Frumination

Q: Mike, how was it that you got to visit the work site of the East Side Access project, hundreds of feet under Manhattan, and check out a real Tunnel Boring Machine?
A: I Know a Guy

I definitely never thought I'd actually get to say that. Fortunately, the guy I know told me to bring a camera. The battery was dying so I didn't get to snap that many pics, but what I got follows. I think these pictures capture, to a degree, how messy the prospect of assembling a TBM way under ground really is.

The overriding feeling I had throughout was of being inside, around, and on top of a Sandworm in the novel Dune. What really impressed me was the number of people necessary just to put one of these things together, and the enthusiasm of all the people working on the project (sweating it out under 200 feet of bedrock).

The entrance to the work site, in Sunnyside, Queens

The 30+ years old but never used LIRR tunnel under the East River

The beast itself:

So, point being, East Side Access is really happening! This visit was in late August, just before the machine was brought on line. Perhaps I'll get to visit again to see it in action.

In many ways London's system for Congestion Pricing should be model for New York, but in other ways it really isn't. The most obvious way that it isn't is in the actual technology proposed to do the job. Yes there are cameras and computers involved, that's sort of where the similarity ends.

Specifically, in the UK tradition, all of the cameras relay a full video feed to some central processing location. Not only is this absurdly costly (think fibre!!) but it allows for plenty of privacy invasion by anyone who has access to the cameras' feeds. The proposition for New York is very different. The proposition is much cheaper and seems to all but eliminate the possibility of using the cameras for anything but looking at license plates. That's because the cameras would be equipped with enough smarts to know when to snap a photo, and only that still image would be sent to be processed. If you don't believe me, read this excerpt from IBM's recently released proposal:

A worst case analysis shows that for a very busy lane, with one thousand vehicles passing the detection equipment every hour and forced to send two 100kB images for each vehicle, the bandwidth requirement is a mere 57kB/s. This is within the capacity of wireless networks today, but is not the optimal solution approach.

A more realistic case, in which 50% of vehicles are equipped with an E-ZPass tag, 90% of the remaining license plates are read with a sufficient confidence at roadside and 80% of charges are paid in a timely manner, leads to a bandwidth requirement of 8kB/s. A very busy, six-lane detection point would thus be well within the capacity of NYCWiN, even without local reinforcement of the wireless network.

We estimate that, with our proposed solution approach to vehicle detection at the edge of the network and given the estimated amount of traffic in the city, the average local bandwidth requirement across the system will be on the order of less than 1kB/s per lane, and the overall load on the backbone of the wireless network will be small.

More generally speaking, I think it suffices to say that Congestion Pricing uses technology, and as we know technology only gets better and cheaper over time, so we can be sure that NYC's Congestion Pricing technology will be much better and cheaper than London's.

Now, if only somebody would only explain this to all the privacy freaks and civil libertarians that are making this process so painful...

In 1969 Norman Mailer ran for Mayor. In 2002 my grandfather (probably the most Mailer-like person I know) gave me an original copy of the campaign poster that he had squirreled away for 30+ years. A week or so ago, Mr. Mailer passed away, so it seems like the appropriate time to put this poster on the web, since I have never been able to find a copy online before. I'm about as far from a knowledgeable design critic as you can get, but this thing is an undeniable work of art, especially in the eye of any native New Yorker.

What a platform:

The boroughs, in order of time I've spent in them:

Some lovely embellishments on the Hudson River:

And my favorite little twist:

Not a bad running mate:

But not a good day either (they came in 4th):

For more info on the campaign itself, check out a recent NYTimes podcast and an interview on WNYC with Jimmy Breslin, Mailer's running mate and another icon of New York realness.

A genius I know once wrote an article that some say brought the distinction between packet-switched and circuit-switched networks into the popular consciousness. In the decade or so since, we have seen packet-switched networks take over the world, and unfortunately some people find themselves tempted to abuse this bit of history in arguing related points. The gist of it will always be something to the effect of: "the thing I support is like Packets, the other thing is like Circuits, and since we all know that Packets beat Circuits, I must be right." (This is not unlike how many in my extended family will take anything they think is sufficiently bad and compare it to Hitler.)

For example, a recent piece (of what I don't know) by Stephen Fleming of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, entitled In Transportation and in Technology, Packets Beat Circuits, starts off "Why are so many mass transit policies doomed to failure? Because packets beat circuits. Let's explore an analogy."

You can imagine where it goes from there ("cars are like packets, mass transit is like circuits, so cars are better"). The guy claims to have worked in digital communications for 10 years; I wonder if he's just bitter because he was on the wrong side of the packets vs circuits debate.

For the sake of all 6 people likely to read this, I hereby debunk this terrible analogy:

The fundamental aspect of a circuit-switched network, as stated in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Circuit Switching is that it "establishes a dedicated circuit (or channel) between nodes and terminals." That is, the bandwidth for the flow is reserved end-to-end for the life of the circuit. Traditionally, when I make a phone call, part of the 'space' on a bunch of copper wires connecting where I'm calling from to where I'm calling to is reserved even if no one is saying anything over the line.

Clearly a road network is not circuit-switched -- when you start out from your house you don't have a dedicated lane all the way to your destination (if you did, I might just own a car). In a circuit-switched transit network, not only would I have a seat on one R train from Union Street to Union Square, I would have a seat on every R train over the same route for the duration of my trip. Realizing this, the analogy breaks down completely.

Fleming's main argument as to why Transit is like Circuits is that the bandwidth hierarchy, in traveling by train, then bus, then feet, is like the digital transmission hierarchy of telephone (i.e. circuit-switched) networks. Perhaps he lives and works directly on top of an interstate and has never driven by highway, then arterial, then local street in his car. Or never noticed that the bandwidth on his home broadband connection is orders of magnitude smaller than the trans-Atlantic fiber lines that connected me in London to his web server in Georgia.

In a circuit-switched network, I only use as much bandwidth as I need at that moment, and only on the single link I'm currently traversing. When I get to the end of that link, I am put in a queue until the next link on my path is ready to receive me. It's true that it's a bit more obvious to see a road/auto network as analogous to a packet-switched network, but only because of the apparent simplicity of the rules of the system. Transit networks are of the same nature, it's just that the way packets (i.e. people!) are queued and switched where links connect is more complicated and constrained than on roads.

Speaking in data-network terms that we are all familiar with, transit mops up auto when it comes to bandwidth (total bits, or people, per unit time). The problem with transit is, in some circumstances, higher end-to-end latency (the time it takes for the first bit, or person, to get where they're going). But once you get the flow started, we all know that one track of even light rail service can carry the same number of passengers per hour (or was it bits per second) as 7 lanes of freeway or 17 lanes of street (see here).

Unfortunately, people actually read and believe this kind of proof-by-bad-analogy thinking. In a recent newsletter from the Reason Foundation, Robert Poole, Reason's Director of Transportation Studies, claims to have had his "Aha!" moment when reading Fleming's piece. Too bad for him the "Aha!" wasn't a realization to be much more careful with his analogies.

Or at least, the capacity?

The first strategy for adding additional housing outlined in Mayor Bloomberg's 2030 plan is to pursue transit oriented development. In simple terms, dense development around transit stations and hubs. However, the plan also describes capacity issues that our transit system faces today and will face in the future. So, we should build all our new housing clustered around a transit system already reaching capacity? Hrmmm...

Looking at subway ridership in a long term context, it's pretty clear however that while some lines may be quite crowded today, the system as a whole is substantially below the highest usage levels it has supported historically. On the whole, we have recovered from a nadir of 915 million trips in 1977 to 1.5 billion trips in 2006 -- about the same as in 1952.

We all know that commuters from Williamsburg and the Upper East Side are suffering, but the question remains -- are there parts of the city where subway usage is substantially below levels that have been supported in the past? Comparing each station's 2006 annual ridership to levels in 1952 yields the following map, where red indicates a net decrease over the last 54 years (and thus, theoretically, excess capacity):

This analysis of course doesn't account for the fact that bringing the South Bronx back to historical levels would make the problems on the Lexington line even worse than they are today, but it at least gives a sense of what areas could accept housing growth around subway stations if the most pressing line-level capacity issues were resolved.

What if we want to look at each station's or line segment's pattern over time? As they say here in London -- "watch this space" (and think sparklines).

[Technology Shoutout: most of the work for making the above map was done by the ever-more-brilliant open source PostGIS and GeoServer packages.]

[err, so now NY may get it together on congestion pricing, but the train of thought is relevant nonetheless]

While usually calling something a zero-sum game is a bad thing, in this case I mean it positively. The $500M for a congestion pricing pilot that New York has lost may still lose would go to somewhere else like Dallas, San Diego, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, Miami, Seattle or Minneapolis. I am a New Yorker born and bred, and am as disappointed as anyone about this, but I think in this case we all may be suffering from a slight case of New-York-is-the-center-of-the-world-itis.

None of these other cities have nearly the mass transit system that New York has. Probably combined their mass transit systems don’t carry half the passengers ours does, and most people living in those places think of cars as an absolute necessity for practically everything they do. In a broader sense, it could very well be an overall net positive that the congestion pricing pilots happen in other cities. Perhaps those places will make incremental progress in shifting people out of cars and more importantly, changing peoples' value systems when it comes to cars vs. other modes.

If we are really lucky, this could be the first wave in a national shift towards more rational thinking about transportation, which would definitely benefit NYC in the long term. In truth, I'm a lot less worried about NYC than I am about other cities and the country/world as a whole, so I wonder if it doesn't hurt to at least imagine the possibility of some greater good coming from Albany's (seeming) ineptitude.

In its 1996 Third Regional Plan, the Regional Plan Association describes a rapid transit line in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx that could be built almost entirely on pre-existing rail rights of way and would connect with at least twenty existing subway lines. The so-called ''Triboro RX'' (''TRX'' for short) presents a unique opportunity to provide mobility and accessibility to New Yorkers living or working within these three boroughs, at a fraction of the cost of most transit projects of similar size. In my part-time internship at the RPA, which ends today, the lion's share of the work I have done has focused on fleshing out the idea of this line.

Working with the singular Jeff Zupan and his former sidekick Alexis Perrotta, I helped to develop a possible alignment for the Triboro RX, and a crude estimate of what levels of initial commuter ridership one could expect to see if it were built. The fruits of this labor can be seen on the web at http://transit.frumin.net/trx/TriboroRX (including sections on the alignment, our data sources, the demand model, and detailed results). There I describe in detail how the line and its stations are laid out and how we made our estimates. At the end of the day, we can comfortably say that at least 76,000 New Yorkers (including 32,000 diverting from other modes of transportation) would use the Triboro RX to get to and from their jobs every day. This number that is quite competitive with many existing lines, and without ever touching the island of Manhattan.

At the heart of our ability to make this estimate is the Journey-to-Work data published by the census -- counts of commuters between every census tract and every other census tract in the city. Given these flow data, the shape of the subway network with and without the Triboro RX, and a rough model of how people make travel decisions on public transportation, it's not so hard to guess which subway riders would use a new transit line if it were built. Estimating new transit riders is more nuanced, but we did our best with limited resources.

This study of the Triboro RX has, for me, been much more than a semi-traditional transportation modeling exercise. I took it as an opportunity to get intimately familiar with the state of the art in Open Source mapping and GIS software, including PostGIS, GeoServer, and OpenLayers. These pieces represent a full network-enabled stack for, respectively, storing and manipulating, mapping and presenting, and client-side interfacing of spatial data. I don't think they are quite yet usable by the non-hacker, but I wouldn't be doing this work if I didn't think that my computing skills brought something special to the table. That said, I encourage you to check out the following:

• Interactive map of New York City, its subway system, and the Triboro RX (don't forget to try changing the background map and various overlays)
• Subway and Triboro RX in Google Earth
• The whole enchilada in Google Earth

Now, it wouldn't be a perfect project to do, for free, when I should be saving money for school, if it didn't also involve getting my hands dirtier than they already do from all the crumbs in my keyboard. It seems absurd to talk about planning a transit line without actually having visited the areas it would connect. Having synced the clocks on my GPS device and digital camera, I twice explored the Triboro RX right-of-way and its environs from Flatbush to Bay Ridge, in Brooklyn. The results are viewable either in Google Earth or directly on the web. What really struck me was the diversity of neighborhoods -- Flatbush, Ocean Parkway, Borough Park, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge -- traversed by the Triboro RX in less than a third of its length. Continuing on, it runs through East New York, Brownsville, Cypress Hills, Middle Village, Jackson Heights, Astoria, and Mott Haven. You could eat your heart out while getting from Brooklyn to the Bronx, skipping "the city" entirely.

Finally, no contemporary New York transportation project is complete if it doesn't some how tie into Congestion Pricing. In terms of providing mass transit to unserved communities in the outer boroughs, methinks this graphic speaks for itself:

PS Please forgive me, I know these maps need legends for the quantitative parts. It's all a big hack, trust me!

PPS The interactive web maps work much better in FireFox than Internet Explorer. Save your soul and get a real browser.

Instead of relying purely on viral marketing or mass media marketing alone, big-seed marketing combines the two approaches so that a large initial audience spreads the marketing message to a secondary audience, yielding more overall interest than either approach would have by itself, even if the message isn't that contagious. "Because big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread."

While I was not listed as an author in the HBR paper, I am listed on the as yet unpublished version on Dr. Watts' web site (abstract).

Last Friday I attended Regional Plan Association's 17th Annual Regional Assembly, entitled "A Bright Green Future," focused on climate change and energy use in the tri-state region. The keynotes (including Mayor Bloomberg's) and plenary were broad and deep, and of the numerous breakout sessions, I chose to attend, unsurprisingly, the one on transportation -- "The Wheels: Getting from A to B with Less C02."

Generally speaking, my interest in transportation is not an environmental one. I like mass transit because it enables a certain kind of social and economic development that is unique to big cities. Nevertheless, transportation is an important part of the energy and climate change conversation, so a thorough treatment by established experts is always a good thing.

The introductory presentation by moderator Lee Sander, CEO of the MTA, consisted primarily of a number of key statistics:

• 25% of world petroleum consumption is by US; our share has only shifted slightly downward in last 20 years. In contrast, US has only 5% of world’s population.
• 28% of US Energy Consumption is in the transportation sector
• Transportation consumed 67% of U.S. petroleum usage in 2005.
• Transportation emitted 58% of the nation’s pollution from carbon monoxide, 45% of nitrogen oxides, and 36% of volatile organic compounds.
• Highway vehicles emitted 82% of all transportation carbon dioxide emissions in 2004.
• U.S. vehicle-miles of travel (VMT) for all modes of transportation approached 3 trillion in 2004, growing at an average annual rate of 2.9 percent over the last 20 years. VMT is doubling every 24 years.
• Passenger car vehicle efficiency has not changed in last 20 years.
• Vehicle miles per capita in US by state – New York is the lowest by far of any state – density, transit, walking is the reason.

The presentations of the four respondents detailed some of the problems with and and solutions to our regional and national transportation and emission trends.

The first panelist was Lee Schipper, Director of Research at EMBARQ, the World Resources Institute Center for Sustainable Transport. Some highlights of his at times riotously funny presentation include:

• Income correlates directly with CO2 emissions per capita
• President Bush has 'Kyotus Interruptus'
• Mileage per Gallon is not going down in the US. All gains in fuel efficiency have been matched with increased horsepower in vehicles.
• Hybrid HOV subsidies and Ethanol subsidies are silly
• Fuel share as a fraction of household income is going down, encouraging further driving behavior
• Alternative 'Fools' are not priced right
• Compared with the US, Europe has higher gas taxes, and much lower fuel consumption and driving
• The Mexico City MetroBus BRT project is working -- traffic is down, polluting minibuses are less used. Rigid enforcement of exclusive bus lanes is key

Next up was Steve Winkelman of the Center for Clean Air Policy. With a similar focus on transportation modes and fuel usage, his presentation was somewhat richer in terms of statistics and graphical exhibits:

• It's all about Travel Demand Management (TDM), and the challenges of sprawl. Examining CO2 production density vs. CO2 production per household yields a rather stark contrast in the San Francisco Bay Area:

• I also really like this diagram, which illustrates part of the inefficiency of the design of sprawled communities:

• Fuel efficiency is a great thing, but is not enough to reduce CO2 emissions. The following graphs show the effects of rolling out California emissions standards nationally, with and without travel growth. Controlling travel growth will be an important part of controlling emissions growth:

• Winkelman believes that compact development can save 20% - 50% of VMT. He cites realtor surveys that actually demonstrate increased consumer demand for compact, transit oriented development (TOD).

• We have a real opportunity to affect change for the future with good policy today. Citing Arthur Nelson in the Journal of the American Planning Association: "Nearly half of what will be the built
  environment in 2030 doesn’t even exist yet, giving the current generation a vital opportunity to reshape future development."

• For example, Portland, Oregon, has decreased its VMT by 6% over the last 15 years while the nation as a whole has increased by 10%.

• In summary, the current ICE-TEA and SAFE-TEA federal transportation legislations are inadequate to help curb emissions and climate change; we need GREEN-TEA

Sonia Hamel, of the Center for Climate Strategies, gave a presentation that was less about the numbers, and more about her experience working in the Office of Commonwealth Development in Massachusetts, tackling climate change at the state level. Her focus was on the benefits of integrating a climate change strategy with other parts of state development agencies.

• In her office, she helped screen the dispersal of state funds in four key areas:
  • Environmental
  • Transportation
  • Housing/Community Development
  • Energy

• The primary criteria for screening was lower energy usage, allowing proposals that met appropriate criteria to jump ahead in the line for state funding.
  • In the first year of the program, there was substantial pushback against the guidelines they set.
  • In the second year, everything was different. People got it.

• The problem with many smart growth initiatives is that they do not directly tie funding to the smart growth criteria.

• Examples of specific changes she helped affect in MA:
  • Educate communities not to fear local housing development, just because increased population may require more schools
  • 30 TOD projects were completed
  • Highway design guidelines were revised.

Finally Paul Roberts, author of End of Oil, offered some cautionary notes and an amazing example of some of the possible unintended consequences of climate change solutions. Be assured, his presentation was much more convincing than my retelling:

• The US government is subsidizing corn-ethanol production, in order to help foster an alternative fuel industry.
• This has driven up the price of American corn which hurts everyone from cattle farmers to Mexican tortilla eaters.
• The increased price of corn has farmers replacing other crops with corn, raising the prices of all sorts of seeds and grains, including wheat.
• Which has caused food manufacturers to buy wheat gluten from China, which we have recently learned has its own problems (melamine!)
• Growing ethanol requires fertilizer, which has high Nitrogen content.
• Nitrogen in the land and water has all sorts of adverse affects such as harming babies (though I missed how), and feeding algae blooms which disrupt aquatic ecosystems.
• But what's worse, one primary source of the Nitrogen for fertilizers is Natural Gas.
• Which we end up needing to import from Russia and Iran, thus curtailing the national security benefits we expect from reduced oil dependence in our transportation systems.

Lots to digest!

PS get a different kind of rundown on the same session at Streetsblog

Generally speaking, the Global Position System does a great job of letting you know where you're at. A well known problem in urban areas results from tall buildings which occlude satellite signals as well as reflecting them, causing so-called multi-path errors. A good example of how these problems preclude the use of GPS for certain urban applications can be found in Transport For London's "Technology Trials." The image below shows the size of the buffer zones that would be necessary to calculate with 99% certainty that a car with GPS entered London's Congestion Charging Zone:

(source: Transport for London)

Enter, Skymeter. To enable their GPS-enabled parking and congestion charging business, they have developed algorithms for correcting GPS signals in urban canyons, as shown here (white is the position from a standard GPS chip, yellow is the post-processed SkyMeter position):

(source: SkyMeter Corp)

Toronto? Do they even have tall buildings there? Well, SkyMeter recently went to London to test their system in the same areas of London that caused TfL's GPS vendors so many problems. The results are similarly impressive (red = standard GPS, green = SkyMeter)*:

Zooming in a bit:

(check out the cool PostGIS, GeoServer, and Google Maps-powered interactive version)

To get a sense of what they were up against, take a look at TfL's calculations of the number of GPS satellites available in central London (red = less than 4, yellow = 4 to 10, green = more than 10, all in the 99% confidence interval):

(source: Transport for London)

Even after the Galileo (the euro-GPS) goes online, the test area is still no better off, according to TfL's models:

(source: Transport for London)

I think the data speak for themselves. Skymeter is currently planning a number of pilot installations including one for parking in the City of Winnipeg, and I wonder what London and Stockholm, or other cities contemplating congestion pricing (eg New York), will do with it. How much it really changes the discussion of what technologies are suitable for congestion pricing right now I'm not so sure.

* A disclaimer from SkyMeter, who was generous enough to give me their data to make those London maps:

This data is the "before" (red) and "after" (green) of the data processed by Skymeter with its first alpha test of data collected in London, UK, in heavy "urban canyon". This same data was analyzed by a third party (Mapflow from Ireland) in London. They calculated error as point to line perpendicular distance, and reported a reduction in the 90, 95 and 99 percent error quantiles of 26% 34% and 48% respectively (i.e. in meters). While this says the Skymeter process clearly removes error, this metric does not measure the second to second error variance, in otherwords, Skymeter removes absolute error AND makes the process much better behaved. This provides [1] a far-stronger evidentiary record, [2] two to three orders of magnitude greater compression, [3] spatial error bounding and [4] extremely rapid pricing-map registration (a trivial form of map matching at the data center)

This process is the first of four parts that [1] de-noises the GPS positioning signals, [2] characterizes the residual error for non-refutability, [3] bounds the spatial error, and [4] bound potential financial error. This process is part of a patented process that Skymeter claims can reduce tolling errors for GNSS-based tolling for distance-based road user charging as well as GNSS-based parking metering to arbitrary levels -- for example to one bill in 10,000, or to an arbitrary percentage such as 0.01% of a bill -- including in urban canyon.