Monthly Archives: January 2011

An intriguing question: just how many parking spots are in the United States?

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The Infrastructurist reports on a new academic study that considers the full environmental impact of parking. But in order to provide an answer to this query, the researchers had to first consider another question: just how many parking spots are there in the United States?

Turns out that’s no easy task; in fact, according to the authors, no such “nationwide inventory” has ever been done. “It’s kind of like dark matter in the universe,” Donald Shoup, the so-called “prophet of parking” (and not part of the study), told Inside Science. “We know it’s there, but we don’t have any idea how much there is.” When the Berkeley researchers crunched the numbers, they came up with five scenarios of available U.S. parking that ranged from 105 million spots to 2 billion. Give or take, I guess.

The most likely estimate points to roughly 800 million spaces across the country, and the construction and maintenance of those spaces do, in fact, take a large cumulative toll on the environment. When parking spots are taken into account, an average car’s per-mile carbon emissions go up as much as 10 percent, the authors conclude. They also report that, over the course of a car’s lifetime, emissions of sulfur dioxide and soot rise 24 percent and 89 percent, respectively, once parking is properly considered.

Those are just part of a broad “suite of impacts” that includes previously studied costs like the “heat island effect” — the term for when dark pavement raises the temperature of a city, leading to additional energy demands for cooling. And atmospheric costs are only part of the suite. According to the paper’s lead author, Mikhail Chester, there may be a larger infrastructure for parking than for roadways. If that’s the case, there would seem to be another great cost to all this parking: the relative cost of useful space.

I like the comments from “the prophet of parking.” While there are not probably too many people in the world who would want to know the exact figure of parking spots in the United States, it is important to know this fact in order to understand the larger impact of parking.

Parking itself is an interesting phenomenon. In a culture that loves automobiles, parking spots are essential features are many places. There is much evidence that if Americans can’t find a relatively cheap parking spot, they are likely to go elsewhere. Some of the allure of the shopping mall, with the first ones constructed in the mid 1900s, was that the consumer had a vast area of free parking as opposed to the crowded streets of downtowns. Homes have to have their own form of parking spaces, to the point of many homes from recent decades leading with their garages (and earning the nickname “snout houses” for how this garage protrudes toward the street).

But of course, as this study points out, parking spots come at a cost.

A related question that I would be interested in knowing the answer to: how many parking spots are occupied at different times of the day? How many parking spots in America are constructed for the 8-5 work hours and then sit empty the rest of the day?

Talking about Twitter language and what it reveals about the world

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It may seem like common sense that people’s regional dialects show up in their online communication. According to a new study that examined “380,000 messages from Twitter during one week in March 2010,” people in California say “coo” for “cool,” southerners still say “y’all,” and New Yorkers are more apt to say “suttin” instead of “something.”

But I think the study does just go beyond common sense in some of its other conclusions:

Eisenstein said some of the online “accents” mirror those in the spoken language, but not all. For example, many people in the Great Lakes region tend to have similar accents when speaking, but that wasn’t necessarily found to be true in the study, he said.

“One thing I think that it shows is that people really have a need to communicate their identity — their cultural identity and their geographic identity in social media,” he said.

This is interesting: how exactly do people portray their identity through their online language? On mediums like Twitter, people make very conscious choices about how to speak. People of different regions and dialects can choose to use their typical speech patterns or not. And why do they make these choices?

A broader question to ask is how much do posts on Twitter represent reality? What sort of picture of the world does Twitter deliver? This study can help us understand what Twitter behavior is like but can it tell us much about the broader world?

Finding the right model to predict crime in Santa Cruz

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Science fiction stories are usually the setting when people talk about predicting crimes. But it appears that the police department in Santa Cruz is working with an academic in order to forecast where crimes will take place:

Santa Cruz police could be the first department in Northern California that will deploy officers based on forecasting.

Santa Clara University assistant math professor Dr. George Mohler said the same algorithms used to predict aftershocks from earthquakes work to predict crime.”We started with theories from sociological and criminological fields of research that says offenders are more likely to return to a place where they’ve been successful in the past,” Mohler said.

To test his theory, Mohler plugged in several years worth of old burglary data from Los Angeles. When a burglary is reported, Mohler’s model tells police where and when a so-called “after crime” is likely to occur.

The Santa Cruz Police Department has turned over 10 years of crime data to Mohler to run in the model.

I wonder if we will be able to read about the outcome of this trial, regardless of whether the outcome is good or bad. If the outcome is bad, perhaps the police department or the academic would not want to publicize the results.

On one hand, this simply seems to be a problem of getting enough data to make accurate enough predictions. On the other hand, there will always be some error in the predictions. For example, how could a model predict something like what happened in Arizona this past weekend? Of course, one could include some random noise into the model – but these random guesses could easily be wrong.

And knowing the location of where crime would happen doesn’t necessarily mean that the crime could be prevented.

Traveling through underground New York

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Walking underneath a city through the tubes, pipes, and sewers has always sounded fascinating to me. One New York Times reporter had the opportunity make an underground excursion and here is a description of the start of his journey:

Tuesday, 12:36 a.m.
Exterior Street, the Bronx

We inspect our exit point — a manhole in the middle of the road. Will Hunt, a bespectacled 26-year-old who is writing a book about the underground (“The last frontier,” he says, “in an over-mapped, Google-Earthed world.”) will serve as our spotter. Will’s job is to watch for traffic: ascending from the hole, we do not wish to be hit by a car. We are to communicate by walkie-talkie. Will ties a long pink ribbon to the inside of the manhole cover. Dangling downward, this will be our signal we have reached the end.

1:20 a.m.
Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx

Down we go by way of sewer pipe, joined now by Andrew Wonder, a shaggy former film student making a documentary about Steve. The change is stark, immediate: darkness, shin-high water, a dull ammoniac funk. My eyes adjust, and I see an endless tunnel, rounded, eight feet high and made of faded brick. The floor is scummy and perilous to walk on. Within seconds, Steve, Erling and Andrew rip their waders: they’re taking on water. We nonetheless progress and, after 50 feet, the entrance disappears. Forgot how much I hate enclosed spaces.

1:48 a.m.
Bronx sewers

Amazing. The sounds down here are even more impressive than the sights and smells: the Niagara-like crash of water spilling in from side drains; the rumble of the subway; the guh-DUNK! of cars hitting manhole covers overhead, like two jabs on a heavy bag. Steve says we’re only 12 feet beneath the surface, but it feels far deeper. The familiar world is gone: only sewage now, the press of surrounding earth, the anxious dance of headlamps on the water. Every 100 feet or so, an archway appears and we can see a parallel channel gurgling beside us with a coffee-colored murk. I shine my headlamp down and watch a condom and gooey scraps of toilet paper float by. I check the air meter constantly: no trace of gas, and the oxygen level is a healthy 20.9 percent. I ask Steve how he navigates down here; he laughs. “Hey, Erling,” he calls out, “you’re taking care of the navigation, right?” Funny.

This sounds like an interesting adventure. But it also is illustrative of the important world of infrastructure beneath our feet that handles a lot of important functions. How this was all constructed in such a way that it was accessible and so that multiple systems could be in place (subways, sewers, phone and cable lines, etc.) is a remarkable feat of planning and engineering.

It also seems that a disproportionately large number of movie and television scenes take place in this environment. Such scenes often have a certain feel to them: a cold, dank place where monsters, rats, and criminals run around. I have read about “urban spelunking” groups that take it upon themselves to explore the underground worlds but I’m sure this is a relatively rare activity.

h/t The Infrastructurist

How one sociologist views boxing

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Boxing is a familiar subject for movies but not so much in sociology. French sociologist Loic Wacquant has written about his boxing experiences and plans to write even more. But this sociological writing about boxing may not be easy to digest for those who are used to movies like Rocky or The Fighter. Here are a few excerpts of Wacquant’s work courtesy of The Guardian:

We get analysis, but best of all we get a fist/hand account of the action: “Jabs from me, blocked by his fists, versus jabs from him, blocked by my nose. I’m better able to see his punches coming, but I still don’t move fast enough. He lands another punch on my face, a right that makes my headgear turn sideways. DeeDee growls ‘Move yo’ head, Louie!’ I’m trying!”

A second book, to be called The Passion of the Pugilist, will, Wacquant says, address “the dialectic of desire and domination in the social genesis of the boxer’s vocation”, “the work of the trainer as virile mothering”, “confrontation in the ring as a homoerotic ritual of masculinisation”, and other topics that did not fit or had not matured in time to go into Body Soul…

A paper called Whores, Slaves, And Stallions – Languages Of Exploitation And Accommodation Among Prizefighters, in the journal Body and Society, hard-boils down to this:

“The boxer’s experience of corporeal exploitation is expressed in three kindred idioms … The first likens the fighter-manager combo to the prostitute-pimp duet; the second depicts the ring as a plantation and promoters as latter-day slave masters; the third intimates that boxers are used in the manner of livestock”.

This sounds like weighty analysis. But it sounds like Wacquant certainly put in his ethnographic time: 35 months in the gym and thoughts about ending his study and turning pro.

(I’m not quite sure what it means that this story is part of a series called “Improbable Research.” Or consider the description about the writer: “Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize.” If you go to the website for the Ig Nobel prize, the tag line is “Research that makes people LAUGH, and then think.” Hmmm.)

Las Vegas Sun reports on ASA move to Las Vegas

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Last week, the American Sociological Association announced that the 2011 Annual Meetings have officially been moved to Las Vegas from Chicago. This news made it into the tourism column in the Las Vegas Sun with some interesting commentary:

The public usually doesn’t have many kind things to say about unions because of the labor disruptions they can produce. But here’s an instance in which union tactics are playing in Las Vegas’ favor.

Last week, the American Sociological Association announced that it’s going to have its 106th annual meeting at Caesars Palace Aug. 20-23. The reason: A protracted labor dispute involving two Chicago hotels is showing no sign of resolution and the American Sociological Association Council opted against taking a chance that it wouldn’t be solved by August…

It’ll be the first time that the association has met in Las Vegas, and members seem delighted, not only because for the first time since 1990 the organization with 5,000 attendees will be able to conduct its event under one roof but because sociologists find Las Vegas to be interesting laboratory.

“Not only is Las Vegas vibrant and fascinating from a sociological perspective, but it’s also easily accessible for our members across the country,” Hillman said. “When we decided to move our meeting from Chicago, we put an emphasis on finding an alternate location that offered optimum convenience for our members. By selecting Las Vegas and Caesars Palace, we believe we’ve achieved that goal.”

Workers at Caesars Palace have union contracts, but they don’t expire until 2012.

LVCVA representatives have to be happy with the association’s decision, since it’s wanted to get more medical groups to give Las Vegas a try.

The next goal should be to work hard with the association to convince leadership to keep the event here. If the event shows a healthy attendance increase from previous years, the group would have to think twice about returning to Chicago.

A couple of things strike me as interesting in this report:

1. So the sociological meetings can be written off as a research trip? Las Vegas is a fascinating place and it will be interesting to see all of the sociologists out on the town. But most sociological work I have read about Las Vegas, mainly in the field of urban sociology, has been negative. Las Vegas is described as a simulacrum, a fake place that illustrates the worst of American consumption. Perhaps the convention people in Las Vegas don’t care what a group says about a place as long as they are willing to spend money there.

2. Is this report suggesting that sociology is somehow related to medicine?

3. Did the reporter look at how ASA rotates its annual meetings between certain cities? I would be shocked if the meetings are in Las Vegas again next year, not because it is a bad place or has poor facilities but because ASA seems to like to move around.

George Will on the Arizona shooting, sociology, and social engineering

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The opinions are flying regarding the Arizona shooting over the weekend. Conservative commentator George Will enters the fray with some thoughts about sociology:

It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson’s occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds. The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience.

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience.

This does seem to be a common human desire: to establish order within the chaos of life. But I would make a distinction between his quick thought here that sociology and half-baked explanations are related. As a discipline, sociology seeks to observe and measure reality. Bad sociology leaps to half-baked conclusions while good sociology follows the scientific process, looking for evidence of causation. Bad sociology is really “pop sociology” or “armchair sociology” where commentators leap to certain conclusions without carefully considering the evidence or attempting to be objective.

Will then goes on to talk about what he thinks is behind the desire of the Left to blame the Right for the shootings:

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

Using the term “social engineering” is an interesting choice. It implies images of 1984 or A Brave New World where a powerful government dictates what people should do in order to fulfill their own ideas of human perfection. Of course, there is a lot that could be discussed on the subject of human perfection (can humankind bring about its own redemption?), what kind of perfection is desirable (individualism or a Marxist collective?), and how to reach this point (and whether it has to be “clever” or not). And if we have some tools and knowledge that could help improve the social environment, available through disciplines like sociology, shouldn’t we pursue some of these options?

But by linking sociology and social engineering, Will is obscuring the fact that the social environment does play some role in influencing human behavior. It does not completely determine human behavior but there would be few social scientists who would claim this. Figuring out why humans do what they do is a complicated story involving both nature and nurture.

From Will’s point of view, do conservatives deny that the social environment affects human behavior? Do conservatives not try some social engineering of their own to advance particular ideas and policies?

The Not So Big House in the Chicago suburbs

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Architect Sarah Susanka has made a name for herself by writing about the Not-So-Big House. In this, Susanka advocates for smaller homes with custom features that fit the personality of the inhabitants. Instead of buying a cookie-cutter McMansion or tract home, Susanka would have you design a slightly smaller home that better fits your needs.

A new development in Libertyville, a northern suburb of Chicago (about 40 miles north of the Loop), will feature four of Susanka’s homes. Here is a description of the price and size of these homes:

SchoolStreet will have 26 homes in a “new urban” design, plus condominiums in the historic Central School. The single-family homes range from $500,000 to $700,000 and 17 homes have already been sold.

Susanka is designing one floor plan of about 2,200 to 2,400 square feet with four fronts, so four could be built in the community. McLinden says the bungalow-style model or showcase home will be completed and open to the public next fall. It will stay open for six months because the architect thinks the only way for most people to really understand her principles is to walk through the spaces. McLinden hopes to build homes like it in future communities, too.

“This is just the beginning,” said Susanka. “We both are doing this as a test drive to see if there really is a market here.”

It is interesting to note that these homes are not cheap (though they may be slightly smaller). The money in these homes will go to certain features that mark Susanka’s designs:

Vary the ceiling heights. This provides the intimacy and feeling of personal space that some say is missing in big-box McMansions with all tall ceilings. Builders might try this with tray ceilings — at an extra charge, said Susanka.

Create sheltered spaces. Frank Lloyd Wright had his inglenooks or seating areas around fireplaces. Susanka puts a library alcove off the living room.

Make spaces do double duty. The library alcove works as a formal dining area.

Light to walk toward. This means put a lighted something, such as a window or lighted painting at the end of a hallway or other vista. “It provides a sense of extension. It feels like it’s longer than it actually is, and people experience more space.”

Don’t forget the “away” room. This can be an office or first-floor bedroom, of course, or a room for adults to read, do crafts or entertain friends. Or maybe the messy little children can use the away room, leaving the main living areas in better shape.

Speaking of messy youngsters, the home will have a laundry room that’s about 11-by-12 feet. “It can be a craft room for the kids — let the paint fly,” said the architect.

The author-architect is willing to explain and describe her homes, but she believes nothing compares with seeing them in real life.

“I’m trying to make as simple as possible a set of ideas that in a way are complex,” she said. “We are used to thinking about design in two dimensions. The quality of the space has to do with the third dimension, the heights and shapes of the space.”

Multiple times in this article, Susanka and the developer suggest these homes must be experienced in order to understand how all of these pieces come together. I would be curious to tour one of these houses myself to see if it really does feel different to a typical home, even in a quick walk-through. I have looked through a number of her books and have most enjoyed seeing pictures of cozy reading spaces.
I would also be interested to know who is attracted to these homes rather than typical new homes. People with greater appreciation for aesthetics and design? People with higher levels of education (Bourdieu’s theory of distinction)? People looking for the “hot” yet suburban neighborhood?

The new Congress marked by more suburban, rural, and small town members?

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Joel Kotkin continues to make the case that the political changes in the new Congress are marked by a city/suburb split. Kotkin explains this shift:

This contrasts dramatically with the last Congress. Virtually its entire leadership — from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on down — represented either the urban core or affluent, close-in suburbs of large metropolitan areas. Powerful old lions like Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) of Harlem, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) of Los Angeles and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) of Newton, an affluent, close-in Boston suburb, roamed…

The new House leaders are, for the most part, from small towns, suburbs and interior cities. Most GOP pickups came from precisely these regions — particularly in the South and Midwest.

Kotkin then goes on to talk about the possible consequences of the change in leadership:

This change in geography also suggests a shift in the economic balance of power. The old Congress owed its allegiance largely to the “social-industrial” complex around Washington, Wall Street, public-sector unions, large universities and the emergent, highly subsidized alternative-energy industry. In contrast, the new House leaders largely represent districts tied to more traditional energy development, manufacturing and agriculture.

The urban-centered environmental movement’s much-hyped talk of “green jobs,” so popular in Obama-dominated Washington, is now likely to be supplanted by a concern with the more than 700,000 jobs directly related to fossil fuel production. Greater emphasis may be placed on ensuring that electric power rates are low enough to keep U.S. industry competitive.

The Obama administration’s land-use policies will also be forced to shift. Sums lavished on “smart growth” grants to regions, high-speed rail and new light-rail transit are likely to face tough obstacles in this Congress.

Kotkin is not alone in discussing these potential consequences: the Infrastructurist has been tracking for a while how Republican control might threaten plans for high-speed rail, infrastructure, and green programs.

But I wonder if suburban/exurban/more rural Congressmen will really express these kinds of political sensibilities in Congress. Traditionally, local suburban politics has been marked by a lack of partisanship (with many municipal races not involving the two major parties) and an emphasis on issues like keeping property taxes low, ensuring property values, and keeping crime rates low. Do these concerns translate to a national level where everything becomes a political skirmish and politicians consider the national budget, defense spending, entitlement programs, and so on? Can Kotkin or others point to a current or past member of Congress who has exemplified a suburban or exurban approach to national government that is distinct from an urban approach?

US land use statistics from the 2011 Statistical Abstract of the United States

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I have always enjoyed reading or looking through almanacs or statistical abstracts: there is so much interesting information from crop production to sports results to country profiles and more. Piquing my interest, the New York Times has a small sampling of statistics from 2011 Statistical Abstract of the United States.

One reported statistic struck me: “The proportion of developed land reached a record high: 5.6 percent of all land in the continental U.S.” At first glance, I am not surprised: a number of the car trips I make to visit family in different locations includes a number of hours of driving past open fields and forests. Even with all the talk we hear of sprawl, there still appears to be plenty of land that could be developed.

But the Statistical Abstract allows us to dig deeper: how exactly is American land used? According to 2003 figures (#363, Excel table), 71.1% of American land is rural with 19% total and 20.9% total being devoted to crops and “rangeland,” respectively. While developed land may have reached a record high (5.6%), Federal land is almost four times larger (20.7%).

Another factor here would have to be how much of the total land could actually be developed. How much of that rural land is inaccessible or would require a large amount of work and money to improve?

So whenever there is a discussion of developable land and sprawl, it seems like it would be useful to keep these statistics in mind. How much non-developed land do we want to have as a country and should it be spread throughout the country? How much open land is needed around cities or in metropolitan regions? And what should this open land be: forest preserve, state park, national park, open fields, farmland, or something else?