Do Hidden Cameras Make Our Cities Safer?

I am torn. A recent article tells me that hidden cameras in a park near where I live are effective at making me safer. The combination of a hidden camera and a "you in the green shirt" loudspeaker seems to work.

On the other hand, many privacy advocates I know (look left for Michael Geist's blog) are uncomfortable with a benevolent Big Brother monitoring you in more and more places.

I have been disappointed on several occasions when developers propose CCTV cameras as security instead of actual physical design that allows ordinary community members to interact and animate public spaces. A camera is a sign of a building determined to look inward and cowering at the thought of strangers outside.

On the other hand, should we acknowledge that some areas have become impersonal enough that normal mechanisms of enforcing norms of social control fail us to the point that it becomes a vicious circle: there is no social controls so alienated people cause mischief. This makes people more feel less ownership of their community, which in turn reduces social controls and causes more alienation.

The solution, besides more police or more invisible robocops, is to design urban spaces so that everyone feels a part of the community.

Tags: Urban Planning Urban Design Safety Privacy

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Drive Less, Says Automobile Association

On which web site can you find this text? "With such a dependence on roads and highways, how can we hope to preserve our environment? The answer is to re-examine our approach to mobility." "We can no longer continue to be a country that travels one person in one car at a time. We need alternative forms of fuel that are less harmful to the environment! Let's start sharing our cars, using public transit, and carpooling. Let's start buying vehicles that are less harmful to the environment, and changing our driving behaviour to be more environmentally friendly." Answer: The Canadian Automobile Association.

The CAA, once a bastion of car culture, is recommending to drivers that they drive less and adopt alternative vehicles, to do their part against climate change. It also wants the government to impose emissions standards for both light and heavy-duty vehicles. Their new policies go significantly beyond what even environment-friendly governements have dared do.

Among their policies are the encouragement of multimodal transportation through the addition of park and ride lots and bicycle/walking paths; the addition of high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes for buses, taxis and cars with two or more occupants; improvements to public transit systems, which promote accessibility, reliability and convenience, thereby increasing usage; modern roundabouts should, where appropriate, be the preferred alternative for new construction and as a replacement for collision-prone rightangle intersections; governments, where feasible, should use low and zero-emission vehicles or alternative fuels vehicles in their fleets to prove their viability and encourage consumer demand for such vehicles; the government should implement progressively improved fuel consumption standards, to achieve a 25 percent improvement for cars and light trucks by 2010.

References
http://www.caa.ca/eco%2Dmobility/english/role/policies.html

Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Environment

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Planting Forests to Offset Global Warming

Can we plant a forest somewhere to atone for our fossil-fuel burning sins and emit with a clear conscience? According to several recent news stories, planting forests to combat global warming may be a waste of time, especially if those trees are at high latitudes. This story is a bit of a simplification of a pair of papers presented by Ken Caldeira, Govindasamy Bala, and others at the 2006 fall meeting of the Americal Geophysical Union.

There have been several other papers with similar conclusions in recent years by these authors, but without the media attention. What these authors are looking at is not just the capacity for trees to absorb carbon in a reassuringly visible way, but their effect on evaporation and albedo, compared to other ground cover.

Trees are darker than snow. Snow reflect light back out into space. Trees absorb it. Plants also release water into the air. This forms fluffy white clouds that also reflect light back out into space. Trees absorb carbon, but they are also little radiators, absorbing and releasing light and heat. The models behind the studies conclude that Their ability to block the light from the snow or to be blocked by clouds has an effect on temprature that is comparable to and can be greater than the cooling effect of their absorption of carbon. All of these effects depend on latitude. For northern latitudes, grasses are better than, say, desert.

Which is not to say that forests are bad. Whatever the short-term effects of albedo on a daily or seasonal basis, CO₂ and methane are long-term effects, and photosynthesis is one of the only ways we have of keeping the levels in check. By we, I mean the Earth. People have a great ability to interfere with the process, but there is not much that we can do to help it along besides reducing our ecological footprint.

To paraphrase current research, forests in general are not really good carbon sinks. They can go either way. Peat bogs are good, definitely, as long as they are not flooded, for instance to produce clean hydroelectricity. And oceans are good, but they work slowly. Artificial carbon sequestration is, at best, entertaining hocus-pocus, and at worst an expensive way to ensure a quick end to life on earth some time in the future.

So the best thing is to reduce our energy use, preserve as much wilderness as possible, stop using peat for topsoil, and protect all peat bogs, encourage agricultural methods that are shown to accumulate carbon in soils, and work with tropical countries to help them do the same. Use your money to get more efficient, not to pay out to the forest protection racket.

References
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6184577.stm
Will afforestestion strategies help mitigate global warming?
Carbon, Biophysics, and Climate: Where do Forests Warm? Where do Forests Cool?
http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/324200.pdf
http://www.mcgill.ca/reporter/32/15/roulet/
http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOP_5X5LD5

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Kyoto Protocol Carbon Sequestration Environment

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Carbon Emission Trading a Booming Market

The magazine Environmental Finance has some articles on the year in emissions trading. Despite not joining the Kyoto Protocol and not having mandatory CO₂ targets, the U.S. is quite active in trading for GHG emissions.

For one thing, the greenhouse gases other than CO₂ do have federal targets that are tradeable, including SO_x and NO_x. At $200,000 a ton, there is money to be made. Secondly, some states like California may well soon have state and regional trading of emissions. Thirdly, with a Democratic congress and a court case forcing the EPA to regulate carbon, the U.S. may very well get carbon trading soon and businesses want to be ready.

But most importantly, the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) are already multi billion dollar markets, even with 2008 two years away. One of the top firms involved in trading and consolidating emission credits is New York based NatSource. Another is White Plains based Evolution Markets. CO2e, the European GHG trader is part of the Cantor Fitzgerald group (New York). ICF International, one of the top advisory firms in GHG trading, is from Fairfax, Virginia. The Chicago-based Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) is where a great deal of the world's GHG trading goes on.

The U.S. and Australia are putting Canada to shame when it comes to regulating and trading GHGs, even though they never agreed to Kyoto targets. What precisely is wrong with this country?

References
http://www.environmental-finance.com/envfin/06survey.pdf
http://www.natsource.com/index.asp
http://www.evomarkets.com/
http://www.emissionstrading.com/
http://www.icfi.com/
http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Kyoto Protocol aggregates Environment

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Environment Hamilton Response to Climate Change

The non-profit organization Environment Hamilton released on Monday a ten-point plan of low-cost actions that the new city council can undertake to address climate change.

The EH response to climate change report is a brief set of 10 suggestions, with relatively little quantification of the expected effects, but both GHG and smog reductions are mentioned in the document.

Among the recommendations are

• Free public transit on all smog days.
• High occupancy vehicle lanes on at least two major east-west corridors
• An anti-idling bylaw
• A moratorium and phase out of commercial drive-thru operations.
• A bylaw banning or restricting the use of gasoline-powered leaf blowers and weed whackers.
• Double the urban tree canopy by 2025.
• An after-hours lights-out program for city facilities and offices and encourage private businesses to do the same.

The ban on gasoline-powered leaf blowers and weed whackers is also interesting. These are major contributors to smog, both when they are in use and when they are being fuelled. I would add lawn mowers to the list. The hydrocarbons released into the air on hot days are a major source of smog.

Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Environment Hamilton

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Poorly Planned High Density Can Impair Child Development

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald describes how children living in apartments have poor motor and social skills The article is based in part on the research report Children in the Compact City: Fairfield as a Suburban Case Study prepared by Bill Randolph of the University of New South Wales. The report describes how higher-density living can reduce the opportunities for children to play outside. The lack of suitable places for active play, the lack of possibility of visual supervision, and the social isolation caused by these and other barriers to social interactions with other children all contribute to the lower motor and social skills.

This is not particularly new; Christopher Alexander has often discussed the four-storey limit supported by multiple studies showing that any more has impact on the mental health of residents, and decried that outdoor open spaces are merely "left over" between buildings. Only a few enlightened architects and urban designers create child-scaled features, and children are relegated to sterile playgrounds designed by others, rather than being full independent users of public space.

Tags: Urban Planning

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Congestion Charge for New York?

Several articles have been appearing recently in New York City, making the case for congestion charges for all or part of the island of Manhattan.

The motivation is to reduce peak traffic. Environment does not seem to enter into it. But charging people a fee to enter the urban core is only part of the solution. Besides making driving a little more expensive, other means of transportation must be made more attractive. Successful traffic reduction plans also include improvements to walking and biking with more of the streets given over to them, making public spaces more appealing for people, improving transit and making parking more difficult. The Project for Public Places web site shows several examples where alternative transportation can become the showcase for a truly vital city.

Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning New York

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The Environmental Cost of Concrete and Aggregates

The Ontario government has decided to approve last year's joint decision of the Ontario Municipal Board and the Environmental Review Tribunal to allow expansion of the Dufferin Aggregates Milton quarry, located in the Niagara Escarpment and the Greenbelt (map), with strong conditions. This decision had been appealed to the Provincial Cabinet by two environmental groups and three members of the public.

This is the off note in the recent set of Ontario governement initiatives that include stronger rules to protect the greenbelt, the Escarpment, and to put stronger environmental controls on the aggregates industry.

The environmental groups argue that we should use less aggregates. Is building with rocks harder on the environment than using wood or other materials? Ontarians are among the world's biggest users of stone, gravel, and sand, at 15-20 tons per person per year, double the U.S. per capita consumption, and triple Europe's. Half of it is for roads and bridges.

The biggest environmental problem with concrete, a major use of aggregates, is the greenhouse gases emitted in producing cement and other components of concrete. For every ton of cement produced, more than a ton of greenhouse gases are released into the air. Half of it from the energy required to make it and half because the limestone itself releases CO₂ into the air during the process. You are taking two sources of trapped CO₂ laboriously extracted from the air by creatures millions of years ago, and releasing them again. And because concrete structures are not suited to adaptive re-use, you have disposable buildings with a disposal problem that will have environmental costs of their own in the relatively near future.

Building with wood, on the other hand, is a carbon sink. A natural forest, contrary to popular belief, is not a very good carbon sink. Yes, the trees take carbon out of the air, but eventually it all falls to the ground where natural processes release it all into the air again, some of it as methane which is even worse. But if you put that tree into some 2 by 4s or even fibreboard, the wood runs a fair chance of staying out of the atmosphere for a century or two.

The environmental scorecard of aggregates is considerably more complex than that. For a variety of reasons the quarries are likely to be on environmentally sensitive land, they consume and pollute water, emit fine particulates and sulfur and nitrogen oxides, and are a natural source of radioactivity near us. Their use in road building is certainly excessive. We could definitely do with less of it.

References
http://www.aggregateresearch.com/article.asp?id=10172
http://www.mnr.gov.on.ca/MNR/csb/news/2006/oct30nr_06.html
http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm?fileName=020201b.xml

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Kyoto Protocol aggregates Environment

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Toronto Greener and More Powerful Than Ever

Fresh from having defeated their opponents and more powerful than ever before, Toronto's mayor and councillors have revealed just how much power is being given to them by recent changes to the City of Toronto Act.

Their new taxation power not only gives them the ability to raise new revenues, but to also to selectively punish people for bad behaviour. They intend to use their new powers to slay the anti-environmental dragons. I won't say windmills because the windmills are the good guys in this story.

The new powers allow the city to selectively tax, for instance parking lots by their location and cars by their size. They can tax buildings according to their landscaping and energy source. "People who don't build best-use projects, you could whack them pretty hard," one councillor is quoted as saying. He is one of the guys who get to decide what use is best. The mayor also now has the power to appoint council committee chairs and fire them if they don't do as he says. Neither Napoleon nor Palpatine had that.

While I am a fan of the outcome, disincentives to using cars downtown and the ability to enforce certain environmental design standards, I am also a fan of democracy. Call me old-fashioned, but the ability to put a selective punitive tax on behaviour should be circumscribed, as should the ability for the mayor to punish disloyalty. Sure, it can be used for goodness and niceness but the power to be arbitrary is a bit scary.

References
Toronto Star story

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Toronto Parking

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Thank You, Turkey

I don't often have posts on religious issue here. But this one is so refreshing that I couldn't resist. When Pope Benedict XVI quoted the opinion of a medieval Byzantine emperor about Islamic theolology in a scholarly lecture, there were some violent reactions from modern-day Muslims.

But when he went to Istanbul, where the Byzantyne emperors had once reigned and now a predominantly muslim country, he was greeted with crowds of protestors carrying signs with polite theological arguments. Signs with messages like “Jesus is not the son of God, he is a Prophet of Islam,” and “We as Muslims believe Jesus came before Mohammed and accept Jesus as our Prophet."

It's quite startling that a 14-century old theological debate with so much political, cultural, and historical baggage should manifest itself today as, well, a 14-century old theological debate. Thank you Turkey for putting things in perspective.

Tags: Turkey Christianity Islam Religion

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Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators, Relative to intensity

The second annual report on Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators came out recently and confirms, no surprise here, that Canada is far above its Kyoto targets.

As you can see in one if its charts, Greenhouse gas emissions relative to Gross Domestic Product is down. This is very important when it come to the proposed "intensity-based targets" in the Clean Air Act. If we use targets that are relative to intensity, we can easily reach them with business as usual. We've already achieved 6% below 1990 levels. The problem is that we are putting a lot more GHGs into the air than before, when our planet demands that we put less

Alberta is the culprit

For more information on short-term GHG trends by province, see the recently-released National Inventory Report - Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks in Canada, 1990-2004, and Trends in Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks in Canada, 1990-2004 and this page in particular.

The big problem is Alberta, and other provinces can not compensate for Alberta. Its primary energy consumption is up by a whopping 150% since 1980. Per unit of GDP, one job in Alberta costs 5 times more in terms of greenhouse gases than a job elsewhere in Canada. Alberta emits more than Ontario. It is a tragedy that Alberta is undoing all of the good work done by the people of all of the other provinces. Behind all of this, directly and indirectly, is the tar sands. It is the elephant in the room. All we need is a big-game hunter.

References
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/061123/d061123c.htm
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/16-253-XIE/2006000/t424_en.htm

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Kyoto Protocol Oil Sands Canada Energy

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Congestion Charge Returning to Stockholm

Stockholm's congestion fee scheme is coming back. After a 7-month trial ending in July, which resulted in a 20% reduction in peak-hour traffic and decrease in the number of accidents, residents of Stockholm voted 53% in favour of makgin it permanent. Neighbouring municipalities voted against it.

Now a conservative (by Swedish standards) politician who voted against it has the job of implementing a new version of the plan. He says the money will be used on road building, but that a complete transportation planning exercise, including public transit, would follow.

The Stockholm fees, about $2, are a fraction of what is charged in London or in Singapore, about $15 in both cases.

References

http://www.thelocal.se/5466/20061110/
http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Congestion_fee_to_be_introduced_in__11102006.html

Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning Stockholm

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Ottawa Election : Technologist Helped by Engineers

Larry O'Brien, an engineering technologist who founded a communication system consulting firm, has been elected mayor of Ottawa. The major issue (besides a 2% diffence in promised tax rates) was a remarkably unspecific public discussion on transportation planning. The old mayor wanted a North-South light rail link, which city transportation planners worked on for years, where the contract was already signed, and for which funds other than local ratepayers are paying for the vast majority of the bill. The local buzz was that east-west links are more important, since the city has an overburdened east-west transportation system.

The reason for North-South are that 1) It's much cheaper to build, and 2) the official plan call for most new growth to be in the south, where there are now few roads. It is thought that moving in to an area with good transit and bad roads, people will opt for transit.

Unfortunately for the mayor, Ottawa's transportation planners are notorious for vigorously arguing that their design is the only possible option and that all alternatives are impossible. They did that even with a flip-flop. They had presented one option for the downtown terminal and dismissed all other options as impossible. When they were instructed to evaluate another alternative, they evaluated the new one (previously dismissed as impossible) as the only conceivable solution and dismissed all others, including their previous single solution, as not up to minimum standards.

Difficult to have a rational policy discussion with that sort of attitude. Eventually, the city transportation engineers alienated all environmental and transit promotion groups, who came out against the city's plan. The mayor was stuck defending a plan that he had been told by his employees was the only possible one, but when experts started saying other alternatives are better, every citizen with an opinion was designing a transit system that would take all other drivers but him off the road.

O'Brien never presented a plan. He just critized the one the transportation engineers had come up with, like everyone else did. The engineers were too stubborn to allow that any of their plan was open to discussion, thereby sealing the fate of the mayor.

Tags: Transportation Urban Planning Transportation Planning Ottawa Elections Light Rail

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Some Heresy About Google

Google's search engine is not as good as it used to be. There, I've said it.

There was a time when if you wanted a quality search, you searched Google. Almost every time, it found more stuff and also more relevant stuff, and the other search engines couldn't touch it. At one point, FAST (later called AllTheWeb) was coming close, but then Overture/Yahoo bought them and squandered what could have become a good alternative to Google.

In terms of relevance, Google is still pretty good. Despite the best efforts of the SEO industry to influence the rankings, Google stayed one step ahead of most of the ranking manipulation techniques. The other search engines, who were not even directly targeted by this battle between Google and "Black Hat" SEO firms, got caught in the crossfire and fared badly.

But the advent of the blog and the ability to set up fake blogs and to vandalize other people's blogs has got the better of all search engines, including Google, whose response to this attack has harmed its own index. The Google index now seems paranoid about "quality" and all pages having a hint of suspicion are subject to Soviet-era purges and guilt by association. If you search on Google now, you get much fewer results. Some high quality results that used to be returned are no longer there, although the pages still exist. Some of them even have high pagerank. If you're looking for something specific, use one of the other search engines. They have more spam, but they also have more of the relevant pages.

It used to be that Google could explain its reasoning to some degree. If a page was in its index, you could ask it which other pages linked to it using the "link:" command, and that gave you some insight into who thinks this page is important. Ah, it's in the Open Directory index or a Princeton prof links to it. No longer. I have often come across high-pagerank pages with apparently no one linking to it. I have to use the other search engines to tell me why Google gave it a high rank. Google denies knowledge of links from ODP or Wikipedia - those pages have been sent to the Gulag on suspicion of link spam and are now non-pages.

The Google blog search is even worse. This blog you're reading rates well in the regular Google index, but a few months ago it was purged from the Google Blog Search, despite dutiful pings. What did it do to offend? Mystery!

I hope that Google changes its tactics soon, because its paranoia about "quality" is interfering with its ability to do its job. Maybe Pagerank should be temporal: "this page was good in 2003 and good pages linked to it, but it's changed so I will give less weight to what's changed since then." Or maybe it can let me adjust whether I want precision or recall in my search, to use the technical terms. Or maybe it can even cooperate with blog owners to look up who is being blackballed and to let humans have a say in which blogs are clean and which are not.

Tags: Technology Google AllTheWeb PageRank SEO

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Brownfield Brutalism - Urban Planning for Sale

How zealous should governments be to put development on brownfields, and who should pay for the cost of rehabilitating the sites?

In an article in Spiked Online, James Woudhuysen talks about "The dangers of Brownfield Brutalism" in a reference to Britain exceeding targets for how much of new housing is going on brownfield sites. Get this, in England the target was that by 2008, 60% of new homes should be brownfield, but by 2006, 74% was on brownfield. Average densities of new homes have gone up from 25 dwellings per hectare in 1997 to 42 now.

While it is possible to have a perfectly nice community at that density, and I myself live in a modest single family home in a neighbourhood with even higher density, there is a disturbing tendency to build very high densities on brownfields.

It should be the case that whoever contaminated the site should pay for the cleanup. But the reality is that someone else often has to foot that bill. Rehabilitating and developing brownfields is a public good. Development on serviced and relatively accessible land reduces the cost of delivering public services to the population, and removing contaminants on sites means they are less likely to affect surrounding residents in the future.

Local governments recognize this, but hesitate to pick up the bill themselves. The economic system goes part of the way by reducing the cost of contaminated land, but apparently not far enough for the difference in price to pay for the cleanup. Someone should talk to whoever is in charge of economics to see about this. Maybe negative land prices would do it, but again, economics... Instead, local governments use a currency that is apparently free: zoning regulations. By allowing developers to build at higher densities than would have been found appropriate otherwise, developers can buy the land at one value, and have its value increased through zoning, in exchange for paying for something that is a public good, essentially writing a cheque to a cleanup firm as part of a deal for preferential legislative treatment.

I am very uncomfortable with governments putting urban planning up for sale. It would be better to have public funds pay for public goods, to have developers decide for themselves how much to pay for land and what to build within the law, and to have urban planning decisions made on the basis of what is best for the city and the community. If one community loses the right to be treated like other communities just because they live near a brownfied, then you have backroom deals involving transfer of costs from one party to another. I have seen some very nice brownfield plans and some terrible ones with excessive density for the location in the form of high-rise or low-rise brutalism, but the very idea that developers must be compensated in kind for having paid more than the contaminated land is worth to them is wrong.

Everyone involved can say that they are environmentalists and doing the right thing, but when urban planning is up for sale it loses legitimacy.

Reference
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1681/

Tags: Urban Planning Sprawl Brownfields Smart Growth

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Urban Design and Public Health

One of the reasons we plan cities is to keep us alive. Urban and transportation planners are always looking at statistics to see how their designs can reduce fatalities. But there are more ways for transportation to kill a person than by high-speed collisions. The ways in which neighbourhoods are laid out are even more likely to kill us.

But besides violent death, the inability for kids to walk to the store or to school has a huge effect on their health. And the time spent in smog caused by the combination of cars and heat islands is a major cause of deaths attributable to bad urban design.

Urban planning used to be all about public health. Get people out of disease-ridden blight and give them sanitation and open space away from the smokestacks. Only now, we make them bring their portable smokestacks with them.

Hover your mouse over the picture of the book. It's pretty cool. If you click on the picture to get to Amazon and click on the picture again, you get to a web page where you can read entire pages from the book.

Reference
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2353

Tags: Transportation Urban Planning Sprawl Public Health Smart Growth

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Technorati is Back!

This blog had not been indexed on Technorati for over 6 months. The Technorati spider hadn't visited at all during that time.

I alternated between ping services Pingoat and Ping-o-Matic, tried pinging directly on the Technorati site, even found and adjusted a handy little XMLRPC plug-in for blosxom, the blog engine I am using. To no avail.

But after over a month of weekly support e-mails to Technorati, they not tell me that it is indexed again Was it put on some sort of black list the day I got big time comment spam? No explanation was given, just an apology.

Tags: blogs Technorati XMLRPC

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BT Tackling Spam at the Source

British Telecom will be monitoring its network for spam and taking action to stop it. It will disable accounts, blacklist IP addresses, and phone customers to tell them their computers have become spambot zombies, and help them clean them.

This is better than just filtering mail; it actually stops spam before it happens by identifying and isolating where it comes from. If they actually focus customer service on helping remove the problem, it will be a great move forward. I have had the pleasure of this "service" by Rogers Internet at work. Someone had brought in a computer from home and plugged it into our network. When someone noticed the activity an hour or so later, the computer was quickly removed from the network. Too late. Rogers cut off the broadband internet service half an hour later. Calling them to tell them that the problem had been solved 30 minutes before they acted did no good. Our IP address had been blacklifted and their rules were to keep cut off service for 7 days. A deterrent rather than a solution. Because of this, I can't recommend Rogers business service to anyone.

There are bound to be people cut off that are not happy about it. On the other hand, one of the reasons cited for BT to do this were that customers whose IP address was blacklisted because they had become zombies, were unable to send e-mail for reasons that they were never told, and simply got mad at their ISP and switched providers. At least when your own ISP bans you, they have your phone # and they care whether you remain a customer.

I contrast this with the ridiculous US court order against UK-based SpamHaus, which says that if you publish your opinion of which IP addresses are spamming, you are liable for lost sales to everyone who acts on your opinions. It even ordered ICANN to block access to all SpamHaus.org servers to ensure the list of spammer IP addresses is inaccessible. The US lawyers who came up with that gem should also be put on some sort of list.

It's a good thing the UK has more sense.

Tags: internet spam

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The Causes of Sprawl

An interesting article in the May 2006 Quarterly Journal of Economics, regarding where sprawl happened in the US between 1976 and 1992, and what these places had in common.

This paper defines sprawl a little differently than many others: sprawl is a building with undeveloped land around it. Their index uses the amount of undeveloped land in the square kilometre surrounding a building. Their definition of built-up land is also different than most, so they come up with less built-up land than others, about 2% of the U.S. in 1992 as opposed the U.S. government's 3%. They split up the U.S. into 30x30 metre squares, and say it is built up only if there is a building or pavement in it, whereas the U.S. government calls it built-up if the gap between buildings is less than 150 metres. That means if your building is 75 metres from the lot line and you decide to subdivide and build something new, the government calls it infill and this paper calls it greenfield. It also refers to parks as undeveloped urban land, and to highways and parking lots as compact development. Still, if you are going to process that much data, you need simplistic definitions.

Whatever the definitions, what is interesting is what their sprawl index correlates with. One interesting conclusion is that the average "compactness" of development has not changed. As new outer suburbs are developed, the previous generation of sprawling suburbs is intensified. The sorts of places where people live has not changed, but where they work and shop has. Commercial development used to be split between the two extremes of density. It has shifted dramatically to low density. New jobs are far from downtown, bad news for transportation. In fact, the more sprawling employment is, the more sprawling residential development becomes.

The authors tested various theories of the causes of sprawl to see how they correlate with their sprawl index. The most important factors promoting sprawl are dispersed employment, fast growth, the appreciation of undeveloped plots of land, the presence of aquifers allowing individuals to have wells, rugged terrains but no high mountains, temperate climate, land not subject to municipal planning regulations, and the transfer of servicing costs to other taxpayers. The density of roads does not seem to have an effect. The fragmentation of local government is not as important as the existence of unincorporated land with few rules or taxes.

Factors that inhibit sprawl include a mature compact urban core, cities with a transit-oriented history, physical barriers such as mountains.

The most sprawling city according to their index: Pittburgh (up) overaking Atlanta (down). The least sprawling, Miami. Most improved: Phoenix. Portland and Seattle show no improvement but it would be interesting to see what happened after the urban boundaries were imposed.

Reference
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/qjec.2006.121.2.587
http://www.planetizen.com/node/21462

Tags: Transportation Urban Planning Sprawl Smart Growth

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Energy Star Sprawl

The city of Vaughan, in Ontario, is opening up new subdivisions where houses will be Energy Star rated, with upgraded insulation and heating/cooling systems. They claim these houses will use up 40% less energy.

That's better than it could have been, but looking at a transit map of Vaughan, these houses are beyond the current range of all public transit, even beyond the "limited service" dotted lines. The houses are being built on what was farmland across from the Kortright Centre for Conservation, a pristine natural habitat 30 miles from downtown Toronto.

The story says that "some commercial development" is part of future plans. No matter how you dress it up, this is sprawl. The 40% savings in heating will be quickly consumed and then some by the fact that every single resident will need a car to drive long distances every day. What a waste of good efficiency investments.

The Energy Star rating system for houses should really take the location into account.

Tags: Transportation Urban Planning Sprawl Smart Growth

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Auditor General: Climate Change Programs Worked

The report is now out, and the Auditor General of Canada is, contrary to what the National Post has been reporting as fact for a month, giving the thumbs up to most climate change programs reviewed, including the ones that were cancelled this year, based on the claim that the AG found them inefficient.

Quite the contrary. Energuide for Houses, for instance, was found to be 35% more effective, and therefore 35% more efficient for the federal dollars, than predicted. It was cancelled. What is more tragic, is that with it went a couple of dozen more provincial and utility programs that relied on it.

In terms of effectiveness, most passed, but some of the programs reviewed got an unsatisfactory score. But by and large these were programs where money was committed but not spent. So in terms or efficiency, getting no results by spending no money is still efficient.

I haven't yet found a table showing the programs that were cancelled versus the AG findings, but from looking a a few examples, I suspect that there is little correlation between a program's effectiveness and its odds of survival.

That excuse is gone. We've got to make up for a lost year. Let's get back to work and get some targets and stick to them. That means restoring the housing programs, strong measures on vehicles and on oil production, emission trading, and incentives for consumers in collaboration with their provinces and utilities, to put money in their pockets in lieu of tax cuts. To quote the report, a massive scale up of our efforts is needed.

References
http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/domino/reports.nsf/html/c2006menu_e.html
http://www.gca.ca/indexcms/downloads/Programs%20that%20piggyback%20on%20EGH%20-1.pdf

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Kyoto Protocol Oil Sands Canada Energy

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Auditor General: Curb the Oil Sands

The Auditor General of Canada is calling for real action to deal with CO2 emissions by Oil Sands, an emission trading program, and the strengthening of the policies of the previous government. Although it does not deal with this year's events, the programs that they say should be strengthened have recently been scrapped. Ironically, the reasoning for scrapping these programs was that the Auditor General's unreleased report was going to show those programs were ineffective.

We could argue for a while whether the National Post's version of the upcoming report is closer to the truth than the Globe and Mail's version, or we could just wait a few hours. I also don't want to discuss politics unnecessarily.

Other news on this front: comments from Energy minister Rona Ambrose seem to show that the new "Made in Canada" GHG reduction policy would be... California's plan. That's actually a very good start. Like in the U.S., where states like California and cities such as New York are trying to make up for federal government deficiencies, provinces such as Manitoba and Quebec have decided to spend money from barely balanced budgets to address this issue.

But now in good news: Hydro Quebec has announced cuts in future electricity prices. The major reason is the unexpected progress in energy efficiency among its customers, even greater than last's year's unexpected progress. This cuts down the requirement to make expensive investments to increase supply in peak periods. It therefore decided to use some of that money for more residential energy efficiency programs.

As I reported before, where investments are made to improve the energy efficiency of individuals, they pay off and energy use goes down. Individuals do cooperate, programs are relatively cheap, and they work better than a tax cut to put money in the pockets of individuals.

References
http://www.hydroquebec.com/4d_includes/surveiller/PcFR2006-127.htm
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/article/20060926/CPACTUALITES/60926120/1030/CPMONDE
http://www.gov.mb.ca/finance/budget06/b_in_b/index.html

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Kyoto Protocol Oil Sands Canada Energy

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Trees Prevent Accidents

In a recent article in New Urban News, studies of accident statistics show that rows of trees along arterial roads reduce the incidence of car crashes. Although cars are more likely to run into trees when they are there (duh) they are less likely to hit other cars, or to kill or hurt pedestrians because the narrower visual field of the roadway makes them be more careful.

The article quotes Eric Dumbaugh, from Texas A&M, and his 2005 article, "Safe Streets, Livable Streets," in the Journal of the American Planning Association, and a follow-up article in the 2006 edition of Transportation Research Record.

Traffic engineers routinely oppose street trees, arguing they are unsafe. These are probably the same engineers who say we can build our way out of congestion. My favourite quote: "many traffic engineers work out of a pseudo-science" Hear, hear.

What some engineers, with their little proprietary models and extrapolations, don't get is that behaviour is not held constant when other variables are changed. The more complex behavioural models are in their infancy, so unfortunately, we often jump to wrong conclusions and spend billions on misguided solutions.

The article briefly mentions Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. Monderman is a visionary who has been allowed to try out his wacky ideas on live people, and they seem to work. Although that is not in the article, Monderman thinks that traffic signs are a symptom of bad design and a well-designed intersection should be obvious, with enough non-verbal cues to have drivers adopt the right behaviour. He thinks drivers should focus their attention on others road users, not on signs and lights. He has no curbs, and no separation between cars and pedestrians at intersections and traffic circles. That makes motorists slow right down.

See also
https://www.planning.org/japa/pdf/JAPADumbaugh05.pdf
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html
http://www.ecoplan.org/wtpp/general/nomination-letter-monderman.htm

Tags: Transportation Urban Planning Traffic

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Author Anthony Flint Drops By

Since my review of his book is no longer on the front page of the blog, I thought I would point out that author Anthony Flint has contributed a comment about the review of This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America.

Tags: urban planning smart growth

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Happy Anniversary, Star Trek

Star Trek turns 40 today. How are you celebrating?

Star Trek changed our world. A lot of current scientists and engineers were inspired by it when they were young. Cell phones came from Star Fleet's communicators, many uses of lasers were first thought up there, NASA's new Ion Propulsion system, and many other technologies were first proposed there, including some not invented yet.

But not just in technology, it also explored social and political issues. Star Trek had US television's first interracial kiss, a multiracial bridge, some same-sex romances, a russian officer during the cold war, many episodes about the ethics of war and peace during Vietnam, it put women in believable positions of authority, um, eventually, but also in its first failed pilot.

Not bad for the mid-sixties.

Tags: Star Trek

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Is High Density the Cure for Transportation?

It's about time I talk about my paper in last month's Ontario Planning Journal, Optimizing TOD Housing Mix and Density before it disappears from the internet.

In a nutshell, it explains that higher density in the form of houses reduces the total driving done within a city, but high density in the form of apartments does not. The article on the web has been significantly edited by the journal to remove the diagram and the references, in accordance with the style guide of that section of the publication. Here is a longer version.

I got interested in the topic of what is the ideal residential density for Transit Oriented Development (TOD) when I read something written by Peter Calthorpe (I can't find it any more) that proposed some very specific percentages of different housing types in different types of TOD projects, that included a lot of relatively low density forms. Contrast that with the Official Plans in Ontario, in places like the Golden Horseshoe and Ottawa, where density is to be as high as possible. A great deal of those plans are based on having nothing but high-density apartment buildings near where there is transit.

These are two very different approaches. What evidence do either of them have to support this. In Ontario I talked to a number of planners and read a lot of documents. It turns out that there is no real evidence other than extrapolation. So I put together a very simple model based on what I knew about vkt of different groups at different densities and distance from transit or from downtown. All of it was very orthodox numbers, and it showed first of all that there was an optimal density, a minimum above and below which total driving increased, and how to calculated it with really quite simple easily available data.

The paper was rejected. Apparently it was based on unprovable assumptions. Essentially the model was based on the self-selection bias. Build at higher density and the mix of households will tend toward smaller ones. But eventually, the smaller households are on average closer to transit and the larger ones further. The larger ones then drive more. But how do I know that households will move and how do I know which will change their driving behaviour and by how much?

So I went back to the drawing board and took a detailed look at the data released by the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) in the U.S. They have a wealth of data and make it available. Rather than doing it group by group, and using statistics to see where people would eventually move to in response to development, I did the analysis based on the housing form, much more directly measurable. What I found was so surprising that I spent weeks going carefully through the weighting factors, sampling errors, and non-respondent corrections to make sure that it was not just a statistical anomaly.

The graph shows the story: for people living in single houses and townhouses, the relationship between density and total amount driven is pretty well according to common knowledge: if you live in higher density you drive less. But for people in apartments, the story is very different. First, in medium and high densities apartment dwellers drive more than house dwellers. Second, increasing the density has less effect on apartment dwellers than on house dwellers. Third, apartment dwellers drive much less in low density.

Also, by trying out the density graph with density measured at different levels (density of your block vs density of your neighbourhood vs density of your area) the effect is very local: block-level density is a better predictor of your car use than neighbourhood density.

For several different variations on types of apartments, the results are similar, and most of the graphs are much worse than this one; apartment dwellers actually drive more, not less, at higher density. But those conclusions are more difficult to be confident about, especially since they are more controversial. Some housing forms are rarer at low densities, so the sample sizes get pretty small for some points.

The results are actually quite shocking and show that not only does apartment-based high density do nothing to reduce car use, it actually has the opposite effect. High density does little or nothing to reduce car use of apartment dwellers. Density does, however, improve the picture when it is applied to houses and duplexes.

So if the objective of a plan is to reduce the total number of vehicles on the roads, concentrate on houses and townhouses and put them in as high a density as you can. As for apartments, it doesn't seem to matter much whether they are in high or low density. You don't get much reduction in vehicle use by putting them in high density.

So why do individual TOD densification projects show good results? This is where self-selection comes in. If the major advantage of your new apartments is that they are near transit, then those people who would use transit anyway tend to move there. That doesn't necessarily mean that there are more people using transit, it means there are more people using transit right in the vicinity. If they would have used transit anyway, then you have no new transit riders. But now you may have one less transit rider living further from transit, and the household replacing them further from transit may well now switch to cars in a big way.

This may be one of the lessons to be learned from Portland and other cities. You can have a lot of individual localized success stories, but you have to look at the big picture. If your overall transit ridership does not grow and your total vehicle distance driven does not fall you have not made any progress.

Tags: Transit Greenhouse Gas Pollution Transportation Urban Planning Smart Growth

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Free Lessons on Manual Transmission

Here is an easy program to reduce GHG emissions: free lessons to switch from automatic to manual transmission.

Manual transmission is about 10% more efficient on average, but even more since car makers know that the energy-conscious are more likely to buy them. But most people in North America don't buy these cars even though they are cheaper to buy and cheaper to drive. Why? They never learned. Driving schools and dad's car often don't have the option. The driving test is hard enough without it.

A subsidy program to give free or almost free lessons on standard (manual) transmission to licensed driver is highly targeted to people who would reduce their GHG emissions. Even people who drive a standard already could benefit from lessons since the efficiency of a standard depends on how you drive it. Subsidizing lessons is a one-time cost in order to save 10% or more on gas. It's also a good way to make it cost-efficient for driving schools to get standards in their fleet.

If it succeeds, fuel-saving driving techniques could also be taught for other types of vehicles. Simple things like learning how and when to accelerate have a huge effect on fuel efficiency.

As an aside, I drove a Renault Megane Scenic while in Europe. Manual (it's Europe) diesel, with incredible fuel efficiency. Over 1,000 km on a 50 Euro tankful of diesel, seating 5 comfortably, plenty of luggage, driving 130 km/hr over mountain passes. Translation, 625 miles, US$64, 80 mph. Despite European gas prices, it's cheaper to drive there.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Automobiles Energy Efficiency

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Dedicated Servers Rented by the Hour

Amazon has released a new service into limited Beta: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Essentially this lets you boot up and shut down as many server instances as you want, and pay for them hour by hour, with no long-term contract.

You want a Linux machine as a web server? It's up and running in minutes, and starts billing you 10 cents per hour until it's shut down. The site is popular and you need more capacity? Add more machines. It's less than $75 per month for a virtual dedicated machine, plus bandwidth. If you want to separate the web server, application server and database server, just ask for more machines and they are there within minutes.

These are actually virtual machines, but the initial disk image is what you want it to be. If a machine is shut down, its disk gets wiped. If you want permanent storage, you can use the existing Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).

This option is great for startups. You never know if a new service will catch on, and scaling up can be painful from an operational and financial point of view. This new Amazon service is an innovative modern version of the old mainframe service bureau.

Tags: Amazon Computing

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Classified Ad: Scientist Opinion for Sale

Money is a little tight right now, so here is how I intend to pay the bills.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Global Warming Climate Change

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Why not Build Medieval Towns Here?

I just came back from a trip to Europe to visit relatives. While I was there I visited several medieval towns in Umbria. Looking at them I thought why don't people still build towns this way?

The towns I saw were mostly built in the middle ages, but on top of a Roman town which itself was built on top of earlier Etruscan and Umbrian settlements from 2500 years ago or more. They are often built on rocky southern hillsides, taking away very little agricultural land and giving everyone some sunlight and fresh air.

These towns are the archetypal walkable neighbourhoods, built thousands of years ago according to urban planning rules we are only now rediscovering. Inside the medieval or Roman walls, the streets are relatively narrow. Everyone walks or bikes and cars are mostly parked outside the walls. The streets are animated with kids running everywhere. There is ground level retail with housing above. There are all sorts of squares and public spaces. The houses are stuck together, with quieter residential areas down narrow laneways. There are lush private rear gardens and courtyards, more private than here because they are virtually invisible from the street. Outside the walls, the density is lower, but still high by North American standards. There is a relatively sharp boundary between urban and rural. Despite thousands of years of agriculture and development, there are always old forests within a few miles.

Now, even in Italy not everyone wants to live like this. But here I don't know of a single example of this type of town planning. I bet that if you build it they will come. Include the narrow streets so that there is a reason to only have the small yet remarkably roomy European type cars, and people will be happy to live a much more energy efficient lifestyle. It will be difficult legally; even New Urbanism developments have to get relief from a lot of zoning rules. But so worthwhile.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Urban Planning Buildings Cities Zoning

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Green Roofs: Enough Energy Impact to Make a Difference?

The city of Toronto now has a Green Roof Pilot Program to encourage green roof construction. These small grants are more recognition than incentive. Shouldn't the energy savings be incentive enough?

Actually the savings to the building owner are relatively small, but new research is making it more appealing. A green roof is useful in the summer. It blocks some sunlight, and by absorbing and releasing water it diverts stormwater from the sewers and does some evaporative cooling of the roof. In winter, some types of designs can even reduce heat loss by insulation and by acting as a wind barrier. Technology in improving and energy costs are up, but the investment, extra weight, and maintenance are still high enough to not make the savings worthwhile.

The real benefit is that green roofs can combat heat island effect, where an entire city heats up in part because of its albedo. The higher temperature increases everyone's air conditioning use, and increases the incidence of smog. So the savings accrue not just to the building owner, but to the rest of the city.

I have been suspicious of green roofs in the past. Some buildings that I know tell me that they are not successful as recreation space: no one goes there and when they do the cost of maintenance is very high. So when a builder proposes to increase the building's lot coverage by putting the required outdoor amenity area on the roof, I can't support it. As outdoor amenity areas go, whether they are private or public, they will not have the same value as ground-level God's green earth natural space. The fact of having your garden at ground level where everyone can see it is a great incentive to keep it in good condition. Ground-level gardens are better at filtering water before it reaches the water table, and is better for the critters that maintain a healthy ecosystems. Bunnies, squirrels and toads don't take the elevator.

I hope the green roof movement does not lead to an increase in building footprints, which would make the ground even more impervious, but as long as it is not counted as amenity space it is a welcome addition to cities.

References:
http://www.greenroofs.net/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060725.PRGREENROOF25/TPStory/Business

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Buildings Green Roofs Heat Islands Cities Zoning

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Free Transit: The Carrot and Making It Stick

The San Francisco area's "Spare the Air" days, where transit was free (see previous post), are over, and some transit agencies are reporting that ridership is up even though it's not free any more. The introductory offer has some people hooked.

This is despite the fact that regular riders complained loudly that the free days were crowded and unpleasant, and that extra delays made them late. Imagine how many people would switch if the newbies could experience a normal level of service.

The Bay area is already looking at extending the number free days next year. Looked at in terms of the cost per rider on the few free days, the program is expensive. But viewed from a marketing perspective, the cost of acquiring a new customer is relatively low.

I've mused before about free transit, mostly to dismiss it as being as poor a policy instrument as the Canadian federal transit tax rebate. But properly targeted as a marketing tools, it could be pretty cost-effective.

Imagine this scenario: your household has two cars. What if a couple of months before exipry the second car licence, the renewal papers had the following offer: Here is a voucher for 2 months of transit passes in your name. If you renew your licence during those 2 months, the cost of the passes will be added on to your fees. If not, the passes are free. We have arranged a simple process with all insurance companies to make it easy to suspend your car insurance for 2 months. The money you same on insurance can pay for a few more months of passes. And here is a list of employers who will match those passes, making it 4 months free.

Simple, cheap, targeted. A little unfair, maybe, to add the cost of the passes to the fees of those who don't use them, but disguising the costs in a fee increase would make the deal less compelling. Add in some car-sharing vouchers for when you really need a second car and you can make a real dent in auto use and have people like it.

References:
http://www.insidebayarea.com/trivalleyherald/localnews/ci_4096495
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/07/28/EDGOBIPVU31.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=13&entry_id=7417

Tags: Transit Greenhouse Gas Pollution Transportation Car Sharing San Francisco

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Free Transit: the Answer to Air Pollution?

The San Francisco area has just had experimental "Spare the Air" days where transit was free. These were so successful that city officials are wondering about making it free all the time.

San Francisco has a big problem with smog, and these are getting more frequent in all sorts of cities as well. The free fare days occured when smog was expected. They increased transit ridership by 15%. In parts of the network it went up by as much as 500%.

The free transit days are driven by a very interesting federal policy that cuts transportation funding to cities for every day with poor air quality. Unfortunately, the Bay area didn't succeed in cutting pollution enough to avoid the funding cuts.

Cities already know they can't pave their way out of congestion. Can free transit solve it? The city gets savings from less transportation infrastructure required. More transit brings more density (some think it's the other way around, but they're probably wrong) so all sorts of other municipal costs go down relative to the tax base. Money for free transit can be raised from other sources, like tolls and parking taxes.

Some cities like Portland and Seattle have made transit free in the downtown area. It seems to make financial sense for them. It certainly makes financial sense for commuters. The cost of driving is incredible. It costs you $20-30 per day to drive an average new car. This is already over 5 times more than transit. But the perceived cost is much lower compared to driving, so by removing the cost of transit altogether, money is removed as a factor.

References:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/26/BAGCTK5I041.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/27/BAGK1K5ED41.DTL

Tags: Transit Greenhouse Gas Pollution

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Nightclub Loses Licence so Residents Won't Lose Sleep

The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) has revoked a longstanding nightclub's liquor licence because of noise complaints from neighbouring residents. In the past I have seen the AGCO impose severe restrictions on a licence, but actually losing the licence is unusual.

BlogTO post

This recent decision highlights what is increasingly becoming a problem with mixed uses in cities. Separation of uses, the old way of doing things, avoided this type of problem. Where families sleep remained quiet. But as soon as you stop having large separations between uses, you then have to manage the incompatibilities. If in addition you have higher densities, these problems affect a larger number of people at once. Ironically, most zoning allows more disruptive uses the higher the density.

Not managing the mixing of uses with more restrictive behavioural controls brings on a different and more damaging type of separation: segregation by age, income, and lifestyle. When you decide to associate noisy and disruptive mixed uses with residential forms, the result is a migration of households with children and more well-off families out of those areas. Higher density areas then have a very narrow set of demographics. Besides the social costs of this segregation, the people who leave will go for larger lots further away and drive more, creating environmental and financial costs.

The price of denser mixed uses is that noise standards must be very strict. There was a time when urban neighbourhoods could expect civil behaviour from customers of the local nightlife. But now the enforcement of social standards has declined, and must be replaced with laws and legal enforcement, preferrably with advocacy for the low-income. Party-goers hate it, they get fined and their hangouts get closed, but it has to be done. It's probably possible to have a good time without making noise that wakes the school kids.

Tags: Urban Planning Smart Growth

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Changes to the Pagerank Algorithm

PageRank has been declared dead over and over, usually by people who only have a vague idea about the algorithm. Every now and then I read an amusing (to me) article about how no one knows what the algorithm is and then proceeds to speculate. These are usually people who charge money for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services.

The article describing the algorithm was published even before Google existed as a company. The only thing that is not published is the value of the base of the logarithm that takes it from an open-ended scale to a 0-10 scale. It is thought to be between 5 and 6 and to vary. Despite its flaws, it is probably the best method there is to measure the relative importance of web pages.

The problem with pagerank is that it can be manipulated. People can agree on reciprocal linking schemes, or pay or trick someone into linking to a page whose intrinsic importance does not warrant it. Google is known to fight this in a number of ways, but possibly not in the PageRank algorithm itself. There are other factors besides PR in the rankings.

In a recent report that is frustratingly just a bit short on methodology, Fortune Interactive determined that inbound link quality and quantity are still major factors in figuring out ranking. Their definition of "quality" is missing, but Pagerank is one possible one. There are other definitions of "quality" hanging around, including different weights for different top-level domains. That one seems unlikely since GOV, EDU, ORG, etc, are very US-centric. However, I do note that where where Google ranking differs from other engines it is higher for non-com TLDs.

I would guess that the PageRank algorithm itself has been little changed over the years. Yet in light of the plague of manipulation of PageRank in recent years, a few changes to the PR algorithm itself have been proposed to automate the detection of links intended to manipulate it.

My favourite is the adaptive epsilon algorithm, which is simple and consistent with the intent of PageRank. Essentially this one changes the damping factor, or the proportion of a page's rank that is not propagated to the pages it links to, when the odds of coming back to the same page are too high. This is an indicator of collusion.

Another one is SpamRank, a more complex algorithm that looks at the distribution of the pagerank of the pages that link to your site. If there is an unusual relative number of low-rank sites that link to a page, it is evidence of a linking stategy or even of a spambot.

I wonder why there aren't more people doing serious statistical work to determine whether Google has changed the PR algorithm and if so why. For instance the PageRank of this site is a mystery. The site currently has a PR of 4. According to Google, the only external backlink it lists is a PR3 link from deep within the ODP index on a page with many external links. It's in a fly-by-night type of domain. I can't explain it.

Tags: Technology Google PageRank

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Off-peak Power for Electric Cars

With the recent release of Who Killed the Electric Car? and the narrow ideological niche it tries to appeal to, and the rise of the Cal Cars plug-in hybrids and its hype based on misleading mpg numbers, maybe it's time to start getting serious about off-peak electricity consumption at the consumer level.

First of all, despite the publicity's almost religious conviction in trumped-up numbers and political conspiracies, these technologies do have a lot of merit if, and there's a lot of work and expense behind this if, they can use off-peak power.

First my complaints about plug-in hybrid electric vehicle hype. Some claim they are 100+ mpg cars. They are not. Most of the time they are hybrid vehicles with about the same (maybe slightly less) efficiency as other hybrid cars. The extra miles they claim to travel on the same gallon of gas aren't powered by gas but come from a wall socket to recharge the batteries. The gallons of crude required to produce that energy aren't being counted, and if they were, the overall efficiency would be lower than that of a hybrid car. Figures and debate upon request, but really that's not the most important benefit of the electric or part-electric cars.

The fact is that even by just shifting the combustion of fossil fuels from individual internal combustion engines to electric power plants, we avoid putting a lot of hydrocarbons into the air. This is the stuff that causes smog and is more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. Secondly, not all electrical power is produced by burning hydrocarbons. A significant component comes from renewable resources and nuclear power. Many of these sources have a fatal flaw: they can't easily increase and decrease production based on demand. When everyone gets home and turns on their air conditioner, the evening sun and wind aren't accommodating.

What renewable power needs to be commercially viable is economical storage capacity: massive banks of batteries to store electricity at night so that it can be used during the day, and people willing to pay money for electricity that gets produced at a time when nobody wants it. This is where electric and PHEVs comes in.

PHEV users may be willing to buy electricity at night at retail prices, store it at no cost to the utility, and use it later. Rather than spending their transportation dollars on gas, they spend it on batteries. This is similar to what hybrid users are doing, except that in this case the consumer's investment reduces the utility's investment, and allows it to rely more on renewables.

This economic formula only works if actual off-peak power is being used. If these cars are plugged in during peak hours, then the opposite happens. The utility woudl have to increase its peak capacity, which means high expense and greater reliance on fossil fuels. The current crop of PHEV enthusiasts say they will only plug in the car at off-peak times, but this is unlikely. Firstly, you plug it in when you get home - at peak hours. That is convenient and human nature, and without complex metering it costs you the same. Secondly, off-peak recharging will only top you up for your morning commute. This is about 20% of the daily driving according to recent statistics. Afternoon and evening driving now dominate the stats, and PHEVs will have to plug in during peak times in order to satisfy this driving demand.

In order for this to work, you need a better guarantee that only off-peak charging is done, and this has to be done with minimum cost to the utility. Some countries already have separate off-peak circuits. No complicated circuits, timers, or metering. In addition to your normal power plugs, the off-peak outlets have power only for random times at night. Plug the car into that outlet and hours later the power will turn on, and shows up on a separate line on your power bill. Only those who intend to use cheaper off-peak power will have the extra outlets and meter installed.

Some power companies around the world already have separate off-peak circuits. Some use a device called the Zellweger switch so that devices can be switched on and off while using the same circuit. The utility can send the switch some signals using the power lines as a carrier.

My own house has a "smart meter" as part of a pilot program. It measures my power use hour by hour, and can charge me based on a complex algorithm. It is an expensive way of metering. It takes a great deal of effort for me to get a tiny bit of insight into my household's consumption, and it gives me absolutely no help in changing my consumption pattern. Oh, and they intend to recover the cost of it from me even though it has no effect on my electricity consumption.

We've got to do better than that. We need proper off-peak switching and metering infrastructure, to benefit from the electric cars and renewables in a way that actually reduces GHG emissions.

References:

Tags: Transportation Greenhouse Gas Electric Cars PHEV Electricity Energy

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Transit Tax Credit: How Much Per Ride?

Remember this Conservative party press release?

December 30, 2005

OTTAWA – In response to the Conservative Transit Pass Tax Credit, David Jeanes, President of Transport 2000, has incorrectly suggested in several news reports that the Tax Credit applies only to monthly-pass holders. On the contrary, under a Conservative government, any purchase of transit passes or tickets will be deductible so long as receipts are provided...

The details have been released, and it turns out that Jeanes was in fact correct. The tax credit only applies to monthly passes, thereby avoiding the "negative funding" scenario where transit systems would have had to incur costs associated with issuing receipts for cash fares and tickets. The expired pass itself is a tax receipt, and any combination of documents that proves that a monthly pass was purchased will do.

This program obviously addresses high-income suburban transit users. Refundable tax credits don't apply to low income households anyway, so removing the program's cash fare and ticket portion doesn't have much addition impact on low-income riders, the backbone of urban ridership. Still, these are the people who drive the most, and where the ghg savings are greatest.

The Finance minister's statement says the tax credit is to address gridlock. An interesting perspective. At some point I'll write about whether gridlock is good or bad for transit demand. The energy minister's statement predicts it will cause a 5% increase in ridership.

Does that mean that 95% of the money spent has no effect because it goes to people that were transit riders already? Not quite: most transit riders get nothing because they are not rich enough. Remember that Energuide for houses, where the money only goes to those who reduce GHG consumption, was cancelled because the minister claimed that 50% went for measuring energy losses rather than for the actual work? (In a televised committee hearing he admitted his officials disagreed with his figures)

So how much does this initiative cost per transit ride? There were 1.6 billion transit rides in 2005. A 5% increase is 80 million new trips. The program is predicted to cost $220 million per year. That adds up to $2.75 per new trip. That is more expensive than handing out free bus passes.

References:
http://www.conservative.ca/1113/37893/
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/whatsnew/items/transit-e.html
http://www.fin.gc.ca/news06/06-031e.html
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/05072006/2/national-tories-tout-tax-break-transit-riders-environmentalists-remain-skeptical.html

Tags: Transit Greenhouse Gas Canada

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An Alternative to Net Neutrality

Network neutrality is a principle that all those who use the internet are equal and should be given the same quality of service, access, and pricing. It is a reaction against the ability of large large companies who carry both their own data and other people's data that they will let their own data jump the queue, and slow down or disable competitors. The recent initiative to legislate net neutrality in the U.S. just failed, barely.

On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for the ability to specify Quality of Service (QoS) on the internet. For instance, if you are listening to music broadcast over the internet and at the same time backing up a payroll file, you might like to say the file has priority and let the quality of the music degrade a bit if we run into a bandwidth crunch. Similarly, let my e-mail be delayed by a second or two, it's not that urgent.

We do it all the time to the extent that it is possible. That's what UDP is for: do your best to deliver this data packet, but if it gets lost I won't force you to track it down. I switch from Voice over IP to dedicated lines when VOIP quality get too low. Back in the old days we used UUCP to transport e-mail "whenever", and newsgroups were relayed as slowly as necessary. Still today, you get the speed and latency you pay for. You set up web servers and DNS services on the best backbone you can afford, with distributed servers linked by dedicated lines if budget allows. You can pay for "shortcuts" and "toll lanes", network providers who can shave milliseconds off delivery times by avoiding the crowded public networks and magically transporting your packets closer to their destination in a single hop. Operating systems almost always work that way: every task has a relative priority. If you set everything to highest priority, your computer slows down.

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