Jesse Grant, Oakland police officer: "In the future, suburbs will be the ghettos because they're the least convenient places to be, and the cheapest."

Welcome to suburban Concord, Calif. Your papers please: Concord police say they target offenders for illegal turns, not where they live. But a non-resident motorist driving through streets used by congested freeway-bypassers says she was stopped by a police officer even though she was driving legally. "He wanted to know the name of the person I visited and their address," she said. "I thought. What is this, a Nazi state?"

This is hard to believe, but the World Health Organization says that road traffic accidents kill more than 1.2 million people a year worldwide. WHO has dedicated World Health Day 2004 to "Safe Roads." (Item courtesy of the Bicycling Advocacy mailing list.)

From the New Urbanism list, posted on Feb. 11: Writing about the recent U.K. Guardian essay, "The US economy needs oil like a junkie needs heroin," Daniel Jennings writes: "the so-called peace activists driving to their anti-war demonstrations don't want to hear it." My own Oakland Tribune on Monday morning had a photo of a little girl from Napa marching in San Francisco. I seriously doubt her family took public transit to get to the march. If we oppose a war for oil in Iraq, then many more of us need to start showing our opposition to the U.S. Driving Everywhere culture at the root of it all.

From the New Urbanism list, posted on Feb. 11: Chasing the leader: Are Europeans really so much worse off than Americans? "Taking account of how Americans waste a chunk of their income on heating, air conditioning, prisons and the like, while also attaching value to Europe's superior public transport, Mr Gordon suggests that perhaps half of the current gap in living standards between America and Europe, as measured by GDP per head, is illusory. Add in the value of their extra leisure time and Europe's living standards are now perhaps only 8% behind America's, he suggests, not the 23% suggested by official data. Indeed, on Mr Gordon's broader measure, Europeans' productivity may have overtaken that of their poor American cousins."

New York Times: No big problems as London starts charging drivers.

More weirdness. The 1/31/03 posting showed up this morning as my most recent, but when I went to my blog archive, which was supposed to be current up to and including 2/1/03, the most recent posting was from 1/30/03.