Looks like they’re now allowing liberals on the teevee. Excellent news.

Incidentally, for a great example of what I was talking about in the post below about choosing how to allocate space on our streets, check out Streetsblog’s photos of the makeover Broadway’s getting in New York City — fewer traffic lanes, more of everything else. That kind of treatment isn’t right for every street or for every city, but it’s the kind of thing that should be considered much more widely and at least be in the mix. It’s crazy to dedicate so many resources to car transportation that everyone goes everywhere in cars, and then throw up our hands and decide that because everyone’s driving everywhere we have no choice but to dedicate more resources to cars.

NYC is a pedestrian town. If it apportions its streets accordingly, suburban commuters will find themselves more inclined to take commuter rail into town and suburban politicians will find that agitating for better commuter rail service — rather than for more highways — is their new transportation funding priority.

An interesting Boston Globe Magazine article by Billy Baker looks at state-of-the-art information about how to design streets that are safe and inviting for pedestrians. I understand the journalistic considerations behind doing it this way, but I kind of wish Baker hadn’t led with the nutty-sounding Mondermanite prescriptions for eliminating pedestrian-vehicle separation and road striping altogether. I think those are interesting ideas that people should learn more about, but at the same time it’s worth emphasizing that the bulk of the relevant considerations here are pretty much commonsense.

But to make a long story short, a town or city needs to decide whether or not they really think that maximizing vehicle speed is the right priority for the design of their streets. If you decide to make it the priority, then you’ll wind up with a city that’s bad for pedestrians — narrow sidewalks, wider roads to cross, walk signs that only work if you press a button, intersections where walkers defer to turning traffic, etc. — and at the same time you’ll have fast-moving vehicles that tend to collide with human beings in a relatively deadly manner. If you decide not to make it the priority, then you get the reverse — wide sidewalks, narrow road crossings, adequate walk signals, and intersections where turning traffic defers to pedestrians. Cars will move slower through your city and there will be fewer car-person collisions and those that do occur will be less lethal.

There are some exotic considerations that get a bit weird, but the basic shape of things, as Baker makes clear down the road, is pretty simple. And to me it’s a pretty easy choice. Shifting resources in a pedestrian-friendly direction helps save lives directly. It’s also good for the environment and boosts public health. If you live in a city with a walkable downtown, it might be instructive to go to a block that has heavy automobile and pedestrian traffic and just look at the amount of space dedicated to cars versus what’s dedicated to people. Even in places like New York and Washington, DC where only a minority of city residents commute by car to work, more space is dedicated to the cars than to the people. And in DC, the central business district dedicates almost no space whatsoever to bikes. Not only are those choices that I think are mistaken, but most people barely even realize that the choices are being made at all — but it’s not like it would require magic for the central business district in DC to feature bike lanes on all streets, wider sidewalks, and fewer traffic lanes. And you can bet that people’s preferences about commuting methods would shift in response to a shift in space allocation.

Victor Davis Hanson isn’t happy:

The theme of the movie — when George Clooney was not dodging a bankrupt media or Saddam’s poison gas mortars — was that we had left brave Shiites hanging to be butchered by Saddam’s henchmen, and apparently were unwilling to do the right thing and remove a murderous dictator and try to help the people of Iraq. The only common denominator between not doing enough in Three Kings and doing too much in Redacted, Syriana, Rendition, etc. …seems to have been that whatever the U.S. did was always wrong — whether too little or too much.

Seeing as how neither Syriana nor Rendition depict Iraq in any way, and nobody involved in the production of Three Kings was involved in Redacted I find the hypocrisy charge here a bit difficult to grasp. If it were actually the case that Syriana was a film about the US “doing too much” to remove Saddam Hussein from power, then Hanson would be on firmer ground, but it very clearly isn’t. That said, even if Syriana were about what VDH seems to think it’s about, the point would be that the common thread is a lack of genuine concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people. During the first Gulf War that lack of concern manifested itself in things like encouraging the Shiites to rise up against Saddam and then agreeing to let Saddam crush their rebellion. In the case of the second war we can see evidence of lack of concern in everything from the failure to do population security from the outset, the military’s lack of quantitative metrics of how many civilian casualties are inflicted by combat operations, our horrible handling of the refugee situation, and now our government’s apparent determination to ignore the stated views of all the major Iraqi political factions on the propriety of an open-ended American military presence.

I just got an email from an advocacy group about what they rightly term “The Elephant Still Very Much in the Room” — the fact that it was one month ago today that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he wanted the United States to negotiate a timetable for withdrawing forces from Iraq that would have its endpoint somewhere in 2010. As readers will be aware, I favored taking steps along those lines before Maliki ever said he did and still think that would be the right thing to do even if Maliki were saying he wants an open-ended American presence. But I simply do not understand how the anti-timetable argument stays viable in the face of that particular turn in Iraqi politics, especially because Maliki’s main domestic opponents tend to be even firmer on their desire for an American withdrawal.

In a sane world, Maliki’s call would have transformed the Iraq debate in U.S. politics. But in part because it’s not a sane world and in part because of, I guess, tactical failures on the part of Democratic Party politicians it doesn’t seem to have done so yet. But really it was a huge deal that got some coverage at the time but still hasn’t had the sort of profound impact it deserves.