My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: All about logistics, architecture, and construction.

Days of Future Past

I meant to be already retired by now, but HR tells me they’re still looking and can I stay a bit longer, and otherwise they’ll sue me. So, I stay. (I think Maggie is bribing HR.)

The closer I get to that possible retirement, the more books I find myself reading. I’ve always been a reader, though I seem to have more time for it now. If you've followed my blog, you can probably guess I tend toward history, with an emphasis on logistics, architecture, and construction.

My most recent read is Daniel Brook's A History of Future Cities. Despite the name, it's not science fiction. Instead, it's a history of four cities (St. Petersburg, Mumbai, Dubai, and Shanghai) that have undergone rapid Westernization and industrialization by their rulers in an effort to turn them into world class cities.

These “instant cities” all have histories that eerily echo one another. They all seem to have gone through remarkably similar life cycles:

• They began as nothing, or as a provincial backwater, then were built up massively in a very short time by order of their rulers.

• They undergo a period of absurd Westernization, to the point of hiring exclusively Western architects, who often never even go to the cities before designing their buildings.

• They all undergo a period of rejection and resentment by the rest of the nation.

These cities are most strongly characterized, however, by their rejection of the traditional ways of their country.

Each city is, of course, still extremely distinct from one another. Dubai, for instance, has a population that's 97% foreign workers, divided between affluent foreign businessmen and poor itinerant laborers shipped in from other countries and paid a pittance.

Mumbai is surrounded by and interwoven with one of the world's largest slums.

Shanghai disguises all of its poor workers it imports in uniforms and houses them in dorms on the outskirts of town.

Brook does an excellent job exploring the rise and fall of cities in regions trying to rapidly adapt to and join the technological West. The result is that these cities become not just comparable power players but places actually trying to be the West, in a very real sense.

Though A History of Future Cities definitely tends towards the somber at times, it's a surprisingly gripping read.

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: not as numerous as cardboard cuts but much, much worse...

Ground Your Lift

Forklifts weigh massively more than cars do. They are not toys. If you play with one, you're going to get hurt or die. Not that those people apt to play with them in the first place are going to listen, but at least I tried.

In all seriousness, they're one of the leading cause of serious workplace injuries in warehouses. (The leading cause of minor injuries—er, hands down—are cardboard cuts.)

An early ancestor of the forklift was a manually powered hoist that we employed to lift a load. Simple in design and easy to manipulate, it generated lift through basic mechanical advantage. Those stuck around for a while without changing much.

In 1906, though, the Pennsylvania railroad introduced battery powered trucks to move luggage at stations. These two developments quickly began converging in the years leading up to the first world war, when a labor shortage—brought on by the war and the Spanish Flu—spurred the development of early hauling tractors and trucks.

We continued to develop these over the years, and the introduction of hydraulics set the pace for modern usefulness.

The most important piece of the puzzle, though, is one that no one blinks twice at today: the standardized wooden pallet. Skids (essentially pallets with no boards on the bottom) had existed since Ancient Egypt.

I'm Inclined to Inspect

Up until the 1930s, barrels and crates remained the preferred shipping options. Pallets, however, came together with forklifts in a perfect storm, and we rapidly standardized them, along with forklift sizes. Though there are many different pallet standards today, they largely remain homogenous in any given region.

We also standardized pallet jacks. (Interestingly enough, the pallet jack dates back to 1918, making the forklift actually older than the pallet jack.) The second world war only served to cement forklifts and pallets as preeminent in shipping.

This might all seem like idle trivia, but it's actually incredibly important. We design pretty much everything in that world—from truck widths and road widths to warehouse layouts and cardboard box sizes—with the different sizes of pallets in mind.

_________

Quotable

Cheers to you, Yard Ramp Guy. May 2023 bring greater reach to your business. In the meantime…

“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”

— Bill Vaughn

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: is sand an endangered, er, species?

Air and water are our two most heavily-used natural resources and, though not as obvious, dirt is number three. What's number four, though?

Surprisingly enough, it's sand.

Endangered?

We’ve used sand for construction since the time of ancient Egypt, if not longer. We utilize certain high-grade sands for glass, with other grades for detergents, toothpaste, cosmetics, solar panels, and computer chips.

The biggest use? Concrete. Essentially, concrete is just sand and gravel bound together by cement.

You might wonder why I'm distinguishing between dirt and sand. They're both just stuff on the ground, right? Well, no. Dirt contains a high degree of biological debris and is great for growing things in. (It often contains sand.) Sand is just ground up bits of minerals, usually quartz.

As common as sand is, turns out that it's also a finite resource. Humans use more than 40 billion tons of sand and gravel every year, and the demand is getting severe enough that riverbeds and beaches all over the world are being emptied out. We can't use desert sand because it's too rounded to bind together well—a result of wind erosion rather than water erosion.

And shortages are beginning to crop up. The absurd construction boom in Dubai has so denuded local sources that they're literally buying and shipping their sand from Australia now.

As local riverbeds, beaches, and quarries run out, sand miners have started to turn to the seafloors, vacuuming up sand from the seabed while dealing marine ecosystems massive amounts of damage.

Alarming ripples.

At least two dozen Indonesian islands are simply gone now due to Singapore's sand requirements (its artificial land construction projects make it the largest sand importer in the world). Environmental damage in the region has gotten so bad that three countries have already banned exports of sand to Singapore.

Construction sand now even has a black market, profitable enough that violent organized crime groups are building up around it.

The environmental damage from the sand trade is immense. This hardly gets any attention in much of the world. After all, it's just sand, and for millennia now we've used “grains of sand” as a metaphor for something countless.

Our sand turns out not to be countless after all.

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: what's the angle on ramps? It's a protracted conversation.

Me . . . Thinking About It

A gazillion people out there refuse to learn math after a certain age. Just absolutely refuse. In my experience, many of them frequently refuse math as much as possible. I can't say I get this, but enough people do it that, well, it's definitely a thing.

This causes a lot of problems for those of us who don't mind math—especially when we need to explain a concept that relies on that math.

As an example, let's look at describing ramp angles. Specifically, why do ramps have particular angles?

First off, we’ll choose the type of ramp. Wheelchair ramps, for instance, have an allowed ratio of 1:12. This means it's allowed to increase one inch in height for every 12 inches in length, which means about 3.58 degrees.

By comparison, the steepest road in the world has a 19-degree slope, a 35% grade (using the US system for determining road slopes). We figure this using a pretty simple equation called “rise over run.” (You just divide the rise, or the increase in height, by the run, or distance, then multiply it by 100. We're failing in our effort to avoid math, though.)

Why is the angle so much lower on wheelchair ramps? Well, we need to delve into some more math—in this case, the basic principle behind ramps:

Lifting an object always takes the same amount of work, no matter what method is used. An elevator works just as hard as you do to lift something; it's just capable of lifting more. A ramp lets you spread that work out over more time. You're still working hard, just not all at once.

Angled Access

So, the reason wheelchair ramps have such an angle is to minimize the work necessary for someone to get into a building. Many yard and loading ramps have steeper angles because we often have more limited room to fit the ramp, and we’re willing to make our workers do a bit more to earn their pay.

Take a look at how I described road grade and wheelchair ramps, and then see how I described the general principle behind ramps. One has more numbers than the other, but both contain essentially the exact same amount of math. I simply used words to describe it more heavily in the latter and provided examples in the former.

This really leads me to believe the problem isn't with math itself, but the way we learn it in schools. Using more real-world problems instead of pure math might really help make it more interesting. That, and actually providing the schools with enough support to do their jobs.