Siting Bank Branches
bam.kalzumeus.com
bam.kalzumeus.com
> Some people in society have to actually be right about what they publish, and they have developed an important novel insight into human behavior: people cannot fly.
Haha savage.
I really love this article - it's a love letter to understanding all of the minutiae that goes behind something simple.
The comment is specifically that people who are not often considered intellectuals/researchers/etc, who have titles like Real Estate Acquisition Specialist, have a much higher fidelity understanding of the issue of access than the people society believe are largely the responsible voices regarding access issues.
This was in the context of an extended discussion about how e.g. regulators with an access mandate care about maps but that is insufficient.
Edit: if you simply wanted to flag “food desert” as a term of art, enclosing it in quotes would have been best. Your “so-called” implies that you are casting doubt on their existence.
> Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality
> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry, household moves to healthier neighborhoods, and purchasing patterns among households with identical local supply, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only nine percent, while the remaining 91 percent is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the common notion that policies to reduce supply inequities, such as “food deserts,” could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality. By contrast, the structural results predict that means-tested subsidies for healthy food could eliminate nutritional inequality at a fiscal cost of about 15 percent of the annual budget for the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Expertise on a subject in one specific area doesn't necessarily translate to expertise in the general concept.
The reason they’re better at this than a professor is a bit controversial but I will own up to saying it: banks actually care about people using their branches and need to design systems which will correctly site those branches. Professors need to design systems which get their papers cited. Making accurate observations about reality is not necessarily required.
"A grocery store on the corner of 24th and Main would help food access a lot and be quite successful" is not really a great research paper; but it is very useful to a business development person. "Food access is a significant problem in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas" is a fairly good research paper, but not something that you could ask the REAS in Community X to do for any area beyond Community X.
In the end, I think my question would be this. Let's take as true that Professors aren't all that accurate in their assessments of some issue, and that in their communities, REASs are more likely to be accurate in similar assessments. What then? How can we easily take that accurate, anecdotal REAS data, and turn it into broad comparative data that lets us better understand the problem nationwide?
In contrast if the professor’s paper a) actually gets noticed and b) the study conclusions are actually sensitive to the details of the distance estimation methodology, there’s a possibility (not guarantee) of someone writing a rebuttal in six months, which is embarrassing. B is important—spherical cows are frequently good enough!
Fundamentally, we shouldn’t be surprised that the methods appropriate for “decide where to spend $20M on a building” and “spend <$100k of researcher time to perform population-level analysis” should differ.
This development model is very specific to Illinois and should not be generalized across the country. In many places the road could be owned by a local development corp, the county, a non-profit, a pension fund, the bank itself or some combination of the above. Illinois has harsh winters, a 9-5 suburb/downtown traffic pattern, average traffic and lots of land which makes the drive through an important feature and curb cuts EXTREMELY valuable.
- there is substantial value to creating a curb from specific local traffic patterns
- there is one state body that is tasked with "approving" changes to curbs
- changes are "rationed" so that businesses need to request approval
For example the commission of Clark county in Nevada often prioritizes the interest of the local casino's and can move very fast to remove any "obstacles"
In NYC the value of a curb is going to be much less because there is relatively more foot traffic and much less car traffic, so a bank is not going to prioritize local zoning changes.
In smaller towns you are not going to get as much casual car traffic in general
I don't think I've ever seen a bank branch that had a car park, let alone a drive-through window.
After email killed off intra-office mail, banks are one of the last viable economic uses for pneumatic tube systems.
Still bums me out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...
Trucks probably weren't very competitive in 1897.
They’re aiming to solve last mile delivery with city wide networks of pipes
What had happened was a previous customer had driven off with the carrier, and the teller put their spare into the tube. Then the customer who had absconded with the carrier realized what they had done, and returned to the drive-thru lane - putting the carrier back in and leaving without saying anything. Now there were two carriers in the tube. So when the next customer arrived, the carrier that arrived at the teller was the spare, the one that didn't have their documents in it.
Jams were a bear. Crews would travel the route of the tube and check air pressure at test points every two blocks where the tube surfaced. When they found a drop in pressure at a test point, they would try to free the stuck canister by injecting extra pressure. If that failed, they would have to dig up the street.[2]
In the early 2000s, parts of the network were repurposed to run fiber optic cable.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor... [2]https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01870447/document
> Bank branches are not destinations. Like Starbucks and cell phone shops, they rely on capturing your day-to-day custom when you’re out and about. In the U.S., that mostly means being maximally accessible by cars. (In Japan, and other places with different transit behavior, bank branches are among the most likely user for large parcels directly adjacent to hub train stations, with smaller light branches and ATM-only locations being deployed close to far-from-station workplaces.)
Here a bank branch is basically a physical way of dealing with customer service. The people you talk to in the branch are no different than the people you talk to on the phone, they don't have any real power in decisions, they are just navigating the paperwork and submitting applications that someone/something in HQ (which may even be another country) makes a decision on. Some branches don't even deal with cash, you can only use an ATM to withdraw and deposit.
The simplest drive up bank isn't that expensive at all, and in areas with 6 months of below freezing temperatures, it was quite nice.
Uhhhh... really depends on your state for those last two.
North Carolina has places as well called “brew thrus”
It’s downstairs from my office and pretty quick.
I get it - I’m weird. But even weirder is that the bank branch sometimes have money! More than a couple thousand dollars is sometimes too much.
I asked my bank a while back to send me a new card as I regularly do when the current card gets worn out and starts to more frequently fail chip/strip readers, and it got lost in transit. I requested them to send me another; however, this time they had marked my old card having been lost/stolen and closed the debit account.
Not wanting to struggle with finding a friend both actually having money to spare and willing to engage in some attentive coordination, I was effectively cut off from _all_ of my cash, as far as I could see. I'm not particularly familiar with all the money movement mechanisms.
I had to make the effort to get to the bank the next day during business hours (I am a night owl and work full time), and I withdrew a good chunk of cash to hold me over while waiting for my card, which finally arrived yesterday.
Yadda yadda, something something don't put all your eggs in one basket. Yes, I know. I have only on the order of months been making enough to be able to entertain sharding off more than negligible amounts into a secondary account. It is on the to-do list.
We just transfer money directly to bank accounts, or pay by direct debit, or electronic invoice. For paying small amounts (up to about 500 USD) we have a Scandinavian mobile app called Vipps that lets private individuals pay other people just by knowing their mobile number.
All these things are free to use but using a cheque costs money.
Deposit cheques in business account.
Have a personal conversation with manager about that loan and thank him.
Get heads-up if some cheque you issued might bounce and deposit money tomorrow.
Meet friends you made at bank as you have been visiting it for the last 40 years.
For example, the process to open a new account at SMBC (one of the three largest banks in Japan) can be done entirely online, unless the customer has a middle name. Why? Probably some ancient COBOL program that can only be bypassed by hand-verifying the customer's info.
Indeed. I'd have changed my main bank years ago if not for the pain of changing over all my automated payments. I don't like them at all but they've not done anything bad enough to make it worth several hours of irritation, probably spread over multiple months, moving everything.
They also required me to find a fax machine, too, when they were the victim of fraud.
I don't miss you Regions!
I suppose they are written as if broadly true and without caveats, but in practice are drawn from relatively specific types of experiences that are not reflective of the whole.
In this article, I’d say most aren’t sited like this. Might appear like this, but this was not the algo. In the prior article, it’s possible a large set of small or regionals thought like that, but most megas do not, albeit with various ways of differing.
Good reads though, always well written and enjoyable. Just keep a YMMV in mind.
Add up many such decisions and you get the current car dependence of the United States.
The ones still opened are hollow shells, with more security personally then tellers. It saddens me, because I liked banks. Thier gross now though.