For more general design patterns for water management, see Brad Landcaster's book series, "Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond".
In the pictures in the article, the roads form berms, and the fields are basins. It doesn't just have to be roads -- walkways threading through a smaller scale can act as berms as well. The two volume book contains many other water harvesting structures.
As a note, Andrew Millison has a youtube video about a river system that was developed in India over the course of centuries -- deliberately engineering a delta, with flood channels. They basically did what beavers have been doing in North America (slowing down and spreading out water) for ... longer than we humans have been around.
These ideas are not new. They have been around for a long time. It's not that we found new ways to progress, but rather, rediscovering old methods that had been dropped in our rush for modernity.
I don't know where he got the idea, but I've also seen videos by Mark Shepard where he uses roads as spillways. Instead of running water retention parallel to access, he will run it perpendicular. I was never quite clear how he prevents the overflow from exiting the property at maximum speed.
If your water retention system reaches capacity, by definition you cannot hold onto it, but water flowing at speed is also an erosion risk. It can lead to earthworks failures, which are about as bad as landslides.
One phenomenon I heard about recently is that new developments plant smaller trees in order to reduce impacts on power lines. While this achieves the nominal objective, the smaller trees are generally ineffective for shade and general thermal management, provide limited support for squirrels and birds, and generally result in a much inferior aesthetic. According to some models (which are difficult to test), trees improve air quality; smaller trees probably have less effect. But the costs of trees accrue to the developer (who may be a city), while the benefits are diffuse and difficult to measure. Moral hazard, unintended consequences, call it what you will; you have to know about the problem to fix it.
In this article, we hear:
>“The biggest asset for [the county government] in this program is the reduction of maintenance costs,” Maluki says. “It’s a two-way benefit.”
What relates my first paragraph to this article is that I have read dozens of articles touting the benefits of trees in urban design and practically never see much attention paid to the forces in the decision process that keep trees out of cities. Yes, the emerald ash borer and [other story] played a role, but not all villains are so one-dimensionally bad.
This article reads like another puff piece. Insofar as it engages with differing perspectives, they contacted an ecologist who doesn't want to build any roads, and he got two paragraphs. They didn't bother contacting anyone who builds roads and who has doubts about the project, though; their concerns are limited to about half of a sentence:
>but road departments themselves have proved reluctant. “They don’t want the costs associated with designing and implementing [them],” he says.
A new subdivision went in across the major street from my neighborhood recently. The developer clear cut the forest, put in roads and cookie cutter houses, and then planted one small tree in front of each house. Many of the people who live there cross the busy main road to walk/jog/etc. in our older neighborhood, which has many more trees.
Why would a new development have power lines? In my country older suburbs have powerlines but everything is underground in new ones. Much more economical to do it in an area before any buildings or roads are built.
The newer ones are horrible for other reasons. They do tend to have smaller trees but over here that’s because everything is squeezed in to as little space as possible to maximise developer profit per square meter of land.
we need to also think of the fact that the vast mojority of people move alone in a vehicle of 1500kg, this doesn't make sense for the environment, we need to go lighter and smaller
>It started as a coalition between farmers' organizations groups and bicyclists' organizations, such as the League of American Wheelmen.
Also:
>the vast mojority of people move alone in a vehicle of 1500kg
The total number of cars in the world is estimated at around 1.5 billion. The population is around 8 billion. In fact, the vast majority of people do not own a car. This article focuses largely on road construction in less developed countries, such as Nepal.
[+] [-] hosh|2 years ago|reply
In the pictures in the article, the roads form berms, and the fields are basins. It doesn't just have to be roads -- walkways threading through a smaller scale can act as berms as well. The two volume book contains many other water harvesting structures.
As a note, Andrew Millison has a youtube video about a river system that was developed in India over the course of centuries -- deliberately engineering a delta, with flood channels. They basically did what beavers have been doing in North America (slowing down and spreading out water) for ... longer than we humans have been around.
These ideas are not new. They have been around for a long time. It's not that we found new ways to progress, but rather, rediscovering old methods that had been dropped in our rush for modernity.
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
If your water retention system reaches capacity, by definition you cannot hold onto it, but water flowing at speed is also an erosion risk. It can lead to earthworks failures, which are about as bad as landslides.
[+] [-] scythe|2 years ago|reply
In this article, we hear:
>“The biggest asset for [the county government] in this program is the reduction of maintenance costs,” Maluki says. “It’s a two-way benefit.”
What relates my first paragraph to this article is that I have read dozens of articles touting the benefits of trees in urban design and practically never see much attention paid to the forces in the decision process that keep trees out of cities. Yes, the emerald ash borer and [other story] played a role, but not all villains are so one-dimensionally bad.
This article reads like another puff piece. Insofar as it engages with differing perspectives, they contacted an ecologist who doesn't want to build any roads, and he got two paragraphs. They didn't bother contacting anyone who builds roads and who has doubts about the project, though; their concerns are limited to about half of a sentence:
>but road departments themselves have proved reluctant. “They don’t want the costs associated with designing and implementing [them],” he says.
[+] [-] CrazyStat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|2 years ago|reply
The newer ones are horrible for other reasons. They do tend to have smaller trees but over here that’s because everything is squeezed in to as little space as possible to maximise developer profit per square meter of land.
[+] [-] TehShrike|2 years ago|reply
I'm glad the article linked to this PDF that gets more into the implementation details, I wouldn't mind going a bit deeper: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/1029516237428532...
[+] [-] seltzered_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 11235813213455|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scythe|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement
>It started as a coalition between farmers' organizations groups and bicyclists' organizations, such as the League of American Wheelmen.
Also:
>the vast mojority of people move alone in a vehicle of 1500kg
The total number of cars in the world is estimated at around 1.5 billion. The population is around 8 billion. In fact, the vast majority of people do not own a car. This article focuses largely on road construction in less developed countries, such as Nepal.
[+] [-] brightball|2 years ago|reply
...safely, at sustainable speeds 10-15x faster than they would be otherwise capable while solving the last mile efficiencies at the same time.
Increasing the lifetime and repair/upgrade-ability of those vehicles would probably do more for the environment than anything else.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numbol|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomohawk|2 years ago|reply
https://www.britannica.com/place/Ethiopia/Socialist-Ethiopia...
[+] [-] WalterBright|2 years ago|reply