Tag Archives: urban infrastructure

September 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. and Russia may have blundered into a proxy war in Syria. And on a loosely related war-and-peace note, Curtis LeMay was a crazy bastard.
  • The ecological footprint situation is not looking too promising: “from 1993 to 2009…while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense, widespread and rapidly intensifying in places with high biodiversity.” Meanwhile, as of 2002 “we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green material) produced on Earth each year (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf (Pauly and Christensen 1995), and we use 60% of freshwater run-off (Postel et al. 1996). The unprecedented escalation in both human population and consumption in the 20th century has resulted in environmental crises never before encountered in the history of humankind and the world (McNeill 2000). E. O. Wilson (2002) claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if every human consumed at the level of the average US inhabitant.” And finally, 30% of African elephants have been lost in the last 7 years.
  • Car accidents are the leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 24. The obsession with car seats may not be saving all that many lives, while keeping children out of cars as much as possible would be 100% guaranteed to save lives. And one thing that would be guaranteed to help us create more walkable neighborhoods and therefore save children’s lives: getting rid of minimum parking requirements in cities once and for all. And yet you don’t hear this debate being framed in moral terms.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • Monsanto is trying to help honeybees (which seems good) by monkeying with RNA (which seems a little frightening). Yes, biotech is coming.
  • Some people think teaching algebra to children may actually be bad. Writing still seems to be good.
  • There have been a number of attempts to identify and classify the basic types of literary plots.

transportation megaprojects exceed cost estimates by 28%

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According to this Danish study, worldwide transportation “megaprojects” exceed their projected costs by an average of 28%.

  • In 9 out of 10 transportation infrastructure projects, costs are underestimated.
  • For rail projects, actual costs are on average 45% higher than estimated costs (sd=38).
  • For fixed-link projects (tunnels and bridges), actual costs are on average 34% higher than estimated costs (sd=62).
  • For road projects, actual costs are on average 20% higher than estimated costs (sd=30).
  • For all project types, actual costs are on average 28% higher than estimated costs (sd=39).
  • Cost underestimation exists across 20 nations and 5 continents; it appears to be a global phenomenon.
  • Cost underestimation appears to be more pronounced in developing nations than in North America and Europe (data for rail projects only).
  • Cost underestimation has not decreased over the past 70 years. No learning that would improve cost estimate accuracy seems to take place.
  • Cost underestimation cannot be explained by error and seems to be best explained by strategic misrepresentation, i.e., lying.
  • Transportation infrastructure projects do not appear to be more prone to cost underestimation than are other types of large projects.

Big Bertha

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The problems for Seattle’s “Bertha” tunnel boring project are continuing according to the Seattle Times.

Tunnel-machine Bertha’s two-year breakdown will further delay the Highway 99 tunnel’s grand opening until 2019 and saddle Washington state with an estimated $223 million in cost overruns, lawmakers were told Thursday…

A 2019 opening would mark a full decade since former Gov. Chris Gregoire chose the deep-bore tunnel option and lawmakers approved the tunnel bill sponsored by then-Sen. Ed Murray, now Seattle mayor. Gregoire dismissed critics such as then-Mayor Mike McGinn, who warned that a clause in the bill put Seattle taxpayers at particular risk for paying for overruns…

The extra costs almost certainly would be paid by the state’s drivers in gas taxes, more transportation-fund debt, or by tolls and fees.

Tunneling is a key technology for the future of urban infrastructure. But the experience in Seattle illustrates the risk that the technology entails. It is one thing for state and federal governments to undertake this risk under the oversight of elected officials, and another for state and federal governments to put pressure on local governments and utilities to undertake these types of massive projects, as is common in the water quality and flooding arena. A tunneling project that goes well can indeed often reduce pollutant discharges or flooding at an attractive unit cost, but the costs can mount quickly when a project does not go well. Luckily, that happens only when we do not know in advance precisely what we are going to find underground every step of the way under a city that has been around for a couple hundred years (in other words, always). Tunneling is an alternative that should almost always be looked at. Green infrastructure should be looked at too and considered seriously on its merits as an engineering infrastructure technology that can have multiple benefits for the citizens, taxpayers and ratepayers of urban areas.

index of redevelopment potential

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This is an index of redevelopment potential for individual properties in Philadelphia and other cities. The application to real estate is obvious, but I can also see a number of applications to public policy. For example, changes to codes and ordinances can improve the overall health, safety, and environmental impact of a city. But these get implemented slowly and incrementally, especially in older cities with fixed boundaries, where most development is redevelopment. If you had a reasonable prediction of where and when redevelopment is likely to occur, you would know which areas to sit back and be patient, and which areas of the city to intervene more directly if you want to see change on any reasonable time frame.

It’s a little bit of a shame the person is not sharing their methodology. I’ve had a number of urban planners and economists tell me over the years this is very hard to do, and seen a few try and give up. So this is either brilliant, or it is little more than a guess. If it’s brilliant it could be very valuable indeed, so I guess I can see the financial incentive not to publish the details. But there is no way to know the difference without knowing how it is done. The author could at least publish a white paper showing some back testing of the algorithm against historic data.

Swiss tunnel

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It is actually possible to build major new infrastructure. At least, the Swiss can do it.

The Gotthard rail link has taken 20 years to build, and cost more than $12bn (£8.2bn). It will, the Swiss say, revolutionise Europe’s freight transport.

Plans for a better rail tunnel have been around since the 1940s, but it was not until 1992 that Swiss voters backed their government’s plan to build a new high-speed rail link through the Alps…

For 17 years, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, more than 2,000 people have worked on the tunnel. There have been accidents: nine tunnel miners have died.

Pretty amazing. What infrastructure projects will the U.S. public support starting today that will not be ready for a generation? Like I said, the Swiss can do it.

I think tunneling is a key technology for the future for everything from transportation to water management, and eventually space colonization. The technology has improved a lot since we dug the first subway systems with shovels in the late 1800s. Now we use massive tunnel boring machines like the one shown in this article. But it’s still hard and expensive enough with our current technology that it’s not often the first technology we go to.

May 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

  • There are scary and seemingly reckless confrontations going on between U.S. and Russian planes and ships in the Indian Ocean. And yet, it is bizarrely humorous when real life imitates Top Gun.
  • The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • Obama went to Hiroshima, where he said we can “chart a course that leads to the destruction” of nuclear weapons, only not in his lifetime. Obama out.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • I try not to let this blog get too political, really I do. But in an election season I just can’t help myself. This is a blog about the future of civilization, and the behavior of U.S. political, bureaucratic, and military elites obviously has some bearing on that. In May I mused on whether the U.S. could possibly be suffering from “too much democracy“, Dick Cheney, equality and equal opportunity, and what’s wrong with Pennsylvania. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, TRUMP IS A FASCIST!
  • The world has about a billion dogs.
  • It turns out coffee grounds may not make good compost.

“hybrid” infrastructure

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I like a couple things in this abstract from the journal Cities.

One is a definition of hybrid infrastructure as “infrastructure systems that are integrated within buildings and landscapes that also provide non-infrastructure uses”. In other words, you are trying to kill two birds with one stone. This should be efficient and cost-effective compared to killing two birds with two stones, but the reason it often doesn’t happen (at least in the U.S. cities I am familiar with) is that there are typically two entities responsible for killing one bird each, and if their stone happens to kill the other bird they will ignore that and not count it as a benefit. Each agency calculates the cost as one stone, while the actual cost to society was two stones. (The only problem with this analogy, obviously, is that we are talking about ecological benefits and killing birds would actually be bad.)

The second thing I like is that the question asked is about the “maximum ecological performance potential of buildings and landscapes”. This is a nice question to ask – not just how can one type of infrastructure perform one function cost-effectively, but how can it fit into the landscape and perform many functions at the same time. If those two agencies (or in real life, 10 or 20 agencies) were all asking this question together, maybe you could achieve much better outcomes in cities.

March 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

February 2016 in Review

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I’m going to try picking the three most frightening posts, three most hopeful posts, and three most interesting posts (that are not particularly frightening or hopeful) from February.

3 most frightening posts

3 most hopeful posts

3 most interesting posts

  • The U.S. election season certainly is getting interesting, although not really in a good way. ontheissues.org has a useful summary of where U.S. political candidates stand…what are the words I’m looking for…on the the issues. Nate Silver has an interesting online tool that lets you play around with how various demographic groups tend to vote.
  • Fire trucks don’t really have to be so big.
  • Titanium dioxide is the reason Oreo filling is so white.