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Off-ramp: How demolishing freeways is reviving American cities

(author unknown) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 04:18:28 PDT

John Norquist. (Photo by Congress for the New Urbanism.)

Excerpted from a longer interview in Next American City.

One of John Norquist’s best-known achievements as mayor of Milwaukee — an office he held from 1988 to 2004 — was demolishing the Park East Freeway, a 1960s-era expressway that restricted access to the city’s downtown. Today, he is CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an organization that promotes urban highway removal and walkable, mixed-use urban development.

Norquist, who is also author of The Wealth of Cities, an argument for using the free market to achieve urbanist goals, will be one of the featured speakers at the Congress’ 20th annual gathering in West Palm Beach, Fla., this May. Here, he discusses urban highway removal — where it’s been done, where it will happen next, and why we as a nation must overcome our obsession with reducing congestion.

Q. As local leaders around the country are now seriously considering highway removal in some form or another, how do you suggest convincing concerned residents that such a move is right for them and their city?

A. Well, you have to change the discussion from pure traffic count comparison to traffic distribution. A robust street grid, with lots of connections, will distribute traffic much better than a few large freeways.

For example, when the Embarcadero Freeway, a double-deck freeway [in San Francisco], was torn down, a majority of the trips — according to a study by the city of San Francisco — got shorter and faster because of the increased connectivity. With the freeway, there were a lot of trips where you overshot your destination and had to come back. It also attracted trips that didn’t add any value to the neighborhood: People going from Oakland to Marin County were cutting through San Francisco. When the freeway was torn down and replaced by a boulevard, it suddenly didn’t look so attractive to go that way, and [drivers] found a different way to get to Marin Country or, in some cases, didn’t make the trip.

Q. What is the best way to fund urban highway removal?

A. A lot of freeways are headed beyond their design life, so they have to be rebuilt. You can’t just resurface them again. It’s cheaper to just tear it down and replace it with a surface street, so you win the cost argument by comparing it with rebuilding the freeway.

As far as other funds that are available, you can try for some of the TIGER grants … But I think the biggest single way to finance these things is to compare them with rebuilding the existing structure. In the case of Milwaukee, it cost about a third as much to tear it down as it would’ve been to rebuild it.

Q. What are some of the highway removal projects around the country that you consider particularly admirable?

The West Side Highway in 1979. (Photo by m.joedicke.)

A. New York’s West Side Highway was closed in 1975. It fell down once in ’73, and they repaired it, and it fell down again in ’75. At the end of its 40-year design life, it fell down right on schedule. And it was just really expensive, and politically unpopular, to rebuild it … The result of the West Side Highway coming down was [that] it really helped the rebirth of the real estate market in Chelsea, Tribeca, Battery Park City.

In Portland, the riverfront section of the expressway was removed and there was a huge property value increase. People could see the [Willamette] River, and without the freeway in the way, that made a huge difference.

And then in Seoul, South Korea, is the most spectacular one of all: They took out a freeway with over 150,000 cars a day and replaced it with two moving lanes on each side of a river, which they restored. And it works just fine because they have a really rich street grid in Seoul.

Basically, freeways don’t belong in densely populated cities. They create more problems than they solve. They’re very expensive, so almost nobody’s building new ones. That tells you that they’re sort of doomed: When you’re not doing new ones, you’re going to eventually have to remove the old ones.

Q. What about some of the pending projects? Are there any that stick out in your mind?

A. I’d really, really love to see the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans reach a point where it can be removed. I think the neighborhood’s pretty well convinced that it’s a great idea. Two aldermembers are for it. There’s a third councilmember who’s still debating if it’s a good idea, and then the mayor has said favorable things about it. He’s not completely locked in yet, but there’s a good chance of the Claiborne coming down.

We’ve got to take care of some concerns, like the Port of New Orleans — they haven’t quite wrapped their mind around us yet as a good thing for them. There are a lot of truck movements that have to do with the port, and some of those trucks go on the Claiborne. But it’s only three miles long, and a multi-lane boulevard would be able to handle the traffic at almost the same speed — not quite as fast, but it might even work better in rush hour because it wouldn’t congest as much.

That’s one of the things about freeways: They tend to fail when you need them the most. They fill up, and then there’s no escaping. Once you’re on it, you just have to wait until they uncongest. Whereas when you’re on a surface street — like, say, Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. — even though it’s a big road that carries a lot of traffic, it really doesn’t come to a complete standstill, because there are so many cross streets that, if the thing congests, then people go to a different street instead. They turn right, get off the street and go to Massachusetts Ave., or Wisconsin Ave., or one of the other streets.

Q. Despite underuse and pretty bad congestion on many urban freeways across the country, there’s still this strong, vocal element against removing freeways, people who still want them in their cities.

A. It is a hard sell, because it’s counterintuitive. So the average person hears that you want to tear down the Claiborne Expressway, and they go, “You want to do what? How could you be against that big road? Cars probably need it. Traffic needs it.” So you have a lot of explaining to do, and it takes years, sometimes, to get to the point where the public says, “Oh, yeah, maybe that isn’t such an idiotic idea after all.”

Q. Do you think that stems from a misunderstanding of highways and their effect, or is there something else at play there?

A. Everybody’s been sort of trained to believe that if you’ve got a traffic problem, all you have to do is make the pipe bigger, you know, make the road wider and that’ll solve the problem.

The Detroit metropolitan area is covered with freeways … More than any other place in the country, the Michigan DOT pretty much got its way. And they have solved the problem that they identified, which was congestion … So by creating a transportation system that encouraged people to leave town — the population of the city is about a third of what it was since 1950.

[Detroit] had 300 miles of streetcars at the end of the war. That’s all gone … The street grid has been cut up, so it’s hard to move around on the surface streets. [But] the stated goal was to battle congestion, and in Detroit, they did it. And there are side effects.

You could take care of congestion in New York in a similar way: If you eliminate the 700 miles of subway, eliminate the commuter trains, build the Cross-Manhattan Expressway, put the West Side Highway back in — build all the freeways that Robert Moses didn’t get around to building — you could probably solve the congestion problem in New York. Manhattan’s population would drop from 2 million down to half a million, and the city would become a really poor place instead of a rich place.

The point I’m making is that, since the postwar period, federal transportation policy has been focused on eliminating congestion, and that’s too narrow a goal. The goal ought to be: What adds value to society? What adds value to the economy? If you look at the richest places in America, they’re the most congested.

Filed under: Article, Cities, Infrastructure

The Johnny Appleseed Method

johnrobb — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:02:23 PDT

Is it possible to seed resilient communities? Most people assume that the only way to do this is to write a book or share information.

Here’s another more action oriented way to do it. A method modeled on the career of Johnny Appleseed.

Johnny Appleseed is a well known American legend. While many people imagine him traveling the countryside as a beggar — planting apple trees in every nook and cranny — that isn’t actually the case.

In reality he was an early entrepreneur. He started businesses.

What?

He traveled the newly settled mid-western US planting apple orchards and nurseries that he ran as decentralized co-operative businesses. Here’s how he did it:

When he arrived in a newly settled area, he acquired some land. It was usually cheap land.
He then planted an orchard and established a relationship with a neighboring farmer.
He then left the business in the hands of the neighbor, who in turn leased the individual trees to the community to generate income.
Interesting twist: Since the apples were sour, they were used them to make hard cider.

How successful was he? By the end of his life, he had established 1,200 acres of orchards and nurseries across multiple states (he actually planted much more than this, but his accounting was spotty), run in much the same way as community supported agriculture is run today.

What makes Johnny interesting to us is that he seeded these early, struggling communities with local production. Production that made them both more valuable and better places to live.

Is it possible to be a modern, technically astute Johnny Appleseed seeding micro co-operatives that run permaculture gardens/orchards, local composting businesses, solar heating systems… across the countryside?

I think so. He’s an interesting role model.

Your thinking about new ways to build resilient businesses analyst,

John Robb

Driving Storage Costs Down for AWS Customers

(author unknown) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:00:00 PST

One of the things that differentiates Amazon Web Services from other technology providers is its commitment to let customers benefits from continuous cost-cutting innovations and from the economies of scale AWS is able to achieve. As we showed last week one of the services that is growing rapidly is the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

AWS today announced a substantial price drop per February 1, 2012 for Amazon S3 standard storage to help customers drive their storage cost down. A customer storing 50TB will see on average a 12% drop in cost when they get their Amazon S3 bill for February. Other storage tiers may see even greater cost savings.

These Amazon S3 cost savings will also help drive down the cost of Amazon EBS snapshots and Amazon Storage Gateway snapshots, for example in the US East (Virginia) Region, their cost will drop from $0.14 to $0.125 per Gigabyte.

In a time where on-premise infrastructure costs are rising significantly it is great to see that AWS can let all of its customers, big and small, benefit from the cost cutting innovations in storage.

More details can be found in the Forum Announcement, on Jeff Barr's blog and on the Amazon S3 Pricing Page.

Chitchat

(author unknown) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:06:20 PDT

From an interview with William Gibson in The Paris Review: For someone who so often writes about the future of technology, you seem to have a real romance for artifacts of earlier eras. It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone. My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving...

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The wisdom of statistically manipulated crowds

(author unknown) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 06:48:24 PDT

Roots Rock Rabbi - Home

(author unknown) — Tue, 24 May 2011 08:51:26 PDT

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Rock on

E-textbooks flunk an early test

(author unknown) — Thu, 12 May 2011 08:02:59 PDT

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flip, flip, flip

When it comes to buzzy new computer technologies, schools have long had a tendency to buy first and ask questions later. That seems to be the case once again with e-readers and other tablet-style computers, which many educators, all the way down to the kindergarten level, are lusting after, not least because the gadgets promise to speed the replacement of old-style printed textbooks with newfangled digital ones. In theory, the benefits of e-textbooks seem clear and compelling. They can be updated quickly with new information. They promise cost savings, at least over the long haul. They reduce paper and photocopier...

Official Google Blog: +1’s: the right recommendations right when you want them—in your search results

(author unknown) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 04:18:28 PDT

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Search going social. Wrote about this in my last polemic on the semantic web.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Nothing much happened

(author unknown) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 06:36:57 PDT

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Beautifully spun - When a Library is better than Google, or the Value of what we don't Measure

"If you look at the history of the world, up until 1700 nothing much happened."

AWS Elastic Beanstalk: A Quick and Simple Way into the Cloud

(author unknown) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 04:51:44 PST

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Amazon brings IT-as-a-utility one step closer to the mainstream. With this, a developer can write application code and get all of the top-tier IT infrastructure at the push of a button. Bet on Amazon to win, place, and show in the cloud.

Flexibility is one of the key principles of Amazon Web Services - developers can select any programming language and software package, any operating system, any middleware and any database to build systems and applications that meet their requirements. Additionally customers are not restricted to AWS services; they can mix-and-match services from other providers to best meet their needs. A whole range of innovative new services, ranging from media conversion to geo-location-context services have been developed by our customers using this flexibility and are available in the AWS ecosystem. To enable this broad choice, the core of AWS is composed of building blocks which customers and partners can use to build any system or application in the way they see fit. The upside of the primitive building block approach is ultimate flexibility but the flipside is that developers always have to put these blocks together and manage them before they can get started, even if they just quickly want to deploy a simple application.

To battle this complexity, developers who do not need control over the whole software stack often use development platforms that help them manage their application development, deployment and monitoring. There are some excellent platforms running on AWS that do precisely this; Ruby on Rails developers have Heroku and Engine Yard, Springsource users have CloudFoundry Drupal developers can use Acquia, and PHP aficionados can sign up for phpfog, just to name a few. These platforms take away much of the "muck" of software development to the extent that most RoR developers these days will choose to run on a platform instead of managing the whole stack themselves.

Developers have continuously asked us to create similar platforms to simplify development on AWS. However, given that there are probably as many different approaches to development as there are developers, instead of creating a particular platform, we are launching AWS Elastic Beanstalk, an application development container that can be the basis for the development of many different development platforms. It targets both the application developer by providing a set of simple tools to get started quickly and the platform developer by giving control over the underlying technology stack.

Elastic Beanstalk makes it easy for developers to deploy and manage scalable and fault-tolerant applications on the AWS cloud. It takes just minutes to get started and deploy your first application. AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically creates the AWS resources and application stack needed to run the application, freeing developers from worrying about server capacity, load balancing, scaling their application, and version control. There is no charge to use Elastic Beanstalk and developers only pay for the AWS resources used to run their applications. Elastic Beanstalk stays true to the AWS principles by not locking customers into a black box; Elastic Beanstalk creates resources on behalf of the developer providing transparency and control over application operations as well making it easy to move applications out of the container at any time. An Elastic Beanstalk container comprises an application software stack running on Amazon EC2 compute resources with an Elastic Load Balancer, pre-configured EC2 Auto-Scaling, monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch, the ability to store data in Amazon S3, and multiple database options.

Developers who want even more control have access to the AWS resources supporting their application and can easily select more advanced deployment options such as using multiple Availability Zones for higher availability, logging into their Amazon EC2 servers, opening specific network ports for use, or taking control of Elastic Load Balancer or Auto-Scaling settings. The public beta release of AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a container for Java developers using the familiar Linux / Apache Tomcat application stack. We plan to make additional containers available over time including support for customers and solution providers to develop and share their own containers.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk has been developed in such a way that other programming platforms can be created relatively easily. This is extremely important as the AWS developer ecosystem has always been very rich and we want to keep it that way. Our goal is to ensure every developer's favorite platform is always available on AWS so they can stop worrying about deploying and operating scalable and fault-tolerant application and focus on application development. In a nutshell, we want to let a thousand platforms bloom on AWS.

Last week I ran into an AWS customer at CES who was enthusiastic about how his digital production workflow and video encoding is now running reliably in the cloud. When discussing how AWS could improve to serve him even better he finished with "I have a bunch of smaller java apps that I really want to run in AWS but I just can't be bothered with picking the right instance size and setting up the load-balancing, etc." This is exactly where Elastic Beanstalk will help: to make it even simpler to get started and to run applications in the AWS cloud. "Easy to begin and impossible to outgrow" is an excellent characterization of Elastic Beanstalk which handles deployment, scaling and reliability such that its customers don't have to.

To get started using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, visit http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk. More information on the launch can be found on the AWS developer blog.

Introducing Apache Wave

(author unknown) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 06:07:53 PST

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Decidedly not dead.

One of the best outcomes from November's Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation's incubator program. Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software. Last week, that proposal was accepted, and we're spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way.

During the summit, it became quite clear that there is a healthy community of startups, independent developers, and industry partners enthusiastic to continue development of the Wave Federation protocols and Wave in a Box product. We've posted videos of the technical talks and demos presented throughout the summit so that those who couldn't make it to San Francisco needn't miss out.

The final days of the summit were dedicated to technical design and coding. Progress since then includes significant improvements to the wave panel, visual enhancements to the login pages, gadgets hooked up and working, improved development set-up and documentation, and a draft HTTP transport for wave federation.

In recognition of this work, we're proud to announce that the open source project leadership is expanding to include a number of new committers from outside Google: Tad Glines, Michael McFadden (Solute), James Purser, Ian Roughley (Novell), Anthony Watkins (SESI), and Torben Weis (University Duisburg-Essen). They are joining graduated Google interns Joseph Gentle and Lennard de Rijk as trusted contributors who have demonstrated high quality code and valuable design insight.

The creation of Apache Wave will serve to accelerate the growth of the existing community with strong open source processes. If you'd like to get involved, please join the Apache Wave mailing list (send an email to wave-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org). We're looking forward to working with you.

Posted by Alex North, Software Engineer, Google Wave team

Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box"

(author unknown) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 13:25:08 PDT

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Not dead, just resting.

Since the announcement that we will discontinue development of Google Wave as a standalone product, many people have asked us about the future of the open source code and Wave federation protocol. After spending some time on figuring out our next steps, we'd like to share the plan for our contributions over the coming months.

We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box."

This project will include:

an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
a fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
refinements to the client-server protocols
gadget, robot and data API support
support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

This project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware.

Since the beginning, it has been our vision that the Google Wave protocols could support a new generation of communication and collaboration tools. The response from the developer community to date has been amazing and rewarding. Even more so now, we believe that developers and other projects are a critical part of this story.

While Wave in a Box will be a functional application, the future of Wave will be defined by your contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve. We'll discuss more technical details of our plan on the Wave Protocol Forum, which is the best place to keep up with the latest progress on the open source project and learn how you can contribute.

Wave on

Posted by Alex North, Software Engineer, Google Wave team

Amazon Web Services Blog: Introducing The Amazon Linux AMI

(author unknown) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 03:04:35 PDT

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What does this mean for RightScale?

Yes, you read that right. We now have a Linux AMI tuned for AWS! Many of our customers have asked us for a simple starting point for launching their Linux applications inside of Amazon EC2 that is easy to use,...

Match 4 Coudal Partners' Layer Tennis Presented by Adobe CS5 9/10/2010 | Layer 1

(author unknown) — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 14:56:10 PDT

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For the design set - an absolutely fantastic match of Layer Tennis.

Op-Ed Contributor - Math Lessons for Locavores - NYTimes.com

(author unknown) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:48:12 PDT

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Putting the knife to the sacred cow of local eating

Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself.

Study uncovers every possible Rubik's Cube solution: Only 20 moves needed | Mail Online

(author unknown) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:05:20 PDT

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Interesting to see. Doesn't sound very graceful though. Would rather see some genius prove this in a few elegant lines of math.

Using Google’s supercomputers, a team of researchers have processed every one of the Rubik’s Cube’s 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different configurations.

15+ Incredibly Useful iPhone Tips and Tricks | iPhone.AppStorm

(author unknown) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 04:38:03 PDT

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Good stuff for the iPhone user. Lots of stuff here that I hadn't known.

The fourth generation iPhone shattered records for opening day sales and continues to sell quite well despite antenna-gate. This means there are bound to be

Your Brain on Computers - Studying the Brain Off the Grid, Professors Find Clarity - NYTimes.com

(author unknown) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:08:06 PDT

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Humans like nature.

Five scientists spent a week in the wilderness to understand how heavy use of technology changes how we think and behave.

Google plans to drop Wave - CNN.com

(author unknown) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:49:43 PDT

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I'm betting that it gets reworked, rebranded, and relaunched. There's way too much cool technology in here to just mothball.

Google is pulling the plug on Google Wave.

Facebook (1) | Eliezer Israel

(author unknown) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 04:42:36 PDT

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This is entirely an exercise in testing the power of links from Google Buzz, my blog, and various other RSS consumers. No need to pay attention. Move along.

On top of Old Smokey,
All covered with cheese,
I lost my poor (soy) meatball
when somebody sneezed.