Amateur Earthling

Hacking the President’s DNA

A fun look at our transition to a Gattaca style future, through the lens of an evildoer, designing a customized pathogen meant to kill only the President, using the same tools that can be used to target a particular cancer with a viral drug delivery mechanism. How quickly will these tools be democratized? Is secrecy or transparency the better route to countermeasures? The Wikileaks cables revealed top-level diplomatic directives to collect the DNA of world leaders. For what purpose? Is it possible for anyone to keep their genome private?

A Goss Grove Neighborhood Greenway?

The Goss-Grove neighborhood is a quiet residential enclave in the center of Boulder, bounded by Canyon to the north, Arapahoe to the south, 17th St. to the west, and Folsom to the east. It’s quiet largely because it’s nearly cut off from the rest of the street network. The only through access to the area for cars is 22nd Street, which connects Canyon and Arapahoe north-south. At the same time though, the area is relatively permeable to bikes and pedestrians, with little pocket parks and community gardens making some of the north-south connections at 18th, 19th, 21st, 22nd and 23rd Streets, which all connect Arapahoe and Canyon. Running east-west, Grove Street becomes Grove Circle, connecting 15th all the way to Folsom St. for pedestrians.

If you’re willing to walk through the parking lot by James Travel and Mondo Robot, you can get all the way from the Farmer’s Market to McGuckins on very quiet streets.

As a bicyclist, you can get through too, but it’s not designed to make it easy. With some relatively minor changes to the Grove corridor, we’d be well on the way toward creating a Neighborhood Greenway like the ones Portland, Oregon has been putting in. Streetfilms looked at them in this video:

Continue reading A Goss Grove Neighborhood Greenway?

How safe is our bike infrastructure?

A major study in Vancouver, BC has looked at the relative safety of biking on various types of infrastructure, by looking at several hundred actual accidents resulting in hospital visits by cyclists over an 18 month period. Vancouver has a lot of different types of bike infrastructure, some of it extremely safe, so it’s a good test bed. Unsurprisingly, busy roads with parked cars and no on-street bike facilities were the most dangerous. Cycletracks (physically separated dedicated on-street bikeways) were an astonishing 90% safer. Interestingly, multi-use paths weren’t all that much safer, despite being preferred by many cyclists.

The Zen of Affordable Housing

A good list summarizing the ways in which density is good for affordability, ending with this zinger:

Income inequality is the core reason why housing affordability is such an intractable problem in the United States. In pretty much every other industrialized nation on earth, greater redistribution of wealth helps ease the problem of affordable housing. This includes social investments that significantly reduce other major household expenses, such as healthcare, education, childcare, and transportation, thereby freeing up more income to pay for housing. Here in the U.S, we will be beating our heads against the wall forever trying to provide enough affordable housing to make up for this underlying inequity.

Painful because it’s true.

Suburbs == Ponzi scheme

Charles Marohn of Strong Towns on Grist, explaining the way in which American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme. Essentially, since WWII there have been several rounds of up-front financing for suburban expansion, including federal dollars, and debt leveraging supposed future increases in tax revenues resulting from the growth. Along with these capital investments come long-term O&M obligations. Unfortunately, the obligations are too large, and we’ve only been able to meet them with new influxes of capital, but that’s flamed out. Sprawl is inherently expensive to build and maintain, and doesn’t create enough real value to support itself in the long run. How long will it take to internalize this reality culturally?

Making Boulder into one of Jan Gehl’s Cities for People

A couple of months ago I finished reading Jan Gehl’s book Cities for People, and I’ve seen Boulder differently ever since. I’m both more frustrated with it as it is today and more excited about what it could be in 20 years. Where before I might have been diffusely irritated by or in love with a place, I’m now explicitly aware of details that enhance or degrade its functionality for humans. I can’t recommend the book highly enough. It’s short, it’s filled with pictures, and unless you’re a die-hard motorist or collapsitarian neo-primitivist, I think you’ll find its case persuasive. You can watch him give a talk about the book in NYC on YouTube too, if you want another preview.

Gehl is a Danish architect who’s lived and worked in Copenhagen for the last 40 years, designing urban spaces for human beings. His first memory of the bicycle is riding away from the city as a small boy with his father, all day and all night, to escape the Nazi occupation. In his childhood, Copenhagen was dominated by pedestrians and bicycles. By the time he’d become a young man, the city was being occupied not by an invading army, but by automobiles. He was trained as a modernist architect, in the tradition of Le Corbusier’s isolated towers surrounded by parklands and freeways — a tradition Gehl almost immediately rebelled against — but in the 1960s, few wanted to hear about cities for people. Somehow, human and humane cities were not part of society’s vision of The Future. A devastated continent was being re-built in the modernist mold, and re-designed to accommodate cars, but by the early 1970s citizens across northern Europe had begun to question that vision. A lot of the resistance to transforming Europe’s cities into automobile friendly spaces didn’t come from environmental concerns as we see them today. Rather, re-making cities to work well for cars ended up degrading the quality of urban life dramatically. Jane Jacobs said we’d either erode our cities with cars, or the cars would suffer attrition at the hand of good cities. Then the first OPEC embargo highlighted the economic risks associated with oil dependence. We chose erosion in the US, but many European cities chose attrition. Energy economics, the quality of urban life, and environmental concerns together were enough to convince these nations to re-consider their Modernist visions of the future, and they revolted against the automobile invasion.

Continue reading Making Boulder into one of Jan Gehl’s Cities for People

The Silos of the Status Quo

Strong Towns looks at the absurdity of having separate city departments of transportation and land-use planning, which often end up directly at odds with each other, even when they’re both doing their jobs. In Boulder this dynamic has been bad enough that the city recently made the two departments go to conflict resolution training together. Like, inter-departmental couples counseling or something. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have done a whole lot of good.

Europe’s Vibrant New Low Car(bon) Communities

ITDP wrote up case studies of 8 relatively new car-free (or very car-light) neighborhoods in Europe, with scales ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands of people, and how they compare to adjacent, similar communities, in terms of transportation mode share, etc. It’s great to see developments like this happening outside of the 500 year old city centers where cars really can’t be squeezed in without destroying the district. The urban density required to do this and make it work really isn’t all that high. Two developments each in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, one outside London, and another in Switzerland.

Melbourne Urban Density Study

The city of Melbourne, Australia did a study of various types of urban density (it’s a PDF) to inform their own planning for the development of the Southbank area. The study as presented here is a little bit cartoonish, but they do pull together various quantitative measures of different neighborhoods around the world, which are interesting to compare — from Hong Kong to Barcelona to Battery Park in NYC. Their conclusion: uniformly developed low-rise, 3-8 story buildings can produce as much density as anybody might want (tens of thousands of people per square mile, just look at Paris), and are more conducive to a livable urban environment than towers, and in fact many tower heavy districts aren’t all that dense in aggregate. Parking regulations are key to making good urban space for people, as is the provisioning of social infrastructure (common green space, libraries, good schools) within walking distance. They suggest that densities of 100 residents and 50 jobs per hectare (30,000 and 15,000 per square mile, respectively… wow) represent a threshold at which fully featured urban infrastructure (including public transit) can pay for themselves.

To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

The NY Times looks at the trade-offs between requiring or encouraging helmet use, and actually getting people to ride bikes. American Bike Advocate Sacrilege, perhaps, but I agree: if we want cycling to be mainstream everyday transportation, the helmets and the spandex are going to fall by the wayside, and that’s fine. Promoting helmet use in the US has become a rational astrology: a norm we conform to no matter whether we believe it to be justified, because the social consequences of deviance are too large.