We also learned how to draw cautionary tales.

I submitted my masters thesis today, a full five months before anyone else in my department. Overachiever much?

Behold: Beyond “Urban” Planning: An Overview of Challenges Unique to Planning in Rural California.

Read the Executive summary, watch the submission process, or browse the whole thing below. And yes, my thesis has a trailer.

TRB is *the* big transportation conference in the US, if not the world. It has 11,000 participants this year, three hotels, a really capable iPhone app, and sessions on any and every topic even tangentially related to transportation. If you want to listen to people talk for two hours about taxis, pavement mixtures, or airport transit access, this is your place.

This year I co-presented a poster with a colleague from Berkeley. I’ve been to a handful of poster sessions, and this was by far the most intense. People were asking questions from the minute it went up until we took it down 15 minutes after the session ended. I didn’t get a chance to look at a single other poster (and there were two of us to field questions!), but I was told that ours was the best looking design there.

The best question by far was from a fellow at WMATA. Our poster explored congestion pricing for BART, based on certain entry and exit stations that get particularly crowded, and trying to reduce that crowding. The big capacity problem in DC is actually transfer stations. It’s impossible to tell from someone’s entries and exits if they used the major transfer stations. How can WMATA levy fees on users that pass through the critical transfer points at peak times? I suggested RFID on choke points within those stations – escalators, stairs, elevators. But that wouldn’t work for paper tickets. Second rounds of turnstiles would just increase congestion. Tricky. Maybe careful timing: narrow down the likely transfer options based on trip timing? It was a great question, and one that reminded me how much I love transit planning.

The research paper, model, and an earlier version of the poster are available on this blog already. Here we are in action!

Unlike the good ol’ consulting days, I’m on my own for accommodations. DC may be the major east coast city where I know the fewest people, or at least the fewest people near Dupont Circle, so I’m staying at a great AirBNB rental a block from the main conference hotel. My host is an awesome Cal Public Health alum, and she’s across the street from the Loagai Museum of Chinese Human Rights Abuses and this cool bike rack. This really is a cool town. I hope post-TRB I will have more excuses to come back.

Enjoy:

Planning Rural California: Video Abstract from Ruth Miller on Vimeo.

Finally, a lorem ipsum text generator for planners! This one skews heavily towards California’s particular oddities and rural topics, but should entertain and fascinate your client the next time you’re lightly cajoled into building a website about planning.

Need some wonky planner verbage? Generate it automatically!

My predominant excuse for bailing on social functions this last month was my first real studio class. My group designed a senior affordable housing project for a site in Fairfax, California. By “designed” I mean from the pro forma and tax credits down to the units and the fountain in the lobby. We were a group with many diverse skills, but everyone still ended up in each others’ wheelhouse. Which is how I came to drawing this:

Not bad! And it sounds like I will do A LOT more of these next semester.

The premise - If you had the chance to build a whole new neighborhood, with a blank slate, think of all you could do right. It would be walkable, transit-oriented, mixed use, etc. All those nice planning things. But you could also lay down some truly innovative biotech infrastructure. NASA has developed an algae that generates biofuel from wastewater. There’s solar, plus, build in the pier area, and gain tidal power. We have the technology today to make energy-neutral or energy-negative urban housing, we just need to get both sides excited about it.

We didn’t win, but we each learned enough about each other’s field to explain the basic concepts, and I haven’t had to understand how a battery worked in a long time…

Celebrating a birthday, transportation finance ballot measures, and cake. It’s good to be through mid-terms.