Orphan Road

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.

(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?

The council approved fixing two crosstown arterials today, Spokane St. and Mercer St. It's a green light with an asterisk, though. The council says that SDOT can do engineering work and even acquire property, but the Mayor has to show that he's got a financing plan before construction can begin.

It sounds like a pretty big vote of confidence on the part of the council, that either the city will come up with the money from outside sources, or from the city itself.

Background here on the back-and-forth between the Mayor and the Council over these projects.

9th Avenue in South Lake Union was restriped over the weekend, and is now a two-way street with bike lanes in either direction.

This is the complement to Westlake Avenue, which also went two-way recently. Bicyclists who were getting stuck in the streetcar tracks on Westlake can now use 9th instead and have their own dedicated lane.

I'm all for more two-way streets in Seattle. Except for downtown (and maybe the Roosevelt Ave-11th Ave NE combo in the U District), the traffic doesn't really justify these wide, 3-lane one-way streets. They encourage speeding and bad driving. Just the other day, I was heading south on 9th Ave when another driver ahead of me decided to slowly drift across all three empty lanes -- no turn signal, of course -- right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and we came with inches of crashing.

This quote from Sen. Jim Horn is priceless:

And any proposal would encounter stiff opposition from people like former state Sen. Jim Horn, R-Mercer Island, a longtime toll skeptic. He says regionwide tolling is really about "rationing your roadways and harming your quality of life."

Sen. Horn then announced his proposal to widen I-405 to infinity lanes in each direction.

Two pieces worth reading on the Viaduct-Spokane St.-Mercer St. funding issue. Erica Barnett in the print edition of The Stranger, and Larry Lange on the P-I's Traffic Watch blog.

At issue is Mayor Nickels' attempt to push a Mercer St. upgrade through the city council. Nickels doesn't have the money for it, but he wants to link it to a rebuilt Spokane St. viaduct as a way to increase mobility when the Alaskan Way Viaduct comes down.

So far, the council isn't buying, prefering to wait until more funding is secured. They may have a point. To the outside eye, it seems like Nickels is just rushing to get Mercer done so it's nice and pretty in time for the Vulcan-built Amazon headquarters opening in SLU in 2011-2012, and he's using the Viaduct as a convenient excuse. But that's just idle speculation on my part.

That said, costs of a new Mercer St are going to continue go up, up, up. Maybe it is best to float a bond like the Mayor's suggesting and get to work.

Rendering of Mercer St. looking west from SDOT.

After watching Who Killed the Electric Car? the other night, I've posted some thoughts about electric vehicles here.

This comes just as Subaru and the New York Power Authority have commenced testing on Subaru's new R1e for potential sale in the US.

Two East-West routes that are critical to a post-Viaduct Seattle are still short funds in the wake of Prop. 1's failure.

The Mercer cost estimate has increased $78 million since late last year, chiefly because of inflation and advanced design work that now includes property costs. The project would widen Mercer between Dexter Avenue and I-5 but not include reconnecting streets above Aurora Avenue.

Some $78.9 million has been secured for the Spokane widening, now estimated to cost $168.5 million, which includes $3.4 million from the Port of Seattle; new ramps would connect the Spokane Street Viaduct to the waterfront.

Lowering Aurora and reconnecting the streets above has always been the most appealing part of this project for me, but that's because I don't have to deal with Mercer during rush hour.

Also, if you're interested, you can watch a video simulation of the 2-way Mercer and narrowed Valley streets here (22MB .avi movie). It sure will look cool when that new Amazon.com office goes in!

At the beginning of the 20th century, most Americans walked or rode transit to work. With few hard-surfaced roads outside towns and cities, the horse and the interurban remained the most practical way for farmers to get to town.

Companies making motorized vehicles had largely inherited their money or were already producing farm vehicles and wagons. Their business model was to use capital to produce a product, which was then sold to people who could afford it. At that time building a car usually took well over a month, and probably in 1900 America built about as many streetcars as automobiles.

Then Henry Ford arrived. His business model was to create capital and the market by mass production, totally transforming American society by "putting us on wheels".

Much of what is said about Ford is a myth, invented after the fact, but the power of the myth derives from events- by the beginning of the 21st century, walking or riding transit to work had only a little more market share than the automobile had in 1900. The Ford model had redistributed the profits of mass production to the workers, entirely rebuilt the infrastructure of the nation, and drained the petroleum resources of the continent.

But now the wheels are falling off. Check out recent headlines- GM loses $39 billion (and 74,000 jobs disappear- this is the Ford economic model in full reverse)- Oil breaks $100/bbl but production remains flat-climate changes could kill thousands by 2012.

Within the lifetime of many readers, America must "nail the dismount", abandoning mass car ownership in favor of transit, bicycles, and walking.

Think big, really big.