Brad Ideas - Transportation - Comments

It starts to stink quite rapidly

brad — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:17:23 -0800

But it’s minor and you leave the vent open in the bathroom. It also depends on how well your toilet seals. If you go driving and slosh it around, it’s worse.

Sorry for the typo, I meant

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:53:51 -0800

Sorry for the typo, I meant FLU and not fly.

How long

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:52:54 -0800

How long can a holding tank for black water go without a trip to the dump station before it starts to stink?

Bigger tanks

brad — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:17:48 -0800

Bigger tanks are of course possible, but they take precious physical space, and when full they are quite heavy. They must be in the bottom — the black water tank is almost always located directly under the toilet and the gray typically under the shower. 80 gallons of water weighs 640lbs, which is not trivial.

And yes, you want to empty the tanks sooner rather than later because they stink, especially the black one. No matter how many chemicals.

I’m surprised I don’t see more dry composting toilets running on propane or something which would change things a bit.

Extracting water from the air

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:12:24 -0800

Dehumidifiers will only work well on ambient that is very humid and will not do well in dried places. Besides being expensive to work them there is also the question that viruses, principally fly, spread really well on dried and warm environments.

Would that be possible to

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:08:04 -0800

Would that be possible to have a larger holding tank for black water on most motor homes, as they usually come already installed; pretty much as about 40 gallons of Black and around 60 of gray on large RVs, without major modifications on the system?
And to possibly have a second gray water holding tank connected to the dump system. like lets say 15 gallons extra holding tank, so one could set up a drain near the sink and dispose of gray water with lots of oil, grease, leftovers, rest of soda, milk, coffee and the like?
If one is using gray water for flushing then the amount of water in the first gray tank would supposedly be decreased and if water from it after passing through filtration is almost as good as clean then one could just water the lawn around the RV when the gray tank gets full?

I am not so sure how long a black holding tank can keep waste in without taking a trip to the dumping station as I just went RVing very few times on weekends. Could someone shed some light on this for me?

Education...

Rich — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:25:51 -0800

Other than your technological solutions, it sounds like what's really needed is education. People early merge because we're taught that jumping lines is wrong. It needs to be made clear that merging at the merge point is not jumping lines. Then more people will use the empty lane then there will not be a line to jump.

It's not that easy

brad — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:23:27 -0800

Indeed, many of those things happened. But I am afraid that people have come to love the personal car lifestyle without government pro-car regulations and subsidies to help them. And in many cases, those pro-car rules were passed with the glowing support of the people. When traffic is congested and parking is hard to find, people do get frustrated with their cars, yet they still demand their cars even when they understand their true cost, which can be many times more than the cost for non-owners. People will pay many times more for door-to-door, no waiting to start convenience, the ability to carry stuff with them (and leave it in the vehicle) and not having to sit next to random strangers and homeless dudes. They want that even when the transit is faster, but in the USA it rarely is; the transit is often much slower, sometimes even an order of magnitude slower. Even in cities with great transit like Tokyo people wish for cars and will pay a fortune to have them.

But robocars will replace transit because they could fix just about everything people prefer about transit, except transit’s ability to avoid congestion when it has private right-of-way. But that’s not a virtue of transit, it’s a virtue of private right-of-way, and if we need to, streams of robot cars, jitneys and the occasional van on private ROW will provide people with the best of both worlds. I don’t think we’ll actually need to.

People can use this tech to be much more efficient than today’s transit systems or cars, but some will also use it to be more wasteful (by living further away because the trip is so pleasant.) But we won’t stop them from doing what they want to do, not very easily.

Not as hard as you might think

MythoftheNobleSavage — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:47:07 -0800

Don't get me wrong, consumer adoption of new technology, mainly widespread car ownership had a substantial impact on our built environment. But, we voted transit oriented communities OUT when we allowed policy changes to occur at the federal and local level that favor auto-oriented development. If you read Fighting Traffic by Peter Norton (http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Traffic-American-Inside-Technology/dp/026...) you’ll see that it was not an easy battle for the motorist lobby to win. I’m not old enough to remember, but you may recall “Urban Renewal” projects in the 1960s and 70s where we took a good idea: the interstate and DEFENSE highway system (originally envisioned as a way to rapidly transport our military to any point on the mainland and facilitate the movement of goods) and made the bonehead mistake of deciding it should become the backbone of personal transport in this country. So we carved wholes through our neighborhoods and constructed monstrous concrete and asphalt barriers in the name of progress and fragmented our cities in many cases accomplishing the very opposite of the program’s goals.

Today we continue to subsidize driving by spending 40 billion dollars a year on highway and roadway infrastructure while most local municipalities collectively mandate billions more dollars a year in construction and maintenance of parking facilities through minimum parking requirements (basically a driving subsidy yoked to new development). Never mind that we haven’t been paying the real cost of this infrastructure, the ASCE gave roads a” D-“ this year, estimating we need to invest 930 BILLION dollars, just for roads, over the next 5 years, just to make up all the deferred maintenance and get back to an “OK” level of safety and service. http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/fact-sheet/roads

The original streetcars that were present in almost all small and large American cities at the turn of the last century are almost non-existent today, not because they were an inferior mode of transportation, but because most of them were built and operated by private companies and continued to be taxed while our government pumped huge amounts of money into the largest construction project in human history (China’s Great Wall might as well be a sandcastle compared to the US interstate highway system) and subsidized driving by mandating minimum off-street parking requirements. Ask any economist what happens when you tax one competitor and subsidize another, the one being taxed loses every time. I’m part of a broad and growing coalition that is working to make policy changes NOW because I know it will take a long time to address these infrastructure issues and I don’t want my kids and grandkids to still be dealing with this by the time they are in my shoes.

It's hard to vote it in

brad — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:48:51 -0800

What I mean is it’s very hard to vote in lifestyle changes. People do what they want to do regardless of what the government tries to make them do. The challenge is to avoid the wall-e world by making it less attractive, not by outlawing it.

RE:Public Health and the true costs of Parking

MythoftheNobleSavage — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:26:11 -0800

Come on Brad,
I was hoping for a little more than just and antidotal response. You're correct that there is not much that can be done to get people to adopt healthy lifestyle routines that scientific research says are good for them. That is partially due to the reality that the suburban, auto-dependent environment we have built in america for the last 50-80 years is not conducive to a convenient healthy lifestyle. When I flash forward to a future full of automated personal vehicles a few scenes from the movie WALL-E come to mind. I also realize that there is very little that I can do to cure cynicism. What I can do is chose to live in an urban walkable environment, design compact walkable communities, and vote to support policy that favors transit and transit oriented development. It only took one human lifetime for us to make a mess of our cities, maybe it wont take us that long to heal them. You probably wont be around to see it, but maybe I will.

No robo-electrics in the city?

brad — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:18:37 -0800

That’s entirely backwards — you want people to drive gasoline cars in the city? You’re not going to get a walk&transit-only city, not in the USA, not even in Europe. There are still tons of cars on the streets in Manhattan and London and even Tokyo and Shanghai. I’ve seen a few Asian cities where the cars are rare like Hong Kong but this is both unusual and often a product of geography.

There is only so much you can do, or want to do, it forcing people to do what you think is “best for them.” It is far more effective to offer solutions that they think are better, which also meet your agenda. Well, not just far more effective, because it’s binary. It works, the other one doesn’t.

You can figure out what you want — healthy living, pleasant environments, quick trips, serendipitous meetings — but it doesn’t work to tell people how to get it. You always get it wrong. People want these things and you can arrange so they can get them when they want them.

Robot cars of course do not require garages in any significance, and where they do require garages they don’t require them to be in the expensive or concentrated areas. (The further away they wait, of course, the longer they take to summon and the more energy they use, but they are so efficient that a few miles doesn’t hurt and if you just want the next available taxi you don’t have to wait because most of them are stored 2 miles out of the CBD.)

Public Health and the true costs of Parking

MythoftheNobleSavage — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:03:11 -0800

Brad,
You point out that there are considerable external costs and benefits to both auto-centric transportation and transit-centric systems. You also seem to recognize that it is impossible to speak about transportation without also discussing its relationship to land use. What do you say to those who see transit as an important component that enables safer, healthier, more livable communities? Wouldn't you agree that encouraging compact, walkable, transit oriented communities is an attractive way to reduce the need to supply copious amounts of parking which is expensive at $2-3 thousand a space for surface lots and about $15 thousand per space for structured parking to construct, not including long term maintenance. According to Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking, the economics of free parking is what drives our destinations further and further apart.

What are your thoughts on the effects of an auto-centric environment on public health? Some connections are obvious 4,000+/- pedestrian deaths each year in the US, 40,000+/- annual deaths in motor vehicle crashes...
(http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx)

other connections are being made by health professionals between health and our built environment:

365,000+/- annual deaths due to sedentary living (Mokdad, A.H., et al. 2004. Actual causes of death in the US. JAMA 291: 1238-45)

$40,000,000,000+/- direct cost to tax payers due to inactivity and poor nutrition. (www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/
(Obesity Research, Finkelstein et.al., Jan, ’04)

It appears that the best way to help people get the recommended 30-60 minutes of aerobic exercise per day is to create an environment where they get that exercise without even noticing it, for example: walking to/from work, school, or a transit stop. To make this lifestyle feasible it requires destinations to be within close proximity. Transit oriented density makes for a much more livable environment when compared with auto-oriented density (places like Los Angeles which has the density of a city but the relative parking supply of a suburb). To that point, fixed guideway transit is the only way to send a clear message to private developers that it is okay to reduce their parking supply because the presence of the transit infrastructure signals that service will continue. (Bus routes can change overnight, but its hard to re-route a streetcar)

On the earlier discussion of infrastructure funding, I agree that we have a pretty dumb system in America. The Barchan foundation has done an excellent job of analyzing the way that the world's infrastructure is paid for, and I would be for a system much like much of the rest of the developed world uses where contracts for public asset for design/build/operations/maintenance are bid together as a package instead of separately. (You'd design and build something very differently if you were the entity that was ultimately going to have to create a system to fund the operations and maintenance of that asset.)
http://www.barchanfoundation.com/

I only propose this approach for urban developments were the market can be supported, and mounting evidence suggests that generational preferences in the U.S. are shifting towards a more urban lifestyle.
http://www.rclco.com/pdf/Gwinnett_Redevelopment_Forum-Gregg_Logan-8-10-0...

Transit is not especially viable for rural areas and by accommodating new population growth in an urban form we can ensure that those great rural areas stay rural, let rural residents drive robo-electric vehicles, but keep them out of the city, we don't want to inflate our costs of living by having to provide parking garages.

As the numbers are not far apart

brad — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:51:36 -0800

Because the transit numbers and car numbers are within reasonable range of one another, it is not really important to consider improvements in transit which are not on the order of doubling or quadrupling the efficiency (or ridership with same energy.)

For people to ride transit as the green choice, it is not enough for them to save 20% or even 50%. That’s because in the USA in most cases, riding transit is a big sacrifice in time, convenience and other factors. Transit can be more convenient in a few cases, like private ROW in a congested rush hour (when it is also efficient) but outside those cases, people are already willing to spend tons more money for private transportation. They will not accept the inconvenience of transit just to be a little greener. They want to be 4 to 10 times greener, and it’s very hard for transit to deliver that.

I'll need a cite here

brad — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:47:54 -0800

as I know it’s not every system, since BART’s SFO extension in right in my own town is way under projections.

So please give me a cite for this underestimation? Is it related to the brief transit peak that took place in 2008 during $4 gasoline?