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Joe Cortright of City Observatory recently published an interesting post on HOT lanes (high-occupancy toll lanes) and cited a research paper by Austin Gross (University of Washington) and Daniel Brent (Louisiana State University). The paper looked at the behavioral response of drivers to dynamic HOT lane pricing.
They way HOT lanes work is simple: when traffic is light, the price dynamically decreases; when traffic is heavy, the price dynamically increases to ensure a minimum level of service. That is, the price increases until enough cars leave the lane and driving speeds increase to some minimum threshold. In this case, it’s 45 mph.
The key takeaway from the report is that “value of reliability” appears significantly more important to drivers than “value of time”. Put differently: it’s less about the time I’m wasting in traffic and more about the uncertainty of not knowing when I’m going to arrive at my destination.
It’s for this reason that HOT lanes are used more frequently in the morning (when you’re running late for that meeting) than in evening (when you’re just on your way home from work).
Gross and Brent estimate that the spread is about 7.5x. The typical driver values saving time at about $3 per hour and reliability improvements at about $23 per hour! This is fascinating because we tend to focus a lot on time. But arguably what people really want to buy is greater certainty.
I can tell you that it’s definitely one of the things that I love about walking to work, or for that matter cycling somewhere. I always know how long it’s going to take.
Roman Mars of 99% Invisible recently published an excellent episode called The Mind of an Architect. It has to do with a set of research studies completed in the late 1950s by an organization at the University of California, Berkeley known as the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR).
IPAR was founded by a personality psychologist named Donald MacKinnon. He initially worked for the precursor to the CIA and founded IPAR with the intent of studying “combat readiness and efficiency.” But over fears of how creative the Soviets were getting, the focus of IPAR shifted to instead studying creativity.
And architects were deemed to be an ideal test subject (from 99percentinvisible.org):
“Researchers saw architects as people working at a crossroads of creative disciplines, a combination of analytic and artistic creativity. As professionals, architects had to be savvy as engineers and businessmen; as aesthetes, they also acted as designers and artists.”
So over a series of weekends in the late 1950s, some of the most celebrated minds in architecture – including people like Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, and Louis Kahn – were studied and picked apart.
They were asked to do quick sketches, create mosaics, and they were asked questions such as this one: “For the next 45 minutes we would like you to discuss this notion: if man had developed a third arm, where might this arm be best attached?”
In the end, here’s what they concluded:
The researchers began to notice certain patterns across creatives of all professions and genders, including a tendency to nonconformity and high personal aspirations. They also found many creatives shared a preference for complexity and ambiguity over simplicity and order. Creatives could make unexpected connections and see patterns in daily life, even those lacking high intelligence or good grades.
In short: IPAR found that creative people tend to be nonconforming, interesting, interested, independent, courageous and self-centered, at least in general. Many of these traits may seem obvious today, but they were not necessarily obvious prior to these studies. Back when their tests were being conducted and findings presented in the 1950s and ’60s, the very idea of a “creative personality” was a novelty in academic and public discourse.
The findings may not be groundbreaking to us today, but the documents and recordings produced during the study are certainly interesting. If you’re into this topic, there’s also this book you can pick up.
Oh, and if we are to have a third arm, I would like mine to run almost parallel to my existing dominant arm (right). That way I could double up on my most potent dexterity. It would also be far less intrusive than an arm on one’s head or in the middle of one’s back. Then again, it would ruin our symmetry as humans. And perhaps that third arms need to be celebrated instead of being masked.
What would you suggest?
Image: Institute of Personality and Social Research, University of California, Berkeley / The Monacelli Press (via 99% Invisible)
I am sure that a lot of you know where the title of this post comes from. It’s a riff on one of the most important and influential books in the world of city planning: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961).
But when Jane Jacobs first wrote this book, there was no such thing as smartphones and nobody was “checking-in” to hipster dive bars on Foursquare.
So instead of leveraging big data, her analyses and arguments were based on observation. She walked the streets of New York and Toronto and figured out what made cities thrive and what made cities die. That was her brilliance.
Today, however, we have data – lots of it. And so recently, a group of researchers set out to test Jane Jacob’s theories using mobile phone data. The study was called, The Death and Life of Great Italian Cities: A Mobile Phone Data Perspective.
More specifically, they set out to test the following 4 essential conditions:
“She [Jane Jacobs] argued that, to promote urban life in large cities, the physical environment should be characterized by diversity at both the district and street level. Diversity, in turn, requires four essential conditions: (i) mixed land uses, that is, districts should serve more than two primary functions, and that would attract people who have different purposes; (ii) small blocks, which promote contact opportunities among people; (iii) buildings diverse in terms of age and form, which make it possible to mix high-rent and low-rent tenants; and (iv) sufficient dense concentration of people and buildings.”
To accomplish this, the team assembled and studied data from the following sources:
Mobile phone activity (specifically internet activity)
OpenStreetsMap Data
Census Data
Land Use Information
Infrastructure Data
Foursquare Data (Venues API)
Ultimately, they determined that Jane Jacobs knew what she was talking about. The above conditions are essential to urban vibrancy and they apply to Italian cities, just as they did and do to American cities. But this test was valuable, because the more that we can measure and quantify cities, the better I think we’ll get at creating and promoting urban vitality.
Now imagine if you overlaid the findings of their report with residential and commercial rents. I bet you’d also find that there’s a strong business case for urban vitality.
I’ve heard a number of people say that, eventually, every company will be a software/technology company. And I don’t think we’re far off from that reality. To me, this study feels like an early example of what that might look like for city building.
On a side note, the picture at the top of this post is of the Spanish Steps in Rome. I took it on a weekend trip in 2007. I was living in Dublin at the time.
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