Reducing trespassing on railroad tracks

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Experts from several areas are working to limit the number of people on railroad tracks:

Trespassing numbers have remained fairly steady over the years and now account for about 72 percent of all railroad-related deaths, with 761 fatalities in 2015, including 296 suicides.

Safety experts are now focused on finding ways to cut trespassing through education, intervention and barriers such as fencing at popular trespassing spots. But advocates concede it won’t be easy — there are 140,000 miles of railroad track in the United States, and it is impossible to contain it all.

“Trespassing has been more of a stubborn problem for us,” said Bonnie Murphy, president and CEO of Operation Lifesaver, a national train safety organization, who spoke along with other safety experts at the biennial DuPage Railroad Safety Council conference last week. “There’s a disturbing, ongoing trend of people walking along the tracks.”

This is an important safety issue. But, it raises a larger question: while the lines are technically private property, how do you realistically keep people off of them when they crisscross all parts of America at ground level? Railroads rejected the idea long ago that fences should be built along the thousands of miles of lines. There is no mention in this article of enforcing trespassing but I assume this would require a significant amount of resources. Cameras at important locations? Warning signs at regular intervals along the lines? Trains using a more effective warning signal of their arrival (think of a targeted rumbling option from a longer distance)? More effort at moving rail traffic away from major population centers (such as going around major metropolitan regions when possible)?

Railroads can be incredible at moving freight and people long distances. However, they don’t interact well with pedestrians.

A few fake LA lawns watered as CA drought continues

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The lawn may be so culturally powerful that fake lawns need to be watered:

But a CBS Los Angeles investigation found the water has not stopped flowing outside DWP buildings. Rather, the DWP has installed sprinklers to soak its fake grass for minutes at a time…

On a recent Thursday morning, sprinklers ran for six minutes, soaking fake grass outside the South LA substation. Even an area completely devoid of grass — real or fake — was inundated by water from sprinklers.

The excess water ran down the sidewalk and toward the street in an apparent violation of city code stating, “No customer of the Department shall use water in a manner that causes or allows excess or continuous water flow or runoff onto an adjoining sidewalk, driveway, street, gutter or ditch.” Such runoff is prohibited even for recycled “gray” water.

I realize that this story appears to be driven less by concern for water supplies – which are an ongoing issue in California – and more about neighbors expressing anger that they have to conserve water lest they be fined while the city appears to be wasting it. In other words: big government should follow its own rules. This could be a microcosm of national politics.

Yet, could there be a good reason for watering the fake lawn?

“We’re rinsing the grass to make it more sanitary,” said Richard Harasick, director of water operations at the DWP…

“We’re really just trying to wash out dog pee,” he said.

So it is dogs that utilize the fake lawn. Who knew that even replacement lawns need so much regular maintenance due to regular use. (Some need to be painted.) And getting people to stop their dogs from using the replacement lawn may be difficult.

Perhaps a solution here is to get rid of the fake lawn entirely. A common sight in recent years in California is to use lawns replaced with other features like drought resistant plants or stones. There was even a rebate program implemented for this as the state aimed to replace a lot of turf.

One takeaway to this story: it is hard for Americans to get rid of lawns as well as reactions to their use and maintenance.

What exactly does “Death Knell Tolling for McMansions” mean?

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Numerous outlets are sounding a similar theme: Death Knell Tolling for McMansions. Most of this seems to be based on one recent study that said the cost premium McMansions used to command has declined. Does this mean McMansions are in decline? Not necessarily. There are many ways this could turn out including:

  1. McMansions are still built and bought and sold. Even if they don’t command as much money as before, they still might be profitable.
  2. Over the coming years, fewer McMansions are built and the ones that are constructed are primarily in thriving communities (lots of money as well as population growth).
  3. Regardless of whether #1 or #2 happen, there are plenty of existing McMansions. They could go (1) like many other older American homes – altered, remodeled, passed from groups to groups; or (2) they are so undesirable or shoddy that they are replaced by other housing options. The second option is hard to imagine; plenty of postwar houses are still in existence and it would be costly to destroy a lot of housing units.

Even if fewer McMansions are constructed in the future, they aren’t simply going away. Some McMansions will be around for 50+ years.

Sociologist on the effect of skylines on cities

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Camilo Jose Vergara is a sociologist and photographer who in a recent piece showing multiple angles of the World Trade Center tower over the decades also remarks about the power of a city skyline:

“The skyline is often how people relate to cities,” Vergara told The Huffington Post. “If a city has a skyline, it enters into a different category. It’s a grand city, a great city.”

Two points are notable:

  1. Cities are complex so an iconic image – the skyline – can be an important shorthand for the large city and metropolitan region.
  2. Important cities have notable skylines. Of course, many cities have taller buildings that can be seen from a distance. But, only certain cities have large collections of tall buildings and these skylines can have buildings that becomes iconic in themselves.

In other words, it is hard to imagine major American cities without recognizable skylines. Yet, European cities don’t have the same obsession with skyscrapers and tend to feature older structures like churches. And I wouldn’t be able to immediately pick out a skyline for Tokyo or Berlin or Moscow or New Delhi.

Trying to convert large empty grocery stores to better uses

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The end of a company can have rippling effects: a number of Chicago area communities have been working for years to fill empty Dominick’s stores.

When Dominick’s went out of business in December 2013, it added 72 empty stores to the Chicago area’s retail landscape. The most desirable ones were snatched up by chains like Jewel-Osco, Mariano’s and Whole Foods Market. Last year, Albertsons acquired Safeway, Dominick’s parent company, giving it control of most remaining Dominick’s leases and property in the area.

At least 18 suburbs are still trying to turn the lights back on in the darkened stores. As time drags on, the prolonged vacancies create pockets of blight in once-thriving retail areas, hurting town coffers, hindering other businesses and inconveniencing residents. Some officials blame Albertsons, saying the company is paying rent on dark buildings to block out Jewel-Osco competitors…

Albertsons has been “extending dark store leases” to keep out competition, a tactic that’s “objectionable, but not unusual” in the Chicago area’s extremely competitive grocery industry, said Andrew Witherell, a commercial real estate broker who consulted with Mariano’s on its expansion into 11 former Dominick’s stores…

Other towns have banded together to attract retailers. Last year, nine western suburbs launched a joint effort, “One Call/10 Stores,” to try to fill some 700,000 square feet of former Dominick’s space. Most of those stores, however, remain empty.

In other words, there is little incentive for Albertsons to sell the properties. I would also guess that a number of suburbs have struggled to find tenants who could use all of the building space and possibly be there for a long time. In many places, is there really a need for another grocery store given all the options (and with Walmart operating as the biggest grocery chain in America)?

Perhaps some of these communities need to head in different directions. Break the large store into smaller pieces. Think about retrofitting the whole structure to include a mix of uses and alter the big store and large parking lot dynamic. Maybe demolishing the structure could provide a fresh start and entice someone who doesn’t want to be saddled with an aging large structure. It will be interesting to see how long communities will go before trying something more drastic.

The Swiss Cheese Model for dealing with industrial accidents

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I was recently reading The Grid by Gretchen Bakke where a discussion of massive power plant brownouts led to discussing two approaches to industrial accidents:

One might be given to think that this blackout might have been prevented if somebody had just noticed as things slowly went awry – if in 2002 all of FirstEnergy’s “known common problems” had been dealt with rather than merely 17 percent of them, if the trees had been clipped, if a bright young eye had seen the static in the screen. But what most students of industrial accidents recognize is that perfect knowledge of complex systems is not actually the best way to make these systems safe and reliable. In part because perfect real-time knowledge is extremely difficult to come by, not only for the grid but for other dangerous yet necessary elements of modern life – like airplanes and nuclear power plants. One can just never be sure that every single bit of necessary information is being accurately tracked (and God knows what havoc those missing bits are wreaking while they presumed to-be-known bits chug along their orderly way). Even if we could eliminate all the “unknown unknowns” (to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld) from systems engineering – and we can’t – there would still be a serious problem to contend with, and that is how even closely monitored elements interact with each other in real time. And of course humans, who are always also component parts of these systems, rarely function as predictable as even the shoddiest of mechanical elements.

Rather than attempting the impossible feat of perfect control grounded in perfect information, complex industrial undertaking have for decades been veering toward another model for avoiding serious disaster. This would also seem to be the right approach for the grid, as its premise is that imperfect knowledge should not impede safe, steady functioning. The so-called Swiss Cheese Model of Industrial Accidents assumes glitches all over the place, tiny little failures or unpredicted oddities as a normal side effect of complexity. Rather than trying to “know and control” systems designers attempt to build, manage, and regulate complexity in such a way that small things are significantly impeded on their path to becoming catastrophically massive things. Three trees and a bug shouldn’t black out half the country. (p.135-136)

Social systems today are increasingly complex – see a recent post about the increasing complexity of cities – and we have more and more data regarding the components and the whole of systems. However, as this example illustrates, humans don’t always know what to do with all this data or see the necessary patterns.

The Swiss Cheese Model seems to privilege redundancy and resiliency over stopping all problems. At the same time, I assume there are limits to how many holes in the cheese are allowed, particularly when millions of residents might be affected. Who sets that limit and how is that decision made? We’ll accept a certain number of electrical failures each year but no more?

Exploring why Americans think their children are at such risk

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Virginia Postrel summarizes a recent study looking at how Americans perceive the safety of children:

The researchers suspected that overestimating risk reflects moral convictions about proper parenting. To separate the two instincts, they created a series of surveys asking participants to rate the danger to children left alone in five specific circumstances: a 2 1/2 -year-old at home for 20 minutes eating a snack and watching “Frozen,” for instance, or a 6-year-old in a park about a mile from her house for 25 minutes. The reasons for the parent’s absence were varied randomly. It could be unintentional, for work, to volunteer for charity, to relax or to meet an illicit lover.

Because the child’s situation was exactly the same in all the intentional cases, the risks should also be identical. (Asked what the dangers might be, participants listed the same ones in all circumstances, with a stranger harming the child the most common, followed by an accident.) The unintentional case might be slightly more dangerous, because parents wouldn’t have a chance to make provisions for their absence such as giving the child a phone and emergency instructions or parking the car in the shade.

But survey respondents didn’t see things this way at all. “A mother’s unintentional absence was seen as safer for the child than a mother’s intentional absence for any reason, and a mother’s work-related absence was seen as more dangerous than an unintentional absence, but less dangerous than if the mother left to pursue an illicit sexual affair,” they write. The same was true for fathers, except that respondents rated leaving for work as posing no greater danger than leaving unintentionally. Moral disapproval informed beliefs about risks…

“People don’t only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral,” the researchers write. “They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous. That is, people overestimate the actual danger to children who are left alone by their parents, in order to better support or justify their moral condemnation of parents who do so.”

This reminds me of the trolley problem. While it doesn’t deal with risk, it hints at how morality is involved in assessing situations. Good parenting today includes avoiding intentional absences (and even these can be ranked). Leaving a child for unintentional reasons is not so bad. Both are of equal risk – just as saving five lives in the trolley problem regardless of how it is accomplished – but not viewed the same.

Generally, we have difficulty these days estimating risk. Are we more in danger from a possible terrorist attack (limited risk) or getting into a car (one of the riskiest daily behaviors)? We don’t always assess situations rationally nor do we have all the information at our fingertips. I don’t know that the answer is to suggest we should be more rational all the time: this is difficult to do and may not even be desirable. In this particular case, it might be more prudent to explore where these ideas of morality come from and then work to alter those. Alas, this is also likely a lengthy task.

 

Housing anxiety in America will lead to what kind of action?

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A new poll suggests Americans are worried about housing:

According to a survey by the NHP Foundation, 75 percent of Americans are worried they could lose their homes, while 83 percent of respondents said that they were concerned about the rising costs of housing.

Some 30 percent of the respondents described themselves as “very concerned” that they or a close friend or relative could lose their housing, meaning that nearly one-third of Americans feels that a lack of affordable housing could represent a personal crisis. Another 27 percent described themselves as “concerned”—meaning more than half of respondents consider housing instability to be a looming danger.

Per the poll, about 40 percent of respondents say that they fear they could lose their homes due to job loss. This fear is not unfounded. Neil Gabler’s May cover story for The Atlantic cites Federal Reserve Board data that showed that almost half of U.S. households (47 percent) could not muster $400 in an emergency. A report by the Urban Institute shows that more than one-third of all American families (36 percent) have savings of less than $250. One-quarter of U.S. households have no savings at all…

The NHP Foundation finds that 80 percent of its respondents (1,000 Americans polled nationwide) say that they would welcome affordable housing in their communities. But affordable housing is rarely if ever posed to residents or voters as an up-or-down, yes-or-no question: “Would you like more affordable housing?” Sure, we all would. Except when it involves changes to the places where we live; then our neighbors flip out about it.

Perhaps builders will help with a shift toward constructing smaller homes. Or, as the quote above suggests, housing isn’t the primary issue: people anxiety about jobs which then affects housing.

Thinking longer term, I wonder what it would take to advance more drastic solutions to housing issues. Some possible turning points:

–The homeownership rate continues to drop. Some might say this limits the American Dream while builders could note that this limits their profits and industry (which is also connected to jobs).

-Housing prices rise to where a larger segment of the market is paying substantially more than 30% of their income for housing. Even then, how exactly would this group turn their grievances into collective action?

-Another economic downturn leads to higher employment and more housing issues. Higher foreclosure and eviction rates could cause issues.

-A political candidate makes housing a major issue. As this article notes, no one is really talking about this.

-Could there be a major building or financial scandal that leads to reform?

I’m not sure any of these would lead to anything but temporary measures. Or, perhaps housing in the United States will simply slowly change: wealthier residents will be able to afford newer housing in better locations, people with fewer resources will have fewer and fewer options, homeownership will become less desirable, and all of this will be more clear in a few decades.

Middle-class incomes have biggest year to year rise – with a catch

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New data suggests middle-class incomes rose in 2015:

The incomes of typical Americans rose in 2015 by 5.2 percent, the first significant boost to middle-class pay since the end of the Great Recession and the fastest increase ever recorded by the federal government, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

In addition, the poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points, the steepest decline since 1968. There were 43.1 million Americans in poverty on the year, 3.5 million fewer than in 2014…

The 5.2 percent increase was the largest, in percentage terms, ever recorded by the bureau since it began tracking median income statistics in the 1960s. Bureau officials said it was not statistically distinguishable from five other previous increases in the data, most recently the 3.7 percent jump from 1997 to 1998.

Rising incomes are generally good. But, note the catch in the third paragraph cited above: officials cannot say that the 5.2% increase is definitively higher than several previous increases. Why not? The 5.2% figure is based on a sample that has a margin of error of at least 1.5% either way. The data comes from these Census instruments:

The Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement was conducted nationwide and collected information about income and health insurance coverage during the 2015 calendar year. The Current Population Survey, sponsored jointly by the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is conducted every month and is the primary source of labor force statistics for the U.S. population; it is used to calculate the monthly unemployment rate estimates. Supplements are added in most months; the Annual Social and Economic Supplement questionnaire is designed to give annual, national estimates of income, poverty and health insurance numbers and rates.

According to the report (page 6), the margin of error for the percent change in income from 2014 to 2015 is 1.6%. Incomes may have risen even more than 5.2%! Or, they may have risen at lower rates. See the methodological document regarding the survey instruments here.

The Census has in recent years moved to more frequent reports on key demographic measures. This produces data more frequently. One of the trade-offs, however, is that these estimates are not as accurate as the dicennial census which requires a lot more resources to conduct and is more thorough.

A final note: it is good that the margin of error is hinted at in the article on rising middle-class incomes. On the other hand, it is mentioned in paragraph 12 and the headline clearly suggests that this was a record year. Statistically speaking, this may or may not be the case.

A McMansion as shorthand for the white, suburban privilege of Brock Turner

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One blogger connects the case of Brock Turner to the suburban house to which he returned:

I googled the address. I don’t know why I did that– morbid curiosity always gets the better of me. I clicked the satellite image and squinted at the blurry photo of a roof. It’s just an ordinary upper-class McMansion, one of many, on a spastic squiggle of a street in the middle of a wealthy suburban development. The kind of place where people can have every luxury they want, unless what they want isn’t kitsch. True luxury that isn’t kitsch is reserved for the richer still, the astonishingly wealthy whose sons would not go to trial at all for rape– not for the Suburban-McMansion Rich whose sons serve three months if the press is bad enough.

A suburban McMansion fits the story a number of people have told regarding Turner’s actions and subsequent treatment by the criminal justice system. McMansion owners are typically white suburban people with money – not really rich, as this post suggests, but rich enough to expect others to be impressed with their standing (and home). In this narrative, the McMansion signals their posture to the world: we aren’t bad people and should be treated with respect.

It is tempting to link a house to a narrative in this way. On the other hand, what if Turner had returned to a more modest 1950s suburban ranch? Would we then see a connection to white conformity? Or, how about a early 20th century suburban bungalow that hints at the fastidious nature of whites who want to preserve some golden era? Or, would a pricey downtown condo conjure up images of high-flying urban nightlife? Since Turner is an unlikable figure to many, I suspect detractors could find all sorts of evidence from the consumer goods in his life – clothes, appearance, vehicle, shopping patterns, and home – to illustrate their dislike. Some of these objects may indeed be connected to white, middle/upper-middle class suburbanites.

This is the not the first time McMansions have been linked to immorality and crime. See, for example, the suggestions in Gone Girl. And such narratives have a much longer history in novels, films, and TV shows that in the postwar era loved to peel back the facade of suburban life to find its truly seemly underbelly. Whether such links and depictions are connected to demonstrable patterns of morality and criminality is another story…