I have a short quote in an article in the Christian Science Monitor today about extreme commuting.

The thing that strikes me about the extreme commute is how something absurd has become normalized. As Andres Duany said in my interview with him, “time in public means time in traffic” and its a competitive, hostile experience.

The article is partly in response to the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2007 Urban Mobility Report which, among other things, says

• Trips take longer

• Congestion affects more of the day
• Congestion affects weekend travel and rural areas
• Congestion affects more personal trips and freight shipments
• Trip travel times increasingly are unreliable

They have some suggested solutions, but they mostly have to do with traffic engineering (not surprising considering the source). It’s a kind of myopic viewpoint, restricted by the profession. A more comprehensive view would consider urban planning issues, including multiple design theories and scenarios.

Then there’s the personal angle:

“There’s the philosophy that people buy houses on Sunday and discover on Monday that it’s a tough commute.”

The Subdivided DVD is now available! Get yours here.
They will ship August 10th. (I know, it’s taken forever!)

For Library & Institutional purchases, or if you’d like a discount on more than 10 copies please email list (at) subdivided.net.

Subdivided won an award for Creative Excellence at the Worldfest International Film Festival in Houston!

Thanks again to all who were involved and supportive!

Subdivided will play the USA Film Festival Sunday April 22nd @ 3pm
. And what a great group of folks they are by the way - really.

Subdivided will air on PBS Station KERA in early January. Here are the dates and times:
• Wednesday January 3rd 8PM (Premiere)
• Saturday January 6th @ 3am (Tivo / DVR special!)
• Tuesday January 8th @ 11pm
Thanks to the kind folks at KERA and Bart Weiss‘ Frame of Mind for making it happen.

Here’s a short trailer that will be running on KERA leading up to the broadcast.

Finally there will be a radio interview with yours truly on KERA 90.1 radio on Wednesday January 3rd @ 12pm (the day of the premiere)
National distribution and festival screenings news coming soon.

A lot of new stills from Subdivided have been uploaded to flickr.

Subdivided is… wow it’s hard to say.. completed. It’s been a very long and difficult process, and I even though this is the beginning of the life of the film in public, I am really done with it, with the whole subject. Well not completely. My interest in communities has moved online and I am in the beginning stages of another project about online communities. We’ll see…

So as I was saying, I’m toast. It’s the longest single creative project I’ve ever been involved with in terms of both time (3.5 years) and scope of content. And I did every single bit myself, save help with second camera on a few occasions. Shooting, editing, writing, photography (except the fantastic aerials by Jim Wark).

Why did I do it all myself? I had spent several years in more of a producing role - thinking up concepts yes, but mostly hands off. This was not my training, coming from a normally solo mode of a fine arts background. I’m a huge proponent of teams and collaboration, but for this I wanted to tweak each edit, sound, and image myself. Luckily, I’m over it now.

In the meantime there is this blog, which starts at the end of the production process, and will chronicle the film as it makes its way out into the world. I’ll also post images and articles written during production, and links to stories about what subjects in the film are up to. Andres Duany, James Kunstler, and Robert Putnam get a lot of ink, and the subject of McMansions has become a major topic of discussion here in Dallas and all over the country.

Communities are fragile things, and places (as opposed to locations) are rare.