Zombie Miles And Napa Weekends: How A Week With Chauffeurs Showed The Major Flaw In Our Self-Driving Car Future, Jalopnik, Aaron Gordon, November 15, 2019

“These promises couldn’t be checked. After all, self-driving cars didn’t exist yet.” Yep. Also:

The logic behind how AVs will reduce traffic or reduce emissions—that there will be less space between cars, and cars will communicate with each other to flow more quickly and less erratically than with humans behind the wheel—is fundamentally no different than the arguments made in those old video clips, which maintained that more space for cars in the form of new lanes and new roads will do the same.

But the piece is mostly about a very neat study trying to figure out how people might actually use self-driving cars, and the results suggest that overall miles travelled would increase dramatically. As some environmentalists say, self-driving cars might save the car industry, but not the environment.

It’s a pretty long, and very interesting piece.

The donut effect: How the pandemic hollowed out America’s biggest cities, Full Stack Economics, Timothy B. Lee, April 7, 2022

A lot of people left the nation’s capital last year. Recently the Census Bureau announced that Washington DC lost 20,000 people between July 2020 and July 2021, a decline of 2.9 percent. It was a stark reversal for a city that gained 80,000 residents between 2010 and 2020.

Directly across the Potomac from DC are Arlington County and the city of Alexandria. These affluent, densely populated jurisdictions lost 2.5 percent of their population. The next tier of suburban counties—Virginia’s Fairfax and Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s—shrank by 0.8 percent.

But if you zoom out further, to DC’s exurban fringe, the story is different. Maryland’s Calvert, Charles, and Frederick Counties grew by nearly 2 percent. On the Virginia side, seven outlying counties grew by 1.1 percent.

That alone is pretty striking. Read the whole piece.

With office environments changing, it’s time to look at furniture waste, Resource Recycling, Trevor Langdon, May 24, 2021

The EPA estimates up to 8.5 million tons of office furniture end up in landfills annually in the United States. This represents a stream of waste that is generally out of the public’s purview, and it’s one that is growing.

As the pandemic continues, companies are closing, downsizing or going virtual, rendering a lot of the furniture previously in use in offices unnecessary. The environmental cost of tossing this material is a great one, as is the cost on the actual bottom line: Those 8.5 million tons of furniture discards equate to over $450 million spent each year on landfill tipping fees, based on average landfill costs in the U.S. last year.

Wow. And most of that furniture is probably in pretty good condition. There’s so much actual value there, in terms of the products themselves (as opposed to their materials for recycling). The big problem, I guess, is the weight and bulk of this stuff.

The article is a case study of Expedia office decommissioning, and how the various contents of these shuttered offices were separated out for reuse or sale, recycling, or disposal. This is one of those things that takes place pretty much out of the public eye, but which is pretty interesting.

Efficiency and the Decline of American Freight Railroads, Home Signal, Uday Schultz, December 27, 2021

This is a really interesting, wonky history/policy piece. I don’t even know which part to pull, because any snippet alone probably won’t mean much to you. If this sounds at all interesting, read the whole thing!

Related Reading:

New and Old #7

New and Old #8

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