Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

best “urban planning” books of 2023

And the “best of” posts begin… I put urban planning in quotes because the field is broad and covers a lot of ground that may be of interest to engineers, natural and social scientists, economists, and many others. Here are a handful that caught my eye:

  • How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between. Interesting to me because, in general, neither the United States nor my specific state or city seems able to get big things done. I think this is largely a failure of imagination and priorities, but I also listened to this Freakonomics podcast recently on how construction productivity in the U.S. has just gone nowhere over the last 50 years while productivity in other sectors has grown by leaps and bounds. They rule out lack of capital investment and excessive monopoly power. Some evidence seems to point toward regulation (whether health, safety, and environmental protections are “excessive” is in the eyes of the beholder, but this also includes misguided/outdated local land use policies like minimum lot sizes and parking requirements), citizen input/resistance (but in my city, legitimate public input takes place alongside some shady politician/developer horse trading and the two can be hard to distinguish, and of course, existing homeowners have a rational but unhelpful interest in resisting new construction and new residents, and this can also be tinged with racial bias). Nobody thinks better construction management and risk management would be a bad thing, and this is an area I think computers and automation (call it artificial intelligence if you want) might make a difference. Make a digital model of exactly what is supposed to be built where and when, then monitor the hell out of it during the construction process to try to anticipate and correct deviations from the plan before they occur. There is always interest in prefabrication and making construction look a lot more like manufacturing, which it superficially resembles except for taking place in the real world of weather, traffic, surprise underground conditions etc. And then (not really covered in the podcast) there is the high-tech stuff like drones, robots, and advances in materials science. Being in the engineering industry myself, I know it is fiercely competitive and yet relatively risk adverse and slow to adopt new technology.
  • Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. I’m not sure I want to be depressed enough to read this, but certainly an important topic. To solve poverty, you can give people money in the short term (which you have to take from other people/entities who have more than they need, although they won’t see it that way), and/or you have to give them education, skills, and job prospects in the longer term. That’s really the whole story – now go forth and prosper, everyone.
  • Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar. Well, before reading this everyone should read the classic The High Cost of Free Parking. But I have gotten jaded trying to change minds on this by providing accurate and rational information to the parking-entitled crowd, which is almost everyone.
  • Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet by Ben Goldfarb. “Road ecology” almost sounds like an oxymoron to me. Then again, it is really eye opening when you realize how much of the urban surface is made up of roads, streets, driveways, and parking lots. So if there really are ways to reduce the impact, it is worth thinking about.
  • Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City and The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown. Important topics, given that there is less and less land not altered by humans out there.
  • Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth. This covers population shrinkage in developed countries today, and possibility eventually in most countries. But developed countries will need to deal with increasing migration pressure in the medium term, so I am not sure how soon we will have the luxury of thinking about reducing our city sizes. Then again, maybe we should be letting some cities shrink while densifying others and making them as vibrant and human as possible.
  • The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. Okay yes, densify and improve the cities in good places.
  • A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? and The First City on Mars: An Urban Planner’s Guide to Settling the Red Planet. Fun to think about, because we need to have some imagination and practice thinking big even as we are solving all those tricky little problems close to home.

November 2023 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: An economic model that underlies a lot of climate policy may be too conservative. I don’t think this matters much because the world is doing too little, too late even according to the conservative model. Meanwhile, the ice shelves holding back Greenland are in worse shape than previously thought.

Most hopeful story: Small modular nuclear reactors have been permitted for the first time in the United States, although it looks like the specific project that was permitted will not go through. Meanwhile construction of new nuclear weapons is accelerating (sorry, not hopeful, but I couldn’t help pointing out the contrast…)

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: India somehow manages to maintain diplomatic relations with Palestine (which they recognize as a state along with 138 other UN members), Israel, and Iran at the same time.

migration

In the U.S., it’s “secure the border”. In the UK, it’s “bring down net migration“. In the Netherlands, it’s the possible rise to power of an openly anti-Islam party. As I happen to be reading one of the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr (A Quiet Flame, 2008) set partially in 1930s Berlin with the Nazis on the cusp of power, I find all this thought-provoking and concerning. In most countries, we’ve come far enough that openly advocating discrimination against a group already in the country is not an acceptable mainstream position. But expressing open anti-immigrant nationalist views is the next best option.

There is some rational fear of job loss and wage suppression that all this feeds on. But inequality between richer and poorer countries is somewhat clearly the root driver of migration, and climate change driven disasters and droughts are adding fuel to the fire. Add in some old-fashioned geopolitical conflict and you have a very volatile mix. The irony is that the policies needed to counteract these forces – economic and technological aid from richer to poorer countries, education, trade, reasonable guest worker programs, arms control and peace negotiations, serious emissions reduction and climate change adaptation investments to name a few – are anathema to anti-immigrant nationalist politics. So you have a feedback loop where the migration pressure drives the anti-migration political rhetoric, and the political rhetoric drives politicians and policies that increase the migration pressure.

Rationally explaining all this to enough voters to elect politicians who would break these feedback loops does not seem to be a viable option. It’s a tough one, and if I come up with the answers that have eluded a lot of smarter people than me up until now, I will let you know.

automatic speed regulators

Automatic speed regulators on private vehicles – YES PLEASE. This is an idea that will save lives, and its time has come. Won’t somebody please think of the children?

The article suggests limiting speeds to 100 mph, but come on! Why not limit them to the local posted limit? Or if saving lives that way is too interventionist for “‘Merica”, then install the technology and let insurance companies massively penalize people who choose to turn it off. This could be a middle ground between self-driving cars and people who insist on the preventable mass murder of letting human beings continue operating deadly highway vehicles on city streets, once it is no longer necessary.

America’s shoplifting panic

Recently I purchased a small bottle of dishwashing liquid for less than $2 at a Walgreens in Center City Philadelphia, and I had to call a clerk to unlock it a Plexiglass case and get it for me. I also notice that shelves are oddly empty in many stores, and I have certainly seen and heard the stories about shoplifting and “flash mobs”.

As always, I like journalism that provides some data to back up storytelling and anecdotal evidence. So kudos to CNN here:

Shoplifting reports in 24 major cities where police have consistently published years of data — including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas and San Francisco — were 16% higher during the first half of 2023 compared to 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis.

However, excluding New York City, the number of incidents among the remaining cities was 7% lower.

CNN

The article also provides some interesting context on past “shoplifting panics”, including one in London when women first ventured into public in significant numbers. People believed they were stealing for the thrill of it. I would speculate that it may have been more a question of whether they had access to cash or what their husbands may have thought about them spending said cash. Then there was a hippie shoplifting panic in the 1960s. And now we have a “breakdown of law and order in cities” narrative fueling the current one.

The article also talks about the enormous pressure on brick and mortar retailers to compete with online sales. I suspect this narrative provides them some convenient leverage in negotiating with landlords, insurers, and local politicians. I also wonder if shoplifting has always gone on but modern surveillance technology means insurance companies are more easily aware to quantify it, and it is just more prevalent than they thought.

115 traffic deaths and counting for Philadelphia in 2023

The Bicycle Coalition has a grim but nicely done map and infographic of traffic deaths in Philadelphia. 115 and counting, including 52 pedestrians, 2 scooter riders, 11 motorcyclists, and 9 bicyclists (but I believe there was a 10th since these numbers were updated.) This is the worst in 24 years, according to the site.

Public opinion tends to blame the victims – pedestrians to some extent, and certainly bicyclists and scooter riders. Public opinion thinks motorcycles are just awesome, despite how deadly they clearly are. I see a trend of people riding motorcycles without helmets, which is just taking a huge risk with absolutely no reward to go along with it. Public opinion tends to blame the police to some extent for lack of enforcement. And last but not least, drivers tend to blame other drivers, because of course every driver considers themselves well above average.

As an engineer, I blame ignorant, incompetent street design first and foremost. I blame the engineers who are not up to date on best practices, ignorant bureaucrats who constrain them even if they are, and ignorant politicians who constrain the bureaucrats and engineers. On the latter, the outgoing Philadelphia mayoral administration at least has a Vision Zero program on the books, massive failure though it has been. The incoming mayor is not known to be a friend of safe streets, and is a proponent of the corrupt “councilmanic prerogative” system that allows ignorant politicians to overrule competent planning and design decisions in our city. The poster child for the latter, Kenyatta Johnson, is set to become the leader of our city council, by most reports.

So I am keeping my hopes and expectations under control. If in some parallel universe the incoming mayor asked my opinion, I would advise her to bring in new management for our streets department (I have no personal knowledge or experience with our current streets department leadership, except to note that they have failed to design safe streets, maintain streets, or pick up garbage and recycling as effectively as other cities.) I would ask that new management to at least bring our street design standards up to the safest level our state transportation department allows. I would ask that new management to put a professional asset management program in place to keep those streets in the best state of repair possible with the funding available. I would give that new management challenging yet achievable metrics and deadlines, and hold them accountable. That’s the relatively easy stuff. The harder stuff is dealing with the police, dealing with the state legislature, and chipping away at public opinion. On the latter, if pictures of dead and suffering children in Gaza are upsetting to people, can we maybe learn something and focus on showing and telling more stories about the risk and suffering street violence is causing to our own children here at home?

India’s Foreign Relations

Here is a long Foreign Policy article on India’s foreign relations. Among interesting things, they manage to maintain formal diplomatic relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel, and Iran at the same time. Their spats with China and Pakistan seem to go on forever but at least in recent decades, have not turned violent.

One thing that occurs to me in thinking about the recent “U.S. offer of civilian nuclear power” to Saudi Arabia is that both India and the U.S. might have an interest in prying Saudi Arabia from close ties to Pakistan’s nuclear program. They may cynically have decided that the nuclear proliferation tumor is going to metastasize to Saudi Arabia no matter what, and they would prefer for it to happen on their terms. An alternative, in a sane world, could be to offer Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other responsible countries civilian nuclear power under strict UN/IAEA oversight, backed up by a Security Council with some credibility.

“plutonium pits”

A “plutonium pit” is the actual core of a thermonuclear bomb. According the Scientific American, the U.S. plans to spend $1.5 trillion dollars on new plutonium pits and new intercontinental ballistic missiles to put them on (actually, it’s not even clear from the article if the $1.5 trillion includes the missiles. This is all while people are sleeping the streets, life expectancies are falling, violence is raging, educational attainment is falling, and the list goes on. I don’t even hear politicians talking about peace or even proposing negotiations to limit the pace of this new arms race. Real, courageous leaders would do this, and they seem to be in short supply. With all the risks our global civilization is facing (food security, floods, fires, drought, pandemics and biological weapons to name just a few very bad ones not really being addressed), we can’t let nuclear proliferation and nuclear war rear its ugly head again. To our politicians I say, somebody step up and lead, you cowards!

what’s new with small modular nuclear reactors

Nuclear energy just has to be part of a climate smart future. It has to be. It also maybe, can be, should be part of a peaceful future free of nuclear weapons. Anyway, what’s new and exciting is that a small modular nuclear reactor was permitted for the first time in the United States. What’s not exciting is the company decided the project was…

https://medium.com/afro-cinemaphile/not-economically-viable-man-beb060247fce

Still, if it can and has been permitted, hopefully somebody will find a business model that works, and/or governments will subsidize it to get it off the ground. In the cancelled or on-hold negotiations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia recently, we hear that the U.S. was willing to consider “giving” Saudi Arabia civilian nuclear technology. This seems problematic, when we know countries (Iran and Israel just to name a couple) have managed to develop dual-use uranium enrichment technology under the appearance of a peaceful civilian energy program. So the technology shouldn’t be “given” unilaterally by nuclear powers (the geopolitical kind of power here) to governments they like. This needs to be done under the IAEA under a strict inspection regime, and there has to be a commitment to enforce it. It seems somewhat unlikely the dysfunctional UN Security Council is set up to do this in the near future.

Greenland ice shelves

The floating ice shelves holding back the rest of the ice on Greenland are in worse shape than previously thought, according to this article. The article says the ice in this area is enough to raise global sea level by about 2 m. From a quick skim, I didn’t get a sense of how long the authors think that might take to happen, other than “long term”.