Real estate developers
January 15, 2024
I am on Team Yimby because housing supply has not met demand for years, that causes prices to spike, and makes life hard for very many people younger and/or less lucky than me. However, building more houses means someone needs to build them, and that ends up being real estate developers. My experience with them over the years has usually been non-positive — perhaps because I grew up in Florida.
I grew up in Florida, in an orange grove, about 1/2 a mile from the nearest paved road. Nearest neighbors as the crow flies were either the Stantons or the Eagles. Everything around us was mostly citrus, swamp, or sinkhole (swamp is a special case of sinkhole, an old one that collected water, grew stuff, which eventually fell into the middle and made peat. “Bay head”, below, is swamp). My great grandfather once owned a chunk of it, and gave my parents land to build a house on.
Greatgrandfather sold to someone, someone held it a few years and sold to U.S. Homes, who proceeded to build “Highland Lakes”.
U.S. Homes was as far as I know about middling, for land developers. I never heard of any particular scandals, for example. However, from the point-of-view of someone who knew the local territory pretty well (as well as one can know it by age 12) they were not the brightest bulbs. For example, we lived half a mile from a paved road. I wonder how we got to that paved road, eh? Could it be, on a 1/2 mile by 8-feet 99-year easement across the north edge of the property? Why yes, it could. Easements survive sale of property, just FYI, so pretty soon, we were walking through newly-purchased backyards to get to the school bus (not kidding, didn’t happen “sometimes”, we did this, every day, it was the shortest route and the one we had been using since an early age).
I gather that this caused problems, and this was eventually solved by trading the easement for a $15,000 bond set against future legal costs should we need to sue them for incidental damage to our property. (Keep in mind, early 1970s, that was real money.)
Another mistake they made was to misread topographic maps. Somehow, they convinced themselves that the water in our pond had collected at a high point, not a low point, and that water drained out of our pond. Any fucking fool who just walked out and looked could have seen that was not how things were arranged. Somewhere in all this land rearrangement they monkeyed with the drainage, and the pond started going up, and up, and up, enough that it was killing trees and we could imagine it causing problems for our septic system’s drain field. We grumbled at them and made threatening noises about that bond, and they installed an overflow, like for a bathtub, for that pond. My best guess as to the least-cost route for that overflow is shown in dashed blue, below. The overflow drain is a large sinkhole with a porous bottom; water will accumulate there, but eventually disappears. You can tell which drain pipe into it comes from our pond; there’s far more weeds/wildlife there.
In their zeal to market the height of Highland Lakes, it was not enough for them to be high, one must also perceive them to be high. To help with this, US Homes sculpted the main road down below the houses that they built, I think also using some of this earth to raise the land around the bayhead.
One problem with this is that the water table in Florida is very high, is also quite variable, and sometimes it can be quite rainy. One day walking to school (no longer on the 1/2 mile easement) I noticed that the road was not really a road anymore, and was instead a mixture of gooey wet roadbed and asphalt crumble; the water table had risen under the road, and then a construction truck was driven on that, and the roadbed was now fluid and just squirted up through the asphalt and blew it apart. Naturally, they repaved the road without addressing the root cause, it rained again, someone drove a truck again, and it happened again. THIS TIME, before repaving, they installed a drain field, more or less a french drain, running along the edge of the road, to redirect the water table away from the sculpted road.
So, anyway, developers are bozos, but I am still on Team Yimby.
I write letters (to my state rep and senator)
November 19, 2023
Thought I would harass y’all (again) about stuff I care about, I’ll try to make it short and not show too much of my work. (This would be shorter if we didn’t have so much broken stuff that needs fixing.)
Infrastructure dithering
October 20, 2023
One thing that completely baffles me about some of the delay in doing things — for example, in building wheel-chair accessible ramps at train stations, or experimenting with different ramps and elevations for complex portions of bicycle lanes — is that for some reason we insist on making them only from incredibly permanent materials, thus their design and construction is expensive, thus we delay, delay, delay with planning and interminable community discussion, lest we carve the wrong thing into stone and steel. We could, instead, work in marine plywood, which with minimal care appears to last at least 15 years outdoors exposed to the elements (I have a deck on my bicycle made of marine plywood that is that old; the original came apart in just a few years).
And yes, marine plywood is expensive plywood, but it doesn’t require fancy tools. Could pre-cut most of the parts off site, deliver, and assemble. Or if it is a complex design in a quirky place, it doesn’t take that long to do a custom job on-site, work in the off-hours. Use treated lumber where appropriate, soak the cut ends in marine anti-fouling paint to keep the bugs out. That gets us a low-cost prototype that lasts for a few years, if it works, we redo it in concrete, if it doesn’t, we try something else.
A second annoying thing is what I can only call inappropriate use/requirement of rules and standards. In Cambridge, at the larger Fresh Pond rotary, there is a big sign informing east-bound traffic of what happens at the intersection. The design and location of the sign are completely bullshit; it’s obviously built to help ensure safety of traffic moving twice as fast as anything on that road, but because it is thus-and-such a highway, I’ll bet those are the rules. So, it is located a safe distance from the road (but right next to a cycle track) which allows the trees near the road to obscure it from the traffic that needs to see it. And, rather than a plain post, it is on a special breakaway post, just in case someone departs the road at twice the speed limit, plows through numerous other obstacles, and manages to not hit any trees — that sign, it will break away, and protect them.
How I ended up on team YIMBY
October 15, 2023
A few observations changed my mind from “pro housing but we need deal with these problems” to “pro housing”.
The first observation is that in the face of high housing demand, our zoning laws are completely indifferent to the demographics of who can afford to move into a region, and only speak to the shape, size, and placement of the boxes that we live in. Is a town, and a town’s “character”, the boxes that people live in, or the people who live in those boxes? If the middle class can no longer afford to buy in a city or town, over time that city will lose its middle class, and its character will absolutely change. But the boxes, those at least are preserved.
The second observation is that the problems associated with greater housing density are problems that we can deal with local-ish. The two main problems are school funding and traffic; in both cases these have state and local/regional solutions, and we can elect people who favor solving these problems. Traffic is a squishier problem but we also have a lot of tools that we can use to mitigate it. We need to get our transit fixed; it worked decently well thirty years ago, why not make it work well again? We can also run it even better, if we are willing to pay for it. We could extend it further out, if we are willing to pay for it. We can run better rail to suburbs and chip away at some of that traffic. We can improve cycling in the cities and towns surrounding Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville; for plenty of people, their commutes (and their errands, actually more trips than commutes) are possible on a bike. (If you don’t know how to deal with groceries, kid transportation, or winter, other people do, it’s not hard, it just requires the right bike and a little knowledge.) We could pass a congestion tax, IF we do it before housing prices get too high — someone willing to pay $2million for a condo will not be substantially deterred by small fees for driving into crowded places.
The highest demand for more housing is closer to jobs, which are largely in Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston, so if new housing is created where demand is highest, it will generally have a higher chance of not needing a daily car trip.
Edit/addition, 2023-11-25: For many towns, “traffic” is also not caused by local density, but by people traveling through a town. If those people are in cars, one thing they do, is always seek the currently fastest route, nowadays updated with same-hour congestion reports. This means that any locally-influenced traffic changes (increase or decrease) will be counteracted by cut-through traffic adjusting to that change. The local “solution” to this problem is to decouple local transportation from automobile traffic as much as possible; allow businesses close enough to where people live that they can walk, provide safe and comfortable bike routes so people can bike, and reserve lanes for bus use so that traffic increases don’t affect bus speeds. And, try to reduce cut-through traffic with long-haul alternatives, like better rail to suburbs.
The third observation is that the problems that result if we don’t build enough new housing to meet demand w/o substantial price increases, are problems that we cannot easily solve. The higher prices are allowed to rise and the longer the high prices persist, the greater the effect on the town’s demographics. That change is roughly permanent. Adding supply at that point will perhaps, instead of stabilizing prices, depress them, leading to recent purchasers underwater on their mortgages; it’s a lot of real economic harm to them. And at least the initial tranche of any new supply will be at the high market, and will continue (through addition rather than replacement) some of the same demographic changes resulting from the spiked-high prices.
High unit prices also make it more difficult to construct legally-defined-affordable housing; any unit sold at an affordable-instead-of-market price means that someone, somewhere, is subsidizing that difference, and the larger the difference, the larger the subsidy. One way out of this is to permit higher-than-usual density if some units are affordable, but that still throttles supply, and still leaves no housing supply for the middle (given high enough prices, upper-middle) class.
We’re terrible at road safety in the United States
October 14, 2023
This is one of those things that I never noticed till I did, and now I can’t not know it, and makes me internally snark at anyone in conventional US road safety institutions discussing/promoting “road safety”.
There’s three reasons to think we suck at safety.
First, international comparisons by the OECD.
“But wait”, you say, “we’re a big country. Surely this is because we drive so much.”
And yes, congratulations for realizing that excess driving is its own risk amplifier, but actually, we suck at driving per-mile (or kilometer) also. Maybe if we didn’t suck at safety we’d try to reduce distances driven until we got our risk-per-mile under control, but we suck at safety:
Second, recent history, where we slid backwards pretty horribly.
Third, the popular attitude towards bicycles and pedestrians in any US safety discussion. For a little context, another chart from the OECD:
We’ve only done worse since then:
Or, if you prefer a per-capita comparison, for the US in 2022, 22.8 pedestrian fatalities per million population, worse than all the nations here except for Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. For Massachusetts the rate was 14.3, New York 15.1, Texas 27.8, California 28.2, and Florida 37.0. Our “good” states are still about twice as deadly per-capita as countries we’d like to think of us our peers, never mind the “good” Scandinavian countries where the pedestrian crash death risk is only about 1/4 what it is here.
The usual US reaction to this seems to blaming “distracted pedestrians”, as if we were the only nation on earth with hand-held distractions.
Anytime anything bicycle-and-safety-related comes up, some chirpy ignoramus will helpful contribute “but bicycles are dangerous to pedestrians!!!”. In the US, crashes between bicycles and pedestrians kill about 1 pedestrian per year, usually someone in New York City, the only place in this country with both enough bicycles and enough pedestrians to make this event roughly likely. Not adjusting for trip share, the car-crash pedestrian death rate is SEVEN THOUSAND times higher. Dividing that down by the bicycle trip share makes the risk a mere 40-ish times higher, but in most safety discussions 40x is a darn large factor. Once again, we (in this case, drivers, by far the majority road user) are bad at safety and seem not to even be aware of it.
And, okay, snarky blogger guy, what would YOU do about safety? One problem we have is that we drive a whole darn lot while our per-mile safety is poor. I would stop building roads; driving less is one way to drive more safely. Our stats wouldn’t suck so much if we drove less. Another thing I would do is impose lower speed limits any place pedestrians are near the road. And by lower, I mean, 15mph. Rather than rely on enforcement, I would install hard bollards along the edges of the road that I wanted to have this lower speed limit, so as to encourage a little more care. Bicycles tend to go about that slow, and bicycles have a much better safety record, let’s try this. A third thing I suggest (and I do) is I do not use a car when I can get the job done on a bicycle. The car that isn’t driven is safe; using a bicycle instead is a 97-98% risk reduction, that’s pretty good.
Safety training, habits, and reflexes
October 1, 2023
For a while I’ve believed that too much of popular (and sometimes legal) approaches to road safety are built around fairy tales. For example, the idea that horns are a safety signaling device for anything other than “that guy is backing into the front of my car” is just a fairy tale. In forward motion, which is usual case for crashes, brakes are far more effective than a horn because they only depend on one person perceiving and reacting — you, the person who sees the problem first. Braking reaction time could be better, if, say, a car used hand brakes like motorcycles and very many bicycles, because that way it’s not necessary to move a foot from one pedal to the other, but one person’s reaction time is still shorter than the sum of two people’s reaction times. The horn is also broadcast, and low-bandwidth, so really the second person’s reaction is to look around to consciously figure out what is wrong, and then react to it (and that assumes they will react appropriately and productively, of course).
For bicycles, our road safety wizards decided to copy this fairy tale, substituting bells for horns. There are better ways to do bicycle safety than copying ideas from cars, never mind copying dumb ideas from cars.
A second dumb thing that we do for car safety is that we create two categories of pedestrians crossing the street, “legal” and “jaywalkers” and then we obsess over the distinction between the good ones and the bad ones. This, too, bleeds over into bicycle safety, and it is counterproductive. We are not junior police, it’s not our job to shame the illegal walkers, it’s our job not to hit them.
You might think, “so what if I worry about these things? I still stop, don’t I?”
But I don’t think you stop as well. Thinking about whether we should stop, or stop and ding, or just ding — that takes time, and if that is our habit, it will always take time. It’s better to train yourself to always stop/swerve first, ask questions later. Make the faster process into a habit, and eventually, you will train your subconscious to do it automatically.
I’ve recorded video of most of my commutes over the years, saving the interesting bits, and some of the interesting bits are how I react to pedestrians that I see around me, and how quickly. Recently, I reacted to a pedestrian turning to cross a street before I consciously knew it; someone had placed a utility box in such a way that it obstructed my view of the crosswalk entrance, and when I tried to reconstruct the reaction in the way that I remembered (my conscious experience, for better or worse) I got a completely impossible reaction time of not more than 300ms. I looked at the larger video again at 1/10 speed, and it became clear that some part of my brain had seen her starting to turn, figured out what was happening, and even earlier than I first thought, initiated a letter-perfect snap turn; I was already committed to the turn before I saw the pedestrian emerge on the other side of the box. This was a trained, complex, automated reaction, and I can do this now because I have made a habit of always swerving away from pedestrians and not complicating my reaction with a bunch of decisions that are not actually relevant to safety.
Engineering stuff people often miss
September 30, 2023
Area under the curve versus peak height of curve
- Distance traveled is the integral of speed over time; that is, if you graph speed over time, the area under that curve is distance. The tortoise wins the race because it applies a low speed, but continuously, whereas the hare attains high speeds for only a few short amounts of time.
- Yield force versus work to destroy; a carbon fiber bicycle fork will withstand a tremendous force, but if that force is exceeded, it takes little work to completely destroy it, where a steel fork will yield at a lower force but continue to resist, tortoise-like, requiring much more energy to actually destroy it.
- Time with mask off versus risk per minute. If the guard at airport security asks you to take your mask down for 5 seconds and your mask is 99% effective, that is the same risk as waiting for your plane (mask on) for 500 seconds, or less than 9 minutes. How long do you wait for your plane, how long do you spend in the plane? Yes your risk is briefly very high, but, BRIEFLY, the total risk does not change by much.
You get what you optimize what you measure
- Focus on mass transit cost, not mass transit service. The MBTA that we have in 2023 is the result of years of measuring and optimizing cost instead of service. What we got, is worse service. If someone makes a lot of noise about controlling costs and does not make as much noise about maintaining or improving service, expect worse service.
- Is it more important to ride your bicycle as fast as possible when you ride it, or more important to ride your bicycle for as many miles as possible? The inconvenience of attaining ultimate speed may cause you to ride less often (see also, tortoise, hare, area under the curve)
- Road design focused on throughput for cars instead of people movement or people safety. Why would you expect this to produce safety, if that is neither measured nor optimized? The result is some of the least-safe roads in the OECD. (No, this is not just because we drive a lot, though good for you that you notice the risk multiplier of excess driving. We DO drive a lot, but we’re also pretty bad at safety per kilometer.)
The Intermediate Value Theorem
- If your function of x has a low value for Xsmall and a high value for Xlarge, then somewhere in between those two points, it has intermediate values. An example where this is relevant is considering the effect of bicycle speed on bicycle safety, versus motorcycle speed and safety. You may not know this, but per-trip, riding a motorcycle is 25 times more likely to result in a crash death than riding a bicycle. Lots of people like e-bikes and other forms of bicycle assist because they “feel safer”, but the given measured unsafely of riding a motorcycle at motorcycle speeds, there has to be some bicycle speed at which the risk quits declining and starts increasing.
Exponential functions
- Any non-constant dollar graph of anything financial will always look like a hockey stick because inflation is exponential. Don’t be swayed by such graphs.
- On a log scale, you can see that the “September” upward trend in Covid levels began in late June.
- From @vb_jens / https://github.com/mountainMath/xkcd_exponential
Reply to the usual anti-bike-lane whining
June 9, 2023
This time in the Boston Globe, spilling over to a receptive audience on NextDoor.
Explaining “swerving” on Nextdoor
April 16, 2023
I’ve been collecting videos on my bike for years now, enough that I can collect them into collections with various themes. Lately I started poking around NextDoor, which I can best describe as “the social network for old people who like to confirm all the stereotypes about old people”, and I’ve started to use the videos to illustrate points. Not sure if anyone clicks through or not.
Here’s a reply in response to someone complaining about cyclists “swerving around” pedestrians:
“Swerving around” is an other way of saying “carefully not running into”. People on bikes often get routed into areas where they share space with pedestrians (Cambridge Common, Minuteman Bikeway, Harvard Plaza, other paths) and what we do there is nothing but swerving around, again and again.
Here’s an example; notice the speed adjustment to time passes, and how I choose the “far” sidewalk to get to the crosswalk because it has less foot traffic on it:
Now imagine trying to do all these things in a car — it would be completely impossible, the car is too wide, cannot make the turns, darn-sure cannot fit on the 2-foot wide scrap of sidewalk between lamppost and curb. The lamp-post pass points out another thing, which is that someone who’s been biking on Boston-area streets for a while has a lot more tolerance for tight clearances than the “average” person, and what seems perfectly safe to them will seem much less safe for the average person — that is, I need to make a conscious effort to pass wide (it’s becoming a habit). What’s a little weird is that it depends on whether you’re on the bike or not; I was walking across an intersection, and someone on a bike (oncoming) passed me, and it felt notably close to me (you can see me moving out of her path several times, little handlebar nudges, and she just keeps consuming the extra space. I knew exactly what she was doing, but it still felt “bad”):
Example close passes, where my handlebar is passing above the flex bollards and I am brushing them with my thigh as I ride past. Yes, experienced riders can really do this, I am not kidding or exaggerating:
Here’s another video, helmet camera, notice always moving away from pedestrians, especially children and dogs, plus the bonus jerk-on-a-scooter at the end:
The point here is that it is not about “swerving”, and not about whether someone decided to put a red light over the mess of bikes and pedestrians; what actually matters (for not-cars) is speed control, and clearance. Changing the situation from a park to an intersection does not magically make the bicycle more dangerous; the intersection is dangerous because it ALSO has cars in it.
Trip and infrastructure report
April 3, 2023
Just spent 3+ weeks in Europe (spouse had work, I was along as a vacationing assistant more or less), we visited Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, and spent part of a day in Malmo. Is it perhaps necessary to point out that Cambridge is a wealthy city in a wealthy state in an actually-wealthy nation (that fails to tax its richest people adequately and overspends on war preparation, thus the government is perpetually complaining about “can’t afford?”).
- I assume all y’all are jealous of this fun vacation (I had a great time). Would it perhaps be nice to live in an interesting place like these?
- All these cities are, shall we say, unfriendly to cars and especially to parking. Yet Paris actually has quite a few cars in it, despite all the press that Mayor Hidalgo has received. Copenhagen, had cars in it, spouse had to do a day in Aarhus and car-pooled there, the car arrived at the door of where we were staying (a half-block from a no-cars pedestrianized area). Copenhagen, I saw plenty of people older than me, including women, including in the drippy rain, biking. Their raincoat game is strong there.
- All these poorer-places have great mass transit and some amount of bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, the lack of which we always trot out as our reason for not making it harder to drive/park. (The Paris Metro on strike works better than the red line currently does.)
- No doubt someone will point that Massachusetts is not Denmark, we don’t have the density that they do. This is correct, Massachusetts has less area than Denmark (10565 vs 16580, square miles) , more people (7 million vs 6 million) , and is actually denser (900 vs 360, per square mile). “Gross State Product” of MA is $584B (2020), versus either $411B (2022, Purchasing Power Parity) or $387B (2022, nominal). Whatever works in Denmark because of their population density and wealth, should work better in Massachusetts.
So, we could add bike lanes and fix mass transit, if we wanted. That’s a choice we make, we have the money, we have the density. We cannot do “cars-cars-cars” in Cambridge/Somerville/Boston/etc without noise, pollution, traffic jams, and a low but not-zero level of pedestrian crash deaths; that’s not a choice, that is physics. And the way to get better transit is to quit voting for lower-my-taxes penny-pinching conservatives; if you complain about the T and then vote for the guy (and the party of the guy) who broke it, you’ll get to complain some more in the future.
Slide show from the trip (Google Photos).
dr2blog 