Back to San Francisco

It's November 1st, 2012, and I'm back in San Francisco for the second time. Hopefully it rivals last year's visit with my architecture studio, as over the next few days I'll be meeting and exploring fellow architecture students from all over the Western United States!

I'm mostly starting this blog to get my thoughts written down and unforgotten. Pictures don't always tell the full story, though yes, I've taken dozens already today.

The flight out of Pullman left on time, and I accidentally caught an earlier flight out of SeaTac than planned! However, it worked out great, because I had plenty of time to get to my hotel, check in early, and wander around the city. From San Francisco International Airport I took the BART (Bay Area Regional Transit) commuter rail to the Civic Center station. I was pleasantly surprised to see "Hotel Whitcomb" attached to the side of a historic building as I emerged from underground. Even though I was three hours early I was checked in my room right away, giving me a chance to go explore.

Before heading out I stopped by a credit union to get some cash and stopped at a deli for lunch. On the way I passed what looked like San Francisco City Hall in the distance. I'd found Morton's Sandwiches, about five blocks northwest of the hotel, on Google, and it looked a little sketchy from across the street, but I was glad to find a bustling patronage and enjoyed a fine "Pop's Classic" sandwich for lunch. Afterwards I headed east on Market Street and ambled past the Hotel Metropolis, where our study tour group stayed last fall. I would say the Whitcomb is definitely a step up. I also passed the Crown-Zellerbank building, where Phil gave a lecture in a plaza last time I was here.

At one point I passed a Zipcar table, staffed by two people, on the street. I'm a Zipcar member, and I knew San Francisco was very trend-setting in car sharing, but I'd never actually seen an employee as it was all done online. I wanted to get a picture of the sight but, being my awkward self, did not turn around to do so and instead walked back around the block. But halfway there I found an awesome plaza with terraced planting and a sloped atrium. Sometimes when you make a detour is when you find the best a city has to offer.

Afterwards I rounded the block and got vouyeristically got my picture of the Zipcar staff.

At the end of Market I finally reached the Embarcadero and Justin Herman Plaza, the site of my studio project one year ago. There were some changes underway in the area; a hockey rink was being built on the plaza and even out into the drained fountain. I also found a sculpture with "Occupy" painted on, a remnant of the Occupy Wall Street protests that gripped the country last year.

I wandered over to the park next to the Embaracdero Center towers and found it was open to the public; last year it was under construction and fenced off. I also recall only spending about ten minutes there, which was unfortunate but didn't affect my project too much! I could image my terraced walkways, spanning arches, and boxy mixed-use cultural center filling up the space as I walked around.

Afterwards I found myself behind the Ferry Building and look out over the Bay. It was a beautiful day and all kinds of ships and boats were around. I then went through the Ferry Building, not as crowded with food vendors as I remembered, but I stopped in a fruit store and got some delicious Camino Apples!

On the way back to the hotel I started up Mission Street and got a very different change of scenery. The buildings were somewhat smaller, more homeless people, but perhaps a more accurate picture of the city. At one point I refoudn the Yerba Buena Gardens and found a cozy little spot on a wall to sample one of the apples I bought earlier. The gardens are quite a well-designed urban public space.

Returning to Mission I found a few building facades that may inspire changes in my current studio project. I also visited the Federal Building again, though from a different angle than on the study tour. I have mixed feelings about, but I like that it's different than other buildings in the area with it's second facade.

This is the first trip to a big city that I've made by myself, and honestly, I already like it better than going with a group. I have freedom to wander and do whatever I want and I don't have to worry about anyone else's needs. I also like to reaffirm that I'm mature enough to travel alone, though recent trips to large cities in years past have prepared me for this.

Compared to this year's study tour in Chicago, my impression back in San Francisco can be summed up as less sirens, less horns, more weed, more homeless people. Chicago was so neat and tidy, at least in the areas I visited, but San Francisco is okay with being a little dirty and expressive of human nature. San Francisco's blocks are also really long away from the waterfront, whereas Chicago's blocks were relatively small and more human scale.

Compared to the building watching and neck straining I did in Chicago, here I am doing a lot more people watching (perhaps because I've already seen the architecture). And people are wonderful. You can tell the tourists from the businesspeople from the service workers, like any city, but the mix here is very diverse and made up of many cultures and ethnicities. There's also the little moments of human interaction that help along the experience, like bumping into a group of slow walkers, passing a bike cop investigating a parked car, seeing a women pound on the side of a bus, chatting with the cashier, waving to the UPS driver as he pulls in front of me on the wharf, watching a man yell at his whore, denying candy cane sales from a bum, and nodding to a security guard.

That's San Francisco for me and I love it.

Well I'm off to the Academy of Art Architecture building to sign in the for the reason I'm here: the Fall 2012 AIAS West Quad Conference. I'll check back in soon!

The Fork in the Road

I am not a scientist nor a doomsayer, but rather an ordinary Internet user that reads much more news, journals, and books than the average person. And it has become clear to me that as a national and global civilization, we face two diverging futures that will be chosen in the 21st century.

The first is negative, and at the heart of it is entrenched corporate money in government. Vast subsidies to oil, food, and financial monopolies ensure that there is no interest in much needed social progress. America continues to spend almost half of its budget on its military, more than all of the over armed forces in the world combined. Fossil fuels will be burnt to the last drop, still used for everything from plastics to agriculture.

More corn than we can ever use is grown and then wasted because farmers are paid to grow so much of it; much of ends up in almost every food product we eat in the form of high fructose corn syrup, resulting in a third of the adult population being obese. This and other problems will continue to stress the most expensive healthcare systems in the world, and there is resistance to change for loss of insurance company profits. When insurance companies make money, so do their shareholders and the other financial institutions of Wall Street.

When the public reacts to this, their voices are ignored by those who can change things; why bother, the politicians getting more money from their corporate sponsors than their constituents.

All of this is connected. Fueling this spiral will lead to lack of meaningful social progress and decline.

There is another path, however, and its signs are intertwined in the headlines if you look carefully. Renewable energy technology is offering a path away from oil, and its not impossible to power the world with it; enough sunlight hits the Earth in an hour to power our world for an entire year. Social equality and new technologies will enable widespread housing, healthcare, and education. Even as the developing nations reach a standard of living with the West, population growth becomes more sustainable and industry finds ways to recycle and process materials to reduce our impact on the planet.

Fusion technology and space exploration lead to new economies and a space-fairing civilization. The drive to acquire new territory, resources, and explore will reap unlimited benefits. Getting off Earth will also serve as a safety net, as life is bound to end on this small planet eventually.

I think we will see a mixture of both paths. The part you take part in depends mainly on which nation you call home; powerhouses like the United States and China will continue to consume most of the world's resources will doing little to improve life. Smaller, socially progressive nations will have the foresight to invest in scientific advancement.

• With several commercial space startups conducting successful tests as of late, including Virgin Galatic and SpaceX, space tourism is right around the corner! (CNN)
• In a related note, space experts and scientists are calling for a 'Space Superfund' to help cleanup the hundreds of thousands of pieces of artificial debris in Earth's orbit. (MSNBC)
• Several cities around the country are progressing on local streetcar lines, courtesy of public support and federal funding. This article provides a look at both sides of the argument whether streetcars can improve city life. (CNN)
• Scientists in the Pacific Northwest are conducting tests to see how marine life could be affected by ocean-based power sources, such as wind and wave turbines. The theory is that many species may navigate by sensing the Earth's electromagnetic field, and the electromagnetic fields from copper cables may throw off that sense. (Seattle Times)

The Magnetic Solution

The following is a proposal I wrote for my second-year architecture project. I think it does a good job of summarizing the idea of maglev trains in the United States.

The future of human energy production will likely be decided in the 21^st century. We are sure to run out of accessible fossil fuels within a few generations, but promising projects for alternative energy sources are already underway. Development of new energy sources depends on complex political, economic, and social forces, and change to more sustainable power will come gradually and unevenly throughout the world. Transportation is one of the key industries that will be greatly affected by this change. What follows is an examination of the merits, drawbacks, costs, and feasibility for an emerging form of transportation, magnetic propulsion, which may become the dominant form of human movement within the next few centuries.

Magnetic propulsion holds promise for the future of transportation for a number of reasons, but first we must examine its current technological state and how it is has thus far been implemented. Magnetic levitation is the effect of an object being supported only by magnetic fields. The first patents issued for magnetic levitation transportation systems were made in the early 20^th century. By controlling the electric current within a magnet, the magnet’s repulsiveness or attractiveness to other magnets can be controlled. Magnetic transportation is primarily concerned with trains; unlike conventional trains that run on tracks, magnetic levitation (maglev) trains employ powerful magnets to float above a guide rail. Magnets are located within the train units and the track; the latter are switched on and off or alternate current as the train approaches to pull the vehicle forward, providing magnetic acceleration. This will be explained in further detail later.

           

Maglev trains have the primary advantage of speed, efficiency, and silence. They have the potential to relieve local and regional road and airport congestion, and the technology already exists and is in use today in several countries. Because the train makes no contact with the track at high speeds, the only drag occurs from air resistance, allowing for speeds upward of 580 kilometers per hour; theoretically, maglev trains could obtain speeds of up to 6,400 km/h in evacuated tunnels. Maglev trains would dramatically reduce travel times regionally. Additionally, the absence of rolling resistance eliminates the need for an on-board engine, increasing power efficiency. On-board train systems (lighting, climate control, etc.) are powered from the track through induction.  Because the maglev train makes no contact with tracks, they produce little noise compared to conventional trains. The first official passenger maglev train opened in 1979 in Hamburg, Germany as part of an exhibition. Today, there are full service maglev lines running in Japan, China, and South Korea.

           

There are also several drawbacks to maglev transportation, including cost, infrastructure, and weight. Because maglev trains cannot operate on existing track, they require an entire new infrastructure system of tracks. The way the train interlocks with the track makes any kind of system other than point to point difficult to construct. Their high speeds usually necessitate that the tracks are elevated above roadways and other obstacles for safety reasons. However, trains can be designed to be used with existing railway stations and facilities if current track is built over.  The capital costs involved with a maglev system are significant, and systems such as the one in Shanghai are not able to recuperate initial investment. A proposed Baltimore-Washington line would cost 69.3 million dollars per kilometer. High ridership could offset these costs. Finally, massive magnets are needed to support to large weight of a maglev train, which becomes a major design issue. Research is currently underway to increase the efficiency of magnets and how to use less power to support the magnetic fields.

Another issue with maglev transportation is the method of levitation. There are two types of magnetic levitation; electromagnetic suspension (EMS) and electrodynamic suspension (EDS), the latter of which is still experimental. In EMS, the body of the vehicle wraps around the steel guideway, where the train’s guidance magnets levitate the train horizontally and levitation magnets vertically. The train is pulled forward by a traveling electromagnetic field in the track. This system is inherently unstable, so on-board electronics must constantly monitor the train’s distance from the track and adjust for irregularities. On the other hand, this system can operate at any speed, simplifying the design of the track. Comparatively, EDS systems only work at minimum speeds of 30 km/h, requiring a secondary system built in to the entire track for low speeds (steel wheel is a possibility, used when entering and exiting stations). In this system, the train floats above the track via magnetic forces from the train and track. The repulsion between the train and track is stable and requires no automatic feedback. Alternating current in the track pulls the train forward.

In relation the electric highway project, magnetic propulsion could be applied as an alternative form of road transport or as an additional system integrated with the highway. As personal transportation, private vehicles could be fitted with normal wheels (or whatever form they may have in the future) in addition to a system that can hook into an automated maglev highway. A simpler proposal is to integrate a maglev system with highways as we know them today, providing an alternative for passenger and freight transport. Attaining high speeds, the maglev system would reduce the highway system to that of private transport for short distances. Maglev trains could take freight and people across large distances within a few hours, greatly reducing transportation costs. In conventional systems, maglev trains may be outrun by air transport, but maglev systems have the potential for much higher capacity due to frequency. As a public transportation system, maglev transit would likely become quite popular, especially in regional areas of the United States like the northeast and southwest, for its high speeds. International maglev trains, such as the proposed mid-Atlantic tunnel, would also greatly increase global interdependence. Maglev systems would be very energy efficient, not needing fuel of its own but electricity from power plants – perhaps wind, solar, and hydro power plants could be placed along the route of the maglev line to exclusively power it, especially in open country. As a very basic concept, magnetic propulsion technology could eventually be used to launch payloads into space.

The environmental and human benefits from local, regional, and national magnetic levitation transportation systems would outweigh the costs and technical hurdles that are currently associated with them. As the world runs out of economically recoverable oil (predicted to happen by mid-century), humanity will have to cope with less fuel or step up and increase power from alternative energy sources. Fortunately, the world currently gets 19% of its energy from alternative energy. Maglev transportation will efficiently use that energy to move commerce, goods, and people around the world.

Weather Brings Havoc

Image courtesy CNN

• A Minneapolis' sports stadium 'deflated' after receiving a large amount of snow over the weekend. (CNN)
• A mudslide near Vancouver has closed the Washington-Oregon Amtrak line (CNN)
• Speaking of rail, Ohio and Wisconsin's high-speed rail funds were taken by the federal government and spread back out to several other states. California received the most funding, with Washington state receiving $161 million. (Seattle Times)

Green Roofs and Fast Trains

• A new LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified house in Chicago sports a number of 'green' features, including solar panels hidden from street view by a V-shaped roof. But at $1.6 million, it didn't come cheap. (USA Today)
• China claims it has set a new record for fastest unmodified commercial train at nearly 500 miles per hour! (CNN)
• The latest Shuttle launch has been delayed because of extensive cracks in Discovery's external fuel tank. It appears that our shuttle fleet is showing its age. (USA Today)
• The Air Force's new secret space plane, the unmanned X-37B has successfully landed after performing secretive tests. Observers on the ground surmise it's purpose is probably quick-launch reconnaissance. Here's a Popular Mechanics cover story on the plane. (PM)

Natural Gas Prospects

• New York legislators have sent a bill to the governor that, if passed, will create a state ban on fracking, the controversial drilling process that brings natural gas to the surface. (CNN)
• On the other hand, natural gas seems to be an increasingly favorable source of energy for power suppliers nationwide, as many companies find that switching to burning natural gas will be cheaper than upgrading coal plants to be less dirty. (NYT)
• The US Department of Transportation is requesting that stimulus funds sent to Ohio and Wisconsin be returned, since the funds were designated for high-speed rail projects and the new governor-elects appear ready to cancel those projects. (CNN)