From Streetcars To Spaceships

Round Off Your Rails - Simple things CAN make a difference.

Like many of us in the do-gooder world, I tend to get wrapped up in complex, multi-billon dollar projects and conceptually demanding things like greenroof. Sometimes it's important to remember the simple things like tapering and finishing that can make a huge difference.

I used to have two large pine planters, bought at the same time from the same store. Each was four feet long by twenty inches wide and each cost me over two hundred dollars. One difference in how I treated them made a critical difference in how they aged.

With one I left the exterior as is and focused on the interior. With the other I rounded off the tops, which were vertical four inch pieces, and then sanded them down a bit. Then I coated the whole planter in two coats of varnish, expecting that it wouldn't last long but figuring that every bit helps.

Well, by twelve years later the top of the one that I had left alone was far more fractured and worn that the one I had beveled and sanded. This ain't rocket science; when it rained the rain would pool on the flat top, in fact, over time it warped towards the wet side (the top) and even more water would accumulate in the now concave top. The other one, which started out a bit convex after my sanding, would shed the water as fast as it got rained on and, except for periods of heavy storms or snow, never stayed wet for more than a few hours. And, predictably, the varnish on the sanded planter also lasted longer than was typical. Much of it was still there when I sold it last year. By contrast, it peeled right away in less than two years from a similar pine surface on my balcony that I hadn't rounded off.

I'm sitting here right now in a house that has been remodeled to within an inch of its life. The fridge is a double-width Sub Zero. There are two bathtubs, one a sybaritic wonder of well-set blue and white tile big enough to park a truck in. The skylights and windows are generous, wood-clad, and triple paned. But the wooden top, about a foot wide, of the low wall on one side of the second story deck has just been nailed on flat.

Or at least it was flat when it was put there. Now it's already starting to bow up and, sure enough, in last night's rain I could see little pools accumulating where the now raised edges retained it.

What would it take for me to take a rasp and round down those edges? How much more effort to take a quarter sheet sander and give the whole thing a slight curve? Maybe an hour? How many more years would that big plank of high quality wood last if I did it?

I swear, some days I'm tempted to bloody well carry  a rasp with me and just round off edges of railings and fence tops as I wander whichever city I'm in. Probably save  ten thousand dollars of lumber purchases a year if I did.

-Rustin

Rationalized Rights of Way - Above AND Below.

Look at our cities. Look into the holes torn out for every road being rebuilt or cable being laid.

What do see? A slovenly tangle of pipes and wires and fragments of long-gone structures.

Like a large family of eccentric and badly raised children, we've gotten used to each agency or utility just barely keeping out of the way of the others, each going their own way IN their own way. Then we cover it all with mounds of rubble and toxic dirt, making and destroying accessways every time we need to get at something.

Why do we do that?

The Romans knew how to build a sane and permanent city two thousand years ago. How to make streets and ducting that could last for a thousand years with no maintenance.
But we're Americans, right? It's all just temporary. Why do it right now if we can just do it over later?

Who benefits from how we do things now?
Verizon, PG&E, and every other company that is stalling nimbler, better competitors with the excuse that access is just too hard and hiding their shenanigans under the lack of transparency that all that chaos provides. Because institutionally controlled "chaos" attracts fraud the way piles of garbage attract rats.
With the deregulation of the past decades, many claims have been made that power companies, telcos, and the like would become far more efficient, charge lower prices, and generally become far better as they would have to compete with newcomers.
Well, the reality has been far different, with existing companies using the complexity of their existing systems as a way to prevent competition and manipulate the market.
You want to feed power into the grid? Be prepared to face a series of illegal but common obstructions (click the link for "our fight with PG&E") as the power companies claim that they would need to install new transformers, can't reach the lines near your house, etc.
Want phone service from a competitor to your regional telco? Watch as they only schedule access to their trunk lines as rarely as possible, adding costs, conditions, and delays for anybody else offering dialtone or using non-spec gear. Cable television prices have actually risen at a time when most of their costs have dropped like a shot.

Who else benefits?
Penny-ante politicians spending less now and leaving the cleanup and rebuilding for the people coming after them.
And all those parts of the world that gain from a shambling, dim-witted America, that doesn't work right now and breaks down in unpredictable ways when stressed.

I lived through damage control after one September 11th. It's past time to talk about how to make us less vulnerable to the next one.

How we handle infrastructure has bothered me for a long time. It's part of why I spent several years at places like Engineering News-Record, Architectural Record, This Old House Magazine, and Woodworker, trading my skills for the chance to shamelessly grill experts in the field, use their reference libraries, and find directions for further research. And plenty of talks with engineers and architects from firms like Parsons-Brinckerhoff and SOM have helped me see why they make the choices they do. Of course my own project work in squats and mansions in the process of demolition and various commercial spaces influence me, too. So what you'll find below is a result of a pretty serious amount of thought and research. This writeup is actually a revised and expanded version of one I did in 2003. I also agree that comprehensively reengineering our infrastructure will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, at the least, and make for an awful lot of unhappy people while the work is getting done. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated in 2005 that it will take us well over a trillion dollars just to rebuild our decaying infrastructure just using conventional techniques.

It's not that I think these things are easy. It's that I know that they are essential.

What Have We Got Now?
Have you ever looked at a cutaway view of what's under city streets? A tangled hodgepodge of sewer lines, electrical systems, abandoned pneumatic lines, and a dangerously underdocumented collection of private gas lines, accessways and other ducts and channels and rights of way.

The complexity of the physical systems required to keep a densely populated area going is well known. A dozen children's books have been been built around the subject. Probably twenty PBS and Discovery Channel documentaries. I've always been fond of David Macaulay's Underground, though he makes things look a lot tidier than they really are.

Periodically, a water main will break or a major power line will go down in an urban area and accounts will be blithely given of the mix of two-hundred-year old water pipes, high-voltage electrical lines, and so on. Somehow, we are expected to accept this as we do hurricane season or the Yankees and Raiders being jerks.

And, even more pathetically, we allow billions of dollars in federal money to be pumped into projects like the L.A. subway and Boston's Big Dig, tearing out huge hunks of city and putting them all back, without putting things back any better then they found them. Which is even more perverse when you realize that the first New York subways were built with temporary orderly rights of way for water pipes and all the rest. Rights of way that were then abandoned, allowing all those pipes and wires and chambers to get rerandomized all over again.

That's like starting with a random pile of hundreds of books, sorting them all to find a few particular ones, and then knocking your neat piles back into chaos before leaving.

So what can we do?

Think about that staple of horror movies and USA Network dramas (woo-eee-ooo!) underground steam tunnels. In the trade, these are called "utility galleries" or "service tunnels". Long corridors with power and communications and so on, all neatly lined up along the walls. Need to reach the telephone lines? They're all in a row, with regularly-spaced junction boxes and labels. Power? Right beside them. And so on. All of us who've run server rooms know how to do this. Every corporate campus built these days includes related technologies. The only differences are scale and the number of people who need to be mollified along the way.

So why don't we put those under each and every street?

Let me propose a saner way of doing things. All areas with a population density above ten thousand people per square mile (think denser suburbs and three story buildings) will be subject to The Omnibus Infrastructure Renewal Act. This act will empower the federal government to partner with state and municipal authorities. First consideration will be given to areas where new developments are already about to be executed or were recently built. All applicable areas will be provided with a federally funded and staffed team empowered and equipped to carry out the following:
One linear mile per year of road per municipality will be selected. In the first few years this will consist of numerous short stretches of street along small areas of high density construction, such as a cluster of high rises in an area of less density or the roads adjoining a set of office parks. Larger areas such as multiple adjacent streets will not all be done at once in inhabited areas so all of the streets to a given property are never under reconstruction at the same time.

Tear It All Out, Examine What's There
After a period of investigation and service provider liason, each selected stretch of road will be utterly torn out, down to between fifteen and thirty feet, deep enough to expose all utility lines of all sorts, including private lines belonging to cable companies and the like. If something man-made is down there, we expose it.
The channel is cut to the width of the road, right up to the edges of the sidewalk, if there is one, or until the building foundation is exposed, should that foundation butt up against the edge of the owner's property.
A team makes their way along as the digging progresses with a full suite of testing equipment, documenting the current situation, including not only placement, condition, and nature of current systems, but also the state of facing foundations and other systems abutting the roadway.
All entities owning property along the road are offered, for a nominal fee, a basic evaluation of the state of their foundations and the opportunity to have their needs incorporated into the final system. This should make insurance companies and property assessors, among others, very happy.

Now comes the scary stuff.

ALL existing lines are torn out or otherwise made capable of being put in their final placement.
Where possible, temporary utility replacements are put in place, such as mobile electrical generators, limited waste water processing and provision of clean water, communications, and so on. Ideally "combined service" teams move along with reconstruction, using and reusing the same set of generators, solar panels, wireless boosters, and so on. The opportunity is taken, where viable, to cut connections at existing junctions or at good locations for the creation of new ones. Whenever possible, buildings that abut the right of way are assisted to create one access point into their property through which all of their services will be rerouted.

The Tunnel Is Laid
A tunnel with internal dimensions of about twelve feet wide by ten feet high is built along the roadbed, as far down as is practical, creating a tunnel the length of the roadway. This tunnel is built of heavy cast concrete, cast iron, layered brick, or other wall types proven to be able to survive for at least two hundred years without any structural maintenance. Materials that rust or otherwise swiftly decay are avoided, which, among other things, means that solid concrete or fiber-reinforced concrete will be favored over rebar-reinforced concrete which we know by now tends to eventually fracture and weaken where the rebar is. At regular intervals expansion joints are incorporated not only into the tunnel itself but into cables and pipes running along the tunnel. Where possible, materials like aerated, autoclaved concrete that minimize propagation of cracks are used. Overall, think Roman results with modern techniques and materials.

Please note that should superior results be possible with a tubular cross-section, by using arches, or otherwise changing the profile while maintaining the same general interior cross-section, so be it. I don't doubt that there are plenty of engineers who can work out better details than the ones described here. This description is just meant to give an idea of how this can be done.

Sewer lines are run beside or below this tunnel. All other lines are relocated to within it, placed in orderly and standardized channels along the walls of the new tunnel. All communications lines will run in one group, all electrical lines in another, gas in another, and so on. Clean water and stormwater are also, when possible, run in piping within the confines of the tunnel.

Soil and other similar matter displaced during digging is tested for levels of contaminants, and, if suitable, is used as raw material to create gardens and other "green" areas, with a minimum depth of soil in resulting areas of four feet and compost or other "waste matter" as required used as soil amendments. "Waste" concrete, brick, stone and other such materials are either broken up for use on-site as aggregate or otherwise reused.

New Systems Put In
Floors are of standardized dimensions, with maximum designated degrees of curvature and slope, and designed to allow the eventual use of automated systems to deliver materials to repair workers, robotic (and telepresence) examination of lines, tunnel travel in Cushman-type vehicles, and, if merited, a narrow gauge (approx. three feet) rail line to carry workers and materials. At intervals flood doors are built in and raised incorporated dividers cast in place to handle smaller leaks. Such a tunnel system worked very well indeed in Chicago for decades and was lost only when it was flooded after years of poor maintenance and lack of documentation led to a wall being breached and river water pouring in.

Once the tunnel is in place, it will then be covered up with an engineered new road, including drainage, sidewalks (where appropriate), accessways, and so on. Designs will again be chosen to minimize future cost of maintenance. Attention will also be given to minimizing vibration reaching the raceways as well as spreading as much load as possible to the surrounding roadway and off of the ceiling of the tunnel. Again, arches are our friends.

A central authority with transparent management built into their charter makes licences available to any organization needing access to the galleries. Each service provider is given a certain number of licences proportional to their number of miles of lines, capacity, line type, etc.
You want to start a telcom company? Maybe one selling gas or steam from a cogeneration system? Think you can provide broadband cheaper and better? Get a licence for your repair folks, get an identifier code, install your lines in the appropriate rows of ducting, and you're now (comparatively) on peer terms with the big boys.

Competing Tunnel Systems
It is worth noting an implication of the dimensions of the tunnel. The system I describe should end up with an external width of fifteen to eighteen feet. Far narrower then many roads. If a private company should wish to build their own tunnel system, I say (heh) more power to them. As long as they offer equivalent or better access to their systems (including access for court officers and regulators responsible for administration of the services carried) and a reasonable (there are legal definitions of this) level of safety, they're welcome to step in.
The point of this whole mandate is to ensure a baseline, not force a federal monopoly.

Now let's look at what all this would accomplish.

Open Source Utilities
The cryptic, inefficient, and mutable nature of our utility lines is one of the biggest and most effective tools of the MegaCorps in their struggle to force us to do things their way or not at all. AOL/Time Warner, PacBell, Con Edison, MCI, and all their buddies have shown that access is control. If nobody knows how you do what you do, you can do pretty much whatever you want and the citizens will just have to put up with it. And probably foot most of the bill. Just ask Enron.
With lines accessable to anybody with a reason to use them, this delaying game gets cut down to size and the way opens for smaller players to compete on a more even playing field.

Do It Right; Then You Don't Have to Keep Doing It Over
Think about how we do things now. We take systems we've spent TRILLIONS of dollars to develop, put them in cables to protect them from rain, animals, and a host of other hazards, and then drop them into dirt. Then, when things need to be changed or fixed, we dig up all that dirt, set up a set of walls around them, pull them up, do the work, drop them back down, disassemble and remove the temporary walls, and cover the cables and junctions with dirt all over again.
Does this really make sense to you?
Even a conventional cast concrete tunnel would cut the stresses from temperature changes and moisture way down. A supplementary layer of low-density terra cotta or concrete would make it even less stressful. When Thomas Edison was creating the first electrical and telephone companies, he tried putting everything in dedicated cast metal raceways since he knew that even at late eighteen-hundreds' prices, it was already cheaper to do it that way than to have to keep digging stuff up or hang it from poles. The only thing that changed his mind was that they didn't yet have trustworthy waterproofing technologies, a problem long since addressed.

Our current approach is an outgrowth of several phenomena:
Firstly, we, as a society, would far rather keep spending smaller amounts of money over and over then invest up front, even if total cost would be less.
Secondly, the benefits of such a system must be matched against costs and with each utility bearing their own costs, it is far harder to justify. But if the job is done once and everybody benefits, then the cost/benefit ratio is far more favorable. This is one case where "the free market" definitely will not solve the problem and the tragedy of the commons looms large indeed.

Water Usage Will Decrease
With the creation of a proper network of water management means, the additional costs of any number of desirable systems goes way down.
With stormwater (and perhaps other "greywater") in accessable and generously built channels, the viability of systems like localized cisterns (as peoples from the Romans to the modern Chinese have done) increases greatly.
Why lose our greywater? Especially in places like Arizona and Colorado, where sprinkler runoff could, with minimal processing, be reused right there instead of traveling miles to evaporate on the way or get mixed with more toxic wastestreams?

One possible option would be the incorporation (in appropriate locales) of small (say forty foot deep by eight foot wide) tanks within and below the gallery, into which greywater would run.
By building in any number of passive systems (such as layers of circumferential horizontal tilted baffles and offset holes to allow water to fall further down) much of the muck would be drawn off mechanically. The remaining water would then be fed through a pipe at the bottom to a fifty foot vertical tube containing a solar-powered (or equivalent) heating element. This heater would circulate or even evaporate the water, which would then be collected at the top, cleaner and reusable.
(Yes, I have a much longer version of this proposal)

In short, as many of us have learned in our professional lives, put in good infrastructure with room to grow and a standardized layout, and many things become easy that were previously unthinkably difficult.

Disaster Prevention and Management
From now on, line inspections can be done properly and cheaply, internal and external. Line breaks become more trackable, and repairs start as soon as the repair teams arrive and get down the manhole cover.
Btw, didja' catch my placement of water lines? Water runs below power. Sewer runs below the floor. Ideally, considerably below the floor.
Do the job right and most shutdowns from water main breaks become a quaint bit of lore spoken of by old-timers.

Further Regulatory and Implementation Details
Many of you will have noted that the proposal I explain above covers only one mile of road per year, far from enough to result in a full, swift conversion.
Well, first of all, I have no problem with this program taking fifty years to complete. Some places are too poor, too complex, or too politically messed up to make swift conversion viable, let alone smart. Also, if any program can benefit from eight or ten years of working out the kinks, this is it.
So I say, start with the low-hanging fruit, and meanwhile learn how to do it right.

I would far prefer to see entire cities and campuses converted at once. But I have seen quite enough of the way things currently work within the construction trades in the U.S. to want some time to shift how business is done. After all, we're talking about the territory of the Teamsters, among others.
My old employer, Engineering News-Record, did a study while I was there and concluded that construction had the lowest increases in productivity in the preceding hundred years of any industry studied. This is not a culture comfortable with radical change.

Our culture tends to focus on the false dichotomy of grand or not at all. We debate and hassle and nitpick for years about the just right approach, and all the while the only people gaining are the consultants.
Let's learn by doing. We can scale up (doing more roads per year) once we've gotten past our growing pains and know how to best do this sort of thing. Why not intersections? Well, here I'm not so certain. It might well be that the best place to start would be to open up major intersections and restructure out from there. Any civil engineers out there have opinions about that? Or maybe the best bet would be to start at a utility plant or telephone exchange and work out from there. I really don't claim any great insight here.

So the hidden subtext of my timeline is that the first few years are used on areas that are damn near sacrifices wihle the federal teams pursue an agenda of remaking how construction like this is done.

Another note on unspoken concerns: I've been thinking about implementing systems like this for over twenty years. Most of that time I thought that such ideas were somehow just not being proposed or hadn't been thought up or something. About ten years back I was having dinner with a very senior engineer I've known since the mid-eighties who has played a key role in many famous projects (for example, he's played a serious role in rebuilding the WTC site and supervised some of those folks who the media thinks are in charge). Much of what he does is tunnels. I carefully broached the idea of systems like this and he freaked out on me (no problem, he does that periodically).
It turns out that he's been (he says) pushing this idea for over thirty years. Is in love with it. Is endlessly passionate about it.
The problem is that he's a geek. A geek in a suit. A geek who has stacks of degrees and licences and credentials.
But still a geek.

So he leaves the politics to others and we suffer for it.

Soooo, If I seem a little looser on details then usual, if I seem a bit lackadaisical on some specifics, much of that is that I already know that working civil engineers (yes, I've heard similar sentiments since from others) with a hundred times my expertise already have given this much thought and are eager to dive in and do it. I just had a talk with an architect working for the Portland government last year who said that most of the junior engineers in his office were already pushing for this kind of thing.
So I see my role as getting the word out and drumming up support. Once they don't feel so friendless, they'll emerge from their underappreciated role in the shadows and work that stuff out far better than I ever could.

Also, keep in mind the examples of federally subsidized projects I gave at the very beginning. The Big Dig. The Second Avenue Subway. The rebuilding of our container ports.
From now on, if a project involves tearing out streets, let alone cut and cover transit construction, that project should incorporate partial or total implementation of service tunnels. The dirt doesn't go back until everything is in place.
Look at the cross-sections of the Chunnel. That ain't one tunnel; it's a right of way with every need handled in an appropriate way, from rail to communications.

Lastly, I am absolutely convinced that once this program is in place, our citizens, who have far more sense of the costs of daily life then the yahoos behind the podiums, will start to demand more of this, not less.

When we build it, they will come.

Rustin

Greenroof for the cost of a sixpack.

For over fifteen years now I've been periodically working on a system for very low cost, low skill, low labor greenroof trays. Recently I wrote one version of it up as a page on the Recode site. I'm reproducing it here with some additions and changes in the hope that this will get a few more people to see it and, ideally, do it.

In recent years there has been more and more attention paid to the idea of greenroof, putting dense bodies of plants on top of various kinds of structures. But despite all the press coverage and enthusiasm, there really haven't been that many greenroof projects done. There are a lot of reasons for this, including withdrawn expected funding, lack of public education, concerns about weight, damage to and lack of access to existing roof surface, cost, unknown performance, and fire risk.

One possible way to address many of these factors is with a low cost, low weight, tray-based system built from post-consumer materials, mostly trash that can be found by the side of the road, and made available in a ready to use condition at nurseries, farmer's markets, and other similar places. This way somebody can just take home a completed unit, put it on their roof, and then pretty much leave it alone. Such a tray can also be used to grow food in tight spaces in weather too cold or hot for conventional planters with lower water use and less maintenence. Here's how such a tray system could be done by an individual, a non-profit or under the umbrella of a government agency.

Such a unit has several basic components:
- container
- liner
- growing medium
- flora and/or seeds
- protection from pests
- base (on sloped rooftops)

Many of the stresses that plants in containers suffer from are caused by the unhealthily fast temperature and humidity changes the root ball experiences, the root ball being the core of the part of the plant that is under the surface. These problems are even worse in shallow bed systems like the ones of a typical rooftop installation. So insulating the planter and covering the soil with an insulating, water retaining mulch is very useful.

Also, while tray-based systems have their advantages, especially for modular and turnkey implementations, they've got a deserved reputation as expensive, the kind of thing done by flashy firms who work through glossy fifty page proposals, patented and brand named custom "systems", and proprietary installation procedures done by "certified" subcontractors for thousands of dollars a day.

The system explained below ain't like that at all.

Tray - Fish are typically delivered to restaurants and retailers in styrofoam containers, containers that are typically about twenty-eight inches long, fifteen inches high (including the cover), and eighteen inches wide. These then become waste, which is even harder to dispose of given their predictable coating of bits of dead fish. Dead fish bits that are, for us, free fertilizer. Let's use these containers as our trays. First, to protect them, we enclose each box in a lidless, form-fitting box made of corrugated plastic. This design is flammable, which could be fixed by using a metal box but a metal box would be heavier, more expensive, and would rust unless copper, stainless steel, galvanized steel, or other expensive and/or ecologically questionable materials were used. If you have cheap access to lots of aluminum screen door mesh (not steel or plastic, only aluminum), then maybe you can wrap the tray in several layers of that instead of using the corrugated plastic, giving you a cover that is not only still light and cheap but also fire resistant.

Growing medium - We use a lightweight soil optimized for greenroof, like the Gaia Institute version, made of treated chopped styrofoam and compost. Styrofoam from the waste stream is chopped, treated (I find that immersing it in a slurry of soil, starch, and gooey waste like the water from a fish tank works very well), and mixed with compost, perhaps from something like the currently expanding Portland Composts! program. Watch out for insufficiently treated styrofoam, which flies off everywhere and has static cling problems like you wouldn't believe.

A layer of chopped, treated styrofoam fills the bottom inch or so, perhaps with some water-retaining gel mixed in if the budget allows for it. We then lay in a base layer of our soil to within four inches of the top. Over this layer we lay a mesh cover, stretched onto a rigid frame designed to fit snugly within the planter. This mesh keeps the styrofoam from migrating upwards too much over time. There should be no air space between the top of the layer of medium and the mesh.

Above the layer of medium we put about an inch of straight compost into which we mixed a "supersaturated" combination of regionally appropriate seeds, with a goal of at least ten seeds per square inch. By starting with far more seeds than are typical and placing them deeper, our tray will, after a period of adjustment, have a subset of "survivors" best suited to the microclimate that tray sits in. A few bean seeds or seeds from other nitrogen fixers are always a good addition. (Personally, I usually just buy bags of beans at the supermarket.) Since microclimate can vary greatly even on one rooftop, better to provide a surplus of options than to try to guess ahead how to get each mix just right. While we could instead include some quantity of seedlings, this ups the cost and weight and may actually result in less-optimized mixes of plants once the planter has been in place for a season or more. Also, by mixing seeds, we reduce the likely severity of many bug, fungal and other blights since most blights are relatively species specific and don't propagate as well or last as long in a diverse environment.

Over our layer of compost we put another inch and a half of soil, about half compost, about half the lightweight mixture or even just straight compost if the weight is acceptable for the planned location and you're willing to do without the insulating properties of the lightweight mixture. This layer is denser not only so as to be more nutrient-rich for seedlings but to be less vulnerable to wind and burrowing animals such as birds that will disturb the soil when doing things like searching for bugs to eat.

Above the soil is a thin scattering of straight compost covered by a mulch of flattened "pebbles" made from glass or plastic waste. These pass rain down while keeping water loss from evaporation down. They also provide some protection against excess sun and wind. Ideally these pebbles are made with "foamed" or bubble-rich interiors but solid will do just fine.

Over time this mixture will settle. Chances are that by a year later you will have at least two inches of clearance all around the inside of the planter. Once your planters are settled in and a few months in place, you might want to add some worms to keep the soil from compacting too much. If you're lucky, ants will eventually reach your roof and loosen things up, too, as can various other helpful beetles and beasties.

Protection from pests - a recurring problem with such planters is that birds and other animals tend to use them as nesting areas. Cats also have a habit of seeing these planters as litter boxes. This is fought by placing a dense "forest" of vertical sticks over the planter surface. Prototypes have mostly used chopsticks though dumpster-dived conduit has worked well for me, too, not only keeping animals from moving in but also serving as stakes for plants needing a hand up. Any rigid, durable rods work just fine. Metal kebab stakes with ornamental tops work really well and look cool besides.

Production Considerations - These planters use entirely post-consumer materials from the waste stream except for the corrugated plastic, the seeds, and the internal mesh cover. If the supply of fish shipping containers doesn't meet demand, American manufacturers are now making trays for industries like berry-picking from recycled plastics and, with the addition of a styrofoam liner to provide thermal protection, these trays provide another low-cost, U.S.-created, recycled material solution to the problem. I've also made planters from a wide range of containers, from milk crates to buckets for joint compound. A good rule of thumb is that any container big enough to fit a basketball and strong enough to hold half its weight in water should work fine, though obviously heavy containers require more care abut where you put them.

Production of such planters is low-skill, low-cost, and can be done, except for the creation of the "pebble" mulch, on a scale of one at a time to thousands a day, making this a good candidate for groups such as congregations looking to engage in environmentally helpful activities without investment in training or equipment. Any rigid material can work as the frame for the internal mesh and any sort of fine to medium mesh will do, from fish netting to fish net stockings. Existing glass pebbles of the kind for sale at any Dollar Tree or garden store work just fine as mulch, too. Personally, I sometimes add some semi-precious stones (ordered by the bag), or marbles, or other cool stuff that, like the pebbles, protect plants from wind and dehydration while allowing water to soak down to the soil. In fact, in some cases, such mulches actually increase humidity since they tend to get wet with dew if nighttime temperatures drop enough.

These planters, as we said above, could be made available at municipal sites, offered at plant shows and to contractors, or, possibly, provided for sale at large stores like Fred Meyer, Home Despot, or Lowes.

Placement - Placement on flat rooftops requires no special skill, equipment, or materials, though some would recommend raising the planter on blocks, though I don't. To me that's just asking to have pests move in and start eating away at the planters from beneath. Other downsides of raising the planter on feet include greater concentration of load, increased exposure to wind which both reduces thermal stability and increases the risk of the planter being blown askew. I do strongly recommend that on older rooftops with uncertain strength placing them only in one row along load bearing walls and near other known load-bearing members. If your roof is fragile it may also help to lay down a layer of plywood or surplus pallets and putting your planters on those though there, too, the problems of raised planters come up.

Soon after placement, ideally within the first week or so, the planters should get as much watering as two or three heavy rains, ideally spread over several days and done slowly, remembering that the planters can store quite a bit of water so just filling the exposed inch will not be enough. This initial watering gives the seeds a good start. Just be sure not to hit the planters with the concentranted blast of a hose since this will push the mulch and soil around into disorder. After seedlings have established themselves the planters will be able to handle streams better but even then a spray is a much better idea.

Placement on pitched surfaces would require some form of support, possible including a flat platform to place underneath which itself is suspended from the roofline with light cable suspended from load-distributing inverted V pads. Personally, I haven't done this. I've always stuck to flat or mostly flat surfaces. Platform "legs" should ensure that the tray remains level. While planters could be designed for slanted surfaces, that would require that they be built from scratch, which to me seems like a whole different kind of thing.

Some final thoughts - Overall, this design provides a low-cost, proven technology, scaleable way to get a lot of plantings on a lot of roof surface, cheaply, quickly, and in a way that is easy to customize, reduces the waste stream, and can be done by anybody with access to a roof, a mind to make it green, a couple of bucks, and some free time. Among other things, if I still lived in a top floor apartment under an asphalt roof, you can be sure that I would put some of these up there over my place just to keep my apartment cooler on summer days. This whole design has come out of years of experimenting by me and others working on apartment balconies, the rooftops of industrial spaces, squats, and apartment buildings. A lot of failures got worked through on the way to these conclusions.

To put it mildly, no special training is needed to do this, nor are special tools, equipment, or components. In addition to milk crates and the other stuff listed above, I've made these in the styrofoam containers that steaks are shipped in (placed in wine crates), in laundry bins lined with spray foam, in seventies fiberglass planters lined with mylar "emergency blankets" and bubble wrap, and in a quarter-inch plywood shipping container covered in huge quantities of surplus paint and four coats of Rustoleum.

And ya know what? I've eaten spinach in February, sage by the handful, scallions year round, and snap peas for most of the summer.

Try it. You'll like it.

And let me know how it turns out.

Happy planting.

-Rustin

Milwaukee is following me.

Earlier this year I finally found a good apartment in Portland. And not too long thereafter I found workspace in the Watershed building off Milwaukie Avenue. I had enjoyed my time living in the City of Cheese so this was more than fine with me. But on this trip this is getting a bit silly. I left New York on Thursday and took the train to Chicago and it seemed like every time I stopped to do something I ended upon Milwaukee Avenue. Taking the Blue Line (which runs along Milwaukee) out to Wicker Park, I found that Quimby's was just as good as I expected but  was even more impressed with Myopic Books, over on, of course, Milwaukee.

Well, then I go on the bus to Milwaukee (the actual city, you know) and spent a very productive few days (Growing Power, the Urban Ecology Center, Harry W. Schwartz Books) and hung out with the household of gamers I always crash with there before heading off to Minneapolis. My friend Jessica meets me at the station, we take light rail to her new place on . . . Milwaukee Avenue. Which turns out to be a stunningly beautiful pedestrianized street of masonry houses with gingerbread details built by the railroad back in the day.

Are the gods trying to tell me something?

Wrong Way Drive: U.S. Postal Service Buys Crrrrap!

This week I’m in Minneapolis. I’m visting my friend Jessica and taking a chance to meet some distributors face to face. I'm a hands-on guy and I’ve never liked doing business with folks I haven’t met, especially folks who sell things I publish. Anyway, I always enjoy looking at things like mailrooms and distribution systems. So a chance to meet the people at Northland Poster and Northern Sun Merchandising means a lot to me.

And I figured that while I’m in town I’d get a chance to look into a few things that I’ve been curious about, the kind of things that are harder to see in places like Portland and New York City where I spend most of my time. I’ve seen brand new minivans here and there recently being used as U.S. Postal Service delivery vehicles and I’ve wanted a chance to talk to a postal worker who drives one. So when I saw a woman standing beside hers in her USPS uniform, clearly taking a moment in the sun, I walked over, said “hi” and asked her what she thought of them.

Oh, my. Okay, first of all, she says that it gets 8 mpg. That's right, eight miles to the gallon. Which is worse than the vehicle it replaces. Which since her old vehicle was larger, easier to see, better suited to delivery work in half a dozen ways from her ability to see the road to the practicality of the seats, kinda makes you wonder why these General Motors beasties got bought. And, according to this woman, who was more than glad to vent on the topic, the USPS has bought thousands of these things with, as far as she knows, no input from the drivers or the union. Officially they’re “flex-fuel” which, here in the Midwest means “approved for agribusiness-provided gasahol”. No, no diesel or electric vehicles are being used by the U.S.P.S. anywhere around here that she knows of.

All of which leaves me a bit, shall we say, perplexed. What year is this again? Am I missing something? For some reason I was under the impression that our country was having some problems with energy these days. And that gasoline vehicles were even less rational a choice for fleet use than they are for individual use. And the postal service, which seems to keep getting redefined as a "quasi-private entity" or as a government agency every few weeks depending on the issue being discussed, has gone out and bought huge quantities of cheapass minivans of the sort that everything from Blue Book resale values to environmental data have long shown to be the worst of all worlds.

I'm no fan of U.P.S., the guys in brown. Their OSHA problems alone would have long-since bankrupted them if they hadn't been one of the biggest campaign contributors to both sides of the aisle for decades now. But look at their vehicles and you'll see how delivery vehicles are done by people who have their act together. Aluminum frame to save weight. Transluscent top to see what is inside without spending too much on electric lighting. Easy access handles. Internal signage. And they've been doing this kind of thing for decades now. As have Fed-Ex and U-Haul, and plenty of other companies. Go to any commercial vehicle dealer and you'll find that you can spec a Ford Sprinter or any of a few dozen standard small to mid-sized delivery vehicles with such features standard. And, make no mistake, the drivers of the USPS know all about the difference between their fleets a what the other folks use.

So you tell me, why is the USPS buying short-lifetime, low-quality, high total-cost-of-ownership, consumer vehicles with terrible mileage?

At some point soon I'm going to see if I can get an official statement from somebody in the post office on their recent vehicle purchase policies; maybe what I've seen in five cities this past year or so is all anomalies. But I doubt it. If anybody out there reading this has any facts to point me to I would love to see them.

Until then I'll be keeping my eyes open and hoping for the best.

Take care,

-Rustin

My mother explains things to Eugene, OR.

In honor of Mother's Day, I am reprinting here my mother's letter to the editor as it was reproduced in the Register-Guard, the local Eugene paper, on May 3rd. (Bolding and explanations in brackets are mine.)

I appreciated seeing Lane Transit District [Eugene is in Lane County] acting boldly to head off cuts in bus service next year. With the price of gas rocketing up towards $4 or $5 a gallon, public transit offers a thrifty alternative.

Additional benefits are less air pollution and global warming, less crowded roads, and a healthier lifestyle for us all. To convert more drivers to riders, we need more frequent and wide-ranging service, not less.

As a car owner who walks a lot and often rides the bus, I cherish exercise, which keeps me trim while it calms my mind. The knapsack I wear carries small purchases more efficiently than a ton and a half of car. It's often fun and convenient to walk one way and take public transit the other.

Cyclists can hoist their bikes on the front of a bus for part of their trip, then pedal away at their convenience. Let's use this great community resource and make sure LTD [Lane Transit District] gets the funding it needs and deserves.

Sylvia Hart

Eugene, Oregon

National Train Day Is Coming!

Just in case any of you didn't know yet, National Train Day is May 10th.

Now, I could suggest that all of you go out to transit-themed events or call your legislators for increased funding or that you buy rail-themed toys for any children you know to counter the endless wave of automobile-themed everything.

And if you do any of those things you will certainly make the world a better place.

But all that I ask is that all of you reading this pause somewhere, sometime on May 10th, and make choo choo noises while making locomotive gestures with great abandon.

Bonus points for every kid you get to join you in this.

Any of you who email me links to pictures of yourselves doing this will get free copies of my 24" by 36" Transit of Portland poster when it comes out.

All together now,

"CHA cha CHA Cha CHA Cha CHA Cha - Choo! Choo!"

May it ring from the rooftops.

"Useless" Transit, part 2

When I was a kid growing up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the seventies I got active in politics pretty early. Which made sense since my parents, grandparents, and at least one great grandparent had been politically active all their lives. And one thing I asked about early and often, including at Park River Independent Democrats, the relevant Democratic club, was what had happened to the huge, mostly abandoned rail yard about a mile from where I lived. The story that I was told again and again, as reinforced by stories in the The New York Times and periodic statements from government officials, was that the yards were worthless. Out of date. That when the freight rail bridge to Manhattan had caught fire there had been no point in rebuilding it since there wasn't any practical way to process freight rail anyway and the yard was a dinosaur.

This line of patter has continued ever since and was a key justification when that yard was torn down by Donald Trump not too many years back to make room for more condos.

Well, I did wonder a bit in the mid-nineties when they started converting the buildings designed to manage freight rail traffic to dot com offices. After all, I knew some of the guys doing the conversions and they said that those buildings were built like pyramids and were as strong and intact as the day they opened. And since I had hung out in the yards for a few years as a kid, I certainly thought that the equipment I had seen didn't look all that old.

But the real punchline turned up in a railworker union magazine that I found in Portland. It trumpeted the twenty million dollar gut rehab that had just been done on the Upper West Side freight yard. About how everything had been modernized, optimized, and brought to the state of the art.

The same issue had a feature about prosecutions by Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

When that fire happened that yard was less than fifteen years old. In a field where fifty year old equipment is trusted every minute of every day.

You are being lied to.

When I write things like my post about Redbird Reef, I do so from a position of having found that when rail officials say that equipment was junked because it was too old, they are usually lying. There is a thriving market for rolling stock, from intact cars to trucks to wheels to springs. They are reconditioned and sold to the many people who want them. And if nobody in North America wants them, you can be damned sure that somebody in the developing world does. If you ever want a tour of the history of American streetcar design, look at Latin American cities.

Many of the old streetcars we have were saved because if nobody wanted to use them as streetcars somebody wanted them for use as utility cars. And if they weren't sold as utility cars, they got used as restaurants. And if they didn't get used as restaurants, they got used as houses and cabins. There was an entire neighborhood built in San Francisco of rehabbed streetcars. Somebody was always there asking for them when they got decommissioned.

So let me say it again. When a government official tells you that they are destroying mass transit resources because "they're nothing but scrap", they are lying to you.

Don't believe the hype.

-Rustin

Old subway cars are useless? I don't believe it.

Many of you have probably heard by now about Redbird Reef, which was created by taking hundreds of millions of dollars worth of subway cars and dumping them into the ocean.

Well, guess what? Evidently that profligacy was so much fun that now the MTA is going to do it again. I just heard from a guy who works at the 207th street yard that they're now preparing to take 64 cars bought in the eighties and dump them into the ocean, too.

Is this, perhaps, because we have a surplus of mass transit systems in the world? Or because stainless steel and aluminum are so cheap that people always just throw it away by the ton? Or maybe because there is no market for New York City memorabilia, not even from film companies or theme parks.

I don't believe it. This is grossly irresponsible behavior. And I don't care how many people have drunk the koolaid and believe that this is sane, ethical activity, I've spent enough time researching the fraud and sabotage that underlay the destruction of streetcar lines to recognize criminal acts when I see them.

Look at the pictures I link to above. Do the math. Take a look at what the MTA means when they say a thing has been "stripped of all reusable components". This is a dumping round into which they're pouring the citizen's property.

This is a crime. Don't let anybody tell you different.

And *why* exactly do they call it WASTE?

Maybe I'm just dumb. Maybe I'm missing something. But I just can't understand why NASA protocol is to regularly take considerable amounts of mass (empty packing materials, small non-working stuff like pens, feces, etc.) and drop it into the atmosphere.

I mean, hey, how much does it cost per kilo to get something into Earth orbit?

And there's no viable solution possible to take our leftovers and turn them into something useful? I simply don't believe it.

I remember back in elementary school building a solar reflector out of cardboard, aluminum foil, and Elmer's glue. It worked fine. Sure, it wasn't ideal, but my little fourth-grade hands did just fine using stuff from the kitchen to make a servicable device able to concentrate sunlight enough to burn stuff.

So tell me, why can't NASA, with their billions of dollars in staff and facilities (and all their buddies at Morton Thiokol, et al), come up with a device to melt materials to vapor (plasma?), spray the vapor onto strips or sheets, thereby separating it by compounds and maybe even elements, and then, at the least, boost the stuff to a parking orbit? Which would be a more efficient use of load capacity, a typical launch of one more ISS component or one of a dozen low speed booster tugs to take existing garbage out to L5? At the very least we should be making shielding out of this stuff.

I'm not even going to get into the issue of all the "junk" wandering about various earth orbits. I'll just point out that at even an assessed current value of, oh, say, three hundred dollars a kilo, there's a hell of a lot of valuable bits and glops up there waiting to be recovered. I must admit, I am curious as to what folks like Lloyds have decided about the law for space salvage. I have a sneaking suspicion that once somebody was recovering materials at a facility created to service the ISS and/or shuttle, they could add to that income by having little robots puttering about collecting the rest of the little bits wandering about unwanted near our planet. I'll even bet that insurance companies would subsidize the venture, one orbit at a time, as a way to cut their current risks on insured satellites.

Now again, maybe I'm missing something obvious and would be most curious if anybody (with facts to present) could show why this is impossible. But it looks to me like we're talking about a very finite set of problems here.

1.) put matter in openable or burnable bags.

2.) transfer bags to predictable, stable, and reachable location.
This can mean storing them within the ISS and/or shuttles, storing them at the ISS/shuttle but on an external tether, or even moving them off to a stable orbit somewhere or even to someplace like L5. All that matters is that when it's time to take out the garbage/empty the toilet the resulting matter reaches a location that is predictable, safe for crew, reachable for later processing, and will not cause the matter to dissipate/burn up.

3.) Divide matter into usable materials.
This problem itself subdivides and I'm not up for going into all the possible subsets or techniques. These include:
- thermal depolymerization
- melting the organics off packing materials but saving the metals and glass
- holding organic waste aside for slow shipment to the moon or L5 giving us an instant headstart of maybe as much as thousands of pounds of starter to create soil.
- fractionating columns in solution and/or rotational devices to separate by mass.
- organic and/or chemical means of separation including everything from microbes in water solution (we've got ones now that can concentrate everything from petroleum to various metals) to enzymes, to simple chemical reactions.

An infinitum. But personally my favorite (just as a starting point for this type of discussion) is what I think is the most elegant. That consists, as I said above, of making a big melting device at the head of a series of magnets and/or a rotating chamber such that the resulting vapor (again, probably actually plasma, but not in all cases) will separate as if it were passing through a giant mass spectrometer. Then we take everything but organic matter and put it into our beastie. At the far end of the chamber matter will accumulate in thicker and thinner bands of divided materials, ready for harvesting and, in some cases like iron, immediate reuse. I've had people comment that mass spectrometers are expensive, complex devices. To which I say, yes, they're designed as precision diagnostic tools; this is merely a way to separate garbage into different materials. This would be to a mass spectrometer as a a steel box with a blow torch under it is to a laboratory calorimeter. The vibration problems give me the heebie-jeebies and I don't doubt that thousands of technical problems would stand in the way of implementation. But I also don't doubt that we've got the know-how to address this kind of thing if we decide to take it seriously.

4.) Store until we begin space-based manufacturing.
Now this can be addressed easily but probably inadvisably by storing the stuff in the general neighborhood of the ISS. I understand that in general our space program is easily dissuaded from processes that are slow and/or gradual, not doing things that involve "and then we sit around for twenty years" if there is another answer that is far more resource hungry but faster. ("Why" is a discussion for another post. Let's just say that I'm well aware of issues of funding concerns, desire for career enhancement, etc.)
I suspect that the best bet is to, again as I've suggested elsewhere, build a fleet of tiny, slow robotic tugs. Probably ion-engine driven and solar powered, such tugs could readily cycle through a libration(sp?) point (like L5) to LEO route, bringing one load after another to a truly stable location well out everybody's way and stored somewhere that we will certainly want stuff later.

Fundamentally, what I'm saying here comes down to three things.
First of all, Americans are terrible at recycling and waste management in general, which sucks, but for us to extend those habits to a place where materials cost thousands of dollars a pound or more is flat out offensive. Especially since doggone it, this is, in a very real way OUR FRACKIN' SPACE PRAGRAM. We have allowed them to be in charge of what is for now, pretty much the only game in town in an aspect of civilization that is incredibly important to all of us. If they want to play sloppy on their turf, well, I'll just be conceptually annoyed. But when they are sloppy at building my house, I don't intend to stay so blase.

Secondly, materials handling procedures, like so much else in the space program, takes a very short-term view. In other words, they say "we don't have any use for such matter today, so why save it?" Well, I dispute that they cannot use any of what they now throw out but even if they can't, I find it highly unlikely that reuse will be impossible for the forseeable future. Or, to get to the real point, it looks to me like figuring reuse and recycling is much smarter per kilo than figuring cheap ways to get more mass up the gravity well.

Third, this looks like a commercial opportunity to me. I don't expect NASA, the ESA, or their bureaucratic brethern to manage this, only to allow somebody else to work with them to do it.

So, what do you think?

Rustin