Author Archives: legallysociable

New goal in Chicago: no traffic deaths in ten years

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The city of Chicago recently set an ambitious goal: there should be no traffic deaths in ten years.

The city of Chicago’s transportation department, headed by commissioner Gabe Klein, has released a new “action agenda” called “Chicago Forward.” It contains a goal that, as far as I know, has never to date been explicitly embraced by a major United States city:

Eliminate all pedestrian, bicycle, and overall traffic crash fatalities within 10 years…

[T]he city will be taking a multifaceted approach to traffic safety that includes engineering local streets to reduce car speeds; improving pedestrian and bike facilities; education; better data collection and evaluation; and increasing enforcement. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is strongly behind such measures even when they are politically unpopular, as was the case with a controversial speed camera bill that the mayor pushed through the City Council last month…

The idea of aiming for zero traffic deaths may be novel in the United States, but in Sweden, it’s national policy. In 1997, the Swedish Parliament passed the Vision Zero Initiative, with the “ultimate target of no deaths or serious injuries on Sweden’s roads.” Currently, the plan calls for an interim goal of reducing deaths and injuries to 50 percent of 2007 figures by 2020.

Has it worked? Zero is still some ways off – 2050 is the target date now — but the absolute number of traffic fatalities in Sweden continues to fall even as traffic is on the rise. And compared to the United States, their numbers are impressive: In 2009, Sweden had 4.3 traffic deaths per 100,000 population, while the United States had 12.3 (the European Union average was 11 in 2007).

I will be curious to see how this all works. Transforming a major city like Chicago in a short amount of time is difficult. Like most American cities, Chicago has sacrificed much for the automobile and even with higher gas prices and more calls for walkable neighborhoods, making quick changes to the transportation grid will require a lot of work. Additionally, traffic safety has a lot of moving parts, such as safety standards for cars, over which Chicago has little control.

I like the comparison to the efforts in Sweden. However, what happens when the target date approaches and the number has not dropped to zero – does someone get blamed, fired, or what? This is a laudable goal but perhaps this could turn into another public war: the war on traffic deaths!

It is hard to argue with safety. However, I imagine someone will raise a question about the possible costs of these measures…what will this war on traffic deaths cost? I also imagine someone could argue that boosting Chicago’s walkability and general pedestrian friendliness would lead to a better quality of life (as well as higher housing values), possibly making Chicago more appealing to younger and older generations who want to live in more urban neighborhoods.

Most common college grade: A or A-

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Here is some data about college grades and how they have increased to a modal letter grade of an A:

In 1960, the average undergraduate grade awarded in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota was 2.27 on a four-point scale.  In other words, the average letter grade at the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s was about a C+, and that was consistent with average grades at other colleges and universities in that era.  In fact, that average grade of C+ (2.30-2.35 on a 4-point scale) had been pretty stable at America’s colleges going all the way back to the 1920s (see chart above from GradeInflation.com, a website maintained by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who has tirelessly crusaded for several decades against “grade inflation” at U.S. universities). By 2006, the average GPA at public universities in the U.S. had risen to 3.01 and at private universities to 3.30.  That means that the average GPA at public universities in 2006 was equivalent to a letter grade of B, and at private universities a B+, and it’s likely that grades and GPAs have continued to inflate over the last six years…
National studies and surveys suggest that college students now get more A’s than any other grade even though they spend less time studying. Cramer’s solution — to tack onto every transcript the percentage of students that also got that grade — has split the faculty and highlighted how tricky it can be to define, much less combat, grade inflation.”…
Last year, Professor Rojstaczer and co-author Christopher Healy published a research article in the Teachers College Record titled “Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940–2009.” The main conclusion of the paper appears below (emphasis added), and is illustrated by the chart below showing the rising share of A letter grades over time at American colleges, from 15% in 1940 to 43% by 2008. Starting in about 1998, the letter grade A became the most common college grade.
“Conclusion: Across a wide range of schools, As represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. Ds and Fs total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more As and Bs combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.”

This is quite an increase, particularly as more Americans started attending college in this period. What does this do in the long run for credentialism – the idea that employers and others can get an idea about the competence, skills, and work ethic of people by knowing whether they have a college degree or not. Are employers and students looking for ways to differentiate between students?

Seeing the data by discipline (and not just broad categories) would be particularly fascinating.

Something to note about grade data: good grades can only bring up the average so much since they have a max of 4.0. So the rising average is partly due to more good grades being handed out but also partly due to fewer bad grades (which would have a greater effect on the average) being assigned. Note the last chart: about 78% of grades are either As or Bs, suggesting that students have to work at getting grades below this.

h/t Instapundit

Second-class shareholders

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Commenting on James Surowiecki’s recent New Yorker piece, Felix Salmon decries the structure of Facebook’s IPO, which left Mark Zuckerberg with 57% of the voting shares while actually owning only 18% of the company:

The reason to be concerned about the rise of companies with dual-class share structures, then, is not all that dissimilar to the reason to be concerned about the rise of big private companies more generally. The stock market is no longer the common ownership of the means of production: it’s a place where early-stage investors can exit to a group of muppets and high-frequency traders.

Initial public offering (IPO) investors are increasingly being offered “ownership” of companies that comes with little or no actual control.  As Surowiecki puts it, companies are effectively telling investors, “Thanks for your money. Now shut up.”  It’s a very peculiar system that gives majority stockholders a non-majority say in corporate governance.

Wired: “Living Large in a 130-Square-Foot Apartment”

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Tiny houses are getting their share of attention these days and I find it hard to resist seeing how people design and live in small spaces (in a country where new homes are roughly 2,500 square feet). Check out this gallery and description of  “Living Large in a 130-Square Foot Apartment“:

The apartment was once the master bedroom of a larger apartment, which should give you a pretty good idea of its postage-stamp size. The idea was to separate the room to create a small studio that could create rental income…

The smartest design trick was to create a split-level floorplan. Baillargeon and Nabucet divided the studio into two levels by building a platform for the kitchen and bathroom, which creates the illusion of separate spaces without using any walls or dividers. The only true partition between living and dining is a long, bar-height shelf that doubles as a functional table for eating. A smart take on the traditionally depressing breakfast nook…

The bed is always a challenge in a studio space. You don’t really want a mess of comforters and pillows in the middle of your living space, and no grown person should really be sleeping on a futon. Baillargeon and Nabucet brilliantly bucked the Murphy bed concept with a bed on wheels that slides elegantly beneath the kitchen platform. The bed can also do double duty, sliding halfway underneath to create the illusion of a couch, thanks to the addition of decorative pillows.

A coffee table, stored along the wall while the bed is in use, slides elegantly out in front of the couch. The convertible bed/couch is Ménard’s favorite feature, as it allows for maximum square-footage for socializing. “It’s a multi-faceted space which can be adapted for watching a movie, working, inviting friends over or cooking.”

Looking at the pictures, the split-level plan seems to make a big difference. So when can Ikea sell all of this as a package? I wonder how much an architect or designer can make for putting together a space like this…

Another thought: can tiny dwellings only really work in communities that emphasize or at least allow socializing in public/private spaces? How much time does the average tiny house dweller spend in their unit compared to people with bigger homes? I could see this as a marketing pitch for tiny houses: you’ll be forced to be more social in public!

Living alone in higher percentages in Rust Belt cities

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Living alone is not limited to young singles: some Rust Belt cities have higher percentages (compared to the national figures of 27% of single households) of older single households.

Pittsburgh, former capital of the nation’s steel industry, has seen its population drop by more than half to about 306,000 since 1950, according to the 2010 Census. The government said 41.7 percent of households consist of one person, the sixth-highest rate in the nation…Now, about one in eight Pittsburgh households is occupied by a single elderly person, the fifth highest among U.S. cities. Russell said a significant share of the single households consist of elderly women, whom he calls “Rust-Belt babushkas.”…

In the Census data, Atlanta and Washington were tied at 44 percent for the highest percentage of one-person households.

Cincinnati ranked third in the nation with 43.4 percent of its 133,420 households consisting of single people. In 1900, Cincinnati was the nation’s 10th largest city, with a population of about 326,000. In 2010, it was the 62nd largest, with about 297,000.

The city’s relatively high number of singles is probably the result of families leaving for suburbs starting in the 1970s, combined with an influx of young professionals to the central city, where University of Cincinnati and Xavier University students also live, said Jeffrey Timberlake, an associate sociology professor at the former.

This reminds me of Eric Klinenberg’s earlier book Heat Wave that looked at the implications of the elderly living alone in Chicago. There are large social forces at work that can lead to certain communities having larger populations of elderly single people.

My thought: the implication here is that Sunbelt cities (South and West) don’t have as large single populations. What is the primary reason for this: the cities simply aren’t as old and they haven’t seen these cycles of population that the Rust Belt cities have experienced? Is it because Sunbelt cities don’t have some of the same kinds of dense urban neighborhoods and downtowns (and instead have more sprawl)? Are these cities more attractive to families (certain kinds of jobs, values, lower crime rates, more single-family homes in suburban subdivisions, etc.)?

One firm look at a particular subset of singles (they “restricted its analysis to single, widowed, and divorced women age 25-64. Without this cap on the age range, places with higher concentrations of elderly people would show a misleading number of single women.”) argues these are the 10 US cities with the smaller percentages of singles:

People tend couple up more in the smaller towns, though there are big city outliers like Edison, NJ, and Nassau-Suffolk metro area in New York. Many places that view themselves as traditional boast marriage rates above the national average.

A few college cities buck the trend of having more singles. North Carolina cities, Raleigh and Charlotte–each home to a university with more than 20,000 students–are in the bottom 25% by percentage of singles.

Logan, UT, and Provo, UT, both have fewer than 20% singles, the lowest in the country. Texas cities McAllen and Laredo have similarly low numbers of single people.

See their statistics for the 100 biggest US cities here. Since Pittsburgh and Cincinnati are so much further down this list, it suggests that those Rust Belt cities have larger percentages of elderly singles.

 

Quick Review: the Chicago History Museum

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I recently had a chance to visit the Chicago History Museum, a place I had visited several times as a kid but hadn’t been to in at least 15 years. Here are a few thoughts about the museum:

1. The best exhibit, in my opinion, is the dioramas of key moments in Chicago’s history. While these are now decades old, they still look quite good and effectively tell the story of Chicago’s early years. Here is the classic diorama of the 1871 Chicago Fire:

2. The museum has some interesting historical artifacts, ranging from Native American items to modern-day Chicago neighborhoods. My favorite: the Pioneer locomotive which made the first run on the Galena & Chicago Union railroad (the first railroad running out of Chicago and currently the Union Pacific West line in Metra nomenclature) in 1849:

3. Moving beyond my favorites, I think there is a larger issue with the museum: who is supposed to be its target audience? School kids? Tourists? Local residents? This drives another decision: how much detail should the museum present? I think there is a surprising lack of detail about major events which seems particularly appalling since Chicago is a world class city and urban sociologists still talk about (or perhaps joke about) Chicago being the quintessential American city. The second floor covers more modern Chicago history but it does this very quickly and without much context for each event/issue. For some of these modern topics, say transportation or Chicago neighborhoods or suburbanization, you could fill whole museum rooms and really inform the public about what happened and what it means for the future.

4. I also noticed that there is a very little in the museum about recent politicians (say, since the early 1900s). No commentary on the two Daleys and Harold Washington? I assume part of this might be driven by the fact that the Daleys are still around but there is a lot of potential material that could be covered here. For example, there is a small display about the 1968 Democratic Convention and a clip from a History Channel documentary on the subject but there is very little commentary on it. The lack of political material is quite noticeable when talking about the history of a city with powerful (and sometimes problematic) politicians.

5. The lobby of the museum is pleasingly eccentric. If I remember correctly, the museum used to a grand staircase in the lobby which gave it a very traditional look. But here is what one of the lobby looks like now:

Overall, the Chicago History Museum has some good moments but I don’t think it lives up to the world-class standards of Chicago. When the best exhibit consists of decades-old dioramas, there is room for improvement. In a city known for its museums, culture, and history as well being a center for urban study, the museum could be so much more.

Most people buy greener houses for the cost savings

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At the end of a larger discussion about builders constructing more green houses, an industry insider talks about why people buy green homes:

Q: Over the years, industry studies have shown that consumers’ interest in green building has tended to focus on energy conservation; they want to reduce their heating, cooling and appliance costs.

Do they still see green building through that lens of energy efficiency? Are they more motivated to build green for the sake of being green?

A: They’re still energy-oriented. In the most recent study, about two-thirds of consumers who requested green features in their homes said they wanted either to lower energy use or to save money.

In addition, consumer health concerns related to indoor air quality have moved up rapidly among the reasons for requesting green. But concern for the environment was a major issue for only about one-fourth of consumers requesting green.

While it will be interesting to see what green features the new homes of the next few years have, I think this hints at a larger issue with green products: people are more willing to invest in them upfront (in the case of a house) or buy them if they offer savings in the long run. Even with houses, this insider suggests that 30% of people wouldn’t pay extra for green features. The motivation here is not necessarily the earth or all of humanity but rather costs for individuals. This is a very different ideology and seems rooted in a consumeristic mindset.

But what happens when going green requires higher prices – like gasoline or other energy prices – without obvious cost savings for individual consumers? This is a much harder sell.

Ph.D. degrees are pretty rare, The Five-Year Engagement notwithstanding

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In the movie The Five-Year Engagement, one of the main characters has a post-doc at the University of Michigan in social psychology. I wondered how many people know what a post-doc is and this pushed me to think more broadly: just how common is a Ph.D. in the United States? According to the 2012 Statistical Abstract, there were 49,562 PhDs awarded in 2009, up from 42,437 in 1996. According to the National Science Foundation, here are some additional figures on the number of doctorates awarded:

-In the first year of their data, 1957, there were 8,611 PhDs awarded.

-The greatest years of PhD growth (measured by % change from previous year) were clearly in the 1960s with peaks of 14.1% in 1965 and 14.6% in 1970.

-There were 48,069 doctorates awarded in 2010.

(Unfortunately, these tables do not break down how many doctoral students graduated with degrees/concentrations in social psychology.)

Census figures from 2010 say 27.9% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Figures from 2011 show that 7.95% of Americans have a master’s degree and 3% have a doctorate or professional degree.

All this suggests that PhDs are relatively rare in the United States meaning that many Americans may not be able to relate to this story (plus, how many movies or TV shows focus on academia?). However, the movie is set in San Francisco and Ann Arbor: 51.2% of residents in San Francisco have a bachelor’s degree or higher (with a California state figure of 30.1%) and 19.7% of residents have a graduate or professional degree (ACS estimates). In the college town of Ann Arbor, 71.1% of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher (with a Michigan state figure of 25%) and 42% have a graduate or professional degree (ACS estimates).

So is Judd Apatow aiming for a more educated audience with his latest film?

CA town: the public will help determine how a one penny sales tax increase is spent

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Amidst other changes in Vallejo, California, the community is trying something innovative involving a recent one cent sales tax increase:

And the city council struck an unusual deal with residents — if they agreed to a one-penny sales tax increase, projected to generate an additional $9.5 million in revenue, they could vote on how the money would be used. The experiment in participatory budgeting, which began in April, is the first in a North American city.

The approach was pioneered in Port Alegre, Brazil, as a way to get citizens involved in bridging the large gap between the city’s middle-class residents and those living in slums on the outskirts. Individual districts in New York and Chicago are also experimenting with the process, and residents there have expressed interest in spending money on things such as more security cameras and lighting, public murals, and Meals on Wheels for seniors.

Here is more information on Measure B the city provided before the vote over the tax. Measure B itself passed in a very close vote and it looks like the city opened up the approved sales tax to the process of “participatory budgeting” (with some disagreement) in April 2012:

A bid to draw significant public participation in the city’s budget planning was approved Tuesday night by the Vallejo City Council.

The council voted 4-3 to launch a process known as “participatory budgeting,” setting aside 30 percent of revenue collected from a sales tax hike initiative voters passed in November.

Under City Charter provisions, public-proposed uses for the estimated $9.5 million a year ultimately will require council approval.

Duly noted: this is a measure with some controversy. It will be interesting to see how this works out: how much input will the public get? Will a good number of people in the city participate in the process? How much money will the public be able to control? What happens if the public wants to use the money for other purposes than the city council?

Could this work beyond the local level?

h/t Instapundit, Via Meadia

Two years of construction on Congress Parkway yields…bleh

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The Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic Blair Kamin provides an overview of what the two years of construction of Congress Parkway have yielded…and his verdict is ambivalent:

Yet two years and innumerable construction delays later, it’s hard to muster enthusiasm for the nearly complete, $20 million undertaking, which was paid for with city, state and federal stimulus program funds. That’s not because the job has failed to accomplish what it set out to do. Rather, it’s because many of those things have been done and, still, no one would mistake the new Congress Parkway for the Champs-Elysees…

Handling more than 60,000 vehicles a day, Congress became a barrier that separated the revitalized Printers Row district to the south from the Loop to the north. The recent appearance of dormitories and other academic buildings on both sides of Congress has only accentuated its identity as an asphalt moat…

For now, though, the new features remain overwhelmed by the still-intimidating width of the road and its vast field of shiny black asphalt. The cars don’t seem to have slowed down. Engines still rev. Horns still honk. Some pedestrians still jog through crosswalks to avoid speeding cars. As cars accelerate as they near the Ike, Congress feels more like a highway than a parkway…

Perhaps that will happen, but it will be more important in the long-run for city planners to keep attacking other problems that continue to make Congress Parkway a Champs-Elysees wannabe, such as the ragged building edge and a relative lack of street-level shops. The present revamp, while welcome and attractive, is but one step down a very long road toward taming the highway monster.

Several thoughts:

1. This seems like a very unique project: how many American highways with this kind of traffic end up turning into regular city streets within a few blocks? This is a reminder of what can happen when highways are imposed on the cityscape – the construction of highways in Chicago altered a number of neighborhoods.

2. I’m not sure why Kamin refers back to Burnham’s 1909 plan when talking about this road. While the Burnham Plan tends to get idealized, how much of it was actually carried out? Going further, how much of it was even realistic with the shift to cars and highways that Burnham could have only dreamed about?

3. A major issue seems to be that Congress Parkway itself is not a living street. Traffic is not necessarily an inhibitor of an interesting street. However, if there aren’t businesses along this road itself, such as shops and restaurants, this remains simply as a road to cross rather than a place to go for its own purposes.

4. Does anyone consistently do cost-effectiveness studies of highway/road projects? Kamin notes that this project cost about $20 million and took longer than expected – can we ask whether it was worth it? Should the public have gotten more bang for their buck?

5. Fairly, Kamin notes that the streetscape is not complete and some interesting design features have yet to be installed.