Guest blogger Greg Kushmerek continues his series of articles on bike commuting:
Someone I like to follow on-line is Andy Kessler. He’s a financial journalist and author of sorts who’s written a few books and used to run a hedge fund. He’s very practical, has an excellent sense of the arbitrary nature of “value”, and I’ve come to realize as I’ve followed him that he seems to hate cyclists, or at least cycling evangelists.
Andy’s made a few comments denigrating, really almost fearing, a vision of the future where cars are not dominant and cyclists such as me have “won”. He has a real distaste of a future where everyone lives in densely populated areas in order to make a greener place. If I’ve read him correctly, he thinks that would attack the very nature of what it means to be American — that having onerous burdens that force people to live in cities would create a society devoid of innovation.
There are some great areas for discussion in that position, the first and foremost being that it’s a real concern shared by many people who would rather not have to face arriving at work sweaty from a summer ride with dirty hands from trying to rebuild a snapped chain. That little saddle doesn’t sound as appealing as a cushy leather seat and air conditioning (or heat in winter). How do you reach these people? If you can’t, are you going to force them towards that vision via government regulation?
Now Andy has a sharp wit and it’s very tempting to point out that the proper market-oriented answer is that rich people like him would ultimately pay teams of people like me to come out to his vast estate and cart him around in our little cycling paradise. The ruling class could grow to a race of Jaba-The-Hut proportions and lord it over the rest of us.
However it’s at this point I think one should step back and look at this from a more practical standpoint: could the cycling vision really work in America? I’ve previously mentioned that The Netherlands only oriented itself to cycling in the 1960s, which implies that with enough will the same kind of thing can happen elsewhere. The problem with that position is that it ignores what 40 years of infrastructure development in the USA have created: a population spread out over a wide area, much bigger than tiny Holland.
Think about it: if the Feds suddenly put out bike friendly infrastructure and created an economic environment more favorable to cycling, what would it mean? My city condo would go up in value as some people would find my dense neighborhood more attractive, but plenty of people in the suburbs and exurbs would neither want to move or appreciate a reduction in their own property values. The houses in far flung places won’t magically disappear and the communities won’t just transplant themselves. Some people hate dense areas and generations have grown up in spacious suburbs. People will still live in places with long roads in between their destinations. They’ll start driving more efficient four-wheeled vehicles before they move. You don’t have to be especially bright to see the real implications.
In this kind of environment, what do you do to make cycling more attractive in suburban areas? Bike lanes are ridiculous on most roads since they’re plenty wide enough. It’s the main connecting roads that you have to think about. Should there be bike lanes on those? Should there be more “bike stops” so people can duck out of the rain? One policy I like, that would make some people howl, is to reduce the percentage of car use on those main arterial roads by 40%. Shove cars in narrower lanes in the middle, put up some raised granite separators on the outside, and make the space from the granite to the side of the road exclusive to cyclists and mopeds.
Maybe you could buy them out? The Great Smokies National Park used to be plots of private farmland until the 1930’s. We spent the 60’s using eminent domain to raze the center of cities and put in highways. Should we now use those same policies to reverse engineer what’s in place?
In the end, this only confirms Andy’s fear. The houses won’t get any closer if you force the roads to be more cycling friendly. Not everyone will leave and those who do will not do it all at once. Some business will not want to expand into suburban areas if the government creates market conditions more favorable to denser cities or exurbs. While I think that this kind of environment won’t stifle innovation — it will enhance it as people rush to fill voids that a new market condition creates — that’s cold comfort to Andy’s point of view.
Still, I am vexed over what to do with all of those suburbs. You can’t simply say “too bad”. The political backlash would kill pro-cycling integration policies if those policies became onerous to suburban living. Yes you can create market conditions that encourage people to give that existence up, but you need to think of ways to accommodate those who do not switch. After all, even the most avid suburban cyclist is likely to have a car for errands.
Water and energy are scarce resources, the conservation of which is becoming increasingly important. Researchers at Wayne State University, lead by civil engineering department chair Carol Miller, are developing a computer-controlled approach for operating the Detroit water system. According to the Chicago Tribune, Miller hopes to reduce energy consumption for the system by shifting from manual control of system pumps, to automatic control. The water system is so large that these improvements stand to deliver significant energy savings. In addition, Miller estimates this will save ‘10 million tons of greenhouse gases and other pollutants per year’.
This is one of many engineering systems that can be viewed as a design optimization problem, and I would like to use water distribution system improvement as an example to explain what design optimization is.
In engineering design we have lots of decisions to make, decisions like what materials to use, the size of components in our system, or how parts of our system should work together. In mathematical optimization, we seek to minimize or maximize something by choosing the right values for some set of variables. Design optimization links engineering design with mathematical optimization in a way that helps us identify what design decisions will lead to the best possible engineering design.
How can we frame the operation of a water distribution system as a design optimization problem? We have three tasks to make this happen:
Identify Design Decisions: each design problem has some degree of design flexibility. That is, designers are free to make decisions about certain aspects of their system. In new systems that are being designed from the ground up, there is a lot more design freedom (more decisions to make). If a system must use some already developed components, then some design decisions are already made, reducing design freedom. In the case of the water distribution system, there is even less design freedom, since the physical system already exists. In any case, designers need to identify what aspects of a system they have control over; these aspects are the design variables. One set of specific values for the design variables represents one system design alternative. In the water distribution problem here, the design variables are quantities that define how each pump in the system should be controlled.
Specify Design Objective: We need to have some way of comparing design alternatives and evaluating which designs are better. A design objective, or objective function, is a system property that we can measure, and that reflects the usefulness of a particular design. The design objective drives the design process, and is a critical choice in product development. Whether or not design optimization is used formally, product designers choose a design objective, or at least set priorities for their product (influenced by the market segment they are targeting). For example, in automotive design, Porsche engineers have performance as a design objective, while Aptera engineers consider energy efficiency paramount. The resulting designs reflect the difference in design objective. In the water distribution system problem, we are seeking to minimize energy consumption.
List Design Constraints: Engineering design is full of tradeoffs; that is, if we seek to optimize one thing, something else is bound to get worse. We can’t simply focus on the design objective alone and expect to develop a usable system. In the automotive example, some constraints include safety, size, range, and cost. In addition, by choosing energy efficiency over performance for a design objective, Aptera engineers still need to meet some minimal performance constraints. Who would want to buy a car so slow that it’s not driveable in traffic, even if it could acheive 500 mpge? If we sought to minimize energy consumption in the water distribution system problem without considering any constraints, we might arrive at a solution that says we simply should never turn on any pumps. We need to impose a constraint to make this work: require that water delivery needs are met.
The design optimization approach to engineering design involves minimizing or maximizing some design objective, while meeting a set of constraints, by varing something you have control over. This way of presenting an engineering design problem is actually pretty natural. Some engineers may be using the design optimization process informally, even if they are not aware of it. Design can be viewed as the process of finding the set of design variable values that satisfies the design constraints and optimizes the design objective. To summarize the water distribution system design optimization problem, we are trying to find an automated pump control policy that minimizes energy consumption, while ensuring water delivery needs are met.
Now that we have presented our design problem as an optimization problem, how do we actually solve it? In some cases, engineers could build physical prototypes and use a trial and error approach to search for the optimal design. This could get very expensive. A little more sophisticated approach might employ systematic testing and statistical models. This still requires expensive physical protypes. Would this even be practical for the water distribution system needs? Would engineers be allowed to try out new (untested) pump control ideas, risking water delivery failures for such a large metropolitan area? It sounds like we need some way to test design alternatives without actually having to test them in real life. This is where physics-based modeling and computer simulations come into play. Researchers and engineers have developed computer models for all sorts of systems that allow designers to test out ideas in a virtual world. These models help predict how a system design will behave, without actually having to build it. The software and computers are far from free, and the models are not 100% accurate, but they are accurate enough to help make design decisions, and allow designers to test out far more design alternatives than are possible with physical prototypes. If you would like to learn more about computer modeling, you can read through an ongoing series of articles on modeling.
If a system can be modeled using a computer simulation, then engineers can use optimization algorithms to solve the design optimization problem described above. These algorithms are computer programs that very intelligently choose what designs to test (using computer simulations) so that we can find the optimal design quickly. Using design optimization can help engineers develop better products in shorter time periods. Using optimization to develop better water distribution systems has actually been going on for several years. A full issue of the journal Engineering Optimization was devoted to this topic (you can read an overview of the issue here). In many of these articles, the engineers have additional design flexibility; they are not just looking at changing how the system is operated, but also at how the physical system is designed.
Design optimization and modeling are topics that I will revisit. These are important tools that could be used to transform how engineering design is done, and enable engineers to create systems that use much less energy, while meeting or exceeding our performance expectations. It’s my hope that more engineers adopt design optimization and use it to improve sustainability and quality of life, and that more people can become aware of design and design optimization, their impact on how we live, and the role they can play in our shift to a sustainable path.
Guest blogger Greg Kushmerek continues his series of articles on bike commuting:
A key design tip in the world of print is consistency: keep consistent design elements in place. People recognize a designed page as “belonging” to the overall product. Apply this to the physical world and you get predictability, and that’s good for something like traffic management.
We don’t have enough predictability on today’s roads, however, for drivers or cyclists. For example: should bikes be subject to all rules of the road, or should they have their own set? Aside from the fact that some cyclists create their own rules, I have seen plenty of examples where bikes have been given the right to do things that cars cannot.
For example: it’s the law in Massachusetts that bikes can pass cars on the right so long as the local town or city hasn’t explicitly outlawed the practice. Pass someone on the right in a car, and you’re subject to a ticket (it was the first one I ever got when I was a teen). Of course, few people know this — I once had someone try to use his car as a rolling roadblock to prevent me from going down the right side.
More signage would help as would other aids to navigation. Intersections can have bike traffic lights or bike signs explicitly dictating what cyclists may do. Signs in advance of major intersections could warn cyclists and drivers that the road is about the change and thus the dynamics are about to be different.
Consider bike lanes again: the non-uniformity of how they appear, how long they last, on what kinds of roads you’ll see them all lead to ambiguity. Ambiguity in traffic is bad. When are they solid lines? When are they dashed lines that allow cars in them? And, as I previously mentioned, how close to the side of the road are they? I personally prefer the idea of redefining the idea of a road to be partly a place where cars travel and then partly a place where “other things” happen. Some roads are generously wide enough that you can cut out eight feet from the side, leave six feet for parking, a foot of space, and the last foot be available for bike lanes. Consistent marking would make it clear where moving cars do and do not belong, and people would form new habits.
What about sidewalks? Any cyclist who’s spent enough time on the road has been asked, rhetorically, “Why don’t you go back on the sidewalk where you belong?” (Presumably, the thought of a cyclist rapidly sneaking up on a baby stroller is more appealing to these drivers than having to share the road.) Just when is it a good time to be on a sidewalk? Ever? Never? I think they’re even more dangerous for cyclists than most roads, but the laws here are also quite mixed even encouraging cyclists to use sidewalks.
I think it’s time to consider a federal-level set of guidelines tied to highway and road funding. Signage, lane width, location, requirements on which kinds of roads should have bike lanes, consistent rules — all of this can come right down and level the playing field to create the predictability we need on the roads. It won’t stop cars from complaining about bikes on the roads, but hopefully it will move their complaints over how someone is biking on the roads and not whether someone should be biking on the road.
Last summer Americans had a taste of high fuel prices, and our driving habits and vehicle choices actually started to change. Substantially higher prices certainly would cause a lot of pain, particularly in the short term, but what benefits might we realize? Chris Steiner, Forbes columnist and author of$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better, explained in a recent NPR interview that dramatically higher prices could lead to a better way of living.
Steiner predicts that as fuel prices climb, we will become less of a disposable society, and migrate to denser, more interactive living arrangements. Air travel may not be economically viable for most of us, and travel by rail will grow in popularity (look at nations in Europe or Asia with high-speed rail infrastructure for examples). Other positive changes include more exercise in people-centered (as opposed to car-centered) communities, cleaner air, better (local) food, and improved health. And let’s not forget one of my favorite impacts: increased popularity of cycling.
In addition to environmental and health benefits, curbing petroleum consumption is a national security issue. This video features retired generals and others discussing a recent report from CNA that ‘explores the impact of America’s energy choices on our national security policies’. Vice Admiral Richard Truly, USN (Ret.), discussed the urgency of helping improve public knowledge about energy use, and the importance of resolving our energy situation. General Chuck Wald, USAF (Ret.), explained that Americans must realize that our energy situation is not going to take care of itself without us being a part of it. The link to national security alone could be motivation enough to take action.
The transition to higher fuel prices and lower consumption will certainly be painful, and hurt more for certain segments of the population than others. Should we wait for fuel prices to rise due to market forces and adapt then, or should we take some preemptive action to ease the transition? A phased-in fuel tax could be used to fund required infrastructure changes, as well as investments in technology that will enable us to enjoy a high standard of living on far less petroleum. Revenues could also be used to assist those struggling most with the transition to higher fuel prices. Instituting a U.S. fuel tax would funnel revenue into infrastructure and investments that benefit Americans, whereas waiting for market forces to drive up fuel prices will instead boost revenue for oil producers. Automakers actually support a fuel tax, hoping that it will stabilize fuel prices so they can invest in advanced technologies with more confidence in future demand for energy efficient vehicles. The main question here is not whether fuel prices will increase, but would we rather transition with foresight and a strategy, or just wait until we are forced into reacting. The former option would certainly be less painful, and would leave us in a much better position after the transition.
A strategic transition would require a substantial fuel tax (or a price floor), but this appears to be politically impossible right now. What do you think it would take for U.S. citizens to support an appropriate fuel tax?
A few weeks ago Congress sent a letter to the presidents of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, and the Institute of Medicine, seeking advice on steps our nation should take to strengthen our research universities. You can download a pdf of the letter here. The letter describes how long-term research has contributed to our “social and economic well-being”, and has made possible the high American standard of living. The authors express concern that our research universities are at risk, and pose this question:
What are the top ten actions that Congress, state governments, research universities, and others could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and achieve national goals for health, energy, the environment, and security in the global community of the 21st century?
If you were to respond to this letter, what would you say to Congress? What actions do you think we should take? What are your thoughts on what is at stake?
In a somewhat recent post I wrote about the need for renaissance engineers, that is, engineers who can move beyond their narrow disciplinary lens of engineering when looking at a problem. Engineering problems need more than just purely technical solutions. Virtually any project touches humanity in some way, and this element cannot be ignored if success is to be achieved.
So what are we doing to develop holistic problem-solving capabilities? Last month I attended the IESS Conference at MIT, sponsored by CESUN, the Council of Engineering Systems Universities. I had the opportunity to meet with professors and researchers from around the world and learn some about what they were doing to address this challenge. There are dozens of interdisciplinary programs in place right now that are training students to solve problems using knowledge from a variety of disciplines, and it was inspiring to see this level of activity in interdisciplinary engineering research and education.
At IESS Chuck Vest discussed how engineering research has focused in recent years on narrow or small-scale topics, such as nanoscale engineering, but that macro-scale topics are getting increased attention now. Some of the most important challenges society faces, he explained, are large-scale problems that span many disciplines, such as health care, energy, environmental, manufacturing, communication, and logistics problems. Vest pointed out that employers are now seeking engineers who are trained in more than one area. We need people who understand not only engineering, but engineering and economics, health care, public policy, or psychology (for example). In particular, we need people who understand the interface between these disciplines. Spectacular challenges, opportunities, and surprises lie within these interfaces.
Growth in the number and maturity of interdisciplinary engineering education programs, such as those affiliated with CESUN, is essential to gaining a deeper understanding of these interfaces and solving the macro-scale problems that society faces now. As an example of one of these programs, the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) at MIT offers several graduate degrees in engineering systems, which MIT defines as:
A class of systems characterized by a high degree of technical complexity, social intricacy, and elaborate processes, aimed at fulfilling important functions in society. Such systems include electrical grids, transportation, manufacturing supply chains, and health care delivery.
An emerging field of scholarship that seeks solutions to important, multi-faceted socio-technical problems.
ESD focuses on four domains: energy and sustainability, extended enterprises, health care and delivery, and critical infrastructures. There are numerous other approaches to interdisciplinary engineering research and education. Other examples include the University of Michigan’s Design Science program, which offers an interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree that requires students to choose coursework and research topics that span engineering and at least one other discipline (such as marketing, psychology, or public policy). Yet another strategy is to specialize in the interface between engineering and one specific second discipline, as is done at the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
There seemed to be nearly as many pedagogical approaches to (and definitions of) engineering systems at IESS as there were institutions represented. This is a fantastically complex, emerging area of study, so this variety is not unexpected. In any case, it was clear that we had a lot to learn from each other, and there is a lot of exciting and important work to be done. I hope this broader approach to engineering, and the greater focus on the link between engineering and society, will inspire more people to study engineering and engineering systems, and perhaps attract other professionals from disciplines other than engineering to get engaged in collaborative work to solve engineering systems problems.
Guest blogger Greg Kushmerek continues his series of articles on bike commuting:
There’s a lot of arguments out there about whether bike lanes are good or bad, and a lot of the arguments against them seem to come down to “They create more problems for cyclists than they solve”. Perhaps that’s an oversimplification, but it’s an opinion I agree with with when looking at many implementations of bike lanes in my own area.
Consider Boston. Boston really should be a great biking city. It’s not that small, has lots of parks, fairly wide roads, and isn’t all that hilly right in the city area. However, biking in the city feels risky. The few attempts to put in bike lanes have simply stunk. The first bike lane I’m aware of is behind Jamaica Pond on Perkins Street. There’s some parking between the curb and the bike lane, and then the parking lane ends and the bike lane takes over. What happens is this: people fill up all the parking spaces and then just park right over the bike lane when parking runs out.
Now you can point your fingers at the Boston Transportation Department or Boston Police Department and say that they should be out there doing more ticketing, but that ignores the larger point. The implementation stinks. The bike lane competes with parking in a highly desirable location. The bike lane could have been one foot further out, eating into the regular road. This would make it clearer that there’s a real lane there. The lane could be using different paint than the simple white lines that, everywhere else in the city, denotes the shoulder.
Worse still is that the placement of the bike lane puts cyclists in a zone of danger. People come in and out of that area with their cars all the time to go walk around the park (yes, they drive to the pond to go jogging, but I’m not going there today — at least Massachusetts has the 2nd lowest rate of obesity in the country today). In other words, the risk of a cyclist getting doored is pretty good.
Imagine if the federal government had a law giving states and municipalities the incentive to put in bike lanes only if those lanes had little boxes all alongside them that randomly punched out at passing cyclists? That’s kind of what’s happening today. If you are resurfacing a road, you can ask the feds to chip in on the cost, which they’ll gladly consider if you agree to spray on some bike lanes.
So here we are: you have local transportation departments taking the cash and laying down lines about as close to the side of the road as they can get it, regardless of the parking situation. In Cambridge, MA, this led to a cyclist’s death a couple of years ago when a female cyclist in her lane on Mass Ave was doored and fell to the ground in front of a passing bus.
I don’t think this automatically makes all bike lanes bad. I think that bike lanes are a really good thing when they’re done correctly. I point to The Netherlands as one such example of doing these things well frequently, but this time I don’t have to look so far. Right in Newton, on Beacon Street, the town effectively cut the road in half by making a shoulder out of what was an unofficial second lane. It’s not now considered a bona fide bike lane, but that’s how it’s frequently used by many commuters and college students. Parking is limited and where there is parking, a passing cyclist has enough space to get around the car and not be in traffic.
I’d like to see more of this, and I’d like to see the feds put in some guidelines on just how a bike lane gets implemented rather than having them simply hand over a check.
What do you think makes a successful bike lane? How can the policy be better?
When you hear someone is an engineer, what is your first thought? Are these poor souls cursed with “The Knack”?
Or, does something else come to mind? There is a lot of talk about technological solutions to energy and other sustainability problems, but who actually makes all of this happen? We need policy makers to create an environment conducive to investment, innovation, and implementation, but we also need creative people who have a grounded understanding of how to make things work (i.e., engineers).
When I was at the IESS Conference last month, I heard Chuck Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering, speak of the concerning state of engineering education in the U.S. (you can download his slides here). He explained that the graduation rate for engineering in the U.S. is lagging substantially, which “does not bode well for our future”. He described the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering (a topic for another article), which is a set of critical problems facing our world that require engineering solutions. We need more engineers to tackle these challenges, several of which involve sustainability and energy issues.
Chuck Vest spoke of studies that aimed at understanding why so few Americans pursue engineering as a profession. One question that was asked of college students in these studies was “why aren’t you studying engineering?”. A popular response was “because I want to make the world better”. Clearly this is a failure in communication; engineers can have a profound positive impact on the world and create lasting value. Why is there a disconnect? Why don’t our youth see engineering as a way to make our world better? What can we do to inspire more Americans to become part of the technological solution so that we can build a better future and reestablish America’s leadership role in science and engineering? Have a look at this video and this post for a few ideas.
Vest proclaimed that we must get the word Engineer back into the vernacular. Engineering needs to be a more common topic of conversation. We need to somehow remake the perception of engineers. I believe this requires action on two fronts. Obviously we need to get the public more interested and excited about engineering, not just absorbed with enjoying the fruits of engineering. In addition, perhaps we need to adjust what engineering is. For example, a common theme at IESS was to address problems holistically, not just from a narrow disciplinary view. We can’t just design technical solutions in a bubble, ignoring relationships with other aspects of the world. The problems we are facing are growing too complex to continue with that approach. We need renaissance engineers: people who are skilled in more than one discipline. We need engineers who can focus on solving important societal problems, and who are willing to learn about and engage with other disciplines outside engineering (e.g., economics, psychology, public policy, etc.). Taking a whole-systems approach to solving these socio-technical problems will lead to much better solutions, and perhaps will improve public perception of engineering and it’s role in improving the world.
Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics at Princeton, summarizes what the passing of the Waxman-Markey bill would mean to Americans in a short NPR interview. He explains how it will help us take into account the cost of global warming into the economy, providing incentives to change how we produce and consume energy (see my article on externalities for more on this). He says that the overall number of jobs will remain about the same, but the mix of jobs will be different. Krugman says he would bet his Nobel prize that the climate bill would not cost Americans much financially (he says serious studies conclude it would cost most families less than the value of a postage stamp per day), but was not willing to bet his Nobel prize that the bill would save the world, explaining that it may not be enough. In fact, some members of Congress opposed the bill because they felt it was not aggressive enough. Several environmental groups, including Greenpeace, also oppose the bill for the same reason.
How does all of this relate to design? While many exciting technologies are emerging that help us use less energy and produce it more sustainably, these technologies only make it to market if they make economic sense. To invest in a new renewable energy project, for example, a business case must be made. If we include the true, long-term costs of fossil fuel derived energy, some renewable energy sources are clearly the right choice. While many engineers and others are concerned about sustainability and interested in energy efficiency and renewable energy, this concern is not enough to produce the large-scale shift to sustainability we need. We need to create an economic environment that supports substantial, continued investment that will accelerate the development and deployment of clean energy technology.
I hear many folks talking about what individual choices they can make to reduce their carbon footprint or live more responsibly. I hear support for wind and solar energy. Consumers are starting to consider ‘greenness’ in purchasing decisions. But oft times there seems to be a disconnect when it comes to making collective choices that will bring about substantial change, much more than what individual choices will procure. We need to shift our collective support from status quo energy systems to new energy strategies that will carry us (and the natural world) through successfully for generations to come. The innovative spirit and talent is there, waiting to rise to the challenge. It will lie relatively dormant until citizens make the clarion call for strong incentives and bold policy that will empower engineers and others to accelerate the metamorphosis of our energy, transportation, and agricultural systems.
Waxman-Markey is not ideal. It may not be enough. But perhaps it will give Americans a taste of the exciting progress that can be made when we focus and guide our efforts in the right direction. Perhaps after this first taste we will be willing to move beyond this first step.
The Waxman-Markey bill may not be the ideal solution, but its passing is a landmark event, and offers significant progress over the status quo. This energy/climate change/jobs bill passed the House hours ago by a narrow margin; it still needs to pass the Senate. Friday’s vote is historic, and deserves increased attention. If you are looking for a way to have a big personal impact on sustainability, consider learning and talking about this and other legislation that is aimed at leading society toward a path of sustainabilty and better quality of life for the long term.
