October 2009 Archives
2009-10-17 08:39:47
Crosspost: All Aboard
14 October 2009
The Ashtabula Star Beacon carried a
report from the Associated Press today noting the number of jobs
saved or created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of
2009 in Ohio. That number was only thirteen thousand. More than
that has been lost since the Recovery Act's passage into law as the
state's unemployment rate climbed from 9.5% in the month of passage
to a preliminary number of 10.8% for August. September's data will
be released later this month.
A ton of money has been spent. It is uncertain what there is to
show for it. In lieu of just criticizing something, alternatives
should be presented.
Rather than spending federal dollars on preserving jobs directly,
infrastructure development might have helped better. The concept of
the "bedroom community" is growing where people commute long
distances from their home to their workplace. Ashtabula and Lake
counties in northeast Ohio are prime examples of that in providing
bedroom communities to the Cleveland metro area. Previously when
our western engineer lived in Ashtabula County he routinely did
round-trips to work on Cleveland's west side in excess of one
hundred miles per day. He was not alone in doing this.
Along the way between Ohio's geographically largest county and its
closest urban metro there is already one AMTRAK route that runs in
the wee hours of the night. I myself have ridden those rails to and
from conferences in Detroit as well as returning home for
Thanksgiving from undergraduate studies. There is no station any
more in Ashtabula County and the next closest stations are in
Cleveland and then over the state line in Pennsylvania on Peach
Street in Erie. A mass transit infrastructure is there and with
some small modifications could be linked into the Greater Cleveland
Rapid Transit Authority's network which itself already links to
Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
Something better that funds could have been directed to that would
have helped promote fuel conservation, greenhouse gas reduction,
and more would have been to instead build up commuter service on
the rail. Auto insurance costs alone from the hazards of winter
driving in northeast Ohio would go down if those commuting from
bedroom communities to Cleveland instead were on a train. The
amount of fuel expended in commuting is greater in the winter as
more parts of the vehicle have to operate compared to the summer
months. The rock salt mix used on icy roads also causes enough
corrosion on vehicles that the average life of an automobile before
requiring replacement runs about three to five years. Between the
hazards of driving in snow and the chance of deer strike, the
potential for calamity would go down if a mass transit option for
commuting were in play. Such would also create positions through
creating rail stations and perhaps park & ride facilities to
serve commuters. Conditions elsewhere along the rails could
potentially also allow for such to be tried in other
communities.
Why does this matter in the library setting? By and large, the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 does nothing to
directly help libraries. Libraries exist through the ability of
patrons to be able to pay taxes for the upkeep of the libraries. In
bedroom communities, the labor expended for wages does not happen
locally but those wages are brought back to the community. Making
it possible to have an economic base for a community to exist
remains a prerequisite for a library to even be possible.
While scattered reports indicated that most of the jobs saved by
the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 were in K-12
education, there is more to life than the classroom. A tax base
made up of mostly teachers is not a stable economic setting for
trying to keep a library open. Since teacher pay comes out of taxes
too, the question then becomes who was shaken down to get
that money. Simple infrastructure upgrades, whether in
improving mass transit or otherwise reducing a community's cost of
living, might have the greater potential to lift economic baselines
that make keeping library doors open possible.
All Aboard! by Stephen Michael Kellat is licensed under a
Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at lisnews.org.
2009-10-08 15:06:08
Cross-Post From LISNews--An Ill Wind Blows
7 October 2009
There is a film titled "A Mighty Wind". It is a
great film in the genre of the mockumentary. Unfortunately this
piece is not about that film. Instead we get to talk about mighty
winds.
Overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, northeast Ohio was battered with
high-velocity winds. Wind gusts were estimated at points around
forty-five miles per hour. Rain was scattered. Branches were felled
by this mighty wind. This was something that would lead into
something worse.
I was already woke up once by the whistling winds outside my
bedroom windows. After I caught another two hours of sleep, I woke
up to find a lack of power. The first priority, though, was to
secure down the facility in light of the winds. This meant running
around locking up the barn, checking on the corn crib that doubles
as the "cat house" and more. The barn cats were no dummies and
seemed to fly inside as soon as a door was opened.
After waiting a while in case the power outage was transient, we
departed for somewhere with power. This part of Ohio has two
seasons: "snow" and "not snow". It was getting cold and when we
called the outage in to First Energy we were not even given an
estimated time of restoration.
The outage pointed out some problems. First and foremost, my
battery-operated transistor radio worked fine. I could hear WWOW's
morning program just fine. The time signal on shortwave from WWV
was still audible. Computers in the house were fancy-looking door
stops. Laptop batteries have a particular mean time between failure
and unfortunately some batteries were miserable failures. Desktops
could not be fired up without electricity. The Apple portable media
player had a decent battery charge but it was preserved for as long
as possible.
While we went driving, we saw what looked to be part of the
problem. Kingsville Township Volunteer Fire Department was out
responding to a downed electrical line. The line was sparking and
the field it was being buffeted around in due to the high winds
bore scorch marks from the fires it started. This felt all too
reminiscent of the huge outage in 2003 that covered a significant
chunk of the northeastern United States as well as the Canadian
province of Ontario. In that case a tree that fell started a
cascade that wiped out power to many.
For librarians, this presents some interesting points. While the
data cloud might be proposed to be a great tool, it would have been
a miserable failure in the face of a power outage. If a Kindle were
possessed on the farm it would have been useless for downloading as
Sprint has no coverage at the farm. Although news was just released
that AT&T will be eventually providing data coverage for
Kindles, that would still not help here. Power had to be shepherded
in battery operated devices as there was no way to know when
service would be restored. That would wipe out any hope of mobile
broadband or similar backstops for accessing the cloud. Thankfully
the backup power supplies at the cell towers were intact long
enough to call in outage reports but I would not have pushed my
luck in seeking data through those means.
This was a case where books won out. Candlelight or the light from
a hurricane lamp would be sufficient provided I could find my
glasses. Analog tools like that did not need power to operate and
would have carried through.
Fortunately the outage only lasted a few hours and service was
restored for us by the early evening. Not everybody in northeast
Ohio affected by this have seen service restored yet. This does
leave an issue for librarians to ponder. While issues like
irregular power are normally thought of as things happening to the
poor abroad, what happens when the homeland does not seem as
impervious to such problems? How do you plan effective information
access over digital means in light of such?
An Ill Wind Blows by Stephen Michael Kellat is licensed
under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at lisnews.org.