Research comparing pedestrian behavior in Bryant Park and outside the Met, 1979-1980 versus 2008-2010: The biggest change in behavior was that lingering fell dramatically. The amount of time spent just hanging out dropped by about half across the measured locations. I personally am a fan of “lingering” and “just hanging out.” Via Tyler Cowen
Clouds and mountains were dancing this morning. I think they’re in love.
There’s an alley off Albuquerque’s Central Avenue, old Route 66, between the Southwest Capital Bank and St. John’s Thrift Store. You can’t go down the alley on Google Street View. Google Street View mostly doesn’t go down alleys. Alleys mostly don’t have names. You have to go there for yourself. Down past the “Drug Free …
The reflection of socioeconomics in Strava’s running heat map for my town is striking. It’s sort of Tiebout sorting?
A team out of Wyoming, including my Colorado River Research Group colleague Kristiana Hansen, has a new paper that reminds us that we need to be careful about how we thinking about conserving water that is being “wasted.” Their case study is an area on the New Fork in Wyoming, a tributary of the Green, …
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A colleague sent me this neat paper by Nicholas Irwin and colleagues at the University Nevada Las Vegas about how water use patterns shifted under initial COVID lockdowns. As you would expect, home water use went up while institutional use went down. But was it just a one-for-one offset? No… [W]e find an initial and …
Continue reading ‘Changes in municipal water use under pandemic shutdown – a neat case study’ »
The latest product of my eclectic new academic career – a paper about manure. Manure disposal is a growing problem as agricultural specialization leads to ever-larger concentrations of farm animals. Animals and crops were once grown on the same farm, creating an easy path for manure disposal on cropland in a cycle from animals to …
Burnishing my notes for UNM Water Resources class this afternoon to talk about Elinor Ostrom, I spent a bit of my morning going back through the underlined bits in my copy of her seminal book Governing the Commons. I first read it in the fall of 2009, when she won the Swedish prize. My initial …
Many thoughtful comments on yesterday’s breakfast musing on the implications of rising California ag land prices, here and over on the twitter, provide yet another reminder that my readers are far smarter than I am about this stuff. The most important point, which quite a few people made, is that a single California number hides …
New US Department of Agriculture report out this week shows the dollar value per acre of irrigated California cropland continuing to rise: Above is a quick plot of the data for six of the seven states included in the Colorado River Basin. THIS IS NOT COLORADO RIVER BASIN IRRIGATED ACREAGE. Large areas of many of …