By Frank on December 6, 2007
My last post on fuel efficiency generated quite the comment thread. If you didn’t like Aptera’s 300 mpg car, here are a few of the other contenders vying for the Automotive X Prize — $10 million for a car that gets at least 100mpg. There are some great looking cars there. I have no idea if any are production-ready. Gasoline will need to get way, way more expensive before people start using these things, though.
Posted in legislation
By Frank on December 4, 2007
This photo of I-5 at Exit 77 has to be seen to be believed.
Posted in legislation, transitnow
By Frank on December 4, 2007
This has to be it: routing Seattle-Portland traffic through…. Yakima. A 440-mile detour. I’d hate to be a trucker plying that route.
Update: a much shorter detour is now open…. sort of.
Posted in legislation
By Frank on December 4, 2007
The P-I has a good map of all the road closures as of this morning. Sounder’s still closed due to mudslides. It looks like the Earth is caving in around Bothell-Woodinville.
There are plenty of photos on Flickr, if you’re curious.
Photo by Flickr user stevet31, used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted in legislation, public investment
By Frank on December 3, 2007
Take care driving tonight and tomorrow. Several Puget Sound highways are closed, and Amtrak/Sounder trains are cancelled for at least the next 48 hours. The TV stations have good coverage here and here.
Posted in legislation
By Frank on November 2, 2007
What do you get when you cross a car with a shopping cart?
Something like this.
(Via)
Posted in legislation
By Frank on October 11, 2007
Clark Williams-Derry is a smart guy, and so I defer to him when he says that building new lanes for cars doesn’t improve congestion. But I’m still skeptical about the claim that fuel efficiency will increase by only 2 percent a year over the next 50 years. True, fuel efficiency has stagnated in the past, but we as a society are far more interested in fuel efficiency now than we were even during the gas crunch of the 1970s. And the cost of fuel, adjusted for inflation, is now higher than ever. Even higher than in 1981, the previous peak year for fuel prices.
Additionally, new technology is coming on line that’s going to radically reshape the picture. This car, for example, gets 300MPG and will be available for purchase next year:
Crazy!
The link wetween miles driven and GHGs (Greenhouse Gases) is only going to get more tenuous over the next few decades. As that happens, environmentalists will lose another weapon in our arsenal. We need new arguments for smart growth that are directly about smart growth (like preserving wetlands, for example) instead of related issues like carbon emissions or national security.
Posted in legislation
By Frank on October 8, 2007
CIS is thinking about how to message congestion pricing to road warriors. All the ideas he puts forward are intersting jujitsu moves — designed to use free-marketers own strengths against them.
Let me suggest another, that might be even simpler: congestion pricing is a use tax. Conservatives like use taxes. Many, for example, expect bus tickets to cover 100% of the cost of the bus (ignoring the fact that bus service has positive externalities that justify the taxpayer subsity). The common refrain I often hear is, “I’m never going to ride the bus, so why should I pay for it?”
Well, that argument cuts both ways. Congestion pricing simply lines up the supply and the demand to make you pay for what you use, as I’ve written before.
Posted in intercity rail, legislation, seattle transit
By Frank on September 7, 2007
Flexcar users are understandably peeved that their “rentals” are now subject to the same 18.7% tax rate as other rental cars. Alan Durning does a good job of explaining why these taxes exist:
Many Cascadian cities, with state authorization, put special sales taxes on rental cars. The rationale, as best I can understand, is that rental car taxes are mostly paid by nonresidents: business travelers with expense accounts and vacationers who don’t vote locally.
Flexcar, however, has created a whole constituency of in-state car renters, and suddenly the legislators are caught with their pants down (apologies to Larry Craig), taxing their constituents at a rate that will approach 20% once the RTID/ST2 taxes pass this November.
Posted in i90, legislation, roads and transit, seattle transit
By Frank on August 30, 2007
Apologies for the dearth of posts lately. I’ve been out of town and then work got hectic and, well, you know how it goes. In the meantime, I hope you’re reading CIS’s enlightening series on the history of road financing.
… or Clark Williams-Derry’s eloquent summary of the I-5 closure.
Regular posting will return shortly.
Posted in legislation
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