Philadelphia transit cuts

It’s sad – Philadelphia’s public transportation, which was already creaky and unreliable due to decades of deferred maintenance and capital investment, is being financially starved due to dysfunctional politics at the state level. At the heart of the political game is a willful misunderstanding of a fundamental truth – most economic activity occurs where the most people are. Is this really not so obvious that we need to debate it? And this means that most taxes in a state like Pennsylvania are paid in its metropolitan areas. It makes sense to spend some of that money disproportionately in rural areas which by definition can’t generate the net economic activity to support themselves. But people and politicians in these rural areas not only do not appreciate this, they believe the exact opposite thing to be true – that they are subsidizing metropolitan areas. Which is logically, financially, and physically impossible. But mirroring the larger country, these irrational rural politicians have disproportionate political power relative to the number of people they represent. I have no political answers to this political problem, and I am getting closer to considering leaving the state. Delaware and New Jersey have their own problems but are much more rationally governed.

Anyway, having said all that, Philadelphia’s public transportation is not exactly cutting edge or visionary. It’s dirty, old, slow, and communication is poor. And it’s not cheap – one person riding a bus can save money relative to Uber, assuming they don’t place a high value on time. But several people traveling together will not save money. Tourists and business travelers have no hope of understanding it, if they were willing to brave the urine and feces and garbage and rats in the stations and bus stops and on the vehicles themselves. A system like this is at risk of losing out to more innovative competition, even if that innovative competition is bad for the environment and dangerous for people. So let’s look at some of the alternatives mentioned in this ABC article.

  • ride sharing databases – The local one is run by our metropolitan planning organization. Basically just a message board for people to find each other who want to carpool. Makes sense, just seems low tech and clunky. Enterprising individuals could probably build a business around this, which may or may not be against the rules.
  • Rideshare (Uber, etc.) – Sure they’ve been around for awhile, but they have some new ideas. With “Group Rides”, you can invite specific friends to share your ride. “The company’s latest option, Route Share, is designed to function like a commuter shuttle running every 20 minutes during peak times from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.. with designated pick-up and drop-off points.” … “For even more significant savings, try Uber Transit, which provides a public transit route, sometimes combined with an Uber ride.”
  • van pools run by rental car companies – “The rental car company teams up with companies to match employees who live near each other, then provides them with vehicles to use… Each ride consists of 4-15 riders who live near each other or along a route, and share rides to and from work. Enterprise takes care of maintenance and vehicle liability insurance.”
  • New Jersey and Delaware also have “Transportation Management Associations” which seem vague to me but again have something to do with organizing carpools and vanpools.

A couple thoughts. First, we see tech solutions like Uber adapting to public transportation, and starting to cover the gap between whatever public transportation can provide and what people actually need to get from Point A to Point B. This is basically good, although if public transportation can’t compete on cost it may eventually disappear. Governments might do the math and decide to subsidize the more flexible private options instead. Self-driving and self-parking wheeled vehicles may change the dynamics of how all this works, and relatively soon. All of this is likely to exacerbating sprawling land uses rather than the more compact urban areas we know are best for economic growth, innovation, human health, and the environment. But that has been the trend for a century at least.

I have some hope that self-parking vehicles may enable less waste of the most economically valuable land for parking. Because the point of parking is to make transportation easily accessible where you are working/shopping/recreating, and a self-driving vehicle can park efficiently farther away but still show up when and where you need it. Instead of a store having to have a parking lot that is bigger than the store, you can now have two stores next to each other and a large parking lot/garage out of sight on the edge of town. And that garage or lot won’t have to be as big because the self-parking cars will be able to maneuver more efficiently not to mention infinitely patiently compared to human drivers.

Telecommuting and work travel in Australia

This might seem esoteric, but it is somewhat germane to some points I made recently. One part of a big-picture solution to housing supply challenges lies in, well, housing. But another angle (at least from an economic growth perspective) lies in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure allowing people to live in one place and work in others with less friction (i.e., travel time and cost.)

A tale of two cities: Patterns and drivers of Australia’s intercity non-local employment from an industry perspective

Under conditions of spatial mismatch between labor supply and demand, intercity non-local employment, including intercity-commuting-based employment and remote work, has become increasingly common worldwide. However, research examining intercity non-local employment from an industry perspective remains limited. Using census data from 2011, 2016, and 2021 for Australia’s significant urban areas, this study adopts an industry lens to examine patterns of intercity non-local employment and their associations with industry diversity, industry disparity, and the location quotients of different industries. The findings reveal that: (1) Intercity non-local employment in Australia intensified during 2011–2021, with Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth serving as key network nodes; (2) Although industry diversity is not significantly associated with non-local employment, work-residence connections are more likely to form between industrially diverse cities over longer distances; (3) Industry disparity between work and residential cities reduces the likelihood of non-local employment, reflecting a tendency toward employment self-containment; (4) Cities with higher location quotients in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing exhibit a stronger capacity to attract non-local workers. This study supports developing regional industrial diversity centers as hubs for labor mobility and interaction. Furthermore, it highlights the rationality of industry complementarity, particularly between capital and non-capital cities, as a strategy to balance labor supply and demand, and calls for further evaluation of the long-term impacts of non-local employment on cities reliant on specific workforce sectors. Overall, this research advances the understanding of Australia’s urban structure and offers valuable insights for targeted industrial development strategies aimed at fostering balanced and sustainable urban systems.

I did work and travel in Australia a bit about 10-15 years ago, and one thing that struck this American is that their cities are just really far apart, and there is not much in between. So I got the impression that a lot of their white collar business travel is by plane. What is blue collar business travel you ask – there I am thinking of long haul trucking. And no, if I am thinking about long haul trucking in Australia I can’t get Mad Max out of my head. One really hopes this is not our future.

unifying “Green Area Factor” and “No Net Loss of Biodiversity” measures

Here in the US, implementing these types of policies seems mostly like a political pipedream at the moment. I could imagine a really smart developer doing this as a marketing scheme, maybe. maybe. But this is a great article that gives us a window into some things that are being tried in Europe (although, I also hear voices in Europe speaking longingly of the perceived lack of regulation in the US). I don’t know – our regulations may be equally strong or stronger in some areas like hydrology and water quality (which is missing from the framework discussed here btw) wetland and floodplain protection, and endangered species (although these are under constant political threat). Ideally in my view, species would not have to get endangered first before we will do anything for them.

More than the sum of its parts – Integrating the use of green area factor tool and biodiversity offsetting for no net loss urban planning

As part of the actions to fight biodiversity loss, the European Union is working on a restoration regulation demanding the principle of no net loss (NNL) state of biodiversity of urban green space. Applying this principle in urban planning may raise conflicts between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision. Furthermore, integrating the NNL of biodiversity principle into urban planning cannot be isolated from existing planning tools or processes. Here we present a novel approach where the green area factor tool and biodiversity offsetting are integrated to achieve NNL of biodiversity in urban planning, while maintaining the necessary ecosystem services and avoiding the negative, unintended tradeoffs that may occur if only one of these tools is used in the planning process. We provide a model which combines the two approaches to create a holistic method to understand and govern both biodiversity and ecosystem services of urban greenery. The model is intended to be used as part of urban planning processes.

entropy economics

John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, has a new book called Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production. The ideas are not really new, as he admits:

As we and others have said before, from a physics perspective, resources are low-entropy materials (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). The entropy law holds that systems tend towards higher entropy states spontaneously. Living systems, as non-equilibrium systems, need to extract low-entropy materials from the environment to compensate for their continuous dissipation.

We are taking concentrated resources from the Earth’s biophysical system, using them to perform useful work, and producing waste products which consist of less concentrated substances and heat which are too diffuse to use for useful work, and in many cases cause harm to the system. Entropy must increase at the scale of the universe, but organized systems like life and human civilization can get away with decreasing it on scales that matter to us short-lived primates, if not to a dark, cold universe that most likely doesn’t care about us (revealing my atheist stripes here, sure if you are religious that helps to solve this existential dread problem, and good for you!) There is a scale where the impact of our human economy becomes large relative to the physical system it is embedded in, and the economic theories we have based critical decisions on have chosen to neglect that to this point. Economists might say, our equations can account for that, we have just chosen to neglect it and we have clearly stated our assumptions. Well, those assumptions no longer hold as we approach or pass the point of no return.

Many others have made these points. In addition to Georgescu-Roegen – a few that come to my mind are Herman Daly, Howard Odum, Brian Czech, Jay Forrester and the authors of World3, to name a few. But these voices have been ignored by mainstream economists because they were from other disciplines, did not have the right credentials, or did not make their arguments at a time when the prevailing body of thought was receptive. So it probably helps to have one more credentialed academic economist make them for the audience of academic and professional economists at this particular point in history. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s professionals. Economists are very, very important. For better or worse, their opinions and choices and advice to policy makers shape our world. Maybe at a time when the public has become less receptive to these ideas even though the crisis has rapidly worsened, the economics profession could be ready to listen. I don’t know, but it’s worth another try.

University of Chicago Press

AMS Annual State of the Climate 2024

While there is a propaganda shield between news coverage of the global climate emergency and those of us absorbing news here in the US, the American Meteorological Society bravely continues to publish their annual State of the Climate report. I think “absorbing” is the right word because, while accurate news sources are not actually censored and are out there to be sought out, if you are just getting your news from headlines and sound bites and passing a monitor in an airport, you’re getting the impression that the ongoing collapse of our world’s biophysical life support system is not a front and center concern.

Anyway, I think of this report as sort of the interim annual report between whenever the IPCC gets around to their major releases. Here are some quick highlights:

  • Atmospheric CO2 stands at 423 ppm. This is the highest ever, it is growing each year and it is growing at the fastest rate recorded since the 1960s. So the world is not only turning the corner, it is not decelerating toward turning the corner. It is accelerating.
  • Record heat. Record drought. Record ocean heat. Record polar heat, ocean ice and glacier loss.
  • Record sea level. Well, this is not surprising because the trend is up, and this one I wouldn’t expect to fluctuate so much year to year. The summary in the article I linked to doesn’t say whether there is evidence of unexpected acceleration. But with all that ice melt, there is a mass balance situation here…

So it’s bad bad bad, dad. I don’t know how else you can spin this other than to say it’s important to put one year in the context of longer-term trends. But the long-term trends are all bad. And if we are hitting unexpected records, that suggests that the projections (which are bad) may not be bad enough. Increasingly it looks like the world may be at that tipping point – it will be called in retrospect rather than definitively in the moment, but it might be now. 2025 will be a nice round year to put in the history books.

potential natural vegetation

This is a short Wikipedia article about defining and mapping the historical or potential natural vegetation of areas that have been developed or otherwise altered by humans. Sure, there is plenty of scientific debate about the concept but it seems to me like it could be adapted for practical purposes. Even in the U.S., we have ordinances in most places requiring maintenance or restoration of something approaching natural hydrology on development sites (I’m not saying implementation of this concept is remotely perfect either, just that it is widespread and more or less accepted). But we don’t have anything approaching that for ecology, and you can restore hydrology without restoring an ecosystem (for example, with a storage and infiltration tank under a parking lot). So if you have a model of what the original or potential natural vegetation of a place is, you should be able to quantify what percentage of that is being destroyed, preserved, or restored by a given project.

This is just some natural(ish) vegetation. I’m just trying to make the site more visually interesting, okay? Thank you Indiana Jo for posting on Wikimedia.

medieval French towns

This (paywalled) Financial Times article has eye-popping pictures of French towns built in the 1200s and 1300s. Many of these still exist and are going strong today, and people love them. They were small (around a thousand people) and densely populated. They were generally built around a public square with a weekly market. At the time, the article says, feudal lords created the towns as a way of concentrating, controlling, and taxing people, in exchange for greater safety and quality of life. The feudal lord generally owned the commercial and industrial real estate, of course, but the article says this can be a model for development corporations today, with master planning and long-term ownership of business districts. Housing developers in theory can do their short-term thing but pay into these development corporations which are then set up in perpetuity to operate and maintain the commons. Sounds good in theory. Clearly the private markets don’t create the kind of green spaces, schools, etc. that people say they want but then vote against with their actual dollars and housing and transportation choices.

Lussan, Département Gard – aerial view

positive tipping points

This paper identifies a number of “positive tipping points” on climate change that can help counteract the risk of reaching negative tipping points such as glacier melting and methane release. They identify the shift to solar and wind power, electric vehicles, and heat pumps for heating and cooling buildings. These seem very market- and consumer-driven to me. So these are feedback loops that have been gathering some steam, and maybe governments can do relatively small things to reinforce them in the hopes of getting them to a takeoff point where they are self-sustaining and able to counteract the negative feedback loops that are out there. It is somewhat heartening to realize that the renewable energy and electric vehicle revolutions are farther along outside the US than inside, and we are not getting this impression I believe because of effective oil and gas industry propaganda here. Because those companies and their lobbyists understand these positive feedback loops too, and they are evil or at least amoral in the pursuit of short term profit at the long term expense of human civilization on Earth.

From what I understand (outside this article), adoption of heat pumps and building electrification is farther along in the U.S. than elsewhere. This is interesting – how did we manage to move away from heating buildings with coal, oil, and gas directly decades ago if this decreased the profits of the all-powerful fossil fuel industry? Were they just asleep at the switch, or were the economic incentives just that strong? Is it because we made the choice to fund electric infrastructure through a decentralized, regulated electric utility industry? And once we built that infrastructure, the economic incentives became too strong to resist. Whereas we have not built the infrastructure to support the electric vehicle transition, and the fossil fuel/automobile/highway construction industry is successfully fighting that tooth and nail through propaganda and (legalized, by our corrupt Supreme Court) political corruption. (Remember that currently, highway construction has dedicated funding from gas taxes. And auto dealerships make more money from servicing and repairing fossil fuel powered vehicles than they do from selling them.)

Note the oil and gas industry could have been decentralized and regulated too, that is just not the path we went down a century or so ago. It’s too late for this, but economic incentives are going to push in the direction of building the charging infrastructure, because it is just a better, cleaner, and cheaper way to get around overall. So by pushing for this policy, however strongly and effectively the forces of darkness have been pushing against it lately, we are working to reinforce a positive feedback loop that can eventually tip and become irreversible.

I know, a lot of electricity is still generated with fossil fuels at this point. It is still more efficient from what I understand. And slowly but surely, renewables are chipping away. Add modernized nuclear technology to this mix, like the small modular reactors, and keep pushing toward that longer-term dream of fusion power.

Designer babies are here

We kind of knew this would happen. IVF has been around and is getting more common, although it’s still expensive. We’re told DNA sequencing means people using IVF can select embryos to reduce the probability of genetic diseases. So far so good. Basic research exists tying genes to traits other than susceptibility to disease, like intelligence and eye color. So it was inevitable that companies would arise offering to let people select embryos tied to these traits, right? And that has now happened. Here is a long rundown of where the state of this industry stands.

The biggest concern, which I share, is that rich people will be able to afford this and nobody else will, so rich people will have even more advantages and the gap between rich and poor will grow. But I do like this quote from the article:

One might object that at least they’re in good company: other products which help rich kids get healthier/smarter/taller/prettier than poor kids include private tutors, gyms, hair salons, health insurance, clothing, books, and food.

Next the article presents the argument that rich people adopting a technology early helps to move it along the path to economies of scale and eventually a cost everyone can afford. This makes a certain amount of sense. But it would make even more sense for governments that care about their people to be the early adopters.

Also, it would be crazy for any forward-thinking government not to cover this; it could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in future health care expenses. In countries with public health care, this comes directly out of the government treasury; even in the US, it’s covered by Medicare after age 65. The government should be begging people to select embryos.

The most persistent cost barrier is likely to be in vitro fertilization itself, a necessary precursor. In the US, 2-3% of babies are born through IVF. For those kids, this is a no-brainer – even if the cost never comes down, the cheaper products are only a fraction of total IVF expense. What about the other 98%? If those parents feel like they have to get embryo selection (and therefore IVF) to keep up, this could be a significant burden. IVF isn’t fun – it requires pumping a woman full of mind-altering hormones for weeks, extracting eggs in a minor surgery, and then implanting embryos in another minor surgery, all with a decent chance that some step will fail and you’ll have to do it all again. It also costs $15,000 in the US (less in poorer countries), and unlike the genetics, the cost has barely gone down in the past twenty-five years.

Israel is cited as a country that is offering universal free IVF to its citizens. And here in the U.S., policies that have favorable long-term benefit-cost ratios just implement themselves, right?

All this is without any form of genetic engineering, remember. You are just selecting within the variation in naturally-occurring embryos. One can imagine accelerating this even more if generations of embryos can be spliced and diced by AIs and robots in a short amount of time. And even more if the actual genes are manipulated. (Ethical issues TBD, but if it can be done, someone somewhere will do it eventually.)

Incidentally, Brave New World is supposed to enter the public domain in the U.S. in 2028. But here is a copy you can buy for only $6000!

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=32104210021&ref_=ps_ggl_17738760402&cm_mmc=ggl-_-COM_Shopp_Rare-_-product_id=bi%3A%2032104210021-_-keyword=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=17181841339&gbraid=0AAAAAD3Y6gtcv40_Qjr2D1xBL4VjC3nin&gclid=CjwKCAjwhuHEBhBHEiwAZrvdcoWyZ_ZjsnURlTPQYuYLdu9EQjGJxngizjT_cWCIs38mKkv7xF6U3hoCBYIQAvD_BwE

How early should you get to the airport?

Nate Silver has put together a spreadsheet with a comprehensive answer to this question, based on records from 800 flights he personally has taken. You have to be a paid subscriber to his site to get the spreadsheet, but there are plenty of clues in the narrative. It is not crystal clear which factors are additive rather than overlapping.

  • First, the “base case” is a solo English-speaking American business traveler. Families and people who don’t speak perfect English are inconveniences that can be treated in a stochastic manner. More specifically, this base case is a solo domestic (U.S.) traveler, with TSA PreCheck or CLEAR, and not checking bags. For this base case, the rule is “60 minutes from walking through the airport door to departure.”
  • For a car commute, round up whatever Uber/Lyft says the trip will take by 30%. [For public transportation, my rule is to take the vehicle before the last vehicle that would get me there just barely on time.]
  • If parking or returning a rental car, add 15-30 minutes.
  • Add 15 minutes for a really big, busy airport (like JFK, O’Hare). 5-10 if you use that airport a lot and know it inside and out.
  • Add 5-10 minutes if you have a connection make. His reasoning: “This might seem silly since it doesn’t affect the departure time at the originating airport. But it raises the stakes for missing your flight. Also, if you arrive at the very last moment, you’ll likely be asked to gate-check your bag, which can get you off to a slower start when making that tight connection.”
  • Add 20 minutes if you do not have PreCheck/CLEAR, +5 for really big busy airports and -5 for small ones
  • Add another 20 minutes in bad weather.
  • For international, add 20-40 minutes if you don’t need to check in at the counter and another 15 (business class) to 30 (economy class) if you do.
  • Add 20 minutes if you just enjoy relaxing at the airport with a beverage before flying.
  • Special case: If you’re going somewhere (like Canada) that you need to clear immigration before getting on the plane, you need to allow an extra 30 minutes. Presumably it will save you the same amount at the other end (although in my personal experience, U.S. immigration is about as bad as it gets anywhere I have been.)

Okay, let’s try adding this up for my most common travel cases.

Case 1: A domestic business trip, let’s say I’m attending a 2-3 day conference. I have one bag that fits in the overhead compartment or can be gate-checked. I check in online. Weather is reasonable. I’m going to allow 60 minutes at the airport, +10 because my home airport of Philadelphia is pretty big and pretty busy but I know it well, +25 because I don’t have Precheck and security can be a real cluster-, +20 because I enjoy sitting down and having a beer before flying. That’s 1 hour 55 minutes, so the “2 hour rule” was just about right. I could do PreCheck if I really travel enough to make it worthwhile, and obviously I don’t need the beer, I just want it.

Case 2: An international trip with the family. I am past the stroller/car seat/diaper phase which would add exponential complication – not part of Nate Silver’s computational framework. Let’s say I am traveling in reasonable weather from the nightmare hell (but relatively easy to get to) hub of Newark. 60 minutes + 15 because it’s a nightmare hell hub + 10 minutes because there’s a connection + 20 minutes for security + 60 for counter check in (! – but yes, it can be this bad). I’ll skip that beer because I don’t want to get even more dehydrated on a long haul flight. I get 2 hours 40 minutes, so the “3 hour rule” is not far off.

So in conclusion, for me the 2 hour rule can maybe be shaved to 1.5 and the 3 hour rule to 2.5 if I want to live adventurously. I try to get to the airport by public transportation when I can though, so that adds another layer of likely delays. My rule there is to take the vehicle before the vehicle that would get me there just in time. Sometimes you just have to try to relax and make the most of wherever you happen to be, and not worry so much about the time. If I spent another half hour at home or the office before I left for the airport, what would I really do – either interact with other people or do something on a screen. Traveling is stressful, and it can be good to take a moment between the mad dash to the airport and security line, and the various inconveniences and indignities of actually flying. At the airport, I am more likely to read a book, have a beverage, or unwind a bit before flying if things aren’t too crazy.