The American people are stupid (part III)
Oil reached $135 a barrel recently and it looks like some of the American people are starting to smarten up. Sales of SUV's and light trucks have crashed, public transit usage is way up and gasoline consumption is basically level or dropping now after many years of continuous increases. Unfortunately the past stupidity still has a long way to run. This is apparent in a number of ways. The resale value of gas guzzlers has plummeted and many people are still stuck with them. Land use patterns and past underinvestment in public transit means that many areas of the country are not able to get much benefit over the short term from mass transit. This should lead to some interesting shifts in the economic competitiveness of different areas of the country as fuel prices continue their march higher. Large sprawling sunbelt cities (e.g. Atlanta) will become far less desirable while the older coastal cities with dense transportation networks will become more attractive. The economics of long distance trade will shift and we will start to see a reversal of the trend of the last 30 years towards increased globalization
Another place where the stupidity still has to run its course is in the electoral choices we have made over the last few years. In a truly remarkable display of stupidity the Democratically controlled house of representatives passed a measure that would allow antitrust lawsuits against OPEC members. What they don't seem to realize is that OPEC does not control world oil prices anymore. The bad news is that no one does and you can't file an antitrust suit against the law of supply and demand. Lest anyone accuse me of being partisan here the bill enjoyed strong support from both parties. To his credit on this particular issue President Bush opposed the bill. He has plenty of stupidity on his own though with the energy policies of this administration over the last 7 years. I do feel a little sorry for him however. Twice in the last few months he has gone to OPEC to beg them to increase production and the answer has been no. Watching a grown man beg is always sad. Bush has much to answer for though. While it wasn't hard to predict what was going to happen trying to change US energy policy is politically difficult. Bush is the only president in the last 30 years who had the right political environment of national unity and purpose required for the task after 9-11. He failed utterly to recognize and seize the opportunity and frittered it away trying to gain partisan political advantage.
The automobile manufacturers have their own dose of stupidity that needs to play out too. Last year they spent $70 million dollars on lobbying efforts to head off higher fuel economy standards. And that's just one year. Go back the last 20 and add the numbers up and it comes to a pretty fair chunk of change. Wasted money since they will wind up meeting even higher fuel economy standards than they fought against since consumers just won't buy their gas guzzlers anymore. The money would have been better spent on research to improve fuel economy.
The world supply of oil is the biggest issue facing the US (and the world) right now. Riots and protests are breaking out in many places and the real supply crunch has barely begun. Dealing with the issue will be complex and time consuming. Unfortunately we are likely to be bombarded with a lot of people trying to sell snake oil solutions. Expect the Democrats to vilify the oil companies and the Republicans to claim that drilling ANWR will solve all our problems. Eventually the American public will come to accept that the era of cheap and plentiful oil that we have constructed our society around has ended but the acceptance process will be painful.
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References -
Would come in really handy in the near future. Although it's kind of grotesque to think that Abu Risha was martyred so that the world could have (relatively) cheap gas and the Dulaimi could get rich.
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)Seriously, they're awesome. If anyone is thinking of starting to commute via bike, I have an absolute wealth of hard-earned knowledge about things that work and (a much larger set of) things that really don't work.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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)Even though the commute to my new job is less than half an hour, sitting on a highway staring at a flat concrete horizon for an hour every weekday just doesn't sound very appealing. It's a miracle people don't fall asleep with cruise control.
There's a light rail that stops about 4.5 miles from my office. How long would it take to bike that?
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| parent )Personally, I don't think globalization is going to decline at all -- at worst we'll see an insignificant slowdown in growth towards it.
This is because shipping stuff around the world on container ships is simply dirt cheap. Boats have been an incredibly efficient means of cargo transport since the first one was made.
Air travel costs would be the other drag on that -- but improvements in internet structure and speed I think outpace any losses.
--Steven Palmer Peterson
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)Getting it from point of manufacture in China or India or whereever to port, shipping it by sea and then sending it along to it's final destination. For small high priced items it won't matter that much. For bulkier lower priced items I think it will matter a lot.
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| parent )that zero point energy prototype I was working on. But, it made the apartment too cold, plus it was interfering with cell reception in my building, so I built my wife a bookshelf out of it. C'est la vie.
Just kidding. I'm not looking forward to the crunch. Why doesn't cold fusion work?
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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)Muon catalyzed cold fusion that is. Unfortunately the energy return is not enough for the process to be a practical power source.
Muon catalyzed fusion
But that's probably not what you were thinking of :)
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| parent )mass transit/ high speed rail? What is the lag time and longterm payoff? Are these systems over the next twenty years good investments?
--Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers. Be open to wonder and at the same time subject all claims to knowledge, without exception, to intense skeptical scrutiny. Be aware of human fallibility. Cherish your species and your
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)Only involves building the rolling stock, since it can use track that is already in place. Quite a few North American cities are starting to build a commuter rail infrastructure, and if gas prices stay high, this is probably going to continue.
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| parent )America's a big place. High speed rail requires huge outlays for preparing the grade: the train and tracks are incidental costs. Europe and Japan make them work because the distances are shorter, the endpoints more defined, with central Hauptbahnhofen supporting express runs such as ICE and TGF trains with a network of commuter trains and coordinated bus service. Acela works pretty well, because the BosNyWash corridor conforms to the old European patterns of settlement. But Acela doesn't repair its own tunnels or infrastructure.
Passenger rail never made a dime for the railroads, not even in their heyday. Those lovely passenger cars of yore were loss leaders, every one of them. The airplane and interstate system knocked them down. Railroads only made money on freight, but many classifications of freight elude the rail freight mode of transportation.
The paradigm of high speed rail can't work here in the USA. The logistics of suburbia and exurbia might support commuter rail, and we see good examples of such a system in places like Chicago and St Louis.
St Louis's MetroLink light rail works well enough, but it loses money, too. I loved MetroLink: I lived in Belleville IL, walked to the train station. I walked from the train to my job downtown and preferred MetroLink to the airport. Oh I loved MetroLink.
America's problem isn't the transportation paradign, it'd the commuting paradigm. Consider the idiocy of a person wasting two hours a day on the road, driving 80 miles to a cubicle, only to connects to a server 1000 miles away. What's wrong with this picture? Huge parking lots full of cars, traffic jams, air pollution, the colossal toll on infrastructure. Driving is the single most dangerous thing anyone does.
Nowadays, I don't consult on site if I don't have to. When I show my clients the numbers: it's insane to bring in a consultant to connect to your servers the same way I'd have to connect remotely. It's ironic that I spend an hour a week in your conference room, doing a presentation on an architecture for a web service you're developing in Bangalore. Want to see me? Get Skype, it's free, it's secure and it works Look, get that punch-card fossil in IT to tolerate video and a secure chat client on his network, you know, the one who's always over in my cube telling me war stories about computing in the Chalcolithic Era, and you'll get more of my time, and a lot more bang for the buck.
It's not the car that's the problem. It's the office building. It's lost relevance. Incent telecommuting, and you don't need high speed commuter rail. Tax the traffic jam to death, and the problem goes away.
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| parent )That's not true. Japan and California are about the same size, and California's economy is one of the strongest in the country, so let's compare those two. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka (~550km) is about the same as the distance from the SF Bay area to Los Angeles. To go from Tokyo to Osaka, the slow route is a $140, 4-hour train ride. The direct route is cheaper and faster, costing $80 for the 2.5hr trip. The trip in California is much cheaper at $56, but it takes... 10 hours.
If passenger trains aren't making money it's partly because their tickets are severely underpriced, and partly because politicians and businessmen in the US 40, 50 years ago didn't have the foresight to build high-speed rail like they did in the rest of the first world (the Tokyo-Osaka line was built in 1959 and their superfast maglev has been under construction since the 1970s, to be opened in 2025).
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| parent )would be a lot more competitive with other forms of transportation if the price of oil in the US had reflected it's true cost. As the price of oil goes up passenger rail will become viable in more and more areas of the country.
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| parent )who wants to sit in a dirty, old, loud train with rude staff for a 10-hour bumpy ride? Amtrak is just awful. At least with air travel you have decent options like JetBlue, though you still have to deal with the TSA security theater.
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| parent )Are you sure you were on a passenger train?
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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| parent )Much greater potential fuel options for rail.
This year, for the first time, our annual summer vacation trip to the Midwest will see the return trip (Kansas City to the Bay Area) made by train. It's about a 41-hour trip, but we've decided to make it part of the adventure. We've reserved two "roomettes"...one for my wife and I and another for the girls. The price was very competitive vs airfares.
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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| parent )don't expect to leave or arrive on time. But it's a great trip, well worth the run.
People are friendlier on trains. Perhaps train travel somehow brings the distances within human scale. Many happy conversations come to mind of long train rides. Even better are my memories of the quartet of friends who always sat together on the 5:17 West Line METRA train to Elgin, playing hearts and drinking cans of ice cold beer, bought from the heartbreakingly lovely wenches who sold them to scurrying commuters in Union Station Chicago.
Long ago, I went from Chicago to Oklahoma City by train for Basic Training and AIT. I fell in with the OK City zoo keeper's daughter on that train. Much furtive kissing and fumbling about in the dark, in the observation car lounge, the stars wheeling overhead.
An earlier run from Chicago to Colorado City on the train, waking up to the sight of the Rockies in the distance.
I am old enough to remember the heyday of transatlantic air travel on KLM, the wonderful Dutch chocolate, the little air wings they would give the children, the friendly stewardesses, one of whom took my little crying sister in her arms and rocked her in the aisle.
People were friendlier in those days. As long as we were well-behaved, children were allowed the run of the aircraft We could even go into the cockpit, if we were very good.
I am old enough to remember a trip across the Atlantic aboard the steamship Ile de France. My mother was sick most of the time, I remember watching her ghastly and ineffective retching, leaning out of bed over the seau de mal de mer.
In a pressurized beer can in the sky, the ground a distant blur below, the infernal noise of the aircraft, it's a chore to travel. O'Hell Airport is a nightmare, and getting worse. The indignities of taking off my shoes, the snarling, piggy-eyed harpies of Homeland Security -- why are they always women of color whose uniforms never fit? If ever there was a rationale for the burkha it is these corpulent and baleful Bernadette Fifes. Do they send these people to special Rudeness Schools? It's hard to find someone that horrible.
I would never fly in a commercial airliner again if I could manage it. I quite literally have nightmares, remembering waiting in the black cold for the limousine to pick me up at O'Hell.
Enjoy your trip. Amenities aboard the train are expensive, bring plenty of cash.
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| parent )before I ever flew in an airplane. Prior to that, all our family travel was either by train or car.
In 1966, at age 13, I took a rail trip...unaccompanied...from St Louis to Bellingham WA. It took 3 days and it cost $75.00. I also clearly remember having dinner in an observation car while we passed through Green River, Wyoming. It seemed like I could see forever from up there. The meal was served on railway china, with silver and a linen tablecloth.
I should also note that at that time, those trains were very much on schedule.
I didn't ride on a train again in the US until about 5 years ago, when my wife and I took the Coast Starlight from Sacramento to Seattle. It was a spectacular trip. The service from the staff was first-class and very personalized. We loved it.
At this point in time, intercity rail travel isn't for folks who are on a tight schedule. But if you want to make getting there part of the adventure, it's fine.
Over the past several years, air travel has become a real headache. But I could put up with the security lines, the overbooked flights, the absolute lack of anything resembling customer service, the lost bags, the in-flight "meals" consisting of cheap snacks and a beverage, and even the idiots who try to stuff everything they own into overhead bins, if the price stayed low enough.
But watch where those fares go this summer...especially after school is out.
On the train that's returning us to California, the "family bedroom" accommodations have been sold out for more than 2 months.
I won't be surprised to see competition start up again (in a limited way) for rail travel.
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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| parent ). . .from a round trip Amtrak ride to SoCal. Twenty-nine hours going down, thirty hours going back up. I sat next to a very nice widow on the way down who politely offered to tell me about Jehovah's Witnesses. I listened, and after she finished we spoke of other things until she got off in Salinas. A few minutes later, a tractor and a pickup truck decided to race with the train to an unguarded crossing. The tractor made it, the truck got nicked and sent spinning, delaying us half an hour as the cops showed up to play "interview the idiot." A few more inches, and that guy would have been strawberry jam. It's a train, people--it masses hundreds of tons and is going sixty miles per hour--you're not going to win that contest!
The trip back up was less eventful, but somewhat delayed by waiting for passing trains. I can't recommend sleeping in reserved seats as a regular practice--by the time I left the train at both ends of the trip I felt like I had run a five mile obstacle course. Maybe I'm just getting old.
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| parent )My AMTRAK trip from L.A. to San Antonio came in 12 hours late.
You see, they'd siderail us any time more important cargo came along -- so I sat there looking out my stationary window as big containers of gravel and old tires rolled past me.
The train ride itself was nice (though the food was poor even by microwavable standards). But they need to change the speed and get things going on time.
--Steven Palmer Peterson
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| parent )But passenger rail must integrate with other forms of transportation. In Germany, the buses arrive at the station along with the trains. In typical German fashion, everything is, or should I say was obsessively integrated, but the recent well-publicized debacle surrounding the privatization of Deutsche Bahn shows "competition" is an irrelevant concept.
Mass transit should be viewed no differently than road-building.
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| parent )spy scandal may be brewing.
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| parent )Railroad Tycoon so lied to me! In that game the only way to make big money was on passengers and mail.
--Steven Palmer Peterson
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| parent )The old Union Station was just down the street was converted into a hotel and mall of sorts. I'd often eat in the food courts and restaurants there.
I spent about 18 months in Belleville, befriended some people in the Historic Preservation Committee. One guy knew more about the railroads than was good for one person to know: he told me all this. Union Station was a showpiece, it never made money.
Escape from New York, that rotten tomato of a movie with Kurt Russell (who should be tied to a pillar and whipped for a while) was filmed in the decaying hulk of Union Station St. Louis before its restoration.
The Amtrak station for St Louis is a stone's throw from Union Station. It's a grubby little bus station looking thing, or was at the time. Brought my wife down on the train, she arrived hours late, bedraggled and unhappy. We ended up schlepping her bags a few hundred yards across an empty lot to the MetroLink station: they couldn't even build a sidewalk to connect Amtrak to Metrolink, much less integrate the two stations.
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| parent )The buildout price is going to be a lot higher than it would have been if we had started a few years ago since the cost of everything is going to go up as oil prices increase. We would have been much better off using the cheap oil of the past to build out our infrastructure. Instead we blew it all out the tailpipes of our SUV's.
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| parent )before building a modern city above the ground with all the cabling underneath.
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| parent )years ahead.. I am one that thinks we need to change the budget process to make appropriations on three to five year terms with supplimentals as needed. I think that in part the having to do everything every year leads to bad choices and short sightedness.
--Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers. Be open to wonder and at the same time subject all claims to knowledge, without exception, to intense skeptical scrutiny. Be aware of human fallibility. Cherish your species and your
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| parent )