Tag Archives: cost-effectiveness

Links: end of the pipe

Time to dump some tabs that I’ve accumulated in the browser over the past few weeks:

You can never go down the drain:

This week’s City Paper cover story is a short piece on DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility (arrange your own tour here!).  The accompanying photographs show the infrastructural landscape in all of its glory.

For an incredibly in-depth tour of the facility (without the smell), check out this mammoth post from September, showing the entire process in excruciating detail.  Mammoth notes the fundamental process of cleaning the water mimics the existing natural processes that rivers use, albeit concentrated and accelerated.

The two basic tracks are to separate liquids and solids, while making the liquids more liquid and the solids more solid at each step in the process.  The end result of one process is water back into the Potomac (cleaner than the river it enters); and the other result is ‘concentrated biosolid’, also known as the concentrated crap of Washington, DC.

The biosolid is sold as fertilizer for agricultural applications for non-human consumption. Waste nothing.  For an in-depth tour of how such a facility works, I can’t recommend the mammoth piece enough.

On the water delivery side (as opposed to the sewage disposal side), Atlantic Cities has a piece on why your water bill must go up to help finance the replacement of the infrastructure we’ve taken for granted. Both the delivery and disposal networks are in need of investment.

JD Land has a set of photos from the new Yards Park-Diamond Teague bridge, including one of the historic pump house that sends sewage from the District south to Blue Plains. Another shot shows the bridge’s informational signage from DC Water, documenting the agency’s own long-term control plan for management of DC’s combined sewer system.

It’s all about jobs:

The remarkable takeaway from the Blue Plains phototours is the role of natural processes in the system (minimizing pumping in favor of gravity, for example) to maximize efficiency via infrastructure.  Thus, it was curious to see the Washington Post writing about the expansion data centers in old manufacturing towns to serve as the physical location of cloud computing servers, but noting that such infrastructure doesn’t provide many long term jobs.

Granted, jobs are the narrative of the Great Recession, but using the data center seems like an odd place to focus.  Using a similar infrastructure investment like Blue Plains as an example, a better comparison would be to the economic activity enabled by clean water and sewage disposal – just as the data centers should look at the indirect effects of internet connectivity and activity, not direct employment via the infrastructure that sustains the internet.

Mammoth has a few thoughts on IT infrastructure, aesthetics, and the return of light industry to mixed use urban environments.

Here comes the sun:

Some solar powered notes – the cost of PV cells is coming down.  Some thoughts on the implications for the climate (Joe Romm), for the economy (Paul Krugman) and for DC (Lydia DePillis).

Is transportation too expensive?

David Levinson proffers a few hypotheses as to why transportation investments are so expensive.  Many are interesting, (thin markets and insufficient economies of scale trigger thoughts of rolling stock protectionism; project scoping and organizational structure are similarly compelling) though I’d take issue with a few of them.

One is #5, discussing incorrect scope.  David mentions big buses serving few passengers, but as Jarret Walker notes, the real cost is in operations; the real cost is the driver.

The idea of standards run amok is intriguing, but I think a more relevant point is asking if standards make sense.

Nitpicks aside, the idea is a great one – this is a conversation that needs to happen.

On profitability and privatization

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

Given Metro’s current and future budgetary issues (and the plethora of ideas to fix them amongst various comment threads at GGW and other places), discussions of profits and priorities are certainly topical.  With that in mind, Jarrett Walker has an excellent post up on the fundamental goals of transit service – the public good we planners try to achieve.

In fact, high-ridership transit services are almost always the result of aggressive government investment and policies, including the pricing of car travel, the planning of dense centers around stations, and a huge range of other actions.  A democratic government must care not just about the bottom line of the transit but also about the quality of the community it serves.  In this role, it may advocate low-ridership services to serve other sustainability goals.  For example, when opening a new “transit oriented development,” the long-term health of the community may require a lot of public transit service just as the first people are moving in, to help them establish transit habits, own fewer cars, etc.  This service will be “unprofitable” but can be a rational part of a long-term sustainability strategy.

Thatcher’s formulation, swallowed whole by Judt, is that service is either “profitable” or “social.”  Judt will go on to make “social inclusion” arguments for why service to low-ridership markets, such as rural towns, should be retained.  Fine, but he’s already given away the revenue that could pay for much of that service — the “profits” gained by the private operating company running the “profitable” services.  He’s also given away funds that could be used to fund new infrastructure investments for the next generation of profitable services — investments that should be government-funded not because they’ll be profitable, but because they’ll be intrinsic parts of a humane, sustainable, and livable city — all valid criteria for government attention.

Walker describes the definition of profitability (and the relentless focus on cost effectiveness to the exclusion of other considerations) as a “conceptual trap” that does not truly capture the reality of transit benefits or the complexity of how cities and urban places function.   Defining the debate in these terms automatically puts transit on poor footing.

“Social” and “economic” are just two legs of the three-legged stool that has come to be known the “triple bottom line,” a useful scheme for thinking about all of the possible valid outcomes of public policy.  The missing third term is “environmental.”  Judt is so attached to the “social” dimension of the question that the other two terms, “economic” and “environmental,” have collapsed in his mind into a single opponent, the “economic.”  We are all used to thinking in binary (us/them, this/that) terms, but the triple bottom line requires us to hold three points of view in the mind at once — which, to be fair, is much harder than it sounds.

Indeed.

Walker’s piece is excellent food for thought, particularly as our transit agencies and other municipal entities are facing huge budget problems and often turning towards privatization (see Chicago’s parking meters) – we must make sure we consider all of the potential outcomes, as well as all three legs of the stool.

Cost-effectiveness

Streetcar tracks, H St NE - CC image from flickr

Streetcar tracks, H St NE - CC image from flickr

Over the past couple of days, there have been lots of reactions to the DOT’s decision to lessen the importance of their cost-effectiveness measures in decisions on new transit starts funding (TTP, Yglesias, TNR, TOW, Streetsblog), almost all of them positive. There are, however, some key points to consider.  With the emphasis on livability as opposed to cost-effectiveness, the question will now be about measuring that livability.  Jarrett Walker notes:

Great news, perhaps, but I look forward to seeing how FTA is going to turn something as subjective as livability into a quantifiable measure that can be used to score projects, particularly since the payoffs lie in development that a proposed transit line might be expected to trigger, but that usually isn’t a sure thing at the point when you’re deciding to fund the line.  And of course, travel time does still matter.

Measurement is indeed the key.  Part of the problem of the Bush Administration’s emphasis on the CEI was an expansive definition of costs and a rather narrow definition of ‘effectiveness.’

The other problem is one that Donald Shoup talks about extensively in his book, The High Cost of Free Parking.  Namely, often imprecise data points are given undue precision in a bias towards quantifiable results and numbers – precision and accuracy are two different things, and it is important not to conflate them:

HOW FAR IS IT from San Diego to San Francisco? An estimate of 632.125 miles is precise—but not accurate. An estimate of somewhere between 400 and 500 miles is less precise but more accurate because the correct answer is 460 miles. Nevertheless, if you had no idea how far it is from San Diego to San Francisco, whom would you believe: someone who confidently says 632.125 miles, or someone who tentatively says somewhere between 400 and 500 miles? Probably the first, because precision implies certainty.

This doesn’t disprove Jarrett’s point – there are still metrics that can be used for more qualitative factors – but the larger issue here is a move away from false precision and towards outcomes that are more accurate – outcomes that better reflect the true (qualitative and quantitative) nature of cities.

With that in mind, it’s interesting to read some reactions published in the National Journal (h/t Planetizen).

Anthony Shorris: The new approach laid out by Secretary Lahood should force a re-thinking of all of our evaluative tools — cost-benefit analysis, alternatives analysis, environmental impact statements — with an eye toward re-balancing them away from an excessive reliance on only those measures that can be readily quantified.  This re-thinking should be inter-departmental (including other agencies and OMB) and inter-disciplinary (including the perspectives of urban planners and designers as well as economists).  One thing the financial crash should have taught us is that there are limitations to even the most seemingly sophisticated financial models, and that apparently crisp spreadsheets are no substitute for the prudent exercise of judgment that the American people have a right to expect of their leaders.

William Millar, APTA: With the action taken by DOT to consider all the factors required by law, transit projects can now be looked at from a holistic perspective. By judging a project on the multiple benefits it offers (i.e. mobility, economic development, environmental impact, land use improvements etc.), a well-rounded and more informed decision can be made. By removing the barrier that the Bush Administration implemented, the process is now in alignment with how it was originally intended to be.

Projects must still be cost effective and meet at least an overall medium rating in project justification and local financing. However, now, instead of a narrow prism through which to judge a project, a wider lens will offer a larger perspective. It should encourage innovative projects to be proposed and funded.