Author Archives: legallysociable

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?

A few issues with Curbed’s timeline of McMansions

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Curbed has a new feature: “Track the evolution of this uniquely American housing on Curbed’s McMansion Timeline.” I have a few issues with what they say.

1. There is a lot of editorializing in this timeline. For example, the entry for the 1980s includes “Upwardly mobile suburban rejoiced, the McMansion was born” and the 1991 entry says “Social climbing middle-class professionals weren’t the only ones hooked by the oversized home boom.” These are typical critiques of McMansion owners but are based more in stereotypes than evidence.

2. The article suggests the first usage was in the New York Times in 1993. However, the Oxford English Dictionary gives an earlier usage from the San Diego Union-Tribune on July 15, 1990.

3. We are only given vague descriptions of what McMansions are. They are large houses but it is implied than a 15,000 square foot home could be a McMansion. There are also hints that McMansions are built with less quality materials and they are mass produced. But what about the architecture and design (the pictures hint at this)?

Overall, learn a lot more by checking out my paper on the usage of the term McMansion in the New York Times and Dallas Morning News.

Housing for the poor in Hong Kong

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Like in many global cities, affordable housing is a big issue in Hong Kong:

Some 100,000 people in the former British colony live in what’s known as inadequate housing, according to the Society for Community Organization, a social welfare group. The category also includes apartments subdivided into tiny cubicles or filled with coffin-sized wood and metal sleeping compartments as well as rooftop shacks. They’re a grim counterpoint to the southern Chinese city’s renowned material affluence.

Forced by skyrocketing housing prices to live in cramped, dirty and unsafe conditions, their plight also highlights one of the biggest headaches facing Hong Kong’s unpopular Beijing-backed leader: growing public rage over the city’s housing crisis.

Leung Chun-ying took office as Hong Kong’s chief executive in July pledging to provide more affordable housing in a bid to cool the anger. Home prices rose 23 percent in the first 10 months of 2012 and have doubled since bottoming out in 2008 during the global financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund said in a report last month. Rents have followed a similar trajectory…

His comments mark a distinct shift from predecessor Donald Tsang, who ignored the problem. Legislators and activists, however, slammed Leung for a lack of measures to boost the supply in the short term. Some 210,000 people are on the waiting list for public housing, about double from 2006. About a third of Hong Kong’s 7.1 million population lives in public rental flats. When apartments bought with government subsidies are included, the figure rises to nearly half…

While cage homes, which sprang up in the 1950s to cater mostly to single men coming in from mainland China, are becoming rarer, other types of substandard housing such as cubicle apartments are growing as more families are pushed into poverty. Nearly 1.19 million people were living in poverty in the first half of last year, up from 1.15 million in 2011, according to the Hong Kong Council Of Social Services. There’s no official poverty line but it’s generally defined as half of the city’s median income of HK$12,000 ($1,550) a month.

While many cities face this issue (including long waiting lists for public housing in Chicago), the contrasts are stark in Hong Kong which boasts a world-class business district. Add this to lack of open space, leading to higher housing prices, and this is an issue that likely requires an ambitious plan over many years to even address part of this housing shortage.

The “extreme architecture” of “a drone-proof city”

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With the recent talk about drone use, here is an interesting thought exercise: how to best build a city that limits the reach of drones?

Kohn’s envisioned drone-proof community, which he calls “Shura City,” is a thought experiment, a provocation (shura, Arabic for consultation, is a word associated with group decision-making in the Islamic world). It’s a self-contained environment with elaborate architectural devices designed to thwart robotic predators overhead. Minarets, along with the wind-catching cooling towers called badgirs, would obstruct the flight path of the drones. A latticed roof, extending over the entire community, would create shade patterns to make visual target identification difficult. A fully climate-controlled environment would confuse heat-seeking detection systems. He has not included any anti-aircraft weapons in this scenario…

Kohn writes in his proposal that he envisions Shura City as a brick-and-mortar response to a 21st-century conundrum, a world in which war is ill-defined and combatants on both sides live in an extrajudicial limbo…

Kohn says that he thinks it is a duty for his generation to challenge the newly mechanized means of warfare that have become routine over the last 10 years. “If people are going to create new and exciting ways to kill people, I think there’s no harm in pushing the envelope of peace technology,” he says. Imagining Shura City is part of Kohn’s personal response to that challenge, a way to hack the machines of modern war.

“There is a deliberate impudence to the City,” he wrote to me. “Drones rely on data mining of individuals and tracking of individuals, kind of like Facebook. The City hides the individual in the embrace of the community, using human traits drones cannot understand as protection. The City subverts the aggressor.”

Peace architecture vs. war architecture. Cities with the ability to hide people vs. the ability of drones to find people. There are some interesting contrasts here. Many urban sociologists like to promote public spaces where people of all backgrounds and circumstances can share physical settings (see the example of The Cosmopolitan Canopy by Elijah Anderson). But what happens if the public spaces that perhaps mark democratic society are places citizens are afraid of being spotted from above? Can cities more closed to above still be open in the sense that we think of them?

While this particular example may be far-fetched, it wouldn’t surprise me if some cities around the cities attempt to limit the effectiveness of drones.

Trying to ensure more accountability in US News & World Report college ranking data

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The US News & World Report college rankings are big business but also a big headache in data collection. The company is looking into ways to ensure more trustworthy data:

A new report from The Washington Post‘s Nick Anderson explores the increasingly common problem, in which universities submit inflated standardized test scores and class rankings for members of their incoming classes to U.S. News, which doesn’t independently verify the information. Tulane University, Bucknell University, Claremont McKenna College, Emory University, and George Washington University have all been implicated in the past year alone. And those are just the schools that got caught:

A survey of 576 college admissions officers conducted by Gallup last summer for the online news outlet Inside Higher Ed found that 91 percent believe other colleges had falsely reported standardized test scores and other admissions data. A few said their own college had done so.

For such a trusted report, the U.S. News rankings don’t have many safeguards ensuring that their data is accurate. Schools self-report these statistics on the honor system, essentially. U.S. News editor Brian Kelly told Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik, “The integrity of data is important to everybody … I find it incredible to contemplate that institutions based on ethical behavior would be doing this.” But plenty of institutions are doing this, as we noted back in November 2012 when GWU was unranked after being caught submitting juiced stats. 

At this point, U.S. News shouldn’t be surprised by acknowledgment like those from Tulane and Bucknell. It turns out that if you let schools misreport the numbers — especially in a field of fierce academic competition and increasingly budgetary hardship — they’ll take you up on the offer. Kelly could’ve learned that by reading U.S. News‘ own blog, Morse Code. Written by data researcher Bob Morse, almost half of the recent posts have been about fraud. To keep schools more honest, the magazine is considering requiring university officials outside of enrollment offices to sign a statement vouching for submitted numbers. But still, no third party accountability would be in place, and many higher ed experts are already saying that the credibility of the U.S. News college rankings is shot.

Three quick thoughts:

1. With the amount of money involved in the entire process, this should not be a surprise. Colleges want to project the best image they can so having a weakly regulated system (and also a suspect methodology and set of factors to start with) can lead to abuses.

2. If the USNWR rankings can’t be trusted, isn’t there someone who could provide a more honest system? This sounds like an opportunity for someone.

3. I wonder if there are parallels to PED use in baseball. To some degree, it doesn’t matter if lots of schools are gaming the system as long as the perception among schools is that everyone else is doing it. With this perception, it is easier to justify one’s own cheating because colleges need to catch up or compete with each other.

Infrastructure mental image of the week: “America is one big pothole”

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood may be retiring but he made clear yesterday the infrastructure issues he believes face the United States:

Outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood lamented the amount of infrastructure spending that was approved by Congress during his tenure at the Department of Transportation (DOT) on Wednesday.

“America is one big pothole right now,” LaHood said in an interview on “The Diane Rehm Show” on National Public Radio.

“At one time … we were the leader in infrastructure,” LaHood continued. “We built the interstate system. It’s the best road system in the world, and we’re proud of it. But we’re falling way behind other countries, because we have not made the investments.”…

LaHood said Wednesday that whoever ends up replacing him will have to think outside the box to find more transportation funding.

LaHood is not alone in suggesting that America’s lack of attention to infrastructure could be quite costly down the road. Infrastructure is the sort of thing that greatly benefits from good funding and planning upfront rather than trying to patch problems down the road. It reminds me of the stories in recent years in Illinois about how asphalt gets used on tollways because it is cheaper upfront but concrete is costlier upfront yet saves money in the long run.

I wonder what it would take to convince politicians and the public that infrastructure needs should get priority when other issues look larger in their perception. I don’t think people would say money shouldn’t be spent on basic issues, particularly when safety is involved, but infrastructure tends to get left behind among other concerns. Can someone create a sexy pothole repair or bridge repair marketing campaign?

Barnes & Noble as “the last bookstore chain standing”

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Here is a look at the dwindling fortunes of Barnes & Noble:

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mitchell Klipper, chief executive of Barnes & Noble’s retail group, said that, over the next decade, the chain will reduce its outlets by about twenty a year to reach a figure of about 450-to-500 consumer stores, down from a peak of 726 in 2008. A separate chain of 674 college bookstores (which thrive on tchotchkes and their exclusive franchises) is not part of that calculation. Even with so many fewer consumer stores, Klipper said, “It’s a good business model. You have to adjust your overhead and get smart with smart systems. Is it what it used to be when you were opening 80 stores a year and dropping stores everywhere? Probably not. It’s different. But every business evolves.” Klipper disputes the notion that bookstores will be unable to hold their own in the digital era, despite the chain’s need to downsize where rents or locations are hurting the prospect of acceptable profitability. Only a handful of the stores–fewer than twenty–are actually losing money, he told the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg. But the company’s revenues have been significantly impacted by its commitment to build the Nook franchise.

While holding on to ownership of nearly 80 percent of its Nook division, a $300 million investment in Nook from Microsoft last fall, followed by an $89.5 million commitment from Pearson, which sees value in the growing electronic textbook market, are signs that Barnes & Noble can forge a way to secure enough of the digital business to offset the problems it faces in traditional bookselling.

But the overall impression of Barnes & Noble’s situation in the book industry is not nearly as positive as its owners and investors would like to portray. Publisher’s Weekly reported last week that Barnes & Noble is in the midst of contentious negotiations over terms with Simon & Schuster. “Although the exact nature of the disagreement is not yet clear,” Publisher’s Weekly reported, “Barnes &Noble has significantly reduced its orders from S&S. The main reason for the cutback seems to be, according to sources, Barnes & Noble’s lack of support from S&S.” (One way or another, this means a dispute over the size of discounts and advertising.) Another factor for concern is the impending merger of Random House and Penguin, which is expected to give this corporate behemoth the ability to deal with Google’s Android ecosystem, and Apple’s consumer cachet as well as Amazon’s dominant position in online retailing. There was an initial belief that Borders’ bankruptcy would bring a substantial portion of its in-store business to Barnes & Noble, but that has not turned out to be the case.

“Barnes & Noble is the last bookstore chain standing,” Wharton management professor Steve Kobrin, who is also the publisher of Wharton Digital Press, told the Knowledge@Wharton newsletter. “There’s still a niche there, but it may go to small independent bookstores.”

As I’ve watched these stories over the last few years, here are a few thoughts:

1. There still is a lot of irony in people lamenting the loss of Barnes & Noble today when not too long ago they were lamenting the rise of big box bookstores in general.

2. We could have a larger conversation about reading in society in general. Is this just about Amazon and online retailers taking away business or are less Americans reading in general? (Book sales were down 2.5% in 2011.) This extends to libraries as well: do people go there for books or DVDs?

3. There is room for interesting conversations about the goals bookstores meet in society or the function they play. Are they supposed to be more like “third places,” commercial learning centers where the average citizen can encounter a world of knowledge (commercial versions of a library), or retailers looking to make money? If bookstores are lost, what is really lost? If people aren’t going to bookstores, what are they doing instead?

Pew finds majority of Americans taking breaks from Facebook

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Facebook may be near ubiquitous in the United States but Pew finds that a majority of users take breaks from the site:

New research suggests that Facebook fatigue may be setting in with some users. Twenty-seven percent of Facebook users surveyed in the U.S. plan to spend less time on the site in 2013, compared with only 3% who plan to spend more time, according to a study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

(Another 69% of Facebook users say they plan to spend the same amount of time on the site this coming year.)

The Pew study also found that 61% of Facebook users have taken a break from the service for several weeks or more. During these breaks, the vast majority of Facebook vacationers don’t delete their profiles…

The reasons people gave for taking a sabbatical from the network were varied. The most common motivation was not having enough time for the site, with 21% of people saying they were just too busy with real-life responsibilities to spend time reading posts, liking and commenting.

Other reasons for leaving: Ten percent called it a waste of time, 10% cited a lack of interest in the content, and 9% said they were unhappy with the amount of drama and gossip on the site. Only 4% of people mentioned privacy and security concerns as their reason for taking a breather.

These findings could counter a common narrative about Facebook use that is based in some real trends. It suggests Facebook users and Internet users in general spend way too much time online, can’t get away from it, and end up in weird and possibly harmful situations (see: Manti Te’o story). The suggestion is that users don’t realize the possibly harmful effects of being on Facebook. These findings counter this narrative: a majority of users do try to get away from it at times. They are not unaware of what is going on and try to get some distance from it.

On the other hand, I don’t think this is necessarily bad news for Facebook. This could simply be a plateauing of a sharp upward rise for Facebook that was untenable over the long haul. In other words, perhaps people simply can’t maintain the amount of time they spend with Facebook or realize they don’t want to. Some people just joined because others have joined. Yet, these findings suggest that people aren’t leaving Facebook altogether even as they take some short breaks. They are trying to find ways to balance their lives with Facebook and still want to participate, even on a reduced basis.

So how much might Facebook do to try to reduce these breaks and have people participating consistently?