Carlos Waters | Vox

The problem with beach nourishment

2018-12-10T10:32:17-05:00

Lido Key Beach has seen better days.

In the spring of 2018, the city commission in Sarasota, Florida, declared a beach erosion emergency after repeated beatings from Hurricane Irma and Subtropical Storm Alberto reduced the wide, sandy beach to a narrow strip. The damage to the beach was an “immediate and ongoing threat” to property and infrastructure near the shore.

Aerial photographs show the change on Lido Beach’s coastline from 2004 to 2018. Credit: Google Earth

The emergency plan requested state and federal funds to help rebuild the beach with approximately 150,000 to 200,000 cubic yards of sand.

Lido Key is your classic coastal resort city, filled with high-rise condos and nightlife. Like many coastal communities, its residents and business owners depend on the beach economy.

Which is why they are taking action to defend their beach from the effects of critical erosion. And they are doing it with one of the most popular strategies for coastal defense: beach nourishment.

During a beach nourishment, engineers will add new sand to an eroding beach in order to rebuild or expand the shoreline. The wider beach can then help buffer high tides and violent storms from damaging or destroying nearby property and infrastructure.

But researchers discovered that coastal defense schemes like beach nourishment may ultimately do more harm than good by providing a false sense of security in critically eroding areas. There is evidence that beach nourishment can “mask or reduce the apparent impact of coastal hazards without changing the natural processes driving them.”

Watch the video above to learn more about beach nourishment, their effectiveness in the short run, and their long-term problems in an era of climate change and sea level rise.

How Ikea mastered the Gruen effect

2018-10-17T17:05:07-04:00

Researchers estimate that 50 percent of purchases are unplanned. These purchases present an opportunity for retailers who can entice consumers to deviate from their shopping lists.

One of the most effective ways to influence consumer behavior is through a store’s architecture. Master architect Victor Gruen had a hunch about creating spectacles with light and elaborate displays. In his early designs of storefronts on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, he created some of the first window shopping experiences, reducing the threshold between passersby and the products — and converting them into shoppers. It proved wildly successful, so much so that people now refer to this conversion as the “Gruen effect.”

Ikea has mastered the Gruen effect using story layout to influence customer behavior. From the moment you enter an Ikea, layout designers nudge you onto a specific path through a maze of products. That path is the least direct route to the register. By the time you’ve finally picked up a shopping cart and selected your first item, you’ve considered the possibilities of purchasing many of the items on display.

Researchers have found that increased exposure leads to impulse buys.

Watch the video above, featuring professor Jeffrey Inman of the University of Pittsburgh and visualizations by Farah Kazim, to learn about how Ikea has mastered the Gruen effect.

Don’t blame the scooters. Blame the streets.

2018-09-18T14:51:02-04:00

If you visited an American city during the summer of 2018, you may have seen one of these.

The photos suggest they’re a nuisance. The surveys indicate that they’re beloved. Dockless electric scooters made waves when companies released them to city sidewalks, often without permission. Unfortunately for pedestrians, that meant the loss of valuable real estate.

This is not the first time that a transportation technology has robbed pedestrians of space.

“In the 1920s and 1930s we start seeing many more cars in cities. It is not only the pedestrians that are afraid. Cities are also concerned with issues of liability,” Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a UCLA professor of urban planning, told Vox. “We start seeing the first pedestrian automobile crashes. And so the cities start, really, segregating the two types of uses — the pedestrian circulation from the bigger circulation.”

Space in cities, especially on the sidewalk, is pretty tight these days. But we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the potential of electric scooters. These lightweight vehicles and their counterparts could solve a key transportation access issue: the “last mile.”

Personal vehicles, taxis, and companies like Lyft or Uber have provided the most realistic travel option for those far from a neighborhood subway station or bus stop. But the growing popularity of tiny vehicles — Segways, electric skateboards, and now scooters — may change the status quo.

It’s a worthy goal. In several American cities, space alloted to cars dominates other land uses. In places like New York City, the political debate over congestion pricing rages. Decades of underinvestment across the country have left train and bus systems overburdened.

The rise of dockless individual transport is about a fundamental shift in inner-city transit. You can watch the video above to learn about the scooters, the last mile problem, and how “complete streets” could push city streets into the future.

How Janette Sadik-Khan built New York City’s bicycle renaissance

2018-09-11T18:07:28-04:00

When Janette Sadik-Khan became New York City’s chief transportation official in 2007, her mandate was clear: install more bike lanes.

The city established a Bicycle Master Plan a decade prior, but its cycling culture still had a tough reputation.

“If you were a cyclist in New York City, it was almost like you were a cast member from Escape from New York.” Sadik-Khan told me. “You were dodging cars. (There were) no dedicated lanes. It was dangerous. It was not a place to have any kind of safe commuting experience.”

So Sadik-Khan set out to makes some changes, especially along streets in downtown Manhattan that were prime candidates for traffic calming. One of these corridors, Ninth Avenue between 16th and 23rd Street, became the site for America’s first parking-protected bicycle lane.

The pilot was, by many accounts, a roaring success. While bicycle volumes increased 65 percent on the corridor, crashes with injuries decreased 48 percent. For businesses that operated along the protected bike lane corridor retail sales increased, outperforming control sites. And the parking-protected design assuaged concerns over vehicular access that often fuels anti-bike lane sentiment.

The 9th Avenue pilot was the catalyst for a transformative era of urban design in New York City. Today, the city boasts roughly 1,200 miles of bike lane, with 120 miles protected. You can watch the video above for a full explanation on why protected bike lanes help promote cycling and safer streets for everyone.

I spoke with Sadik-Khan, who now leads the urban transportation group NACTO, about her career as an urban planner and about weighing the costs and benefits of protected bike lanes. Below is a transcript of the conversation, which has been edited for clarity.

Carlos Waters

What was your job in 2007?

Janette Sadik-Khan

Well, in 2007 I had just been appointed transportation commissioner by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And I was appointed right on the cusp of the release of this plan called PlaNYC, It looked at how (the city) was going to accommodate the million more people that are expected to move to the city by 2030 and still improve the quality of life in neighborhoods and business districts. And that had really profound implications for business districts and how we managed our streets.

Because we weren’t going to accommodate a million more people by double decking our streets and highways. We needed to accommodate this growth by making it easier to walk around, to bike around, to bus, and make it safe for people that were doing so. That was the really big moment, and one of the really big first tasks I had was to basically triple the number of bike lanes on the streets of New York City.

Carlos Waters

Could you let me know what cycling was like in New York City in the 2000s? Was it a nice place to cycle?

Janette Sadik-Khan

If you were a cyclist in New York City, in the 2000s it was almost like you were a cast member from Escape from New York. It was not a friendly place. Maybe if you were an extreme sports person, it might work for you. Because you were dodging cars, no dedicated lanes, it was dangerous. It was not a place to have any kind of safe commuting regular transport experience.

Our streets had not changed, really in 60 years. And when you think about it, so many of the things in cities change over 60 years. The businesses change. The technology has changed. The people have changed. All things have changed. But in city after city — and New York was no stranger to this — all of the concrete and steel was exactly the same. It hadn’t changed.

And when you think about it, that’s crazy. I mean, if you didn’t change the way you did business, your major capital asset, you wouldn’t still be in business. And that was absolutely the same in transportation.

Carlos Waters

How does it feel to look at New York City’s streets now as opposed to then?

Janette Sadik-Khan

It’s really exciting.

Ten years ago, nobody knew about bus bulbs or slowing areas, or (pedestrian) plazas. And now, New Yorkers have a totally different vocabulary for their streets, totally different expectations.

They expect their streets to be safer, they expect there to be places where you can just sit and take it all in. They expect that they should be able to get on a bus and move fast. And so everything has changed. And I’m always excited when I see people on Citi Bike, I think that’s always a bit of a thrill.

Carlos Waters

Why did New York City’s Department of Transportation focus on protected bike lanes in your tenure?

Janette Sadik-Khan

Well, when I was appointed commissioner, I went to Copenhagen to see the bike lanes there. And one of the bike lanes that really caught my fancy was this parking-protected lane. They used the parked cars to protect the cyclists. And I thought it was a totally cool idea, and it wouldn’t cost a lot of money. All it was, was allocating space on the road.

And I was with my chief traffic engineer. I asked him if he thought this was work. He squatted down on his knees and took out the tape measure he brought with him. He got down and measured it and looked up and said, yeah, we can do this. And that was a really important moment in transportation in New York City.

But it wasn’t really about the engineering of the space and the allocation of the space, because you can move that space and preserve the parking and make a bike lane. But the real battle was going to be about the culture — about changing the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, of changing their minds about who their streets were for.

Right after I got back from Copenhagen, we put in the first parking protected bike lane in the United States. This was in 2007 in the fall. And we did it on Ninth Avenue, between 16th street and 23rd Street.

It was much better for pedestrians, it was easier to cross the street, because the crossing distance was shorter. Cars had dedicated turn lanes, so the traffic processed much better. And bikes had a dedicated lane.

And not surprisingly, we saw crashes go down. We saw much better for businesses — their retail sales went up almost 49 percent.

So it was a win for business, it was a win for drivers, it was a win for people on foot. And it was a win for people on two wheels. And that really set the stage for all that followed.

Carlos Waters

Are protected lanes politically harder to implement than conventional lanes?

Janette Sadik-Khan

You know, one of the benefits of parking protected lanes is that you can preserve the parking. There’s always a battle when you try to take away parking space. People get really passionate about it. Taking away a parking space is like taking away someone’s firstborn.

Taking away parking spaces is not for the faint of heart. And there is no super secret magic recipe that’s going to make it easier to do. But you need to make a case about what you are trying to do.

Our streets for too long have just been looked at as a place to move cars as fast as possible, from point A to point B, or to just serve as parking lots. And these cars basically sit on the side of the road unused 98 percent of the time. That’s not a really good use of one of the most precious resources a city has: its streets.

And so designing streets for people, that make it easier to bike, easier to walk, and easier to take the bus — that’s the kind of recipe for the future success of cities. And the cities that make these investments and changes are the cities that are growing and thriving in this century.

Carlos Waters

How do bike lane networks fit into this?

Janette Sadik-Khan

A bike network is a system that actually allows you to get where you needed to go. When I first started, so many of our bike lanes were a mile or two, and then kind of unceremoniously dump you into moving traffic.

You need a system that people can rely on to get them where they need to go, and it needs to be safe. And the way that we look at the health of bike lanes, and our bike lane network, is how many women and children are using the lanes. And so our goal was to create a safe and connected bike network.

And now there are almost 125 miles of protected bike lanes in New York City. It can be done, and now biking is not alternative transportation. It’s basic transportation.

Carlos Waters

Should communities still make conventional lanes then?

Janette Sadik-Khan

You know, the thing is that every society is different, and every street is different. We did what we could to create as much protected space as we could for cyclists. But I’m not a fan of sharrows [shared-lane markings]. I don’t think they provide the kind of protection you need to get the number of cyclists out there that you want to see on the streets of your city.

Carlos Waters

One of my favorite things about your success with bike lanes in New York is how fiscally responsible it is.

Janette Sadik-Khan

When you look at the cost of the bike lanes that we put in, it was less than 1 percent of our capital budget. And 80 percent of the funding from our bike lanes came from our federal government.

So, you know, the bike lanes were like 99 percent of our headlines, but they were only 1 percent of the budget. I don’t think there’s a better investment. If you want to build a better city, you can start by building better bike lanes.

Road diets: designing a safer street

2018-07-25T18:00:39-04:00

Transportation officials across the country agree: Several minor traffic corridors in America are overbuilt and unnecessarily unsafe. So they’ve started to adopt European-inspired designs that change how drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians use the road in order to reduce speeding and encourage safety for everyone. It’s called a “road diet.”

A road diet usually will reduce the amount of space devoted to cars along a given corridor. An engineer then might use the space left from a lane reduction to, for example, add bike lanes, widen sidewalks, or add buffer zones.

There are many ways to reconfigure a road, but the vast majority of road diets in the US convert four-lane roads into three-lane roads. And a handful of studies show that four-to-three-lane road diets can reduce crashes and improve the overall quality of traffic flow.

Watch the video above to find out how it’s done and how engineers evaluate which roads will work better when put on a diet.

Why chronic floods are coming to New Jersey

2018-06-04T17:24:02-04:00

Sea level rise will have a profound impact on coastal infrastructure because it’s often built on cheaper, low-elevation land. As sea level rises, the systems that support the densely populated, urban areas — power generation facilities, wastewater treatment plants, and miles of transportation networks — will be at greater risk of flooding.

Significant portions of the US’s eastern coast are also sinking, due to an ancient, melting glacial ice sheet and the subsidence of its bedrock.

The video above details the impacts an accelerated rising sea level will have on the greater New York City metropolitan region.

Rutgers University climate scientist Robert Kopp said that “with a higher sea level, it requires less of a storm to produce the same amount of flooding. And the same storm will produce more flooding.”

The impact of increased floods will fall on residents who rely on low-lying infrastructure on a day-to-day basis. “Imagine if you were on a train and you had to wait for high tide to go out for the train to go through,” said Robert Freudenberg of the Regional Plan Association. “We’re facing an impending crisis of shutdown because of this connective tissue in our region in our infrastructure.”

For communities on the shore, flooding already occurs at certain high tides, even on sunny days. When the moon is full and particularly close to Earth, the tide strengthens and water rises. These tide cycles are known as “king tides.”

Some residents in coastal communities document the flooding from these high tides. A variety of king tide photo initiatives have started in the past decade. You can learn more about joining one or starting your own at the King Tide Project’s website.

There are a variety of measures to prevent, adapt, or retreat the development of infrastructure in newly flood-prone areas. Groups including the Regional Plan Association have introduced ideas like the creation of a coastal commission that would coordinate climate adaptation measures. They’ve also advocated for the full-scale retreat from wetlands that will one day be reclaimed by nature.

But many experts across disciplines agree that most communities aren’t doing enough today to prepare for the negative effects of sea level rise.

“Sea level rise impacts are happening now. We’re seeing them in the East Coast in terms of increased number of these sunny-day flooding events,” says William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “As sea levels continue to rise, the impacts are going to become deeper, more severe, more widespread. And we’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that the way we live our lives today is not going to be the same as the way we live our lives in the future.”

This “duck curve” is solar energy’s greatest challenge

2018-05-15T09:43:24-04:00

Electricity is very difficult to store. But most consumers use it in a very predictable pattern. So utility managers use demand curves to anticipate the electric needs of their customers. And as solar energy expands, their job is getting a bit more difficult.

Solar energy production peaks at mid-day, and this causes demand for other energy to drop off. Researchers in California call this seeming drop in demand the “duck curve.” The more solar energy capacity increases, the more the curve looks like the belly of a duck. Here is the chart that illustrates the issue:

CAISO" />

That dip creates a few problems for management of the power grid. Watch the video to learn the basics about the duck curve. If you’re looking for further information on solar energy production and power grid management, I recommend reading more from Vox’s David Roberts.

What the decline of American shopping malls means for social space

2018-04-11T10:50:28-04:00

People spend the majority of their lives in one of three places. The first is the home, the second is the workplace, and the third is any other social space.

Those “third places” are critical for relationships. Ray Oldenburg introduced the concept in his 1989 book The Great Good Place.

In their best iterations, third places are the building blocks of community — think public libraries, local cafes, or the neighborhood barbershop. But when Americans started building and moving into new suburbs in the 1950s, they had a problem. There weren’t enough social spaces to hang out with friends or meet their neighbors.

“The problem with our society since World War 2 is that the government ruined community by single-use zoning,” Oldenburg told Vox. “There are no places that people can get together where they live. It’s the dumbest thing in the world.”

So where did suburbanites go? Cue the mall music.

At the same time suburbs were being built, the first indoor shopping malls were designed. They were supposed to be the idyllic community centers for the suburbs.

Between 1970 and 2017, the number of American shopping malls quadrupled. It was the golden era of the mall. So many were built that they became de-facto social space for America’s suburban youth.

But 60 years later, social connections form as much on apps like Instagram or WhatsApp as they do in real life. And as more Americans do their shopping online, the predicted “shopping mall apocalypse” will eliminate a prolific, albeit imperfect, third place.

The decline of the mall though doesn’t need to be the death of the third place. Watch the video above to find out why.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. Subscribe for the latest.

Why Black Panther’s box office success matters

2018-02-16T15:57:03-05:00

Early reviews indicate that Black Panther will be a major hit at the box office this year. There are many reasons for why that is. Marvel superhero films tend to do well, the film has an all-star cast, and more generally, people think it’s a good movie.

But there are socioeconomic facts that support the film’s cultural significance. When it comes to diversity, Hollywood has a long way to go, especially if it wants to appeal to the evolving demographic profile of the United States. That’s the major theme of a series of reports authored by UCLA’s Bunche Center for African American Studies.

The 2017 edition of the report suggests there is a strong business incentive for Hollywood to correct its diversity issue. It also provides evidence indicating that minority audiences are more avid media consumers than the rest of the country. And our current best census estimates indicate that the American population will become majority-minority in a matter of decades.

As Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s dean of social sciences and author of the Hollywood Diversity Report, wrote:

Black Panther is like the perfect storm. It has everything going for it in the sense that it’s a major tent-pole film based around a Marvel character, and superhero movies are in now. … From a black perspective in terms of black culture, it is doing something that we rarely see, centering black themes, black issues in a major film with a major budget.

Watch the video above to learn more about what’s driving all the excitement behind the release of Black Panther.

Why this elbow is a Time Person of the Year

2017-12-13T07:35:04-05:00

Time magazine named “the Silence Breakers” its Person of the Year for 2017. These are the women and men who shared their stories of assault, harassment, and hostility and publicly named their alleged abusers. But the story goes beyond the magazine’s cover.

That elbow in the lower right-hand corner is attached to a young hospital worker from Texas, who anonymously reported her harassment for fear of the negative impact it could have on her and her family. It represents a much larger contingent than the women on the cover: the silence keepers.

Sexual harassment and sexual assault are both underreported. A government study by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that about 70 percent of harassment is never reported. The same report aggregated a study that found when people did report harassment, about 75 percent of faced some sort of retaliation for doing so.

The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) studied the underlying reasons people don’t report, and, unsurprisingly, the above statistics are connected. According to RAINN, the No. 1 reason people don’t report their abuse and harassment is because they’re afraid of the repercussions.

Time has made it a point to recognize the courage of the “Silence Breakers,” but it’s important to remember why their actions were brave: because there are far more people remaining silent, who feel that they don’t have the option of speaking up.

To learn more about why women and men do not report harassment and assault, watch the video above and subscribe to our YouTube channel.