It's Time for Cities to Favor People, Not Cars by Keith Barry

Los Angeles and countless other cities - Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta come to mind - are far more friendly to cars than people, having been built according to land use policies that all but put people behind the wheel. It's an unsustainable model, and it must change.

That was the message transportation planner Timothy Papandreou brought to "Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Mobility," a symposium sponsored by the Art Center College of Design. The school could be called the Harvard of transportation design, and two-day conference drew experts in fields as varied as urban planning and aerospace engineering to discuss where the future of mobility lies.

Papandreou called for an end to "state, federal, and local land use policies that are literally forcing people to have to drive" and told Wired.com we're on the cusp of an inevitable "mode shift" away from individual car ownership toward a greater reliance on mass transit and sustainable transport.
"We're already at that crossroads," he said.

Papandreou is a former transportation planning manager for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and he's currently with the San Francisco Municipal Railway, so he's got some idea what he's talking about when he says too many big cities favor cars over people.

"There's this cycle of automobile dependency," he said. "You have to have a place to park at home, a place to park at work, and a place to park at retail establishments." In an absurd "market distortion," cities have become places where "cars have a right to housing and people don't."

That distortion, he says, is the result of years of increasing capacity for automobiles and shifting funds away from alternative forms of transportation. It's brought us to the point where most Americans consider automobile ownership an essential key to a productive, fulfilling life. Papandreou suggests a sea change in how we view personal mobility.

Car-friendly policies have created a "carbon shadow" that vehicles can't escape -- the result of "all of the regional consequences of all these policies and collective actions," he says. Instead of the "manufactured value" of personal car ownership, we should adopt "demand management" by creating disincentives for driving that will, in turn, encourage people to walk, ride mass transit, carpool and use other means of getting around.

In Papandreou's eyes, freeways are wasted space. Consider this: 200 people can jam the I-405 riding along in 177 cars (the average ratio). Or they could use just two lanes in three city buses, or have plenty of personal space around them if they rode bikes.

"All that road space could become something else," he said, stressing that the only way to achieve that vision is with a total "eco rehab" that avoids the sort of ineffective piecemeal programs that only survive due to their political popularity. The Obama Administration's economic stimulus package could be a first step toward that future.

"It's a down payment to a massive mortgage," Papandreou said. "I'm hoping that the stimulus gets the ball rolling."

Is Twitter useful after all? by Roderick Jones

Announcing $35M in new funding last Friday Twitter was one of the few bright spots in a collapsing economy. The micro-blogging service has been attracting increasing attention within the mainstream, as the political classes adopt the service – most notably, congressman Pete Hokestra (R-Mich.)who produced a stream of tweets detailing his location as he traveled from Andrew’s Air Force base to Baghdad and back. Besides the disbelieving head shaking this particular series of political tweets attracted, it does highlight the amorphous nature of Twitter -- it isn’t clear what it really is.

Certainly, the revenue model remains unclear, as does its true utility or even what the unintended consequences of using the service may be. In a National Security sense Twitter emerged as a powerful networked communications platform during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when a stream of tweets marked #Mumbai (# being the global tagging system Twitter employs) gave a seemingly real-time commentary on events as they unfolded in Mumbai. Similarly, Twitter has been used to communicate the message and activity surrounding the riots in Greece using the #Griot tag. These are examples of the network effect working with a rapid communications platform and developing a powerful narrative from many different observation points. The style is anarchic but increasingly compelling.

Therefore, one argument regarding the long-term use of Twitter, in the National Security space at least, is that Twitter in conjunction with other tools, continues the trend of making ordinary citizens active producers of potentially actionable intelligence. This equally applies to Microsoft Photosynth and the meshing of user created digital platforms is a future trend, which doesn’t seem too far away. One of Twitter’s more recent high profile moments was the picture of the USAirways plane in the Hudson taken by an ordinary citizen who happened to be on a ferry, which went to the scene. This picture quickly and succinctly explained the situation to any emergency service in the area. This same principal can clearly be globally extended in terms of data and geographic reach. In fact it is the increasing penetration of mobile devices, which would seem to offer a bright future for the Twitter platform.

An area, which the Twitter platform excels in are the tools that can be used to manipulate the information within Twitter. This is where the open feel of the service suggests it somehow has more potential than the well designed social networking platforms such as Facebook. Information is messy and Twitter fits around this principle.

In order to examine Twitter we established a Twitter feed at www.twitter/In_Terrain. The idea behind this was to use the RSS feed Twitter tool TwitterFeed to push content of interest (such as the CT Blog) to a Twitter account and then examine ways in which this could be consumed. The results so far have been impressive. Twitterrific available for Apple products displays the security information feed in a very useful way. Tweetr for windows does a similar thing for Microsoft based systems and TwitterBerry covers Blackberry users. If users join Twitter they can chose to ‘follow’ the In_Terrain feed and receive the same information and potentially reply to specific tweets they find interesting – thus creating the ‘conversation’ Twitter, desires. Similarly, if other security and intelligence focused twitter feeds become apparent the In_Terrain twitter feed can ‘follow’ those conversations – thus beginning the network effect.

Clearly, this is still experimental and there are other avenues to explore with regard to GPS Twitter applications. The aim with the In_Terrain Twitter account is to generate tweets from mainstream information sources as well as the 'lower frequencies'. Starting a National Security focused tweet seems like an interesting idea right now – so I welcome CTBlog readers to ‘join the conversation’ – and please make suggestions for improvements or content additions. Maybe it will even become useful.

It's Time for Cities to Favor People, Not Cars by Keith Barry

Los Angeles and countless other cities - Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta come to mind - are far more friendly to cars than people, having been built according to land use policies that all but put people behind the wheel. It's an unsustainable model, and it must change.

That was the message transportation planner Timothy Papandreou brought to "Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Mobility," a symposium sponsored by the Art Center College of Design. The school could be called the Harvard of transportation design, and two-day conference drew experts in fields as varied as urban planning and aerospace engineering to discuss where the future of mobility lies.

Papandreou called for an end to "state, federal, and local land use policies that are literally forcing people to have to drive" and told Wired.com we're on the cusp of an inevitable "mode shift" away from individual car ownership toward a greater reliance on mass transit and sustainable transport.
"We're already at that crossroads," he said.

Papandreou is a former transportation planning manager for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and he's currently with the San Francisco Municipal Railway, so he's got some idea what he's talking about when he says too many big cities favor cars over people.

"There's this cycle of automobile dependency," he said. "You have to have a place to park at home, a place to park at work, and a place to park at retail establishments." In an absurd "market distortion," cities have become places where "cars have a right to housing and people don't."

That distortion, he says, is the result of years of increasing capacity for automobiles and shifting funds away from alternative forms of transportation. It's brought us to the point where most Americans consider automobile ownership an essential key to a productive, fulfilling life. Papandreou suggests a sea change in how we view personal mobility.

Car-friendly policies have created a "carbon shadow" that vehicles can't escape -- the result of "all of the regional consequences of all these policies and collective actions," he says. Instead of the "manufactured value" of personal car ownership, we should adopt "demand management" by creating disincentives for driving that will, in turn, encourage people to walk, ride mass transit, carpool and use other means of getting around.

In Papandreou's eyes, freeways are wasted space. Consider this: 200 people can jam the I-405 riding along in 177 cars (the average ratio). Or they could use just two lanes in three city buses, or have plenty of personal space around them if they rode bikes.

"All that road space could become something else," he said, stressing that the only way to achieve that vision is with a total "eco rehab" that avoids the sort of ineffective piecemeal programs that only survive due to their political popularity. The Obama Administration's economic stimulus package could be a first step toward that future.

"It's a down payment to a massive mortgage," Papandreou said. "I'm hoping that the stimulus gets the ball rolling."

Will Afghanistan Awake? by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

U.S. Central Command recently announced it will be supporting an indigenous movement opposing al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, similar to the Awakening movement that was central to turning Iraq around. Already, critics are saying it won't work.

Iraq's Anbar Awakening was a collection of Sunni tribesmen, Iraqi nationalists, former insurgents and others united by the goal of driving al Qaeda from their country. Coalition forces gave this movement protection and support at key points, and it was later broadened through the Sons of Iraq, a U.S. initiative authorizing formation of paramilitary organizations.

There are good reasons to think the case for pessimism in Afghanistan is wrong. Four arguments are commonly made suggesting an Afghan Awakening could not succeed: that it would detract from improvements in Afghan security forces, that Afghanistan is too different from Iraq, that the Pashtun tribes would not support an Awakening, and that these efforts could destabilize Afghanistan.

Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay, for example, opposes an Afghan Awakening because he prefers a more formal training process that leads to a more reliable, more professional soldier and Afghan national security force. One problem with this view is that Afghan forces have been slow to develop. Newsweek recently reported that U.S. commanders think Afghan units may not be able to operate independently for another five years. Moreover, there is no forced choice between an Awakening and the development of Afghan forces. Both can be done at once.

One critic arguing that Afghanistan is too different from Iraq for the Awakening to be a relevant model is Spencer Ackerman. He writes at the Washington Independent that while al Qaeda brutally overplayed its hand in Iraq, This isn't anything new for Afghanistan, where al Qaeda, the Taliban and other affiliated groups have existed and operated in these fashions for, in some cases, 30 years.

Is it true the Afghans have grown accustomed to, and thus content with, the brutality of al Qaeda and the Taliban? There have been reports of tribal leaders banding together against them, only to get slaughtered, since al Qaeda and the Taliban enjoy military superiority. The Taliban has also taken to posting night letters, threatening notes put in public places at night warning the population not to defy them. If Afghans were truly content with their dominance, would these measures be necessary?

American intelligence sources also report that segments of the Taliban have shifted dramatically in their theology from Deobandism toward the more foreign Salafi-jihadi outlook since Sept. 11, 2001, under the influence of such ideologues as Sheik Isa al-Masri. This may further rupture the Taliban's relationship with the Afghan people.

The argument that Pashtun tribes will not take part in an Afghan Awakening posits that their shared ethnic identity with the Taliban will prevent meaningful participation. This argument is likely overstated, since much of Afghan identity is determined not by ethnicity but by a complex array of local tribal alliances. Indeed, the United States was able to find support among some Pashtun tribes during the 2001 invasion.

Even if this argument was correct, and Pashtun participation in an Awakening was minimal, this does not mean the effort would be doomed. For example, a successful Awakening in Nuristan, which has a small Pashtun population could have an impact on neighboring Kunar Province. Kunar, which borders Pakistan's tribal areas, is a key point of ingress into Afghanistan by Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

Finally, critics claim an Afghan Awakening would be destabilizing, empowering warlords or undermining disarmament efforts. Though this argument is not without some merit, Afghanistan is already destabilized.

NATO and U.S. casualties hit an all-time high in 2008, and a December report by the International Council on Security and Development found that the Taliban now holds a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan, up from 54 percent a year ago.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's central government is largely a rump state. As an American military intelligence officer recently said, Arguing that introducing a new strategy is bad because it might be destabilizing is a bit like squabbling over dinner seats while the house burns down all around you.

There are also ways to minimize long-term destabilizing effects of these policies. Arming tribes does not mean weapons will be distributed chaotically. As the Sons of Iraq program progressed, the United States did a decent job of keeping track of armaments that were distributed that made it easier to later incorporate participants into the Iraqi security forces, or send them to vocational schools as an alternative to militia activity.

There is no guarantee that an Awakening will work in Afghanistan. Nor would it be implemented uniformly, as there are great variations among the country's regions. Yet the strategy has promise: Writing it off this early seems unwise, given the gravity of the situation the United States faces.

The Islamists Show Their Hand by Soner Cagaptay

When Turkey's justice and development party (AKP) first took power in 2002, it tried to reassure moderates fearful it might chip away at the country's secular, democratic and pro-Western values. The AKP renounced its Islamist heritage and began working instead to secure European Union membership and to turn Turkey into an even more liberal and pro-Western place. Almost seven years later, however, the AKP seems anything but reformist. The recent performance of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the party's leader and Turkey's prime minister, at Davos—where he stormed off a panel with Israeli President Shimon Peres, vowing never to return—has convinced many skeptics that the party is turning its back on the West. So have moves like saying he wants to represent Hamas on international platforms and defending Iran's nuclear weapons. The AKP now sides with Islamists and ignores their crimes. This is radically different from the Turkey of old. What happened?

To understand the AKP's turnaround, remember where it came from. The party's founders, including Erdogan, cut their teeth in an earlier, more explicitly Islamist party, which featured strong anti-Western, anti-Semitic and antisecular elements. The Welfare Party, as it was known, joined a coalition government in 1996 before alienating the secular Turkish military, the courts, and the West, leading it to be banned in 1998. Yet the party never truly disappeared, and Erdogan re-created it as the pro-American, pro-EU, capitalist and reformist AKP.

Its transformation was a cynical one, however, and no sooner had the party gained power than it began to undermine the liberal values it supposedly stood for. In 2002, for instance, it began to hire top bureaucrats from an exclusive pool of religious conservatives, and the percentage of women in executive positions in government dropped.

Efforts by secular institutions to curb the AKP only backfired. When the Constitutional Court tried to prevent it from appointing one of its own as president in 2007, the AKP cast itself as the underdog representative of Turkey's poor Muslim masses and won a monumental election victory. This hastened the party's return to its core values. The AKP began abandoning its displays of pluralism, dismissing dissent and ignoring checks and balances and condemned the media for daring to criticize it.

The failure of EU accession talks also hurt. Having made a number of painful reforms in order to improve its chances of entry, in 2005 Turkey nonetheless hit stiff opposition led by France—at which point the AKP decided there was no point in making more painful and unpopular reforms. The nail in the coffin came that same year, when the European Court of Human Rights upheld Turkey's old ban on Islamic headscarves on college campuses. The AKP had hoped Europe might help recalibrate Turkish secularism into a more tolerant form. But this wasn't in the cards.

Soon the AKP began abandoning its pro-Western foreign policies as well. Despite Ankara's historic friendship with Washington, the United States is highly unpopular among the Turkish masses. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the AKP realized it could use this anti-Americanism to bolster its own support. And when the Gaza operation began in December, it decided to add anti-Israeli language to the mix, which culminated at Davos, where Erdogan lectured Peres for his supposed crimes before flying home to an orchestrated hero's welcome.

Such behavior has fanned the flames of anti-Semitism in traditionally tolerant Turkey. Erdogan has blamed "the Jewish-influenced media for misrepresenting facts about Gaza," and the AKP-run government of Istanbul has erected giant billboards across the city reading, "You cannot be the children of Moses."

Seven years after the AKP came to power, Turkey's Islamists have returned to their roots. The AKP experience demonstrates that when Islamist parties moderate, it reflects not a strategic change but a tactical response to strong domestic and foreign opposition. Once these firewalls weaken, Islamist parties regress, driven by popular sentiment. A recent survey shows that the AKP's popularity jumped 10 percent after the Davos incident, suggesting the party could pass the game-changing 50 percent threshold in the upcoming March 29 local elections. The AKP's renewed Islamism may play well at the polls. But Turkey, and its allies, will be left worse off for it.

Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey.”