% of its sites were in these two “junk” categories. It should have been a wake-up call demanding immediate improvement of the nationwide network, not least because the Met Office frequently catastrophises its temperature figures in the interest of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Alas, no. A new FOI has found that the Classes 4 and 5 junk sites have increased significantly over the last 18 months and now total an appalling 80.6% of the entire network. Pristine Class 1 sites – which measure a credible ambient air temperature with little chance of unnatural heat corruption – are just 4.9% of the total, having fallen in number in this short period from 24 to 19.
Hundreds of millions of pounds have flowed through this Government department over the last 18 months but little effort seems to have been made to improve its basic and important meteorological measuring function. What is worse is that the Met Office doesn’t seem to understand the scale of the problem. Over the 18 months, it appears that 20 new sites have been opened in its now 387-strong network. Seventeen of these have been given WMO classifications, of which a frankly ludicrous 64.7% are starting life in the Class 4/5 junk lane.
The WMO rates weather stations by the degree of possible temperature corruption caused by nearby unnatural or natural influences. Classes 1 and 2 are considered what we might call pristine, with no significant errors arising from artificial influences. The latest figures show that the Met Office has just 12.1% of its sites in these two unadulterated categories. Class 3 comes with an uncertainty of up to 1°C and accounts for 7.23% of the total. The real shocker is Class 4 where the percentage of the total has risen from 48.7% to over half at 50.1%. Class 5 has no defining conditions and could be located next to a blast furnace door. It has risen over the last 18 months from 29.2% to 30.5%. The WMO states that a Class 1 location can be considered a “reference site”. A Class 5 site is said to be a location “where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”.
Despite this, Class 5 “extremes”, often caused by temporary but obvious heat spikes, litter the Met Office databases and record books. Of course such Class 5 data, unsuitable for providing an accurate temperature for a “wide area”, are loaded into databases producing “hottest evah” days, months, seasons and years. Their final destinations are the global datasets that exaggerate recent warming, again to promote Net Zero. Sprinkling the Class 4 and 5 fairy dust over the figures adds a bit more of the urgency required for elite political purposes.
Comments Off on Britain’s network of weather stations is becoming less and less reliable
May 17, 2025
QotD: Suburbs and their critics
I respect [sprawl] as people’s choice – the suburbs, highways and byways, strip malls, cookie-cutter houses, whether small semi-detached or McMansions, the whole lot of it.
It gets a lot of bad press, it has got a lot of influential haters, ridiculers and deriders. There are the urbanists, the town planners, the architects, most of whom can’t abide the sprawl. It’s ugly, inefficient, unsustainable, it lacks amenities and it lacks a sense of community, it prioritises – or privileges, as they would say – cars over pedestrians, it wastes space and it wastes resources, it’s barbaric. Those much smarter and more creative than us have offered a lot of alternatives: high-density living, modernist spaces, Le Corbusier’s houses as “machines for living”. They tore down the slums and erected high rise projects, council flats, banlieues and osiedla. They designed and built whole new districts, rich in concrete and wide bare expanses of public space.
Then there are the cultural as opposed to professional haters, and they too are as old as the suburbs themselves. The sprawl is a prison, a conformist hell. It deadens imagination and stifles creativity. It’s full of dumb people leading dumb lives. It’s a triumph of materialism, selfishness and narrow mindedness over selflessness, community and commonweal. From literature through movies and music to TV shows, suburbs don’t get a break; they are the hotbed of reaction, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, intolerance, prejudice, oppression and kitsch. “Revolutionary Road”, “Stepford Wives”, “American Beauty”, “Weeds”, “Little Boxes”, Stephen King novels, the list is endless, but you get the drift.
There are many differences between the suburbanites and the suburbs haters, but the one big one is this: the suburbanities are the live-and-let-live crowd – they know what they like but they don’t give a shit if you don’t like it. It’s your business and it’s your life – you can do whatever you like. The suburbs haters, on the other hand, not only know what they like but they believe that everyone else should like it to, and if they don’t, tough luck, they should be forced to change for the sake of what’s really good for them and for the whole community. Suburbs are not something that can be tolerated as an option; they should be destroyed, land reclaimed, ideally by nature, their former residents corralled and concentrated.
In many ways it’s yet another example of the old elite versus the masses cultural clash. The masses essentially just want to be left alone. The elites want to remake the whole world so it accords to their vision of what’s good and useful. The masses’ is not to question why …
Arthur Chrenkoff, “In praise of sprawl”, Daily Chrenk, 2020-05-21.
Comments Off on QotD: Suburbs and their critics
October 7, 2024
The demographic impact of modern cities
Lorenzo Warby touches on some of the social and demographic issues that David Friedman discussed the other day:
US Birth Rates from 1909-2008. The number of births per thousand people in the United States. The red segment is known as the Baby Boomer period. The drop in 1970 is due to excluding births to non-residents.
Graph by Saiarcot895 via Wikimedia Commons
Cities are demographic sinks. That is, cities have higher death rates than fertility rates.
For much of human history, cities have been unhealthy places to live. This is no longer true: cities have higher average life expectancies than rural areas. But they are still demographic sinks, for cities collapse fertility rates.
The problem is not that more women have no children, or only one child, making it to adulthood. Such women have always existed, though their share of the population has gone up across recent decades.
The key problem is the collapse in the demographic “tail” of large families. Cities are profoundly antipathetic to large families, and have always been so. This is particularly true of apartment cities — suburbs are somewhat more amenable to large families, though not enough to make up for the urbanisation effect.
While modern cities do not have slaves and household servants who were blocked from reproducing as ancient cities did, various aspects of modern technology have fertility-suppressing effects. Cars that presume a maximum of three children, for instance. An effect that is worsened by compulsory baby car-seats. Or ticketing and accommodation that presumes two children or less. There is also the deep problems of modern online dating. Plus the effects that endocrine disrupters and falling testosterone may be having.
These effects also extend to rural populations: falling fertility in rural populations is far more of a mystery than falling fertility in urban populations. How much declining metabolic health plays in all this is unclear. Indeed, futurist Samo Burja is correct, we do not really understand the “social technology” of human breeding.
Be that as it may, cities as demographic sinks is a continuation of patterns that go back to the first cities.
Matters at the margin
There are factors at the margin known to make a difference. Religious folk breed more than secular folk, though that is in part because rural people are more religious and city folk more secular.
Educating women reduces fertility. This is, in part, an urbanisation effect, as more education is available in cities. It is also an opportunity cost effect — there is more to do in cities, both paid and unpaid.
Education increases the general opportunity cost of motherhood, by expanding women’s opportunities. This also makes moving to cities more attractive. Women having more career opportunities reduces the relative attractiveness of men as marriage partners, reducing the marriage rate.
Strong cultural barriers against children outside marriage can reduce the fertility rate, by largely restricting motherhood to married women. This makes the fertility rate more dependant on the marriage rate.
Educating women makes children more expensive, as educated mothers have educated children. Part of the patterns that economist Gary Becker analysed.
Comments Off on The demographic impact of modern cities
July 8, 2024
Train & Public Transport in London (1941)
Charlie Dean Archives
Published Sep 24, 2013According to tfl.gov.uk: “Not only did the Tube help 200,000 inner-city children escape to the country, it was also used to shelter hundreds of thousands of civilians every night during the Blitz. On 27 September 1940 a census found that a staggering 177,500 Londoners were sleeping in Tube train stations. With so many people seeking shelter in the Tube, London Underground sprang into action and installed 22,000 bunk beds, washroom facilities and even ran trains that supplied seven tonnes of food and 2,400 gallons of tea and cocoa every night. Before long there were even special stations with libraries, evening classes, movies and musical evenings.”
The film states that 10 million people used public transport in London. Today, that figure stands at around 8.6 million. The opening title cards state that this film began filming just as the London Blitz began, yet there is very little visual reference to this.
(more…)
Comments Off on Train & Public Transport in London (1941)
December 8, 2023
The development of the American suburb
In the latest book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, Jane Psmith discusses A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised): The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture, by Virginia Savage McAlester. In particular, she looks at McAlester’s coverage of how suburbs developed:
After some brief but interesting discussion of cities,1 most of the page count is devoted to the suburbs. It’s a sensible choice: suburbs have by far the most varied types of house groupings, and more than half of Americans live in one. But what exactly is a “suburb”? It’s a wildly imprecise word, referring to anything that is neither truly rural nor the central urban core, and suburbs vary tremendously in character. As a working definition, though, a suburb is marked by free-standing houses on relatively larger lots. (If you can think of a counter-example that qualifies but is “urban”, I’ll bet you $5 it started out as a suburb before the city ate it.)
This means that building a suburb has a few obvious technological prerequisites, which McAlester lists as follows: First, balloon-frame construction, which enabled not just corners but quick and inexpensive construction generally and removed much of the incentive for the shared walls that were so common in the early cityscape. Second, the proliferation of gas and electric utilities in the late nineteenth century meant that the less energy-efficient free-standing homes could still be heated relatively inexpensively. Third, the spread of telephone service after 1880 meant that it was much easier to stay in touch with friends whose front doors weren’t literally ten feet away from yours.2 But by far the most important technological advances came in the field of transportation, which is obviously necessary if you’re going to live in the country (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and work in the city.
The first of these transportation advances was the railroad. In fact “railroad suburb” is a bit of a misnomer, because most of the collections of houses that grew up around the new rail stops were fully functional towns that had their own agricultural or manufacturing industries. The most famous railroad suburbs, however, were indeed planned as residential communities serving those wealthy enough to pay the steep daily rail fare into the city. Llewellyn Park near New York City, Riverside near Chicago, and the Main Line near Philadelphia are all examples of railroad suburbs that have maintained their tony atmosphere and high property values.
The next and more dramatic change was the advent of the electric trolley or streetcar, first introduced in 1887 but popular until about 1930. (That’s what all the books say, but come on, it’s probably October 1929, right?) Unlike steam locomotives, which take quite a long time to build up speed or to slow down again, and so usually had their stations placed at least a mile apart, streetcars could start and stop far more easily and feature many more, and more densely-placed, stops. Developers typically built a streetcar line from the city veering off into the thinly-inhabited countryside, ending at an attraction like a park or fairground if possible. If they were smart, they’d bought up the land along the streetcar beforehand and could sell it off for houses,3 but either way the new streetcar line added value to the land and the development of the land made the streetcar more valuable.
You can easily spot railroad towns and streetcar suburbs in any real estate app if you filter by the date of construction (for railroad suburbs try before 1910, for streetcar before 1930) and know what shapes to look for. Railroad towns are typically farther out from the urban center and are built in clusters around their stations, which are a few miles from one another. Streetcar suburbs, by contrast, tend to be continuous but narrow, because the appeal of the location dropped off rapidly with distance from the streetcar line. (Lots are narrow for the same reason — to shorten the pedestrian commute.) They expand from the urban center like the spokes of a wheel.
And then came the automobile and, later, the federal government. The car brought a number of changes — paved streets, longer blocks, wider lots (you weren’t walking home, after all, so it was all right if you had to go a little farther) — but nothing like the way the Federal Housing Authority restructured neighborhoods.
The FHA was created by the National Housing Act of 1934 with the broad mandate to “improve nationwide housing standard, provide employment and stimulate industry, improve conditions with respect to mortgage financing, and realize a greater degree of stability in residential construction”. It was a big job, and the FHA set out to accomplish it in a typical New Deal fashion: providing federal insurance for private construction and mortgage loans, but only for houses and neighborhoods that met its approval. This has entered general consciousness as “redlining”, after the color of the lines drawn around uninsurable areas (typically old, urban housing stock),4 but the green, blue, and yellow lines — in order of declining insurability — were just as influential on the fabric of contemporary America.
A slow economy through the 1930s and a prohibition on nonessential construction during the war meant that FHA didn’t have much to do until 1945, but as soon as the GIs began to come home and take advantage of their new mortgage subsidies, there was a massive construction boom. With the FHA insuring both the builders’ construction loans and the homeowners’ mortgages, nearly all the new neighborhoods were built to the FHA’s exacting specifications.
One of the FHA’s major concern was avoiding direct through-traffic in neighborhoods. Many post-World War II developments were built out near the new federally-subsidized highways on the outskirts of the cities, so the FHA was eager to protect new subdivisions from heavy traffic on the interstates and the major arterial roads. Neighborhoods were meant to be near the arterials, but with only a few entrances to the neighborhood and many curved roads and culs-de-sac within it. Unlike the streetcar suburbs or the early automobile suburbs that filled in between the “spokes” of the streetcar lines, where retail had clustered near the streetcar stops, the residents of the post-World War II suburbs found their closest retail establishments outside the neighborhood on the major arterial roads. Lots became wider, blocks longer, and sidewalks less frequent; houses were encouraged to stay small by FHA caps on the size of loans. And although we tend to assume they were purely residential areas, the FHA encouraged the inclusion of schools, churches, parks, libraries, and community centers within the neighborhood.
1. America doesn’t have many urban neighborhoods that predate 1750, and even fewer that persist in their original layout, but if you’ve ever visited one it’s amazing how compact everything feels even in comparison to the rowhouses of the following century.
2. McAlester’s footnote for the paragraph that contains all this reads: “These three essentials were highlighted in an essay the author has read but has not been successful in locating for this footnote.”
3. This is still, I am told, how some of the more sensibly-governed parts of the world run their transit systems: whatever company has the right to build subways buys up the land around a planned (but not announced) subway line through shell corporations, builds the subway, then sells or develops the newly-valuable property. Far more efficient as a funding mechanism than fares!
4. This 2020 NBER working paper points out that redlined areas were 85% white (though they did include many of the black people living in Northern cities) and suggests that race played very little role in where the red lines were drawn; rather, black people were already living in the worst neighborhoods.
Comments Off on The development of the American suburb
September 23, 2022
Is This Atlanta Streetcar “The Worst Transit Project of All Time”?
ReasonTV
Published 22 Sep 2022Transit ridership, especially rail, has collapsed post-pandemic, but the Atlanta BeltLine Coalition says now is the time to take federal dollars and build a $2.5 billion streetcar.
Full text and links: https://reason.com/video/2022/09/22/i…
—
Twenty-three years ago, Atlanta-native and architecture and urban planning student Ryan Gravel had an experience that opened his mind to what urban living could be.“My senior year I spent abroad in Paris and lived without a car for a year and traveled by train everywhere,” says Gravel. “And within a month of arriving, I had lost 15 pounds. I was in the best shape of my life because I was walking everywhere, and the role of the physical city was made clear to me in a way it really had never been before.”
For his Georgia Tech master’s thesis, Gravel sketched out a plan to make Atlanta more like Paris. He proposed redeveloping the land along the city’s historic rail lines to create a 22-mile loop called the Atlanta BeltLine. He proposed turning the city’s abandoned industrial areas and single-family home neighborhoods into business districts and walking trails. And he proposed connecting downtown to the rest of the city all with a new train running along the entire Atlanta BeltLine.
“I never imagined we would actually do it,” says Gravel.
But they did — for the most part. Cathy Woolard, who was president of the Atlanta City Council, read Gravel’s thesis and decided to use it as a blueprint to remake much of the city. Today, the Atlanta BeltLine is a walking and biking trail, parts of which are bordered by retail and condos.
But one piece of Gravel’s grand vision didn’t get built: The train.
Today, Gravel runs a co-working and event space along the BeltLine, which also serves as a gathering place for urbanists interested in making Atlanta less dependent on cars. He says that the train line is essential for improving city life.
“In those early days, when we built the movement behind the [BeltLine] project, it was around transit,” says Gravel.
The three COVID relief bills set aside $69 billion in federal funding for local transit agencies to operate and add to their transportation systems, meaning that Atlanta might finally get its train—with many American taxpayers who will never step foot on it picking up much of the tab.
Many American cities have used federal money in the past to build rail transit lines that suffer from dismal ridership, that are expensive to maintain, and that are a major drain on their budgets.
(more…)
Comments Off on Is This Atlanta Streetcar “The Worst Transit Project of All Time”?
May 11, 2022
City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems
It’s one of my standard quips that the more government tries to do, the less well it does everything, but Chris Bray‘s city government shows that I’m being far too Pollyanna-ish:
We’ve built political systems that are astoundingly disconnected; they go where they go, and you can’t turn them, or even try to communicate with them. I just spent weeks trying to get basic information about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live — a problem I started writing about here. Just as I was getting really frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone in county government to tell me anything about anything, I saw an interview with Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who says that he’s never met our district attorney, and has only managed to speak to him on the phone once. Then a staff member in the office of our county supervisor finally responded to my repeated questions about local criminal justice statistics with a quick message letting me know that, as Supervisor Barger’s criminal justice staff assistant, she doesn’t have local criminal justice statistics. So, no, you’re probably not going to communicate with your government; it doesn’t even communicate with itself. The sheriff has never met the DA. That’s the world we’re living in.
I live in a tiny suburban city, a little over three square miles. As I’ve written before, the city is a relentless shambles, constantly fumbling its simplest tasks while holding city council meetings to offer bold pronouncements on the city’s direct role in managing the climate of the planet. We went the better part of the last fiscal year without a budget, because the fifth finance director in two years screwed up the budget proposal so badly that the council couldn’t vote on the worthless thing.
Cities are supposed to regularly adopt an updated general plan that makes educated guesses about business and residential growth, so they can prepare for change around questions like do we have enough fire stations for the population we expect to have in five years? Our current general plan was adopted in 1998; the city is now in its sixth year of a fumbling effort to write a new plan, with no sign that it’s moving toward success. Meanwhile, our small-town city council is focused on getting electric patrol cars for the police department — to control the climate of the planet — and banning the sale of tobacco products, to take the fight to Big Tobacco. (Three square miles.)
I can’t get my city government to fix a bunch of basic and obvious problems, in a city where I pass members of my city council in the supermarket. I send out email messages to them, but nothing comes back from them in response. They go where they feel like going, endlessly pursuing lawn sign politics in a city government that struggles to complete budgets and basic planning documents; currently they’re signaling that their next interest is in developing a local mandate for residential greywater systems, and they won’t be talked out of it in favor of completing their endlessly incomplete basic tasks.
Now: Put your hands on the levers to stop the madness of the United States of America sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. Right?
Comments Off on City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems
April 11, 2019
Ontario government unveils massive subway and light rail expansion for the GTA
Doug Ford has always been a fan of subways, but now that he’s the Premier of Ontario, he’s getting to indulge his subway fetish in a vast expansion to heavy and light rail transit in and around Toronto:
Click map to embiggenate
The plans include:
- An expanded downtown relief line, now to be called the Ontario line, running from Ontario Place on the lakeshore through downtown along Queen Street then crossing the Bloor-Danforth subway line at Pape station and running north to the Ontario Science Centre on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line. This line is optimistically to be ready for opening by 2027.
- The existing Sheppard Line will be extended east from Don Mills to McCowan, where it will intersect with the planned Scarborough subway extension (now to include three stops, not just the one originally announced, and to be completed by 2030).
- The Yonge-University line will be extended north from current terminus at Finch to the Richmond Hill Centre with a hoped-for completion date soon after the Ontario line.
- The Eglinton Crosstown line will be extended west to Pearson airport, with a target completion date of 2031.
- New light rail lines will be created between Finch West on the Yonge-University subway to Humber College, and along Hurontario Street in Mississauga from Port Credit on the lakeshore to Steeles Avenue in Brampton.
To accomplish all of this will require financial contributions from the City of Toronto, York Region, and the federal government, as the province is only funding just over one third ($11.2 billion) of the estimated $28 billion price tag.
Of course, it’s a Doug Ford plan, so none of the usual suspects in Toronto are happy about any of it.
Comments Off on Ontario government unveils massive subway and light rail expansion for the GTA
May 18, 2018
Deploy scare quotes as required when considering the “cultural” “impact” of the suburbs
Rick McGinnis has a thoughtful piece on the creation and evolution of the modern western suburb, in the context of the ongoing Ontario election:
Maybe it’s some remnant of our tribal past, but it’s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or in the next valley. We might think we’re sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, but this nascent tribalism is never far from the surface, and I saw it re-emerge with a roar during recent municipal elections here in Toronto.
Back when the late Rob Ford won his surprise mayoral victory in 2010 – certainly a surprise for his opponents, who couldn’t imagine how decisively he’d win – the electoral post-mortems painted his triumph as the revenge of the suburbs that once comprised a group of independent townships over the downtown, Toronto’s older urban core.
It was a battle between the suburbs and the city, won this time by the suburbs, who rallied behind various standards – summed up in the media as a love of cars, ethnic and cultural homogeneity and lower property taxes. As with any history written by the losers – the media, for the most part, who identified as urbanite, not suburbanite – it relied on conveniently ignoring facts that didn’t fit, and the deployment of sweeping generalizations, many of them out of date – if they were ever true at all – by decades.
[…]
Up here in Ontario, the imminent provincial election means that the suburbs versus city scenario will be revived, to either apportion blame should Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford become premier, or get unpacked if he loses and the boogeyman of a monolithic voting bloc needs to be triumphantly debunked.
There remains the small matter that Ford Nation events – held inevitably in the suburbs since the heyday of Doug’s brother Rob – are visibly far more diverse than, say, the average Liberal fundraiser, and Ford opponents have been chewing on that tough gristle for nearly a decade.
Obviously, the suburbs can’t be both a politically, economically and culturally monolithic place, and a diverse, complex collection of communities mysteriously moved to unite during election cycles to oppose the prerogatives of certain political parties and the urbanites who love them. There’s a very complex story about the suburbs dying to be told, but we’re still invested in stereotypes that are decades out-of-date for the purposes of situational political utility. It’s an object lesson that politics, more than anything else, is the enemy of truth.
Diversity has joined “marriage,” “rights,” “privilege” and “family” on that list of words that we’ve come to use without sharing a common meaning, especially when we talk about places like the suburbs, what have come to mean something very different in our imaginations than they exist in reality. For the people living there – whose lived experience has nothing to do with convenient fictions – the suburbs are really just a place where a mortgage might be affordable, where you can have a front and a back yard, and where you don’t share walls with your neighbours.
Comments Off on Deploy scare quotes as required when considering the “cultural” “impact” of the suburbs
May 9, 2018
QotD: The “you can’t get good help” period after WW1
Look, I, like you, heard about how terrible the aftermath of WWI was, and how broke people were right after, and how they were moving to cities and living in tenements. It wasn’t until I was reading a book about the between the war period in England that I realized they were telling me TWO stories which couldn’t both have happened. In the part about the common folk, they were telling me how much poorer they were than before the war. In the part about the great families, they were telling me how the huge rise of the middle class and the building of suburbs had hurt them, and how the newly rich common folk no longer wanted to be servants.
That was one of those “wait a minute.” Sure I was taught both things in school, but you know you write down the bullet point for the test, and that’s it. Now I was going “Who the heck wrote these narratives and why doesn’t anyone question them?”
The truth, btw, from going to primary sources is closer to the second. And the people who wrote the narrative were the unseated noblemen, who did not like all these nouveau riche but who wanted to justify their disgust by showing how it hurt the poor. (It did increase the underclass somewhat, not because of economic conditions, but because a lot of men don’t integrate well after war, and well, WWI was something special by way of trauma.)
There are tons of these when you start poking. For instance the idea that the industrial revolution was unremittingly bad for the poor/people. Looking at China and India and such places right now, all I can do is roll my eyes.
Yeah, sure, the conditions of the early industrial revolution were appalling. And yet people crowded to the cities to take these jobs. What the historians never ask themselves is “How much worse was what they were escaping from?” We know that in India and China and other recently industrialized countries.
Sure the countryside has relatively clean air and more open space, but there are still real famines, and the work was unremitting and brutal and yes, little children worked too (says the daughter of middle class in a rural community whose first “job” was weeding the onion patch at five. And I was a pampered moppet. Kids my age from farming families had what we’d call full time jobs. Factory jobs at least had a stopping time.)
The idea that the industrial revolution was awful comes from upper class historians who could see the little kids twisted by working in the mills but who never consorted closely enough with the rural poor to see the misery behind raising baah lambs and the pretty pretty flowers.
Yeah. So the past isn’t written in stone. And it’s not a conspiracy. Not precisely a conspiracy. Yeah, sure, the Marxists influenced a lot of modern history with their ideas, but that is not necessarily conspiring. They view the world a certain way and it influences how they view the past too.
Sarah Hoyt, “How Do You Know?”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-24.
Comments Off on QotD: The “you can’t get good help” period after WW1
April 22, 2018
How to begin solving the common problems of big cities
Vladimir “Zeev” Vinokurov is writing about Australian cities in particular, but the same general analysis applies to many Canadian, American, and British urban areas as well:
… our economy and population are growing, and the resulting congestion is costing us thousands of dollars per year individually, and billions to the economy. It isolates us from family, friends and work. But cities can still grow without getting us stuck in traffic, missing increasingly overcrowded and delayed trains, or left unable to afford property. All this is happening because workplaces are too far from residents living in the suburbs, which effectively funnels residents into the inner city for work. It must change.
First, we must unwind planning laws that prevent offices, homes and apartments from being constructed alongside each other and throughout the city. These laws also raise housing prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, instead of banning cars, charge commuters for using congested roads and trains. Third, stop supporting taxpayer funded ‘road to nowhere’ infrastructure projects. These reforms will cut congestion, grow the economy, cut living costs and reconnect us to family, friends and local communities.
Planning laws cause congestion and social isolation by preventing people from building apartments and commercial offices throughout our city. As a result, rents and property prices become dearer because not enough housing is built to accommodate demand from population growth. Indeed, Reserve Bank economists estimate that planning laws increase average property prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This drives residents into the outer suburbs to look for cheaper housing, even as they commute into the inner city for work. If more people lived close-by to their workplaces, commutes would be shorter.
We need multiple CBDs, not just one. Unwinding planning laws that prevent commercial growth outside the CBD will cut housing costs and rents, cut congestion and promote tightly knit, thriving urban communities.
Congestion also occurs because we pay for using roads and public transport with thousands of dollars of time every year, rather than money. Congested public roads or trains cost us no more money to use in peak times, and busier routes cost no more to use than empty ones. As a result, the Grattan Institute think tank estimates that the average Melbournian’s commute to the city is twice as long in peak time. By contrast, Sydney’s trains are less congested, but are used more widely compared to Melbourne’s because its tickets are dearer in rush hour. Congestion charges that reflect market demand for infrastructure will also encourage businesses to open in commercial districts outside the CBD. Reconnecting local commuters with local workplaces will save us time and money overall.
Congestion charges are also a fairer and cheaper way of funding infrastructure projects compared to taxes like fuel tax or stamp duty. Scrapping these two taxes could save property purchasers tens of thousands of dollars or more, and reduce petrol bills by at least a third. If we pay for congested roads and trains with money rather than time and taxes, we may end up paying less.
Comments Off on How to begin solving the common problems of big cities
July 11, 2017
The 905’ers – “the bridge-and-tunnel barbarians at the city’s gate”
Sniffy Torontonians have apparently adopted the NYC snobs’ favourite term for out-of-towners:
Not satisfied by the socioeconomic barriers to fine dining, downtown gourmands imagine any behaviour not matching their arbitrary standards of etiquette to be uncouth, going so far as to label outsiders to their tribe with a distinct pejorative: “the bridge-and-tunnel crowd.”
Originally a derisive description for commuters to Manhattan (the earliest known instance of its use is found in the December 13th, 1977 edition of the New York Times), the term has been adopted by the inhabitants of urban centres across North America to further alienate outsiders. In Toronto, it is used interchangeably with “905er,” a reference to the common area code for the suburbs surrounding the city.
To fully grasp the classism and snobbishness inherent in the term’s use, one is best advised to revisit an episode of the second season of The Sopranos, in which an annoying bar patron in Manhattan refers to the well-meaning, but simple-minded Christopher as a “bridge-and-tunnel boy.”
There is much sense, but little grace, to the formulation of such a descriptor. The self-absorbed downtown-dweller, you see, requires constant justification for their choice of domicile. The idea that one could escape the claustrophobic propinquity of the city and its higher cost of living while still enjoying its cultural amenities and nightlife on occasion is an affront – a threat that undermines not only the urbanite’s domestic decision-making, but to some extent, their very identity.
[…]
That an expectation of sustenance from ordering food at a restaurant would be scoffed at represents, at least on some level, a misappropriation of values. Oh, yes: It’s definitely the suburbanite who balks at the $35 plate of deconstructed spaghetti who is the fool. Believe it or not, you can live in a home with a dual car garage and still watch Chef’s Table on Netflix – and even understand why one might travel to Chicago to experience a meal at Alinea. However, if a chef is offering a Saturday night prix fixe, they’re probably not Grant Achatz.
Furthermore, it seems that if only one side of the urban versus suburban divide must be labelled ill-mannered, it should be the allotment who greets the other for an economic infusion in their service sector with disdainful mockery. The summer is littered with festivals and three- to five-course restaurant specials purposely constructed as an invitation for out-of-towners to come and open their wallets, and yet, the derisiveness projected toward them suggests a suffix should be attached to the Field of Dreams axiom: if you build it, they will come … for you to disparage them.
Comments Off on The 905’ers – “the bridge-and-tunnel barbarians at the city’s gate”
April 27, 2017
“Richard Florida has a new book [that] advises cities on what to do about problems that result from advice he gave them in his previous books”
Chris Selley hits this one out of the ballpark:
Gadabout urbanist Richard Florida has a new book: The New Urban Crisis. It advises cities on what to do about problems that result from advice he gave them in his previous books, notably The Rise of the Creative Class. Stuff your downtown core full of creative types and you shall prosper, the University of Toronto professor advised, and many cities listened. Now some face a “crisis of their own success,” he told a Toronto breakfast crowd at the Urban Land Institute’s Electric Cities Symposium: the blue-collar types who make the creative class’s artisanal baked goods and mind their children have been “pushed” ever further into the suburbs. Economic and geographic inequality results, and Rob Ford/Donald Trump/Brexit-style resentment can build.
Florida’s many critics have long warned this was a flaw in his vision. But now Florida says he finds it “terrifying,” so he’s off on another book tour.
If I sound a bit peevish, it’s because I find him rather insufferable. Critics have poked holes in much of his research, but much more of it strikes me as overly complex analysis and measurement of fairly basic, intuitive phenomena that are common to dynamic and not-so-dynamic cities. While the remarkable urban revivals in recent decades in New York and Pittsburgh, and nascent ones in Detroit and Newark, are all very interesting, I’ve never understood what they have to teach us about Canadian cities. Their cores never “hollowed out” in the first place, necessitating wholesale renewal. When I listen to Florida talk, I hear Lyle Lanley trying to sell Springfield a monorail.
In any event, his prescriptions for the GTA are not exactly visionary: more transit, more affordable housing, densification over NIMBYism and more decision-making autonomy for cities. “The key today is shifting power from provinces to cities,” Florida writes in a Canadian-focused paper linked to the new book. That made it all the more galling to watch his post-speech “fireside chat” with Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, whose tires he pumped well beyond their recommended PSI.
“You know this. It’s in your blood,” Florida gushed of her urbanist bona fides.
Well, let’s see. Wynne can certainly claim to have committed many billions in taxpayer money to transit projects. But if there were awards for NIMBYism, Wynne would have one for the nine-figure cancellation of two unpopular gas-fired power plants, during an election campaign of which she was co-chair; and perhaps another for her party’s shameless politicking on transit in Scarborough.
Comments Off on “Richard Florida has a new book [that] advises cities on what to do about problems that result from advice he gave them in his previous books”
