Infrastructure Megaprojects: Communication

Think about what your life would be like without a phone, without television, without internet access, without books, without music. Really sit and consider that for a minute. I'm betting that if you're reading this, you can't even imagine what you'd do with most of your time. Now imagine your life to date without those things.

Will anyone dispute that information is a necessity in this world?

The US information infrastructure is pathetic compared to most of the developed world. But it's fixable! Estimates have Google Fiber costing about $1,500/home to install. Figure 100 million homes in the US, and to wire the country with high-speed fiber would cost something like $150 billion. Even if it's double that, it's trivial on the scale of projects we're talking about. And following the Google Fiber model, it should be possible to supply most households with free high-speed internet access, only charging for higher bandwidth connections.

But it shouldn't stop there. Wired communication is only part of our information consumption. Right now there are a large number of incompatible cellular networks in the country. How much could we save by standardizing those networks on a single interoperable technology? Think about that. With appropriate leasing agreements in place, you could use anyone's tower, and just let the providers haggle over who pays whom on the back end. And once there's a single universal standard, expanding coverage and service becomes much easier and more efficient.

How much would it cost to pay everyone to switch their towers over to a shared technology? Figure there are 200,000 towers in the US, and we want to change out 90% of them to match the rest. At $150,000 per tower, the entire network would cost $30 billion to build from scratch. Assuming the electronics involved are only a tenth the cost of the tower, we're talking about three billion dollars. Chump change. Once a standard was in place, the government would probably spend more than that building additional towers just to improve coverage.

Unfortunately, we're now beyond my technical knowledge. Are there actual technical advantages to Verizon's approach over, say, Sprint's? Is one objectively better? Is there some technical reason what I've proposed is unworkable? I can't say. But anyone who's ever considered switching cell providers knows what I mean when I say that anything to reduce vender lock-in is a good thing.

Oh, and while we're at it, let's get rid of bundling the cost of a phone into my monthly bill. If it's a $600 phone, don't tell me it's a $200 phone with an early termination penalty if I leave before 2029. Just tell me it's a $600 phone. Finance it, pay cash, whatever, but vender lock-in needs to die.

No, that's not a megaproject. But let's do it anyway.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Arable Land

So now we have energy and fresh water. The next obvious human need is food. Food production comes down to three things: water, land, and fertilizer. We have a solution to get arbitrary amounts of fresh water, and we can develop fertilizer from the leftover potassium from the desalination plants. That leaves land.

Large sections of the United States are desert, and much of the rest is trending that way. Deserts may not all be dead and barren, but they're not particularly useful by human standards. The growth of deserts is a huge problem.

So let's fix them. It's possible to reverse desertification by planting trees. It's counter-intuitive, but think about it this way: plants don't just absorb water, they also release it through their leaves. That means that whatever rain that's fallen, the trees hold it temporarily, then release it back to the environment to rain out again. That means that whatever rain falls in the area stays in the area longer, cycling through the local ecosystem, rather than just evaporating and leaving.

There are about a quarter million square miles of desert in the continental US, and about as much semi-arid land. Figure fifty trees per acre, and that's sixteen billion trees. Sixteen billion trees to increase our useful arable land area by 20% sounds like a pretty good deal!

If you think that number sounds totally unreasonable, think again. During the great depression we planted three billion trees. More recently, seven billion trees have been planted in less than a decade. Moreover, this requires almost totally unskilled labor, so it's a great jobs project.

Of course, once the forests are established, we wouldn't just leave them untouched. Forests are great, and they have all sorts of positive effects on air quality, improving the health of those nearby. But forests aren't the only end goal. Over time we'd need to make some reclaimed areas into farms, taking advantage of the rebuilt soil. But we'd do that in a planned and controlled fashion. We need to make sure that we don't reclaim the deserts, only to recreate them later.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Water

Water stress is the resource challenge of this decade, and probably a few more to come. Much of the US has been in drought for the last five years, driving up food prices. Some estimates are that this drought has cost the US economy $150 billion dollars each year! Water tables are being drained faster than they can refill, and polluted beyond use. Some bodies of water are being diverted so much that they've become poisonous, or ceased to exist. We need new sources of water, and we need them now.

Unfortunately you can't just create water unless you have a lot of hydrogen lying around. But we're not lacking for water; we're lacking for potable water. We have all the water we need, if we can just clean it up a bit.

We need to build desalination plants to make the seawater drinkable. There are already several in the United States, and quite a few more around the world. This is not a new thing, it's just a question of scale.

How much water are we talking about? Looking at a couple sources, we can estimate that the US uses around 400 billion gallons per day, most of which goes to run power plants and irrigate crops. An average desalination plant (based on Australian installations) could do 60 million gallons per day, consume about 24 MW, and cost $1.8 billion. So to replace every source of fresh water in the US, we're talking about 6,700 desal plants, consuming 160 GW and costing $12 trillion.

Now, that's just an upper limit. There's no need to desalinate every last drop of water we use. Let's scale back a bit, and target 10%, which should be more than enough to relieve the water stress we're seeing. Now we're talking about 670 plants, 16 GW, and $1.2 trillion. That's eminently doable. And the system scales wonderfully. You can build it gradually over time. If you need more water later, you can build more plants.

Figure 3.5% salinity as a general average, so we're talking about having to find a home for 6 million tons of salt every year. That's enough to cause an environmental catastrophe if it's all in one place, so we need to plan for that. Luckily, the US presently produces 7-8 times that much salt in a year, so our economy could obviously absorb it.

Other resources are present in seawater. We'd be extracting 220,000 tons of potassium a year, about 1/5 our present production of potash. This has great possibility for fertilizers, though I can't speak as to the chemistry involved. We'd also get a comparable amount of magnesium, making us the world's fifth largest producer.

The total value of all those extracted solids comes several hundred million dollars a year. Trivial by comparison to the cost of the construction, but still, a nice offset to operating expenditures.

Of course, it's not just the coasts we're worried about; we also need a way to move the desalinated water from the sea to the midlands. We're talking about a huge aqueduct network. We already have quite a bit of experience building such things, but the scale would be unheard-of. Figure a trillion dollars to build the aqueduct network alone.

Now, we could do closed pipes, but I'm not sure that's what we want to do. Perhaps instead we should have open aqueducts, and let the water evaporate as it will. It will condense back out somewhere as rain, giving us the most efficient possible distribution method. Some combination of covered and uncovered aqueducts would probably be best.

Ultimately, the oceans will provide us with the only sustainable source of fresh water on the planet. We'll eventually have to start tapping it, and we're getting to that point.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Energy

Without energy, nothing happens. That's not a hyperbole; nothing happens if there's not energy. No water is pumped, no food is moved to market, no computers or lights turn on, and come winter we all freeze to death. It seems fitting to start our megaprojects list here.

Electricity is our most efficient means of moving energy from place to place. There are many ways of generating electricity, but most have significant downsides. Fossil fuels pollute to varying degrees, and need continuous exploration to find new sources. (The negative effects of fracking for this purpose are tremendous. But that's another post.) Wind and photovoltaic solar cells are weather-dependent, and thus unreliable for continuous demand. Hydroelectric dams can only be put in a few places.

There are only two developed means of generation which are both emission-free and weather-independent. The first is nuclear. A well-designed and well-maintained nuclear plant is one of the safest means of power generation ever conceived. Adding up all the deaths due to nuclear accidents, those numbers don't come close to the damage of coal plants. Most nuclear accidents in the world have been due to old designs that were not properly fail-safe; there are vastly better designs now. Spent fuel rods can be reprocessed, eliminating most of the waste disposal concerns. And research into thorium reactors could further enhance both safety and pollution concerns.

But there's an even better way. Solar thermal power is completely pollution-free. It has all the upsides of a large-scale photovoltaic plant, and none of the down-sides. It can run at night, doesn't require complex chemical processes to build, and has no lifetime constraint. Right now there are about 1.5 gigawatts of installed solar thermal power in the US, with another 4 GW in planning.

Average electricity consumption in the US is on the order of 500 GW, about two-thirds of which is fossil fuel based. A large solar thermal plant can generate ~300 MW, so about a thousand solar thermal plants could eliminate fossil fuel plants entirely. Cost of construction for solar thermal plants is about $5500/kW, meaning it would cost ~$2 trillion to get the grid entirely off fossil fuels. That's a lot of money, but it's only about 4x the cost of the interstate system. Divide it up over 40 years, and we're talking about $50 billion a year. That's significant, but it's only about 1.5% of federal spending. What we would gain would be far greater than what we would lose.

Ecological benefits are obvious: our particulate and carbon emissions go way down. Economic benefits are high as well, as our fossil fuels now become something we can sell on the world market, rather than something we must burn here just to keep our civilization going. We'd become a huge supplier worldwide, greatly increasing our soft power. Along with this, we should improve our infrastructure links to Canada and Mexico, allowing us to become a net exporter of electricity and helping improve those countries as well.

Now, that's just the macro picture. There would clearly need to be a robust program in place to retrain whatever workers were displaced by the shift. And there would be second-order effects as electricity prices drop, possibly shutting down other plants. There's no changing one thing without changing fifty others, and we'd want to minimize the overall damage as much as possible. But once the shift was over, having a large, distributed, clean, free source of electricity would make the United States and our neighbors far better countries to live in.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Introduction

The US economy tanked in 2007, and is still lagging significantly behind where we would all like it to be. Right now, I don't want to bicker and argue about who did what to whom. I don't want to argue about what can best be done about it. I'm happy to do those things, just at another time.

Right now, I want to argue from an assumption, as a thought experiment. It's often said that government spending on infrastructure construction is a good way to kickstart the economy. It puts people to work, and the net gains eventually outweigh the immediate costs. So let's start from that premise. If government spending on infrastructure is good stimulus for the economy, what form should that infrastructure spending take?

Oh, there's the obvious collapsing bridges and dams, things that need fixing. But what new could we do? What one-time projects would make the United States a better place to live for centuries to come, like rural electrification or the interstates did? What can we build that is, in a word, awesome?

I'll be talking about several possibilities in a series of posts. Each post will be one answer to the question, "What do people need?"

Marsha Blackburn: On Municipal Broadband

Ms. Blackburn issued this press release recently. I'd like to ask the Congresswoman to clarify something. You are defending the states' rights, yes. But which rights, specifically? The rights to override the will of the people of a city or town? You claim to be in favor of small, local government. Yet the policies you are defending seem inconsistent with this. You are, in fact, defending the power of central government over local, and using the power of an even more remote government to do it.

I'd like to better understand how this is consistent. Why is it acceptable for the states to dictate terms to the people of their cities? I understand the legal structures are different, but that's a technicality and a cop-out. As a matter of principle, why should a remote central government be able to override the will of a local government in this one case, but not in others?

Please understand, I'm neither Republican nor Democrat, neither conservative nor liberal. Others may put me in such boxes, but when it comes to politics, I'm simply an engineer. I want things to work, I want to fix broken things. And like any observer, I can tell you that our broadband market is broken. Internet speeds in Tennessee are slow, service is abusive, and there is no market of competition to drive innovation. This map shows that the majority of the state doesn't even have two broadband options; you need far more than that to drive a free market! Further, Comcast is a clear example of regulatory capture and the continuous legalized bribery of our elected officials. We live in a government-sponsored monopoly, not a free market.

So if we live in a government-sponsored monopoly, what's so wrong with admitting that, and doing it right? It's what we do with every other utility, and they operate quite well. Several municipalities in Tennessee built local fiber networks before 2008, when the state legislature was 'lobbied' into making building such networks much harder. All these networks provide vastly better speeds than the state or national average. Some are among the fastest in the country, literally a hundred times faster than the rest of the state, and remain a point of technological pride for our state.

In short, municipal broadband works. Or at least it has some hope of working. It's perfectly clear that our current corporate ISPs don't, and never will.

So I have to ask, Ms. Blackburn, why are you fighting so hard to maintain the status quo? Right now, most of our state is locked into an unresponsive, dysfunctional monopoly, with no hope of competition to improve our lot. Those cities that have acted to improve the situation have succeeded; their citizens have better lives and more options. Yet your actions work to lock us into the same dysfunctional system. Why? What matter of principle could possibly justify such a hurtful act towards the people you were elected to serve? It's clearly not about central government vs. local government, we've established that already.

So what is it? Even if your constituents don't deserve modern utilities, they at least deserve an answer from you on this.

Letter to the Editor: Amp Alternative

Traffic on West End is abysmal, and something needs to be done. The Amp is, indeed, something. But what alternatives are there? I’m not presently taking sides in the debate over the Amp. But I’d like to propose one alternative which I think will be simpler and cheaper.

Amp is projected to cost $4 million a year to operate, plus the $174 million startup costs. Add some for inevitable overruns, divide that over 20 years, and you get about $14 million annually. A comparable BRT system in Cleveland has ridership of around 14,000 daily. So we’re spending (very roughly) a thousand dollars per year to get each individual car off the road.

How about instead, we just pay people to carpool? If someone paid me a thousand dollars a year for my trouble, you can bet I’d be carpooling! Set up a good smartphone-based system to make ride matches, and I guarantee you you’ll get more cars off the road for less money. The result helps all of Nashville, not just one dense strip. And there’s zero construction disruption. If you want to get it off the ground fast, don’t put a fixed dollar value on it. Say “There’s a million dollars in the pot. Whoever carpools splits it.” It will take off instantly.

Obviously there’s a lot of variation possible. Who gets paid? The driver? The rider? Both? How do you keep track and minimize gaming the system? I don’t have all the answers. But it’s worth consideration.

What's better than public transportation?

I'm a big fan of public transportation. The ability to survive without owning a car would lead to a tremendous reduction in cost-of-living. Reduction in traffic is in everyone's best interest. And not having to drive every day would let me get a lot more reading done. (Or more realistically, sleep.)

But here in Nashville, the bus system is more or less a joke for much of the city. I live in the city limits, and I could get to work by bus, but I'd have to spend ninety minutes instead of twenty, I'd get there late, and I'd spend more money. The many thousands in the exurbs are pretty much hosed except for the Music City Star, and even then your options once you reach Nashville are limited.

The more I think about it, the more I think the emphasis on trains and buses may be misplaced. Mass transit as a concept has one inherent limitation: each rider wants to stop at only two places, and no others. The more riders there are wanting different stops, the less convenient it gets for everyone involved. But the fewer stops the bus (or train or whatever) makes, the fewer people the bus is convenient for. You want a very high person-to-stop ratio. This only works for high-density end-to-end traffic paths, like an express from a park-and-ride, a commuter train, or a small local circuit in a high-density area.

But what about those of us (and I'd guess we're the majority) who neither live nor work in high-density areas? By definition, we collectively have more stops to make. To keep a high person-to-stop ratio, you have to reduce the number of people per vehicle. Perhaps to, say, five.

I argue that mass carpooling could have more effect getting cars off the road than any imaginable public transportation system. Say we're comparing three options: 60-person buses, 5-person carpools, and the default single-occupant car. If there are six thousand people commuting from Clarksville (to pick a random number and exurb), that's six thousand cars, twelve hundred carpools, or one hundred buses. Obviously both carpools and buses are vast improvements to traffic. And if everyone would ride the busses, they win over carpools. But not everyone will bus, because of the lack of flexibility.

So the next question is, how many people are willing to bus? How many are willing to carpool? And at what point does realistic carpooling get more vehicles off the road than busing? I won't bore you with my algebraic prowess (maybe later), but in our case the answer works out to be pretty interesting: regardless of the number of people involved, if just 25% more people are willing to carpool than are willing to bus, mass carpooling gets more vehicles off the road. This even though a bus holds twelve times more people! Since a carpool is far more convenient than a bus, I'd expect far more than 25% greater ridership.

Now let's consider cost. If you've got 100 busses, that's at least $30,000,000 in capital expenditure. Probably more. Each bus costs around $100/hr to run. Even if you assume they only run four hours a day (two round trips), that's $40,000/day, or $10,000,000 a year in operating costs. Assuming each bus lasts ten years, that's $13,000,000/year to get 5,900 vehicles off the road. This seems like a lot, but consider that adding a lane of interstate between Nashville and Clarksville would cost something like $150,000,000 and take several years.

How about gasoline? A hundred mile round trip at 25 mpg costs $15 a day. That's $22 million a year in gasoline saved by getting those 5900 cars off the road! That's a number so big I almost want to cry.

Further, consider that traffic can add half an hour to your commute each way. One hour a day saved, times six thousand drivers, is 1.5 million man-hours per year. Figure an average wage of $12/hr, and $13,000,000/year starts to sound cheap.  If we come up with a solution that makes a significant reduction in traffic that only costs, say, a million dollars a year, we collectively are coming out way ahead.

So here's the idea: we should pay people to carpool. But not at a flat rate. Put a million dollars in a pot, and declare that that pot will be distributed evenly among everyone who carpools that year, weighted by how many days they do it. Imagine how people would respond to an incentive like that! If only five people carpool all year, boom, easy $200k each. Pay it out more often than once a year, too. Say every two weeks. Within a few months you should reach an equilibrium point where exactly the right number of people are carpooling for the money being offered. After that you can see just how good the system is and how much it's worth.

As an added bonus, you could let people without cars sign up for the system, and basically turn every driver in the city into a government-provided taxi for the carless. The driver gets paid by the number of passengers, so its a win for them. And the car-free individual gets better service than busses.

The problem is making the matches. If you could get our hypothetical six thousand people to put their schedules in a system, a relatively simple computer program could make matches between them and make a huge dent in traffic. There are already such systems, but there's relatively little data in them. Paying people to participate will fix that. And with smart phones becoming ubiquitous, hitching a ride without advance planning becomes easy.

Now, how does this apply to the Amp? To be clear, I’m not presently taking sides in the debate over the Amp. Traffic on West End is abysmal, and something needs to be done. The Amp is, indeed, something. But what alternatives are there? I think this alternative is better from almost every perspective. Let's run the numbers.

Amp is projected to cost $4 million a year to operate, plus the $174 million startup costs. Add some for inevitable overruns, divide that over 20 years, and you get about $14 million annually. A comparable BRT system in Cleveland has ridership of around 14,000 daily. Each rider represents at most one car off the road, but maybe not even that. Depends on whether they count the same person going both directions as one rider or two. So being generous, we’re spending at least a thousand dollars per year to get each individual car off the road.

How about instead, we just pay people to carpool? If someone paid me a thousand dollars a year for my trouble, you can bet I’d be carpooling! Set up a good smartphone-based system to make ride matches, and I guarantee you you’ll get more cars off the road for less money. The result helps all of Nashville, not just one dense strip. And there’s zero construction disruption.

Obviously there’s a lot of variation possible. Who gets paid? The driver? The rider? Both? How do you keep track and minimize gaming the system? I don’t have all the answers. I can tell you that the system has to be set up well from the start; I've seen far too many systems like this half-complete with clearly zero ease-of-use consideration. The problem isn't trivial. But it is solvable, and I think this is what we should be looking at as an alternative to ripping up West End for a few years.

Footnote:

Suppose you have two forms of transit available to people. Cars, which hold 5 people, and busses, which hold 60. Suppose your goal is to get as many vehicles off the road as possible. For cars to get more people off the road than busses, more people have to be willing to use cars than are willing to use busses. How many more?

Define DB to be the number of people held by a bus, and DC to be the number of people held by a car. The ratio of people willing to carpool vs. number willing to bus must be at least (1-1/DB)/(1-1/DC)

If this criterion is met, more vehicles will be off the road by carpooling, even though each vehicle holds fewer people.

Google Fiber in Nashville

Nashville is now on the short list of potential Google Fiber expansion sites. Here's what that would mean: 

• Faster internet speeds for all, making every information-based company in Nashville more competitive
• Free internet connections for thousands of poor families, making job searching and education vastly easier, and relieving considerable burden from our libraries
• Better service offerings from AT&T and Comcast, as they're finally forced to compete and improve their dismal services.

I am not given to hyperbole, so please take it literally when I say that Google Fiber coming to Nashville would be one of the most cost-effective infrastructure improvements that could ever happen in this city. We need to do everything possible to make this happen.

Like all things, you're going to see some opposition. You can bet that that opposition will be supported by Comcast and AT&T. Even in Kansas City, where Google Fiber has changed everything for the better, some bought legislators are trying to keep Google Fiber from spreading to the rest of the state. They claim it's in the name of free markets, but how does preventing competition ever lead to free markets? Free markets are all about having as many competitors as possible!

If you see any such bills proposed here, look past the spin and recognize them for what they are: legalized monopoly for AT&T and Comcast, at the expense of all of us.