Write Only Memory

2012-05-14T11:03:00.005-07:00

Something I noticed some time ago was this:

Here's the logo for the Toronto Transit Commission:

And here's the one for the "Tomorrowland Transit Authority", a ride at Disney World:

I suppose they're not that similar, really. But there is a resemblance.

(Images from Wikipedia)

On-street bike parking is a safety improvement

2012-01-04T17:22:00.000-08:00

This post from StreetFilms shows that adding bike parking in the curb lane can improve safety. Since a group of bicycles is less bulky and blocks views less than a car does, replacing one car space with a number of bicycle spots not only increases the capacity of the street and encourages alternative transportation, it also makes the street safer by allowing vehicle operators to see other vehicles and pedestrians coming around the corner.

Here's one case where there's no "it might hurt safety" excuse to promote alternative transportation.

A (2003) critique of Aerotropolis

2011-10-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Aaron Renn at the Urbanophile took a look at a new book on Aerotropolis, the idea that future cities will be built around airports. (I found it through Streetsblog.)

This is not a new idea. One of my instructors at the USC Sacramento Center was enamored of the Aerotroplis idea back in 2003. A fellow student and I were assigned a paper on "California's Airport Crisis," and were asked to include discussion of Aerotropolis. This was the critique of Aerotropolis that I wrote back then. While this was written some time ago now, I thought it might be useful to have up where people could see it.

Aerotropolis

John Kasarda, the director of the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina, has suggested that air transport will reshape cities into air metropolises, or “aerotropoli.”

Kasarda points out the increasing importance of air travel and air cargo shipment to today’s economy. Just-in-time production processes and global supply networks make fast access to air traffic crucial to current manufacturing. Companies that provide business services need good access to airports so they can reach their clients. Advanced telecommunications and e-commerce make sales possible in far-off areas that were previously inaccessible.

According to Kasarda, air travel is the “fifth wave” of transportation, after seaports, inland waterways, railroads, and highways. He believes that air travel will affect the ways cities develop in the 21st century in much the same ways that these other modes affected urban development in previous centuries. New development will begin to form in clusters radiating from airports. These will be mixed-use developments, including office, retail, and residential uses. Dedicated automobile and rail infrastructure will be built to provide airport access. Low density development with easy road access to the airport will provide easy accessibility, which will be the key to future real estate decisions.

Kasarda’s vision has little relevance for California and is fundamentally based on an oversimplification of the way transportation modes affect urban development. Cities are affected in two ways by transportation: where they form and how they form. Long-distance transportation primarily affects the location of development, while the city form is affected by the mode of transportation used for day-to-day short-distance trips.

Long-distance transportation affects the location of cities because the movement of goods to market is a primary activity of cities. Development occurs where it is possible to transport these goods, and at entrepot points where merchants trade: around harbors, navigable rivers, and areas where train stations and highways were constructed.

However, the form of that development has little relationship to the long-distance mode of travel. Of course, areas used directly for long-distance transportation infrastructure (rail yards, sea ports) are affected by those modes. But to the extent that the form of the city depends on transportation, it depends on the mode used for short-distance trips taken by its residents, not by this longer-distance transportation. The houses, shops, and warehouses in a city where most travel was performed by walking or in animal-powered vehicles was similar whether long-distance travel was conducted by sea, river, or rail. The advent of commonly-used public transit changed the shape of the city in the late 1800s, and the common use of the automobile changed it again in the mid-1900s. Rail for intercity use preceded the advent of public transit by several decades, but only with the electric streetcar in the 1880s did cities change their form dramatically. Unless we find ourselves in some science-fiction future where jetpacks and aircars are the norm, air transportation may shape the location, but not the form, of cities.

(In any event, the idea that transportation has come in five “waves” is profoundly ahistorical. Sea travel and river travel are both ancient. Only because the settling of the United States by urban people began at the seacoasts and moved inward can it be considered earlier even in this country; sea travel generally came later than river travel due to the difficulty of navigation in the open sea. Airplanes and the automobile were invented at nearly the same time; both were originally made possible by the internal combustion engine.)

But air transportation, unlike water transportation and to a greater extent even than rail or highways, does not dictate any particular location. An airport can be located anywhere there is sufficient flat land, and does not need access to large bodies of water or even be connected to a network of roads or rails.

Kasarda’s “aerotropoli” are supposedly about air travel, but the form he suggest they take – “Low Density Development, Wide Lanes, and Fast Movements” – point to the automobile as the primary mode of transportation for day-to-day use inside them. The aerotropolis is differentiated only by proximity to an airport from a thousand other automobile-based developments. Indeed, Los Colinas, a Dallas-Fort Worth area development cited by Kasarda as an example of an aerotropolis, is discussed in Joel Garreau’s Edge City without any reference to its airport. Sprawl near an airport is still sprawl.

The justification for this airport-centered development is the centrality of air transport to future businesses. There is no question that for some enterprises, accessibility to an airport is key when making a decision on location. However, Kasarda paints this with too broad a brush. It has always been important for manufacturing and warehouse functions to be in locations accessible to long-distance transportation, and as air travel becomes more important relative to rail or sea, these functions may locate in proximity to airports.

But other functions of these same enterprises (such as research and development, marketing, and executive functions) have other needs, such as high employee quality of life, which are at odds with airport proximity due to airports’ negative environmental impacts. For business services, the same advanced telecommunications that Kasarda cites as an incentive for airport accessibility actually makes physical travel less important as more business is done over the Internet.

What are the implications for California? It is clear that California has no special advantage for developments related to airports. An airport-related development can exist anywhere there is flat land and reasonably reliable infrastructure, and California has no monopoly on either. The functions that can most take advantage of airport proximity – manufacturing and warehousing – are relatively unimportant in California’s economy and are disproportionately impacted by California’s high labor and land costs. California would do best to play to its strengths rather than follow the aerotropolis will-o’-the-wisp.

Sources:

Garreau, Joel. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Doubleday. 1991.

Kasarda, John. “Transportation and Business Forces Shaping Urban Development: The Rise of Aerotropolis.” Presentation prepared for the California Transportation Futures Conference. June 21, 2001.

Kasarda, John. “Airport-Driven Commercial Development: The Rise of the Aerotropolis.” Presentation prepared for the Owen G. Kenan Conference, Bangkok, Thailand. January, 2003.

Urban Land Institute. “Will The ‘Aerotropolis’ Replace the Metropolis? In Today's Real Estate Environment, Easy In-Easy Out Is Key Factor.” Press release. Available at “http://experts.uli.org/Content/PressRoom/press_releases/2002/PR_039.htm.” November 7, 2002.

Don't litter on transit

2011-09-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

The FMyLife blog gives me a taste of mild amusement during the day. I usually sympathize with the posters, but not for this post:

Today, in a desperate attempt to get my business "out there", I dropped a few of my cards on a station floor. I got a call, even a quote. A $500 fine from the transit for public littering. FML

If you want to advertise on transit, we would be happy to put your ads up in our billboard frames or in our publications (with reasonable compensation, of course).

Mainstream vs. Authentic

2011-09-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

From a supermarket in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What does it say about us that we oppose the concepts of the mainstream and authenticity?

I suppose it's possible that they are only opposed for Hispanicism, but I doubt it.

Promoting secondary units (in-law apartments)

2011-09-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

With streamlined regulations, in-law units could boost East Bay affordable housing stock and economy, study finds

Adding secondary units like this is an extremely cost-effective way of providing affordable housing; the main reason it doesn't happen more is zoning regulations. The main zoning issue is parking, but street parking is not generally difficult to find in these areas. Adding units either in existing units' back yards or carved out of the existing homes should be promoted by the cities.

Oakland's Station B, 31 August 2011

2011-08-31T22:06:00.000-07:00

The Station B Post Office, at 1446 Franklin St, Oakland, CA 94612, closed today. I wanted to take some pictures of it before it did.

To be honest, given where the USPS is financially and that there is another post office less than half a mile away, I really can't blame them for closing Station B. There are much more important and impressive post offices being closed in other parts of the country. Still, I'll miss the convenience of it, and more importantly, I love the walls and woodwork inside.

I wish I could think of some business that could use the space intact, but I can't -- I can only hope it gets to a reuse center rather than being junked. Thanks, Station B. I'll miss you.

If you don't like the oh-so-cool slideshow, here's a link to the Picasa album itself.

Oakland's Station B, 31 August 2011

Open source public transit information

2011-08-29T21:58:00.000-07:00

I work for AC Transit, where I am responsible for a series of projects relating to public information, including our maps, our at-stop schedule program, our other bus stop signs, and so forth.

One of my longer-term goals is to make the programs I've written available for others to see and use. The system as a whole is called "Actium", named because "ACT" = AC Transit. (Although I joked originally that, like Augustus, I found an AC Transit public information system of bricks and will leave it a system of marble.)

As such, I created a few months ago a Google Code repository for them. Today I posted a description of the at-stop schedules, one of the more important parts of the Actium system.

Anyone interested in exemplary Perl should probably look elsewhere, but I am working on it, and I do believe at some point it may be useful for people.

Write Only Memory on Blogger

2011-08-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

I am moving Write Only Memory to Blogger, instead of hosting it with my current web provider (webhostingbuzz.com). We'll see how it goes.

Secret revealed -- Sue Grafton's 27th book cover!

2011-06-17T23:50:00.000-07:00

Seen here for the first time.

Brilliant use of space

2010-04-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

This brilliant architect used moving walls to create 24 "rooms" in his tiny apartment (see Youtube video):

I love it.

Memories of Loma Prieta

2009-06-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

I actually wrote this in 1996, for the Cafe Utné forum.

I was in my classroom up at UC Santa Cruz when the earthquake struck. We knew it was a big one. My first thought was "I hope the epicenter is *here*." (That's always my first thought; if it's here, that means it's no worse anywhere else.) We all filed out. The building up the hill was undergoing seismic retrofitting, and it was fine, so I figured everything else would be OK too. Right?

It was big but I didn't think anything serious would happen. I went up to do some stuff at a different part of campus (there were some student government elections) -- but the power was mostly out and nothing was happening, so I went home.

Well, I tried to. The buses that went downtown (where my house was) weren't running for some reason. There was another bus that ran down to about a mile from my house that was running, so I took it instead. (The bus driver said her radio was out.) The road on the east side of campus gives a good view of the city and Monterey Bay, and you could see smoke from some buildings.

I got to Bay and Mission streets and walked the rest of the way to downtown Santa Cruz. It was getting to be twilight. As I walked I heard radios. Mostly they were playing "evergreen" tapes, stuff designed to be played when nobody knew what was going on. People were guessing on the Richter scale and where the epicenter was. As I walked I could see places where the sidewalk had buckled. Places I had been earlier where the ground was flat now made a step of six or eight inches.

I came around the corner where my house was (on Spruce Street between Pacific and Cedar if you know Santa Cruz at all, one block south of Laurel). My apartment was part of the first floor of an old Victorian house from 1893. It was a tall two-story house with an attic dormer that you could see from the end of the block. As I looked up at it from around the corner it looked tilted, like it was at a different angle than usual. I don't think it registered until I was actually in front of it. The house had fallen off its foundation, and the left half had fallen away from the right half of the house.

Pictures of it are available on priven.com.

I must have stood there for a while talking to myself, wondering what I was going to do. A neighbor -- who I don't think I'd ever talked to -- offered me a place in her living room that night. I ended up going back to campus. Everybody on campus was told to stay out of their dorms and we ended up sleeping literally on the parking lot until about midnight when we were allowed to go into the dorms. That was the first I had heard of the Bay Bridge or the Marina District fires. I stayed in the hall of a friend's dorm that night.

The next day I moved my stuff out of the apartment. My parents managed to get down from San Jose and San Mateo to help me, braving the back roads. We moved everything out and into a storage space we rented, with the help of my friend Doug and a number of passing strangers. There were no major aftershocks that day, thank goodness, and we were all OK. Still, the building was red-tagged later and knocked down. Now there is a small apartment complex there.

I arranged with campus housing to get a place in a dorm lounge. I lived in three different rooms on campus the rest of the school year.

As I write this I keep thinking of other things. I worked in the college library, and I snuck in there to call my parents around 7 pm. I remember the completely empty shelves with books tossed on the floor. I remember looking in the house amazed as the fragility struck home, windows and walls once square turning to parallelograms.

I remember walking from my house to the bus station, with streets closed off and everything smashed. I remember weeks later coming down and looking at all the empty spaces where there had been buildings and businesses.

Three people died in Santa Cruz that day from falling buildings. Many more people lost their livelihoods. I lost almost nothing -- a few kitchen things, a cassette tape or two, and an old IBM clone which wouldn't boot up again after the quake. The house wasn't even mine. Despite the stress and the hardship I still feel very lucky.

Throwing shoes at Bush

2008-12-15T07:41:00.000-08:00

They should throw the book at him in The Hague, not shoes at him at a press conference.

I love Harriet

2008-10-25T07:29:00.000-07:00

This blog's been abandonded for a long time, but finally I have something to say. This is my wedding day and I love Harriet Patterson very, very much.

Powerpuffs

2006-12-30T20:38:00.000-08:00

Back in 2002, I read this review by San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman of The Powerpuff Girls Movie. Who ever heard of a four-star review for a kids' cartoon? It sounded like just the thing to share with my niece, then nine years old. So I asked her if she wanted to go. She said, no, she'd never heard of the Powerpuff Girls.

I was shocked. They were the big thing, I said. They were the hip cartoon of 1998-2002. If I knew about them — through a coworker who was interested in hip cutesy cartoons — surely every nine-year-old girl had heard of them? This was the same girl, after all, who couldn't spend enough money in the Hello Kitty section of the Sanrio store.

Lupita said no, she didn't want to see it, but that if I were too embarassed to go alone, she would be willing to see it with me.

Having a nine-year-old tolerantly condescend to me is something I didn't expect to live to see.

The reason I bring this up now is that, while having a cold, I finally got around to watching The Powerpuff Girls Movie, which I had set my TiVo to record. And I have now firmly come to a conclusion which I should have realized from the outset and which I have suspected for some time:

Tim Goodman is a moron.

Thank you, Lupita, for saving me from spending $8 on this garbage. At least this way I saw it when I was so zonked out on medication that I wouldn't have been able to appreciate something better.

Adobe's icon scheme

2006-12-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

This seems to be the general reaction of users to Adobe's new icon scheme:

Recovering chocoholics

2006-10-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

Do people recovering from addictions to chocolate become "Friends of Bill M. & M."?

Jen Spool

2006-10-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

meta-creation_date: 10/15/2006 11:55

A few months ago I heard Jen Spool at an open mic at the Freight and Salvage. I thought she was good, in a Dar Williams-y sort of way. I went to her CD release concert and bought the album. I liked it. Check it out. Support local artists, and all that.

(Sorry if the new "music" department pulls up old posts. I'll finish the favorite songs series one of these days.)

Xiao peng you zao

2006-10-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

I don't know how long this article will be up on the San Francisco Chronicle's web site. It's about the new Mandarin immersion class in San Francisco's Starr King Elementary School.

My nephew is in this class. As he is is already bilingual in English and Spanish, the third language will open up many new doors for him.

I always figured someday I would take him on a vacation trip somewhere and have him translate for me. I just never thought it would be China!

Seriously, I am so proud. And jealous. Oh, so jealous.

On Carpool Lanes

2006-09-13T00:30:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, high occupancy vehicle lanes (aka carpool lanes) were pretty simple. If you had some number of people in your vehicle over one, whether a carpool or van or bus, you could use a lane of traffic set aside for you. Nowadays there are all kinds of other people in the carpool lane as well: motorcyclists, people who drive hybrid cars or other clean-air vehicles, and people who pay money in "high-occupancy/toll (HOT)" lanes.

Allowing these other groups of people in HOV lanes is controversial, as is, for that matter, allowing children in carpool lanes to count for purposes of carpooling. And there is good reason for this.

Although it isn't usually stated this way, HOV lanes generally work, when they do, because they directly compensate for what they are intended to encourage.

Carpooling, or taking a bus, takes more time than driving alone. Either way, the vehicle goes out of its way and stops more often to pick up passengers than a single occupancy vehicle would do.

Society benefits from carpooling and transit use, but except for the additional time it takes, in most other ways individuals benefit as well. It's generally cheaper to carpool or take transit than to pay for gas and parking, and because passengers are not busy driving, they can use the time for other things.

But it takes longer. HOV lanes directly compensate for this extra time by reducing the difference in the time needed to travel. Depending on the trip and the mode chosen, it can actually make the trip take less time than driving alone, but even if it isn't that beneficial, it still reduces some of the cost in time. This directly advantages carpooling and transit use in precisely the way that is needed most.

But this is not true for the other possible ways people can use carpool lanes, which trade money for time or cleaner air for time. To the extent that these things make HOV lanes more crowded and less valuable for real HOV travelers, they harm HOV traveling in ways that cannot be easily compensated by the other benefits that they undoubtedly provide.

Sometimes I hate the Internet

2006-07-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

So, last night I was thinking about poetry, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and it occurred to me that it would be fun to have a young witch read "A Child's Garden of Curses." I thought I was being oh-so-original. Then it occurred to me that somebody might have thought of it already, and it turns out, not only did someone think of the joke, she actually wrote it.

Sigh. All my best original ideas were thought of by somebody else.

No more comments

2006-06-04T01:11:00.000-07:00

The comments feature wasn't being used and I got tired of cleaning up comment spam.

Update: I am trying them again now that the site is hosted on Blogger,

Pictures from Empire Builder, Southwest Chief trip

2006-05-21T23:02:00.000-07:00

I took a long train trip this past week, from Portland to Chicago (on the Empire Builder) and thence to Gallup, New Mexico (on the Southwest Chief), where I stayed for a few days (visiting Canyon de Chelly and Shiprock) before continuing to Los Angeles (again on the Southwest Chief). I took a bunch of pictures, mostly on the Empire Builder and of Canyon de Chelly. I am a terrible photographer, sadly. Still, I put them up on my home page so people can see them. It's always good to give people something to cluck over. At some point I will probably go through it and give all the pictures titles, but I have not done so yet. You'll just have to guess on a lot of them. Sorry.

Tattoos

2006-05-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

While passing a tattoo parlor on the street, it occurred to me that I should get a tattoo that just says "This body intentionally left blank."

A new take on the right to bear arms

2006-05-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Gun-shaped teddy bear crackers ready to liven up wedding receptions

IMABARI, Ehime -- A paint firm here is hoping to add color to wedding receptions in Japan with a new device it has jointly developed -- a gun-shaped party cracker that shoots out a teddy bear. [...]