Tag Archives: infrastructure

Essay on Chicago’s alleys

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You aren’t going to find too many erudite essays like this one on the subject of Chicago’s alleys:

Thus, alleys in Chicago, as in most other cities, evolved organically: as a general product of function and construction, but with modulations in dimension, materiality, position, and construction, readily changed to suit the needs of its neighbors and occupants. Fluxing along their entire lengths, they cut a byzantine pattern in the city’s figure ground, contributing to its unmistakable appearance in plan without serving as the primary warp and weft of the fabric…

The results are not always beautiful or orthodox, but they are usually interesting; alleys seen in this light could be conceived as both museums and laboratories for material combinations and adjacencies, methods of assembly and detailing. But in another light, alleys are urban canyons—broken glass, vegetation clinging to the fragile mortar joints, with a single swath of sky above: more products of time and erosion, with human intervention to architectonic formations what glaciers are to geology. Again: raw super-nature registered through a Kantian impression of the sublime…

And consider this: glamour in its modern manifestations is generally assigned to objects and places that are alluring, attractive, and special. Its secondary connotation is less positive; a permutation of Norse and Scottish words that tie it to illusion and obfuscation, spells of the eye meant to conceal true natures. In that vein, is it so difficult to see ordinary as glamour, and alleys as extraordinary? We would do well to keep ourselves open; there may be something truly remarkable lying in plain sight within the gravel and brick.

For those who know cities well, I suspect many of them could tell of places where they found something sublime in the non-glamorous places. Much of the attention paid to major cities focuses on major works (like skylines) while residents and others who take a longer and deeper look see a different side.

I was reminded of Chicago’s alleys recently when showing my class part of Mitchell Duneier’s video supplement to his ethnography Sidewalk. In the film, we see images of the subjects of his research – homeless street vendors – wandering through New York City’s garbage in order to find books, magazines, and other things to sell at their sidewalk tables. There was so much garbage simply piled at the curb, not exactly a glamorous sight. In contrast, alleys allow some of these basic functions to be moved behind buildings and open up sidewalks for more pedestrian and social uses.

Mining Twitter for ratings of mass transit and what the agencies can do in response

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A new study examined Twitter comments about mass transit in the United States and Canada and came up with a ranking of those invoking the most positive and negative sentiments:

The results of her study, published this month in the Journal of the American Planning Association, ranked 10 of the largest public transit agencies in the US and Canada by how well regarded they are on Twitter. Based on Schweitzer’s “mean sentiment score” and more than 60,000 tweets collected between 2010 and 2014, Twitter was nicest to Vancouver’s Translink, which was followed by Portland, Oregon’s TriMet and Toronto’s TTC. The harshest tweets concerned systems in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. For comparison, Schweitzer calculated scores for public figures (the sentiment score ranged from William Shatner to Osama Bin Laden), airlines, police departments, and welfare programs (the full chart is at the bottom of this post).

Schweitzer used text mining to pick out positive and negative words from the tweets (and manually added terms including brokedown, wtf, scam, epicfail, pervy, and unsuck). Machine learning helped spot things like parody accounts and unusually frequent tweeters. Schweitzer and her graduate students also analyzed some 5,000 tweets by hand, to ensure they lined up with the computer system’s interpretations. Reasons for complaint included delays, facilities, staff conduct, public mismanagement, and the class, race, and gender of other riders.

Here’s the funny thing: The transit system’s scores don’t line up with service quality (judged by on-time performance). But the unsurprising fact that public griping doesn’t necessarily match reality doesn’t make the data useless. Because Schweitzer did find one factor that predicts “mean sentiment”—the way the transit agencies themselves behave on Twitter…

So what’s the takeaway? If you’re looking for a low investment way to improve your public image on Twitter, use Twitter as a tool for conversation, not one-way communication. It may seem that someone complaining to 18 followers that their train is late doesn’t matter, but Schweitzer makes the point that social media does influence broader public perceptions.

Engaging in public relations on social media is not new. However, the idea that government agencies or infrastructure organizations need to may be more recent. On one hand, Americans expect government to be responsive. On the other hand, mass transit is one of those areas that seems monolithic: leaders in those organizations are not elected and infrastructure faces its own kind of difficulties (aging, weather issues, particular funding sources, a sort of permanence that is difficult to change quickly). But, at least the disgruntled might feel heard if there is social media interaction even if their complaints are not fixed immediately.

Possible next steps: would major mass transit groups make policy decisions based on Twitter? Remember, a small percentage of Americans use Twitter regularly but those users can be pretty vocal and/or well positioned in society.

Approaching drastic water rationing in Sao Paulo

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One downside of rapid urban growth is illustrated in Brazil where drastic water rationing may start soon:

In São Paulo, the country’s largest city with a metropolitan area of 20 million people, the main reservoir is at just 6 percent of capacity with the peak of the rainy season now past…

After January rains disappointed, and incentives to cut consumption fell short, São Paulo officials warned their next step could be to shut off customers’ water supply for as many as five days a week – a measure that would likely last until the next rainy season starts in October, if not longer.

State officials say they have not yet decided whether or when to implement such rationing, in part because they are still hoping for heavy rains in February and March. Indeed, thunderstorms in recent days have caused lakes to rise a bit.

Still, independent projections suggest that São Paulo’s main Cantareira reservoir could run out of water as soon as April without drastic cuts to consumption.

While this problem may seem far away, I imagine numerous big cities around the world would face major problems in addressing a shortage of certain resources if something “out of the ordinary” – whether weather or changing political conditions – occurred. Wealthier big cities are expected at the most basic level to have water, electricity, sewers, and other features of modern infrastructure but these could be threatened by a variety of factors. And while the article notes that residents and institutions are scrambling to meet the crisis, cities should have some sort of long-term planning for some of these foreseeable issues.

The county with the worst roads for traveling in the Chicago region

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The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning has a new data tool online and it provides insights into the commuting experiences of Chicago area residents:

CMAP planners say it’s time to “get people excited about data.” The hope is CMAP’s constituents — Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties — will use the facts to understand why certain projects deserve prioritization and funding. To access the data, go to http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/mobility/explore…

To that end, a section on ride quality includes detailed maps measuring pavement conditions on both expressways and major roads. A snapshot of counties’ ride quality on major roads puts Cook County with a 47 percent rating compared to 72 percent in DuPage, 80 percent in Kane and 83 percent in Lake and 90 percent in McHenry.

Other data available includes stats on bridges in need of repair, pavement quality, the number of passengers boarding at Metra and CTA stops and the worst railway crossings for delays in the region — FYI, it’s on Chicago’s South Side at Morgan Street and Pershing Road with 3,194 vehicles delayed a day.

Taken cumulatively, the website sends a message that the region’s infrastructure needs more capital to avoid gridlock, stagnant transit and deteriorating roads. The warning is timely, with a new governor in Springfield and a push for state and federal multiyear capital programs.

Two things strike me as interesting:

1. I always like the idea of putting more data into people’s hands. Commuting is a common experience and one that people would probably want to see improved. However, without data that moves behind individual and/or anecdotal evidence, it is hard to have conversations about the bigger picture in the region.

2. Some people may like data but it is another thing to translate that data access into collective action. Assuming that some people go to this site, will they then take an interest in infrastructure projects? Will they contact political officials? Will they vote differently? How exactly CMAP goes about putting this data into action is worth paying attention to.

Collecting data to see if cyclists break traffic laws more than drivers

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Cyclists and drivers often do not get along but which group breaks the law more? Some researchers are hoping to find out:

These questions about sociology and infrastructure point to a more nuanced picture of what’s happening on city streets than most heated rhetoric — darn law-breaking bikers! — allows. Marshall, who co-directs the Active Communities Transportation Research Group with Kevin Krizek, wants to research this scofflaw behavior, why people say they do it (drivers and cyclists alike), and when they don’t.

As part of this research project, they and Ph.D. student Aaron Johnson and Savannah State’s Dan Piatkowski are running a survey that they hope will gather broad data on all of our behavior (go ahead and help science out here, even if you’re not a cyclist yourself).

Most of us, whatever mode we travel, break the law at some point, Marshall points out, whether we’re driving five miles over the speed limit, or crossing the street against the crosswalk. And yet, we tend not to treat lead-footed drivers with the same disapproval as cyclists who ride through stop signs, even though the former behavior is potentially more publicly harmful than the latter. Which raises another question: Are cyclists really more prolific scofflaws than drivers anyway?

More data on the scofflaws inside all of us could potentially help create safer streets, even, Marshall imagines, more productive public debate about how cars and cyclists coexist. There is some evidence, for instance, that cyclists may be less likely to ride the wrong way down one-way streets and more likely to wait at red lights when they’re given dedicated bike paths. This would make sense for a number of reasons.

I would like to think that having more data would solve the issues and help both sides look at the situation more rationally. However, I suspect both cyclists and drivers might prefer more anecdotal stories that privilege their own perspectives. People on the roads tend to get angry with the people right in front of them rather than with abstract groups. However, the data could be used to change the infrastructure – more bike lanes? more regulations for cyclists? Roads with no markings or separation from the sidewalks? – which then might have more direct effects.

When the underground borer Bertha gets stuck under Seattle – for a year

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The construction of massive infrastructure underground can be impressive but it doesn’t always go as planned:

A year ago this month, North America’s largest tunnel-boring machine got stuck just 10 percent of the way through a 1.7-mile-long dig under downtown Seattle. Throughout 2014, engineers have been plugging away on an ambitious plan, outlined in a Popular Mechanics feature, to free the mechanical marvel and get the project going again.

But today, Bertha remains stuck under the city. And according to an update from The New York Times, crews monitoring the project to free the machine have noticed something alarming: one inch worth of settling in the downtown district under which Bertha now sits…

Instead, investigators eventually concluded that Bertha was overheating—that grime and gunk had gotten past bearing seals, entered the machine, and muddied the operation. Engineers still aren’t sure why all this happened to the 326-foot-long machine, but they decided they had replace not only the seals but also the $5 million main bearing.

But just getting to Bertha, which sat more than 60 feet below downtown Seattle near the stadium district and the waterfront, posed a serious problem. Crews could go through the painstaking, time-sucking process of disassembling the machine from behind to make the fixes, but instead chose to dig a 120-foot-deep access pit in front of Bertha.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that such a big project could lead to a problem that doesn’t have a quick fix. Putting together a machine this size is notable in itself and getting it back on track likely requires a lot of careful planning and long hours. Yet, these sorts of projects tend to go on without much attention until they are done and people experience the benefits. Unless something goes wrong. It would be interesting to see how Seattle responds to the delay and if someone is blamed for the problems, what kind of negative consequences they suffer.

Modern wonder: NYC’s water system

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Here is a look at the vast system that keeps pumping clean water flowing in New York City:

The pipes that carry this life-giving force are largely invisible to New York’s thirsty masses. (Here’s a great map.) The system includes 19 reservoirs nestled in the rolling hills and mountains, draining a sprawling 1.2 million-acre watershed; three controlled lakes; 300 miles of underground thruways, including one that burrows 1,100 feet underneath the Hudson River; and thousands of miles of thin pipe under New York’s streets. Together, they deliver fresh, potable water to 8.4 million people in New York City and another 1 million people upstate…

The system emerged as a matter of necessity. “New York City developed this water system because it was unlucky,” says Kenneth T. Jackson, the Columbia University historian and authority on New York City. “It couldn’t could take water out of the rivers, because the Hudson is salty all the way up to Poughkeepsie.” In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the city’s growing number of residents relied on wells, water brought in on ships, and spring-fed ponds like the Collect (near what is now Foley Square), which quickly turned into dumping grounds for sewage and garbage. The fetid waters helped spawn the cholera epidemic of 1832, which killed more than 3,500 residents. And the absence of significant water sources in city streets thick with wooden buildings led to a series of disastrous fires. After the Great Fire of 1835, which consumed about 700 structures, municipal leaders were moved to act…

Built at a time when the city’s population stood at about 200,000, the Croton system served well until the early 1900s. By then, New York’s population soared to more than 3 million, thanks to immigration, expansion, and the annexation of the Bronx and Brooklyn. In the early 20th century, the city expanded the system to develop new resources in the Catskills. The Ashokan Reservoir, whose creation required the submerging of seven villages, came into service in 1915. A system of pipes and canals were constructed to ferry water via the Catskill Aqueduct 92 miles to the Kensico and Hillview Reservoirs in Westchester—including a circular tunnel with a diameter of 14 feet that goes 1,100 feet under the Hudson River near West Point. Water Tunnels No. 1 (completed in 1917) and No. 2 (completed in 1937) carried the water from Yonkers into Manhattan. Next came the Delaware system to the city’s northwest. Starting in the 1950s, vast pools of water created by damming tributaries of the Delaware River were fed into new infrastructure, including the Delaware Aqueduct, which at 82 miles is the longest continuous underground water tunnel in the world. Here, again, gravity does the work. The highest reservoirs are about 1,200 feet above sea level. And the volume of water pushing down through the pipes creates an enormous amount of power. Today, Bosch notes, “the pressure is so great that it can take it to the sixth floor of most boroughs without any pumping,” said Bosch.

The 500 miles of fat pipes upstate are augmented by 6,500 miles of narrower underground conduits that run underneath the five boroughs, from the crags of Riverdale to the distant, wave-tossed shores of the Rockaways. From the Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers, right on the Bronx border, pipes plunge a few hundred feet into one of the three massive water tunnels that carry water to the south about 500 feet below ground level. Every 20 blocks or so, vertical tunnels sprout up to feed into trunk water mains, with a diameter of about a foot. Ultimately, they connect to buildings, whose pipes are private property.

It would be really difficult to have the #1 global city without a well-designed water system. Such planning and engineering may not get much attention in explaining New York City’s rise but it certainly had to be present. Interestingly, histories of Chicago tend to note the importance of reversing the flow of the Chicago River so that waste was sent downstream towards the Mississippi rather than into Lake Michigan where it polluted the water supply.

“Why Congress won’t raise the gas tax”

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Gas prices are lower and the money is needed for highways but one writer suggests Congress is nowhere near raising the gas tax:

Fuel prices are plunging to their lowest level in years. The Highway Trust Fund is broke, and Congress faces a spring deadline to replenish it. The obvious answer—the only answer, according to many in Washington—is to raise the 18.4 cent-per-gallon gas tax, which hasn’t gone up in more than 20 years. Since prices at the pump have dropped more than a dollar per gallon in some areas, drivers would barely notice the extra nickel they’d be forced initially to pay as a result of the tax hike. That wasn’t true until recently: For years, the pocketbook punch of the Great Recession combined with gas prices that peaked above $4 made an increase both politically and economically untenable.

Yet even with prices at a four-year low, the odds of Congress touching the gas tax are as long as ever. “I think it’s too toxic and continues to be too toxic,” said Steve LaTourette, the former Republican congressman best known for his close friendship with his fellow Ohioan, Speaker John Boehner. “I see no political will to get this done.”…

Advocates on and off Capitol Hill are mounting a new push to lift the gas tax as Republicans prepare to assume full control of Congress in January. Funding for the Highway Trust Fund will run out May 31. On 60 Minutes last month, officials including former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell used the specter of a major bridge or highway collapse to warn of the need for new investments. LaHood, a Republican who was once rebuked by the Obama White House for suggesting a switch to a mileage-based tax, is now going public on the gas tax, in his typically colorful style. “The best argument for doing it is is that America is one big pothole,” he told me in a phone interview, “and America’s infrastructure is in the worst shape that we’ve seen in decades.”…

In a separate interview, Blumenauer said the administration had recently “dialed back” its opposition, with senior officials telling lawmakers that if Congress could somehow pass a gas tax hike, he would sign it. Yet just a few hours after his and Petri’s press conference, Obama himself seemed to put their plan back on ice. At a business roundtable at the White House, FedEx CEO Frederick Smith asked Obama why Congress couldn’t just raise the gas tax and solve the infrastructure problem. “In fairness to members of Congress, votes on the gas tax are really tough,” the president replied, after first chuckling that if it he were in charge on Capitol Hill, “I probably already would have done it.”

It sounds like Congress thinks that such a move would be very unpopular. Americans like driving (even if they have cut back in recent years), prefer cheaper gas, believe the country is still experiencing tough economic times, and many don’t want to personally pay more in taxes. Yet, it makes some sense that highways should be funded by the gas tax: if you use the highways and associated infrastructure, you should help bear some of the cost.

Is Congress responsible for this or the American people? The article suggests Congress won’t act but Congress suggests the American people wouldn’t want it. Are both groups pretty blind to infrastructure needs or long-term investments? In the short-term, few people want to pay the necessary costs but no one will like it if the situation becomes dire.

Threatening to cut off the NSA’s water supply in Utah

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Here’s one way to fight a political battle against the NSA: consider stopping the flow of water to a facility you don’t like.

Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

The legislation, proposed by Utah lawmaker Marc Roberts, is due to go to the floor of the Utah House of Representatives early next year, but it was debated in a Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee meeting on Wednesday. The bill, H.B. 161, directs municipalities like Bluffdale to “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.”

The NSA brought its Bluffdale data center online about a year ago, taking advantage Utah’s cheap power and a cut-rate deal for millions of gallons of local water, used to cool the 1-million-square-foot building’s servers. Roberts’ bill, however, would prohibit the NSA from negotiating new water deals when its current Bluffdale agreement runs out in 2021.

The law seems like a long-shot to clear legislative hurdles when Utah’s legislature re-convenes next year, but Wednesday’s committee hearing was remarkable, nonetheless, says Nate Carlisle, a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune who has waged a fight with the NSA and Bluffdale officials to determine how much water the data center is actually using. “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,’” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.”

All of this does suggest an interesting tactic in the arsenal of local governments yet I have a hard time imagining the possible outcomes. The federal government finds an independent water supply? There is a massive lawsuit about whether a local government can limit the water supply to a federal agency? The threat pushes the federal government to move their facilities elsewhere? The federal government ensures any new facility has much longer contracts for basic services? Regardless, I would guess this situation wouldn’t be resolved quickly.

Related thought: given serious droughts – like the one in California – could the government require a larger share of water to maintain “critical” functions over the needs of other users?

 

Heading off a future where American cities suffer more power outages

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One sign of urban growth around the world is the proliferation of urban lights. But, what happens if many American cities are at risk for blackouts?

Electricity blackouts will become more common as surging power demand outpaces public and private utilities’ abilities to provide a continuous and reliable flow of power to customers, a new research paper asserts.

The problem, while global in scope, could be especially pronounced in urban areas where old and often fragile power distribution systems are being tested in ways not conceived of a generation ago, states the research paper that examined the causes behind 50 blackout events in 26 countries since 2003, including several major U.S. outages.

“Understanding the nature of blackouts is more than just a record of past failures,” researchers Hugh Byrd and Steve Matthewman write in the Journal of Urban Technology. “[B]lackouts are dress rehearsals for the future in which they will appear with greater frequency and severity, and as urban areas become more compact, with greater consequences.”

Their research paper, titled “Energy and the City: The Technology and Sociology of Power (Failure),” is the latest in a series of studies examining grid failures and warning that the world should “prepare for the prospect of coping without electricity as instances of complete power failure become increasingly common.”…

The paper estimates the economic damage caused by power outages in the United States alone at $25 billion to $180 billion annually, although the indirect costs of such disruptions could be up to five times greater.

It is a little difficult to operate a world-class city when the power is out or if there are consistent threats of blackouts. As this paper suggests, such incidents could be crippling given the amount of critical infrastructure and day-to-day necessities are dependent on electricity.

If this is the case, what are cities doing about it? Not having enough electricity is a fundamental issue that requires large-scale attention. Building power plants, transmission lines, and resilient systems are not sexy but they are critical.