this private think tank report on the future of transportation claims to have used a system dynamics approach and to have reached some radical conclusions, like the collapse of private car ownership, the oil industry, and major decreases in the cost of getting around within a decade or so. The buzz phrase is “transportation as a service”.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
New sharing economy startups
here are a couple internet startups of note in the shared parking and household/business cleaning arenas. Certainly these have all been done before, but there is room for improved reliability and payment options.
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/parking-network-airgarage-wins-phoenix-smart-city-hack/508031/
https://www.axios.com/cleaning-is-a-profitable-business-for-these-two-startups-2502432673.html
Don’t end the Fed?
some candidates for Federal Reserve chairman are being mentioned, and the good news is that all appear to have some central banking experience, and none are actually against central banking or espousing weird conspiracy theories!
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/next-fed-chair-yellen-successor-by-jeffrey-frankel-2017-10
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-fed-appointments-by-eswar-prasad-2017-10
Uranium One
I’m at a disadvantage traveling and trying to post on my phone, so my posts may be short for awhile.
So just what is/was Uranium One? According to Lawfare.com, almost nothing. It was a business transaction between a Russian government-linked company and a Canadian company owning U.S. uranium mines. Such transactions have to be reviewed by a panel including many U.S. government agencies, which seems like a good idea. The State Department, overseen by Hillary Clinton at the time is one of the many departments involved. The transaction was reviewed and approved by the book. And seriously, that’s all. To suggest otherwise is propaganda, not professional journalism based on facts and logic. We seem to live in a country now where even educated people don’t realize there is a difference.
https://lawfareblog.com/unpacking-uranium-one-hype-and-law
Broken glass, the crunchy treat
just in case you want to make broken glass themed candy for Halloween, here is how you can do that.
http://eatthedead.com/2017/10/27/halloween-recipe-glass-shard-skull-cake/
the most rat-infested cities
Orkin has released a list of which cities it has trapped the most rats in. Interesting, except they don’t appear to have controlled for population or area. So, the biggest cities have the most rats, which doesn’t tell us much except that rats are present in cities. It would be more interesting to know how many rats are present per square mile or per 1,000 people per square mile. Which I suppose you could try to figure out from this data.
- Chicago
- New York
- Los Angeles (+1)
- San Francisco – Oakland (+1)
- Washington, DC (-2)
- Philadelphia (+1)
- Detroit (+2)
- Baltimore (-2)
- Seattle – Tacoma
- Dallas – Ft. Worth (+4)
population growth and cities
According to this article in Governing, some economists question whether population growth is always a good thing for cities.
Although the preponderance of media opinion has always been that more people make a better city, there has long existed a cluster of academics who challenge that wisdom. Perhaps the leading voice in this contrarian club is Paul Gottlieb, an economist at Rutgers University. He has argued for decades not only that local elected officials should take a measured approach to growth, but that metropolitan areas with stable or slow-growing populations are likely to have greater economic prosperity. Fifteen years ago, in a paper titled “Growth Without Growth,” Gottlieb called attention to 23 of the largest 100 metro areas, which he nicknamed “wealth builders.” Those were places with below-average increases in population and above-average increases in per capita income.
Another group of metro areas, which Gottlieb labeled “population magnets,” had excelled at gaining residents but performed below average at increasing per capita income. The data seemed to suggest that mayors shouldn’t frame future population increase as a guaranteed path to a better economy, especially when it comes at the cost of greater congestion, pollution and the loss of open space. “My paper was controversial in the sense that it questioned the desirability of population growth in any way,” Gottlieb says now. “It’s not obvious why you would want population growth except as a means to the end of increased income or increased wealth.”
It seems to me that bringing in more affluent taxpayers has to be good for a city as a whole, particularly legacy cities that have lost population density and have vacant, undermaintained housing and infrastructure. Of course it is not good for some residents in some neighborhoods if they feel as though the newcomers are concentrating and displacing them. I don’t have the answer to this any more than anyway else, except that providing excellent transportation and other infrastructure might tend to encourage people and well-paying jobs to spread out a bit more geographically. In Philadelphia, what is happening is that the newer, more affluent taxpayers are concentrating in neighborhoods closest to the central business district where they work, so they can walk, bike, or have a reasonable commute on public transportation to work. There will not be any lack of housing in Philadelphia as a whole any time soon, but the less affluent are getting pushed farther out from the city center and neighborhoods with good transportation links to the city center. Philadelphia actually made a plan for a comprehensive subway system a hundred years ago, built a small fraction of it, then stopped. Nobody has the imagination to even suggest finishing that system. We don’t even have the imagination to consider taking diesel buses offline in favor of the electric buses and trolleys we used to have, even as we have a serious air pollution problem. Schools and parks that have been in a state of disrepair for decades are very gradually improving in the more affluent neighborhoods, and continuing to languish in the less affluent ones. All this leads to tension between black and white, rich and poor, recent arrivals and long-time residents. Increased tax revenues could be invested to help solve these problems, but our politicians and bureaucrats just continue to fail us.
SDG Index and Dashboards Report 2017
The UN has released an update on the Sustainable Development Goals. I find the number of indicators a bit bewildering. It is interesting to dig into some of the thresholds and methods behind the indicators, and to see how individual countries score. I wonder though if countries are really using these metrics to guide their planning and policy decisions. I wonder if something a bit simpler (not simpler to compile, but simpler to interpret) like a GDP adjustment or ecological footprint would work better. If every country were in the “good” range for all these metrics, do we really know that the world would be sustainable in an absolute sense, meaning not exceeding the limits of our planet? These indicators instead seem to rank countries against each other, taking the countries doing the best in each category as the model for all the others. I wonder if the best the world currently has to offer is really the best we can aspire to in every category. Well, this is an academic question when there is clearly such a gap between the best and the worst, or even the best and the average. And I wonder if we will be patting ourselves on the back in the future because some percentage of countries met some percentage of these goals.
The Republic of Minerva
Here’s something I didn’t know: in 1971, a group of American libertarians created two small artificial islands on an unclaimed coral reef near Fiji and Tonga, (very roughly) a thousand miles or so off Australia’s east coast, and proceeded to declare a new country, which was then invaded and conquered by the kingdom of Tonga, and then washed away by storms.
The best Oliver could do was Minerva Reef, in the middle of the Pacific, 500 km (260 miles) southeast of Tonga. It had never been claimed, despite being discovered as far back as 1854. There were, however, serious problems establishing a settlement on the reef, not the least being that the reef lies some three feet above water at low tide and about four feet under water at high tide.
Undaunted, in January 1971, Oliver and a small party went to Fiji, where they chartered a 54-foot motor sailer and purchased the materials to create artificial islands on the reef. On their arrival at Minerva, the party unloaded large hunks of coral wrapped in chicken wire, concrete blocks, sand and other rubble, which allowed them to build two micro-islands on the reef. On one of these islands, they built a small stone tower and hoisted its flag: a yellow torch of freedom on a solid blue background. The founding fathers of Minerva hoped to expand the reclaimed land until it would eventually support a city of 30,000 citizens…
Taking up the challenge was King Tāufa’āhau Tupou IV, the heaviest monarch in the world, weighing in at over 440 pounds. On June 21, 1972, he led an expeditionary force to invade the Principality of Minerva. Without an army or navy to call on, the king recruited a five-man convict work detail to undertake the invasion and, to add gravis to the expedition, a four-piece brass band played the Tongan national anthem from on-board the royal yacht Olovaba to inspire the troops. Taking courage, when he saw that Minerva was unoccupied, the king decided to personally lead his force. Once the tide was out, the king went ashore. After tearing down Minervan flag, he read aloud a proclamation of sovereignty. The reef now belonged to Kingdom of Tonga.
I like to think I have a creative mind but I certainly couldn’t have made that up.
trees and public health
A new report from the Nature Conservancy makes the case for the value of urban trees to human health. They go through a number of economic valuation studies that are out there, and the literature on health benefits: air quality, heat stress, mental and physical health, climate change. Then they make a case that urban tree canopy in the U.S. is actually declining and that it is severely under-funded in most cities.
Also, on the tree front, here is a recent paper on the rate at which wood inside urban trees decays. I think one important concept with urban trees is to think of them as infrastructure that has to be maintained and replaced at some rate. They just don’t live as long as forest trees, because they are in stressful environments, performing functions for us, and getting worn out. And the cost of maintaining and replacing them is actually low, and their benefits high, compared to other types of infrastructure. But even though the engineering, planning and architecture professions have been talking a lot about green infrastructure for at least a decade, most of us still aren’t taking it seriously as infrastructure, and the construction industry, bureaucrats and politicians are not taking it seriously, if they have even absorbed the concepts at all. I think this is a case where wealthy private foundations or individuals could make an enormous difference if they wanted to, because the institutions to plant and maintain trees typically exist, but are just severely underfunded. So all I have to do is become a wealthy private individual and I will take care of this. Okay, a solution exists and I’ll get right on that.
The overlooked carbon loss due to decayed wood in urban trees
Decayed wood is a common issue in urban trees that deteriorates tree vitality over time, yet its effect on biomass yield therefore stored carbon has been overlooked. We mapped the occurrence and calculated the extent of decayed wood in standing Ulmus procera, Platanus × acerifolia and Corymbia maculata trees. The main stem of 43 trees was measured every metre from the ground to the top by two skilled arborists. All trees were micro-drilled in two to four axes at three points along the stem (0.3 m, 1.3 m, 2.3 m), and at the tree’s live crown. A total of 300 drilling profiles were assessed for decay. Simple linear regression analysis tested the correlation of decayed wood (cm2) against a vitality index and stem DBH. Decay was more frequent and extensive in U. procera, than P. acerifolia and least in C. maculata. Decay was found to be distributed in three different ways in the three different genera. For U. procera, decay did appear to be distributed as a column from the base to the live crown; whereas, decay was distributed as a cone-shape in P. acerifolia and was less likely to be located beyond 2.3 m. In C. maculata decay was distributed as pockets of variable shape and size. The vitality index showed a weak but not significant correlation with the proportion of decayed wood for P. acerifolia and C. maculata but not for U. procera. However, in U. procera, a strong and significant relationship was found between DBH and stem volume loss (R2 = 0.8006, P = 0.0046, n = 15). The actual volume loss ranged from 0.17-0.75 m3, equivalent to 5% to 25% of the stem volume. The carbon loss due to decayed wood for all species ranged between 69 to 110 kg per tree. Based on model’s calculation, the stem volume of U. procera trees with DBH ≥ 40 cm needs to be discounted by a factor of 13% due to decayed wood regardless of the vitality index. Decayed wood reduces significantly the tree’s standing volume and needs to be considered to better assess the carbon storage potential of urban forests.