Here and There

This poll applies to drivers and cyclists in San Francisco only, please.

Vote away:

Politics blogger Marc Ambinder breaks it down for us: $8.4 billion for pubtran and $9.3 for rail. Nice work, senators and representatives.

And low-speed, even. Just rails.

Air travel took off because of its novelty and efficiency, moving large numbers of passengers over vast distances in a somewhat timely manner. Certainly faster than anything that came before.

To get rail back in vogue, this blogger thinks the immediate benefits will have to become obvious, if we’re to create and sustain a demand that justifies a supply. So, how to achieve that demand? How to make rail cool?

We could start by connecting regional hubs served mostly by short-stint flights now, eliminating the hassle of air travel, parking, commuting to airports, checking luggage, and the like. High-speed rail can get a person from (sorry to trot out this tired example) San Francisco to Los Angeles in around three hours at about half the cost of air travel. When you factor in the time it takes to get to and from the airports, the duration of travel really isn’t that different. An hour or an hour and a half, tops.

Making that same trip, say, a quarter of the cost (and the savings would ostensibly be funded by some sort of federal subsidy) would be key. But you’ve got to make that initial investment.

When demand rises, perhaps a nice, healthy, free-market industry will rise up to offer competition. That would require some expansion of the real estate tracks live on, but ultimately, train tracks take up a lot less space than freeways.

In sum, invest in building the infrastructure and subsidizing (thereby sustaining) demand, and you might just give birth to a new era of travel. One that’s kinder to the environment and land, and that would clear the skies for longer-haul air travel.

Yeah?

Okay, the swearing in has happened, the balls are commenced. Now comes the sobering moment — there’s work to do, folks.

You see, many of us lost our jobs. I was fortunate to find work quickly. But others are still hurting. We’ve got to get work for them, and we’ve got to buttress our unemployment insurance programs for those who aren’t able to find work in the meantime.

We’ve got wars to end, troops to bring home, foreign alliances to rebuild. There’s an active Middle East conflict in progress, and godammit, we better really try to help bring about a peace this time.

Also, at home, there’s an urgent need to start real programs to try to stop global warming. We’ve got to kick into gear cleaner ways of generating energy, whether by tidal power, solar, wind, geo-thermal, whatever. There’s smarter, more efficient ways of going about our daily lives, like high-speed rail, hybrid vehicles, reusable bags at the grocery and drug stores. The list goes on.

The point I’m trying to make is, let’s recover from our inaugural hangovers and get to work. Lord knows there’s no shortage of work to be done.

It set out from Philadelphia today, picking up the Bidens in Delaware, and making various stops for speeches along the way.

America, fuck yeah!

*Chills*

The Train in Spain Replaces the Plane, about high-speed rail on the Iberian Peninsula.

Can I go back and ride the rails, now, please? Love España.

In this post on his blog at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum discusses his problem with full-on advocacy of high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles. There’s no key quote or anything. He’s basically saying, rightly, that the routes being considered for the West are a whole different story than what they’ve got out East, mostly due to a difference of population density. On this point, Drum is absolutely correct.

But where he’s somewhat dismissive of Central Valley cities along the proposed route in California, a rail line would ostensibly connect those towns (Bakersfield, Fresno) to the more plentiful opportunities that exist in bigger cities like San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Build it, and they will come, sort of.

I think it’s kinda cool. Though it’s got nothing on the Batmobile.

I realize it takes like 17 years to turn the Titanic 45 degrees, but a stipulation on that $15 billion “bridge loan” Congress gave to Chrysler and GM last month should have been a mandate not to manufacture one more gas-guzzling car. Nothing below 25 or 30 mpg leaves the floor. Hell, the technology is there, why not insist that every car built from this point forward by those two companies be a hybrid?

Some days, I really don’t know what U.S. industry to hate most. As far as we’ve come, the priorities of individuals and businesses in this country are beyond whacked-out.

A couple of related posts on Andrew Sullivan’s blog today got me thinking about cars and raising the gas tax.

(Cross-posted at Muni Diaries)

Matt Yglesias, prominent blogger of politics and public transportation, takes on what it means to be poor and the question of car ownership in our nation’s capital.

It’s a good, quick read. Many of the arguments Yglesias makes apply to our situation in San Francisco. I especially liked this bit:

The progressive move isn’t to keep subsidizing cars, but the reverse — to use congestion charges and performance parking fees to raise funds that improve the quality of service on the bus lines that poor people rely on.

I am starting to come around on tax incentives for folks to buy hybrids and other ultra-fuel-efficient cars. But even with such lures, the poor will be left out. Similarly, I’ve been a fan of congestion pricing for dense, urban areas, but not without adequate public transit already in place. That caveat prevents such a system from being just here in San Francisco under present circumstances, as Muni/BART are ill-equipped to deal with so many people choosing not to drive.

As I’ve said before, I’m hoping governments (especially federal) will reprioritize public transit and give it the funding it demands. True, more money alone won’t solve Muni’s problems. But shoring up the agency’s deficit can prevent fee hikes, a terrible idea in our current economic state. I’m excited that the incoming Obama administration is talking of exactly this kind of infrastructure funding. Now our new local government needs to get serious about overseeing big changes at SFMTA, and to help fund those changes.

what percentage of traffic is caused by people not letting other cars into their lane? how about cars who cross the intersection before it’s clear, and end up sticking out?

UPDATE: No sooner do I post this than I discover my former place of employment has advocated for the same. And in a much more insightful manner, to boot. Wired.com’s Dave Demerjian has more.

ORIGINAL POST: Now that the average price of a gallon of gasoline has fallen by well more than 50 percent since summer, state governments and Washington should both look into raising their tax rates on the fuel.

Record-high prices of gasoline exacerbated a drop in consumption this year, something I think we can all agree is a good thing.

States are in trouble financially. California’s legislature is still battling it out with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to close a $40 billion budget deficit. I realize that increased gas-tax revenue alone won’t close that gap, but it will help, while also reducing consumption.

And the federal government can use that increase to help close its deficit (though I’m not of the opinion that reducing the national deficit is key at this time) and possibly also use it to invest in green-energy technology.

I usually try to see both sides of issues. And I understand that not everyone has the luxury, if it can be called that, to stop driving, or stop driving as much. But in tough times, we all need to adjust and make sacrifices. That’s something horribly absent from the so-called leadership of the past eight years — calls for sacrifice.

There’s also the fact that for those who absolutely do not have the choice not to drive, they’d be paying more to play. My answer to that is almost identical — an investment now in less-harmful means of generating energy will pay huge dividends down the road. That, and I don’t expect a bump in gas prices, nowhere near what we saw last summer, to bankrupt anyone. If that were the case, I would hold that all options were not exhausted.

I read something the other day, a story about a young person who was really excited that gas prices had fallen from summertime highs. “I’m gonna drive everywhere now,” the person said, in essence. That’s exactly the kind of recklessness low gas prices leads to. In order to curb consumption and help speed the development of healthier alternatives, we need a higher gas tax. Now.

Do I need to say how great this is?

If this report from inside the Capitol is accurate, and Democrats caved on efficiency and emissions standards as a prerequisite for any government loan, then perhaps it’s better that this bill failed. The next Congress is sworn in three weeks, and can draft a new bill with its near-fillibuster-proof levels (some combination of Snowe, Collins, McCain, Lugar, and Specter is all we need, right?). It can send that bill to a surprisingly supportive, still-president, President George W. Bush.

Perhaps by then it will be too late for thousands or millions of workers, but maybe not. It’s a thought.

I don’t own a car. The last two cars I owned, back in the late ’90s, were both Hondas. After growing up driving mostly Fords, the Civics I owned were such a relief. They just … worked. And they got kick-ass mileage, even back in the pre-Inconvenient Truth days.

I pretty much wrote off American cars a few months into my first Honda, before I wrote off owning any car for at least a while.

In the meantime, SUVs and Hummers happened, and I didn’t think I could be any more grossed out than I already was. The companies that made them (and to be fair, foreign car companies eventually got in on the guzzler action) seemed to be creating a demand, rather than fulfilling one, instead of doing the responsible thing and starting early to recognize that driving cars that literally burned through ridiculous amounts of gasoline wasn’t sustainable. They could’ve retooled production and saved all that money lobbying against increased fuel-efficiency standards, and instead made cars that were (you guessed it) more fuel-efficient.

I sound like someone who might applaud the likely death of at least two of the three big U.S. auto companies (General Motors and Chrysler), but I’m not. Not at all.

The fact that Congress’s bailout died tonight in the Senate, no matter how flawed, really does strike me as the equivalent of dropping a match into a house filled with flammable gases. We were starting to choke on the gases, but now we’re bound to be burned alive, I fear. And all for what?

I have no choice but to see the largely GOP move to stop this bill in its latest form as the ultimate in cynicism. As John Judis points out at TNR.com, the senators who threatened filibuster, rather than allow the bill to go before the Senate on an up-or-down vote, are letting Japanese auto manufacturers dictate the terms of American jobs in the their states, all because those senators (and also most capitalists in the world today) don’t believe in unions. The unions in Michigan get the workers there better wages and benefits. But instead of maybe, oh, you know, while we’re being socialists about it, allow Tennessee, South Carolina, and Alabama autoworkers to unionize, those outstanding Americans chose to act in a reactionary way that could leave as many as one million people with no work.

I’m in utter disbelief.