California port truckers ‘drowning’ in supply chain inefficiencies
freightwaves.com
freightwaves.com
Will this happen with the supply chain problems that we've had this year? For how long?
Both commonly happen after supply chain disruptions. Bullwhip effect happens over the entire chain, while group velocity happens on a single stage of it.
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.
Bring back inventory.
That's a really good way of putting it.
Rapidly increasing your stockpile size as a response to shortages is what worsens things.
So it's actually a lot more analogous than you'd think.
- 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.
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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Calories_per_acre_for_vari...
https://www.quora.com/What-crop-including-tree-crops-produce...
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.
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.
Also why efficient mass transport (eg new bullet train lines) are too costly to build in USA.
Invest the earnings from a carbon tax in carbon-negative projects (such as renewable energy), and you've got a win-win situation.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 efficient. Any claim to the contrary is an extraordinary one, and requires extraordinary evidence.
It can't be explained away with fossil fuel externalities, because it's been going on since before fossil fuels.
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.
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..
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.
Why not?
Sea freight is massively efficient per unit/distance. So it is no wonder it is cheap.
The high density region of cars is moving backwards.
> “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.
That's one way to solve the problem.
The supply chain is so lean that there's no buffer space along the way. The ports end up as the buffering zone.
I'm by no means expert in logistics, but that's the first idea that popped into my mind.
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.
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.
It does seem like long haul trucking is overrepresented in our logistics chain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As for the last mile:
1. train rolls into freight yard
2. crane lifts container off of rail car
3. crane puts container onto last mile truck
4. truck drives last mile
1. truck drives onto flat car
2. train goes long haul
3. truck drives off flat car
4. truck drives last mile
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.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/DTTX_724...
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.
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
Rail is paid for by the rail traffic.
Hence the gross distortion of financial incentives.
As for why it is inefficient:
1. one truck driver per load vs one train driver per 50 (or whatever) loads
2. one engine per load vs one engine per 50 loads
3. steel wheels are far more efficient than tires
4. no rubber dust pollution from steel wheels
5. truck damage to freeways is enormous, but is not paid by trucks. rail is built to handle heavy loads, and is much easier/cheaper to maintain
6. trains are far more fuel efficient per load than trucks
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.
Take a look at this chart:
https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
and this article
https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa...
From the article:
"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.
I am very skeptical of this. If this is true, it makes rail the only transit mode not subsidized by the government. Do you have a source for this?
In fact, railroads pay property taxes in some states, so they actually bear even more cost than competing modes of transportation.
> 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.
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.
It would take either another port opening, or logistics companies suing the ports to force them to hire more workers.
He said union-free, not automated.
It's right there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
The question was why they stay on the road when they're not delivering someone. If the issue isn't lack of parking, what is it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Progressives building trains that sit in traffic is very expensive virtue signalling as far as I am concerned.
Your description is apt for the South Lake Union Streetcar, though.
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.
Try not to dismiss ideas so quickly as "virtue signalling" without an understanding of what they accomplish
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.
- Short, local travel where large scale transport services don’t make sense, and
- As a mediocre stop gap measure to make up for lacking infrastructure.
The idea that busses go on the highway in Seattle is appalling
Agree that you can move many more people on one set of rails than one highway, but it's not unlimited.
1. Do not know how other countries work. A lot of stuff seems far fetched until you learn about about the places where it already happens.
2. Don't know much history so essentialize the last 50 years as the way it always ways (similar to 1)
3. Believe in "monotonically of virtue": i.e. that various compromises and half-measures at least deliver half the value.
4. Lack a sense of a urgency, or have faith that "at the end of the day, American institutions are good will work it out".
5. Might be more "idealist than materialist".
But our ruthlessly individual mindset here in the states blocks us from reaching many of these higher level goals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I understand this point? For one, if anything there's a clear preference for cars as the default mode of transportation.
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.
If Seattle never build another freeway, but keeps building trains and bus rapid transit we'll come out WAY ahead.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I think you need to combine realistic freeway growth with other growth limits to restrict sprawl or, you're right, you become SLC/PHX/etc.
The famed light rail is supposed to reach Issaquah (from Seattle) in 2041. That's if everything goes according to plan.
Even when staying there, let’s say Woodinville or Kirkland. Driving to Bellevue or Redmond let alone Seattle sucks worse than those.
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 also requires dense living.
Remove all COVID-era restrictions from schools, workplaces, and transport, and systems will go back to functioning normally.
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.
Try different masks, different styles. There's several different patterns for masks and finding the right one for your face helps a lot.
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.
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.
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.
You clearly haven't used KC Metro. (Though like this thread is pointing out, not exactly their fault we don't give them dedicated lanes).
I learned to build in huge volatility for travel times, having a car was incomparably more convenient than relying on buses.
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.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/chariot-private-bus-startup... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_Transit
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.
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?
But, there’s infrastructure to support it - parking & HOV lanes.
> 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).
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.
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.
https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/samtrans-ondemand-...
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).
[0] https://www.translink.ca/rider-guide/transit-accessibility/h...
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 Sweden, it's been privatized for quite a while (since the 1990s) with substantial cost savings and service improvements. See https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2010/03/03/in_socialist_s...
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.
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.
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.
I live in a NW Seattle neighborhood that doesn’t even have sidewalks that you could walk to get to the school if you wanted.
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.
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.
I always assumed truckers took mandatory breaks during rush hour. Here in Charlotte, traffic is minimal except during rush hour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Boston Dynamics has built droids capable of handling cargo.[1][2][3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7v8ZUq16F4
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkv-_LqTeQA
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?
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.
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.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2uFoP12ksE
(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.)
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