For decades, public cash has gushed into building infrastructure designed to get us around in those little (or not-so-little) privatized pods. Indeed, the mobilization to create and maintain our road and highway network probably counts as our greatest public achievement of the last half-century.
Meanwhile, while the highway rode high, our rail-transportation network crashed. Attacked and defunded by politicians and rejected by the public, Amtrak lurches on, barely. It's a a parody of a transportation system -- unrecognizable as such by anyone who's ever caught a train in Western Europe.
Things may be changing, though. High oil prices aren't just causing Americans to cut back on driving; they're also impeding efforts to maintain roads. Just as cars run on oil-derived gasoline, the road to auto nirvana is paved with oil-derived asphalt. From USA Today:
Fewer roads will be repaved this summer, thanks to soaring prices of oil-based asphalt. Some states, cities and counties say their road-repair budgets didn't anticipate asphalt prices that are up 25.9 percent from a year ago, so they're being forced to delay projects.
"We will do what patching we can," one county official in South Dakota complained to USA Today, "but this will truly, truly be a devastating blow to the infrastructure."
Meanwhile, the airline industry has entered a state of free fall; hammered by oil prices, the world's airlines collectively expect to lose "at least" $2.3 billion in 2008, The New York Times reports.
U.S. truckers, too, are reeling, unable to make a living as diesel prices soar.
I'm not trying to get all peak-oil on y'all, but maybe it's time to start reinvesting in rail? I'm just saying.
More NYC farmers markets accept food stamps and sales soar
Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!
Comments
View as Flat
Russ Posted 8:51 am
06 Jun 2008
Politicians should quickly focus on maintaining railroad structure and forget about road infrastructure because 30 years from now, they will be really good bike paths. People of the future will stand in awe at the expansion of society and how those buildings and infrastructure were supported.
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human power Posted 9:46 am
06 Jun 2008
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JMG Posted 9:51 am
06 Jun 2008
One thing many people don't realize is that the typical 42' bus puts a greater weight on each axle than many 18 wheelers, thereby causing greater road damage. So it's not just "support transit" and get cars off the roads -- we need to support RAIL transit for everything -- people and freight.
With a little creativity we can get around the rail monopolies by converting the interstate highway systems to electrified rail systems -- thus returning them to the National Defense Highway System that they were sold as, only this time with an actual benefit to national security.
The 5% Project
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Sam Wells Posted 10:22 am
06 Jun 2008
As for asphalt repairs, summer is "paving season" up north and you know what, they're not! A dab of cold patch on the big holes is all you get. This has nothing to do with cars, trucks, or buses running over the roads, just ice-heave.
As to rail, the northern winter really socked it to rail, a story that isn't sexy enough to make the media. Lack of infrastructure repairs and making bridge crossings higher and wider for larger trains is maybe 10 years behind where it should be.
And that includes passenger rail.
Onward through the fog
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:28 am
06 Jun 2008
Coal makes up 40% of US Rail Freight.
http://www.kansascity.com/438/story/640980.html
That's a lot of free'd up capacity to leverage for hauling stuff.
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:32 am
06 Jun 2008
Not to mention the benefit that the trucks themselves only get 8mpg.
And for the shorter haul stuff, that could all be covered by natural gas or eventually electric.
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:16 pm
06 Jun 2008
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Delay And Deny Posted 12:30 pm
06 Jun 2008
In that sense, if the roads decay back to dirt paths, suburban SUV's might finally get the "off-road" justification they so desperately promoted.
Imagine, hopping rocks and hillsides to get to the corner grocery...TA-HOE!
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Tasermons Partner Posted 2:55 pm
06 Jun 2008
Though they left it undecided at the time, there were several council members who stated that they has recently talked to construction managers who said that although costs for both concrete and asphalt were rising, that asphalt's prices were rising much quicker.
They predicated that, at current rate, asphalt would become so expensive that concrete would become the preffered choice...whereas for most times past, they only used it on heavy-duty projects due to it's high cost.
Go figure :/
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wiscidea Posted 4:51 pm
06 Jun 2008
The current potholes are already hard on the '94 sedan. It rattles so much, I'm afraid someting important will fall off. But I use the sedan -- rather than the SUV -- most of the time because it gets better mileage. Apparently I'll soon NEED the SUV to travel over the decaying roads.
Seriously, though... our town has also decided to delay repairing roads due to the high cost of sealer, asphalt, whatever it is they use to repair the cracks and fill the potholes. I suspect milk trucks are hard on the rural highways. There was also a lot of frost heave.
Unfortunately, local tax revenue can't keep up with expenses. Or so the pro-development forces argue. It's an interesting puzzle. They want to build more houses to pay for the roads, but then there is more traffic, which is harder on the roads. And only a fool would set himself up for a long commute right now, especially if the roads are crappy! Front-end alignment for that '94 sedan last month... $90. Who wants to add that as a regular expense?
As I'v said before, in for a penny, in for a pound. I'm committed to living where I chose to live, which means continuing to commute to work via my "personal pod". But I can read the writing on the wall. I realize it is going to be a struggle and require some creativity. I do not believe I have a God-given right to drive a "personal pod". I might have to choose my "personal pod" over some other luxury. I might have to put more effort into figuring out how to earn a living without ever leaving the house.
Anyway.... I know, I'm babbling... I suspect most Americans thought higher oil prices would simply translate into higher gasoline prices... they figured they'd cut back on driving or get a more fuel-efficient vehicle. But I've been waiting to see how they react to the full implications of higher oil prices. It's a slow-motion car wreck and the drivers don't quite realize what has happened.
It doesn't look like Americans realize that construction costs are higher due to the rising cost of oil. It doesn't look like they realize that food costs are higher due to the rising cost of oil. It doesn't look like they realize our foreign policy is toally f*** up due to our addiction to oil.
Will the asphalt problem finally bring the message home? When their "pesonal pods" require more repairs, when they complain about the potholes and the guy on the other end of the line says taxes will have to go up to pay for those repairs, will Americans realize our dependence on oil is not such a good thing and that extracting a few more barrels from ANWR or invading another country will not solve our problems.
By the way, I thought someone invented a way to combine asphalt, discarded rubber, and discarded plastic to make a more-durable material for repairing roads. Whatever happened to that? Maybe Exxon Mobile bought the patent and decided sit on it so we'd have to continue repairing our roads -- over and over and over -- with plain old asphalt, thus ensuring a steady stream of revenue.
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MAD MAC Posted 6:08 pm
06 Jun 2008
Having said that, anyone who's lived in Germany can tell you that Germany's autobahns have major traffic jams every single day. It is extremely infrequent to drive more than two hours on a German highway during the day - any day - and not encounter a "stau".
It seems to me that there is more at issue in the psychology of the Green movement than pollution. There is another agenda at work. As if individuals doing things as individuals is inherently bad. That people should always be doing things, especially transiting from one point to another, in groups. This is flawed thinking. Individual modes of transport are, from a time standpoint, most efficient. Therefore, the emphasis should be on development of clean methods of doing that. Not in "changing lifestyles", which clearly most people do not want to do - although the market may force it.
So,
Victory in Pattani
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hapa Posted 1:38 am
07 Jun 2008
yes. it's called "thinking ahead." it's very sinister.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:20 am
07 Jun 2008
Or building renewable electric powered commuter rail in the freeway median, like they are doing in Minnesota. And going to concrete for roads.
The autobahn is three times the thickness of US highways, resulting in a lot less rebuilds. That is a design choice made by government in service to the best interests of taxpayers. Our roads are designed to need pork filled repaving frequently.
Politicians bribed by contractors to keep the pork flowing. This is the result of corruption as usual.
I'm betting that a call will now go out to sell the highways to contractors. Let them pay for highway upgrades, then charge tolls to keep things profitable, from a bottomline perspective.
Cheney and friends are getting exactly what they want with oil prices killing the economy. Government as we knew it dying, corporate feudalism on the rise. Contracting all the way.
Does anyone think the exxonmob will allow a rail revival? No chance.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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MAD MAC Posted 3:37 am
07 Jun 2008
Victory in Pattani
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Pangolin Posted 8:42 am
07 Jun 2008
Converting our roadways to concrete in many areas would necessitate digging up our water, gas, electric and phone lines in many areas and re-installing them in service tunnels due to the need to maintain said infrastructure. Unlike asphalt a concrete roadway puts up a serious fight when you need to get under a two foot strip of it to repair a gas line. Plus you can't (shouldn't) just lay down some cold patch when you're done.
In some dense urban areas this is exactly what we are going to do but I'm not sure how this will ever be feasible in the strip malls of suburbia.
Put the Carbon Back
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JMG Posted 10:01 am
07 Jun 2008
The 5% Project
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:01 am
07 Jun 2008
Use of capital. If you run a factory, you want to run the equipment as often as possible, avoiding "downtime", that is, the machinery sitting idle. Individual transport -- cars -- are incredibly inefficient in terms of capital productivity, because they are usually not being used. Think about wasted machinery next time you see a parking lot. In fact, the huge expanses, particularly in cities, taken up with parking is another inefficiency, using up land. But the only thing less efficient than a car that is not being used is a car that is being used, so
Using an entire motor for each individual is inefficient, and loses the efficiencies of scale available in a train or bus. Which leads to
by enjoying the advantages of density, a transportation system based on transit, biking and walking decreases the time needed for transit, because it puts the destinations closer to one another. In a sprawl situation, it's like being on the outside of a circle, while in a dense downtown, everyone is in the middle of the circle. and this also leads to better use of land, because you need less land for transportation.
so the bottom line is, dense, transit-oriented city and town centers are much more efficient than suburbs, or any area centered on automobiles.
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MAD MAC Posted 2:09 pm
07 Jun 2008
The Green movement has to get it's head wrapped around this. The US is not - nor is any other country - going to restructure its entire economy around the environment. Pie in the sky. It is not going to happen regardless of how many on these pages think it should.
As for concrete, hard to build many modern buildings without using things like steel, concrete or wood. Name a building material and someone here will tell you why you can't use it. Again, we have to be realistic.
Victory in Pattani
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:35 pm
07 Jun 2008
Now, it very well may be pie-in-the-sky, but I think it's my moral responsibility to put forward ideas about averting collapse if at all possible. so I argue for pie-in-the-sky.
If you live in the middle of NYC, after a 12 hour day you can get back to your apartment in as little as 10 minutes. why? because of density plus a subway. Yes, I know, much of america doesn't want this -- but quite a bit of america does, which is one reason its so ridiculously expensive to live in NYC.
What I find as depressing as the love of suburbia in the US is the status value of cars outside of the US. A friend who lived in Malaysia for a long time tells of friends there who now will pile everyone into their car to drive the 2 blocks that they always used to walk, just to show how much better off they are.
but maybe if the US changed, the rest of the world would have a different model to emulate?
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MAD MAC Posted 3:54 pm
07 Jun 2008
Take the Wai for example. Westerners mistakenly take this greeting to be an Asian form of shaking hands. It's is, but it's also more than that. Lower Wai's higher. Thus when two Thais meet, they will quickly suss out who is higher in the social strata. At that point, their language changes and one becomes deferential in word selection. Also, the titles for you change based on where someone is in the pecking order. Money is a huge factor in determining where you sit. So a visible sign of wealth means status. This tradition has nothing to do with us.
As for this:
"...I don't think the US or any other country will have any choice but to shift their economies away from, first, oil, then natural gas, then coal."
I absolutely agree. I think any sentient being would agree. These are limited, non-renewable resources. We have to move away from them.
Having said that, most Greens want to move in radical directions. Let's take suburbia. Now, I hate the suburbs. Doesn't have the advantages of the city or the country.... too many negatives for me. But they are hugely popular with most people. Therefore, practical solutions should take this into account. Suburbs mean people need independent transport modes...... Tens of millions of people live in Suburbs, so generating quality housing for tens of millions (which of course could only be done with large amounts of carbon emissions in the construction process) isn't going to happen either. You know this as well as I do. So the solution lies in providing incentives to the transportation industry to develop environmentally friendly individual transportation means, not in saying "Everyone has to walk or bike from now on and move out of your house and into the city center."
Victory in Pattani
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:55 am
08 Jun 2008
First, the millions of homes that are now in suburbia are mostly the product of the post-WWII period, so theoretically, what you can do in 50 years is reorient your society in either a suburban, or, alternatively, an urban direction. Whether we would have the same resources to rebuild cities that we had when there was plenty of cheap resources around is another question. but,
second, I don't think that the emissions generated in rebuilding cities would necessarily be huge. Ideally, such construction could be powered by clean electricity. More realistically, the construction sector currently only uses about 5% of our oil, if I remember the statistics correctly. However, what is probably your main point is,
third, can we make suburbs work sustainably? there was an interesting post about this at theoildrum.com recently, much of it focusing on suburbs feeding themselves.
My take on this is sort of in-between -- there are suburbs, and there are suburbs. Ideally, many suburbs either once were perfectly well functioning towns or could be transformed into ones, that is, something with a reasonably accessible town center. then, you can set up electric trains into the cities from there.
another consideration is that small electric cars, which are available now -- sorry, I'm not familiar with what you have access to in thailand, it's probably a bigger choice than here -- can go about 30 mph, 60 mile range,which would be perfectly adequate either for a dense city or suburb with a town center. Of course, people want huge monsters with "oomph", we'll see how the technology works out. And also whether keeping roads paved works out.
So I think the future of suburbia is very foggy, and there are many configurations possible, partly depending on how the technology develops.
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MAD MAC Posted 3:23 am
08 Jun 2008
Now when he was young, he worked lived in Watertown and worked in a bakery Dorchester. It took him, with his father (who was the manager of same bakery) two hours each way to commute. And they worked 12 hours a day, six days a week. That meant six days a week you worked, slept and ate and that was it. If the price of oil keeps climbing before industry can create the requisite alternative transportation, you will see this again.
My neighbor here runs and insurance company. His house is in the next provincial city, exactly 101 kilometers from here. Were he in the US, without a doubt he would make the hour drive each way every day. But wage structures here prohibit that; it just would not be affordable. He sleeps at work six days a week on a mat on the floor of the office and goes home Saturday evening to see his family. Again, if fuel prices continue to rise (and I think they will sooner rather than latter) and if alternative transportation options are not developed fairly soon, then I think you will see more and more Americans doing this as well.
Where I live in Thailand there is no public transportation. The private sector has stepped in to fill the gap. Covered pickups function as buses and have predetermined routes. They are fairly cheap (at least by our standards), but you often end up sitting on the roofs as they are grossly overcrowded about half the time I have used them. Most actually have roof racks for the purpose of allowing passengers to hold on. But when there's an accident, it's very ugly with people flying everywhere. And there are a lot of accidents.
As for electric transport, I have seen several types ranging from very small, to Vesper type scooters. I don't know what their operational parameters are, but one did drive by my house today and man it was quiet. Too quiet really. You can't hear it coming and hearing is one of the key senses in avoiding collision with pedestrians. I personally own a Honda Shadow, which gets fantastic gas mileage. I pay less than 10 dollars a month for gas.
Victory in Pattani
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:58 am
08 Jun 2008
However, the exception may have been NYC. for some reason, the powers-that-be, at the turn of that century, decided to lay down a very extensive subway system, even into the far reaches of northern Manhttan that were undeveloped at the time. I suppose that, because cars were not an alternative in 1903, they had no choice if they were to keep NYC at the center of the economy.
but that system allowed a poor boy like my father to travel from the bronx to the Museum of Natural History for very little money, or for thousands of african-americans to travel from harlem to the garment district to get good jobs, etc. etc.
LA -- which had a very good transit system -- and Houston are in big trouble, as is Phoenix and many other cities in the southwest such as in florida, or atlanta.
remember in the 1960s when people thought that there was an "urban crisis"? that's because people still viscerally understood the importance of cities, exactly for this sort of problem. and hopefully they will return to this understanding.
By the way, is thailand still building a huge city that has an airport at the center? I shuddere to think what happens when air travel starts to become too expensive, particularly for freight, which I believe was at the center of the thais' decision.
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MAD MAC Posted 4:33 am
08 Jun 2008
The new airport was built in the hopes of turning it into the aviation hub of southeast Asia. Alas, of all the transportation industries, aviation is set to take the biggest hit of all. So this investment is unlikely to pay off.
As for Bagnkok, it is massive urban sprawl at it's worst. And a fun place to hang out.
Victory in Pattani
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sindark Posted 1:30 am
10 Jun 2008
a sibilant intake of breath
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