De-emphasizing Long-Haul Trucking

First a useful anecdote.  Some years back, I had an hour to kill with a furniture store owner.  Every month or so, he buys a container of furniture from Europe, puts it on a ship to Newark, and then uses a long haul truck to cross the country to his store in Bellevue.   I asked him why he didn't use a train, and he says the costs by train are only slightly lower, but it gets there a day and a half earlier by truck.  Consequently, he has a day and a half less lead time and inventory to pay for.  So it's worth it to him.

 

The bottom line is that long haul trucking is heavily subsidized by the taxpayers.  The trucks do 90% of the damage and pay 30% of the costs maintain our roads.  The non-truck taxpayers cover the rest, with our gas taxes, our property taxes and our income taxes.  Moreover, the energy consumption and pollution of trucks, per ton of payload, is 5 times that of trains, or more.   Trucks cause congestion.  Trucks have accidents (e.g. sleepy driver).   Etc.   The railroads have to pay their own maintenance but have much lower operating costs per ton, yet the subsidy for trucks is such that they're nearly competitive.

So I want to see the costs changed, such that trains are enough cheaper than trucks to overcome the lead time disadvantage, at least for durable goods.  The simple way to do this is to tax trucks, which is appropriate, since they're the ones damaging the roads.  I don't want to raise prices, so I think the way to do it is to have a long-haul penalty:  delivery trucks and the truck moving the container from the Seattle team track to the Bellevue furniture store wouldn't have to pay it, but transcontinentals would.  The threshold is probably under 50 miles.

pro:

   it reduces pollution, fuel use, congestion, road damage

   it generates extra business for the railroads

   it has no impact at all on short-haul trucking.

con:

   it puts long-haul teamsters out of work.

   it it adds a transfer and short-haul delivery to a lot of trips.

   it doesn't do much for road wear near urban areas.

   it's a little complicated

it should be cost neutral, or maybe even a slight saving.  In the long term, I think it'll wind up lowering costs substantially, because we won't be rebuilding the roads so often, and will be buying less fuel and paying fewer drivers as part of the cost of our furniture, etc.  Moreover, if there's demand for it, the railroads will increase capacity and will be able to get rid of a lot of the delays involved, which will lower costs further.  obviously the vested interests will fight back.

Some numbers:  two people (they're called engineer and fireman) in the cab of a locomotive can pull about 5000 tons of freight.  One truck driver can pull about 50 tons, and usually less.  this is a ratio of 50:1, measured in tons per operator.   A truck gets less than 2 mpg pulling a 50 ton load.  this works out to less than 100 ton-miles per gallon--at best.  Trains get 425 ton-miles per gallon these days.  Both burn diesel, and operator daily hour limits are similar.

(I originally wrote this in April 2009 for one of my train-buddies)

correction: 24 Jul 2014

The US Department of Transportation says that heavy trucks pay for half the damage they cause, while light trucks pay for 150% of the damage they cause.

Phases of Life

Winston Churchill once said: "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart.  If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain."  Like a lot that Churchill said, there's a lot of wisdom there, but now that I'm well past 40, I'm convinced he's wrong.

We go through phases of life, driven by our environment and the things we've learned and adapted to.   When we're babys, we know almost nothing, and we regard out parents as everything--the equivalent of God.  As we get older, we learn to communicate, to recognize similarities and difference between ourselves and other individuals (we call this "self-awareness") and to manipulate our direct environment a little bit.  In this second phase, we may be aware of people that are not in our direct environment, but we don't really have any perspective.  Our "situational awareness" consists of a fairly small bubble, and anything outside it may seem far away, but in our mental picture, it isn't really.

Some time in our teen years, we start realizing that the world is a very much bigger place than the bubble we grew up in.  Among other things, this includes recognizing that your parents are just people, not the godlike entities of a baby's perspective, and that there are other ways to see the world than the one they presented.   One of the most common is popular music.  For most people, their taste in music is defined by the period that they were between 12 and 18.   During that time, you're very open to new things, and everything new seems to be the most wonderful thing in the world.  The fact that 95% of everything is rubbish doesn't start to sink in until the end of the period.  Puberty and our first sexual experiences are happening at the same time, of course, so that's the most wonderful thing in the world too.  Except when the travails of young relationships make it the most horrible thing in the world.    Except for the sexual part, I call this phase "consciousness".  Animals never develop consciousness.  Their view of the world consists entirely of the bubble.

Around age 20, some people start to develop an ability to do what's called "critical thinking".  This is the ability to study, compare, analyze and recognize good from bad.  It comes about from many things.  Life experiences are important, but even more important is the ability to learn from the successes and failures of others.  College is the best way: it pours zillions of ideas and experiences into developing young minds and forces them to compare and judge.  Job training and trying to make your way in the real world with a job or raising a family is good too, but the experiences are necessarily much narrower and more like the childhood bubble.   I've found that the ability to write well correlates well with critical thinking ability although not always.  Translating word problems into mathematical equations is one particular form of "writing" that requires some critical analysis.  A lot of people, the majority I think, never really develop critical thinking ability.

Another thing that happens at around age 20 is the competition.  The world we live in consists of a set of competitions--for food, for lovers, for jobs, for status, for power, etc.   Prior to "graduation", we're exempted from competing to some extent, but normally, completing school dumps us into the real world and suddenly we're competing for real.   (School itself is part of the competition, of course, but the rules are different) This is true in the most capitalistic society and the most communistic.   The only difference are the tools we use to compete with and the rules we play by, and to some extent what happens to us if we lose.  Good critical thinking ability is helpful in the competition, but so are your relationships at the start of the game.  A bonehead who was Bill Gates' neighbor growing up has advantages a much smarter person growing up in the inner city or Bangladesh doesn't have.

A liberal is a person who believes that everybody should have an equal shot in the competition.  A conservative is a person who wants to preserve the status quo, meaning that those who have found or created advantages tend to pass them on to their progeny.    This is natural.  No one is without some conservative sentiment, and to be sure, if the rules made sure that everybody started on an equal footing every day, it would be a pretty traumatic world to live in.   But some conservatives would like to change the rules to benefit themselves or their group to the heavy cost of everyone else.   Churchill's 40 year old is such a person.  The competition beats a lot of people down to the point that they're prepared to surrender or cheat by age 40.  

A major goal of society should be to make sure that people don't get so beaten down that they want to surrender or cheat.  The "social safety net" is one way, but conceived as such, it's not capable of much.   A better way would be to make sure that the rapaciousness of a few cannot possibly make it impossible for great numbers to keep afloat.  Things like anti-monopoly laws, bank regulation, media fairness doctrines and so forth can have a profound effect.    The 40 hour work week is a good metric.  If 90% of families can live a decent life on a 40 hour work week, then we're doing all right.  Decent includes comfortable housing, food, transportation, putting a little away for the kids education and retirement, and health care such that sickness has no secondary financial consequences.   When too many people can't do this, we need to adjust the inequality needle.

Some people will cheat, no matter the circumstances.  But most will not.  We need to arrange society so that the cheaters are easily caught and prevented from causing harm, and nobody else feels the need.

addenda: 17Feb2012  Catherine Rampell has a column on this same subject, with real data.

Science and the Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt has a new book out next month which seems to explain why intellectual and moral battles seem so intractable.  I haven't read the book yet, but I saw his TED speech and interview on the Moyers program, and it seems to dovetail well with Kuhn and Feyerabend's ideas about the fundamentally rhetorical nature of progress in science.

We humans, Haidt points out, are not all that good at reasoning.  What we are good at is winning arguments.  When we're reasoning, we're prone to taking shortcuts provided by confirmation bias and regard an argument as completed when we've won over the people we're trying to win over.  When the opponent largely agrees with us already, this happens fairly quickly.  When they are respectful colleagues, they force us to recognize our biases, and reason through them--possibly rejecting the idea, or modifying it or its argument until all parties are satisfied.

When the colleagues are not respectful is when we get into trouble.  When an idea runs counter to their confirmation biases, many people react with anger.  If there was already disrespect, this tends to deepen the disrespect.  If you believe that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist, you're very likely to reject a priori any evidence which contradicts this and label any purveyor of such evidence as misguided or evil.   It is only through respectful disagreement that we can make progress.

Saul Alinsky taught that politics is warfare and that only through radical stunts and use of language can you capture the minds of your opponents.  The conservatives, especially Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz, have been brilliant at turns of phrase which convey the otherness of liberals and progressives while emphasizing the membership of conservatives.

Going to the Moon

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon 43 years ago this year.   Three years later, we packed it in and switched over to providing bus service to low earth orbit.   The vision provided by one of the great movies of the time, 2001: A Space Odyssey, suggested that 11 years ago, we'd have space stations that were big enough to require bus service and populated enough to justify artificial gravity by rotating them, and at least two permanent bases on the moon.  The cold war was still going full force.

Last week, Newt Gingrich proposed a permanently manned base on the moon by "the end of his second term", which in his delusional grandeur would occur in 2021.   Newt doesn't understand this, but this is a very Keynesian idea, and could well be the most sane thing he has said during his entire campaign.  The space program used to be a great impetus for innovation and new technologies.  The computer, microelectronics in general, networking, numerous material, chemical, and other new industries were created by the space program.  Most of these things would likely have happened eventually anyway, but the confidence that there would be a lucrative business providing these things accelerated all these industries by many years.  It cost $23.9B (about $170B today) over about 15 years, and created over 350,000 direct jobs.  Most of these didn't last the full life of the program, but lets say it was about half--that's $50 or $60K per job in current dollars.  And that's only direct jobs.  It doesn't count the new industries it created or expanded.   A business is much more inclined to open a new production line if it knows that (say) half its production will be bought by the government.  Then there are also the people providing lunch and housing for the workers. How many job/years did Apollo create indirectly? tens of millions? compare this to the piddly 12000 job/years created by the $7B Keystone XL (about $500K/job).

Space exploration is best done by robots.  They're much more tolerant of radiation, they don't have health problems related to low gravity and boredom, they allow larger teams to participate over dramatically longer time periods.  Unfortunately, they do have long time delays, so it really helps to have a human close up.  For this reason, we really do need to have colonies over the long term.  There are lots of potentially useful things we can "harvest" from space.  Pure exploration is the most obvious and probably the most valuable over the long term, but there are lots of shorter-term wins.  For example, there are a bunch of production processes that can only be done in a vacuum or zero gravity.  This is difficult or impossible to achieve on earth.  There are minerals in the asteroid belt that can be enormously valuable here on earth. They may be even more valuable in space--if we learn to mine them, we don't need to lift them off the earth, which will make the colonies cheaper.   Radio takes an hour or more to get to the asteroids, so we need to send a few humans with our mining robots.  This will be way cheaper if they live in a space station or on the moon.

The real point of space exploration is the creation of new things, things we could have never imagined had we not tried to do it.   Would the iPhone have happened without the space program?  Maybe, but probably not for another 10 years or so.