May 2006 Archives

According to the Strib, the City of Minneapolis is trying to keep strangers out of alleys:A back-alley approach to fight crime in Minneapolis. The alleys will essentially become private streets for the residents.

From the article '"If you don't live there on that block there's no reason to be in the alley," said Killebrew, who proposed the ordinance to the city attorney.'

Well I can think of reasons, namely taking a walk and looking at the backs of houses, which provides lots of entertainment for law-abiding folks in the summer, doubling the amount of entertainment that can be had from simply looking at the fronts of houses.

I just don't understand how this is supposed to help. If you have already broken the law (or intend to), the alley ordinance doesn't seem like much of a disincentive. Neighbors might now report more suspicious activity (where "strangers" in the alley are suspicious), but nosy neighbors are pretty good at that in Minneapolis already.

See enclosure and private road.

Via TechCrunch: SuperOyster: Monetizing the Waiting List, which is a lot like the idea of reservation pricing (See Appendix G) with trading. If only we could figure out how to make the transaction in a dynamically changing system with roads and cars.

An interesting article on the history and present state of traffic control, focusing on LA: Cabinet Magazine Online - Blocking All Lanes

-- dml

I have just started watching The Thick of It on BBC Four and BBC America. A weird combination of Yes Minister and The Office, it hilariously captures the rise of public relations over substance in the bureaucracy. It reminded me of the politically hyper-sensitive reign of current Congressional candidateElwyn Tinklenberg as Transportation Commissioner in Minnesota during the Ventura administration.

My favorite quote of course is in Episode One when the then Minister of Home Affairs is being told to resign, and he suggests the Transport Minister resign instead, and the political aide says something like "We can't fire him. Transport, that's important stuff, you know, cars, trucks, roads" and the doomed Minister of Home Affairs says "I know what Transport is".

-- dml

Minnesota's Governor Pawlenty signs Twins stadium bill , bringing to an end the incessant pestering/lobbying/threatening by the Minnesota Twins for a new ball field at the public's expense.

I just attended NetSci 2006 , which was an interesting conference with physicists and social networks people claiming the title "Network Science" (I believe I was the sole representative of physical networks: transportation, electricity, telecommunications, etc.).

What was most remarkable about the conference was the especially large number of audience members who used laptops while someone was speaking, especially if the speaker was not a "name" or an especially experienced. Why bother showing up if you are going to pay more attention to your computer screen than the speaker?

One can understand the next speaker reviewing their powerpoint perhaps, but I think for something like this more communications channels (free wireless) is less, diminishing the effectiveness of the conference by having less common ground among the audience to discuss common issues (i.e. the presentations in the last session).

-- dml

I will be at NetSci 2006 in Bloomington, Indiana over the next few days. This should be an interesting interdisciplinary conference. I will be presenting The Evolution of Transportation Networks written with my former student Lei Zhang.

From today's Strib ... "Proposed light rail slower than express bus".

Of course the comparison should not be with the express bus (with no local stops), nor should it be with today's locals, which stop every block, but with a similarly designed local bus with just as many local stops (and just as good a signal prioritization).

The Washington Post notes Supreme Court Declines D.C. Commuter Tax Case. I am sure the court is right that the framers gave Congess full authority over the district. It is just too bad DC cannot exploit its monopoly power as national capital to tax those who live outside the district to pay for District services. This notion of "taxing foreigners living abroad" is a politically elegant way of off-loading costs in the toll-road context.

-- dml

An interesting article at ZDNet: A traffic control system for molecules. I don't know if there are practical applications for transportation any time soon, but neat nonetheless.
(link courtesy Slashdot).

- dml

For your amusement: Boing Boing: Having fun with roadside alert signs

There has been a lot of discussion about "network neutrality" as being a core property of internet service. This discussion includes a number of inter-related concepts, which not every advocate agrees to. In particular, the wikipedia article on the subject identifies:

"* Non-discrimination means that all traffic over the network (typically or exclusively digital packets or bits) is treated the same by the network, including the traffic originating with the network operator. This principle of 'bit parity' means that all bits are treated as 'just bits', and no bit traffic is prioritized over other bits, and none is hampered or disabled.

* Interconnection means that network operators have both a duty of interconnection and a right of interconnection to any other network operator. Networks must be constructed so that there are a reasonable number of accessible interconnect points; that traffic is carried to and from rival networks at reasonable rates; and that the network is built with sufficient excess capacity to accomodate the reasonably foreseeable traffic that may be presented at the head-ends or peering points. Without a right of interconnection, there is no network.

* Access means that any end user can connect to any other end-user. End users may be people, but the term could also mean devices (modems, routers, switches) or even other networks. Access means that a piece of content, say, an email message, has a right to enter the network, and if properly addressed, be received by the other end user, even if said user is on another network. In other words, traffic can begin at any point on the network and be delivered to any other point."

I wrote to my friends that Andrew Sullivan is right about conservative govt. being dead, but being quite simplistic about gas taxes (and sounds just like Thomas Friedman).

To which my friend Phil Goetz asked "What would someone less simplistic say?"

Randall Crane's Urban Planning Research discusses accessibility vs. mobility. He seems to be searching for a definition.

Accessibility is nicely defined as the ease of reaching particular destinations. That can be operationalized (and easily communicated) as how much stuff you can get to in a particular amount of time (e.g. number of jobs within 20 minutes). Our book from the conference is now out. The first of many reports on methods for measuring accessibility will be out soon.

Randall rightly notes that the importance of different things varies for different people. Accessibility measured as above is clearly a supply (or opportunities) measure, and makes no account of demand. No one measure encapsulates the entire economy.

Choices have costs. Increasing acccessibility is not free. Enabling someone to access 101 grocery stores in 30 minutes travel by auto instead of 100 will likely not be noticed unless that grocery is somehow distinct, and valuable, to an individual consumer.

-- dml

In the blog L.A. traffic sucks: Let's fix it! the author argues that driving is an "addiction". I believe people are behaving individually rationally (with perhaps irrational preferences) to achieve personal satisfaction, which may result in societally unoptimal outcomes.

From today's Star Tribune: State of our roads is getting bumpier

The article says "Department officials say they don't consider the condition of the roads a safety concern," and there is no evidence unsmooth roads (at least in the range considered in Minnesota, where roads are much better than, say, Africa), reduce capacity, so what is the rationale for smooth roads?

The answer seems to be to prevent future deterioration.

""You can reconstruct the roads already in poor condition or you can keep the roads that are about to go into the poor category from ever getting there by doing something first," Janisch said. "It's cheaper to keep them up.""

But is there a value to smooth roads? How much of a premium would travelers pay, all else equal, to have a smoother ride?

-- dml

In the most recent episode of The West Wing(the penultimate episode "Institutional Memory"), White House Chief of Staff C.J. Cregg is being recruited to help run a foundation loosely based on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and her idea of what the best use of $10 billion would be to criss-cross Africa with highways, which would enable the delivery of medicine, expand trade, and do all sorts of good things.

From The Becker-Posner Blog: Gasoline Prices--Posner's Comment the higher gas tax is again in fashion.

An interesting blog post about the planned community of Irvine Ranch in California from Randall Crane Urban Planning Research: Researching Irvine which discusses Columbia, Maryland as well as the work of my colleague Ann Forsyth.

I am still not clear why we entered the war in Iraq.

Many opponents of the war say it was for oil, but destroying oil fields doesn't result in there being more oil anytime soon. Given that the price of oil has gone up (as have oil company profits), maybe it was a "war against oil", but surely had that been the oil companies Machiavellian aim, that could have been achieved much easier (just bomb the oil fields).

An example of a recent line of reasoning ... Bring On The $6 Gallon Of Gas / It would revolutionize America. It would make us all better humans. But could you handle it?

Another example from Andrew Sullivan

Or this from Thomas Friedman

Howard Greenstein summarized my talk on "Lessons from the The Transportation Experience at Meshforum. Thanks for the notes, I always wonder what I actually say when I give a talk, and what others think the salient bullets are.

Random Thoughts from HowardGr: Meshforum - David Levinson

-- dml

Whether entering a city for the first time, or entering it for the five-thousandth, a traveler interacts with the environment to obtain cues. A first time traveler is very concerned about issues of navigation … where should I go? … how should I get there?, while the experienced resident may rely on memory and history to make those same decisions. Yet in complex cities, there are many places even the most experienced residents may never have explored, there are paths untaken, and like Heraclitus’ River, you never really step into the same city twice.

The website Visualcomplexity.com has some really nice transportation graphics, which I became aware of after seeing Manuel Lima present at Meshforum. In particular, the travel time remapping of the London Underground is quite slick.
--dml

I will be on The Exchange | New Hampshire Public Radio 9:00 am Eastern Time, Monday, May 8, 2006, talking about commute times and such.

In Dynamist Blog: Angelenos for Higher Gas Prices Virginia Postrel notes the upside of higher gas prices ... less traffic. We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. So let's say her car gets 30 miles per gallon, and gas is $3 per gallon, she is paying $0.10/mile. If she were traveling at 50 miles per hour when gas was $2 per gallon ($0.067/mile) and 60 miles per hour now (at $3/gallon), she is traveling 20% faster (a one mile trip used to take 1 minute and 12 seconds but now only takes 1 minute). (I doubt average speeds have increased that much, but if she is noticing it, it is probably at least 10%).

A View Of Urban Sprawl From Outer Space by Jenny Hall

Hall writes: 'Roads, on the other hand, have no impact on the extent to which development is scattered, despite commonly held beliefs to the contrary. "We looked at a lot of measures of road density - miles of road per area, average distance to a road, distance to an interstate exit - and we could find no relation between those measures and the scatteredness of development," Turner says.'

The Minnesota Streetcar Museum, Minnesota's "other light rail" will be open for rides again. See related article in the Strib about rail nostalgia, when life was simpler and trains were faster than cars. All obsolete transportation systems become rides, what will we do with interstates once we get flying cars?

Computing the commute, Minneapolis Star Tribune May 1, 2006

Every so often the newspaper (here the Star Tribune) rediscovers urban economics (people are trading off time for space). As gas (or other) prices change, people's utilities change, and they reassess where they want to be on the curve. The newspaper always focuses on the extreme person with the 60 or 90 minute (one-way) commute instead of the normal person with a 22 minute commute, giving a misleading perception of the problem.

The problem is not people having long commutes in exchange for more real estate, that is (presumably) rational behavior on their part given their preferences. The problem is the system that subsidizes those trips by not charging users for the full cost of the trip or developers for the impact they are imposing. We need some way of paying for the fixed costs of roads as well as their variable costs that is fair.