buses

[meganursula]

My cold has been giving me breathing issues, so i took the bus yesterday and today.

Yesterday was annoying because i'm not on a schedule for taking the 'nice' bus, and the stupid bus, is, well, stupid. If i get up in time to take the commuter line it comes on time, and gets to work quickly. If i leave late enough to take the same i also get predictable schedules and a short ride. But, yesterday i left a couple of minutes late and couldn't stay late enough at work, so i had to take the dumb bus, which gives me a 45 minute or more commute, vs. the 20 on my bike. Today i left work early enough and am staying late enough that the time is less onerous. I even finished reading a paper while i was on the bus!

Also, i seem to have lost my id card, with my bus pass stuck to it, so i had to pay with money. That sucked. I'll need to replace the card, i guess - i can't even remember when i last used it, except that is was probably to get into work right before my thesis was due.

At any rate, thank heavens the cold is abating, and by Thursday (the next day i come to the office) i should back on my bike!


I wanted to mention, though, that capitalism is working on our oil issues. This summer gas prices finally got high enough that people started responding. Bike stores are sold out of bikes (used bikes are particularly hard to come by), and the buses are packed. People are really starting to figure out alternatives to driving their single occupancy cars. The most wondrous thing is that economics are also working on the supply, and oil prices have started to drop.

I've been saying for a while that what we need is to increase gas prices, not decrease them. People need to start thinking about alternatives, and clearly they need the financial incentive to do that. I'm rather thrilled with these developments.

(And, yes, i know, its a regressive demand issue. There are people out there who really are being hurt by the higher oil prices, and who don't have the option to modify their cars or commuting options. People are being hit by higher costs for food and other consumables related to gas prices, and some of those people can ill afford those increases. I get that. Still, i'd rather see those people be helped out by a capitalist driven decrease in oil prices, or other means entirely, than an artificial influx or more oil.)

Especially given all of that, I am vehemently against increasing our oil supply by opening up new oil reserves. I think that would be a temporary solution to a huge problem. I think it would harm our environment directly, while only delaying the need for different solutions to our energy issues. I think forcing people to become creative to find those solutions by allowing the oil prices to stay high has very little downside (exception noted in parenthesis above). The higher gas prices mean that people are walking or biking, which is a healthy habit for most people to adopt. It means they are using transportation options that are less harmful to the environment, and that they are more likely to support or adopt newly developed technologies. This is all good.

Honestly, even if oil prices come down, i'd like to see auto-fuel prices remain elevated. Although i know that is a pipe dream only likely to be supported by a city-dwelling bike enthusiast like myself!

In short, though, this issue of oil is important to me. It is a big reason that i favor Obama over McCain.

Comments

[mh75.livejournal.com]

I think there are a lot of complicated issues surround fuel costs for automobiles. Clearly much of the cost increase is due to oil cost increases (although tracing that back to honest supply and demand is also not straight forward), but it is obvious that there are other things going on. Biodiesel, for example, has also skyrocketed. I suspect some of that is honestly due to increased demand for grain. Some of it, though, i think is probably capitalization on the expectation that fuel costs have gone up (eg., profiteering). I honestly don't know about how diesel may track gasoline.

In the end, it doesn't matter too much for me. I'd like to see end user gasoline prices stay high. I'd like to see us attack the oil issue with an approach that is not opening up new reserves. I think that some of the difficulties with high gas prices (eg, my point about the regressive costs) can be approached by considering ideas that do not involve boosting the current rate of oil production.

As much as i hate to pay for parking, for example, making parking expensive and/or rare is one way to get people to take the bus to work instead of driving. It also places the onus for change on a population that is more likely to have an easy alternative. Giving shipping companies tax breaks would help address the high cost of transport while still allowing for capitalist forces to work for individuals who can modify their commuting options. Popular ideas? I doubt it, but i think they would be better for us in the long run.

MS is probably doing better with their public transport than the City of Seattle right now - the capacity of the bus system here is not increasing as fast as the demand, and the reluctance to get other solutions implemented still appalls me.

...
I wonder if i'll garner a dissenting opinion in my lj?

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

I'll dissent on the giving tax breaks to shipping companies bit: the same forces reducing car usage will reduce truck usage (in favour of either shipping more efficiently, or not shipping at all), and that would be a good thing.

There is a problem of long lead times to change how things are done, and the government might be justified in intervening to help the transition, with subsidies on both sides, reduced over time. Unfortunately, governments are good at sending out incentives, but not so great at scaling them back.

[mh75.livejournal.com]

yeah, it is tricky. I'd sort of rather have the free market figure out the shipping costs, too. However, it seems like a reasonable way to ease some of the more harmful side-effects of having high fuel costs, while still encouraging the general public to challenge themselves to conserve.
Ideally the trucking industry would be helped in the short term, while better infrastructure was developed in the long term. Governmental subsidization of both trucking and, say, rail seems fair to me.
Points noted about the difficulty the government has in reducing its subsidization over time, though.

[via-lens.livejournal.com]

Alternative solutions have to be front-loaded. It is clear that private enterprise is souring on the idea of spending billions on research and development for alternatives that truly reduce the need for oil: most of the new hybrids coming out are actually less fuel-efficient than the earlier ones, are based on old technology, and are vehicles that are not efficient in the first place, meaning they're meant to appeal to people who want to feel like they're doing something good without actually doing it.

Similarly in transportation, it takes years to implement large-scale transportation improvements. Microsoft can do it because they have a single location to which their employees travel (or else they build additional locations closer to where their employees live) and they can control all of the factors at once. Building more office capacity while building proportionally less new parking space means people will be more inclined to use the alternative methods of transporation or telecommute. But in a city like Seattle where parking is one of the most lucrative businesses you can be in when you own land, it's hard to squeeze off that pipeline. Sure, it costs more, but most people just accept it and pay the difference. (As you know, I stopped doing that years ago.)

To really make something like light-rail work, you have to front-load the whole project and build enough lines that they provide real services to a large number of commuters. You have to expect that it might take 10 years of operating at full capacity before the system operates within its budget. This is more than most individual voters are willing to accept because they'd rather pay the cost piecemeal by putting the gasoline in their own tanks or paying for their own little parking space over those ten years. Getting a critical mass of people to see the big picture is hard -- I worked on the light-rail proposal in 1992 here in Seattle and we're no closer to getting people to understand it. Amazing to think that if we'd succeeded then, in 1992 dollars, we would be operating at a profit and spending less on highway infrastructure now. :p

I think the only break that shipping companies need is a return to proportional profits on diesel fuel. If oil companies were making the same percentage of profit on diesel that they're making on gasoline, diesel consumer prices would come down by about 30%. Where the federal subsidies belong, in my opinion, is in improving the infrastructure to use means other than trucking for long distance transport -- which means rail and sea primarily.