Category Archives: Web Article Review

Toronto shoppers arriving by bike

Toronto has done a study of preferences and spending by shoppers in one of its neighborhoods, and the results show that merchants have an inaccurate picture of the demand for driving and parking.

A summary of the findings:

  • 72% of the visitors to the Study Area usually arrive by active transportation (by bicycle or walking). Only 4% report that driving is their usual mode of transportation.
  • Merchants overestimated the number of their customers who arrived by car. 42% of merchants estimated that more than 25% of their customers usually arrived by car.
  • Visitors who reported using active transportation to visit the Study Area visited more often and spent more money per month than those who usually drove or relied on public transit.
  • Visitors to the Study Area were much more likely to prefer a bike lane or widened sidewalks over no change, even if this resulted in the loss of on-street parking.
  • Merchants prefer the current layout of Queen Street more than a configuration where on-street parking is reduced to accommodate expanded sidewalks or a bike lane.
  • A majority of visitors (53%) and merchants (64%) stated that there was not enough bicycle parking within the Study Area.
  • Merchants were more likely than visitors to perceive the amount of car parking as inadequate: 52% of merchants stated there was not enough car parking in comparison with 19% of visitors.

This area must already be pretty safe and accessible by foot and bicycle. In most U.S. cities, I doubt we would find results like these. But if not, the lack of shopping by bicyclists could easily be a self-fulfilling prophecy if there are no bike lanes to begin with. The other critical factor, I am pretty sure, is whether people actually live in or near the shopping district. There are examples of U.S. cities that tried downtown pedestrian concourses that ultimately failed, but in the case of Philadelphia at least I am pretty sure they failed because nobody lived nearby.

self-driving cars, sustainability, and urban form

The debate about the likely impacts of self-driving cars rages on. This article suggests they will “kill the desire for better public transport, and wipe out the jobs of current drivers, plus many other jobs in the transportation system.” I think these charges may be true, but I think the overall impact will depend on the community. I have oriented my life around the idea of taking most of my daily trips for work, shopping, education, and social events on foot. I’ve been doing this for about 15 years, but the advent of ride sharing and mainstreaming of delivery services has made me a lot more comfortable doing it, and has made me comfortable doing it with a young family. There are other people like me out there. On the other hand, I am sure there are also people who live car-dependent lifestyles now who will be even more car-dependent in the future, and if that lifestyle choice becomes even more dominant, it could lead to even less demand for walkable cities in the future. Remember though that most cars are parked most of the time, so even if vehicle miles traveled stay the same or increase, any decrease in demand for private car ownership could have some positive effect on land use for more productive and sustainable uses other than parking (in other words, almost any uses at all).

So I just don’t think we know. I think cities should double down on livability and walkability, but not fight this technology which is probably inevitable. In fact, I think they should treat the technology as inevitable and think about how they can use it to develop more flexible, adaptable public transportation going forward.

choosing a college major

For some reason, I was thinking today on what advice I would give a high school senior on picking a college major. Now, I believe in education for its own sake, and I believe there is a difference between education and training, but I would still have to advise someone who asked to consider a major with significant economic value. I think I would recommend a fairly traditional science or engineering degree to most people, because this leaves open many options for specialization in graduate school.

I think computer science will continue to be a hot field for the foreseeable future, and genetics is probably the emerging hot field right now. You really couldn’t go wrong picking one of these two majors.

If you want to go the computer science route, the obvious major is, well computer science. There are also computer engineering programs out there, and either electrical or mechanical engineering would be a good undergraduate foundation while leaving options open for a number of different careers. Good old mathematics is also an option.

If you want to go the genetics route, biology is the obvious major. Chemistry or chemical engineering would also lead to your knowing your way around a laboratory, while leaving all sorts of possible career options open in the chemical, energy, and pharmaceutical industries. Some schools have programs in biological, biomedical, and agricultural engineering that might have relevant training.

If these majors just aren’t your thing, other remaining traditional professions like law, medicine/nursing, architecture, and accounting should still be reasonable career paths. Teaching and child care are honorable professions but don’t get paid what they are worth to society, at least in the United States. You have to be a little careful with accounting, because you hear so much about basic bookkeeping functions being automated. But people who really understand the tax code and helping companies comply with financial laws should always be in demand. I might put my own profession of civil and environmental engineering in this category – it is not a path to fantastic wealth, but it is not likely to go away. Chemical engineering probably gives a person more flexibility to work in either the public or private sector, but it was just not my thing. I have no regrets about the path I have chosen and would recommend it to anyone if the field really interests you.

Now, if you really have your heart set on a liberal arts or fine arts degree, I think that is great. I might advise someone to do some training in a skill on the side or over the summers. You can still make a living as a plumber, electrician, or mechanic, for example. You can also learn to work with specialized software such as geographic information systems.

residental graywater

Here’s an interesting report on the economics of residential graywater systems. It’s a little wishy-washy (no pun intended, ha) on the numbers, but it has some links and references that could be useful. From a quick skim, it suggests that if you can achieve a savings of about $200 a year, your system will break-even over a typical service life of around 15 years. This is more likely to happen if you have a relatively high number of people in your house and if you have relatively high water rates.

I have a low-tech, essentially free graywater setup. I turn on the shower, wash my hair and face with weird chemicals, stop up the drain, and wash the rest of myself with pure, non-toxic biodegradable soap. Then, I use a bucket to collect water for houseplants and outdoor plants. I check with NOAA online to see if there has been less than an inch of rain over the past 7 days (a very rough rule of thumb for evapotranspiration around here) and to see if there is rain expected over the next day or so. If I’m diligent about this in the summer, I end up not having to get out the hose too often. Combine all this with a rain barrel or two and I would have to get the hose out even less often.

If I were to accidentally pee in the shower…well, I’ll take the 5th on that one but I’m pretty sure the plants wouldn’t mind.

America’s worst President: “does that sound familiar?”

My vote has always been for Andrew Jackson, for two reasons. First, he destabilized the financial system, ushering in a century of unnecessary chaos. Second, he mounted a truly evil genocidal campaign against ethnic minorities. To quote Donald Trump (just slightly out of context), “does that sound familiar?”

By the way, I put Truman second for dropping the bomb. Then Lyndon Johnson, for the blood on his hands in Vietnam. I would put George W. Bush in the top 5 or so for starting two aggressive, unnecessary wars and destabilizing an entire region of the globe. If Trump manages to destroy our health care system and set climate change mitigation back by a decade, he may deserve a top 5. If there is a major war or nuclear detonation on his watch, he may still earn that #1 spot.

drought in Bolivia

According to Popular Science, La Paz, Bolivia has been devastated by the near-total loss of its glacier-fed water supply. The military has stepped in to restore order and ration water.

At nearly 12,000 feet in altitude, La Paz sits in a zone—the high tropics—suffering the effects of climate change quicker than the rest of us. The glaciers that once fed the city are in retreat; the seasonal rains that should replenish the reservoirs from November through February are increasingly unreliable. In early November, the federal government declared a state of emergency. Overnight, officials cut water to 94 of the city’s neighborhoods, leaving about half of its roughly 800,000 residents caught completely off-guard…

For years, scientists predicted that climate change would cause a devastating water shortage in the Andean plain. Like the ominous rumblings of a movie soundtrack before the T. rex appears on-screen, there were persistent warnings. Nongovernmental organizations like Oxfam (2009) and then the Stockholm Environmental Institute (2013) put out increasingly dire pleas for water management. Lake Poopó, whose waters sustained the indigenous Uru-Murato for millennia, dried up last year. At the same time, the normally robust winter rains shrank by more than 25 percent. And through it all, a local paleoglaciologist named Edson Ramirez tried persistently to get someone to act.

A soft-spoken professor at the Institute of Hydraulics and Hydrology of the Higher University of San Andrés in La Paz, Ramirez did not want to be the Cassandra for this catastrophe. But the science left him little choice. In 1998, he began measuring Chacaltaya, a glacier an hour’s drive from the city, which held a world-famous attraction: the world’s highest ski resort. Ramirez expected shrinkage. But the reality surprised even him: Just 15 meters thick, the glacier was disappearing at a rate of at least 1 meter a year. Ramirez calculated it would be gone by 2015. In 2005, he went to city officials to warn them and discuss the consequences for a city that relies on glacial runoff for water. He laid out a dire timeline. The bureaucrats politely listened but were unconvinced. They told him: “Maybe it will happen, but maybe it will not.”

Sierra Club vs. Allan Savory

I was thinking some more about my post on woolly mammoths. That article bought into the idea that large predators will keep a herd of large herbivores bunched and on the move, which can in turn preserve and even restore a grassland ecosystem, with great effects for biodiversity and even carbon sequestration. It’s a nice idea, and incredibly cool to think about when the large herbivores are mammoths and the predators are dire wolves. But unfortunately, modern science seems to be shitting all over the idea that cows shitting all over can ever be a good thing. Here is an article from Sierra Club with the basics.

Pleistocene Park

This Atlantic article is about Pleistocene Park, an idea to restore functioning grassland ecosystems that existed during the last Ice Age, complete with woolly mammoths. The mammoths are supposed to keep the grassland from turning into forest, and the grass in turn is supposed to reflect more light and heat, thereby preserving the permafrost.

If this intercontinental ice block warms too quickly, its thawing will send as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere each year as do all of America’s SUVs, airliners, container ships, factories, and coal-burning plants combined. It could throw the planet’s climate into a calamitous feedback loop, in which faster heating begets faster melting. The more apocalyptic climate-change scenarios will be in play. Coastal population centers could be swamped. Oceans could become more acidic. A mass extinction could rip its way up from the plankton base of the marine food chain. Megadroughts could expand deserts and send hundreds of millions of refugees across borders, triggering global war…

Research suggests that these grasslands will reflect more sunlight than the forests and scrub they replace, causing the Arctic to absorb less heat. In winter, the short grass and animal-trampled snow will offer scant insulation, enabling the season’s freeze to reach deeper into the Earth’s crust, cooling the frozen soil beneath and locking one of the world’s most dangerous carbon-dioxide lodes in a thermodynamic vault.

A lot of the article is about the process of genetically engineering the mammoths. Apparently, we know exactly what mammoths looked like because people have found plenty of intact frozen specimens. I didn’t know that some isolated pockets of mammoths survived until just 2,000 years ago, compared to tens or hundreds of millions of years for the dinosaurs. So there is really no comparison there – they are just cold-adapted cousins of elephants. The plan is not necessarily to clone extinct mammoths, but simply to edit the genes of modern elephants to give them the mammoth traits, then turn them loose and let them adapt and evolve a bit more in the wild.

In another interesting section, it talks about how nutrient cycling in temperate and cold-climate grasslands is much faster than in forests at the same latitudes, rivaled only by tropical forests. And large herbivores are critical both because their digestive systems are where a lot of that cycling takes place, and they also favor grass by keeping trees in check.

Another interesting claim is that Africa is the only continent with large herbivores left because the animals there evolved alongside humans for millions of years, whereas animals in temperate climates did not and were not prepared for humans when they came.

Finally, there’s this:

The park will need to be stocked with dangerous predators. When they are absent, herbivore herds spread out, or they feel safe enough to stay in the same field, munching away mindlessly until it’s overgrazed. Big cats and wolves force groups of grazers into dense, watchful formations that move fast across a landscape, visiting a new patch of vegetation each day in order to mow it with their teeth, fertilize it with their dung, and trample it with their many-hooved plow. Nikita wants to bring in gray wolves, Siberian tigers, or cold-adapted Canadian cougars. If it becomes a trivial challenge to resurrect extinct species, perhaps he could even repopulate Siberia with cave lions and dire wolves.

Yes, dire wolves are a thing.

minimum wage and unemployment

In this Atlantic article, James Kwak summarizes several theories on why a higher minimum wage doesn’t seem to increase unemployment in the real world as the simple supply-and-demand theory would predict.

The idea that a higher minimum wage might not increase unemployment runs directly counter to the lessons of Economics 101. According to the textbook, if labor becomes more expensive, companies buy less of it. But there are several reasons why the real world does not behave so predictably. Although the standard model predicts that employers will replace workers with machines if wages increase, additional labor-saving technologies are not available to every company at a reasonable cost. Small employers in particular have limited flexibility; at their scale, they may not be able to maintain their operations with fewer workers. (Imagine a local copy shop: No matter how fast the copy machine is, there still needs to be one person to deal with customers.) Therefore, some companies can’t lay off employees if the minimum wage is increased. At the other extreme, very large employers may have enough market power that the usual supply-and-demand model doesn’t apply to them. They can reduce the wage level by hiring fewer workers (only those willing to work for low pay), just as a monopolist can boost prices by cutting production (think of an oil cartel, for example). A minimum wage forces them to pay more, which eliminates the incentive to minimize their workforce.In the above examples, a higher minimum wage will raise labor costs. But many companies can recoup cost increases in the form of higher prices; because most of their customers are not poor, the net effect is to transfer money from higher-income to lower-income families. In addition, companies that pay more often benefit from higher employee productivity, offsetting the growth in labor costs. Justin Wolfers and Jan Zilinsky identified several reasons why higher wages boost productivity: They motivate people to work harder, they attract higher-skilled workers, and they reduce employee turnover, lowering hiring and training costs, among other things. If fewer people quit their jobs, that also reduces the number of people who are out of work at any one time because they’re looking for something better. A higher minimum wage motivates more people to enter the labor force, raising both employment and output. Finally, higher pay increases workers’ buying power. Because poor people spend a relatively large proportion of their income, a higher minimum wage can boost overall economic activity and stimulate economic growth, creating more jobs. All of these factors vastly complicate the two-dimensional diagram taught in Economics 101 and help explain why a higher minimum wage does not necessarily throw people out of work. The supply-and-demand diagram is a good conceptual starting point for thinking about the minimum wage. But on its own, it has limited predictive value in the much more complex real world.

Even if a higher minimum wage does cause some people to lose their jobs, that cost has to be balanced against the benefit of greater earnings for other low-income workers. A study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that a $10.10 minimum would reduce employment by 500,000 jobs but would increase incomes for most poor families, moving 900,000 people above the poverty line. Similarly, a recent paper by the economist Arindrajit Dube finds that a 10 percent raise in the minimum wage should reduce the number of families living in poverty by around 2 percent to 3 percent. The economists polled in the 2013 Chicago Booth study thought that increasing the minimum wage would be a good idea because its potential impact on employment would be outweighed by the benefits to people who were still able to find jobs. Raising the minimum wage would also reduce inequality by narrowing the pay gap between low-income and higher-income workers.

recycling in Philadelphia

This article has a lot of details and links about recycling in Philadelphia, including a quiz on what is recyclable and what isn’t. I don’t think the message gets through to the public very well overall, although there is a clear list here (how about a poster guys?). It’s a fairly impressive process though – single stream and somewhat automated but there is still a lot of human labor and judgment involved in the collection process. It’s a pretty massive effort when you think that they do this for every street and all half a million households or so in the city every week. I personally am amazed at the workers who get a recycling truck down my 7-foot alley, do all the sorting and collecting, and still find time for a few smiles, waves and honks for the children.