Electric and bike transportation in Firenze, Italia (Florence, Italy)

This is an electric recharging station for electric scooters. (Firenze, Italia, July 2009)



Traffic lanes that can work for everyone! Pedestrian sidewalk, bike lane (non-motorized), parking, motorized vehicle lanes (to far left, beyond parked cars)- with trees! (Firenze, Italia, July 2009)



All electric car parked in Firenze, Italia, July 2009. Small car but great for small streets! Licensed and street legal.

I am regularly amazed by the belated recognition of the obvious. Seemingly otherwise sane people tell me that using cell phones, texting and other distractions including drinking coffee, eating food, changing the radio station...... while driving are not hazardous distractions. Oh what denial we can accept. I do it myself. I don't talk on the phone at all while driving in DC yet in Maryland I will answer the phone and try to pull over as quick as possible. Sometimes the conversation is over before finding a pullover spot, but I can attest to the fact that it is a distraction. And I can walk and eat pizza at the same time. According to the article below from The Washington Post, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration withheld from the public research showing serious risks to all drivers posed by drivers using cellphones while driving. the Post cites sources who said the info was withheld so as not to anger Congress. Hmmmmmm....... smells like money to me ........... my safety versus cell phone text culture..... Having recently driven a number of miles at high speeds, I am vividly aware of the small fraction of reality that keeps the car on it's path, able to avoid disaster. The NHTSA research showed at least 240,000 car accidents in 2002 due to cell phone use. That is way too many and avoidable. July 21, 2009 Driven to Distraction U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving By MATT RICHTEL In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel. They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America's roadways. But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers' agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress. On Tuesday, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by two consumer advocacy groups, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents. The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen provided a copy to The New York Times, which is publishing the documents on its Web site. In interviews, the officials who withheld the research offered their fullest explanation to date. The former head of the highway safety agency said he was urged to withhold the research to avoid antagonizing members of Congress who had warned the agency to stick to its mission of gathering safety data but not to lobby states. Critics say that rationale and the failure of the Transportation Department, which oversees the highway agency, to more vigorously pursue distracted driving has cost lives and allowed to blossom a culture of behind-the-wheel multitasking. "We're looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up," said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety. The group petitioned for the information after The Los Angeles Times wrote about the research last year. Mother Jones later published additional details. The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002. The researchers also shelved a draft letter they had prepared for Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta to send, warning states that hands-free laws might not solve the problem. That letter said that hands-free headsets did not eliminate the serious accident risk. The reason: a cellphone conversation itself, not just holding the phone, takes drivers' focus off the road, studies showed. The research mirrors other studies about the dangers of multitasking behind the wheel. Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content. The three-person research team based the fatality and accident estimates on studies that quantified the risks of distracted driving, and an assumption that 6 percent of drivers were talking on the phone at a given time. That figure is roughly half what the Transportation Department assumes to be the case now. More precise data does not exist because most police forces have not collected long-term data connecting cellphones to accidents. That is why the researchers called for the broader study with 10,000 or more drivers. "We nevertheless have concluded that the use of cellphones while driving has contributed to an increasing number of crashes, injuries and fatalities," according to a "talking points" memo the researchers compiled in July 2003. It added: "We therefore recommend that the drivers not use wireless communication devices, including text messaging systems, when driving, except in an emergency." Dr. Jeffrey Runge, then the head of the highway safety agency, said he grudgingly decided not to publish the Mineta letter and policy recommendation because of larger political considerations. At the time, Congress had warned the agency not to use its research to lobby states. Dr. Runge said transit officials told him he could jeopardize billions of dollars of its financing if Congress perceived the agency had crossed the line into lobbying. The fate of the research was discussed during a high-level meeting at the transportation secretary's office. The meeting included Dr. Runge, several staff members with the highway safety agency and John Flaherty, Mr. Mineta's chief of staff. Mr. Flaherty recalls that the group decided not to publish the research because the data was too inconclusive. He recalled that Dr. Runge "indicated that the data was incomplete and there was going to be more research coming." He recalled summing up his position as, the agency "should make a decision as to whether they wanted to wait for more data." But Dr. Runge recalled feeling that the issue was dire and needed public attention. "I really wanted to send a letter to governors telling them not to give a pass to hands-free laws," said Dr. Runge, whose staff spent months preparing a binder of materials for their presentation. His broader goal, he said, was to educate people about the dangers of distracted driving. "Based on the research, there was a possibility of this becoming a really big problem," he said. But "my advisers upstairs said we should not poke a finger in the eye of the appropriations committee," he recalled. He said Mr. Flaherty asked him, "Do we have enough evidence right now to not create enemies among all the stakeholders?" Those stakeholders, Dr. Runge said, were the House Appropriations Committee and groups that might influence it, notably voters who multitask while driving and, to a much smaller degree, the cellphone industry. Mr. Mineta, who left as transportation secretary in 2006, said he was unaware of the meeting. "I don't think it ever got to my desk," he said of the research. Mr. Ditlow, from the Center for Auto Safety, said the officials' explanations for withholding the research raised concerns. He said the research did not constitute lobbying of states. And he said it was consistent with the highway safety agency's research in other areas, like seat belts. Mr. Ditlow said that putting fears of the House panel ahead of public safety was an abdication of the agency's responsibility. "No public health and safety agency should allow its research to be suppressed for political reasons," he said. Doing so "will cause deaths and injuries on the highways." State Senator Joe Simitian of California, who tried from 2001 to 2005 to pass a hands-free cellphone law over objections of the cellphone industry, said the unpublished research would have helped him convince his colleagues that cellphones cause serious — deadly — distraction. "Years went by when lives could have been saved," said Mr. Simitian, who in 2006 finally pushed through a hands-free law that took effect last year. The highway safety agency, rather than commissioning a study with 10,000 drivers, handled one involving 100 cars. That study, done with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, placed cameras inside cars to monitor drivers for more than a year. It found that drivers using a hand-held device were at 1.3 times greater risk of a crash or near crash, and at three times the risk when dialing compared with other drivers. Not all the research went unpublished. The safety agency put on its Web site an annotated bibliography of more than 150 scientific articles that showed how a cellphone conversation while driving taxes the brain's processing power, impairing reaction time. But the bibliography included only a list of the articles, not the one-page summaries of each one written by the researchers. Chris Monk, who researched the bibliography for 18 months, said the exclusion of the summaries took the teeth out of the findings. "It became almost laughable," Mr. Monk said. "What they wound up finally publishing was a stripped-out summary." Mr. Monk and Mike Goodman, a division head at the safety agency who led the research project, theorize that the agency might have felt pressure from the cellphone industry. Mr. Goodman said the industry frequently checked in with him about the project and his progress. (He said the industry knew about the research because he had worked with it to gather some data). But he could offer no proof of the industry's influence. Mr. Flaherty said he was not contacted or influenced by the industry. The agency's current policy is that people should not use cellphones while driving. Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the agency, said it did not, and would not, publish the researchers' fatality estimates because they were not definitive enough. He said the other research was compiled as background material for the agency, not for the public. "There is no report to publish," he said. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

New Ventures Truck Farms' Online Orders to Town

Ahhh... convenience...... The Haul That Helps the Small New Ventures Truck Farms' Online Orders to Town By Emma Brown Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, July 22, 2009 Twice a month, Laurie Smith and Mark Reinhardt load their refrigerated cargo van with stew beef and steaks, chickens and eggs, honey and salsa. All of it is produced by their Rappahannock and Culpeper County neighbors, and on this particular day all of it is headed to Northern Virginia, where customers who have placed online orders await the van's arrival at one of six scheduled drop-off points. "I don't have to go to the farmers market or the farm anymore," said Mary Malina, whose home on a leafy Annandale lane doubles as a drop-off location. "The food comes to me." Smith and Reinhardt's year-old business, the Local Flavor, is one in a wave of online enterprises cropping up across the country to connect eaters such as Malina, who want local, farm-fresh food without farmers markets' lines and limited hours, with farmers who would rather spend time working their fields than hawking their wares. "Most farmers don't know much and certainly don't care much about marketing," said Cliff Miller, owner of Mount Vernon Farm, whose pastured pork and grass-fed beef and lamb account for the bulk of the Local Flavor's sales. "If somebody can communicate with the customers in urban areas and ideally even come and pick up at the farm and take it to the urban areas, that's a big deal." Locally grown food accounts for less than 1 percent of total U.S. food sales, according to the Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, which hosted its first conference on local food systems on June 26. But demand is growing. The market research firm Packaged Facts predicts local food sales will rise from $4 billion in 2002 to $7 billion in 2011. According to the USDA, there are 70 percent more farmers markets than there were a decade ago. About 12,500 farms offer community-supported agriculture (CSA) memberships, in which customers buy shares in the farm, assuming some of the farmer's risk and receiving weekly or monthly boxes of produce in return. Demand for local food is growing so fast, in fact, that it exceeds supply, said University of Maryland agricultural economist Jim Hanson. That, he said, is encouraging producers and eaters to seek new channels -- including virtual farmers markets such as the Local Flavor and On the Gourmet, a Vienna business that launched last year -- for getting food from farm to fork. The Local Flavor was born in April 2008 when Miller, who had been taking online orders for four years, handed over his customer list to Smith and Reinhardt, who have so far kept their day jobs as a freelance marketer and Web site developer. They recruited eight other farmers to sell their products, which vary according to the season, through a common Web site. For farmers, filling Web orders is less risky than traveling to a market where they never know what's going to sell, said Joel Salatin of Virginia's storied Polyface Farm, who earns half of his revenue delivering orders made online to the D.C. area. "This way it is nonspeculative," he said. "Everything is presold before we go." Smith and Reinhardt deliver to Warrenton and Fredericksburg in addition to making the Northern Virginia run, which includes stops in Reston, Sterling, Alexandria, Arlington, Annandale and -- as of June -- Fairfax City. More than 1,200 families are on their e-mail list. There is no restriction on how often or how much they buy, and about 100 place orders in any given month, Smith said. Orders average $100, she said, but range from $9 for two dozen eggs to $500 for weeks' worth of beef, chicken and lamb. Meat is by far the biggest draw, and Mount Vernon's thick-cut, uncured bacon -- more sweet than smoky -- is difficult to keep in stock. The Remington Pepper Co.'s salsa has also earned a following; the chipotle variety is made from home-smoked local peppers, the "gourmet" variety from a blend of herbs and spices, including ginger. "I just kind of fell in love," said Vicky Reiner, an Arlington court reporter who buys a half-dozen jars each month. Sarah Fox, who hosts the new Fairfax City drop-off spot, said she spends several hours a day procuring and preparing seasonal, local meals, sometimes wrestling with how to use unusual foods that her husband has a habit of ordering. ("Stew meat, in summer?" she asks.) Echoing arguments articulated by Michael Pollan in his best-selling book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," she said she goes to such lengths because the food is more healthful, is more environmentally friendly and tastes better than food from the grocery store. "Supporting local farmers is an idea that's important to me," said Fox, who grew up on a Virginia farm. There is no agreed-upon definition for "local," but Smith and Reinhardt aim to serve farmers and buyers who live within 100 miles of one another. The two either collect a commission from the participating farmers or buy the products outright and resell them at a markup. Customers pay a flat $4.95 delivery fee, plus a premium for food that's produced with high quality rather than low price in mind, Smith said. A grass-fed porterhouse steak, for example, costs $18 a pound, nearly twice as much as the grain-fed supermarket variety. "It's really worth it," said Cherry Gaffney of Old Town, picking up filet mignon on a quiet residential street in Alexandria to celebrate her husband's return home after a year-long tour of duty in Iraq. "What price," she asked, "do you put on good health?" Similar businesses are taking hold here in the Washington area and across the country, offering fewer choices, perhaps, than traditional food-comes-to-you services such as Peapod and Washington's Green Grocers but a stronger allegiance to local farmers. On the Gourmet, a mobile local- and fine-foods business housed in a 24-foot truck, was started last year by a trio who met while working together at the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts. Sara Guerre said she and Libby Rector Snipe shared a love of food and were considering starting a catering business when they were inspired by the scads of food trucks popping up across the country, from Austin's mobile creperie to a dessert truck in Manhattan. They bought a 1989 Utilimaster, and Chris Guerre, Sara's husband, joined them in outfitting it with hardwood floors, custom shelves, a refrigerator and a freezer. "We thought we could have everything that the farmers market has, and more, in one truck," said Rector Snipe. A main draw is meat, said Chris Guerre, including Loudoun County lamb and grass-fed bison and beef from Culpeper County's Buffalo Ridge Farm. Ice cream and milk come from a Pennsylvania creamery, and bloody mary mix hails from West Virginia. They sell a little bit of produce: salad greens, okra and peppers from the Guerres' 800-square-foot backyard garden in Vienna. Not all of On the Gourmet's products are local; customers can pick up foie gras and white fig jam from France along with other high-end imports. But the three have found that local food is what customers want, said Rector Snipe, and they have jettisoned foreign products when they found closer-to-home alternatives. Truffle oil from Italy, for example, has been replaced with a North Carolina variety. It has been a successful strategy so far: The trio opened for business in May 2008 at farmers markets in Great Falls and Alexandria, then started offering online ordering and biweekly home delivery to a dozen customers when the markets closed for winter. In August, they plan to make deliveries weekly, hoping to tap customers who are too busy for farmers markets, and to open a storefront in downtown Vienna. In Richmond last November, restaurateur Molly Harris launched Fall Line Farms, a for-profit virtual farmers market. She started with 25 customers, but by December, that had quintupled to 125 families. Now, more than 300 families order food from 40 local producers, who deliver weekly to drop-off spots around town. Michele Credle of Chesapeake, Va., enlisted about 200 customers for her nonprofit buyers' club, Essentially Organic, which took its first orders in May. Georgia entrepreneur Eric Wagoner has licensed Locallygrown.net, the software he wrote for a virtual farmers market in Athens, to about 100 other markets, most in the Southeast and Midwest. Eleven food-buying clubs have launched using open-source software developed by the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, which started in 2003 and now boasts between $70,000 and $90,000 in monthly sales. And in the past year, clubs have started in Cleveland; Des Moines; Lehigh, Pa.; central Massachusetts; and Niagara Falls, Ontario, each with a slightly different business model. The Local Flavor is still young and is not, as Smith put it, "a one-stop shop." So far this year, the selection of produce has been thin because of the unusually rainy spring. In June, the only vegetable for sale was an heirloom variety of cucumber from Whipple Farms in Rixeyville, Va. But July's warm days and clear skies have nudged the growing season along, said Smith, and on their next trip to Northern Virginia, the pair expect to offer locally grown peaches, heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, peppers and potatoes. "This is a seedling," Reinhardt said of the business. "We're cultivating it."

Instead of complaining about the farm smell, the farm could raise property values! NY Times July 1, 2009 Organic Farms as Subdivision Amenities By ALEC APPELBAUM SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. — The bewildered Iowan who converted his farm into a ballpark in "Field of Dreams" in 1989 might reverse the move today. From Vermont to central California, developers are creating subdivisions around organic farms to attract buyers. If you plant it, these developers believe, they will buy. Increasingly, subdivisions, usually master-planned developments at which buyers buy home sites or raw land, have been treating farms as an amenity. "There are currently at least 200 projects that include agriculture as a key community component," said Ed McMahon, a senior fellow with the Urban Land Institute. In 2001, investors in a stalled project with an agriculture component outside Boise, Idaho, recruited Frank Martin to take over their development. Mr. Martin had been a manager at Prairie Crossing, a subdivision built around a working farm in the Chicago suburb of Gray's Lake. By 2008, the 1,756-acre Idaho development had repaid a $12 million loan from the financing arm of General Motors; realized a 61 percent premium on the sale of its sites, compared with similar parcels with no farm nearby; and claimed a $2.8 million pretax profit by selling 785 of 800 lots, while keeping 1,000 acres open. The success of the two developments proved the concept, and like-minded developers around the country are trying it on inactive farmland and even on formerly industrial land. "Open space improves the return for a developer," Mr. McMahon said. "We have 16,000 subdivisions around golf courses, where developers found they could charge a lot premium of 25 to 50 percent over comparable tract subdivision. But most people who live on golf courses do not play golf." The latest variation on this is blending in working agriculture, Mr. McMahon said. Living with a farm, he noted, can bring a buyer permanent views, wholesome activities for children, access to walking and riding trails and inclusion in an epicurean club. Here in South Burlington, David Scheuer, a developer, runs a firm called Retrovest that specializes in pedestrian-friendly subdivisions. He is adapting the Prairie Crossing model with a 220-acre project called South Village, where he eventually hopes to sell 334 homes at prices of $200,000 to nearly $700,000. A 16-acre segment of the property, which was not previously used for farming, is now producing lettuce, garlic and other crops, which are harvested for sale to homeowners and others from the area who have joined a local community-supported agriculture group. "Agriculture can be the caboose on the train," Mr. Scheuer said, "and housing can be the engine." Once he is selling 20 homes a year, he said, he hopes to pay the salary of a full-time farmer. At the 220-home Serenbe project near Atlanta's airport, the cachet of local produce has been added to retiree-friendly businesses, including galleries, a bed-and-breakfast and three restaurants. Steve Nygren, an Atlanta restaurant impresario, started the project on his 900-acre farm. "We preserved forest and pasture, and there were 20 acres left for an organic farm, and we also have a large wildflower meadow," Mr. Nygren said. "We've set up the design so 90 percent of the houses back up to one of those natural amenities. We are selling our lots at a premium that's probably three times what the raw lot is." Mr. Nygren has focused Serenbe's second phase on "edible landscaping," he said. "At street corners there are blueberry bushes, fig bushes, peach trees and spotted apple trees." And in more rural areas, developers are buying big tracts of ranchland and selling small lots to buyers. David Hamilton, a principal in Qroe Farm Preservation Development, is pursuing this approach at the sprawling Bundoran Farm subdivision outside Charlottesville, Va. "We go through a mapping process to see functional agricultural units, if they are good for apples or cattle or whatever, then see where they go together. Qroe (pronounced "crow") leases some of the land to cattle ranchers and orchard managers. A buyer of a home site hires a builder from a developer-approved list. Qroe is marketing lots of under four acres for less than $400,000, Mr. Hamilton said. "You're buying two acres but access to 2,000 acres," he said. Grady Lewis, a Virginia native who closed on his 2.67-acre lot in 2007 and moved into his 1,800-square-foot house at Bundoran with his wife, Diane, this spring, responded to Qroe's idea of preserving "rural quality." When all the house lots have been sold, the rental income from the farmers, which currently goes to the developer, will go to the homeowners' association. "Beyond it being great to see 300 head of Angus scattered across the acres," Mr. Lewis said, "it's a cash-flow issue." Farm-focused developers must juggle financing a few houses at a time with cultivating crops on a yearly cycle, so many rent farmland to professionals. Mr. Scheuer hired David Miskell, a veteran Vermont organic farmer with a white beard, to help convert the property's damaged soil. Working organically, which Mr. Miskell translates to "a lot of manure," he and two hired farmers replenished the soil with enough nitrogen to grow greens, root crops and sunflowers this year. "Upfront costs are high to build fertility, but I doubt they are any higher than any golf course," Mr. Miskell said. "Mainly, we are growing healthy organic food for healthy homeowners." Gus Burti, who lives with his wife, Maggie, at South Village, says the farm helped clinch their purchase after a two-year search of the area. "We used to live on a golf course in North Carolina and wanted to come back to Vermont," he said. "My wife loves to cook, and we like that it's organic." Because a farm's open space takes land from the tax rolls, a developer often donates some land for public use. Hidden Springs sold a parcel to the local school district for $10,000, and Retrovest deeded South Burlington some land with road frontage for a soccer field and playground. But developers stress that their housing units should stand on their own for the idea of the farm-as-amenity to click. Mr. Scheuer, driving around a competing subdivision with nondescript open space, is convinced that despite the work that goes into a farm, it adds real value to a development. Scoffing at the look of the traditional development, he said, "If I have to do this to make money, I'll find some other way to spend my time." Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

William Jordon on the case - $11.4M "View 14" Development Bailout

Seems William Jordon was a little ahead of the Post on details of developers with their hand in the till....... see Good Ol' Socialist Capitalism from May 26, 2009 --- On Wed, 2/25/09, William Jordan <whj@melanet.com> wrote: From: William Jordan <whj@melanet.com> Subject: [columbia_heights] $11.4M "View 14" Development Bailout To: southcolumbiaheights@yahoogroups.com, columbia_heights@yahoogroups.com Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 9:30 AM VIEW 14 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 2009". http://www.dccounci l.washington. dc.us/images/ 00001/2009010816 1933.pdf When I going through the schedule to find the time and date of the DDOT Performance & Budget Hearing, I came across a hearing for a bailout plan for the View 14 Condo development at 14th St & Florida Ave. NW for $5.7M or $11.4M is opportunity costs are included(such projects were pedaled as increasing the tax base not taking away from it.). My first question has to do with the affordable housing component of the bailout. The legislation talks about setting aside 6000sqft as affordable to those making up to 80% of AMI or about $72K/yr. I searched through the PUD hearing transcript and found that 15,000sqft was proffered for the affordable component. Is the 6000sqft in addition to the 15,000sqft or is it a reduction? My second question has to do with the approach to this bailout. I've noticed that tax waviers from real estate and transfer taxes is commonly being used to achieve public policy goals. Usually, this has been none for non-profits and public/private partnerships, but more and more for purely commercial developments. My question , is anyone aware any legislation like this in the pipeline or on the bookss to support the development of our small business retail corridors such as the 1400 block of Park Rd., 14th St North of the Tivoli, 11th St or Georgia Ave? Based on presentations I've seen I kow that the business on the 1400 Block of Park or the small businesses going into DC USA could use such a boost. William __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Files | Photos | Links | Database | Polls | Calendar URL to this page on the web: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/columbia_heights/ Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe Recent Activity 6 New Members Visit Your Group Give Back Yahoo! for Good Get inspired by a good cause. Y! Toolbar Get it Free! easy 1-click access to your groups. Yahoo! Groups Start a group in 3 easy steps. Connect with others. . __,_._,___