Posted on Thursday August 20th by The Infrastructurist | 90
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- Ryan Avent unloads once more on economist Edward Glaeser who has set out to crunch the numbers on high speed rail. Glaeser’s latest dispatch looks at the question of whether HSR meaninfully addresses sprawl. Glaeser: Not meaningfully. Avent: Edward, you’ve bungled it again. (NYT, StreetsBlog)
- In the debate about the new transportation bill, some people (e.g. Jim Oberstar) warned that ambitious construction projects would be halted if the bill was pushed till 2011 or beyond. Big projects are all about budget visibility, after all. Well, now that’s happening. (CQ)
- Remember that weird speech Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal gave earlier this year to a national audience where he mocked high speed rail? Well, now he’s decided he likes it and wants $300 million of gubmint moneys, plz. (Yglesias)
- China is looking at the question of how to rein in sprawl in cities like Beijing, and is investing in transit explicitly as a way to do so. Some good news: smaller cities in China seem to be much less taken with the automobile. (NYT)
- From the world of energy price speculation: A major hedge fund is betting that natural gas prices will triple in the near future, just as they are hitting a seven-year low of $3. The fund is putting its money on $10+ by February. (Bloomberg)
- From the archives: We stumbled again across this great map from NPR showing the US electric grid in four distinct aspects. The coolest part is a visualization that includes every power plant in the country represented by how much electricity it generates. (NPR)
August 20th, 2009 at 11:54 am
You know what I’d love to see on the grid viz tip? Some way of showing the age of the respective power plants. A lot of them were built in the 50s and 60s. Would love to see a map with a slider showing how many plants were built in a given time frame.
August 21st, 2009 at 2:34 am
Not a bad idea, but it depends on what you’re tracking. If you’re trying to gauge deterioration, then it should probably go back to the last major renovation rather than to initial construction. The Crawford Street Station in Chicago was built in the 1920s, but the turbines inside have been improved and replaced since then. Only the outer architectural shell is the same.
However, if you’re trying to get a sense of which eras fostered heavy power plant growth, then initial construction date would be useful.