Induced Demand

Posted on April 18, 2023 by SusanG

So that title looks a little technical or academic or something. Definitely not artistic or musical. And you would be right. It’s not. It is, however, something I’ve been thinking about after some of the reading I’ve done over the last couple of years. If you’d like to know more about it see my earlier blog post about what I’ve been reading and watching lately.

I think I first came across the phrase ‘induced demand’ when I was reading one of the books on urban planning. I’d guess the phrase is typically used with regard to the phenomenon of widening roads and making traffic even worse than it was before. They have done studies that show if you widen a congested road when it is complete the traffic increases to the point that not only has all the excess capacity been utilized the entire road then becomes over utilized. So, say a road can handle 100 cars in 5 minutes, but you want to make it easier or quicker to get all 100 cars through so you increase the capacity of the road so it can handle 200 cars. You do this thinking that at 200 cars the commute time on that stretch of road will decrease so instead of taking the 10 minutes to get someplace caused by the traffic, it will take the 5 minutes that was expected. Except, that’s not what happens. Once you add the extra capacity, instead of that road handling the original 100 cars in 5 minutes or even the 200 cars in 5 minutes, the usage will actually be more like 300 or so cars trying to use the same road. When this happens the engineers then say something like ‘see. I told you we needed a bigger road.’

So now that we have a base idea of induced demand let’s look at how messed up that is and how it happens in other areas of our lives. Because this is what really hit me when I was doing all that reading and as I’ve watched a couple of those YouTube channels I noted before.

What happens with induced demand on our roads is that now that the road has increased capacity more people will use that route because they think it will be faster, instead of their previous route that they used that spread out or dispersed the traffic over a wider area. Now the same volume that 5 square kilometers could handle is funneled into .5 square kilometers. As an example. I don’t know how real these numbers are. It’s kind of like if you have to leave a stadium through just one door or if they open all the doors to let people out.

Some will talk about those extra cars and car trips as pent-up demand and that is true to an extent. But I would argue, as some of the planners, authors and creators have, that it would be better to build sidewalks, trains, trams, bus routes, true bike lanes, and to bring the destinations of those drives closer to the residential neighborhoods or even office space neighborhoods so that people don’t need to get in the car to pick up a liter of milk and a loaf of bread.

And this is where induced demand starts to get insidious while looking like efficiency.

If it takes me 20 minutes to drive my car to the supermarket to get a loaf of bread or a liter of milk, then I’m more likely to buy more while I’m at the store so I don’t have to make that trip too often because it’s a pain. I’ll buy stuff that I maybe need but not really. Because, just in case. Now I have food that is more likely to go to waste because I bought produce beyond the capacity of one person (me) to eat in the timeframe I need to for it to be at its freshest and at its best level of ripeness. And now I’ve wasted my money on something that ends up in a landfill without ever being used, eaten, etc.

And that is all because some fool decided to widen the road instead of giving me a safe way to get to the nearest place to buy food on a regular basis without wasting huge amounts of time.

Let’s look at induced demand in relation to food from a different reference. The refrigerator. There is no standard size for a refrigerator. I found this out a couple of years ago when I bought a new one that barely fits in the space allotted. It wasn’t that I wanted or needed a big refrigerator, it was the best price for the features. But it is a bit big. And we are told that refrigerators work best and are most efficient when full. So, to operate my refrigerator at its optimal level I need to fill it with food. I’m one person. And the food I tend to keep in the refrigerator is perishables. Things that will go bad faster if I leave them on the counter. Or so we are told. They still go bad. They go bad faster than say a bag of flour, or a bag of beans, or a bag of rice, or you get the idea. If I fill my refrigerator with enough perishables to make it operate at its most efficient, then I have more food than I can eat before it spoils, even in a refrigerator, and has to be thrown out. Induced demand, again. And waste.

The thing about induced demand is that we don’t even realize that is what is happening and how it is being used to convince us to buy more stuff. If we had, by default, smaller refrigerators, and easier to access food markets, then we might be able to cut food waste. Seriously. If, when I finish working for the day, I could walk to the nearest food market, safely and in a reasonable amount of time, or even bike, then I might buy a couple of pieces of fruit for breakfast for the next couple of days and some veggies to go with dinner for the night. I could get produce that was reasonably fresh and would be less likely to have to throw it out.

Induced demand is wasteful. And yes, I just realized that as I wrote this.

I’m not some paragon of virtue when it comes to this. Really. I’ve only recently come to see what has been happening and I certainly have and still do succumb to the thinking that it encourages. And as I’ve started to see it, I see it happening in more and more areas of my/our lives. It’s frustrating.

Let’s talk about this some more because these are just a couple of examples of induced demand, and it is more prevalent than in just traffic and refrigerators.

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Art Update April 2023

Posted on April 11, 2023 by SusanG
picture of oil painting of a crane (bird) on green background on canvas board sitting on an easel. Work in progress
Crane oil painting on canvas board – In progress

Here’s the update on the art that I promised to tell you more about in the last post. I decided to try another oil painting. Only this time do it a little more painterly. If that’s a thing. The Telecaster painting felt a little like a paint by numbers in that I drew the whole thing out first and then colored it in. Yes, there was more to it than that, but it still started from a draftspersons view and then became a painting. I wanted to try a painting as just a painting. And I wanted to do something that fits more with what a lot of people like about my art in most other mediums. I wanted to do a creature. It could be human or animal, it just needed to be a creature. I settled on a bird, a crane that I have done in pencil, and even in Zbrush.

Picture of Octopus painted with soft pastels in color on paper taped to board. work in progress
Octopus in Pastel on Paper – In Progress

I painted a background of sorts on a canvas board a couple of weeks ago so that it could be ready for last week. And, since I haven’t been sketching as much this past year as I did for those few months the year before, I felt like I needed to sketch out the shape before I tried to put paint to canvas. I’m glad I did because it took a little work to get the shape right. Initially when I started writing this I hadn’t got very far. Then last week I added more paint to canvas and have the shape blocked in and some shading started. I am hopeful that it will turn out nice. So far it is on track for it to.

I have also done a very small bit more on my octopus. Just enough to be surprised that I might be able to get the effect I’m looking for and that it could turn out the way I envisioned it.

Things are a little crazy and busy with the day job right now so I haven’t had quite the time I want to work on things more. And the rest of this month isn’t looking much better. However, I have a cool adventure coming up and expect to have lots more to post about and even art about. It could be an exciting summer.

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What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

Posted on April 5, 2023 by SusanG

(There are affiliate links in this article and I may earn a modest sum on any purchases made through the links.)

Since I don’t really have anything art or music related to share right now I thought I’d share something a little bit different. Before I jump in, I do have a new painting I’m about to start so there will be more art to come, just not this post. Now, on to the good stuff.

How it started. Well, that’s probably not true. It probably goes back farther than this. This is when I really started looking at some things differently, and it’s why travel outside of packaged tours and outside of your home country is really, really important. I made a trip to Australia a few years ago, just before the Covid-19 pandemic, I wrote about it on this blog. I landed in Sydney on my own and was free to see the city the first day, the only thing on that day’s agenda was a tour of the Sydney Opera House. And yes, that was cool and I have some great pictures from it. What I think was more impactful was the experience of being in a vibrant, bustling, lived in city.

I grew up in suburbia. I am not bashing my childhood experiences. Some of mine were much different than my peers and cohort. And a very early experience likely shaped my thinking about things even today. Sydney was my first experience where I saw a living city, not just one for working in. I’d been to Los Angeles a few times, but I never felt like it was someplace where people lived in the city. In Sydney, I walked from my hotel, that was just at the edge of the Asian district, to the Opera House. I walked. And on the way I noticed how there were shops interspersed with apartments, or maybe condos. I saw people coming out of their homes on the way to work or wherever and not getting into cars and driving. Oh, there were plenty of cars, don’t get me wrong. There was also public transport in abundance. This was a different view for me. And even visiting my friends in Melbourne our car time was specific. We took a road trip and there were specific things that we used the car for. But we walked and took the train. Where I live, I have to get into a car to pickup take-out from the Chinese Restaurant across the street from me or I risk my life trying to cross the road on foot or bike. 

Since that trip I’ve read a few things on a different economic model, a bike centric city, and some history that I was not at all taught in school. And more recently we have had the degrading of Twitter. Not that it was likely a very healthy place to begin with. However, the shift in the environment at Twitter encouraged me to look at other social media type of places that might be more interesting. I landed on Mastodon. I’ve mentioned it before. There is easier access to a more diverse viewpoint, or not, it’s up to you. And that’s the beauty of it. Because I choose to read more than just my myopic feed, I come across some interesting things that I might not have encountered without consciously looking for them. Remember how bookstores and libraries were places for that?

Recently someone linked to the video for the ‘Not Just Bikes’ channel on YouTube. Awesome. This is a guy who, I believe, is an urban planner, or works in urban planning, something like that, who has moved from Canada to Amsterdam and shares his take on the differences between living in Amsterdam and North America particularly when it comes to the urban/suburban environment as well as city livability. He did a collaboration with the guy who has the ‘Climate Town’ channel that was really interesting and informative. And it turns out, some of the discussion is relevant to a book I’m currently reading. ‘Palo Alto – A History of California, Capitalism, and The World’ by Malcom Harris. The collaboration between Not Just Bikes and Climate Town centered on zoning laws and how that came about. In ‘Palo Alto’ there is also a discussion of how some of the zoning in California came about, and just a hint of why Oakland and Compton are what they are today. Don’t get me wrong. I have fond memories of living in California and have relished every visit I’ve made since leaving after high school, and I definitely benefitted from some of what I’m reading about in the book, because, the ideas, concepts, laws, and thinking didn’t just stay in Palo Alto.  However, it is definitely not the history I was taught in school, even there.

The book I read about the city of bikes is about Amsterdam and the history of bicycling in the city. And it is fascinating. That one is called ‘In the City of Bikes – The story of the Amsterdam Cyclist’ by Pete Jordan. It really just covers what it says it is about, it also has just a little bit of the history of the automobile in it and its relationship to bikes, particularly in Amsterdam, also in North American cities, just enough that when you put it together with a couple of other books I read, ‘Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream’ by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, and ‘Walkable City – How Downtown Can Save America, On Step at a Time’ by Jeff Speck, you start to get an idea of how the United States has become what it is, and just maybe how and why we’ve become more polarized, less healthy, and more depressed as a nation. It’s really interesting to see that there is a different way to live that might be more beneficial to people and the planet.

I’ve read a whole host of other books in the past few years that have covered histories of various areas and how we got to where we are, from David Attenborough’s ‘A Life on Our Planet’ to Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’, Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity Without Growth’, books that offer the analysis of how we got here and even some ideas of what we could do to change things, including ‘How to Save the World for just a Trillian Dollars- the Ten Biggest Problems We Can Actually Fix’ by Rowan Hooper. I’ve even read Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Whatever you may have thought of him as a politician, set that aside and have a read. That book along with Attenborough’s will give a really good picture of how things have changed.

And as I read these books I am fascinated, appalled, disgusted, enlightened, and frustrated. I feel like I have always known that there was a different and probably better way to live. I think I’ve been saying something along those lines since I was about 10. One year, while visiting my father, my mother sent me a newspaper clipping of a study that was done by a Pennsylvania university that essentially said, I was right. So this many years later, to see that we haven’t made changes that would make things better and that they have only gotten worse, it’s frustrating. And mind boggling. There is so much evidence that what we are doing isn’t working that it is dumbfounding that we aren’t doing something about it. We say we want change and then do the exact same things we have always done. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Or at least one definition of it.

I would like to see things change. After I finished reading one of these books I wanted to order take out food from the Chinese restaurant across the street. I was so inspired by the idea of doing something different that when I got to my garage, I briefly thought of taking my bike. It would be so much less hassle. Well, except that I probably needed to air up the tires. After thinking about that for a moment I realized that taking my bike, though on the surface better for me, was actually the most dangerous thing I could do. I was irritated and dismayed as I got in my car to go get my food. The mood lasted because a few days later as I was driving, again, to my Taekwondo class, less than five miles away by the way, I saw a nice shiny suburban light truck and thought ‘damn it, it’s my planet too.’ That truck wasn’t some farmer or construction worker it was some suburbanite who thought it looked cool or tough and I know, as you know, that they guzzle gas like nobody’s business.

All of this is to say, there is a lot of really good, informative reading out there and if you want to understand why the United States of America is in the state it is in, it might be worth doing some reading. And look beyond the obvious titles. The ones that say ‘this is how America became what it is’ or ‘how America got here’. I suspect that even those books will only offer a small slice of what the cause is. I only suspect that because, in all fairness, I haven’t read a book that has that sort of analysis. And don’t just read one book. Read a few more. Because the problem is bigger than one little corner of the society.

You know I have more to say about this. But this post is getting a little long so I’ll save it for another post. Until then I’ve linked to some of the YouTube Creators and Books that I’ve found really interesting lately and that I mentioned above. There are easily a few missing, these are just for a start.          

Sites

Not Just Bikes – YouTube channel – also has a Nebula channel and a Patreon

Climate Town – YouTube channel – also has a Patreon

Never Too Small – YouTube channel

Books

‘Palo Alto – A History of California, Capitalism, and The World’ by Malcom Harris

‘In the City of Bikes – The story of the Amsterdam Cyclist’ by Pete Jordan

‘Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream’ by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck

‘Walkable City – How Downtown Can Save America, On Step at a Time’ by Jeff Speck

 ‘A Life on Our Planet’ by David Attenborough

‘Doughnut Economics’ by Kate Raworth

‘Prosperity Without Growth’ by Tim Jackson

‘How to Save the World for just a Trillian Dollars- the Ten Biggest Problems We Can Actually Fix’ by Rowan Hooper

‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore

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March 2023 – A Curveball

Posted on March 15, 2023 by SusanG

I try not to write too much about my day job because, that isn’t really what I want to talk about here. However, this year the day job has thrown a curve-ball my way that is impacting the time and energy I have for doing the things I do that I write about here. So for a little while I’ll probably be mentioning it a bit more here than usual.

In case I haven’t covered it, the curve-ball involves the retirement of my manager who is also the only other person on my team. He made it known in a somewhat unusual way, when he was filling out his self-evaluation part of our yearly review. In the section for career development for the next year, he put that it didn’t really matter since he is retiring at the end of quarter one. Yes, that means the end of this month. When our line manager laughed and asked if he was kidding my manager responded that he wasn’t. That of course set off a bit of a frenzy with all the rest of the management above, and in other departments that rely on our services.

Watercolor on Paper

As you can imagine, in the time since, as they have gotten more serious about understanding what he does and knows, my involvement in learning what he knows and taking over things he has been doing has grown. Just this last week we had the big push for management to really get an understanding of the knowledge of how our systems work and are connected something that he has a very good grasp of. And it made me realize how much documenting I’ve done over the years that needs updating. That’s a different story, though part of the same issue. We run a lean organization and like in many lean organizations backups for key people and key knowledge do not always exist.

Anyway. Because of all that has been going on at the day job I don’t always get to shut down at the “scheduled” time and even when I do it can take me a while to mentally recover and refresh to do anything else that I might want or need to do. This past week was an exceptional challenge for that given that of the four days of meetings at a meeting facility, at the end of the day I had to dine with everyone two of those days. At least the company was good. Some of our colleagues from our “home office” made the flight over from Germany to attend and ask questions.

The last week isn’t the only week that I have found it difficult to do much more than my language lessons after the day has ended. The time since his announcement has been very busy. That doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten anything done on my projects. I have. Even to my surprise. I just haven’t gotten as much done as I might otherwise.

I finished the watercolor painting of one of the pictures my sister took on her trip to France last year. It’s ok. Color is ok and the composition is good. Though she took the photo, and I didn’t really make adjustments to the composition so I can’t take credit for that. I did have a little issue with some perspective. Mostly that had to do with my challenges with the watercolors. Some might have been influenced by the age of the architecture and the possibility that things weren’t perfectly lined up to begin with, not to mention any repairs of the years, and all that type of thing. Mostly, I just didn’t get it right. Look what I learned.

After completing that I was looking at another photo that I thought I might paint, and I realized that I need more practice with those type of scenes. Buildings, alleys, city scenes and the sort, hard surfaces. I don’t do a lot of art of those sorts of subjects. So, I got out a sketchbook and have done a little practice. Not much because of the day job stuff. At least I’ve started. I plan to do a bit more practice before trying to make some sort of painting of it.

I also revisited a pastel painting that I started long enough ago that I don’t remember when that was. It’s been since the pandemic started; I just don’t remember which year. Anyway, I got the background in and then did some work on the subject. I’ve thought to work on it more a couple of times however, I don’t want to deal with the dust right now. Not because I’m picky about the chalk dust. Meh. I probably should be, but we’ll move on.

Pastel on Paper

The reason I don’t want to deal with the dust is because I have another painting in progress that takes some time to dry and I don’t want to fight the dust with the wet paint and so on. Yes, I can move the other painting to another room and if the urge to work on the pastel piece is strong enough and not five minutes before I need to be in bed, then I’ll move it.

That new piece? It’s my very first oil painting. Yeah, really. I like guitars and I have a few and one day I was looking at my Telecaster and thought it could be cool to make some art from it. I have this long-ish skinny canvas board that I thought would be really cool to use for it. I started sketching it out on that canvas board without a real plan as to how I was going to finish it. My choices were to do stippling, which didn’t really excite, or try acrylics, or try oils. I bought a set of oil paints early last year thinking I might try it with the wrist in the brace. I didn’t need brushes really since I inherited many from my grandmother. And that’s how I started my first oil painting.

I’ve tried to take my time and be patient with the process of oil painting. I know for some of it I really could just plow through from beginning to end. I don’t feel like I can do that with this piece. There is enough finer detail that I want to include that I want to be able to have some of it as crisp as I can get it. So, I work on it weekly. I do a part and then give it the week to dry so that any finer details that go over the top of what I’ve done won’t be muddied by the wet paint below it. So far it has worked well for me. I think I am a week, maybe two from being done with it. I have strings to put on the guitar and some background to tighten up and then I think it will be ready. I’ll need to figure out what sort of varnish to use with it after it cures but I can to that later. I think I’ll let it sit for at least a month maybe longer before I do that step. I made such a mess with my last stippling painting of the Gretsch because I tried to varnish too soon. I’m going to wait this time.

Oh, what song am I working on? Well, remember that book of songs from Charlie Brown Christmas? I’m still working on songs from that. Specifically, I’ve been working on the song ‘Skating’ that is played while they are ice skating on the pond. It’s a great song and the type of music that always reminds me of watching after school shows when I was a small child. Some jazz music reminds me of my childhood. That’s a whole other story.

And if you are wondering if I’m still playing guitar the answer is yes. It’s why the Telecaster is sitting out instead of in its case. I was reading a book on the history of the electric guitar and learned something really cool about the Telecaster and wanted to try it out. Apparently, the original audience for the Telecaster was the western swing guitar players in southern California who would use a hybrid picking method that used a plectrum (guitar pick) and their fingers. The single coil pickups on the Telecaster were designed or used to pickup the finger picking on the treble strings better. Cool. I’ve been working on this one song, and I wanted to see how this sounds. Out comes the Telecaster, plug it in, tune it up, adjust the tone a little and give it a go. Oh yeah. That makes a big difference. So, even though the scale is a little long, for my short fingers, the fact that the strings don’t require near the grip and the neck is skinnier than the acoustics I’ve been playing, the Telecaster has been getting some love again.

Oil on canvas board

I’ve learned all the notes for the song, now I’m trying to get it nice and smooth and flowing. It’s coming along nicely and I’m almost ready to start to tackle the song ‘Linus and Lucy’ which I think most people recognize as being the Charlie Brown/Peanuts theme song, whether it is or not I wouldn’t say.

The other thing that I’ve made a little progress on is the next character for the Blender character and animation course I’m taking. I finished the steps to build the character and was ready to do any fine tuning before the rigging part and I ran into an issue. I’ve figured out what the issue is and even how to solve it. I haven’t finished fixing it though. It’s a problem that I did in the first step of creating the limbs and because that piece was copied and used for other parts of the limbs, the problem was copied. Which means I either have to fix it in all those places or re-do that whole part. I got stuck deciding what to do and then the day job. So, I haven’t gotten back to it. That frustrates me a little because it puts me behind where I wanted to be with the character course and the project that I’m taking the course for. I’ll probably get back to it soon. I’m kind of excited for this particular scene because as I was watching the next videos, beyond where I am with the actual work, it inspired me to create something that I had thought to do a few years ago and even sketched out. It happened that, after watching the videos I came across that sketch and I got excited about the possibilities.

I’m also excited about the possibilities with the oil painting. After I worked on the Telecaster painting this weekend, I started thinking about what else I might want to try to paint in oils. Now I just need to squeeze out some time to work on all the cool stuff. It may be a challenge. My manager has extended his retirement date to the middle of April and right after that I have a trip to the main US office for the day job which means a trip to Florida. From there I will be on holiday for a week and traveling with my sister. I’m excited and I have an awesome sister. I’ll tell you more about the travel later. Until then I’ll be working on my projects bit by bit and will try to do better about posting updates. Cheers

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