Here’s a post on what housing can look like at various levels of density.
what density looks like
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VMT, traffic, and density
This post provides evidence that increasing density (households per acre) does indeed reduce vehicle miles traveled per household. The thing is that what people experience is not vehicle miles per household, it is “traffic” and the inconvenience of parking. So even if driving per person or household decreases, the inconvenience of daily life will still increase until you get to a point where cars are unnecessary for most daily work, school, shopping, and leisure trips. I picture a curve where convenience decreases with density up to a certain point, and then increases again. People who have experienced only the decreasing side of the curve have trouble understanding what it would be like to get over the hump and up the other side. And this plays right into the hands of the highway-oil-auto industrial complex.
Shot Spotter
Shot Spotter is a set of microphones installed on telephone poles around a city that is supposed to allow police to respond rapidly to gun shots. It actually came to mind when I read recently about people in violence-impacted Philadelphia neighborhoods asking the police for more cameras. This article is about Chicago, and is generally critical of the technology on racial justice grounds. It sounds like the system there is perceived as yet another way for the police to harass people. That sounds bad, but I can imagine this being one more piece of evidence useful for prosecuting a violent crime after the fact. I can imagine a combination of video, audio, and eyewitness testimony being pretty persuasive.
food crisis moves off the business page
I’ve been thinking that when the food shortage headlines move off the (proverbial at this point) business pages and on to the (equally proverbial) front page, the situation may be coming to a head. Well, here is an Associated Press article on the subject (link is to the Philadelphia Inquirer but you can probably find the article elsewhere).
The Treasury Department announced that several global development banks are “working swiftly to bring to bear their financing, policy engagement, technical assistance” to prevent starvation prompted by the war, rising food costs and climate damage to crops.
Tens of billions will be spent on supporting farmers, addressing the fertilizer supply crisis, and developing land for food production, among other issues. The Asian Development Bank will contribute funds to feeding Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and the African Development Bank will use $1.5 billion to assist 20 million African farmers, according to Treasury…
As part of the effort to address the crisis, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will convene meetings in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. over the next two days focusing on food insecurity.
Philadelphia Inquirer
So the issue has not just moved from the business pages to news pages, it has moved from the Treasury Department to the State Department. You could say this situation has developed among a perfect storm of pandemic, climate change-driven droughts and storms, and now an unexpected war. But we live in a world where apparently supply was tight enough that the food system was not ready to absorb these shocks. Now the question becomes are we approaching physical/environmental limits for how much food the world can support, or can we boost production by opening up more land and dumping more fertilizer on it? And even if the latter is true, what is the lag time to make that happen compared to the time scale of the current crisis? And even if we solve these short term issues, are we preparing for the risks in the future? Is the current situation truly something so extreme we could not reasonably have prepared for it, or is it a magnitude of risk we should be expecting in an compromised biosphere and we need to be preparing for next time?
micro-transit
A number of public transportation agencies have been experimenting with micro-transit, where buses (or sometimes smaller vehicles) operate on-demand and are dispatched by algorithms. I like the idea – it seems like a possible way to provide service in low-density suburbs, unless we are going to start building differently. However, this op-ed from WHYY says it hasn’t gone well. Keep in mind the author is an advocate for transit riders and transit unions. It’s possible the person is cherry-picking examples or that the pilots in question for poorly implemented and managed.
On average, microtransit pilots across the U.S. have a ridership of zero to three riders per hour, with most pilots operating much closer to zero than three. For comparison, the Route 127, one of the most confusing and infrequent buses in SEPTA’s network, still moves an average of 13.9 passengers per revenue hour. When AC Transit in Oakland, Cal. replaced one of its low-performing fixed-routes with microtransit, the per passenger subsidy more than doubled. And when Kansas City attempted microtransit, the ridership was so low that by the end of the pilot, they ended up paying $1,000 per passenger to operate the service.
WHYY
To be fair, this article is specifically arguing against implementation of this option by SEPTA (Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Agency), which is not known for above-average implementation or management. The currently have an app which provides real-time data on bus and train arrival, but the data seems to be supplied by a random number generator. So I would not be too hopeful that they would be the first to pull this off successfully. Maybe they should just give everybody a pre-paid card to use Uber, or hire small-time taxi drivers who lost their life savings when that industry was upended a few years ago.
more police cameras
Since I was recently musing about police cameras, here is an article about San Francisco police using footage from cameras on autonomous vehicles.
While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may one day offer, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.
“Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “Investigations has already done this several times.”
Vice
My first reaction was why is a camera on an autonomous vehicle more sinister than one on any other vehicle. But I guess the point here is that all autonomous vehicles collect camera footage, so it is a large potential data source for the police to tap. I am not sure I have a big problem with this. A Go Pro camera is kind of expensive, and I don’t have one. When a driver threatened to kill me recently when I was riding my bike 100% legally on a one-lane city street, I tried to pull out my phone and get some footage but it wasn’t very good. I wouldn’t mind at all if someone else had recorded evidence of that crime. There is not much point in my bothering to report it to police when it would just be a claim not backed by any evidence. But especially if the guy continues to harass me (which has already happened once) it would be good to have a record. I don’t think the guy is actually dangerous though, he is just an ignorant asshole at least when he is behind the wheel.
food and commodities
Articles about the “commodities market” are a bit brain twisting if you’re not in that biz. For example:
When you buy or sell a financial commodity product by a future on the exchange like the London Metal Exchange, you just pay a fee, an initiation margin call, and then your broker buys on your behalf the full position. If the market moves against you, you pay a bit more margin, and if the market goes in your favor, you get a bit more money from your broker. As the market was starting to go up, the Big Shot position was underwater and the brokers were demanding more money from this position. When the whole market is caught in that situation, we get a short squeeze, which forces everyone who was betting on the downside to buy back their positions because they are facing billions of dollars of margin calls. It got to a point where the market went up 250 percent in about thirty-six hours, with margin calls in the billions. The exchange had no option but to shut down trading. This is a very unusual situation; it only happens once every few decades that a major commodity market has to shut down.
What if a similar situation were to happen in the oil, wheat, or gas market? What would be the consequences for the global economy? Are the commodity traders and the commodity exchanges “too big to fail”? Their failure will bring chaos to the global economy not through the credit channel but through the real economy, perhaps through shortages or crippling high prices.
Phenomenal World (which I never heard of, but this is a transcript of an interview with a Bloomberg reporter)
So this is how the first warnings of a serious global food crisis could come out. So watch the digital equivalent of the business pages.
city biodiversity
This paper in Urban Forestry and Urban Greening suggests three ways to increase biodiversity in cities.
Consideration of the three key factors influencing biodiversity identified here (grassland extent, land-use in the surroundings, and management intensity) would provide the optimal options for maintaining city biodiversity. Protecting current urban grasslands from development and restricting construction in their surroundings, restoring city wilderness areas using urban spatial planning, and setting up butterfly-friendly management regimes (e.g., mowing in mosaic) could all be future options to help enhance biodiversity in cities.
Urban Forestry and Urban Greening
These sound like measures the average U.S. homeowner’s association will gleefully embrace (#irony).
police cameras
This article in the (paywalled) Philadelphia Inquirer says people in neighborhoods with large numbers of shootings are asking for more police cameras. I surprises me a little because it goes against the idea that people in these neighborhoods do not trust the police. This would support the idea that people want to be policed, i.e. protected from violence, as long as they feel they are being policed fairly. A certain level of fear seems to be the tipping point where people are more willing to give up some privacy in return for safety.
People want violent crimes to be solved and violent people to be brought to justice. They don’t want to be harassed. So it’s a fine line – police could use these cameras along with facial recognition to track people on probation or parole, for example, or even just people who have been arrested in the past. I don’t know if police are allowed to access driver’s license or passport photo databases, but if they are they could probably track anybody. I’m not paranoid about these things because the technology of tyranny has clearly existed for some time, and we have to work through our political system to make sure our rights are protected. We are hearing that there is “no constitutional right to privacy”. As wonderful as our 18th century founding fathers were, they could not have imagined these technologies. Maybe it is time for a 21st century bill of rights.
numbers on vegetarianism in the UK
Our World in Data articles are always interesting to look at, partly just to see how they visualize data. We also know (at at least I think it is clear) that eating less meat is a key way to reduce our species’ ecological footprint. In the UK, which is probably a reasonable indicator for a range of Anglo-American and European countries, meat eating has declined over time and younger people tend to eat less meat. Around 80% of retirees eat a traditional amount of meat, but only about 50% of young adults (18-24) do.