Going to Nine Shift Territory: Do They Already Know?

A few weeks ago I went to give an all day presentation in Nine Shift territory - - Aurora, Illinois. 

Walk around downtown Aurora and you see all of the Nine Shifts taking place - - here, now.  There are 12 passenger trains a day (yes, 12!).  There are apartments downtown with only 5-10% vacancy.  The downtown is being rennovated, alive, vibrant. 

And Waubonsee Community College has a campus right downtown in the middle of it, a building in exactly the right location for the 21st century.  So before I gave my all-day presentation for President Sobek and her top 37 administrators, I wondered whether they knew already all these changes, since they were seeing them every day.

The answer, as my co-author Julie Coates predicted, was no.  They did not fully understand the Nine Shift changes.  No 'bad' on them, it's just the way it happens.  100 years ago Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street about the transition from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age and it came out in 1921, immediately after it all happened.  Everyone reading the book had just experienced this transition - - and yet they needed Main Street to give them the full picture. 

Comments

[D. P. Lubic]

Off topic, but this is the handiest place to put this, and it may be of interest: younger people going car-free in the District of Columbia:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-bicycle-friendly-dc-going-car-free-is-increasingly-common/2011/08/15/gIQAHDc7KK_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-bicycle-friendly-dc-going-car-free-is-increasingly-common/2011/08/15/gIQAHDc7KK_allComments.html?ctab=all_&#comments

Maybe we have hope yet--but some of those following comments!

[D. P. Lubic]

Comments from Nine Shift territory on a Nine Shift subject, trains, by Alon Levy of New York:

http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/quick-note-amtraks-rolling-stock-shortage/#comments

Other commentary by Levy on cars holding on longer than they should:

http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/special-interests-and-the-general-interest/#comments

Most notable comment:

"In a one-to-one match, special interests always win: they’re invested in their side and often fighting for survival. Detroit needs the rest of the US to keep driving much more than the rest of the US needs to reduce its sprawl. The gas and oil interests are more invested in their own existence than consumers are in rooftop solar panels. Corn farmers need ethanol subsidies more than people who aren’t corn farmers need the money for healthy food."

We have our work cut out. . .