Monthly Archives: May 2013

Chicago tries out a “pedestrian scramble” intersection

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Chicago has started testing the “pedestrian scramble” at a Loop intersection:

The changes center on a new pedestrian crossing pattern – dubbed the “pedestrian scramble” – that will be introduced at the intersection of State Street and Jackson Boulevard…

The test involves stopping all vehicles – heading east on Jackson and north and south on State – for about 14 seconds every other light cycle to give pedestrians a jump on traffic to cross in all directions, including diagonally, according to Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation.

Developed more than 70 years ago, the pedestrian scramble allows pedestrians a running start to cross six ways instead of four ways.

The experiment is part of a larger plan by Chicago Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein to reduce speeds and the number of vehicle travel lanes on busy streets in an effort to slash the number of crashes…

Klein’s strategy involves narrowing some streets, or putting them on a “road diet.’’

Two quick thoughts:

1. This reminds me of photographs of busy intersections in Tokyo where you see mobs of people crossing at all angles. See short videos here and here. Indeed, other countries have used pedestrian scrambles for decades.

2. People may not like the idea of a “road diet” but there is evidence that reducing traffic capacity could be more effective at dealing with traffic and congestion rather than continually expanding roads. Plus, you then get the side benefit of more safety and convenience for pedestrians and cyclists.

NHTSA asks states to wait on driverless cars

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The federal government is asking states to wait on approving self-driving cars for general use until more research can be conducted:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration unveiled new recommendations to states for self-driving cars, urging them to be used only for testing and to require safeguards to ensure they can be taken over by a driver in the case of a malfunction.

NHTSA also said it was embarking on a four-year research effort on self-driving or autonomous vehicles as it considers requiring features like automatic braking, in which the car takes action to prevent crashes.

“We believe there are a number of technological issues as well as human performance issues that must be addressed before self-driving vehicles can be made widely available,” NHTSA said in its 14-page automated driving policy statement. “Self-driving vehicle technology is not yet at the stage of sophistication or demonstrated safety capability that it should be authorized for use by members of the public for general driving purposes. Should a state nevertheless decide to permit such non-testing operation of self-driving vehicles, at a minimum, the state should require that a properly licensed driver (i.e., one licensed to drive self-driving vehicles) be seated in the driver’s seat and be available at all times in order to operate the vehicle in situations in which the automated technology is not able to safely control the vehicle.”

NHTSA says as self-driving cars improve, they will reconsider. NHTSA says self-driving cars being tested in California, Florida and Nevada by Google and Audi of America should have the capability of detecting that their automated vehicle technologies have malfunctioned “and informing the driver in a way that enables the driver to regain proper control of the vehicle.” The Michigan Legislature is also considering allowing self-driving car testing…

Safety on the roads is an important concern but I’d be interested to see how much testing it might take for the government to approve self-driving cars. And, even if the safety appears to works out fairly quickly, will it take more time to reassure the public that such cars are safe?

It would also be interesting know how alert drivers are going to have to be while not driving. If the driver needs to be alerted to retake control, how relaxing is not driving going to be?

Wait, the good episodes of Arrested Development are like fully furnished McMansions?

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One commentator suggests fans of the new season of Arrested Development should be patient and then makes an interesting comparison:

Stay cool, Internet. Arrested Development‘s new Netflix-delivered season may prove to be great yet.

Within hours of the streaming service dropping a 15-episode Bluth bomb, critics and fans rushed to proclaim the new episodes as substandard. Mere model homes instead of the fully furnished McMansions that they had watched and rewatched over the past few years. And while I certainly count myself amongst the fans who feel at least a wee bit disappointed by the new episodes, it’s still far too early to jump to conclusions about the episodes’ quality or legacy.

You see, Arrested Development is a unique show. While most sitcoms rely on simple setups and punchlines for their laughs, this is one show that runs amuck on the formula.Punchline often come before setups, and it’s not uncommon for objects to regularly flash across the screen and get call-backs several episodes (or even seasons) later. Basically: Many of the show’s jokes were simply not designed to make any sense the first time you see them.

As someone who has studied the use of the word McMansion, it is unusual to see someone making a favorable reference to McMansions. In this article, fans of Arrested Development are waiting for the “fully furnished McMansions” which are compared to the good episodes of the show. This is odd enough in itself. But, there is an extra twist. The show itself has commentary about McMansions. As Wikipedia puts it, “The Bluth family of the television series Arrested Development is in the business of building opulent-looking sub-quality housing.” Part of the show’s comedy is that this family who involved in a quintessential American industry, building homes, is so dysfunctional. They provide the American Dream but live a wacky version of American family life.

I also suspect that many fans of Arrested Development would not be fans of McMansions. The sort of arcane and long-form humor (see the running jokes here) of the show doesn’t exactly endear itself to the masses.

Five experts weigh in on global flight-path maps

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An art critic, environmentalist, aviation consultant, data visualization expert, and philosopher offer some interpretations of global flight-path maps.

From the art critic:

It’s almost like contemporary fractalisation – based on fractals, those beautiful divisions of science and nature. A number of artists have exploited them. Max Ernst based a lot of his surreal landscapes on fractalisation.

From the aviation consultant:

Europe looks so bright because it has so many short-haul flights. It’s also one of the busiest global markets and there are several hubs in relatively close proximity in Europe: Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and London…

What we’re going to see in a few years is more connections between Asia and Africa, and South America and Africa, along with more “south-south” trade.

From the expert in data visualization:

You can see the density of the flights, but it doesn’t show you how many people are travelling on them. You could do that by colouring them differently.

From the philosopher:

We are not seeing the life of individual human beings, but the life of the species as a whole, as if the species was one organism, pulsating like a jellyfish. Maybe it represents our collective existence?

Interesting thoughts all around. The quote above from the philosopher is right on in that maps like these allows us to see larger patterns and how we are all connected. It is not just about the flow of passengers or cargo back and forth but also about how these flight paths connect us. The maps could also serve as a proxy for global power and business activity. I remember seeing work from sociologist Zachary Neal along these lines. Take a look at his publications involving cities, networks, and airplanes here.

Some Chicago aldermen, businesses argue they want parking meters to move cars and customers along

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As Chicago debates a parking meter policy, some aldermen and businesses want metered parking on Sunday so they can keep customers moving through the parking spaces:

Some aldermen are saying “no thanks” to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s offer of free Sunday parking when it comes to their commercial districts for fear it would hurt businesses that rely on street parking for their customers…

“As soon as this deal happened, I got a letter from my chamber of commerce, saying … this is going to hurt local businesses,” Ald. Michele Smith, whose 43rd Ward includes most of Lincoln Park, said during a Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday to weigh the mayor’s proposal. Businesses need parkers to move on so others can take their place, several aldermen said…

“In some commercial areas, with some businesses, the businesses actually want the turnover that payment on Sunday gives, because having spots filled by somebody that’s just leaving it there all day hurts business, and that’s the concern that we’re trying to address on a case-by-case basis,” Patton said.

Intriguingly, this puts the aldermen in a tough position between residents/customers and businesses:

But aldermen would have to request it, something Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th, said could leave council members in a tough spot. “What it ends up setting up is a situation where, ‘Well, whose side are you on — the businesses or the constituents?’ It’s problematic,” Pawar told Patton.

This highlights an advantage of parking meters: they can keep the parked traffic moving so that cars can’t clog up spaces. Without them, city residents and visitors are likely to sit in the spots for a long time. This also is a reminder of the mix of uses often found in urban neighborhoods: both residents and businesses are vying for parking for much of the day. In contrast, parking is more plentiful in suburban shopping areas and many suburban downtown businesses gave up parking meters decades ago to keep customers happy. But, these suburban downtowns rarely have the density and demand for street parking that cities face.

So, if residents in these neighborhoods complained loud enough about wanting free parking on Sundays, would they be able to force an alderman to side with them?

McArdle: real 21st century problem is providing meaningful jobs for all

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Megan McArdle considers the recent rioting in Sweden and suggests developed nations have a long-term problem of finding meaningful jobs for all:

In too many places, for too many people, the modern industrialized democracies are not working. People can live, but they are cut off from the broader society. And the number of these people seems to be increasing. It’s too hard for many people to find a decent job. And taking from the rich to buy them health care and day care and subsidized housing does not repair the hole this leaves in their lives.

It looks to me as if the great task of the next few decades will be to find ways to employ all the people on the margins productively, and with dignity. But this is not, mostly, the question that most public policy debates are engaged in addressing. That question is hard, and no one has a good answer, so instead we debate technical questions about stimulus multipliers and minimum wages, and have the occasional knock down, drag out fight about who has a moral right to how much cash. There’s nothing wrong with those debates, and I myself have been a spirited participant. But the harder questions have much more important answers.

Interesting analysis. Simply providing a safety net may not be enough moving forward. Expectations have changed, both for those receiving government or private aid and those providing the aid. People expect to have an opportunity to make decent money as well as pursue something that interests them.

It boils down to this: what happens if you have developed societies with relatively high unemployment, particularly for disadvantages groups, for decades with little change?

h/t Instapundit

Former downtown Wheaton Jewel store demolished, makes way for medical building

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The closing of the Jewel in downtown Wheaton in 2008 upset a number of residents but the building is being demolished and making way for a new medical building:

Bulldozers have arrived at the former Jewel Osco site in downtown Wheaton, demolishing the building that has been vacant for several years.

It’ll make way for a new DuPage Medical Group building, which is expected to bring in new jobs and more activity into the city’s downtown…

Just south of the site, construction of a new Mariano’s grocery store is ongoing, along with an apartment complex called Wheaton 121 being built a few blocks north. Both are slated to open in the fall.

The DuPage Medical Group building, which will be three stories and span 40,035 square feet at Main Street and Willow Avenue, is expected to be done by April, said Dennis Fine, Chief Operating Officer. The project will relocate 45 employees and 12 physicians from their current location at N. Main Street and W. Cole Avenue.

Fine expects to add at least 15 jobs and three to five more physicians to accommodate the services being added at the new location.

The city has been looking for years for a way to utilize this site and help the part of downtown south of the railroad tracks. It doesn’t sound like this new building will be a huge source of jobs but it does reinforce the image that downtown Wheaton is a place to be. Medical offices fit the image downtown Wheaton is looking for: more upscale residences, offices, and business establishments. Plus, the new grocery store will provide a more upscale business so the downtown will have gained a better grocery store plus this new medical office. I would guess that a lot of downtowns in the Chicago area would be happy if a medical facility redeveloped a vacant retail site.

However, this does lead to a newly vacant building on the north side of Wheaton in a more commercialized corridor. What might go at this site at Main and Cole?

The most profitable song is “Margaritaville”

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Copyrighting the words of “Margaritaville” as well as trademarking the name has been quite lucrative for Jimmy Buffett:

To think that all of this poured forth from a goofy, three-chord song—a mere 208 words, roughly half the length of this article—written about being lazy and getting drunk. But as Buffett’s Parrothead empire continues to spread, one can’t help but wonder whether a more lucrative song exists. “If there is anything on the same scale as a Margaritaville, it’s not a song—it’s a motion picture,” says Robert Brauneis, a professor of intellectual property at the George Washington University Law School and author of a research paper on Happy Birthday to You, which continues to generate upwards of $2 million a year. “When you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, you have to think in terms of Star Wars, Winnie the Pooh, or Transformers. That’s probably in the same order of magnitude.”

As a recording, Margaritaville doesn’t post stratospheric numbers. After debuting on Buffett’s 1977 album Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude, it peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 100 charts. According to the 2012 BBC documentary The Richest Songs in the World, Margaritaville doesn’t crack the top 10, which is populated by three Christmas songs. The two highest-ranking pop songs are You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, by the Righteous Brothers, and Yesterday, by the Beatles. (No. 1 was Happy Birthday to You.) “If you want to get technical, there are two Margaritavilles,” says Brauneis. “There’s the copyright that protects the song, which is valuable because of the stream of income. Then there’s the trademark that has developed out of the song’s title, and legally that’s a different piece of intellectual property.”

Of course, this means the song and the brand are separate legal entities and could, in theory, be sold separately. But this isn’t the case. If you want to check Buffett’s tour dates, there’s no JimmyBuffett.com—there’s only Margaritaville.com, where his music career and the rest of his empire are seamlessly melded into one site.

“From a larger business perspective, when you combine the two and look at what the song stands for as a lifestyle and as a branding vehicle,” says Brauneis, “it’s worth far more than Happy Birthday. I can’t think of another example of a song that has that total impact.”

The key here is not really the song itself but the business opportunities the song has led to. This is spectacular branding: Buffett and others have created a sellable lifestyle out of the song and there has been a willing set of consumers willing to eat at the restaurant, buy merchandise, and go to concerts. It is hard to imagine a “Yesterday” themed restaurant – the song is really sort of sad – or one centered around “Happy Birthday” as this is an event that only comes around once a year. Indeed, it would be interesting to see how other artists have tried to capitalize on individual songs and the outcomes of those ventures. Is there any other song that could potentially lead to such financial opportunities? Is this a future source of income for musical artists?

Where emerging adults live tends to perpetuate residential segregation

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A new study suggests mobility patterns of emerging adults tend to reinforce existing patterns of residential segregation:

“We were interested in this idea that this stage of the life-course could be a potentially really important juncture for breaking down these kinds of very long-established patterns of residential segregation and all of the inequalities that go with them,” says Marcus Britton, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has studied the question. “Unfortunately, our results are not tremendously encouraging on that score.”

Britton and Pat Goldsmith, a sociologist at Texas A&M, examined records from the National Education Longitudinal Study of more than 7,000 students who were eighth-graders in 1988. That study followed these students through 2000, when most of them were 26. Britton and Goldsmith, in research published in the journal Urban Studies, compared their home zip codes and other characteristics at various points along this timeline with census data collected in 1990 and 2000 about the racial makeup of those neighborhoods.

Blacks and Hispanics who migrated to new metropolitan areas were, in fact, more likely to live in zip codes with greater exposure to whites, unlike minorities who moved within their own city. But few minorities actually made such long-distance moves. This means that segregation persists in part because many minorities have limited exposure to integrated neighborhoods as children, but also because they have limited mobility as they age to relocate somewhere entirely new.

Britton has conducted other research that suggests that minorities are also much more likely to live at home as young adults than whites are. And given patterns that we’ve seen more recently during the recession – when young twentysomethings of all races have been stuck at home – these trends bode particularly poorly for integration.

This is a clever research design: emerging adults, who may be more interested in diversity compared to older generations and who are also in a period of transition where they can try out some new kinds of places, might break out of patterns of residential segregation. But, this description of the research findings suggests it is difficult to move beyond past residential segregation patterns. This sounds like a basic sociological finding, people are strongly influenced by past conditions, but also adds the element that even a younger generation who has heard more about diversity and may be more interested in living in urban areas is also not willing or able to move in large numbers to more diverse places.

This would be something interesting to keep track of in the future: could we envision a United States in several decades where most people support diversity and fighting inequality based on race/ethnicity, class, and gender but few people are willing to actually change where they or others live?

Determining how Illinois road money should be split between Chicago area, downstate

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The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning argues Illinois needs to change its formula for how it apportions road money between the Chicago area and downstate:

A deal hammered out by the state’s top politicians in the 1980s means that 45 percent of all transportation revenues go to the Chicago metropolitan area and 55 percent is allocated to downstate Illinois.

CMAP wants to change the status quo with a performance-based system using population, congestion, pollution and economic impact as criteria when it comes to doling out dollars for significant projects such as new highways, bridges and interchanges or additional lanes…

The agency points out that the metropolitan region comprises 65 percent of the population and contributes about 70 percent of the state’s income tax and 65 percent of its sales tax revenues.

Yet, in IDOT’s 2014-2019 multimodal transportation improvement program, about $3.1 billion — or 45 percent — out of $6.9 billion goes to District 1 including Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties, CMAP planners said…

“It’s a very bad idea,” said Republican Rep. Dwight Kay of Glen Carbon. “The needs of southern Illinois in terms of total miles is far greater than in the suburbs or in Chicago. I would be somewhat dismayed if not shocked to think anyone would propose changes. We have hundreds of bridges that either need to be replaced or are older and in disrepair.”

My first question is how lawmakers came to a 55/45 split in the first place. I would hope this agreement was based on some hard numbers but perhaps they were the only figures that everyone could agree on?

It sounds like the current debate would shape up like this: downstate lawmakers argue they have plenty of road miles and infrastructure to maintain while Chicago area politicians argue they put in a majority of the money and have a majority of the population. Do Illinois lawmakers even have the ability to discuss something like this even in the midst of other major money woes? Wouldn’t this simply inflame the ongoing Chicago versus downstate debate? I suspect this won’t be on the front burner even if infrastructure is a growing conversation piece around the country.