"Urban Burbs"

Leigh Gallagher, being interviewed by Eric Jaffe for the Atlantic Cities:

It’s not that every single suburb in America is going to vaporize. My thesis is that there are a lot of reasons why the suburbs were poorly planned and poorly designed and are making millions of people really unhappy. That’s happening. Those people are looking for and moving into different kinds of options. Based on what’s happening with demographics and preferences of the younger generation, as you guys have well covered, those trends are just going to accelerate.

But to say that everyone wants to live in a 50-story skyscraper in New York City is not at all practical or realistic or in touch with how people want to live in this country. So a big part of the future will be “urban burbs.” Suburbs that are adapting or already exist in this fashion. Where they have a walkable downtown, a pleasant place to take a stroll and bump into people, and where it’s possible to live in closer proximity to the things you need to do everyday.

I remember when these used to be called small towns.

The Unexpected Ways Engineers Help Us Move Faster

Robert Victor, writing for NOVA Next:

In the 20th century, creating American infrastructure meant building the Interstate system, but today, the era of massive road expansion is largely over. Now, engineers and planners are working on how to use the infrastructure we have most efficiently. This doesn’t mean just repairing roads, though that is an essential piece of the puzzle. Rather, new advancements in construction, design, and technology promise to revolutionize how we move people and goods on roads, on rails, and through the air. Cities and states across the country are experimenting with different strategies to maintain and modernize their infrastructure, spurred by the challenges caused by decades of underinvestment.

Using words as coordinates

Cade Metz, writing for Wired:

Rather than relying on street addresses or postal codes — which may get you only so close to your destination — What3Words lets you pinpoint a location and pinpoint it in way that doesn’t require, say, a seemingly endless string of GPS coordinates. “There’s an ease to words,” Sheldrick says. “It’s a way of encoding a huge number into something memorable.”

It looks something like this: fetches.almost.overtime, which is the three word coordinate for the Eiffel Tower (compared with its address, 5 ave Anatole 75007 Paris).

In a way, this is a very old idea. For a millennia, people have given names to specific places, the numbers of which varied according to an area’s population density. The only difference is that What3Words divides the world into equal-sized squares. It’s more regular, less flexible, and less organic, but it works well with computers. It’s also being rolled out in other languages. 

The only downside is that, unlike addresses, What3Words isn’t hierarchical. In other words, I can’t first navigate my way to a city, then find the street, then follow the addresses up or down until I arrive at my destination. Using What3Words requires a connected device, something that addresses don’t.

How much energy does your smartphone consume?

Bryan Walsh, writing for Time about the largely hidden energy footprint behind digital devices:

Beyond the amount of wireless data being streamed, total energy consumption also depends on estimates of how much energy is consumed per GB of data. The top example assumes that every GB burns through 19 kW of electricity. That would be close to a worst-case model. The Centre for Energy-Efficient Communications (CEET) in Melbourne assumes a much lower estimate of 2 kWh per GB of wireless data, which would lead to a much lower electricity consumption estimate as well—as little as 4.6 kWh a year with the low T-Mobile data use.

Railroads, airlines, and profitability

Chris Cooper and Kiyotaka Matsuda, writing for Bloomberg:

JR Central had free cash flow, or money from operations minus capital spending, of $2.95 billion in the fiscal year ended March. That compares with $2.42 billion at Union Pacific Corp. (UNP), the largest U.S. railroad by sales, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Japanese company, whose bullet trains carried more passengers last year than any airline in the world, predicts net income will rise 11 percent to 222 billion yen this fiscal year. It has made a profit every year since it was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1997.

Meanwhile, U.S. airlines barely kept their heads above water.

Aviation Today:

A4A’s report profiles the 10 airlines that reported full-year 2012 results—Alaska, Allegiant, American, Delta, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Southwest, Spirit, United and US Airways—for a combined $152 million net profit.

Augmented-Reality Sandbox Turns Dirt Into a UI

Kyle VanHemert, writing for Wired:

A Kinect camera mounted above the sandbox tracks the physical activity below. As visitors young and old go about their terraforming, a projector throws a dynamic topographic map on top of it all, updating contour lines and elevation colors in real time. Then, the fun part: a virtual rainstorm, also supplied by the projector, sends a torrent of blue water cascading down the peaks, showing runoff and watershed on the landscape created moments before.

The drink that kept an empire going

Kal Raustiala, writing for Slate:

Quinine powder quickly became critical to the health of the empire. By the 1840s British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. Quinine powder kept the troops alive, allowed officials to survive in low-lying and wet regions of India, and ultimately permitted a stable (though surprisingly small) British population to prosper in Britain’s tropical colonies. Quinine was so bitter, though, that British officials stationed in India and other tropical posts took to mixing the powder with soda and sugar. “Tonic water,” of a sort, was born.

Sugar couldn’t mask all the bitterness, though, so it wasn’t long before they started adding gin.

Restore to what?

Keith Mulvihill, reporting for the New York Times:

“The term ‘forest restoration’ begs the question — what are you restoring to? The point isn’t to go back; the point is to go forward,” [said Katerli Bounds, director of forest restoration for the New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation]. “We know that we can’t eradicate all invasive plants, but what we can do is hold them at bay long enough for the native populations to build back up again.”

As Humans Change Landscape, Brains of Some Animals Change, Too

Carl Zimmer, writing for the New York Times:

In two species — the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole — the brains of animals from cities or suburbs were about 6 percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or other rural areas. Dr. Snell-Rood concludes that when these species moved to cities and towns, their brains became significantly bigger.

Dr. Snell-Rood and Ms. Wick also found that in rural parts of Minnesota, two species of shrews and two species of bats experienced an increase in brain size as well.

Dr. Snell-Rood proposes that the brains of all six species have gotten bigger because humans have radically changed Minnesota. Where there were once pristine forests and prairies, there are now cities and farms. In this disrupted environment, animals better at learning new things were more likely to survive and have offspring.

One Dot Per Person

Here’s a fun map that’s being shared around the internet. It’s a map of the United States with one dot per person, color coded according to race, and jittered within their census tract. It’s striking, and even reveals some ghosts of geography if you look in the right places (try the Appalachians to start).

The Hyperloop and the Annihilation of Space and Time

Jon Christensen, writing for the New Yorker:

The Hyperloop may be nothing more than vaporware designed as a critique of high-speed rail for not moving fast enough; in some ways it seems effective, particularly as the high-speed-rail project has become bogged down in lawsuits, struggles over permits, and other controversies. But in truth, it’s not a particularly useful solution—it doesn’t solve the real, complicated issues inherent to constructing fast, effective rail transit. It merely elides them, all while propagating the kind of magical thinking that often gathers around high-tech billionaires—like the notion that they really can annihilate space and time.

“All of the Above” Energy Means More Fracking, Renewables, Nukes and Clean Coal

David Biello, reporting for Scientific American:

That means for the next decade or so, the fact that the U.S. gets 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels is unlikely to change much, though the relative balance of coal, oil and natural gas will change. And if natural gas, the least polluting of the fossil fuels, is to play a bigger role, then fracking wells, gas pipelines and wastewater management will all have to be done correctly. “It’s not magic,” Moniz said.

What’s more energy efficient, shopping online or in stores?

■ fedex-truck

Back in 1998, in the heyday of the dot-com bubble, Pets.com launched. The site was perhaps best known for its ad campaign which featured a sock puppet dog. The company’s business plan was to deliver pet supplies to people’s homes. The site was a horrendous failure, and its bankruptcy served as a sort of warning sign to would-be e-commerce entrepreneurs for years to come.

Yet if we fast-forward to today, home delivery of everyday items seems, well, everyday. Pets.com may have had a flawed business model, but the basic principle behind it was sound. Amazon weathered the dot-com bust, as did a handful of other e-commerce sites. Many brick-and-mortar retailers have successful websites. Even trips to the grocery store are being replaced with deliveries from companies like Peapod, FreshDirect, and even Amazon.¹ But with the boom in online shopping for everything from jeans to Jujyfruits, people have grown concerned that e-commerce’s simplicity comes with an environmental price.

The concern mostly centers around the delivery’s carbon footprint. All those UPS trucks rumbling down every street in American surely can’t be a good thing. They’re big, their loud engines must suck tremendous amounts of fuel, and what happens if you’re not home to pick it up? Fret not. Your Amazon delivery probably has a trimmer footprint than a simple trip to the store.

A number of studies have looked at the difference in carbon emissions between items ordered over the internet and those purchased the old fashioned way.² One straightforward study collected data from a clothing retailer in Germany that sold their wares both in stores and online. Researchers surveyed over 700 in-store shoppers at two locations and 40,000 online orders. They then stratified their results based on travel distances to the store and distances from the warehouse to customers’ homes. At short distances—less than 8.6 miles or 14 km one-way—in-store shoppers slightly edged out online customers per transaction, about 73.8 g CO2 vs 77.9 g CO2. But over that, online shoppers’ footprints remained relatively stable while store goers emissions skyrocketed to as high as 451.4 g CO2 per transaction if they had to travel over 62 miles or 100 km.

Another more comprehensive study from the U.K. looked at the “last mile,” or the last journey of an item to a customer’s home. Researchers focused on non-food items, such as books, CDs, clothing, cameras and other household items. They also took into account how a person traveled to the store—car, bus, walking, or other public transportation—the frequency with which items are returned, and how requiring signatures for packages affects the rate of successful deliveries.³ If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, their results were unequivocal: Shop online. If you drove to the store, you’d have to buy 24 items to make the trip equal to the carbon footprint of just one item ordered online. If you took the bus, you’d have to buy eight.

Why are brick-and-mortar stores so inefficient? It turns out that transporting people to the store to select something and then getting them back home again requires a lot of energy. You also have to consider that items sold in stores were distributed from a central warehouse. When you place an order online, that trip transforms from one to the store to one directly to your home. Plus, delivery services optimize their routes to waste the least amount of fuel. Everyday shoppers don’t think in that level of detail. Even if you combine trips, which many of us are terrible at doing, you’d have to buy a lot of stuff per trip to equal the efficiency of a delivery.


  1. I subscribe to a monthly delivery of cereal from Amazon—it’s cheaper and one less thing I have to worry about at the store.
  2. Most of them considered European consumers, so you can assume that whatever inefficiencies are racked up for in-store purchases can be inflated for American consumers, who use less public transit and have less fuel efficient vehicles.
  3. Requiring signatures decreases the first-time delivery rate substantially, from as low as 2 percent for no signature to as high as 30 percent with a required signature.
  4. UPS’s famous “no left turns” rule is a testament to that.

Sources:

Edwards J.B., McKinnon A.C. & Cullinane S.L. (2010). Comparative analysis of the carbon footprints of conventional and online retailing: A “last mile” perspective, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 40 (1/2) 103-123. DOI:

Wiese A., Toporowski W. & Zielke S. (2012). Transport-related CO2 effects of online and brick-and-mortar shopping: A comparison and sensitivity analysis of clothing retailing, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 17 (6) 473-477. DOI:

Photo by lordferguson.

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Tesla Model S scores highest ever safety rating

Todd Woody, writing for Quartz:

With no gasoline engine block, the Model S sports a big front crumple zone that absorbs energy and protects passengers in a crash. The car’s massive battery pack sits underneath the passenger compartment, giving the Model S a low center of gravity that helps prevent rollovers—so much so that the company says that during testing technicians could not get the car to flip in the usual way. “Special means were needed to induce the car to roll,” according to Tesla.

Hyperloop on PRI's The World

In case you missed, it, here’s last Friday’s segment on The World in which I spoke with Marco Werman about the hyperloop and how it stacks up against high-speed transit in other countries.

A half-breathless, half-realistic assessment of the hyperloop

Mario Aguilar, writing for Gizmodo, discussing the hyperloop:

Trains failed in America because they’re expensive and not really better than the alternatives. Amtrak’s “high-speed” Acela trains are a prime offender. They’re way more expensive than just the regular train (which itself is often more expensive than a plane to begin with), and on a trip from Washington DC to New York, it saves you a grand total of about a half-hour.

I’m pretty sure that’s not why trains have “failed” in the U.S. I’m pretty sure they failed because we gave up on them decades ago and are only now wondering what happened.

And yet the proposed high-speed rail line in California isn’t a big enough step forward by many accounts.

Whose? Musk’s? California’s HSR won’t have face melting speed, but at an average speed of over 160 mph for the entire route, it’ll be pretty fast.

It’s not using the fancy magnetic levitation technology being implemented in places like Japan and Germany, which will allow trains to fly down the tracks at over 300 mph.

If by “already being implemented” you mean “currently being tested”, then yes. (Also, Germany’s Transrapid maglev test track will probably be dismantled soon.)

If the Hyperloop doesn’t happen, it won’t be because of the proposed price tag.

Or it could be because the budget in the hyperloop proposal is too optimistic.

Up until this point, Aguilar has pretty much taken Musk’s proposal and talking points at face value. But then his tone changes pretty dramatically.

Indeed, take a look at the numbers, and you start to wonder if the money wouldn’t be better spent on regional transit. The estimated daily ridership for the California High Speed Rail is 260,000 people, which is pretty middling considering that the San Francisco’s BART alone moves some 380,000 people every day. What’s more, Hyperloop would only serve a fraction of that 260,000 population because it doesn’t include all of the intermediate stops.

And he ends with a totally sensible summation of the whole project:

The technological ambition and courage behind Hyperloop are unimpeachable. Ambition, know-how, and funding don’t mean a thing if you don’t have the right kind of support. And right now, it’s hard to see how Musk gets it.

Clearly the hyperloop has sparked a fairly large conversation around the proposal and also around high-speed transit in general. I’m split as to what value Aguilar’s article adds to the discussion. He begins with some pretty shallow reporting about the hyperloop proposal and its competition. But then he fires up the reporting machine and pumps out some solid criticism of the hyperloop. Not just “oh, this thing will be terrible” criticism, but insight that could be valuable to both refining the project and reevaluating our current transportation options.