To mark its 50th anniversary, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently pitted a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against its contemporary counterpart, a 2009 Malibu, in a 40 mph crash test. As you can see in the video, the Malibu destroys its predecessor.

The results were intended to demonstrate how much safer cars are now than a half-decade ago, but my first thought was that the new vehicle is the same make and model that NYPD Detective Kevin Spellman drove into Drana Nikac at an estimated 30 mph -- a speed that carries a pedestrian fatality rate of up to 45 percent.

So while modern-day engineering may be better at protecting drivers and passengers, the auto industry and the IIHS -- whose "bigger is better" philosophy ignores those outside of vehicles -- have a long, long way to go before they can crow too loudly about overall safety.

She's back! Veronica Moss, D.C. lobbyist for the Automobile User Trade Organization (A.U.T.O.), recently returned to New York to get her first look at the new, pedestrian-friendly Times Square. Her views may rankle some in the livable streets camp, but we think it's important to note that some influential people out there just abhor walking, socializing, and the freedom to safely enjoy public spaces.

The latest beckoning driver distraction, from Roadify.

Horrified by the notion of Roadify members barreling down your block while performing tedious multi-step tasks on their cellphones? Not to worry. Taking a page from the mobile manufacturer playbook, the Roadify website includes not one, but two "don't text and drive" disclaimers. Problem solved.

Or, we could just charge a fair price for scarce curbside parking, so spaces aren't so hard to come by.

Parking Around Me has debuted in Park Slope, with the promise of eventual full city coverage. Roadify says it will expand its "social transportation" offerings to include airline and transit passenger info, but for now, it's all about the ever-suffering city motorist. Coming soon: the "meter maid" stalker!

Via TreeHugger, Copenhagenize reports that Volvo is in the final stages of testing technology to improve safety for people outside its products -- a "pedestrian detection" system available in S60 models next year:

It is meant to spot all pedestrians in front of the car as well as off to the sides in a 60 degree angle. It will warn the driver with a red flashing light on the windshield if the car is on a collision course with a pedestrian.

If the driver doesn't react quick enough it will brake automatically up to 25 km/h and stop by itself if the car is traveling under 25 km/h.

The system cannot recognize bicyclists yet, but engineers are working on it.

At first blush, a car on the lookout for pedestrians seems like a can't-lose safety measure. But a lot depends on how drivers compensate, knowing that their vehicles can mitigate their own lapses in judgment and attention. Might a safer, smarter car lead people to take more risks and exercise less care behind the wheel?

Since this is exactly the sort of question that comes up again and again in Traffic (recipient of the 2008 Streetsie for best book), I emailed author Tom Vanderbilt to get his take on the merits and drawbacks of Volvo's new tech. Here's what he wrote back:

It's hard not to be of two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm all for personal responsibility and putting the driver in charge. On the other hand, there are certain times when even the most cautious driver might be plagued by some shortcoming in perception or attention -- e.g., a few months ago I almost hit a cyclist because I did not see them in my right-rear blind spot, and I wasn't expecting a cyclist to be there. It's unfortunate that it doesn't work at night, given the overrepresentation of pedestrian fatalities at that time, partially having to do with visibility. But in any case the real question is whether even with negative behavioral adaptation there's still a net safety gain. And the other bright spot is at least someone besides Honda is actually thinking about pedestrians from the car's point of view.

Interestingly, I've heard that some of the settings at which auto engineers place these systems for activation are much more stringent than what drivers themselves seem to desire -- so maybe the car really would know best in this situation.

And of course there's other things we could do, vis a vis technology, to improve urban traffic safety, "Intelligent Speed Adaptation" being top of the agenda here. This too is a form of "collision avoidance," as obviously the slower you're going, the more time to avoid a crash.

I should note that the pedestrian detection system will be optional on those new Volvos, part of a $3,500 premium package. So for now, this potentially life-saving tech remains a luxury item.

As if constant engine noise, gratuitous horn honking, booming stereos and screeching car alarms weren't enough of a collective imposition on millions of New Yorkers, NYPD is about to escalate the street-level aural arms race with the "Rumbler," a souped-up siren designed primarily to pierce the cocoon of obliviousness enshrouding city motorists.

Expected to be installed in over 100 police vehicles this week, the Rumbler emits a low-frequency signal transmitted through subwoofers similar to those used by car audio enthusiasts. According to manufacturer Federal Signal, the siren has "the distinct advantage of penetrating solid materials allowing vehicle operators and nearby pedestrians to FEEL the sound waves."

"In other words," says Richard Tur, founder of Queens-based org NoiseOFF, "this ear-splitting noise will be heard and felt by motorists, pedestrians and people in their own homes at a level that can cause permanent hearing damage and seriously disrupt their lives."

As noted on the NoiseOFF website, Federal Signal warns Rumbler users to wear ear protection to guard against hearing loss. Yet, says Tur: "The NYPD purchased and installed the equipment with no oversight, no public hearings, and with no evident liability for the massive noise pollution they are about to inflict on New Yorkers, all in the name of public safety."

Though a 2007 article in the Times, when the department was testing the Rumbler, at least touched on the possible downsides ("To experience it is to feel a little earthquake beneath one’s feet"), media have largely treated this week's roll out as a novelty.

"People assume that noise pollution is an irritant or an annoyance," Tur says, "but noise pollution is a public health issue, and it is adversely affecting residents."

There is little doubt in these quarters that excessive traffic noise poses a significant hazard, though Streetsblog regular ddartley comments that his experience with the Rumbler -- at least from a few stories up -- hasn't been all bad.

I was worried when I heard that some ambulances in NYC were Rumblers. The low frequencies are audible up in our apartment, but are not ear-splitting, adrenalin-spiking terrors, like all the higher-frequency sirens are. If emergency vehicles would rely almost exclusively on the Rumbler and not the high frequency sirens, perhaps (PERHAPS!) that would actually be a public health improvement?

Another consideration: When police worry about drivers not clearing a path, is it because their sirens are insufficient, or because the street is so packed with other cars that there is hardly anywhere to go?

Ke Hai Du. Photo: Daily News

In the unofficial battle for the most irresponsible, over-the-top media endorsement of motorist entitlement, the Daily News took the trophy this morning, declaring that drivers are within their rights to run down human beings who stand between their vehicles and on-street parking.

To many people accustomed to the norms of civilized society, this would seem a clear case of assault, if not something more serious. But to the News it's a game, which the victim rightfully lost when he challenged the "finders keepers" rule -- or, as News editors put it, "a basic and inviolable tenet of the universe."

What Du did is right up there with stealing a taxi from the person who hailed it, or bringing 15 items to the "10 items or less" register, or stopping at the top of a subway stairway to read e-mail, or backing up in an E-ZPass lane.

The lesson is clear: Park your carcass in a parking space, and you may end up as road kill.

In August, 8-year-old Axel Pablo was killed by a cab driver in Harlem. Witnesses say the cabbie was on his cell phone. Though police cleared him of wrongdoing, the TLC has since revoked his hack license. Photo via Daily News

According to the News, keeping cab drivers off the phone should only be required when passengers are present -- apparently because News editors believe distracted driving is a mere annoyance, rather than a well-documented threat to public safety:

The present TLC rules forbid cell chatting while cabbies are driving. That's reasonable; you shouldn't have to listen to your hack yack while you're paying $2 per mile, no more than you should be forced to listen to the radio at full blast.

But when drivers are alone, using their cabs as cars -- just like millions do -- they should live by the same rules as the rest of the population.

So instead of advocating for more stringent distracted driving laws for everyone who gets behind the wheel, the editors of the Daily News would prefer that we "cut some slack" to thousands of professional drivers who patrol streets teeming with vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists 24/7/365. Never mind that cell-phone-using drivers, hands-free or no, are four times more likely to be involved in a crash. And remember that national summit a couple of weeks ago, when the U.S. secretary of transportation declared distracted driving a "deadly epidemic"? Honestly, people: Where have you been?

For the record, the Post is in favor of the new TLC rules. And no wonder. It's hard to believe a position so ill-informed as that of the Daily News editorial board could be held by anyone who reads a newspaper on a daily basis, much less publishes one.

Livable streets prodigy Elli Giammona. Photo: The Missoulian

Elli is a 9-year-old in Missoula, Montana who a couple of years ago began to question why she couldn't bike to school. When her mother explained that it wasn't safe because the road leading from their home to Hellgate Elementary -- a typical suburban arterial, from the looks of it -- didn't have a sidewalk, Elli took action.

With encouragement from her mom and the help of her younger sister and older brother, she petitioned Missoula County, gathering signatures and composing a letter explaining the benefits of a walkable Mullan Road. The Missoulian reports:

The letter is dated Jan. 14, 2009, around the time [county public works director Greg] Robertson was looking for a project eligible for American Reinvestment and Recovery Act dollars. Criteria? A quick turnaround, a project in the urban area, and one uncomplicated by problems like right-of-way negotiations and extra environmental reviews.

"Honestly, I didn't have any other projects for consideration at the time that would have met the criteria," he said.

Long story short: A new trail is expected to be finished in time for Elli to ride it to school next fall.

Not only has Elli made it safer for herself and her neighbors to ride a bike or take a walk, she's also made plain how completely the stars must align for something as simple as a car-free ribbon of asphalt to become reality. (Even now, the planned Missoula trail won't connect with the school because of right-of-way costs.) Just a few decades ago a kid riding or walking to school would be considered the epitome of American wholesomeness. Now it's a symptom of child neglect, in part because of infrastructure so obviously inhospitable that even a 7-year-old gets it.

Maybe, above all, Elli Giammona and her family have given us hope for a future in which full-grown adults get it too. One where it won't take an act of Congress to get a child to school safely.

Image: Census Bureau via Economix

Bike Pittsburgh has posted some great, sortable data about how commuters get to work in major American cities, drawn from a Census Bureau report. As you'd expect, New York comes in as the city where the least amount of people commute solo by car -- only 23.3 percent, followed by 37.2 percent in Washington, D.C. and 38.4 percent in San Francisco. Wichita, Kansas ranks as the place with the highest percentage of drivers: 85.1 percent of commuters use a car to get to work. The unfortunate national median for commuting by car is 74.15 percent.

There's also an interesting chart on bike commuting trends by gender, in response to a Scientific American article which posits that cycling needs to be made more attractive to women in order to boost overall urban cycling numbers. The argument seems to check out: according to Bike Pittsburgh's data, even in cities with relatively high levels of bike commuters, men cycle to work significantly more than women.

The secret of European eco-friendliness? Maybe not. Photo: romerican/Flickr

Rosenthal attributes much of this difference to behavioral factors relating, it seems, to Europeans' unique tolerance of inconvenience. She writes:

But even as an American, if you go live in a nice apartment in Rome, as I did a few years back, your carbon footprint effortlessly plummets. It’s not that the Italians care more about the environment; I’d say they don’t. But the normal Italian poshy apartment in Rome doesn’t have a clothes dryer or an air conditioner or microwave or limitless hot water. The heat doesn’t turn on each fall until you’ve spent a couple of chilly weeks living in sweaters. The fridge is tiny. The average car is small. The Fiat 500 gets twice as much gas mileage as any hybrid SUV. And it’s not considered suffering. It’s living the dolce vita.

She later adds:

Also, in Europe, the construction of most cities preceded the invention of cars. The centuries-old streets in London or Barcelona or Rome simply can’t accommodate much traffic — it’s really a pain, but you learn to live with it. In contrast, most American cities, think Atlanta and Dallas, were designed for people with wheels.

What makes this particularly remarkable is that she opens the essay by discussing an experience she has in Stockholm, in which she insists on taking a taxi from the airport, which ends up being much slower and more expensive than the train.

Brad Plumer frames the piece as a fascinating read in light of the "lifestyle taboo," writing:

It's not considered the height of political savvy here in the United States to point out that European lifestyles are greener than our own. Don't expect that line in an Obama speech anytime soon. Too many facets of European life—the cramped apartments, the clotheslines for drying laundry—would likely strike suburbanites as inconvenient, burdensome, or even downright primitive...

Rosenthal wonders whether similar measures could fly in the United States: "I believe most people are pretty adaptable and that some of the necessary shifts in lifestyle are about changing habits, not giving up comfort or convenience." Maybe so, but this sort of talk still tends to be taboo in mainstream U.S. green circles. Josh Patashnik wrote a terrific piece for TNR last year on Arnold Schwarzenegger's brand of "pain-free environmentalism" in California—it's all just peachy to talk about swapping out coal-fired plants for solar-thermal stations, but ixnay on trying to rein in suburban growth or coax people into smaller homes.

I see several problems with Rosenthal's essay and with Brad's framing of it. One is that it's not really correct to attribute the huge gap in per capita emissions between America and Western Europe to the charming European habit of drying their clothes on clotheslines.

As Brad notes, power sources play a major role, whether one is talking about greater use of natural gas, the French nuclear industry, or Iceland's geothermal capacity.

Climate is extremely important. Western Europe is fairly temperate relative to much of America (and especially compared to the dirtiest parts of the country). In the same way, Californians are much greener than Texans, thanks to the moderate conditions along the heavily populated Pacific coast, which reduce the number of days on which home heating or cooling is needed.

But there are lifestyle issues involved, particularly where transportation and land use are concerned. And contrary to Rosenthal, it isn't that Europeans have opted for inconvenience. Rather, they have chosen different conveniences, as her Stockholm air train anecdote makes clear.

It is incorrect to say that an overabundance of land drove America to sprawl, and to drive. The Netherlands is dense of necessity, of course, but in Britain and France and Germany there is ample countryside, which might easily be home to sprawling subdivisions.

But Western Europeans have largely chosen not to encourage such growth, opting instead to tax gas at high rates, invest in transit, and protect center cities from the threat of urban freeways.

I think it is very difficult, objectively, to demonstrate that their choices have produced ways of life that are clearly less convenient than American lives. It is clear that Europeans tend to have better health outcomes than us, and they die in car accidents at much lower rates, and of course they're enjoying levels of wealth similar to our own while producing half as much carbon.

The obvious retort to this line of thinking is that perhaps that's all true, but like it or not America is now sprawling, and any effort to make the country greener by pursuing European land use and transportation options would be very difficult. In a similar vein, it is argued that attempts to push Americans into such a life via gas taxes or carbon prices would wind up being very painful.

But this is not quite right. As I have pointed out before, America will more or less need to build itself all over again by 2050 in order to accommodate population growth. Just because most of America is currently sprawling doesn't mean that most of the America built between now and mid-century has to look the same.

It's also not clear that increasing the push factor on households has to be especially painful. Taxes on drivers can be levied in a progressive fashion, if some revenues are used to fund transit options while others are refunded to lower and middle income households to help offset the added cost of driving.

Congestion tolling would mean higher government revenues and reduced driving, but it would benefit rich and poor alike. As with tax revenues, tolls could be used to provide a cushion against the increased cost for lower income families and increased investment in transit. Higher income households (which will tend to place a greater value on work hours lost to congestion) would enjoy a speedy ride into the office.

If the federal government worked to address limits on urban growth in green cities like New York and San Francisco -- limits which also serve to make housing in such places extremely expensive -- then America could grow denser and greener by improving access for middle-income households to some of the most dynamic metropolitan economies in the country.

Perhaps not all of the policy changes needed to reduce America's carbon footprint will be a walk in the park, but efforts to improve land use and transportation decisions are likely to be some of the most benefit-rich aspects of the climate change fight (as you'd think most people would realize, given the obvious pain of congestion, high gas prices, driving fatalities, and isolation among those unable to drive, among other things).

This storyline -- that changing lifestyles to enhance walkability will be painful -- makes it harder to pass good metropolitan policies and easier for politicans to fall back on the lame argument that Americans simply won't tolerate anything other than the sprawling suburban patterns which have dominated new development in recent decades.

And by reinforcing the idea that some of the most promising and least painful policy changes that can be made are unlikely to "work" here in America, writers and politicians alike ensure that more of the hard job of cutting emissions will fall to the parts of the economy where there are no good alternative options, and where change will be painful for households.

Rosenthal's essay is odd yet revealing. She instinctually attributes European greenness to practices Americans would dub backward, while pretending that the very convenient and green transport options she finds are built, and presumably used, by Europeans based on some peculiarity in their culture that we lack.

But we could build trains! In any given legislative sessions bills are introduced that would move the country toward the level of convenience Rosenthal enjoyed in her train ride to the Stockholm airport. It's just that they don't pass, because "it's not considered the height of political savvy" to embrace those policies, because Americans seem to think that their American-ness will render such conveniences inconvenient.

"Trains won't work here," because "Americans love their cars," and so high quality rail lines aren't built, and so Americans continue to drive. And then we sit around wondering what it is about the European character that makes them enjoy using clotheslines so much.

There are plenty of platitudes flying around about the obvious need for "awareness" of how dangerous it is to operate a multi-thousand pound projectile while reading or typing, but there are lots of of interesting tidbits too. This morning, for example, a AAA rep declined to say whether his group supports a national texting ban, while a Utah transit official suggested that those who want to text while commuting should consider public transportation.

You can follow the event through tomorrow afternoon via webcast or Secretary Ray LaHood's live-blog feed.

Adam Marino: middle-schooler; revolutionary.

They were informed that they were "out of compliance," and had a lengthy discussion over where Adam’s bike could be locked.

"I was extremely bothered," Kaddo Marino said, "after reviewing the way we were met at the school. It was very intimidating to be met by these three men, one of whom was a trooper."

The Marinos aren't alone. A recent New York Times back-to-school piece profiles similar cases in which parents who permit their kids to walk and bike are met with raised eyebrows, or worse. One mother in Mississippi was threatened with a child endangerment charge for letting her 10-year-old walk a mile to soccer practice after passersby saw the boy and called 911. Another in Vancouver, British Columbia, was left waiting and worrying for her first grader after school officials prevented him from walking himself home -- a distance of six houses.

Issues of liability and fears of abductions are often raised to explain the resistance to a practice that was commonplace 40 years ago, when 41 percent of American kids walked or biked to school. But the facts, as cited by the Times, don't support the paranoia. While about 115 children are abducted by strangers each year, some 250,000 are injured in car crashes. Many parents get this, and some are wondering: If schools and districts are so obsessed with the responsibilities entailed by enabling students to bike or walk, why aren't they more concerned about having kids arrive in -- much less driving their own -- cars?

The most obvious answer: car culture. While some communities mentioned in these stories are, and should be, concerned over street safety (advocates in Saratoga Springs, for instance, are rallying around the Marinos), the response in most cases has not been to make improvements, but to castigate families who want their kids to navigate the world outside the confines of a motor vehicle. This reaction -- to escalate the simple act of a child riding a bike to the level of civil disobedience -- can only make sense in an environment where it's considered normal to shuttle the kids by car down the driveway to meet the school bus.

Jane Jacobs (center, in light dress) demonstrates at New York City's old Penn Station. Photo: Metropolis

These efforts are interesting because they manage to earn a degree of sympathy from urbanists themselves, who have grown increasingly tired of the decades required to navigate a transit line from planning stages to operation.

There is something very attractive about an individual who can drive the stakes and get the project built -- damn the politicians, and damn the NIMBYs.

But this is dangerous territory. In rehabilitating Moses and reconsidering Jacobs, it's important to be clear about where each was right, and where each went wrong.

There are many ways to interpret the clash between Moses and Jacobs: development versus preservation, city versus suburb, design for people versus design for automobiles, power versus powerlessness, and so on. To acknowledge that the balance has swung too far in one direction in one of these conflicts does not at all suggest that the balances are similarly out of whack on others.

Take, for example, one of Glaeser's principal intellectual standbys: that resistance to development slows the growth of housing supply, increasing housing costs. Glaeser says:

Jacobs underestimated the value of new construction—of building up.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities argues that at least one hundred homes per acre are necessary to support exciting stores and restaurants, but that two hundred homes per acre is a “danger mark.” After that point of roughly six-story buildings, Jacobs thought that neighborhoods risked sterile standardization. (The one public housing project that Jacobs blessed, at least initially, had only five stories.) But keeping great cities low means that far too few people can enjoy the benefits of city life. Jacobs herself had the strange idea that preventing new construction would keep cities affordable, but a single course in economics would have taught her the fallacy of that view. If booming demand collides against restricted supply, then prices will rise.

The best way to keep cities affordable is to allow private developers to build up and deliver space. Jacobs was right that high-rise public housing is a problem, as street crime is much more prevalent in high-rise, high-poverty neighborhoods. But in more prosperous, privately managed buildings, height is not a problem. If you love cities, as Jacobs certainly did, then presumably you should want the master builders to make them accessible to more people.

In this, Glaeser has a point. The opportunities to live in walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods are extremely limited, and so safe, walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods tend to be quite expensive. When regulations or NIMBYs block new developments, they limit access to this already limited supply, in the process hurting the causes of affordable housing and environmental sustainability.

On the other hand, it's difficult to understand the ferocity of urban anti-development forces without reference to the battles that hardened their views.

In Washington D.C., where I live, urbanists are routinely frustrated by neighborhood groups opposing new infill developments around Metro stations. These individuals are often outraged by the encroachment upon their neighborhoods and reluctant to listen to the arguments in favor of new walkable, transit-oriented developments around what is a very valuable piece of transit infrastructure. This is occasionally maddening.

But these neighborhood groups were often forged in the highway battles of the 1970s, when planners sought to run freeways through Washington neighborhoods to downtown. Where the highway and public housing builders were successful, neighborhoods were irreparably damaged. The stubbornness is a reaction to the insensitivity of earlier cohorts of urban planners. Had Moses and his ilk been less Moses-like, Glaeser would not find himself so frustrated by construction limits today.

It's also worth asking whether Glaeser's ire is best directed at urban neighborhoods, rather than suburban ones. If you love cities, and if you love the things that cities do well, perhaps you should take aim at the heavily regulated, extremely low-rise metropolitan periphery.

Consider this: The Bronx is home to about 1.4 million people who live on 42 square miles -- a remarkably dense area by American standards. Next door in Westchester County, about 950,000 people live on 433 square miles -- dense for America but much less dense than the Bronx.

In 2004, the Bronx permitted the construction of nearly 5,000 new housing units to Westchester's 1,800. The following year, the numbers were again 5,000 for the Bronx, and only 1,300 for Westchester.

Tiny, dense Bronx County seems to be doing a much better job accommodating new housing units, regulations and all. And this is no outlier. Queens packs more people onto less land than neighboring Nassau County, and suffers from New York's burdensome zoning regulations, and yet Queens managed to approve far more housing in recent years than Nassau County.

Glaeser could use some perspective. New York City packs more than 8 million people into 300 square miles, while the New York metropolitan area has 19 million people spread across over 6,000 square miles. If you doubled the density of the metro area outside the city, you'd make room for an additional 11 million people, while still keeping the metro population density below the level of the least dense New York City borough.

In other words, supply restrictions bind most in the suburbs. Were the suburbs developed on the scale Jacobs favored -- think about those five-story buildings -- the New York metro area might easily contain three times the housing units it currently has. That's a lot of downward pressure on prices.

Glaeser also goes astray in confusing the importance of building infrastructure with the importance of building a certain kind of infrastructure. He says:

Jacobs was right that cities are built for people, but they are also built around transportation systems. New York was America’s premier harbor, and the city grew up around the port. The meandering streets of lower Manhattan were laid down in a pedestrian age. Washington Square was urban sprawl in the age of the omnibus. The Upper East Side and Upper West Side were built up in the age of rail, when my great-grandfather would take the long elevated train ride downtown from Washington Heights. It was inevitable that cars would also require urban change. Either older cities would have to adapt, or the population would move entirely to the new car-based cities of the Sunbelt.

When Henry Ford made the car affordable, millions of Americans understandably wanted to drive. After all, the average commute by car in the United States is twenty-four minutes, whereas the average commute by public transit is forty-eight minutes. The automobile certainly created great challenges for every older city that was built at highway-less higher densities. No matter what Jacobs thought, there simply was not a car-less option for New York. For the city to continue growing and changing and leading the world, it needed to be retrofitted for the automobile. And that enormous task was given to Moses. Perhaps he did too much for the car. I am certainly on Jacobs’s side on the Lomex issue, and cannot possibly approve of the destruction of Tremont; but New York’s fall would have been far more precipitous if it had ignored the automobile altogether.

It is hard today to accept the allegation that Moses was responsible for New York’s demise. The troubles that New York experienced in the 1970s were hardly unusual. Except for Los Angeles, every one of the ten largest American cities in 1950 lost at least 10 percent of its population over the next thirty years. New York is exceptional not in its decline but in its resilience, and perhaps Moses deserves some credit for that. New York and Los Angeles are the only two of those ten big mid-century cities that have gained population over the past sixty years.

For a New Yorker, Glaeser has an odd sense of the attractive qualities of his home city. The people aren't there for the highway bridges. New York City in particular -- and Manhattan specifically -- are the least auto-friendly parts of the entire country, Moses or no. And yet, as Glaeser admits, they continue to grow. Maybe Moses saved New York, or maybe he risked its future unnecessarily by threatening to destroy the density that makes it so vibrant.

And meanwhile, we have counterexamples. London opted not to build any motorways through the heart of the city, and yet it has managed to remain one of only a handful of global financial and cultural capitals.

Glaeser fails to entertain the obvious hypothetical: What might have happened to New York if Moses had focused instead on transit and rail construction, rather than accommodation of the automobile?

Robert Moses. Photo: Cup of Cha

The difficult question, then, is not whether to make some accommodations for the automobile but how to do so. And it's not at all clear that Moses' approach was the right one, or indeed, even a very good one.

We have good evidence that Glaeser, and Moses, are wrong. To cite just one example, a 2006 paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow reads (emphasis mine):

Between 1950 and 1990, the aggregate population of central cities in the United States declined by 17 percent despite population growth of 72 percent in metropolitan areas as a whole. This paper assesses the extent to which the construction of new limited access highways has contributed to central city population decline. Using planned portions of the interstate highway system as a source of exogenous variation, empirical estimates indicate that one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent. Estimates imply that aggregate central city population would have grown by about 8 percent had the interstate highway system not been built.

What New Yorkers were after wasn't the car, specifically; it was the promise of mobility offered by the car. But the job of city planners is to understand how to improve mobility across the entire city and region.

Given the density of New York, the space occupied by automobiles and parking structures, and the sheer cost of land in the city, construction of expensive, low capacity roadways seems like a poor decision.

Ed Glaeser is right when he says: "Successful cities need both the human interactions of Jane Jacobs and the enabling infrastructure of Robert Moses." But he seems unable to grasp that successful cities need city-oriented infrastructure, which actively facilitates those human interactions.

Most of the people who work in New York don't get there by driving, on Moses' highways or any other streets. They take transit, and many others can bike or walk thanks to the density that transit facilitates.

Moses didn't just get the means wrong, he also messed up the ends. And if present and future master builders don't learn better than he -- and Glaeser -- how infrastructure serves a city, they'll likely end up as loathed as Moses himself.

According to Movieline (via New York Mag), Jay Leno's new prime time show, set to debut on NBC in September, hasn't exactly been generating a lot of buzz. But since nothing says funny like a grisly hit-and-run, this promo, co-starring Fred Armisen of "Saturday Night Live," should turn things around.

Though I'm pretty sure Leno has never gotten as much as a chuckle from me, I understand where the humor is supposed to be here. Yet for some reason the laughter isn't coming.

Somewhere, though, I imagine pedestrian-hater Robert Novak is yukking it up.

Photo via PSFK

This is why a couple of recent Zipcar campaigns are so puzzling. As seen on PSFK, Zipcar staffers were spotted "clocking" and "ticketing" New York pedestrians for moving too slowly. In an earlier print campaign, the company encouraged subway riders to "burn rubber," and pictured a Zipcar peeling out like a race car -- not the most responsible message in a city where pedestrians die at the hands of motorists an average of once every three days.

Transportation Alternatives tried to get Zipcar to pull the "burn rubber" ads. But despite a pledge that the company would not only nix the campaign but do more to educate its clients on safe driving, nothing has happened.

Instead of goading pedestrians and transit users into getting behind the wheel, wouldn't it make more sense to try to get car owners to reduce congestion and pollution by swapping their daily driver for a Zipcar membership and a MetroCard?

We have a message in with chief marketer Victoria Godfrey about the pedestrian promotion. In the meantime, here's an Advertising Age interview from January where Godfrey discusses Zipcar's "feet-on-the-street" growth philosophy.

Image: Reclaim

Vanderbilt's piece, entitled "The 'E' Word," deconstructs what he considers one of the most "abused word[s] in contemporary political discourse."

A few facts -- "stubborn things," as Reagan called them -- are in order. The most obvious thing to note is that car drivers make up a very small portion of the commuter population -- 16.9 percent of travelers into the proposed "congestion zone" of Manhattan, and that includes trucks. And as the New York City Independent Budget Office has found, those people who do drive into Manhattan have a median annual income that exceeds other commuters by some 28.6 percent. And yet it's the cyclists who are elite.

Council Member Liu complained that Sadik-Khan's job is not to be a "visionary." Rather it's to strike a "balance between all the entities competing for street space." Well, let's think about that "balance" under the status quo so beloved by Liu. In regards to the Times Square project, the space under consideration currently hosts nearly seven times as many pedestrians as vehicles. And yet how much space was devoted to those pedestrians? 11 percent.

Of course, what else but propaganda such as this would we expect from a publication produced by Transportation Alternatives -- the group that, according to one anonymous New York Mag source, "is literally writing transportation policy in the city of New York -- unchecked."

Carry on, TA overlords. We look forward to future elitist measures like parking reform, car-free parks and, naturally, the ultimate prize of the ruling class: congestion pricing.

The dealer, whose motto is "God, Guns, Guts and American Pick-Up Trucks," one-upped himself from last year's offer of pistols or petrol, and said that sales have doubled since the promotion started. He also had some choice social commentary in various interviews:

• "There's a bunch of evil in the world and people need to protect themselves."
• "I'd personally like to have a sporting chance, instead of just becoming a victim."
• "Without guns, we are subjects. With guns, we are citizens."
  
• "The only 911 call I need is chamberering a round."
  

Fortunately you can't just walk out of Max Motors with an AK; Muller provides you with a voucher for $450 redeemable at a local gun dealer, where you still have to go through a background check. Maybe I haven't been to a gun show in a while, but doesn't that seem like a lot of gun for so little coin?

No matter your moral leanings, you have to admit Muller's plan is ingenious marketing, given that, outside of iPhones, guns are about the only thing selling well in this economy under this presidency. He has even given interviews to Al Jazeera, and Russia Today.

Two of the more entertaining interviews after the jump:

As car manufacturers again turn to free gas gimmickry to boost sales, New York developers are looking to lure tenants and buyers with -- that's right -- free cars. 

Tishman Speyer is offering a one-year Mini Cooper lease to the tenant who can draw the most referrals to Stuyvesant Town. "I suppose it could be worse; it could have been an SUV they're giving away," writes our tipster. "But this is still the last thing Manhattan needs right now -- another resident, private car." Joining Stuy Town is Prospect Heights development The Sinclair, which, as seen on Curbed, is giving away Toyota Priuses.

We wouldn't expect these guys to be so savvy as to put up, say, a Bakfiets, but really -- a car? Not a lifetime of MetroCards?

What will be the next ridiculously counterproductive real estate marketing trend? Leave your best guess in the comments -- and win a carton of Marlboros!!

This image of Fifth Avenue unearthed by the Times' Jennifer 8. Lee (nice headline!) is a fascinating relic from the dawn of the motoring age. The new geometry pictured here nicked 15 feet of sidewalk from pedestrians to make room for two traffic lanes. In one fell swoop, the balance of space shifted dramatically: Two 30-foot sidewalks and a 40-foot roadway became 22½-foot sidewalks and a 55-foot roadway. The insets show the sort of "imperfections" slated for elimination on the auto-friendly Fifth Avenue: terraces, stoops, gardens -- the type of amenities that make streets more than simply thoroughfares to pass through.

Which got me wondering: A hundred years from now, how will we interpret images like this?

Photo: jblough/Flickr

We've published a couple of items lately on how noise from motorcycles and booming car stereo systems continue to diminish quality of life in Inwood and Washington Heights -- not that these problems are by any means unique to Upper Manhattan. The Queens-based NoiseOFF website has compiled a fascinating case against the manufacturers of car audio equipment, much of it drawn directly from product advertising, in which companies use slogans like "Turn it down? I don't think so." and "Be Loud. Be Obnoxious." to market their wares, mostly to young men with a misguided longing for attention and "respect" (I speak from experience here).

For insight into the twisted psychology of boom car ownership, and the perverse ways it is exploited by the car audio industry, get a load of this long-form ad from Pioneer (also featured on NoiseOFF), entitled "Disturb." Think that guy on the block cares that he's rattling windows and setting off car alarms? Hardly. More likely it's his reason for living.