Monthly Archives: November 2013

Chicago area highway drivers going faster: 85th percentile between 71 and 75 mph

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A new report highlights the fast highway driving along Chicago area highways:

Only a few are obeying the law. In those stretches, an average of 1 out of 20 motorists drives at or below that limit…

The data, gathered in April, May and September, showed that, depending on which tollway stretch was tested, 91 to 98 percent of drivers exceeded the 55 mph speed limit. In those stretches, the average speed ranged from 66 to 70 mph.

The studies followed a 2012 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report that showed that average highway speeds increased to almost 71 mph in 2009 from 65 mph two years earlier. At the same time, traffic fatalities — 33,561 last year — are dropping, except for a slight increase in 2012. The report concluded that the higher speeds might have been the product of less speed enforcement in 2009 and fewer cars on the road that year, leading to less congestion…

But perhaps the most fundamental metric in deciding where to set a speed limit is a concept known as the 85th percentile, or the speed at which 85 percent of drivers are either traveling at, or below. In essence, it measures the limit that most drivers place on themselves, regardless of posted speed limits.

Tollway data showed that the 85th percentile speed ranges from 71 to 75 mph.

Read on for more discussion of then how Illinois might or might not increase speed limits.

I’ve talked to numerous people over the years who are nervous about driving in the Chicago area because of these speeds. On one trip that involved driving through the Chicago region, I was asked to drive since I was used to it. While the speed is one factor, I wonder how much the overall traffic, particularly the large trucks, matter. It is one thing to drive fast in more open spaces – Michigan, for example, has had 70 mph speed limits for at least several years but it often doesn’t feel as bad with less people around. It is another thing to have at least three lanes and often four in each direction full of drivers of different sizes and speeds.

One thought: if we end up with a world of driverless cars in a few years, what speed would these cars travel on a highway? Presumably, the cars could go faster because the cars would share information and maximize the speed. But what then would be considered “safe”?

Don’t blame Black Friday and Thanksgiving shopping; they just expose the consumerist system

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As crowds gathered to shop on Thanksgiving and into Black Friday, there has been plenty of backlash from those who think this violates a sacred family holiday to those who don’t like that relatively low-paid retail workers have to work another day to those who bemoan the lengths Americans will go to fight over some doorbusters. All of this might be true but I think it misses the point: these two days simply lay bare American consumerism. In a similar way that Walmart and McDonald’s tend to take the brunt of complaints about big box stores and fast food restaurants, Black Friday and shopping on Thanksgiving share a similar fate: they simply make real what is true about Americans and what they want.

There is a whole system at work here. It involves buying single-family homes, talk about the American Dream (equated with acquiring certain items), dreams about scientific progress and mechanical abilities such that life will be easier, liking having choices more than enjoying the goods themselves, acquiring stuff, and an economy and financial system dependent on average citizens continuing to buy beyond subsistence items. This system involves some great advances put to interesting uses, things like the assembly line, the internal combustion engine, transistors and semiconductors, the mass production of houses, the rise of marketing, and mass media.

The lesson is that hardly any day all year long is sacrosanct any longer; more than family togetherness, more than patriotism, perhaps more than the Super Bowl (which combines all of these things in a different way), Americans enjoy shopping, good deals, and consumption. It is competitive and alluring and our collective retirement accounts may all very well depend on this behavior.

Thanksgiving football game = 11 minutes of action, over 100 ads

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Football is America’s favorite sport but the average NFL broadcast doesn’t actually contain much football:

The NFL’s popularity is all the more remarkable when you inspect the fare it has to offer each week on television. An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes…

The 11 minutes of action was famously calculated a few years ago by the Wall Street Journal. Its analysis found that an average NFL broadcast spent more time on replays (17 minutes) than live play. The plurality of time (75 minutes) was spent watching players, coaches, and referees essentially loiter on the field.

An average play in the NFL lasts just four seconds.

Of course, watching football on TV is hardly just about the game; there are plenty of advertisements to show people, too. The average NFL game includes 20 commercial breaks containing more than 100 ads. The Journal’s analysis found that commercials took up about an hour, or one-third, of the game.

As this piece correctly notes, this is partly due to the rules of the game where there is down time between plays. At the same time, the NFL broadcasts go out of their way to add commercial breaks. Consider a sequence like this: touchdown scored, kick the extra point, commercial break, kickoff, commercial break. This happens all the time.

For contrast, watch high school or lower level college football. These games still have breaks between plays but the drop-off in wasted time for commercials is astounding.

One other note: if it weren’t for all the commercials, would the networks still show football games?

Why are so many car commercials set in the Los Angeles area?

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I’ve noticed something about car commercials lately: many of them are shot in the Los Angeles area. Here are three common scenes:

1. Driving down a few blocks of downtown Los Angeles, possibly with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in the background or in the parking garage that provides a nice overlook over the city. Even if you don’t know the concert hall by name, you may have seen this behind numerous cars:

WaltDisneyConcertHallJul12

It takes some work to block off urban streets but these few blocks of downtown get a lot of air time.

2. Driving on Highway 101 along the Pacific Coast. Think of scenes with cliffs on one side, the Pacific Ocean on the other, a sunny day, and a beautiful car driving down a narrow road over curves and with sweeping vistas.

3. Driving along Mulholland Drive with the city in the background or along a similar road in the hills north of downtown Los Angeles. One of the commercials on the air right now ends with a shot of the new car winding its way toward the Griffiths Observatory. The observatory is a nice place to explore and there are good views:

LAfromGriffithsObservatory

Overall, I suspect there is some good reason for all of this. Perhaps it to simply take advantage of all of the power and tools of Hollywood. Perhaps LA is great because of its varied landscape. Perhaps there are some tax breaks involved. However, there are plenty of other cities where this filming could take place and LA is far away from Detroit, the traditional center of American cars. At the same time, this might provide more reasons why that Super Bowl commercial about being “Imported from Detroit” received so much attention.

The features Americans want in their homes for 2014

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Businessweek takes a look at what Americans want in their homes in the new year. Here are a few of the trends:

-Builders says closet sizes have more than doubled in some high-end models from a decade ago. And Pulte Homes notes that walk-in closets are becoming de rigueur for even guest bedrooms.

-Three-bedroom homes accounted for 46 percent of new builds in 2012, down from 53 percent in 2009. Four-bedroom houses have grabbed 41 percent of the newly constructed home market – providing more room for aging relatives or kids who move back.

-The size of U.S. homes is growing again after declining during the recession. The latest government data show the average, newly built U.S. single-family dwelling is 2,505 square feet. That’s within a hair of the 2,521-sq.ft. peak in 2007 at the height of the housing boom.

-About half the added square footage on homes built by Pulte in the past 10 years has gone to storage space. A sign of the times: what Pulte’s director of architecture, Scott Thomas, calls “the Costco room,” a closet near the entrance from the garage that can hold all those jumbo-size packages bought at warehouse stores.

One commentator says this is the “new normal” McMansion. As household sizes have declined and more Americans are living alone, homes aren’t necessarily shrinking (though this is likely skewed by those who have money to buy new homes while the lower end of the market languishes) and people are looking for plenty of storage for all the stuff they own and are buying. So, even if these McMansions might not be as big as some past McMansions or they might be designed better and grenner, it appears consumption is still the name of the game.

Music has gotten louder not to drive sales but because artists want it that way

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Recorded music today tends to be loud – and this is what many artists want:

The problem with Katz’s pronouncement, though, is that the market doesn’t incentivize loudness in the first place. Studies have shown that there is no correlation between volume and sales. Broadcast radio, where the competition for loudness might be most fierce, already clips the audio waveform at a certain level to avoid conflicts with advertisements and speech. Many cloud music services like Rdio and Spotify already have volume adjustment logic built in with no noticeable effect on recording trends. Low-fidelity loudness has succeeded and survived for some time without much outcry from the public, just from the small population of audiophiles and sound engineers.

The truth is that artists and engineers make their music loud because they want to. And the desire to do so usually correlates more with trends in technology than with commercial concerns. From gramophones to electric playback of records and digital technology, a series of short-lived fads have sprung up wherein musicians abuse new listening mediums to make their songs as loud as possible to the detriment of fidelity. In a paper for the journal Popular Music, Kyle Devine reviewed the long history of feuds over formats and electrical amplification for attention:

The history of sound reproduction can be understood as a history in which auditory ideals and practicalities are in constant negotiation, where the priorities of audiences and “audiophiles” drift in and out of synch…

And something similar is happening now in pop music as more songs that aren’t in the vein of screaming punk choruses make their way onto the charts. While not high fidelity, groups like Adele and Mumford & Sons are easing away from the volume ceiling with moments of quiet that are actually, technically, quiet.

We’ll see what happens in the latest installment of the loudness wars. There appears to be an interesting interplay between what is possible technologically, what artists want to try (and this varies quite a bit by genre), and what the public wants to listen to. From a production perspective in the sociology of culture, technology is the important part because that is what drives tastes. Flip the question around and we could ask whether punk rock would have emerged as it did without the technological ability to simply play loud.

I wonder if another reason is the uptick in headphone/earbud usage throughout the day which really began in force during the 1980s with the Walkman which was followed by the Discman which was followed by mp3 players/phones. While walking around and with lower quality headphones, particularly ones that don’t block out other noise or cover the whole ear, quiet songs are difficult to hear.

Just how many fake Twitter accounts are there? And why does it matter?

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Twitter and experts disagree on how many fake Twitter accounts there are:

In securities filings, Twitter says it believes fake accounts represent fewer than 5% of its 230 million active users. Independent researchers believe the number is higher.

Italian security researchers Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli say they found 20 million fake accounts for sale on Twitter this summer. That would amount to nearly 9% of Twitter’s monthly active users. The Italian researchers also found software for sale that allows spammers to create unlimited fake accounts. The researchers decoded robot-programming software to reveal how easy it is for spammers to control the convincing fakes…

Jason Ding, a researcher at Barracuda Labs who has studied fake Twitter followers for more than a year, also thinks Twitter underestimates the prevalence of fake accounts on the network. Mr. Ding says users don’t understand how active and realistic the fakes can appear.

Read on for more details how the battle between the black market and Twitter’s use of algorithms to discover fake accounts is going. Even if the average user can’t quite figure out who is a real or fake user, the consequences are real:

The fake accounts remain a cloud over Twitter Inc. in the wake of its successful initial public offering. “Twitter is where many people get news,” says Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. “If what is trending on Twitter is being faked by robots, people need to know that. This will and should undermine trust.”

According to this article and others, it appears that fake accounts are most commonly used for promotional purposes, whether for Washington politicians or entertainment stars. How harmful are these fake accounts which might be used to boost the number of followers or retweet material?

On the other hand, Turkle suggests these fake accounts could easily mask what is really happening on Twitter. Perhaps they are pushing certain Twitter trends, which then influences other users. Or, perhaps these fake Twitter accounts could push false news reports, which could have some different consequences depending on the situation. It could be worse if a large number of users find out they were interacting with or trying to engage with fake accounts.

While I agree with Turkle that this does present an important trust issue, I wonder if it would take some high profile case before this becomes a real issue. Imagine someone is able to use a set of fake accounts to pull off a terrorist act or throw off the government.

As Chicago area home prices rise, housing affordability drops

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Affordable housing is a persistent issue in the Chicago region – and the percent of affordable homes has dropped in the last four quarters:

Housing affordability in the Chicago area just took its biggest quarterly tumble since early 2005.

During the year’s third quarter, 63.7 percent of all new and existing homes sold in the area were affordable to families earning the area median income of $73,400, according to the most recent National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo home affordability index.

The index put the median home price in the Chicago area at $210,000.

That compares with the 70.6 percent of homes being considered affordable during the second quarter. It was the fourth consecutive quarterly slip in local affordability. This latest decline was the most dramatic since the change recorded from the first to second quarters of 2005.

While this is a shift as home prices rise, it is a reminder of the bigger issue: the Chicago area has a long-term problem with affordable housing. This is the case in the city of Chicago as well as suburban areas. This isn’t just an issue of people being able to find decent housing; it is related to businesses being able to find workers (who don’t have to travel ridiculous distances from housing they can afford), people being able to access good school districts (which are often related to higher housing values), and whether there is continued residential segregation where those of certain racial and ethnic groups can’t live in certain areas.

New York Times: “McMansions are making a comeback”

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This is becoming a recurring headline: “McMansions are making a comeback“:

In 2010, homes starting growing again. By last year, the size of the median new single-family home hit a record high of 2,306 square feet, surpassing the peak of 2007. And new homes have been getting more expensive, too. The median price reached $279,300 in April this year, or about 6 percent higher than the pre-recession peak of $262,600, set in March 2007. The numbers are not adjusted for inflation.

Yet the economy remains weak. How can Americans keep buying bigger and more expensive homes? It turns out, of course, that not everyone can.

“It’s all about access to credit,” said Rose Quint, an economist at the National Association of Home Builders. “People who are less affluent and have less robust employment histories have been shut out of the new home market. As a result, the characteristics of new homes are being skewed to people who can obtain credit and put down large down payments, typically wealthier buyers.”

The data and conclusions are nothing new. But, the choice of story and the headline itself are interesting. What should the reader take away from such a narrative? I can’t help but think part of this is motivated by an interest in scaring people: “McMansions are back!” When the comeback stories are typically written, they are not from a positive point of view. Critics would argue McMansions are emblematic of a whole host of American problems from the 1980s through the mid-2000s: too much interest in consumption, too much debt, poorly designed goods that are more about impressing people than anything else, the continued spread of suburban sprawl, and the growing gap between the have and have-nots. There may be truth to all of this but there is a lot of negative baggage suggested by a return of McMansions.