Parallel parking in small towns rocks. They still mark the spaces for land-yachts and big pickup trucks.
The marked spots in small towns can take a full-size pickup truck, and still have 2-3 feet between the bumper lines plus 2-3 feet between the driver’s door and the outside of marked parking spot.
In comparison, when I drive Big Red Downtown in Albany in one of the marked spots, the bumper hangs over both bumper lines, and the driver side usually hangs out along the white outer line.
Earlier this summer, the 12-story Champlain Towers South beachfront condo collapsed in Surfside, Florida. The final death tally stands at 98 people, making it the fourth-deadliest structural failure in American history. While the engineers paraded into press conferences and experts brought onto news channels are quick to dismiss this collapse as an outlier, it is important to ask what forces are at play here, and to wonder if this is a foreshadowing of what is to come. Perhaps this is what happens when we build for economic—instead of human—purposes.
It is no revolutionary claim to say that we find ourselves in an age of consumerism. While it is not the subject of this piece to dive into the abstract economic discussion of free-market versus consumer capitalism, one can look around and quickly come to the conclusion that economic decisions today are usually predicated on desire, not need. In other words, modern American capitalism is governed not by production, but by consumption. How is this done? By planning obsolescence.
In 1932, a real estate broker named Bernard London wrote a now-famous essay entitled "Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence". In it, he outlines a solution to the Great Depression: government-mandated lifespans of consumer products and hefty taxes levied on “continued use of what is legally ‘dead’ ”. While this sounds draconian (I encourage a reading of the entire essay), much of what London was proposing is now standard practice. What was the “solution” for the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic? At least two stimulus checks, with some folks receiving as many as four. In both cases, the purpose is to incentivize consumption; to have the nation spend its way out of an economic downturn. This is because our economic system has a need for liquidity, the ability to easily convert assets into cash. Planned obsolescence generates these desired economic transactions, which can result in lots of growth. But the problem with this growth is that it comes at the cost of long-term prosperity.
The former First Lady was there to illuminate the plight of the Beaux Arts railway station that once dazzled New Yorkers and was, upon its opening in 1913, considered one of the city’s greatest wonders. Intended by developers to dwarf the nearby Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal cost nearly $160,000,000 (more than $4 billion today) to construct and was a front-page story in the local papers for weeks leading up to opening day. As dependence on rail travel diminished in the mid-20th century, Grand Central’s relevance too was questioned, and in 1963, the top of the station became the base for the tower known as the Pan-Am building, named after the airline headquartered there.
In 1975 a plot was hatched to dwarf the Pan-Am building with an even larger structure designed by famed Modern architect Marcel Breuer, but there was a problem: the sting of Penn Station’s demolition in 1964 was still fresh in the minds of many New Yorkers. In the aftermath of that legendary building’s destruction, Grand Central had been designated a New York City Landmark under a new law that gave the city the power to protect buildings it deemed worthy. When plans for the Breuer addition were presented to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the response from officials was that the tower was essentially an “aesthetic joke.”
While few doubted the significance of Grand Central, the terminal’s owners took issue with the law itself—how, they wondered, could it constitute anything other than an unreasonable violation of their rights as property owners? Preservationists like Onassis, working with groups like the Municipal Art Society, continued to insist that saving Grand Central and buildings like it wasn’t a mere real estate matter, but an issue of public good. On June 26, 1978, the United States Supreme Court agreed with them in Penn Central Transportation Co. vs. New York City, not just in regards to Grand Central but in the spirit of the Landmarks law itself, with Justice William Brennan writing that to rule in favor of the building’s owners would “invalidate not just New You City’s law, but all comparable landmark legislation elsewhere in the nation.”
Electric cars and road tax – a sticky wicket ⛽
Eventually the automobile is going to become electric. Even if climate change wasn’t a serious threat, the need for more urban pollution control and the flexibility of fuel that electricity represents and the precise control of torque and speed of electric motors means that’s where the future of the automobile industry resides.
But how on earth do you tax automobiles to cover the cost of running electric cars on these roads? It’s easy to tax gasoline, as it’s primarily a motor vehicle fuel. You can’t tax electricity as a fuel because it has many different uses.
You could tax roads by installing cameras and sensors to create toll roads but the thing that is not a practical option except on the biggest thoroughfares and would lead many roads to be untaxed, unfairly burdening commuters on select routes. People might shun the major highways to save money on tolls, causing additional traffic problems.
The other way would be a mile tax but that’s harder than some think. You could tax based on vehicle weight and miles traveled but that opens a series of problems. For one, if it’s a yearly tax collected after safety inspections, than the big tax bill at the end of the year would be be difficult for families to afford. They could do budget plans, but even those might challenging to administer, especially for folks without bank accounts. Without paying for the tax up front, people also might over use the roads and hit with a surprise tax bill.
Smart vehicles could talk to a satellite or cell phone tower to report their mileage but I would imagine that would lead to all kinds of privacy concerns. Would the government use GPS coordinates to secretly track people? Plus in outlying areas there might be infrequent and poor cell and satellite service, making it difficult to get regular reports on vehicle milage. It also would be impossible to track legacy electric vehicles without these sensors – and risk abuse when people unplugged or tampered with these sensors.
New York is aiming to ban the sale of all gas-powered vehicles in the state by 2035. A bill amending the state's environmental conservation law was passed by the state's Senate and Assembly and signed by Governor Kathy Hochul last week.
Under the new law, 100% of in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks will have zero emissions by 2035. That means state agencies will work to develop affordable powering options for zero-emissions vehicles in all communities, improve sustainable transportation and support bicycle and pedestrian options.
Several agencies will work to create a zero-emissions vehicle market development strategy by 2023, so ensure more zero-emission cars are available in the state.