New York Stuck, Montana Didn't

I just took the language quiz which has been spreading around. A lot of the questions cheated, and were really not asking about language as much as local laws and wildlife. Still though the results were rather interesting:

 

I was not surprised that it put me as being from central California. I took it twice, once it said I was from Fresno, Modesto, or Sacramento, the second time it said Fresno, Modesto or Santa Rosa. Since I spent at least half my life in the triangle from Fresno in to San Francisco and back to Modesto this makes sense.

I also spent three and a half years in Ithaca New York, along with about the same amount of time in Montana and Southern California. My language is very West Coast according to the quiz so Southern California would be easy to hide in the blob of red. However there are a few other dots around the country, the one that surprised me was the big orange spot in Western New York. I suppose it isn't so different in size from the one in Chicago where I have never spent much time but it still seems unlikely to be coincidence. Some of the way people in New York speak stuck.

Montana though shows little sign of having stuck. I guess this makes sense because all the time I spent there was with people from California.

Little sign of affordable housing

Reading through the comments on this New York Times article gave me much less hope for the place. Most of the comments complain about at least one of the following: too much development, too many ugly large buildings, and too expensive of housing.

Almost no one seems to understand the basic problem. Several million more people want to live in New York City then actually live there. Either they build enough new housing for all of these people, other cities step up and become competitive with the city, they make the city a worse place to live or housing prices continue to go through the roof. There is no magic option where the city stays exactly like it is today, but prices become reasonable.

I am a huge advocate for creating several new Manhattans around the country while building like crazy in the real one. Unfortunately almost no one seems to understand that by fighting development, they make sky high prices inevitable.

Hopefully Los Angeles steps up and takes this role. From a technical standpoint it would not be an issue to build a couple million high density housing units and a few hundred subway stations near downtown. All the city would need to do would be make the permitting process dead simple for new skyscrapers while demanding money from developers for subway expansion. There are some signs of this with the tallest building on the west coast under construction along with a handful of new subway stations and quite a number of light rail stations. Still, the NIMBYs are strong and current levels of development are too slow.

Electric Buses

I am still rather skeptical of electric cars, although I admit to be pretty impressed by the advances of the past five years. Electric bikes have made sense to me for a while, and on some days other small electric vehicles such as a segway don't seem entirely crazy.

Electric buses actually make a whole lot of sense to me though. Rather than charging in the morning, then running all day most have overhead wires which power them. Modern battery technology means that they don't have to stay under the wires all day. They can charge for most their route, but if they need to move away from the wires for short distances during emergencies or to pick up passengers they can do so.

This seems like a best of all worlds. The problem with electric cars is the battery. The cost per mile of buying batteries eats up the entire cost difference between gasoline and electricity. Also they have to recharge for so long limiting range. By running off overhead wires a trolley bus seems to eliminate those problems.

The only downsides I can see are the wires which are pretty ugly, and the fact that like all public transportation it only works well in high population density areas.

Favorite Pundit

Recently my favorite pundit has been Matthew Yglesias. He seems to be one of the few people out there with reasonable plans which if they could just be adopted would lead to dramatic improvements in the country. Here are some examples of recent articles from him:

Central Planning in America
Long Term Unemployed: Doom
Housing Costs: Its the Zoning, Stupid
Raise the Gas Tax!
How Inflation Helps Heal Financial Crises
If Corn Loses, We Win
We Need More $88 Million Apartments

Native Plants

I finally gave in and drove to Tree of Life Nursery to pick up my native berry plants. I got a Golden Currant and a Nevin's Barberry. They are both native to Southern California, although I do not believe either lives closer to me than the Cleveland National Forest.

I planted two types of native clover, foothill clover and bull clover. These two are at least native to Orange and LA counties but have not been very good at sprouting. So far I just have one tiny plant, and I am not even positive that it is not just a white clover plant.

Overall things are improving, but there is still too much dead space. Surprisingly the mulberry has hit ten feet in less than six months. I expect I will need to do quite a bit of pruning to limit it to the area I want it:

The Cape Gooseberry still has not produced a ripe fruit, but it is starting to look like it will so I might keep it until next summer to see if it improves:

I was unhappy to learn that Dill is an annual, fortunately it seems to have reseeded itself:

The Pineapple Sage was mostly a failure, the leaves taste horrible. Luckily it is pretty and the hummingbirds like it:

The rat tail radish apparently get way too big for the limited space I have, but have been fairly productive and fun:

The Chinese 5 Color Peppers were fairly successful, although one of the three plants was either a mutant or hybrid. The plants are productive and easy to grow:

Trains are slow

Trains in California are slow.

I was looking at a list of future rail stations in Los Angeles County. I saw that the Gold Line is working its way far to the East with future stations which go near where I work.

Then I started reading about the gold line:

The Gold Line takes 54 minutes to travel its 19.7-mile (31.7 km) length. This means the Gold Line averages 21.9 mph (35 km/h) over its length, making the Gold Line the slowest of all of Metro Rail's lines. In particular, the Gold Line is slow through the Highland Park area, where trains reach speeds of only 20 mph (32 km/h), and through the curves, where trains travel at about 25 mph (40 km/h).

As slow as traffic is, it is pretty hard to compete with cars when your average speed is not even 25mph. Even worse, this is some of the newest track on the rail system. It was all built in the past decade, and they still can't manage to get something capable of moving at a reasonable speed!

At least they are considering extending the gold line to the Ontario Airport. Connecting the train network to several airports and colleges strikes me as about the best way to make it actually useful. Unfortunately that seems likely to be delayed even longer than connections to LAX. 

Subways are returning

I am pretty surprised to see that Southern California is back to building subways. Subways seem like the only transportation mechanism which has been able to compete with the car, so they may a bright future. Still, nine years for four miles of subway does seem like an awfully slow schedule. Even the Channel Tunnel only took six years of construction, and that was seven times as long.

Apparently the subway system is bigger than I thought, there are a total of nine subway stations on the purple line. The expansion will add another seven, but probably won't be complete for twenty years. The red line includes another eight stations in addition to some in the same stations as the purple line. There are another three proposed subway stations with the regional connector transit project projected to be done by 2020.

So today there are 17 stations, and by 2023 that number will be 23 stations. That is a rate of 0.6 subway stations per year, putting it on track to match the 421 of subway stations built in New York City by the year 2718. Even including rail stations only brings the current total number of stations in LA county up to 80.  Perhaps I shouldn't get my hopes up too quickly that this will be a viable transit system in such a sprawling area. The only chance seems to be forcing high density construction next to rail stations so a high percentage of the population/businesses are within walking distance of rail.