http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06oil.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Spigot&st=cse&oref=slogin
Wonder if a similar article will be written in 30 years about global warming?
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TheMonsignor |
30-year Bipartisan #@%&up on Energy Policy |
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I thought this was an excellent analysis of how this country has ignored the oncoming oil and gas crunch for 30 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06oil.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Spigot&st=cse&oref=slogin Wonder if a similar article will be written in 30 years about global warming?
Bless the Badgers.
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LamontS1 |
#1 | |||
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Good article. But I would argue that any government attempt to increase fuel efficiency standards would be a drop in the bucket relative to the incentive
consumers currently have to buy more fuel efficient vehicles and the auto-makers to sell them. The market has seen a huge increase in the sales of fuel
efficient vehicles over the past year that never would have been possible (or even close to possible) by governmental regulation alone. Second, I think blaming
the failure to increase gasoline taxes is kind of laughable. If we're talking about nickel, dime, or quarter a gallon increases, that is extremely small
relative to the impact of the increase of gasoline futures and would hardly change driving habits. Gasoline went from around $1.50 a gallon to around $3.70-ish
before we saw any nationwide decrease in gasoline consumption. And if we're talking about a several dollar gas tax increase, I'd bet every single
congressman who voted for that bill would find themselves out of office in their next election.
Last Edited By: LamontS1 07/10/08 8:11 AM.
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Myles Long |
#2 | |||
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I seldom find myself in agreement with Lamont, but twice this week I have said to myself that snappy headed howitzer is right on this one. I didn't read
the article, but he is right about taxes not being the answer to our consumption. It would have taken a $75/barrell surtax to have had any effect on us.
Somewhere out there ex #2 is saying, I told you not to buy that guzzling SUV back in '02.
"You have an avatar of a recruit and are hyping a stadium that hasn't even been built yet....
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Ol Badger |
#3 | |||
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Actually, Lamont has it pretty much right. Thomas Friedman's been arguing for a couple of years that the federal gasoline tax should be set to ensure a
price of $4.00 or more a gallon, because anything short of that isn't enough to dampen demand significantly. As the article points out, that's what
the western European countries do (much higher taxes than that, actually), and it works. If you've been to Europe you know that big American-style cars
are rare, and public transportation plentiful. The problem is that we have a huge infrastructure disconnect with that model: our cities are highly
decentralized, making it harder for public transit to replace cars, and the sunk costs in highways, streets, schools, sewers, etc. militate against a quick
transition.
These ARE the good old days!
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blockski |
#4 | |||
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The reason you don't think the gas tax would have an impact, Lamont, is because you're thinking of the gas tax in American terms - you put a quarter
per gallon as the high end. If we put it in European terms, and things suddenly look a lot different:
They have those more fuel-efficient cars in Europe without the cumbersome CAFE standards we have because they have high prices. They have high prices because they tax it. And they tend to tax fuel heavily because they are all oil importers. The US taxation scheme on gas is a relic from the days when we were both the pre-eminent producer and exporter of oil, neither of which is true today. Aside from that, there's plenty of evidence that you need to do both - raise the price and increase efficiency through mandates. What is well documented, however, is that simply increasing efficiency without increasing the price only leads to more miles traveled, and in the long run, a net increase in gas consumption. Needless to say, that's not a very wise policy. In short, using CAFE standards to mandate efficiency (as a proxy for raising the gas tax) is an ineffective measure. What makes it worse is that it's been repeatedly torpedoed by Detroit (despite the fact that they seem to make cars in Europe that do just fine). |
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blockski |
#5 | |||
Ol Badger wrote: Yes, we won't have a quick transition. Which is all the more reason to start re-investing in transit and rail now.
Our land use isn't just decentralized by accident or by some magical free market mechanism, it is a direct result of our policies regarding
infrastructure investment - pretty much nothing but highways and cars since WWII.
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Ol Badger |
#6 | |||
blockski wrote:
Excuse me, block, but aren't we in serious agreement here? And by infrastructure I was casting a much broader net than highways, or even physical plant; there's a lot of social capital invested in our current arrangements, too, and while that will follow the physical infrastructure there likely will be some wrenching adjustments. My guess is that Americans will first try to find a technological fix that can maintain the current, decentralized society (solar-powered autos, maybe?) before they'll readilly adopt the high-density living of Europe or Asia. As for Lamont's comments about gas tax increases, I believe he was referring to the actual bills from the 1980s-90s highlighted in the article, which amounted to something like $.05 - .025 per gallon. I think we all agree that this would be insufficient to affect demand significantly. I also think he was agreeing with the article that at the time it would have been impossible, politically speaking, to impose European-level gasoline taxes, as I suspect it still would be today.
These ARE the good old days!
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NumenLumen |
#7 | |||
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"If you've been to Europe you know that big American-style cars are rare, and public transportation plentiful. The problem is that we have a huge
infrastructure disconnect with that model: our cities are highly decentralized, making it harder for public transit to replace cars, and the sunk costs in
highways, streets, schools, sewers, etc. militate against a quick transition. "
If you've been to Europe, you will also note that it's a pretty small continent, with countries the size of our states. The biggest (in western Europe, anyway), France, is about the size of Texas, and Germany is the size of Oregon+Washington. It's a lot easier to have everything directed towards mass transit when you don't have hundreds or even thousands of miles to traverse to move goods and people. It's not that Europe is smart and we're dumb, or vice versa. Both continents have been built with the infrastructure that makes the most sense to them. Note that Canada, despite somewhat higher gas taxes, has built it's infrastructure more similar to ours. Why, becaue they are more like the U.S., a vast continenti-wide nation, than Denmark. It the U.S., where it makes sense (i.e. the BOSNYWASH corridor) mass transit is very previlent for both local and regional uses. It other big cities where mass transit makes sense, it is there, as well. In a decentralized "city on a prairie" with two downtowns and lots of suburb-to-suburb commuting, it's a lot harder to firgue out how it works cost-effectively (Am I talking about MSP or DFW? Maybe both....). |
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Ol Badger |
#8 | |||
NumenLumen wrote: Well, this makes sense if you're talking about inter-city transportation. But it doesn't explain intra-urban transit. At one time, US cities were fairly compact; you can see remnants in, say, Boston or San Francisco. But the advent of the automobile allowed us to build out rather than up, and we've done that with a vengeance. It's not unusual for people working in downtown Washington to live 50 or 60 miles out, for example. That's possible because of the freeways we maintain to allow those people to move between home and work by car. And we discovered some time ago that the more roads we build to do that, the more ex-urban (soon to become suburban, of course) development we get.
These ARE the good old days!
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blockski |
#9 | |||
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OB, I was never disagreeing with you - just following up on your points. The one point I wanted to add was that our lower density lifestyle is not an immovable object. It is a direct
result of certain policies. Those policies can and should be changed, allowing our cities to change over time.
And yes, I agree that fuel taxes at a European level were and are politically unrealistic. I think the most promising arrangement these days would be an all-encompassing carbon tax of some sort. NumenLumen wrote:On intercity travel: Europe is not that small. America is not that big. People tend to get hung up on comparing countries to states and vice versa. As far as European travel is concerned, their high speed trains can compete (and beat) air travel over distances up to about 500 miles. There are plenty of American cities within 500 miles of each other - pretty much everything east of the Mississippi, as well as key hubs in Texas, the Colorado Front Range, California, the Pacific Northwest, etc. Just as you don't regularly sign up to take a train from Lisbon all the way to Ankara when in Europe, nobody is proposing trains from LA to NYC.
What does make sense, however, is those regional corridors. A hub around Chicago. The NE corridor. One around Atlanta. Etc. On intracity travel: Those big prairie cities are decentralized because our public policies have never provided anything but highways. The densest parts of Minneapolis were all on the old streetcar system. That was a fine transport system for its day, and it was Thomas Lowry's pride and joy - yet Lowry's fortune came from real estate, not transportation. Investments in transportation have a direct influence on where land develops and the form that development takes. Invest in highways and you need to find someplace to park all those cars - you get auto-oriented suburbia. Invest in subways (as DC did in the 70s) and you get a downtown oriented to people walking. In short, the built form we see today is not a given. It is constantly changing. It will change a great deal in the next 20 years, too. We should make every attempt to shape that change in a more sustainable way. As it relates to energy policy: Sure, gas prices are high - but they're not as high as they are in Europe. We're feeling the pinch because our demand is quite inelastic - and that demand is so inelastic because we have no other option but to drive. Some futuristic technology solution isn't going to get us out of this mess. We need to consume less - and not just consume less gas while substituting that for electric cars or hydrogen cars - we'll make a far bigger dent by simply driving less, period. |
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LamontS1 |
#10 | |||
blockski wrote: On nearly all measures, "infrastructure" spending has gone up significantly over the past 25 years and has continued to increase further during this economic downturn. I've never been sure what statistics people have been looking at when they come to the conclusion the US doesn't investment in infrastructure. Just driving around and all around the US in the past ten years it seems all the infrastructue looks really new to me. I guess people are mostly referring to bridges and maybe powerlines.? Back to the data, non-residential fixed investment (of which much could be considered infrastucture) has actually increased at a higher rate than residential investment over that period. Look at these numbers: http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/scratch/66-249-67-79!fedstl_pnfic96 For the numbers divided by actual category, I can't find the longer term data sets but the link below shows the construction investment in most categories going back to Jan 2002. http://www.economagic.com/cenc30.htm The numbers on total construction on "highway and street" have jumped substantially. Numbers for construction in the "power", "healthcare", "education", "transportation", "sewage and waste", "water", and "manufacturing" categories have jumped substantially since 2002 and all continue to grow now. The value of federal spending on "highway and street" has doubled since Jan 2002 and continues to climb. http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/cenc30/fedsa14
Last Edited By: LamontS1 07/10/08 11:00 AM.
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LamontS1 |
#11 | |||
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"Those big prairie cities are decentralized because our public policies have never provided anything but highways. The densest parts of Minneapolis
were all on the old streetcar system. That was a fine transport system for its day, and it was Thomas Lowry's pride and joy - yet Lowry's fortune came
from real estate, not transportation. Investments in transportation have a direct influence on where land develops and the form that development takes. Invest
in highways and you need to find someplace to park all those cars - you get auto-oriented suburbia. Invest in subways (as DC did in the 70s) and you get a
downtown oriented to people walking.
As it relates to energy policy: Sure, gas prices are high - but they're not as high as they are in Europe. We're feeling the pinch because our demand is quite inelastic - and that demand is so inelastic because we have no other option but to drive. Some futuristic technology solution isn't going to get us out of this mess. We need to consume less - and not just consume less gas while substituting that for electric cars or hydrogen cars - we'll make a far bigger dent by simply driving less, period. " Have you ever figured that public policies were that way because that's what people wanted? If there is high demand for big houses outside the city and for driving cars and at the same time no demand for living in cramped high rise buildings and for taking the train, then it makes sense for public policies to support that, right? Why would you build a high speed rail or subway system in places where barely anyone will use them? When I was a kid some public officials decided our town needed a city bus; then within a year they realized that no one wanted to take the bus and thus scrapped the idea. As for high speed rail between cities, I'm all for it. I'm really afraid of flying, even though I do it all the time and would love nothing more than to hop on some high speed train like in Germany, for example. But I think the issue is that it would be far too expensive to build and would lose huge amounts of money. |
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Ol Badger |
#12 | |||
LamontS1 wrote: It's worth noting that all forms of transport (for people, as opposed to cargo) lose money. That's because the social benefits of the underlying infrastructure never can be captured in the price for the service--there are just huge external benefits. Hence, subsidies prevail everywhere (yes, even for the airlines).
These ARE the good old days!
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blockski |
#13 | |||
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Lamont, it doesn't really matter if our infrastructure spending is increasing or not - the amount we're putting in is woefully inadequate to even
maintain our existing stuff, to say nothing of expansion to accommodate economic and population growth.
http://www.asce.org/files/pdf/reportcard/Category_Fact_Sheets.pdf Have you ever figured that public policies were that way because that's what people wanted? If there is high demand for big houses outside the city and for driving cars and at the same time no demand for living in cramped high rise buildings and for taking the train, then it makes sense for public policies to support that, right?Sure, that makes sense. Except for the fact that your assumptions are totally wrong. You might want to inform the 8 million or so residents of New York City, for example. Our current public policy does more to determine what options people can choose from. This is not a free market in operation - not even close. There's also substantial evidence, based on research done by one of my grad school professors that plenty of current suburbanites would rather live in a more urban setting, but can't because there aren't enough options. Our public policies don't just favor suburban forms, they also tend to dis-favor urban ones, skewing the market in that direction. There's tremendous pent-up demand for walkable, transit-oriented, urban places. These places that do exist have by and large avoided much of the housing bust, especially when compared to exurban locations. Why would you build a high speed rail or subway system in places where barely anyone will use them?You don't. You put them where people will use them - which is a lot of places that don't currently have them. Transit systems across the US are setting ridership records due to gas prices. People that do have the option to switch to transit (because transit is in place) are doing so on a massive scale. People will use transit - but it has to be available for them to even have the chance. As for high speed rail between cities, I'm all for it. I'm really afraid of flying, even though I do it all the time and would love nothing more than to hop on some high speed train like in Germany, for example. But I think the issue is that it would be far too expensive to build and would lose huge amounts of money.HSR makes sense for many reasons. It's more energy efficient, it can relieve pressure off airlines for those shorter routes (which are usually not profitable for them anyways, and are a large factor in the crowding of our airspace and airports), and the list goes on. It would be expensive, without a doubt. So was the Interstate system. As far as operations go, high speed trains in Europe and Japan operate at a profit (though that does not cover the capital costs). So does Amtrak service on the NE corridor. This is what I'm talking about when it comes to leadership. There's no easy way out of this problem, it's going to involve spending money. The idea that we can somehow get something for nothing on this is simply wrong. Any way you slice it, we're going to spend a lot of money, either on high priced gas, new infrastructure, old infrastructure, or any number of other things. Time to bite that bullet. |
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LeviBooth |
#14 | |||
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I just got an email from Northwest Airlines, strongly advocating (and linking) to this site, 'Stop Oil Speculation Now':
http://capwiz.com/sosnow/issues/alert/?alertid=11571321 Interesting that they're directly appealing to their consumers for legislation re: commodity speculation. |
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PassTheDutchie |
#15 | |||
LeviBooth wrote: I heard this morning on NPR that all the airlines are sending the same (or similar) letter to their top customers.
"American democracy will never be destroyed by outside enemies -- but it can be destroyed by the malefactors of great wealth who subtly rob and undermine it from within." - Theodore Roosevelt
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NumenLumen |
#16 | |||
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"But the advent of the automobile allowed us to build out rather than up, and we've done that with a vengeance."
Because there has been room to do so. Much less the case in western Europe. "It's not unusual for people working in downtown Washington to live 50 or 60 miles out, for example. " And they do it realizing either implicitly or explicitly that they are trading time for larger or more affordable digs. "That's possible because of the freeways we maintain to allow those people to move between home and work by car." And you end up with a flexible transportation infrastructure good for moving goods as well as people. Can't move a piano on the subway. Re: blockski's map overlay- the projection you're using, I believe is the classic Mercador projection, which makes northernmore landmasses look larger (see how large Greenland looks), and is thus deceving since morst of Eurpoe is well north of most of the U.S. (or a diffeent projection for the Europe vs. the U.S. which casts the entire scaling in doubt). Secondly, you're incorporating all of Europe when it's really western Europe we're talking about, which I think would fit in the area east of the Misssissippi. I do think high speed trains would be viable for regional travel. Make 'em electric and power the suckers with nuclear energy and we can take a chunk of the hydrocarbon fuel used by jetlines out of the system. What would be the cost vs. benefit, however. I agree with Lamont that you can't immedtely conclude that consumer behavior follows public policy and not the other way around. YOu need to develop a public policy for each city and region that makes sense for that city and region. Dense, transit intensive infrastructures make sense in SF, Boston, NYC because they have geographic features that place land at a premium. When the subways were built in DC, the bulk of commuting was already going toward the core of the city because that's where the jobs are. DC as an analog for MSP just doesn't make any sense. In the Twin Cities, the urban cores have a lot of jobs and are frankly very well served by suburban bus services. However, whole lot of jobs are in the suburbs as huge companies like 3M, General Mills, Cargill, Carlson Cos., etc. are in the suburbs, and not necessarily near each other. You can't build a transit system of any sort that efficiently captures all of the possible suburb-to-suburb commuting permutations. For a metro area like the Twin Cities, making bus transit as efficent as possible (combined rapid bus/HOV lanes) is really the way to go. It is flexible, scalable, and requires a whole lot less initial spending. Regarding a propsed new Minneapolis-St. Paul light rail line, MN state rep Mark Beusgens calculated the following: "The Governor vetoed a $70 million bonding provision for a part of the $900 million Central Corridor light rail line connecting Minneapolis to St. Paul. Let us assume that the cost of the project would not grow. Even without a government discount or a bulk discount, one can buy a 36-seat transit bus (the CTS rear engine model from Champion Bus Inc. of Imlay City, Michigan) for about $120,000. So for the same price for the 11-mile light rail line, you could buy 7,500 buses. These buses are 38 feet long. So the length of 7,500 buses, rolling bumper to bumper, would be 285,000 feet. The 11-mile route of the rail line is 58,080 feet long. So you could have five lanes of buses cramming University Avenue, bumper to bumper for the same price as the train. Or you could have one lane of buses headed in each direction, bumper to bumper, with 4,500 buses waiting in mothballs until they were needed. Or you could have 100 buses headed in each direction of the 50-block route, with one bus for each block. That would leave you with 7,400 buses in mothballs. With a five-year warranty on each bus, it would take you 375 years to run out of buses. " Put another way, about the most expensive cost I could find for a lane-mile of urban freeway was $12MM. For the almost $1B price tag of the Central Corridor, you could almost build an additional 8-lane freeway (on top of I-94, which also covers that stretch). Or you could add a high speed bus/HOV lane in each direction and still have money left over to buy some buses, and build bike lanes for all of the Maoists in town. Make those busses electric, power 'em with nuclear power, and I've taken two steps toward solving global warming or climate change or cooling or whatever we need to call it based on the day's weather. |
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Ol Badger |
#17 | |||
NumenLumen wrote: Having a lot of room is beside the point if you can't get from place to place. Someone built those roads; they were not acts of god. I know very well that people with long commutes understand their trade-offs, but, again, something has to facilitate that movement. And our land-use policies, for the most part, tend to favor low-density outward expansion to higher-density in-fill. It's the combination of policies, infrastructure and available space that promotes sprawl; land alone is not nearly enough. And yes, highways are just great, the Interstate Highway System an engineering marvel, etc. But it's forgotten that those roads were inspired more by the need to move goods (and military supplies; the law is called the National Defense and Interstate Highway Act for a reason, after all) than people. In any case, that system reflects a time when oil was plentiful, cheap, and mostly produced domestically. Those days are gone. The freight people have figured out how to merge highway and train modalities to get the most efficient transportation for goods; it's time we invested in how to do that for people, too. It's not as if we really have a choice over the long run, anyway.
These ARE the good old days!
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LamontS1 |
#18 | |||
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Lamont, it doesn't really matter if our infrastructure spending is increasing or not - the amount we're putting in is woefully inadequate to
even maintain our existing stuff, to say nothing of expansion to accommodate economic and population growth.
http://www.asce.org/files/pdf/reportcard/Category_Fact_Sheets.pdf Blockski, I don't think you've been looking at or have access to the recent data. If you were an investor, you'd know that infrastructure has been one of the most powerfull investment themes over the past four years, much like tech was in the late 90s. I'm all for increased infrastucture spending. I'm invested in a lot of companies directly related to infrastructure. My big problem is, however, that many people are alarmest on this issue and they seem to be using old data to support their arguments, much like the articl you linked that mostly uses old investment data from the recessionary levels of 2001 and 2002 (to support their case). I simply showed you (in links above) that those investment levels have gone up nearly double in every category since that period and are continuing to increase. And I understand that we need more investment in these areas, particularly in bridges, airports, and the electrical grid, but in areas like rail, schools, water utilities, roads and rail investment has already been very strong and there's definately not some kind of funding emergency in these areas. I'm not sure why rail, in particular, is included in the article, though it did receive a decent C- grade. I've been invested in both railroad companies and companies that manufacture railcars and make railroad ties+accessories for a long time and can tell you that there has been a significant increase in investment in this industry for the past four or so years and that rail infrastucture is far from being any kind of state of emergency like the article implies. Also, investment in the electric grid has increased massively as well, alhtough there is far to go. Just look at the increase in stock prices of companies like Quanta and General Cable (which I own but has been killing me lately). For roads, we need more investment, as Astec Industries which manufactures equipment for roadbuilding, suggests in their 2007 annual report, but if there's some kind of major issue with the conditions of roads in the US, I've never seen it. " You might want to inform the 8 million or so residents of New York City, for example. Our current public policy does more to determine what options people can choose from. This is not a free market in operation - not even close. There's also substantial evidence, based on research done by one of my grad school professors that plenty of current suburbanites would rather live in a more urban setting, but can't because there aren't enough options. Our public policies don't just favor suburban forms, they also tend to dis-favor urban ones, skewing the market in that direction." Are you suggesting that all 8 million residents "want" to live in NYC? There's a lot of ghetto there and I'm quite positive many/most would leave to a big house in suburbs in a hot second if they were able. And the "research" conducted by your left wing radical grad school professor indicating that "plenty of current suburbanites would rather live in a more urban setting" doesn't mean that they'd want to live in a high rise and take trains every day, does it? There's tremendous pent-up demand for walkable, transit-oriented, urban places. These places that do exist have by and large avoided much of the housing bust, especially when compared to exurban locations. That depends on geography and is also most likely because there was a lot more residential construction in suburban areas vs urban areas throughout the US. Why would you build a high speed rail or subway system in places where barely anyone will use them? You don't. You put them where people will use them - which is a lot of places that don't currently have them. Transit systems across the US are setting ridership records due to gas prices. People that do have the option to switch to transit (because transit is in place) are doing so on a massive scale. People will use transit - but it has to be available for them to even have the chance. A lot of people who are currently taking the train will return to their cars once they adjust to the new higher gas price. We've already seen weekly gasoline demand go from down 4% on an annual basis as of early May to down less than 1% currently. Why? Because they're adjusting to the price. |
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Ol Badger |
#19 | |||
LamontS1 wrote: OK, Lamont, it's time for you to rent the boxed dvd set of "Sex and the City". You'll not only love the high-fashion styles (all those women are wearing Prada and Manolo Blahnik--tres chic) but you might also discover that a lot of people who can afford to live anywhere they want own high-rise apartments in Manhattan. Seriously, it's true! The ghetto version of NYC is just so "Kojak"! This is not you father's New York City, it's your grandfather's. Hopefully helpfully...
These ARE the good old days!
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LamontS1 |
#20 | |||
Ol Badger wrote: |
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