Tag Archives: transportation

May 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
Painless vaccines may be on the way.
The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
The UK may have hit “peak car“.
Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.

trains

The sad Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia reminded me of this sad article, Why Can’t America Have Great Trains? An excerpt:

Compared with the high-speed trains of Western Europe and East Asia, American passenger rail is notoriously creaky, tardy, and slow. The Acela, currently the only “high-speed” train in America, runs at an average pace of 68 miles per hour between Washington and Boston; a high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona averages 154 miles per hour. Amtrak’s most punctual trains arrive on schedule 75 percent of the time; judged by Amtrak’s lax standards, Japan’s bullet trains are late basically 0 percent of the time.

And those stats don’t figure to improve anytime soon. While Amtrak isn’t currently in danger of being killed, it also isn’t likely to do more than barely survive. Last month, the House of Representatives agreed to fund Amtrak for the next four years at a rate of $1.4 billion per year. Meanwhile, the Chinese government—fair comparison or not—will be spending $128 billion this year on rail. (Thanks to the House bill, though, Amtrak passengers can look forward to a new provision allowing cats and dogs on certain trains.)

A few decades ago, news of another middling Amtrak appropriation wouldn’t have warranted a second glance; passenger rail was unpopular and widely thought to be obsolete. But recently, Amtrak’s popularity has actually spiked. Ridership has increased by roughly 50 percent in the past 15 years, and ridership in the Northeast Corridor stood at an all-time high in 2014. Amtrak also now accounts for 77 percent of all rail and air travel between Washington and New York, up from just 37 percent when it launched the Acela in 2000.

Trains connect cities and ignore the empty spaces in between, while highways serve those empty spaces. In our U.S. “republican” system (in the original dictionary sense of the word), our politicians disproportionately represent those population and economic dead zones, so that anti-city and economically unproductive nonsense policy positions pay off in power and re-election. These same politicians also find that it doesn’t hurt to throw a little racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the mix just for good measure. It’s about fear of those people in the city who are not like you.

cars are over in the UK

Most Americans haven’t caught on yet, but the tide has turned against widespread car ownership. Here’s an article in the Guardian about the tide turning in the UK:

London, which has pioneered congestion charging and has a well-integrated system of public transport, has led the move away from cars over the past decade, during which time 9% of car commuters have switched to other forms of transport. “People in London have a lot of options and there’s been huge growth across all modes,” says Isabel Dedring, the American-born deputy mayor for transport in the capital. “There’s been a massive increase in investment in public transport…”

Dedring says London has always been progressive in terms of public transport – its narrow, twisting roads were never conducive to the automotive domination that occurred in many US and European cities in the 1960s and 70s, when the car was king. But from the turn of the millennium, there has been a concerted attempt to encourage switching to other modes of transport, and the past decade has seen a 30% reduction in traffic in central London.

“Traffic levels have gone down massively,” says Dedring, “partly because of the congestion charge, but also because we are taking away space from private vehicles and giving it to buses through bus lanes and to people through public realm [developments].” And now to cyclists, too, with the planned “cycle superhighways” and cycle-friendly neighbourhoods being trialled in three London boroughs.

autonomous truck

With all the talk of self-driving cars, I figured self-driving trucks and buses wouldn’t be far behind. And here is a self-driving truck, already licensed in a few U.S. states. It sounds like there is still a human driver in it for now. But in the long term, I imagine this is bad news for human driver as an occupation. It should be good news for the safety of humans on the road in general. It seems like it could favor the economics of road freight vs. rail. Then again, it might make much narrower travel lanes practical, leaving plenty of room in the right of way for other infrastructure like high speed rail, high voltage lines, pipelines, etc. Time will tell.

the suburbs are dying

To my good friends still thinking about buying property in the suburbs – I don’t recommend it! According to Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of Retrofitting Suburbia; Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs:

of the 1,100 shopping malls, one third are dead or dying. The 50,000 strip malls have a 11% vacancy rate. Within the 350,000 big box stores, 300 million square feet are vacant. However, you point out these dynamics have been around awhile, with the newest marker being the suburban office vacancy rates of 16-24%. What has changed to make these suburban offices less attractive?

There are several converging factors here. The one most frequently cited by CEOs is the need to relocate to the cities that are attracting the educated 25-34 year-olds that they most want to hire and who, for the most part, find the idea of working in a Dilbert-like suburban cubicle un-creative and toxic. Additional factors include the fact that computers have automated many of the clerical jobs that used to be done in the suburban back-offices at the same time that space/employee standards have significantly reduced. The wave of ’80′s office parks and corporate campuses are aging and increasingly out of date, while the cities have become immensely more livable than they were in the ’70s. So, we’re seeing the tide reverse itself as a wave of corporate relocate out of suburbs and back into cities and newly named “innovation districts.”

open source street noise model

Here’s an open-source code for modeling street noise propagation. It’s written in R and open source database and GIS tools.

This paper describes the development of a model for assessing TRAffic Noise EXposure (TRANEX) in an open-source geographic information system. Instead of using proprietary software we developed our own model for two main reasons: 1) so that the treatment of source geometry, traffic information (flows/speeds/spatially varying diurnal traffic profiles) and receptors matched as closely as possible to that of the air pollution modelling being undertaken in the TRAFFIC project, and 2) to optimize model performance for practical reasons of needing to implement a noise model with detailed source geometry, over a large geographical area, to produce noise estimates at up to several million address locations, with limited computing resources. To evaluate TRANEX, noise estimates were compared with noise measurements made in the British cities of Leicester and Norwich. High correlation was seen between modelled and measured L_Aeq,1hr (Norwich: r = 0.85, p = .000; Leicester: r = 0.95, p = .000) with average model errors of 3.1 dB. TRANEX was used to estimate noise exposures (L_Aeq,1hr, L_Aeq,16hr, L_night) for the resident population of London (2003–2010). Results suggest that 1.03 million (12%) people are exposed to daytime road traffic noise levels ≥ 65 dB(A) and 1.63 million (19%) people are exposed to night-time road traffic noise levels ≥ 55 dB(A). Differences in noise levels between 2010 and 2003 were on average relatively small: 0.25 dB (standard deviation: 0.89) and 0.26 dB (standard deviation: 0.87) for L_Aeq,16hr and L_night.

10-foot lanes

Here’s an article arguing compellingly for 10-foot lanes on city streets. 12-foot lanes might save time and lives on highways, but on city streets they waste space and kill people.

On city streets, most drivers ignore posted speed limits, and instead drive the speed at which they feel safe. That speed is set by the cues provided by the environment. Are there other cars near me? Is an intersection approaching? Can I see around that corner? Are there trees and buildings near the road? Are there people walking or biking nearby? And: How wide is my lane?

All of these factors matter, and others, too. The simplest one to discuss, and probably the most impactful, is lane width. When lanes are built too wide, many bad things happen. In a sentence: pedestrians are forced to walk further across streets on which cars are moving too fast and bikes don’t fit.

I think we need to move toward safe, multi-modal streets on the Dutch and Danish models worldwide. This will be truly sustainable – safe, healthy, low-energy, low-carbon, and supportive of creative, innovative urban ecosystems where people can come together to solve problems. These are major capital investments with tax dollars, so a cost-effective way to do them is to develop the new standards, adopt them as business as usual, and then upgrade our streets to the new standards as they wear out.

That is a vision, but I see some cheap, easy short-term retrofits that could be done right away without major capital investment. Repainting with narrower lanes (streets need to be painted periodically anyway), and giving the saved space to pedestrians, bicycles, and green infrastructure would be pretty easy. Once streets get repainted, the next incremental step is bollards or other physical protections for pedestrians and cyclists. Some more short-term parking and loading zones would be helpful in a lot of cities – if we had more of those in Philadelphia you wouldn’t have so many people blocking the bike lanes we do have. Another short-term thing that could be done is to turn off stoplights and go back to stop signs on a lot of lower-traffic streets – this should even save a little energy and money. Stop signs are much safer for pedestrians, because all the vehicles have to stop or at least almost stop. You don’t have people gunning the engine on a yellow light to clear the intersection or make a quick turn – that is when pedestrians and cyclists die. Finally, on higher-traffic streets, light signals can be reprogrammed so that pedestrians are not in conflict with cars. Left turns on green just absolutely have to go away. I think right turns on green can be made a lot safer by small curb extension requiring a sharper turn, but we should think seriously about whether we want any turns on green. Let’s think about the pedestrian scramble model, where all traffic stops and pedestrians can cross diagonally. Cyclists could be allowed to treat this like a stop sign. Then, add turn arrows for all turns and it’s pretty safe for everyone.

Future Yada Yada Yada

in which I explore the imminent collapse of civilization, the fabulous science fiction future, and points in between