May 2008

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Gas Prices

By Frank on May 27, 2008

This article has some interesting points to make about fuel consumption:

Americans spend 3.7 percent of their disposable income on transportation fuels. At its lowest point, that share was 1.9 percent in 1998, and at its highest, it reached 4.5 percent in 1981, said Johnson of Global Insight.

Still, despite the rise in energy prices, gasoline remains cheaper in the United States than in most industrialized countries. In France, for example, a gallon of gasoline costs about $7.70 at today’s exchange rates. Also, Americans pay less to drive a mile today than they did in 1980, once the impact of inflation and gains in fuel efficiency are taken into account, said Lee Schipper, a visiting scholar at the transportation center of the University of California, Berkeley.

Schipper estimates that the cost of gasoline per mile traveled will be about 15 cents this year. That is nearly three times the low of 5.6 cents a mile reached in 1998, when fuel efficiency peaked and prices were at their lowest. But it is still cheaper than the record paid in 1980 of 17.1 cents a mile, adjusted for inflation.

As bad as gas prices seem, they’re still not as high as they’ve been by historical standards. But people’s perception in this case matters at least as much as reality, and the perception is that gas prices are pretty darn high. Finally, it’s hard to separate the increase in gas prices from the general slow down of the economy in general.

All that said, it certainly does seem like the fundamentals of supply and demand, not reckless speculation, are leading us inexorably towards $200/barrel.

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Isn't This Kind of Obvious?

By serial catowner on May 25, 2008

Right now the good ol’ USA is being whipsawed by the Bush administration and the world oil futures markets. Bush lets it be known he intends to attack Iraq (most recently by a leak from an Israeli military staffer), oil futures jump, and, just as though that $132/barrel oil weren’t still in the ground, prices at the pump jump. Our money is siphoned relentlessly to multi-national oil companies and the local retailer can only watch helplessly as sales fall.

Without going into too many details, it seems clear we need a transportation backbone of domestically produced renewable energy. For the Finns and the Swedes, who still have mothballed fleets of wood-burning steam locomotives “just in case”, that was once their resource in forests. For them and for us, that would now be wind and solar power, making, your friend and mine, electricity.

It’s been a sad story in the PNW, as our hydropower has been used to make the aluminum cans that litter every road in the state, and a generation has grown up that can hardly imagine making electric buses and streetcars the very least we can settle for. Maybe we need hours-long waits at the gas stations, to get a rationed 5-gallon dollop of gas, to wake us up to the steel grip the oil markets have on our national manhood.

Be assured, that day will come. And when it does, every diesel bus in the country is going to be hurting just as bad as the private car- just when we need them the most.

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Low Hanging Fruit?

By serial catowner on May 23, 2008

Richard Layman, at Rebuilding Places, blogs about improving bus service and quotes James Hamre, a transit manager in the Washington DC area:

“According to Mr. Hamre, to run the bus line, if it ran on time, would require 22 buses, to provide the current level of service. Instead, they have 42 buses in service on the line daily, to provide the service required.”

IOW, this bus line, if intensively managed, could cut equipment requirements almost by a half. Surely that is a goal to aim for!

*Somewhere else* on the internet today is a post about a student in Portland who, as an experiment, acted as a dispatcher for one bus line in Portland, and managed to maintain on-time performance by having empty buses leapfrog full buses on the route.

It might seem extreme to detail one person full time to dispatch one route, until we compare it with saving the costs of twenty drivers and twenty buses.

And this stuff will matter, eventually. Eventually, we will reach the $6-7/gallon gas prices that will supposedly make people “change their behavior”, and from what we’ve seen so far, “change their behavior” in this context will mean “a tsunami of new ridership swamping already overloaded buses”. It’s time for the transit systems to start thinking outside the box.

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Density Around the World

By Frank on May 23, 2008

Interesting chart, via Ezra Klein, on relative densities of major cities around the world. When folks like me talk about increasing density in the Seattle metro area, we’re talking about going from Houston-like levels to maybe, maybe Stockholm- or Berlin-like levels.

I’m sure there are issues with this chart and the methodology (Is Barcelona really 4 times denser than New York?), but the point is that, relatively speaking, we don’t have to increase density by all that much to see significant benefits in transit use and energy conservation.

Update: Speaking of Stockholm…

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Where There's a Will

By Frank on May 23, 2008

The Urban Land Institute states what should be obvious: if you keep voting down transportation funding, sooner or later you’re not going to have any money to spend on transportation:

Among U.S. cities/metro areas studied, the Seattle-Puget Sound area’s infrastructure-funding gap was nearly twice that of Dallas-Fort Worth, which was second at nearly $400 per capita. ULI, a nonprofit education and research institute that focuses on land-use, population growth, urban planning and the environment, worked with financial consultants Ernst & Young to produce the 60-page study.

“By 2040, the population of the Seattle area is projected to grow by 1.7 million new people, with 1.2 million new jobs … that’s like dropping the population of greater metropolitan Portland into the Puget Sound area,” John Hempelmann, co-vice chairman of the Reality Check Task Force for ULI Seattle, said Wednesday.

I-695, Prop 1, the monorail… the list of transportation projects ultimately rejected by Puget Sound voters is long (going back to the Bogue plan in 1911 and Forward Thrust in ’68).

But the really maddining thing is that the Seattle Metro area has generated an absolutely astonishing amount of wealth in the last decade or two. We’re home to two of the richest men on planet Earth, not to mention the highest number of millionaires per capita in the country. And yet, despite all this, we can’t fund an infrastructure project (and don’t get started on funding for other priorities like education).

At the end of the day, then, this is our own fault. After all, we have no state income tax, so our taxes end up being more regressive than most places. Partly, of course, it’s a leadership issue. But at the end of the day, trying to lead people in the Northwest is like herding cats. This part of the country, tucked away in the corner, appeals to (and breeds) a certain kind of loner, a do-it-yourself type. As such, we’re pretty skeptical of mass movements and big organizations. That’s too bad, because we have the resources (natural, intellectual, and financial) to really show America (and the rest of the world) how to do things right.

(via CIS)

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Great reason to have an ST2.1 vote in 2008 provided by: The Discovery Institute?

By Matt the Engineer on May 23, 2008

How does a pro-roads organization come to favor rail? Well, they don’t. But they provide a great reason to push for infrastructure improvements immediately. The world is awash with global capital right now (article here). Sure, they want to use this cheap capital for building roads, but the argument is the same for building massive rail improvements quickly.

Here’s the situation. Remember the collapse of the mortgage industry, specifically the sub-prime mortgages? Well the bubble was caused by a glut of global capital looking for a safe place to rest, and the bubble popped when investors realized that sub-prime mortgages were not a safe bet. This capital hasn’t gone away – it’s still there looking for safe, long term investments (see: Dubai for one of the places it has landed). For a great primer on this, listen to a rare This American Life documentary on the subject (here).

What would be a safe, long-term investment for global capital? Discovery says infrastructure fits the bill. We may disagree on what that infrastructure should be, and I don’t think they realize the full financial potential out there, but we agree on the major financial points. This global capital is available now. We don’t know what the financial picture will look like in several years. Actually, this is a great reason to do more than just ST2.1 immediately – let’s build an in-city light rail system while we’re at it. We just may not ever get this good of an opportunity again.

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Vote Transit

By Frank on May 22, 2008

Ezra Klein warms my heart:

How long till traffic becomes a voting issue? Americans spend more time in it every year. They get heart attacks from it. And now, with gas prices well above $100 — and racing skyward still — how long till road rage, till driving, till a life spent in the car and a paycheck spent at the pump, become voting issues? Arguably, gas prices are already there. But no politicians has figured out how to do anything with that save promise lower gas prices. But we’re not going to lower gas prices. And discontent will only become more intense. Someday, some politician is going to figure out what to do with that, and my hunch in the word “transit” will be a big part of it.

Emphasis added. I’ll go him one better — not only will no one lower gas prices, but even if we did, it would increase traffic.

I just love, love, love how far the national conversation has moved towards a pro-transit agenda. We’ve got a long way to go before we’re spending more money on rail than roads, but we’re getting there.

For more, check out this post on The Overhead Wire regarding the proposed Boxer Amendment to the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill.

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End of the Road

By Matt the Engineer on May 21, 2008

(inspired by [daimajin]‘s post)

I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but I’d like to list another reason for building rail-based transit that has nothing to do with the gasoline that cars burn. It’s the roads that they drive on.

Let’s start with peak oil. Some say we hit it years ago and OPEC has been hiding this fact*, others say we are hitting it now (hence the price spikes), while some say it’s a decade or two away. But nobody says it’s much further than that. When we hit peak oil the price will rise at an exponential rate and never come down.

The road supporters either ignore this fact or tell us that we’ll find an alternative fuel for our cars. Although I mostly disagree (battery power has some potential – the others are dead ends), I won’t debate that here. What I will bring up is the roads themselves.

Roads, at least the top level, are made of asphalt concrete: asphalt mixed with rocks. Asphalt is an oil product. This layer of asphalt concrete breaks down over time and use, and needs to either be patched using more asphalt concrete or regenerated by removing it, grinding it up, and adding more asphalt.

So what happens to our miles and miles of roads when the price of oil goes up? Road maintenance requires a lot of oil. We either spend much more on roads (not new roads here – the same old roads) increasing cost with time, or we abandon roads over time.

Of course, this is an amazing waste of money, time, and resources. Steel rail is expensive, but we won’t run out of steel any time soon. Electric power lines are expensive, but we’ll be glad we have them once the rest of our transportation system starts breaking down.

So this is one of the reasons that building new roads seems ridiculous to me. Any new roads can only expect a few decades before we will have to consider abandoning them.

* Apparently OPEC members benefit from exaggerating their oil reserves. The amount of oil they are allowed to sell is proportional to how much reserves they report that they have.

update It looks like some predictions of peak oil say there will be no peak oil, notably OPEC and our EIA. Of course, OPEC’s model predicted in 2007 that “oil resource base is sufficient to satisfy demand increases until 2030 at a price of $50-60 per barrel, increasing afterwards to account for inflation.” Oops. What’s a barrel of oil at now, $132?

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The Sad Thing Is…

By serial catowner on May 21, 2008

Overheard at the Overhead Wire:

It’s very very disgusting. Actually, you know I saw an article on Wired’s blog about Dubai’s awesome Metro today. The sad thing is that it was basically funded by us.

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New Service Allocation (if I had my way)

By bgtothen on May 20, 2008

How should new service hours be allocated and how should that apply to BRT and LRT investment? King county’s 40-40-20 is killing Seattle, and ST is a rail agency no question about that. So what about better bus service in Seattle?

I know this is somewhat of a circular argument but I think one reason everyone wants rail, myself included (besides all of the other ones) is because our bus system is so bad here we have no concept of what a good bus system is like. Metro has just recently gotten onboard with feux to semi BRT (depending on how you look at it) and ST doesn’t even pretend to have BRT. I want ST to build LINK but I think that we need to build it where demand is, not where politics or sub-area equity take it.

I don’t want this to become LRT vs BRT I just think we need to think outside the box and really decided what our end goal is. LINK will help a lot but what if we want to get to 10% or even 15% market share? How could this even be done? With gas prices it doesn’t seam to outrageous to ask these questions. I know one thing and that is unless the federal government helps out there is no way we can afford that much LINK.

So this is what I think needs to happen. Metro need to dramatically improve service frequency and hours according to demand, not subarea. Also it should take it’s 10 highest ridership routes (besides the current rapidride routes) and give them all BRT treatment. I also think they need to come every 10 minutes during the day not every 10 or 15 like rapidride. As I have said before the system should be design to get people to their destination but it needs to encourage transfers, just like rail. And for god sake please fix E/W access in this city. Metro has underinvested in quality bus transit, rather just focusing on trying to get as much service out the door. This is understandable but they need to get beyond that. Things are changing and I really think that we need visionary and bold leadership form ST and especially metro.

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