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Late July Link Harvest
A collection of interesting things from the outside world..
As always, good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.
- Oakland wants to be Portland when it grows up. Or, at least, Oakland is considering building a streetcar line down Broadway and trying to replicate the Pearl District story. I still need to read the proposal and analysis, but this sounds unabashedly cool.
- I don't normally signal boost The Onion, but this article about one of Britain's recent cost-cutting measures is priceless. Be Seeing You.
- Goldman Sachs and the SEC have settled the criminal case against Goldman for duping investors in a large, failed synthetic derivative investment in mortgage securities. Many people are touting this as a win for Goldman, who got off without admitting guilt or wrong-doing, but with publicly promising to never do it again. Also, with the largest securities fine in history, $550 Mn, and a loss of ~25% of their market capitalization since the suit was announced. Wall Street is believed to be scrambling now to adjust their business practices so as to minimize how much damage the investor lawsuits do to major derivative-writing houses. Market-watchers widely assume that a) if Goldman was doing it, everyone else was doing it too, and b) there is never just one cockroach and the SEC went after the case that they could win most easily. Also, here's some more background on the GS story from The Big Picture.
- From the financial blog, The Big Picture, a discussion of how and why the US Residential market is going to suck for the foreseeable future. Alright, I misstate - we can estimate when the US residential market will start being a place where home-sellers can again
make moneyrecover what they've invested in their homes over the years, it's just farther in the future than you would like it to be, if you're a home-owner who might want to move someday, or if you make your living off of something related to housing, such as, say, the US economy. - Turning from Finance to the world of Technology, HTML 5 looks like it will be very, very cool. For example, someone wrote a version of the classic game Asteroids in it. That you can play in any modern browser. Without being actively connected to the 'Net. Which is right up there with Google implementing Pacman as an in-browser game.
- Okay, back to Finance. The US Gov't bailout of the finance industry keeps getting cheaper. Congress authorized spending $800 Bn on the effort back in 2008, which many critics on both the Left and Right loudly decried was money straight down the drain. As the WSJ reported back in April, the expected total cost has now fallen to less than $90 Bn. That would put the effort at costing roughly one percent of GDP, one-third what the S&L crisis did in the early 90s. Not too shabby for turning a probable Depression into a merely deeply unpleasant Recession. Just think how cheap it would have been if voters hadn't been insisting back in the early 2000s that the gov't hire regulators who were asleep at the wheel for the rest of the decade...
- There's a fascinating new paper from some researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston looking at the impact of credit card incentive programs on the pricing of retail goods in the US. In the very short form, credit cards are effectively driving up the nominal retail prices of many goods, which has the result of transferring wealth from people who pay cash to people who pay with credit but pay off their cards every month. Not a surprise, but nice to see someone pulling the data together.
- I read a fair bit of Jonathan Carroll's work, after the chair of the upcoming Reno Worldcon gave me a copy of Carroll's The Land of Laughs about two decades ago. He does all the normal writerly new-media stuff these days, including a blog and LJ and Twitter and RSS feeds. He often sends out snippets of other people's work that are worth signal boosting, such as this lovely little piece about changing your life for love.
- Finally, a plug for some lovely software - I've recently started using InstaPaper, so that I can flag articles as I'm browsing to read later and easily come back to them and flag them when I want to share. It's very cool, and works in your browser on your desktop, your mobile device, what have you.
As always, good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.
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A study done about five years ago in Florida suggested that light-rail / streetcar systems may be the only urban redevelopment strategy that we've ever seen reliably succeed - in particular, building stadiums spectacularly doesn't work, which apparently people often suggest. I was going to post links off to that set of studies along with the Oakland article, but I need to go track the original source data again. The most interesting finding from the study was that putting in a streetcar / light-rail system (something running at street grade level, that is effectively increasing the geographic range of walkers) reliably creates local economic activity and concentration. The second most interesting finding was that this works even for very short segments of track - as little as a half mile or some such is enough to start the process rolling.
SF is presently running this set of experiments, having recently installed the Third Street muni line, running from the main in-city subway system down the east (bay) side of the city. The launch was good, but I haven't been closely enough following the development story over the last year. Well, beyond the fact that this is San Francisco, so everyone wants to have their say, whether or not they have anything new to say or whether having their say is likely to increase the likelihood that they'll get what they want.
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MAX cost a metric buttload to build per mile
you have to wait a lot longer at a stop for the MAX you want
MAX largely connects suburban park&ride lots to a walkable downtown, whereas the streetcar connects different walkable areas into one awesome whole that you couldn't easily cover on foot yourself
I like stadiums as a place to have events, but I agree they don't drive development. Portland is going to run a zillion more streetcar lines in the next 5 years, some of which will even go through our "Rose Quarter" stadium district. It will be interesting to see if the streetcar development effect can overcome the stadium effect that it is its opposite.
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But even a max system, as expensive as it is per mile, etc, can still be a strong improvement over one more high-rise parking lot in the central city and trying to figure out how to shoehorn one more lane of traffic from the suburbs to the city. Full disclosure: I loathe suburbs, as you may have guessed. I'm all for genuinely rural spaces, but suburbs are a barely mitigated evil.
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re: freeways: I figure we're less than 20 years away from workable computer-driven driving systems that let freeways run at 4x their current capacity, provided there aren't too many dumb cars in the mix. You can do things like intelligently redivide lanes into eastbound and westbound in realtime, run bumper-to-bumper at 70 mph, make way for emergency vehicles without slowing down, stuff like that. My point being that once that happens, there will be much less need to widen the freeways -- although there may be some transitional demand for 'no manual driving' roads and 'no automatic driving' roads.
when auto-driving becomes commonplace I think the next step is a blurring of the line between taxis and car rentals. Why drive yourself on a commute if the car can do it for you? and then: why own a car if you can have a perfectly good unmanned transport show up at your door every morning? (and the flip side: why keep your car in the garage when it could be out renting itself to commuters?)