Has Seattle "Reinvented" Itself?

I don't normally write online comments to newspaper articles, but every so often one will come along that really pushes my buttons. This recent piece in The New York Times is trying to capitalize on the country's almost cult-like fascination with Seattle that's been around since grunge and Sleepless in Seattle. Not only are we responsible for $4.50 mocha frappuccinos and the Dreamliner, we have also "reinvented" our economy through education and cutting-edge urban design, the author argues, in a way that has uniquely saved us from the recession. Did I get that right? Because of course, Seattle likes to think of itself as being so "progressive" it's practically from the future. But are we really? Does the way we run things in the Emerald City really hold true for other cities?


Here's the original article:

As the 2010 Census rolls out, much of the attention of news organizations is focused on the continuing growth of Texas and Florida, but there is much to be learned from the less extreme, but still significant, population growth in less sunny places, like Seattle.
Seattle is one of the few large cities outside the Sun Belt that is growing more quickly than the country as a whole. The city’s growth reveals the benefits of concentrating smart people in dense cities. 

The success of Seattle was hardly foreordained, as it shares much with America’s many declining cities. Like Detroit and St. Louis, Seattle grew as a node of the great transport network, which included canals from Erie to Panama and intercontinental railroads, which enabled Easterners to access the vast wealth of America’s hinterland. 

Seattle’s growth spurt during 1880s coincided with its rail connection to the East. In its early years, the city specialized in providing access to timber and Klondike gold. 

To succeed in the 20th century, American cities needed to do more than help move natural resources, and Seattle moved into manufacturing transportation equipment, natural enough given the vast distance that separated the city from the country’s population centers. 

During World War I, the city’s shipbuilding industry expanded rapidly, andBoeing began as a partnership between a naval engineer and a lumberman. 

Just as Michigan’s forests were part of Detroit’s early success in making cars, since early automobiles — like the carriages that preceded them — had plenty of wood, early planes used light wood and Washington’s timber industry was a boon to Seattle’s airplane industry. William Boeing’s own expertise in wood products helped him to be smart about early airplane construction. 

In 1954 more than half of Seattle’s manufacturing workers labored in the transportation industry. By 1960, Seattle was seen by many as Boeing’s town, but that should have been recognized as a bad omen. 

For 50 years, economists have documented that urban reinvention and entrepreneurship rely on small companies and industrial diversity, not industrial monoliths. 

At the start of the 20th century, Detroit was one of the most innovative cities on earth, with an abundance of small automotive entrepreneurs supplying each other with parts, financing and new ideas. 

As the Big Three rose to dominance, Detroit became synonymous with urban decline. Boeing’s outsize footprint in Seattle set the stage for the city’s 20 tough years after 1960.
Before the industrial revolution, cities were centers of small, smart companies that connected with each other and the outside world. Small companies and smart people are the sources of urban success today. The industrial city now seems like an unfortunate detour during which cities exploited economies of scale but lost the interactive exchange of ideas that is their most important asset. 

As Boeing scaled back its Seattle employment, the city floundered. By 1971, amuch-discussed billboard read “Would the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?”
But there was a crucial difference between Seattle and Detroit. Unlike Fordand General Motors, Boeing employed highly educated workers. Almost since its inception, Seattle has been committed to education and has benefited from the University of Washington, which is based there. Skills are the source of Seattle’s strength. 

Over the last three decades, human capital has become increasingly linkedwith urban growth outside the Sun Belt. 

The ability to attract skilled people was intimately tied to the success of Seattle’s star companies, such as Amazon; Nordstrom’s, whose strategy of empowering employees was more feasible because those workers were skilled; Starbucks, a coffee chain founded by educators; and Microsoft, which depends on a steady supply of smart software engineers. (Disclosure: I serve on the domestic advisory board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.) 

A great paradox of our age is that despite the declining cost of connecting across space, more people are clustering together in cities. The explanation of that strange fact is that globalization and technological change have increased the returns on being smart, and humans get smart by being around other smart people. 

Dense, smart cities like Seattle succeed by attracting smart people who educate and employ one another. 

A person’s earnings rise by more than 7 percent as the share of people in his or her metropolitan area with a college degree increases by 10 percent, holding that person’s own level of education constant. Educated neighbors are particularly valuable in dense cities, where contact is more common. 

Skilled people have often chosen to come to already educated cities, and the share of Seattle adults with college degrees has risen to 56 percent from an already high 47 percent in 2000.
Today, Seattle is one of the wealthier and most productive metropolitan areas in the United States. Per-capita personal income is 25 percent above the United States average. Per-capita productivity is 37 percent above the metropolitan average in the United States. That productivity explains why Seattle has grown so robustly over the last decade. 

Seattle has also helped itself by permitting taller structures. That density enables ideas to flow freely. Building up is also an environmentally sensitive alternative to building out, and Seattle’s height helps the city maintain a relatively high level of public transportation use and a relatively low level of carbon emissions. 

Sun Belt sprawl isn’t the only model of modern metropolitan success. Skilled, tall cities like Seattle provide an alternative model of urban growth that emphasizes the creation of knowledge. 

The Seattle model is particularly important, because the ideas created in skilled cities are likely to be the economic mainstay of America in the next century.

I've lived in Seattle for 21 years, and I have lived in both its central city (Capitol Hill) and in suburban areas (Kirkland), graduated from the University of Washington, now working for a Microsoft vendor.

The article is absolutely right to point out the UW and the Port of Seattle as primary ingredients in the success of our fair city. The Port is responsible for nearly a quarter million living-wage jobs in the city, and as Asian economies grow, so do we. Washington is the most trade-dependent state in the US almost exclusively for this reason.

The UW is probably the world's best kept secret among top public universities - it's affordable (less than $8,000 a year in-state tuition), full of top-ranked departments, with 60,000 students packed into a relatively small city neighborhood a 10-minute bus ride away from one of the best and most vibrant downtown areas of the West Coast.

With other factors, the article is a bit off. Luck has definitely been just as much a factor in Seattle's success as entrepreneurship and the "creative class." Microsoft took root in the Eastside suburbs not because a highly educated workforce was ready and available, or because the various infrastructure was secure and well-established. It did so because two of its founding partners, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, had the serendipity of being upper-crust white nerds at an elite prep school working on computers at the precise economic moment (de-industrialization and restructuring in the late 1970s) when doing so could make any decent programmer a millionaire. Starbucks, likewise, emerged at the tail end of the largest crime wave in American history during the late 90's, before- which building sidewalk cafe culture and walkable downtowns (as the early espresso carts before Starbucks did) would have been unthinkable.

Second, the author is quite mistaken if he believes that Seattle's affinity for density is at all responsible for its growth. 75% of Seattle is zoned as single-family neighborhoods. Areas of true high-density living, like one would find in New York, Chicago or San Francisco? There are exactly four of them: Downtown, Capitol Hill, the U District and Belltown, with a combined population of perhaps 100,000 people. Seattle only rezoned areas of South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle for high densities in the past 5-10 years. Before that, these and several other areas were nearly barren and full of parking lots. We just got to the point where major groceries became comfortable locating downtown, which in the US is some kind of accomplishment. How about families with children living downtown? Elementary schools in high-density areas? Compared to a New York, Chicago, or even Vancouver to the north, Seattle shows few of these key signs of life in its "high-density" areas.

Transportation is a severe problem in Seattle, and it is precisely because the city has not adequately invested in truly high-density, sustainable neighborhoods (especially in its middle-class "urban village" areas), that this is the case. The 520 bridge, the Alaskan Way Viaduct debacle,  and our notoriously pothole-plagued streets do not help our case for being paragons of the quality transit infrastructure needed to "win the future", as Obama might say. Need I mention our relatively pathetic light rail system that was rejected in a public vote in the 1960s - it might reach our suburban job centers by 2030, and that's if Tim Eyman doesn't have his way. Outside of a few key corridors, bus service is infrequent and low-quality. In reality, the city's transportation network is a lot like that LA - lots of transit "ridership" on a few highly-trafficked routes, but with the vast majority of commuters trapped in congested freeways with no alternatives in sight.

What is really so special about Seattle?
1. Seattle really is the most educated city in the country, topping even Boston and SF. Do you have a Bachelor's degree? So do 55% of Seattleites over 25. A Master's degree? 1 in 4. 1 in 10 Seattleites has a PhD. If are you are a high-school grad, GOOD LUCK trying to live here.

2. Compared to local incomes, Seattle has some of the most overpriced real estate in the country. The quality of life here makes up a lot of that. Geographically, Seattle is hourglass-shaped with water on all sides. Pretty much anywhere with a "view" - and this is a large chunk of the city - is out of reach to the middle class.

3. If there was one cultural vibe you get from living in Seattle, it is the feeling of being unique and/or apart from the rest of the US. As one of my transplant friends often tells me, this is a "city of the mind." It's like Scandinavia on the Pacific. If you want to study with some of the smartest people on the planet, write code that will change the world, fight global warming, or do business with China, this is the place to do it. Socially, this feeling of constantly being on "the edge" of the next big thing has some negative consequences. The "Seattle Freeze," an ever-present lack of social energy and perceived coldness to outsiders, is something every transplant experiences. Part of it is indeed due to the gloomy weather. As I'm writing, I'm thinking back to the last time I saw sunshine, and the number of weeks it's been is daunting. Another is the dominant upscale, corporate culture of the city that dampens the nightlife on weekdays in most areas. Finally, the high-tech emphasis of our economy (geeks working long hours) and the influence of Asian and Nordic local cultures blends together to create a relative shyness, indifference even, to new people you don't find in other cities.

Huskies Ring in the New Year with a Holiday Bowl Victory - GO DAWGS!!!

The NY Times had a cover story profiling the Huskies and Jake Locker's rise to fame at UW - goooooooo alma mater!


This has to be one of the best pieces I've read about Seattle's football culture. I don't normally like posting full articles, but this piece by William Yardley is beautifully written and really encapsulates so much of Seattle - from the condos of Belltown to the strip malls of Aurora - and how it all comes together to produce one of the best college sports scenes in any big city. The full article is below:

They say Jake Locker was carved to athletic perfection between the Cascade Range and the Salish Sea. Big, strong and strikingly fast, he was a statewide myth by the time he was a teenager, a high school football force scorching through Friday nights in the farthest reaches of the Pacific Northwest.

By the time he became the quarterback for the University of Washington, he was cast here as nothing less than a savior, a rural kid summoned to the digital city from a place few of his new fans could find on a map, Ferndale, Wash., population 11,000. His father taped drywall for a living. His grandfather worked in a pulp mill for 37 years. Neither of them graduated from college, but Jake would stir the rescue fantasies of an ambitious university and what theCensus Bureau has called the nation’s best-educated city.

“Don’t go, Jake!” the crowd chanted at raucous Husky Stadium a year ago, at the end of his junior season. Pro scouts swooned in the stands. Mr. Locker was projected to become a top N.F.L. draft pick, and a multimillionaire, if he left college early. “One more year!”

On Thursday, Mr. Locker will play his final college game against heavily favored Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. Analysts will point to his decision to stay for his senior year as reflective of fine character — but they will also recount the disappointing season that followed, from blowout losses to his plummeting draft prospects. The savior proved mighty mortal.

Yet regardless of Washington’s 6-6 record or what might happen Thursday, many people will always measure the kid from Ferndale by more than touchdowns and passing efficiency.

At a time when college teams recruit from across the globe, when talented players are expected to jump early to the draft and others are quick to transfer if things do not go well, Mr. Locker has been defined not just by his performance or potential but also by the simple fact that he repeatedly chose to stay close to home, to anchor himself ever more deeply in the complicated corner of America where he was raised. In the Northwest, a region reaching for a broader role in the world even as it fears losing its sense of place, being a local hero meant playing across a delicate divide between old and new.

“The people who consider themselves to be the true Washingtonians, the true Northwest, they identify with Jake,” said Rob Rang, a high school literature and history teacher from Tacoma who has followed Mr. Locker closely as part of his moonlighting job — as an N.F.L. draft analyst for cbssports.com. “Not to make Jake sound like he’s some lumberjack, but he’s more of that than the latte-sipping, work-at-Microsoft kind of thing.”

Told of those comments, Mr. Locker agreed.

“You saw what my dad does,” he said. “No matter what the circumstances, you can always work hard enough to give your family what they need.”

Seattle is more than generous billionaires and precision composting. It exports airplanes and wine but also wheat and wood. It is still a crossroads, energized by friction between rural and urban, union machinist and transplant techie, immigrant and entrenched. Not far from the rows of bungalows beloved by carbon-conscious New Urbanists, Aurora Avenue, a critical city artery, features stunning views of Mount Rainier — and boarded-up motels.

Yet in the center of it all there has long been a uniting force, the home team. Before theSeahawks or the Mariners or the Sounders soccer team, before Microsoft or Boeing, before the Klondike gold rush or even statehood, there was the University of Washington, founded as the Territorial University of Washington 150 years ago next fall with a single professor and 30 students.

Back then, Seattle was a frontier town with fewer than 1,000 people. It was less Jet City — or Metronatural, as a new generation of boosters has branded it — than it was Ferndale. A century and a half later, the university, not Microsoft or Boeing, is the city’s largest employer, with nearly 30,000 faculty and staff members serving 45,000 students.

But for all its heft — Washington is perennially among the top universities in attracting federal research dollars — the university has lost some of its prominence in a changing region. It increasingly struggles to draw political support outside the Seattle area. Many people view it as elitist, distracted by its global ambitions.

At a time when public universities are taking significant budget cuts, Washington has suffered plenty, losing a third of its state financing in the past two years. To raise more revenue, it is capping its in-state enrollment because outside students pay about three times the tuition.

That shift is not expected to improve local loyalty, but the university has taken other steps that it hopes will, from expanding aid for low-income in-state students to enhancing its brand name, in Seattle and beyond. Next fall, it will begin construction on a $250 million renovation of 90-year-old Husky Stadium. Rejected in its request for state money, it began a private fund-raising campaign just as Mr. Locker began his senior season.

“Sports is the gateway into the university for many, many people,” Phyllis M. Wise, the university’s interim president, said in an interview. “It is the front porch. It’s what people know.”

Small-Town Roots

Washington has seized on the small-town imagery surrounding Mr. Locker. In addition to putting his picture on buses across Seattle, the athletic department sent staff members to Ferndale for several days this summer after the town proclaimed the main day of its annual Old Settlers Picnic to be Jake Locker Day. Washington created a Web site featuring video testimonials from Ferndale residents recalling Mr. Locker’s earnest boyhood.

“I wasn’t comfortable with it at first,” Mr. Locker said. “But I thought the way they did it was best suited for me. It came from the people I grew up with. It’s a community that really, really cares about all the people in it.”

Of all the impressive tailgate parties that take place before and after Washington football games, one of the most formidable the last few years has been held by the “Ferndawgs,” the passionate group of family and friends from Ferndale who have cheered at every home game Mr. Locker has played.

Yet while the Ferndawgs now drape themselves in Washington purple and gold, very few of them attended the university. When Mr. Locker enrolled in the fall of 2006 — he graduated this month as a fifth-year senior — he was one of only 12 freshmen admitted from Ferndale High School, 100 miles north of Seattle and just south of the Canadian border.

“Even that hour-and-a-half drive, it was a huge adjustment for me,” Mr. Locker said. “I got really homesick.”

Every Husky fan knows that Mr. Locker chose to come to Washington when its football team was at rock bottom, after scandal and losses had prompted coaches, administrators and even boosters to leave a program once among the giants of college football. He could have played virtually anywhere, but Seattle was an easier drive for his grandparents.

Washington has produced many fine quarterbacks who have nurtured lasting connections here. One of them is Brock Huard, himself a small-town star who made a similar choice to stay in college more than a decade ago.

But Mr. Huard is among many people who say Mr. Locker’s tale is different and deeper. He may not have won the Heisman, but he stayed long enough to get Washington back to even.

“So much was on his shoulders to singlehandedly turn things around,” Mr. Huard said. “There’s almost a purity to him and his story — almost a ‘Hoosiers’ thing. He’s formed such a bond with this place. And that bond got pushed and tested more than anyone ever thought it could.”

Mr. Locker feels the bond, too. A principal reason he returned, he said, was “just being able to extend that passion one more year, one more game and one more snap.”

He risked failure on the field, but not necessarily financial hardship. In the summer of 2009, before his junior year, he signed a minor-league baseball contract — he threw a 95-mile-per-hour fastball in high school — that included a signing bonus of about $250,000. He has not been on scholarship since then, though he lives in a group house and shares a room with his dog. And when he decided to return for his senior year, he took out an insurance policy that would provide him with a very comfortable living should an injury prevent him from going on to N.F.L. wealth.

He still may be among the top quarterbacks picked in the draft, though far from No. 1. No one seems sure what to expect of him as a professional. Will he learn to read defenses better and pass more precisely?

“The most frustrating quarterback I’ve ever scouted,” Mr. Rang called him.

‘Thank You Jake’

In Mr. Locker’s final home game, against U.C.L.A., he missed several open receivers and threw an interception. He was marginal. He had many fine performances this season but many like this one, too. Washington won by riding other players to victory, as it often did late this season. It qualified for a bowl by winning its final game.

Yet when the U.C.L.A. game was over, the people in purple still chanted the quarterback’s name. He had played much of the season with a broken rib. More important, he had stayed. Among the better-selling Christmas items at the university bookstore this year was a hand-painted tree ornament in the shape of Mr. Locker’s No. 10 jersey.

“Jake! Jake! Jake!” they rumbled in the stands. “Locker! Locker! Locker!”

Down on the field, Clayton Olson, a 1963 Washington graduate and former high school scout who uses a cane to walk between end zones, pointed to 12 students who had painted their bare chests to spell “Thank You Jake.”

By simply getting to the Holiday Bowl, Mr. Locker has accomplished the only goal he clearly articulated when he returned for his senior year: taking Washington back to the postseason spotlight for the first time since 2002. That the game is against Nebraska only seems fitting to many people: the most disastrous performance of his life was against the Cornhuskers in a game in September this season.

No matter how things might end, Mr. Olson said, looking into stands that night against U.C.L.A., “He’ll own this town.”

Then again, for all his affection for Seattle, Mr. Locker has made clear that his final destination will be Ferndale.

“I’m very proud of where I came from and the people there and I always will be,” he said this month when he turned in the two papers that stood between him and a degree in history. “They’re the people that understand me and know me the best.” 

Highlights of the Holiday Bowl:

 

An Interview with the Woman Behind New York City Bike-Sharing

A few days ago I wrote about New York City's plans to create one of the largest bike-sharing programs in the United States, with up to 10,000 bikes available 24 hours a day by 2012. The program is just the latest of a string of revolutionary projects from the NYC Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. 

After creating a miraculous transformation in Times Square by converting major stretches of Broadway into pedestrian plazas, installing hundreds of miles of bike lanes throughout the five boroughs, and enrolling tens of thousands of city workers into car-sharing programs, she has been called the most influential New York bureaucrat since Robert Moses. 

A parklet on San Francisco's Castro Street, inspired by similar open space projects in New York

As press coverage from Esquire to The New York Times has attested, if Sadik-Khan's sustainability projects on as grand a scale as New York succeed, they can be replicated anywhere and everywhere. 

Transportation Nation posted an interview with the ground-breaking New Yorker herself, with more details about the bike-sharing program in the city. I'm posting the full interview below:

NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, in the now car-free plaza at Times Square

NYC transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan spoke with WNYC’s Richard Hake this morning about the city’s plans to operate a bike share program. (The RFP can be found here.) You can listen to the interview here; the transcript is below.

____________

Richard Hake: New York City today takes the first step toward launching the largest bike-share program in the country.  New Yorkers will be able to rent bikes one-way for short term rides all over Manhattan.  The idea is that the program will  be entirely privately run, but the city will share the revenues.  Joining us now is the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan.

Tell me how this program would work. If I get off work today, I’m here on Varick Street and I want to take a bike up to Union Square, would that be possible?

Janette Sadik-Khan: The system would be similar to the bike share format we’ve seen in Paris and London and Washington where heavy-duty bikes would be located at docking stations every few blocks throughout the system, and they can be ridden and dropped off at any other docking station in the system. So we’re asking for companies to come in and give us their ideas where the best place would be to site a bike share system.

RH: So where would these docking stations be? Would they be in major sections like Union Square? Would there be one in Times Square? Have you investigated how that would work?

JSK: Well, the RFP does not specify the number of bicycles or the precise geographic area to be covered. But we do have preliminary research that says south of 60th Street in Manhattan in the central business district would be an ideal match for New York’s geography because we’ve got high density and a growing bike infrastructure there.

RH: Now are you looking at this more for tourists, for people who just want to leisurely go around the city or could this be done for people who want to go to work and get some errands done?

JSK: We expect it to serve bothgroups. Bike share would give New Yorkers many more transportation choices as the city’s population continues to grow and as traffic congestion increases. And it would be privately funded, so taxpayers will not be on the hook for coming up with dollars to support this, but they would share in any profits. And we think this is really the best deal in town for on-demand travel and a nice complement to our transit system.

RH: So when you say privately run, does that mean, there would be different companies or maybe one large company would actually purchase the bikes, maintain those bikes and actually rent the bikes out to people that want them?

JSK: Yes, the RFP specifies that a private company would bear all the costs and responsibilities with the system during the initial five-year period while sharing revenues with the city. No taxpayer funds would be used for the system’s implementation or for the upkeep or for the maintenance of it. And in fact, we expect significant revenues from user fees and sponsorship and we will negotiate a city share of that revenue.

RH: One of the big problems of riding a bike in New York City is actually where to put it and the risk of theft. Now I know you’ve investigated the other programs going on in Europe and the other cities in the U.S. What have they been doing with the risk of theft of the bicycles?

JSK: Modern systems are much more sophisticated than they used to be. And security and technology on bike systems has really improved significantly. Theft and vandalism hasn’t occurred in places like London. I think something like five bikes have been stolen because the contractor failed to lock them properly. Even judging Paris as it applies to New York, in 2008, Paris’ larceny and theft rate was more than four times that of New York and more than double that of Boston and Washington, D.C.  And overall property crime such as theft and vandalism is much more frequent in France than in the United States.

RH: I know since you’ve become the Transportation Commissioner, we’ve seen lots and lots of new bike lanes all over New York City. Are there enough bike lanes now for this program to be actually safe?

JSK: We’ve built on an extensive system in line with Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative. The idea is we’re not going to be able to battle traffic congestion and continue to grow and thrive unless we provide New Yorkers with some more options. What we’re looking to do is build on the safety record we’ve got here. New York city cycling is getting safer as more people are riding bikes and the network expands. Cycling has more than doubled from 2006 to 2010. But at the same time, cycling injuries and injuries to all users, where we’ve put down bike lanes, has gone down from 40 to 50 percent.

RH: Janette Sadik-Khan is the city’s transportation commissioner.  Commissioner, thanks so much for joining us.

JSK: Thanks, Richard.

Via: Transportation Nation 

Who lives in the pyramid at the Top of the Smith Tower? These lucky bitches...

When I was a freshman at UW, I was looking for a part-time job. I came this close to landing a job working as an elevator operator and tour guide for the Smith Tower, the iconic 1914 skyscraper where this incredibly lucky family lives in the pyramid at the very top.

This has to be one of the most sought-after, out-of-this-world penthouse apartments in the entire city of Seattle. It's like being a 21st century pharaoh in your very own terra-cotta pyramid.

According to the NYTimes article linked above, one of the residents is an energy and recycling executive, and his wife is childhood friends with Dale Chihuly. It's good to have a dream, right? Especially one that involves having a giant glass ball in your attic and living at the top of a 35-story urban legend.

Via: NYTimes

Electric Bikes Garner Media Attention in the Pacific Northwest

The online news forum Crosscut has recently published an article exploring the possibility of facilitating electric bike infrastructure in major urban areas of the Pacific Northwest.

While China has a long-established mass culture of bicycle transportation (though it has certainly waned in recent years), cities such as Seattle and Portland and elsewhere in the United States have a long way to go to make electric bicycles a part of the everyday American commute.

It is estimated that while 100 million Chinese use electric bikes as part of their daily commute, only about 58,000 Americans do. Major factors for this enormous discrepancy include the lack of electric vehicle charging infrastructure in most American cities, the lack of shoulders and bike lanes on most arterials, longer commuting distances and lower densities of urban neighborhoods that make bicycle transportation impractical.

Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute, a prominent Seattle think tank has recently published a series outlining the promises and struggles of creating an electric bike culture in the Northwest.

Three primary trends favor the rise of electric bikes as part of the low-carbon, "green" transportation infrastructure of the future, thanks in large part to the large amounts of the stimulus funding now available for such projects.

1. Technical innovation keeps improving electric bikes. To give one example, the Japanese firm Sanyo has designed the Eneloop eletric assist bike which promises to change the electric bike market in the US permanently. The bikes are sleek and cost-competitive, available for $2,300 at Best Buy. American manufacturer Trek has also introduced a competitive electric model, the Ride+.

2. Electric bikes are catching on like wildfire not only in China, where 120 million users are expected by late 2010 (a massive increase from just 56,000 in 1998) but in Northern Europe, India, and New York City. Although the American market numbers less than 200,000, according to David Goodman's article in the New York Times the number is projected to rise in the coming years. Two types of electric bikes are emerging as contending popular models. The first, most popular in the US and Europe, is similar to a typical manual-powered bicycle with an auxiliary motor that can be engaged on command or when the cyclist pedals.

By contrast, in China, electric bicycles have evolved into bigger machines that resemble Vespa scooters. They have small, wide-set pedals that most cyclists do not use as they travel entirely on battery power. The bikes move at up to 30 miles an hour, with a range of 50 miles on a fully charged battery.

Best Buy has recently released electric bike models for sale at many of its outlets in the Seattle and Portland metro areas, some for as little as $899.

3. Electric bikes are more energy-efficient and easier to charge than electric cars. According to the Sightline Institute's Durning,

Simple physics favor e-bikes over e-cars. Bicycles, even ones loaded with batteries, weigh less than their riders. Electric cars, in contrast, weigh many multiples as much as their drivers. Consequently, most of e-bikes’ battery charge can be spent moving the mass of the rider, but most of electric cars’ charge must be spent moving the bulk of the car itself. What’s more, part of e-bikes’ energy comes from leg muscles, again reducing the required battery power. In auto parlance, e-bikes have human-electric hybrid drives.

Despite these trends that favor an explosion of electric bike production in the urban US (some estimates predict sales of 1 million e-bikes annually by 2016), there are four obstacles that stand in the way of a truly viable electric bike culture.

1. Immature Technology - relative to electric cars, e-bikes still have a long way to go before the technology of installing, charging, and cleaning the bicycles' batteries is seamlessly integrated and convenient for consumers, as DL Byron pointed out on the e-bike blog Bike Hugger. 
2. Bike Culture - In Asian and Northern European cities, bikes are ubiquitous forms of transportation, nearly as commonplace as automobiles in many. However, in North America, bicycles are seldom used for purposes other than recreation. Especially in the urban Northwest, the local bike culture has defined itself in opposition to the automobile, and its point of pride is that bicycles are "trendy" because they are hard work to commute with using only muscle energy. The individualism and identity that come with car ownership in American culture also work heavily against electric bikes.
3. Inefficient Distribution - There is a very segregated bicycle sales market in the US - the high end that sells racing and commuter bikes, comprising 25% of all sales, and the low end selling primarily childrens and recreational or mountain bikes, comprising the other 75%. Neither sector has adapted to the rise of e-bike technology, and as such very few American bike shops today have the technology or expertise to help customers with their electric bikes. 
4. Safety - Few American cities have provided the bicycle infrastructure needed to make e-bikes a viable option for most commuters. According to Jonathan Maus of the Portland bike blog BikePortland, “Our current lack of a connected, separated, and comfortable bike network makes many people afraid to even try biking — and simply giving them motors won’t change their minds.”

According to the Sightline Institute's Durning, the market contexts of electric bikes are very different in China and the US, and therefore expanding the American market and its associated infrastructure has very different policy implications.

The economic context of e-bikes is radically different in China than in the Northwest. In China, most buyers of electric bikes are stepping up in vehicular speed and comfort from heavy, low-performance bicycles. They are opting for electric bikes not in place of cars but in place of bicycles, motorcycles, or scooters. In the North America, e-bike buyers are stepping down in vehicular speed and comfort from the automobile. (Actually, they’re mostly buying an additional vehicle, to use in place of their car some off the time.)

Electric bikes, as the forerunners of electric cars and trucks, have tremendous potential, but they’re unlikely to win more than a toe-hold in a marketplace long dominated by petroleum-powered vehicles. Unless public policy makes petroleum-powered vehicles far less attractive, as China did for motorcycles. Petroleum is just too phenomenally effective and (still) cheap. Electric bikes will inch upward in market share in the Northwest, becoming less like novelties and more like regular bikes in their prevalence. But they will not sweep through the population as they have in China, unless we act through public policy to make their fossil-fueled competitors less competitive and cycling in general much more attractive. Specifically, we can:

• Enact climate policies that put a price on carbon through a carbon tax or a fair cap and trade system.
• Make dramatic progress in threading a complete network of continuous, separate, named, signed, and lighted bikeways through our communities, so that cyclists (pedal and electric) are shielded from auto traffic.

SF Bay's Electric Vehicle Charging Network Receives a Huge Dose of Funding

According to a recent New York Times article, the San Francisco-based venture capital firm Better Place has committed an additional $350 million to research and development for its network of charging stations for electric vehicles, such as the network under development for the Bay Area. This new investment brings Better Place's total investment in the charging station networks to nearly $1.4 billion, in addition to $200 million in federal stimulus funding earmarked specifically for California. Of this amount, $700 million has already been allocated. This funding will complete research and development on project sites in Israel and Denmark, where the Better Place charging stations are scheduled to become publicly available in early 2011. 


The Israeli-born entrepreneur and chief executive of Better Place, Shai Agassi, has framed his massive investment in the Bay Area charging network in terms of innovation and economic competitiveness:

“We’ve demonstrated that our network is deployable,” Mr. Agassi said. “We’re ready for a big breakthrough, and there is not one country that doesn’t need to get off oil.”

Often compared to early efforts by Google and Microsoft to change the world of personal computing, Better Place faces major operational hurdles to enacting its electric charging networks, most especially in the heavily auto-oriented United States. If Agassi's investments in California and other innovative regions are successful, 

"consumers would buy electric vehicles made by the big automakers but get the batteries from Better Place and pay a fee according to the distance they drive. The blueprint calls for thousands of conventional charge points, as well as switching stations where a robotic device could replace a battery in less time than it takes to fill a tank of gas. These stations are needed because batteries have a range of only about 100 miles...and recharging takes up to five hours. Changing batteries en route would make long journeys more convenient."

Major questions still remain about the source of the vehicle charging networks' electricity. If the source is a renewable fuel, such as solar, hydropower, or wind energy, the charging network has great potential for reducing the carbon emissions from personal vehicle use. However, if the source is a conventional fossil fuel, as is more likely in most countries, the net carbon savings of these electric vehicles - regardless of how commercially popular they may become - could be negligible. Furthermore, the lithium ion batteries powering new models like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt themselves have large carbon footprints involved in the mining and manufacture of their components. The impacts of these supply chain processes is still in need of intensive investigation.

SF Bay Area to Build the Nation's First Electric Vehicle Charging Network

Electric vehicles have been identified as a crucial technology for reducing the carbon footprint of our nation's fleets, above all because they produce no greenhouse gas emissions.

Evergreen Fleets has defined electric vehicles as the preferred option for "neighborhood vehicles" (NEVs) designed for short trips in their Best Practices section, due to the current market shortage of vehicles capable of traveling on freeways. This market shortage is poised to dramatically change in the coming months, as the Nissan Leaf (fully electric) and the Chevy Volt (plug-in hybrid-electric) are introduced as affordable, freeway-capable models.

However, even when new plug-in hybrid and fully electric models are introduced to the market, the question of the availability of an adequate charging infrastructure remains.

According to a recent EPA study, the Chevy Volt would only achieve a fuel efficiency of 48 miles per gallon, assuming its electric battery has been fully charged. The fully-electric battery has a range of 40 miles, after which a gas-electric generator kicks in for the remaining 300 miles until the vehicle needs to be refueled. While the vehicle is in its fully electric mode, its fuel efficiency approaches 100 miles per gallon.  After the initial 40 mile range of fully electric power, the vehicle's efficiency drops dramatically, bringing its aggregate fuel efficiency to the figure of 48 m.p.g. cited above. While the 40-mile range of fully-electric power covers the average commuting distance for over 75% of Americans, to be truly practical, an inter-metropolitan network of electric charging stations outside of the home must be created to facilitate this vehicle's optimal fuel efficiency range.

This is even more  true of the Nissan Leaf, whose fully electric range is only 100 miles and lacks a gas-electric powertrain - when the Leaf runs out of electric charge, the driver has no choice but to pull over and search for the nearest charging station. An 8 hour charge is needed for the Leaf, suggesting that to be truly effective and convenient for drivers it must be charged periodically throughout the day.

A Bay Area venture capital firm, Better Place, in November 2008 committed to a $1 billion investment for the first electric vehicle charging network in the United States. The Mayors of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose each threw their support behind the network partnership. The network is anticipated to become operational in 2012.

In response to the regional plans for this electric vehicle charging network, the City of San Francisco recently announced a change to its building code that would require new buildings to have an outlet for charging electric vehicles. As a New York Times article pointed out, there is serious concern among public utilities that the rapidly expanding demand for electricity due to the charging of electric vehicles could overwhelm local electric grids if vehicles like the Nissan Leaf become widely popular. City officials anticipate having 60 charging stations operational within San Francisco by the end of 2010 and more than 1,000 throughout the Bay Area by 2011. In addition to venture capital funding, large portions of this network will be funded by a $200 million subsidy from Obama's stimulus package.

Two key concerns over the introduction of this electric vehicle charging grid are 1) the true reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, which depend on the electricity's source and 2) the popularity of electric vehicles in regions outside of the relatively wealthy Bay Area (a 240watt home charging kit for an electric vehicle can run up to $1,500).