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http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_annual_report/2010/html/chapter_01/chapter_01_04.html

Doesn't look like "in droves"

U.S. airlines carried 0.5 percent more domestic passengers and 4.9 percent more international passengers in the first 7 months of 2010 than during the same period in 2009. This was a reversal of 2009, when total (domestic and international) enplanements dropped 7.2 percent from the first 7 months of 2008

While total passengers were up in 2010, the number of domestic flights was down 2.1 percent for the first 7 months. Increased passenger-miles flown coupled with fewer available seat-miles produced an all-time airline industry high average load factor of 82.3 percent, up from 81.0 percent during the same period in 2009.

Looks like 2009 was off 2% from 2004. That's as far back as that webpage goes.

The US Bureau of Transportation Statistics actually keeps track of these things. It looks like ridership peaked in July of 2007 and has been dropping off slightly since. But that suggests that it's more tied to the fact that people aren't flying for leisure as much, probably because they're broke than due to any TSA stupidity.

Airlines are also really getting burned by the speculation in the crude oil markets that have been driving gas and other fuel prices through the roof.

You compared REVENUE to PROFIT. Not the same thing. Oil companies profit on the sale of gas. The government spends more money building roads than it gets in gas taxes, so it's operating at a LOSS.

Since the oil companies can't make any money on gas unless the government builds and maintains roads, the government should increase gas taxes until road spending is paid for. Alternatively, the government could also put a special tax on oil company profits so that the government is no longer subsidizing the oil company's business.

Apparently, the Federal Government makes more money on fuel and excise taxes than it spends on roads. It's only when you factor in the subsidies for trains, buses and (slightly) planes that the total spending increases more than revenues collected. On the whole, though, taxes on highway use - at least at the Federal level - are the net money-maker for the Government.

    The fuel tax already covers that nicely. Truckers are using the most expensive fuel. According to the US Department of Energy, both gasoline and diesel are taxed at 12% average. The average cost of regular gasoline is $3.56/gal. The average cost of diesel is $3.91/gal.

    According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (in 2008 numbers), the average passenger car gets 22.6mpg, and the average other 2 and 4 wheel vehicle (motorcycles, passenger trucks and SUVs) get 18.1mpg. That's average, everyone will claim "mine gets [higher|lower]".

    A tractor/trailer rig gets 10mpg unloaded, or about 5 to 7mpg fully loaded. so, on a hypothetically average trip of exactly 1,000 miles, and equally average driving conditions for all involved...

    Avg passenger car: Fuel: 45 gallons. Cost: $160.20 Tax: $19.22

    Avg tractor/trailer Fuel: 167 gallons. Cost: $652.97 Tax: $78.36

    And lets address his complaint of "In fact the (highway) road damage of one 18-wheeler is equivalent to at least 9600 cars", lets consider what the car to truck ratio is...

    Again, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2000 (the last year this report shows any numbers), there were 133,621,420 passenger cars, 4,346,068 motorcycles, 79,084,979 passenger trucks and SUV's, and 5,926,030 other 2 axle vehicles.

    So, 222,978,497 2 axle vehicles, and 2,096,619 truck/trailer combination. So 106 cars for every truck on the road. Consider that those heavy trucks spend far more miles on common routes, (i.e., interstates, state highways, etc) than on the sprawling local roads and community streets. You'll see that it doesn't matter much that they do 9600:1 damage to the highway, they are likely only driving on a very very small percentage of the overall roadways. They only have to repave an interstate once and it's repaired, so the cumulative effect does not equal a 9600:1 burden on the overall paved streets across the country.

    Consider your own neighborhood. How many cars drive past your house for every heavy truck. The number probably becomes tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to one truck.

    But don't let factual statistics get in the way of cherry picking numbers to scream about the awful blight of the heavy truck. :)

    The fuel tax already covers that nicely. Truckers are using the most expensive fuel. According to the US Department of Energy, both gasoline and diesel are taxed at 12% average. The average cost of regular gasoline is $3.56/gal. The average cost of diesel is $3.91/gal.

    According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (in 2008 numbers), the average passenger car gets 22.6mpg, and the average other 2 and 4 wheel vehicle (motorcycles, passenger trucks and SUVs) get 18.1mpg. That's average, everyone will claim "mine gets [higher|lower]".

    A tractor/trailer rig gets 10mpg unloaded, or about 5 to 7mpg fully loaded. so, on a hypothetically average trip of exactly 1,000 miles, and equally average driving conditions for all involved...

    Avg passenger car: Fuel: 45 gallons. Cost: $160.20 Tax: $19.22

    Avg tractor/trailer Fuel: 167 gallons. Cost: $652.97 Tax: $78.36

    And lets address his complaint of "In fact the (highway) road damage of one 18-wheeler is equivalent to at least 9600 cars", lets consider what the car to truck ratio is...

    Again, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2000 (the last year this report shows any numbers), there were 133,621,420 passenger cars, 4,346,068 motorcycles, 79,084,979 passenger trucks and SUV's, and 5,926,030 other 2 axle vehicles.

    So, 222,978,497 2 axle vehicles, and 2,096,619 truck/trailer combination. So 106 cars for every truck on the road. Consider that those heavy trucks spend far more miles on common routes, (i.e., interstates, state highways, etc) than on the sprawling local roads and community streets. You'll see that it doesn't matter much that they do 9600:1 damage to the highway, they are likely only driving on a very very small percentage of the overall roadways. They only have to repave an interstate once and it's repaired, so the cumulative effect does not equal a 9600:1 burden on the overall paved streets across the country.

    Consider your own neighborhood. How many cars drive past your house for every heavy truck. The number probably becomes tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to one truck.

    But don't let factual statistics get in the way of cherry picking numbers to scream about the awful blight of the heavy truck. :)

In fact the (highway) road damage of one 18-wheeler is equivalent to at least 9600 cars:

http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf

Since there are approximately 2 million heavy trucks in the US although not 18 wheelers all of them I would expect them to dominate the road wear (if we assumed unrealistically that they were all 18 wheelers the road wear would correspond to approximately 20 billion cars).

http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_annual_report/2005/html/chapter_02/highway_trucks_by_weight.html

Yeah, okay. The Tesla would be horrible if you're going to do a road trip in excess of its range. You're right, Tesla has no defense for that.

The thing is, you just don't need that sort of range for everyday use. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average American travels only 29 miles a day. Even at the 55 mile range, that's almost twice as much as is needed.

One of my good friends (and a lot of his friends) are really, really into cars. He's barely 30 and he's been through almost 20 cars - buying, building, rebuilding, tuning, trading, etc. At any one point, he has always owned two cars. No racer or car enthusiast worth their salt would take a drift car, rally car, or racing car out on the street for every day use. Hell, on a drift car alone, you have (expensive) custom suspension work, high quality tires, and perhaps even a custom ECU. Right now, my buddy owns a Skyline R32 and a '86 Corolla. The R32 is on the road maybe an hour a week at most. The '86 is his Daily (the term they use for their everyday use cars).

Would it be a good idea to take a Viper or a Ferrari grocery shopping? Come on now.

Electric cars will not be the be-all, end-all for at least 10 years. However, they will make fantastic daily cars. If you want to take a long-term trip, then you could rent or borrow a regular gasoline-powered vehicle. Actually, that might not even be necessary, considering a study shows that the average American household owns 2.28 cars. You could very easily have one electric and one gasoline car and you'd still be doing a lot to help the environment.

How many road trips or long car drives have involved both cars the average family owns? Typically they'd take the minivan or van or what have you for maximum passenger capacity and cargo storage. Ditto on grocery shopping.

If Tesla had the money to advertise, I think perhaps they should go with an appeal to the facts. After all I've said here, can anyone give me a good reason why owning an electric car with at least a 50 mile range on a day's charge would be a bad idea?

The navigational equipment should be designed so it is tolerant of this sort of interference.

Perhaps it will be going forward. However the average age of an aircraft you fly in today is probably in the neighborhood of 11 to 12 years old. Which means the designs for these planes are even older. Since WiFi wasn't very common (if it was at the consumer level in some cases)when the current planes were designed, it's a little silly to state the current fleet should be designed to be tolerant of it.

Maybe it will be possible to retrofit active designs in the future, but I'd guess the cost involved will be extremely prohibitive. I'd also guess even if they could retrofit all current aircraft, the testing that would be required before doing so would take years.

For instance, if America could get the national momentum to develop a truly high speed rail system, not that wannabe crap that got passed in California a year or two ago, that would show that we could overcome the bureaucratic, legal, and technical challenges that high-power, high-cost, high-risk projects tend to run into.

I ran across a phrase recently that describes my opinion about large projects like this. You can't steal a million from a million. In other words, you need a big public works project, if you want to steal a lot of money from it. I think a publicly funded space tether would be just as much a boondoggle for the US as a nation-wide high speed rail system today.

If one looks at the high speed rail, it doesn't fill an impressive role. Timewise, it covers distances too long for car and too short for plane. Merely improving those means of transportation (for example, a much faster airport check in and security screening procedure or tolls on congested artery roads) would close up that gap.

Nor is it going to be cheap. Glancing around it looks like the average cost per mile of track will be at least $50 million (and IMHO closer to $100 million per mile). In comparison, a 4 lane freeway in rural areas seems to cost up to $20 million per mile. I think there's far more mileage to be gained from merely improving existing transportation infrastructure.

There's no indication of demand for high speed rail. Amtrak would place somewhere in the bottom ten airlines by revenue passenger mile, if it were an airline.

It doesn't add anything to existing transportation networks. Amtrak had this cool idea of moving cars by rail. That seems pretty popular. But it doesn't require high speed trains in order to work.

While I've beat up on high speed trains, I imagine the same absence of practicality, high cost, and very similar problems would infect any public space tether project.

Finally, the US has a long history of underperforming public transportation projects. Sure, I bet it's the bureaucratic, legal, and technical challenges. But most of all, I think it's the reality challenge. Sure, we could waste a few tens of billions of dollars to find out that not only couldn't we pass those hurdles you mention (since that would never be the intention of the thieves who sponsor high speed rail, a space tether, whatever), but that the resulting product would never be worth what we put in, even if everything had gone along smoothly.

Please use links. This USDOT source says that Amtrak gets about 70 p-m/gal, after you do the conversion. http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_26a.html

This is an important highlight because it confirms once again that power generation is a larger portion of the CO2 emission "pie" than that emitted by vehicles. So when folks talk about our need to implement CAFE or gas taxes etc in order to reduce CO2 emissions, I will continue to call it mis-direction and/or flat-out mindless drivel. Focus on the coal plants before you come after automobiles on this issue.

I'll still listen you folks about OTHER reasons such as sending flaws inherent in sending cash to despotic regions for oil... or other pollutants... but CO2-crazies: STFU.

You are factually wrong regarding small cars.

I dont have a ton of time to dig up a full set of stats, but this is from the linked website

"In the United States, fatalities have increased slightly from 40,716 in 1994 to 42,884 in 2003. However, in terms of fatalities per 100 million miles driven, the fatality rate has dropped 16% between 1995 and 2005. Injuries dropped 37% over the same period. (National Traffic Safety Administration, 2006). Fatalities for those aged 16 and older show 55% of 2006 were unrestrained by seat belts and similar devices.[35]"

http://sites.google.com/site/freeautoaccidenthelp/death-and-injury-statistics-regarding-auto-accident-in-the-us

Here is moe from the BTS, there is no /mile driven stat but you can see the total statshave been fairly flat despite a massive increase in populaiton and distance driven.

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2002/html/table_02_01.html

There is more wrong in your post, but I dont have time to point it out. Long story short, bad info bad opinions.

This article is from 2007, but it points toward a price drop of around $42 after 9/11 domestically:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19982800/ns/travel-news

To fill in the gap from 2007 to 2010, look no farther than the front page of the Bureau of Transportation Statistics:

http://www.bts.gov/

Choose "Air Fares" under Year to Year Change, and you'll see that prices have been up and down, but about flat in general.

The average MPG in 2003 was 22.2MPG. In 2009 it was 22.6.

So evidently there's something wrong with you.

Sorry about this. Math mistake made here.

Newer, better data from here.

Commuter rail: 124 deaths/11049 million miles = 1.12 deaths per 100 million passenger miles

This is for a direct comparison. I'll look for other types.

That's what Black Gold Alchemist wrote, and he's misunderstood the source he's quoting from.

Read it for yourself if you refuse to believe me.

In the UK for 2006 (latest I can find with numbers rather than graphs here):

2.5 car deaths per billion passenger km (i.e. terametre, Tm)
0.1 rail deaths per passenger Tm
(and 31 / cyclist Tm , 36 / pedestrian Tm -- less car use would also reduce these. More rail could increase deaths from people jumping barriers at level crossings, or maybe reduce them if trains are more frequent so people know the risk is higher?)

US in passenger Tm:
4.9 car deaths per passenger Tm (0.79/0.161) ...and the rail figure isn't comparable. See the note in the table "A Train-mile is the movement of a train (which can consist of many cars) the distance of 1 mile. A Train-mile differs from a vehicle-mile, which is the movement of 1 car (vehicle) the distance of 1 mile. A 10-car (vehicle) train traveling 1 mile would be measured as 1 Train-mile and 10 vehicle-miles. Caution should be used when comparing Train-miles to vehicle miles."

2 train fatalities in 2006 from the table you linked. I don't know which kind of rail journeys (from here) that includes -- perhaps just Amtrak? Amtrak provided 54.1 hundred million passenger miles in 2006, which comes to 0.2 deaths per passenger Tm.

In this country, 0.79 fatalities per 100 million car passenger mile in 2008 (year used for car comparisons because it is the latest with complete data), and 2.2 fatalities per 100 million train passenger miles in the year 2006, the lowest year. Switching to trains could grow the figure to over 90000 people per year. More people die of flu and cold than of cars. What country, are you in?

If people could compare their car's economy to vehicles from the 80's, they would plainly see just how inefficient their vehicles are.

Yeah, right. Oh, the Horror!

That's a nice thought, but in reality motorcycle are by far the most dangerous form of transport.

Measured per 100 million vehicle-miles,
cars have 1.2 fatalities
light trucks have 1.2 fatalities
large trucks have 0.3 fatalities
motorcycles have 38.4 fatalities

source

I don't expect anybody to read this as Slashdot articles grow exponentially in comments each hour but...

The price of petrol in London is about 116 pence per liter http://www.whatprice.co.uk/petrol-prices/
1 US gallon = 3.78 liter
4.39 GBP (pounds) per gallon
1 pound = 1.5 dollars (exchange rates are always crazy)
6.59 dollars per gallon

195k / 49.5 = 3939.40 * $6.59 = 25,960
  195k / 30 = 6500 * $6.59 = 42,835
195k / 15 = 13000 * $6.59 = $85,670

So, while many will argue that "Europeans" are "controlling their oil consumption" through taxes, I would argue that the world has been susidizing the oil industry. Additionally, many American vehicles get 20 or even 15 mpg.

PLEASE REMEMBER, money is fiction (pieces of paper), work is economic fiction, government is fiction, and the price of Gas/Fossil Fuels is fiction. We all agree to a system but the system can and should be changed towards improvement.

IEA: To promote efficiency, cut fossil fuel subsidies
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20007059-54.html

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_23.html

So perhaps instead of silly rebates we should reduce Fossil Fuel susbidies and increase the tax on gas (yes, there are both Federal and State taxes on gas already so I'm not proposing some radical communist ideology).
       

A 40-50 mile round trip work commute is hardly rare for those in the US. Adding anything like a seeing a doctor, picking your kid up at school, visiting friends or family, running some other errand or even going on a date can easily put the total over 100 miles.

The average US commute is 16 miles, and the percent of people driving further drops off geometrically with increasing distance, to where only about 1% of Americans "stretch commute" 50 miles each way. Tacking on errands doesn't even come close to what you're describing unless you live on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Driving habits have been *extensively* studied by the auto industry. They don't need you telling them what people do. Over half of all trips, *counting multi-stop trips*, are 1-10 miles. Only 1% are over 100 miles, and these are almost always "planned".

The Atlanta airport is around an 80 mile round trip from the heavily populated northern suburbs. Picking up or dropping off a friend at the airport would hardly considered a extraordinary event.

Then you park here. There are *already* charging stations at the airport, and there's almost no EVs on the road. What do you think it'll be like when there are hundreds of thousands or millions on the road?

On the weekends, spontaneously deciding to take a day trip to somewhere more than 50 miles away isn't rare either.

So you're driving somewhere that's more than an hour away, but you're not staying there long enough to get a quick charge? Who the heck does that?

---

From a more fundamental level... of course you can come up with hypotheticals wherein some imaginary person might have trouble. "What if you had some guy in Bairol, Wyoming who daily needs to deliver a load of manure to Cheyenne, huh? What would they do???" But this belies the fact that according to actual studies, such people are very rare. And, from a more fundamental perspective, you're making an even bigger error: the notion that "A single electric vehicle using today's tech must meet the needs of every last American, or it's worthless". Which is just plain absurd -- do you apply that standard to any other vehicle? Do you drive to work every day in a moving van in case you have to move some large object? Different vehicles meet different needs. At this point in time, an electric vehicle is an ideal second vehicle for the 60 million two-car households in America, providing them with a way to have clean, cheap, low maintenance, fun, sustainable transportation. For a few tens of millions of households, it will work as the sole mode of transportation as well. With today's tech. That's way, way more than enough, since it will take at least a decade, probably more like two, to produce that many electric vehicles. But batteries increase in energy density by about 8% per year. Two decades of advancement means 4.7x more range for the same-sized pack. And it also means two decades of rapid charger deployment. So when you're talking about expanding beyond this initial market, you're not talking about doing it with today's EVs; you're talking about doing it with EVs that drive hundreds of miles on a charge and can get a full charge in ~10 minutes almost anywhere in the country. That's an entirely different argument.

Indeed, the figures don't back him up either. The median age for a car in the United States is 9.2 years.

Therefore we do this. ...without considering if 'this' is useful or effective. It's pointless doing things that don't work or ineffective.

Actually, there's a specific circumstance where there is a point to doing things that don't work - when you don't know that they're not going to work; call it a specific method of study.

Still, in order for something like SPOT to work, I think we'd first need high definition video of how actual terrorists behaved in an actual airport before an attack. I'm not sure we have those. To train against false positives, we'd also need video of non-terrorists, but those would be relatively easy to get.

I could see myself signing off on a '5 year trial' of SPOT, but by the same token, I'd have no problems shutting it down if, at the end of five years, it had proven ineffective. Thing is, it can be tough to be effective. We average, what, 1-2 terrorist attacks on planes per year, and worldwide at that? Even then, I wouldn't necessarily consider the signs of an ineffective terrorist the same as an effective one. I'm sure the shoe and crotch bombers acted differently than the ones that committed 9/11. You go by that you're reduced to something like 1 major attack per decade, if that.

Meanwhile you have to screen around 2.1 Million passangers, in the USA, per day. 767.5 Million a year, 2009 figure.

You're looking at lottery level odds of any one passanger being a major terrorist intending to perform an act during that flight.

The SPOT guys could have a 99.9999% accuracy rate at eliminating false positives and a 100% rate of catching terrorists, and they'd still trigger on 768 innocent people per terrorist caught.

http://www.bts.gov/xml/air_traffic/src/datadisp.xml

Jul 1996: 55,664,748

Jul 2007: 80,986,135 (peaked)

Jul 2009: 77,135,721 (due to recession)

Feb 2010 is nearly identical to Feb 2009, so if passenger miles stay FLAT, then the 70% reduction in fuel will result in more miles flown and more fuel consumed, per Jevon's Paradox

If fuel continues to rise in price, and nullifies Jeavon's paradox, but the growth in air travel from 1996 to present continues, then the savings of the 70% will be used up within 10 years.

Game over. Thanks for playing.

I think a better use of material would be high speed electric trains, and only use aircraft for transcontinental travel, and to implement this ASAP.

If the govt hadn't pissed a trillion bucks away on war and hundreds of billions on propping up criminals in the banking industry, we could have paid for the whole thing in advance...

The problem isn't technology, the problem is twofold: geological limits on resource production and the political will to deal with it rationally and develop plans to transition society into a different energy basis.

http://www.bts.gov/publications/bts_special_report/2007_10_03/html/table_02.html

not very recent, and does not answer the question of how often very long trips occur, but still, range does not seem to matter a whole lot.

I think the issue is more about getting to a point where it makes economical and practical sense to have an electric car for daily use, and rent a fuel car for longer trips.

That's as silly as saying that trucking companies are dependent on government because they don't build their own roads.

Except it's not silly at all to say that; it's a simple observation of the truth. And that basic truth -- that every major form of transportation we have is dependent on government -- should be remembered in discussions on building transportation infrastructure, instead of pretending that one form of transportation is Honest God-Fearing American Capitalism Hard At Work while another is Evil European Pinko Socialist Government Interference In The Free Market. Which is pretty much what the conversation seems to degenerate into every time rail is mentioned.

In 2006, which appears to be the most recent year for which figures are readily available, total government expenditures (federal, state, and local) on highways were almost $100 billion, while rail expenditures were a little over $1.5 billon. Please, please try to tell me that this doesn't constitute a massive subsidy -- a hell of a lot bigger than anything Amtrak gets, or ever will get -- to trucking and other industries that depend on highways for their existence.

Oh yeah -- air travel? A little under $42 billion. Again, this is a massive subsidy, and so far beyond anything that rail gets that there's really no comparison. So go ahead, bitch about Amtrak ... but remember where your tax dollars are really going.

Fortunately for the article, there are 4 million miles of road in the US http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2002/html/table_01_01.html

All of it gets resurfaced from time to time so it is not as if there is no replacement schedule. If the task is too daunting, how did all that road get built in the first place?

And since I'm burning karma anyway lemme toss another sacred cow onto the grill. Enough with this continual blather about the 'disadvantaged/poor/etc.' if you nitwits aren't going to deal with the actual problem. To a very high degree of correlation, the 'poor' aren't living in poverty because of a lack of money. They lack money because they have make poor lifestyle decisions that RESULT in a lack of money. Things like failure to get an education (or worse reject the value of knowledge entirely), become a single parent, waste money on substance abuse or Xbox... but I repeat myself.

Wall Street Journal reported that generational class mobility -- how likely it is for someone born poor will die middle class -- is lower in the US than Europe, even though the rags-to-riches story is ingrained, even intrinsic, to the American Dream. Why is that? Are we to believe that Americans are lazier than their "socialist" "nanny state" European brethren? I doubt that. In fact, if one was to take the conservative talking points at face value, the European-style social safety nets would discourage economic mobility. So what gives? Well, European poor are healthier, due to easy and affordable access to health care, thus allowing them to work more. They have better access to daycare, thus enabling them to find a job, instead of being forced to stay home with children.
You repeat the canard, that the poor are all lazy that fritter away their money, ironically on luxuries (alcohol, drugs, video games, etc.), but what does the science actually reveal? says that 27% of income of the working poor is left after housing, food, and commuting expenses. The working poor income is defined as less than $8000 a year, so that's $2160 a year, so $180 a month. So where does that $180 go? Well perhaps University of Akron chart will help. $50 for child care, and the rest for "housekeeping supplies, apparel and services, and personal care products and services" And the end ? $-81.

You clearly have no interest in actually reading a study of what's going on, because "reality has a well known liberal bias."

The given version of "terrorist" is arbitrary and thus subject to change over time - from people who hijack planes with guns and explosives, to apparently nowadays, Iceland, however I think that if you're starting with a number of 1 in 3000 you are so far from reality anyway that what you really want to do is harass innocent people.

Let's look at ALL the hijackings from 1970 to 2000, a total of 924 hijackings. I couldn't find more recent figures quickly, but let's assume that hijackings have continued at a rate of around 30 per year (the average from 1970-2000), that would add another 30 * 9 = 270 hijackings, for a total of 1194 ok I will be generous 1200 hijackings.

Now let's assume (and this is a BIG assumption - I am again going to be very generous) that TEN people, (the terrorists), board the plane for EACH hijacking event. So now we have 12,000 terrorists.

Now let's just look at the passenger data for the LAST YEAR ALONE for the top 5 airlines. They carried last year 420 million people. LAST YEAR. Now assuming that since 1970 till today there have been a total of 12000 "terrorists" (a VERY generous number), when you divide 420 million by that, you would be looking at 1:35,000 people being a "potential terrorist". However do remember that I am only including passenger data for ONE SINGLE YEAR. Assuming again a 90% accuracy, you are still wrongly intimidating well over 3500 people.

If I was to go through year by year and gouge up the billions of people that have been transported by air, the actual chances of the person being screened actually being a terrorist drops to almost zero.

I will not argue against the value of security as a deterrent. However I think that airport security employees should be well aware that they are, more likely than not, harassing innocent people. Therefore all the excessive bullying, posturing, abuse, privacy and rights violations are completely unnecessary in this context. Airline terrorism is NOT a real threat, be it ever so dramatic on the few times when it does happen. Use technology to screen for the obvious, and lock the god damned cockpit door with a solid lock, for the not so obvious.

As far as sharing the road, thats nonsense. Bikes want cars to give up the roads totally to them

No, bikes just don't want cars to hit them. The problem is car drivers are like spoiled children who can't be bothered to slow down or obey traffic rules ("but mommy, I want it NOW!!").

[bikes] ignore all the traffic laws the cars are for the most part obeying.

Well at least you admit that cars tend to ignore traffic laws when it suits them, but you're right I see bikes run through stop signs/red lights all the time. And while riding on the sidewalk is illegal in most places, I can understand why they do it sometimes. As I said, most bikers aren't out their to shove it in your face, they just want to ride without getting turned into roadkill. There are many roads that have no shoulder at all, high speed, blind curves, and idiots who can't think 2 seconds in front of them on the road. Sometimes it just makes more sense to hop onto the sidewalk for a few hundred feet than become a hood ornament.

I don't know where cyclist got the idea that they should have the right to use a road build for a car with their bike anyway.

Uh, perhaps the part where bicycles are written into the traffic laws? The roads were built for all vehicles not just your gas guzzling Suburban. I have yet to here of a jurisdiction in the US that does not consider a bicycle a vehicle for the purposes of traffic law.

You know exactly whats going to happen, that YOU are causing problems with traffic INCREASING the amount of gas and oil used than would otherwise normally be used. So yes, it IS the cyslists fault... their actions are DIRECTLY wasting MORE gas and oil.

Wait, are you seriously suggesting that slowing down for a few seconds consumes more gas than barreling down the road, exceeding the speed limit by 10-15mpg? I guess you might be referring to the part where you honk your horn, pass within inches of the bike and slam on the accelerator to show how much better you are. Wow, you really showed him.

The other side of the coin is that roads DIRECTLY benefit everyone, bike paths only the VERY small minority that choose to cycle.

Everyone? Really? In 2006, there were about 250 million total registered highway vehicles, or about half that for passenger vehicles at 135 million. In the same year, the US population hit 300 million. In other words, 135 million passenger vehicles for 300 million people, or 45% (i.e. a minority).

Yet you think we should invest as much for a small minority? That's just arrogant if you ask me.

I doubt anyone is seriously suggesting that a single city spend millions of dollars on bike paths. Of course, they're not needed anyway as long as drivers don't behave as homicidal assholes.

Also, where do you think you have any RIGHT to ride a bike at all on public property?

See, it's people like you who truly show that you are the one who has no right to use public property as you seem to be woefully uninformed about the conditions for such use. As you already stated, roads are public property and a citizen does not lose his rights just because he hops on a bicycle.

Maybe its the self righteous, self centered, arrogant attitude that most cyclists have that turn off most Americans.

Self-centered? Arrogant? Funnily, I believe you just described yourself. Complaining about cyclists forcing you to slow down (while simultaneously suggesting that they should be aware of you even before you are in their presence, and then that they should inconvenience themselves by pulling over) is remarkably self-centered. The definition of

No. My point is that there are three things making older airlines ineffective. First, they suffer from unionization and paying their employees too much. Second, they suffer from the pension problem. New companies are strictly 401k. Third, there simply is too much competition in the airline industry. Come to think of it, there have been a number of federal requirements (like the new security burden) that have further hindered these airlines.

I strongly disagree that the airline industry will naturally have a lot of churn. There's little reason to expect employees to become too expensive merely because they work for a company for a long time. The new airlines hire old employees too. After all, they make up a large portion of the workforce. Finally, the current state just isn't churn. Most of the business remains in the hands of companies that have been around for decades.

Finally, you're just wrong about "churn" in the airlines. Of the top 10 airlines by marketshare (American, Southwest, United, Delta, US Airways, Continental, Northwest, JetBlue, AirTran Corporation, and Alaska), only a few are new in the sense you mean. For example, of the top five Delta has been around since 1929. American Airlines since 1930, United since 1934, US Airways since 1934, and the new kid in the top 5, Southwest since 1971. In other words, more than half the revenue passenger miles flown in the US were by five companies that with one exception have been around since the beginning of commercial aviation. The exception, Southwest Airlines has been around for almost forty years. This indicates to me that the problem in aviation isn't too much churn, but rather too little churn.

"The train grossed $49,351,664 in ticket revenue in Fiscal Year 2006, making it Amtrak's highest grossing single train. With total expenses of $62.1 million, it is Amtrak's best-paying long distance train in terms of income in comparison with operating expenses."

We already have a working, proven solution in the United States to make this happen. All we need to do now is expand it.

Seems that a service which, in the best case, loses 26 cents for every dollar of revenue is hardly a "working, proven solution" that will necessarily scale.

Perhaps there are alternate similar solutions that could work, but I think in its current incarnation it is a proven failure. Just in this "best case" scenario, ticket prices need to be increased 26%, expenses reduced by 21% or some combination thereof to make it successful. If increases in ticket prices drive many consumers away, that likely won't work well. If decreases in expenses causes a reduction in service (less scheduled trains, more crowded trains, less maintenance etc.) and therefore drive many consumers away, that likely won't work well either. Perhaps expenses could be reduced without noticeably impacting service (such as more efficient scheduling or replacing workers w/inflated wages with workers willing to work for market rate) but one has to wonder why this hasn't been done already given the desperate fiscal performance of Amtrak for many years.

I'm not too sure what to make of these figures which indicate that Amtrak enjoys the highest "revenue per passenger mile" in 2001 (the last year data for all categories is shown) among several forms of transport.

• Air carrier, domestic, scheduled service: 13.2 cents
• Class I bus, intercity: 12.9 cents
• Commuter rail: 15.1 cents
• Intercity/Amtrak: 24.9 cents

Perhaps this is because of unique factors such as people stuck on trains for a long time buy food on the train (resulting in revenue that is counted in the passenger mile) while those traveling by plane buy food in the airport or off site because their travel is shorter? Perhaps this is because of the differences in routes served. Perhaps...

I like the concept of rail and use it where practical. However, I'm doubtful that it's a very attractive economic solution for extensive expansion in the United States.

On a related note, California recently passed "Prop 1A to authorize issuing about $10B in bonds towards funding a $40B high speed rail system. Of course, a couple months after it passed, the rich folks (most of whom, by the way, voted for [PDF] it) in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Atherton were shocked, I say shocked, that it might actually run through their towns above grade and not be silently tunneled underground where they could ignore it.

That's Bullshit.

Figure the percentage of federal dollars vs fare dollars for each and your head will explode. Even if you assume that the average flight costs ~$100, the 700 million annual passenger flights makes a nice big number:

http://www.bts.gov/programs/airline_information/air_carrier_traffic_statistics/airtraffic/annual/1981_present.html

You do realize that this will only effect hybrid or electric cars right?

Here is some things to consider, in 2006there were a little over 135 million registered passenger cars in the US. Now that's not counting pickup trucks that had to be registered as commercial vehicles but are still used as personal vehicles. Since 2000, not more then 2.5-3 percent of new car registrations have been to hybrid vehicles or electric vehicles until 2007 which saw around 5%. This means that this can effect less then 10% of the passenger vehicles on the road and more likely that number is much lower.

The second thing is, if these shocks produce a gain of around 10% in energy recovered, then we can do some math on the economics of it. If a hybrid electric car gets 60 MPH, Some say on 40, and they travel an average of 1500 miles a month, then we can find how much 10% is worth. So 1500/60 and 1500/40 respectivly come out to 25 and 37.5 gallons of fuel. At $2.00 a gallon, that would be about $50 a month for the 60MPH and $75 a month for the 40MPG. A 10% savings of them would be $5 and $7.50 per month savings. Regular shocks wear out after about 5 years or so of driving, some last around 10 years before they are noticeably shot. So $5 * 12 months * 10 years means this device would only save about $600 and $900 over ten years. That's the price point they have to beat in order for there to be a savings. If they can't get the cost of this stuff under those dollar figures, then they are probably costing more then any savings.

My guess is that their effectiveness is going to go as the shock absorption abilities go and will only be effective for that typical 5 years then severely degrade after that like regular shocks and struts seem to do. The concept doesn't seem to be much different then a wave generator but applied to an existing gas or oil filled cylinder instead of hydraulic pistons connecting floats. This means that they will have to create a valve system and generator and a way to connect it to the cars power inputs. They might be able to do that for less then $6-900 every ten years. But I doubt it.

Somehow, I doubt seriously we'd need 1000% of our current electrical generation capacity to replace oil alone....

We use oil for some stuff like lubrication that, assuming we insist on using nuclear power to provide it, wouldn't be too efficient. ;)

I haven't seen an estimate either on how many kwh a year it'd take if we went to 100% EVs. Don't feel like building one at the moment either - though .3kwh a mile is one figure I've seen. You'd have to get trucks and trains as well.

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2004/html/table_01_32.html

3 Trillion highway miles a year - 900 Billion kwh required - a Gigawatt plant can be expected to produce ~7.8 Billion kwh a year.

We have just over a hundred reactors now, to supply 20% of our power. Call it 500 to supply all of our electricity, and another 100-200 to provide the power for vehicles. 700 reactors in total, for relatively carbon-free transportation and electricity. Utilize cogeneration and we'd be able to eliminate a lot of heating bills as well. Reactors by the ocean could use the ocean for cooling and desalinate water while they're at it.

We'd burn through our uranium reserves pretty quickly doing it that way with traditional reactors, but using breeders and such we'd be good for thousands of years before we'd need to start filtering the stuff from ocean water or switching to Thorium. Still, I'd definitely use wind/solar where it makes sense.

It's also suspected that with increased use of nuclear fuel and the depletion of fuel coming from weapons stockpiles that a price spike would result in more exploration ala oil and find lots more of the stuff.

There are only about 2x as many cars sold each year as guns. About 50% of all households have a gun (I know this might come as a shock to leftie-liberals, but it's true).

A gun doesn't have to be shot to be useful. Deterrent value is the primary value of a gun anywhere off the battlefield. There's no way to capture the statistics about how many people weren't killed, how many women weren't rapped, how many people weren't beaten, how many robberies and burglaries and thefts didn't occur because the would-be perpetrator was confronted by, or just concerned about the possibility of, a gun.

new cars: http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_12.html
new guns: http://www.atf.gov/firearms/stats/afmer/afmer2006.pdf
number guns: http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

The infrastructure developed from the New Deal provided a tangible product which could be openly used by other segments of the economy and benefited far more. Roads affected the Automotive Industry and eventually the suburban sprawl and housing.

It should be noted that the Interstate Highway System was not started until 1956.

The CCC improved roads in public parks. The WPA did pave or repair 300,000 miles of road, but keep in mind the US currently has 3.9 million miles of highway.

New Deal spending is actually a lot less than people generally think. Federal spending peaked at 8% of GDP during 1933-1941, whereas today it is over double that number (20%) while both state and local spending are both themselves are today over 8% of GDP.

The New Deal was more about dollar devaluation and regulation rather than spending.

The idea is that you check out marshals more thoroughly, both background and psychologically. Thus, the chances of one being a terrorist is very, very low. Much like actual airline pilots.

Still let's look at some numbers -
In August(2008), U.S. airlines operated 897,800 scheduled domestic and international flights, down 5.7 percent from the number of flights operated in August 2007 (Table 1). The number of domestic flights decreased 6.0 percent in August from a year earlier while international flights were down 2.4 percent (Tables 7, 13).

Call it 29k flights a day, 203k flights a week. Figure an AM does 2 flights a day, 5 days a week, 10 total. That'd mean that you'd need 20k air marshals to cover every flight. Probably closer to 22k, with leave, training and such. 14k if you figure on planning smart enough that the marshals average 15 flights a week. Looking further - in 2006 there were 599 airports 'certificated to serve commercial air carrier aircraft with nine or more seats'.

Now, my local airport probably employes around a dozen TSA workers - that'd be a minimun of 7.2k. Obviously large airports will have hundreds. However, I've seen some links saying things like 45k TSOs. Even assuming we PAY the marshals more, they'd have to earn far more than double(remember benefits!) to cost more.

Meanwhile we'd increase travel as we stop harrassing travelers and a few guns are far cheaper than x-ray machines.

Not usual, perhaps something very specific with your car.

A similar question popped up on econbrowser a few months ago. They traced the origins of the chart to a 1998 study, whose data can be found at Table 7.23 of the DOE's Transportation Energy Data Book (large pdf warning).

At the time, I found a 2006 short note on greencarcongress , about a comparison published by Auto Bild, a German weekly magazine. Their data support the notion of a steady increase in fuel consumption with increased speed, even with modern, high speed autos.

recently found this link to fuel consumption in 2007: http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2007/index.html

It's best to consider PMPG (Passenger MPG). Also to note, if you have one person per car that average 40MPG you don't have still 40PMPG, you actually have 20PMPG. I get this number by total miles over total gallons used, if two 40MPG cars drive 40 miles you've used a total of 2 gallons, one for each car. thus total fuel consumption per person is 20, not 40.

Based on the first provided link A 60 passenger gets on average 6MPG, that's 360MPG.
A prius with 5 passengers would get up to 270PMPG.
Amtrack train with 350 passengers averages 1400PMPG but with only 200 people it averages 800.
A modern plane like the 747 gets ~100MPG as per Howstuffworks.com

To satisfy my own curiosity I calculated what it would cost (in terms of MPG per Person) to transport 5000 people using bus, boeing 747, Prius and train. Prius is hands down the worst of the above choices, then bus, then 747, then train(which is significantly greater than 747)
I should probably note that this neglects start and stop costs, so the above works well for long trips.
It also depends on how many people need to get between points A and B.

So really you should feel less guilty when flying across country than driving.

What's interesting is that when you adjust the numbers for how many miles are driven, rather than how many cars are on the road, the difference between passenger cars and light trucks all but disappears: http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_annual_report/2005/html/appendix_b/html/table_03_03.html

Based on that information, it seems that small cars are involved in more fatalities because they are driven more often.

I don't have the link anymore, but I have also seen a table that broke it out by individual vehicle model. In terms of fatal accidents per million passenger miles, you are just as likely to be killed in a Ford Explorer as you are in a Toyota Corolla, and you are three times as likely to kill somebody else.

How about this:

http://www.bts.gov/publications/freight_in_america/html/table_01.html

The US moves (by weight):
Truck: 60%
Train: 10%
Boat: 8%
Pipeline: 18%
Mixed-mode: 1%
Other 2%

The interesting thing is the ton-miles table where Trains are much closer to Trucks.

I used to work at a mid-sized auto parts company. We had a fleet of about 20 trucks that would move things from Minnesota to about half of the country, mostly on the east side. I always thought it was fairly in-efficient that we had trucks that would go all the way to Texas instead of driving it into Minneapolis (55 miles), then shipping it via train to Dallas where a local truck would take it to a warehouse for store distribution.

This graph is a good one but only goes up to 2004. Going to the data source and creating your own table shows that you're correct (RPM=revenue passenger mile=one paying passenger flying one mile). However, the graph does look bumpy lately, and I'm not sure how valuable extrapolation really is here.

This graph is a good one but only goes up to 2004. Going to the data source and creating your own table shows that you're correct (RPM=revenue passenger mile=one paying passenger flying one mile). However, the graph does look bumpy lately, and I'm not sure how valuable extrapolation really is here.

Forget for a moment that a large percentage of people can't safely drive a vehicle on the ground at 65 mph.

no. That would be a small percentage. Millions and millions of people driving over 2000 billion miles accident free every day.

Yes over 2 trillion miles.

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2004/html/table_01_32.html

But the real joke is the fact that people think our gasoline consumption has some huge effect on our oil usage. Actually our automobile fuel usage only accounts for 10% of our overall oil consumption.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics begs to differ.

In 2003, US transportation used 13 million barrels per day, industry 5 million, buildings 1.27 million, and industry just 500 thousand per day.

Now it is true that outside the US, oil is used far more for electricity production, but plastics are "a drop in the bucket" of oil use.

>>> So, how is all the new demands for electricity going to be satisfied.

A lot more easily than you seem to think.

There are about 3T vehicle miles logged in the US each year. An electric car requires about 250Wh/mi, well-to-wheel. Using electricity to power the US's total yearly vehicle miles would require 250Wh/mi x 3Tmi = 750M MWh.

For comparison, the total amount of electricity generated in the US per year is 4,000M MWh, or 5-6 times as much. Converting every vehicle in the US to all-electric would add less than 20% to the electricity generation needs of the most car-happy country on earth.

For further comparison, note that the US used 115Mbbl of oil in 2006 to generate 41M MWh, meaning that existing generating facilities generate roughly 1M MWh per 3Mbbl. Accordingly, the 4,000Mbbl of gasoline and diesel the US consumes to run its vehicles for a year could be converted to 1,300M MWh, or nearly twice as much electricity as would be needed to run all-electric versions of those vehicles.

If getting enough electricity to run an all-electric fleet is the problem you're worried about, you simply haven't done the math.

Hyperbole aside, number of passenger miles http://www.bts.gov/publications/white_house_economic_statistics_briefing_room/october_2005/html/air_revenue_passenger_miles.html has nearly doubled since 1992, yet number of fatalities per year has gone down RADICALLY (http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Paxfatal.htm - wow was '85 a bad year).

I dunno, seems like it's getting safer to me.

You mean that unlike all other essential forms of commerce it should be helped out when they aren't making enough profits

instead of maybe making a better service to attract customers, instead of acknowledging that we are not cattle but people that need some leg room and pushing the seats back to where they were

Since the money comes from all the citizens that pay taxes instead of just those who fly the planes, thats so much more fair isn't it. So the ones who use the service don't have to pay a slightly higher price when they fly, but all of us do, through taxes. Great solution. Thanks.