Transportation

David Wogan brings up an important point--if we're serious about global warming, we need to lower the amount of energy buildings use: Consider this: according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, our nation's buildings consume over 40 percent of the energy consumed across all sectors - that is even more energy than consumed by the transportation sector (29 percent). And in our homes and apartments, nearly half (49 percent) of all energy is used for heating and cooling. As he points out weatherization is something you can and should do to lower energy consumption. But there's…

The Atlantic is being paid some unknown amount of money by McKinsey and Co. (the same people who brought you some very nice healthcare propaganda) to discuss this: The Atlantic and McKinsey & Company brought together some of the top minds in business, government, and the world of ideas, each to answer the same question: What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation? Matthew Yglesias has the best idea of the bunch, which is to moderately increase inflation. But then the other neo-liberal bromides are trotted: job training, tax credits to spur innovation, and…

This weekend, Los Angeles will close a 10-mile stretch of the 405 freeway for 53 hours so work crews can conduct demolition that will enable widening of the freeway. Locals are referring to the planned closure as "Carmageddon," anticipating gridlock on nearby roadways that remain open. The hope is that the short-term pain will bring relief of chronic traffic congestion once the widening project's finished. Unfortunately for hopeful Angelenos, adding more road space probably won't relieve congestion. NPR's Guy Raz spoke to University of Toronto economist Matthew Turner, co-author of a study…

Monday, The NY Times had an interesting story about Zurich, Switzerland's intentional policy of making car-based transportation utterly miserable--and thereby convincing people to use other transit options: While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear -- to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of…

...that's pretty good, even if you're not a wackaloon Chartalist like the Mad Biologist. Andrew Samwick writes: The right reasoning is that with aggregate demand lower by hundreds of billions of dollars a year, there are unemployed and underemployed workers and underutilized capital whose services could be purchased on the cheap. If we have projects that add long-term value, this is the right time to be undertaking them. Plenty of those projects are to repair and maintain our seriously degraded infrastructure. Others are to make the upgrades necessary to plan for a future with different…

Dan Froomkin has a great article about the role that financial speculation plays in driving up gasoline prices*. Keep in mind that even Goldman Sachs, the largest oil trader, admits that speculation drives up oil prices. But what really disgusting is how this speculation-based rise in prices serves as a wealth transfer from, well, just about everybody to oil company executives (italics mine): By and large, the oil companies' profits are not finding their way back into the communities from which they came; are not being used to create more jobs; and are not being invested in new equipment…

By way of Jay Ackroyd, we come across this article about the whole "liquids and gels" silliness. If you fly regularly, it's nothing you don't normally experience: My carry-on goes through the scanner and comes out the other side. One of the guards squints at his monitor, then shoots me a hostile look. What's this, no plastic baggie? He pulls my luggage aside, opens it, and asks me to repack my liquids and gels "the right way." I do as he wants. When I'm finished, I hand him the baggie so he can run the items through again. To my surprise, he won't take them. "No," he says. "Just put them in…

Over the past couple of months, there has been a spate of articles celebrating cities that are getting rid of their urban highways. The Christian Science Monitor had an article discussing New Haven's urban reclamation efforts. NPR reported the following: How did this happen? After all, this is the country that always saw roads as a sign of progress. Now, taking down freeways has gone mainstream. Cities as diverse as New Haven, New Orleans and Seattle are either doing it or talking about it. The chief motivation seems to be money... This is the city planner's dream: Take out an underused…

A while ago, I raised the problem--an inconvenient truth, if you will--that moving to a renewable energy future is going to be difficult: My impression reading a lot of commentary about renewable energy is that there's this fantasy that we just have to build a bunch of windmills, install some solar panels, buy a Prius, and replace our windows and all will be well. But the brutal reality is that we need to urbanize our suburbs. We need to discourage detached housing. We need to massively fund local mass transit--not just SUPERTRAINS. We can't have people firing up their own personal combustion…

In light of the nuclear power plant partial meltdowns in Japan, there are calls for not expanding the U.S. nuclear power plant capacity, and even shutting down existing plants. What bothers me about this is that there is no discussion of how we make up the energy production shortfall--I'll get to energy conservation in a bit. As the U.S. begins the 21st century, we still are generating most of our power by lighting things on fire: oil, gas, and coal. While renewable energy (which despite its name still has some CO2 footprint) could pick up some slack, given our dysfunctional political…

It's called living in Boston. Unbeknownst to the Mad Biologist, we read that some mental health professionals believe 'sidewalk rage' is a psychiatric disorder: Researchers say the concept of "sidewalk rage" is real. One scientist has even developed a Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale to map out how people express their fury. At its most extreme, sidewalk rage can signal a psychiatric condition known as "intermittent explosive disorder," researchers say. On Facebook, there's a group called "I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head" that boasts nearly 15,000…

I agree with Atrios--while high-speed trains would be technologically groovy, trains that actually got somewhere quickly would be a major, albeit unsexy, improvement (italics mine): As for inter-city rail, I certainly support it too on the grounds that driving long distances and flying really suck. Flying sucks more than it used to for various reasons, and it is unlikely to suck less anytime soon. Having to travel to the airport, arrive early, deal with the various indignities and potential delays, the discomfort of airline cabins, extra time at the other end waiting for baggage, the need,…

By way of Atrios, we find that Massachusetts is the second safest state for drivers. No, really: The safest places to drive in the USA are Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts. Among the most dangerous: Montana, Wyoming, Louisiana and Mississippi. Those conclusions are based on federal data of traffic fatalities per 100,000 population and per 100 million miles driven. The primary reason for the difference: Urban roads are safer than rural roads. Even in states with low overall road death rates, rural areas often have rates twice as high as urban ones. That's because urban areas usually have…

Yesterday I mentioned sewer systems as an indispensable part of urban infrastructure, and today I want to focus on the more visible issue of transportation. The efficiency with which people and goods move into and within cities has a huge impact on both energy use and air quality. And the availability of non-driving modes of transportation can improve people's lives in a lot of ways. I read a few blogs that address transportation issues (Greater Greater Washington is indispensible for DC-area transportation nerds), and I'd like to address an assumption that I see a lot of commenters making:…

Chris Matthews makes a very good point (no, really) about our complete failure to upgrade our infrastructure: We used to build trains and subways and airplanes for the world. Now we read about trains running three hundred miles an hour in France and China and we piddle along on Amtrak like we're on a buckboard. Why can't we build railroads -- rapid railroads to unite this country instead of making the vast continent between New York and LA "fly-over country" for the bi-coastal elite to look down on? Why don't we build "anything" anymore? Would we build the subway systems of our country today…

I recently logged 1,300 miles in a rented white PT Cruiser traveling on I-94 from Chicago to Milwaukee and Madison, WI, down I-65 and I-74 to Cincinnati and up I-75 to Detroit. Along the way I saw dozens of road construction projects to expand traffic lanes, repair overpasses, and repave the road surface. Workers were dutifully wearing hard hats and reflective vests, but these protections seemed completely inadequate for the deadly hazards in their midst. Vehicles were zipping past within a few feet of the workers, with only a line of plastic barrels as a barrier. At one site near…

The Boston Public Library has a really cool exhibit about postcards related to Boston. Here's one I thought was funny from 1908 (based on the postage, I think it's 1908): I want my own unidirigible! Too bad Boston doesn't really look like this.... If you can't get to the library, the postcards are online here.

Gotta love Cambridge, MA: Policy Order Resolution O-32 IN CITY COUNCIL August 2, 2010 VICE MAYOR DAVIS COUNCILLOR CHEUNG COUNCILLOR DECKER COUNCILLOR KELLEY MAYOR MAHER COUNCILLOR REEVES COUNCILLOR SEIDEL COUNCILLOR SIMMONS COUNCILLOR TOOMEY ORDERED: That the City Manager be and hereby is requested to investigate with the MBTA the possibility of installing a long flat tube slide (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4o0ZVeixYU) at a Cambridge MBTA station to add a bit of personality to a subway stop. I'm feeling hopey and changey already... (By way of Cantabridgia)

The New York Times' latest "Room for Debate" discussion is entitled "2025: A Lot of Old People on the Roads," and it introduces the topic this way: ...the number of drivers 70 and over is expected to triple in the next 20 years in the United States. Older drivers are more likely to be injured, and they often reach the point where they stop driving voluntarily, even before someone takes their licenses away. How will they get around, given that most of them don't live in cities or transit-friendly planned communities? What should transportation planners be doing, if anything, to prepare for…

Earlier this month, I was able to attend the final day of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) USA conference, and it reminded me how far behind we are in preparing for a future in which oil is less readily available than it is now. Sharon Astyk, who's an ASPO board member, wrote a helpful Peak Oil 101 post that walks through the concept in some detail, but the basic issue is that there's a finite quantity of oil in the world, and at some point the rate of global oil extraction will slow. We may have already reached that point, or we may reach it in a decade or so. The…