“When I have nothing to say….”

…my lips are sealed
Say something once
Why say it again?”

EMP_maple

But thankfully, with the help of the fabulous interwebs, one can have nothing to say and still pretend to have something to say by copping what other people say. Watch me now: Apparently Alex Steffen was so bored this weekend he managed to crank out two great pieces, one on walkability:

The true test of walkability I think is this: Can you spend a pleasant half hour walking or on transit and end up at a variety of great places? The quality of having a feast of options available when you walk out your front door is what I starting to think of as “deep walkability.”

…A place that embraces deep walkability could almost be considered the very definition of a great city.

and one on green prosperity:  

Throughout much of the developed world, but especially in North America, the debate about sustainability is routinely framed as a trade-off between the environment and the economy. The problem is, no such trade-off exists…

The old economy is dead.

Connecting a few more dots on how transitioning to a green economy is a no brainer, first, we have Thomas Friedman prattling on again about green China (and as such, contradicting David Byrne, who couldn’t be more wrong about “why say it again?” when it comes to promoting massive cultural shifts):

We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China’s main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.

And then there’s the new AP report that found stimulus spending on road construction has not led to gains in employment:

Ten months into President Barack Obama‘s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.

So on top of it being a bad long-term investment in terms of creating green prosperity, road building also appears to be a bad short term investment. Brilliant.

Meanwhile, we have learned that a stimulus dollar spent on transit provides about twice as many jobs as a dollar spent on highway infrastructure:

…for every billion dollars spent on public transportation projects, 16,419 job-months were created. A billion dollars spent on highway infrastructure projects created only 8,781 job-months.

I’ve got nothing to say about any of this.