Why Cross the Potomac?

With the recent failure of two pieces of proposed legislation in Virginia, the likelihood of a additional structure crossing the Potomac River retreats for another ten years and we are all well rid of the over-priced sprawl generating highway concept.

Going back in history since the original roadway plans in 1954 that showed the Outer Circumferential Freeway in Montgomery County with a Potomac Crossing, various politicians and developers carried the idea forward through iteration after iteration. The proposed locations have generally center around an area north of Dulles Airport where the design and construction would be relatively simple with the shallow rapids and narrow expanse of the river. The environmental impacts, however, would prove formidable and costly barriers as Montgomery County has designated approximately 90,000 acres on the Maryland side of the Potomac as Agricultural Reservation and the Environmental Protection Agency has long opposed a bridge in this area.

The political and economic pressure for the new crossing isn’t difficult to understand given that the Washington D.C. metropolitan region regularly makes top ten lists for ‘most congested regions’ and travel time delays cost the region millions of dollars. Nearly everyone would prefer less congestion but the costs of roadway improvements, distinctly different incentives motivating local land use planning and state level transportation planning, and the “plus one” problem complicate matters to the point where all involved parties agree there are no simple solutions.

Currently, the Maryland State Highway supports options that improve existing crossings and it is slowly working on improvements to I-270 and I-495/I-95 corridors that include a potential $500 million breakout project widening the American Legion Bridge. However, given the status of the federal transportation bills in congress and the warm reception Annapolis has given the proposed gas tax, I’d not be holding my breath.

So, the question I ask my readers, is “why cross the Potomac anyway?” If one considers the value of your time, the cost of $4 gas, the wear on your vehicle (and your nerves), and the cost of housing together, it may become obvious that you’d live more cheaply if you moved closer to your place of employment. Just consider what could you do with the 2 hours a day you spend commuting and the money you’d save.

 

Unprecidented Event??

Recently, an article appeared that questioned the appearance of two 100 year storm events in Birmingham New York in two years. Given the climate change predictions of larger and more intense storms includes a increase of the 100 year event to nearly 1 in 20 years at the high end this sequence of storms is not so unlikely as one might think. Perhaps it is the new normal?

 

Rebuilding the Oceans

I’m awfully busy with a house restoration project but found this bit on-line and thought I’d share.

 

LINK

 

Why That Reactor was Built Where and How it Was…

The nuclear genie appears to the public this week as a monstrous beast capable of terrifying an entire hemisphere as it renders a goodly portion of Japan uninhabitable.  Setting aside the most hysterical comments, one finds a large number of questions regarding the placement and design of the reactor. Commentators suggest a criminal negligence by those in charge of governmental oversight and by the private design and construction companies. The truth is I suspect substantially more complicated than it appears at first glance. A discussion of risk management seems in order to clarify the process for those interested in a rational consideration of the enabling sequence of events.

Decision making under uncertainty centers on controlling the costs of risk regardless if the decision involves reaching for the boiling pan of water or building a nuclear power plant. Assuming a rational decision-maker, the process would involve generating a decision tree assigning probabilities and costs to specific choices and then selecting the preferred alternative.

The process begins, not with a problem statement, but with the choice of parties involved in the decision. Ideally, the final arbiter might be a diverse group of involved stakeholders, but more often it involves a governing agency (led by a politically appointed administrator and supported by public tax dollars) negotiating with a private entity within a politically charged arena. This might well have been the case for the nuclear reactor.  It can easily be seen that more than one risk assessment is underway by each involved party and they all influence the primary choice even if not represented on the decision tree.

In terms of actually settling on a site, the private entity generates a tree that looks like this:

                                                    Tsunami

                Earthquake

                                No Tsunami

BUILD

                                                Tsunami

                No Earthquake

                                                No Tsunami

No Build ———

Then based upon “science” a risk for the earthquakes of various magnitudes is generated and a cost estimate for the design of a suitable reactor is calculated. The design may also account for a tsunami depending upon the estimated risks but this could also depend upon the industry or governmental oversight requirements. As part of the design/engineering process there will be negotiations before a preferred design alternative is selected and every single part of the project might be discussed from the likely maximum earthquake to the expected life-time of the reactor. The agreed upon standards might reflect short term political realities much more than the longer term uncertainties of science.

The final result might decide that the reactor would be designed to last 50 years and that according to the agreed upon science the likelihood of an earthquake greater than 7.0 is estimated to be 1:1,000 or 0.001* and the likelihood of a damaging tsunami would be 1:100 or 0.001 over the course of  those 50 years.  Further estimates would show that a critical meltdown would cause damage equal to X dollars and a tsunami would add Y dollars. Thus the final tree would look like this:

                                                Tsunami (0.001 x 0.01) x Cost A

                Earthquake

Build                                       No Tsunami (0.001) x Cost B

                                               Tsunami (essentially 0%) x Cost C

                No Earthquake

                                                No Tsunami (99.99999) x Cost D

You can clearly see that given the relatively low probability of an earthquake or an earthquake AND a tsunami decision-maker can accept quite a large amount of damage before the cost becomes an issue (i.e. more than the cost for no earthquake AND no tsunami). The chance of both events occurring over the course of the 50 years is 0.00001. Thus even a $1 billion dollar clean-up isn’t too terrible (note they’d also likely calculate the rate of inflation out over 50 years to account for present day value of future clean-up and this has its own set of issues).

The decision is additionally complicated by the estimated profits from the generation of electricity over the next 50 years which has its own set of assumptions regarding demand, other costs, and regulatory requirements.

What may not be immediately obvious is that there could very well be 4 earthquakes with tsunamis in a five year period because averages and estimates are just that. The tricky problem is as someone once said not “knowing what you don’t know”, but rather “not knowing what you don’t know”.  So did they build a reactor and failed (as a group) to think through the possibilities or did they consider those possibilities to be so remote that failing to design for them was an acceptable risk?

*This number is pulled from thin air for the purpose of example only.

 

Not Just About the Coastline: The National Security Angle

Not Just About the Coastline: The National Security Angle

Climate Change impacts more than just our physical infrastructure and engages a wider spectrum of interested parties than biologists and transportation planners. In the world of national security the projected impacts of climate change grabbed serious attention somewhere around 2003. Shortly thereafter the analysts in the Department of Defense (among others) began to do what they do best; run scenarios based upon likely outcomes. The results aren’t pretty.

As you  might guess, regional and global security are linked to climate changes that affect water and food supplies, human sanitation issues, the spread of multiple disease vectors, and extreme weather events. The US DOT anticipates that China, the Middle East, and the Near East will all suffer greatly from changes that could initiate mass migration, starvation, and armed conflicts.  And even the United States will suffer as marginal farming regions supported by rivers or aquifers run out of water. Furthermore, significant increases in tension (read perhaps armed conflict) are anticipated in regions where wealthy countries exist beside poor countries with high vulnerability to climate change and large populations.

What I find fascinating about the report is the seriousness with which the authors take the concept climate sensitivity. This is the idea that a global climatic response to increases in Green House Gases (GHGs) has been fairly well established as being between 2-4.5°C with a small but reasonable change of it being higher. This essentially means that “things happen” when the global temperature changes by X°C and given the built in change from existing GHGs, things are inevitable.  Even better from a scientific point of view is the understanding of tipping points and the need to allocate significant funding to monitoring regions such as the boreal forests and arctic tundra for signs of disastrous large scale changes.  The point is made several times throughout the paper that these worst case scenarios are not low probability events, especially if the current CO2 and methane emissions continue unchecked.

In conclusion, the people whose job it is to defend our country against disruptions such as war and civil unrest consider climate change to be a real and immediate threat to our (the United States) society and to the world’s stability. Their take on making decisions under uncertainty is well worth the time to read.

 

Sustainability and Livability

After attending the recent Transportation Planning Board conference in Washington, D.C. I came away mulling over how I might approach combining sustainability and livability in transportation planning. At first it might seem relatively simple to nest livability within sustainable planning efforts but as one examines how transportation planning fits within these two frameworks things quickly become complex.

To be clear, livability is generally a local concept, more fittingly applied to a  city, neighborhood or community rather than a county, state, or country. A livable community always complies with some human-generated boundary and it is assumed that an abundance of available goods and services such as schools, groceries, libraries, trails, employment centers, safe housing, and parks are available within that boundary. Obviously, different groups prefer different sets of goods/services and sort among the available communities based upon what is perceived as desirable and affordable; but the underlying urge among all groups is a selfish desire to consume the maximum quantity of high quality resources.

In contrast sustainability’s focus centers the present value of existing ecosystem produced goods and services (as opposed to manufactured goods and services) to current and future generations. Efforts focusing on sustainability seek to maximize standards of living in a manner not encouraged by the free market model or human nature. They might be described as selfless. Furthermore, sustainability is not constrained by political/economic boundaries as livability might be. One might as easily focus on the sustainability of a small watershed as focus on a multi-state temperate forest, both of which sprawl over and totally ignore line on human maps.

Therefore,  because livability is selfish and minds human-made rules it does not necessarily align with the selflessness of a sustainability ideal that respects a community larger than humanity.

Here is where transportation planning comes into the picture. From the point of view of some planners (and certainly the politicians), the transportation system is about providing access in support of economic growth. Roads, bike paths, sidewalks, bus lines, light rail, freight rail, ports, and airports all move people and goods to what the free market determines are their highest and best uses (assuming you blindly accept all the inherent assumptions built into the free market model). Cut to its essence, transportation planning supports consumption of natural resources and improves livability.  And, it supports consumption without judgment or consideration of the eventual consequences to a sustainable planet. Or does it?

How much planning and forethought is now given to reducing the impact of impervious surfaces to non-point discharge limits in the Chesapeake Bay, to the stormwater retention requirements, the recycling of construction materials, the reduced idling of construction vehicles, the efforts to improve system efficiency without increasing roadway “capacity”, and efforts to support Transportation Oriented Developments (TODs) and Priority Funding Areas (PFAs)? I can tell you quite a bit of effort and discussion is ongoing at my job but nobody’s asked the biggest question. Is transportation planning inherently unsustainable given its current political/economic agenda? And if it is, what would an alternative look like?

 

The Allocation of Resources or the Limits of Our Imagination

What constitutes an acceptable standard of living? Answering this question is part of the larger “Save the Earth” puzzle that the green movement has yet to adequately address.  To even glance casually toward the idea of an  determining (sustainable) acceptable standard of living involves  diving deeply into the cold black waters of social and environmental justice through which swims the deadly shark called violence. But what sustainability jumped the shark?

The basic math seems fairly straight forward. Humans have used up approximately 20% of the planet’s natural resources over the last 200 years and seem on pace to use up much more than that rather directly.  In fact, some clever calculations indicate that in our species’ rush to bring every person up to the middle-class American standard of living would required somewhere between 5 and 9 planets worth of resources.

Now, leaving aside the fact that I’m not entirely clear that “use up” natural resources accurately reflects our ongoing devastation of the genome bank or the ongoing depletion of the protective/regenerative capacity of the soil, water, and air; the aforementioned calculations may assume humans continue with our current level of efficiency in resource use.  So our species might be able to delay the pain for a while before the real difficulties begin and hard decisions must be made related to allocation.

But who makes those decisions? At present there is no governing body with sufficient authority or knowledge to manage world-wide distribution of resources.  Instead, we humans rely on “free trade”  and “capital markets” to  determine the “value” of natural resources. However, the free market is a model and all models come with inherent flaws and bias.  In this case, two of the largest flaws are the tendency to value the present use more than  a future use, and a failure to recognize that no consumer at any level has anything approaching perfect information regarding their decisions.

To be blunt, the free market system is smarter than other systems but still amazingly stupid. It’s also slow to respond to externalities like climate change.  If it worked better I could drink the water out of my local aquifer and I’d be worried about things…. instead it appears we hairless monkeys are hard-wired to make really stupid long-term choices.

These may include: allowing multi-national corporations “free speech”,  failure to adequately test the long-term cumulative effects of thousands of new and unique chemical compounds dumped into the ecosystem, and drinking water shipped  from other continents.

So, how then does our society adequately address the issue of resource allocation?  The traditional manner involves fighting and killing people. Dead people need very few resources and don’t generally object to you taking what formerly was theirs.  American hegemony begins to look pretty clever right about now but it surely isn’t the best for our planet or our species.  Can’t the monkeys do better than  that?

I’ d talk about going local, green, and voting…. but we’ve all heard that story multiple times. But what if I propose something far more radical for our species…(no not going extinct)…  pushing all our efforts toward genomic modification and the singularity.  Simply put, what if we could exist in virtual worlds inside machines while the planet heals?  We could build ourselves new living bodies whenever we wished to, travel to the stars, replicate ourselves multiple times, merge ourselves, and step beyond the limits of our current neural parameters.  What if we evolved to save ourselves….

 

Sea Level Rise: A Matter of Inches

The politicians, planners, and average citizens continue to ask questions about climate change that don’t have simple answers and perhaps the biggest subject of discussion on the table for climate change scientists involves their models of sea level change over the next 100+ years. Understanding these changes is a vital task, after all millions of humans all around the globe live in communities that sit at or within 5 feet of sea level. Should the sea levels increase communities will experience loss of aquifers, lost of coastal land, increased storm surges, and disruption of agricultural resources. Predicting changes accurately would allow for timely evacuations and relocations of populations to avoid traumatic economic impacts.

To be certain, the increase in sea level won’t be evident in the manner that pouring water into a bathtub covers the bottom, but modeling the increase, whatever form it takes, depends upon having solid data for the topography of the sea floor at a scale of inches rather than ten foot increments. Right now NOAA doesn’t have much of that data for the coastal regions of Maryland or Virginia*.

Knowing the topography is only part of the puzzle because the water depth depends upon a multitude of variables: local and regional ocean currents, sediment composition, deposition, erosion, subsidence of the local land masses, thermal expansion of the sea water, and tidal patterns.  With a solid estimate of these variables in hand, scientists and engineers can construct predictive regional models.

What might these models show the decision-makers?  I’d expect shore-line changes to occur slowly with coastal wetlands retreating before the rising water in most areas. In others, where change exceeds 2-4cm per year, those wetlands should vanish as they can’t adapt (raise themselves through organic deposition) quickly enough.  The dangerous changes should appear during the larger, more intense storm events that are predicted for our region. Ten, twenty, even thirty feet of coast can vanish in the course of one major storm event even as the sea level rises slowly.

Vulnerable areas such as Ocean City may elect to armor their shorelines with stone or concrete. Perhaps truck in tons of sand to create dunes that replace what is removed.  At some point, perhaps at six inches or two feet of increase it will become much more expensive to protect existing development that that development is worth to society. And here is where the sea level issue becomes truly difficult.

If society develops the capacity to predict sea level change with reasonable accuracy, we must then decide when to adapt through fortification and when to retreat from the rising tide. What do elected officials tell citizens along the rural eastern shore of Maryland when condemning their properties as unsafe while building multi-million dollar sea walls to protect Annapolis or Ocean City residents?  How does the MDOT, county or local government explain that public roads will no longer be rebuilt after flooding? How do property rights fit in to this?

Predicting sea level change may well be the simplest part of the task ahead.

*In fact for certain locations along Maryland’s coast there are two official estimates of water depth differing by 15cm (or 6 inches). We really don’t know how deep the water is.

 

Congested Intersections Revisited

The state of Maryland relies upon fund 87 dollars to address intersections identified as congested however, the amount of dollars programmed to this fund continues to fall as the gas tax fails support the highway transportation fund. As a result the State Highway Administration should review its definition of a “congested intersection” to better develop multiple funding sources supportive of needed improvements.

The current intersection evaluation process involves the developing measurements of critical lane volumes during peak traffic flow periods and  comparing those volumes to the acceptable levels as determined by the County or State (generally this number is 1600 vehicles/hour). More precisely, the peak hour volume/critical volume is a ratio and once the ratio reached 1.0 the intersection fails to provide an adequate level of service for motorized vehicles. At levels approaching 1.0 traffic will be extremely slow and vehicles may require several cycles of the signal system to pass through the intersection.

It should be noted that intersection failure comes in many flavors and some intersections fail so completely that even major geometric realignments can not address the poor quality of traffic and thus a grade-separated interchange (an overpass) is required. Fund 87, by design, is not intended to address a major geometric improvement or a grade separated interchange so the traffic engineers and planners must identify less substantial projects to develop where current congestion may be addressed.

Herein lies one of several problems facing transportation planning in Maryland today; how to select and fund the best possible improvements. Clearly, given the new federal non-point discharge limits for the Chesapeake Bay and Maryland’s tighter storm water regulations simply increasing the amount of impervious surface (capacity improvements) isn’t going to be fiscally feasible. Instead, the SHA should adapt its process of identifying congested intersections to reflect the need for a multi-modal transportation network that efficiently moves people and freight.

To do this will require adopting a level of service (LOS) for the intersection that takes into account pedestrians, cyclists, freight traffic, and bus service. Given that any intersection remains fundamentally limited as to the length of signal cycle, the SHA may have to accept that fewer automobile may pass through the intersection during peak hour traffic. This should be counter-balanced by a higher person throughput for the intersection AND the corridor as a whole.

That second point is particularly important as current critical lane volume related improvements do not generally consider how changes in signal timing affect the up and down stream intersections. Fortunately, computer simulations can evaluate larger network conditions stemming from signal timing improvements, pedestrian crossings, bus priority lanes, and geometric improvements.

Once this wider range of factors becomes part of the analysis additional funds (for ADA improvements, bike lanes, freight and air quality improvements, and intelligent traffic monitoring systems can be coordinated to improve the targeted intersections. The automobile will become but one factor among many as SHA increases its commitment to serve all users of the state road system.

 

Climate Change: It’s Time to Adapt but to What?

Adaption and mitigation exist as complementary efforts to address the ongoing climate changes on our planet and until recently most of the focus seemed to revolve around mitigation. Strategies that reduce the output of green house gases through improvement in the gas mileage of automobiles, tighter restrictions on the freight truck emissions, reforestation and similar ideas continue to be tossed about at all levels of government. However, now that the ICC has stated with virtual certainty that range of 20 year impacts that will occur,  governmental agencies are focusing on adaptation.

At present, the best regional models show increases in rainfall totals and intensity, increases in mean and peak temperatures, higher storm surges and sea level rises. All of these changes impact  pieces of vital social infrastructure that support the economy, public safety, and public health so some measured response seems appropriate.  But the initiated responses must deal with uncertainty (something unfamiliar to planners). Historically, planners relied on data culled from prior climate data to project into the future but now they can’t easily generate just one scenario. The question of the moment appears to be “adapt to what exactly?”

Newer models of risk assessment suggest that targeting short term, no-regret goals that benefit society regardless of climate change (while increasing society’s adaptive capacity and it’s recovery  capacity) are the clear first steps. The second steps involve a series of scenario-based activities that initiate at pre-planned trigger points. An example of this principal might be the transportation administration begins to update its design standards for storm water management and highway drainage. This leads to an ongoing upgrading of water management capacity over-time and a set of bridge and road designs that anticipate the future climatic conditions.  The scenario-based decisions kick in when the storm intensities definitively have increased (and as new climate models for the region are reviewed) so that roads essential to evacuation or access can be actively improved.

Essentially, this adaptive path allows for the government actors to ease into major changes while ameliorating the initial climate change impacts. The important parts to include in the scenario planning  effort is the effects of sudden change (climatic tipping points) and the effect of endogenous factors such as changes in social or political desire for adaptation, new scientific or technological information, and population growth.

The next challenge: does adaptation generate a moral hazard?