A good post from Fort Worthology on the perils of continuing to build late-20th century sprawling car-centric cities, and the fallacy that transit/bike/pedestrian infrastructure is a “handout for developers” while highways are not. All public infrastructure — especially transportation infrastructure — has consequences for developers, and economic development, and you get the development you build your transportation systems for. Who wants to be the next Detroit? Who wants to continue supporting the petro-dictators? Not me, thanks.
Tag: economics
The Selfish Automobile
A good overview of the cost of cars in terms of money, space, and time at Planetizen. Transportation costs are already unaffordable (>20% of household income) for the lowest income 40% of the US, and drivers only pay a minority of automotive costs directly. Over the last half of the 20th century, the proportion of household income dedicated to transportation doubled. Cars use ~20x as much spacetime (s*m^2) as bikes for the same commute, and ~200x as much as a pedestrian. Interestingly the direct car costs mentioned are only about half what AAA estimates ($4100 vs. $8500 per year).
The Rise of the New Global Elite
A nice long-form piece from The Atlantic on the phenomenon and dangers of the New Plutocrats… not just Lloyd Blankfein and his parasitic bankster ilk, but nearly everyone who stands at the so-called Commanding Heights of industry, including productive innovators. The developed world was all to hot to globalize the economy when we thought we’d always stay on top. But that was ridiculous of course. Now “on top” is just a few people scattered all over, and most of us will slide toward the very large bottom if we’re not careful.
When do fuel costs actually matter?
Kim Stanley Robinson gave a fun talk at Google a couple of years ago in which he brought up the possibility of large, slow, wind powered live-aboard bulk freighters, among other ideas. I was reminded of it by this post from Alex Steffen. Especially for commodities like coal, grains and ore — non-perishable goods that get carried in bulk carriers — what matters is the net flux of materials and the predictability of supply. More (or larger) slow ships can deliver the same flux as fewer high speed ones. International contracts for these goods can span decades. If fuel prices became a significant portion of their overall cost, it would be worthwhile to make this kind of ships-for-fuel substitution. However, it turns out that fuel is a vanishingly small proportion of the overall cost of most internationally traded goods.
Our neighbors in Pasadena moved back to Thailand, and packed their entire household into a single half-sized shipping container. The cost to get it from their home in SoCal to their home outside Bangkok was $2000. Their combined airfare was probably a larger fraction of the cost of moving across the Pacific. You can get a full-sized shipping container moved from point A to point B, anywhere within the global shipping network, for several thousand dollars. If your cargo is worth significantly more than that, then you don’t have to worry about Peak Oil destroying your business. For a typical container carrying $500,000 worth of goods, the shipping costs (not all of which are related to fuel!) represent about 1% of the final costs of the goods. If fuel prices were to go up by a factor of ten, the shipping costs would still only represent 10% of the overall cost. This would have an effect on business, to be sure, but it would not cause global trade to collapse.
The Box That Changed the World
The cost of moving a shipping container between most any two points on Earth is about $5000, and only part of that cost is fuel. So if your container of goods is worth much more than that, then their price and the viability of your business is not going to be particularly sensitive to the cost of liquid fuels. You can pack half a million dollars worth of manufactured goods into one of these boxes. Increase the price of oil by a factor of ten and the cost of those goods goes up by 10%. Annoying? Sure. World changing? Hardly.
Do Roads Pay for Themselves?
A study from the US Public Research Interest Group (PDF) on transportation funding the US. The short answer is that only about half of highway funds come from “user fees” like the gas tax and vehicle registration fees. The rest is payed out of bonds, property taxes and other government revenues.
Markets and Morals
A good talk from Chautauqua on the interaction between markets and morals. Some interesting examples of morally ambiguous markets: countries paying one another to take on refugee acceptance obligations and the outsourcing pregnancy to impoverished surrogate mothers in Gujarat, India. Sandel argues that in the last few decades we have gone from having a market economy to being a market society. Markets are now a large portion of our governance, and it’s unclear whether this is really a good thing.
Whose Roads?
A summary of research looking at how road infrastructure is funded (PDF) from VTPI. Only about half of road funding comes from “use” fees like the gas tax and vehicle registration fees. The other half comes from general tax revenues. Ultimately this means that non-motorized road users, whose impacts on road infrastructure are very low, overpay significantly and end up subsidizing motorists.
Fluid norms or Meta-ideology
Steve Randy Waldman takes Krugman and the US left-of-center more generally to task for their implicit assumption that our national ideological stage is somehow not subject to being shaped over time. Casino games and sport have fixed rules. Politics does not. Somehow, many positions that even Nixon was supportive of in 1970 would now be laughed out of congress as socialist. Trying to get things done within the apparent current constraints is not necessarily as pragmatic as trying to change the rules over time.
A life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL and LED light bulbs
Life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL, and LED light bulbs – It’s important to make sure when you’re using a new technology that supposedly saves energy, that you haven’t just shifted the energy consumption from the operational to the manufacturing portion of the product’s life cycle. This study compares three different lighting technologies: incandescent, compact fluorescent, and LED bulbs, and asks what the total energy input is to get ~400 lumens of light for 25,000 hours. Both CFLs and LEDs save about 80% of the energy over incandescent bulbs. For all bulb types, the embodied energy of manufacturing is only about 2% of the total energy consumed over the bulb’s life. CFLs and LEDs were roughly equivalent energetically at the time of this study, but the LEDs produced less in the way of toxic byproducts. The general expectation is that the efficiency of LED lighting will continue to improve, while CFLs are a pretty mature technology. The two best LED bulbs on the market today, with warm yellow light, compatible with dimmer switches, and giving about 800 lumens of light output (equivalent to a 60W incandescent bulb), seem to be this 13W one from Lighting Science ($30) and the 12W Philips A19 EnduraLED ($40). The prices seem high, but as with gas furnaces and boilers, electric motors and pumps, the cost of the electricity or fuel you run through the device ends up dwarfing the capital cost over its lifetime, so paying top dollar for efficiency is worthwhile.