Why Don't We Cover the Sidewalks?

1-09-2018

I live in Ottawa, Canada, a place known for its harsh winters, and so far, the present winter has been the worst yet (or maybe I have never been so old before). In December, we got end-of-January weather a month in advance, and if this is Canadian-style extreme weather, indirectly related to climate change, then there is more and worse to come.

I am a public transit user with no personal car, and I found conditions imprisoning. You can only cocoon for so long, and then you need to go and buy groceries. In my case, this involved a fifteen minute walk, under conditions that made a fifteen-minute walk onerous. This collective ordeal lasted for a full week at least, without a break.

Sheltering in the lobby of a restaurant with my bags of groceries and looking out the window, I watched the bundled-up young people go by on the sidewalk with looks of outright pain on their frost-punished faces. Not a good advertisement for old Ottawa.

Why don't we cover the sidewalks?

Cover them, and heat the resulting enclosed spaces in the winter and air-condition them in the summer. Don't ask me how; I'm not a civil engineer. To aid in the execution phase, we have the creative, young minds at Algonquin College. They have a Center for Construction Excellence right there.

Make the project a multi-generational effort, to be advanced incrementally as cash flow permits, like the way they built the great cathedrals of Europe. The many benefits would likewise increase incrementally; you wouldn't need to wait for some distant completion date to begin enjoying them. Begin building at the main transitway stations where there are already predictable crowds of people predictably exposed to the elements with no car. Build the network of covered sidewalks radially and progressively outward from these stations until the whole city is served by the new infrastructure. As a practical matter, each house or workplace would also have a covered passageway connecting it to the sidewalk.

1-13-2018

Such a system could also be viewed as a network of large air ducts that could be used to distribute centrally heated/cooled air to local homes and businesses, resulting in economies of scale. Therefore, individual homes and businesses would need much smaller furnaces and air conditioners, just sufficient to make up the difference between personal preferences and the publicly available temperatures. An all-purpose Peltier-effect device in each building might be sufficient.

1-14-2018

The system would have to be built through people's back yards, rather than their front yards, to avoid interference with garbage pickup and garage access. Where there are no back yards, such as downtown, it would have to be built above-grade, with access via the second stories of buildings. The system could be called CHAPP, for "central heating, air-conditioning, and pedestrian plan," and would be paid for mostly by subscriber fees, like any other utility.

1-19-2018
A windowless but sky lighted version of the duct/via system could also provide the privacy between adjacent lots now provided by the backyard hedge. Just build it where the hedges are now.

11-21-2020

When the Rideau street mall was built, it soon became a haven for homeless people and people with addictions looking for a warm place to sleep, and several businesses allegedly failed as a result. The city's response was to tear down the covered mall, at great expense. Will the same thing happen to the system proposed here? Where was the problem with Rideau street, exactly? You figure it out. This will be your homework assignment.

1-09-2018

Leadership will be required. Expect people to object to the city-borne part of the costs, such as expropriation of rights-of-way, preferring to just endure the hardships; right now, they know no better. Mayor Jim, I'm talking to you: Will you step up to the promotion and oversight of this great enterprise in its formative years and go down in history as one of the great mayors of Ottawa?

• Then the sidewalks will not have to be shoveled and salted in the winters.
• Then our old people will no longer break their bones slipping on ice that no amount of sanding and salting could have prevented.
• Then the city can finally begin to get people to leave their cars at home, relieving downtown congestion and the madness of rush hour.
• Then there will be fewer vehicles on the road, there will be less air pollution and less consumption of gasoline, resulting in healthier Ottawans and a reduced carbon footprint for the city.
• Then people will walk way more, again resulting in healthier Ottawans.
• Then Ottawa will be even more of a magnet for tourists in the winter.

A highly pedestrian population may even be a mellower population, if my theories of human dispersal are correct (See "The Pilgrim and the Whale" in my theory blog, "Theoretician's Progress," at https://mmmtheory.blogspot.com), leading to less crime and a higher quality of life.

Mooney's Malthusian Inventory

_____________________________________________________________________________
The MMI

Participant number: _____________________________
Location:                 _____________________________
Date:                       _____________________________

Section I                                                                                 Disagree            Neutral           Agree

1. People often get in my way.                                              _______           _______         ______

2. I often feel impatient waiting in lineups.                            _______           _______         ______

3. I often bump into people.                                                   _______           _______         ______

4. I often have to put up with noise from children.                _______           _______         ______

5. I often have to put up with noise from adults.                   _______           _______         ______

6. I often have to put up with noise from machinery.            _______           _______         ______

7. I often have to put up with odors.                                      _______           _______         ______

8. I often see things that need cleaning.                                _______           _______         ______

9. I often feel that my personal space has been invaded.     _______           _______         ______

10. I often flee my dwelling for no particular reason.           _______           _______         ______

11. Sex isn't worth it.                                                            _______           _______         ______

12. Commuting isn't worth it.                                               _______           _______         ______

13. Kids aren't worth it.                                                         _______           _______         ______

14. A degree isn't worth it.                                                    _______           _______         ______

15. Cooking isn't worth it.                                                     _______           _______         ______

16. Wealth isn't worth it.                                                       _______           _______         ______

17. Lifestyle and personal expression are important.           _______           _______         ______

18. Politics and social justice are important.                        _______           _______         ______

19. Hobbies and side hustles are important.                        _______           _______         ______

20. Social media are important.                                           _______           _______         ______

Section II

1.   Months required to find your present dwelling: ____________  (Homeless: ___)
2.   Months required to find your present job:         ____________   (Unemployed: ___)
3.   Hours required to earn $1,000.00:                     ____________   (N/A: ___)
4.   Amount spent daily on recreational drugs including caffeine and alcohol: $___.__
5.   Number of current, known enemies:    ____________________
6.   Number of siblings, dead or still alive:____________________
7.   Number of jobs held, lifetime total:    _____________________
8.   Number of psychiatric diagnoses:      _____________________
9.   Number of suicide attempts:               _____________________
10. Number of medications:                     _____________________

Section III

I am:                                                  trans: ___    female:___   male: ___
I am:                                                  ___ y old.
Height, cm:                                        ___
Weight, kg:                                        ___
Country of origin:                              ____________________
Immigration date:                              __mm, __yy,  N/A __
____________________________________________________________________________

To the investigator: The MMI purports to measure the level of the construct "crowding stress," which is theorized to be an excellent predictor of history-making upheavals such as world wars and mass migrations [1,2]. Crowding stress, in turn, is thought to correlate with persons per hectare, with the slope of the regression line dependent on the details of housing and zoning practices. Gentrified developments, for example, would intuitively be expected to have a lower value of the slope, whereas slums would be expected to have a higher value.

[1] "The Cogs of Armageddon," in: "Theoretician's Progress" mmmtheoryblogspot.com

[2] "The Iatrogenic Conflicts of the Twentieth Century" in: "Theoretician's Progress" mmmtheory.blogspot.com

___________________________________________________________________________

To the Reader: of course, the above is just a pretend-test, with nothing known about how best to score it, the test-retest reliability, the content validity, or the construct validity. I propose it to get people seriously considering that "crowding stress', or "psychological population density," as it could be called, may have an insidious effect on the course of history that flies below the radar of the conscious mind, affecting people's emotional reactivities directly. City planners may derive some wiggle room from the fact that psychological population density is not necessarily the same as physical population density. These ideas were inspired by Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rats and mice.

Ok, so I am not showing masses of people here, but the tone is right. (However, the infamous Rideau Street sinkhole opened up later at the base of the nearest street-light in this picture. Make of that what you will.)

Intro

The URL of this blog is https://nightbull.blogspot.com
This is a companion blog to "Theoretician's Progress," at https://mmmtheory.blogspot.com. In the present blog, I place all prescriptive material, that is, writing that tells the reader what to do. These posts are best understood as suggestions for experiments arising out of the theoretical considerations of the other blog. Some will be traditional lab experiments and others will be social experiments.