Mixed-use development

These days with high gas prices and awful traffic, we are starting to hear more about mixed-use development, generally with terms like "urban villages" and such. The point seems to be that people can live next to where they work and have short commutes. But that is, for the most part, just wishful thinking, and entirely misses the point of being in a city, that being the access you have to a wide variety of jobs and leisure activities. A city is more than just a bunch of villages concatenated together.

No, the real point of mixed use development is just plain old efficiency. Things like raods, transit, and sewers are expensive to build, and they have to be built to meet the peak demand. The neat thing about mixed-use is that the peak demands of the uses generally come at different times, so the overall peak is only as big as that of the biggest use. If you've built roads and parking lots to support an office park, you can probably build a shopping mall next to it with only a little extra road capacity and parking, since the office park is empty on evenings and weekends, which is exactly when the shopping mall is full.

Carpets in subway car

I was reading some documents published by WMATA (which runs the Washington Metro) about their subway train fleet, and I learned an interesting fact: 15% of maintenance downtime is due to carpet replacements. I suspect this is slightly less bad for BART, but it's still pretty significant. No wonder both systems are looking for ways to get rid of carpets and save themselves money and maintenance headaches.

Another interesting fact is that 20% of in-service delays related to equipment failure are due to the ATC system. So maybe there's some advantage after all to having a nice simple mechanical train-stop system like NYC does: it's very, very reliable, and most light rail systems can get by just fine with no train-stop at all, just plain old block signals, again with much higher reliability since there's no carborne equipment to fail.

Automobile

I read a post on a forum on the topic of cars, and I think it is a wonderful demonstration of the sheer cognitive dissonance that is America's "love affair with the automobile".

Nothing will ever beat the private car for convenience. Its right there, whenever you want it. Its fast, it can be used by almost anyone, regardless of physical health. No wait times to use it, no sharing it with the smelly unbathed guy, the psycho homeless person, or the screaming infant. No stops along the way. And it can be used for trips of any length, to any location, without being forced to walk a mile from a bus stop to the destination. And depending on where you're driving, it can be quite pleasant- driving in the mountains with the top down is *fun*. I've never had a fun bus ride.

Apparently this person has never lived in a city, never had to walk a quarter mile across a parking lot, never had to sit in traffic for half an hour, never even stopped at a traffic light. He's never gotten drunk and been unable to drive, never been a teenager too young to drive or had a grandparent too old to drive safely.