Monthly Archives: February 2013

On state roads in Chicago, IDOT wants to properly collect evidence about bike lanes

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Chicago may be interested in building 100 miles of bike lanes but the state of Illinois wants to slow down the process on state roads in the city in order to collect more data:

But in many of the selected locations, sections of the roadways fall under state jurisdiction. The Illinois Department of Transportation won’t allow protected bicycle lanes to go on state-designated routes until it is satisfied they are safe, officials said.

IDOT will collect at least three years’ worth of traffic accident data and then make a determination based on the analysis, officials said, adding that the existing information is inadequate because protected bike lanes are new here…

Claffey said IDOT has safety concerns that include the visibility of cyclists at intersections and operational issues like maintenance and snow-removal around protected bike lanes. Approving protected bike lanes for Chicago would open the floodgates to allowing all other local governments in the state to do the same, he said.

“We are also concerned about losing traffic lanes,” Claffey said, noting that protected bike lanes require more space than traditional bike lanes.

In Illinois, it seems safe to ask if there is something else going on behind the scenes. But, if IDOT is claiming in part that they need more data about safety, isn’t this typically a persuasive argument when it comes to roads?

Some proposed solutions to the problem of 947,000 hours a year in traffic lost to parcel delivery trucks

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Cities are looking into ways to better facilitate parcel delivery than having trucks park along the curb:

Over the last couple of years, urbanists have dreamed up a handful of new parcel delivery strategies. A number got a field test in Europe last year as part of CITYLOG, a project funded by the European Union to evaluate fresh ideas in urban transport.One of these new strategies, the BentoBox, works by shifting delivery truck activity away from peak driving hours. If congestion reduction is the goal, the ideal time to deliver packages would be late at night—but customers won’t likely be smiling when they answer the door. Named after a single-serving Japanese takeout tray, the BentoBox is a storage locker that can be loaded with parcels and then dropped off at a local docking station after hours. Customers in the area can access one of six subdivided units with a key the following morning…

TNT Express has its own program aimed at piloting urban delivery solutions. In Brussels, where the courier company delivers about 1300 parcels per week, three-quarters of those deliveries are already made using pedal-assisted electric tricycles. These small vehicles are more environmentally sound than large trucks and vans, and much less disruptive to traffic patterns when parked.

TNT is modeling a new distribution model for Brussels that it calls the “mobile depot.” In this system, which works similarly to the BentoBox, a trailer containing a large number of parcels is towed to a central location in the city during off hours. Parcels are delivered by last-mile drivers in small electric or human-powered vehicles. If a few of these mobile depots could be dropped in strategic locations around the city, package trucks, which currently use surface streets and highways en route to distribution hubs located outside the city, could be eliminated.

The “mobile depot” idea sounds interesting but it might be difficult to find suitable distribution sites within cities. This idea reminds me of the rail traffic problems in the Chicago area where the solution in recent years has been to keep moving distribution facilities to areas further away from the core of the region. But, new distribution sites could inconvenience certain neighborhoods or areas while providing a benefit to the city or region.

I wonder if this is similar to adding lanes on highways: if delivery trucks are taking up less space, will more cars fill the space?

Architect Jeanne Gang opposed to sprawl

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An interview with Chicago architect Jeanne Gang, designer of Aqua in the Loop, reveals her dislike for sprawl, and, along the way, the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright:

“Urbanization is the huge issue of our time,” she says. “We can’t survive if we can’t solve the problems of population growth, loss of clean air and water and loss of biodiversity.”

Gang and her firm, Studio Gang Architects, are pioneers in ecological urbanism, a field of design that considers rising populations and dwindling resources. Cities are key laboratories, and Gang says they must become denser and more nature-friendly.

She hasn’t hesitated to take on global icon Frank Lloyd Wright with her anti-sprawl approach. Chicago’s — and America’s — most famous architect spent decades promoting single homes on suburban lots where residents would savor nature far from downtowns and connect with society in cars.

“I want to turn Wright’s legacy upside down,” Gang says with no hint of doubt. “The way to be ecological is not by spreading out. It’s by clustering together. It’s by having a better relationship with nature in the city than you can have in a far-out suburb.”…

Taking on Wright is not an easy task. While he may have designed a number of single-family homes, he also designed a mile-high tower. Particularly in Chicago, Wright is someone revered for his ability to design in a Midwestern sort of way, drawing upon prairie influences and helping Chicago grow up. But, I’m sure Gang could find many people who agree that sprawl uses too many resources. Additionally, if new designs like that of Aqua can be more ecologically friendly, attract residents and business, and give cities iconic buildings, city leaders are likely to see this as a big win.

Cool images of underground subway construction in NYC

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Building new subway lines is a massive undertaking and this gallery of photos gives some indication of the scale of the work. Here is what New York is undertaking:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has taken on three massive projects: East Side Access, the No. 7 subway line extension, and the new Second Avenue subway line. Construction for the projects is taking place deep underground, much of it simultaneously. The three projects span 14 miles and are expected to be finished in 2019 at an estimated cost of $15 billion.

This indicates a few things: New York has the kind of capital and ability to build such lines and the trouble it takes to construct such things suggests new lines must be needed in a city where a large percentage of residents use mass transit on a daily basis.

Misinterpreting a graph of income in the US by misreading the X-axis categories

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Some graphs can be more difficult to interpret, particularly if the categories along one of the axes are not a consistent width. Here is an example: misreading a chart of income in the United States:

“When I was growing up in Canada,” says Jon Evans of Techcrunch, “I was taught that income distribution should and did look like a bell curve, with the middle class being the bulge in the middle. Oh, how naïve my teachers were. This is how income distribution looks in America today.”

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“That big bulge up above? It’s moving up and to the left. America is well on the way towards having a small, highly skilled and/or highly fortunate elite, with lucrative jobs; a vast underclass with casual, occasional, minimum-wage service work, if they’re lucky; and very little in between.”…

Er, no.  Look closely at those last two brackets.   Now look at the brackets immediately to the right of them? What do you notice?

Probably, you notice the same thing that immediately struck me: the last two brackets cover a much, much wider income band than the rest of the brackets on the graph.

Each bar on that graph represents a $5,000 income band: Under $5,000, $5000 to $9,999, and so forth.  Except for the last two.  The penultimate band is $200,000 to $250,000, which is ten times as wide as the previous band.  And the last bar represents all incomes over $250,000–a group that runs from some law associate who pulled down $251,000 last year, through A-Rod’s $27 million annual salary, all the way to some Silicon Valley superstar who just cashed out the company for a one time windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Unsurprisingly, much wider bands have more people in them than they would if you kept on extrapolating out in $5,000 increments…

To put it another way, the apparent clustering of income along the rich right tail of the distribution is just an artifact of the way that the Census presents the data.  If they kept running through $5,000 brackets all the way out to A-Rod, the spreadsheet would be about a mile long, and there would only be a handful of people in each bracket.  So at the high end, where there are few households, they summarize.

The Census likely has good reasons for reporting these higher-income categories in such a way. First, because there are relatively fewer people in each $5,000 increment, they are trying to not make the graph too wide. Second, I believe the Census topcodes income, meaning that above a certain dollar point, incomes don’t get any higher. This is done to help protect the identity of these respondents who might be easy to pick out of the data otherwise.

But, this is a classic misinterpretation of a graph. As McArdle notes, this is a long-tail graph with very few people at the top end. The graph tries to alert reader to this by also marking some of the notable percentiles; above the $130,000 to $134,999 category, it reads “The top 10 percent reported incomes above $135,000” and above the top two categories, it reads, “approximately 4 percent of households.” Making the right interpretation depends not just on the relative shape of the graph, bell curve or otherwise, but looking closely at the axes and categories.

Six reasons Gen Y isn’t interested in cars

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Howard Tullman gives 6 reasons in answer to the question “Why doesn’t Gen Y care about cars?”

Emotional ties…

Mechanical abilities…

Technical constraints…

Economic realities…

Environmental considerations…

Political and regulatory changes…

If I had to vote for one of these reasons as being most important, I might go with number four. Owning a car is simply expensive and requires a long-term investment. Cheap reliable cars, say, under $5,000, can be difficult to find and the costs of insurance, maintenance, and depreciation are very real on top of expensive gas.

But, I think there are a few other reasons Tullman missed that could fit under his first and fifth reasons. Under emotional ties, it isn’t just that people don’t see owning a car as a “civic duty” but that Generation Y and younger have emotional ties to other objects like computers, video game consoles, and smart phones. Additionally, an interest in living in more urban areas might fit under environmental considerations plus the other bonuses such as culture and “scenes” present in big cities that are much more difficult to find in suburbs. Living in denser areas is seen as greener and such areas often offer more opportunities for mass transit or walking and biking.

A few other thoughts about the six reasons:

1. I think the interest in mechanical abilities has definitely shifted from analog objects, like cars, to digital objects. Generation Y is interested in “mechanical” activity but in a very different way.

2. Political and regulatory changes may discourage driving to some degree with stricter standards but this could also work in the favor of cars. If gas mileage increases significantly in the coming years, cars could be greener and small ones, in particular, could fit an urban ethos. The trick here might be making sure that these regulations don’t increase the costs of cars in such a way to discourage purchases. And, it remains to be seen if the federal government will significantly shift money toward mass transit and further encourage people to drive less.

Zillow starts estimating remodeling costs

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Zillow is already known for estimating housing values but just last week they started offering another estimation: what it will cost to remodel.

On Tuesday, Zillow waded into the world of remodeling, by pairing its database of photos of pretty rooms (from its for-sale listings) with the tool that seems to drive most aspects of American life these days, the algorithm.

Thus, the company is attempting to answer the obvious question that dogs glossy magazine layouts and cable TV decorating shows: How much would it cost to do a room like that, anyway?

Remodeling costs are notoriously difficult to generalize about with the public, for a number of reasons…

Undeterred by all that, the website has rolled out Zillow Digs, which has launched with about 6,500 photos of kitchens and master baths. Beyond mere real estate eye candy, though, it also has brought in a team of contractors to offer estimates of the cost of each room’s appliances, finishing materials, labor, etc.

As the article notes, this could be quite a money maker with the number of Americans who remodel their homes. It seems like the algorithm could benefit from getting some data after the remodeling takes place; perhaps a later appraisal or an estimate based on a later sales price. Of course, this would require waiting some time after the remodeling takes place and perhaps there are not enough cases of remodeling within a certain geographic area to make a good estimate.

In the end, it will be interesting to see how many people make use of this new site. Additionally, how many will be willing to make financial decisions based on the estimates from the site?

How much do McMansions contribute to traffic congestion?

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After seeing the Washington D.C. region leads the country in traffic, one reader of the Washington Post suggests McMansions have contributed to the problem:

Regarding the Feb. 5 news article “Washington again rated worst for traffic congestion in annual study”:

I don’t understand. The entire metropolitan region builds, builds and builds, squeezing  condos onto every block and ruining old neighborhoods with ghastly McMansion and townhouse developments.

Do officials consider quality of life? Don’t they realize how these new homes have a tremendous effect on our local traffic? We have overbuilt this area to death.

It would be interesting to see a study on this. I suspect the real answer is not McMansions over other forms of housing and development but rather the issue of sprawl. McMansions may often be found as part of sprawl but not necessarily; McMansions don’t have to be built on large lots, which leads to more spread out development, and they can be built as teardowns in denser areas. But once sprawl has already happened, it is more difficult to provide effective mass transit (even as the Washington region sees an expansion of Metro service to suburban counties). In other words, McMansions are symptoms of sprawl which leads to a lot of driving and traffic.

Can car-sharing spread to older Americans?

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The Christian Science Monitor asks whether the phenomenon of car-sharing will spread beyond young adults:

But there are limits to the model. Car sharing caters to a fairly limited demographic – namely, educated, Web-savvy urban dwellers in their 20s and early 30s with access to decent public transportation. “It’s narrow in terms of the overall driving potential,” Mr. Belzowski says.

Car sharing works well in a compact city with decent public transit like Boston or New York, but Belzowski points out that more sprawling US metro areas present a problem. “Many cities are designed for having a vehicle, and it’s difficult to move around those cities in a timely way unless you own a vehicle.”

Another obvious drawback: Car owners share with strangers at their own risk. “I had an issue with there being a lot of dog hair in one, and I found a dog toy in the back,” Hill says.

Even in car-share hot spots, having a car at your beck and call is not guaranteed. The number of available cars is still limited to the point that getting one during peak times, like weekends, requires advance planning. That could be helped as car sharing goes more mainstream – national rental car company Avis recently agreed to buy Zipcar for $500 million, a merger that should expand the company’s vehicle fleet. Other major rental car companies, including Enterprise and Hertz, are getting into the car-sharing game as well.

I’m not sure this article gives us much insights into what might prompt older adults to adopt car-sharing. Reading between the lines, here are a few hints from the article:

1. Older adults are more likely to live in suburbs while younger adults desire to live in the city.

2. Older adults are less willing to share cars with others.

3. Older adults would rather have cars available when they want them rather then having to more meticulously plan their driving schedules.

The first hint seems relevant: this would appeal most to people living in denser cities where owning a car is much more difficult. However, these second two reasons seem more flimsy and seem based on the idea that older adults simply aren’t used to the idea of car sharing. Reasons #2 and 3 could be related to having children.

One solution to the demographics is to simply wait for these younger adults to grow up and they will be already used to car-sharing. But, I suspect Zipcar and others would like to grow this category at a faster pace.

h/t Instapundit

The experiences of a passenger in a driverless car

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I have wondered about this: what is it like to be a passenger in a driverless car?

As we drove along Chicago’s South Lakeshore Drive, Muharemovic switched the car through three modes which can be selected based on what the driver wants and what the traffic situation entails…

Finally, there’s a Highly Automated mode that adds full-speed ACC with an automatic-resume function that uses free-space detection and side-sensing. This is the one we’re looking forward to.

In fully automated mode, Muharemovic completely removed his hands from the steering wheel and foot from the pedals. At one point he turned around for several seconds to talk to passengers in the backseat. He had a casualness that comes from getting used to the technology over thousands a miles and a steadfast faith in the systems he helped create…

A dyed-in-the-wool Detroit car guy, Muharemovic challenges anyone who fears that autonomous driving will take the fun out of motoring. “I’d like to meet someone who loves traffic jams,” he says, adding that his girlfriend has noticed that he comes home less stressed from his daily commute.

As this article suggests, it will likely take some time for drivers to feel comfortable letting the car do all the driving. But, once drivers see what their commute could be like, perhaps they would like the freedom.

Two other pieces of information I would like to have:

1. In fully automated mode, would traffic jams become shorter because traffic could be more evenly spaced? If so, this would be a double bonus: less traffic and not having to pay attention to whatever traffic there is.

2. I can only imagine what the early lawsuits might be like if one of these systems fails and an accident ensues or there is a glitch in the design. I was reminded the other day that nothing was ever found wrong with Toyota’s gas pedals yet they had to pay out millions in settlements. How much money could be on the line if an automatic system like this fails?