The Overhead Wire on The Truth About Road Subsidies regarding a Texas DOT study on the cost of building and maintaining roads:

The decision to build a road is a permanent commitment to the traveling public. Not only will a road be built, but it must also be routinely maintained and reconstructed when necessary, meaning no road is ever truly “paid for.” Until recently, when TxDOT built or expanded a road, no methodology existed to determine the extent to which this work would be paid off through revenues.
The Asset Value Index, was developed to compare the full 40-year life-cycle costs to the revenues attributable to a given road corridor or section. The shorthand version calculates how much gasoline is consumed on a roadway and how much gas tax revenue that generates.
The Asset Value Index is the ratio of the total expected revenues divided by the total expected costs. If the ratio is 0.60, the road will produce revenues to meet 60 percent of its costs; it would be “paid for” only if the ratio were 1.00, when the revenues met 100 percent of costs. Another way of describing this is to do a “tax gap” analysis, which shows how much the state fuel tax would have to be on that given corridor for the ratio for revenues to match costs.
Applying this methodology, revealed that no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

Just remember this when someone states that gas taxes pay for roads in total. Texas DOT themselves admit that roads are heavily subsidized outside of gas taxes.

We’re fans of Aaron Draplin here. Huge. We’ve just learned that Jess Gibson is working on a documentary of Draplin and you can view a teaser trailer: Draplin: “Why America is Fucked” (unsurprisingly set in Futura).
The sign Draplin bought can be seen here.

PLAZA-Cario, IL, originally uploaded by SKY✡VU

Please Note: SKY-VU’s photostream via Draplin (it will be a Draplin-heavy day, be warned) is a huge time waster and we cannot be held responsible if you lose a day looking through the 3,000+ photos.
You have been warned.

Riveted steel , originally uploaded by RickM2007

Quick fact: steel produced in North American has high content of pre- and post-consumer recycled steel content. Of the two modern methods of steel production, the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) process uses 25 to 35 percent recycled steel while the electric arc furnace (EAF) process uses 95-100 percent recycled steel. This is why using steel studs which have certified recycled content helps boost your LEED rating.
For more information, check out the steel industry’s recycle steel website.

Olafur Eliasson Waterfall, originally uploaded by dietrich

Richard Fleming asks about the apparent blogosphere waterfall blackout:

I’m at a loss to explain the astonishing lack of coverage of Olafur Eliasson’s massive public art project in New York Harbor. One would think that at the very least the blogosphere would have something to say about the four towering waterfalls, conveniently positioned for maximum visibility off the south-eastern tip of manhattan, since this is exactly the sort of big, crowd-pleasing, innocuous and offensive-to-no-one-(except-hard-core-curmudgeons) sort of “art event” that usually brings in the bloggers in droves. Perhaps I need to improve my googling skills, but I haven’t heard a word.

I think Richard answered his own question: Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls, while interesting, are no match for New York City.
The essence of the problem lies in the work’s context. Eliasson’s “The Weather Project” (below, near) at the Tate Modern or his more intimate work (below, far) at PS1 all force the viewer to interact with natural forces. In both examples, you are intimately aware of the body in space and body’s scale and the scale of the installation and the space (positive or negative) created by the work.Additionally, Eliasson’s work generally doesn’t hide the apparatus and infrastructure which create the work; thus allowing for reading the work on two levels, a physical manifestation of of the structuralist signifier/signified dialectic.


The Waterfalls failure is that, while massive in scale, there is no challenge or redefinition of the body in space. The Waterfalls do not challenge your scale nor do they compare at all to the scale of New York City. Not to mention Eliasson’s dialectic is completely destabilized by the massive amount of infrastructure required to create the flowing water. They are wonderful to look at, but as installations they lack the power of Eliasson’s prior work because they lack context with the human body in space.
I’m opening comments: what do you think about Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls?

Modern Architecture, originally uploaded by Ballet Lausanne

Eames house entry, originally uploaded by Dystopos

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Vol. 07, "How We Get Things", originally uploaded by Draplin

Check out the retro Vintage Childcraft “How and Why Library” Icon Gallery by Draplin.

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