Tag Archives: efficiency

The inefficiency of the construction industry

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One issue that affects American housing is the lack of efficiency in the construction industry:

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Companies like Reframe are trying to solve a conundrum scholars call the construction crisis. Although most sectors of the economy have gotten more efficient over time, construction has moved in the opposite direction—construction sites are less productive today than they were 50 years ago. It’s a genuine mystery, and everyone has their own pet theory about what’s to blame.

Efficiency is the answer to numerous perceived social issues in the United States. Make government more efficient. Make the distribution of resources or services more efficient. Get things done faster and at lower cost. And in the business world, who would be opposed to more efficiency?

I also recall some of the concerns expressed by critics about efficient home building operations. Take the Levitts mentioned in this article. Amid the various concerns expressed by many was a concern about the quality and character of homes that were mass produced. Would such homes stand for a long time? What does it do to community life when there are so few models available?

The example given in the article of efficient housing is modular housing. Part of this involves logistics; can it be produced at particular quantities and price points that makes it viable. But there will also be architectural and community questions. Will neighbors want to live next to it? Do early residents find it comparable to housing built by other methods? How does it stand up over time?

It would be interesting to ask Americans if they want “an efficient house.” Is the opposite of this “an inefficient house”? I’m not sure many think about in terms of efficiency when thinking about their residence.

Electrical grids working efficiently

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Infrastructure may work but not do so efficiently. One firm says this is the case for ComEd’s electrical grid:

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The ComEd territory essentially has the least efficient electrical grid in the country, with 40% of homes experiencing power distortion at 8% or greater, according to Whisker Labs. That means roughly 1.7 million ComEd customers are paying upward of $500 per year in energy waste, according to Bob Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Whisker Labs.

“ComEd in particular shows that they by far have the highest percentage of homes that have harmonics that are outside of industry acceptable limits,” Marshall told the Tribune. “It causes a reduction in the energy efficiency of everything that uses electricity in the home.”

The electricity provider did not agree with the assessment:

ComEd questioned the methodology behind the Whisker Labs data, and said it has one of the most reliable electric grids in the nation. At the same time, the utility acknowledged that the increased cost of the electricity is impacting many of its Chicago-area customers this summer, with low-income customers being hit the hardest.

It is one thing to have infrastructure in place. Is there electricity, water, the Internet, and more available? Are the roads driveable?

It is another question to ask whether that infrastructure is working as it could or should. If this claim is correct, what would life be like if the electrical grid worked more efficiently? Of if the water didn’t just come but the pipes were free of lead? Or if the transportation options were not just there but were ones that residents felt good about choosing? And so on.

Optimizing infrastructure can be tricky. How many people want to pay money now to improve things for benefits down the road? Is a 10% (or whatever the percentage is) improvement in efficiency worth it? These can be more difficult judgment calls that depend on current conditions and resources.

But I cannot imagine too many companies or places want to be last in rankings of infrastructure.

The small scale of American homebuilding prior to World War Two

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A new book on the work of the Levitts – Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia – includes this section about developers building at scale prior to the Second World War:

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The company had averaged more than two hundred houses per year at a time when just six firms nationwide were constructing as many as twenty-five homes annually in Levitt’s price range. Eighty-six percent of pre-war builders put up two or fewer houses a year, and 60 percent built only one. In 1947, the editors of Fortune magazine called homebuilding “The Industry Capitalism Forgot.” (17)

This is an important feature of postwar suburbia: the construction of single-family homes happened at a scale unknown in previous eras. Before then, many builders built few homes. It took time to put together a block. Neighborhoods and communities grew more slowly. After the war, subdivisions and communities with thousands of residents could emerge within a few years. Fields or woods could be turned into flat land for building quickly. Housing frames went up, the trades came through and did their parts, people moved into completed homes.

The scale and efficiency is hard to compare between these two eras. It is like two completely different processes. The Levitt company argued the new approach allowed them to get needed homes into the hands of people, particularly veterans (but not Black residents), at an affordable price point. Critics said the process led to conformity and a lack of true community. Either way, new communities quickly developed and the processes were adopted by other builders and developers.

Trying to make the American “feeling economy” measurable and efficient

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Sociologist Allison Pugh suggests we are heading toward a “feeling economy” with measurement:

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Erin is one of millions, from teachers to therapists to managers to hairdressers, whose work relies on relationship. By some accounts, the U.S. is moving from a “thinking economy” to a “feeling economy,” as many deploy their emotional antennae to bear witness and reflect back what they understand so that clients, patients, and students feel seen. I’ve come to call this work “connective labor,” and the connections it forges matter. It can be profoundly meaningful for the people involved, and it has demonstrable effects: We know that doctor–patient relationships, for instance, are more effective than a daily aspirin to ward off heart attacks.

But this work is increasingly being subjected to new systems that try to render it more efficient, measurable, and reproducible. At best, firms implement these systems assuming that such interventions will not get in the way of workers and clients connecting. At worst, they ignore or dismiss those connections altogether. Even these complex interpersonal jobs are facing efforts to gather information and assessment data and to introduce technology. Moneyball has come for connective labor…

Connective labor is increasingly being subjected to new systems that try to make it more predictable, measurable, efficient—and reproducible. If we continue to prioritize efficiency over relationship, we degrade jobs that have the potential to forge profound meaning between people and, along the way, make them more susceptible to automation and A.I., creating a new kind of haves and have-nots: those divided by access to other people’s attention.

To quantify relationships could be difficult in itself. It requires attaching measurements to human connections. Some of these features are easier to capture than others. In today’s world, if a conversation or interaction or relationship happens without “proof,” is it real? This proof could come in many forms. A social media post. A digital picture taken. Activity recorded by a smart watch. An activity log written by hand or captured by a computer.

Then to scale relationships is another matter. A one to one connection multiplied dozens of time throughout a day or hundreds or thousands of times across a longer span presents other difficulties. How many relationships can one have? How much time should each interaction take? Are there regular metrics to meet? What if the relationship or interaction goes a less predictable direction, particularly when it might require more time and care?

Given what we can measure and track now and the scale of society today, the urge to measure relationships will likely continue. Whether people and employees push back more strongly against the quest to quantify and be efficient remains to be seen.

Walking to go somewhere or interact with people in contrast to walking suburban loops for exercise

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Several months ago, I heard Andrew Peterson discuss “The Mystery of Making.” As he talked about places and suburbs, he mentioned something about walking: suburbanites walk in loops instead of having walks that go somewhere or involve interacting with people.

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As a suburbanite who walks both for exercise and in order to get to places, this is a thing. This could occur for multiple reasons:

  1. The design of suburbs limits walking options. Because of the emphasis on single-family homes and separating them from other uses, suburbanites may not be able to access many places as pedestrians. Can they get to schools, libraries, stores, workplaces?
  2. Perhaps suburbanites do not want to interact with many people. Suburbanites want to avoid conflict and interaction happens when people want it, not necessarily because of proximity or an orientation toward the community. Add headphones/earbuds/smartphones to this and pedestrians can be in their own waking cocoon.
  3. This sounds like a focus on walking as exercise as opposed to walking as a means to accomplish other worthwhile goals. Such a focus sounds like it would fit with American emphases on efficiency or productivity.
  4. If you really need to get somewhere, Americans often opt for a car, even when the route is walkable.

Having more walkable places would likely help here but it does not necessarily guarantee sociability or walking as transportation.

Trying to convince Illinois drivers to use zipper merges

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New recommendations from the Illinois Department of Transportation mean drivers should expect to see more zipper merges:

Most people aren’t familiar with the zipper merge and have never even heard of it. But with construction season just a couple months away, the Illinois Department of Transportation wants drivers to use the zipper merge technique when approaching lane closures…

Experts believe that is the quickest way to get through construction sites and entrances on highways during busy season.

So much so that a new law for 2020 mandates the zipper merge be included in this year’s Illinois Rules of the Road handbook, following many other states that already use the technique like Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Montana and Nevada, to name a few…

Not only is the zipper merge a safer and more efficient way to merge into traffic, it’s the law and carries a $164 fine, not including court costs and fees.

Changing decades of ingrained patterns is not an easy task. New drivers can be trained on this from the start but many drivers have been operating with different methods for decades. However, I would guess the presence of police and the use of tickets in situations where zipper merges will now be expected could help prompt people to follow the new guidelines. Or, imagine a campaign on public media where drivers who do not follow the guidelines are highlighted.

The one thing I do not get about resistance to zipper merges and the drivers who look to block traffic is that it is inefficient to not follow the zipper merge. Theoretically, everyone wants to to get where they need to go as quickly as possible. Hence, rampant speeding and other behavior intended to save time. Zipper merges are supposed to help with this which should be a win-win for everyone.

Other cities learned from Chicago’s privatization of parking meters

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Failures in one city can help other cities learn what not to do:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel aggressively pushed to privatize 311 in 2015, telling journalists it would save the city “about a million dollars a year” to run the system using contractors. Hiring an outside operator would save the city from shouldering the cost of sorely needed improvements to a 20-year-old system, he suggested.

City officials weren’t thrilled at the idea. A famously unpleasant privatization effort was still in people’s minds. About 10 years ago, Chicago made an 80-year deal to pass control over its parking meters to a private firm in exchange for a $1.2 billion lump sum. The firm promptly made more than half that lump sum in revenue for itself—and still has 70 years of returns. (I wrote about this in WIRED last year.)

But that parking meter deal has been remarkably generative: It has dampened enthusiasm for privatization in cities around the country. Left to its own rational profit-making devices, a private company will systematically squeeze services to the bare minimum and avoid additional investments. That’s fine for margins, but not always great for the public.

And so when Emanuel proposed privatizing 311, scores of Chicago aldermen felt emboldened to fight.

At least other cities and Chicago now think twice before privatizing certain services. This could also lead to at least a few interesting interesting research questions:

  1. Part of the pitch for privatization was increased efficiency. Would more reluctance for such deals hold back cities in certain ways?
  2. How have private companies shifted their efforts now that cities may be wiser about making such deals? I assume this means that profit margins on such deals are smaller…

Why suburbanites want to have their own police departments and local governments

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Writing about a recent incident of police violence in a Pittsburgh suburb, one writer looking at all of the small police forces in suburbia asks:

It’s not often clear what the rationale is for these small municipalities to have their own city administrations and law enforcement agencies.

And he later says:

If having multiple police departments makes for inefficient and unprofessional work across St. Louis County, imagine what it means for Allegheny County, which has almost twice as many police departments. Micro-department intrusions add up to macro-resentment of police in general.

The argument for efficiency in consolidating local government and police forces may make sense in this particular context. Perhaps a larger-scale police force could better avoid such incidents through training and more familiarity with a broader area.

But, there are two related and powerful reasons that the American urban landscape is broken into so many local governments: Americans like the idea of local control and they like the idea of living in a small town. In a smaller community and with their own officials, Americans think they can exert more influence on local processes and the size of each local agency does not become too large. It is theoretically much easier to meet an official or register a complaint or run for local office if there is a major precipitating issue. This can especially be the case with wealthier suburbs that want to maintain their exclusivity by remaining small.

The only factor that may push suburbs and smaller communities to give up this dream of local control and small town life is difficult financial positions or seeking certain efficiencies. See an example of Maine communities that have dissolved due to a lack of local revenue. Illinois has tried banning the formation of new local taxing bodies while DuPage County has moved to reduce the number of local governments. But, if the resources are there, Americans might prefer these small units of government. (Another argument that could be leveled at all these small governments is that they may be corrupt or inept. Small suburbs can become little fiefdoms with weird rules, as illustrated by Ferguson and other communities in St. Louis County. But, even in those cases it is less clear that the residents of these small suburbs do not like their local governments where it may seem obvious to outsiders that there are problems.)

Also, it is important to note for this story that Pennsylvania is a leader among states regarding the number of local governments. Not every state does it the same way. Similarly, many metropolitan regions in the South and West are much larger in terms of square miles compared to Rust Belt cities that had difficulties annexing any suburbs into city limits after 1900.

Using behavioral science to improve interaction with government

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President Obama signed an executive order yesterday that promotes using behavioral science to make the government more user-friendly and efficient:

The report features the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team’s first year of projects, which have made government programs easier to access and more user-friendly, and have boosted program efficiency and integrity. As a result of these projects, more Servicemembers are saving for retirement, more students are going to college, more Veterans are accessing their benefits, more farmers are obtaining credit, and more families are gaining healthcare coverage.

The Federal Government administers a wide array of programs on behalf of the American people, such as financial aid to assist with college access and workplace savings plans to promote retirement security. Americans are best served when these programs are easy to access and when program choices and information are presented clearly. When programs are designed without these considerations in mind, Americans can incur real consequences. One behavioral science study found, for example, that a complex application process for college financial aid not only decreased applications for aid, but also led some students to delay or forgo going to college altogether.

Behavioral science insights—research insights about how people make decisions—not only identify aspects of programs that can act as barriers to engagement, but also provide policymakers with insight into how those barriers can be removed through commonsense steps, such as simplifying communications and making choices more clear. That same study on financial aid found that streamlining the process of applying—by providing families with assistance and enabling families to automatically fill parts of the application using information from their tax return—increased the rates of both aid applications and college enrollment.

On one hand, the administration suggests this improves efficiency and helps people make use of the help available to them. On the other hand, there are predictable responses from the other side: “Obama issues Orwellian executive order.”

These are not new ideas. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (who tweeted the news of the executive order) wrote the 2008 book titled Nudge that makes policy recommendations based on such science. For example, instead of having people opt-in to programs like setting aside matched retirement savings or organ donor programs, change the default to opting out rather than opting in and see participation rates rise.

I imagine both parties might want to use this to their advantage (though it might might rile up the conservative base a bit more if it was made public) when promoting their own policies.

Driverless buses could improve mass transit

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Discussion of driverless buses in Britain highlights the efficiency they could offer, leading to improved service:

Claire Perry, the Transport Minister, said that operating buses without drivers could help companies provide “better and more frequent” services, particularly in rural areas.

She also revealed that work is already under way to identify any problematic “regulatory issues” which could prevent the vehicles being rolled out on roads across Britain.

Speaking at the Driverless Vehicles Conference at Thatcham on Wednesday, Mrs Perry said she could “see a future where driverless buses provide better and more frequent services”.

“A major component of rural transport is the cost of the driver – and so a truly driverless bus could transform rural public transport in the future,” she said.

Driverless cars offer safety and commuting convenience but this is a twist: mass transit could be more frequent and cheaper without drivers. It would be interesting to know how much cheaper this could be. Would this mean a 20% increase in bus service for the same price or is it something even more drastic? If so, perhaps this could make buses a lot more attractive, particularly in rural or suburban areas where riders may not necessarily want to ride with a lot of other people and want service that doesn’t inconvenience them much.