Posted on Thursday October 15th by The Infrastructurist | 181
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- According to the White House, the stimulus package has directly created (”or saved”) 30,000 jobs in the private sector — that is, with companies that have actually received gubmint checks made of stimulus money. Our thoughts? Yawn. Stimulus job figures have thus far been so unreliable as to border on meaningless. (CNN Money)
- Santa Monica is jacking up parking rates on it’s most coveted streetside parking spaces. Right now too many people are cruising for prime, cheap spots. How do you know if they’re priced right? About 15 percent are empty at any given time. (LAT)
- Every year the natural gas industry allows more than 3 trillion cubic feet of methane to leak into the atmosphere. This despite the fact methane is 25x more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The leaks show up clearly on infrared cameras though, and smart companies are starting to fix their wells. (NYT - pic via, below)
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- All across the US west, towns are bumping up against the fact that lawns require huge amounts of water. A massive new spawly suburb near Denver is trying a novel strategy: allowing grass only as a landscape accent around desert plants. They hope to reduce per home annual use from 200,000 to 72,000 gallons. (WSJ)
- New York City has been enduring a heated mini-debate over the past few days about whether jay walkers should be ticketed. Mayor Mike weighs in at last: policepeople have “plenty to do,” he says, and the city will continue to defer to the common sense of peds. (Gothamist)
- Californians are proving very adept at conserving water. Los Angeles trimmed consumption by 20% over the past year. Other communities have done even more. One unfortunate side effect: water utilities are being forced to lay off workers because of lower revenue. (Green Inc.)
- It looks like there might be more carnage on the way for the labor force of SoCal water utilities: The City of LA has just approved a waterless urinal for widespread use. Urine just filters through a little cartridge, releasing a pleasant lemony scent–no need to flush it away with precious H2O. (TreeHugger - pic via)
October 15th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
The city of Pasadena has been pushing those waterless urinals for some time. The building I work in has had them since I’ve been here, nearly 4 years.
They waterless urinals… mostly work. The downside is that they’re very easily clogged, they’re not precisely odorless (though generally not very bad at all), and as I understand it the filtering cartridges need to be changed a lot more frequently than the company would have you believe.
Then again, they’re hardly any more gross than regular urinals can be, and according to the little placard above each one, it saves the city 40,000 gallons per year.
I’d say that on the whole the waterless urinals are a good thing. But, you know. Don’t buy the BS about a clean fresh lemony scent.
October 15th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Stimulus job creation works the same as monetary policy: the benefits filter through the supply chain and business networks. Measuring direct job creation is using a crappy performance metric that tells you nothing about the actual success and cost-effectiveness of a program in trying to help the overall economy. I’m not happy to see such a bad performance metric propagated by this site. Standards people!
On a separate note, I’d love to see more about government programs/policies/legislation to promote private sector involvement and especially private sector innovation to solve water and energy efficiency problems. Much of the time, there seems a market inefficiency in solving these problems that on the face of it would provide a great investment return: eg - it’s easier/cheaper to save water/energy than to make a marginal increase in the supply (a new power plant or higher dam).
October 15th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
SMU, where I am currently attending grad school, has those water-less urinals in some of their newer LEED buildings. As far as I can tell, they work fine. While they don’t smell like urine, I can’t say they smell like lemons either. Though, I haven’t stuck my nose down one to smell.
October 16th, 2009 at 2:44 am
Ugh, the new planning school at Ryerson in Toronto has waterless urinal, and they are mostly awful. I do appreciate the idea, but they clog all the time, and DO smell, quite a lot actually, most of the time. Don’t know if ours are worst then most, but right now I wonder if they aren’t more trouble then they’re worth.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
On the waterless urinals, just think of all the work plumbers and maintenance people will have for years to come retrofitting flushed urinals to waterless, by my estiation a couple of 100,000 units. This is and was the same when they retrofitted all those low flow toilets and lots and lots of buinsesses and workers had extra work!