kevinburke

The code is a legal requirement. If the code did not set mandatory minimum widths for parking stalls, builders could still set them at 9 feet wide.

The point is that if you are builder who wants to build a 7 foot wide parking stall (or avoid parking stalls altogether and just have the cars park themselves as efficiently as possible) you are not legally allowed to do this.

I'm just saying that people should have the choice to build a building without parking if they think that it makes more sense to use the ground floor for other things. Currently, they do not - they are required to build 9 foot wide parking stalls and 16 foot wide parking aisles.

And you do not need to have an entire building of self driving cars to make a large dent in the building footprint that is currently dedicated to parking.

I don't really like being called dishonest, there's a pretty broad literature showing the potential gains of cross ventilation even with a small amount of wind. It's extremely rare to have a day without wind at even 2mph and even if such a day exists, running your hood or bathroom fan are also extremely effective ways to create a pressure differential and draw air into your house. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1755660/FULLTEXT...

"there is a reduction of 90% of hours of a possible use of mechanical ventilation, showing the feasibility to achieve thermal comfort within the house by using passive ventilation"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...

" Indoor thermal conditions were found to be within the comfort zone for more than 70% of the time under cross ventilation operation while single-sided ventilation provided adequate thermal conditions for only 1% of the time. Results from this study highlight a significantly better performance of cross ventilation over single-sided ventilation." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...

Yes - this proves my point - both of those 3 bedroom floor plans are for corner units. They have windows on two sides because they are corner units.

In a podium building you only have so many corner units, everything else is 1 or 2 bedroom units. In this particular building that means only 12 units out of 66 https://www.costar.com/article/939748887/lloyd-companies-bra...

Sure. One thing we could do is waive requirements about how wide parking stalls need to be, and parking aisles, and how many parking spaces you need, and then let builders make those decisions for themselves.

The far bigger danger to kids from an abuse perspective is the adult driver in the front seat and from a safety perspective is the poor average quality of human driving.

And a self driving car is capable of locking all the doors, identifying threats, calling 911 etc.

The garage sits underneath the housing in this case.

Right, the difference is you can see from charts of miles driven by Waymo etc. that the technology is clearly ready. If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.

When was the last time you looked at a chart of Waymo passenger miles driven?

My sense is that parents are pretty tired of driving their kids to and from things and if it was possible for your kids to take a self driving car to school or to activities or to camp that would be a pretty attractive proposition.

The schools or daycares or camps could help figure out unloading on the other end.

It's extraordinarily difficult, and expensive, to convert parking garage space to housing - the heights are different, it's not designed with the same egresses, the floor material is concrete.

It also affects what the ground floor of buildings looks like - you can't have ten ground floor pedestrian exits or bike parking in the courtyard if the courtyard is on the third floor.

You've got this backwards - big elevators with union labor mean that they're an expensive undertaking that only large multifamily buildings can afford.

Smaller, more affordable elevators mean that they're less of a luxury item. You could put an elevator in your house, or retrofit an older apartment with an elevator, much more easily. This is incredibly common in other countries

The Maxis offices are about two hundred yards from this site!

I'm Googling for "Des Moines apartments" and clicking on any that I find that have double loaded corridors and so far I'm 0 for 4 on finding any that have a three bedroom apartment.

Finally found one on my fifth try. Here is one of the three bedroom floor plans that they offer. None of the bedrooms have a window https://capi.myleasestar.com/v2/dimg/178334024/2000x1333/178...

Walnut Creek is in PG&E territory where peak hour energy is 54 cents/kwh right now.

And the difference is A/C is paid by the renter not the building owner. If you want to address cost of living one thing we could do is make it easier to have the wind cool down apartment buildings.

With respect, people who drive used cars are not renting brand new apartments in downtown Walnut Creek.

It does not make sense to mandate parking standards in new buildings that assume 100% of cars will be driven by humans who park and then need to open the door to exit the car.

The point is the city's parking code assumes that every car has a human driver that needs to park and then exit the car. This informs the choices about how wide the spaces and how wide the aisles are.

Even if only some of the cars had the ability to park themselves - onsite or offsite - you could drastically reduce the floor space required for parking. Reducing the floor space reduces the building height, the construction cost, and the required rent.

We are going to be stuck with the choices we make now about how much space to allocate for parking for the next ~75 years or however long this building is there for. I don't think humans are going to be driving for a lot of that time.

If I'm reading this right that only lets you set the application name, not a specific profile inside the browser.

The confidential information will be the detailed financial statements.

This is why I adjusted SF’s offer for population and then multiplied it by 50%, then used 400 million as the base for financing.

Financing at 4% interest is not the expensive part though. Even if the price was $1 billion it would be 6 cents per kWh.

I agree it would be bad if they had to fight in court for a decade! But you have to start somewhere and as I mentioned you might get a good outcome just from threatening to do it. My hope is the CPUC would force them to accept some offer.

This has not been the case with the three operators in the Bay Area - Santa Clara, Palo Alto, and Alameda.

Bankruptcy would not help because you’d still have some entity managing the entire coverage area. The gain comes from creating a market for lemons.

Thank you, I got the same impression, I have relatives and friends who work in government roles for local and statewide energy operators and ran this post by them, hopefully I did not butcher the details too much.

Not just rural areas but places like Orinda and the Berkeley Hills where I will pay to underground lines at massive expense.

There is also a huge moral hazard problem where we make it cheaper than it should be to live in fire zones by subsidizing electricity and insurance. So people build a lot of houses in fire territory that burn down.

In the meantime we make it more expensive to live in the safe places. We should stop doing that

The flip side of this is that more and more homes are being built in fire zones in large part because we subsidize development in fire zones. It's a bad problem because of bad incentives. We should incentivize urban living

Highly recommend reading the state LAO report which goes into the cost structure behind the large utilities. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4950

As well as Palo Alto's utility financial statement which is linked in the post.

I'm the author here. The cost savings come from not having people who live in cities pay for undergrounding lines and maintaining power lines in rural areas. Maintaining the city networks is much cheaper.

This is why Santa Clara, Palo Alto and Alameda's power companies can deliver power for half of what PG&E can. You can just copy their cost structure.

Yes, the fact that PG&E rejected the offer is why I adjusted the figure for Walnut Creek's population and then increased it by 50%. The fact is muni borrowing is cheap - even if PG&E charged $1 billion we could finance that for about six cents per kilowatt hour.

I don't think the CPUC will let them get away with "we won't sell at any price" - I think the regulators would force them to sell at some price.

All utilities have usage based costs and large fixed costs. Historically, all utilities have charged solely on usage. The problem is when you have solar, or solar + battery, your usage goes way down. Unfortunately the grid still needs to be maintained and power plants at peak times (maybe a bit lower, but still high) still need to be paid for.

With usage based bills, people with solar pay less than their fair share for the maintenance component of a utility's cost, which means that this cost is larger for the other rate payers. On top of this California has huge subsidies to early rooftop solar adopters. This structure hurts lower income people more since lower income people are more likely to rent and apartments don't have as much space for / not as interested in rooftop solar.

So the CPUC started exploring different models for adding a bigger fixed charge to the bill and lowering the per-kwh cost. Of course the rooftop solar installers hated this as did the different "equity groups." Which is where you got the idea to adjust the fixed charge based on income.

I don't think it's a great idea but I at least understand where the CPUC is coming from. We probably need more innovation in utility pricing models.