Henry Grabar

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“Lines, In All Their Forms, Are Being Subverted By Markets”

January 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Henry Grabar’s Salon article “The Uberization of Everything,” the author looks at how the egalitarianism of the queue is being undone for good by the Internet and dynamic pricing. An excerpt:

The line’s advantage is more basic. Beyond early risers and people with good shoes, the line has a natural constituency: those whose time isn’t worth much. If you’re a well-paid lawyer, working long days for a high hourly fee, two hours in line has a huge opportunity cost. For two hours of work, you could pay market price and have cash left over for dinner. If you’re unemployed, on the other hand, sitting in Central Park all day to see Twelfth Night for free might well be worth your while.

In that sense, the line is a very egalitarian concept, demanding the only thing we’re all given in equal measure: time.

It may also be growing obsolete. Paying to skip has become common, from Six Flags’ Flash Pass to the TSA’s PreCheck system. Real-time markets, where price can be instantaneously aligned with demand, have been implemented to dispel throngs of diners and highway traffic. Where lines endure, they’re infiltrated by professional “waiters,” standing in for clients whose time is worth more.

Lines, in all their forms, are being subverted by markets.

The most well-known example of a real-time market system is Uber’s surge-pricing algorithm. When cab demand is high (like on New Year’s Eve, or during a terrorist attack), the price of a ride goes up. This brings more cars into the streets and shortens the wait time for those who can afford them. It’s a pretty neat demonstration of supply and demand at work, an economist’s fantasy realized by the mobile Internet.

It’s easy to see who wins from surge pricing: drivers, Uber and customers willing to pay to get someplace quickly. Riders willing to share might also stand to benefit.

It’s harder to see who loses, because the old way of getting a cab (sans smartphone) was so irritating. In the biggest cities, where cabs are hailed on the street, demand pricing displaces a complex hierarchy of street knowledge, aggressive behavior and luck. But in most places — airports, train stations, cities with phone-order cab distribution — fixed pricing and a supply shortage rewarded travelers who had waited the longest.

Lines still dominate the urban experience. Roller coasters, movie theaters, airports, restaurants, clubs, government offices, sample sales, traffic: all these places operate on some kind of first-come, first-served basis.

But that system is changing.

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“Mattress-Laden Fire Escapes Lined The Block Like Iron Bunk Beds”

August 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The only air conditioning related trivia I know: It was the late actor Tony Randall’s favorite technology. No, not exactly required knowledge.

While AC may not have been quite as revolutionary as the washing machine, it certainly changed life in industrialized societies dramatically. From Henry Grabar’s Salon article, “How Air Conditioning Remade Modern America“:

“The environment has changed too: Summer in the city isn’t as hot as it used to be, thanks to air conditioning. When Jane Jacobs described the ‘sidewalk ballet,’ fewer than 14 percent of households in urban America had air conditioning. Today, it’s over 87 percent.

It’s almost impossible to imagine, dashing from the house A/C to the car A/C to the office A/C to the restaurant A/C, how hot and different the American summer once was.

One evocative recollection of the un-air-conditioned American city is Arthur Miller’s vignette ‘Before Air-Conditioning,’ which describes New York in the summer of 1927. The street in those days was repurposed nightly as an outdoor dormitory; mattress-laden fire escapes lined the block like iron bunk beds.

Lacking that option, there was always Central Park, where Miller would ‘walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake.’

That was the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs; then came air conditioning and the reinvention of American life.

The National Academy of Engineering ranked air conditioning the tenth-most important achievement of the 20th century.”

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“American Homes Dwarf Those In Nearly Every Other Country On Earth”

July 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cars are smaller and fewer and less gassy in America, but home-size growth halted only briefly during the depths of the Great Recession, subsequently regaining the lost square footage and then some. Even our most famous environmentalist, Al Gore, lives in a climate-killing monster with more-than-ample mantle space for his Nobel and Oscar. From Henry Grabar’s Salon piece, “We Must Kill the McMansion!“:

“This surfeit of space is a potent symbol of the American way of life; it speaks to our priorities, our prosperity and our tendency to take more than we need. But the superlative size of our houses isn’t just a foam finger America can hold up to the world. It’s correlated with land use patterns and population density, which in turn determine the environmental impact and personal health of communities, and whether they can support a diverse range of businesses, facilities and transportation choices. It’s no coincidence that a modern American suburb like Weston, Florida, has just one-third the population density of Levittown.

Given the environmental, infrastructural and financial costs of Americans’ insatiable spatial appetites – the share of our budgets devoted to housing is 41 percent, up from 26 percent in the Levittown era – you can understand why some saw good news in the recession-era report that our houses had begun to shrink. Between 2007 and 2010, for the first time in a half century, the average size of new U.S. homes fell by more than a hundred square feet, dropping back toward 2004 levels.

It was no peak; last year, the average size of new American houses reached an all-time high of 2,679 square feet. The increase in space per person has been even more dramatic. Between 1973 and 2013, the average American household shrank from 3.01 to 2.54 persons; new homes give Americans more than 1,000 square feet per family member, on average. That’s roughly twice as much space as we had in 1973.

You may consider this an indicator of success, excess, or both. Planners consider it a challenge. Economic growth, as the prolific planner Pedro Ortiz has written, drives urban expansion far more than population growth. In Madrid, for example, the average person’s living space expanded from 129 square feet in 1974 to 301 square feet in 2007 — a nearly threefold increase. While the population hardly changed between 1975 and 1995, the city’s footprint expanded by 50 percent.

The phenomenon is universal. But American homes dwarf those in nearly every other country on Earth.”

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