Tag Archives: urban design

SEPTA tries micro-transit

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The Philadelphia-area Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) is experimenting with micro-transit. I have heard that the idea of micro-transit, including semi-fixed but flexible bus routes people can schedule with apps, has not worked all that well in trials elsewhere. And SEPTA has a history and tendency of underwhelming. Nonetheless, I think that if the U.S. remains committed to its low-density sprawl land use preferences, traditional fixed bus and rail routes are just not going to work. Something more flexible is needed, and if public agencies can find ways to do it more efficiently or cost-effectively than the private sector then it’s worth a try. If we are tempted to say it is unfair for a subsidized government agency to compete with the private sector in this area, we should remember the enormous public funding that has gone into building and maintaining our enormous public road network over the past 70 or so years at the expense of nearly all other types of public infrastructure.

I’m still skeptical of you though SEPTA. You have never exceeded my low and steadily declining expectations. Prove me wrong.

most popular words in home listings in 2022

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I am a big fan of walkable urban communities, and I want to believe my fellow Americans would learn to love them if they just had more options to experience them. But an analysis of home listing keywords shows that what is selling is still big floor space, big yards, and garages.

Spaciousness defines home descriptions in 2022: Keywords addressing the need for more “room,” “space,” and an “open floor plan” were among the most used, aimed at ticking the boxes of space-deprived buyers. This universal need for space was also reflected in the frequent use of space-related adjectives, like “open” or “great.”

Curb appeal matters, but parking space matters more: “Garage” was the most-mentioned amenity in listing descriptions across the country.

Homes that promise a “patio/porch” or a “yard” might experience a boost in interest with these outdoor amenities still riding high off their post-pandemic popularity.

point2homes.com

Due to the tyranny of geometry, you can’t have lots of private space, lots of parking, and the density that allows walkability all at the same time. If we want to reduce car use, we will have to find ways to make shared public spaces as good or better than the private spaces people are saying they want, and we will have to find ways for people to get from point A to point B that are faster, cheaper, and more pleasant than the private car infrastructure they are saying they want. I would say safer, but almost anything is safer than cars and having non-deadly transportation options does not seem to be a selling point in our real estate market. The people have spoken.

To create space inside houses in the city, you can either go vertical or you can take it away from other land uses. Some people like high rise living, but the public by and large does not seem to want this. The next option to create space inside houses and for private outdoor space is to take it away from public outdoor space. This is what we tend to do in denser neighborhoods like the one I live in – some people are able to have small yards and some people live in exclusive gated communities with their own private parks. Public open space is extremely limited, in extremely high demand, and to a certain extent a victim of its own success (for example, because trash cans quickly become overwhelmed on the weekend leading to litter, bags of dog waste, and odors). So in this case, people who value large, nice smelling open spaces don’t stick around. The final option to create more space, both indoor and outdoor, public and private, is to take it away from driveways, garages, parking lots, roads, and street parking. People resist this because cars are still the most convenient way to get around, if you happen to have convenient parking. Public transportation, where it exists, is slow, infrequent, and gross. Biking and other forms of personal mobility, even where they have dedicated infrastructure, are not remotely safe. We know how to improve these things, but there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem where the public does not support spending more money or taking more space for them because they are so pathetic now. You could break this cycle by just fixing it using known technical solutions, but at a high political and financial risk. You could create pilot programs in certain neighborhoods where public support exists, but then you run into the gentrification trap because it is likely to be higher-income neighborhoods where that support exists. Or you can thrust it into lower-income neighborhoods where there is more likely to be public opposition, and that is also politically and financially risky. So we might need leadership with the courage to take some risk, and this is in particularly short supply.

2021: Year in Review

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As per usual, I’ll list out and link to the stories I chose as the most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting each month in 2021. Then I’ll see if I have anything smart to say about how it all fits together.

Survey of the Year’s Stories and Themes

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A China-Taiwan military conflict is a potential start-of-World-War-III scenario. This could happen today, or this year, or never. Let’s hope for the latter. This is a near-term existential risk, but I have to break my own “rule of one” and give honorable mention to two longer-term scary things: crashing sperm counts and the climate change/fascism/genocide nexus.
  • FEBRUARY: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.
  • MARCH: In the U.S. upper Midwest (I don’t know if this region is better or worse than the country as a whole, or why they picked it), electric blackouts average 92 minutes per year, versus 4 minutes per year in Japan.
  • APRIL: One of the National Intelligence Council’s scenarios for 2040 involves “far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation”.
  • MAY: The Colorado River basin is drying out.
  • JUNE: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.
  • JULY: The western-U.S. megadrought looks like it is settling in for the long haul.
  • AUGUST: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?
  • SEPTEMBER: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.
  • OCTOBER: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.
  • NOVEMBER: Freakonomics podcast explained that there is a strong connection between cars and violence in the United States. Because cars kill and injure people on a massive scale, they led to an expansion of police power. Police and ordinary citizens started coming into contact much more often than they had. We have no national ID system so the poor and disadvantaged often have no ID when they get stopped. Everyone has guns and everyone is jumpy. Known solutions (safe street design) and near term solutions (computer-controlled vehicles?) exist, but are we going to pursue them as a society? I guess I am feeling frightened and/or depressed today, hence my choice of category here.
  • DECEMBER: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: Computer modeling, done well, can inform decisions better than data analysis alone. An obvious statement? Well, maybe to some but it is disputed every day by others, especially staff at some government regulatory agencies I interact with.
  • FEBRUARY: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer, HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.
  • MARCH: I officially released my infrastructure plan for America, a few weeks before Joe Biden released his. None of the Sunday morning talk shows has called me to discuss so far. Unfortunately, I do not have the resources of the U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve available to me. Of course, neither does he unless he can convince Congress to go along with at least some portion of his plans. Looking at his proposal, I think he is proposing to direct the fire hoses at the right fires (children, education, research, water, the electric grid and electric vehicles, maintenance of highways and roads, housing, and ecosystems. There is still no real planning involved, because planning needs to be done in between crises and it never is. Still, I think it is a good proposal that will pay off economically while helping real people, and I hope a substantial portion of it survives.
  • APRIL: Giant tortoises reach a state of “negligible senescense” where they simply don’t age for a long time. Humans are distant relatives of giant tortoises, so maybe we can aspire to this some day. They are not invulnerable to injury and disease.
  • MAY: An effective vaccine for malaria may be on the way. Malaria kills more children in Africa every year than Covid-19 killed people of all ages in Africa during the worst year of the pandemic. And malaria has been killing children every year for centuries and will continue long after Covid-19 is gone unless something is done.
  • JUNE: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.
  • JULY: A new Lyme disease vaccine may be on the horizon (if you’re a human – if you are a dog, talk to your owner about getting the approved vaccine today.) I admit, I had to stretch a bit to find a positive story this month.
  • AUGUST: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.
  • SEPTEMBER: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.
  • OCTOBER: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.
  • NOVEMBER: Urban areas may have some ecological value after all.
  • DECEMBER: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: There have been fabulous advances in note taking techniques! Well, not really, but there are some time honored techniques out there that could be new and beneficial for many people to learn, and I think this is an underappreciated productivity and innovation skill that could benefit people in a lot of areas, not just students.
  • FEBRUARY: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.
  • MARCH: One study says 1-2 days per week is a sweet spot for working from home in terms of a positive economic contribution at the national scale. I think it is about right psychologically for many people too. However, this was a very theoretical simulation, and other studies attempting to measure this at the individual or firm scale have come up with a 20-50% loss in productivity. I think the jury is still out on this one, but I know from personal experience that people need to interact and communicate regularly for teams to be productive, and some people require more supervision than others, and I don’t think technology is a perfect substitute for doing these things in person so far.
  • APRIL: Hydrogen fuel cells may finally be arriving. Not so much in the U.S., where we can’t have nice things.
  • MAY: I learned about Lawrence Kohlberg, who had some ideas on the use of moral dilemmas in education.
  • JUNE: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.
  • JULY: “Cliodynamics” is an attempt at a structured, evidence-based way to test hypotheses about history.
  • AUGUST: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.
  • SEPTEMBER: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.
  • OCTOBER: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?
  • NOVEMBER: Peter Turchin continues his project to empirically test history. In this article, he says the evidence points to innovation in military technologies being driven by “world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding“. What does not drive innovation? “state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication“. As far as the technologies coming down the pike in 2022, one “horizon scan” has identified “satellite megaconstellations, deep sea mining, floating photovoltaics, long-distance wireless energy, and ammonia as a fuel source”.
  • DECEMBER: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.

Continuing Signs of U.S. Relative Decline

Signs of U.S. decline relative to our peer group of advanced nations are all around us. I don’t know that we are in absolute decline, but I think we are now below average among the most advanced countries in the world. We are not investing in the infrastructure needed in a modern economy just to reduce friction and let the economy function. The annual length of electric blackouts in the U.S. (hours) compared to leading peers like Japan (minutes) is just one telling indicator. In March, I looked at the Build Back Better proposal and concluded that it was more like directing a firehose of money at a range of problems than an actual plan, but I hoped at least some of it would happen. My rather low but not zero expectations were met, as some limited funding was provided for “hard infrastructure” and energy/emissions projects, but little or nothing (so far, as I write this) to address our systemic failures in health care, child care, or education. The crazy violence on our streets, both gun-related and motor vehicle-related, is another indicator. Known solutions to all these problems exist and are being implemented to various extents by peer countries. Meanwhile our toxic politics and general ignorance continue to hold us back. Biden really gave it his best shot – but if this is our “once in a generation” attempt, we are headed down a road where we will no longer qualify as a member of the pack of elite countries, let alone its leader.

The Climate Change, Drought, Food, Natural Disaster, Migration and Geopolitical Instability Nexus

2021 was a pretty bad year for storms, fires, floods, and droughts. All these things affect our homes, our infrastructure, our food supply, and our water supply. Drought in particular can trigger mass migration. Mass migration can be a disaster for human rights and human dignity in and of itself, and managing it effectively is difficult even for well-intentioned governments. But an insidious related problem is that migration pressure can tend to fuel right wing populist and racist political movements. We see this happening all over the world, and the situation seems likely to get worse.

Tipping Points and other Really Bad Things We Aren’t Prepared For

We can be thankful that nothing really big and new and bad happened in 2021. My apologies to anyone reading this who lost someone or had a tough year. Of course, plenty of bad things happened to good people, and plenty of bad things happened on a regional or local scale. But while Covid-19 ground on and plenty of local and regional-scale natural disasters and conflicts occurred, there were no new planetary-scale disasters. This is good because humanity has had enough trouble dealing with Covid-19, and another major disaster hitting at the same time could be the one that brings our civilization to the breaking point.

So we have a trend of food insecurity and migration pressure creeping up on us over time, and we are not handling it well even given time to do so. Maybe we can hope that some adjustments will be made there to get the world on a sustainable track. Even if we do that, there are some really bad things that could happen suddenly. Catastrophic war is an obvious one. A truly catastrophic pandemic is another (as opposed to the moderately disastrous pandemic we have just gone through.) Creeping loss of human fertility is one that is not getting much attention, but this seems like an existential risk if it were to cross some threshold where suddenly the global population starts to drop quickly and we can’t do anything about it. Asteroids were one thing I really thought we didn’t have to worry much about on the time scale of any human alive today, but I may have been wrong about that. And finally, the most horrifying risk to me in the list above is the idea of an accelerating, runaway feedback loop of methane release from thawing permafrost or underwater methane hydrates.

We are almost certainly not managing these risks. These risks are probably not 100% avoidable, but since they are existential we should be actively working to minimize the chance of them happening, preparing to respond in real time, and preparing to recover afterward if they happen. Covid-19 was a dress rehearsal for dealing with a big global risk event, and humanity mostly failed to prepare or respond effectively. We are lucky it was one we should be able to recover from as long as we get some time before the next body blow. We not only need to prepare for much, much worse events that could happen, we need to match our preparations to the likelihood of more than one of them happening at the same time or in quick succession.

Technological Progress

Enough doom and gloom. We humans are here, alive, and many of us are physically comfortable and have much more leisure time than our ancestors. Our social, economic, and technological systems seem to be muddling through from day to day for the time being. We have intelligence, science, creativity, and problem solving abilities available to us if we choose to make use of them. Let’s see what’s going on with technology.

Biotechnology: The new mRNA technology accelerated by the pandemic opens up potential cures for a range of diseases. We need an effective biological surveillance system akin to nuclear weapons inspections (which we also need) to make sure it is not misused (oops, doom and gloom trying to creep in, but there are some ideas for this.) We have vaccines on the horizon for diseases that have been plaguing us for decades or longer, like malaria and Lyme disease. Malaria kills more children worldwide, year in and year out, than coronavirus has killed per year at its peak.

Promising energy technologies: Space based solar power may finally be getting closer to reality. Ditto for hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles, although not particularly in the U.S. (I’m not sure this is preferable to electric vehicles for everyday transportation, but it seems like a cleaner alternative to diesel and jet fuel when large amounts of power are needed in trucking, construction, and aviation, for example.)

Other technologies: We are actually using technology to catch fish in more sustainable ways, and to grow fish on farms in more sustainable ways. We are getting better at looking for extraterrestrial objects, and the more we look, the more of them we expect to see (this one is exciting and scary at the same time). We are putting satellites in orbit on an unprecedented scale. We have computers, robots, artificial intelligence of a sort, and approaches to use them to potentially accelerate scientific advancements going forward.

The State of Earth’s Ecosystems

The state and trends of the Earth’s ecosystems continue to be concerning. Climate change continues to churn through the public consciousness and our political systems, and painful as the process is I think our civilization is slowly coming to a consensus that something is happening and something needs to be done about it (decades after we should have been able to do this based on the evidence and knowledge available.) When it comes to our ecosystems, however, I think we are in the very early stages of this process. This is something I would like to focus on in this blog in the coming year. My work and family life are busy, and I have decided to take on an additional challenge of becoming a student again for the first time in the 21st century, but somehow I will persevere. If you are reading this shortly after I write it in January 2022, here’s to good luck and prosperity in the new year!

clean up that air and get those fat asses moving!

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Max Roser has one of his nice data-based articles focused on air pollution. There are a variety of estimates, but they fall within a fairly narrow range (considering the population of the world) of about 7-9 million people per year. Something like 2-4 million of this is estimated to be due to indoor air pollution, which is a big problem in the developing world. The biggest source of the problem is…wait for it…particulates from burning fossil fuels.

He compares these numbers to around 75,000 deaths per year from terrorism and war combined, 500,000 from homicide (I’m rounding to the nearest 100,000, and he doesn’t provide numbers for suicide which I would guess could be similar or higher), 1.3 million for road accidents, and 2.8 million for obesity.

So if you were a politician (or emperor) who wanted to help the most people, you would make this a big priority, along with reducing deaths in and around motor vehicles and deaths from all the sitting around we do. What do these all have in common? We need to work toward electrification and clean energy, sure – but using 100% existing knowledge and technology, we can design safer streets and roads using the designs we (okay, a few Europeans, at least) already know work, and encourage people to live near work and shopping where they can mostly get around by their own muscle power, supplemented by good public transportation. Or to be much more crude, get those fat asses moving and those lungs out in the healthy, fresh air! Every dollar transferred from the defense/security budget to these things would pay off something like 8:1. And that is in the short term, if a thing called global warming caused by burning fossil fuels did not even exist.

cars = freedom?

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I don’t know how many regular readers of this blog exist, but if there are some, you know I am not a huge fan of cars. They ruin our urban areas, pollute our air and water, kill and injure us and our children, and make us fat and sick and sociopathic. Beyond that, I knew about traffic stops. The U.S. and U.S. states do not just issue you an ID card at birth. Generally speaking, your driver’s license is your most official government issued ID for most people, and there are enough hurdles to getting one that disadvantaged people (poor, homeless, unemployed, transient, undocumented, disabled, addicted, mentally ill, too old, too young, too busy, the list goes on…) often don’t have them. Those people still use cars to get around in many cases, because that is the only way to get around in many of our communities, and then when they get pulled over in a routine traffic stop they are in trouble. Especially if they already have a warrant or some past legal trouble, which the disadvantaged quite often do.

It’s also always bothered me that you give up your rights against search and seizure the minute you step into a car. Police can stop you and search your car and body on very little pretext in a way they would be unlikely to do if you were on foot (“stop and frisk” aside – another conversation, although it illustrates that police intrusiveness we routinely accept when we are in a motor vehicle can cause an uproar when we are not). Sobriety checkpoints also bother me – don’t get me wrong, drunk driving is very, very bad. But a random sobriety checkpoint subjects you to search and seizure on no pretext whatsoever other than the fact that you chose to get into a car, and if you have some previous legal trouble, or just a paperwork problem, suddenly you are in trouble you had no reason to expect. (The best solution to drunk driving is a walkable community.)

So that’s the disadvantaged portion of the population, who tend to get more disadvantaged over time because the deck is stacked against them. But what about the larger population as a whole? Well, this Freakonomics episode tells the story in a way I hadn’t fully considered:

  • Before cars, ordinary people and police just didn’t interact that much. Generally speaking, a search warrant was required for the police to stop and search someone. There weren’t as many police, they weren’t as heavily armed and they just weren’t that busy.
  • Once cars came on the scene and started killing and injuring people in large numbers, traffic laws were enacted. Police were told to enforce the traffic laws, and courts ruled repeatedly that the imminent danger posed by cars in real time overruled the need to obtain a warrant.
  • Add in guns, or really just the possibility of guns being present in any traffic stop, and you have even more violence on top of the deaths and injuries the cars are already causing – “The traffic stop is the most common encounter between individuals and the police, and it’s also the site of a lot of police violence and police shootings that we see in the news today.“
  • At this point, technology would allow us to handle most traffic violations as an administrative matter, with a picture of the violation and a ticket sent in the mail. The article likens this to tax collection and penalties. The police wouldn’t even be involved in most cases.

A couple more thoughts – First, there is a link between mounting fines and mass incarceration, so just imposing more fines on disadvantaged people and trying to collect them may not be the perfect answer. Second, this article doesn’t go into it, but there is also a critical role for safer street and intersection design, which can help a lot to reduce the number of violations, deaths, and injuries in the first place. And I already mentioned it, but the larger urban design and land use policy can reduce the need for driving and increase the number of people able to get around under their own power, which is good for the air, water, land, our bodies and our minds!

I still have some hope for computer-driven cars too. The hype has died down, which means the practical application will probably gradually creep up on us when we least expect it. A computer-driven vehicle should be able to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light, stay under the speed limit, stay out of the bike lane, and just generally avoid unpredictable behavior. And if it doesn’t, that is a malfunction rather than a crime, which it should be able to self-report to police and insurance companies and get corrected. Some people are still going to get hurt because there is no risk-free transportation system, but it should be far fewer than what we deal with now.

sirens on emergency vehicles: “more harm than good”?

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I knew it – all those sirens on ambulances and fire trucks tearing around town might not be improving outcomes. They are bad for our hearing (especially for the people working on the trucks) and might startle drivers into making mistakes or sudden unpredictable moves. Sure, the idea is that if you are having a heart attack or stroke the second count. But according to this article at least, the data just don’t support the idea that those sirens are getting the paramedics to you faster.

Americans love our sirens. When I lived in Singapore for a couple years, one thing I noticed was that police, fire trucks (which were often more like vans), and ambulances didn’t use sirens much. Now, Singapore tore down most of its historic buildings (which you could argue is sad), which means its buildings are mostly very modern standardized high rises. I think that is one reason they don’t need the big fire trucks. Their streets are wide and well maintained (this is not great for pedestrians or people on bicycles). They also do congestion pricing on a major scale so they just don’t have the traffic we have (I support this, but you could argue it is inequitable because the rich can afford to drive while everyone else takes public transportation. The public transportation is very good and reliable however.) Sirens aside, I found Singapore awful in terms of urban noise pollution and wore ear plugs much of the time I was there. The noise didn’t seem to bother most of the locals or people from nearby countries.

golf carts

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Why don’t we drive around in low-speed city traffic in something like golf carts? Bikes are great, but there are times you need to move heavy bulky items around, and I applaud people who bike around with small children but have not found that practical on a daily basis. Golf carts would save tons of space, and would eliminate a lot of noise and pollution if they were electric.

I can think of two reasons why we don’t use them. First is that we want highway vehicles so we can get on the highway and leave the city at at moment’s notice. But if we live, work, shop, and study in our cities, we only need to leave occasionally. In that case, it makes sense to rent that larger vehicle just when we need it. We would also be more likely to pick buses, trains, and planes for those weekend trips when it makes sense, because we wouldn’t have sunk all that money in private cars and feel like we need to make use of them. (I’ve heard this is 100% illogical and also 100% normal human behavior.)

The second reason is the perception that we need big, heavy, fast vehicles to protect us from other big, heavy, fast vehicles. Well, mutually assured destruction is no way to run our cities and lives. If everybody switches to golf carts, we won’t have this problem, but nobody wants to be the first and end up a stain on the pavement. And most cities won’t dedicate streets and lanes to smaller vehicles because the big vehicles need so much space for driving and especially parking. And no, I don’t think golf carts really belong in our protected bike lanes, where we are lucky enough to have those, because they are still big, heavy, and fast enough to run over bikes, I think.

Just reminder, though, that we still need to get off our butts and walk most places, most of the time. Riding around on quiet, clean, safe motorized vehicles isn’t going to help with things like diabetes or obesity.

how to measure access to parks

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Two simple measures of park access are the total area of parks in a city and the average distance of residences from a park. You can divide the former by population to get a normalized stat that can be compared across cities or tracked over time, and you can look at various stats on the latter such as the percent of households within 10 minutes of a park. Here are a few more ideas from a guy in Singapore.

  • length of walking and/or cycling trails
  • length of waterfronts (not sure exactly how this was defined, if it included Singapore’s concrete drainage channels in addition to oceanfront, lakes and ponds)
  • area of dense vegetation within parks
  • “supply of of park area to residential buildings” based on a decay factor (some sort of weighted average I suppose based on how much people of willing to travel – paper here)

This all makes some sense to me. I might add some measure of tree canopy. None of this does anything about the weather in Singapore. If you want to enjoy parks there, I recommend getting up very very early. Then take a nice long afternoon nap, stop by the pool if you have access to one (but if you are light skinned realize you are at the equator and you still need sunscreen late in the afternoon), and go enjoy the more urban amenities (like food, very large bottles of beer which are meant to be shared, and a variety of less family friendly entertainments I have only heard about) after dark, which is around 7 p.m. year round. One thing about Singapore is it is safe to be out at any time of night, and street food is available all night.

sidewalk robots are legally pedestrians in some states

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Including, surprisingly, my state of Pennsylvania, which is rarely at the forefront of anything new. I am cautiously optimistic about this. It sounds like some pedestrian and bicycle advocates (I include myself in these groups) are against this. But I think slow-moving, light, predictable vehicles should not be a big problem. Fast, unpredictable vehicles driven by humans on infrastructure that does not consider the existence of pedestrians and bicyclists are what usually kills people. Also, every package on a slow, light, predictable robot is one that is not on a truck, and that should reduce the number of trucks over time. Trucks disproportionately kill people – pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists alike. I realize that trucks also create some jobs, and job losses need to be dealt with through unemployment, education and training.

I see some problems looming, and these are infrastructure problems that need to be solved. Here in Philadelphia, sidewalks are often blocked by construction and parking because the law is either too lax or not enforced. Bike lanes often do not exist, and when they do they are often poorly designed, unprotected and unmaintained. Ramps for disabled people (which also help the rest of us, especially parents pushing strollers) often do not exist, are in a state of poor repair, collect water every time it rains, or are simply blocked by, again, construction or illegal parking. These are design and operational problems that have solutions, and the relevant public agencies (more than one, but one in particular) are either ignorant or incompetent or both. We need to fix the public agencies before we can design streets, bike lanes and sidewalks that are really going to work.

There’s another issue here. I don’t have the time, money, or expertise to sue individual contractors, landowners, or public agencies because they are blocking my walking path or bicycling lane. An Amazon or a UPS or a Google or an Uber will have these resources. This might be okay if it forces some change on big entities with deep pockets. This could be a problem for the individual homeowner or small business owner though. In my city, technically the sidewalk in front of my house is private property but public right-of-way. That means I can’t stop people from walking past, I can’t modify it significantly, but I can be sued or forced to repair it if it is not up to code. This might make sense on paper, but in practice cities are very lenient enforcing this on the small-time homeowner unless there is a serious incident. Sticking every homeowner in a city with a $10,000 repair bill (you might as well replace water and sewer lines while you are at it, which many people also don’t realize they own and are responsible for) would be a big burden on the middle class on down. Sidewalks are obviously public infrastructure and really part of the street, but this is one way cities push responsibilities and costs to the citizenry and try to keep taxes down a little bit. Taking over the sidewalks and raising enough tax revenue to keep them in a state of good repair would probably be the best answer from a technical and economic standpoint, but this would be a big legal and financial change for city government.

My utopian vision is for walking, bicycling, and slow, predictable, light, soft rounded vehicles to gradually displace most of the trucks, taxis and private cars that are out there. There would be less traffic at this point, almost no need for parking because the vehicles can just stack themselves somewhere out of the way when they are not in use. Maybe you only need one travel lane for big vehicles at this point (we’ll still want ambulances and fire trucks, although really I think these can be a bit smaller and quieter and still do the job), and robots, bicycles, and pedestrians can all have their own dedicated spaces and signals. You would have lots of room opened up for green infrastructure, sidewalk cafes, park benches, fountains, or whatever else you want to do. There is no technical or economic reason it couldn’t be done, and it would be cool. Cynicism, ignorance, and poor leadership are the reasons it won’t be done, at least not in most U.S. cities anytime soon.

New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future

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I basically agree with the principles of new urbanism (which were based on old urbanism). Communities where people can take most work, school, shopping, and entertainment trips by walking or biking are better for the planet and better for our physical and mental health. With good planning and design, there is plenty of room in the spaces we have already developed to accommodate whatever population growth we are expecting, without continuing to chew up land that could be left wild or used as farmland. The trick is to establish a virtuous cycle where gradually more people buy into the idea of life without private cars taking up half the space. And then some of that space saved has to be invested in good public infrastructure, access to recreation and nature to offset some of the negative effects of density. I think New Urban ideas have blunted suburban sprawl and car-dependency a little in the United States, but only a little unfortunately. There just aren’t that many walkable neighborhoods to choose from, and so people either aren’t familiar with them, and can’t imagine a non-car-dependent lifestyle, or else they assume people of average means can’t afford them, which is true in general of desirable things in short supply.

New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future

The New Urbanism, initially conceived as an anti-sprawl reform movement, evolved into a new paradigm in urban design. Recently, however, some researchers have argued that the popular appeal of New Urbanism has eroded, the movement has lost its significance, and critical research on the broader theme has tapered off. In response, this article investigates whether the movement has lost its currency and explores the future of New Urbanism in the context of contemporary circumstances of development. The article begins with a brief description of the conceptualization of New Urbanism as an exception to the development trends of the time. Collaborative efforts of its protagonists that have contributed to the integration of New Urbanist concepts into other programs, policies, and development regulations are presented in the next section to describe its expansion, to clarify its mainstreaming, and to call attention to its broader impact. The concluding section presents contemporary circumstances of development and changes that are intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, including those related to the nation’s demographics, climate change, technological advances, rapid growth of the digital economy, and acceleration of e-commerce to explore the significance of New Urbanism for future development.

Urban Planning open access journal