andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-68 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A New York Times article reports the opening of a half-mile section of bike path, recently built along the west side of Manhattan at a cost of $16M, or roughly $30 million per mile. That’s about $5700 per linear foot. Kinda sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, $30 million per mile for about one car-lane mile is a lot, but it’s not out of line compared to other urban highway construction costs. The Doyle Drive project in San Francisco — a freeway to replace the current old and deteriorating freeway approach to the Golden Gate Bridge — is currently under way at $1 billion for 1.6 miles…but hey, it will have six lanes each way, so that isn’t so bad, at $50 million per lane-mile. And there are other components to the project, too, not just building the highway (there will also be bike paths, landscaping, on- and off-ramps, and so on). All in all it seems roughly in line with the New York bike lane project. Speaking of the Doyle Drive project, one expense was the cost of movin
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1 A New York Times article reports the opening of a half-mile section of bike path, recently built along the west side of Manhattan at a cost of $16M, or roughly $30 million per mile. [sent-1, score-0.92]
2 Well, $30 million per mile for about one car-lane mile is a lot, but it’s not out of line compared to other urban highway construction costs. [sent-4, score-0.919]
3 The Doyle Drive project in San Francisco — a freeway to replace the current old and deteriorating freeway approach to the Golden Gate Bridge — is currently under way at $1 billion for 1. [sent-5, score-0.467]
4 6 miles…but hey, it will have six lanes each way, so that isn’t so bad, at $50 million per lane-mile. [sent-6, score-0.393]
5 And there are other components to the project, too, not just building the highway (there will also be bike paths, landscaping, on- and off-ramps, and so on). [sent-7, score-0.407]
6 All in all it seems roughly in line with the New York bike lane project. [sent-8, score-0.485]
7 Speaking of the Doyle Drive project, one expense was the cost of moving a bush called a “San Francisco Manzanita” out of the way. [sent-9, score-0.467]
8 Maybe I shouldn’t say A San Francisco Manzanita, I should say THE San Francisco Manzanita: this species hadn’t been reported since 1947 and was presumed extinct, but a single bush was found last year, in the path of the Doyle Drive project. [sent-10, score-0.568]
9 It was moved this January at a reported cost of $175,000. [sent-11, score-0.275]
10 If you look at the photos linked to that article, you’ll see that the move involved a heavy crane, a bunch of workers, etc. [sent-12, score-0.08]
11 ; and I think it’s understandable that when you are working with possibly the very last example of a species, you hire some consultants to make sure that the place you’re moving it to will actually support it. [sent-13, score-0.229]
12 (I’m a big fan of preserving endangered species, and if this is what it costs then so be it, but…is this really what it costs? [sent-15, score-0.217]
13 It’s very tempting to be snarky about these high prices, but I’m hardly in a position to criticize, considering that my work time (including overhead and benefits) is charged at about $320,000 per year, which, trust me on this, is far more than my salary. [sent-17, score-0.487]
14 And of course, anyone who has work done on their house will discover that it costs about 3 times more than you think it should, and that is true even after you have inflated your initial guess by a factor of 3. [sent-18, score-0.215]
15 And if you’re a cyclist, like me, you know that buying a nice (but by no means top-of-the-line) bicycle can easily cost $1800, and that the local bike shop where you buy it is probably struggling to make ends meet (which might also be true of the manufacturer). [sent-19, score-0.676]
16 If there’s a point to all of this (which, I must admit, I’m not sure there is), I guess it’s that some things cost much, much more than you think they should, but you’re probably kidding yourself if you think you could do them cheaper yourself. [sent-20, score-0.338]
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Introduction: A New York Times article reports the opening of a half-mile section of bike path, recently built along the west side of Manhattan at a cost of $16M, or roughly $30 million per mile. That’s about $5700 per linear foot. Kinda sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, $30 million per mile for about one car-lane mile is a lot, but it’s not out of line compared to other urban highway construction costs. The Doyle Drive project in San Francisco — a freeway to replace the current old and deteriorating freeway approach to the Golden Gate Bridge — is currently under way at $1 billion for 1.6 miles…but hey, it will have six lanes each way, so that isn’t so bad, at $50 million per lane-mile. And there are other components to the project, too, not just building the highway (there will also be bike paths, landscaping, on- and off-ramps, and so on). All in all it seems roughly in line with the New York bike lane project. Speaking of the Doyle Drive project, one expense was the cost of movin
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Introduction: Aleks points me to this article showing some pretty maps by Eric Fisher showing where people of different ethnicity live within several metro areas within the U.S. The idea is simple but effective; in the words of Cliff Kuang: Fisher used a straight forward method borrowed from Rankin: Using U.S. Census data from 2000, he created a map where one dot equals 25 people. The dots are then color-coded based on race: White is pink; Black is blue; Hispanic is orange, and Asian is green. The results for various cities are fascinating: Just like every city is different, every city is integrated (or segregated) in different ways. New York is shown below. No, San Francisco is not “very, very white” But I worry that these maps are difficult for non-experts to read. For example, Kuang writes the following:: San Francisco proper is very, very white. This is an understandable mistake coming from someone who, I assume, has never lived in the Bay Area. But what’s amazing i
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Introduction: Image via Wikipedia Robert Zubrin writes in “How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?” ( Reason , Feb 2012 ): …policy analyst John D. Graham and his colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found in 1997 that the median cost for lifesaving expenditures and regulations by the U.S. government in the health care, residential, transportation, and occupational areas ranges from about $1 million to $3 million spent per life saved in today’s dollars. The only marked exception to this pattern occurs in the area of environmental health protection (such as the Superfund program) which costs about $200 million per life saved. Graham and his colleagues call the latter kind of inefficiency “ statistical murder ,” since thousands of additional lives could be saved each year if the money were used more cost-effectively. To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3
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Introduction: A New York Times article reports the opening of a half-mile section of bike path, recently built along the west side of Manhattan at a cost of $16M, or roughly $30 million per mile. That’s about $5700 per linear foot. Kinda sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, $30 million per mile for about one car-lane mile is a lot, but it’s not out of line compared to other urban highway construction costs. The Doyle Drive project in San Francisco — a freeway to replace the current old and deteriorating freeway approach to the Golden Gate Bridge — is currently under way at $1 billion for 1.6 miles…but hey, it will have six lanes each way, so that isn’t so bad, at $50 million per lane-mile. And there are other components to the project, too, not just building the highway (there will also be bike paths, landscaping, on- and off-ramps, and so on). All in all it seems roughly in line with the New York bike lane project. Speaking of the Doyle Drive project, one expense was the cost of movin
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Introduction: Where are the fixed-gear bike riders? Rohin Dhar explains : At Priceonomics, in order to build our bicycle price guide, we measure what kind of used bikes people are trying to sell and the quantity sold in any city. By mining our database of 1.3 million bicycle listings, we can tell what are the largest markets for used bicycles, how the prices vary by region, and where people who prize fixed gear bikes live. Fixies (fixed gear bikes) are considered to be a strong indicator of hipsterness. For those unfamiliar, a fixed gear bike requires riding in a single gear and the only way to stop the bike is to pedal backwards to help skid the bike to a halt. You can’t “coast” on a fixie; when you are biking downhill, your pedals will keep moving so you better keep pedaling too. Because of the minimalism of this fixed gear system, the bikes tend to be aesthetically pleasing but somewhat challenging to ride. . . . In short, fixed gear bikes = hipsters, and New York boroug
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Introduction: As part of his continuing plan to sap etc etc., Aleks pointed me to an article by Max Miller reporting on a recommendation from Jacob Appel: Adding trace amounts of lithium to the drinking water could limit suicides. . . . Communities with higher than average amounts of lithium in their drinking water had significantly lower suicide rates than communities with lower levels. Regions of Texas with lower lithium concentrations had an average suicide rate of 14.2 per 100,000 people, whereas those areas with naturally higher lithium levels had a dramatically lower suicide rate of 8.7 per 100,000. The highest levels in Texas (150 micrograms of lithium per liter of water) are only a thousandth of the minimum pharmaceutical dose, and have no known deleterious effects. I don’t know anything about this and am offering no judgment on it; I’m just passing it on. The research studies are here and here . I am skeptical, though, about this part of the argument: We are not talking a
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