[PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts

[Joshua Dunfield]

On 3 December 2010 15:54, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> On Dec 3, 2010, at 4:04 AM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:
> Wo wohen Sie in Deutschland nun?

Ich wohne in Kaiserslautern.  (But not for the military.  I don't have
the red formular they keep asking me for.)

> The difference between German and U. S. cities that I observed even a half century ago was that those European cities had twice the population in the same size foot print that ours would have.   I was stationed (a military term) in the city of Pirmasens, which had a land area which might accommodate about 25,000 Americans but it contained about 50,000 Germans.   Therefore the streetcar line that vanished in 1943 was replaced by an oberleitungs bus (trolley bus).

Coincidentally, I ride to work on Pirmasenser Strasse.

I don't have density numbers for Kaiserslautern.  But you're probably
right.  Even the parts of town that are "suburban" (which are
substantial; Allied bombs destroyed nearly half the city) are built on
a different scale: narrow roads, small garages, smaller yards.

>... "It's a German thing isn't it?"
>
> Yes, it is.   It cannot be moved to the United States because we don't comprehend.   We attempted to make pedestrian malls but they fail because the public wants to put their car where they always did.   Remember how East Liberty failed when they tried to change people's habits back in the 1970s.   Or Biloxi or some other cities.

There's some controversy here about whether the defunct department
store building should be turned into a mall, or whether a new mall
should be built, or whether nothing should be built because it would
cannibalize the pedestrian shopping areas.  This is in addition to
general concerns about the suburban commercial strips outside town,
which don't sound so different from concerns about big box stores in
the US.  The sense I have is that Germans (around here, at least) are
becoming somewhat more like Americans in these respects.  But I don't
buy into the idea that the only way society can change is by following
the trajectory of the US; it has to be possible to go the other way.
(As Dwight said, the alternative to changing isn't pretty.)

East Liberty was more of an example (not the only one) of general
incompetence leading to a bad outcome.  There were a lot of ridiculous
notions packaged into "urban renewal", combined with some reasonable
ideas.

-j.