Urban Legends
Nathan e-mails to point out a contradiction:
I'd love to hear somebody reconcile Global Warming with New Urbanism.
New Urbanists want everybody to move back downtown, increase urban density to create ridership to support the TRAIN.
Dense populations create a heat island. So if the New Urbanists had their way, Minneapolis would get hotter and hotter.
Paul Douglas says Minneapolis endorses Kyoto. Great. The Council should order an AC ban (like a sprinkler ban, cool your department store on alternate days only).
Pack thousands of people into apartments to prevent them from moving to the suburbs, shut off all the air conditioners to comply with Kyoto, and it will take how long, exactly, for the riots to start?
I dunno. I suppose we could ask the French.
Speaking of the French, Nathan also points out (via The Q&O Blog) that it appears that their enthusiasm for car sharing has its limits:
They might have been congratulated for their "green" efforts in an area of heavy air pollution.
Instead a group of French cleaning ladies who organised a car-sharing scheme to get to work are being taken to court by a coach company which accuses them of "an act of unfair and parasitical competition".
The women, who live in Moselle and work five days a week at EU offices in Luxembourg, are being taken to court by Transports Schiocchet Excursions, which runs a service along the route. It wants the women to be fined and their cars confiscated.
Yes, sometimes its not easy being a modern Frenchman. On the one hand, car sharing is good. But on the other, the freedom to compete is bad.
"Using our cars is quicker and at least twice as cheap. And on the bus we didn't have the right to eat or even to speak," said Martine Bourguignon. Odette Friedmann added: "In the evening instead of coming to get us at 9.30pm the bus would arrive at 10.30pm. If you made any comment to the driver you'd get a mouthful of abuse."
You will take the bus. It will cost more. You will not eat or speak. It will be late. And if you complain, you'll be verbally slapped down.
Vive La France!
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