Department of Accessibility

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At streets.mn, Andrew Owen has a fascinating look at the work he has done with David Levinson on measuring accessibility in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area.  I’ll let Andrew define accessibility:

Accessibility measures the ease of reaching valued destinations.

Think about the last trip you made. You were in place A, you wanted to be in place B, and you got there by paying some sort of cost. There are several components at work here.

First, lets look at your reason for wanted to be in place B. That’s the whole reason the trip took place! You didn’t just want to move around for a bit, and then come back to A. (People do that sometimes, but we don’t consider it travel — we call it things like recreation, exercise, or NASCAR.) No, you had a reason for traveling to place B. That reason, from a transportation economics perspective, is the value that place B holds for you.

Now that we’ve established that place B has some value to you, it would be great if you could get there whenever you want, for free. But you can’t. Even if you frugally decide to walk from A to B instead of drive, fly, take the bus, or ride a horse, you cannot escape spending a precious resource: your time. The total amount of resources you spend in getting to B, whether they are time, money, oats (for your horse), or some combination, is thecost you pay to reach place B. To generalize just a little bit more, we can say that when the cost of getting to B is low, then B is easy to reach.

That, in a nutshell, is accessibility. It combines the value that we get from travel with the cost of making the trip. I love accessibility because it neatly encapsulates what I consider to be the fundamental purpose of transportation systems: providing ways for people to get to places they want to reach, at costs they are willing to pay.

Andrew then goes on to discuss the results of a project they completed for MN-DOT on measuring “cumulative opportunities accessibility”, or how many things can be reached within a given cost (time) threshold by car and transit.   You should read the whole post to see Andrew’s many interesting conclusions.

After reading it, a few things jumped out at me:

Owning a car gives you an overwhelming advantage in accessing jobs in this metro.  In a huge swath of the metro, making up all but the most outlying areas, you can access at least 100,000 jobs in 20 minutes by car.  A very large area, incorporating both core cities and most first-ring suburbs, can access over 500,000 jobs and up to 2.2 million.  By contrast, transit accessibility to jobs maxes out at 100k – 250k jobs, and this is if you live very near downtown Minneapolis.  If you live in parts of North and South Minneapolis and use transit, you have the same access to jobs in 20 minutes as someone with a car living in southern Dakota County (like in a corn field).  Or, based on the map shown below, from parts of Minneapolis, you can only reach 10-20% of the number of jobs reachable by car.

Ratio of jobs accessible by transit to jobs accessible by car

Is our transportation/land use system is failing those that can least afford a car?  I’d say that judgment wouldn’t be a stretch looking at these maps.  It will be interesting to see what MNDOT does with this information.

There will be a temptation to interpret this metric as only about transportation.  It’s actually about destination density AND transportation system performance.  I posted this idea in the comments and Andrew had a good response:

That’s a great point, and I didn’t talk much about the land use side of things in this post.

I feel like the popular conception often sees land use as more static than transportation; it is the background canvas upon which the dynamic lines of transportation are drawn. Discussion of expensive, exciting transportation systems tends to magnify this effect.

But in reality land use is far more dynamic! Transportation systems change in big fits and starts, but land use is constantly evolving in countless small ways. Even if we completely halted new investments in transportation, we could still make huge changes in accessibility through the policies we choose to guide land use development.

MNDOT mostly builds roads, so I assume they’ll use this report to think about where and how they should build more roads.  But if your goal is increasing accessibility, is it cheaper to lay blacktop or increase jobs/housing density?  What are the environmental implications of choosing each of those options?  Why do we have one half of the equation that’s totally socialized (road & transit building) and one that is totally privatized (with obvious regulation – land use controls/building construction)?

What if instead of a Department of Transportation we had a Department of Accessibility and it’s mission was to improve accessibility while meeting environmental standards, building resilient systems, and being economically viable?  I bet it would look at lot different than our current DOTs (hint: it would do a lot more with land use).

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s dedicated ROW!

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Over at streets.mn, I have a post about everyone’s favorite fictional urban transit revolution, the urban gondola (or aerial tram).

The case history on US urban gondolas doesn’t look good cost-wise, but the travel time savings look great.  The Portland Aerial Tram, which could also be called an urban gondola (if you consider low-slung Portland urban), cost $57 million, or roughly $90 million per mile, if I calculated the hypotenuse correctly.  The Portland Aerial Tram travels at a top speed of 22 mph, which could make an Uptown Transit Station to Hennepin-8th Street trip in 6.5 minutes.  That’s about one-third the posted travel time for the #6 bus, and less than half the travel time of the limited-stop #12.  6 minutes is even less than half the travel time identified by Metro Transit for an upgraded arterial BRT on Hennepin.

National Climate Assessment: trouble ahead

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duluth flood - mpr

A draft of the US National Climate Assessment was released about a week ago, and the outlook for changes headed to the Midwest and country as a whole is not good.  Minnpost has a good look at the Midwest section (emphasis mine):

Climate change will tend to amplify existing risks from climate to people, ecosystems, and infrastructure in the Midwest. Direct effects of increased heat stress, flooding,

drought, and late spring freezes on natural and managed ecosystems may be altered by changes in pests and disease prevalence, increased competition from non-native or opportunistic native species, ecosystem disturbances, land-use change, landscape fragmentation, atmospheric pollutants, and  economic shocks such as crop failures or reduced yields due to extreme weather events.

These added stresses, when taken collectively, are 

projected to alter the ecosystem and socioeconomic patterns and processes in ways that most people in the region would consider detrimental.

Much of the region’s fisheries, recreation, tourism, and commerce depend on the Great Lakes and expansive northern forests, which already face pollution and invasive species pressure – pressures exacerbated by climate change. Most of the region’s population lives in urban environments, with aging infrastructure, that are particularly vulnerable to climate-related flooding and life-threatening heat waves.

CC Midwest temp rise

Over at MPR, Paul Huttner also has a good overview, highlighting the coming “climate shock” of project 5-degree warming headed to Minnesota.

 

Bottom line?

This magnitude of warming will likely cause some dramatic… and potentiallyalarming changes in our Minnesota Landscape.

Our forests will shift north. Pine forests may dissapear, and transition to hardwood forests in significant sections of northern Minnesota.

Prairies will also overtake areas that are now forested…possibly even the parts of Twin Cities metro.

Increases in the frequncy of extreme rainfall events will create more events like the multiple “500 to 1,000 year” flood events seen in Duluth and southern Minnesota in the past 9 years.

The changes we’re already observing in Minnesota will continue…and the pace of change is likely to quicken in the next 30 years. Our children will live in a very different Minnesota than our parents did.

How are we doing to address this challenge?  Haven’t US greenhouse gas emissions gone down recently?  Yes, but unfortunately not enough, and we can’t just worry about US emissions.  From the report’s mitigation section (emphasis mine):

Even absent a comprehensive national greenhouse gas policy, both voluntary activities and a variety of policies and means at federal, state, and local levels are currently in place that lower emissions. While these efforts represent significant steps towards reducing greenhouse gases, and often result in additional co-benefits, they are not close to sufficient to reduce total U.S. emissions to a level consistent with the B1 scenario analyzed in this assessment. 

And remember, hitting that B1 scenario is critical if we want to avoid the most dangerous impacts and potentially runaway climate change.  For more on what the world might look like if we stay on the emissions path we’re on, take a look at the World Bank’s most recent report on 4-degree warming.

Too hot to pump gas

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art-weather-620x349

From Per Square Mile, this bit of news from the ongoing mega-heat wave in Australia.

It was so hot in the South Australian outback town of Oodnadatta yesterday that the local servo stopped selling petrol.

The Outback town has been sweltering through one of its great heatwaves with the temperature soaring above 40 degrees every day this year, reaching a peak of 48.2 degrees yesterday.

“The ground, the building, everything is so hot, you walk outside and you feel it’s going to burn you,” Pink Roadhouse owner Lynnie Plate said.

Mrs Plate said the Roadhouse couldn’t serve unleaded fuel after midday because it was vapourising and wouldn’t pump in the extreme heat.

In one part of Australia, temperatures reached 120 degrees F.  Are roads melting and gasoline evaporating an engineering problem, or a wake-up call?

Solar access, land use and 30-year planning

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Over at streets.mn, I wrote a piece about the mostly unknown requirement that cities in the metro address solar access in their comprehensive plans, and how we could improve to address the purpose of the requirement.

By law, every community in the seven-county metro is supposed to adopt a comprehensive plan that includes “an element for protection and development of access to direct sunlight for solar energy systems”.  This requirement dates back to 1978, when there was anoil crisis and gasoline was $1.30 per gallon (or, close to what it was in 2011inflation-adjusted).  In 1979, Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House.  Reagan took down the solar panels in ’86 and oil got a lot cheaperthrough the late 90′s.

The requirement remains however, even if few communities have ever done anything related to solar after they developed some language for their comprehensive plan.  As we enter this season of plan updates, perhaps it’s time for another look at how solar access, land use, energy and other issues are interrelated, and what are vision is for our energy systems.  Solar power is cheaper than ever, and the message is pretty clear on the need to start decarbonizing our energy system.

Modernization vs. ecotheology

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The Breakthrough Institute has an interesting essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus describing the case for “modernization” in our ecological approach versus what they call the traditional view, “ecotheology” which views our modernization as an affront to nature.  Here’s a long quote.  Be sure to also read the responses by Leslie Paul Thiele and Jon Christensen.

The rise of the knowledge economy — encompassing medicine, law, finance, media, real estate, marketing, and the nonprofit sector — has further accelerated the West’s growing disenchantment with modern life, especially among the educated elite. Knowledge workers are more alienated from the products of their labor than any other class in history, unable to claim some role in producing food, shelter, or even basic consumer products. And yet they can afford to spend time in beautiful places — in their gardens, in the countryside, on beaches, and near old-growth forests. As they survey these landscapes, they tell themselves that the best things in life are free, even though they have consumed mightily to travel to places where they feel peaceful, calm, and far from the worries of the modern world.

These postmaterial values have given rise to a secular and largely inchoate ecotheology, complete with apocalyptic fears of ecological collapse, disenchanting notions of living in a fallen world, and the growing conviction that some kind of collective sacrifice is needed to avoid the end of the world. Alongside those dark incantations shine nostalgic visions of a transcendent future in which humans might, once again, live in harmony with nature through a return to small-scale agriculture, or even to hunter-gatherer life.

The contradictions between the world as it is — filled with the unintended consequences of our actions — and the world as so many of us would like it to be result in a pseudorejection of modernity, a kind of postmaterialist nihilism. Empty gestures are the defining sacraments of this ecotheology. The belief that we must radically curtail our consumption in order to survive as a civilization is no impediment to elites paying for private university educations, frequent jet travel, and iPads…

Putting faith in modernization will require a new secular theology consistent with the reality of human creation and life on Earth, not with some imagined dystopia or utopia. It will require a worldview that sees technology as humane and sacred, rather than inhumane and profane. It will require replacing the antiquated notion that human development is antithetical to the preservation of nature with the view that modernization is the key to saving it. Let’s call this “modernization theology.”

Where ecotheology imagines that our ecological problems are the consequence of human violations of a separate “nature,” modernization theology views environmental problems as an inevitable part of life on Earth. Where the last generation of ecologists saw a natural harmony in Creation, the new ecologists see constant change. Where ecotheologians suggest that the unintended consequences of human development might be avoidable, proponents of modernization view them as inevitable, and positive as often as negative. And where the ecological elites see the powers of humankind as the enemy of Creation, the modernists acknowledge them as central to its salvation.

Modernization theology should thus be grounded in a sense of profound gratitude to Creation — human and nonhuman. It should celebrate, not desecrate, the technologies that led our prehuman ancestors to evolve. Our experience of transcendence in the outdoors should translate into the desire for all humans to benefit from the fruits of modernization and be able to experience similar transcendence. Our valorization of creativity should lead us to care for our cocreation of the planet.

Yglesias discovers the comprehensive plan

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Matt Yglesias, Slate writer and MOU (market-oriented urbanist), laments Minneapolis’ NIMBYs (emphasis mine):

…if each NIMBY group gets its way, then the “push the costs onto other people” plan becomes self-defeating. Others bear the costs of your NIMBY actions, but you bear the costs of their NIMBY actions. What’s needed is a citywide institutional framework that leads to a less-dysfunctional outcome where valuable projects are allowed to go forward.

Perhaps some sort of community visioning session that combines a look at projected growth, market forces, neighborhood desires, externalities of development, transportation impacts, and comes up with a mutually-agreed-upon document that can guide regulatory land use controls?

Or perhaps he means, as a friend emails, a comprehensive plan and zoning code that aren’t influenced by residents/stakeholders? 1) Good luck and 2) that kind of defeats the purpose.

See my early screed about MOU “solutions”.  MOUs claim market forces can unlock better outcomes for our urban areas, but the big barrier is really one of better process and collaborative decision making, which gets short shrift or no shrift at all in these posts.

Robot cars with morals

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From the New Yorker via the Transportationist.

The thought that haunts me the most is that that human ethics themselves are only a work-in-progress. We still confront situations for which we don’t have well-developed codes (e.g., in the case of assisted suicide) and need not look far into the past to find cases where our own codes were dubious, or worse (e.g., laws that permitted slavery and segregation). What we really want are machines that can go a step further, endowed not only with the soundest codes of ethics that our best contemporary philosophers can devise, but also with the possibility of machines making their own moral progress, bringing them past our own limited early-twenty-first century idea of morality.

Building machines with a conscience is a big job, and one that will require the coordinated efforts of philosophers, computer scientists, legislators, and lawyers. And, as Colin Allen, a pioneer in machine ethics put it, “We don’t want to get to the point where we should have had this discussion twenty years ago.” As machines become faster, more intelligent, and more powerful, the need to endow them with a sense of morality becomes more and more urgent.

“Ethical subroutines” may sound like science fiction, but once upon a time, so did self-driving cars.

Below are some thoughts about this article I posted on Google+, reposted since I have a suspicion it’s a ghost town.

It’s somewhat fascinating that we’ll even have this problem, since we have no standardized “ethical subroutine” in our current social contract, even for driving.  We generally just tell people to try not to crash.  We have signs and rules, but I was never told in drivers ed which way to swerve when I encounter an oncoming vehicle in a narrow mountain pass in order to minimize loss of life (especially if that swerving meant self-sacrifice).  Likewise, we have no “right” answer we teach in elementary school about how to solve the trolley problem.  We’re ok with ambiguity and possible less utilitarian outcomes when humans do it, but not when our creations do it.

To take it a step further, suppose we developed an ethical subroutine that generally as a society we felt comfortable with for robot cars.  Would we then enforce conformance with that subroutine on the remaining human drivers?

Linking spending decisions, greenhouse gases, and social games

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Via the inbox, I get word of a company trying to develop an app/website to make the greenhouse gas impacts of your spending decisions plain.  Of course, they’d like your support to get started.

Many frustrated Americans would like to take climate action
into their own hands, but it’s hard to know where to start. Enter Oroeco.com.

“The basic idea is that every dollar we spend on products or services impacts the environment and society for better or for worse,” says Oroeco’s CEO, Ian Monroe, who also teaches courses on climate change and renewable energy at Stanford University. “The problem is that these impacts aren’t apparent when we’re deciding what to buy, particularly now that global supply chains have shifted problems half a world away. We are building a tool that automatically connects purchase data from debit and credit cards (via Mint.com) to scientific climate impact data – so you can track the climate footprint of your groceries, gas, airfare, home energy, clothing, etc. You can also see how you compare to your friends and earn points and prizes.”

There are lots of services to track home energy usage/impacts, like Opower and the now defunct but awesome Microsoft Hohm.  I’m not familiar with others that go beyond energy use to purchasing decisions.

Some communities try to inventory consumption impacts, like King County and the City of Minneapolis, but an app/game will probably be a lot more effective at reaching residents and consumers.