Orphan Road

I like this new gas pedal idea from Nissan. It increases resistance when you've gone beyond optimal fuel consumption. You also get feedback in the dashboard. It could increase fuel consumption by 5-10%.

Aside from simply building smaller, lighter cars, there are a whole host of things we can be doing to improve fuel efficiency, given sufficient motivation. But helping people adjust their driving habits is a big part of it.

This is particularly true for hybrids. I know hybrid owners accelerate like hell and run the car with the A/C cranked all the time. Then they wonder why they're not getting 50mpg. If you really want to make the best use of a hybrid, you have to learn how to keep the gas engine from engaging, which means driving slower, starting up slowly, and braking more gradually.

I was working up a response to Matt Rosenberg's piece in Crosscut on buses, but Erica Barnett got there first and says what needed to be said.

Following up on Matt's post below, it's worth linking to the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Housing + Transportation Affordability Index. This got some play in the blogs a few months back. Here's a map of "affordable" Puget Sound, if you only consider housing costs:

And here's the same map of affordability when you look at housing and transportation costs combined:

Take a few minutes at the site and play with the tool. You can make all sorts of fun graphs taking into account gas prices and more.

From the Washington Post:

"Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn't so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.

'We've passed that tipping point,' U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said."

So, why does Secretary Peters want to take money from transit and use it to build suburban roads?

Because George Bush is an honest man- when he's bought, he stays bought.

Sometimes I wish I was a retired engineer with too much time on my hands, and I could waste the state's time by leading them down blind alleys:

"We're going the extra mile on this one," said viaduct project manager Ron Paananen. "We don't expect this will change the outcome at all."

The state will hire California structural engineer Kit Miyamoto, the same engineer who reviewed a plan by Port Townsend engineer Victor Gray, who for years has been urging the state to repair, rather than replace, the viaduct.

Does Gray have photos of Paananen visiting a Thai brothel or something? Why are they bending over backwards to accommodate this guy?

(via)

In a recent Hugeasscity comment, a friend was described that drives 100 miles to work everyday so that they could have a large house in the suburbs. I ran a quick calculation to see what kind of house they could afford in the city with the money they're wasting in the commute. The difference, with less than a 30-year payback, was $400k. This analysis did not take into account the wasted time from the commute.

Let me quickly go over this analysis again, just to let it sink in. At 200 miles a day x 5 days a week x 52 weeks a year, you're putting 52,000 miles a year on your car. Using a lifespan of 200,000 miles for a $20,000 economy car getting 30mpg, that's $7,700 worth of car you're burning through a year. Add $1,400 a year in maintenance (low, I'd say for that many miles), $600 a year for insurance, and $7,000 in $4/gal gas, and you're up to $16,700 a year (I came up with $14,000 in my comment - I think I used a cheaper car?). In 30 years you'd spend $501,000 doing this.

Now I ask, what kind of upgrade of a house can you get in the city for an extra half million? Assuming you don't need a ritzy area (which you don't if we're comparing the suburbs) that's a big house and a big yard. And you don't need to spend 3.5 hours a day (at an average of 55mph = 910 hours/year = 16% of your waking life = 24% of your non-working waking life) driving a car.

Note that this comparison isn't apples-to-apples. First of all, you'd have to get rid of a car when you live in the city to save on all of those insurance and maintenance benefits (though they'd both shrink immensely if you didn't drive much). But then most of the money was in the gas and wear on the car itself - both of which are all but removed in city life. But the real difference in this comparison is that in the exurb case the money you spend is just gone - sent to oil companies and car manufacturers. In the city case, this money still exists in your house. Yes, perhaps half of it will go into the interest in your loan, but you get the rest back when you sell your house (and likely more, if housing prices go up in 30 years).

Of course a working-class commuter probably can't afford a half-million dollar home in the first place. I think the lesson here is that if you can find a city house that you can live with and afford (even with a larger mortgage than you're comfortable with), it's a strongly better deal than anything you can get out in the country.

This is an extreme example. But it's a real-life example, and likely a common one. Also, the lesson applies for shorter distances as well - the numbers get more mild as you approach the suburbs, then drop off once you don't need a car at all.

Which brings me to the tie-in to Seattle transit infrastructure. With rail or bus access within walking distance, we can extend that carless-commute out a ways from the city center. You still waste life (though less of it), but you don't waste close to as much money.

France's state-owned rail agency is going gangbusters:

[T]he new SNCF chairman sees rail stations, mainly in the regions, becoming new transport (and commercial) hubs not just for trains but for buses and trams – "all those places where people don't want to bring their cars."

SNCF executives believe rail can take market leadership from air and road on journeys up to four hours long and point to the success of Eurostar (part owned by the group) in increasing traffic so far this year by around a fifth on the back of shorter journey times between London and Brussels/Paris. You can even get to Marseille from Paris in little more than three hours.

Pepy is, therefore, unfazed by the recent move by Air France-KLM to join forces with French freight operator Veolia and launch its own TGV services to, say, Charles de Gaulle airport. "SNCF is not going to be an airline-style operator as we need to operate regional and local services as well."

This comes via Savage via AutoblogGreen, who both focus on SNCF's $1.7B profit in 2007. While that's certainly encouraging, I'd caution against focusing too much on those numbers. SNCF runs both freight and passenger service in France, as a government monopoly. I'm pretty sure that if the US congress decided to nationalize BNSF, Union Pacific and the rest and roll them up into a huge ball with Amtrak, the resulting agency would be profitable.

Still, it goes to show that if you invest consistently in rail infrastructure, you can expand it pretty rapidly when demand rises. On the other hand, if you let it decay for 40 years and then try to throw a hail mary at the last minute, it's going to be pretty difficult to achieve anything significant.

For twenty centuries the structure of the European city has included the urban riot and the flight of the patrician class to their estates in the country. In the late 19th century the railroads elaborated this theme and the 'upper classes' commuted into the city in the morning and out at night. We are, therefore, hardly amazed that in the democracy of the automobile millions of essentially common Americans followed the same pattern.

It is seldom remarked that Americans using the interstates to establish vast suburban aggregations were, in the 50s and 60s, leaving cities not only polluted and old, but ruled by criminal gangs. In Seattle, for example, not only did the Teamsters blackmail employers and employees, and the police blackmail gays and rob the blacks, but the Fire Department and the Building Department served as very partial 'enforcers' for a gang at City Hall that punished enemies and rewarded friends.

By the mid-70s the fruits of these policies, nationally, were bankruptcy and riot in almost all our major cities. From the ruins citizens, with varying degrees of success, began to reconstruct city governments with more legitimacy. Sure, Seattle has great scenery, but the houseboats are there because they fought the Fire Department and won, the Regrade is vital because the zoning laws were changed, and the Market and the electric trolley buses were saved by citizen's initiatives.

The pendulum has swung and the cities are now where you go to escape the gangs of the suburban and rural areas. The great traffic flow is still in to the city in the morning and out at night, but with the large cohort of Boomers beginning to retire, it seems not extravagant to anticipate more outward commuting in the morning and in at night, or even a densification of the city core, with residents who both live and work in the city.

Would not such residents be better served by streetcars and trams than by heavy commuter lines? Considering that, with the exceptions of some King County grand juries, the improvements of Seattle governance were made by residents of Seattle, shouldn't Seattle residents try to improve Seattle, and let regional governance look to the region?

Predictions are always hard, especially when they involve the future, but one thing seems certain- the daily ritual of traveling 30 miles to work in the morning, and 30 miles home in the evening, will, for most of us, become a memory instead of a reality. It was, in a sense, the industrial mass-production of a patrician ideal that, even in Rome or Renaissance Italy, never involved the actual patricians in a daily commute. It's an idea whose time has come- and gone.

Martin's right, this is a good bill. Kudos to Jay Inslee and Earl Blumenauer.

Seattle will soon close part of three streets for a few hours, for exactly one day per street this summer. This is not a big deal for many cities, and the town where I went to college would do this once a month on their main street throughout the summer. But can this be the beginning of a positive change?

I've long thought that a great idea for a city of any size is to have a few car-free streets. If you build narrow streets this allows for Europe-style density, and if you leave them wide then you have potential for public meeting areas. Noise is dramatically reduced, safety is increased, and the neighborhood becomes much more walkable.

Car-free streets generally have tables set up for outside dining, served by nearby restaurants. You'll see children playing, and people promenading - window shopping, people watching, eating ice cream. The street becomes a destination, not something in your way to a destination.

But how does car-fixated Seattle react to this small step toward something beautiful? Well, read the comments yourself.