Eigth and State

I kept carful records of my driving costs for a while and it turned out to be 12% of my nominal pay for fuel, maintenance, repairs, license, and insurance. I didn't count the cost of the car. If I considered after-tax income, it turned out to be 17% of take home pay.

The two items in the chart that I do not agree with are that rail transit reduces dependence on foreign oil and reduces pollution. I think the assumption is that rail transit reduces the need for cars and therefore reduce the need for petroleum. Well, on a personal level, it does reduce the need for cars for people who live near the line. However, in the big picture, it will not reduce the need for cars. The petroleum resources and emissions will just shift somewhere else along with automobile use. In my humble opinion, rail transit supporters should stress the fact that rail transit leads to a more comfortable life.

For discussion, I offer this plan. 1. Terminate the 3-C line at Sharonville, or perhaps Bond Hill. The center of population of the Cincinnati metro is north of downtown anyway, and if the terminal were downtown or at CUT, most people would have to drive some distance in the wrong direction to get to the station. 2. Forget about connecting to Cincinnati Union Terminal and let bygones be bygones. It's too far from downtown to be practical for walking from the station to downtown. 3. Forget about the Cincinnati Streetcar uptown connection to the Over-the-Rhine loop. The OTR loop was a working plan until the extention was brought in. The best route, Vine Street, is too steep for modern streetcars. 4. Construct a light rail line from downtown Cincinnati to the Sharonville (or Bond Hill) station, and make sure that there is a stop at U.C. main campus and one at the University Hospital campus. Portions of the CL&N might be able to be used, but a lot of new right of way will be required. There might be some subway sections. The disadvantage is that it will take a two-seat ride to get from downtown Cincinnati to downtown Cleveland. The advantage is that it wil get downtown and also serve more stops between downtown and Sharonville, with the light rail portion serving both as an extension / feeder to the 3-C and a commuter / circulator line within the metro area. Obviously, the light rail will not be part of the Quick plan.

"Government always has the power to check the power of corporations." Ah, but corporations have the ability to move around to another state or country. Even if the corporation doesn't move it's physical plant, it can move the company charter, or play games with mergers and sales of companies to achieve some goal. Many corporations are chartered under the laws of Delaware, for example.

One more thing: while CSX and NS cooperate and use each other's tracks for directional running, Amtrak uses the CSX track to Hamilton in both directions.

Also regarding the congestion and comparison to historical data: Some trains that are assembled in Queensgate are TWO MILES long! One end of the train can be in the hump yard just north of the Western Hills Viaduct and the other end can be north of Ludlow Viaduct, moving forward and reverse to assemble trains.

I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but just so you know that area between the railroad and I-75 is a hazardous waste landfill. Nothing is easy...

"We'll be able to mine asteroids with unmanned equipment, controlled from Earth." Some mines on earth barely pay, and countless other resources go untouched because the cost of extraction is more than the minerals are worth. Take Afghanistan, for example. Afghanistan is rich in iron ore, yet there are no iron mines of any significance. Why not? Iron ore is useless without coal, water, and limestone to process the mineral into useful iron. The cost of transportation of the ingredients, whether it be iron ore from Afghanistan to someplace that has coal, or vice versa, is more than the minerals are worth. There is also an example of the Soviets building a railroad to a coal mine in Siberia where the train consumed more coal in it's journey than it could carry! It has been said that if the moon rocks that we brought back had been pure gold, the apollo mission still would not have paid its own way. It still takes energy, and lots of it, to launch a vehicle into space. I doubt that we will ever be mining asteroids. I enjoyed reading the rest of your response.

"The transition to an electric economy will not be that disruptive unless deliberately made so by government." "And if you're pushing some government-imposed solution to this supposed crisis, I want to know exactly what it is." I detect an anti-government tone in your posts. No offense intended. I am not pushing any action. I just make a game of trying to understand the world, or at least some small aspect of it.

What I think he means is that we have a choice to 1) reconstruct the track from Sharonville to Lunken at about $15 million or to 2) make some improvement to the track between Sharonville and CUT for an unknown cost. If we choose option 1, that's $15 million of sunk cost that cannot be applied to option 2, which is the preferred option.

"What makes the issue even worth caring about?" Well, this forum is weighted heavily toward the urban planning interest. There are folks on this board who are employed in the planning of public infrastructure, and still more who want to be or take an interest in it. Personally, I think that a lot of planners, as well as the population in general, are wrong regarding assumptions about the future. I think that construction of a replacement for the Brent Spence Bridge is a mistake, for example. The replacement is unnecessary, and will divert resources from other projects. The reason why I think that the replacement for the BSB is unnecessary is because I expect automobile traffic to decline significantly during the useful life of the existing bridge. Maybe I'm wrong, but there is no way to know today. I have mentioned this opinion in the BSB thread, but in order to stay on topic I have placed most of my peak oil comments in this thread.

"Whole stretches of America's cities could look like the land between Calhoun and McMicken. " Many stretches of American's cities already do.

In a free market, supply equals demand. The price will fluctuate to keep supply and demand in balance. Supply and Demand is a snapshot of the economic conditions at a point in time; "Supply" in this sense means the supply available right now, not the supply available 100 years from now. "Supply will not be able to keep up with demand" is technically not correct. Some economists look at historic trends and make a straight line projection. If we consumed 40 million barrels of petroleum in 1960 and 80 million today, a straight line projection says that we will consume 120 million barrels in 2050. The straight line projection is not a good assumption in this case. Likewise, Demand is not the same as want of something; demand implies the ability to pay for it. What those who say "Supply will not be able to keep up with demand" really mean is that people will want more oil than will be extracted out of the ground. We have 150 million drivers in this country, and most of them bought automobiles under the assumption that they would be able to afford fuel for it for the next 5 to 20 years, depending on how long they expect to drive the vehicle. When the price rose to $4 a gallon a few years ago, a lot of folks just stayed home and whined about it. What the price does is sort out who gets the remaining oil. The price of oil is heavily influenced by governments, so it's not really a completely free market, but that's another topic. The price of oil may or may not skyrocket. Rising prices are not a foregone conclusion.

"The planet is theoretically finite; the universe is not (except in the absolutely broadest sense that is of no relevance to modern society). As I said, by the time the physical limitations of the planet become meaningful, the planet will no longer be the boundary of the area from which humanity can extract resources." I will grant you that the energy resources of space are many millions of times greater than those of earth. If humans were ever to colonize space, we shouldn't have to discuss peak oil anymore. I disagree with your second sentence. The physical limitations of the planet are ALREADY meaningful. Just look at the apollo program and the chances of sending a man to the moon again. It's been said that we can't afford it, and we already have the technology to do it! The knowledge of HOW to do something is not the same as the ABILITY to do it. And the moon is practically our next door neighbor compared to the rest of the solar system, not to mention the rest of the galaxy. In science fiction, man can colonize space, but in the real world it's not likely to happen, EVER!

Suppose you measure the growth rate of trees in the forest and find that for a certain area you get 200 board feet of wood per year. If you cut down less than 200 board feet of wood per year, your harvest is sustainable indefinitely. If you cut down more than 200 board feet per year, your harvest is unsustainable. These numbers must be based on averages and account for the fact that younger trees grow faster than older trees. The same effect goes for natural fisheries, animal populations, water reservoirs, glaciers, organic material in soils, and all kinds of natural systems that are renewable. Taking a harvest that exceeds the rate of renewal is unsustainable. According to Gildone, around 1985 the sum of all harvests globally exceeded the rate of natural replentishment. There are a lot of examples of this in National Geographic magazine, which also has excellent articles about new technology. I recently read an article about Chesapeake Bay that said that the oyster and fish harvest peaked around 1950. The Chesapeake Bay area now imports seafood from the Gulf Coast.

^---- Peak oil is not about price. Peak oil is about quantities. I predict that we will be consuming about 40 million barrels of oil per day globally by 2035 compared to about 80 million today. I have no idea what the price will be.

^----"We can sustain that population growth (and more) indefinitely. There is no ceiling," I don't know what the ultimate peak human population will be. There are some that say we are near it now, but I just can't say. However, we CANNOT sustain population growth indefinitely. Utimately, humans need food to live. Food comes from plant life, which is based on photosynthesis of sunlight into hydrocarbons. That's the only place food comes from. Agricultural technology has improved the soil to produce more per acre, but you can't get more than 100% of the sun's energy tranformed into food. There is a limit. The peak oil folks think that petroleum is so important that other resources will not be able to make up for the decline in petroleum. The chemicals used in agriculture, for example, come from petroleum. Mechanized farming also depends on petroleum, and irrigation largely depends on petroleum. Whether the ultimate population peak corresponds to peak oil I can't say today. But if you think that population growth can be sustained indefinitely, you're fooling yourself.

"It seems weird there is no mall on the east end. (Harrison or Indiana)" Did you mean west side? Northgate Mall (despite the word "north") is where west-siders shop. In fact, Northgate Mall has a market area as far away as Oxford. For perspective, remember that the west side is less densly populated. Only 20% of the popluation of Hamilton County lives on the west side, and only 5% lives west of the Great Miami River.

^---- I thought rail had a competitive advantage in cold weather because automobiles don't do as well in the snow. In Cincinnati, we get one or two times in a year when we get a snow in rush hour and everybody takes two hours to drive home. Someone always says, "if we had a rail system, we wouldn't have had to sit in traffic for two hours yesterday." Yet, they forget about the experience, until it happens again the next year. Imagine if this happened, say, 50 days out of the year. There would be a lot more incentive to build a rail system.

At one time there was talk of splitting the Cardinal into two routes, each terminating in Cincinnati. They wouldn't necessarily meet in Cincinnati at the same time, so it wouldn't be practical to transfer in Cincinnati. Very few riders passed through Cincinnati anyway.

"A recent study indicated that $400 billion worth of commodities travels across that bridge every year;" Then a 1% toll on commodities would raise about $4 billion a year. Toll the existing bridge. It's the logical alternative. Of course, politics isn't necessarily logical.

^----"I would love to see an effort to move both the Mayor and Council to demand that Amtrak make the "Cardinal" a daily train. You'd get a lot of support in Oxford as well from Miami University." Pardon me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Cardinal doesn't stop in Oxford. The Cardinal suffers from the same congestion problems in Cincinnati that the 3-C would suffer. This is no small task to increase the number of runs for the Cardinal, though it would certainly be more popular if there were more runs.

"I'm curious if you have any examples of companies that actually did this." I do not wish to tell the name of the company here, but I can tell you that in 2008 and 2009 a local company of about 104 employees cut bonuses and perk benefits, then laid off 18 people, then cut health benefits, and then cut salaries / wages to finally get expenses back in line with revenues. Two of the people laid off were friends of mine.

No, no, no! Gasoline is the most versatile fuel. Gasoline powered cars are going to be around as long as gasoline is available. My point was that electric cars will not replace gasoline powered cars without affecting the diesel fuel market. Sorry if I didn't explain that clearly.

Simplistic? I am just pointing out how complex the world is. You can't change one thing without affecting everything else. "It's possibly the most compact, portable, and potent energy source in history." That's exactly what I'm trying to say. There are no true substitutes.