Terms Which Have Disappeared

[tonyb]

...

And no, people aren't going to abandon their automobiles for the street cars, no matter how charming and environmentally-conscious an urban light rail might be, not 'til you pry their cold dead fingers from around the steering wheel.

The voters eventually told the political elite in no uncertain terms that this was one boondoggle up with which they would not put!

But there's no denying the charm, so long as someone else is paying for it.

People love their personal vehicles, and for good reason. Sure is convenient to go where you wanna go, when you wanna go there. For more than a century we have built our world around cars. And it works pretty darned well. Generally, anyway.

But it comes at a huge cost. All that infrastructure has cost untold trillions, and will continue to. It feeds sprawl. And it has been an ecological disaster, historically. Et cetera.

Still, the personal car is here to stay. Propulsion and navigation systems are changing, which should go quite some ways toward addressing pollution and congestion and safety problems.

Mass transit won't get people out of their cars entirely, but in most metropolitan areas it should at least slow the growth in personal vehicle usage.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

But it comes at a huge cost. All that infrastructure has cost untold trillions, and will continue to. It feeds sprawl. And it has been an ecological disaster, historically. Et cetera.

It's the "tragedy of the commons" for the 21st Century. It's not only a matter of cui bono, but more importantly, cui emi.

 

[BlueTrain]

I doubt it has cost trillions and I likewise doubt that it has been an ecological disaster. If you think the air pollution from cars is bad, you just haven't been around horses enough.

One of my neighbors when I was little was a street sweeper. The tools of his trade consisted of a broom, a shovel and a big bin on wheels. He was an old man and decidedly poor, street sweeping not being a highly skilled trade. He was a relic from the horse and buggy days. Only one of our neighbors kept horses.

The city also had a big mechanical street sweeper. I've never ever seen one where I live now. Has anyone else ever seen a street sweeper come through your neighborhood?

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's not just air pollution. The soil along most highways contains highly elevated levels of lead -- the result of fifty years of tetraethyl lead additives in gasoline. It's a health hazard that isn't going to go away within our lifetimes, or the liftetimes of our great great great great grand-descendants. You can thank General Motors, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and the motoring public of the 1920s-1970s for that.

We have the big street sweepers here still -- they're most commonly seen in the springtime, cleaning up the remains of the sand and salt strewn on the roads during the winter, and they continue to make rounds, usually around 730 in the morning, all thru the summer. Our city also has a spring roadside cleanup program, where the trucks come around to pick up tree limbs, leaves, and other yard debris that have accumulated over the fall and winter -- you just heap it up at the edge of your driveway and they pick it up and haul it to the dump.

We've also got a guy in town who sells fresh vegetables off an old horse-drawn milk wagon. He's not Amish, I guess he just likes horses, and he has a can hanging off the back of the wagon to carry away his horse's vitamin deposits, presumably to fertilize his vegetable gardens.

 

[HudsonHawk]

We have the big mechanical street sweepers everywhere...parking lots, highways, neighborhoods. They're as ubiquitous as the mosquito trucks.

We also have the "Downtown Street Team" which patrols the downtown area on foot during the day, keeping the streets reasonably clean. They wear colorful blue and yellow uniforms with pith helmets. You can't miss them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The classic street-cleaners' "push can" disappeared in most areas by the 1960s -- although anyone who watched reruns of old Warner Bros. cartoons knew what they were, because they remained a staple of cartoon comedy long after they were obsolete. In New York City, the operator of such a vehicle was known as a "whitewings," because of the white-coat uniform he wore, often stencilled on the back with "D. S. C.", for "Department of Street Cleaning."

This particular whitewings is masked for protection from the 1918 flu epidemic. You hat guys can have a field day with his headgear. NOW THAT'S STYLE.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I doubt it has cost trillions...

We currently spend about $200 billion/year on roads and highways, about a quarter of that at the federal level. Since the Federal Highway Act in 1956, the federal portion alone is close to $1 trillion. The total cost of automobile roads and infrastructure to the public is well into the trillions.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^

And that's just on roads. Consider all the other costs associated with personal vehicles and the numbers are staggering.

But that's certainly not all bad. Not at all. Transportation is a huge piece of the economy. Many many millions of us are employed in transportation-related industries, and the largest segments of that are directly related to personal vehicles.

 

[tonyb]

We have the big mechanical street sweepers everywhere...parking lots, highways, neighborhoods. They're as ubiquitous as the mosquito trucks.

We also have the "Downtown Street Team" which patrols the downtown area on foot during the day, keeping the streets reasonably clean. They wear colorful blue and yellow uniforms with pith helmets. You can't miss them.

People can "normalize" most anything. We see the conditions under which some people live and we shake our heads, but to those people that's just how it is.

Me, I prefer not looking at litter. And I much prefer clean streets to be the norm. People do indeed take cues from their suroundings. They see litter and the assumption is that littering is acceptable.

It's not just an anecdotal observation that littering is much less acceptable than it was when I was a youngster, more years ago than I care to recall. I clearly remember Lady Bird's highway beautification campaign, and "every litter bit hurts," and the promotion of litter bags in cars.

In my smoking days I treated the world as my own personal ashtray. It's no exaggeration to say I tossed tens of thousands of burning cigarette butts out of car windows or onto sidewalks. And I was in plentiful if not necessarily good company. These days, tossing a burning butt out a car window might get a person a stiff fine. Now you rarely see those orange sparks emanating from the cars ahead of you on the highway, as was such a common sight not so long ago.

 

[BlueTrain]

Around here, there is a program whereby companies or other organizations sponsor the trash clean-up of certain stretches of highway. They receive credit with signs to that effect. All it amounts to, however, is a once-a-month litter patrol on their portion of the road with a semi-volunteer crew from the organization. I guess it's a good idea and one that seems so contemporary. I can't imagine something like that ever happening when I was little. But there was a lot that happened when I was little that I was totally unaware of.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It used to be common to use jail inmates for that kind of cleanup work -- work crews in the North, chain gangs in the South.

 

[Stanley Doble]

It would be interesting to see an accurate cost comparison of public transport vs private. All I can say is, I have never seen public transit of any kind that is price competitive with my car, in spite of the fact that cars are heavily taxed and public transit is subsidized.

 

[tonyb]

It used to be common to use jail inmates for that kind of cleanup work -- work crews in the North, chain gangs in the South.

Several years ago I did a ride-along with a state Dep't of Corrections crew that picked up large items (tires, appliances, mattresses, etc.) dumped at various sites in Southeast Seattle. The double-cab truck was driven by a corrections officer and the crew were strapping young cons serving a portion of their sentences performing this duty.

Knowing this was but one of several such crews, and that this was but one day's haul, I was left to conclude that I lived amongst some real slobs, and that if not for these convicts, we'd either be buried in trash or that we would have to come up with other ways to address this serious problem.

My story reflected those observations.

 

[tonyb]

Around here, there is a program whereby companies or other organizations sponsor the trash clean-up of certain stretches of highway. They receive credit with signs to that effect. All it amounts to, however, is a once-a-month litter patrol on their portion of the road with a semi-volunteer crew from the organization. I guess it's a good idea and one that seems so contemporary. I can't imagine something like that ever happening when I was little. But there was a lot that happened when I was little that I was totally unaware of.

Similar program in the Seattle area. They call it "adopt a highway litter control program." The volunteering entity gets its name on a sign.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Around here, you often see the slogan "Don't Mess With Texas" on signs, bumper stickers, tshirts, etc. Many people assume that some sort of declaration of swagger, but it's the slogan for TxDOT's anti-littering campaign. The campaign is credited with drastically reducing littering, and it's become quite the catch phrase. Perhaps not everything from the Boys From Marketing is a bad thing.

You still see the influence of Ms. Lady Bird's efforts, especially the wildflowers along the side of the road:

 

[Stearmen]

The city also had a big mechanical street sweeper. I've never ever seen one where I live now. Has anyone else ever seen a street sweeper come through your neighborhood?

We have a fleet of them, they come through my street several times a year. Only down side, if my neighbor decides to park in front of my house, the sweeper just goes around him!

 

[BlueTrain]

In response to Mr. Doble's comments, you are probably correct in that private automobiles make for cheaper transportation than public transportation, which of course depends on where you live. But there are other considerations. For one thing, all the highways are subsidized, though there is a disturbing trend back to toll roads. Naturally they never use the term toll road but that's what they are. And I even understand there are privately owned roads here and there.

The existence of all of these things is part of a dynamic that changes when something is added or subtracted, sometimes in unpredictable ways (everything is predicted by someone or other). Streetcars or trolleys became something of a nuisance when automobiles became more numerous, even if they didn't run on tracks. No matter what we're talking about, there will be resistance to change. When the Golden Gate Bridge was being planned, there was a lot of resistance to it from ferry operators. Given what bridges cost, probably some cost-benefit analysis would show that it was less expensive to furnish each commuter with a boat. That probably doesn't make sense but it does have some appeal.

Years ago, someone discovered that the Air Force provided transportation by boat from the Air Force Base, the name of which escapes me, on the Maryland/D.C. side of the river (roughly directly opposite Alexandria, VA) to the Pentagon. There was supposedly a public outcry and the practice ceased. That ferry made sense and that's why it stopped.

We've always been producing trash that couldn't be disposed of at home, I suppose. Even though we lived in town, we burned as much trash as possible, a delightful practice for a boy. The city, as it official was, provided the trash pick-up service, such as it was. The trash truck was simply a stake-bodied truck with a two-man crew. And the trash dumps were actually in the city limits. One was old and no longer used, the other new but it was still a dump.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

... For one thing, all the highways are subsidized, ...

That's a complicated notion. The Federal government has an agency called the Federal Highway Administration, created in 1958 under the Eisenhower administration. It manages the Federal Highway Trust, a stream of revenue created by a tax on motor fuels (18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on diesel fuel). This revenue stream collects roughly $35 billion to $40 billion annually. Add to this fuel taxes collected by states.

Outlays from the Federal Highway Trust are running above the intake in recent years, although if the FHT didn't subsidize mass transit to the tune of $9 billion annually, the FHT would be running in the black.

One of the ironies of this situation is that Federal fuel tax revenues have been declining as the average MPG of vehicles on the road has been increasing over the past decade or so, meaning that despite the highways bearing increasing traffic, the amount these more-efficient vehicles pay in gas taxes has been going down. During the period of 2008-2010, nearly $35 billion was transferred from general revenues to the FHT to cover shortfalls.

So, to say that "all the highways are subsidized" is true, narrowly speaking. On a broader view, they are being subsidized by the drivers who use them by the gas taxes they pay, and roughly a quarter of those taxes go to subsidizing mass transit.

 

[BlueTrain]

Fair enough. To say it's complicated is an understatement. But then, I remember what highways were like before 1958.

How many miles of new railroad track do you suppose have been put down since then? This is not to say that one form of transportation is better than another but railroads received some help, too. At any given time, in spite of the resistance, which there always is, people want more. More railroads, more highways and more air travel. I suppose we could go back to travelling to Europe by ocean liner instead of air liner and going down to New Orleans by riverboat instead of motoring, too.

 

[BlueTrain]

Oh, I forgot. We want all those things but not in my backyard.