April 16, 2010 France: ‘Smurf House’? ‘Chinese Hat’? Museum Intrigues

Article and photo published by The New York Times.

‘Smurf House’? ‘Chinese Hat’? Museum Intrigues



METZ, France — From afar, the new Pompidou museum in this postindustrial landscape resembles an enormous snow-white toadstool rising out of a wasteland. The avant-garde shape of the building in this otherwise sleepy provincial city of Lorraine, in once German eastern France, has inspired a flood of nicknames. The mayor calls it the Smurf House. Some residents prefer the more elegant Chinese Hat, because Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect who designed the building, used a woven bamboo hat purchased years ago in Paris as the inspiration for his roof.
With its modular structure and futuristic design, the “Pompidou-Metz” — the first regional branch of Paris’s famed Pompidou Center, scheduled to open its doors in May — is many things to many people, but whether it can become the next Bilbao, as the town fathers hope, is another question altogether.
Metz, an unglamorous, bourgeois, often neglected city of 127,500 people, is home to one of France’s largest military bases. In these bland surroundings, the flamboyantly modern building, devoted exclusively to contemporary art, was initially perceived as out of place, even a little bizarre.
Metz, as many here will quickly tell you, suffers from an identity problem, having circulated over the centuries between German and French rule. It was under Germanic rule for 700 years, until the 17th century, then under modern Germany from 1871 to 1918, and again between 1940 and 1944.
For many years after World War II, said its mayor, Dominique Gros, Metz suffered a protracted crisis of identity. “Those commotions,” as he chose to call them, “destroyed the city’s self-esteem,” he said.
The “Germanization” of Metz after 1871 also led to a huge exodus of the city’s largely French upper class and intelligentsia. “People still see Metz as a German city,” said the mayor, a Socialist elected in 2008.
Metz has magnificent medieval and Belle Époque architecture, but no major opera house, only one theater and a dozen art galleries.
Even the city’s main attraction, the 13th-century cathedral of St. Étienne — with one of Europe’s largest collections of stained glass, including a dozen works designed by Marc Chagall — is not well known outside Metz.
“For the rest of France, we are a barracks city, a sad and ugly city,” said Corinne Wilhelm, 43, who owns the Kangourou Café on the central Place Saint-Jacques.
The museum, which is intended to serve as a cultural center as well, with conferences, films and performances, was financed in large parts by the Lorraine region and the city of Metz.
The new museum will have the right to choose among the 65,000 artworks that the Pompidou center in Paris, the largest contemporary collection in Europe, has in storage.
Metz has dreams of becoming a European artistic hub, but that will mean cashing in on what many here, including the mayor, call “the Guggenheim effect,” after the urban transformation of Bilbao, Spain, that centered on the striking Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry.
The Bilbao museum now has more than a million annual visitors, transforming a grimy, industrial city in northern Spain into one of Europe’s major cultural destinations. Mr. Gros had Bilbao’s deputy mayor visit Metz for advice.
“Metz has bet on a Guggenheim effect since the beginning,” said Gérard Michaux, vice president of the University of Metz and a professor of history. “We have the same potential as Bilbao and we will do our best to make economical profits, even if it’s a long-term process.”
The Guggenheim effect is not easily duplicated, but it has inspired other neglected areas, like Lens, in northern France, to seek branches of larger cultural institutions, in that case, the Louvre.
For Thomas Werquin, an economist and the president of an association that studies urban planning projects, the Guggenheim effect is a “myth.”
“A lot of cities now think that having a big, branded museum is enough to make a name for themselves; it’s a big problem,” he said. “The museum is a great element of urban marketing, but not a cultural policy.”
For Mr. Werquin, the Guggenheim museum only served as an “accelerator” in Bilbao’s already strong and determined urban policy.
Laurent Le Bon, director of the Pompidou-Metz, said that unlike in Bilbao, his museum, with a strategic location between Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and France, could become a flagship for contemporary art in Europe. He hopes to see the museum attract about 200,000 visitors annually.
The museum will have one of the biggest display walls in the world, Mr. Le Bon said proudly in an interview. Picasso’s huge “Rideau de scène de parade” will be hung there, he noted, for an inaugural exhibition in May called “Chefs d’oeuvre?” The exhibit will feature about 800 artworks, many of which are rarely on loan, like Alexander Calder’s “Joséphine Baker IV,” Picasso’s “Femme à la tête rouge” and works by Matisse and Braque.
Some residents, like Bernard Staudt, have already begun to benefit from the museum. When he first saw the building, he said, he was mesmerized by the simplicity of the shapes, the elegant materials and the prevalence of natural light. “People love it here — it has become their No. 1 subject of conversation,” he said.
So last year, he sold his gallery in the city center and bought an old factory opposite the Pompidou building. He plans to convert it to a “New York-like loft” selling contemporary art.
If the name “Pompidou” has no particular resonance for her, Ms. Wilhelm, the owner of the Kangourou Café, is also captivated by the building’s architecture.
“People here don’t know much about contemporary art,” Mrs. Wilhelm admitted. “But we find the roof magnificent!”

Transportation: Would streetcars in D.C. spoil the city's vistas?

Article posted by the Washington Post

On the rails? D.C. and streetcars (access photo gallery)

Transportation in Washington has never run smoothly. The District, however, is planning to reintroduce streetcars, to provide options to bus and Metro users and to spur economic development. Although several miles of track have already been laid, there are still hurdles. Part of the streetcar¿s appeal, however, is pure nostalgia. And so we offer a glimpse of 1930s Washington.

Would streetcars in D.C. spoil the city's vistas?
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Does the District of Columbia want to awe America, or inspire it? That's the philosophical question underlying the suddenly hot debate about streetcars, the overhead wires that power them, and the combined effect of both on the city's streetscape.
Tracks already laid in Anacostia and along H Street and Benning Road in Northeast Washington show how close the city is to realizing the dream of adding an efficient modern streetcar network to its increasingly clogged grid of streets and balky, overcrowded Metro system. But an 1889 law that bans overhead wires in the historic city could slow implementation and increase its cost.
Arguments against overhead wires rest on two essential assumptions: that the city is filled with streets that have historically significant and aesthetically impressive views; and that wires and poles would be ugly intrusions on these grand vistas. The former is questionable, the latter a matter of opinion.
But the deeper issue is Washington's relation to the nation. Do we want to preserve the early 20th-century sense of ourselves as a grand, imperial city that overawes tourists? Or do we want to be a model city for the 21st century, a place where visitors from across the country and around the world can be inspired by innovative experiments in sustainable urban life?
For many of the vast hordes of tourists who visited Washington for cherry blossom season, this city may be their first experience of walkable streets, mass transportation and extensive public parkland. There are certainly other more progressive cities on the tourist agenda -- most of them not in America -- but the power of Washington to lead by example shouldn't be overlooked by residents who take its considerable amenities for granted. A streetcar system, quiet and pollution-free, connecting neighborhoods once balkanized by race and economic distinctions, would be an important chance for Washington to lead by example.
So what to make of historic preservation concerns raised by groups, such as the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, that overhead wires -- the easiest and probably the cheapest technology to install -- would ruin the open view down D.C. boulevards? One wonders if they've actually gone out in the street and looked for a view anytime recently.
There are, of course, some impressive views in the District. The Capitol and its majestic dome make views down Pennsylvania Avenue iconic and inviolable. But there are no plans to run the streetcar system down Pennsylvania Avenue (although there are admirable plans to create bike lanes down its center). From the Mall, the view north up Fourth Street SW gives one a good sense of exactly what preservationists believe they need to protect: the mini-Acropolis of the Old City Hall (designed by George Hadfield) topped by the pediment of the National Building Museum (designed by Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs) behind it. This is indeed an example of Washington's open streetscape yielding a beautiful vista. But there are no plans to run a streetcar up Fourth Street.
There are plans, however, to run it down Eighth Street in Northeast and Southeast Washington, and one might worry that wires would impair the view of the Navy Yard gate, designed by Benjamin Latrobe, the great federal architect who also worked on the Capitol and the White House. Except that Latrobe's gate, much altered over the years, is all but blocked from view by the hideously ugly bulk of the Southeast Freeway.
If you listen to preservationists, the most ardent of whom oppose any overhead wires in the city, you might think Washington was loaded with great vistas. And it is, but not the awe-inspiring views they're thinking about, which turn out to be fairly few and often not that impressive. Even down our wide avenues, sightlines tend to terminate in small monuments that are best seen up close.
The great views down the streets of Washington are just coming into their full glory as the leaves of spring return. These aren't wide-open vistas with monumental buildings in the far distance; they are tunnel-like views of shaded streets, overarched by majestic elms, oaks and maples. These shady tubes of green, which are rare in newer and suburban neighborhoods, are the truly distinctive beauty of Washington. The only reasonable concern about running overhead wires should be the protection of trees that create these glorious canopies.
According to Mike Galvin of Casey Trees (a nonprofit group committed to protecting and restoring trees in the District), that means maintaining ground permeability around tree trunks and avoiding an overhead wire system that would require damaging pruning of the leaf canopy. Both principles argue in favor of running wires closer to the centers of streets, right where they would most obstruct the theoretical beauty so dear to some preservationists. But would that really matter on, say, Eighth Street SE, where the old trees are spectacular and the view of the Navy Yard long since obliterated by a highway?
Right now, progress toward new streetcars, which could begin rolling as soon as 2012, depends on moving forward with a so-called "hybrid" streetcar that would use wires for most of its 37 miles, with batteries or supercapacitors (which recharge and discharge power somewhat like a hybrid car) to power it in historically sensitive areas. This mix of wires and some wireless stretches (of up to a mile) would keep the views that are truly remarkable intact (on and near the Mall or crossing North Capitol Street). It would also allow the District Department of Transportation to keep in place track it has already laid, and to shop around among different streetcar vendors for cars and future equipment.
"When you have more than one manufacturer that is building those vehicles, it is a lot more flexible," says Scott Kubly, head of DDOT's streetcar program. Flexible, and cheaper, not just to get the system started, but to maintain and expand it.
The ardent (shall we just say unreasonable?) anti-wire contingent would prefer a system that runs entirely on underground power, which DDOT says is problematic during snow and ice and would force them to work with a single proprietary vendor, thus potentially driving up costs and keeping the system in thrall to a single supplier.
This is a ridiculous demand, and not just because it would limit the District's options, force it to pay more and result in a system that might not function during weather such as we all remember from February. It is ridiculous because it assumes that wires are ugly.
Some wires are, and one is thankful for the many District neighborhoods where the majority of wires and cables are underground. But wires powering a modern and environmentally friendly streetcar are the opposite of ugly. They are a manifest advertisement to the world that the city is committed to public transportation, limiting its carbon footprint and improving quality of life. The flexibility of a hybrid system means that not only can the occasional monumental views of Washington be preserved wire-free, but that in certain areas the really distinctive views -- the urban allees of overarching trees -- might be kept wire-free, too. If DDOT is flexible on both counts, the addition of streetcars would be as beautiful as any view of a marble monolith anywhere in the District.

May 20, 2010 Houston: The Five Things Standing Between Houston and Effective Mass Transit

The Five Things Standing Between Houston and Effective Mass Transit
May 13th by The Infrastructurist
This guest post is by Kristie Lewis, who writes on the topics of construction management degrees. She welcomes your comments at Kristie.Lewis81@gmail.com.

Houston is the fourth most populous metropolitan area in the U.S., and its population numbers have been steadily rising as the Texan urban economy fares better than its counterparts during the recession. Given its size, one might think that the city would have a public transportation system that would rival any in the nation. But the sad reality is that Houston’s public transportation is, in a word, abysmal. As a longtime Houston denizen and a daily user of its MetroRAIL service, I have identified the following five problems that form the crux of Houston’s mass transit crisis.
1. Attitude
Before any problem actually manifests itself, it has seeds in ideas. A major, almost ideological obstacle to improving Houston’s public transportation is the enduring notion in this town (and the country at large) that one absolutely needs a car to be anybody, or to do anything. Is it true? Partially. And a lot of its truth stems from the layout of the city itself, as Houston is the only urban area in America with no formal zoning laws. However, George Washington University law student Michael Lewyn interestingly contests this notion, explaining that Houston’s auto-dependence can be blamed on other factors as well. I believe that auto dependence in Houston has only become a self-fulfilling prophecy because of preconceived notions held about the city.
2. Politics
Since its founding, the MetroRAIL service has endured a steady barrage of political trials and tribulations. First there were financial accusations against the PAC that supported its construction. Then fingers were pointed at the Houston Chronicle for its supposedly biased media coverage, after an internal memorandum leaked suggesting the paper had political intentions behind rallying support for the rail. Now that the construction of several new lines is in the works, the most recent political scandal involves MetroRAIL itself being accused of shredding documents that would disqualify the new lines from receiving federal funding.
DiggSubmit
3. Budgeting
Closely associated with the political issues that surround Houston’s light rail system is its budgeting. In fact, budgeting is what nearly the entire political argument is about in the first place. The Houston’s Clear Thinkers blog gives a rundown of the most recent financial disasters, while the Chronicle has reported that Mayor Annise Parker chastised the Metro agency for its fiscal irresponsibility and for breaching the public’s trust.
4. Law Enforcement
One thing I’ve noticed as a frequent rail rider is the inefficiency in the law enforcement system. Unlike many subways and rail systems across the country, the Houston MetroRAIL is patronized by an honor system: You purchase your ticket from the kiosk at the stop, you board the rail, and then you show your ticket or pass whenever an officer happens to be checking.
Yes, this payment system has its advantages. It cuts down on time lag, and there isn’t any need for turnstiles. All you have to do is hop on, theoretically. But the problems presented with an honor system are too numerous to count — there’s the free rider problem, and the need for consistent and expensive police monitoring, and on and on. What’s more, the de facto police presence is anything but consistent. The police particularly target Houston’s many homeless. The ticket checks often end in several fine citations, which create legions of bureaucratic court cases. One friend of mine went to court to appeal a citation he’d received. After waiting for hours in line with several others who received similar tickets, they were all informed that the court date and location had changed. My friend now has a court location outside the city, and the date was pushed back six months.
5. Construction
Houston has begun construction on several new rail lines set to be finished between 2012 and 2014. While the expansion of the rail system has come under fire from all sides in terms of budget, yet another controversy sparked only a few weeks ago regarding the new rail cars recently purchased from a company in Spain. Metro Houston is currently under investigation by the FTA for violating the “Buy America ” clause. Many Houston residents are also fearful that their businesses, homes, and historical landmarks could be sacrificed in the new rail lines’ construction process.
Obviously, there aren’t easy solutions to the complex problems surrounding the desperately-needed improvements to Houston’s deficient public transport. I can only propose a standard through which all future considerations should be sifted. As a proud Houston resident, optimistic for the future of this city and its development as a leading economic and cultural center, I prescribe that the city think of its residents first and foremost. Houston Metro should not turn what is essentially a civic duty into a political travesty. Sure, there is money to be made (and lost), and there are parties that will inevitably be pandered to. But in the end, the traffic congestion in Houston is now out of control, and with a steady population increase, it will only worsen. Houston is one of the most polluted cities in this country, and its urban sprawl is exponentially expanding. If we want Houston to continue its economic success, then figuring out how to transport its millions of residents safely and efficiently via mass transit should be the city’s top priority.

November 2, 2010 South Korea: New Songdo City

Photos and article published by Architectural Record

New Songdo City
10/2010
A Green City Rises: Inspired by precedents from around the world, New Songdo City emerges near Incheon International Airport as an up-and-coming bustling business hub primed to bring South Korea’s struggling economy back on track.
Strategically situated just a short distance from the airport across a suspension bridge, New Songdo City is intended to become an international business hub within easy access of neighboring Asian cities. Propagating outward from Central Park, the city consists of a patchwork of neighborhoods laced together with pedestrian-friendly, tree-lined avenues and broad boulevards created in response to South Korea’s enduring enthusiasm for car travel.

Rendering courtesy KPF


A retail and entertainment center designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind, Riverstone is next in the construction queue. Located amid the city’s commercial zone opposite Central Park, the complex includes a department store, cinema, ice-skating rink, and food court. Reminiscent of the dramatic South Korean landscape, it consists of jagged volumes that guide the flow of pedestrian traffic like rocks in a riverbed.

Photo © Gale International


The tallest building in South Korea, the 68-story Northeast Asia Trade Tower stands out as a landmark on the New Songdo City skyline. Symbolizing the city’s mission to promote international trade, it occupies a key position next to the convention center at the end of the canal that runs through Central Park. Changing shape from a quadrilateral to a triangular plan as it ascends, the skyscraper contains offices below coupled with hotel and service apartments above, where the tower tapers. While the building’s striking form responds to the clients’ goal of architectural innovation for individual buildings, high-performance glazing and exterior shading devices help satisfy the request for lowered energy consumption by reducing solar heat gain and cooling loads. Heerim Architects was the associate architect.

Photo © H.G. Esch

Sustainability: Swedish commuters' body heat to warm office

Article published by Reuters.



Swedish commuters' body heat to warm office
Thu Jan 10, 2008 3:08pm GMT
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Swedish state-owned firm has found a cheap, eco-friendly source of energy to warm one of its offices: body heat from a quarter million commuters steaming through Stockholm's central train station. Body heat already warms the station itself but the surplus, currently let out in thin air, will be redirected to provide as much as 15 percent of the heating in a planned 4,000 square meter office building, real estate firm Jernhusen said.
"We had a look at it and thought 'We might actually be able to use this'," said Karl Sundholm, project leader at Jernhusen, which also owns the station. "This feels good. Instead of just airing the leftover heat out we try to make use of it." Jernhusen markets the building as "environment smart" and aims for its energy consumption to be half of what a corresponding building usually is.
The bodily warmth from the central station will be redirected to heat up water. The investment will be around 200,000 Swedish crowns ($31,200), Sundholm said. "The ventilator aggregates are already there, and even some of the pipes. All we need to do is complement with a few pumps and pipes."
(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom)

Jernhusen Central Train Station make over  web page

December 27, 2007 Most Literate U.S. Cities: Minneapolis and Seattle

Article published by  livescience.com

Most Literate U.S. Cities: Minneapolis and Seattle
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience

Residents of Minneapolis and Seattle are the most bookish and well-read, according to results from a new survey released today of the most literate American cities.

The survey focused on 69 U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or above. Jack Miller of Central Connecticut State University chose six key indicators to rank literacy. These included newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.

Overall, the top 10 most literate (and wired) cities included:

1—Minneapolis, Minn.
2—Seattle, Wash.
3—St. Paul, Minn.
4—Denver, Colo.
5—Washington, D.C.
6—St. Louis, Mo.
7—San Francisco, Calif.
8—Atlanta, Ga.
9—Pittsburgh, Pa.
10—Boston, Mass.

Car Share: It's Nice To Car Share

Article excerpts and photos published by The Austin Chronicle.

DECEMBER 31, 2010
It's Nice To Car Share
The more hands on the wheel, the merrier
By Kate X Messer

Car2Go CEO and President Nicholas Cole. Photo by Jana Birchum
...For the last four years, my relationship with cars has changed radically. My empty nest status has been in flux. When I found the cost of maintaining two cars for myself and my college-bound son financially impossible, I began rooting around for options. Paring down to one car between us was the first step.Capital Metro (no offense, Austin public transpo providers) and my cobbled-together options just didn't cut it. The delayed bus transfers, taxis, rides begged from friends, rental cars, and all the attendant panic attacks were clearly not the solution to this mounting mobility crisis. No bueno.

The boundary around Car2Go's current operating area, as seen above, is known as the "geo-fence." (Smaller shaded areas around UT and some state properties indicate locations where parking is limited or restricted.) Car2Go has announced that it will be expanding its geo-fence in the early part of 2011.
Less than a month-and-a-half after my tragic and guilt-inducing Gulf Coast sojourn, my car-sharing card was in the mail.
Baby, You Can Share My Car
Though it may seem new, the concept of car sharing has been around the block a time or two. While car shares have been documented as far back as the late 1940s, one of the first successful, ongoing programs was loosely based on and founded by the folks behind Europe's White Bicycle project (think Austin Yellow Bike Project). Amsterdam's Witkar ("white car") launched in the late 1960s and lasted into the mid-Eighties, offering reasonable transportation solutions in the city center, where it provided mobility to more than 4,000 users during its decade-and-a-half of existence.
Varied car-sharing successes and developments continued over the next 25 years in northern Europe and North America. Accord­ing to Innovative Mobility Research – a group working within the University of Calif­ornia's Transportation Sustainability Research Center in Berkeley – as of October 2008, car-share programs were "operating in 22 countries and four continents, accounting for an estimated 650,000 members sharing approximately 20,000 vehicles." By July 2010, more than 10,000 vehicles were being officially shared in North America alone, serving more than 500,000 members.
The most successful operation is Zipcar, launched in Cambridge, Mass., in June 2000. Currently, Zipcar boasts 400,000 members worldwide. In the U.S., it operates in 13 major cities and on more than 100 college campuses, representing 80% of the country's market share for car-share programs. Recently, Zipcar announced that it will bring a fleet to Austin's University of Texas campus in January 2011.
The biggest local car-share news of the past year, however, has been the unmistakable influx of adorable blue-and-white mini-storm-troopers, from German car manufacturer Daimler AG. Its Car2Go program, featuring the Smart brand's Smart ForTwo model, began in November 2009 (and continues currently on a month-to-month basis) with a pilot program in cooperation with the city of Austin. The program placed 200 of the tiny Smarts within the bureaucratic belly to help expand the city's fleet by allowing city employees on- and off-work access to test the car-share model. On May 21, 2010, Car2Go expanded its service to the general public and has, since that date, signed up more than 15,000 members in Central Texas. News of that success has put Austin on the lips, blogs, and pages of car-share enthusiasts, green advocates, and tech-trend-watchers across the globe.
By the time the Car2Go program became available to the general public, it had already been through six months of working out kinks with the city employees' pilot program. This successful beta test, the national and international news buzz, and anecdotal enthusiasm from some Car2Go co-workers certainly factored into my decision to enroll in the program and use it actively. Eventually, I realized I was no longer resigned to having to save for a second car.
Fire Up the Batmobile
City spokeswoman Karla Taylor Villalón characterizes the city's relationship with Car2Go as "a zero-revenue model." She says, "We made it very clear from the beginning that we weren't going to put any revenue into the game, that if they wanted to have a pilot program with us, then those were the terms they had to agree to." Nevertheless, the project has been mutually beneficial. City staff can use the cars both for departmental and personal use: "They have two accounts," says Car2Go CEO and President Nicholas Cole. "When they access the vehicle with their membership card, it's either to the city or their personal account." Meanwhile, he says, for the duration of the program, the city allows Car2Go to have "free-floating parking ... at any metered spot" in addition to 31 designated on-street Car2Go parking spaces that can accomodate 62 Smart cars. Of course, from Car2Go's perspective, perhaps even more valuable than the free parking is the free publicity. Says Paul DeLong, Car2Go's head of North American sales and marketing, "Our cars are our biggest advertisement."
Aside from the obvious word-of-mouth that 200 cute cars can generate, the program also provides an altogether different sort of feedback. Each Car2Go vehicle is equipped with an elaborate GPS-based telematic system (not unlike OnStar but unique to the Car2Go program), and the information collected from the 15,000-member data sample can "serve as a catalyst on some level to track population movement and trends Downtown," says Cole. Austin's condo culture, currently mushrooming across the city's urban corridors, is an ideal testing ground for introducing car sharing deep in the heart of car-addicted Texas. "They're paying $1.2 million for a beautiful condo, but they're not even guaranteed parking," says DeLong. He believes that car-share programs can play an important part in the mobility-solutions puzzle.
That raw data has also proven beneficial for the city in other ways, in that it reflects specific vehicle usage in each participating department. "That data-rich environment can help us make better decisions about fleet purchases and reduction," says Villalón. "For instance," she says, "if one department holds on to a car for eight hours, that scenario might not be as beneficial as using it for short hauls for four or five employees throughout the day. Those are the bits of information telematics can give us to better make decisions."
Pounding Pavement, Laying Asphalt
But it wasn't Car2Go that pioneered car sharing in Austin. Back in fall 2006, a group of local enviroluminati launched the first vehicle-sharing program in the state of Texas. Brandi Clark Burton was a founding board member of the fledgling Austin CarShare, which at its peak served 450 members with a modest fleet of seven vehicles. After four years of operation, in July 2010, a few months into the city's relationship with Car2Go, Austin CarShare announced it was ceasing daily operations.
"It was never a totally solid business model," admits Clark Burton, who left her board position in January 2010. "It was always undercapitalized and held together by modest fundraising and the good will of board members." What it did accomplish, aside from its obvious and lofty mission to lower greenhouse-gas emissions (by an estimated 40,000 pounds, according to a farewell letter sent last summer by ACS to its members), was to establish the car-sharing precedent in a town not known for its forward-thinking mass transit models. It also worked its way through the often Byzantine city government processes necessary to establish such a program and negotiated free parking spaces from City Council – no small feat, and a coup that many say laid the groundwork for Austin's continued stake in car-sharing viability. "If you look at other cities," says Clark Burton, car-share programs "pay top dollar for parking spaces."
"Car2Go is doing what we dreamed, by putting high numbers of [shared] cars on the road," says Clark Burton. "But they only have two-seater cars, which is only good for a certain aspect of most people's lives." Austin CarShare's small fleet of seven – which included a truck – provided options that Clark Burton believes are optimal for car sharing's long-term appeal. Clark Burton had hoped that, ultimately, ACS and Car2Go could coexist or even work together. "We were hopeful that we could create a co-branded cooperative solution for people interested in car sharing," she says, "maybe as a nonprofit providing educational outreach" by offering workshops, crunching numbers, and building awareness among potential members. While the ACS board still exists, it is burdened with, as Clark Burton puts it, "a big, fat debt." Still, she says, "It would be great if ACS could survive and be that complement."

"We're definitely keeping communication channels open with the ACS board," says Car2Go's DeLong of a possible future collaboration between the two programs.

Who's Gonna Drive You Home Tonight?
As much of a love affair as Austin is having with car sharing in general and Car2Go specifically, Villalón insists that the city's connection with them is ... well, let's just say it's more of an open relationship. At some point, the city will be flirting with other car-share options (Zipcar being a particularly curious coquette, given its recently announced dalliance with UT). "We've made them fully aware from the beginning that we'll go through an [request for proposals] process and open up to all potential vendors, and they'll be one of the potential vendors," said Villalón. "There's no guarantee that they'll be a selectee. They have to go through the process like anybody else."
No matter where this relationship goes, the mutual benefits are already apparent. What both the city and Car2Go have learned through their collaboration has changed the nature of Austin's transportation future. The city has been able to expand its efficiency and data collection thanks in part to participation in car sharing, and it's using what it has gleaned to further refine the RFPs that will be issued as Austin's car-share possibilities open up in ways not previously imagined. In fact, says Villalón, the city will "probably put out a separate RFP related to installing telematics in existing city vehicles" to track usage, miles driven, length of trips, and so forth.
The initial yearlong term for the city's pilot program ended in November 2010, but the city has decided to continue its relationship with the Daimler program. "It's still a pilot program," says Villalón. "The terms haven't changed. It's still a barter agreement but is now renewed on a month-to-month basis."
Roads? Where We're Going ...
According to research from UC-Berkeley, people who have joined car-share programs have saved $154 to $435 a month on transportation costs. For this single mom feathering an emptying nest and trying to economize while concerned about the fate of our oil-soaked culture, car sharing has proven worthwhile (see "My Hooptie: Kate's Cost Comparison" - posted below). But for the concept to become a viable transportation solution for many drivers in a car town like Austin, car sharing needs to kick into overdrive.
"We want to be part of the overall solution here," says Cole, which is why, he says, it's essential to have transit players like Capital Metro at the table to discuss how these various options might complement one another. "They seem very open and willing to listen to new ideas, and we wanted to make sure that they didn't feel that we were here to take away their ridership. Just the opposite, actually. And I think that car sharing is driving more people to public transit, and vice versa – we'll benefit as well." Villalón confirms, "If you look at other cities, you'll find that [car sharing and public transit] are complementary services, not competing."

This past November, Car2Go announced three innovations for spring 2011: The program will add 100 cars to the current fleet of 200; it's replacing the original 200 Smart ForTwos with Daimler's new Car2Go edition, designed by Smart specifically for car sharing; and it's expanding the program's "geo-fence" – or car-share operating area (see map, above).

Studies show that in North America, "the growth of car sharing could be exponential over the next six years," says Cole. "If people are aware of it, they're gonna use it, and if it's not for them, they could always opt to buy a vehicle if they choose to."

Car sharing is a tricky concept for a culture addicted to Texas tea. "Getting people to consider implementing it is a one-on-one conversation," says Clark Burton. "For someone to realistically make the choice to give up a car and rely on a car-share system, there has to be volume." Car2Go's DeLong feels confident in his company's continued role in Austin's car-share revolution: "Fifteen thousand people have signed up. They get it."

DECEMBER 31, 2010
My Hooptie: Kate's Cost Comparison*
BY KATE X MESSER
*your mileage may vary
Should I buy a second car? According to my numbers, the answer is no. Sharing one car with my son was no easy feat until we joined Car2Go this past summer. Since then, I've used the service anywhere between 66 and 160 minutes a month, at a cost of about $23-56. I could use it that much every week and still not spend what I would if I bought that second car – even a cheap one. Here's a breakdown comparing my Car2Go expenditures to the costs of ownership at both ends of a hypothetical price range (my old hooptie vs. a late-model one).
Weekly Cost
1991 Mazda ($1,000 cash) $59.61
2007 Dodge ($10,000 financed)  $110.38
Car2Go (40 minutes/week)  $14.67
Note: Estimated ownership costs include purchase price, maintenance, gas and oil, insurance (for a single driver), registration, parking, and related fees. Car2Go costs 35 cents a minute, plus a $35 registration fee. (Hour- and daylong rentals are discounted; the per-minute price increases to 45 cents after 150 miles in one trip.) Weekly costs decrease after one year for the Mazda (to $40.38) and after four years for the Dodge (to $59.61).

Finance: The Case Against Homeownership

Photo and article published by Time magazine.

Suburban development outside Lancaster, PA (Vincent Laforet)

The Case Against Homeownership
By Barbara Kiviat Saturday, Sep. 11, 2010

Homeownership has let us down. For generations, Americans believed that owning a home was an axiomatic good. Our political leaders hammered home the point. Herbert Hoover argued that homeownership could "change the very physical, mental and moral fiber of one's own children." Franklin Roosevelt held that a country of homeowners was "unconquerable." Homeownership could even, in the words of George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Jack Kemp, "save babies, save children, save families and save America." A house with a front lawn and a picket fence wasn't just a nice place to live or a risk-free investment; it was a way to transform a nation.
Houses owned by the people who lived in them, we believed, created social and financial stability — more-involved citizens, safer neighborhoods, kids who did better in school. No wonder leaders of all political stripes wanted to spend more than $100 billion a year on subsidies and tax breaks to encourage people to buy.
See pictures of Boise's struggling housing market.
But our leaders, with our encouragement, went much too far. The dark side of homeownership is now all too apparent: foreclosures and walkaways, neighborhoods plagued by abandoned properties and plummeting home values, a nation in which families have $6 trillion less in housing wealth than they did just three years ago. Indeed, easy lending stimulated by the cult of homeownership may have triggered the financial crisis and led directly to its biggest bailout, that of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Housing remains a drag on the economy. Existing-home sales in July dropped 27% from the prior month, exacerbating fears of a double-dip recession and accelerating the accompanying slide in stock that took the Dow Jones industrial average to a seven-week low. And all that is just the obvious tale of a housing bubble and what happened when it popped. The real story is deeper and darker still.
For the better part of a century, politics, industry and culture aligned to create a fetish of the idea of buying a house. Homeownership has done plenty of good over the decades; it has provided stability to tens of millions of families and anchored a labor-intensive sector of the economy. Yet by idealizing the act of buying a home, we have ignored the downsides. In the bubble years, lending standards slipped dramatically, allowing many Americans to put far too much of their income into paying for their housing. And we ignored longer-term phenomena too. Homeownership contributed to the hollowing out of cities and kept renters out of the best neighborhoods. It fed America's overuse of energy and oil. It made it more difficult for those who had lost a job to find another. Perhaps worst of all, it helped us become casually self-deceiving: by telling ourselves that homeownership was a pathway to wealth and stable communities and better test scores, we avoided dealing with these formidable issues head-on.
See high-end homes that won't sell.
Now, as the U.S. recovers from the biggest housing bust since the Great Depression, it is time to rethink how realistic our expectations of homeownership are — and how much money we want to spend chasing them. As members of both government and industry grapple with re-envisioning Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the rest of the housing finance system, many argue that homeownership should not be a goal pursued at all costs. "There is this notion that being housed well is synonymous with being a homeowner," says Raphael Bostic, assistant secretary for policy development and research at HUD. "That narrative has got to change."
The Homesteaders
The concept of mass homeownership seems an inseparable part of American mythology. The U.S., we tell ourselves, has always been a nation of bootstrapping immigrants, a place where, in the 19th century, anyone with enough endurance could head West and collect a homestead.
Yet it wasn't until the 20th century that Washington started throwing major resources at turning everyone into a homeowner. In 1919 the government took over the Own Your Own Home campaign that the National Association of Real Estate Boards (the present-day National Association of Realtors) had launched. As Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover was a booster, declaring that "maintaining a high percentage of individual homeowners is one of the searching tests that now challenge the people of the United States."
The Great Depression didn't make that test easy. As the economy collapsed and foreclosures swept the nation, first Hoover, elected President in 1928, and then Franklin Roosevelt signed a series of laws to get banks lending again, including legislation creating the Federal Housing Administration to insure mortgages and the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) to buy them up, thus freeing banks to lend even more. These new agencies went hand in hand with the establishment of a new sort of loan, one lasting for 30 years at a fixed rate of interest. The 30-year mortgage was a revolution, a stark contrast to the short-term loans that had been the norm until then; it put homeownership within the reach of many more families. It made perfect sense. At a time when 25% of workers were jobless and a third of the lost jobs were in construction and related trades, kick-starting housing was a smart piece of economic stimulus.
See pictures of the housing crisis in Cleveland.

Yet even when the economy had regained its footing after World War II, Washington's encouragement of homeownership continued. At first, homeownership was a handy way to prompt a transition to a higher standard of living: from cold-water flats in cities to tree-lined cul-de-sacs in the suburbs. But with each new Administration, some fresh advantage appeared, and rarely was the benefit questioned. Bill Clinton set out to create 8 million homeowners, and George W. Bush another 5.5 million. In 2002, Bush said, "If you own your own home, you're realizing the American Dream" — though when historian James Truslow Adams coined that term in 1931, he didn't say anything about owning a house. Still, "before the bubble burst, homeownership was a win for everyone," says historian Vincent Cannato, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Whether you were looking to promote personal responsibility, ease the postwar housing shortage for returning veterans, help the poor establish a financial foothold or drum up jobs in a labor-heavy industry, homeownership was the answer.
As a consequence, Washington lavishes homeowners with special treatment. When they file their income taxes, they can deduct mortgage interest and property taxes. When they sell, they don't have to pay tax on the first few hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. In 1986 the tax code was rewritten, disallowing the deduction of interest from consumer loans like credit card debt, but an exception was made for the interest paid on a mortgage — a caveat that cost the government some $80 billion in lost revenue in 2009.
See 10 big recession surprises.
Then there is the mortgage market. In the 1930s, the government wanted private investors to start a secondary market for the buying and reselling of mortgages to bring stability and lower rates to the market. When no one did, the government created Fannie Mae and, later, Freddie Mac. The agencies provide a great service to the American home buyer — those 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, which are awful for lenders, might not exist in great numbers without them. But the way these outfits have been configured in recent decades is flawed: they are aggressively profit-seeking yet implicitly backed by the government. That allowed Fannie and Freddie to borrow funds cheaply — and helped keep mortgage rates low — but meant there was little incentive for investors to monitor what the agencies were doing, even if it was so risky that their eventual bailout in September 2008 would cost more than $150 billion.
One Nation, Stuck in Place
Star Korajkic, one of America's newest homeowners, doesn't particularly care about all this history. What she cares about is being able to paint her daughter's room purple without asking anyone's permission.
Until February, Star lived in a rented apartment in Burlington, Vt., with her husband Danijal and daughter Alina, 6. Now the family lives in a modest Cape Cod, which they own. Danijal works 11-hour shifts as a truck driver, and Star works two jobs in order to make the mortgage, but the sacrifice, she says, is worth it. "It's amazing. We can do whatever we want. We can plant a garden. We can sit outside and have music and a cookout. We can live a normal and nice life."
No doubt, for many American families, buying a home is a smart choice. On paper, putting nearly all your liquid assets into a single piece of property may look foolish, but in practice it often works out beautifully, with the mortgage paid off just before retirement, leaving a couple with a cheap place to live in old age. The point of questioning the virtues of owning a home isn't to question the decisions of families like the Korajkics; it is to take into account the trade-offs involved.
One major trade-off: mobility. Being free to move around the country easily means that people can go where the jobs are. Fifteen years ago, Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick in the U.K., was one of the first to note that places with high homeownership rates seemed to have high rates of unemployment as well. Indeed, some of the U.S. cities with the highest rates of homeownership have stagnant Rust Belt economies: Detroit; Allentown, Pa.; Rochester, N.Y.; Akron, Ohio. "The economy is changing all the time, and we need people to be mobile in order to drop into the right job slots," Oswald says. Where most people own their homes, rentals are sparse, which makes it tougher for workers — especially young, nimble ones — to redeploy.
See 10 perfect jobs for the recession — and after.
The inflexibility that pervasive homeownership brings to labor markets has a cost. Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University, notes that Americans, compared with other nationalities, are more prone to move in the wake of downturns. In a classic 1992 study, Katz and Olivier Jean Blanchard, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that it takes U.S. regions about six years to recover from a local spike in unemployment, and during those six years the same number of people who have lost their jobs leave the area. "It's not that the jobs that disappeared come back," says Katz, "but that people move on to new areas with new opportunities." In a typical year, some 40 million Americans move — and nearly 20% do so for a job.
Unless, of course, they can't. And that is the case for many now. In the wake of the April expiration of a short-term tax incentive to buy, existing home sales are again falling. With property values depressed, some 11 million homeowners now find themselves owing more on their loan than their house is worth. Even if a likely buyer appears, a sale is not a sure thing. Jenn Hartzell looked into selling her family's house in Glen Burnie, Md., when her husband retired from the Air Force and came across his "dream job" — working as a radio program director — in San Diego. But the value of the house was less than the amount the couple still owed on their mortgage. "We couldn't do it," says Hartzell. "We couldn't leave."

In today's economy, mortgages can be a millstone. That's new. Time was, workers expected to stay with one company for decades and see a steady rise in annual income. But these days, being in the workforce is a game of constant reinvention. Workers expect to change companies, even professions, multiple times. Households are much more likely now than in the past to see income dip dramatically — even if only temporarily. In the late 1960s, about 7% of households experienced a decline in income of 50% or more over a two-year period, according to Brookings Institution economist Karen Dynan. In the mid-2000s, some 12% of households saw such a drop. Yet a mortgage, typically a homeowner's largest expense, is as rigid and unforgiving as ever. For homeowners, quickly adapting to new financial realities is rarely an option. Homeownership may provide a sense of stability to families, but stability in today's economy isn't always a virtue. What families need in order to maintain income is the flexibility that homeownership works against.
Solving or Causing Problems?
Earlier this year, Fannie Mae conducted a survey on homeownership. The top reason people gave for buying: "It means having a good place to raise children and provide them with a good education." The second: "You have a physical structure where you and your family feel safe."
See the best business deals of 2009.
The belief that owning a home is the gateway to safer neighborhoods and better schools is deeply embedded in the national psyche. Remember what Jack Kemp said: Homeownership can save babies. Yet the evidence that homeownership actually brings other benefits is decidedly mixed. On the surface, the results are often impressive. In 1997 academic economists Richard Green and Michelle White found that children of homeowners stay in school longer than children of renters and that daughters of homeowners are less likely to become teenage mothers. A 1999 study by Denise DiPasquale and Edward Glaeser concluded that homeowners are more likely to vote in elections and be involved in community organizations.
Yet the researchers who conduct such studies often warn about taking the findings too far. Just because two qualities show up at the same time doesn't mean one is causing the other. DiPasquale and Glaeser, for instance, attribute a big part of their findings to the fact that homeowners move less frequently: they have more time in a community than renters do to get involved. A 2009 study in the journal Real Estate Economics found that kids living in owned homes are less prone to drop out of high school, but whether a family owned a car had an even stronger correlation. Should we give cars the credit? Or should we instead realize that both home and car ownership are probably markers of something else, like a stable family life or living in a nice neighborhood?
See pictures of Americans in their homes.
There is really only one effect that seems consistently caused by homeownership: owners invest more time and money in the physical upkeep of their homes. They are more likely to make repairs. They are more likely to garden.
In the U.S., homeownership typically goes with living in single-family detached dwellings. Eighty-nine percent of stand-alone houses are owned, while just 17% of apartments are. There is a logic to this: for a landlord, an apartment building provides an economy of scale that a suburban development doesn't. But that means that a system that glorifies and subsidizes homeownership pushes people to live in suburbs, where they, or developers, can find more-affordable patches of land on which to build. Of course, it's fine to choose to live miles from a city, but that choice comes with broader consequences. People who live in detached houses use 49% more energy — like electricity and natural gas — than people who live in buildings with five or more apartments, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Suburban living requires driving a car practically everywhere, which in turn means that U.S. energy policy prioritizes cheap oil — whatever the geopolitical and environmental consequences.
There are reasons people like living in leafy green suburbs. In Crabgrass Frontier, the 1985 classic on suburbanization, Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson traces America's centuries-long idealization of agrarian life. Cities accumulated industry and disease and accidents. Who wouldn't want to escape to a home and yard of their own? But these days, Cleveland's Cuyahoga River doesn't catch fire, Pittsburgh has clean air, and fish markets and docks don't ring the island of Manhattan — bike paths and baseball diamonds do. Cities aren't for everyone. But maybe they would be for more people if we didn't all feel as though at some point we were supposed to move to the suburbs and buy a house.
Own a Home? Here's Some Cash
Since the benefits to society of owning a home are hazy, you might conclude that individual families should be left alone to decide whether to rent or buy. Yet Washington throws more than $100 billion a year in tax breaks and subsidies at buyers through the mortgage-interest and property-tax deductions, the capital-gains exclusion and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which help keep home loans cheaper than they would be otherwise.
None of this is particularly fair: there are no blanket subsidies for the tens of millions of American families that rent either because they choose to or because they have to. Nor are these tax breaks efficient economic policy. In 2001 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that only half the benefit of the government's implicit backing of mortgages through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was passed along to borrowers in the form of lower rates. The other half went to the companies' shareholders and to banks as higher profits.
See pictures of the recession of 1958.

The mortgage-interest tax deduction provides an even sharper case study. Nearly half the people in the 2010 Fannie Mae survey said tax benefits were a "major reason" to buy a house. Yet the mortgage-interest deduction isn't even claimed by many homeowners. To get it, you have to itemize on your taxes, and more than a third of homeowners don't. The bulk of the benefit goes to wealthier households that probably wouldn't have trouble buying a home without the deduction. According to a 2010 analysis by James Poterba of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Todd Sinai of the University of Pennsylvania, the 2.8 million homeowning families with an annual income of more than $250,000 save $15 billion a year thanks to the deduction. Meanwhile, the 19 million families making from $40,000 to $75,000 save $10 billion. For those middle-class households, the average annual tax break is worth $542, or $1.48 a day. Are legions of middle-class families able to buy houses because they save $542 a year? Doubtful. The U.K. got rid of its mortgage-interest deduction years ago, and its homeownership rate is still higher than that of the U.S.
More unsettling yet is the way the mortgage-interest tax deduction entices people to borrow big: you get the deduction for the interest on the loan, not for owning the house or paying down the debt. Sinai, a self-described "pro-ownership guy," recalls how his accountant once suggested he buy a larger house in order to get a better deduction. "I nearly bit his head off," says the normally mild-mannered economist. "We conflate the idea of homeownership with extravagance."
But even if the government were to change the extent and the ways in which it underwrites homeownership, we would still be stuck with a stock of housing that has very largely been shaped by the bias toward owning. When Kirtie Lo, a newly minted hand surgeon, called up a real estate agent in Hutchinson, Kans., (pop. 40,000) to find a place to rent, the agent told her she'd want to buy. Lo was moving from Connecticut on a one-year contract, and she actually didn't want to buy, but she quickly understood what the agent meant about the city. "They do have apartments," says Lo, pausing to find the right words. "But they're not luxury apartments."
That, often, is what people mean when they say their top reason for owning a home is to have a good place to raise children. They want to live in nice neighborhoods, and in the U.S., that often means you have to buy. In an ideal world, the way you pay for your shelter shouldn't reflect your socioeconomic status. In Switzerland, one of the world's richest nations, two-thirds of all families rent. Yet in the U.S., whether you own or rent says something about who you are — and often limits where you can live.
Here again the hand of government is evident, but this time at the city and county level. Harvard economist Glaeser has looked at how local governments, often spurred on by existing homeowners, restrict housing type. Of the 186 towns and cities within 50 miles (80 km) of Boston, 34 forbid multifamily dwellings such as townhouses and apartment buildings, and another 81 allow them on less than 10% of the available land. People who don't buy stand-alone houses — for the most part, renters — are not welcome. And that doesn't just happen around Boston. "In many parts of the country," says Glaeser, "renters are zoned out."
Some demographers predict that the attitude that most areas should be the exclusive province of single-family homes on big tracts of land will change as Baby Boomers tire of four-bedroom houses with lawns to mow and big property-tax bills. That would be a huge adjustment, one that is at times hard to imagine. But there is reason to try. 
See pictures of the global financial crisis.
The Cost of Easy Credit
What is perhaps the worst side of the homeownership fetish is dark indeed: for many years, the fact that our house prices were rising enabled us to ignore deep structural changes taking place in the American economy. For decades, income inequality has been growing, and middle-class wages have been stagnant. In the eyes of at least some academic observers, cheap credit, especially when used to buy ever-larger houses, has been a way to get people to feel O.K. with their lot. "Cynical as it may seem, easy credit has been used as a palliative throughout history by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class directly," writes Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago, in his new book Fault Lines. "The expansion of homeownership — a key element of the American dream — to low- and middle-income households was the defensible linchpin for the broader aims of expanding credit and consumption." Pumped up on credit-card debt and home-equity loans, we kept spending away and felt richer than we actually were.
If the U.S. is ever to break that cycle, we will have to go through a well-known list of changes: save more, invest in people through better education and training, and use the levers of government to help create high-quality jobs — the sort you can raise a family on — instead of coaxing people into becoming homeowners.
That is no small order. But if there ever were a time to start weaning America off the idea that homeownership cures all our ills, now — after the worst housing crash in 75 years — would be it.
Stuck in her house in Maryland, unable to move for her husband's dream job in California, having spent thousands of dollars and countless hours on various home repairs, Jenn Hartzell reflects on their decision to buy a house. "It's been a really big learning experience," she says. "I would say I'm glad that I did it." Then she stops. "I think I am. I'm not sure." When her friends tell her they're considering buying a house, she says, "You know, it's not what we were raised to think it would be."
This article originally appeared in the September 6, 2010 issue of Time magazine.

Traffic modeling software

HCS

HCS Analysis - This section discusses the use of the Highway Capacity Software program to perform analysis of interchange and freeway operations reflective of different design alternatives and traffic volumes. The two key modules that will examined in the documentation include the FREEWAY OPERATIONS and the RAMPS. For each of these two, examples will be provided showing the traffic and geometry of the facility and the corresponding screens from the Highway Capacity Software will be provided to serve a guide for entering the information.

HCS+T7F is now available! is now available. Click to order HCS+T7F.

• This latest version of the Highway Capacity SoftwareTM is now integrated with TRANSYT-7FTM for signal timing optimization within the new HCS+T7FTM package.
• HCS+TM (Release 5.4) includes HCS+ Interchanges implementing the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) Chapter 26 methodolgy for Interchange Ramp Terminals.
• TRANSYT-7F (Release 11.3) is included with HCS+, able to import HCS+Signals and HCS+Interchanges files for optimization and one-touch CORSIM animation.

Netsim

NetSim is a comprehensive tool for studying computer networks. NetSim features state of the art network simulation technology, and comes with additional offerings that enhance and quicken students’ learning, and prepare them better for their career.

Simulation

• Model networks with various technologies, protocols, devices and traffic types.
• Study Performance metrics at network, link by link and packet levels
• Analyze and graph, inter and intra protocol performance by varying modeling attributes
• Learn from detailed simulation lab experiments
• Built as per International Standards set forth by IEEE, ITU and IETF
• View the different technologies in the Standard Version

NetSim 3.0

Article: About NetSim Network Simulator & Router Simulator
The Boson NetSim Network Simulator is an application that simulates Cisco Systems' networking hardware and software and is designed to aid the user in learning the Cisco IOS command structure.

QRS II

What is QRS II? - Version 7 - Quick Response System II runs the four-step planning process – trip generation, trip distribution, mode split, traffic/transit assignment – for highway and transit forecasting. Networks and data are entered and edited graphically using the powerful General Network Editor.

Titre du document / Document title
Comparative study of EMME/2 and QRS II for modeling a small community

Demo Editions of QRS II and GNE

Arc Press

Arc Press - ArcPress for ArcGIS is a print rasterizer for fast, high-quality printing of maps. ArcPress for ArcGIS transforms maps into the native language format of your printer.

Arc GIS

ArcGIS - People are using ArcGIS in all types of organizations to improve their workflows and solve their most challenging issues. ArcGIS helps you with:

* Asset/data management including systems integration, claims/case management, service/territory area management, and constituent/customer management
* Planning and analysis such as forecasting and risk analysis
* Business operations such as call center/dispatching; monitoring and tracking; field data collection; inspections, maintenance and operations; and routing
* Situational awareness including decision support and customer/public access
ArcGIS is a system for people who rely on accurate geographic information to make decisions. It facilitates collaboration and lets you easily author data, maps, globes, and models on the desktop and serve them out for use on a desktop, in a browser, or in the field, depending on the needs of your organization.

Arc Info

ArcInfo - ArcInfo is the most complete desktop GIS. It includes all the functionality of ArcEditor and ArcView and adds advanced spatial analysis, extensive data manipulation, and high-end cartography tools. Organizations use the power of ArcInfo every day to create, edit, and analyze their data in order to make better decisions, faster. ArcInfo is the de facto standard for GIS. ArcInfo can:
* Perform advanced GIS data analysis and modeling.
* Take advantage of tools designed for overlay analysis, proximity analysis, surface analysis, and raster processing and conversion.
* Publish and convert data in many formats.
* Create and manage personal geodatabases, multiuser geodatabases, and feature datasets.
* Use high-end cartography tools to generate professional-quality, publication-ready maps.
* Design customized symbols and place sophisticated annotation and labels on your maps.

Arc View

ArcView - ArcView is geographic information system (GIS) software for visualizing, managing, creating, and analyzing geographic data. Using ArcView, you can understand the geographic context of your data, allowing you to see relationships and identify patterns in new ways.
With ArcView, you can
Author maps and interact with your data by generating reports and charts and printing and embedding your maps in other documents and applications.
Save time using map templates to create consistent style in your maps.
Build process models, scripts, and workflows to visualize and analyze your data.
Read, import, and manage more than 70 different data types and formats including demographics, facilities, CAD drawings, imagery, Web services, multimedia, and metadata.
Communicate more efficiently by printing, publishing, and sharing your GIS data and dynamic content with others.
Use tools such as Find, Identify, Measure, and Hyperlink to discover information not available when working with static paper maps.
Make better decisions and solve problems faster.

Avenue Programming

Avenue Programming

CUBE Voyager

CUBE Voyager - Cube Voyager combines the latest in Citilabs' technologies for the forecasting of personal travel. Cube Voyager uses a modular and script-based structure allowing the incorporation of any model methodology ranging from standard four-step models, to discrete choice to activity-based approaches. Advanced methodologies provide junction-based capacity restraint for highway analysis and discrete choice multipath transit pathbuilding and assignment. Cube Voyager includes highly flexible network and matrix calculators for the calculation of travel demand and for the detailed comparison of scenarios.
Cube Voyager was designed to provide an open and user-friendly framework for modeling a wide variety of planning policies and improvements at the urban, regional and long-distance level. Cube Voyager brings together these criteria with a comprehensive library of planning functions applied under the general Cube framework. This makes the management of data a snap, and the coding of complex methodologies simple via a step-by-step approach.

The FTP Voyager Software Development Kit (SDK) allows you to power your application's FTP capabilities with same engine used in the FTP Voyager client. The SDK exposes FTP Voyager's FTP capabilities through a thoroughly documented and easy to integrate DLL. This flexible interface gives you the ability to use the. Free download of FTP Voyager Software Development Kit 12.3.0.1, size 6.38 Mb.

DYNASMART-P

DYNASMART-P version 1.3.0

Dynamic Network Assignment-Simulation Model for Advanced Roadway Telematics (Planning version)
DYNASMART-P version 1.3.0, released by the Federal Highway Administration through McTrans in February 2007, provides many new features and enhancements. These include:

• Convenient import of network and demand data from other planning models
• Click-and-drag network/control creation and editing interface based on background imagery
• Easy conversion of baseline static OD matrix to time-dependent OD matrices
• Generation of default movements and signal control data for fast deployment
• Improved loading and display speed for large-scale network datasets
• Calculation and display of link- and network-level toll revenue for HOT or tolling applications
• Easy redistribution of user classes within vehicle and path files. This allows for flexible implementation of various planning scenarios
• Capability of modeling large networks

 FHWA Corporate Research and Technology - DYNASMART-P

Em2ProCoresims

EMME/2/3

• Emme  is the successor to EMME/2, the pioneering software package that first brought multimodal equilibrium modelling to professional practice.
• Emme is a French-English acronym for Equilibre Multimodal / Multimodal Equilibrium, today's industry-standard assignment method.
• The worldwide Emme community pronounces it em-mee, em, or em-muh. As with the types of models you can build with Emme, the choice is yours.

INRO - Emme is a complete travel demand forecasting system for urban, regional, and national transportation planning. Make informed transport policy decisions with Emme's comprehensive set of tools for demand modelling, multimodal network modelling, visualization and analysis. And have confidence in the integrity of your results.
Emme 3 combines powerful, proven modelling capabilities with professional productivity tools. Visit the transport modelling page to learn about the sophisticated transport modelling technology that Emme can bring to your application. Or, visit the software features page for details on how the Emme Desktop's integrated editing, analysis, and visualization capabilities can help you develop and express your models to all the stakeholders involved.

Slides from modeli2000up.ppt (www.hbp.usm.my)

Syncro / SimTraffic

Syncro/SimTraffic - Synchro is a software application for optimizing traffic signal timing and performing capacity analysis. The software optimizes splits, offsets, and cycle lengths for individual intersections, an arterial, or a complete network. SimTraffic performs micro simulation and animation of vehicular traffic. With SimTraffic, Individual vehicles are modeled and displayed traversing a street network. SimTraffic models signalized and un-signalized intersections, and freeway sections.

Tran Plan

TranPlan

• After defining the network and socio-economic characteristics for the network, the network is ready to be run through Tranplan to determine the loaded traffic volumes and travel speeds. The programs to perform this step of the process include a series of MapBasic and Fortran programs which will export the network information to text format and write out a Tranplan control file that contains all the necessary elements to perform a model run (Build the network, identifies skim trees, trip distribution, matrix operations, and assigns the traffic).
• A Guide to Transportation Modeling Using TRANPLAN for Computer Simulation of Strategies for Managing the Rural Road Infrastructure (PDF white paper link)
• This City-wide traffic model was developed, using the TRANPLAN transportation modeling software. The model's network and zone system were developed to provide an appropriate level of detail for local circulation system planning, while incorporating the influences of regional through traffic on the City arterial system; this was accomplished by developing a focused model. (PDF white paper)
• Forida State University Transportation Modeling
• Montana DOT white papers on Tranplan 21 links

Trans CAD
TransCAD - TransCAD is the first and only Geographic Information System (GIS) designed specifically for use by transportation professionals to store, display, manage, and analyze transportation data. TransCAD combines GIS and transportation modeling capabilities in a single integrated platform, providing capabilities that are unmatched by any other package. TransCAD can be used for all modes of transportation, at any scale or level of detail. TransCAD provides:
•A powerful GIS engine with special extensions for transportation
•Mapping, visualization, and analysis tools designed for transportation applications
•Application modules for routing, travel demand forecasting, public transit, logistics, site location, and territory management.

Transims

Transims - TMIP sponsors the research and development of the TRansportation ANalysis and SIMulation System (TRANSIMS). TRANSIMS is the next generation of travel modeling, microsimulation and air quality analysis tools. Through TMIP the planning community can stay up to date on the development and delivery of TRANSIMS products.

TRANSIMS Open Source
The Transportation Analysis and Simulation System (TRANSIMS), is an integrated set of tools developed to conduct regional transportation system analyses. With the goal of establishing TRANSIMS as an ongoing public resource available to the transportation community, TRANSIMS is made available under the NASA Open Source Agreement Version 1.3
Software download

Trans Modeler

TransModeler - TransModeler is a powerful and versatile traffic simulation package applicable to a wide array of traffic planning and modeling tasks. TransModeler can simulate all kinds of road networks, from freeways to downtown areas, and can analyze wide area multimodal networks in great detail and with high fidelity. You can model and visualize the behavior of complex traffic systems in a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional GIS environment to illustrate and evaluate traffic flow dynamics, traffic signal and ITS operations, and overall network performance.

UTPS
UTPS - Urban (or UMTA) Transportation Planning System

• Simulating Traffic for Incident Management and ITS Investment Decisions (PDF white paper)
• Considering Network Demand Issues in GIS Transportation Data Modeling (PDF white paper)

Vissim

Vissim - Visual Solutions' VisSim is the fastest and easiest-to-use dynamic simulation and model-based system development software available. VisSim is up to 10 times faster than competitive simulation products. The free VisSim Viewer lets anyone run VisSim diagrams.

Austin, Texas: car2go goes USA - Daimler introduces innovative mobility concept in Austin, Texas

car2go goes USA - Daimler introduces innovative mobility concept in Austin, Texas

• US pilot phase slated to start in Fall of 2009 with fleet of 200 smart for two vehicles
• International expansion parallel to second pilot phase in Ulm, Germany, with public access starting March 26
• Multimedia Highlights from today’s announcement in Austin, TX

Ulm, Germany / Austin, TX (March 26, 2009) /PRNewswire/ — Daimler will bring its innovative car2go mobility concept to the U.S. by fall of this year. The first international pilot will start in the Texas capital Austin with an initial fleet of about 200 fuel-efficient smart for two cars. car2go provides a simple, flexible, and cost-effective solution for city driving. The U.S. introduction coincides with the expansion of the pilot in Ulm, Germany, where the company opens the service to the public on March 26 after the internal test which started last October.
The car2go concept is based on a fleet of smart for two vehicles which are available for rent to registered members at any time, 24/7, making city driving as easy as using a mobile phone.
Contrary to traditional car-sharing programs, car2go offers the freedom to get in a car and drive at any time of day without reserving a car in advance. The vehicle can then be used for as long as required and returned to any available parking location within the defined area of operation – a mobility solution offering maximum flexibility.

Press Contacts:

Han Tjan

Daimler Communications

212-909-9063

 

Jeffrey Sindone

Forum Media

212-554-2157

Engineer: Thomas Telford

Thomas Telford Scottish(1757-1834)

Architecture: Shipping Container Homes

Chile Shipping Container Home

Infiniski, a green architecture and design company based in Spain and Chile have constructed a number of beautiful houses from recycled shipping containers, pallets old train rails and various other bits of whatever they could find. They also have plans for a large office complex in Chile built around shipping containers.

SHIPPING CONTAINERS CONVERTED INTO HOUSES?!

This entry was posted Monday, 13 April, 2009 at 1:55 pm

With the housing market going down and the rate of foreclosure going up, something needs to be done. The answer to all these problems is shipping containers! The Gorilla Designs Company based in Salt Lake City had something to say about all this. They are working and designing these containers to be affordable, high quality homes that last a lifetime…
More information and pictures after the jump…

Gorilla Design
“After Katrina, we realized that normal houses and traditional materials can’t stand up to global warming and the new storms that will come with it,” said Maufus. “We wanted to make something that could stand the test of time.”

Gorilla also wanted to be environmentally-friendly.

“This is definitely a case of one man’s trash being another man’s treasure,” said Maifus.

There are thousands of shipping containers no longer being used but still in excellent shape lying around ports and railroads yards all over the country that could be turned into quality housing.

Shipping containers can withstand a lot of force. The average shipping container is rated to carry 67,000 pounds, and can withstand eight other fully-loaded shipping containers resting on top of it. That’s about 376 tons per square inch.

“We certainly don’t have to worry about snow load issues,” said Maufus.

The floor of many shipping container is made out of exotic hardwoods that when sanded and polishe produced a rich, beautiful color that could typically cost thousands of dollars and weigh on your conscious, since the wood is often from tropical rain forests.

The thought of living in a big rectangular box may not seem all that appealing, but a shipping container home typically isn’t just one long room. Designs call for the walls to be cut out and then several containers are welded together for larger rooms.

As long as the welds are good, the containers remain tightly sealed,nearly doubling the energy efficiency when compared with a traditional wood frame house.

Since the containers come largely pre-assembled, construction time is reduced as well. According to Maifus, a typical wood frame home takes more than six months to build. A welded shipping container home takes about two months to complete.

Stacking Shipping Containers

| By admin | Category: Profiled ISBU Project

Anyone that is a regular reader of our site would know that a big part of what we are about at containerhome.info is busting open the many myths and misconceptions that surround the use of Shipping Containers as building modules, so that real people that are genuinely interested in getting involved in actual, real world container home builds can gather together the information they need to make informed, factual decisions about building with Shipping Containers.

Today’s post is about the way in which multiple containers can be grouped together in combination to form modular buildings, now this is actually a rather complex discussion and one we deal with in detail in the Container Home Tutorials – so this post is a little more specifically about stacking shipping containers

Anyone that has been looking for inspiration online from photos and shipping container house plans would have seen the literally 1000′s of drawings and architectural illustrations created by Architects and Designers that shows multiple containers stacked in dozens of different configurations.

In the real world things are a little different…

Shipping Containers are designed to be stacked under very prescriptive loading conditions. You will never see containers stacked on-board ships or even in shipping yards other than the way they where designed and intended to be stacked – ie in horizontal and vertical alignment and there is a very good reason for this, they are simply not designed to carry the types of loads created by “criss-cross stacking”.

This small Shipping Container Cabin was created in 2008 so its not new in itself but I wanted to show it here as a great example of what it takes to “realize” the more edgy elements of container home design like criss cross stacking.

BTW the principals we are talking about here apply equally to this 2 container design as they do to a 22 container design.

Take a look at this design – At first glance what you will see is 2 x 20 ft shipping containers stacked on top of each other in a cross cross configuration, this seems to bear out that criss-cross stacking can be done, right ?

Now take another closer look – I have highlighted the extensive modifications and reinforcement required to carry the loads, specifically the additional I beams and supports.

Note that this reinforcement is required not only in the lower container but the upper container as well, the walls of a standardized container are not designed to support the placing of a container off the corner points.

Now even if this particular design is not my “style” or “taste” ( but to be fair the pink-dotted façade is intended to illustrates the wide range of possibilities for tailor-made exteriors rather than an actual colour scheme )  I respect the team that put this together, so this is not in anyway a critical review of the individual design, in fact this is actually what is required to do this “right” so what we are saying here is this….

If you want to incorporate the more edgy elements of container architecture into your home design be prepared for a hefty engineering and modification bill, its not just a case of getting a crane to drop them down on top of each other as is atheistically pleasing your to your eye.

Find our more about design and container modification in our Shipping Container Home Tutorials – the first hour of video content is free. If your interested use the request form in the top right hand corner of this and every page.

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Designers Site 

Featured Designer: Infiniski Manifesto

Infiniski are an Architecture and Design company with Offices in Spain and Chile that have sucessfully designed and constructed a number of Shipping Container Houses. This is their Infiniski Manifesto a 160 SQM ( + 15 SQM Terraces )


The team at Infiniski design and construct environmentally friendly sustainable  buildings from recycled, reused and non polluting materials. There is almost a big focus on the application and use of renewable energy sources including solar and wind power.
Jamie Gaztelu and Mauricio Galeano better know as James and Mau are the founders and partners of Infiniski. James & Mau say they try to think of the  very values of architecture and construction differently as contributing to the needs of our changing environment.
This Project the Infiniski Manifesto House exemplifies that philosophy.  It has a built area of 160 SQM plus an additional 15 SQM of terrace area, cost a littel under 80,000 Euro’s to construct in 2009 over a 90 day period.
All Photographs by Antonio Corcuera

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Reference:
containerhomes.net