“The official workday ends at 5 p.m., but tonight, you need to lead a public hearing on the project. Everybody has a complaint.”

And knowing that it kind of makes this factoid seem a little lackluster:

Salary Data
Median (with eight years in the field): $62,500

Bummer. But apparently someone thinks that’s cool.

CDP fellowships, jointly supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo and the Bank of America Foundation with additional support provided by the Ford Foundation, are intended to provide opportunities for practitioners and policy-makers working on economic and social issues at the urban and regional policy levels to meet with their counterparts across the Atlantic and discuss policies and measures that have been implemented.  Fellows can then return from their time overseas equipped with the ideas and insights necessary to effect significant and lasting positive change in their own communities.

**The Spring 2010 Call for Applications is now open. Further information can befound here.**

Matt earned a Master’s in Urban Planning from UCLA. He has worked for ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and the Bay Area Air Quality Managemetnt District, and has served on the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s  “Parking Policy for Smart Growth” technical advisory committee. Matt also served as a founding member of the Board of Directors of City CarShare, the car sharing non-profit for the Bay Area.

From February-May 2010, Matt will be based in Torino, Italy as the Comparative Domestic Policy Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where he is investigating European cities that have made recent significant transit investments to compare approaches  to station area planning and multi-modal accessibility.

He is married to Margi Clarke, is the father of two boys, Kiernan and Eli. They have been living without owning a car for 6 years.

In other news, it’s interesting that two transportation oriented organizations have decided to rebrand themselves recently: TransLink the Bay Area’s regional transit fare card will change itself to Clipper (http://2cu2.sl.pt ; see also the post by the Bay Area’s Akit) through a $500,000 rebranding campaign; and the UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center will become SafeTREC, the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center. (http://www.safetrec.berkeley.edu/)

Both names are about as interesting as the iPad; would not have been my choices since one sounds like people are riding trains like pirates and the other big Vulcans fans who walk around saying ‘live long and prosper.’  Both still have great things going for them but in an era of fiscal crisis, it makes me wonder if rebranding transportation is responsible?  It doesn’t seem to address or be the solution to ridership or research issues.  It is money well-spent on changing transportation mode shift or doing good transportation research?

The truth is that it’s too painful right now.  The idea that Americans somehow changed their behavior after the release of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth was exaggerated. What is did create was more beairacracy, more urban planning acronyms, jargon and level of government to achieve climate goals – not to mention spawning a new era in the machine of the environmental consulting industry and the production of environmental reports to ‘cover’ development.

The graphs and charts we see now show that maybe this is not working – that democratizing a common good leads to profiteering and divisiveness in how to address the problem.  Driving behavior has not changed and significant transport infrastructure projects see environmentalists as adversaries; residential populations continue to resist density in favor of the status quo and on claims of environmentalism; energy efficiecy programs are abundant but power loads are increasing.

People worry about federal dollars and stimulus, like trasit and renewable energy money that was promised in Obama’s first State of the Union address – however to be frank that money will be too much too late and it’s scale of impact to global. We need local leadership; we need people to stand up for more, affordable and environmentally friendly housing and jobs in the regional code.

Clearly to make the kinds of changes we need strong local and regional governmental leadership.  Recent estimates from the San Francisco Bay Area indicate that even to achieve modest GHG emission reductions the price driving must rise (to close to $5/gallon); more housing must be produced (more than 200,000 housing units are projected to be needed in downtown San Francisco); more renewable infrastructure projects must be pursued.

If this can’t happen maybe we’re just screwed and we should give up on our both our meetings and our goals.  We should all just live gluttonously and wait for the end in our V8 gas guzzlers while eating blue-fin tuna sushi.