Category Archives: Web Article Review

AAA study finds car ownership better than ride sharing

My headline above is true, but misleading. What AAA really did is answer the question under what conditions owning a car is cheaper than ride sharing, and there are some. AAA found that owning a car can be more cost-effective than ride sharing…for people who drive about a thousand miles a month, have “free” parking, and choose a used car. That may indeed describe the average suburban American, and I am not criticizing people who choose that life style. But in my opinion, many people do not choose it but default to it without realizing other options are possible.

I live in a dense city (in a single family home with a small front and back yard, not a high rise apartment.) My family walks for most work, school, and shopping trips. Street parking is cheap but scarce, and garage parking is very expensive (you can’t have cheap, abundant parking and high density together.) Ride sharing has been a great innovation for the occasional trips where a car is the best option, and particularly great for getting home from somewhat far-flung places where calling a taxi used to be a very unreliable and expensive option. We simply don’t worry about getting stranded places any more, which used to be the single most annoying thing about not owning a car. I guess that means we take a few trips now that we wouldn’t have in the past, and if enough people are doing that it explains why ride sharing has increased traffic a little bit – and why that is a good thing.

Anyway, my point is that the AAA conclusion is not a general one that would apply to my situation. And my situation is one that anyone can choose to be in, maybe not tomorrow but if you want to live in a high-density, walkable residential area you can plan that and make it happen within a few years.

we know what killed the dinosaurs, right?

Well, apparently there is a loose scientific consensus but still plenty of debate, summarized in this article in The Atlantic.

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.

Their hypothesis quickly gained traction, as visions of killer space rocks sparked even the dullest imaginations. nasa initiated Project Spacewatch to track—and possibly bomb—any asteroid that might dare to approach. Carl Sagan warned world leaders that hydrogen bombs could trigger a catastrophic “nuclear winter” like the one caused by the asteroid’s dust cloud. Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams—it needed only “some sex and the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying attention,” one journalist wrote. News articles described scientists rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile-wide cavity near the Mexican town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as the killer…

While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”

 

Charles Bukowski on bullshit jobs

If a bullshit job is defined as one that is unfulfilling but pays well (see my post the other day), where does that leave all the people with unfulfilling jobs that don’t pay well? I recently came across this amusing but not so optimistic letter from Charles Bukowski:

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? …

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

So the answer is quit and become a bum? I’m not quite so sure. I’ll have a good look at my fingernails and give it some thought.

ASLA on sustainable transportation

The American Society of Landscape Architects has put together a website with a lot of resources and references for transportation design. This is a nice complement to the more traditional engineering side of transportation planning and design, and underlines the value you can get from a well-functioning interdisciplinary design team even if it costs a bit more upfront. Here’s an excerpt from the street design page.

Bicycle lanes and sidewalks should be physically separated from vehicle traffic by trees, bollards, buffers, parked cars, or curbs wherever possible. Research has shown that physically-separated bike lanes yield the greatest safety gains for cyclists and, as a highly-visible piece of infrastructure, even have the potential to attract new cyclists. Vegetated buffers can further protect cyclists from harmful air pollution and should be incorporated whenever possible.

Green infrastructure should be widely used. Bioswales, rain gardens, and permeable pavement can be used to manage stormwater runoff and reduce flooding as well as create more aesthetically-pleasing streets. New construction should incorporate as many green streets features as possible, and existing infrastructure should be retrofitted to include green infrastructure. In Edmonston, Maryland, a 2/3 mile stretch of road was retrofitted with bioretention systems that now capture 90 percent of the first 1.33 inches of water on-site, helping to mitigate flooding and improve local water quality.

driverless taxis in San Francisco and Arlington, Texas

Driverless taxis are already operating on public streets in these two places, although for now their range is limited and they still have “safety operators”. Once this catches on, I have a hard time imagining how fixed-route bus services could continue to compete. If I ran a public transportation system I would be trying to get innovative on flexible routes right away.

bullshit jobs

In David Graeber’s 2013 essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, a bullshit job is one where the person doing it doesn’t think it is necessary or important. The paradox is that many high-paying corporate jobs seem to fit this mold.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the ’60s—never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ’20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers…

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones…

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

I’m not quite so sure. I think that as we have become wealthier, things our grandparents would have thought of us “wants” are now classified as “needs”. I think air conditioning is one good example. My grandparents would have considered it an unimaginable luxury, but I consider it somewhat of a necessity that improves my life and my family’s life, and I am willing to work a little extra to have it. I can think of a lot more examples that don’t fit this though, starting and ending with all the junk in my house. I would gladly give up most of it in exchange for working a little less. So what is stopping me? That’s actually a hard question to answer. My life style is calibrated to my income and vice versa in an endless cycle that is hard to break, kind of like popping a balloon with your bare hands – how do you get a grip so you can apply pressure? The cable bill might be a start – in fact, I just bought a digital antenna and cancelled my cable. I kept my internet connection though, and somehow Verizon figured out a reason that saves me only a little money (some “discount for bundled services” that no longer applies). So now I could theoretically work maybe 5 minutes less a week, but that would be a weird conversation to have with my employer, and is not going to happen. And of course I am not giving up my internet, because that is a necessity for me and my family, which my grandparents could not even have conceived of existing, but which I am willing to work a little extra to pay for…

the stats on Uber and Lyft

A new report provides interesting data on ride sharing nationwide. We all knew they were shifting rides away from the traditional taxi industry, but they are also resulting in more traffic on the road for a few reasons. First, they are taking trips away from traditional public transportation and from walking in major, high-density cities. And second, people are taking trips they otherwise wouldn’t have taken. The evidence that they are putting downward pressure on car ownership rates does not appear to be strong, at least so far.

I have a few reactions. From a purist economic perspective, if people are choosing to take trips that were too expensive or too inconvenient before, that is a positive improvement in those people’s lives. If the traditional taxi and public transportation models are too slow, dirty, inconvenient and/or expensive to compete, they need to figure out how to step up their games. My sympathy is limited, but I would rather see traditional public transportation adapt than disappear. I have no love for taxi dispatch companies, but I do have sympathy for the small-time owner operators that borrowed large sums of money to invest in a regulated taxi medallion. Governments really ought to buy those medallions back at the market price before Uber and Lyft came on the scene (and then throw them away forever). Fewer walking and/or biking trips is not good for people’s health for both physical activity and air quality reasons, but there city governments need to step up their infrastructure and planning games if they want walking and biking to be truly safe and inviting ways to get around. A final note is that even if traffic does not go down in the near term, any decrease in parking demand will be a positive for dense cities.

Ride sharing has improved my life immeasurably. I choose to live in a dense city and choose not to own a car. Before ride sharing was available, I often had trouble getting a taxi home from certain neighborhoods when I needed it, got cheated by drivers who pretended not to understand where I was going or refused to give change for cash-only payments (which were the only option). Taxi service has improved a lot now that they have some competition. Buses and commuter trains too are slow, dirty, and unreliable, although they too have improved recently. So I think a lot of people’s lives are better and I think the public will continue to demand this technology.

body scanners from Total Recall are now a thing

The Los Angeles subway is installing the body scanners from Total Recall (the good 1990 version, not the garbage 2012 remake.)

The machines scan for metallic and non-metallic objects on a person’s body, can detect suspicious items from 30 feet (9 meters) away and have the capability of scanning more than 2,000 passengers per hour…

In addition to the Thruvision scanners, the agency is also planning to purchase other body scanners — which resemble white television cameras on tripods — that have the ability to move around and hone in on specific people and angles, Wiggins said.

China’s population could “drop sharply”

According to this New York Times article, China’s working-age and child-bearing age population has already started to drop, and the population as a whole may follow. Considering that China represents 1/7th or so of humanity, this is supposedly bad for the economy. It could be good for the planet, but just a reminder that peak population does not necessarily peak ecological footprint if “living standards” (i.e. fossil fuel burning, private car driving, plastic consuming, meat eating, etc.) per person continues to rise.