$5.39 at my local spot, and that’s cheap compared to my brother in Davis, CA. This is the first time in my life gas prices have made me think about my driving habits and how they can be altered.
5.19 for premium....thankfully I only fill up once a month.
We must get people into electric vehicles and ween them from CO2 polluting gasoline and diesel powered vehicles regardless of societal costs!
(this message brought to you by Joe Biden.)
Life feeds on life, feeds on life, feeds on..
Sorry, Tool humor.
for those that heat their homes with natural gas and to a lesser extent propane. The 12 month strip is close to $9.00 per mcf after being at 3 ish for nearly a decde. Furthermore if we get a hot summer more will be diverted for power burn. Its almost a perfect storm and the demand is less elastic. Meanwhile the Appalachian Marcellus producers can increase production but they can't get pipelines permitted and built to get the gas out so they are forced to hold production steady. This would include the atlantic coast pipeline which was a 4 billion writeoff before construction and the Mountain Valley Pipeline which is 3-4 years behind schedule and double the construction estimate of 3.4 billion. It may or may not get finished. No chance of getting new pipelines through New York or Massachusetts it would seem. To make matters worse Natgas is the key input for fertilizer which is causing the farmers to make hard choices on what they plant. Personally I don't think the cost of food and energy are fully discounted and are likely to get worse. Could get ugly later this year. Hopefully coinciding with throwing the bums out in Washington.
Farmers in the Midwest are being told by their fuel suppliers that they may not be able to get diesel fuel this fall. They are telling farmers to fill all their tanks now in anticipation of shortages this fall.
My recent work trips and watching people drive tells me they would rather complain.
Was reading a blog post yesterday by Matthew Yglesias on energy prices. Said history shows us in the short term a $1 increase in gas prices results in a $1 decrease in other spending because people consider driving non-discretionary.
If prices stay high then people shift their behavior.
I have nothing to back that up besides the ebb and flow I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Level of utility.
But god forbid you take 3 parking spots to put in a bus bike lane.
This country is reaping the whirlwind, and no one can see beyond their Wallet.
A bike lane only requires sacrificing 3 parking spots?
It’s a big country and mass transit isn’t the answer for most of it.
I can now get from LA to San Francisco in ... never.
My own Minneapolis has a plan for light rail from city center to Eden Prarie that is grossly over budget. Has one of these plans ever been on-budget?
And when it's done no one's going to remember how long it took.
I think you're falling into the trap of looking at the rebudget or rebudget with reduced scope cost and not the proposed cost. I beleive that the original proposed cost of $10B is up to $105B. You're right that if the rail is successful, cost and schedule will be forgotten.
Knowing what I do now, high speed rail in California is problematic. The train need rail with a minimum amount of curvature for very high speeds. The route out of California requires going through or over some mountains and you add in the tectonics of the reqion, there are significant technical challenges.
that will go from one strip of bars/restaurants to another strip of bars/restaurants.
That doesn't go anywhere meaningful. And they can't get anyone willing to pay to ride it.
to nowhere. Had the full support of the county board - one of whom was a consultant for the winning bidder to construct it. Resulted in the only republican (running as an independent) making it on the board in like 30 years.
I think it must be like the musicman. Some guy thinks up something splashy, and gets virtue signalling local governments to sign on the dotted line.
"Monorail!"
Nowhere to nowhere? That's just flat out wrong. It's the busiest bus corridor in Virginia and there is tremendous in-fill potential along the Pike and in Skyline. Also connects to the Route 7 corridor.
Whether light rail could run down it, in-traffic, down the narrow corridor? That's a different argument. But it does no one any good to make up facts like nowhere to nowhere.
Looking at the project for two minutes, I don't think it will be worth it though it will likely facilitate upzoning/building more densely in that area, even if everyone still owns a car. But you also didn't describe it in good faith.
I love the idea of it, but the benefits will be very minor. There really aren't a ton of people that move between the two areas on the proposed line. Getting to/from the CHI/Schwab to the Blackstone area will be somewhat convenient for visitors, but it will take a ton of development for population to expand downtown to really take advantage of it.
A light rail line from West Omaha to the airport would have a much bigger impact for local transportation (at an insanely higher cost). We just put in a rapid bus line partially covering that route, but it's still just buses.
returning to work the on-time performance is back to sucking. 40 mins late getting home last night.
THey need to to prove they can execute what they got better.
P.S. I went in every day during covid. No one was on the trains. They were clean and on-time. It was glorious.
and get something that moves faster. Diesel loco-hauled trains have horrible start/stop timing.
Electrifying the rails would be too much to ask.
Ever check into the costs?
My county has 1.3% of commuters use bus or rail. More walk or ride bikes. Good luck changing culture.
The investment is not much at all.
Light rail costs like $120-200m per mile. Freeways are well south of that.
And certainly not in a per person moved comparison. You really don't want to see that math.
Particularly if it takes into account full gamut of costs, such as:
highways - repaving, cost of cars, gas, parking lots(!), etc
mass transit - operating costs, pensions, loss time due to longer trip times typically, offset by benefits of denser development
And the “per person moved” metric is inherently biased against public transit. People do not take it because it often sucks. Guess why?
Here in Chicago, they are really pushing Transit Oriented Development as they expand the city’s rapid transit lines and bus routes. Developments tend to cluster around transit stops. Without a stop, it’s hard to attract people and businesses to certain areas of the city. At the same time, it’s hard to convince the city to put stops in areas with little to do. They are trying to address this with the new Red Line Extension and bus projects by soliciting proposals from developers for areas around announced transit stops.
Ridership and funding faces a similar problem. Budget dollars from the state and city are often allocated to agencies based on their ridership. It’s generally slow and not well maintained, so people don’t ride it…so that agency gets less funding…etc.
Then I toured the rest of the country and my biases were confirmed.
It's the sun belt cities' fault they zoned for massive sprawling developments with cul de sacs instead of connective grid patterns. Which makes transit ineffective because you have to walk a mile to get out of the gated subdivision first.
Considering the nut-tugging people like to do about their pickup trucks, I have zero sympathy for their poor choices, both financial and political.
And their poor choices, both financial and political.
In particular in Texas, it's ridiculously oversized pickups hauling air so the driver can tower over ordinary sedan drivers. They truly suck in all ways.
Someone actually brought one of those mall crawlers to the UT game in 2015, and he cranked it up for all to see.
I was not impressed.
Texas is for suckers. At least they're trying to build high speed rail.
I might convince my wife that we should take my car instead of her SUV when we travel out of town.
...and get 25 mpg, the 800 gallons will cost you $4,000 at $5.00 per gallon. At $3.00 per gallon, you'd save $1,600 or $133.33 per month. This is a significant amount for many; but for many others, including, I perhaps erroneously assume, a good number here, an extra $133.33 per month will not lead to ruin. It's certainly a very regressive feature of inflation.
One solution: go hybrid or all-electric. My '21 Camry hybrid, which was getting 40-50 mpg last year, has recently been reaching into the 60 to 70 mpg range. For example yesterday morning I took I-290 from Elmhurst to downtown Chicago. There was a lot of slow going, though it picked up around Ashland. Anyway, I pulled into the Tower Parking self-park on Franklin and saw 72.3 mpg on the display, which is my highest single trip figure yet.
Think of your gasoline price per mile driven, not per gallon purchased. If I average 50 mpg, at $5.00 per gallon my cost is $0.10 per mile; at 30 mpg, it's about $0.17 per mile; and if you're driving a 2021 Escalade, you're reportedly getting about 17 mpg for $0.29 per mile.
practical and can be traced back to the 70s
It is an issue that has *way* more political significance than actual impact on consumer finances. People spend like 10x on housing compared to gasoline, but housing cost increases are greeted with a shrug while gas price increases are apparently a sign of the end times.
And funnily enough, politicians can actually impact housing prices much more than they can impact gasoline prices.
It's not just personal gas consumption. The cost of diesel is and will continue to rapidly drive up the cost of goods you buy daily as th3 cost to deliver those goods to stores increases. That $133/month turns into $500/month really quickly
...Certainly higher prices for refined petroleum products usually makes other things more expensive; I'm not sure I've seen that it's in the range of $370 a month for an average household, but that depends on what they buy.
Not to be too glib, but beans, rice, and everyday fruits and vegetables aren't all that expensive. For example, the BLS indicates that the average price of bananas has increased in three years by about 5%. "Other fresh vegetables" are up about 6%. Other items, particularly those that require significant animal husbandry and/or processing like beef, pork, poultry, eggs, and processed canned goods, are up significantly more, part of the price we pay for eating what I call "industrialized food." (Yes, I like a slider or a bag of Doritos every so often too.)
Take eggs, for example. They're up something like 23% in the last three years. But a dozen eggs costs something like $2.50 to $3.00 depending on what part of the country you're in. A family of four that had an average of an egg a day for a 30-day month would spend about $22.50 to $30.00 on eggs, before sales taxes. In 2019 it would've been about $18.30 to $24.40; the difference of about $4 to $5.50 a month shouldn't be too oppressive on any family.
Inflation is a major issue--there's no evading that. But we should probably dig down and ask, what exactly costs more, and what does it say about our patterns of consumption?
And save the trucks for last mile delivery.
Chicago ohare has become very busy and is now our most important port by value of trade. We have a lot of rail but a good number is still going out by truck. So we are getting a triple whammy of losing out on sea freight, paying more for stuff to come in via gas guzzling planes, and then shipping from the center (not really) of the country. And we are using a lot of trucks.
Also there is a pilot shortage so that may be a quadruple whammy.
Edit: the above stat comes from last weeks economist. Linked below
That siad, I'm all for more rail, both personal and freight.
Beach containers go by rail. I didn't include a link for that, but I did for ongoing plans to expand rail shipping.
One issue that the US has is that a lot of the railways are single-tracked, which can cause delays when a train has to sit at a siding to let another one pass. Unfortunately during the downturn in rail traffic, a lot of dual tracks were ripped out to save on maintenance.
I can remember as a youngster stopped at a rail crossing and counting the number of rail cars that went by (as many as 200 IIRC).
Wonder what percent of those that go by tuck are local? I'd guess pretty high. I'd also be curious to know what the breakdown is on rail usage by imported containers vs. "domestic" shipments.
Perhaps other ports are better. You have a valid point about what distance and speed of delivery make rail or trucks a better choice. Some of the recent rail changes have sped up the route through the cities. I know that there are hge warehouse facilities in neighboring counties, such as the facilities in the city of Banning. Presumably these are rail delivery and distribution facilities.
Oakland has a much lower train usage at its port (10% vs 50% for Los Angeles) I know there's an inconsistency between my reported 35% and this. The supply chain crisis seemed a perfect storm with empty containers piling up in the ports awaiting transport back to the Far East and the ships they were to go on were waiting offshore for space to unload their containers.
if you don’t know what your talking about though. The US is one of the best at moving freight with rail though.
Who cares about us schmucks who still drive to work on gas every day?
in the water this year. Don't want to tow it back and forth to a lake and put the hours on the motor at the cost of fuel. I wouldn't be surprised if my inlaws don't put theirs in this year...the gas combined with my father in law battling cancer may just keep it in storage for the season.
Although gas prices had nothing to do with it.
Prior to both high gas prices and the latest Texas drought and low lake levels. 🙌
... price remains high we will rarely use the boat. We'll probably cycle a lot. We also have kayaks, so we can get on the water without buying gas.
My best guess is: The only thing bringing down prices is a recession. Zero Covid in china should be helping, since their economy is shut down.
OPEC isn’t going to bail us out here.
until it's not