I Hate Stroads - and so do you.

Driving is frustrating. It's frustrating to try to predict unpredictable drivers, it's frustrating when you need to take four turns, cross a 5 lane road, and make a U-turn to get from the Bed Bath and Beyond to the PetSmart, and it's frustrating to need to take a car out on an large arterial road to get milk for the recipe when you run out.

As frustrating as driving in North America is, walking is often worse. I'd want to get my will and testament in order before walking from the Bed Bath and Beyond to the PetSmart on the opposite side of the road.

I hate this intersection. Especially on foot.

Having had many conversations along these lines, among the first things I hear are "the car is the ultimate form of freedom," and "North America was built with the car in mind, unlike Europe, which was built in the time of horses and carriages." These are pretty easy to dispel. Cars are an absolute necessity for anyone living outside of a city center. Saying "cars are the ultimate form of freedom" strikes me much like saying refrigerators are the ultimate form of freedom because your refrigerator allows you to keep your food at a variety of temperatures. Cars are a requirement for participation in society, there is no freedom from cars outside of city centers. They allow you go anywhere, by often it's the only form of transport available. Being able to walk, take a car, bike, bus, or catch a train is a lot more free.

As for the "European cities are built different" gambit, this is a dodge. Cities are not static, they are rebuilt year after year. A moving feast. Most US cities were incorporated before cars were mainstream, and all have been retrofitted to become more car-centric. We've surrendered more and more public space to cars as years have gone on.

Some definitions will help in moving forward. For the purposes of this post, a "road" is made for efficiently transporting cars from one place to another. A road is not a place. Roads connect places. Roads have wide lanes, few connections or distractions, high speeds, and no land access. You must leave a road to access a business. Roads are designed by the mile. If you're traveling more than 50 mph, you're on a road.

Highway 287, south of Loveland. This road leads to Longmont

Streets are places. You might go to a street to shop or run an errand, you may walk from one shop to another, have a meal, or sit on a bench. Things on streets are human scale. Small signs, sandwich boards, window displays, and wide sidewalks. Two story buildings with offices or apartments on the second floor. Streets are places of high productivity. Places like walking malls, college campuses, and Disney World are all incredibly productive, needing only slow streets to connect them; they transcend the need to accommodate cars. Streets are designed by the foot. If you're traveling less than 35 mph, you're probably on a street.

4th between Lincoln and Cleveland in Loveland, one of my local streets. 

Enter the stroad. Stroads are the futons of travel: they have two functions and perform neither well. A stroad has two lanes of travel in either direction, long turn lanes, a center turn lane, many traffic lights, and stay on one long enough and you'll find powercenters (strip malls but with big box stores) on either side. They have many entrances and exits, but do not provide access to places. Sure you can get to the Home Depot, but that's not a place. It's not human-scale, it's car-scale. Stroads are designed by the 'hundreds of feet.' If you're going between 35 and 50 mph, you're probably on a stroad. This is the worst thing traffic engineers have unleashed.

Once you learn to recognize these, you see them everywhere. I'm so sorry (I'm not), but I'm going to absolutely ruin them for you. Stroads are ugly. It's not a place anyone outside of a car wants to spend any time, and if you're in a car, you're glad the speeds are high, so you can get somewhere else quickly.

Most accidents in cities occur on stroads, not highways (look up crash rates in your city). The wide lanes and highway-like design encourages fast driving speeds, regulated by enforcement, and not by design. Combine the high speed with lots of intersections, entrances and exits, and you have the most dangerous design possible. You would be hard-pressed to to purposefully design a road more dangerous than a stroad if that was your expressed goal. The design contributes to the fact that the US has the most dangerous roads of any developed country. 10.6 deaths/100,000/year vs 3-4 across most of Europe.

During the pandemic, road usage dropped, but the fatality rate/miles driven actually increased. So the only reason these stroads weren't killing more of us is because they were too congested to get going fast enough to kill anyone. The average risk of severe bodily injury increases from 50% at 31 mph to 75% at 39 mph. The average risk of death increases from 25% at 32 mph to 50% at 42 mph (source). Bear in mind stroads exist between 35 and 50 mph.

"But stroads at least get a lot of people from one place to another, right?" Well, they get a lot cars from one place to another. Cars are the worst way to carry lots of people. It's the suburb problem all over. Cars are not dense. Most cars contain one person, take up a whole lane, and cut across two lanes of traffic because they just remembered they DO need another towel from Target.

The capacity of a single 10-foot lane (or equivalent width) by mode at peak conditions with normal operations.

Assuming peak values, stroads can move 6,400 vehicles per hour. Changing the 5 lane stroad to a single lane in each direction, a center bus lane, and a two way bike lane in each direction, assuming the lowest values on the new street, actually increases capacity from 6,400 to 12,700. And that's taking the stroad from 5 lanes to 4. Add a sidewalk, and you're at 21,700. With slower vehicle speeds, you could also eliminate the clear zones (cleared out areas along the roadside for out-of-control cars to roll on into).

"This new street would be far more expensive though! Stroads are at least cheap, right?" No. Stroads require far more space and maintenance than comparable higher-capacity roads. Long, wide, and frequent turn lanes mean more asphalt, more traffic lights add cost and maintenance, as do high speeds.

The land that is served by stroads is incredibly low productivity. Parking lots are required, take up space, make no money, and pay little taxes. The land is very low-density by design, meaning a stroad serving powercenters is a high-cost, low-payoff way to use land.

Generic, low-productivity powercenter in Anywhere, USA.

So stroads are bankrupting our cities, but at least they are ugly, inefficient, and unsafe while doing it.

While I'm at it, here's another thing that I'm sorry I'm going to ruin for you (not really). There is a better way to control speed than speed limit enforcement. Everyone hates getting a speeding ticket, but often it's not your fault. When designing environments, the designer has a duty of communication. When that fails, the designer, not you, has failed. Ever pull on a door with a vertical handle, and felt stupid when you realized it's a push door? Don't. The designer made the door with a signifier (vertical handle) that grants the affordance (ability) of pulling. You're not stupid for pulling, even if there is a sign that says "Push."

Design isn't value-free. When designing a door, the values aren't that relevant, but when designing a roadway, prioritizing things like speed or flow over safety is creating a design that comes with a value statement about human life.

Roads are designed just as much as door handles. There is a road that I drive that signifies and grants the affordance of driving 50 mph. Wide, straight lanes, no intersections or distractions signal that driving fast is okay, however the speed limit is 35. I once drove that road at 35, and felt deeply unsafe, being passed by traffic going 15-20 mph faster. Speeding on that road is the safer choice, as it was designed for a high speed. When the road design doesn't match the speed, you are left to constantly monitor your speed. Have you ever carefully monitored your speed on complex, narrow street with lots of distractions? Of course not—the road design matches the intended speed.

Future Scott here: I just got back from driving around Scotland, and the design of the roads there tell you the speed limit. Whenever I checked the speed limit, it was about the speed I was going every time. Big wide roads has higher speed limits. When the speed limit was lower, the road was narrow, curvy, and complex to navigate, naturally slowing me down. I never needed to look at a speed limit sign the whole time I was there. The car could just as well have not had a speedometer at all.

Back to Past Scott: Okay, this has been fun bit of taking down stroads and road design, but pointing out problems is always is the easy part and trying to come up with solutions is the hard part—except with these problems. The solutions can be so easy to implement. Small changes in regulations can make a HUGE difference in the livability of a city. It's almost comical how much of a problem these regulations cause, and how a few targeted changes can eliminate these problems. I find it quite heartening and a wonderful area to direct resources.

Changing the standards to which we build essentially gives us a new road system for free—it just takes a few decades. As roads are regularly updated, it doesn't cost anything more to update to different, safer standards. Many changes are as easy as literally repainting a road.

What follows are specific recommendations, targeted to fix these issues.

Simple Solution #1: Update road standards to human-centric designs.

Streets and roads should be designed with humans in mind. Currently, when designing a road, the intended speed is chosen, followed by projected volume. It is then made as safe as the speed and volume allow, and the cost falls out of the equation. Humans, when asked what they want from their streets and roads, will prioritize 1) safety, 2) cost, followed by 3) volume, then 4) speed. This is almost the exact reverse of how streets and roads are actually designed.

Currently, roads are designed for cars. Switching the standards to consider the other road users - pedestrians, bikes, people in wheelchairs, will lead to more useable, efficient, and higher capacity roads. Techniques like traffic calming can help bring the design of the road match the intended speed.

The street here is brick, signaling that the car isn't the only user. The pedestrian crossing is on the same level rather than using a street cut. A pedestrian island in the middle means the pedestrian only has to look one way before crossing.

Chicanes are used here to narrow lanes, protect turning bikes, and the mini roundabout disallows cars breezing through the intersection without looking for other users.

This area is a huge rabbit hole. If you're interested in how to change standards with better designs, please look into the extra resources below. Traffic calming is just one of many arrows in the quiver.

Simple Solution #2: When updating stroads, slowly convert to streets or roads.

Stroads are not places like streets. Nor are they efficient at moving cars, like roads. Land can be used much more efficiently by creating dense, less car centric areas of high productivity where humans may actually want to spend time, with roads connecting these areas.

Stroad-to-road conversion:

• limit access
• prioritize throughput over access
• connect productive places
• embrace simplicity

Stroad-to-street conversion:

• Slow traffic (traffic calming)
• Prioritize people over throughput
• Build a productive place
• Embrace complexity

Better use of the space that stroads take up could take many forms. You can keep high speed travel in center lanes (roads) and have 'frontage roads' separated from high speed travel that includes all the intersections and complexity of a street. (Esplanade Street in Chico, CA does this). You can cut down to one lane in each direction, and include alternate travel options like sidewalks, public transit, and bike infrastructure to make these powercenters more productive. With less car demand, parking lots can be reclaimed into walkable places.

Simple Solution #3: When implementing alternate transit options, make them more convenient than driving.

On some trips, buses, or trains need to be the faster or cheaper option. If a bus gets a dedicated lane, it will arrive before the cars stuck in traffic. If the bus is more convenient, people will take the bus. If a bus is sitting in the same traffic as the cars, the only people who will use it are the people for who it is an ethical choice or those with no other options. The same goes for biking and trains. If trips are more convenient using other modes of travel, these modes of travel will get used. In Boulder, it is difficult to bike from off campus housing, but there is a convenient bus. Most students in Boulder take the bus. In Fort Collins, there is great biking infrastructure, so students bike. People will take the most convenient mode of transport, and creating more options means no one is forced to take any particular mode of transit. If you like driving, feel free to drive on the now less congested roads.

Changing the zoning rules and standards will change our cities. Every time a road or street gets an update, it can be brought up to the new standard. Cities aren't static; think to a time when you hadn't seen a city for 5+ years, and when you come back it seems unfamiliar. We've seen this happen before.

Car centric areas can be redesigned to reclaim area surrendered to cars and car infrastructure:

Before

After

With an decreased dependence on cars, cities will become less noisy (cities aren't loud, cars are loud) and less space will need to be devoted to parking lots. To see how much space that will open up, here is a map with parking lots and garages highlighted in red of Little Rock and the area around Disneyland in CA:

Notice the sea of red around Angel stadium and the parking surrounding Disneyland in the upper left

It's been done in the past; we can reclaim bad, car-centric, dangerous, and inefficient design and replace it with good, human-scale design.

In the US, we have a car culture, and no one is proposing to take that away. None of these interventions actually force cars off roads. They simply make the roads more efficient, more pleasant, and more productive.

Cheers,

  - Scott

Email List: tinyletter.com/scottsieke

Extra resources:

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles Marohn Jr.
• Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles Marohn Jr.
• The Deadly Myth That Human Error Causes Most Car Crashes 
• City Beautiful on YouTube
• Not Just Bikes on YouTube

The Reality of Renewables

Generating power for the entire country comes with one fascinating quirk: the national grid produces the energy that is demanded at that particular moment. Phrased another way, power is used as it is created. In Xcel’s Pawnee coal plant in Brush, CO, a piece of coal is burned to drive a steam turbine, and some microseconds later, that energy is used to boil a kettle in nearby Wiggins.

From this reality of the grid, several consequences follow. The country has to generate more energy when the Superbowl goes to commercial and Americans turn on stoves and microwaves, so we have to have power plants that can quickly ramp up their production to meet the sudden demand. This need has been problematic in the UK when unexpected breaks in soccer games drive millions to energy-hungry tea kettles.

The power plants that have the capability to ramp up and down their production in response to demand are called load following power plants. These load followers carefully track the energy needs of the grid they are supplying and ramp their production up and down to meet the demand at that moment. When the Superbowl starts, these are the plants that ramp up or turn on to supply electricity to millions of TVs.

As well as the load followers, other forms of energy generation are the more laid-back base load power plants. A great example of a base load plant is nuclear energy. If you asked a nuclear power plant to quickly ramp up production, they would ask how you got in, then say they can’t easily change their output. These plants are kept on 24/7 to meet the base load: the lowest expected daily energy demand.

The extreme example of load following plants are peaking power plants, known as “peakers.” These plants are by default not producing power and only turn on when the base load cannot be met by the base load power plants. Their sole purpose is to smooth out intermittencies and ensure that just enough power is being produced. These plants operate inefficiently to prioritize a fast ramp up and ramp down time, and so the power they provide commands a premium price, as demand is necessarily high.

So what happens if this system goes wrong and there is more or less energy on the grid than is demanded? You might not have heard of the electricity wars between Edison and Tesla (the inventors, not the companies), but you have certainly heard of the band AC/DC. AC/DC got their name after someone saw the initials on a sewing machine. It stands for Alternating Current or Direct Current. Direct current is the kind you get from batteries, and alternating current comes from wall outlets. It is called alternating because it switches direction 60 times a second – 60Hz.

When more or less energy is produced than is needed, this frequency changes, which could begin to wreak havoc on things plugged into the national grid that are expecting a particular frequency. The grid is expected to deliver within 1% of 60Hz frequency to businesses and residences here in the US. One solution to this problem of shifting frequency is to have consumer devices like refrigerators monitor the incoming AC current and when it deviates too much from 60Hz, the device responds by powering down to reduce the demand. Enough consumer devices doing this will reduce demand back to the operating limits, and save consumers a few dimes a year to boot.

At this point it is helpful to look at some data. The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) is the main grid operator in California, responsible for about 80% of the energy usage of the state. Helpfully, they put all their data online, and update it every five minutes, and keep records going back months.

To start, here is the demand curve: how much electricity is needed throughout the day. Note that the y axis does not start at 0:

No surprises here. Overnight, less energy is needed, and there is a peak in the morning as people are getting up and in the evening after getting back from work. A lot of this is from energy-intensive appliances that heat up food and water, and relatively less from lights and TVs, as might be expected.

Next let’s take a look at the Net Demand, or what happens when you subtract out renewables (again, note the y axis):

The purple here represents the non-renewable resources. As expected, there is a dip starting around 7 am, lasting until about 5pm. This midday dip in non-renewable energy demand comes from the sun hitting solar panels.

One thing that can be seen by looking at the Net Demand graphs from many days is that California has been heavily investing in megawatts of solar energy, and less so in wind energy. The effect of heavy investment in solar over wind is that there is a narrow margin of renewables available when the sun isn’t out. December 16, 2019 (the day the data from these graphs was collected) wasn’t a particularly windy day, but the point still holds when looking at relatively overcast and windy days (look at Sep 9, 2019 for an example of a cloudy and windy day).

Next is the graph I want to dig into a little bit:

This graph shows how California met its demand on December 16^th. I didn’t include coal, batteries, or “other” as they are insignificant to the overall supply, and I didn’t include Imports for clarity. The imports curve mirrors the natural gas curve, reduced by about 50%.

First to note is nuclear. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant provides a constant 1,100 MW to California’s overall supply 24/7. On December 16, its output varied between 1,102 and 1,106 MW. This nuclear plant is a base load plant that cannot ramp. The Diablo Canyon Plant is due to shut down in 2024 or 2025.

Next is large hydro, or water behind dams. These can be ramped quickly, but not indefinitely. The water level cannot vary too much, so there is a natural limit to how long these plants can be ramped up - once the water level falls, it's time to shut down. On the other hand, if snowmelt from the neighboring Sierra Nevadas comes through the dam, operators have no choice but to let the water through. This leads to cheap energy prices in spring months. Large hydro is somewhere between a base load and a load following power plant.

Renewables including wind, geothermal, biomass, biogas, and small hydro account for a about 2,000 MW, and these can be considered base load plants. Solar is intermittent, and so can be load-following, but the manner in which they can be load following seems a shame. To make a solar farm load following, build many more solar panels than you need, and connect or disconnect them as the load changes. This seems wasteful, however solar panels do have an unmatched ramp up and ramp down speed; turning them on and off takes nearly no time. California routinely overproduces and curtails solar power at certain facilities during summer months.

Lastly is the hero of California’s load following energy production: natural gas. Natural gas plants can ramp up and down production to follow the load far quicker than coal or nuclear plants. They are comparatively nimble and reactive. Natural gas is at this point absolutely indispensable. Without it, California would be entirely reliant on energy imports from Nevada to match demand.

One more curiosity from the CAISO database. There are times when the cost of energy is negative. Before you get excited, you're not going to see a check from the energy company unless you are a wholesale buyer of energy, which you aren't. This negative cost arises due to excess energy being produced, and the fact that energy is expensive to transport. In some cases, it is cheaper for the grid operator to pay middlemen to offload excess energy than it is to transport or ramp down production. Living nearby a large hydro installation in springtime benefits an energy consumer. A typical large hydro plant might have fifteen room-sized turbines, 5 of which are usually on, but while snowmelt is coming through all fifteen might be producing power to get the water through the dam. This energy is cheaper to offload locally than transport elsewhere. Note to supervillains with energy-hungry doomsday weapons: find a valley in California and run your tests in the springtime to save money on a big electric bill.

The whole reason to have base load plants, load-following plants, and consumer appliances that turn of and off depending on incoming AC frequency is that we don’t have any way to store large amounts of energy. This is analogous to trying to run a restaurant with no refrigerators, or a bar with no kegs – a logistical nightmare. The challenge of large-scale energy storage is what stands between our current power grid, and one that runs off intermittent sources of energy like wind and solar.

There are some ideas floating around that may be able to scale to meet some of the eventual demand for energy grid storage:

1)    Batteries. Creating batteries that power cities rather than cars, watches, or laptops is difficult. Just wiring a lot of LiPo batteries together isn’t going to cut it. These city batteries will need to be charged in the summer, and hold that charge until winter with a near zero failure rate, and be made from earth abundant elements.

<sidenote> "Rare earth elements" are poorly named. Most aren’t rare at all. Every "rare earth element" is more common than gold, and there is about as much selenium as there is nickel. The thing that makes them hard to extract (rare) is that they don’t clump in exploitable deposits like gold or gemstones – they are more evenly distributed. To get an appreciable amount, you need to dig up an process a lot of earth. </sidenote>

2)    Pump Hydro Storage. This is essentially pumping water uphill and behind a dam during the day when you have energy, and letting it flow through a turbine at night when you need it. You can also pump up extra water in the summer and it stores perfectly well until it is needed in the winter. There is a related idea that replaces the dam in a valley with an underground reservoir, and trades out gravity for pressure: pump water underground at high pressure, and release the pressure to drive a turbine when you want the energy back.

3)    Molten Salt. Using power generated during the day to heat up salt until it is molten, as well as chilling antifreeze. This creates an extreme thermal gradient and you can use this to drive a heat exchanger to get energy out. This method doesn’t have a long shelf life – heat up salt during the summer and it will be cold by winter.

The three above are highlighted in this video.

4)    Flywheels. During the day, use solar power to spin up an enormous circular weight called a flywheel, storing energy in the form of angular momentum. At night, apply the brakes to spin up a turbine.

5)    Vehicle-to-Grid. We are starting to heft around pretty big batteries in cars and sometimes in wall mounted batteries in garages. The idea is to use these batteries for ‘peak shaving:’ sending energy to the grid when demand is high, and ‘valley filling:’ charging batteries at night when demand is low.

Without large scale and reliable energy storage solutions, the only way to move fully to renewable resources would be to fully supply our power needs even in the dreary January. Meeting the demand in January using California’s current ratio of renewable energy sources would result in overproduction in summer months several times over.

In the meantime, we need to meet the base load, follow the load as it changes, all while not releasing too much CO₂. The path ahead seems clear:

·      Innovate and install energy storage solutions

·      Continue to invest in diverse renewable power sources

·      Build more nuclear plants to meet the base load

·      Keep our natural gas infrastructure in place until it’s no longer needed to follow the load

Cheers,

  - Scott

Extra watching for nerds

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