Watching traffic on a busy state highway today, I noticed that virtually every vehicle contained one occupant.

Let's be generous and say that each of those cars and light trucks can travel 30 miles per gallon of fuel, and that each driver weighs 200 lbs. That then would mean that those vehicles are moving a ton 3 miles per gallon of fuel.

Trucks on the farms I work with can move a ton 15-20 miles per gallon.

Railroads can move a ton 480 miles per gallon of fuel, and do so with less pollution, less impact on the environment, and also much more safely.

Why do we waste time entertaining debates about hybrids, about ethanol, about the Prius, whatever that is? Or who in their right mind would see people driving a certain type of car - the SUV - as the problem?

And how absurd and foolish is the "progressive" solution- bikes?

Watching traffic on a busy state highway today, I noticed that virtually every vehicle contained one occupant.

Let's be generous and say that each of those cars and light trucks can travel 30 miles per gallon of fuel, and that each driver weighs 200 lbs. That then would mean that those vehicles are moving a ton 3 miles per gallon of fuel.

Trucks on the farms I work with can move a ton 15-20 miles per gallon.

Railroads can move a ton 480 miles per gallon of fuel, and do so with less pollution, less impact on the environment, and also much more safely.

Why do we waste time entertaining debates about hybrids, about ethanol, about the Prius, whatever that is? Or who in their right mind would see people driving a certain type of car - the SUV - as the problem?

And how absurd and foolish is the "progressive" solution- bikes?

I completely agree with you on this but I'm not sure your example tells the story right. A loaded 18-wheeler carries 80,000 pounds or 40 tons. It gets 5 or 6 miles/gal of diesel fuel. From experience I can tell you that 5 miles/gal is pretty much the floor for traveling in any motor vehicle. The only time I've had a car come close to that was a huge fucking 460 with an extreme oil leak blowing into the air filter. Fully loaded school buses don't do worse than that unless you open the fucker all the way up (although I could see that happening since on some of them the rear-end doesn't let you exceed about 55 mph). Oh and this guy I know floored his Camaro once on a full tank of gas and we were dead empty by the time we got to the gas station a couple miles away lol

Anyway, the big rig example works out to moving 200 tons a mile per gallon I think, so that seems a deceptive figure.

It seems like some of the insanity started when subsidies for train and even air transportation were taken away, making over-the-road transport the most "cost effective". Not that any factoid could tell the whole sordid tale. I also remember reading, I think a link by chlamor, that the US Militray is 1/6 of the world's daily oil consumption. That's pretty staggering.

Anyway, I don't often agree with the Doomers -- not the crazy Rapture folk but the Global Warming/Peak Everything crowd who follow the Malthus line that there's only room for so many aboard "Spaceship Earth" and we about to have a major (human produced) cataclysm. But I do find one point they make hard to get over -- how do you beat back automobile culture? Its not just that so much of our infrastructure is made to accomodate passenger vehicles, its also the freedom afforded by auto movement. I realize thats partly a question of perspective because other countries drive far less than we do, but I still can't quite get around the underlying question. To me its about the same as opposing industrialization. There's nothing socialist about that.

So I don't know

Watching traffic on a busy state highway today, I noticed that virtually every vehicle contained one occupant.

Let's be generous and say that each of those cars and light trucks can travel 30 miles per gallon of fuel, and that each driver weighs 200 lbs. That then would mean that those vehicles are moving a ton 3 miles per gallon of fuel.

Trucks on the farms I work with can move a ton 15-20 miles per gallon.

Railroads can move a ton 480 miles per gallon of fuel, and do so with less pollution, less impact on the environment, and also much more safely.

Why do we waste time entertaining debates about hybrids, about ethanol, about the Prius, whatever that is? Or who in their right mind would see people driving a certain type of car - the SUV - as the problem?

And how absurd and foolish is the "progressive" solution- bikes?

Of course you're right, and it don't take a genius to know that the resistance to mass transit has more to do with class than "inconvience". Had great mass transit where I grew up, 'round here it's awful, minimal, the purpose of which was moving domestic help around...

Here's how they do it in Habana:

http://havanajournal.com/images/gallery/camello-cuba-transportation.jpg

Bikes aren't entirely absurd, in urban settings and for the relatively young, did it for years, but that does not a solution make.

I completely agree with you on this but I'm not sure your example tells the story right. A loaded 18-wheeler carries 80,000 pounds or 40 tons. It gets 5 or 6 miles/gal of diesel fuel. From experience I can tell you that 5 miles/gal is pretty much the floor for traveling in any motor vehicle. The only time I've had a car come close to that was a huge fucking 460 with an extreme oil leak blowing into the air filter. Fully loaded school buses don't do worse than that unless you open the fucker all the way up (although I could see that happening since on some of them the rear-end doesn't let you exceed about 55 mph). Oh and this guy I know floored his Camaro once on a full tank of gas and we were dead empty by the time we got to the gas station a couple miles away lol

Anyway, the big rig example works out to moving 200 tons a mile per gallon I think, so that seems a deceptive figure.

It seems like some of the insanity started when subsidies for train and even air transportation were taken away, making over-the-road transport the most "cost effective". Not that any factoid could tell the whole sordid tale. I also remember reading, I think a link by chlamor, that the US Militray is 1/6 of the world's daily oil consumption. That's pretty staggering.

Anyway, I don't often agree with the Doomers -- not the crazy Rapture folk but the Global Warming/Peak Everything crowd who follow the Malthus line that there's only room for so many aboard "Spaceship Earth" and we about to have a major (human produced) cataclysm. But I do find one point they make hard to get over -- how do you beat back automobile culture? Its not just that so much of our infrastructure is made to accomodate passenger vehicles, its also the freedom afforded by auto movement. I realize thats partly a question of perspective because other countries drive far less than we do, but I still can't quite get around the underlying question. To me its about the same as opposing industrialization. There's nothing socialist about that.

So I don't know

You missed it. If it takes 10 cars to move ten people, that is a ton. That is 30 mpg divided by ten = 3 miles per gallon to move one ton.

Yes, under optimum conditions, if all truck freight moved by semis running at highway speeds, we can approach perhaps half of the fuel efficiency of rail transit.

"Freedom afforded by auto movement" is a complete illusion, kid. Seeing automobile transportation as progress, and opposition to it as Luddite, is unsupportable.

This is "ennui" I chide you for, and that you deny. You don't have a position, or a carefully thought out opinion, you have a wet blanket for everything. You see your job as making sure that no discussions can be productive, that all must feel helpless and depressed, that all statements that anyone makes have an equal "on the other hand" counter statement, so that we must always be in stasis, in balance, in complete and utter acceptance of unexamined assumptions.

You need to get a job as a MSM reporter so you can get paid for this "two equal sides to all issues" bullshit.

"Freedom afforded by auto movement" is a complete illusion, kid.

Case in point: DETROIT.

Public transportation sucks - even in comparison to other US cities. There is a very limited, very bad bus system. No rail (the People Mover doesn't count). If you don't have a car, you can't get anywhere. If you live in the city, and you are poor, you are screwed. People commute FROM the city TO the suburbs for jobs because Detroit is so empty. If you don't have a car, you can't get a job. If you don't have a job, you can't get a car.

There is no freedom in that.

Thanks Mike, I appreciate the honesty.

I have to tell you the truth, I'm laughing. I've always been pretty thickheaded, you can ask anyone on that, and, next to the "chestnuts", new information takes the most time to think through.

Without being smug, in five years I think we'll see eye to eye on this particular topic, its pregnant in what you write. Not here or now but soon. Maybe down the road even a dummy like me can help.

You're the ultimate contrarian Mike, and I can't help but smile.

Thanks Mike, I appreciate the honesty.

I have to tell you the truth, I'm laughing. I've always been pretty thickheaded, you can ask anyone on that, and, next to the "chestnuts", new information takes the most time to think through.

Without being smug, in five years I think we'll see eye to eye on this particular topic, its pregnant in what you write. Not here or now but soon. Maybe down the road even a dummy like me can help.

You're the ultimate contrarian Mike, and I can't help but smile.

I appreciate you being such a good foil.

Kid, just how much higher education do you have? I ask because this "on the other hand" stuff, where no one can say anything, no one can have any passion, nothing can ever be said without qualification reminds me of some academics I know. That is what higher education is intended to do - intellectually paralyze people so they can never say anything that might challenge the status quo.

of the automobile is 4.7 mph.

Case in point: DETROIT.

Public transportation sucks - even in comparison to other US cities. There is a very limited, very bad bus system. No rail (the People Mover doesn't count). If you don't have a car, you can't get anywhere. If you live in the city, and you are poor, you are screwed. People commute FROM the city TO the suburbs for jobs because Detroit is so empty. If you don't have a car, you can't get a job. If you don't have a job, you can't get a car.

There is no freedom in that.

When I was like 12 or 13 we walked a quarter of a mile to public transportation and could affordably - on paper route, lawn mowing and snow shoveling money - go anywhere in the country, let alone the city. Downtown in 20 minutes, walk from the train station downtown to anything in the city. And this was after the demise of the streetcars - thanks to GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone secretly buying them and dismantling the system - and long after the demise of interurban cars.

Going up north? Get on a sleeping car on Friday evening, wake up in Petoskey where you were met by a cab and taken to your hotel, and everything again was with in easy reach. Get on a sleeping car Sunday night in Petoskey, that car would be picked up by the through train in the middle of the night, wake up in Detroit and walk to work or home.

Michigan Central station on Grand River - one of three major rail stations in Detroit - was a 24 hour a day beehive, with trains leaving every few minutes for New York via Toledo and also through Canada to Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago by way of Ann Arbor, Jackson, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, trains to Grand Rapids and Flint and Saginaw, trains to Mackinaw City and Traverse City, to Wisconsin by way of rail ferries from Frankfort and Ludington and Grand Haven ports on Lake Michigan, trains to Toronto and Montreal and on and on.

No car payments, no insurance, no being stopped by the cops, no traffic, no parking, no accidents, no gas, no breakdowns.