Exactly. It's a very different phenomenon from group velocity.
Both commonly happen after supply chain disruptions. Bullwhip effect happens over the entire chain, while group velocity happens on a single stage of it.
Well, maybe we shouldn't make the supply chain so long.
Shipping things 5000 miles should not be cheaper than making them closer to home. Although shipping is astonishingly efficient, a retroactive carbon tax (not just for the current emission, but one that doubles it for back-charges) should be instituted on shipping worldwide in bulk. That will incentivize local sourcing.
It's not just for long-term global warming. We are a medium-scale disaster (small asteroid stike, supervolcano explosion, megatsunami) from worldwide starvation due to supply chain disruption.
I'm really glad alternative energy is so competitive, because it is local generation, and not just in the local powerplant sense. Poor places actually are a lot more resilient to disruption because everyone has a cow in the backyard and a garden.
Similarly home solar and storage are so much more disaster resilient.
Perverse economic incentives aren't just on the liberal side. "Free market" economics with its unfunded externalities is another kind of perverse incentive that has led to these ridiculous rube goldberg supply chains.
"Shipping things 5000 miles should not be cheaper than making them closer to home."
The word "should" is used to contrast with reality. Crafting policy around something other than reality is not a good start.
Surely there are some costs hidden somewhere, and that distorts things. But if water transport is not the right way to do things, then there must be a huge worldwide conspiracy that's lasted for millenia.
It's much more perverse than just hidden and externalized costs.
These disasters are extracting billions in additional profits from workers to the 0.1%.
Why wasn't the Texas grid more resilient to cold weather? Because it was more profitable not to weatherproof the system, and then the inevitable grid failure was extraordinarily profitable to the tune of billions of dollars for the owners of energy corporations, at the expense of rate payers and tax payers.
Logistics companies are raking in billions of excess profits due to the shortages of essential products that they themselves caused by not investing in a more resilient supply chain.
Did Texas energy companies intentionally keep the grid vulnerable so they could profit? Did logistics companies intentionally break supply chains to benefit themselves?
It doesn't have to be intentional, it's the natural mechanics of an oligopolistic market system.
When we allow market participants to profit more by running at 100% of capacity than by building in resiliency, and then allow them to profit spectacularly when that lack of resiliency inevitably cascades into catastrophe, then that's exactly what they're going to do.
The 'reality' of which you speak involves a lot of fobbing off external costs to others and to the future.
Everything from sustainability of companies and economies, fossil fuel subsidies and regulatory capture, pollution and climate costs, and far more make shipping things 5000 miles APPEAR to be cheaper in the current time frame.
That does not mean that it really is cheaper.
It is like the problem of buying boots - do you get the $40 pair that might last you a year, or the $160 pair that will last you a decade, and perform better on every parameter the entire time? Which is really cheaper?
So water transport just "appears" to be more efficient due to some kind of market manipulation or slieght of hand? What manipulation is the culprit?
It can't be fossil fuels externalities, because water transport has been used over long distances well before oil and coal were used as fuels. And it can't be due to a government policy because water transport has been used by pretty much anyone that has a coast or riverbank.
Some realities are just to big and obvious to wave away with generalities.
NO. It is not just water transport. Of course water transport has always been more efficient.
If we were talking about economies where all the manufacturing and all the consumption was from communities that lived on connected bodies of water, that would be fine.
But the reality is that everyone does not produce and put their work directly on a boat, and does not purchase goods right off the boat. And even if they did, the current boats are massive carbon polluters, externalizing those costs to the rest of the world.
The reality is that global shipment involves far more than just boats - it is an entire exosystem of multi-modal transport, none of which works without the others — as we are seeing right now with the failures.
Moreover, there are also massive societal costs to offshoring manufacturing that are fobbed off onto future generations. These have zero to do with the efficiency of water transport.
So, I'm speaking of the entire system of offshoring manufacturing and transport of finished goods appears to be more efficient than local manufacture, but is in fact full of highly externalized costs that make the "efficiency" in fact a fallacy.
>>"[globalization] is in fact full of highly externalized costs that make the 'efficiency' in fact a fallacy."
Fair enough
I think where we disagree is on the definition of "efficiency" and globalization.
I agree that there is definite value and efficiency in globalization. It is certainly more efficient to obtain materials only on the other side of the planet rather than go without. And this kind of global trade has certainly been happening for millenia, at some level.
But global trade is not globalization. Globalization is more exporting work to arbitrage labor rates for things that could perfectly well be built at locally, and that kind of globalization has only been happening for a few decades.
For efficiency, if you externalize enough problems and tail risk, anything can be "efficient".
Arbitrage of labor rates is superficially efficient, but it is mostly externalizing costs. These costs begin with hollowing out local economies and increasing local poverty and costs to society as a whole, but arguably more important in the long term is losing key skills, know-how, intellectual property, and industrial capabilities. Perhaps most critical is the loss of knowledge and control of manufacturing key military/defense goods, and creating a potential strategic failure.
Transfer of economic power and capability to benefit the current quarterly statements is efficient today, but can cost superpowers their position. While the US thinks it is exploiting China's cheap labor, China is exploiting the West's current profits myopia to gain strategic economic and military advantage, and they are succeeding.
Burn massive amounts of artificially cheap and subsidized fossil fuels on ships, rail, trucks, airplanes, etc. to transport everything half way around the globe, and the costs do not accrue for decades, but are coming due now. That's not efficient, it's externalization.
Build global just-in-time supply chains with 100 links, and the whole economy becomes subject to weakest link failure. Of course, while it doesn't fail, you have become "more efficient" by not incurring costs of building locally and storing inventory.
All of these things are appear more efficient when longer term considerations and tail risk are ignored.
It is like the economy pre-2008, it seemed very efficient to package all the mortgage loans into AAA-rated mortgage-backed-securities... it worked for years ... until the risk came to the surface and we came within literal hours of a global monetary system crash and did endure a global recession.
So, it is all very efficient at a narrow enough point of view. But, it is not antifragile, it is brittle - when any of it fails, the geopolitical situation, the supply chain, the climate, etc., you're thoroughly forked.
Add in the costs of entire continents or even the globe of becoming totally forked, and repairing that, then I'm not sure the conclusion is that massive globalization is most efficient.
Most of it starts out with lower-skilled labor arbitrage.
However, in China, they are specifically working to steal technology from the west, by both requiring local "partnerships" for any business, and requiring exposure of IP, and training of workers. So, they are trying to leverage the low-cost labor abritrage into their own capabilities.
They are big enough that if they can keep the arbitrage going long enough, a generation or two, the original local industries in other countries are hollowed out and no one knows how to build it anymore. This has already happened.
This is also supported by keeping their own labor & environmental laws skirting abusive levels, so even if the wages increase, the overall costs are still lower than the other country.
If we are very lucky and diligent, we may be able to overcome that by leapfrogging them with automation, but we still need to become a bit protectionist to overcome the differences in labor and environmental protections to bootstrap a higher-skilled and much more automation-leveraged labor force.
also, we need to financially encourage non-Just-In-Time inventory management to reduce risk. The problem is again the short-term profits are increased by JIT management, but the tail risk of being screwed by supply chain issues is also largely increased. E.g., I just saw a headline on HN that BMW is eliminating touchscreens on several lines of cars because of chip supply issues. Higher costs, lower profits, and less-satisfied customers, but hey, they delayed the expense for those chips and didn't pay for warehouses to store them!
And that is an example of "brittleness" — too many single points of failure, that do not have a redundant backup system. Avoiding this is why it is smarter to have multiple sources for every item, maintain inventory, power your factory (or especially data center) with feeds from two grids, etc..
And if we did account for carbon properly, then would everyone get all their goods made in scratch from local producers? No, a lot of stuff would still come from 5000 miles away by boat. Because it is really that efficient, whether it "should" be or not.
If oil was $10000 per barrel, they would power ships with nuclear or gasp wind power just like before.
It wouldn't result in a silicon wafer fab near your house so you can have a locally-sourced smartphone. Even crops would come by sea for a large number of people.
Sure, a different tax or cost structure will shift the equilibrium. But the concept that stuff from 5000 miles away "should" be more expensive, and that we should make policy based on that assumption, is just ridiculous.
EDIT: if oil was more expensive, it would probably shift to more sea transport and fewer people living inland. If anything, land transport is the thing which has been given an unfair market advantage by externalizing costs.
> If oil was $10000 per barrel, they would power ships with nuclear or gasp wind power just like before.
Great! Nuclear and wind are both carbon-neutral. I would be very satisfied with that.
> But the concept that stuff from 5000 miles away "should" be more expensive, and that we should make policy based on that assumption, is just ridiculous.
No, that's not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that stuff that has caused more carbon emissions 'should' be more expensive, and conversely, stuff that caused less carbon emissions 'should' be (relatively) less expensive.
How many miles that stuff happened to travel is only material to the discussion insofar as transport tends to cause carbon emissions.
"more carbon emissions 'should' be more expensive, and conversely, stuff that caused less carbon emissions 'should' be (relatively) less expensive"
It's not clear that such policies would reduce shipping stuff from 5000 miles away -- except by reducing the total amount of stuff made -- so I don't see a direct connection to the topic of this thread.
Reflexivity is the point of policies, no? It’s trivial to make local production cost competitive with customs, tax, subsidies, etc. It’s the second order effects that are dangerous if not considered.
It is all about scale and efficiency. Get a massive ship and fill it with stuff move over weeks over sea. Compare cost per unit there to transporting single unit from let's say next town...
Sea freight is massively efficient per unit/distance. So it is no wonder it is cheap.
I don’t agree with all you write but I will say I have been thinking about building a solar LED green house with battery pack to run it winter or at night. In summer just run it off the sun but as winter approaches fire up a LED grow light for extra light hours. Then I could cut my cost of food a lot but most importantly be resilient to supply chain disruptions.
I would really like to see some math / data on what amount of power / battery etc you need and what crops to grow and survive off of. Basically how much greenhouse space and electricity do you need per person and what would you be eating.
We grow a seasonal garden, much larger than most people I know, about 3 acres and we don't keep tedious records or really optimize it but it seems like it would fall far short of being enough food to live off of.
Well the LED light I plan to build eventually would use around 560 watts on it's highest setting. Then I would plan my battery storage according to that max number and the max number of hours I would estimate I need to run it at that power. I haven't done the math yet. I don't expect I could completely cover my needs for calories at such a small scale of one light but it could very effectively grow things like peppers and other crops that have really gone up in cost at the grocery store. If done right a light like that could easily grow in a 5'/5' space with things like peppers on the top and more shaded plants below. The goal would be reduce my dependency of the supply chain but in reality would take a lot to get completely off of it. You would need to do a much bigger garden so maybe the led light gets me the head start my plants need to thrive when the sun hours just are not there like early spring then out into the garden when the sun is there into summer. Hope that made sense.
Most peoples' gardens aren't exclusively growing staple crops, so some land would need to be set aside for nutritional completeness. Calories/acre isn't a complete picture; root vegetables require less processing than grains. In a "collapse of supply chains" situation, that needs to be included.
If you're using them to supplement sunlight, the electricity required depends on your local climate, efficiency of your lights, etc. I've found that the most readily available data on that is from marijuana enthusiasts, amusingly.
3 acres could definitely provide one with most enough to live on if one keeps animals, preserves surplus, and expands their definition of seasonal. "Four-Season Gardening" by Elliot Coleman, a great book on the subject, shows a green house strategy that involves no added energy (in Maine, no less). I imagine thoughtful addition of active control could improve output.
The hardest part is growing enough protein, which is why livestock is sort of a necessity for subsistence living unless you live someplace with accessible and abundant fish or game. One past solution was collectively owned and worked acreage devoted to beans, milk or similar, though I suppose it could be argued that leads us back here, eventually, once someone gets the idea to sell the surplus of that. (It did once, already)
TL;DR
Check out "Four-season Gardening" by Elliot Coleman for interesting ideas on expanding your growing season without adding electricity
The supply chain situation is much worse because individual actors are trying to optimize for themselves for an advantage at the cost of everybody else.
I just recently had to drive in Atlanta on I75 and merge across three lanes of traffic towing a trailer; the least helpful people I have ever experienced on the road. The only solution was to start going and force them to yield or get hit.
i think that's SOP for large vehicles. Sometimes you'll find a trucker or heavy equipment op in a car and they'll flash their lights, make space, and sort of escort you through the lanes. Most of the time, you just change lanes and let the other, more nimble, cars react to it.
Yeah, I used to drive a box truck around Atlanta for work. Learned by the second day that you just have to start moving into the lane you want. They'll get out of the way.
yes there are a few difficult areas like that around atl. sometimes I'll just get off an exit early or late if I think what I'm about to do is too dangerous for myself or others.
Unfortunately this was a situation where they decided to close all but the right most lane of I75 shortly after the 75/85 split, so I had no choice but to attempt this maneuver in stop and go traffic with very little warning.
I don’t know how self aware rush hour commuters are about their situation. Also the animation linked does not involve decision making.
Right now a lot of companies are aware of supply chain issues and counter acting them for instance by greater stockpiling which in turn worsens the situation for others.
The video that the above animation is from [1] is about how bad (or alternatively, "selfish") driving behaviors where individuals inch up as close to the car in front of them as quickly as possible (only to have to slam on their brakes) actually lead to worse and slower traffic than if everyone just left a buffer of space in front of them and drove at a moderate pace.
So it's actually a lot more analogous than you'd think.
While I do love that video, it has some massive oversights:
- Safety margins requires distance to increase with velocity. i.e. if the light turns green and everyone accelerates together, then you end up with a bunch of cars going at high speeds bumper-to-bumper. This would be clearly undesirable even if everyone could press the gas pedal at the same time. Meaning you'd still want to insert a delay between cars regardless of people's ability to press the gas pedal at the same time. Heck, even with self-driving cars, you'd still want comparable safety margins in case something goes wrong; it's not like self-driving cars result in a perfectly predictable world.
- "Stay the same distance apart from the car behind you and in front of you" ignores the fact that the car behind you might be quite far behind you (if there at all). In reality you probably want to maintain a minimum distance both in front of and behind you, not an identical distance.
- It also fails to show that decongesting a traffic jam by deliberately slowing down (which is what you'd have to do to increase your distance from the car in front of you) will actually result in you getting to your destination more quickly. It's certainly not intuitive for that to be the case.
While I'm not claiming the conclusions would be necessarily wrong if you take these into account, for a viewer that hasn't already done research in this area, it sure doesn't convince them that the conclusions are correct once these are accounted for either.
And in ten years, when the pandemic has passed, the MBA beancounters and/or "activist investors" will ask the question "do we need stockpiles of inventory???" again. And then history will repeat itself - many years of profit, followed by a crisis of some kind and then we will have another "delivery crisis".
But are they doing that selflessly and out of charity, or are they biking for the exercise, car pooling/public transport to save money? In other words, doing those measures out of selfish reasons.
>But are they doing that selflessly and out of charity, or are they biking for the exercise, car pooling/public transport to save money? In other words, doing those measures out of selfish reasons.
Many behaviors considered positive for society are encouraged by appealing to self interest. Various tax credits (EV tax rebates come to mind), appeals to health and cost reduction (bicycling, walking, car pooling/public transport, etc.) and many other areas where a change in behavior is considered a "public good" are encouraged by benefits (or punishment -- tickets for not wearing a seat belt, drunk driving, etc.) that appeal to an individual's selfish interests.
As such, why does it matter if societally net-positive things are being done for selfish or altruistic reasons, as long as people do them?
As such, why does it matter if societally net-positive things are being done for selfish or altruistic reasons, as long as people do them?
You are responding in the context of a thread without considering the reason the thread developed: someone stated that the effect worsens because selfish behaviour.
>You are responding in the context of a thread without considering the reason the thread developed: someone stated that the effect worsens because selfish behaviour.
Your point is well taken. However, GP questioned whether folks were doing net-positive things due to altruism or selfishness.
Assuming that the result is net-positive (which might be an incorrect assumption, but I'm going with it), it's irrelevant as to the 'why'.
If results are net-negative or zero impact, it might be worthwhile to ask the 'why' of the motivation behind the behavior.
I'd add that while the initial post may have asserted that (paraphrasing) "selfish behaviors make things worse," GP's comment didn't address that at all and every other response to GP interpreted it the same way I did.
Is it a requirement that I respond not only to the comment to which I respond, but every comment prior to that one? If so, how far does that requirement to apply prior context apply? Do I need to address the psychological make up of selfish vs. altruistic behavior? The science underlying climate change and greenhouse gases? The basis for chemistry in our physical world?
Well, I mean the chain the_mitsuhiko -> whatshisface -> Retric -> gruez -> you
And yes, there seems something got lost there.
Assuming that the result is net-positive (which might be an incorrect assumption, but I'm going with it), it's irrelevant as to the 'why'.
Hmmm... no. the_mitshuhiko stated that intentions were an important reason as to why things were worse. Then the discussions drifted to other situations where intentions were the same and the results were not.
That could invalidate the_mitshuhiko point since selfish intentions not always lead to worse results.
Then Retric suggested that in fact the_mitshuhiko might be right because along with selfish motivation there could be also selfless motivation.
gruez's comment is where I started feeling a diconnection, because hey, the point seems to be that you can do selfless things for selfish reasons. I really got lost there. If your motivation is selfish, you're not being selfless, like, not at all. Yeah, your actions could lead to good results to society, but that doesn't make them selfless, just useful.
When you respond to gruez, you don't say that. You say that it doesn't matter what's the motivations. I actually kinda agree, but it does matter in the context of this thread.
I consistently get frustrated when a thread goes too deep and people starts responding just to my last comment, maybe I'm being extra sensitive here.
>I consistently get frustrated when a thread goes too deep and people starts responding just to my last comment, maybe I'm being extra sensitive here.
I get you. And my comment wasn't intended to slight anyone, and certainly not to frustrate you. If that was a result of my comment, I'm sorry about that
You hit exactly upon my point with:
>You say that it doesn't matter what's the motivations. I actually kinda agree, but it does matter in the context of this thread.
Again, I take your point, but mine wasn't an observation of the larger issue, just that in the grand scheme of things, if someone does the right thing, it usually doesn't matter whether or not they're done for the right reasons. As long as it gets done.
if someone does the right thing, it usually doesn't matter whether or not they're done for the right reasons
Totally agree.
Unfortunately the reverse is also true: if someone does the wrong thing it usually doesn't matter wether or not they're done for the right reasons (or wrong reasons?) but it also happens all the time.
Sometimes it's very difficult to know if a reason is good, wrong or evil. Driving children to school? Not sure about the USA, but when I used to drive in Madrid, school holidays were patently obvious.
>Sometimes it's very difficult to know if a reason is good, wrong or evil. Driving children to school? Not sure about the USA, but when I used to drive in Madrid, school holidays were patently obvious.
Apologies for the delay in responding.
As the old saying goes, "actions speak louder than words."
I'd say that also applied to the reasons people do things.
While there certainly is merit in consciously choosing to do the right thing (whatever that might be, in context), even if one doesn't have a conscious or stated reason for doing something, the action taken is what will impact the world around us, not the thought (or lack of) process behind that action.
And while acting selfishly may have negative consequences (as you point out WRT driving in Madrid on school holidays), understanding the dynamics of self interest can prompt societally positive behaviors for selfish reasons.
Examples and counterexamples of this are numerous, and we've covered a bunch of them.
I think we're mostly in agreement about the principle behind this, if not always specific examples.
I rode the bus, pre-covid. I'm wealthy and could easily afford to park at work with no noticable impact to my finances.
Is it so hard to believe that there are people who try to do the best thing for the greater good over their own self interest? Some folks, like me, choose a less comfortable experience because we believe in public transit.
> The president of a Southern California drayage company said the Lunar New Year, which starts Feb. 1, may be the recalibration the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach need to clear out the backlog as factories in China shut down for two weeks or more.
> “The salvation I see is this is a time when we can hit the clock and we’ve got 30, 40, maybe 50 days to get the congestion out and reset the game board to zero,” the company executive, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of retaliation by terminal operators, told FreightWaves.
From what I heard, the end points (retailers or warehouses) are out of spaces. There's no shelf space to store the incoming stuff. So they slow down the scheduling of trucks from the ports.
The supply chain is so lean that there's no buffer space along the way. The ports end up as the buffering zone.
We are facing quite aggressive space limitation at FBA warehouses. And we are not alone... Meaning Amazon can't sell fast enough to free up warehouse space. I wonder if the pendulum moving to the other end, meaning we have too much stuff with significantly decreased consumption... For what it is worth, we are going to decrease order sizes for now.
Consumers bought too much stuff, like toilet papers, during the scare, creating a temporary shortage that forced the retailers to increase the production orders. Now the new goods are piling up while consumers are working through their stash. The piled up goods take up the shelf/warehouse/port space such that other goods are on shortage in arrival. This creates another shortage scare. A vicious cycle.
If that were the case, then why the consumer side shortages?...which are at least partly (although nowhere near the degree to which the fed and government would like us to believe) responsible for the price increases.
Half the stuff is overstocked, half the stuff is out of stock because there is nowhere to stock it. This jumbled state actually seems more likely after a disruption, than purely empty shelves. For example, how many people's dwellings are currently loaded with a larger than usual amount of toilet paper and canned goods that they're working through? Businesses are going to have made similar misjudgements of what are critical staples and what is fluff that won't sell.
I'm solidly in the Austrian camp and had to buy a bunch of plywood this summer. But this price inflation narrative seems like half political meme, half telegraphing of corporate plans (like many anti-WFH articles). It's a motte and bailey - yes inflation is "high". But 10% price inflation would still only make a $30 sheet of plywood cost $33 over a year, not $80 over a few months. Unless we're experiencing hyperinflation, specific >30% price hikes are best described by the actual problem (supply chain) rather than playing up people's fears that such rises will happen across the board.
That's one of the most under appreciated things about supply chains in general and inventory in particular. The fact that more inventory regularly does increase shortages. Among the worst offenders, within the industry, to not get that is production closely followed by (B2B) sales in my experience.
And that's what Amazon is doing. From experience, Amazon's owb inventory levwls and placement are well managed. FBA, well there Amazon depends on FBA sellers. And when Amazon is running out of warehouse space for themselves FBA inventory has to go. Long term and slow mover fees make sense.
I don't think these surcharges are enough to solve the issue, not for Amazon and FBA let alone for everyone else. Not that Amazon has much of a choice so.
The truckers that work out of ports (drayage truckers) are distinct from long-haul truckers. They're different people with different tractors and different trailers.
There was a substack/medium post from a trucker I read that said this is unlikely to get better. The ports get to charge priority and demurrage fees when they're backed up and consequently may not have any reason to clear blockages. The issue is generally with the ports.
It would take either another port opening, or logistics companies suing the ports to force them to hire more workers.
There's trucks backed up at the ports, waiting their turn. Part of it is old design and part of it is a lack of need to actually speed things up to still make money as the port authority.
Not really. Rail works great where it exists but there is still a pretty huge last mile problem so it generally gets transhipped onto trucks at some point.
If it's grossly inefficient compared to rail, does it mean it is grossly more expensive than rail + last mile truck? If yes, why does anyone still use it? If no, in what sense is it inefficient?
Depends how far back you wanna go. In Canada, in exchange for building, the railways got free land in every downtown and port, and along their lines. Along with 100% royalty-free surface and mineral rights.
> 1881: Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) began construction of the railway from Winnipeg to B.C. In exchange for building the railroad, CPR was granted 25 million acres of land. These lands included the petroleum and natural gas rights.
> 1882: CPR was able to select lands from the odd numbered sections in a belt of land 24 miles wide on each side of the CPR railway rights. This created a checkerboard pattern, still widely used in the industry today to describe the lands. Where lands were deemed unfit for settlement, CPR negotiated for other lands that were often far from railway construction.
> 1883: CPR began drilling for water in hope of improving the land’s suitability for settlement. While drilling for water, Alberta’s first natural gas was discovered, Langevin No. 1.
"Or where an 80,000-pound 18-wheeler full of cargo is compared to a 4,000-pound passenger car, the truck is 20 times heavier than the car. But taking the 4th power of the relative loads, the semi would cause 160,000 times more road damage than the car. (But my simple calculation is not taking into account the effect of any weight distribution caused by the greater number of axles on the big rig.)"
Even taking into account the number of axles, say, five on the lorry and two on the car we have 2 000 pounds per axle for the car and 16 000 pounds per axle for the lorry. That is a factor of eight, 8^4 is 4096, still a large number.
To elaborate on why this doesn't bridge the gap between heavy trucking road wear and all other traffic, road wear primarily comes down to environmental causes and impact loading. Wear from impact loading scales with IIRC roughly the 4th power of axle weight. The ruts you see in asphalt aren't from wearing through the surface, it's from slowly deforming it due to cyclic loading slowly shifting the subsurface and road surface on top. That basically doesn't happen with any vehicle that doesn't require a CDL.
As a counterpoint the environmental wear is basically inevitable and in colder climates that's going to dominate the road work schedule anyways so it doesn't matter as much. Even with freeze thaw wrecking the road heavy loads still shorten the life of the road surface.
Any way you slice it though, the current taxes and fees that heavy trucks pay do not come close to covering the share of maintenance work they're responsible for. Gas taxes effectively subsidize the trucking industry.
Generally rail + last mile truck is cheaper. It takes longer however, which increases capital costs: goods stay in container for longer, so you need more of it to fill the ‘longer’ pipeline so to speak. And there is the issue of economics, the owner of the container is generally the shipping line, which will give you a relatively short time to deliver the container empty again after pick up in the port. This is called the detention time. After the detention period you pay extremely high fees per extra day the container is in use. The incentives of the shipping line are very much not aligned with that of the receiver of cargo: the shipping line wants their container back in stock asap, the receiver wants the cheapest hinterland transport.
In addition to the other replies, we haven't built new rail lines in a long time. Some of them are at capacity. Some trains leaving Seattle must go through Portland instead of heading straight east.
The Seattle metro area has eagerly ripped up and paved over every rail line it could find during my decades of living here. The area used to have an extensive network of rail - all gone, now.
Even while they were designing the Seattle light rail system, they were still destroying the last of the existing rail corridors so they could not be used for light rail (the rail line that ran parallel to I405, the perfect place for commuter light rail).
The kindest thing one could say about this is it's incomprehensible.
Beyond wasting the truck and wasting energy (fuel) transporting the weight of the truck, the height of the truck and trailer on top of the train car would likely exceed bridge and tunnel heights.
1a. semi-skilled labor individually secures each and every truck to its flat car for safety. Figure 8+ hand-tightened heavy chains or freight straps per truck.
2a. if any mistakes were made during step 1a, then this train, flat car, and truck may enjoy 15 minutes of fame on the evening news.
2b. semi-skilled labor individually removes the heavy chains or freight straps from 1a, and stows them away.
America's railroads looked very seriously at doing this, back in the day. The economics really didn't work out. There is a sorta-similar concept that's still used - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrailer
That ties up the truck for several days while it's being shipped across the country, though. That's a very unproductive use of the truck. It's overall more efficient to do it the way you said the first time.
I know that. But it's a way to get started without needing expensive cranes and crane operators. It also works for intermediate low traffic dropoffs of freight. All you need is a platform level with the flatcar.
> All you need is a platform level with the flatcar.
Do you?
You can't drive a truck sideways (from the side of a parked train); you can't drive a truck across multiple rail platforms (from the end of a parked train); and you can't efficiently split up the train in individual cars, bring them to a rail-end where they can be driven to/from and reconnect them, that would be much more expensive in terms of machinery (locomotive) and operator use than a crane; train cars can be reshuffled but it adds significant time and effort compared to just lifting a container from a truck onto a train, which is how it's usually done. You would also need specialty (longer) flatcars to fit not only the length of the container but the truck as well.
There used to be TOFC (trailer on flat car) cars that had little flaps that you could lower so that you could drive between cars. They don't have those any more, for the most part. They found they could make them less heavy with a "spine" kind of design, which you can't drive across.
> you can't drive a truck across multiple rail platforms (from the end of a parked train)
This is how we loaded our vehicles onto train when I was in the US Army. Everything from small vehicles to large trucks. There were removable pieces connecting the cars so they could be driven over.
Think of it like parallel parking. Not much room is needed, and the flatcar + the gap between cars can be longer than the truck by just enough to make it work.
It does, but that doesn't mean that the major west coast ports have adequate freight rail service.
It seems to me the solution is to have a major rail artery which at least allows freight to be delivered to a distribution center farther inland(Ontario, Palm Springs, or somewhere east). That would free the truckers from dealing with LA freeway traffic.
Another option would be a canal up to the Salton Sea. Obviously that's a much more major effort but it has nearly endless economic and ecological benefits.
> Another option would be a canal up to the Salton Sea. Obviously that's a much more major effort but it has nearly endless economic and ecological benefits.
That would be an obscene undertaking... going a hundred miles THROUGH several mountain ranges.
There would be no ecological benefit. Salton sea will still not have an outlet, so after a one-time dilution, the seas will continue to increase in salinity, endlessly. It needs a massive supply of FRESH water to try to dilute the salt down to acceptable levels. Sea water with salt will just worsen the problem, long-term.
The economic benefits are marginal. You'll be limited to the number of vessels the canal can handle, the size of the port you can build in the desert, and you very quickly overwhelm the roads in the area.
Any malfunction or damage to the canal would be devastating... the unstoppable flooding in the low desert and along the canal zone would be unprecedented.
Salton Sea was a big mistake in the past. It has opportunities. I have heard several proposals for Salton Sea canals, but this is interesting. I would like to hear more if the original poster can elaborate.
No, I'm saying go up from the Sea of Cortez. No mountain ranges that way. That region is an active rift zone and with that combined with sea level rise will likely cause sporadic flooding anyway. El Centro is a dozen or two feet below sea level already. The alternative is, what, a toxic dust bowl with little economic value besides a lithium farm and a geothermal plant?
Okay, so now it's an international construction project, with all the political barriers that brings. And running close to the Colorado river.
> The alternative is, what, a toxic dust bowl
It's the Salton sea that caused the area to become "toxic". Bringing in more sea water with no solution to ever clean it up will provide just a short-term reprieve to the area, but exacerbate the problem long-term.
Your plan is to create a much larger toxic dust bowl.
Down to the Salton Sea, it's surface sits 65m below the Gulf of California. You dig a 200m wide canal and massive network of locks, all you've done is build a half trillion dollar shortcut from the Colorado River to the Coachella valley, an area with no infrastructure.
Or you could build a 20 mile tunnel from the Port of LA/Long Beach to offload the road network. I even know a local guy with a tunnel boring machine company.
LA/Long Beach ports already have a dedicated rail corridor specifically for quickly sending rail traffic out of the LA basin and on to the midwest. Part of the problem is that rail yards in Chicago are clogged with trains that can't be unloaded.
Anyone who could open a port free of longshoreman unions (aka able to automate) would be a step function above what we have. That's not easy to swing politically though.
Eh. I've worked at a massively automated container terminal free from unions (not in the US). It's not any faster than your US terminals. Less people, sure, but not any faster.
I think you massively overestimate the gains automation would bring you.
Yeah, it’s weird. I was watching a YouTube that showed how Amazon was building their own extra long containers and bringing them up the river in Houston on specially constructed container ships with integrated cranes for unloading/loading.
Roads are full, one of the issues I've noticed from living in seattle for decades, more parents are driving their kids to school instead of buses. Morning and afternoon traffic is jam packed with parents and kids, causing major delays for rush hour, just to reach the on/off ramps.
Also, the park and rides are full too early, meaning people have to drive or get to work 1 hour or more early. Parking never kept up with all the new apartment buildings, the newer ones are multi levels, and are already mostly full.
Public transit has failed to keep up with demand, meaning more cars on the road.
Then the limited amount of highways, trucks are stuck in traffic for hours, sharing the road.
Uber and Lyft isnt a fix for less cars on the road.
Now compound that by the hundreds of issues along the supply chain, decades old port design, same methodology from the 1960s on loading/unloading at the ports, limited space at the ports/warehouses, day long waits for truckers at the port, inefficiency from start to finish.
Some ideas, Have the ports move containers to a farther location for pick up, during non traffic times, 9pm to 5am. Have the National guard build some new depots outside of town, hopefully along highways.
Optimize the ports, the containers are sitting too long in warehouses, and not enough cranes.
The solution shouldn't be "ticket truckers" who cant fix the core issues.
I remember reading years ago (pre Uber) that there should be more taxis in the New York City to help people get around.
They quoted a professor who had, according to the article, the most accurate model of NYC traffic given a large number of variables e.g. number of commuters, taxis, buses, subway frequency etc.
A key take away was the a taxi (or Uber/Lyft etc) is much WORSE for traffic than a commuter car. Commuters drive in, park, leave their car all day then leave.
Taxis are constantly circling and looking for fares. IIRC the impact of a taxi was several multiples of the impact of a commuter on daily gridlock.
Now, I love Uber/Lyft for all of the regular reasons e.g. allows people in under-served areas get transportation, senior citizens and the disabled with more access etc.
The traffic impact, however, seems pretty substantial.
Why would Uber/Lyft cars be driving around looking for fares like taxis? They are going strictly by the app, so it’s not like they can’t park when the app isn’t giving them any rides, and usually they are just going from one ride to the next as they are scheduled back to back.
If one Uber car can take 2 people to and from work each day then that should free up 1 parking spot for the Uber and 1 more parking spot can be reclaimed for other use. :)
Not if they were the two people catching a bus that made running the bus every 15 mins rather than every 30mins viable, so now 40 people stopped using transit and 20 of them drive and take a park each. Then this slowed two other bus routes, and so on.
Induced demand and congestion are complex. A taxi is probably better than a car, but neither cars or taxis have enough capacity to viably challenge congestion. You need mass transit that runs frequently and isn't stuck behind cars.
Taxis and ubers are great if you take mass transit but need a back up. Otherwise, you might always be stuck with your car because you lack confidence that you will always be able to take the bus or metro.
Huh, I think this is actually a case where uber's model is a net good rather than just extractive.
There's still congestion to deal with, but a bunch of people whose main work has no set hours who can go 'it's raining, time to taxi some people who don't want to walk or cycle today' synergises well with active transport and transit.
The issue is not parking. The issue is that these cars remain on the road all day, creating congestion. Commuters are only clogging the roads during commutes. Thus “rush hour.”
If two people want to travel from the suburbs to the city and they have their own cars, two journeys are made.
If they travel by taxi there's only one car on the road - but the taxi has to do a third trip, going back from the city to the suburbs between passengers. That trip is likely to be made without a passenger - because in the morning rush hour, far more people want to go in one direction than the other.
Of course, in some cases taxis may help reduce congestion - transporting people to and from train stations, and allowing people who usually cycle to transport bulky items, might enable more car-free living.
Interestingly, I was introduced to the term "drayage" in another thread, but seems apt here. I think some kind of last mile car service at the train stations would improve transit overall. But the 8-ball is having that transit system in the first place. Replacing one kind of inefficient car transportation with another improves nothing.
In the late 90s, tuktuks would hang out outside of metro stations in Beijing to take people their last mile. For some reason, that isn't the case today.
The question is, what kind of parking? A lot of the available parking is in structures that cost to park in, and involve some overhead getting in and out, such as getting through a gate, wandering around the structure for an available space, etc. Not conducive to being used by an Uber or cabbie to wait for a call to go pick someone up. Finding on-street parking is much more dicey.
The commuter and residential parking doesn't free up for Uber drivers if it's not being used by its primary customers.
Disclosure: Extrapolating from how it works in my town.
Then I dare say there is not only one issue. Parking is also a huge disaster in many dense cities (and probably also results in a bunch of wasted driving time circling for parking!).
So then you make more parking which begets yet more cars.
Cities already have absolutely massive amounts of their real estate dedicated to parking. The answer to this problem is not and never will be “more of the stuff that’s causing the problem”.
There is still some time in-between rides where there are no passengers in the car. If riders had a car, that dead-weight car would not be on the road.
True, sometimes it will be equivalent to car travel in that way. But it will never be _always_ true. So overall, Ride share decreases car ownership, but increases traffic.
I'm not sure. The fact that Uber drivers aren't cruising for fares is at least a huge improvement to the way taxis worked. Having spent 9 years in Beijing, it seemed like an even bigger improvement when ride sharing and even just being able to schedule a taxi with an app meant that cars and people looking for rides were connected much more easily and didn't have to go looking for each other (as I often did before).
There are actually places in Beijing to wait for assignments outside of major clogged ring roads and arterials. But it really depends on the design of your city.
I don’t know if it’s that straightforward of a comparison—while it may be true that taxis are bad for traffic, you have to take into account what the use of them is: transporting people around. If you consider the alternative where taxis don’t exist, at least some percentage of taxi passengers would probably just bring their own personal cars into the city, thus making traffic much worse.
Thus, though it’s true that the impact of taxis on traffic is significant, the alternative is much worse. People still need to get around.
However, taxi/Uber/Lyfts are, y'know, moving people around while they circle the city. Commuters clog up the roads with that whole commuting thing, and those car parks are valuable real estate that could be used for anything else.
I kind of wonder why there hasnt been an "uber for bus" yet.
I imagine a fleet of buses directed by sophisticated scheduling and navigation algorithms.
Users select a destination and pick up point, along with an arrival time. Discounts for ordering 1 day early to aid with scheduling. Pay extra to have the algorithm favor a shorter travel time for you.
System makes dynamic smart routes for buses to get people to where they want to go. Make it good at predicting arrival times so people can rely on it.
Seems like such an obvious next step for the whole uber/app-based-transport model. Not sure why nobody has tried it yet.
I've lived in cities with a bus system that meant no wait longer than 10 minutes and no walk to/from a stop of further than a city block. Having a solid mass transit solution requires relatively basic infrastructure before anything else. We shouldn't be trying to create a relatively complicated system when we don't even have a basic one in place and working.
I would expect that anyone who has lived in a city with good, clean, affordable, basic, high quality mass transit looks on that privilege quite fondly. Compared to most (awful) systems in the US having once known such a system and now dealing with what much of the US has to offer will be either rage inducing or depressing (or both).
These sorts of casual dismissals assume that the underlying technological landscape doesn't change, and that all organizations execute identically on product. Neither assumption holds true.
> I imagine a fleet of buses directed by sophisticated scheduling and navigation algorithms.
The primary reason we use large buses rather than e.g. minivans is that it amortizes the cost of the driver over more people. If it weren't for that buses would be less efficient because they're very often not completely full and to be completely full in most cases requires a larger vehicle to travel more miles.
What you really want is, effectively, car pools. Someone was already going there and they just take on more passengers, so there is no separate driver you have to pay.
But Uber already has this. It's called "driver destinations." You tell it you're driving to work, it gives you passengers near you who want to go near there. You make some extra money on a trip you were making anyway and now your car has five people in it instead of one.
> > I imagine a fleet of buses directed by sophisticated scheduling and navigation algorithms.
> The primary reason we use large buses rather than e.g. minivans is that it amortizes the cost of the driver over more people. If it weren't for that buses would be less efficient because they're very often not completely full and to be completely full in most cases requires a larger vehicle to travel more miles.
> What you really want is, effectively, car pools. Someone was already going there and they just take on more passengers, so there is no separate driver you have to pay.
> But Uber already has this. It's called "driver destinations." You tell it you're driving to work, it gives you passengers near you who want to go near there. You make some extra money on a trip you were making anyway and now your car has five people in it instead of one.
> Is the problem just that people don't know this?
The problem is also insurance. Namely, mine doesn't cover ride shares, and here in Canada at least, most don't (unless you pay extra).
> The problem is also insurance. Namely, mine doesn't cover ride shares, and here in Canada at least, most don't (unless you pay extra).
That seems kinda fair? Commercial ride sharing implies more miles driven under different (or at least increased) motivations to get there fast, and regardless of profit motives having more people in the car increases potential payout if something happens. It naively seems like that's a plausible correct increase in cost.
> It naively seems like that's a plausible correct increase in cost.
Only if they're thinking one dimensionally.
Your theory is this guy is going to take on four extra passengers, so now he has to go pick them up and drop them off, which will cause him to drive e.g. 50% more miles.
But now those other four passengers don't have to drive themselves. You're not going from 100 miles to 150, you're going from 500 miles to 150. That's going to reduce the number of collisions and therefore insurance claims.
So from a policy perspective, you want people not to be charged extra for this, even before considering the reduction in congestion and pollution. You might even want to offer a discount.
The exception for a selfish insurer would be if all the other drivers are insured by some other insurance company. But if we're talking about a rule set by the government or followed by every insurer then that doesn't matter. Some of your driver's passengers will be on the other insurance company and vice versa so it's a wash.
Yeah I was talking about that with my gf yesterday. She commented on how it was basically a little over bus fare to go to and from work. It’s kinda sad that it’s gone due to the pandemic. It made Uber a lot more affordable.
I haven't heard many people say they miss it since it's gone. I sure don't, and back then I would get UberX most of the time when Uber Pool was available. I've been avoiding getting in a situation where I need to take Uber and Lyft and using public transit most of the time and it's much better.
I don't think you need something really sophisticated. The true value from public transport comes from predictability.
Having a bus take a known route through important routes that allow you get to a stop and board a bus within <10 minutes without even having to know what time it is is really important for people to start relying on the bus system.
With that, even if the public transport takes slightly longer, not having to actively drive (in traffic) and find parking makes it much better. Now you use the time to read/think/mindlessly scroll through your phone on your way, or even be a bit dizzy on the way back.
I think that adding buses is not enough to reduce car traffic. Probably car-oriented cities are already organized in a way
that driving is "needed" often. Cities with public transport make walking amenable, often fun and relaxing.
Private mass transit has been tried many times before. Read up on the damage it did to places like Santiago, Chile.
I know you haven't thought deeply and this is just an internet forum post, but how do you address:
1) Many riders don't have smartphones
2) How do casual riders know which vehicle to get on?
3) If a profitable route is found, how do you prevent companies from cutting under each other, cost wise? If you think public transit is uncomfortable, can you imagine what it would be like if there was a profit incentive?
4) how do you regulate safety standards and driver training?
5) public transit can afford to be flexible and not collect fares sometimes. You think private for profit companies will let folks skip paying a fare?
Etc etc etc. There are many, many practical reasons why it's much less efficient and desirable to have a number of private companies fighting over a natural monopoly.
In your points you assume privatized = unregulated, but nothing in the modern world is unregulated. You also assume privatized = not publicly funded. In other words, all of your points are strawmen and don't apply to modern privatization efforts.
In fact even in states that have public transportation, what they do is typically create an authority which is a GSE -- government sponsored enterprise -- to run the infrastructure. The vast majority of port, rails, etc are run by GSEs. The difference between a GSE style approach and privatization is that the GSE is awarded a monopoly for all routes that never changes. That creates a lot of disincentives for good performance and cost efficiency.
The rationale of privatization is that you let private businesses bid for contracts for fixed periods of time -- rather than just awarding a permanent contract for all routes to the GSE.
> I know you haven't thought deeply and this is just an internet forum post, but how do you address:
Ouch. I'd suggest that you could think some more about this issue as well.
NYC has lots of private mass transit providing value to many people without being subsidized to the insane degree public transit is. In fact, they're persecuted despite serving the low-income people the public system supposedly helps.
San Mateo county (sf Bay Area) is experimenting with that right now. They are also preparing for what fully autonomous public transit might look like. Even if that means having private “autonomous only” roads.
Something like that already exists. In Vancouver this is called HandyDART [0]. In my mind though this doesn't work for dense cities where public transit is a solved problem and just needs to be given priority and funding.
Very common in the Netherlands (and probably other European countries) for areas that don't see enough riders to warrant a regular bus service. I don't know whether the route planning is computer-driven or human-driven, though.
The big downside of these systems is that you must reserve your route at least 30 minutes in advance, so the bus company can plan the most efficient route. I think they're mainly used by (and exist for) people who have no other options.
Seattle (neh, Tacoma to Bellingham) has built up suburbs around highways unable to keep up with demand. That is the primary reason for traffic. Infrastructure around Seattle is not going to make up for sprawl. That sprawl goes all the way to Snowqualmie and eventually Ellensberg.
The whole of that part of WA is a shitshow where infrastructure has not kept up with demand. No, light rail and housing along such will make up for the greater shitshow.
I’ve been dealing with the area for over 20 years. The ferry system is also falling apart and that affects those that may take bridges instead of ferries.
The gridlock in that area impacts the ports and truckers, but their impact is small compared to the other things that make it a shit show. Seattle / WA driving habits don’t help matters either.
Grew up in the PNW but thankfully moved away 25 years ago before most of the growth. In my opinion the PNW has long been the place where the growth goes unchecked but the cultural animosity for cars has prevented effective expansions of the transit infrastructure. I'm not saying cars are the solution, but I'm saying the pols and voters up there have refused to acknowledge the reality that cars play a major role in our current transportation scheme.
I applaud them for working to expand their light & heavy rail options, while also maintaining a (IMHO) decently effective bus system. But that obviously isn't enough. The reality is that people continue to choose single passenger vehicles and the government hasn't don't much to address it.
I understand the opposition to single passenger vehicles, but the failure to expand transit corridors when land was cheap will have lasting impacts on the ability to expand rail and mass transit networks as such expansion becomes impossible due to cost.
The reality is that, barring a major economic change(which, granted, may finally be here), people will continue to choose single passenger vehicles and not supplying the infrastructure for them means they are even less efficient while they sit in traffic.
> Grew up in the PNW but thankfully moved away 25 years ago before most of the growth.
Seattle has always been a boom (and bust town). I grew up their 20 years ago, and my dad lived in Seattle after his tour ended in Vietnam. The same things we complain about today, we were complaining about them in the 90s and dad was complaining about them in the late 60s.
The boom city nature of Seattle means that it goes through periods of lots of growth quickly enough.
> people will continue to choose single passenger vehicles and not supplying the infrastructure for them means they are even less efficient while they sit in traffic.
Building more freeways usually just attracts more demand. We will never build enough roads to satisfy single driver occupancy demand. The only way to win this is by moving people around more efficiently. If Transit can’t work in Seattle, the city is simply doomed and it’s growth will implode (another bust…it’s not like we haven’t had a few of those before).
IIRC the boom started around the grunge era(30 years ago) when people in east and central cities started to realize Seattle sucked less than their frozen wastelands. I don't think it has slowed down since. All cities have booms and busts, but that doesn't mean you plan for the busts.
You fix the added demand with zoning and a comprehensive regional growth strategy. Not building freeways to service the demand you've have for decades is just insane.
I don't think there has been a single new freeway added since I can remember(early 80s). There is still a huge reliance on surface streets and 2 lane roads to get to the bedroom communities on the outskirts. Not adding lanes to, say, hwy 18, hasn't done a damn thing to limit growth in the east side. It has turned the region into a giant clusterfuck around rush hour though.
Again, Seattle has been a boom town ever since it was founded. The grunge era was actually kind of a bust (if you remember, unemployment was a bit high and housing prices were stagnant in the early 90s), but the start of maybe what we can consider the current boom?
Seattle is a boom town, it doesn’t just have a conventional boom or bust cycle. All west coast big cities (Vancouver BC, Portland, SF, LA, San Diego) have a similar rapid growth profile with similar problems. Note that none of these cities have been able to solve them adequately, and we ran out of space to build new freeways decades ago, so that solution is never happening, even if anyone thought it would solve the problem at all in the first place.
A city like SLC, which has room to add freeways along with republican run government to add them, hasn’t been able to fix its traffic problems either. In fact, they just get worse as the new freeways encourage more sprawl.
Yes, a clear preference among the population. Yet the folks in power seem antagonistic to cars. Look at how the population of the area has grown and yet the freeway network is about the same as it was when I was a kid.
There are still many places in the region with only a single major north-south freeway. You can add all the lanes you want, but a single accident can take your 7 lanes of traffic out of commission. We need more transportation corridors to provide redundancy.
That's how you make a region suck for decades while your transit dream matures.
Building freeways gives you room for HOV lanes and busses, and even rail if you plan it right. Not building freeways is a demonstrably failed policy in the Sea-Tac region.
It's like how SF suspended the traditional criminal justice system before they had a working replacement. Sure, they'll get it right someday but in the meantime you just have to put up with a few decades of crime. But hey, one day it will be perfect and ideologically pure.
We need better mass transit in western WA. Not just municipal but wider scale. to deal with traffic congestion. I live south of Olympia and needed to go to Seattle, so I checked amtraks ticket prices and it was cheaper for me to pay gas and parking driving there and back then to take a train. So that means another car on already congested road and taking up one of the limited number of parking space. I want better mass transit but it needs to be affordable for anyone to use it and what we have isn't
That sounds about right. Moreover, even if Seattle wanted to build something (anything), it would play out like this:
* 10 years of planning
* 10 years of lawsuits
* another 10 years of planning
* 20 years of very slow building
The famed light rail is supposed to reach Issaquah (from Seattle) in 2041. That's if everything goes according to plan.
I have spent many years working for a large employer there. Flying up from the Bay Area was, hour drive to airport, hour to plane, hour and a half flight, 20min to car rental, 60 to 180min bitching about getting from SeaTac to Redmond/Bellevue. Which is stupid. Carpool lanes made no difference. Infrastructure sucks there.
Even when staying there, let’s say Woodinville or Kirkland. Driving to Bellevue or Redmond let alone Seattle sucks worse than those.
I find it interesting that the traffic we experience every day is also what is causing the issues with supply chains.
I feel that it is glossed over. Nobody talks about the larger effects of the traffic in US cities beyond: "You sit in the car longer for work.", not "your meat is expensive because traffic is bad."
Cities are always very hesitant to introduce measures to reduce demand on our roads. I wonder if it is intentional that nobody talks about this.
Reducing demand on roads is a tough sell politically when most people are still car-reliant. People don’t see themselves as beneficiaries at all when they hear “congestion pricing” or “dedicated bus lanes” or “increased funding for public transit.”
In this case even that’s not being done. The government is just not continuing to subsidize car-based transit via roads at an adequate level to keep up with demand for car usage.
I do think a big part of the problem is that you need a critical mass of public transit before people can really ditch their cars. The network needs to be able to reach far away and enable more than just commuting to a desk job in the city center. And it needs times to remain in that state for all the businesses to rebalance around the public transit network (ie less reliance on huge shopping centers and strip malls only accessible by car). As a result I think you probably get a bit of a U shaped cost:benefit curve wrt funding of transit infrastructure.
I say this as a pretty leftist person: I also want free stuff. But I am an adult who understands that our roads, cars, and congestion cost money and it needs to be addressed.
One very sinister outcome of measures to reduce road demand is that it unfairly impacts the lower and lower-middle classes. People who work in high-paying jobs wouldn't think twice about spending $10 on a road charge, but someone working minimum wage simply can't afford that on a daily commute. Carbon taxes are often subject to this criticism as well: if you tax everyone who uses a car, then the lower class simply can't afford to. Truckers and delivery workers still have to, though, because that's the job, and either the company, or, more likely, the consumers absorb the cost of any such taxes. On one hand, it would solve the problem as described, but on the other it would significantly impact the people who are the most sensitive to such impacts, economically speaking.
There is also, in the US at least, a strong argument to be made about Freedom of Movement. I don't know if it has ever been tried in court, but I would be interested to see the result of such a court case.
I have heard this argument before, but there is an easy work-around: low-income people can request an exemption and if they meet the requirements they will be exempt from the taxes.
Though honestly, at the end of the day, there are large corporations making huge profits whose workers commute to their office every day, and they should be the ones footing the bill.
I think of my local situation in Portland, Oregon, where many people in Vancouver Washington commute to portland every day and do not pay a DIME for the road infrastructure they clog up.
>there is an easy work-around: low-income people can request an exemption and if they meet the requirements they will be exempt from the taxes.
There is an easier workaround. Just give people cash, and then hit it with marginal income tax.
>I think of my local situation in Portland, Oregon, where many people in Vancouver Washington commute to portland every day and do not pay a DIME for the road infrastructure they clog up.
From my understanding, OR collects income tax for any work performed in OR. This means residents of WA pay OR income taxes. Is this not considered "paying a DIME for the road infrastructure" (or otherwise costs of operating infrastructure in the state of Oregon?)
A commuter from WA to OR seems to be all gravy to OR. OR residents clog up OR roads just as much as WA residents do, but WA residents pay just as much OR state income tax as OR residents, but surely derive a less proportionate benefit from OR state income taxes.
> I have heard this argument before, but there is an easy work-around: low-income people can request an exemption
That is only "easy" if you ignore the time spent by the low-income people to fill out government paperwork on a regular basis, and ignore the cost of the army of new bureaucrats that would be required to process it.
Or aren't aware of it in the first place. I think a lot of calls for means testing comes from people who can't extrapolate from their experience at the DMV to other under-funded, over-documented, over-gatekept government services. They don't realize the people they want to means test already have to deal with a lot more than the DMV for services with worse forms and wait times. Adding another is just cruel.
I'm a big fan of just giving people money. From another of my comments:
>> "UBI. Really. Just give people money. It generates more benefit than it costs. Look how well billionaires did when unemployment benefits were buffed up. Now imagine if they were taxed reasonably to capture some of that toward covering the cost. People still looked for work, but they could afford to hold out for better jobs."
> There is also, in the US at least, a strong argument to be made about Freedom of Movement. I don't know if it has ever been tried in court, but I would be interested to see the result of such a court case.
I have often suspected that merely charging a toll for using a road creates records which could be subpoenaed. Now say you have a club that meets to discuss edgy topics concerning the government of the day. Do they want their travels to be recorded?
Now, this seems pretty quaint because around here, they use license-plate scans to reinforce the automated collection of tolls, and who knows what else is going on.
FWIW I'm on the same frequency with respect to the disproportionate impact that road pricing and road usage reduction measures have on people with low-paying jobs.
Dude, Seattle has spent billions on light rail and it really works well. Are you on the east side? Decent progress has been made on transit oriented apartments too.
I agree traffic is oddly bad during the pandemic, but we have solutions, more transit, protected bike lanes, and apartments near light rail and buslines.
Trains that sit in traffic still have a massive gain over cars in traffic. They are cheaper to run long term than the equivalent sized bus, and can run almost non-stop without the need to refuel.
Try not to dismiss ideas so quickly as "virtue signalling" without an understanding of what they accomplish
The key issue with buses and trains in traffic is they're slower than a car, so people don't want to use it because it's a shittier experience. When you grade separate they become independent of traffic and thus better than driving so people end up using it more.
Cars vs. transit is a pure throughput issue. You will never, even with 14 lane highways, beat one grade separated transit line with how many people you can move per hour. Eventually you run out of land with roads and cars, with trains you effectively do not.
With trains you are limited because you need a certain amount of separation between trains for safety, and station platforms are only so long which limits the number of cars that can load/unload. And at the final terminal (typically the main downtown station) there are a finite number of platforms which limits the number of trains that can be in the station at any one time.
Agree that you can move many more people on one set of rails than one highway, but it's not unlimited.
Regarding the terminus stations, in Europe many central stations are being converted, or where built as, through stations. This allows for much higher throughput since trains don't have to turn around.
Hah, maybe in some abstract social planning sense - but no one (numbers wise) will use them because as an individual they’re clearly terrible as an individual experience compared to a car. You sit in the same traffic as the car, but have no privacy, no control of your environment, little to no control over your schedule, etc.
Ironically, if everyone used buses, they would be much easier to keep timely. They would also receive enough funding and political focus to be kept clean and high quality.
But our ruthlessly individual mindset here in the states blocks us from reaching many of these higher level goals.
That's true, but we must work with the hand we're dealt.
1. We do not have the political power to ban the cars to clear the traffic until people already ride transit.
2. People will not ride in sufficient numbers unless it dodges traffic.
So yes, there is nothing materially wrong with surface-level transit, but we can't make that work until the cars are already gone...so we are stuck building more tunnels, viaducts, etc.
Light rail right like this fundamental is a salve, or yet another feel-good government service for the poor. But it doesn't help us change mass culture, nor can it easily be reformed into something that does.
Now, I should concede Pre-metro / Stadtbahn is not dead end, and allows for an incrementalist approach that is not just slapping band-aids. But you still need to put the urban core underground to have a beachhead, and to my knowledge only San Francisco of North American cities has a light rail that does that.
Except for one location (Singapore) I’ve used light rail or busses, they generally ends up the type of place it isn’t safe to actually zone out. Anecdotally from friends, Seattle’s are worse than most.
One might make a similar argument with taxis and Ubers significantly reducing the total number of cars that need to exist even though there might sometimes be drivers on the road looking for another fare.
Link light rail is grade separated for most of its route. Where it isn’t grade separated, it isn’t much of a concern, and it is never sitting in traffic (it has priority at all it’s crossings).
I cannot speak to east of Seattle but for significant portions it is grade separated.
Of the 3 stops where it isn't, it has it's own lane on a major thoroughfare and only chances an errant driver crossing an intersection.
Now for the Seattle Streetcars, those are a different story. For the most part, they have a dedicated lane so they breeze past traffic, but could get caught if traffic is especially bad.
Within the densest part of Seattle they took over the underground tunnels which for years had been used as (electric) bus transit only tunnels with light rail.
Past the stadium in the south it's at grade.
After a brief tunnel under the major hill it is at grade through the gentrifying area south of Seattle.
It goes above grade near the airport.
There are expansions to the east and north that I haven't seen yet, and the expansion to the south hasn't yet reached a stage where I've seen sufficient details to answer.
It's grade separated pretty much all the way north to Northgate and beyond. (Which opened this year.) Northgate, Roosevelt, U District, UW, capitol Hill, all the downtown stops are all separated in tunnels/elevated rail.
It's at grade only in parts of SODO and South Seattle. The bulk is separated. Even when not, it takes priority at crossings and has it's own lanes that are rarely shared with cars.
I know a lot of the new light rail is, but it depends on the area. IIRC when it gets near downtown(at least in Rainier Valley/International District) it's on grade. Down by the airport it's up in the air. Same with the new extension down to Sea-Tac Mall(or whatever the hell they call it now).
I also live in a NW Seattle neighborhood without sidewalks. Walking or biking a mile is not a problem for most folks? I understand if someone has a mobility impairment, or some other necessary accommodation. But a mile is not a long ways.
As a counterpoint- I take express bus 545 from Redmond to Seattle between 8 and 9am on weekdays, and there’s typically less than a half dozen people on the bus. I get from my home to the office in 30-40mins. The slowest part is the tiny stretch of I-5 with no bus lane.
I don’t think public transit has failed to keep up, it’s under-utilized, in part due to anxiety about COVID. These same routes were jam packed in 2019.
> Public transit has failed to keep up with demand, meaning more cars on the road.
Public transit simply does not work if people have the option of cars. Public transit did not fail, society’s leaders (and hence society itself) optimized for individual cars. There is no possibility that both can coexist.
Public transit doesn't work if cars still have priority. A bus with 50 people in it should have a higher priority than 20 people in cars. Have dedicated bus lanes for moving vehicles, not just decidated places to pull over at stops. Change traffic light patterns so that they preferentially give buses the right of way, so that 50 people in a bus aren't waiting on 3 people in cars on the cross street.
Once you make public transit be the most convenient, people will take public transit. At the point, public transit expands, typically with more frequent buses/trains on a route. And that makes it even more convenient, because you no longer need to plan ahead to catch the hourly bus.
And where does this leave drivers? Even better than they were at the start. Every bus on the road means that 50 fewer cars on the road. That reduces traffic congestion far more than any amount of counter-productive road expansions that ignore induced demand.
> Once you make public transit be the most convenient
And public transit will never be convenient as long as human operators are needed because convenient public transit means a train or bus every 5 to 10 minutes at most, and that labor is extremely expensive.
And if you have to wait more than 5 minutes for public transit, especially in less than ideal weather, you are going to prefer a car. And once you have invested in a car, you are going to balk at the taxes need to provide public transit that has 5 minute intervals.
You also need Tokyo like density to make those rapid transit intervals make sense.
I'm all for public transport arriving every five minutes, but you realize you don't have to chance it, right? Those vehicles keep a schedule. Just be there a minute early.
I will never take public transit, until I am sure I will not be stabbed in it (or catch Covid). So far no city in USA created this secure feeling. I don’t care what color the traffic lights are and how many bus only lanes there are.
I suspect I am not the only one.
On the NYC public transit system (subways and busses), there is 4 to 6 felonies per 1mil rides per year. That means, if you ride the public transit system twice a day, every day... you will, on average, be assaulted once every 274 years.
In comparison, the US as a whole has a violent crime rate of 369 per 100,000 per year (2019). Or about about an average of 271 years for you to be a victim of violent crime. NYC has a slightly higher violent crime rate of 404 per 100,000 (2020) and is fairly safe as far as US cities go.
In other words, the risk of violent crime rate by being a heavy user of public transit in the largest city of the USA is about the same as the overall violent crime rate of the USA as a whole.
A felony would probably be for infliction of a life-threatening injury. I was punched in the face several times at the Broadway-Lafayette stop and the charge for the assaulting party was a misdemeanor. Still didn't make for a pleasant commute.
Pretty sure (without researching this at all) that you're more likely to die in your own car crash than to be stabbed in public transit OR die in a public transit crash, combined.
Which US cities have you lived in where the chance of being stabbed on public transit is meaningfully higher than the chance of being stabbed in any other public place?
Public transport doesn't work if you have to wear a mask to ride it. People on the margins between wanting to drive or get transport will switch to driving because of the inherent discomfort and dehumanization of being forced to wear a mask.
Remove all COVID-era restrictions from schools, workplaces, and transport, and systems will go back to functioning normally.
Sometimes I swear I'm the only person on the planet who doesn't mind wearing a mask. When you say dehumanizing though - what exactly do you mean by that? Genuinely curious.
I'm with you. Wearing a mask seems like not a huge deal (though I should note that folks on the spectrum may find the experience really unpleasant, and we should do what we can to support folks who aren't neurotypical.)
Try different masks, different styles. There's several different patterns for masks and finding the right one for your face helps a lot.
I own a car and use public transportation. Having to wear a mask has never come even close to factoring into which I take. Having to deal with all the traffic and terrible drivers though? That factors in heavily.
Being on the other side of a bus or train from someone, both wearing masks, allows way more of a humanizing connection than being in a completely separate car bubble.
Alright, I grant you, at least half of humanity wouldn't voluntarily wear a mask even to save the lives of their own family, as we've seen time and again. But the purpose of the masks is to save lives, like wearing a seat belt, or not drinking and driving. Sure, most people would rather drink alcohol while driving without a seat belt. But we don't allow it anyway.
That's not dehumanizing. It's the epitome of humanization. It's about civility, compassion, kindness, and overcoming cruel dispositions and rude habits to become or be made more humane.
Key word - "current". If people had used that same line of reasoning for computers, we wouldn't have the devices we take for granted today.
Things start expensive, and inefficient. Then we innovate and things get cheap and reliable.
> "All we hear in the news is the lack of congestion on the waterside and we can confirm that, but we are drowning on the landside by long lines and staffing issues at the terminals,”
Boston Dynamics has built droids capable of handling cargo.[1][2][3]
If humans are in short supply and these supply issues are causing companies to lose money, surely every business handling cargo from the ports will line up to buy some BD droids?
That's not the kind of robot you need to handle containers in a terminal. Terminals don't open the containers up. They move the whole container from the ship to a stack, and from the stack to the onward transit (truck, trains, barges)
The kind of equipment suitable for this job doesn't look like a droid. If you don't know what you are looking at you would mistake them for a crane, because technically that's what they are. Search for automated rubber tired gantries[1], or automated rail mounted gantries.
Port automation is a fascinating subject. The equipment is huge, so it is very expensive. It's not like you just order a crane from Amazon and it's delivered by the next day. Just figuring out how they get to your port from the manufacturer is an operation in itself. (Here is a time lapse of the Port of Houston unloading their new RTGs [2])
Then you have the problem of integrating them into your software infra. Sure the crane can pick up any container from the pile and put them down anywhere, but to be efficient you try to minimise wasted movements. If a truck comes in for a container and your automated cranes needs to dig it out from the bottom of the stack you just wasted a lot of time. The best case is when all the operations are integrated such that the terminal operating system (TOS) knows before the container is unloaded from the ship when and where will it be needed next. That way they can optimise where they place it to minimise double handling. Here is a good video which shows all the moving parts of the full system, software and hardware: [3]
And then let's not even talk about labour issues. Understandably longshoreman don't like to assist in replacing themselves if they can help it. If you have a working port
and you want to slowly transform it into an automated one, you will probably encounter friction. Best case you win the hearts and minds of your existing workforce over, but if you don't do this very carefully your whole operation might screech to a halt. It is often simpler to build a new automated terminal from the ground up than to try to do knee surgery on a running giraffe.
Thank you for your insight! What about ship size? I don't remember if I saw this previously on HN or if it was a path I went down trying to find out the height of the Baltimore Beltway bridge in Maryland. The issue I came across was that container ships are being built so big now that fewer ports can handle them because of the gigantic gantries that need to be installed and the increased complexity of the automation -- both of which you discuss -- plus dredging, etc. With the smaller ships in the past, a surge in ships could be distributed among more ports up and down the coast, thus alleviating problems like we're seeing. Now, the ships are too big for many ports, which is to the advantage of the big ports/ship-owners who profit from their monopoly.
(I brought up the Baltimore bridge height because, in looking it up, I ran across some articles about the delivery of the new, giant gantries at the Port of Baltimore from China, similar to your Houston example. The ship made its way carefully and successfully underneath the longer Chesapeake Bay Bridge and also the Baltimore Beltway bridge, with only a few feet to spare in both cases. Obviously, this was all carefully coordinated with the local authorities and experts. What I found especially interesting was that the "ship" was also very wide. Very long booms or whatever were stretched out horizontally and perpendicular to the ship. My memory is that these were part of the gantries and they were lowered to further decrease the height of the ship, but maybe the booms are normally this way on the ship to keep it from becoming too top-heavy? [I should watch the YouTube you provided of Houston!] Anyway, this took me off on tangents on the internet reading more and more about the ships and the ports.)
The main constraint for East Coast ports is that they are on the wrong side of the continent from most of the import/export demand in Asia. The Panama Canal isn’t exactly cheap, and some boats don’t even fit in the Canal!
They did recently build out a new expansion of the canal but these problems still remain. What is really cool is the fact that the New York port raised a bridge deck to support the new maximums. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonne_Bridge
I don't think there are any humans picking up and moving these containers by hand. Robots are already doing the physical moving from one transport type to another.
You'd be surprised how strong the longshorman's union is. It's a cesspool of nepotism and corruption(at least in San Diego, where I used to be close to a family of them and got to hear the dirt). It would take a major economic catastrophe(no, not like the current one) to displace them, and you can bet there will be violence in return.
At the California ports experiencing the worst of being unable to fulfill high demand, the robotics space is intentionally diminished by union activity. Rotterdam stores, moves, and transfers with much greater efficiency with robotic assistance.
However, I don't support injuring workers with tech efficiency advances - it's morally wrong.
But I do wish tech and labor everywhere had better discussions on how to introduce efficiency while also, and more importantly, preserving gainful employment and creating better work experiences.
West Coast is closer to Asia, but also look at how many ports you have available on the east coast vs the west. You also have the Mississippi and gulf region ports. A lot of the west coast is either rugged coastline, environmentally protected, or isolated from infrastructure so the goods coming from Asia have fewer options.
2. Much of the stuff that comes through western ports are coming to the east coast. Things being shipped from China/Japan/etc are usually brought across the US as far as I'm aware.
Well I live near Newark and currently there are a bunch of boats there that came from Asia in a month, via Suez & Panama. Its much more efficient than trucking across the whole country.
West coast ports likely move cargo from Asia onto trains destined for much of the central US, which avoids canal fees and bottlenecks, as well as wasted time backtracking.
Is that a common occurrence or is it specifically happening because of the backup on west coast ports? Or is it even part of a bigger macro trend not related to east vs west coast consumption?
> It's much more efficient than trucking across the whole country.
I don't think this checks out on a time perspective. 15 days to get to CA = 15 days for the trucking route, or air. I think both get there under 15 days. Fuel efficiency, maybe, I'd need to do more research. And it seems like the bigger factor is not final destination but the other stops of the shipper, e.g going and dropping in Europe for the Suez.
Actually glad I went on this journey for some learnings along the way, but I guess the point here is that west coast consumption levels have nothing to do with this supply chain issue. I live near you too FWIW, not in this for defending my own west coast dog in this fight, but more to try and see why you were so quick to jump on west coast consumption!
But there are a number of container ships that are bigger than Panamax (the largest size that can fit through the Panama Canal). They can't make it to the East Coast from Asia without going around South America, or else going through Suez.
And: "More efficient than trucking"? You could send them across the country on a train, instead of on a truck...
I think the target population you are using in your example is way too restricted. You're right but I mean lots of people all around the world are buying shit they don't need.
I'm simultaneously impressed and almost grossed out at how quickly the anti-AAPL crowd on HN pivoted so quickly because just because they decided to add some ports on these shitty machines. Had to make a quick release for the holiday season I guess!
Are you sure its the same people? For all that anti-AAPL people that hate ports there are also people that hate them for their anti-right to repair shenanigans but may not mind the ports(other laptops that are loved are also removing them) likewise there is a group of people that never cared about the ports being removed because they favored things like the increased portability or the amazing new processors that you can only get with them now. My point is that there are multiple groups on HN that may not intersect.
Like the jobs the book Bullshit Jobs referred to, I'd bet most of the cargo in these trucks is bullshit products that will end up in landfills within six months.
I understand that this is an oft-repeated meme, but what are these mountains of products that go to the landfill in six months, and who has the money to buy them?
Fast fashion, costumes, holiday decorations and props, organizational solutions, non-heirloom[0] electronics.
[0] not sure what the term of art here is, but flash drive, charger, cables, remotes, even monitors and TVs rather than designer record players, home entertainment systems etc
Generally, I think it's a mistake for anyone to generalize about the purchasing habits of millions of people, but I can list a few examples of disposable merchandise:
(Imagine most of these things costing under 5-10$)
* Toys for children that break very easily (wind up toys, small non-metal cars, plushies)
To answer your question about who can afford to buy them: In my own experience it's people who can't afford to buy better made, more expensive products. If you've ever, say, bought very cheap pair of earbuds or charging cable, and had it die in a month, that is the sort of product in question.
It might make more logical sense to "buy right, instead of buying twice", but there are times where someone is either in a jam, or can't afford to get the quality version.
None of this stuff remotely makes up 'half the products shipped internationally', by value or volume.
And just because something is cheap crap, it doesn't mean that it gets thrown out. I have seen a lot of crap cutlery in my life (when visiting friends), but I always see the same crap cutlery when I visit them. They keep it for years, because shitty as it is, it does what it is meant to. The only time it gets binned is when they replace it with a keep-it-for-life, quality purchase. Likewise for garden equipment. There's a lot of crap out there, and for most people, it suits their needs. They aren't professional gardeners, they only need these tools a few times a year.
I have a shitty toolkit. I'm not a carpenter, I'm not a mechanic, and it's all I need.
I think a possible clue would be to look at the products that pile up in peoples homes, but are essentially cast off or unused. Home space is a staging area for the landfill, if not an outright landfill.
And guilty as charged. I could go through my house and tell you the stuff that I shouldn't have bought, or that had a very short useful lifespan due to changing interests or buying ahead for things that I ended up not needing.
