

Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd. - aspirant
http://blog.transloc.com/?p=91

======
quanticle
>Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so
large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they
drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of
automotive obesity.

Smarts aren't actually that efficient. The small body means that the car has
to be very strong, and therefore very heavy in order to withstand collisions.
I was looking at a Smart on display, and I was surprised to see that it got
poorer mileage than my Hyundai Elantra, despite the fact that my Elantra is
about twice as large.

~~~
rudiger
He's not arguing that the Smart gets better mileage than the Elantra. He's
arguing that the _size_ of the Elantra is unnecessary, and that the Smart's
microcar size is better.

~~~
quanticle
From the article:

 _Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so
large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they
drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of
automotive obesity._

Granted, with vague language like that, its hard to perceive exactly what the
author is arguing. His use of the word "obesity", however, implies heaviness
as well as bigness. I was pointing out that the Smart is probably nearly as
heavy as my Elantra, despite being smaller.

In fact, from a strict efficiency perspective, an Elantra is much more
efficient than a Smart. For the same mileage, you gain the ability to carry a
substantial amount of extra passengers and cargo. The increased size of the
Elantra is quite useful, and goes directly against the inefficiency argument
the author makes.

------
unwind
It took me a while to realize that the author meant Smart (as in
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_%28automobile%29>). Using the marketing
typography made it seem generic, which I find amusing in some ironic way.

Also, speaking of typography, what's the deal with the bar over the 'o' in
TransLoc? Is it like röck döts (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dots>)?

~~~
mikk0j
Thanks for clarification. I missed that completely at first. Even if the
marketing dept. wants the logo in small caps, human-readable text has proper
names capitalized. That's the way it should be.

~~~
bostonpete
> human-readable text has proper names capitalized

Apple products excluded, presumably...

------
PaulHoule
When my son was six we were walking around downtown and saw a Smart car and
his first impression was that he could pick up the car and turn it over. He
thought it was a "dumb."

The industrial food system can definitely be criticized in many ways: it
produces so many calories that obesity is becoming a global problem, and
fertilizer runoff has created a huge dead spot at the mouth of the
Mississippi.

You certainly can't say it's stupid, though. People like Pimental will cherry
pick numbers to make it look bad, but Vaclav Smil's energy analysis
convincingly demonstrates the obvious: the industrial food system makes a huge
amount of food at very low cost... In much of human history people have lived
on the edge of famine and things are much better today than they've ever been.

------
awarzzkktsyfj
While the car example is decent enough in explaining how preferences can be
absurd, "distant food" is a pretty poor example. It is not driven by customer
preferences, but by economics.

------
te_platt
Then again, very often what seems absurd is a pretty sensible engineering
tradeoff.

------
drblast
I have an oven that's about four feet wide that I hardly ever use for anything
larger than a 12 inch cake.

And I have more than one bathroom even though it's really rare that more than
one person has to use the bathroom at the same time.

I have a mountain bike that I only occasionally take up a mountain.

My car can brake in a ridiculously short distance, even though I've only used
that feature to save my life once.

I wear a seatbelt all the time, even though I've never been in an accident
where it would have made a difference.

Edge cases matter. A lot. The Smart car covers the "every possible travel
condition that a college student can think of" case very well, but it's not
versatile enough for most people.

~~~
DanielStraight
Edge cases can also be served by rentals though. If you could rent an oven or
a bathroom as easily as you could rent a car, your home may be designed
differently.

------
DanielStraight
I think "right-sized" cars are still pretty absurd compared to public
transportation.

~~~
choko
You must live in a city with a public transportation system that doesn't take
2 hours to get you to a destination only 5 to 7 miles away and doesn't require
huge taxpayer subsidaries to exist. I would gladly use public transportation
if it didn't suck so hard in my city.

~~~
DanielStraight
No, I live in a city with woefully inadequate public transportation, and I
drive everywhere I go.

But, I lived in Germany for 5 months and only rode in a car 2 or 3 times, and
Germany doesn't even have the best public transportation in the world.

Public transportation will require a lot of tax money, but roads require a lot
of tax money too.

~~~
gaius
On the other hand, cars raise a lot of tax revenue. There's a 400% tax on
petrol in the UK. 80p out of every pound spent on petrol is pure revenue for
the govt. And people hate the oil companies if the price of a gallon goes up
by 1p...

~~~
DanielStraight
That alone doesn't tell us anything though.

Public transportation tends to be _much_ cheaper for riders than private
transportation is for drivers. A year-long ticket for Munich is around $1000.
At current prices, that won't even buy you 10k miles worth of gas in a compact
car, to say nothing of the price of the car itself, insurance and repairs.

I say that to say this, if people have more money in their pocket, they will
tend to spend more money, so the difference could easily be made up in sales
tax on all the newly-freed-up disposable income.

~~~
gaius
Annually my train season ticket costs just over half what my mortgage costs!
And I'm talking repayment not endowment here. So while public transport may be
convenient, it's certainly not cheap here in England.

------
winternett
A "smart" car is just another icon of consumerism, like an iPhone, or a
"snuggie".

If you want to spend money on stuff that is marketed to a self proclaimed
"smart" niche audience of people who think that buying cute stuff makes them
better or "smarter" for their purchased possessions, fine, do so, but don't
expect the public to be enthused about your overconfidence in how much better
material things make you and your life.

P.S. lets hope you're not in a "smart car" when and SUV forgets to stop behind
you "too late" at a major intersection.

~~~
dominastrum
> P.S. lets hope you're not in a "smart car" when and SUV forgets to stop
> behind you "too late" at a major intersection.

Maybe that means we need to question that large SUV with a single occupant and
an always empty cargo hold. Or perhaps why as a society we do not find it
acceptable to "risk our lives" in small, light cars yet we find it perfectly
ok to "risk the lives of others" in our large, heavy "car-trucks."

~~~
khafra
Questioning your own behavior can lead to positive changes in your behavior.
Questioning the behavior of somebody else who chose to buy an SUV can lead to
angry ranting and even less safe driving.

------
ericmoritz
I was having a discussion with someone about how much of our transportation
issues would be solved if we were content traveling at <20mph. Electric
vehicles could be much simpler because they didn't have to move at highway
speeds. Travel would be significantly safer as well.

Think about it, how much of your everyday needs around within 5 miles of you?
Unless you live in a rural area, I'd suspect 100% of your needs are within 5
miles of you. At that speed, you could get to anywhere in ~15 minutes inside
of that 5 mile radius.

~~~
ktsmith
Lots of American cities are very spread out so you don't have to be in a rural
area in order to have to travel more than five miles to satisfy your every day
needs.

~~~
king_jester
This is the major problem with transit in a lot of places. Development spread
outward to cheaply priced land, creating large distances between residential
areas and commercial areas. Major cities that didn't have the land or prices
to allow outward development instead developed upward (and download, with
buildings and transit systems below ground). The end result is that a lot of
places are simply not sustainable without tremendous investment in their
transit systems and city planning. As gas more and more expensive, a lot of
people will end up having to abandon these areas because it will simply be too
expensive to live there.

------
JoeAltmaier
Nitrogen in fertilizer is extracted from the air (not from petroleum as
stated). The hydrogen can be gotten from electrolysis of water, or from
methane.

~~~
aspirant
"In the USA in 2004, 317 billion cubic feet of natural gas were consumed in
the industrial production of ammonia... A 2002 report suggested that the
production of ammonia consumes about 5% of global natural gas consumption...

Natural gas is overwhelmingly used for the production of ammonia..." —
Wikipedia

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Yes, but I read the article to imply that we were spreading petroleum on our
fields, versus the alternative: rotting garbage. If the argument was an energy
argument, I would have expected some mention of energy costs associated with
composting (orders of magnitude worse than large-scale energy infrastructure)?
The comparison wasn't apples-to-apples, and I wanted to clear up the
implication.

So, sure, we use energy to create fertilizer. Instead of mining it and
shipping it, or going without. Again, if it wasn't the cheaper alternative we
wouldn't be doing it.

------
JonnieCache
Those who would like a very small, efficient car that actually has back seats
and suchlike, might like to check out the Renault Twingo.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Twingo>

Doubt you can get it in the US though.

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dominastrum
This can go in line with questioning the status quo:
[http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663429/big-innovations-
question...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663429/big-innovations-question-the-
status-quo-how-do-you-ask-the-right-questions)

------
scythe
Having eight feet of steel behind you makes a lot more sense when you get
rear-ended by a drunk driver going 45 mph while you're sitting at a red light.

>The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from
local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with
pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the
sun beats down on our cities only to fall on ornamental grass and concrete.
Food waste is hauled off to putrefy in landfills. Normal and absurd.

This has more to do with humanity's insistence on living in places which
cannot reasonably produce enough food to sustain the local population. The
Phoenix metropolitan area, located in an Arizona desert, holds over 4 million
people; Moscow, just shy of the Arctic Circle, is home to 11 million.

~~~
eru
I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but
Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'.

There was also a major heat wave in Moscow last summer. See e.g. "Heat
probably killed thousands in Moscow"
([http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/08/17/us-russia-heat-
deat...](http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/08/17/us-russia-heat-deaths-
idINTRE67G2CZ20100817)).

~~~
scythe
>I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but
Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'.

You're quite correct (these scaled-out world maps can be misleading), though
it is not really situated on fertile ground either. A city where the weather
has historically been a major force preventing invasion does not bode well for
agriculture!

~~~
bh42222
_A city where the weather has historically been a major force preventing
invasion does not bode well for agriculture!_

Oh my God, you are wrong on the INTERNET! I must attempt to help you!

There's PLENTY of agriculture on the same latitude as Moscow, in fact there's
plenty of agriculture in and around Moscow. There's no oranges or bananas but
wheat and potatoes do just fine in the surprisingly long and hot summers. Just
because the winter is also long and bitterly cold, does not automatically
imply summer must be short and cold.

Climates are not that simple.

