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.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 6 Comments »

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.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

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.

Posted in Urbanism | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Urbanism, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

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.

Posted in Technology, Urbanism | 10 Comments »

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.

Posted in Urbanism | 6 Comments »

Most of the time, the road is far too big, and the rest of the time, it’s far too small

Sunday, November 13th, 2022

Casey Handmer did a bunch of transport economics when he worked at Hyperloop:

Let’s not bury the lede here. As pointed out in The Original Green blog, the entire city of Florence, in Italy, could fit inside one Atlanta freeway interchange. One of the most powerful, culturally important, and largest cities for centuries in Europe with a population exceeding 100,000 people. For readers who have not yet visited this incredible city, one can walk, at a fairly leisurely pace, from one side to the other in 45 minutes.

[…]

There are thousands of cities on Earth and not a single one where mass car ownership hasn’t led to soul-destroying traffic congestion.

Cars are both amazing and terrible:

Imagine there existed a way to move people, children, and almost unlimited quantities of cargo point to point, on demand, using an existing public network of graded and paved streets practically anywhere on Earth, in comfort, style, speed, and safety. Practically immune to weather. Operable by nearly any adult with only basic training, regardless of physical (dis)ability. Anyone who has made a habit of camping on backpacking trips knows well the undeniable luxury of sitting down in air-conditioned comfort and watching the scenery go by. At roughly $0.10/passenger mile, cars are also incredibly cheap to operate.

[…]

Some American cities have nearly 60% of their surface area devoted to cars, and yet they are the most congested of all. Would carving off another 10% of land, worth trillions in unimproved value alone, solve the problem? No. According to simulations I’ve run professionally, latent demand for surface transport in large cities exceeds supply by a factor of 30. Not 30%. 3000%. That is, Houston could build freeways to every corner of the city 20 layers deep and they would still suffer congestion during peak hours.

Why is that? Roads and freeways are huge, and expensive to build and maintain, but they actually don’t move very many people around. Typically peak capacity is about 1000 vehicles per lane per hour. In most cities, that means 1000 people/lane/hour. This is a laughably small number. All the freeways in LA over the four hour morning peak move perhaps 200,000 people, or ~1% of the overall population of the city. 30x capacity would enable 30% of the population to move around simultaneously.

[…]

Spacing between the bicycles, while underway, is a few meters, compared to 100 m for cars with a 3.7 m lane width. Bicycles and pedestrians take up roughly the same amount of space.

[…]

Like a lot of public infrastructure, the cost comes down to patterns of utilization. For any given service, avoiding congestion means building enough capacity to meet peak demand. But revenue is a function of average demand, which may be 10x lower than the peak. This problem occurs in practically all areas of life that involve moving or transforming things. Roads. Water. Power. Internet. Docks. Railways. Computing. Organizational structures. Publishing. Tourism. Engineering.

This effect is intuitively obvious for roads. Most of the time, the roads in my sleepy suburb of LA are lifeless expanses of steadily crumbling asphalt baking in the sun. The adjacent houses command property prices as high as $750/sqft, and yet every house has half a basketball court’s worth of nothing just sitting there next to it. Come peak hour, the road is now choked with cars all trying to get home, because even half a basketball court per house isn’t enough to fit all the cars that want to move there at that moment. And of an evening, onstreet parking is typically overwhelmed because now every car, which spends >95% of its life empty and unused, now needs 200 sqft of kerb to hang out. Most of the time, the road is far too big, and the rest of the time, it’s far too small.

People often underestimate the cost of having resources around that they aren’t currently using. And since our culture expects roads and parking to be both limitless, available, and free, we can’t rely on market mechanisms to correctly price and trade the cost. Seattle counted how many parking spaces were in the city and came up with 1.6 million. That’s more than five per household! Obviously most of them are vacant most of the time, just sitting there consuming space, and yet there will never be enough when they are needed!

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 7 Comments »

Asian-Americans have one-quarter the traffic death rate of Americans as a whole

Sunday, September 18th, 2022

The Japanese risk of dying in a traffic accident is one-sixth the American risk, David Zipper pointed out before explaining all the ways Japan makes its roadways safer — but I pointed out a more parsimonious explanation: Asian-Americans have one-quarter the traffic death rate of Americans as a whole.

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Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 6 Comments »

The owner can by right operate a bar, a restaurant, a boutique, a small workshop on the ground floor

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

There are a number of reasons small business in Tokyo is so vibrant:

A huge one that you can look at cities around the world and ask is how many flexible microspaces are available across your city. By microspaces, I mean small little nooks and crannies in the commercial or residential sectors of the city that you can do a lot of different things with and don’t need to pay a huge amount of money in rent.

This is going to sound wild to anyone who lives in the US, but for any two-story rowhouse in Tokyo, the owner can by right operate a bar, a restaurant, a boutique, a small workshop on the ground floor — even in the most residential zoned sections of the city. That means you have an incredible supply of potential microspaces. Any elderly homeowner could decide to rent out the bottom floor of their place to some young kid who wants to start a coffee shop, for example. When you look at what we call yokocho alleyways — charming, dingy alleyways that grew out of the black markets post-World War II, which are some of the the most iconic and beloved sections of the city now — it’s all of these tiny little bars and restaurants just crammed into every available space.

[...]

Liquor licenses are extremely cheap and easy. A liquor license in an American city can sometimes run up to $500,000. You’re not going to have a little four-seat, mom-and-pop bar for the locals. So those regulatory and policy choices that we make fundamentally determine what our cities are going to feel like.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 3 Comments »

Building regulations have made cities far more susceptible to heat

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

Building regulations in the developed world, especially the United States, have made cities far more susceptible to heat, Connor Harris explains:

And this is just one instance of a broader lesson: regulations can hurt the environment just as easily, or even perhaps more easily, than they can help.

I live in Houston, the most notoriously hot and humid large city in the United States, in an intensively redeveloped prewar residential neighborhood that comprises mostly mid-rise apartment blocks and three-story townhouses. Even Houston’s summer heat is quite comfortable in most circumstances. I have never felt overheated while eating lunch outdoors on a shaded patio, for example, or even after mid-afternoon bicycle trips along local roads or walks along shaded sidewalks and park trails.

Houston heat is made intolerable by the city’s vast quantity of heat-absorbing asphalt and the frequent lack of shade. I frequent a few restaurants a short distance from my apartment, in strip malls off of a busy, six-lane arterial road. The walk from my apartment to the restaurant, along an unshaded sidewalk between the road on one side and the parking lots of the strip malls on the other, is far more uncomfortable than even exercise in the shade at the same temperature. Even a short one-minute walk through a big-box store’s parking lot can be almost intolerable and make the air conditioning inside feel almost life-saving. More rigorous research confirms that large parking lots contribute powerfully to the urban heat island effect. It’s no wonder that anyone whose experience of the Texas outdoors involves mostly walking between cars and commercial buildings would find the heat oppressive.

These aspects of Houston’s built environment owe less to the workings of the free market than to a set of market-distorting land-use regulations that sacrifice heat resilience, while also wasting large amounts of valuable land, in the name of giving motorists maximum possible convenience. In these respects, Houston’s land-use regulations are perfectly ordinary. Most prominent are the massive requirements for off-street parking spaces for almost all types of development outside a few downtown areas. In Houston, even studio apartments, seldom occupied by more than one person, require 1.25 parking spaces. Any commercial development requires far more parking space. Supermarkets, for example, require five parking spots per 1,000 square feet of floor area. Bars and restaurants, depending on classification, can require up to 14. A typical parking spot takes up about 300 square feet of space, so such establishments could need four times the amount of land for parking lots as for their building itself. Many commercial parking lots often sit mostly empty.

Other common aspects of American land-use codes, such as setbacks and traffic engineering standards, also make heat in American cities harder to bear. Old cities in hot regions such as Latin America and the Middle East typically have buildings (which often incorporate colonnade walkways) set close to the street to provide shade for pedestrians—an eminently sensible design specifically prohibited by most American zoning codes, which enforce a suburban appearance on residential neighborhoods by requiring “front setbacks,” or wide margins of land along the street that cannot be built on. Builders typically pave over large amounts of this setback land to provide driveways much longer than they would have to be without setbacks, adding yet more hot asphalt into cities.

[...]

Traffic-engineering standards also contribute to overheated cities. Houston, for instance, mandates street widths of at least 50 feet on local roads in new subdivisions—more than four times the standard 12-foot width of an interstate highway lane. This gives enough room for cars to pass one another at speed with one lane of parking on each side of the road, a massive waste of land and asphalt in residential areas with plentiful off-street parking where, even at rush hour, local roads will see at most a few cars per minute. It’s common traffic-engineering practice, as well, to maintain the sides of major roads as “clear zones” free from trees and other fixed obstacles, in order to limit the damage to cars that run off the side of the road. This practice eliminates shade while providing only doubtful safety benefits.

Posted in Urbanism | 2 Comments »

Living in walkable neighborhoods alone does not do the job

Friday, August 19th, 2022

There was a viral tweet recently saying something like “Americans only obsess over college so much because it’s the only time they get to live in a walkable neighborhood,” and Ben Southwood thinks there’s something to this:

But living in walkable neighbourhoods alone does not do the job. Most Americans do not choose to live in walkable neighbourhoods, developers do not maximise profits by building walkable neighbourhoods, and walkable neighbourhoods don’t usually have the highest location-adjusted prices. (Though see many admirable projects trying to change this on Coby Lefkowitz’s Twitter feed.)

Americans rarely live on walkable streets. There are some very high rent neighbourhoods that are walkable &mdsah; Manhattan, Georgetown, and so on. There are bungalow courts and assisted living areas for older people. These two neighbourhood types involve clustering, based around affordability or other restrictions, and are often desirable.

Then there are trailer communities, and there are some neighbourhoods of public housing that are in some sense walkable, although the walks tend to be across bleak windswept open spaces or within poorly kept up towers and blocks. These two neighbourhood types tend not to be people’s first choice, and are generally seen as less desirable.

As will be clear if you read my first post, or the title of this very Substack, I think the reason people loved their college days so much, apart from the fact they were young and beautiful, with perfectly functioning brains and livers, is that at university one has all one’s best friends within two minutes walk. And they’re almost always free to hang out.

Compared to the small town example I looked at before, people at a given university are probably more like potential friends. Most importantly, the students all chose to be there — unlike prisoners, who also live in walkable neighbourhoods. And they chose to be there in part because of an organising feature of the university, probably making the intake similar to each other in some way, possibly fitting some cultural type.

In short: it’s also about clustering.

Posted in Education, Urbanism | 10 Comments »

Crime’s costs are even higher than we thought

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

How bad is crime?, Ben Southwood asks:

In the paper, whose calculations were done in 2006, Americans were willing to pay $25,000 to avert a burglary across their society, $70,000 to avoid a serious assault, and nearly $10m to avoid a murder.

A more practical situation comes when juries award money to ‘make people whole’ for physical injury, pain, suffering, mental anguish, shock, and discomfort that they have experienced due to some illegal action. For example, one 68-year old lady was shot through the spine in a drive-by shooting, and left paraplegic — a jury gave her $2.7m in addition to her medical costs.

If you combine these awards, in a large sample, with separate ‘physician impairment ratings’ — basically how bad doctors think the injury is compared to death — then this is another method of estimating the statistical value of a life, something we have hundreds of estimates for, which typically comes out somewhere above $5m, depending on the wealth of the country and the methodology.

[...]

Their central estimate is that crime costs America $2.6 trillion annually, mostly coming from violent crime. This is about 12 percent of US GDP. By this metric, it would be, in GDP terms, one of the US’s biggest problems, on par with housing. For a country like the UK with a murder rate about five times lower, the problem is probably about five times smaller.

I actually think the American problem is considerably bigger than this estimate, because this study only includes the costs of crimes that actually get committed. However, people try their damnedest to avoid being the victims of crime. This leads to many extremely socially costly behaviours.

What are some of these extremely socially costly behaviors?

For example, one study by Julie Cullen and Steven Levitt finds that when crime rates across the city rise ten percent, city centre populations fall one percent — with people generally moving to the suburbs. One crime tends to push one person out of the city centre, on average.

Quantifying this in terms of a real world city, the roughly 400 percent increase in New York City’s murders from 1955 to 1975 (from around 300 to over 1,500 per year) would have been expected to empty the densest parts of the city out by about 40 percent, assuming that other crimes rose in line with murder. And indeed, the population of the centre city — Manhattan — fell about 35 percent over that period, while the population and physical extent of the suburbs grew rapidly.

Murders in New York City peaked in 1990 at over 2,000 per year, roughly as population reached its nadir in the city centre. They have cratered by over three quarters, to about 300. This would have likely driven city centre population up massively, much moreso than it actually did recover, but building restrictions have prevented this happening anywhere near as much as it might, meaning that it has driven up prices instead.

So this story implies that crime in city cores drives people to the suburbs, creating urban sprawl. If so, then crime’s costs are even higher than we thought.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 6 Comments »

Passenger trains generally travel on the same tracks as freight trains

Saturday, August 6th, 2022

Modern American passenger trains take longer to travel the same routes than trains used to take:

First, Amtrak trains often have to make more stops than their pre-Amtrak counterparts. (Abrams didn’t go into detail why, but as a quasi-government corporation, Amtrak sometimes makes more stops along a route to please Congressional representatives who need to authorize its funding, unlike the private railroads that existed before Amtrak’s formation in the early 1970s.) As an example of the added stops Amtrak now makes, Abrams pointed out the 1959 New York Central’s New York-Chicago route took 16 hours and made eight stops, whereas Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited along the same route takes 19 hours 10 minutes making 18 stops, including a lengthy pause in Albany where train cars coming from Boston are linked up.

The second reason has to do with track priority. Passenger trains generally travel on the same tracks as freight trains. When the passenger and freight trains were owned by the same company, they typically prioritized passengers. Now, in the Amtrak era, freight rail companies no longer operate passenger train service but still own, operate, and maintain the tracks, which Amtrak uses. Although the law requires them to prioritize Amtrak trains, in practice they rarely do, resulting in an escalating beef between the freight companies and Amtrak.

[…]

One of the few places Amtrak does not have to contend with freight rail is along the Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C. to Boston via New York. Either Amtrak or regional commuter rail systems own those tracks. And it is one of the few routes with noticeable time improvements since the Eisenhower Era and the only stretch with anything approaching high speed rail service, saving riders some 45 minutes between New York and Washington when compared to Olden Times. And New York to Boston on Acela — until recently the only stretch of track in the U.S. with true “high-speed rail” — is 21 minutes faster than the fastest train in 1952.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 5 Comments »

A person who took a 500 mile flight every single day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022

Amtrak passengers are about 58 times as likely to get injured as train riders in France, but American trains are still much safer Than many alternatives:

Automobiles are one of the most deadly ways to get from Point A to Point B, with 7.28 deaths for every billion passenger miles.
This fatality rate was 17 times as high as the rate for trains, which stood at 0.43 deaths per billion miles. Subways, buses and planes are even safer still.

[…]

“A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year, had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying,” Savage wrote. “The rate per passenger mile was 29 times that for automobiles and light trucks.” By contrast, “A person who took a 500 mile flight every single day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000.”

Posted in Urbanism | 6 Comments »

The students rejected a completely subterranean design as both too expensive and too depressing

Friday, July 15th, 2022

In 1959, the Cornell College of Architecture launched a study to design a city that could survive nuclear attack:

The Schoharie Valley Townsite project was one of the most ambitious civil defense proposals of the Cold War: a factory-town that could not only withstand nuclear attack, but maintain war production even as the hydrogen bombs burst around it.

[...]

As a baseline, they decided to design the town to withstand a 20 megaton blast at a distance of ten miles from city center, and to then maintain industrial production while buttoned up against fallout.

The next step was to choose a location in New York state for their new town. Based on local geology, the availability of transport, and being outside the blast radius of existing cities, they narrowed the choice to either the Schoharie Valley or Slaterville.

[...]

The Schoharie Townsite was explicitly modeled after the factory towns of the IBM corporation, and centered around the “EMF”, or Electronics Manufacturing Facility. Based on existing IBM factory-towns, they estimated a population of 9,000, of whom about 1,500 would work at the EMF itself.

The students rejected a completely subterranean design as both too expensive and too depressing to live in. Instead, they decided to build the town on the surface, with underground communal shelters for each neighborhood linked by tunnels. Since the different shelters were all connected, in an attack people could head for cover immediately, without worrying about being cut off from family members in different shelters. Every point on the surface would be within 1500 feet – about five minutes walk – from a shelter entrance. All underground space would be buried beneath at least four and a half feet of earth and a foot of concrete for blast protection and radiation attenuation.

The 9,000 residents would live in 1,158 apartments, 372 rowhouse and duplex units, and 951 detached houses, split among three main residential areas. Each residential area would be centered around a community center with an elementary school, shops, social center, churches, communal recreation areas, and a park. The entrances to the neighborhood shelter would be in the elementary schools. Each entrance would include mass decontamination stations, able to handle 60-75 people per hour.

At the center of the three residential areas would be a central business hub with a high school, municipal buildings, stadium, and shops. The town high school would sit on top of the downtown shelter, which would also be the hub of the subterranean network. The municipal offices’ basements would be hardened and serve as the town’s civil defense control center.

Unlike the rest of the town, the Electronics Manufacturing Facility would be entirely underground, in limestone one hundred feet below the surface. The access tunnel would have a series of turns to dilute blast, and the internal structures would be shock-mounted. The student planners saw the subterranean character of the factory as a bonus – “by virtue of its subterranean character, the plant inflicts no objectionable atmosphere upon adjacent residential areas, so that usual difficulties in industry-residence relationships should not arise.”

The town would get its water from underground wells, with an underground treatment plant and million-gallon subterranean reservoir in the rock above the EMF, and three other million-gallon reservoirs located elsewhere. A small light water reactor would supply the electrical power.

All of the underground spaces would serve secondary roles in peacetime. The rooms of the high school shelter would be used a gymnasium, library, auditorium, cafeteria, and storage facilities. The underground tunnels would hold a “seatway” transportation network, a sort of minimalist subway: “trains” of eight to ten chairs would be pulled along by a continuously moving belt, briefly disengaging from the belt at stations to allow passengers to get on or off.

This reminded me of a morbidly fascinating fact from Table C, “Per-Cent Mortality at Various Distances,” of The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: from 0 feet to 1000 feet from ground zero, percent mortality was 93.0. Not 100.0 percent. Not 99.9 percent. But 93.0 percent.

Hiroshima was 12 kilotons, less than a thousandth as powerful as a 20-megaton bomb.

(This reminds me of The Atomic Cafe, which makes a splendid Rorschach test.)

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had rather different results:

In considering the devastation in the two cities, it should be remembered that the cities’ differences in shape and topography resulted in great differences in the damages. Hiroshima was all on low, flat ground, and was roughly circular in shape; Nagasaki was much cut up by hills and mountain spurs, with no regularity to its shape.

[...]

In Hiroshima over 60,000 of 90,000 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged by the atomic bomb; this figure represents over 67% of the city’s structures.

In Nagasaki 14,000 or 27% of 52,000 residences were completely destroyed and 5,40O, or 10% were half destroyed. Only 12% remained undamaged. This destruction was limited by the layout of the city.

Rolling hills and a linear, rather than circular, shape could go a long way in reducing the damage to an otherwise ordinary city.

(Hat tip to Adamas Nemesis.)

Posted in Urbanism, War | 4 Comments »

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