Author Archives: legallysociable

Self-driving cars require better maintained roads

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Self-driving cars may have advantages but they might also require spending more on road upkeep:

Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the mundane issue of faded lane markings “crazy,” complaining they confused his semi-autonomous cars…

An estimated 65 percent of U.S. roads are in poor condition, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, with the transportation infrastructure system rated 12th in the World Economic Forum’s 2014-2015 global competitiveness report...

To make up for roadway aberrations, carmakers and their suppliers are incorporating multiple sensors, maps and data into their cars, all of which adds cost.

 

It would be interesting to see some estimates of the additional costs to keep roads at a level where self-driving cars can safely operate. Does the money saved in less congestion on the roads and fewer traffic accidents outweigh the new maintenance costs?

On the other hand, having to do more frequent construction may not affect drivers as much if all cars are self-driving. Since such vehicles are supposed to improve traffic flow, construction is something drivers wouldn’t have to handle – their cars would do it for them. And, if we have driverless cars, can we have driverless maintenance vehicles?

Who is moving to cities? Young, educated, wealthy, childless, white

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Certain people – not everyone – are moving to American cities:

Americans aren’t moving back to the cities. Just 20- and 30-somethings.

But actually, not all 20- and 30-somethings are moving back to the cities. Only those with a four-year college degree and incomes in the top 40 percent are.

And not even all 20- and 30-somethings with a four-year college degree and incomes in the top 40 percent are moving back into cities. Mostly the ones without school-age kids are.

And if you thought that was it, it turns out that not all 20- and 30-somethings with a four-year college degree in the top 40 percent of income without school-age children are moving back into cities. It’s mostly just the ones that are white.

And does this group receive disproportionate attention from (1) city leaders who want a new generation of wealthy city residents and (2) the media who may identify well with these particular demographics? If the people moving to cities did not share these traits (such as immigrants), would they get as much attention?

Thompson also suggests geographic segregation by class: the wealthiest clustering in the densest cities with everyone else setting for suburbia. It has been this way for a while…

Suburbs don’t mind money spent on highways, services that help them

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Alana Semuels looks at who supports the widening of highways even as research suggests building more lanes just adds to traffic:

The support for highways could be because people in the region are moving further from the city center, to suburbs served by the highways. Between 2010 and 2015, suburbs such as Austin grew 25 percent between 2010 and 2015, while Bryant grew 19.6 percent, according to the region’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, called Metroplan. Little Rock grew up 3.1 percent in population, and Pulaski County, where Little Rock is located, grew just 3.3 percent, while Saline County grew 8.7 percent.

Suburbs often grow when highways are particularly robust; if people can quickly get out of the city center to far-flung neighborhoods, there’s little incentive for them to stay in the city. But the causal arrow runs both ways: Once there are robust suburbs, the residents there tend to support projects that will benefit them, and those projects include roads that will supposedly make their commutes faster.

Regional politics often favor spending on resources to suburbs, especially when their populations grow so quickly, according to Joseph DiMento, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied the construction of urban freeways.

“Once people move to the suburbs, they want to be serviced, and historically, the suburbs were wealthier and more politically important, so their votes would go for replacing the freeway and improving it, rather than displacing it,” he said.

But, try to raise tax monies on a regional scale for mass transit and suburbanites are often not pleased as they don’t perceive this as a benefit for them.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a study that shows the statistical relationship between suburban population growth and highway building. What is the strength of the relationship? This is the general argument: after World War II, the government spent money in certain ways and one path that spurred suburban growth was the construction of a federal highway system. Of course, suburbs were already growing at this point but highways certainly helped.

Tool to help urban strangers converse, make eye contact

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Several researchers are working on the Jokebox, an invention intended to promote social interaction in cities:

Mara Balestrini, an expert in human-computer interaction and director of research at Ideas for Change, has been investigating ways to bring shared experiences back into public spaces. She’s been working with researchers from the UK and Mexico on the Jokebox project – an installation that involves separate wooden boxes, each equipped with speakers, sensors and arcade-style buttons, that tell a joke when two people activate them simultaneously.

The key, Balestrini tells me, is that it’s impossible for one person to push both buttons. “The Jokebox is an ice-breaker, an excuse to get strangers to talk to each other or to share a laugh in public spaces,” she explains. “It is also a technology prototype that can help us understand how to design novel interfaces to foster social connectedness in urban settings by encouraging eye contact and co-operation between strangers.”

As part of their study, the researchers conducted a series of tests in the north-western Mexican city of Ensenada. Boxes were set up in a park, a shopping centre and a bus stop. According to the project’s findings, people in those settings reacted in different ways – kids and parents would be more likely to play with the boxes in the park, for example, whereas teenagers were more likely to engage in the shopping centre. Even when people avoided using the Jokebox directly, which was frequently the case at the bus stop, it still provided an excuse for interaction – as is the case in this moment of gentle warmth….

Balestrini tells me future cities will combine different types of technologies, from those that support efficiency by replacing the humans to those that try to foster shared encounters among people. She says it is crucial to enable playfulness and curiosity, particularly in a moment where the discourse around cities revolves around ideas of data-driven automation and efficiency.

It is interesting to consider that it might be technology that could help bring people back into conversation. Is this the best we can do in societies thrilled with technological progress and private space (even when we are in public)? How successful might this be in drawing people out of their private realms or will it primarily appeal to those who are already more interested in social interaction? I’m not surprised that this device uses humor, a social phenomena that can cut across all sorts of social divides. At the same time, the humor has to be broad and affirming rather than the critique and sarcasm that is very common today.

Chicago suburb that may want to dissolve itself

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Many suburbanites like that local communities protect them from other entities but what if suburban residents want to get rid of their own municipality?

Prospect Heights is a unique suburb — a bedroom community of 16,000 residents, many of whom have homes on lots larger than those in neighboring towns. There’s no overall property tax or major retail shopping centers, and some entities — such as Indian Trails Library and Chicago Executive Airport — are already shared with other towns.

But Prospect Heights is independent and proud of it. Parts of it still get water from wells rather than Lake Michigan. Residents have rejected — many times — petitions to become a home-rule community, which, among other things, would permit city leaders to collect sales taxes — and maybe even property taxes — and develop a reliable stream of revenue with which to run the city…

Comparatively, The Initiative is draconian. It calls for Prospect Heights to be broken up and merged into the bordering towns of Arlington Heights, Mount Prospect, Wheeling and Northbrook — or, if all those towns don’t get on board, to essentially merge Prospect Heights with just one neighbor, Wheeling…

Theoretically, though, even without city leadership on board, a bill currently in the rules committee of the Illinois House would make it possible for residents to lead an effort to dissolve their own town or any other government.

It sounds like this could turn into a fascinating battle between residents who don’t want the local government and local officials who want to keep it. Would cost savings or local control and loyalty win out? In the long run, which direction better serves the residents? It is not a wealthy community; Census figures show a median household income around $62,000 and the community is 30% Latino.

Thinking more broadly, I would think it is rare in recent decades to find cases where suburbanites are willing to give up on the community they chose and be absorbed into other communities.

Study suggests Chicago has too much apartment parking

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A new study finds there are too many parking spots for Chicago apartments:

A single underground parking space can cost $37,000 or more to build, Smith said. Developers in Chicago are generally required to build one parking space for every apartment unit, which has led to a gap between supply and demand, and a fixed cost that is passed on to renters, he said…

As part of its yearlong study, Smith and two colleagues visited 40 residential parking facilities in the middle of the night last summer to survey occupancy. The properties ran the gamut from affordable to luxury rental apartments in Chicago and suburban Cook County and included some older buildings that predated the parking requirements ordinance. The research team discovered lots of open spaces.

On average, the buildings supplied .61 parking spaces for every unit, but used only .34 spaces per unit. Adjusted for occupancy — vacant apartments that don’t need parking — the lots were about two-thirds full, according to the report…

In the suburbs, where public transit is less accessible and car travel is a way of life, municipalities often require developers to provide more than one parking space per apartment unit. The study found the parking oversupply extends to the suburbs as well.

As Americans drove more – even in cities – local officials tried to keep up by building roads and highways, planning communities around automobiles, and writing regulations that provided plenty of parking. All those giant parking lots outside of big box stores or shopping malls are the result of planning for once-a-year parking needs while the rest of the year those lots sit empty, look ugly, and contribute to water runoff issues.

But, what happens if driving habits change? Or, planning as a field changes from emphasizing cars to greener options? As the article notes, Chicago has changed regulations for new apartment developments near mass transit. This seems like a win-win for developers: they have to devote less space for parking which can then go toward units and this may even drive up the price of the parking they do build because there is a tighter supply. At the same time, I wonder if this appeals to certain urban homeowners – particularly younger residents rather than all those Baby Boomers supposedly moving to cities – and not others.

Social science assumes “human living is not random”

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Noted sociologist of religion Grace Davie gives a brief description of her work:

My work, like that of all social scientists, rests on the assumption that human living is not random. Why is it, for example, that Christian churches in the West are disproportionately attended by women? That requires an explanation.

This is a good starting point for describing the social sciences. There are patterns to human social life and we can’t rely on anecdotes or interpretations of whether there are patterns or how to understand them. We want to apply a scientific perspective to these patterns and explain why those patterns, and not others, exist. Then, we might delve deeper into level of analysis, theoretical assumptions, and techniques of data collection and analysis – three areas where the various social science disciplines differ.

Summary of problems with Australian McMansions

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One Australian columnist covers a number of the critiques of McMansions:

THEY’RE not McMansions. They’re Shateaux. They’re houses so big they take up the entire block, stretching fence to fence like a Neo-Georgian Graceland. From Caroline Springs to Camberwell, Werribee to Wantirna, many new houses have six bedrooms, three living rooms and five bathrooms — not to mention teen retreat, parents’ zone, indoor/outdoor cabana and entertainers’ deck.

Many are the slums of tomorrow being built for the people of today. In established suburbs these houses are being built by Chinese investors for other Chinese investors so they have somewhere safe to park their money amid the financial crisis. The Chinese don’t care about heritage trees, visual intrusion or the lack of privacy; they just care about getting maximum box for their buck.

For Aussies, it’s more about having the appearance of wealth and upward mobility, even if they don’t quite have the funds to match. With a four-wheel drive out the front and a jetski in the garage, it’s all part of our modern sense of entitlement. People tell themselves they deserve it, even if it’s all on credit and interest-only loans…

As long as it meets the state building code, no one has the ability to stop anything from going up. It’s too bad for residents affected by the monolithic monster being built next door that blocks out their light, overlooks their backyard, is three times the size of any other nearby house and stretches from boundary to boundary. They can’t even look at the plans, let alone object…

Sure, we all want bigger houses, but there’s a difference between big and supersized. What’s the point in having a house that is so massively huge that you can’t afford to heat or cool it, let alone meet other utility costs?

What’s left? Covered here: bad architecture; too much space; slums of the future (either because they are poorly built or push buyers into debt); outsiders entering the neighborhood; about showing off wealth; fits broader patterns of consumption; teardowns ruin the homes of their neighbors and nearby residents can’t fight back; McMansions are inefficient in energy use. Perhaps the only thing missing in this article is a connection to the terrible sprawling suburbs. Or, perhaps the suggestion that such homes exemplify all that is wrong about society.

Chicago’s population decline masked by Mexican immigration

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Amid news that the Chicago region led the country in population loss during 2015 comes this reminder of how Chicago has bolstered its population in recent decades:

More than any other city, Chicago has depended on Mexican immigrants to balance the sluggish growth of its native-born population, said Rob Paral, a Chicago-based demographer who advises nonprofits and community groups. During the 1990s, immigration accounted for most of Chicago’s population growth. The number of Mexican immigrants rose by 117,000 in Chicago that decade, making up 105 percent of all growth, according to data gathered by Paral’s firm, Rob Paral and Associates.

After 2007, falling Mexican-born populations became a trend across the country’s major metropolitan areas. But most of those cities were able to make up for the loss with the growth of their native populations, Paral said. Chicago couldn’t.

Chicago is often held up as a shining example of a Rust Belt city that survived and thrived – but this may have had less to do with grand building projects or powerful mayors or a prominent international presence and more with continuing to be a center for immigration.

Living as the only Section 8 resident in a wealthy suburb

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Mary Schmich tells the story of Winnetka’s sole Section 8 resident:

In a Chicago suburb where million-dollar homes are common and the median household income exceeds $200,000, Miranda held a rare distinction for a while: He was the only person in town with a Section 8 housing choice voucher.

With his large belly and his mustache, his T-shirt and his jeans, he was a notable presence in the village. He liked to be out and about — staying inside depressed him — and his subsidized one-bedroom apartment on Elm Street put him in the heart of Winnetka’s action, meaning close to the Metra station, a bookstore, a Peet’s, a Starbucks, restaurants and boutiques, most of which he couldn’t afford.

He was often spotted with a big coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other, maybe sitting on a park bench. He liked going to the library and, in the summer, relaxing by the lake…

Having a stable home of his own in a tranquil place offered him some peace that life otherwise denied him.

As much as residential segregation by race and ethnicity is present in the suburbs, this highlights another aspect: segregation by social class. According to the Census, Winnetka has over 12,000 residents, is very white – 94.8%, and also very wealthy – a median household income of over $207,000 and a median value of owner-occupied housing units of $941,800. How much affordable housing is available in places like Winnetka? Previous efforts to introduce the idea have met resistance. Does having any Section 8 residents threaten property values or the community’s image? Suburban residents don’t have to actively oppose such plans to provide space for poorer residents; their zoning and comprehensive plans can make their thoughts pretty clear. Would their opinions change if they met a person like Thomas Miranda? Maybe, but no matter how much they might like him as an individual, too many such residents of a certain status would not be good.