Narrows up for Transportation Award

I saw on Mark Briggs' blog that the Narrows is up for the American Transportation Award and that people can vote for it. This is the description on the site:

Washington DOT combined local talent with specialists from around the world for the construction of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The project cost $724 million and required more than 3 million hours of labor to build with only three time loss injuries, a tribute to the project team and management staff. The overall project was delivered under budget and four weeks ahead of schedule, five years after breaking ground. Before the new bridge was built, eastbound drivers would experience "stop and go" conditions weekdays between 6 and 9 a.m. Today, average speeds are 40 mph during morning peak hours and drivers are typically traveling at freeways speeds all day.

I think that's a good description although I'm not sure that the "four weeks ahead of schedule" part is true.

That said, for as much as I like the new bridge, I'm tempted to vote for the "MacArthur Maze Project," for the work done after the tanker fire and freeway collapse in the Bay Area.

Streetcars in Tacoma

There's an article in the New York Times about streetcars and what they can do for urban neighborhoods.

One of the nice things about rail investment is that they can actually help spur development, where bus routes cannot. The reason for that are many, but one of them is that the rail connection to a commercial hub or job center is permanent and (when done correctly) can beat traffic, where bus routes are frequently not permanent and get stuck in traffic just as easily as the anything else.

That said there was an interesting note in the article:

After looking into streetcar systems in Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., and Charlotte, Mr. Dohoney [Cincinnati's City Manager] became convinced that they spur growth. “Cincinnati has to compete with other cities for investment,” he said. “We have to compete for talent and for place of national prominence.”

Tacoma helped inspire Cincinnati? We were a model for another city?

Sweet.

It's that time again

I seem to do this every year in August, but with the Olympics going on this year I just couldn't help myself.

Four years ago I went down to Puyallup and bought my first new car, a 2004 Hyundai Elantra. I remember that while the salesman was talking to his manager in the back about whatever deal I was asking for, my dad and I watched Michael Phelps swim in the Athens Olympics.

The car had 8 miles on it. This month I just passed 26,000. It's something like 6,500 miles a year, mostly from trips around town, with the random trips to Seattle, Portland, and the Lake. I think the farthest it's been from home was a trip to Bend in 2005.

One more year and it's paid off! Whoo hoo!

Sunday Improv Blogging

If you remember the "everyone freeze in Grand Central Station video," here's another fun bit of theatrical improv, this time on the subway. Enjoy

Jonathan Rauch covers the Chevy Volt

Rauch, who wrote one of my favorite political nerdy books "Kindy Inquisitors," has a story in the most recent Atlantic about the Volt, and its production, and how dang hard GM is going to have to try to get it going by 2010.

Worth a read if you're still interested in the subject.

Who's marketing the electric car?

When I got an e-mail out of the blue inviting me to a “Blogger’s Roundtable” with a Vice President at General Motors because he was “very interested in hearing my thoughts and questions,” I thought it was a joke. A joke, or perhaps some new version of the Nigerian e-mail scam asking for my help getting oil fortunes into the US.

But it was actually legit. Robert Lutz, the Vice Chairman of Product Development for GM, was in Seattle and he wanted to have an on-the-record conversation with some local bloggers. I was there because a public relations firm had found my blog after the Seattle Film Festival when I rode to the premiere in a new hybrid Yukon.

I didn’t know what exactly to expect when I arrived at Seattle's Edgewater Hotel for dinner. Half the attendees were car bloggers. They had sales figures for the 1969 Camaro, they knew production numbers, they cracked jokes I didn’t understand about the quality of British cars. They were gear heads. The other four bloggers were: husband and wife bloggers Chris and Ponzi Pirillo; Mike Davidson, President and CEO of Newsvine; and myself.

I spent a little while just trying to get a lay of the land. What exactly did GM want from this dinner? As I listened, it became clear they had two main goals: 1) to generate buzz about their new cars and 2) to get out the message that GM was going green. And both of these goals were intimately tied with a single vehicle--the Chevy Volt.

So. What is the Chevy Volt? It’s a plug-in electric car that GM calls an “extended range vehicle” rather than a hybrid. A single charge of its electric battery gives 40 miles of gas-free driving—a little more than the average American’s daily commute. After that, when the internal combustion engine kicks in, the engine will also recharge the battery. Alternating back and forth, the Volt will have a 600 mile range before needing to be recharged and refilled.

The first Volts are targeted for release in November 2010, with about 10,000 vehicles produced the first year and possibly up to 60,000 vehicles the next. According to Lutz, extended range vehicles are the future, along with “mild hybrids, strong hybrids, and fuel cells.” He apparently liked hybrids and energy-efficient vehicles so much that at one point he referred to himself as “Carbon Footprint Bob.”

This is not to say that Greenpeace is going to praise him as one of their own. “There is a segment of the environmental movement that is in some sense against personal mobility,” he said at one point. Later he said, “If we had a car that eats CO2 and spews daisies out the tailpipe, we would still be criticized for killing insects on the windshield.”

Lutz, and the rest of the executives at the meeting, also spent some time discussing what they saw as contradictory federal regulations. On the one hand, one federal agency is mandating more strict safety standards and “practically want an armored car.” All those safety features add weight, however, making it harder for manufacturers to produce small lightweight (and thus more fuel efficient) cars, which is mandated by another federal agency.

At one point I asked whether the auto industry would skip over biofuel and go right to electric cars after some of the unintended problems with corn ethanol.

Lutz thought the best choice for an alternative fuel was cellulosic ethanol, a kind of ethanol fuel derived from garbage that would normally go into a landfill. With proper funding, “by 2012 it could replace 32% of the petroleum we use in this country,” he said. “It would cost $1.50 a gallon, and the nice thing is, we could buy the Camaros and the SUVs and the stuff we want.” (I thought the phrase “the stuff we want” in there was telling … )

I’m not sure if cellulosic ethanol is a pipe dream--certainly the alchemist who proposed a plant near Tacoma to create cellulosic ethanol (in just 3 minutes!) was a scam artist--but I did read later that GM has invested in Coskata, a company that aims to produce cellulosic ethanol at a high volume.

And then we got to the big topic (at least for me)--gas prices and gas tax. Someone (I don’t remember who) asked if the price of gas went down, would production of the Volt stop.

Lutz answered, “No, that would be the worst thing that could happen. People would want big SUV cars we couldn’t by law build. I’ve said for years, maybe 15 years, that trying to raise fleet fuel consumption rates without high gas prices is like trying to fighting obesity with low food prices.”

Falling gas prices would be the worst thing? And so I asked whether the US should have implemented a higher gas tax when fuel was cheaper. Lutz’s answer was very interesting and Chris Pirillo recorded it. It’s worth watching (at least the first few minutes) below.



I was very surprised. He argued that an 18 cent gas tax was a fool’s paradise that harmed the country in a number of ways, giving us some of the worst roads in the world (I’m guessing he means the developed world) and urban sprawl ... one solid development of "half acre single family ranch homes from sea to shining sea."

It’s interesting to contrast Lutz’s argument here to GM’s recent history. In 2006, GM offered to guarantee $1.99/gallon gas for a year if you bought some of their bigger gas-guzzling cars. (This year that’s actually been outdone by Chrysler, offering to guarantee $2.99/gallon gas for three years on certain vehicles.)

But maybe GM has learned a thing or two since then. When Mike Davidson asked, “What’s the worst thing about GM?” Lutz replied that they were going through a transition from mechanical to electrical cars with a dependence on trucks, sales of which have been particularly hurt by high gas prices.

In many ways, the difficulty of the transition is what I took away from the dinner. GM has experimented with electric cars before (as it happens, I sat next to Dave Barthmuss, the spokesman for GM who appeared in the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?). They need to make that transition “from mechanical to electrical” because of both consumer demand and legislation.

In the process, I think they also want to emerge with the brand of “The Green Car Maker” in the same way that Volvos have the safety brand and Lexus has the service brand. Laying the foundation for the green brand was what the blogger roundtable was about. Making sure the Volt is hailed as the best thing to happen to cars since the wheel is part of that too, and that involves starting the buzz now.

Along those lines, I asked if a transforming Volt would appear in next year’s Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (no kidding, that’s the name), Lutz was noncommittal, but I did get a large nod from another executive at the table. I believe they really do want this thing to go big.

I’ve been pretty critical of GM in the past on my blog, especially in 2006 during the $1.99 gas guarantee and when Hummers started showing up in Happy Meals. But I think Lutz’s vision of the auto’s future is right on: mild hybrids, strong hybrids, extended range vehicles, and fuel cells. Maybe it's no accident they are considering selling the Hummer brand (Lutz would not comment on Hummer or any GM brand at the dinner).

Will they actually grab the green brand? Will they not only grab the green brand but actually be green? We'll see how things look in late 2010 when the Volt's ready to come off the assembly line.

But I do think that one of the central arguments against GM in Who Killed the Electric Car?--that they didn't market the car effectively because they didn't actually want the car to sell--is definitely not true this time. They're working very very hard to make the Volt a success, and they're starting 29 months early.

My Dinner with Bob Lutz

So. I had dinner tonight at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle with four General Motors executives--including Vice Chairman of Global Product Development Robert Lutz--and seven other bloggers as part of a "blogger's roundtable" set up by GM.

Now there is a perfectly legitimate question to ask at this point. "What exactly, Erik, were you doing in a room with bigwig executives of GM?" I wish I fully knew the answer.

Apparently I was spotted thanks to a post on ZestyEnterprise, when we went together to the Seattle Film Festival Opening Night in a hybrid GM Yukon. And I guess I've written enough about transit/energy/the environment that I got invited to the dinner.

Interestingly, when I got there I discovered that most of the other bloggers there were "gearheads" who ran car blogs or social networking sites about cars. So while they were talking about the 1969 sales of the Camaro, I was asking about the national gas tax, recycling cars, corn ethanol, and movies. (Specifically Transformers, which featured transforming GM cars, and Who Killed the Electric Car?)

I'm still trying to put my thoughts together on the night, my questions, his answers, and what exactly it is I want to write about it all. So I think I'll leave it at that for now. But it was a fascinating dinner and everything was entirely on the record, so you can bet I'll be getting something up soon.

"Mish Mush" at the Mall

I have a couple quick thoughts on the mixed-use townhomes at the mall that are under review by the Tacoma City Council.

As the article cites, the Tacoma Mall area is designated as one of the key mixed-use centers for our city? Why is that important? Because, thinking ahead, the City wants to encourage as much density as it can in areas with the best concentration of transit and commercial options. It's not about replacing suburban living, it's about adding residential options to current commercial centers.

As to the "mish-mush" look--and that the City doesn't like the look of the townhomes going up--I tend to think that whether there is a tax-exemption for multi-family housing or not, Tacoma should have more strict guidelines for its 17 mixed-use centers.

Use zoning to prevent strip malls by putting the buildings right up against the sidewalk and put parking below, on the street, or behind the building. Have all multifamily dwellings include a certain percentage of sidewalk retail space. And, as has been advocated many times before, eliminate or substantially reduce the parking requirement for the projects. The point of increasing density in mixed-use centers is to reduce the dependence on cars.

The City should have a plan, too, for creating and maintaining active pocket parks.

With high gas prices and more willingness to take transit, these projects are very important to continue so I am still ok with the tax exemption. But I think having more strict review of the project is a good thing too. It doesn't seem likely right now, but the Mall area, given good design and building standards over the next few years, could be a walkable area for residents and shoppers alike in less than a decade.

Less time in the car

According to the Department of Transportation, the US as a whole drove 11 billion less miles in March 2008 than it did in March 2007, the sharpest yearly drop ever.

To help put that in perspective, that's 36 less miles driven per person. If you figure a (high) average miles per gallon and guestimate March's price at $3.50/gallon, that's about $1.5 billion we didn't spent on gas (collectively).

High Gas Prices

There's an article in the New York Times about how high gas prices have pushed many from cars to mass transit. I know I should be all "rah rah, go mass transit" but I'm not exactly feeling it.

The high fuel prices might directly hurt our pocketbooks with gas prices, but it's also nickel and diming us, too, as pretty much every product we use now costs more to manufacture and ship. So while I like that more people are using mass transit, the high gas prices right now are not to be applauded.

Instead of getting us into a fix, I wish that we'd been able to make this work on our terms--I wish that on September 12, 2001, George W. Bush had called for a $1.00/gallon gas tax (phased in over at least 5 years). Now that I could have gotten behind. Slowly increasing the cost of gas before the market forced the increase on its own would have helped us out a lot.

First, oil-rich despots would not be flexing their muscles right now, they'd be hurting, because they wouldn't be getting the money off high gas prices, we--the US--would. That gas tax could have been a national security measure and I would bet that Americans had the political will to go for it after September 11. The easiest way to send a message to states we don't like is to weaken their biggest source of revenue.

Second, with a 5 year steady increase in gas prices, car manufacturers and consumers can plan ahead a little bit more. Knowing gas is going to be expensive in advance means that people start making decisions based on that knowledge, and they buy homes closer to bus lines, buy hybrids, etc. Those are decisions some will start making now, but more slowly.

It's those big choices that will actually influence how much gas an individual family uses--the location of the house, the car they will have at least 5 years. Switching to mass transit is all well and good, but it's small potatoes compared to these other choices.

Third, the price of gas would probably not be $1.00/gallon more than it is right now, despite the tax. I'm not an economist, but I'd wager that the slow shift in 7 years would mean that gas would be perhaps only $0.50/gallon than it is now, which means that $0.50 stays with the US instead of going to the countries and companies who own the fields.

... I think high gas prices will be with us for awhile. And it's going to hurt us all, which makes it hard to be excited about ridership gains on mass transit, even though that's something I really want. I just wish we had chosen the path rather than been forced in to it.

Sunday Update: Paul Krugman, not a man I normally agree with, makes the point that as of 2005 only 4.7% of Americans get to work using public transit. Figure then that if mass transit ridership went up across the board 10%, you're still only pulling about half a percent of drivers off the road.

He concludes: "The point isn’t that nothing can be done — it’s just that serious reductions in driving would require a lot of long-term rearrangement of the way we live. It will come — but not quickly."

Exactly.

Kudos to Obama

I'd like to tip my hat to Obama (yeah, yeah, big surprise).

McCain and Clinton are both calling to drop the federal gas tax for the summer. That would take 18.4 cents off of each gallon of gas for the summer.

This is in the Times: "Mr. Obama derided the McCain-Clinton idea of a federal tax holiday as a “short-term, quick-fix” proposal that would do more harm than good, and said the money, which is earmarked for the federal highway trust fund, is badly needed to maintain the nation’s roads and bridges."

And then this: "Mr. Obama said lifting the gas tax for three months would save the average consumer no more than $30, a figure confirmed by Congressional analysts. ...“Half a tank of gas,” Mr. Obama told his audience. “That’s his big solution.”

I think this is a case where Obama rising above the obvious political move is a net gain for him. First, it allows the New York Times to write things like "McCain-Clinton idea," something Clinton probably doesn't like. And he gets back to his message that paints Clinton as "same old Washington." He's also taking the high road on an easy choice. If lifting the gas tax really only saves everyone $30 over the entire summer, then I think that's argument he can win. It would also likely cost 300,000 construction jobs (also according to the article).

Regardless of what you think of the gas tax, I'd venture that Clinton's position isn't consistent with her stated goal of weening the US off foreign oil, where Obama's position is consistent with his energy policy.

Cradle to Cradle

I found a great article in the most recent "Vanity Fair" about William McDonough who believes in a "Cradle to Cradle" philosophy. He doesn't like that the legislation that has resulted from the environmental movement only seeks to make things "less bad" rather than actually good.

As an architect, one of his most important buildings was at Oberlin College. The building puts out more energy than it uses. It is also built so that the entire building can be disassembled (not destroyed) and its elements used again in more buildings.

Here's a better explanation of his ideal:

He wants to "make a five-year car that allows for industry to transform the technology at high speed toward the Cradle to Cradle concept. The five-year car is a car whose material are all coherent and tagged. In fact, all materials in the car have 'passports.' So we know where they come from, and we know where they're going--back to the automakers--after five years of utility, so the car could be recycled and updated with the latest in safety and efficiency ... They keep making cars out of the same stuff."

The "Cradle to Cradle" ideal promotes growth and jobs because it's goal is that each product has zero waste. Waste=Food is his mantra, because if you build it right, all waste can become the food for something else.

It's a very good kind of environmentalism.

Kunstler's First Chapter

I started The Long Emergency last night and made it through the first chapter. He's frustrating because he has some good points, but also has a few passages that are so outlandish they are scoffable.

On the first page, he writes, "It is my view, for instance, that in the decades to come the national government wil prove to be so impotent and ineffective in managing the enormous
vicissitudes we face that the United States may not survive as a nation in any meaningful sense but rather will devolve into a set of autonomous regions."

Uh huh.

Then there is this great bit on page 8: "How long might the Long Emergency last? A generation? Ten generations? A millennium? Ten millennia? Take your choice. Of course, after awhile, an emergency becomes the norm and is no longer an emergency."

SayWA? Ten millennia? So we'll still be wrestling with all this in 12008? We only have 5,000 years or so of recorded history, so suggesting we know anything about what we might face twice that length into the future is pretty funny. Even the single millennium guess is funny when you think about it.

As I said there are some good parts in here, but his more fanciful passages make it hard to take.

Erik defends suburbia

As you likely know, I'm an urban dweller and a self-proclaimed champion of urban causes. But I do not believe that the suburbs are the root of all evil, either. I grew up in the Tacoma suburbs so they can't be all bad, right?

The Tacoma Sun offered me a chance to write a long article about something that doesn't get a lot of mention on the "blogosphere" or in print media, so I decided to defend the suburbs ... at least a little bit. I do believe that what happens in the suburbs has a lot to do with happens here in downtown Tacoma.

Thanks again to the Sun for the chance to write! Here's the article.

PAYD Insurance

This is a very interesting idea. "Pay As You Drive" (PAYD) Insurance. Low-mileage drivers are less likely to get into an accident. Not because they are better drivers, but because they are on the road less. But low-mileage drivers pay as much as very high mileage drivers for the same insurance.

Apparently Progressive will start offering a PAYD option in six states to see how it works. I predict success. If Washington is one of the six states, I would certainly consider transferring from my current provider, as I am a very low mileage driver.

How is rail like a freeway system?

RBD over at 5views has an argument against rail as a way to save greenhouse gases. There are sound parts to the argument that are worth investigating like whether it's better to get 1% of commuters onto rail or into hybrid cars (assuming you get to choose) and the benefits of congestion pricing (probably not RBD's favorite part of the report). That said, I do want to make one point here that I made on his blog as well. Please allow me to cut and paste ...

I feel like a lot of anti-mass transit arguments are almost predicated on the belief that there is something natural about the freeway and getting people off the freeway is unnatural.

But the freeways were built for moving troops across the country, not for moving people between Tacoma and Seattle, or other shorter distances. (In fact, the official title of the Interstate system is the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.") It just happened to have that effect.

In total, if you adjust for inflation the cost of the Interstate and Defense Highways system is about $425 billion dollars. That is a crazy crazy amount of money. The only reason anyone was willing to pay for it was because it was considered necessary to national security.

In many ways, I believe the success of the highway system speaks to what could become of a well-developed and well-funded rail system. We pushed billions and billions of dollars of public money into an infrastructure that then spurred even more billions of dollars in private growth (would the automobile industry be what it is without the freeways? Of course not).

What I wouldn't give if last year's TGV rail speed record was broken in the US instead of France ... think of the products we could create and then sell ...

So how is rail different? Why not spend billions of dollars on a transportation infrastructure that will most likely eventually create more innovative technologies that will then end up generating more money back then we spent in the first place (not to mention providing better transit options in and between major cities? It's what happened with highways. Why shouldn't we expect the same thing with rail system too?

New York vs. New York

The congestion pricing plan for New York City that would have helped reform the City's and the region's transportation is basically dead now that the New York State legislature has said there's no way they will do it. Apparently one of the state senators even said it was "morally unconscionable."

Congestion pricing has worked well in London and other cities that have implemented it. Over at The Atlantic, Reihan Salam argues that this battle is grounds to once again start fighting for New York to consider secession from the state. Apparently, secession from the state has been considered for years, dating back to the civil war.

Maybe when DC becomes a state New York City will too ...

Growing Public Transportation

According to some recent research, we have more people using public transit than anytime in the last 50 years. Keep it up! From the study:

Public transportation use is up 32% since 1995, a figure that is more than double the growth rate of the population (15%) and up substantially over the growth rate for the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on US highways (24%) for that same period.

Interestingly, Sound Transit's ridership growth increased 12% from 2006 to 2007 in comparison to the national average growth of 2%. Here's their press release. That's a good frame for consideration of a November ballot initiative for Sound Transit.

If Russell really doesn't want to stay downtown ...

I know everyone's working like crazy to keep Russell in downtown Tacoma. And I'm all for it. But the risk of them going to Federal Way to build their own "campus" is a scary one. If they really want a less urban location, we need to still make sure we can still offer them a place in Tacoma.

With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a second option to the Haub site in the Downtown Financial District: the Nalley Valley. Perhaps even the beautiful warehouse that most recently has held "Ideal Home Furnishings."

Here's the case: Russell, you really want a lot of square footage on the same site. Done. You want easy freeway access. Done. And, as it happens, the Sounder will be running right by your front door. We could do a Russell campus station for you for easy mass transit, including a reverse commuter option from Seattle.

I really really do want Russell to stay downtown. But I think that if they are considering moving to Federal Way, we should have a better option ready to present about the options within Tacoma that are better than Federal Way.

The math on the Link

Here’s some math about the Link that I think is worth investigating. This is inspired by a discussion currently happening on Exit133.

So. The Link cost $80.4 million to build, and costs to operate it have been about $3.7 million annually.

So in 2004, the first full year of its service, estimates show that the Link had about 840,000 boardings. At that point, the costs were $83.7 million (capital + operating costs), or $99.64 per every boarder. That’s a number that is—of course—crazy high.

After two years, though, a total of 1,600,000 had boarded the Link, the total cost of which was $87.4 million, which means that already the total cost per boarder was down to $54 dollars per boarder.

Jump ahead to today. Estimates put the total Link ridership at 3.5 million boarders. And the total cost has been $96 million. The total cost to date then, has been $27 per boarder.

Is that high? Yes, of course. But it hasn’t even been 5 years! Transit is dang expensive, and it’s all about the long haul. Follow that math and in 5 years the total cost per boarder will be down to $5 per boarder or so.

But think how it would look in New York? If I had the time, we could figure out how much New York invested in subway lines since the first piece opened in 1904 and divide that by the total number of boarders in those same 104 years. I bet that the total cost divided by boarders is very small, likely even below the cost of a fare.

All I want to emphasize here is how expansion of a transit network becomes more cost-effective over time. Connecting Tacoma to the airport and to Seattle would initially have an incredibly high cost per boarder, but over time would drop substantially. Same as connecting the suburban areas of Tacoma to downtown. We should be doing both, but I understand that we may have to choose one first. I don’t think it matters which one we build first, just that we keep building.

It’s cheaper to build now than later. So let's build.