February 2012 Archives

The Speculist (via Kottke): In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop

Marginal Revolution: Probability fact of the day:

"The average class size experienced by students is almost always larger than the average class size experienced by professors.

More at God Plays Dice. I recall a JEP piece (?) many years ago which used the same idea to explain the “road curse”–given two equally good roads most people will always choose the more crowded!"

I use this example to explain transit ridership. Two buses, 1 carries 50 people, 1 carries 1 person. 50 people observe a bus with 50 people, 1 observes a bus with 1 person. Perceived average ridership is about 49, actual average ridership is about 25.

There are many useless traffic signals. (Some are also useful).

The most useless traffic signal I see everyday (multiple times) is at the intersection of Beacon St. and Harvard Avenue. Not only is there little traffic for the traffic light, so a stop sign (or better a yield sign, roundabout, or shared space) would do, the pedestrian signal has Beg buttons. I just saw someone who looked a lot like Eric Kaler (who is obviously not an idiot) waiting and needlessly obeying the law while pushing the pedestrian signal actuator multiple times to call for a walk signal, which eventually came. If no one pushes the actuator, you actually don't get a walk signal, so it is working, just pointless.

Why do we have these signals, on a university campus of all places, making pedestrians (who probably are equal in number to cars at this intersection) stand there like idiots while cars can drive through, and even make a "right turn on red"?

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The Metoopolitan Council recently unveiled its name ``Metro'' for rail and BRT services. I don't like the framing. How does this branding compare with other agencies? I looked up the top 10 US agencies (by bus ridership, which is more or less the top 10 ranking overall).

• New York MTA
  
  
  
  • Bus and Subway (uses letters and numbers),
    
  • Commuter Rail lines (names): LIRR, Metro-North
    
  
  
• Los Angeles LACMTA
  
  
  
  • Metro Local, Metro Express, Metro Rapid, Metro Rail (uses colors for BRT and Rail)
  
  

• Chicago CTA




• CTA, 'L'


• San Francisco




• Muni (Bus, Rail=Metro, uses letters for rail lines)


• BART (uses destinations for route names)


• Philadelphia




• SEPTA (color for rail lines)


• PATCO






• Washington WMATA




• Metrobus,


• Metrorail, (colors for rail lines)


• Boston MBTA
• The "T" (colors for rail lines)
• Seattle




• King County Metro (Bus, RapidRide BRT)


• Sound Transit (names for rail lines)


• Baltimore MTA Maryland




• Bus,
  
• Heavy Rail=Metro,
  
• Light Rail (colors for Heavy and Light Rail),
  
• Marc Commuter Rail (names)


• Miami Miami-Dade Transit




• Metrorail (colors for line names)


• Metromover,


• Metrobus

Minneapolis is actually 11th on the list, so we should look upwards, at least for information.

So what does "Metro" mean? It is part of a Commuter Rail name (NYC), it indicates all transit (LA, DC, Miami), Heavy Rail only (San Francisco-Muni, Baltimore), the Bus agency (Seattle). "Metropolitan" is also in the agency name in many places (NY, LA, DC, Seattle), as in the Twin Cities.

In general, the names are distinguished (if at all) by the technology.

I personally like the DC, LA, Miami convention of Metro-technology as a way of distinguishing between the various transit modes. The word "Metro" does not imply privilege as is currently proposed for the Twin Cities, just its metropolitan nature. We could easily have meTrorail (the LRT), meTrobus (local bus service), meTrorapid (BRT) and meTroexpress (commuter bus) or something like that. I have used inCase capitalization to emphasize the "T" logo. Surely that is in the works. (As to whether it should be Metro Rail, Metro-Rail, Metro-rail, or Metrorail I will leave to the grammarians).

Within systems, the naming of routes is also non-standard. Commuter rail tends to be named, heavy and light rail can be lettered (NY, SF-Muni), colored (LA, DC, Boston, Baltimore, Miami), named (Seattle), or place-based (SF-BART). In contrast with rail, for bus there is a standard, bus routes are almost uniformly numbered in large cities. Of course the numbering convention is localized. The use of colors for rail lines as proposed in the Twin Cities is much less awful than the Metro for rail only proposal.

Brendon sends me to Property Management Insider: First Robotic Convenience Store at U.S. Apartment Community Debuts in Fort Worth .

Brendon says "Soon you'll be able to drive your robot car to a robot convenience store." In my view, it will drive itself there, and pick up groceries for me.

NYT: U.S. Rule Set for Cameras at C:

"However, in a preliminary version circulated for public comment, regulators predicted that adding the cameras and viewing screens will cost the auto industry as much as $2.7 billion a year, or $160 to $200 a vehicle. At least some of the cost is expected to be passed on to consumers through higher prices.

But regulators say that 95 to 112 deaths and as many as 8,374 injuries could be avoided each year by eliminating the wide blind spot behind a vehicle. Government statistics indicate that 228 people of all ages - 44 percent of whom are under age 5 - die every year in backover accidents involving passenger vehicles. About 17,000 people a year are injured in such accidents.

"In terms of absolute numbers of lives saved, it certainly isn't the highest," Mr. Ditlow said. "But in terms of emotional tragedy, backover deaths are some of the worst imaginable. When you have a parent that kills a child in an incident that's utterly avoidable, they don't ever forget it.""

$2.7 B/year for 100 lives a year gives a value of life of $27 million. Official US DOT Value of Statistical Life is about $5.8 million. We are losing ~300 lives per year that could otherwise be saved by doing this instead of using the same resources for the better thing. [This calculation is complicated by how injuries are dealt with among other issues]. Guilt is expensive, it is worth ~3 kids, but at least they are anonymous, and in this case the private sector is paying instead of the public.

A Transportationista who wishes to remain anonymous sends this in response to Why Transportation Costs Too Much, 39 Hypotheses and Counting:

"It occurs to me that transportation in the United States is usually underpriced at the user level. For instance, when I get in my car and drive to the store the variable costs I incur are minimal. If I take the bus the cost to me is low because the service is heavily subsidized. But while the direct cost to transportation system users is generally modest it is certainly true that as a society we spend a lot on transportation, much of which is in the form of fuel taxes and license fees of various kinds. I won't venture an opinion on whether we are spending the "right" amount, but in any case we spend quite a bit. Perhaps the question should be "why don't we get more for what we spend?"

In addition to the reasons you have already listed consider the
following possible explanations:

1. Transportation agencies attempt to provide high levels of peak
capacity to accommodate the demand that results from un-priced roads and
highways. This is very costly capacity to provide. If tolls were charged
that reflected true costs people would drive less, especially during
peak hours. It would therefore cost much less to provide the
economically optimal amount of peak system capacity.

2. Federal funding programs create perverse incentives that lead to
very costly capital projects. Almost any project looks good if somebody
else is paying for most of it. For example every year billions of
dollars are spent on passenger rail projects that would never be funded
were it not for generous Federal grants. Just look at the high speed
rail program or the FTA New Starts program. There are examples on the
highway side too, such as bridges to nowhere and freeways in rural areas
with little traffic. These Federal programs, no matter how well
intentioned, tip the local decision making process in favor of expensive
capital projects and discourage consideration of lower cost options and
policy reforms.

3. Most of the transportation system is owned, planned, and managed by
public agencies. These entities have many objectives but efficiency and
cost-effectiveness are rarely a high priority. The public sector does
some things well but it doesn't usually do them very efficiently (I say
that as an experienced bureaucrat). As a result transportation revenues
are not always efficiently converted to transportation user benefits.

4. Because transportation involves a large number of public agencies
with overlapping or intertwined responsibilities planning is complex and
inefficient. Projects end up with all the bells and whistles needed to
satisfy the agencies and constituencies that could block a proposal.
Local elected officials often load up regional plans with pet projects
that do little to improve transportation system performance. There is a
whole science to how public agencies bargain with each other and
interact, unfortunately the results are rarely optimal from a
cost-effectiveness perspective. The principal/agent problem is part of
the reason for this, but only a part. In nearly every metropolitan area
in the United States institutional structure results in transportation
plans and policies that fall far short of the cost-effectiveness that
could be achieved.

These four factors help explain why we have difficulty efficiently
converting our large transportation expenditures into user benefits.
However, it does not explain why we spend as much as we do. That is a
somewhat different question the answer to which has more to do with
other relationships. In particular, a number of studies have shown that
people tend to spend a relatively constant percentage of their income on
transportation. So it follows that a wealthy society like ours will
spend a lot on transportation because we have a lot to spend. I would
add that mobility has a very high value and as our cities spread out and
decentralize that value may be increasing. Being able to travel around a
region confers huge benefits in terms of employment, education,
shopping, etc. Given those large benefits perhaps we should not be
surprised at our willingness to pay. Now the challenge is to enact the
institutional reforms needed to more efficiently use transportation
revenues so those expenditures yield greater benefits."

Mashable: Google To Test Driverless Cars On Nevada Roadways:

"The roads in Nevada are ready for driverless robot cars. Earlier this month, Nevada’s Legislative Commission approved testing of autonomous vehicles on the state’s roadways. The cars will be identifiable by a red license plate."

Lisa Schweitzer in Politico: Opinion: Obama clueless on transit funding:

"His problem? The legislation would eliminate the deficit-plagued Highway Trust Fund as a funding source for transit, walking and biking projects. Money for those projects would instead have to come out of the general fund.

Transit and sustainability advocates are outraged. Don’t the bill’s supporters know how crucial these non-automobile means of travel are to cities?

Unfortunately, the bill is an all-too-predictable backlash against the White House and its apparent cluelessness about the difference between national transportation policy and urban transport policy."

I have a new post at streets.mn Washington Mall Extended.

Recently Published: Carrion, Carlos and David Levinson (2012) Value of travel time reliability: A review of current evidence. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 46(4) 720--741.[doi]

Travel time reliability is a fundamental factor in travel behavior. It represents the temporal uncertainty experienced by travelers in their movement between any two nodes in a network. The importance of the time reliability depends on the penalties incurred by the travelers. In road networks, travelers consider the existence of a trip travel time uncertainty in different choice situations (departure time, route, mode, and others). In this paper, a systematic review of the current state of research in travel time reliability, and more explicitly in the value of travel time reliability is presented. Moreover, a meta-analysis is performed in order to determine the reasons behind the discrepancy among the reliability estimates.

Keywords: Variability; Reliability; Travel time; Scheduling; Meta-analysis

Transitway Network: Metropolitan Council approves METRO name, vehicle graphics for LRT/BRT transitway system (February 23, 2012 Metropolitan Council News Release) :

"“The METRO system name identifies the developing LRT/BRT services as unique,” said Arlene McCarthy, director of Metropolitan Transportation Services for the Council. “METRO riders can expect fast, frequent, and convenient service, whether they ride the Blue Line to Target Field, the Red Line to Mall of America, or the Green Line to the State Capitol.”"

Apparently the 90 percent of regional transit riders who use local buses can expect slow, infrequent, and inconvenient service, whether they ride the 3 to downtown or the 8 to Franklin Avenue Station.

The framing like this aims to diminish local buses into second-class service.

357 Transportation Infographics and Data Visualizations @ Visual.ly

Bloomberg: U.S. Postal Service to Cut 35,000 Jobs as Plants Are Shut:

"The service plans to shut 223 of its 461 mail-processing plants by February 2013, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said in a telephone interview today. The closings will cut about 35,000 jobs, said David Partenheimer, a spokesman."

Blair Barnhardt at Kansas University discusses The Three Legged Stool | Saving America's Infrastructure [YouTube], which makes use of our Brookings Report: Fix It First, Expand It Second, Reward It Third: A New Strategy for America’s Highways (starting at the 23:47 mark running to about 36:00)

Late last year I provoked a bit of a fury with Transportation costs too much and the main follow-up Is transport too expensive?

For the first time, I will briefly list all of the hypotheses in one post.

My coauthors (alphabetically) include John Bedell, Peter Gordon, Michael Iacono, David King, Dick Mudge, Randal O'Toole, Lisa Schweitzer, Stephen Smith, and others who posted anonymously. It goes without saying (which means it doesn't since I am saying it) that not everyone agrees with everything. At the bottom, I have grouped the causes into larger meta-causes where appropriate.

1. Standards have risen [Smith's Man of System].
2. Principal-agent problem.
3. Thin markets.
4. There are in-sufficient economies of scale (Excess Bespoke Design).
5. Projects are scoped wrong.
6. Benefits are concentrated, costs are diffuse [Logic of Collective Action].
7. Decision-makers are remote [Fatal Conceit].
8. No one actually does B/C analysis.
9. The highest demand areas for maintenance and new stock occur in places that are expensive.
10. Project creep.
11. Envy is a much bigger problem in public works than in personal life.
12. Benefit cost is only as good as the integrity of the data and the analysts.
13. Federal funds favor capital-heavy technologies and investments.
14. Design for forecast.
15. Planners and engineers are paid as percentage of total project cost [Principal-Agent Problem].
16. Materials are scarcer (and thus more expensive).
17. Regulations like ADA and environmental protection are driving up costs.
18. Formula spending reduces the incentive or need to worry much about costs. This is obviously related to many of the other hypotheses already considered but I think deserves it's own number.
19. The State Aid system and associated standards.
20. Stop/start investment.
21. Poor commissioning. 
22. "Starchitecture",
23. Separation of design and build.
24. Doing construction on facilities still in operation.
25. Union work rules (not wages)that inhibit productivity gains through new technologies.
26. Fragmented governance leads to large and meandering projects rather than centralized projects. Politicians have to "share the wealth" of projects. This is perhaps a cause of "project creep."
27. Environmental Impact Statements (Reports) lead to "lock-in"
28. Public-private partnerships trade additional up front costs for faster construction.
29. Open government/costs of democracy.
30. Climate change adaptation is increasing the costs of projects.
31.  Ratchet Effect.
32. Baumol's cost disease.
33. Transit investment isn't realizing any productivity gains from labor.
34. Utility works are uncharged.
35. Experience and Competence.
36. Ethos, training and prestige.
37. Government power.
38. Legal system.
39. Lack of user fee funding.

Some other points:

1. Standards arguably includes 14, 17, 19, 21, 24, 27, 29, 30,

4. Insufficient scale economies, there is some relationship to 1, since bespoke probably means higher quality (better local fitting).

5. Scoping, includes 10, 14, 22, 26

MPR reports that Light rail gets a name, new logo :

"St. Paul, Minn. — The Twin Cities light rail system is getting a new name.

Under a plan the Metropolitan Council approved Wednesday, the light rail and rapid transit lines will be known as "Metro" once the Central Corridor line opens in 2014

The system will feature a "T" logo instead of an "M," said Metro Transit General Manager Brian Lamb.

The decision was made after brand testing a variety of logos.

"The qualities that people associated with the "T" logo are really solid ones that we really want to build the system around," Lamb said. "That's reliability [and] the system approach toward transit."

Lamb says the Hiawatha light rail line will become the blue line and the Central Corridor will be the green line.

"

Readers of this blog of course know the real name they stuck with a "T", it was so they would not have to change all the Bus Stop signs. One only hopes they thought about buses when choosing the name, since you know, buses carry some 90% of transit users in the region.

Alternatives names were considered but rejected. These include:

• Hennepin-Ramsey Transit (HeRT)
• Ramsey-Hennepin Transit (RaHT)
• METRO - Moving Everyone (without a car) Through the Region On-grade
• MeToo - Minnesotans Emulating Transit names of Other Organizations

TechCrunch says: Strategic Sharing: Zipcar Leads $13.7M Investment In Campus Car-Sharing Startup Wheelz:

"Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.

Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million Series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself."

KurzweilAI: GPS jamming: a clear and present reality :

"A secret network of 20 roadside listening stations across the UK has confirmed that criminals are attempting to jam GPS signals on a regular basis, according to New Scientist One Per Cent blog.

Jammers seem to be being used by truckers to prevent their journeys being tracked by their bosses, or by thieves stealing commercial vehicles."

Xconomy: Google Transit: A Search Giant Remaps Public Transportation :

"To enable all that, Google introduced a new standard in 2011 called GTFS-realtime. It builds on GTFS, but is a different animal, since it includes new feed types for trip updates, service alerts, and vehicle positions, as well as provisions for constantly refreshing this data throughout the day. In an advisory to agencies, Google puts it this way: “Because GTFS-realtime allows you to present the actual status of your fleet, the feed needs to be updated regularly—preferably whenever new data comes in from your Automatic Vehicle Location system.”"

Tim Leunig, an Elsevier editor of Explorations in Economic History, writes: Elsevier have a right to price their journals as they see fit, but they must be honest in their reasoning and not attack boycotters with untruths. :

"I therefore have no difficulty in defending Elsevier’s right to price its journals as it sees fit. Equally, I have no difficulty in understanding the decisions of individuals and libraries not to subscribe to Elsevier’s journals. What I strongly dislike is the Chief Executive claiming that the objections of Elsevier’s critics are based on “misstatements or misunderstandings of the fact”. He should be honest and state that in many cases his journals have an element of monopoly power which as a commercial, capitalist company he is determined to exploit as fully as possible. I would respect him were he to say that. For him to claim otherwise is simply false – and as a journal editor it is my job to expose those who speak falsely. That responsibility extends to rejecting comments made by my Journal’s publisher’s Chief Executive, just as much as it extends to rejecting articles that make unsubstantiated and unwarranted claims unsupported by the evidence."

Robert Bruegmann @ Bloomberg: Driverless Car Could Defy Sprawl Rules:

"The driverless car could well extend that flexibility in dramatic fashion, combining some characteristics of automobiles and public transportation and allowing people more choice in the way they live, whether it involves more compact, high-density cities, more dispersed low-density settlements -- call it sprawl if you like -- or, perhaps most likely, all of the above."

Fanis Grammenos @ Planetizen Choosing a Grid, or Not :

"Breaking the convenient, but outdated, uniformity of the 18th and 19th Century American grids would be a first step in recovering the land efficiency mandated by current ecological and economic imperatives. Pointing in that direction, Savannah’s composite, cellular grid includes variable size streets and blocks for private, civic and religious functions. A second step would be to include block sizes that can accommodate building types and sizes unknown in the 1800s, again defying block uniformity. A third step would be to adapt its streets for the now universal motorized mobility, of cars, buses, trucks, trams and motorcycles, that is radically different from when oxen, equine and legs shared the transport of goods and people."

Eric Jaffe @ Atlantic Cities: The Tale of a Taxi Driver Who Just Won't Stop Driving [He claims he is not a taxi driver, since he doesn't charge (making it up in tips), the court disagreed]

Lynne Kiesling @ Knowledge Problem: Extreme Makeover: Regulation Edition :

"Yes. Hayek’s Pretence of Knowledge meets Smith’s “man of system”, Tullock’s rent seeking, and Olson’s concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. Regulatory complexity creates benefits for politically-powerful special interests, but it creates costs for everyone else, and this ongoing process feeds the egos of our elected representatives who believe they can engineer, design, and manipulate society to achieve their desired outcomes."

Capital Business Blog - The Washington Post: In White Flint, the mall is being turned into a town :

"The plans ultimately call for 5.2 million square feet of buildings, including 1 million square feet offices in three buildings along Rockville Pike, 1 million square feet of retail, 2,500 residential units and a 300-room hotel. The current three-level mall is about 800,000 square feet.

Civic amenities are also envisioned. On the south side of the property the companies have reserved space for the construction of a new elementary school and on the east side plan to build a public park, part of 13.1 acres of open space on the property."

CBC News: TTC chief Gary Webster fired:

"TTC chief general manager Gary Webster has been relieved of his duties, following a vote during a special meeting of transit commissioners Tuesday.

In a motion describing termination "without just cause," the transit commission voted 5-4 to fire Webster, who has worked at the service for 35 years, just two weeks after he expressed open defiance to a subway plan championed by Mayor Rob Ford. His ouster comes a year before he was set to retire.

"This was not how I expected this to end — certainly not how I wanted it to end," Webster told reporters shortly after his termination. "But clearly the choice has been made to replace me as chief general manager and I accept that.""

Joe Soucheray @ Twincities.com: Let's turn I-94 into a tollway. No, I'm serious.:

"About 30 minutes after you cross the Illinois border below Milwaukee, you are offered the tollway option, which is the only way to go. I went last weekend, and before I left, the CP slapped the transponder onto my windshield.

It made me feel big city. I am certain that if I lived in the western suburbs or had to use I-35W, I'd be a MnPASS customer."

The Transportationist is now also syndicated on Alltop

I heard a nice presentation by Kim Zlimen on Friday concerning the proposed Bottineau Transitway.

Bottineau Transitway is a proposed line from downtown Minneapolis to the Northwest. Currently planners and decision-makers are evaluating technologies and rights-of-way. They seem to have two proposed alignments through Minneapolis, one along Penn Avenue (D2 in the figure) and another through Theodore Wirth Park (D1). If LRT, and that is the direction things seem to be going, the Penn Avenue alignment requires taking houses. There are alternatives (e.g. using Oliver Ave for one or both tracks) that were ruled out that did not require taking houses, but obviously required taking roadspace from parked (and moving) cars. To say those were too disruptive (by requiring people to park a block away), and that taking houses was not, is strange.

Maybe I am just cynical, but I think that the planners were cynical by defining the on-street alternative as requiring the taking of houses on Penn Avenue. In the context of a post-Rondo Twin Cities, house takings, especially in a poor neighborhood make that an unacceptable alternative, and thereby force the alignment through the Theodore Wirth Park.

In the end, if the aim is to serve suburban commuters to downtown, using the Park alignment is probably better for those travelers. If the objective is to serve transit dependent populations in North Minneapolis, this completely misses. The claim is that both objectives are important, but clearly there is a conflict here.

I suspect this is an application of the Overton Window, by framing the choices in a particular way to get the desired outcome.

This does clear North Minneapolis from LRT, making it more amenable to streetcars, which is perhaps the objective (… See, North is underserved by LRT, we simply must provide Streetcars).

[Alex Bauman also has a nice series of posts with another take at Getting Around Minneapolis: Bottineau-no for North, part I part II, and part III.]

Recently released: NCHRP 08-36, Task 102 Assessing Alternative Methods for Measuring Regional Mobility in Metropolitan Regions (pdf):

"The objective of this project is to assess methods for defining and measuring mobility in metropolitan regions. How an agency or jurisdiction defines and measures mobility greatly determines selection of strategies and ultimately investment decisions. In metropolitan areas, measuring mobility at the system level is often limited to the measure of traffic congestion and resulting delay on the freeway and signalized arterial networks. Although traffic congestion does inhibit mobility, it alone may not be a sufficient measure of system performance, particularly as transportation agencies strive to embrace a more multimodal approach to transportation planning."

The report supports the use of accessibility as a standard performance measure.

h. Accessibility as an integrated transportation-land use measure. Trip- based mobility measures are the starting point for accessibility measures, but they are blind to trip purpose or opportunity; they just measure the performance of trips within a given time window. Accessibility measures layer on the trip purpose or type of destination represented by the trip and are meant to measure the ease of reaching opportunities – goods, services, activities and other destinations. Three factors affect accessibility: congestion (or impedance), transportation system connectivity, and land use patterns. Thus, accessibility measures capture all four of these simultaneously; it is still important to understand the contribution of components, especially mobility as this is under more direct control of transportation agencies and easier to communicate to a general audience for a greater range of purposes. Note the accessibility can apply to the ease of getting to activities (such as jobs, recreation, shopping) or aspects of the transportation system itself (freeways, transit route, bike facilities).

[The lead was Cambridge Systematics, with Dowling Associates and TTI, I was on the project team]

KurzweilAI: Traffic intersections of the future will control autonomous vehicles : "Intersections of the future won’t need stop lights or stop signs. They’ll look like a somewhat chaotic flow of driverless, autonomous cars slipping past one another as they are managed by a virtual traffic controller, says computer scientist Peter Stone, a professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin." [Interesting, but I disbelieve this is the likely technology path, there are 1 million signalized intersections and lord knows how many stop signs in the US, autonomous vehicles will develop protocols with each other before most jurisdictions fix their pathetically antiquated traffic signal controllers.]

Joe Verdoorn @ Newgeography Unintended Consequences of the Neo-Traditional City Planning Model: "This tactical criteria of the Neo-traditional model, however, can create unintended negative consequences. The criteria to which I refer includes:

• grid street patterns
• connectivity to adjacent neighborhoods
• mixed, non-residential land uses
• alley access/rear loaded house

Via Martin Engel: CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL on Vimeo: "a short, fun jaunt through history comparing the Ca. High Speed Train budget to other big ticket national projects."

Bradley Heard @ GGW Ride The Tide of light rail, Virginia Beach - Greater Greater Washington: "Dubbed "The Tide," South Hampton Roads' light rail system made its debut in Norfolk on August 19, 2011. The initial $338 million segment, operated by the regional transit agency, Hampton Roads Transit (HRT), is 7.4-miles, has 11 stops, and is currently located only within Norfolk's city limits.
...

Initial weekday ridership during the first year was projected to be only 2,900. However, the 6-month data shows that those early projections have been blown away. About 4,642 people ride The Tide during an average weekday. An even higher number—4,850—use the system on Saturdays, with 2,099 usually riding on Sundays." [Dumbing Success Down: If they forecast Zero Riders, it would have been Infinitely more successful]

Does this appall anyone else?

From Autoblog Green: Mazda CX-5 joins the cast of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax: " The computer-generated film from Universal will feature a "Seuss-ified" Mazda CX-5 rolling through a forest of lollipop-like truffula trees.

It's a slightly strange movie for a car company to call its own, since the original book was a enviromentalist tale and the Lorax – who spoke for the truffula trees against the industrial ambitions of the Once-ler – complained even more when trucks began rolling into the forest. The case is aided by the fact that Universal got rid of that storyline almost completely, and Mazda's Skyactiv credentials are what's really in play here."

Star Tribune: Light-rail service suspended, bridge, road closed after cable problem : "The failure of a cable support on the Sabo bike and pedestrian bridge has resulted in closure of the bridge, suspension of light-rail service at three stops and the rerouting of vehicle traffic on Hiwatha [sic] Avenue."

David Brin sends me to: Future Day:

"This is a brand new holiday — the first Future Day will be March 1, 2012. Let us all work together to get Future Day off to an incredible start."

Calculated Risk: Gasoline Prices: $4.50 per gallon by Memorial Day?:

"High gasoline prices is one reason American are driving less. Brad Plumer at the WaPo discusses a few other reasons: Driving, gas prices and the end of retail

Americans have cut way back on driving in recent years. Total vehicle-miles traveled has stagnated since 2007. One big question is whether this is a temporary blip due to the downturn — unemployed people, after all, don’t commute — or evidence of a long-term structural shift.

Theories for a structural shift generally involve demographics: America’s swelling ranks of retirees don’t drive as much, while kids these days prefer Facebook to motoring around with friends. But there’s another possible factor: the torrid growth of online shopping. Phil Izzo has the numbers, which are striking."

JW sends me to Technology Review: Self-Driving Tech Veers into Mid-Range Cars - Technology Review:

"Fully autonomous self-driving cars are still far from the market, but a wide range of features—including sensor systems that warn of lane departures and imminent crashes, and can even apply the brakes if you don't—are rapidly showing up in midmarket cars."

Silicon Filter: OpenXC: Ford Launches an Open-Source Platform for In-Car Connectivity and Apps :

"Here is the general philosophy behind OpenXC:

What if the user-facing hardware and software was independent from any one vehicle, and could be purchased and installed by consumers as an aftermarket add-on? What if the infotainment hardware was more modular and user-upgradable, and perhaps most importantly, transferable from one vehicle to another?"

PCMag: Nevada Approves Rules for Self-Driving Cars:

"Nevada has become the first state in the United States to approve self-driving cars, a necessary step for Google's vision to become a reality.

In a statement, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles said that its Legislative Commission today approved regulations allowing for the operation of self-driving vehicles on the state's roadways. Nevada's rules are the next step in a process began last June, when the state passed a bill   that required its DMV to draft the rules.

Autonomous test vehicles will display a red license plate, Nevada officials said. If and when the technology is approved for public use, the cars will carry a green license plate. Nevada's standard licese plates are bluish-gray, with most of the license plate representing mountains fading into a yellowish sky."

The federal case for a transit bank | Urban ethics and theory:

"Here’s how you set it up to stop driving the anti-federalist Republicans crazy:

a) Move the FTA over to housing and urban development. Where, you know, urban development is, and where you might be able assemble big joint development projects via b, next:

b) Reassemble it as an transit-focused TIFIA (revolving loan) type program or infrastructure banking program (remember how much Obama wanted one of those) that provides federal guarantees for bond issues on proposals from states and regions alike, paid off with some percentage of the state’s own-source federal gas tax revenues and/or any other state/local/regional revenues committed to the bonds.

c) Whatever percentage of federal funding had been going into the Highway Trust Fund via dedicated transit funds, move that back to the states–revenue neutral. The ones that want it for their own highway projects, fine. The ones that want to use that to commit to paying off guaranteed transit bonds via b can do that.

d) Require that joint development proposals have their local approvals done before one dollar of loan goes forward."

Via The Overhead Wire: Transit Maps: The Tube in Tile in Your Bathroom

Autopia: Peer-to-Peer Pioneer Warns India About Road Infrastructure : "Limewire founder and bicycle advocate Mark Gorton is on a mission to curtail cars.

Gorton has been fighting tirelessly to make cities friendlier to cyclists and pedestrians. He makes no effort to hide his disdain for cars, and he has lobbied endlessly for more equitable transportation polices. Even Gorton isn’t so naive as to call for the eradication of the automobile, but he wants to see policies that aggressively discourage their use.

To that end, he founded OpenPlans, a nonprofit focused on promoting transparent government and civic engagement, and he’s tried to bring an open source approach to urban planning. He also launched Streetsblog. Now he’s taking his act out on the road, making the rounds of India to promote bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly policies in a nation that is developing rapidly."

Steve Brandt @ Star Tribune: Minneapolis not keeping up -- how do your streets rate? : "A recent infrastructure study estimated that the city needs to spend $133 million more than it is now on track to spend by 2030 to avoid further residential deterioration."

Benedikt Groß – Metrography: London Tube Map to large scale collective mental map

Chris Harrison: Visualizing the Royal Society Archive [via infosthetics ]

FailBlog: Drive Thru Funerals

A few weeks ago the Strib noted: Department stores past their prime as retail anchors: "The news last week that Bloomingdale's is leaving the Mall of America comes just after Sears' recent announcement that it was closing 25 of its "full-line" stores nationwide -- most of which are in anchor malls."

One merely needs to look at the List of defunct department stores of the United States to see the trend of consolidation and retrenchment.

Department stores are just following the trend of truck traffic, mail (the figure on the right by Jessica Schoner illustrates) fuel use, oil cars, travel, drive-throughs, skyways, and any number of other technologies whose functions have been adopted by different technologies, or whose demand has withered.

It is sad when any beloved technology begins its slow decline into obsolescence and futility, but rest assured, no technology ever disappears completely (except perhaps telegraph messenger boys). Kevin Kelly has said "I say there is no species of technology that have ever gone globally extinct on this planet." Robert Krulwich @ NPR tried to take him to task, unsuccessfully. The fuller quote is in his book What Technology Wants:

A close examination of a supposedly extinct bygone technology almost always shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it. A technique or artifact may be rare in the modern urban world but quite common in the developing rural world. For instance, Burma is full of oxcart technology; basketry is ubiquitous in most of Africa; hand spinning is still thriving in Bolivia. A supposedly dead technology may be enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for ritual satisfaction. Consider the traditional ways of the Amish, or modern tribal communities or fanatical vinyl record collectors. Often old technology is obsolete, that is, it is not very ubiquitous or is second rate, but it still may be in small-time use.

Creative destruction has two bits, we all love the creation of new things, but the destruction (or diminution) of the old is a necessary element. We cannot both do all the same things we do now and some new ones. We must do less of the old. Time, space, and money constraints demand it. Sometimes this is widely agreed to be good (telephones replace telegraph messengers), but sometimes it is sadder (yet another locally owned neighborhood cafe in a mixed use four story apartment building replaces my beloved single-story drive-through franchise).

Worth it for the headline alone:

Talking Points Memo: Where the Rubber Meets the Road : "Senate Republicans threaten to attach anti-birth control amendment to federal highway bill."

Yglesias: Developers Should Be Able To Bribe Homeowners [Yes and Yes]

Liz Hoffman @ Law360 (behind a firewall) Obama Budget Would Double Infrastructure Spending:

"“Most of what's being proposed are nonstarters,” said David Levinson, a transportation policy expert at the University of Minnesota. “Infrastructure is a big part of what [Obama] is trying to do on the economy, but he's unlikely to get most of what he's asking for.” " [The interview was much longer, but I guess this was the money quote].

A Hypothesis:

The wiring of the brain recapitulates the real external physical networks on which we travel (or our perception of it). If people are learning a map (e.g London taxicab drivers learning The Knowledge), they reshape their brain. The newish technical term for this set of internal brain connections is the Connectome. It would make some sense for this wiring to be topologically similar to the actual topology that is being reflected (i.e. one thinks there would be some parsimony in finding the shortest path on a physical network if it were actually the shortest path in the brain).

I realize (and wikipedia tells me so) that classical Recapitulation Theory (Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny "in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors" ) is disproven.

What I am hypothesizing is different that there is a non-random (statistically significant) resemblance between brain wiring and the physical relationships of the external world.

Now to test. How to test?

Other links:

KurzweilAI reports: Complex wiring of the nervous system may rely on a just a handful of genes and proteins and researchers are working on mapping the internals of the brain.

Businessweek: Making the World's Largest Airline Fly: Cover Story on United Continental merger

As the figure from EIA shows, and Charles Hugh Smith asks:Why Is Gasoline Consumption Tanking?: In short, peak travel, the recession, demographics, changing travel behavior, staycations, residential relocation, fleet use changes, and rising fuel economy (and ethanol) wouldn't seem to explain this large a drop, especially the last two points. Is there a methodological problem? Other hypotheses?

Via JW: Green Car Congress: 2013 Cadillac XTS will feature first GM application of sensor fusion; milestone toward semi- and fully autonomous vehicles:

"The 2013 Cadillac XTS will feature GM’s first application of a Driver Assistance Package using sensor fusion, which combines the information of several, generally heterogeneous sensors and positioning technologies to alert drivers more accurately of road hazards and help them avoid crashes. Sensor fusion and the challenges of its implementation have been topics of interest in the active safety community for a number of years."

The EconomistBuilding competitiveness: A fare fight : "Taxi markets are a perfect test of Europe’s willingness to change."

Tyler Cowan and Kevin Grier @ Grantland: CTE, the concussion crisis, and an economic look at the end of football: "The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?"

The end of football (like the functional end of Boxing we have seen in the past decade) makes a new Vikings stadium look less worthwhile.

Jessica Schoner et al. @ streets.mn Mapping Station Use in the 2011 NiceRide Season

Lisa Schweitzer back on transportation @ Urban ethics and theoryThe House Transport Bill is anti-federalist, not anti-transit [like what I said here: A New Transportation Federalism, but clearer. ]

Jessica Schoner has a blog: Network Distance - Thoughts about transportation, GIS, and life.

Comments on Looking Ahead Fifty Years by Roger W. Babson (revised edition) c. 1942, 1948

Roger W. Babson was an investor, serial college founder, and 1940 Prohibition Party Candidate for President of the United States. I just read (and skimmed) his book "Looking Ahead Fifty Years" from the early 1940s acquired from a second-hand book shop some years ago. Much of it is quite accurate, identifying the competition between communism and capitalism as a defining tension. Much of his commentary on business vs. labor and macroeconomics would still be current today (in short, we have learned very little in 70 years, though he doesn't quite get rational expectations.). His admonitions to "Diversify!" put him right up there with modern personal financial advisors. But there are some really (in retrospect) amusing bits:

p. 22 "Rule Three: Invest in companies which are not dependent on high tariffs and would not suffer from European or Asiatic competition in the years ahead. A thoroughly reorganized traction company in a large city would qualify, while a textile company would not."

[For the kiddies: traction is an old-timey name for streetcar, interurban, and other electric railways. They used to be publicly traded, and profitable.]

Other forecasts are quite good:

p. 29

"Within the next fifty years practically all mail and most of the express will be carried by airplanes. What a standard commercial plane is developed, the depreciation charges can be reduced so that the cost of carrying passengers and light freight will be less by plane than by rail. When this comes at least one third of the railroad mileage will be scrapped."

Some of today's planning complaints are not so new:

p. 56 "Fifty years ago Main Street was made up of local concerns, owned by the best citizens of the community. These concerns have been largely driven out by the "chains." Every Main Street - in all parts of the country - now looks just the same."

KurzweilAI: OpenStax College plans free textbooks for popular college courses [The article doesn't even mention wikibooks like Fundamentals of Transportation. Free is there if you want it.]

John Whitehead @ Environmental Economics: It is hard to stifle my outrage when the government asks those who benefit to pay [See also: A New Transportation Federalism

David King @ Getting from here to there: An Allegory for Justifying Transportation Investments: A Brand New Bathroom!

"What about the future benefits? There are potentially many from a new bathroom such as lower water flow and nicer fixtures. Yet these could also be achieved through remodeling the existing bathrooms, which will need maintenance and upkeep anyway. Maybe everyone would be better off with a new hot water heater instead so there is always adequate warm water for the existing showers. A new bathroom may allow the family to put off fixing up their old bathrooms, but not forever, and money spent on a new bathroom cannot be spent on an existing bathroom. "

Randal O'Toole @ The Antiplanner:

The Seductive Appeal of Value-Capture Finance: "Today, the Antiplanner is in North Carolina, where transit agencies seem to be competing to plan the wackiest, most-expensive rail transit lines that few people will ever use. Right now, the leading contender must be Raleigh, which (according to a paper by UNC-Charlotte transport professor David Hartgen and transit accountant Tom Rubin) is planning a light-rail line that will cost $33 per trip and a commuter-rail line that will cost $92 per trip.

The Antiplanner, however, is in Charlotte looking at a proposed commuter-rail line that is expected to cost more than $450 million to start up and is projected to carry only about 5,600 trips (meaning 2,800 round trips) a day in 2025. The Antiplanner calculates that, for about the same price as the rail line, taxpayers could give every one of the 2,800 riders a brand-new Toyota Prius every other year for the life of the rail project.
...
If the rail line were truly worthwhile, the users themselves would be glad to pay for it. It is only because it is so much more expensive (not to mention less convenient) than the alternatives that users won’t pay for it. Asking others to pay based on some mythical “value capture” is simply deceptive.
"

Tom Vanderbilt @ Wired: Mapping the Road Ahead for Autonomous Cars

Via JW: And in late-breaking news, Economists favor congestion pricing: Poll Results | IGM Forum

I posted an article on County Seats at streets.mn

Transportation takes too long: Slate asks: Should it take decades to build a subway? It's too easy to slow down urban mass transit improvements. Here's how to fix the system.

1. Bureaucracy
2. Lack of funding
3. Politics
4. Existing infrastructure
5. Mismanagement
6. Addiction to cars
7. Basic fairness

This nicely complements my Transportation costs too much series. This applies to roads and other infrastructure as well as subways. The Americans entered World War II in December of 1941. By August of 1945, three and a half years later, the war was over. While it is easier to destroy than create, think about all that had to be created to destroy so efficiently. The Inter-County Connector recently opened in Maryland. Plans for it dated to the 1950s, and the alignment to the 1960s.

Tom Vanderbilt @ Wired Autonomous Cars Through the Ages (a slideshow)

JULIA FRANKENSTEIN @ New York Times: Is GPS All in Our Heads? :

"Varying their viewing direction — facing north, facing east — we then assessed their pointing error. All participants performed best when facing one particular direction, north, and the pointing error increased with increasing deviation from north. In other words, by using knowledge gained from navigation to link their perceived position to the corresponding position on a city map, participants could easily retrieve the locations from their memory of city maps — which, after all, are typically oriented north." [Comment, it annoyed me greatly in Tokyo when the local street maps on signs did not point north] Jarrett Walker @ Human Transit also comments.

Spatial Analysis: London Cycle Hire and Pollution [Someone should do this with NiceRide data]

Per Square Mile: For metros, two cities can be better than one:

" A study of all metropolitan areas in the United States with populations above 250,000 by Evert Meijers and Martijn Burger shows that productivity is higher in metros with more than one city. The effect is especially pronounced among smaller metro areas.

Meijers and Burger speculate that’s because smaller cities tend to have smaller problems—less traffic, lower crime rates, and so on. By splitting the problems up among a few cities, polycentric metros can host a large population without experiencing the problems of a similarly sized, monocentric metro."

The Economist: Saving lives: Scattered saviours :

"Mr Beer has designed something better. His charity, United Hatzalah, co-ordinates a group of 1,700 volunteers scattered around Israel. All are trained in basic first aid. And each has a GPS-enabled smartphone revealing exactly where he or she is.

Anyone who sees an emergency can call a central number (1221 in Israel). A smartphone app (a small programme installed on a modern mobile phone) instantly alerts the nearest first aider, who may be only a block away, standing behind a deli counter or dozing in a meeting. He stops whatever he is doing, races to the scene and tries to stop the victim’s bleeding or start his heart (most volunteers are equipped with defibrillators). They mostly have motorbikes too, to nip through the traffic. When the ambulance arrives, the volunteer goes back to his day job." [Crowdsourcing life-saving - this looks extendible.]

Ken Orski writes:

Why Pleas to Increase Infrastructure Funding Fall on Deaf Ears

Letting the nation’s roads and bridges deteriorate may worsen traffic congestion and add to our commuting woes, but when water and sewer systems begin to fail our very civilization is at risk. That is the message of a recent story in The Washington Post drawing attention to the alarming state of the nation’s water and sewer infrastructure. The story looks at the Washington D.C. system as a poster child for neglected and dilapidated municipal utilities. The average age of the District water pipes is 77 years and a great many were laid in the 19th century, notes the Post article. Emergency crews rush from site to site to tackle an average of 450 breaks a year. ("Billions needed to upgrade America’s leaky water infrastructure," by Alfred Halsey III, January 2, 2012).

...

I agree with almost all of it. Interestingly, he cites Charles Lane writing in the Washington Post: The U.S. infrastructure argument that crumbles upon examination:

So how come my family and I traveled thousands of miles on both the east and west coasts last summer without actually seeing any crumbling roads or airports? On the whole, the highways and byways were clean, safe and did not remind me of the Third World countries in which I have lived or worked. Should I believe the pundits or my own eyes?

For all its shortcomings, U.S. infrastructure is still among the most advanced in the world — if not the most advanced. I base this not on selective personal experience but on the same data alarmists cite.

Well, my eyes, and the vibration in my vehicle, and my tripping when walking, tell me that infrastructure is crumbling here in Minnesota. That is not to say the system is not a marvel, it obviously is, and that it is better than many less developed countries, which is also quite true. It is simply to say Mr. Lane should come visit, e.g. Franklin Avenue east of the Mississippi River, or entrance ramps onto I-94, and tell me lots of local and even some interstate system infrastructure is not crumbling. It is drivable, it could be worse, but it is hardly good.

The most recent attempt to address some of these issues has attracted dissent. There is lots of uproar about the latest proposal from the House of Representatives "The American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act" (see e.g. this op-ed by Rep. Frank Guinta and its comments). The uproar is especially from advocates about how federal highway user fees will no longer pay for transit and bicycle paths if this bill is passed.

I think this bill, while far from perfect, improves the current situation by dedicating fees that are collected from users to the thing they are using. Matt Kahn and I advocated:

Fix It First. All revenues from the existing federal gasoline tax and tolls would be redirected away from new construction. Instead, it would be used primarily to repair, maintain, rehabilitate, reconstruct, and enhance existing roads and bridges.

This bill gets the dedication of funds from users to users right, and it devolves responsibility to the states, but I don't think it guarantees money won't be spent on new projects rather than maintaining the existing system. Thus it still presents the misprioritization problem, but at least it as the state rather than federal level, and that is an improvement. Now it will be up to local citizens and their elected officials to spend the money wisely.

What is missing from these the advocate's discussions is the rationale for why what would no longer be funded is a federal rather than local responsibility. I understand the convenience of keeping a federal gas tax rather than re-debating the issue in 50 state legislatures. I also understand the need for an interstate transportation system, and the imperfection of state gas taxes in capturing revenue from non-residents, especially in small states. What I don't get is why that justifies federal funding of local transportation services that are used almost entirely by within-state residents.

If Minnesota wants more bike paths, that is a great thing, Minnesota should pay for it. (We can then discuss what level of state or local government should actually be responsible). No reason to bring Washington into it.

[As a positive rather than normative comment, given how much the House bill differs from the Senate bill, it is unlikely these differences will be reconciled easily or before the election.]

Lewis Lehe @ Price Roads: Texas Equity : "If airlines were government run, then the idea of offering more expensive, non-stop flights would run into equity concerns. But airlines offer this option all the time, and no one ever complains about it. I’m starting to think the main advantage of private ownership isn’t “greed is good” or anything with incentives, but simply that private firms aren’t beholden to equity concerns whenever anything changes."

Star Tribune: Transit officials looking to Ludwig [von Beethoven] and his posse for help: "You go up that escalator and you feel like you're on your way to invade Poland," said Eric Gustafson, assistant director of the Corcoran Neighborhood Organization, which complained about conduct at the station." [Playing classical music to dissuade transit trouble-makers, we should have an ambient sound-track everywhere on land, and chase the Trouble-Makers into Lake Superior]

Calculated Risk: U.S. Light Vehicle Sales at 14.18 million annual rate in January: " That is up 12.1% from January 2011, and up 5.1% from the sales rate last month (13.5 million SAAR in Dec 2011)."

Exhibition RoadExhibition Road officially open. This is an interesting Shared Space in South Kensington by Imperial College, the Science Museum, the V&A, and the Natural History Museum in London. Photos

Recently Published:

• Iacono, Michael and David Levinson (2011) Location, Regional Accessibility and Price Effects: Evidence from Home Sales in Hennepin County, Minnesota. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board #2245 pp.87-94 [doi][download preprint]

Abstract

Regional location factors exert a strong influence on urban property markets, and measures of accessibility are foremost among them. More local influences, such as proximity to urban highway links, also may positively or negatively influence the desirability of a location. This study used a cross section of home sales in Hennepin County, Minnesota, from the years 2001 through 2004, along with a set of disaggregate regional accessibility measures, to estimate the value of access to employment and resident workers. The effects, whether as amenity or disamenity, were estimated for locations near major freeway links that had recently under-gone major construction to add capacity (or were scheduled to undergo such construction) at the time of the home sales. The richness of the home sales data set allowed for control of a number of structural attributes, as well as some site characteristics. Additional neighborhood characteristics (such as income levels and local educational quality) were added from supplemental data sources. Empirical results indicated that households highly valued access to employment. Access to other resident workers (i.e., competition for jobs) was considered a disamenity. Proximity to local highway access points associated positively with sale price, whereas proximity to the highway link itself associated negatively with that price. The study concluded with some implications for research and practice of the concept and measurement of the relationship between location and land value."

Matt Yglesias @ Slate: Taxi Wars in South Africa: "this story out of South Africa where rival cab associations shoot it out in the streets is reminder that socially functional capitalist competition is a particular kind of thing:"

via Tim de Chant @ Per Square Mile: Image: Twitter Trips by Eric Fischer on Flickr: ""

Keith Laing @ The Hill: CBO reports highway trust fund headed for bankruptcy in 2014: "The CBO released a report Tuesday that predicted the deficit will rise to $1.08 trillion in 2012. Under its calculations, the highway trust fund, which funds road projects using collections from the federal gas tax, will be running on empty just two years after that. "