RU turns 2 🎉, nationalize Greyhound, GND builds a new society, Bezos responds to worker demands, Climate Strike, & more!
Issue 104
Hey urbanists,
How quickly time flies! I sent the first issue of Radical Urbanist nearly two years ago from New Zealand, and now I’m sending this one to you from that beautiful country once again. Thank you for being one of the more than 800 people who receive this newsletter on a weekly basis, and there’s surely more goodness to come! (Hopefully a podcast early in the new year; it got delayed with my being on the road.)
I have a request to set Radical Urbanist on a good path for its third year: please share it on social media with a message telling people what you like about it, and send it to any friends or colleagues who’d benefit from a critical take on cities and tech. Thank you!
Now, onto this issue: I really liked Ben Tarnoff’s article about updating our perspective on the Luddites and dismantling the tech that serves the rich instead of regular people. Plus, Jeff Bezos responds to Amazon workers’ climate demands, “Super Pumped” misses a key part of the Uber story, Greyhound should be nationalized, Norway turning against road tolls, a Green New Deal would build the foundation of a new society, and rent control is a form of monopoly regulation.
As you receive this, I’ll be at an International Hobbit Day celebration at the Hobbiton movie set in Matamata, New Zealand. Have a great week!
— Paris
P.S. — Click the heart if you like the issue!
🔨❤️ Ben Tarnoff calls for a twenty-first century Luddism. Counter to the negative narrative surrounding the Luddites, he argues “they didn’t wait patiently for the glorious future promised by the gospel of progress. They saw what certain machines were doing to them in the present tense – endangering their livelihoods – and dismantled them.” Right now, the promise of smart cities is enabling mass surveillance requiring data that generates a ton of carbon, but maybe we don’t need to collect it.
The zero-carbon commonwealth of the future must empower people to decide not just how technologies are built and implemented, but whether they’re built and implemented. Progress is an abstraction that has done a lot of damage over the centuries. Luddism urges us to consider: progress towards what and progress for whom? Sometimes a technology shouldn’t exist. Sometimes the best thing to do with a machine is to break it.
Tech dystopia
🔍 Hubert Horan writes that Mike Isaac’s “Super Pumped” misses the core of the Uber story by focusing so much on Travis Kalanick and personalities, while leaving out a critical analysis of Uber’s business model and economics. It isn’t a successful company that had a Kalanick problem; it’s fundamentally flawed. (I also noted it lacked a structural critique.)
🇺🇸 California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB5 into law. San Diego has already sued Instacart over its misclassification of workers as independent contractors. More lawsuits are expected as the battle escalates over employment status for workers.
✊ Jeff Bezos announced new climate measures after demands from Amazon workers. Brian Merchant went through the plan in detail and showed how it still has massive holes. Meanwhile, an Amazon Go store in San Francisco became a meeting point for climate and labor groups during Friday’s climate protest. “Is that representing our future?Is Amazon’s treatment of workers our future? Are its shipping business model and carbon footprint our future? We envision a different, healthier planet.” Makes you think of Ben Tarnoff’s piece above.
👨⚖️ Uber and Lyft’s refusal to respect AB5 in California is strategic: it will delay the effects of the bill and give them more leverage to try to get a “third class” of labor codified in law, which would legally revoke some employee protections that the labor movement fought for over a century to win. It’s now also suing NYC over its rules on deadheading.
📱 Navigation apps are causing chaos in cities around the world. “The apps are typically optimized to keep an individual driver’s travel time as short as possible; they don’t care whether the residential streets can absorb the traffic or whether motorists who show up in unexpected places may compromise safety.”
👨⚖️ Next month, an arbitrator will hear arguments in a case against Uber, and there’s a reasonable chance surge pricing could be deemed a form of price fixing and made illegal across the United States
😡 A 15th woman is suing Lyft after being raped by her driver in 2015. Alison Turkos wrote about her experience and why she’s suing Lyft now.
🇺🇸 Poll finds two-thirds of Americans support breaking up Big Tech
Environment and climate crisis
💰 George Monbiot argues there needs to be a limit on wealth because the rich are not only wrecking the planet, their wealth gives them power over the rest of us. That would jive with proposals for a wealth tax of up to 90% in Thomas Piketty’s new book.
🛢 U.K. advertising watchdog rules natural gas is not a “low-carbon fuel” after misleading Equinor ad
✊ City-by-city breakdown estimates 4 million people participated in Friday’s Climate Strike, though more events are happening across the world until September 27
☀️ A Green New Deal “requires us to imagine a more public, community-led form of ownership, which prioritises wellbeing, shared rather than private wealth, and the stewardship of public resources and commons.”
🇩🇪 Germany will spend €54 billion raised through a carbon price, higher vehicle taxes, and a flight tax. It will provide incentives for electric vehicles less than €40,000, reduce train ticket prices, and provide an extra €1 billion a year to Deutsche Bahn, the state rail company. Many say it’s still not enough to cut emissions 55% by 2030.
🏗 The New Deal was about building the infrastructure that’s the back bone of our current system: “hundreds of thousands of miles of new roads and highways, 78,000 new bridges, 1,000 libraries, 5,900 schools, airports, power-generating dams, electrical grids, hospitals, parks, stadiums.” But that infrastructure is also the cause of our climate crisis, so the Green New Deal must be able building the infrastructure of the system that will follow.
🇺🇸 Detroit residents were less likely to blame climate change for flooding “because the ineptitude of local government and faulty infrastructure were the things staring them smack in the face, from their own backyards and basements”
🐦 North America’s bird population dropped by nearly three billion (29%) since 1970
Transit and trains
🚄 “With speeds of 200-350 km/h, HSR travel times are very competitive for distances of 150-800 km (about 1-3 hours), and somewhat competitive up to 1200 km (about 5 hours).” The downside of this analysis: it ignores emissions and relies too heavily on the market. If we want to incentivize use of HSR for long distances, we can; we just build it out then punitively tax flights or jet fuel.
🚌 Greyhound provides essential, “low-cost & low-carbon travel for millions of people every year. High-speed rail may be glitzier, and it’s certainly vital, but any future zero-carbon transportation system must also rely on a larger, greener network of inter-city buses.” That’s why Greyhound should be nationalized and expanded.
🇨🇦 Canada’s Conservatives are promising to bring back a public transit tax credit if they win the October election, but providing that money as “funding for public transit — whether for expanding service, reducing fares, or both — would be much more effective in increasing transit use, cutting congestion and reducing carbon emissions.” It’s part of a series of tax measures that would overwhelmingly benefit the rich and erode collective power to address social problems.
🇬🇧 Analysis finds that a lack of developed transport infrastructure, particularly public transit, is responsible for stagnating productivity in British cities
🇺🇸 Seattle will tax Uber and Lyft to fund streetcars and affordable housing, and will set a minimum pay rate for drivers in future
🇨🇦 Vancouver is leading North America on transit ridership growth, but with ride-hailing services due to start operating, is that success threatened?
🇺🇸 The opening of San Francisco’s Central Subway is delayed until June 2021
Cars and roads
🇳🇴 In urbanist circles, Norway is known for its high electric vehicle sales, elimination of parking in central Oslo, and, well, the fjords. But Norwegians are getting so furious about road tolls, the campaign against them is being compared to France’s gilets jaunes. Some feel that the environmental policies have gone too far: “We are a small country; we can’t fix all the problems in the world.” In recent local elections, an anti-road-toll party got 16.7% of the vote in Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, as Labour dropped 18%. For more cities, look for “FNB,” the anti-road-tolls party, on the Wikipedia page.
🇬🇧 If the United Kingdom stopped building new roads and redirected the funds, it could address the backlog of road maintenance in ten years with 90% of the funds left over to invest in cycling and transit
🛣 If we want to reduce transport emissions, we need to stop expanding and building new highways. The promised benefits never come to fruition.
🛑 James Gleave encourages young transport planners to speak up and push back when transport projects go against climate goals
✊ Youth activists who attended the Climate Strike are emphasizing transportation, calling for people to “walk the talk, bike the talk”
🇫🇷 Paris will offer a €500 subsidy for e-bike purchases in 2020
Housing and homelessness
🇺🇸 The U.S. government may force homeless people in Los Angeles into an unused federal office building, even though it may not have the legal authority to do so and previously denied advocacy groups’ requests to use that same building
🇩🇪 Siemens is planning to redevelop a Berlin neighborhood literally named after the company, Siemensstadt. It will integrate technology, but promises to follow the GDPR, involve local citizens’ groups, and not harvest data from private citizens. It’s not expected to see the same opposition as Google’s planned development in Kreuzberg.
🇺🇸 Exurban sprawl is booming in California as people seek out affordable housing far from their jobs, requiring long commutes
🇮🇪 Dublin residents are getting fed up with the loss of murals and pubs to developments aimed at promoting tourism
📈 “Rent control is not weird or unusual for regulating monopolies. The weird thing is that land is no longer considered a form of monopoly.”
👎 Airbnb plans 2020 IPO, but its war with New York City could get in its way
Other great reads
✈️🚫 Speaking of flight shaming and the need to change our societies so we can embrace slower travel, subscriber Christine Ro sent along an article about how some companies are giving their employees extra time off if they choose trains instead of planes when they go on vacation
🎮 To build Night City, the developers of Cyberpunk 2077 thought through the events that would’ve occurred in the 57 years since between 2020, when the original work was set, to make the world seem as realistic as possible
🛳 Cruise ships deposit thousands of people into small, historical cities, degrading historical sites and marine environments, but since locals need the money there can be little desire to curb ‘overtourism’. “Where once there were bookshops, bakeries, butchers, hair salons and markets, tacky souvenir shops and stalls now cater to the tourists.”
⏱ Our current understanding of time is a capitalist construct. Astra Taylor writes that a more sustainable world may require a return to traditional approaches that we’ve forgotten.
Thinking of time as chronological might be part of what is holding us back from finding a sustainable path. Past, present, future—climate change combines all these registers at once. Time is not an arrow, relentlessly moving forward, but something circular and strange, more akin to “a lake in which the past, present, and future exist,” to quote the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, than a rushing river.
👋 Angie Schmitt says goodbye to Streetsblog
By Paris: Bernie Sanders' climate change plan is radical and expensive — which is why it could work (NBC News THINK)
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