The uneasy case for lower Parking Standards

Minimum parking requirements are the norm for urban and suburban development in the United States (Davidson and Dolnick (2002)). The justification for parking space requirements is that overflow parking will occupy nearby street or off-street parking. Shoup (1999) and Willson (1995) provides cases where there is reason to believe that parking space requirements have forced parcel developers to place more parking than they would in the absence of parking requirements. If the effect of parking minimums is to significantly increase the land area devoted to parking, then the increase in impervious surfaces would likely cause water quality degradation, increased flooding, and decreased groundwater recharge. However, to our knowledge the existing literature does not test the effect of parking minimums on the amount of lot space devoted to parking beyond a few case studies. This paper tests the hypothesis that parking space requirements cause an oversupply of parking by examining the implicit marginal value of land allocated to parking spaces. This is an indirect test of the effects of parking requirements that is similar to Glaeser and Gyourko (2003). A simple theoretical model shows that the marginal value of additional parking to the sale price should be equal to the cost of land plus the cost of parking construction. We estimate the marginal values of parking and lot area with spatial methods using a large data set from the Los Angeles area non-residential property sales and find that for most of the property types the marginal value of parking is significantly below that of the parcel area. This evidence supports the contention that minimum parking requirements significantly increase the amount of parcel area devoted to parking. JEL codes:R52, H23Parking, Land Use, Sprawl

Report of the committee on a commercially developed space facility

Major facilities that could support significant microgravity research and applications activity are discussed. The ground-based facilities include drop towers, aircraft flying parabolic trajectories, and sounding rockets. Facilities that are intrinsically tied to the Space Shuttle range from Get-Away-Special canisters to Spacelab long modules. There are also orbital facilities which include recoverable capsules launched on expendable launch vehicles, free-flying spacecraft, and space stations. Some of these existing, planned, and proposed facilities are non-U.S. in origin, but potentially available to U.S. investigators. In addition, some are governmentally developed and operated whereas others are planned to be privately developed and/or operated. Tables are provided to show the facility, developer, duration, estimated gravity level, crew interaction, flight frequency, year available, power to payload, payload volume, and maximum payload mass. The potential of direct and indirect benefits of manufacturing in space are presented

The C-terminal fragment of the internal 110-kilodalton passenger domain of the Hap protein of nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae is a potential vaccine candidate

Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae is a major causative agent of bacterial otitis media in children. H. influenzae Hap autotransporter protein is an adhesin composed of an outer membrane Hapβ region and a moiety of an extracellular internal 110-kDa passenger domain called Hap(S). The Hap(S) moiety promotes adherence to human epithelial cells and extracellular matrix proteins, and it also mediates bacterial aggregation and microcolony formation. A recent work (D. L. Fink, A. Z. Buscher, B. A. Green, P. Fernsten, and J. W. St. Geme, Cell. Microbiol. 5:175-186, 2003) demonstrated that Hap(S) adhesive activity resides within the C-terminal 311 amino acids (the cell binding domain) of the protein. In this study, we immunized mice subcutaneously with recombinant proteins corresponding to the C-terminal region of Hap(S) from H. influenzae strains N187, P860295, and TN106 and examined the resulting immune response. Antisera against the recombinant proteins from all three strains not only recognized native Hap(S) purified from strain P860295 but also inhibited H. influenzae Hap-mediated adherence to Chang epithelial cells. Furthermore, when mice immunized intranasally with recombinant protein plus mutant cholera toxin CT-E29H were challenged with strain TN106, they were protected against nasopharyngeal colonization. These observations demonstrate that the C-terminal region of Hap(S) is capable of eliciting cross-reacting antibodies that reduce nasopharyngeal colonization, suggesting utility as a vaccine antigen for the prevention of nontypeable H. influenzae diseases

The Role of Cost, Scale, and Property Attributes in Landowner Choice of Stormwater Management Option.

Cities throughout the world are experimenting with Low Impact Development (LID) strategies to replace ecosystem services degraded by urbanization. Stormwater management may need both centralized/publicly-managed infrastructure and decentralized provision by landowners. For landowners to participate in these programs they will need some latitude in the choice of techniques and siting. However, these landowner choices will affect the bundle of ecosystem services provided (such as infiltration, aesthetics, pollution filtering, and others) as well as their spatial distribution. We studied the Santa Monica (CA) stormwater regulations that require stormwater management on a large portion of development and redevelopment but allow a significant degree of landowner choice over the method of rainwater management. We use a novel dataset to investigate both the cost of rainwater best management practices (BMPs) and landowner choice of rainwater BMP. We find strong evidence of economies of scale in capital costs for the smaller size ranges of the BMPs in our data, and that property factors such as land use and overall redevelopment project cost affect rainwater BMP costs. In addition, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that property factors such as building density and land value are important factors in the landowner’s choice of rainwater management option

The Determinants of Nonresidential Real Estate Values with Special Reference to Local Environmental Goods

This paper presents the results of an empirical study of the determinants of non-residential real estate values in Los Angeles County. The data base consists of 13, 370 property transactions from 1996 to 2005. Separate spatial econometric models are developed for industrial, commercial, retail and office properties. The study focus on the impact on property values of local amenities. Our analytical results provide insights on how amenities may affect non-residential properties values and how the impact may differ across property types. Our empirical results offer evidence that explicitly modeling spatial dependence is necessary for hedonic non residential property models where there is interest in local amenities. We also show that it is also important to account for the temporal dimension since ignoring it can lead to misinterpretation of the real measure of spatial dependence over time. Moreover, we find that in general amenities that are jointly valuable to firms and household, such as parks or air quality have either weak or non-robust effects on nonresidential values. However, the fact that the joint amenities coastal access and crime appear to have stable correlations across specifications would be consistent with a higher firm than household valuation. In contrast, those amenities that are likely only valued by firms, such as transportation access and proximity to concentrations of skilled workers have robust and significant correlations with non-residential values.N/

The Marine Biogeochemistry of Selenium: A Re-Evaluation

Vertical and horizontal profiles from the North and South Pacific Oceans demonstrate the existence of three species of dissolved selenium: selenite, selenate, and organic selenide (operationally defined). In surface waters, organic selenide makes up about 80% of the total dissolved selenium, selenite concentrations are uniformly low, and selenate concentrations rise with increased vertical mixing. The organic selenide maximum (thought to consist of seleno-amino acids in peptides) coincides with the maxima of primary productivity, pigments, bioluminescence, and dissolved free amino acids. Deep ocean waters are enriched in selenite and selenate, while organic selenide is nondetectable. In suboxic waters of the tropical northeastern Pacific, organic selenide concentrations rise, while selenite values decrease. The downward flux of particulate selenium generally decreases with depth, and fluxing particulate selenium is found to be primarily in the (-2) oxidation state. These data allow a re-evaluation of the internal biogeochemical cycle of selenium. This cycle includes selective uptake, reductive incorporation, particulate transport, a multistep regeneration, and kinetic stabilization of thermodynamically unstable species

Rapid and Noncontaminating Sampling System For Trace Elements in Global Ocean Surveys

A system for the rapid and noncontaminating sampling of trace elements with volumes of up to 36 L per depth and including the dissolved and particulate phases has been developed for ocean sections that are a crucial part of programs such as International GEOTRACES. The system uses commercially available components, including an aluminum Seabird Carousel with all titanium pressure housings for electronics and sensors to eliminate zinc sacrificial anodes and holding twenty-four 12 L GO-FLO bottles, and a 7500 m, 14 mm Vectran conducting cable (passing over an A-frame with nonmetallic sheave) spooled onto a traction winch. The GO-FLO bottles are stored and processed in a clean lab built into a 20\u27 ISO container. To minimize contamination, the GO-FLO bottles are triggered when the carousel is moving upward into clean water at 3 m min super(-1. Analyses of salinity and nutrients in bottle samples from the stopped versus moving carousel show no detectable smearing, whereas the contamination-prone trace elements show the samples are uncontaminated when compared with other clean sampling methods. Based on the use of this system on three major cruises, the launch-sample-recover time for the carousel (2 bottles triggered per depth) is 1 h per 1000 m, and dissolved and particulate sampling time averages 6 h per hydrocast. Thus, the system described here meets all the requirements for ocean basin sampling for trace elements: rapid, good hydrographic fidelity, and noncontaminating