Monthly Archives: January 2014

“Have We Reached Peak Road?”

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With the decline in driving, perhaps it is time to consider whether we have reached peak road:

At his Transportationist blog last week, University of Minnesota scholar David Levinson pointed out that Department of Transportation estimates of public roads and street mileage in the United States — paved and unpaved alike — leveled off between 2008 and 2011 (the latest year given, with data missing for 2009 and 2010). Levinson charted the plateau (the y-axis mileage is in thousands)…

Like vehicle miles traveled, paved road mileage steadily increased for decades, from roughly 1.23 million miles in 1960 to 2.6 million in 2011. (Unpaved roads followed the opposite trend, declining over time as many became paved.) The paved peak might have occurred in 2008, when mileage reached above 2.7 million. The 2011 mileage, meanwhile, is about the same as that of 2005.

Given that the statistical peak coincided with the Great Recession, it’s probably too early to call things. It’s also important to keep in mind that there are multiple ways to measure a road. There is its end-to-end length (known as “centerline miles”) and there is also its total capacity (known as “lane miles”) — the latter calculated by multiplying the length by the number of lanes….

Levinson thinks the following factors will guide whatever subsequent shifts occur in centerline and lane miles: rural gravelization (converting paved roads into unpaved ones to reduce maintenance costs), tearing down urban freeways, designing complete streets and implementing road diets, and converting general lanes into exclusive bus lanes. Even further ahead, autonomous cars should enable cars to use the existing roadway far more efficiently.

I wonder how much this is tied to sprawl and population growth. Opponents of sprawl would want denser cities and suburbs and this doesn’t necessarily require adding new roads. But, expanding metropolitan regions can lead to new roads and highways.

The call here to use existing roads more efficiently ignores one overarching concern that may be on the mind of a number of local officials as well as taxpayers: who is going to pay for new roads? Here are the pieces involved:

1. Building the roads in the first place. If these roads are constructed in dense areas, the costs rise sharply in order to purchase land. If major roads are desired, we may see more public-private partnerships or toll roads.

2. Maintaining the roads for a long period of time. These costs include everything from filling potholes to adding capacity to complete rebuilds.

If we have reached peak road, perhaps we should continue to celebrate the massive highway building project the United States embarked upon and successfully completed in the second half of the 20th century.

One final thought: when exactly can we declare peak anything? If the data shows not much change over an eight year period, is this enough knowledge to predict no more future growth? I would be very hesitant to stake a lot on such a claim…

Suburban DuPage County to address record number of heroin deaths

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Following a record year for deaths by heroin, DuPage County has plans in motion for 2014:

The call for action in DuPage came months before the county surpassed its year-old record of 38 heroin-related deaths in 2012.Officials say there were 45 confirmed heroin-related deaths in 2013 in DuPage. And depending on the results of toxicology tests, Jorgensen said the final number could climb by one or two.

“If this was gang or gun violence in DuPage County and someone was being killed every eight days, I think the communities would be up in arms,” Wood Dale police Chief Greg Vesta said…

Heroin is more addictive and physically harmful than any other illegal drug, according to Jorgensen, who was a surgeon before becoming coroner.

That’s why, he said, it’s so important for DuPage to have a public education campaign targeted at heroin prevention. One goal of the effort will be to inform families about warning signs and where to find help. The education campaign — called “Be a Hero in DuPage” — will include a website and social media providing timely information, warning signs and resources, officials said.

DuPage County has long been one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. A story like this goes against that image. In a county that prides itself on suburban success, drug use that leads to death is likely viewed as more of an urban problem. Yet, the story for DuPage County and other suburban counties in the decades to come is that they will likely to see more urban concerns including poverty, crime, and more minorities and immigrants moving to the suburbs as they spread within metropolitan regions. It will be interesting to see how DuPage County tackles this issue…

Analyzing Netflix’s thousands of movie genres

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Alexis Madrigal decided to look into the movie genres of Netflix – and found lots of interesting data:

As the hours ticked by, the Netflix grammar—how it pieced together the words to form comprehensible genres—began to become apparent as well.

If a movie was both romantic and Oscar-winning, Oscar-winning always went to the left: Oscar-winning Romantic Dramas. Time periods always went at the end of the genre: Oscar-winning Romantic Dramas from the 1950s…

In fact, there was a hierarchy for each category of descriptor. Generally speaking, a genre would be formed out of a subset of these components:

Region + Adjectives + Noun Genre + Based On… + Set In… + From the… + About… + For Age X to Y

Yellin said that the genres were limited by three main factors: 1) they only want to display 50 characters for various UI reasons, which eliminates most long genres; 2) there had to be a “critical mass” of content that fit the description of the genre, at least in Netflix’s extended DVD catalog; and 3) they only wanted genres that made syntactic sense.

And the conclusion is that there are so many genres that they don’t necessarily make sense to humans. This strikes me as a uniquely modern problem: we know how to find patterns via algorithm and then we have to decide whether we want to know why the patterns exist. We might call this the Freakonomics problem: we can collect reams of data, data mine it, and then have to develop explanations. This, of course, is the reverse of the typical scientific process that starts with theories and then goes about testing them. The Netflix “reverse engineering” can be quite useful but wouldn’t it be nice to know why Perry Mason and a few other less celebrated actors show up so often?

At the least, I bet Hollywood would like access to such explanations. This also reminds me of the Music Genome Project that underlies Pandora. Unlock the genres and there is money to be made.

Illinois the first Midwest state to have majority of minority students in public schools

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New data shows that Illinois for the first time has a majority of minority students in the state’s public schools:

Whites fell to 49.76 percent of the student body this school year, the new data show, a demographic tipping point that came after years of sliding white enrollment and a rise in Latino, Asian and multiracial students.

The black student population also has declined, but it still makes up almost 18 percent of the state’s public school students…

If those numbers hold, Illinois would be one of a dozen states — and the first in the Midwest — to have a school system in which minority students are in the majority, according to the most recent federal education data. Included in that category are Western and Southern states with large Latino or black populations, as well as the District of Columbia, according to the National Center for Education Statistics…

Illinois’ diverse student population doesn’t match the diversity of its teaching staff. Based on 2012 state data, 83 percent of Illinois’ public school teachers are white.

This is a relatively common thing in the United States today though it is unusual for it to happen to a Midwestern state. Relative to whites, minority populations in the United States have been growing.

One way this happens is through immigration. This is a reminder that although certain states are associated with immigration – places like California, Texas, Florida – immigration is closely tied to big cities. Here are some bits from a 2012 Census report looking at foreign-born populations in the 2010 Census:

While the foreign born resided in every state in 2010, over half lived in just four states: California, New York, Texas, and Florida. Over one-fourth of the total foreign-born population lived in California…
In 14 states and the District of Columbia, the percentage of foreign born was equal to or greater than the national average of 13 percent. With the exception of Texas, Florida, and Illinois, these states were primarily in the western and northeastern parts of the country.
With the exception of Illinois (14 percent), the percentage of foreign born in all states of the Midwest region was below 8 percent, including North Dakota and South Dakota, each with about 3 percent.

The Chicago region draws a large amount of immigrants and drew a large number of black migrants during the early 1900s in the Great Migration. Without the draw of jobs and opportunities in Chicago, the demographics of Illinois children today might look much more like Iowa or Wisconsin.

Guinness World Records for housing

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Here is a roundup of some of the 2014 Guinness World Records in housing:

Knapp, who died in 1988, lived in the same house in Montgomery Township, Pa., for 110 years. And for that feat, she earns the title as the person who has lived the longest time ever in one residence, according to the 2014 edition of the “Guinness World Records.”…

While we’re at it, a nod to the world’s tallest real estate agents: Laurie and Wayne Hallquist are 6’6″ and 6’10”, respectively. She’s a full-time agent with Prudential California Realty in Stockton, Calif., while he’s a part-timer with the company…

The skinniest house on record is in Warsaw. It is three feet two inches wide at its narrowest point and just about five feet at its widest. It contains a floor area of 151 square feet, and instead of stairs, occupants climb a ladder to reach the bedrooms above…

The tallest resident-only building is in Dubai. Princess Tower is 1,356-feet high, with the highest occupied floor at 1,171 feet. But the title of tallest residential apartments belongs to Burj Khalifa, also in Dubai, which combines a hotel, offices and apartments. There, the highest residential floor—the 108th—is at 1,263 feet.

Houses, their furnishings, and apparently, their agents, come in all shapes and sizes. However, when I think about these records, it strikes me that most housing in the United States is relatively uniform. I don’t mean that the housing is uniform – this is a common criticism of suburban housing and I don’t think it is particularly fair – but that most housing is within a standard deviation or two from normal. Give or take a few rooms, a few decades, and some furnishings and decorations, most housing is “normal.” The housing cited in Guinness tends to be unusual and extreme outliers.

Attempting to decrease the average age of American real estate agents

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Efforts are underway to attract younger Americans to become real estate agents:

The National Association of Realtors says the median age of its members has inched up to 57, its highest level in 15 years. Agents 40 and younger were just 11 percent of its membership in 2013, down from 20 percent in 2003.

With this in mind, Warren Buffett’s real estate franchise unit, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, recently formed a task force called the REthink Council to explore the topic. Ten agents who are 35 and younger from its offices around the country will gather this month to brainstorm and come up with ways to make the profession more attractive to a younger demographic.

One member of the task force briefly explains what he thinks is happening:

At the time, though, it seemed pretty obvious to me why there weren’t more people my age who were doing this: It takes a lot to get started in real estate (before income starts to flow). There’s a lot of fear and apprehension — what if I don’t make it, what if it takes a while to make money, how am I going to pay my bills?

It was obvious to me then and it’s obvious to me now that there’s a major lack of businesspeople jumping in to real estate. We’re going to have one generation getting out and the next generation is not filling the hole that’s going to be there.

All of this could be very interesting given the projected trends that younger Americans still generally want their own spaces as adults but are more frequently living alone and often want to live in denser areas that offer more cultural and entertainment amenities. If a majority of real estate agents are older, can they still connect with younger buyers who want different things?

Also, this younger agent makes a real estate job sound quite entrepreneurial: you have to take risks, trust your selling abilities, and work hard to drum up business. I’m just speculating but I wonder if this is indicative of declining interest in individual entrepreneurialism. It is one thing to want to go into business with a firm but another to strike out more on one’s own as an agent.

Finally, what are the figures for how much a new real estate agent could expect to make within 1, 5, 10 years? With the glut of articles these days about the income different jobs can expect, how many new real estate agents succeed? Here is some recent info:

Only 2% of Realtors, a trademarked term used by the National Association of Realtors to which the majority of real-estate agents belong, earn more than $250,000 a year. The median annual income nationwide was $43,500 in 2012, up from $34,900 in 2011. The average commission rate for 2013 is projected to be 5.2% of total sale price, according to Real Trends, a Castle Pines, Colo.-based research firm…

Most hopeful agents need to save up before they begin. Studying for the broker’s license exam, which covers both national and state laws and regulation, can take weeks, says Bopa Touch, administrator at the Rockwell Institute, a real-estate training school in Bellevue, Wash. In 2013, the company almost doubled the number of students taking its three-week, $489 broker’s license course, compared with 2012, says Ms. Touch. Between registration fees and desk fees—an amount paid to the brokerage firm to cover operating expenses—most new agents spend $2,000 or more to get started, which doesn’t include months of living expenses necessary before commission checks start coming in. “They don’t realize how much money they need to start,” Ms. Touch says.

The median is not very lucrative…

Ethnography = reporting = paying attention, right?

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A look at psychologist Sherry Turkle’s latest study and promotion of normal conversation includes an interesting description of ethnography:

Turkle is at work on a new book, aspirationally titled Reclaiming Conversation, which will be a continuation of her thinking in Alone Together. In it, she will out herself again, this time as “a partisan of conversation.” Her research for the book has involved hours upon hours of talking with people about conversation as well as eavesdropping on conversations: the kind of low-grade spying that in academia is known as “ethnography,” that in journalism is known as “reporting,” and that everywhere else is known as “paying attention.”

Considering Turkle’s years of studying human interaction with machines and technology (including the fascinating book Alone Together), I suspect she would not describe ethnography this way. But, it is not hard to find similar descriptions of ethnography. Isn’t it just observation and paying attention? Not quite. Journalists tend to equate ethnography with good reporting but this is not the case. Here are some key differences:

1. Ethnography does not involve intentionally interviewing key informants in a story. It involves much more discussion, observation, and time.

2. Ethnography is sometimes known as participant observation. Ethnographers don’t just interview; they often participate with the people or groups they are studying so they can get an insider view (key: while still retaining their outside, analytical perspective).

3. There is a rigorous process to ethnography that typically involves months of participant observation, copious note taking (both on the spot as well at the end of each day – I’ve seen recommendations for 2-3 hours of note-taking for each 1 hour in the field), returning from the field and coding and analyzing the notes, writing a study that interacts with and adds to existing theories.

4. This is not just “low-grade spying.” Ethnography is often an intense, draining experience that involves a lot of human interaction.

In other words, ethnography is not just about showing up and eavesdropping. Some people may be pretty good at this but this does not automatically make a good study. This, in my mind, is often the difference between academic and journalistic approaches to topics and social issues: the methodology employed by journalists tends to be scattered and there is little discussion of the trade-offs involved in their methodological choices.

People who waste money purchase McMansions

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McMansions aren’t just critiqued on an architectural level. Another argument is that owners of such homes are not frugal with their money:

As a gift to the institution that gave her so much joy, the former school teacher left $2.5 million to the Council Bluffs Public Library…

Cook supported the library financially throughout her life, thanks in part to money inherited from her parents, who also passed on their love of books and learning to their daughter. As an adult, Cook would stop by after school let out. She taught from 1964 to 1997 at Norris and the now-closed Bancroft Junior Highs in the Omaha Public Schools system. After retirement she spent even more time at the library, volunteering with the Friends of the Library organization…

He said Cook maintained the wealth she inherited through an unassuming lifestyle, spending her money wisely while living in a modest home on the west end of the city.

“She lived frugally. She didn’t have a McMansion,” her attorney said. “She took care of her money.”

In other words, people who buy McMansions spend lavishly. Such homes are testaments to their money, perhaps through their size or bad design. In contrast, people who are good with their money (and can donate big sums to the local library) live in unassuming houses. They don’t feel a need to show off their money with a big, flashy home.

Of course, these are broad generalizations. Cases like these reinforce the idea that not spending on a big house helps lead to more long-term wealth. Someone who had $2.5 million to donate to the local library could have easily afforded a decent-sized McMansion near Omaha and still have had $1.5+ million to donate. I think the idea is that buying a McMansion is a sign of broader spending patterns but this is not necessarily the case. This is a good example of citing McMansions as shorthand for other undesirable behaviors.

Are America’s most admired simply America’s most powerful?

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Peter Beinart looks at the most recent Gallup’s most recent Most Admired poll and notices a trend:

Nor is it true that Gallup merely measures celebrity, since athletes and Hollywood icons are largely absent. Looking at the winners across the decades, the most common denominator is power. Indeed, the only female winners not in close proximity to political power are Mother Theresa in the 1980s and 1990s and Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse who gained fame treating polio, in 1951.

The men tell a similar story. Presidents almost always win. When they’re deemed weak or unpopular, the public anoints another strong political figure: Douglas MacArthur supplants Harry Truman in 1946 and 1947; Dwight Eisenhower tops Lyndon Johnson in 1967 and 1968; Henry Kissinger replaces Richard Nixon between 1973 and 1975. Even the religious figures who do best are the ones closest to power. Although he never wins, the Reverend Billy Graham—famous for pastoring to presidents—makes the top-10 list more than other man between 1948 and 2005. The other highest-scoring religious figures are popes. Missing are any of the clergy, like William Sloane Coffin or Daniel Berrigan, who made their names fighting the Vietnam War.

In fact, activists protesting injustice rarely rank highly. That includes Martin Luther King. He doesn’t make America’s top 10 most admired men in 1963, the year of the March on Washington. King comes fourth in 1964 and sixth in 1965 but then falls out of the top ten again in 1966 and 1967. The same is true for Nelson Mandela. By the mid-1980s, the global anti-apartheid movement had made Mandela a household name. But as far as I can tell, he doesn’t crack Gallup’s top-10 list until he is elected South Africa’s president in 1994. (To be fair, I was only able to check 1983, 1984 , 1986, 1987, and 1992. For 1993, I could only find the top five. After 1994, Mandela becomes a top-10 regular. But by then, the Cold War is over, the controversy surrounding his communist sympathies has evaporated, and he’s become safe.

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised at this. Part of it could be that people get to vote for some of the political positions so they feel like they had a voice. Additionally, the media tends to cover the most powerful a lot. Celebrities may get a lot of attention but they tend not to do too well, whether star athletes or Hollywood stars, in job prestige rankings.

Beinart suggests the American public should pay more attention to activists, people fighting for justice rather than people holding the reins of justice. These two things are not mutually exclusive: powerful leaders can be good leaders. But, this could be a problem if people are admired simply for the power they command rather than for what they actually do with that power.