Quoderat

OurAirports lets members tag airports to create different kinds of maps. I’ve created two maps that show very vividly where the intersections of people, money, and land occur in the world.

Welcome to the club …

The first tag, top150, shows the world’s 150 busiest airports by passenger traffic (as of 2007). Central Africa has lots of people, but not much money, so it’s empty. Australia and Canada have high per-capita incomes but a low population density, so they also appear mostly empty in the map, with only a handful of top-150 airports each. The U.S. has a lot of land but also a lot of money and a lot of people, so it’s very full. India and the Persian Gulf countries are starting to fill up, as incomes rise and more people travel.

… but not this club

The second tag, top30, shows a much more exclusive club, the world’s 30 busiest airports by passenger traffic. These are the absolute busiest hubs, and it takes a rich and populous city or country to support one. Not by accident, fully half of these airports (15) are in the United States, and 8 more are in Western Europe, leaving only 7 for the rest of the world to share.

In this club, the 1.3 billion citizens of China are represented by only two airports (including Hong Kong), and the 1.2 billion citizens of India are not represented at all. Canada and Australia also don’t make the cut (too few people).

Of course, there are other considerations: aside from its money, land, and people, the heavy air passenger traffic in the U.S. may also reflect its horrendous rail system.

No, this isn’t a porn title: here’s a claim that Roman civilization collapsed partly because Europe passed “peak wood”.

Let’s leave aside the question of what Roman civilization means, and whether it collapsed in 44 BC, 391 AD, 395, 476, 1453, or some other date. If I remember correctly, much Western European farmland reverted to forest after the Black Death of the 14th century, where there was a huge decline in available farm labour — there’s actually more forest in many parts of Europe now than there was before the Bubonic plague.

And that’s the problem with tossing around silly phrases like “peak wood” — you don’t have to do anything to reforest — just stop working to keep the forest away. If all humans left North America for 20 years and then returned, we’d find that our farmers’ fields, sports stadiums, backyards, parking lots, and even city streets were already well on their way back to being forests. Fossil fuels, unfortunately, don’t work that way (at least not in a human time frame).

In my home province, Ontario, it’s now illegal to smoke in a car with a child in it [story]. Another sign of a growing nanny state?

No. A nanny state passes laws to protect people from themselves — “wear a helmet”, “don’t eat trans-fats”, “don’t smoke pot”.

A government passes laws to protect its citizens from each-other — “don’t steal”, “don’t drive drunk”, “don’t attack people with a hockey stick”, or even “don’t do noisy construction work at 3:00 am in a residential area”.

If you’re a hockey player, I support your right to swing your stick, but that right does not extend all the way to my face. If you’re a smoker, I support your right to smoke (tobacco or otherwise), but that right does not extend all the way to my lungs, or to your child’s. There’s nothing nannyish about that.

As North American cities get bigger, and more people drive cars, how are we going to cope with the traffic? Will it be permanent gridlock? It’s gone out of style to bulldoze neighbourhoods to build new freeways, but even if we did that and built more expressways into the city, where would all the cars park when they got here?

We’ve had a glimpse of what that future dystopia might look like here in Ottawa, as our public transit strike has just finished its first month. We’ve had only about 20% more cars on the road, but combined with very cold weather and heavy snow (including blizzards), things have gotten bad. One-way commutes that used to take 45 minutes now sometimes take two and a half hours, and the downtown core completely gridlocks: even as new drivers arrive, the ones came 30 minutes ago are still circling trying to find somewhere to park.

How can any big city survive a traffic nightmare like this? Here are some of the workarounds people have come up with:

• Missing work altogether. I know one doctor who had a four-hour shift scheduled at her suburban hospital before Christmas on the morning of a very heavy snowfall. She called and found out that even if she could make it in, there was an hour-and-a-half line-up to get into the parking lot (even for doctors), so she finally just gave up.

• Time-shifting. Not every job actually requires you to be in from 9-5. People are heading to work a couple of hours early or late and missing the worst of the gridlock. By 7:00 pm, traffic is almost back to normal again, at least in the city core.

• Telecommuting. People are working from home more often than usual, or just as often, working from the nearest coffee shop. They look at the weather forecast, and if it’s bad and their jobs permit, they just stay home.

• Human propulsion. People who live within easy walking distance (5 km/3 miles) of work or school are just walking — its faster, and burns off some of the Starbucks calories. Walking’s not pleasant on days when the windchill drops to -25 degC or worse, but it beats gridlock and fighting for a scarce parking spot. Cycling’s not an option in this weather except for the very brave, but people are also cross-country skiing or skating to work when they can.

• Ride sharing. While it doesn’t help you get to work any faster individually (though it helps in the aggregate), ride sharing is very useful if you have no car, or if it’s difficult to find parking places where you’re heading. Lots of people are car-pooling with co-workers, using ride-sharing web sites, or even just standing by the side of the road holding signs saying where they want to go.

• Private shuttles. The universities set up private shuttles to help at least some students get in for the Christmas exams, and fortunately, the transit union backed down from its threat to block them with picket lines. Some high schools are also offering limited private bus service (Ottawa urban high school and middle school students use public transit, not yellow school buses).

• Fewer parking restrictions. Parking spots in the city core that normally have a 1-, 2-, or 3-hour time limit are now unrestricted, so that commuters can use them (the normal time limit is meant to guarantee that they’re left free for shoppers, etc., so businesses might not be thrilled). People have misinterpreted that and parked in no-parking/no-stopping zones or even in front of hydrants, and have been furious when they’ve been ticketed.

• Helping the vulnerable. Our ParaTranspo service is still operating, and there’s talk about extending it to seniors (so that they’re not shut in). The city is also talking about taxi vouchers for low-income earners whose jobs are at risk.

So over all, a city can cope, even with a crisis like this. Most people I’ve talked to don’t like the strike, but also admit that we’re getting used to living without public transit.

I think we’re missing some real opportunities, though. For example, why not designate one or two lanes on the major highways as carpool-only lanes (minimum 3 occupants)? That way, there would be a significant speed advantage to ride sharing, rather than just a general feeling of virtue. We could do the same with the bus lanes on downtown streets, and let carpoolers just whiz by the gridlock. That’s the kind of thing that we might want to keep even after the strike’s finished.

I’m hearing rumours of small-scale layoffs from a few different places around Ottawa, mostly small-to-medium-sized companies.

Just a single layoff affects dozens of people:

• the person who’s let go
• the person’s family
• the managers who have to do the firing
• the person’s work friends, who’ll miss the lunchtime chats and drinks after work
• the person’s coworkers, who’ll have to pick up the extra load
• people from other organizations or members of the public who had dealings with the person
• the restaurant owner across the street, who always had a special curry set aside for his favorite customer
• (and so on)

When the slowdown became inescapable in November, many companies may have decided to postpone layoffs until after the Christmas holidays, out of kindness. The holidays are over now, and today (January 5) is the first day everyone will be back at work, so there could be a lot of postponed pain hitting all at once.

Are these just a few isolated incidents, or will today be the day that the economic slowdown starts to seem real to people in the tech industry?