And here’s what might be most shocking–despite being saddled with the costs and responsibilities of being the largest private pension and health insurance provider in the world, GM has made clever and key investments that deserve fulfillment. Yes, I’m talking about an American car-maker; hear me out.

Nevermind the now-defunct EV-1–the first modern mass-produced electric car. GM’s heavy-duty hybrid technology would be far more revolutionary than Toyota’s.

The Toyota technology can only be applied to smaller, lighter vehicles–topping out at perhaps the Highlander SUV. Such vehicles are only suited to commuting. In contrast, GM’s technology (developed with BMW and Chrysler) can be applied to huge vehicles–pickups, commercial trucks, and buses.

Why is the GM technology superior? The efficiency gains from hybrid technology are vastly larger in big vehicles. A Prius has only about a 20% gain in operating efficiency, compared to a similarly sized and shaped car. In contrast, the improvement for a full-sized pickup is more like 200-250%.

The Prius, in many instances, is replaceable; bicycles for short trips, mass transit for basic travel. Commute-shmommute; abandoning those cars will give us greater gains than switching to slightly better engines. But those larger vehicles, their tasks are still imperative.

Even if you buy into the environmentally clean car commute bullshit, GM’s approach here is objectively better than anyone else. The Chevy Volt drives its wheels only with electric motors, supplementing the energy stored in a modest battery pack with a gasoline-fired electric generator.

Electric motors produce all their torque right from the start–obviating the need for any sort of energy-sapping transmission system, particularly the ornate sort required when both gas and electric motors are driving the wheels. The small battery pack is sufficient in capacity for the vast majority of trips taken by people with these sorts of cars. The vast majority of energy in vehicle is stored as liquid fuel–that is more weight, space and energy efficient than batteries will ever be. And, since the gas-fired motor is only attached to a generator, it can always operate at its optimal speed using only fixed gearing. The whole package uses each part to its maximal advantage, while being overall simpler than the Prius-hybrid approach. If people are going to continue to commute by car, and live in sprawl, this is the better approach.

East Aloha street is the city’s designated route for cyclists to get East and West across Northern Capitol Hill.

Roll that in your mind, if you’re prone to think the Critical Mass people were asking for it. “The driver was in his right to run over, by accident or intent, several bicyclists. They were blocking Aloha–the major car route across North Capitol hill. The cyclists were intentionally blocking his way. And, he had dinner reservations!”

East Aloha street is totally insane as a bicycle route. It’s narrow, barely wide enough for two cars let alone cars and cyclists. Cars are idiodically street parked along the length–half on the grass, half on the street. (The self-centered jackasses who park their cars on Aloha deserve to have their cars sideswiped more often.) The road twists and turns, ramps up and down, with terrible sight lines. Cars, particularly those seeking a rapid zip across the hill, naturally gravitate to this street compared to those North and South of it. Nobody should use it as a bicycle route. East Mercer street, East Republican street or East Harrison street are all better choices, despite being broken up and littered with shitty drivers driving way to fast for narrow residential streets.

The City tells you, as a potential cyclist, to use East Aloha street as your route of choice–via the Seattle Bicycling Guide Map, a delightful service of the Seattle Department of Transportation. The document pretty much epitomizes the City’s contempt for cyclists–on the part of the police, the drivers, the transportation department and the government. East Aloha street is designated the same as 12th Ave East, an excellent cyclist route.

Let’s say you’re a decent, law abiding person citizen of Seattle who wishes to start commuting by bicycle–perhaps because gas, car payments and insurance have become too expensive to afford, because you’re sick of being complicit in our increasingly disasterous oil wars, because you’re sick of being out of shape and on the way to obese, or simply because you want to. You get a sturdy bicycle (with gears and strong brakes), a helmet, a light and rigorously follow all laws–laws you’ve read about in the City’s guide. You plan your route using the City’s suggestions and end up on East Aloha street as a result. Mr. I-have-a-dinner-reservation comes barreling up behind you. He attempts a crazy pass on a blind curve. (Aloha is all blind curves.) A car is coming the other direction, he didn’t see. He hits you, slamming you to the ground. He has a dinner reservation. He keeps going. You’re left bleeding on the street. You call the police. They laugh at you. You don’t have insurance–or your insurance refuses to pay, since you cannot name who hit you–so you collect your smashed bicycle and go home and hope your injuries don’t take a turn for the worse.

What a fucking joke. I don’t care how obnoxious and idiotic a cyclist is acting–if every stop sign is ignored, if every law is flaunted, if he or she is on the most idiotic street imaginable (Westlake, the Ballard Bridge, Fairview, Rainier all included.) If you are operating a motor vehicle of any kind, you simply have no right to run the person down or even attempt to run the person off the road, to assault or even attempt to assult another human being because you find yourself inconvenienced by a situation. And, let’s be honest: Even with the most heinous of cyclist behavior, the inconvenience is never more than minor. Nobody has the right to exact a death penalty. Whine, complain, bitch all you want. You are in the wrong for even threatening the act.

Driving is the single most dangerous thing we do, the most dangerous to ourselves and to others. When you get inside all those thousands of pounds of glass and steel and start moving, you are at your highest risk of causing devastating physical harm to yourself and others. Driving is a massive assumption of responsibility. Most of us take about as seriously as flossing. The massive effort taken to make the transportation infrastructure as safe as possible–for drivers–is the only reason more aren’t harmed each year.

I both drive and bicycle in Seattle. I’ve been incredibly frustrated by the decisions and behaviors of some cyclists. Nothing comes close to the raw fear I’ve felt as a cyclists facing an insane and incompetent driver. As a cyclist, I want to live. I follow every rule, wear every light, stop at every stop, never pass on the right, take the safest routes at off times of day. Despite this, I’ve been assaulted and left to bleed or die by such inept drivers, without an apparent care. Nobody deserves such treatment. Yet our City’s transportation engineers, law enforcement and politicians view the inconveniencing of a driver, any driver, as justification enough.

As a driver, I long for better infrastructure: Proper cyclist routes, with designated lanes and clear markings. Police that are as interested in the safety of the cyclists as the convenience of drivers. I’d be happier. The cyclists would be happier. The entire city would function better.

And so, “pro-cyclist” activism like Critical Mass doesn’t impress me. Creating “awareness” has done nothing to get such an infrastructure in place. The clot of cyclists on East Aloha street this Friday, on a route that shouldn’t be used by any cyclist at any time, did nothing to make my riding across Capitol Hill safer or more convinient–as a cyclists or a driver. Rather than dozens of cyclists in spandex on every first Friday of the month, I’d be far more impressed by four guys and gals in suits, down at city hall every day, demanding the only sensible thing: A proper infrastructure to match how our roads are used, and should be used.

The insanity of shipping even the cheapest goods around the planet, to save a little on labor costs, is finally being recognized as insane:

As the cost of shipping continues to soar along with fuel prices, homegrown manufacturing jobs are making a comeback after decades of decline. While it once cost $3,000 to ship a container from a city like Shanghai to New York, it now costs $8,000, prompting some businesses to look closer to home for manufacturing needs…

The rise in transportation costs are fueling what some economists are calling “reverse globalization.” For instance, DESA, a company that makes heaters to keep football players warm, is moving all its production back to Kentucky after years of having them made in China.

“Cheap labor in China doesn’t help you when you gotta pay so much to bring the goods over,” says economist Jeff Rubin.

Some local manufacturers have suddenly found themselves in the thick of boom times.

(ABC news)

And, according to the New York Times, this spells the end of the exurb:

Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas….
Across the nation, the realization is taking hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a change with lasting consequences. The shift to costlier fuel is threatening to slow the decades-old migration away from cities, while exacerbating the housing downturn by diminishing the appeal of larger homes set far from urban jobs.

Seattle Bubble disagrees:

Pretty much any way you slice it, the higher cost of housing close-in far outweighs any financial benefits you get by cutting your commute. Run the numbers for any pair of far-flung vs. close-in cities around Seattle and you’ll find the same thing.

By comparison, if that same family stayed in Marysville but sold their 20 MPG car and bought a used Prius that gets 45 MPG, they save nearly $200 a month (at $5/gallon), while the upgrade only cost about $10,000 up front. Heck, they could probably trade straight across for a used Saturn that gets 30 MPG and still save over $115 a month.

The picture is slightly better for first-time home buyers, since they’re comparing both locations at today’s prices, but it’s still not a financial win to go close-in. A potential first-time buyer with a downtown commute looking at putting $20,000 down on an average home in Marysville can expect to spend $2,400 on PITI + commute, vs. $2,850 in Shoreline. With $50,000 down it’s $2,230 vs. $2,780. That’s still $450-$550 a month more to live close-in, with the high cost of housing more than negating their gas savings.

While I like Seattle Bubble’s analysis, I must disagree with conclusion. The relative energy impact of living in an exurb goes far beyond the gas needed to putter out an additional ten or twenty miles each way, each day.

Consider how errands are done in the ‘burbs relative to an urban setting–trips to the bank, the grocery store, the bar, the movie theater, the daycare center and so on. Moving closer to the city center often means moving into a denser, more walkable neighborhood–where these resources are right at hand rather than miles down the road. If you can walk to your bank and your grocery store, you’re piling on the savings far beyond having a shorter commute each day.

Next consider the vastly higher energy costs to heat and cool an isolated structure, the energy and chemicals needed to maintain a vast lawn. Distributing utilities to widely dispersed homes is also costly–requiring more water pumps, more sewers to maintain, more garbage trucks driving more miles and more transmission losses on the sprawling network of electrical wires. Even when the homeowner is shielded from these costs, they still exist.

Driving until you qualify remains a false economy. By focusing on the costs of the commute, we miss the bigger costs of living in low-density sprawl. This is not to say we all must live in the very urban core of the biggest and most expensive cities. Well designed mass transit systems, like Metra in the Chicago area, allow this sort of density to form in smaller communities. All of this makes me want to say “I told you so” to those who killed the monorail and the light rail expansion.

After road proponents realized they didn’t have voter support for a stand-alone roads package (a major roads-expansion proposal died at the polls in 2002), legislators in Olympia linked roads expansion to light rail. This proposal is an attempt to use urban voters to pass a suburban agenda. Rather than letting compromised politicians tell us what’s possible, the people should tell the leaders what’s needed: more light rail without massive roads expansion. It’s time to flex some urban muscle. Seattle voters shouldn’t have to fund roads on the Eastside in order to get light rail.

But by voting No on 50 miles of new transit, wouldn’t Seattle’s pro-transit voting bloc be cutting its nose to spite its face? No. By unwisely voting Yes on 182 miles of new roads, including four new lanes on I-405 to accommodate an extra 40,000 cars a day, they would be.
…
The biggest [road] investments in the package include a massive expansion of a suburban freeway (I-405), new connections between sprawling exurbs and an already overtaxed I-5 (SRs 509 and 167), and a highway that will serve sprawl and pave over some of the last remaining oak prairie in Western Washington (the still-on-the-table cross-base highway.)

(emphasis added.)

It’s a tempting and persuasive argument. Global warming will likely have severe concequences for hydropower-dependent Northwest economy; the last thing we need is more cars, more drivers and more pavement. Transit is likely to become ever more popular. Why not wait for a better package, one free of the knife-to-the-neck road building?

Transportation networks–whether freeways or mass transit–are a form of communication, directing people and companies how and where of the region.

Look at a current-day map of Puget Sound. Aside from the truly heinous (and killable) cross-base highway, all of this roadway expansion won’t really change the highway map of the region. Yes, there will be more lanes and far to few HOV lanes among them. But, the new lanes will soon become just as clogged as the existing roadways. The mental map of the region won’t change much for committed automobile commuters. It will still suck to cross the lake, to drive North to South or East to West. A long distance commute will remain totally unpredictable, with some days taking hours and some minutes. Gas prices, secondary to increased demand and a weakening dollar, will continue to increase. Regardless if this road capacity is built or not, the SOV drivers remain the suckers of the region.

(And don’t give me the drive-until-you-qualify, roads are pro-poor people argument. I’m a graduate student, earning about half of the median income for the region. I still manage to live within walking or distance of my bank, grocery store, movie theater, dinner out and employment–in a huge, quiet place with a view no less. It can be done. Move on.)

Look at the map again, overlaying this time the proposed expansion for light rail from this package. Imagine a line extending from South from Tacoma, winding (basically as a subway) through the heart of Seattle, through Capitol Hill and the University finally ending at almost Everett in the North. A second branch splits over I-90, snaking through Bellevue to end in Redmond. This is a revolutionary addition to Puget Sound, an utterly different way of thinking about Seattle and the surroundings–a new way of connecting the urban, suburban and exurban subregions into a cohesive whole.

The wise people moving to and living around Puget Sound will think of our region as an idealized transit map, just as the wise people picture New York City, Chicago, Boston, the Bay Area, or Washington DC not as a mixing bowl of clogged freeways, but rather an interconnected web of reliable mass transit stops. If your serious about sustaining an economic region, people must have a way of getting to and from reliably; only mass transit accomplishes this.

Yes, the tax is both regressive and so paltry it slows the construction schedule to a crawl. I’m not convinced if Prop 1 goes down, a proper transit package will be put forth anytime soon; the experience with the monorail project is too fresh in my mind, in which the good was killed for an unachievable ideal.

Yes, roads are stapled along for the ride. Roads, as their proponents are apt to point out, are endlessly flexible. A new coat of paint and some signs can convert a SOV lane into an HOV lane, or a bus only lane. Tolls and congestion pricing are a mere stroke of the pen away. A carbon tax can be slapped on with no change to the pavement at all. If we are to flex our urban voting muscle, let’s do these things. The time to fight Prop 1 was back when roads and transit were first smashed together. We lost. Let’s fight the next fights that we can win.

For the idealized transit map of Puget Sound–with big brightly-colored lines connecting the region from Tacoma to Everett, the ferry dock to Redmond–I’m voting yes on Prop 1.