Achievement

The post queue is looking good, with a post scheduled weekly (Wednesdays) until 2027. Six months of queue is the new goal, and then increasing frequency beyond weekly. 

PLSS and your local grid

Post-war suburbs are the same everywhere: wide arterials with strip commercial, connecting suburban subdivisions to freeways along old rural highways. The biggest difference is whether the Public Lands Survey System was used or not. 

Anywhere the PLSS was used, you tend to get streets that follow section lines, and hence square grids.

Everywhere east of the Appalachians lacks it. And so in those areas, the grid defaults to triangle, following the rural roads between towns, mills, bridges, and forts. For example, in Raleigh, there is a 'Durham Road' going to Durham. In Durham, it becomes 'Raleigh Road', and midway, it's 'Duraleigh Road'.  

Look at a map of anywhere in the South, and you can see the constant tessellation of triangles between each triplet of towns.  It's an emergent pattern - people follow the roads, and roads emerge where wagons can travel--paths that are the most energy-efficient for a heavy load, even if it's not the most direct. It's a pattern that can be seen over and over in urbanization - you can see it in London, in Paris, etc. For major towns, the roads forming the tip of the triangle will converge a way out (no need to maintain three closely spaced roads). Regardless, those triangles of rural roads became rural highways, which are urbanized as major arterials. If they don't have enough traffic, they get classes as minor arterials or even collectors. 

But whatever polygon makes up the grid of an urban area, the pattern remains: highways emerge, traffic is funneled to a limited number of paths, commercial springs up along high-traffic paths, and residential happens anywhere with decent job access that commercial or industrial users haven't already claimed. 

It's a demand pattern that affects even places that started with square grids, and why when major transportation investments (railways, freeways) get planned and major investments made, it doesn't tend to follow the grid--it responds more to transportation demand than to administrative costs. 

The Great Housing Mismatch

We don't actually need more single family - it's already most of the stock. Sure, it's still being used, but increasingly by non-family households who would be equally happy with something else. But three incomes outbid two, so families are still having a tough time. We need to build massively larger amounts of multifamily to have any hope of aligning our household types with our house types.

BTS RFI

1.  The overwhelming local government need is for data to satisfying MAPS/FAST Act reporting requirements
2. Much more focus on safety would be welcome. Right now, analysis is at a very basis level of "someone died here" with minimal analysis of causal factors beyond AADT. A FEMA-style document on "How to analyze safety data" would be welcome, with a specific focus on urban arterials, intersections, and pedestrians. 
3. More data on Infrastructure condition would be welcome. We have a much talked about maintenance crisis and pending funding crisis. We make decisions on what we measure, and infrastructure condition is important, so we should do more measurement of it.
4. Being able to access data via API is preferred. I absolutely love tidycensus (in R); it has saved me huge amounts of time downloading, unzipping and filing data, and it's ability to 'cache' data rather than re-downloading when  I re-run a script has been great.
5. API-based data is great, but if you don't have a good archive of past data I can trust (and which will remain comparable in the future) I have the download--I've even had to write custom scripts to download data from live servers, because I can't get a download. Vintage management is key -- If I download the same thing at two different dates, and my boss says "Why is this different", I need to be able to explain why, which means every time a dataset gets updated, it needs a (user accessible) unique ID.
6. If I open a map using experience.arcgis.com, I want to be able to download the data from it, not have to try to find it someplace else within the website. Given all the data in the web applications is publicly available, this should be a default. 
7. Why does the downloadable NTAD data say "coming soon", with a 2021 date? <https://www.bts.gov/geospatial/national-transportation-atlas-database/archivedata> It's a wall I've hit multiple times when hunting BTS geodata.
8. Obtain you own BTS domain on BlueSky, and mirror to Twitter using IFTTT or the like--more control, better archiving.  (Twitter is great for announcing things, but remarkably bad at making it possible to find something you saw and want to see again).I've yet to find an ArcGIS provided "Build you own map" useful. ESRI offers it, but does it provide any value? 
9. This webpage, specifically, is underwhelming: <https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data> It's an alphabetical list of what, by what criteria?
10. I would love a product producing local-area specific estimates of growth in AADT. I've seen traffic engineers using county or even state level growth rates for built-out urban areas when making traffic projects.

Code Cruft in Zoning

Over time, any bit of code (zoning included) generates ad-hoc fixes to resolve problems never envisioned when the code was first devised, and most of those fixes satisfied an immediate need for a metric. Few of these metrics have any initial basis outside of simplicity and sufficiency, and their descendent metrics enjoy few advantages beyond custom and extrapolation.

Legally speaking, the purpose of all zoning code is to regulate health, safety and welfare. Functionally, zoning code has another use, beyond which: it is about pre-emptively managing nuisance by separating incompatible uses. Things which are noisy, or smelly, anything that disturbs a 'right to quiet enjoyment' are nuisances*. 

Even if we make the good-faith assumption that the purpose of all zoning code is to regulate health, safety and welfare, times changes and the problem that zoning fixes were designed to resolve is no longer relevant (ie, coal delivery, livery stables). 

Zoning is law, law is the basis of court cases and precedents, changing the law undermines the precedents, no city wants the cost & hassle of a lawsuit. So it's most often simply not to change zoning except on an as-needed basis. We often thing of the major cities like NYC or LA, but most city corporations are not far removed from that: In America, there are 19,000 incorporated cities, and over 100k 'populated places' of towns, villages, and townships. Many are not far removed from HOAs and are governed on a volunteer basis on a shoe-string budget. Hence, the quality of the average zoning code is not very good, and it is very likely out of date, most importantly regarding residential code.

Most of zoned land is zoned residential. Most of residential zoned land is zoned for single family detached housing, at a time when the nuclear family was the normal household, and land, gas and cars where cheap. None of these things are true any longer, but our zoning codes still reflect that. 

Traffic is a nuisance

A nuisance is anything that disturbs a 'right to quiet enjoyment'. By this definition, most busy roads are nuisances. But as they precede development in most places, that new development is seen as having 'come to the nuisance'. Regardless of the exponential increase in traffic and noise that happened after someone build a house next to it.  Part of this is the 'boil the frog' nature of traffic--the annual increase is so marginal that it's hard to claim damages. But for major projects like freeways, where capacity (and hence noise) increase rapidly, nuisance is clearly an issue. Which is why we get soundwalls, which is why freeways are expensive. 

But why didn't earlier freeway projects suffer the same accusations of nuisance? For earlier freeway projects, the explanation is bleaker: racism. Planners deliberately directed urban freeways through black neighborhoods. Huge numbers of buildings were demolished. Most central city residents are renters, and renters move often, and the cohort effect of new renters incrementally erases any standing to sue.

*Done as a form a slum clearance. Were they slums? Absolutely. But they were also slums that were gentrifying, being improved by the sweat equity of a marginalized people. Anytime someone is dispossessed, ask: 'Was the land cheap, or were the people powerless'? 

SUVs were never designed to be safe

SUVs were never designed a safety project - the whole light truck category was created as a carve-out for things like army jeeps, until someone realized they could exploit a loophole and released the Jeep Grand Cherokee. And they were, for years, famously unsafe - does no one still recall the famous tendency of early SUVs to roll over? They are less safe than an equivalent vehicle. They just happen to be more massive than average. If everything else was equally as massive, their safety premium would vanish. 

Admittedly, they tend to do better than older passenger cars. By dint of height, when they rear-end a car with a low trunk, they over-run the car, killing the passengers in the backseat, rather than driver of the SUV. So, from a public health standpoint, I guess that's sort of a selling point, given that most cars are empty most of the time? 

(It's not by accident that all new passenger cars have a tall rear designed to stop SUVs from overrunning their rear.)

Vehicular innovation

The core of the issue is that our roads are designed with cars as the default and they have a hard time accommodating anything else. What grudging accommodation exists has made the alternative (motorcycles, bicycles, walking) so risky and unpleasant that few people would tolerate it. But bike-sharing cracked that equilibrium, and e-bikes shattered it. We are in an era of vehicular innovation, and our design and regulatory frameworks simply no longer fit.

Public petitions are lobbying, not public input.

One of the tactics of the vocal opposition is a petition, a weapon I have said for decades is the least useful and most easily corruptible method of public “input” there is. I’ve personally experienced the tool being abused many times. The problem is, project opposers use petitions as a tactic because the media loves to report on them, and politicians give them weight even when they shouldn’t.

            - Brent Toderian

Petitions aren't representative. They aren't a sample. They are the reverse of a sample, merely an indicator of how many people you can get to sign a piece of paper. And without a context of magnitude that is normal for a petition, it's hard to tell if 100 represents a lot of people or mere crankery. Again demonstrating the value of an actual (statistically valid) survey for assessing public opinion on a topic.

I understand that surveys are expensive (to design, to administer, to analyze) and that they are addictive. But they do offer elected officials something they can't get elsewhere: A representative sample of what their voters actually think on a specific issue. 

Managing Common Area Disagreements

A cluster of homes around a central green is problematic.  How are 7-14 households going to actually use this open-space /common area? The owners and occupants may have wildly divergent expectations about acceptable uses and maintenance standards. A central open space isn't an adequate replacement for single family front yards. Yards are private, and legal digests and planning dockets are replete with cases of the unacceptable use yard by a problematic neighbor for such uses as vehicle parking, junk storage, raising chickens, and gardens.

Condos are notorious for co-owner disagreements, characterized by both lawsuits and violent altercations, despite having explicit legally sanctioned governance structures. In a way, it's simpler when the central space is a street, plaza, or park--nobody owns it, and there is an impartial external arbiter for disputes about use. The provision of unsupervised, under-regulated and uncontrolled common areas was one of the blights of the use of the 'Towers in the Park' model for public housing. Anyone who has ever lived in a 'group quarters' situation (such as a dorm) can tell how quickly common areas become dirty, disgusting and damaged through neglect and abuse.