Future Imperfect #22: Make our infrastructure great again
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Anyway, here’s what I’ve been following this week:
Make our infrastructure great again
No one can deny that the American commute, whether by train or automobile (planes excepted), is in dire straits. From the Northeast Corridor to the sprawling cities of the midwest and beyond, there’s a lot to fix in the queue. But don’t fret—Patrick Sisson outlines a few ideas to fix the American commute.
Taking a trip from New Jersey to New York today shows the dire straits of America’s daily commute, which relies on a system that’s aged, technologically inept, and in need of repair. Investment in rail systems and mass transit in the first half of the 20th century, when these trains and tunnels could be described as cutting-edge technology and the envy of the world, gave way to car-centric development, endless road construction, congestion, and pollution.
The nation’s largest rail systems, all chronically underfunded, face a $102 billion repair backlog, and the Washington Metro that services the nation’s capital may be shut down for months due to aging equipment and electrical lines. In March, the Twitter account for Bay Area Rapid Transit responded to riders complaining of delays with unvarnished truth: “BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality.”
According to John Olivieri, 21st century transportation campaign director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, that reality is the result of regular budget decisions favoring expanding roadways over maintaining mass transit. The United States spends 55 percent of available transportation funding expanding one percent of the system, and 45 percent maintaining the other 99 percent.
The solution? Instead of focusing on any one panacea, an approach must be tailored to the city. Autonomous vehicles, bike-sharing, and ridesharing should all be embraced, and integrated, with traditional infrastructure improvements to road and rail for cities to gain maximum benefit.
“Four out of five doctors drive Google”
Will driving be the new smoking?
argues for a direct comparison between the two habits.If self-driving cars are even 50% safer than traditional driving (initial tests indicate this estimate is conservative), then it will become patent that choosing to forego that technology will be imposing a tremendous risk to one’s safety. Here is where the analogy to smoking is the most interesting: the risk to others.
We know impaired driving puts others in danger as much as the individual (the “second-hand smoking” of driving, if you will), which means that abstaining from available self-driving cars will be seen as reckless for not just the driver, but the population at large. For anyone that has had to take away the keys of an aging relative, the safety of others is likely fresh in their mind. Here, plainly, are all of the ingredients to prompt a public health response (behavior, risk, safer alternative) to what we long assumed was unavoidable.
At minimum, once autonomous vehicles reach a certain critical mass on roadways, human drivers will act as little more than a nuisance as it relates to traffic efficiency. If you want a future free of traffic jams, you’ll want to embrace the driverless trend.
On a slight tangent, I’m frequently struck by how many people still see autonomous vehicles as a pie-in-the-sky endeavor. It’s true that these cars have some ways to go to be street-ready—not least because of America’s abysmal road infrastructure—but the shift is happening regardless. 10 million autonomous vehicles will be on the roads in 2020—less than five years from now. It’s time to seriously consider the everyday impact that this technology will have on our lives.
End taxation without representation
If you’re in Washington, D.C. this year, you might witness the conclusion of a decades-long struggle for statehood.
from WAMU has the answers to your burning questions. So what can we expect to see?There are three ways D.C. could become a state: by amending the Constitution, by having Congress pass a bill granting the city statehood or by formally petitioning Congress to admit D.C. into the union as the 51st state.
All three have been tried at one point or another, but city officials have settled on the third option for the current push for statehood because they say it is less difficult than amending the Constitution and more proactive than simply waiting for Congress to debate and vote on a bill making D.C. a state. (There’s a statehood bill currently in Congress, but it hasn’t gone anywhere.)
The plan has two big components: a constitutional convention on June 17–18 to produce a state constitution, and the referendum in November when residents will be able to weigh in on whether they want D.C. to become a state or not. Provided that residents say yes, D.C. would then submit the state constitution and proposed boundaries for the new state to Congress for consideration.
This approach has a historical precedent: In 1795, Tennessee — then a territory — drafted a constitution and held a referendum on whether it should ask Congress for admission to the union as a state. The request was made the following year, and Congress approved it, making Tennessee the nation’s 16th state.
Who would have thought that D.C.—er … New Columbia—would beat Puerto Rico to statehood? Not that it’s a done deal—expect a lot of Republican intransigence, especially in an election year, to keep Democrats from gaining a representative and two senators in Congress.
Turning up the heat
One study that’s getting a lot of attention is an analysis from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia. In brief, the 500 million residents of North African and the Middle East may make up the next big wave of climate refugees.
Atmospheric researcher Jos Lelieveld is convinced that climate change will have a major impact on the environment and the health of people in these regions. “Climate change will significantly worsen the living conditions in the Middle East and in North Africa. Prolonged heat waves and desert dust storms can render some regions uninhabitable, which will surely contribute to the pressure to migrate.”
Lelieveld and his colleagues have investigated how temperatures will develop in the Middle East and North Africa over the course of the 21st century. The result is deeply alarming: Even if Earth’s temperature were to increase on average only by two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold. By mid-century, during the warmest periods, temperatures will not fall below 30 degrees at night, and during daytime they could rise to 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit). By the end of the century, midday temperatures on hot days could even climb to 50 degrees Celsius (approximately 122 degrees Fahrenheit).
It was relatively uncontroversial for governments of sea level threatened islands like Maldives to make contingency plans to safeguard citizens’ futures. But the difference in scale between these two cases is massive: 350,000 vs. potentially hundreds of millions. With the European attitude toward migrants as poor as it is, where will these climate refugees relocate?
“In my defens God me defend…”
From Terraform, Slippage and the Flag. “If there were one thing we all could do that was guaranteed to help save the entire world — why would we bother doing anything else?”
Sinkhole Day. What a mess. Planet-wide, the ground opened up like a bad dream. Those future folk sure knew how to make an entrance. London lost half of Parliament. New Delhi saw the entire India Gate subside. Washington’s titular monument tipped into oblivion. Capital city after capital city. Oh, and Glasgow too. Cultural capital of Scotland, sure, but not official. Over There, does Edinburgh still exist? Best not to ask, really.
Then came the transmission, cutting across all frequencies and signals. The world’s sharpest minds sliced at it with predictions of vowel shifts, slang formalisation, rebracketing, calquing. Not that anyone needed a postgraduate degree in linguistics to understand the basic gist. In a dozen pidgin voices, the future asked just one thing:
Send help.
GIF of the Week: Lunch Imperfect
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