Ominous cloud: In what appears to be the most tangible impact so far of Trump’s influence on infrastructure, his administration has cancelled a project that was set to electrify a popular commuter rail line in the California bay area.
DIY anti-speeding trick: A town in Scotland has happened upon a novel method of cracking down on fast drivers: Hairdryers.
Don’t widen roads. Please: As Oregon appears set for another road-widening binge, it’s worth brushing up on your reading about why this method of “congestion relief” is a bad idea. We came across two great explainers this week: One from The Plaza Perspective and one from Driving.ca.
More housing = less congestion?: As Portland girds for freeway widening debates, it’s time to consider the link between congestion and the lack of affordable housing.
No to red light cams: As Portland expands its automated enforcement programs we’re watching how other states handle the issue. In Florida, a place with the worst road safety record in the nation, a ban on red light cameras is moving forward.
Truck speeds: Another thing we’re following is ODOT’s puzzling interest in raising truck speed limits from 55 to 60 mph while research shows it will lead to more deaths and injuries.
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Carifornia: Looks like California — a state that, like Oregon, likes to bank on its eco-friendly reputation — is clueless and carheaded when it comes to transportation (also like Oregon).
Idling engines are the Devil’s playthings: I get peeved at all the people who stare at their phones while idling in traffic or a parking space — so I was glad to see some research aimed at changing that behavior via a Jedi mind trick.
‘OhBoy’ is right: The “bicycle house” apartment building in Malmö was built with complete bicycle access in mind. Take a tour via Copenhagenize.com.
New energy source, same old shit: Why don’t we get excited about electric cars? Because for all their environmental benefits, they do nothing to improve road safety. And despite all the additional subsidies they take from taxpayers, the people who make EVs glorify the same dangerous behaviors that gas-guzzlers have displayed for decades.
It works: Seattle successfully tamed one of its major arterials by simply re-striping the lanes in a way very similar to what PBOT has planned for SE Foster.
Transit matters: Streetsblog shares new numbers that tell the story of how transit ridership is down in most U.S. cities — except where significant investments were made in bus service. (Hi TriMet, we’re waiting.)
— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org
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I hear Oregon reached peak car registration in 2004, but yet, ODOT still wants to widen the Interstates. I sometimes wish I-205 was 4 lanes wide in each direction and 3 lanes wide south of Oregon City, but it is too late for that. I do not see how ODOT can widen the Interstates without causing more traffic backups and Eminent Domain.
What you heard about vehicle registrations is simply WRONG.
Total vehicle registrations in Oregon in 2005 was just under 2.9 million; total vehicle registrations in Oregon in 2015 was just under 4.3 million. Passenger cars in 2005 was 1.9 million; passenger vehicles in 2015 3.4 million.
references:
https://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/DMV/docs/stats/vehicle/2015_Vehicle_County_Registration.pdf
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs05/pdf/mv1.pdf
Rather surprisingly, you are both right, but it depends how you count and who does the counting. If it’s just autos, that is, excluding SUVs, then the count did level off in 2003-4 at about 1.6 million in Oregon, but the number of SUVs soared at about that time. I dare say most SUVs were probably counted as cars before 2003, then counted separately afterwards. Fun with USDOT stats: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=gb66jodhlsaab_#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=Auto&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=state&idim=state:OR&ifdim=state&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false
There is essentially no difference between “automobiles” and SUVs when it comes to occupying space in a lane. Teddy’s argument was that ODOT need not build any more roads because there are no more automobiles today than there were in 2004. A distinction without a difference.
Sorry, but the distinction is very important. An SUV being driven as a single-occupancy vehicle is like an “automobile” on the statistics, but is very different if the SUV is for delivery (freight) or for carpools (soccer parents?), but the statistics until 2004 included light trucks with autos before 2004, then lumped the light trucks and Suburbans with heavy trucks and semis after 2004. After 2010 many buses were also included with trucks, too, further muddling any sort of argument. True, there are more vehicles registered now, but who’s registering them, how are they being used, how often, and what kind of vehicles are they? Is a BMW SUV the same as Freightliner if both are being used to haul freight? What if both are being used to deliver just a single person to work every day, should they be counted as cars? On many farms, the large dump trucks used for moving grain are only used for part of the year, otherwise they sit idle in storage. Many cars in Portland sit idle on city streets for months on end, never driven, yet they are presumed to contribute to traffic. Any vehicle registered in Vancouver Washington can drive in Portland, and many do to jobs in Washington County and elsewhere, but they are never registered in Oregon.
My point is that any claim using vehicle registration data may or may not be true – we simply don’t know. The data is not that concise. Overall, the US has more vehicles. Oregon has more, but California has over 6 million fewer between 2009 and 2014, in spite of continued population growth. Are folks who are moving to California keeping their old plates and tags, not bothering to register them? Possibly, but they could be commercial vehicles registered in Oregon and Washington, but being driven entirely in California. The stats show where vehicles are registered, not where they actually reside.
That piece about building housing reducing congestion is pretty iffy. He points to all kinds of interesting and subtle relationships that are good to keep in mind, but the headline is misleading. Without caps (on people, on gasoline sold, etc.) it is foolish to predict declines in key parameters that we recognize as coupled to these trends. Growth is our religion. As long as we refuse to quit that habit we’re going to be disappointed.
Also, on the graph showing how much better things were than predicted, they were comparing to those straight-line predictions that always fail at some point. It’s the same reason I am skeptical about those Portland growth projections that basically extend current growth rates off to the horizon.
When that extrapolation fails, I will pick my pet policy and give it credit for constraining growth.
Criticizing the electric car predictably ruffles plenty of feathers, upsets the liberal orthodoxy that seeks, celebrates, & defends solutions to our large societal problems which leave our lifestyles basically intact. Most people I’ve met don’t have a stomach for the kind of disruption we’re steering toward, prefer to deny it (sometimes angrily) by lashing out at, for instance, critics of EVs.
I am also a critic of EV’s, as they will never solve the root problem that we just rely on automobiles far too much. This reliance creates other problems such as sprawl and loss of natural resources.
Why are automobiles inherently bad? They definitely have bad side effects, but if these can be mitigated, why is mechanized point-to-point transportation worse than other means of organizing mobility?
Not having kids would go much further than any other policy.
I for one am really looking forward to one day owning a car that drives itself so I can nap, rents it self out when I’m not using it, and in general is less likely to kill someone.
To answer your question, I’d start with Ivan Illich. He more than anyone I know has looked at some of the inherent contradictions of the objective of ever greater speed. I’ve linked to his treatises on these topics many times but am happy to provide additional links if you’ve not read them already.
But if you don’t agree with Illich I guess I’d ask you to make some suggestions for what a side-effect-free form of mechanized point-to-point transportation would look like?
Technology cannot ever be inherently good or bad; it’s about how it’s used. I can’t see a single good thing that comes out of auto-reliance. The main ones being that their misuse can result in death, and that they encourage less-effient, more resource-intensive spread out living. Plenty of minor issues exists too. Cars take up more space per person than any other mode of transportation, and thus heavy car usage interferes with effective transport by bicycle or bus.
You might claim cars make things “more convenient”, but that is simply because we have mindfully designed our cities to make driving the most convenient mode (and in some cases, the only mode). Car’s are certainly not more convenient in other cities not do car-focused, so it’s clear it’s a factor of your built environment that dictates transportation efficiency rather than the mode itself.
It looks like a bicycle.
point for Adam H.!
Hah! Adam H. 🙂
@9watts To me the main side effects are CO2 and safety. EVs make some progress on the CO2 front, and enable more as we transition our power sources away from coal and gas. There is no immediate solution to the safety issue, but, as you know, I put considerable faith in looming technological changes to make huge advances in safety.
So: small, automated, electric vehicles would be my proposal at a solution.
And, yes, bikes for those who want them. Yay bikes!
CO2 and safety, huh?
I figure I could add about 312 more to your list. We didn’t really seriously consider CO2 as an automobile-generated pollutant before about 1990, and Nader’s campaign for auto safety only dates to the mid-sixties. Auto-highway-oil juggernaut? Middle East wars? Destruction of (almost invariably poor and minority) neighborhoods to make way for urban freeways. Exponential increase in impervious surface area destroying water bodies, arable land, and the list goes on.
The EV is a predictable gasp from the usual corners, and we champion it because it lets (or appears to let) us off the hook, avoid the tough choices, falling back on muscle power rather than continue to rely on the energy slaves bound up int he ancient sunlight.
@Adam H Given the way our cities are built (as you say, largely around cars), buses are not a great solution. They may solve some problems we have today, but they also cause some (diesel pollution, higher CO2 emissions than equivalent number of small cars), and they are mightily less convenient for many people (perhaps with a different city configuration they wouldn’t be, but we have the cities we have).
I am definitely pro transit, but I think it will be largely replaced by automated cars.
@9watts That was not intended as a comprehensive list, but those are the two biggest in my book. You identify others, some of which are simply extensions (or alternate tendrils to) the CO2 (solve CO2, you solve oil as well), others will likely always exist (highways aren’t going away anytime soon, even if we somehow reduced demand by 50%, no one is going to pull them up).
Muscle power just doesn’t work for a large segment of society. It works for you and for me, and that’s great, but it simply doesn’t for too many.
Kitty, you seem to propose all these solutions for cars, yet leave out the fact that these same improvements work for buses as well. And you leave out one major factor: cost. Fixed route is more efficient than automated point to point – each individual shares the same vehicle and thus are essentially pooling trips together. And buses are more equitable since the cost is shared by society (via taxes) rather than being “sold” to you by a privately-owned corporation. You think Uber is expensive now, just wait until they monopolize the market with their fleet of self-driving vehicles and jack up the prices.
That being said, I agree that buses are an imperfect solution for the same reason I stated earlier about our cities being too spread out. The solution is, of course, denser development, but we don’t all share the same fondness for density that I do. 🙂
I realize yours wasn’t a comprehensive list, but it was a bit too short for me. And I’m far less sanguine about the relationship between your short list and my longer merely-hinted-at- list above.
you wrote: “solve CO2, you solve oil as well”
Really?
I guess I’m not sure what you mean by solve CO2? There are plenty of nutty, desperate and likely well-funded-in-future proposals out there for what is called carbon capture and sequestration. Not that they will work, but that hasn’t kept us from pouring billions toward this in the past (or toward nuclear power). CC&S is just one of many examples of how those with money hope to split the oil and CO2 equations, have our fossil fuel cake, and eat it too. Furthermore oil exploration and transport have hundreds of repercussions around the world, even if the oil were never refined and burned as gasoline.
Yes, you are right. Buses can be automated, electrified (batteries, not wires, please), and intelligently routed. In fact, if you shrink them enough, and make their routing more flexible, they essentially become automated taxis.
What do automated electric buses give you that automated electric taxis don’t?
What we need is a better way to cover more ground faster, more safely, and more efficiently. If this can be done, you can live far from work which prevents situations like having urban dwelling be so crazy expensive — efficiency does not require us to all be in the same place.
I love cycling, but the problem is that there are physical requirements, few people will ride more than a couple miles, and only the most dedicated will go even 20 miles. It is simply not possible for everyone to live close to work, especially given changing employment situations and the huge number of two earner households.
It is a shame that the enormous funding dedicated to military boondoggles couldn’t be used for transit instead. If transit is the best way to get around, a lot more people will use it. Imagine if they got hyperloop working — you could live hundreds of miles away from work in transit that at least in theory would be faster, safer, and better than anything we do now.
the idea that motorized transport is always necessarily worse than human-powered transport is an extreme one. electric bikes are EVs. seattle and SF’s street trolleys are EVs. light rail cars are often pulled by EVs. moreover, one of the primary reasons that automobiles are so deadly is that they are designed to survive high speed crash into things and each other. i believe that autonomous driving technology and coincident electrification is going to kill car-culture and empower active transportation.
@9watts By “solve CO2” I meant decarbonize the energy and transport systems. We have a long way to go, but are doing so at an unprecedented, and rapidly accelerating pace. Doing that (mostly) eliminates oil as a fuel, though it will still have a role in manufacturing and lubrication. Not burning oil will greatly reduce the amount we need, thereby reducing the impact of extraction and transport.
I see carbon sequestration as a sideshow; I do not believe it will be economically viable when compared to other decarbonized energy sources.
EVs eliminate several root problems:
1. Tailpipe emissions are a major contributor to life-altering illness and death in urban areas. EVs essentially eliminate almost all of this risk.
2. Carbon pollution from low occupancy motorized vehicles is a major contributor to climate change. EVs charged with RECs have effective mpg equivalents in the thousands and, therefore, represent an important approach towards reducing the negative impacts of climate change.
“EVs charged with RECs have effective mpg equivalents in the thousands”
There are so many things wrong with that statement it is hard to know here to begin. We’ve been down this particular road before here in the comments.
(1) to build any of this – the cars, the batteries, the factories, the transportation of EVs, the maintenance, the wind turbines, the transmission lines, the towers… all take massive amounts of fossil fuels. This won’t change in my lifetime, and I think you’re a few years older than I am, soren.
(2) If you run this out, parameterize a massive buildout of the renewable infrastructure to try to get ahead of this, and folks have done this whom I’ve quoted, cited, linked to here in the past, you discover something counterintuitive: CO2 emissions go up, rise faster than without the buildout. The infrastructure required to attempt to realize your claim one future day is staggering in many ways, not the least of which are its climate implications. The fact that your household can buy some renewable credits and plug your EV into the wall socket is NOT, NOT, NOT scalable.
The power, the fleet of vehicles, the infrastructure listed above does not currently exist, and to build it in our lifetimes verges on the physically (never mind politically) impossible, not to mention the fact that it would accelerate the climate catastrophe by INCREASING CO2 emissions over what we glibly call BAU (business as usual). I’m happy to re-cite the studies that explain this, but the last time I did you threw up your hands.
“I can’t see a single good thing that comes out of auto-reliance. ”
There are many good things that cars can be used for. I am able to get around faster, carry more things and have more free time for myself. I also have the option of riding a bike or taking transit, so it is not complete auto-reliance. It’s simply much more convenient for my needs.
“Why are automobiles inherently bad? ”
From an engineering standpoint, cars and the roads they require are still highly inefficient given their typical usage, especially as the number of passengers in the vehicle approaches 1. (source: that article from last week’s roundup about the book “happy city.”)
In addition, they are pieces of machinery that, when operated incorrectly, can have highly lethal consequences for both the operator and other passersby. Given their proliferation on our streets and the statistics which show them to be among the leading causes of death, this danger seems (at least to me) highly underrated.
They’re also noisy, ugly, and the likely cause of a peculiar neurosis which manifests itself as “road rage.” These last claims are subjective and unlikely to receive a wider audience of acceptance given our culture’s social norms, but important to consider nonetheless.
Most of those issues go away when vehicles are electrified and automated.
MotRG: “There are many good things that cars can be used for. I am able to get around faster, carry more things and have more free time for myself.”
I am going to infer that Adam’s point was that autos are – collectively – a disaster. I don’t think anyone would disagree with you that as a means of instantiating selfish behavior autos rank very highly. This was Illich’s chief point. They allow you (for a brief time) to get around faster than others, and at tremendous social cost.
9watts,
I’ve provided citations of LCAs that account for manufacture, generation, and energy grid build out many times. These studies suggest that feasibility is not the issue — the issue is political will. Moreover, like you, I believe a shift towards active transportation is inevitable so the cost of electrification is probably exaggerated. Meanwhile, the EROI of renewable energy generation keeps on falling faster than expected (while the EROI for burning decomposed fossils increases):
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032116306906
“Growth is our religion. As long as we refuse to quit that habit we’re going to be disappointed.”
A major contributor to that “cancerous” growth is the fetishization of low-occupancy housing and “historic” buildings in urban areas.
soren,
The question of scalability remains. The calculations are involved buy not impenetrable. To change over our entire energy and transportation infrastructure to run at the pace we have become habituated to something that would yield EVs in every pot takes generations and planets worth of resources which we don’t have and can’t afford. No product level LCA is going to capture that.
You have a bunch of implicit assumptions in there; I’ll challenge one. You assume we’d need to convert all our cars over to EVs, but if automation takes hold, we might get by with just 10% as many vehicles. We might be able to gain efficiencies we can’t imagine today through technological progress.
This has happened before; the impossible becoming commonplace is a recurring theme in human history.
“You assume we’d need to convert all our cars over to EVs, but if automation takes hold, we might get by with just 10% as many vehicles.”
Let me guess – you live in a metropolis?
Sure. there are opportunities for returns to scale, technological shifts, everywhere we care to look. I don’t know the implications of automation so-called in terms of its ecological footprint (server farms, computers are not free) but I also don’t doubt that we’ll be surprised by the salutary effects of some of the changes along the way. As an example of your point, the smart phones are I think rightly credited for part of the decline in driving among millennials and those younger (what do we call them?). But at the same time, our voracious appetite for information has generated entirely new categories of hitherto unimagined environmental burden. I’m not sure if shifting from cars to data is such a simple savings, however measured. It may be fun, and make us feel dematerialized but I don’t think we know the full significance of these shifts to say ‘we’ll get by with just 10%’ as if this in and of itself represents an order of magnitude reduction in CO2 or whatever metric we’re focused on.
I did specify in my response to soren ‘at the level we’ve grown accustomed’ so I don’t think what you’re critiquing was implicit but rather a stated qualification.
I don’t know if I would call Bikes “side-effect free”. I for example am getting more in touch with my community, and more tolerant and progressive by the day. It’s horrible!
and they get stolen more often, too.
and then there are people like me who maintain that adopting a carbon negative lifestyle is a moral imperative* have come to believe that EVs represent a necessary tool in our quest to move away from the current global tragedy of the commons (based on evidence including LCAs that account for manufacturing, use, and grid maintenance) .
*and transportation choices are only one aspect of this. our food choices, housing choices, and consumption choices also matter greatly.
Eating meat is a huge environmental issue.
Don’t have kids.
Another reason that I shy away from consuming animal products.
Electric cars kill people just as easily as gas powered ones.
Robot drivers are much less likely to do so than humans, regardless of vehicle fuel.
middle of the road guy, i made a conscious decision to not have kids decades ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icmRCixQrx8
Kyle B: “What we need is a better way to cover more ground faster, more safely, and more efficiently. If this can be done”
It can’t, unless you define efficiency in a manner that glosses over the dirty underbelly of all that is necessary to make this work. As Ivan Illich pointed out forty years ago this dream, this pursuit is doomed.
http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html
If you disagree I invite you to refute Illich’s argument.
What is true is that bicycles are efficient compared to other modes of single user transport for short distances. I wouldn’t call that research and I would question some of the numbers as they appear to assume a dense urban setting which is hardly the only reality out there.
His statements are not necessarily true for longer distances or shared transport. It does not reflect how humans actually behave, live, or how things are laid out.
If we hold out for a world where everyone rides their bikes short distances because that’s all they need, that will never happen. There is more to life than putzing around at low speed in a tiny area.
“His statements are not necessarily true for longer distances or shared transport. It does not reflect how humans actually behave, live, or how things are laid out. ”
How do you factor power into the equation? And I don’t mean the kind that is measured in Amperes.
I’m not disagreeing with your conclusion that the world has not been laid out according to Ivan Ilich’s priorities, but stating this is not the same thing as concluding that it is the natural order of things, it couldn’t have been otherwise. Examining WHY things came about the way they did seems pretty important here if we’re trying to understand how to dig ourselves out of this hole.
I am buying a black hair dryer today.
Hey, how come the reply/nesting function in the comments has been curtailed? Two levels is all we get?! That isn’t a good move/smart place to save in my view.
I think limited nesting makes sense. Too often we get an endless back and forth argument between two people that would be best taken offline.
Based on my visits to this blog, I think it will only impact a handful of very active commenters who feel compelled to make sometimes dozens of comments on a single thread.
What you are disparaging there is I think called a conversation. Here in the bikeportland comments we used to have a single level/posts-were-numbered system. The present system replaced it, which offers some added utility when one is responding to someone’s post – just like you just did.
And that’s exactly why they should also be collapsible.
The center turn lane restriping is desperately needed along SW Allen in Beaverton. It’s a 4 lane speedway with horrible sidewalks, no center turn lane, and no bike lanes. That it cuts through mostly residential areas and in front of a school makes the design nearly criminal. Very few places for Peds to cross and feels dangerous even driving with no center turn lanes and a curb hugging the right hand lane.
4 lanes & grass strip need to become 2 lanes with center turn lane and grade seperated bike lanes.
“The center turn lane restriping is desperately needed along SW Allen in Beaverton. …It’s a 4 lane speedway with horrible sidewalks, no center turn lane, and no bike lanes. …
…4 lanes & grass strip need to become 2 lanes with center turn lane and grade seperated bike lanes.” bradwagon
…link for the seattle bike blog story: http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2017/02/23/rainier-ave-safety-project-worked-even-better-than-planned-city-will-extend-it-south/
With the addition of a center turn lane and bike lanes, through elimination of two of the four main travel lanes, the road might still be able to carry the traffic it needs to. Traffic on Allen tends to be intense and fast. The length of Allen between traffic light signaled Murray and Hall, is just under two miles. I don’t recall what is the posted speed limit on that street. As presently configured, it’s not a wonderful street for biking, walking…or driving.
In the Ranier Ave S reconfiguration in Seattle, the story graphics show that bike lanes weren’t added, but that addition of a center turn lane, and parking on both sides of the street, were added by re-purposing two of the four main travel lanes. Study, pre and post reconfiguration, found that speeding dropped after (the data supplied in the story doesn’t report by how many mph people were speeding for ‘speeders’ and ‘top end speeders’.) the reconfig. In that story, another link to a graphic on speeding:
http://1p40p3gwj70rhpc423s8rzjaz.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/RainierAveS_BeforeAfter-speeding.jpg
Ranier Ave S had 30 mph posted, which was dropped to 25 mph.
My guess is that the County waits until somebody is run over, blames the victim for not using the crosswalk 1/4 of a mile away, and then leaves the road unchanged.
A few multi-language signs should fix that street right up!
Re: road congestion. I may be insane, but if we keep doing the same thing over and over again, eventually we’ll get a different result.
A time-honored strategy.
🙂 Made me smile, Matthew in Portsmouth
Sounds like an argument for not building more alternative mode infrastructure.
You need to explain that.
I’m not sure to whom you are responding to, but your comment doesn’t appear to follow anything said above yours. But if you are trying to set up an equivalency between autos-first and everyone-else infrastructure you’re going to have to try a little harder. With auto dominance, defensive expenditures for infrastructure *that is designed to protect those outside of cars from those within* is hardly equivalent, is not subject to the same returns to scale, etc.
Hello, Kitty: no one is going to rip up highways….
Hm.
Harbor Drive?
the Head of the Iowa Dept of Transportation a few years ago (Monday Roundup) disagreed with you; he said we’d one day soon run out funds to pay to maintain the highway grid we already have, never mind the expansion on the books.
I was thinking of who would pay for removing a lane on I-5 between Portland and Seattle if demand fell enough to permit it. Removing highways in cities is a totally different question.
(Maybe a lane would be not maintained, but that is a far cry from putting the land underneath into any form of productive, alternate use, or solving issues like runoff which I agree are totally legit.)
Hello, Kitty: “Muscle power just doesn’t work for a large segment of society. It works for you and for me, and that’s great, but it simply doesn’t for too many.”
It is easy to dispense platitudes like this from our office chairs in 2017, but perhaps you’d agree that for 99% of human history muscle power in fact did work for everyone. We didn’t have the expectations a century of fossil fuels have habituated us to, but this is circular – physical resources, infrastructure, political priorities, not to mention global inequality are required to translate our sense of entitlement vis-a-vis transportation into cheap gas and ubiquitous automobility. The whole edifice is massively fragile, and once it goes, our sense of entitlement—our attitude that muscle power simply won’t cut it—will blow away as quickly as cheap gas on ever corner.
Yes, it did. And I, like almost anyone who really thinks about it, are glad that we’ve been able to move away from physical drudgery.
How do you feed the world’s population without mechanization?
“How do you feed the world’s population without mechanization?”
You don’t.
But you don’t with mechanization either; we are just kicking the can down the road, exacerbating the eventual and inevitable Malthusian reckoning. Exponential growth in the human population (demand for food) will inevitably crash due to the impossibility of a comparable exponential supply on a finite planet. The only way we’ve gotten to this point w/r/t food production is by mining ancient sunlight and turning it into present day calories. But in so doing we’ve destroyed a substantial amount of the topsoil, not to mention fresh water supplies, and the knowledge of how to grow food without oil.
Hunger and famine are real, pressing issues right here in 2017, and not just in Sudan.
That is a can I want to kick as far as possible. We clearly need to limit population growth (and all signs are that we are being successful in this regard), but we really do need to feed everyone.
There is a reason why humans invented machines.
I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means –
kick the can down the road
phrase of kick
1.
US informal
put off confronting a difficult issue or making an important decision, typically on a continuing basis.
That’s exactly what I meant. If a Malthusian die-off is coming, I want to delay it as long as possible.
But that is (collectively) absurd. How do you think we got here in the first place? By doing exactly as you are proposing.
Why steer for an 8 billion back to half a billion humans crash, when a change in course today could soften the blow, e.g., 7 billion back to 3 billion humans, over a couple of generations, or, had we taken a more enlightened approach than what you are proposing a generation a go: 3.5 billion human plateau.
How do we drop from 7 billion to 3 billion over a couple of generations? China had a pretty strict one-child policy, and while they completely changed their population trajectory, they didn’t see anything like the results you are suggesting.
So sure, I would prefer your way.
No matter what we do, the sun’s rate of fusion will increase to the point that our oceans will boil in about 3.5 billion years. Eventually, it will become a Red Giant that will engulf the planet and incinerate anything left. In about 5 billion years, it will burn out.
Having said all that, I suspect the human race won’t last that long. Bottom line is there’s not much point in coming up with a plan that lasts forever…
that is the best you can offer?
Humor doesn’t seem to translate very well here — probably because people here are often serious for what would pass for off the rails anywhere else.
Imagining an ideal world is easy. Figuring out how to get there from where we are is another matter. For example, if we wanted freight trains to have more capacity, all we need to do is widen the rails. So all we have to do to put this idea into effect is tear up and replace all the existing infrastructure — and replace all the trains themselves. Might want to redo things like shipping containers and related processes while we’re at it.
A game plan based on a completely different infrastructure and world than we have now as well as a different societal conscience? Yeah, that seems totally realistic…
“Yeah, that seems totally realistic…”
What your disdain only imperfectly masks is the notion that the path we’re on currently is realistic. I submit that the path we’re on is the unrealistic trajectory, against which most any other path would compare favorably. The only thing our current trajectory has going for it is that it FEELS familiar. But it is not long for this world.
“Humor doesn’t seem to translate very well ”
I had no trouble recognizing it as an attempt at humor (I’ve heard this exact quip about eventual heat death of the universe dozens of times when the subject of whether to bother trying to do anything about human survival comes up). I do take that subject seriously, and feel your attempt at humor is a familiar, transparent, and defeatist attempt to make light of our ability to affect the outcome. It does work. It is a political strategy to discourage serious engagement with these tough questions.
And before you dismiss me as humorless or unable to appreciate humor, let me tell you that Hello, Kitty’s humor is so dry I need a tall glass of water every time.
I never suggested for a second that our current trajectory is sustainable.
But people won’t change until they feel they have to — and even then they won’t. It’s like losing your brakes on a descent. Even if the smart thing is obviously to lay the bike down, very few people have the discipline to do that. Rather, they hang on as long as they can clinging to the desperate hope they can avoid the inevitable until everything fails catastrophically.
With regards to the oil economy, the problem is ultimately self correcting. The stuff will get harder and more expensive to extract, and people will have no choice but to change their behavior when everything becomes so expensive they literally can’t continue carrying on as before.
And yes, that’s not good for climate change or a bunch of other things, but humans really haven’t been around that long and they definitely won’t last much longer at the rate things are going. But maybe they will start doing the right thing when they really have to.
Our best hope in the short term is for the price mechanism to push things in the right direction. I guarantee you that 12 bucks a gallon gas would make people think differently about cars.
Our trajectory may not be sustainable, but it is realistic. It’s so realistic we’re actually doing it.
I guess we have different interpretations of what realistic means in a temporal sense. We are endowed with brains, are able to understand the consequences of our actions now and into the future. Just because we happen to live in a myopic system that does not reward prudence doesn’t mean it is not a valuable attitude or strategy.
realistic:
“having or showing a sensible and practical idea of what can be achieved or expected.”
Some of those bus improvements were done in Portland decades ago.
http://humantransit.org/2012/08/portland-the-grid-is-30-thank-a-planner.html
An end to pronatalism would be a start.
The obvious answer to your question would be to have no kids at all. That sounds harsh, absurd, ahistorical, and just about everything else, but a Malthusian dieoff would by most all accounts be far worse.
The math is not hard; what is hard is coming to terms with the possibility that it all could go very badly.
Plenty of smart people understand this, but our system rewards those who take your advise and—take your pick—kick the can down the road, play ostrich, put their hands over their eyes and shout you can’t see me!, or smear honey in our ears.
How do you convince the world’s population to forgo children? How do you sustain economies when there are more old people than young people?
To your first question, we certainly haven’t tried.
To your second, most of Europe has long since arrived at that point, and while the predictable folks engage in hand-wringing, their aging societies haven’t imploded.
As with may of our arguments here, the issue in my view isn’t that what I’m proposing is easy or going to come to pass without a fight in our current society, but that the alternative (continuing to muddle through, kick the can down the road, pretend climate change doesn’t concern us, etc.) is easily shown to be worse.
My main criticism of your positions has been and remains that you are depending on a widespread consensus on radical social change that we can’t even agree with on this forum, and your proposals are therefore unrealistic and idealistic.
Maybe everyone will agree to stop having children… but they probably won’t.
Thank you for putting the fine point on it, as it were.
“you are depending on a widespread consensus on radical social change”
Here’s my response: my proposals in no way depend on or presume radical change. I’m mostly talking about the framing of the issue. All I’m advocating is straight talk: if we don’t do A, we’ll be steering straight for B. I hear you instead pre-judging what our imagined audiences will stand for, abridging the conversation, narrowing the full spectrum of options—however theoretical or unlikely they may strike you—out of your sense that politics don’t allow us to even contemplate the options, engage in the conversation I’m suggesting we can’t avoid.
Not having children is a radical departure from all of human history. Birth rates are falling, but going from 5 to 2 children is much different than 2 to 0, or even 1.
It will be a challenge to find a widely accepted frame that makes this seem a non-radical proposal.
I don’t disagree, though never having actually opened up this conversation on a large scale we don’t really know, do we?
All I’m saying is we should be (and are emphatically not) having this conversation. Without it, the prospect seems much dimmer. Given the caveats we (I think) both agree on, do you agree that opening up the conversation, putting it all on the table, speaking more frankly than we are used to could be salutary?
And like everything else important, this is a dynamic problem. If w succeeded in broadening the conversation and found widespread resistance to 0 kids, who is to say that we might not as a result end up with a lower-than-we-now-find average fecundity rate? A voluntary 1.0 per couple would be a huge step in the right direction.
The correction is going to come either way. The question is whether we collectively have it in us to choose that option, the timing, or would rather bluff, take our chances.
Who could open such a conversation? It would need to be international in scope, and speak to people from a huge number of cultural traditions.
Yes, I agree a reduction in population would be helpful. I think the way that might come about will be to further current trends of urbanization and education, which tends to shrink family sizes. That runs directly counter to your “less mechanization” agenda (because there will be more urban mouths to feed with lower rural populations).
“It would need to be international in scope, and speak to people from a huge number of cultural traditions.”
Let’s walk before we run. sweep our own door step, try it out right here at home (bikeportland comments section)?
Yes, I agree a reduction in population would be helpful. I think the way that might come about will be to further current trends of urbanization and education, which tends to shrink family sizes.”
AKA the Benign Demographic Transition. Which, as I’ve understood it, is premised on our (White, Northern European) disproportionate and early access to the highest quality fossil fuels across the globe. The question this raises is whether other countries, whose access to fossil fuels came much later and was always in our shadow (we had already gobbled up the high EROI stuff)*, could hope to pass through the Benign Demographic Transition without cheap fossil fuels. I don’t know the answer.
* how did our oil get under their sand?!
“How do you sustain economies when there are more old people than young people?”
That’s what the robots are for. Once we’re all plugged into the matrix and skynet takes over, who cares?
Unfortunately my trike’s engine is not entirely emissions free – just ask my girl friend 🙂
On the hairdryer trick —
1) Downtown Macy’s is closing. I was there a week ago, mannequins were in the $75 range. Buy one, move it around your neighborhood every few days with a different hairdryer.
2) Or, make a “scarecrow” with a hair dryer. Out of plywood, wire and straw, whatever works.
I’d like to see a crowd of scarecrows and hair dryers on our streets…
Ted Buehler
🙂 Ted. Eek! 🙂
Option B)Narrow roads with paint. 9 foot max.
Hi Jonathan,
Slight correction about the last item on your list. You said bus ridership improved in cities with “significant investments in bus service.”
Seattle may have made such an investment, I know they have passed (the city and Sound Transit) a few ballot measures to raise the sales tax (city-wide and in the Sound Transit jurisdiction) to fund transit service expansion. The bus service increase that the article is talking about is the City of Seattle buying extra service from Metro.
As for New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee, I’m not sure about their investments.
Houston, however, did not make any investment. All they did was restructure their network to the form of a grid to make it easier to make crosstown trips (something that the Trimet bus system already does). They also focused more on high ridership routes versus coverage routes.
Jarrett Walker worked on the Houston network redesign, and he states that it was done without increasing operating cost. You can read about it here:
http://humantransit.org/2014/05/houston-a-transit-network-reimagined.html
Just wanted to say that the “significant investments” bit is misleading. Also, according to Trimet, service is at least at pre-recession levels:
http://news.trimet.org/2015/06/trimet-restores-max-frequent-service-on-weekends-beginning-sunday-june-7/
I’m a regular reader of your blog and enjoy your coverage of local transportation issues. Cheers! And happy Monday.
The numbers are metro area not individual cities, but bus ridership in NYC has been flat or declining for fifteen years.
I had to laugh at the apparent surprise that Gov. Jerry Brown is a motorhead. During his first two terms, long ago, one of his claims to fame was his dedication to the Dodge car that he had taken out of the state motor pool. More recently, he vetoed a three-foot passing law for motorists overtaking cyclists, twice, before finally signing a very watered-down version.
Jerry just hates bikes. I don’t know why and it is contrary to other values he appears to hold, but it’s there. Perhaps growing up in SoCal back during the car boom of the ’50’s had an impact on him.
If what you are saying is correct—and I have no information to suggest you aren’t—Jerry’s long time friend Ivan Illich would turn over in his grave.
Worst part is he’s still pushing high-speed rail, which is putting a nail in the coffin on Caltrain electrification. With this fed gov he won’t get anywhere with HSR, so why push rope?
“New energy source, same old shit: Why don’t we get excited about electric cars? Because for all their environmental benefits, they do nothing to improve road safety. …” bikeportland
I think most people that buy an electric car, or a hybrid, which is semi-electric, are driving them moderately, because they’re looking to extend the car’s range and mileage. High speed performance of electric cars, is I think, mostly a marketing gimmick. The marketing claims of power that electric cars can have to a limited extent, might have a buyer feel less bad about having a car some people might regard as wimpy, but I think they may be driving those cars, worst case…no faster than any gas powered cars they buy.
Still have to generate the energy to power electric cars, somewhere, but it’s kind of nice having that happen miles away, instead of right out of a tail pipe in traffic where I’m trying to breathe while using the road.
I see where you’re coming from, but it’s not my (anecdotal) experience. Here in Cali you can get a HOV sticker with electric cars and hybrids, which is a HUGE selling point given our traffic. Prius drivers here are some of the most aggressive I’ve shared the road with (it’s a generalization, sorry), but probably because there are so many – lowest cost of entry to get that coveted HOV commute, and there were plenty of rebates and incentives until gas got cheap. I often remark how people over-drive them because the gas engine is designed for efficiency and not power (it’s called an Atkinson Cycle engine), yet people still stomp on the gas and expect it to lurch like a Porsche. Around here, anyway.
For pure electric, not sure about others, but have you ever driven a Tesla Model S? The acceleration is a pure rush! I have a twin-turbo V6 that’s seen track time that I used to think was quick. I do get why Tesla has a cult-like following; I turned down a job with them last year and my friends virtually lynched me. NIO is another e-supercar people drool over, and while I do get the obsession, I don’t subscribe – but then again most of BP would lynch me for the carbon uber-bikes that I drool over instead… ; )
You’re dead on, though: I’d rather suck a Tesla tailpipe than any diesel, or vintage clunker muscle car exempt from CA’s rules that people gladly tool around in on spare-the-air days here. Yeah, dude, yer ’68 convertible SS is (cough cough) wicked cool.
You’re in an elite category where driving high performance cars is concerned, compared to my own experience. Highest performance car I’ve ever driven was a stock 260 Z, and not to test it to its limits. No racers in my family. One owns a couple of Porsche, but they don’t hotrod. I’ve got an interest in high performance cars, even though I don’t own or drive them. Lots of very cool 60’s pony cars out there…and high performance cars from later decades…and earlier ones also…are very exciting to anyone with an interest in hotroddin’.
My thoughts about prius is largely based on my brother’s recounting of his experience driving his on a daily commute…maybe 50 miles round trip. Bought it used. Family man, doesn’t have huge income, always trying to save pennies. So I’m saying, he babies it to get absolutely top mpg possible. Not hotroddin’.
Interesting thing he told me, is the impression he perceives from other people on the road, responding to the presence of the prius: he seems to think the macho drivers consider his hybrid to be some kind of nerdmobile…so they tailgate, or cut him off, and other weird road behavior…only when he drives the prius. Has a older, small nissan suv too. And an old saturn. Ignored when he drives those vehicles. He likes the tesla…and the all electric concept..it’s just out of his budget. If you’ve seen the chev spark…that might do it…has a lot of range. Boring looking looking little car though.
It’s all relative; where I bike in places like Woodside, Saratoga, Los Altos Hills, Palo Alto, one is prone to see rare and expensive cars, and like your brother has observed, people generally identify with cars as an extension of personalities (and perceived success, etc). The Tesla I drove is owned by a Beaverton friend, ironically. A neighbor here in Santa Clara just bought a Spark and loves it, but to your point I’m sure it doesn’t pin you to the seat on takeoff.
Funny enough, my neighbor once said to me, “I can’t believe you don’t drive an electric car, since you’re so green” (like my Acura wagon is such a dirty gas guzzler). While I may be a bit of a ‘sensible conservationist’ I certainly don’t consider myself ‘green’, but I suppose a transplanted Oregonian who works in renewable energy and rides a bike around town is a total tree-hugger by silly valley standards.
More passengers per square meter of roadway.
Only if the bus is full.
*has more than 2 passengers.
FTFY.
The bus doesn’t even have to be close to full to beat single-occupant personal automobiles. Assuming a typical 40 foot bus and a typical 15 foot sedan (or compact SUV), you can fit roughly two cars into the space of a single bus, provided you accept only half a car-length between the two cars. Thus, a bus only needs two passengers (or one passenger and driver if it hasn’t been automated) to meet the road capacity of single-occupancy vehicles. So is it reasonable to assume both cars are at single-occupancy. Well maybe not. According to Bureau of Transportation summary data, about 38 percent of daily travel is comprised of single-occupant vehicles (https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/highlights_of_the_2001_national_household_travel_survey/html/section_02.html). Let be generous and assume that one vehicle contains only one occupant and the other is has four occupants. Even with that conservative assumption, the bus only needs five people to match the occupancy of the two cars that would otherwise be running its roadway foot print.
In other words, nearly the exact opposite of your statement is true. A bus can be nearly empty and still put more people into the same roadway footprint as the automobile.
I don’t ride buses very often (more of a train guy), but the ones I’ve been on in the past year or so have been packed during the commute times I selected. I’d say buses are winning the passenger density wars on standard (non-rail) roadways.
Stph
Taxis will likely be on different routes (to where passengers actually want to go), so will be more spread out instead of concentrated on a few central routes, and will be more evenly distributed over time. They may well be smaller, and operate more close to one another (I could easily see two driving side-by-side in a single lane).
So your calculations of “space efficiency” are based on a bunch of assumptions that may well not be true, and, in any event, aren’t the limiting factor in network operations.
http://www.kgw.com/news/local/experimental-stop-sign-in-pearl-district-frustrates-drivers/416338889
http://i.imgur.com/t8RwtQO.jpg
KGW doesn’t like the new stop sign, and completely ignores the SUV with a tinted plate cover blocking the bike lane during the whole segment.
That was painful to watch.
If there was still a COTW this would have my vote. Talk about ‘colorblind’!