As far as fire risk is concerned, these areas combine the worst aspects of wildland and urban environments

Thursday, February 27th, 2025

Over a century ago, people started to live together more densely than ever before, and this transformed fires from unfortunate incidents to conflagrations that destroyed entire cities:

By the 1870s, “great” fires were happening several times a decade and viewed as a normal part of life in cities.

And then, by the 1920s, it stopped. Why? After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, we finally got serious as a civilization about stopping urban fires. We rewrote building codes to require fire-resistant materials and metal escape ladders; we built professional firefighting forces instead of relying on local fire brigades with, literally, buckets; and we invented new technologies, like automatic sprinkler systems in 1872, motorized fire trucks with powered pumps and engines in 1910, and CTC fire extinguishers in 1912. Chicago never burned down again.

Today, urban fires are treated as a largely-solved problem. Modern urban firefighting forces and infrastructure are designed for putting out fires in homes. In fact, firefighting is so solved that only 4% of firefighting calls are fire-related — the vast majority are medical. Yet, this model of firefighting is not adapted to the challenges we face today.

[…]

Over the past fifty years, people all throughout developed nations have moved into suburban areas, which fire experts refer to as the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI). As far as fire risk is concerned, these areas combine the worst aspects of wildland and urban environments. Because of humans living in density, you have frequent ignition events. But because they are near nature, you are surrounded by kindling. The environment is furthermore relatively sparse, so you can’t have the same firefighting density as in a city. Taken together this means fires can reach wildfire scale with urban frequency.

Simply put, urban firefighting forces are using an old playbook on a new, unsolved problem. 29% of the United States lives in the WUI now, and California has the highest such percentage of any state.

[…]

To allow for more preventative maintenance, there must be reform to both the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The environmental impact statement of a controlled burn takes 7.2 years to complete, which is longer than most fire cycles. Amazingly, under Sierra Club v. Bosworth, a 2007 Ninth Circuit case, there is no categorical exclusion for controlled burns.

[…]

Major urban centers should not just have one reservoir, but at least two for redundancy. All fire infrastructure must go through an audit and, if need be, rebuilt. California throws 21 million acre-feet of water away each year, which is more than enough to fill firefighting reservoirs and use for irrigation to wet our forests. The money is already there—California voters already approved $2.7 billion for reservoirs with Prop. 1 back in 2014, none of which have been built a decade later.

[…]

The homeless cause 54% of all fires in Los Angeles. That number jumps to 80% for downtown fires. In San Francisco, such fires have doubled in the past five years. Throughout California, the homeless plague highway underpasses with fires, some from cooking and some from derangement. Many of the arsonists arrested during these fires were homeless. Unfortunately, the eternal summer of endless fire season means the time for tolerance is over.

Despite severe economic stagnation, Japan is still a desirable place to live and work

Monday, February 24th, 2025

For more than three decades, Maxwell Tabarrok notes, Japan has endured near complete economic stagnation:

But despite severe economic stagnation, Japan is still a desirable place to live and work. The major costs of living, like housing, energy, and transportation are not particularly expensive compared to other highly-developed countries. Infrastructure in Japan is clean, functional, and regularly expanded. There is very little crime or disorder, and almost zero open drug use or homelessness. Compared to a peer country like Britain, whose economic stagnation over the past 30 years has been less severe, Japan seems to enjoy a higher quality of life.

[…]

Japan’s zoning code is set at the national level and therefore tends to be much less restrictive than the local zoning codes found in the West. Its national system lays out just 12 inclusive zones, which means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default. This compares favorably to zoning codes in the US which often have multiple dozens of exclusive land use categories. Even the most restrictive category in Japan’s system, shown in the top left (below), allows people to run small shops and offices out of their homes. There are floor-area-ratio limits and setbacks, but they are modest, and there is no distinction between single and multi-family housing units within these limits.

For environmental permitting, Japan mostly relies on explicit standards for environmental impact, rather than a lengthy permitting process where applicants must write detailed reports about possible alternatives and mitigation measures under threat of lawsuit, as in the US. Japan does have a copy-cat National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedural environmental law that was enacted in 1997, but it has two important differences that prevent its evolution into the procedural morass seen in other countries.

First is explicit numerical standards for which projects must go through the impact statement process, rather than the hand-waving ambiguities of NEPA. These standards generally only include large infrastructure projects like a port extension exceeding 300 hectares. Some residential projects are covered, but only those which exceed 75 hectares in area. Only 854 environmental impact assessments have been started in Japan since the act passed, and there have been zero for residential construction projects.

Second, the completed environmental assessments are harder to sue over than in Western countries. Plaintiffs need to have a personal and legally protected injury to have standing, rather than a generalized concern for the environment as in the US. Plus, the greater specificity of when the law applies and a court that has a much more deferential attitude towards agency determinations means the lawsuits are harder to win.

Permissive national zoning and an absence of environmental proceduralism leads to Japan having the highest rate of housing construction and the lowest home price to income ratio in the OECD.

[…]

Japan’s social order is incredibly valuable. The annual cost of crime in the United States is around $5 trillion dollars which is 18% of GDP. Higher crime rates would threaten the high-density urbanism which makes Japanese cities so affordable and desirable.

The medieval house might have been built to specifications approved by a rodent council

Sunday, February 23rd, 2025

Dozens of rodents carry plague, Ed West notes, but it would only become deadly to humans when Yersinia pestis infected the flea of the black rat (Rattus rattus):

Black rats are sedentary homebodies and don’t like to move more than 200 metres from their nests; they especially like living near to humans, which is what makes them so much more dangerous than more adventurous rodents. Black rats have been our not-entirely-welcome companion for thousands of years, and were living near human settlements in the Near East from as far back as 3000 BC; the Romans and their roads helped them spread across the empire and brought them to Britain, the oldest rat remains here being found from the fourth century, underneath Fenchurch Street in London.

Black rats were especially comfortable in the typical medieval house, and while stone buildings became a feature of life in the 12th century, most were still made of wood and straw. In the words of historian Philip Ziegler, ‘The medieval house might have been built to specifications approved by a rodent council as eminently suitable for the rat’s enjoyment of a healthy and care-free life.’ This type of rat is also a very good climber, so could easily live in the thatched roofs which were common then.

Because of its preferred home, the black rat is also called the house rat or ship rat, while the brown rat prefers sewers. On top of this, the animals are fecund to a horrifying degree; one black rat couple can theoretically produce 329 million descendants in three years. So the typical medieval city had lots of rats, and with them came lots of fleas.

Fleas are nature’s great survivors. They can endure in all sorts of conditions, and some have developed the ability to live off bits of bread and only require blood for laying eggs. The black rat flea, called Xenopsylla cheopis, is also exceptionally hardy, able to survive between 6-12 months without a host, living in an abandoned nest or dung, although it is only active when the temperature is between 15-20 centigrade. As John Kelly wrote in The Great Mortality, the Oriental rat flea is ‘an extremely aggressive insect. It has been known to stick its mouth parts into the skin of a living caterpillar and suck out the caterpillar’s bodily fluids and innards’. What a world.

There are two types of flea: fur fleas and nest fleas, and only the former travels with its host rather than remaining in the nest. The rat flea is a fur flea, and while it prefers to stay on its animal of choice, they will jump on to other creatures if they’re nearby – unfortunately, in the 14th century that happened to be us. (In fact, they will attach themselves to most farmyard animals, and only the horse was left alone, because its odour repulses them, for some reason.)

As part of the great and disgusting chain of being, the rats inadvertently brought the plague to humans, but it wasn’t fun for the rats either, or the fleas for that matter. When the hungry flea bites the rat, the pestis triggers a mutation in the flea guts causing it to regurgitate the bacteria into the wound, so infecting the rat. (Yes, it is all a bit disgusting). Y. pestis can be transmitted by 31 different flea species, but only in a rodent does the quantity of bacillus become large enough to block the fleas’s stomach.

The flea therefore feeds more aggressively as it dies of starvation, and its frantic feeding makes the host mammal more overrun with the bacterium. The fleas also multiply as the plague-carrying rat gets sick, so that while a black rat will carry about seven fleas on average, a dying rat will have between 100 and 150. Rats were infected with the disease far more intensely than humans, so that ‘the blood of plague-infected rats contains 500-1,000 times more bacteria per unit of measurement than the blood of plague-infected humans.’

When the disease is endemic to rodents it’s called ‘sylvatic plague’, and when it jumps to humans it’s called ‘bubonic’ plague. For Y pestis to spread, there will ideally be two populations of rodents living side by side: one must be resistant to the disease so that it can play host, and the other non-resistant so the bacteria can feed on it. There needs to be a rat epidemic to cause a human epidemic because it provides a ‘reservoir’ for the disease to survive. Robert Gottfried wrote: ‘Y pestis is able to live in the dark, moist environment of rodent burrows even after the rodents have been killed by the epizootic, or epidemic. Thus as a new rodent community replaces the old one, the plague chain can be revived’. The rat colony will all be dead within two weeks of infection and then the fleas start attacking humans.

The first human cases would typically appear 16-23 days after the plague had arrived in a rat colony, with the first deaths taking place after about 20-28 days. It takes 3-5 days after infection for signs of the disease to appear in humans, and a similar time frame before the victim died. Somewhere between 20-40 per cent of infected people survived, and would thereafter mostly be immune.

What happened next would have been terrifying. ‘From the bite site, the contagion drains to a lymph node that consequently swells to form a painful bubo,’ or swelling lump, ‘most often in the groin, on the thigh, in an armpit or on the neck. Hence the name bubonic plague.’

Those crossing through the Holland Tunnel see the most time savings

Monday, February 10th, 2025

New York City’s congestion pricing program has been in place for one month, implementing tolls on drivers who enter certain, often gridlocked, areas of Manhattan:

And so far, the results are “undeniably positive,” transit officials say, with measurably reduced traffic and more commuters choosing public transit.

The traffic mitigation plan covers a “congestion relief zone” that spans almost all of Manhattan below 60th street and includes major routes like the Lincoln, Holland, and Hugh L. Carey Tunnels and bridges that go into both Brooklyn and Queens. Since its launch on January 5, one million fewer vehicles have entered that zone than they would have without the toll, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Passenger cars with an E-ZPass that travel through that zone face a $9 toll during peak hours, from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends, and a $2.25 toll overnight. Tolls are more expensive for commercial traffic, and vehicles without E-ZPass face a 50% premium.

Those charges are meant to reduce traffic in the city and also raise funds for $15 billion worth of transit repairs to the MTA. By cutting traffic and ushering more commuters onto public transit, the program will also reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s the first such plan in the United States, though congestion pricing has been successfully used in London, Stockholm, Singapore, and other cities. In Stockholm, traffic levels dropped about 25%, and the city saw less pollution and more investment in local infrastructure. And though business owners and residents there criticized the program before its pilot began — much like they did in New York — a majority of voters ended up making that toll permanent.

New Yorkers are already seeing an impact one month in. Along with fewer drivers in general, the vehicles that still travel through the area are dealing with less traffic. Those crossing through the Holland Tunnel see the most time savings, with average trip times down 48% during peak morning hours. The Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges are both seeing an average of 30% faster travel times. During afternoon peak hours, drivers in the entire zone are seeing travel times drop up to 59%.

More commuters are opting for buses to cross Manhattan, and those buses are now traveling more quickly, too. Weekday bus ridership has grown 6%, while weekend ridership is up 21%, compared to January 2024. (Subway ridership has also grown by 7.3% on weekdays and 12% on weekends, part of a larger trend in ridership growth happening since the fall, per the MTA. Anecdotally, some subway riders have said they’ve seen more packed trains on their morning commutes.) Buses entering Manhattan from Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx are saving up to 10 minutes on their route times, which also makes their arrivals more reliable.

The scale was almost comical

Friday, December 27th, 2024

Last month, Dwarkesh spent two weeks in China, visiting Beijing, Chengdu, Dujiangyan, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzho:

It’s funny how China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. We can’t rebuild fallen bridges. They build bridges to nowhere. In the most desirable cities in this country, every random Victorian house and park bench is a historic site that can’t be disturbed. There, they’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build an endless skyscraper complex that no one wants to live in.

My overwhelming first impression was: wow this place is so fucking big. Travel often teaches you things about a country which you honestly should have intuited even without visiting. Obviously, I knew that China is a big country, with over 1.4 billion people. But it was only after I visited that the visceral scale of the biggest cities was impressed upon me.

Even in Dujiangyan, a city of just half a million people (considered a quaint countryside town by Chinese standards), we found a Buddhist temple of staggering proportions. The scale was almost comical — we’d enter what seemed like an impressively large compound, only to discover it was merely the entrance to an even grander structure right behind it. This pattern repeated 5 or 6 times, each subsequent building larger and more ornate than the last, like some kind of inverse nesting doll.

I asked a monk at the temple how they funded this massive site in a city of just half a million people. He told us that it was simply through donations. We probed further about how such an enormous project could have been financed by just ordinary people’s donations. He responded, “We’ve got a lot of supporters, dude”, and changed the topic.

Chongqing is by far the coolest city I’ve ever visited. It’s this insane cyberpunk multi-level metropolis of over 20 million people. I wouldn’t know how to begin describing it, but there’s a bunch of great YouTube videos which will show you what I mean. I got a really nice nice 2-floor hotel room that overlooked two rivers and one of the most insane skylines in the world for 60 bucks – highly recommend visiting Chongqing if you get the chance.

Residents found themselves surrounded by polluted water, poisoned air, and a destroyed landscape

Tuesday, August 13th, 2024

Brian Potter explains how California turned against growth:

Residents found themselves surrounded by polluted water, poisoned air, and a destroyed landscape. Views and natural beauty were increasingly spoiled by overhead power lines, outdoor advertising, freeway overpasses, and thousands of identical houses. Infrastructure like roads, schools and sewer systems were stretched to their breaking point. Crime was rising, and neighborhoods of single-family homes with largely white residents were being encroached on by apartment buildings housing the poor and minorities. In response to this unwanted change, Californians began to create land-use restrictions that would curb growth, help stop environmental harm, and limit the influx of new residents. When this drove up property values, Californians then passed Proposition 13, which cut property taxes, reduced the government’s ability to fund services, and locked in the low-growth culture that had taken root.

[…]

Since the days of the gold rush, growth in California came at the expense of the landscape and the environment. Six years after the discovery of gold, the landscape surrounding the motherlode was “scarred and devastated” from mining operations. Following the development of hydraulic mining, which uses high-pressure water to break up rocks, entire mountains were torn apart, and the resulting silt and debris clogged the rivers. The large-scale water projects that brought water to cities and farms flooded ravines, drained lakes, and destroyed ecosystems. Diverting water from the Owens River to Los Angeles dried up the formerly-fertile Owens Valley, and large-scale water diversion caused Buena Vista Lake and Tulare Lake to dry up. Damming of the Tuolumne River to provide water for San Francisco flooded the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Conservationist John Muir, who had fought against the dam, lamented that “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature.” In 1905, a canal dug from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley overflowed, causing an enormous flood which only stopped when the Southern Pacific Railroad filled the breach with 2,500 carloads of rock and gravel. The result of the flood, the Salton Sea, has today become an “environmental disaster” due to steadily increasing salinity. In 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, causing a flood that killed 400 people and destroyed everything in its path as the water rushed out to sea. In 1940 the Los Angeles River, one of the city’s major amenities, was turned into a concrete channel to protect the surrounding areas from flooding.

[…]

Between 1910 and 1930, the number of salmon in the Sacramento River fell by 80%. In the mid-1930s, 750,000 tons of sardines were being caught annually off the California coast, but the industry was completely wiped out by the end of the 1960s, in part due to overfishing.

[…]

Harvests of California’s majestic redwoods rose to “unprecedented levels” to provide lumber for new housing, and by the end of the 1950s, 90% of California’s redwood belt had been chopped down. Air pollution from industry and millions of cars created a lingering “smog” in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco that poisoned the air and blocked off views: smog attacks were so common by the 1960s that they were reported by the news along with other weather announcements. Sewage was regularly dumped into lakes and rivers: in 1961 an estimated 250 million gallons of sewage was dumped annually in the San Francisco Bay. Developers regularly made plans to fill in thousands of acres of the Bay to make more land, to the point where many worried it would be turned into a narrow shipping channel just wide enough for ships to pass. In 1969, a blowout from an offshore platform created an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, killing thousands of animals and polluting more than 30 miles of beaches. Excessive pumping of groundwater for agriculture had caused the land to subside by tens of feet in some locations, and excessive irritation had deposited minerals and other pollutants in the soil.

[…]

Much of this concern was about the aesthetic effects of ongoing growth. Many people had moved to California to be surrounded by natural beauty, not billboards, neon signs, traffic congestion, and thousands of identical “ticky tacky” houses.

[…]

While California had traditionally been a bastion of single family homes, by the late 1960s construction had shifted to building large numbers of apartments, which would inevitably be occupied by low-income residents. This was “perceived as a categorical threat to the detached culture of low-density residential life.” One California housing expert noted that “one of the most cherished property rights in our ‘free enterprise system’ is not the right to do what one pleases with one’s property, but the right to live in a neighborhood in which no more multi-family housing may be constructed.”

[…]

In 1965 the U.S. removed quotas on immigration based on national origin, and subsequent immigration reforms created a path for previously illegal immigrants to become legal residents. In 1960 only 1.3 million of California’s ~16 million residents were foreign born, and only 8% of residents weren’t white. By 1970, the non-white fraction had risen to 12%, and by 1996 it had reached 51%.

[…]

California’s violent crime rate doubled between 1960 and 1970, and by 1980 had doubled again.

[…]

By 1970, 25% of the country saw pollution/ecology as an important problem, up from 1% in 1960. That same year there were over 8000 environmental bills introduced in congress.

[…]

Between 1971 and 1975, 244 CEQA lawsuits were filed alleging that projects failed to properly complete an environmental impact report, and a state study found that CEQA litigation had been “excessive and frivolous, resulting in unnecessary legal costs and costs of project delay.” An environmental organization handbook at the time noted that “the mere threat of a suit can also be an impressive political tactic… suits can be an effective delaying tactic in order to force compromises.” Between 1971 and 1975, CEQA lawsuits were used to challenge more than 28,000 units of housing construction in the San Francisco area alone.

[…]

Los Angeles had the first zoning law in the country in 1908, and California set the precedent for single-family home zoning in the 1920s. But historically, restrictions had been part of a broader plan to encourage growth by making cities appealing; now they were being used to shut it down. By the mid-1970s, most cities and counties in California had some form of growth restriction in place.

[…]

prices. In 1973, southern California homes were on average $1,000 cheaper than homes nationally. By 1979, they were, on average, $42,400 more expensive (reaching $143,000 more expensive by 1988). Between 1970 and 1977, San Francisco had the largest home price increase of any of the 16 biggest metros in the U.S., with average home prices nearly doubling. By 1977 San Francisco had the highest home prices of any large metro in the country, up from 6th highest in 1970. Los Angeles followed behind as a close second.

Increased home prices, coupled with a property tax reform that raised residential tax rates and assessment frequency, caused property taxes to skyrocket. A home purchased in Los Angeles for $45,000 in 1973 with a $1,160 property tax bill would have a $2,070 tax bill just three years later. As home prices rose throughout the state (going from an average of $34,000 in 1974 to $85,000 in 1978), average property taxes doubled, and in some cases even quadrupled.

[…]

Dissatisfaction with the taxes also came from the fact that taxes were increasingly being spent on things like welfare, healthcare, and schools in poor urban areas (a 1976 state supreme court case mandated that spending per-pupil be roughly equal across the state). In other words, in many jurisdictions taxes were being funneled to the poor and minorities rather than improving local services like police or road construction.

In response to increasing dissatisfaction with property taxes, California passed Proposition 13 in 1978. The ballot measure, which won by a 2-1 margin, rolled back assessed home values to their 1975 levels, limited assessed value to a 2% increase each year unless the house was sold, and capped property tax rates at 1% of the value of the house. Later amendments allowed a homeowner to pass on his home to his children (or even grandchildren) without triggering a reassessment, letting the low property taxes be passed from generation to generation.

Proposition 13 did exactly what it said on the tin. Homeowner property taxes immediately fell by nearly 60%, reducing government tax revenues by roughly $7 billion annually (with “losses” even higher later as property values continued to climb). City tax revenue declined by 27% on average, and county tax revenue declined by 40% on average. While government spending had risen by 4.1% per year between 1957 and 1971 in inflation-adjusted terms, after Prop 13 it began to fall. One estimate suggested that by 1988, Prop 13 had saved taxpayers $228 billion. California fell from 7th in the nation in tax revenue per $100 of personal income to 35th.

Cuts in government services quickly followed.

[…]

Perversely, Prop 13 in some ways acted directly against homeowners’ desire for more local control. The measure eliminated local control over property tax, redirecting it to the state legislature and governor. Local governments and school districts were forced to hire lobbyists to represent their interests in the state capitol in the hopes of getting a portion of reduced tax revenue.

Prop 13, along with the enormous number of growth controls passed by various jurisdictions, forced California into a vicious cycle. With reduced tax revenues (and inability to control the revenues that remained), residency became far more zero sum. Services allocated to new residents might easily come at the expense of existing residents, incentivizing jurisdictions to create further growth controls. Rising property values forced people to live farther and farther away from their jobs, exacerbating the problems of growth: longer commuting distances meant more air pollution, more traffic congestion, and more freeway.

[…]

Economist Ed Glaeser estimated that as early as 2002 land use restrictions in San Francisco add nearly half a million dollars to the cost of a typical home, and in 2009 Hseih and Moretti estimated that relaxing land use restrictions in San Francisco and New York alone could boost national GDP by 8.9%.

All of the global cities that we think of as epic took up less than eight square miles

Friday, June 28th, 2024

Accidental Superpower by Peter ZeihanIn The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan reminds us that moving things around is hard:

Anyone who has ever rowed a boat or paddled a canoe in a place where he had to make a portage can (quite en­thusiastically) tell you how much easier it is to move stuff around on water than on land, but have you ever thought about just how much easier it is?

[…]

Modern container ships can transport goods for about net 17 cents per container-mile, compared to semi-trailer trucks that do it for net $2.40, including the cost of the locomotion mode as well as operating costs in both instances.

But even this incredible disparity in cost assumes access to an American-style multilane highway, the sort that simply doesn’t exist in some 95 percent of the planet. It also assumes that the road cargo is all transported by semi rather than less efficient vehicles, like those UPS trucks that probably brought you this book. It certainly ignores your family car. It also does not consider the cost and maintenance of the medium of transport itself. The U.S. interstate highway system, for example, responsible for “only” one-quarter of the United States’ road traffic by miles driven, has an annual maintenance cost of $160 billion. By contrast, the Army Corps of Engineers’ 2014 budget for all U.S. waterways maintenance is only $2.7 billion, while the oceans are flat-out free. Toss in associated costs — ranging from the $100 billion Americans spend annually on car insurance, to the $130 billion needed to build America’s 110,000 service stations, to the global supply chain needed to manufacture and service road vehicles — and the practical ratio of road to water transport inflates to anywhere from 40:1 in populated flatlands to in excess of 70:1 in sparsely populated highlands.

Cheap, easy transport does two things for you. First, it makes you a lot of money. Cheap transport means you can send your goods farther away in search of more profitable markets. Historically that’s been not only a primary means of capital generation, but also a method of making money wholly independent of government policy or whatever the new economic fad happens to be; it works with oil, grain, people, and widgets. In business terms, it’s a reliable perennial. Second, if it is easy to shuttle goods and people around, goods and people will get shuttled around quite a bit. Cheap riverine transport grants loads of personal exposure to the concerns of others in the system, helping to ensure that everyone on the waterway network sees themselves as all in the same boat (often literally). That constant interaction helps a country solidify its identity and political unity in a way that no other geographic feature can.

[…]

In the era before refrigeration and preservatives, hauling foodstuffs more than a few miles would have been an exercise in futility. Even armies didn’t have much in the way of self-managed supply chains right up into the eighteenth century. Instead militaries relied on the kindness — or lack of defenses — of strangers for provisions.

This kept cities small. Very small. In fact, up until the very beginning of the industrial era in the early 1600s, all of the global cities that we think of as epic — New York City, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Shanghai — took up less than eight square miles. That’s a square less than three miles on a side, about the distance that someone carrying a heavy load can cover in two hours, far smaller than most modern airports. If the cities had been any bigger, people wouldn’t have been able to get their food home and still have sufficient time to do anything else. The surrounding farms couldn’t have generated enough surplus food to keep the city from starving, even in times of peace.

[…]

This smallness is why it took humanity millennia to evolve into what we now think of as the modern world. Nearly all of the population had to be involved in agriculture simply to feed itself. The minority was nonsedentary peoples (history calls them barbarians), who discovered that one of the few ways to avoid needing to spend your entire day growing food was to spend your entire day stealing other people’s.

Having garbage-strewn subways that effectively serve as mobile homeless shelters is no way to run a public transit system

Monday, January 29th, 2024

It’s always jarring to come home to the US, Chris Arnade notes, often from much poorer countries, to find that our infrastructure is infinitely worse:

But it was what happened after I left the airport that convinced me that America, and especially NYC, is broken.

[…]

The train, to be fair, was on time. But it was filthy. The carriages were mostly empty, except for three or four homeless guys in each who were either sleeping or passed-out. The dozen or so of us who got on at the first stop chose our seats carefully, positioning ourselves close to each other, for safety, and as far as possible from the sprawled-out guys and their piles of trash and puddles of urine.

[…]

I thought about Sofia, where the subways and buses — and other public spaces and resources — are so much cleaner, safer, and smoother. Where workers simply wanting to get to their jobs don’t have to deal with navigating the mentally ill, addicted and desperate every day. For context, the GDP of Manhattan alone is about nine times that of the entire nation of Bulgaria. But NYC’s problems only seem to be getting worse, especially for those who have the least. I don’t have to take the subway; I have the cash for an Uber. But I try to see, and to understand a little, the world as most people see and understand the world.

[…]

Eventually, that morning, a guy covered in old vomit and carrying a cane, his trousers only just above his knees, got onto the subway train, and went up and down each carriage, hitting every sleeping or passed-out guy on the legs, yelling at them to move on, to give the rest of us some space. Everyone else pretended it wasn’t happening, hoping it wouldn’t go south, focusing instead on the floor or their phones.

[…]

But having garbage-strewn subways that effectively serve as mobile homeless shelters is no way to run a public transit system. It isn’t fair on the riders who don’t have the money to avoid the subway. It also isn’t fair on the homeless, who are being encouraged — or at least not discouraged — to hang out on crowded trains, maximising the chances that bad stuff will happen.

[…]

One of the forces that influenced LA authorities, though they won’t admit it, is homelessness. They built La Sombrita, rather than a proper bus shelter, for the same reason NYC is taking benches out of Port Authority: they don’t want people to sleep there. It’s something you see more and more in American cities: a locking down of public spaces in an attempt to deal with the growth of the homeless population. A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over “misuse” by less than 1% of residents.

[…]

To get big-brained about it, something like La Sombrita could only happen in a high-regulation/low-trust society like the US. If regulations massively limit both bottom-up and top-down solutions, and if those solutions are expected to protect against all sorts of bad behaviour, you end up building the least to mitigate the worst — building things the majority doesn’t want, or doesn’t find useful.

The high-regulation part of the US is usually couched in the language of safety, but it’s really about not allowing organic growth, which is messy — even though, people being people, it tends to result in things the majority really wants. Ecuador, by contrast, is a low-regulation (although low-trust) society: here, you get ad hoc, bottom-up solutions. If there is a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, without natural shade around it, riders rig an umbrella to a pole, or throw some old seats under a tree. In the US, such solutions would be dismantled within days.

But also, in places like Quito, bus stops attract street vendors, who come with umbrellas, making people feel safer by their very presence. LA has some of that, but it’s against the letter of the law, and vendors are constantly hassled with fines, or threats of shutdowns. My favourite taco place was closed down twice during my short stint in LA, for bureaucratic reasons. All this is to say that in Quito getting the bus is a much more pleasant experience than in LA — even though the latter city is roughly 1,000 times richer than Ecuador, and the latter has its own serious troubles.

Regulations themselves aren’t the problem, though. Germany, like much of northern Europe, is a high-regulation society, but it’s also high-trust, compared to the US. Here, nice and fully functional things are built without fear of misuse. For Americans, who have both a high-regulation and low-trust society, this is all rather depressing; it’s the combination that means we can’t have nice things.

Population centers were once built with defense as a top priority

Friday, December 22nd, 2023

As part of Kyiv’s reconstruction effort, city administrators and government officials should consider modifications to bolster the city’s defenses:

Had the Ukrainian government constructed the dam in a way that would have allowed it to control the flooding, the Ukrainian military could have accomplished the same objective — impede the Russian advance —without destroying the dam and causing as much collateral damage to the surrounding communities. By contrast, when the Ukrainian government flooded the Teterev and Zdvyzh rivers, they controlled the flooding without damaging the dams. When the Ukrainian government rebuilds the Kozarovychi dam, it would be prudent to do so in a way that allows it to flood the Irpin without damaging the dam.

Likewise, many of the bridges that the Ukrainians destroyed will have to be completely rebuilt because the structural integrity of the remaining portions is compromised. However, it is possible to construct bridges in a way that makes it easy to destroy a portion without damaging the columns or piers. Bridges built in such a manner would be cheaper and faster to repair, thus allowing commerce and livelihoods to return to normal more quickly.

City planners should also consider building a system of modern moats, giant cement irrigation ditches that serve two purposes: giant cement irrigation ditches that could also serve as obstacles in times of war. These manmade riverways also serve the valuable purpose of helping to prevent flooding during times of heavy rain, which only seem to be becoming more common with climate change. Some cities already have these, but they are not designed with defense in mind, so vehicles can easily cross them. If, however, they were built with a nearly vertical angle, vehicles would be unable to cross, and these ditches would become “urban moats” or, in military parlance, tank ditches.

[…]

An apartment building along a key avenue of approach in the city’s periphery could be built in such a way that it could serve as a strongpoint. Take, for example, Jerusalem, where Israel built dual-purpose apartment buildings that not only were homes but also served as strongpoints at the dividing line with East Jerusalem. The apartment buildings were built with reinforced concrete and had walls around their exteriors with few openings and narrow slit windows with special drainage features to facilitate rifle, machine gun, and sniper firing positions. The reserve forces of the city were assigned buildings and even specific floors to man if conflict erupted.

‘…]

While officials in Kyiv mapped the available bunkers after the full-scale invasion, many were deemed unusable or unsatisfactory. As a result, many residents were forced to find impromptu underground shelters during Russian air raids. With sufficient planning, however, Kyiv could have developed, and can now develop, infrastructure to shield its civilian population beyond existing subway tunnels. They could produce dedicated air raid shelters, something that Sweden did from 1938 until 2002. It is important to remember that any physical structure — be it an air raid shelter or a concrete riverbed — must be maintained. Reports show that thousands of Sweden’s 65,000 air raid shelters are not serviceable, and the status of tens of thousands more is unknown because they have not been inspected in over a decade.

[…]

Population centers were once built with defense as a top priority. Recent history has shown that leaving a city’s defense to its nation’s borders is a dangerous proposition. It is time that Kyiv, and other cities in nations that border expansionist neighbors, once again make the defense part of city planning.

The federal court decision affecting homeless tent encampments in America

Sunday, June 25th, 2023

Five years ago, a federal court issued a crucial ruling, Martin v. Boise, affecting homeless tent encampments in America:

People experiencing homelessness, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said, can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

[…]

The case dates back to 2009, when Robert Martin and a group of fellow homeless residents in Boise, Idaho, sued, arguing that police citations they received for breaking local camping bans violated their constitutional rights. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit agreed that prosecuting people for sleeping or camping on public property when they have no home or shelter to go to violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

“The government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the court declared.

States, cities, and counties urged the US Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing the Ninth Circuit had created “a de facto” right to live on sidewalks and in parks that would “cripple” local leaders’ ability to safely govern their communities. But in 2019, the court declined, baffling some experts, though others suspect it’s because there were no conflicting circuit decisions at the time.

[…]

While the decision only formally applies in areas under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, the ruling has reverberated nationally, as local governments consider how to address unsheltered homelessness in ways that could avoid costly constitutional legal battles. There have already been dozens of court cases citing Martin, including in the Fourth Circuit in Virginia, and federal lower courts in Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Texas, New York, and Hawaii.

For now, though, Martin’s impact can be seen most clearly out West. Just before Christmas 2022, for example, a district judge cited Martin when she ruled that San Francisco can no longer enforce encampment sweeps — meaning clear out homeless individuals and their property from an outdoor area — since the city lacks enough shelter beds for those experiencing homelessness to move into. San Francisco appealed the decision, arguing it’s “unnecessarily broad and has put the City in an impossible situation.”

In Phoenix, Arizona, residents and business owners filed a lawsuit last summer against the city for allowing a downtown homeless encampment to grow with nearly 1,000 people, but a federal judge — echoing Martin — barred Phoenix in December from conducting sweeps if there are more homeless people than shelter beds available. A competing decision issued in March by a state judge ordered Phoenix officials to clean up the “public nuisance” at the encampment by July 10, arguing the city has “erroneously” applied Martin to date.

The problem is particularly acute in Los Angeles and San Francisco

Monday, June 19th, 2023

A recent Boston Consulting Group survey found that many office buildings are at risk of becoming “zombies,” with low usage, high vacancy and quickly diminishing financial viability:

The problem is particularly acute in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where weekday office building use has fallen to around 40%. As a result, in both cities, public transit revenue has plummeted by 80% or more, and office property values and tax revenues may drop by as much as half, according to our analysis of public data.

Rising interest rates are compounding the financial pressure for building owners, whose rental income stands to drop 35% to 45% as corporate leases expire in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Higher borrowing costs coupled with lower valuations could leave some owners owing more than their buildings are worth, leading in turn to a wave of defaults that suddenly make lenders the owners and managers of these buildings. In February, a fund managed by Brookfield Properties defaulted on $784 million in loans on two well-known office skyscrapers in downtown L.A., which was seen by some as a turning point for the U.S. office market.

The US has about 250 billion square feet of residential floor space

Saturday, June 10th, 2023

The US has about 250 billion square feet of residential floor space, spread across about 100 million individual buildings:

The majority of that square footage is found in single family homes, which make up a bit over 75% of residential square footage. Multifamily buildings (duplexes, apartments, condos, etc.) make up another ~18% of the square footage, and the balance goes to mobile and manufactured homes. Within multifamily, we see the majority of square footage is in smaller buildings — 2 to 4 unit buildings, or buildings 3 stories or less. Multifamily buildings taller than 3 stories make up just over 3% of US housing by floor area — your mental model of “typical apartment building” should be a garden apartment rather than an urban high-rise (the US actually has more square footage in mobile homes than it does in multifamily buildings taller than 3 stories). Over 90% of housing space in the US consists of single family homes and low-rise apartment buildings.

This affects energy use:

Modern housing uses substantially less energy than older housing on a per-square-foot basis. A 50-year difference in house age translates to roughly a 50% reduction in energy use. Most of that reduction comes from reduced energy used for heating.

After age, the largest variable that affects home energy use is climate — homes in cold climates use about 30-40% more energy than homes in warm climates, most of which is due to increased heating requirements.

Other than mobile homes, we don’t see a huge amount of variation in energy intensity between different types of housing (single family, multifamily, etc.) On a square-foot basis, single family homes actually use less energy than multifamily housing. Differences in energy use come from the fact that single family homes are much larger than multifamily housing.

Likewise, differences in energy use between the US and European houses stem from the fact that US homes are much larger than European ones.

We don’t seem to find much difference in energy use from across similar homes in states with different level of energy code strictness, though the data here is limited.

Castle design assumes the enemy will reach the walls

Thursday, December 1st, 2022

The battlements along the top of a castle wall were designed to allow a small number of defenders to exchange fire effectively with a large number of attackers, and in so doing to keep those attackers from being able to “set up shop” beneath the walls:

The goal is to prevent the enemy operating safely at the wall’s base, not to prohibit approaches to the wall. These defenses simply aren’t designed to support that much fire, which makes sense: castle garrisons were generally quite small, often dozens or a few hundred men. While Hollywood loves sieges where all of the walls of the castle are lined with soldiers multiple ranks deep, more often the problem for the defender was having enough soldiers just to watch the whole perimeter around the clock (recall the above example at Antioch: Bohemond only needs one traitor to access Antioch because one of its defensive towers was regularly defended by only one guy at night). It is actually not hard to see that merely by looking at the battlements: notice in the images here so far often how spaced out the merlons of the crenellation are. The idea here isn’t maximizing fire for a given length of wall but protecting a relatively small number of combatants on the wall. As we’ll see, that is a significant design choice: castle design assumes the enemy will reach the walls and aims to prevent escalade once they are there; later in this series we’ll see defenses designed to prohibit effective approach itself.

Domes are over-rated

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022

Any article about Moon or Mars bases needs to have a conceptual drawing of habitation domes, but domes have significant drawbacks, Casey Handmer reminds us:

Domes feature compound curvature, which complicates manufacturing. If assembled from triangular panels, junctions contain multiple intersecting acute angled parts, which makes sealing a nightmare. In fact, even residential dome houses are notoriously difficult to insulate and seal! A rectangular room has 6 faces and 12 edges, which can be framed, sealed, and painted in a day or two. A dome room has a new wall every few feet, all with weird triangular faces and angles, and enormously increased labor overhead.

It turns out that the main advantage of domes – no internal supports – becomes a major liability on Mars. While rigid geodesic domes on Earth are compressive structures, on Mars, a pressurized dome actually supports its own weight and then some. As a result, the structure is under tension and the dome is attempting to tear itself out of the ground. Since lifting force scales with area, while anchoring force scales with circumference, domes on Mars can’t be much wider than about 150 feet, and even then would require extensive foundation engineering.

Once a dome is built and the interior occupied, it can’t be extended. Allocation of space within the dome is zero sum, and much of the volume is occupied by weird wedge-shaped segments that are hard to use. Instead, more domes will be required, but since they don’t tessellate tunnels of some kind would be needed to connect to other structures. Each tunnel has to mate with curved walls, a rigid structure that must accept variable mechanical tolerances, be broad enough to enable large vehicles to pass, yet narrow enough to enable a bulkhead to be sealed in the event of an inevitable seal failure. Since it’s a rigid structure, it has to be structurally capable of enduring pressure cycling across areas with variable radii of curvature without fatigue, creep, or deflection mismatch.

Does this sound like an engineering nightmare? High tolerances, excessive weight, finicky foundations which are a single point of failure, major excavation, poor scaling, limited interior space, limited local production capability. At the end of the day, enormous effort will be expended to build a handful of rather limited structures with fundamental mechanical vulnerabilities, prohibitively high scaling costs, and no path to bigger future versions.

One can build a commuter rail network, an intercity network, or a point-to-point HSR line

Tuesday, November 15th, 2022

Rail systems are, by their nature, one dimensional, Casey Handmer explains:

Any disruption on a rail line shuts down the entire line, imposing high maintenance costs on an entire network to ensure reliable uptime. To add a destination to a network, an entire line must be graded and constructed from the existing network, and even then it will be direct to almost nowhere.

Contrast this with aircraft. There are 15,000 airports in the US. Any but the largest aircraft can fly to any of these airports. If I build another airport, I have added 15,000 potential connections to the network. If I build another rail terminal and branch line, at significantly greater cost than an airstrip, I have added only one additional connection to the network.

Roads and trucks are somewhere between rail and aircraft. The road network largely already exists everywhere, and there aren’t any strict gauge restrictions, mandatory union labor requirements, obscure signaling standards, or weird 19th century incompatible ownership structures. Damage or obstruction isn’t a showstopper, as trucks have two dimensions of freedom of movement, and can drive around an obstacle. In Los Angeles during the age of streetcars, a fire anywhere in the city would result in water hoses crossing the street from hydrant to firetruck, and then the network ground to a halt because steel wheels can’t cross a hose or surmount a temporary hump!

California‘s High-Speed Rail (HSR) project had to make too many promises it couldn’t keep:

Routing HSR on the east side of the central valley via Bakersfield and Modesto means those cities can have a station, but frequent services means that most trains have to stop there, and each stop adds 20 minutes to the travel time just to slow down and speed back up. Alternatively, the stations and their railway corridors are extremely expensive city decorations that help no-one because the trains, dedicated to a high speed SF-LA shuttle, never stop. Because they are trains, we can’t have both. If it was aircraft, we could have smaller, more frequent commercial aircraft offering direct flights to dozens of destinations from both cities. But rail has relatively narrow limits in terms of train size and frequency meaning that any route will be both congested at peak times and under-utilized for much of the rest.

Serving peripheral population centers in California is a nice thing to do, but aircraft pollution from Modesto is not driving global warming. Car traffic from Modesto would hardly overwhelm the Interstate 5. HSR minimizes financial losses when it is serving large population centers with high speed direct services. By failing to make the political case serving the main mission, the CA HSR project adopted numerous unnecessary marginal requirements which added so much cost that the project is unlikely to succeed. Even if the money materializes and the project is completed, the train will be so slow that it will hardly impact aircraft demand, so expensive it will be unable to operate without substantial subsidies, and so limited in throughput that it will hardly even alleviate traffic from LA’s outer dormitory suburbs.

In other words, one can build a commuter rail network, an intercity network, or a point-to-point HSR line, but forcing all three usage modes into the same system cannot succeed.