Sprawl returns ...  

And probably sooner than we think. The recession, especially in housing combined with gas prices, and gridlock to bring urban expansion into the country to pretty much a halt. In fact, it has been reversing.

Now, with crop prices soaring and housing in a deep slump, the economics of land investment have turned upside down. Farmers and investors are buying land that had been slated for development and using it for agriculture. And they are paying a small fraction of what housing developers paid for the same land before the recession.
The trend, if it continues, could represent a historic shift away from development in the far reaches of metropolitan areas. These properties had fueled much of the housing industry's bubble last decade.
In September, the Vanderweys, an Arizona dairy farming family, paid $8 million for a 760-acre alfalfa and cotton field that had fallen into foreclosure in Buckeye, Ariz., about 30 miles west of Phoenix. That same parcel, called Liberty Farm, had been sold to real-estate speculators in 2005 for $40.8 million. The Vanderweys want to plant hay.

California farmer Paul Singh bought this land from housing developers.

"These prices are becoming the new normal," said Nick Vanderwey, one of four brothers who purchased the farmland. "Everything in this area is coming back into farmers' hands."[More]
(Note: this article was from 2011)

 But wait!  This song isn't over, and Google may be writing the next verse with its autonomous car. There are others working on this, but Google provides a convenient benchmark. And it has a powerful argument about feasibility.

Watch and marvel.


The implications for such vehicles are simply staggering, and one may be a chance for those exurban farmer super-fortunates to sell their land again to developers as cities begin to expand.

Many anticipated consequences of driverless cars have already received attention on this blog and elsewhere, such as their impact on the mobility of the elderly, on taxis and car sharing services and on the future of the car industry. A crucial aspect which has escaped attention is the impact of driverless cars on urban form, which I anticipate will follow two broad predictions:

• Cities will greatly expand, again: Faster and more efficient transportation will convert locations that are currently too remote for most users into feasible alternatives, abundant with space. Like suburban rail in the early twentieth century and the mass consumer automobile that followed, driverless cars will generate a gradual, but dramatic expansion of cities.
• Buildings and parking will be uncoupled, freeing up valuable land: After dropping off passengers, driverless cars will independently seek parking (or their next car-share customers) and they will show up for the return ride at the tap of an app. As soon as driverless cars are common enough, the demand for adjacent parking will dwindle and parking lots in areas where land is sufficiently valuable will be ripe for conversion to other land use. As parking in high-value areas is thinned out or altogether purged, the micro-structure of cities will change – you guessed it – dramatically!

Why will cities expand?

Driverless cars will make it less “costly” for people to travel a given geographic distance, partly because they will be free to engage in other activities while travelling, but primarily because of reductions in travel time. Unlike human drivers, autonomous vehicles will follow optimal routes given real-time traffic conditions without fail. More crucially, as soon as suitable roads such as freeways (or lanes thereof) are declared off limits to manual driving, driverless cars will travel – safely – at much higher speeds than we do today. Gains in efficiency will follow from coordinated traffic management protocols, too. Once vehicles communicate with each other traffic through intersections and merges will flow much more smoothly than permitted by today’s traffic signals, stop signs and merging lanes, leading to substantial gains in travel time (a partial, human-mediated step in this direction is explored in this article).
If people currently forego affordable, spacious dream homes because the associated commute is too long, a technology that condenses the time needed for commuting along the same route – and allows doing so in the back seat – will make those homes more agreeable. Similarly, businesses whose location depends chiefly on access to appropriate labor or clientele will find that potential locations which are currently too remote will become feasible. It will still be crucial for them to sit “close” enough to their talent pools or their customer base, but because what matters for “closeness” is travel time rather than geographic distance, these firms will be able to reap the benefits of more remote locations without giving up “closeness.”

How far will cities expand?

The extent to which cities expand will be determined by the extent to which travel times are reduced. The more efficient traffic flow becomes the broader the geographic range in which living and working becomes feasible.
Will we ever hit a point at which people are no longer interested in the extra space offered by more distant locations? This is unlikely. Today swimming pools and three car garages are common in suburban homes, but who would have imagined that possible before the advent of the mass consumer automobile? Perhaps the current equivalent is the wish voiced by some home buyers – typically just beyond the urban fringe – that neighbors’ homes be out of sight. That seems like a lot to ask in today’s suburbs, but it could well become the norm looking forward.

When will this happen?

Most estimates suggest that the arrival of the fully self-driving car on the consumer market will occur within a decade. Provided that it will be possible to install these systems in existing manually driven cars – much as hands-free cellphone devices can be installed today – then there will be no need to wait for the entire stock of cars to gradually be replaced, and a much faster process of adoption will ensue. The speed of the process will be determined by people’s willingness to give up the driver’s seat, and by the adaption of the legal environment, first to permit driverless cars and then to secure them an exclusive right of way (a separate lane on the freeway). Google and the automakers will go to great lengths to ensure that legal barriers are removed and that the driverless car is adopted quickly. The devotion of a separate right of way may be a more challenging feat, but it will be difficult to reject in light of the gains it will offer.
Following these developments, the gradual process of city expansion will take place over many decades, much as the ramifications of the mass consumer automobile continue to play out almost a century after its arrival. [More worth reading despite my generous excerpting]

I fear the autonomous car will arrive about 20 minutes after I end my career at USFR and don't have to make my 3 hr. 7 min. commute to South Bend. That's OK. But I wonder what farmers could get up to in our ever-expanding off-season if distance were less of a hassle.

If any group in the US should grasp the possible impact the autonomous car could have, it is we farmers. Let's face it - I'll probably lose control of my grain cart before long.

Forget the Segway - I'm betting on this as the Next Big Thing.

How we'll get...  

To the new EPA mileage requirements. With luck, I'll be dead.



 It won't be nearly as scary on the right side of the road, of course.

In case things are going too well for you...  

A possible headache on the horizon.

Farmers across the Northwest and Midwest are watching nervously as longshoremen and grain terminal operators start negotiations with far higher stakes than in the disputes that caused chaos at the Port of Portland this summer.

The disputes diverted ships and clogged cargo as far away as Idaho and India but affected a relatively small container port. The grain talks involve a couple of Puget Sound terminals and, most importantly, operations on the Columbia River, which is the nation's top wheat export outlet.

If the talks fail to replace a contract expiring Sept. 30, wheat, corn and soybeans would back up across the U.S. grain belt, affecting billions of dollars in exports and tens of thousands of jobs.

No one predicts failure. But the negotiators, who occupy the narrow end of a gigantic U.S. grain funnel, face unprecedented pressure.  
...
Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition, an Iowa-based soybean industry group, said a shipping stoppage caused by any problems with the longshore grain negotiations would hurt the Midwest economy. But he also noted that a threatened strike by Atlantic and Gulf Coast longshoremen, who also coincidentally face a Sept. 30 negotiating deadline, would hurt the national economy.

Such a stoppage by the International Longshoremen's Association, halting container movement at 36 ports from Maine to Texas, would dwarf the Portland, Longview and Columbia River/Puget Sound situations. Shippers would shunt cargo through West Coast ports, unless Pacific Coast longshoremen refused to handle it in solidarity with their East Coast counterparts. [More]

Longshoremen strikes are something we normally associate with Argentina, and I am not predicting one here. But It is a real blast from the past to ponder the effect of a strike.

Let's see, it's three hours...  

And nine minutes to South Bend (best ever). Slightly over 210 miles. So is this the equivalent of commuting 42 miles each way, 5 days a week?

That may explain my new suits and blood pressure meds...

In other words, a long commute is definitely bad for your blood pressure but it's positively disastrous if it ends up eating into your physical activity time. So a longish walk or bike ride to work probably isn't that bad, but a long drive is disastrous. I really firmly believe that the existence of persistent regular traffic jams is just about the most underrated problem in American public policy, especially because it's a problem we could almost certainly solve relatively easily with a mix of congestion pricing, demand-responsive pricing of street parking, and more bus service.  [More]

I can assume I'll drop 20# and 20 points on the diastolic when I retire, right?

Driving less: Chapter 2...  

The previous post on mileage driven drew not just attention here, but prompted more inquiries into traffic stats. Another interesting wrinkle is the fatality decline.

What’s interesting, though, is that fatalities per mile often drop during a recession — and it’s dropped extra dramatically in this particular downturn. “This is the most profound departure from the general trend we’ve ever had,” said Darren Grant, an economist who studies traffic safety at Sam Houston State University (and who provided me with the chart above).
Grant notes that traffic-safety experts aren’t certain why people seem to drive more safely during a recession. One factor might be that people go out drinking less. But Grant offers up another theory: “It’s possible that it has something to do with how people value their time.” When the economy’s booming, the logic goes, people drive faster because they have places to be. That same principle might explain why people walk measurably faster in cities with high productivity, like, oh, Manhattan (although this is a complicated topic, see here for a fascinating discussion). [More]

I for one don't miss windshield time, and look forward to avoiding it strenuously in the future.

Driving less?...  

Well, somebody is. For whatever reason we are keeping our cars parked slightly more.

 [Source]

Theories abound, such as this one:

There’s also a theory floating around that Americans—especially young Americans—are simply no longer as car crazy as they were in the 1970s. In 1976, three-quarters of all 17-year-olds had drivers’ licenses. By 2008, that was down to 49 percent. Last year, Zipcar, the car-sharing company, did a survey that found that 67 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds would prefer to drive less, especially if alternatives were available. (Mind you, Zipcar is hardly a disinterested party here, but other surveys have yielded similar results.)
What could explain this cultural shift? Maybe more young people are worried about the price of gas or the environment. But—and this is just a theory—technology could play a role, too. Once upon a time, newly licensed teens would pile all their friends into their new car and drive around aimlessly. For young suburban Americans, it was practically a rite of passage. Nowadays, however, teens can socialize via Facebook or texting instead—in the Zipcar survey, more than half of all young adults said they’d rather chat online than drive to meet their friends.
But that’s all just speculation at this point. As Bernstein says, it’s still unclear whether the decline in driving is a structural change or just a cyclical shift that will disappear once (if) the U.S. economy starts growing again. [More]

'Tis a puzzlement, to be sure. I don't know enough about teenagers today to jump aboard that idea, but it may be.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

We're special, Example #78...  

Farmers in IL and probably elsewhere are less than thrilled by impending motor carrier regulations that until now applied only to other folks.

A large percentage of Cornbelt farms have semi-trailer trucks to more efficiently handle high capacity harvesting equipment.  While some of those trucks have limited use other than harvest, many others become a second home for farmers who work as commercial carriers when they are not farming.  Although they have the required commercial drivers’ licenses and many of their trucks have US Department of Transportation registration, many will not be happy to learn the DOT is working its way down further into their farming operation.  Buckle your seat belt.
The US Department of transportation has an internal administrative staff to develop rules and regulations and implement those for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act. It is designed to enhance safety on public roadways, and part of the rules are licensing and registration for commercial vehicles used in interstate commerce.  Over the road truck and bus drivers know all about the FMCSA and its rules.  And many farmers who obtained a commercial drivers license from their state department of motor vehicles will be familiar with many of those regulations, and may already have a USDOT number on their vehicle if it has been driven across a state line. [More]

Notice the outraged comments and helpful information in the comments to the above post, but there is a big part of the issue conspicuously absent:

Why should farmers be exempt from these rules?

There may be a case for why my truck loaded with grain should be regulated differently from your truck loaded with carpet, but I don't see any compelling arguments.  Instead we have these rather familiar assertions:

1. It will cost money. 
2. It will be a hassle.
3. Farmers are different.

Since the overall goal of the regulatory effort is safety, where are the data showing we aren't part of the problem? Or conversely, why aren't we equally outraged at all the other trucks being taxed/regulated/hassled?

What makes us so special?

This is not an issue about regulatory outreach or taxation.  It's what happens when special political treatment of farmers ends.

(Yes, I will be affected, since I live 2 miles from the state line.)

Sobering sentence of the day...

Via Andrew Sullivan:

While traffic fatalities remain a top U.S. killer, the historical decrease is impressive and heartening. Did you know that there are now fewer traffic deaths each year in the U.S. than suicides? [More]

Yay?

Just like it's spelled...

First, here's how to pronounce the volcano in Iceland, “Eyjafjallajökull.”  Amaze your friends.

Now here's why the planes are grounded.

The intake of an airplane engine (far left) brings air into the combustion chamber.  The particles are small enough that they have no problem getting in past the intake and combustion stages (unlike birds).  When the particles reach the combustion stage, however, they get hot enough to soften or melt and instead of going through the engine, they stick on the turbine blades.  Once enough of the particles have accumulated, they block the flow of air through the engine, the engine stops generating thrust and the aircraft plunges.  This has been documented in about 20 civil aviation craft, in which the plane was essentially a glider for 5-10 minutes.  During that time of freefall, the engine usually cools, the particles agglomerates get pushed out and the engines can be restarted.  But that's an awfully uncertain way to unclog an engine. [More, including the radar problem]

It could last for months, too. This could be a serious economic headache as well, methinks.

[via iglesias]

I'm all for quieter...

Helicopters could become less obnoxious for bystanders.

For all the government conspiracy militia nuts out there, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there is no such thing as silent, stealth black helicopters. The bad news is that, thanks to Eurocopter's noise-canceling Blue Edge rotor blades, there soon will be.
The extremely loud noise made by helicopter blades results primarily from the blades chopping through eddies in their own wakes, a phenomenon known as blade-vortex interaction. By changing the shape of the rotor blades, Eurocopter manages to pair down the blade-vortex interaction so thoroughly that the sound only reaches the whisper volume of 3 or 4 decibels. [More]

Now if they could just tweak the emergency glide path, I might actually get in one.

Now we know how...

Children feel about traveling.  Flying is approaching the equivalent of a car-seat for adults.

As part of the increased security, passengers on a flight Saturday from Brussels, Belgium, to Dulles Airport in Virginia were not allowed to leave their seats for the last hour of the flight, a traveler told CNN.
Niki Yazzie said the flight crew told the passengers that they had to remain in their seats with their seatbelts fastened and couldn't have any items, such as pillows or blankets, covering their laps; everything was stowed away.
Passenger Johnny McDonald, who was on a U.S. domestic flight, told CNN he saw officials X-ray milk parents had brought for infants and saw many people patted down.

"They X-rayed the milk I don't know how many times," McDonald said. "And then they took the milk out and sampled each and every bottle of the milk. I've never seen that before." [More]

This unfortunately predictable over-response to the latest incident will continue the hassle of air flight for businesses and even vacationers. I suspect more technology will be thrown at sales programs as opposed to face-to-face transactions.  We'll get used to it, but the airlines won't.

Meanwhile, the BIG story of the day is Iran.  But it isn't getting much coverage outside foreign press and bloggers, especially Andrew Sullivan.  If you think through what regime change could mean in Iran to the US, the possibilities on the upside are enormous.  

Then ponder what a less hostile, more productive Iran oil industry could mean to oil prices.  Defense spending?  Terrorist support?

Dept. of Duh!...

Maybe I'm missing something really important here but did we really need a study to prove the railroads made agriculture boom?

During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms surged by more than 100 million acres while almost 50 million acres of land were transformed from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of transforming this land into a productive resource represented a significant fraction of domestic capital formation at the time and was an important contributor to American economic growth. Even more impressive, however, was the fact that almost half of these total net additions to cropland occurred in just seven Midwestern states which comprised barely less than one-eighth of the land area of the country at that time. Using a new GIS-based transportation database linked to county-level census, we estimate that at least a quarter (and possibly two-thirds or more) of this increase can be linked directly to the coming of the railroad to the region. Farmers responded to the shrinking transportation wedge and rising revenue productivity by rapidly expanding the area under cultivation and these changes, in turn, drove rising farm and land values. [More]

In fairness, I did not plunk down $5 for the paper on principle, but just looking at the age of towns in IL for one example, the ones on the IL Central tend to be the oldest.  The railroads also prompted the immigration of millions of Northern Europeans to the Midwest and forever altered its previously Yankee culture.

That influence was by far the more important for America, IMHO.

Best post title I've read in months...

From Wired:  WaterCar Python Offends All 5 Senses on Land And Water

 

Once installed, the Python will make short work of your trip to the boat launch with an average 0-60 time of 4.5 seconds. Once you get to the yacht club, stun your high society friends by driving the Python straight into the water, pressing one button to retract the wheels and another to start the jet. You’ll be gliding on a bright blue highway in seconds. Far from a glorified Amphicar, this baby can do 60 mph on the water.
In addition to being one of the absolute coolest toys we’ve ever seen, we can imagine high-speed police chases in L.A. might get a bit more interesting if suspects choose a Python as their getaway car.

On land, the Python is a custom-built hot rod that looks like a cross between a Chevy Avalanche and a Corvette. Out on Lake Havasu, where you just know one of these will show up, it’s a 20 foot luxury boat appointed with a polished wood dashboard and a leather wraparound bench seat — just like the Chris Craft you keep at your house in the Hamptons. Sadly, air conditioning, an automatic transmission and a hardtop are not currently available. [More]

Like the personal jet-pack, this idea just won't stay dead.

It could also dim the Christmas lights...

As the marketing buildup for the Chevy Volt intensifies, something I had been wondering about is starting to occur to others:  Can you really just plug electric vehicles (EV) in like a shaver?

Consider the puff for a Mercedes EV:

All of the cars feature a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery with a maximum capacity of 35 kWh; Mercedes says they charge in four hours when plugged into a typical wall outlet. The electric motor produces 70 kW (about 94 horsepower) and 236 foot-pounds of torque, propelling the little runabout to 62 mph in a little less than 11 seconds. [More]

Now do the math.

Imagine that. You could plug the BlueZero into your living room receptacle and in four hours transfer 35KWH of electricity from your incoming power line to your car's batteries. 35KWH in four hours. 8.75KWH in an hour. In the US, where we have 110V power, this means 79.5 amps of electricity are coursing through the walls of your house. I don't know about your house, but mine uses wiring that will safely pass 15A, less than a fifth of the 79.5A. That turns a four charging time in 20 hours. [More]

To put that in perspective, electric ovens are typically 30A (240V) circuits which would be equivalent to a 60A (110V) circuit.  That's big wire, dude.  Like #4 or #6.

Now add up the effect if all the houses on the  block suddenly went green.

Chief among those challenges is how thousands of power-hungry vehicles would tax distribution transformers at the local level. Such transformers have historically handled electricity load for about 10 average-size homes each.
Adding a plug-in car to the grid is equal to about a third of a house, Kjaer said. And because early adopters are likely to spring up in geographic concentrations, that could mean overloaded transformers at the distribution level or plug-in cars potentially causing power outages.
"The worst imaginable situation you could have is your neighbor yelling at you because you blacked out the neighborhood," Kjaer said.
Kjaer is less concerned about transmission or generation being overtaxed, as long as consumers are taught to charge their plug-in cars at night, during off-peak demand periods, to smooth the load. Kjaer said improving distribution is the key infrastructure challenge for utilities, aside from creating a network of charging stations.

"We're talking about the last 10 feet" between the house and the transformer, he said. "It's the last 10 or 20 feet that we've got to work on. We're got to work on it really hard, really quickly, because these cars are coming." [More]

Of course all these problems are simply opportunities for electricians and charger manufacturers, in a sense. But you probably ought to read the owner's manual before signing up to buy an EV and check your garage wiring.

Urban crawl?...

One of farmers' long-standing complaints (unless you were selling, of course) has been urban sprawl. I have been less uptight about this than many, feeling inherent problems would curb sprawl (Heh).

Well, between energy prices, total inertia in home building, and a new political atmosphere, anti-sprawl wishes may come true faster than we ever imagined.

For example, the debate over optimum population density is impacting transportation and city planning.

On to St Louis. It’s hard to talk in too much detail about places I’m not very familiar with. But the pace at which things can change is going to be dictated, in part, but the extent to which there’s actual interest in building anything in the metro area. At the moment, clearly, nobody is going to undertake large new building projects—dense or otherwise—in St. Louis or anywhere else. And a small city in the midwest is under no particular obligation to turn itself into a particularly dense metropolis. But what you want is to avoid a situation where you’re preventing density. St Louis has a couple of decent rail transit lines and it’s important to allow dense projects to be built near those stations and along the corridors that are served by rail. These things are expensive to build, and once they’re there it’s important to utilize the served areas in the most efficient way possible. That doesn’t mean forcing people to build extremely tall projects near them, but it does mean letting such projects go through without demanding vast fields of parking to be placed around everything. 

In general, I would also just note that it can get misleading to look at citywide density averages. The relevant issue for a city that (like St. Louis) has some transit is whether or not you’re achieving density at your transit nodes. Additional consideration that are important is that ideally the stations will be close enough together to create not just pockets of density but whole corridors of density, even if the corridors are surrounded by pretty traditional suburbs. The stretch of Arlington County running from Rosslyn to the Metro stations at Court House, Clarendon, Virginia Square, and Ballston are a great example of how this can look. [More]

The increased availability of light rail to create "corridors" of density might be a compromise image more farmers could buy into.  Of course, this also implies small communities not in the corridor could see further economic stress.

High oil prices change everything...

As energy cost spiral upwards strange reactions become commonplace. Consider the allure of (gasp!) coal.

As odd as the idea may seem, coal power in the gulf is just one more outcome of skyrocketing oil prices. In a world with dramatically disparate ideas on how or even whether to address the risks of global warming, demand for coal plants across the globe is growing rapidly to the detriment of efforts to increase the production of renewable energies such as solar, hydro and wind.

Nowhere is that demand more paradoxical than in the oil-rich Middle East. At the end of April, for example, the state-owned Oman Oil Company signed a memorandum of understanding with two Korean companies on the construction and operation of several coal-fired power plants. Dubai, for its part, is initially planning to build at least four large facilities with a cumulative output of 4,000 megawatts. Abu Dhabi also wants to get into the act. Even Egypt is thinking of constructing its first coal-fired plant on the shores of the Red Sea. [More]

People don't just whimper about high gas prices.  They look for alternatives. One is energy-dense coal. Now think about where it could come from.

Is it any wonder US railroads rank coal before transporting ethanol or grain?

The sound of one piston firing...

If you haven't been around an electric or hybrid vehicle, there is one curious aspect that frankly creeped me out: they don't make any noise. We had friends over for dinner who had just bought a Prius and we all went out to look at it when they left.

The car just sort of rolled back out of the driveway like the brake had slipped or something, the only sound was the crunching of gravel. It got me to thinking (and maybe some of you hybrid owners can help) about knowing the car was working when it doesn't make any noise. For example, you're waiting to turn left on a busy road or pull out into a crowded oncoming stream of traffic. The last thing to boost my confidence would be a silent, unvibrating car. That's what a dead car sounds like. It would take a long time to have the confidence, I think, that when I mash on the accelerator, something would happen.

Of course, another problem is we have come to depend on noise to remind us cars are around.

Hybrid and electric vehicles are potentially silent killers thanks to their stealthy electric engines that do not warn pedestrians they are coming. So goes the argument for making them produce some kind of warning noise, a proposal strongly backed by the National Federation for the Blind.

A bill backed by 16 US members of Congress would require the Department of Transportation to establish minimum sound levels for all hybrid and electric vehicles. And just last month, a mother whose son was hit by a Toyota Prius raised concerns over the stealthy nature of such cars. [More]

Am I the only one who can imagine a individual "car-tone" download industry arising, similar to ringtones?

Miles matter more now...

As we stumble into what I think will be a new era of very expensive energy, no sector will be more changed than transportation. Ask the airline industry. And if transportation changes, many of the current trends in globalization will have to change in response.

The world seems to be becoming less flat. Shipping costs between Asia have risen so much that they have eclipsed tariffs as a barrier to global trade, according to a new report that calls the cost of moving goods "the largest barrier to global trade today."

The impact of rising transportation costs, driven significantly by high oil prices, is already being seen in capital-intensive manufacturing that carry a high ratio of freight costs to the final sale price. But a new report has determined that higher energy prices are affecting transport costs at such an unprecedented rate that "the cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today."

The report, released by CIBC World Markets last week, concludes that the continuing increase of energy prices poses a major threat to price stability and overseas manufacturing — to the point that such forces "may reverse the impact of globalization."

"Exploding transport costs may soon remove the single most important brake on inflation over the last decade — wage arbitrage with China," says Jeff Rubin, chief economist and chief strategist at Canada-based CIBC World Markets. "Not that Chinese manufacturing wages won't still warrant arbitrage. But in today's world of triple-digit oil prices, distance costs money." [More via Free Exchange]

For example, remember when we found out chicken was being shipped to China to be processed into prepared foods and then shipped back to us? What if shipping costs make such schemes a non-starter?

Similarly is the argument for food-miles, which was largely discredited for some higher-value fruits and vegetables, at least. But the more costly the mile, the more the productivity gain/labor savings have to be to make the trip worth it.

This will likely affect commodities, although they seem to be in lockstep with energy prices, so the value shipped still overcomes the cost of shipping, but I'm not so sure that is a reliable indicator of the future.

But the underlying reliance on cheap transportation to help speed globalization could be in jeopardy. At the very least, a higher return for local products and services, or those which can be delivered electronically may provide some counter-balance many have been hoping for. Unfortunately, it will be an expensive counterbalance, forcing some harder consumer choices.

I'm not sure betting the farm on shipping commodities across the globe is wise.We need to transport ideas and services and eliminate transportation costs.

Our tiny future...

A couple of comments below about Asian minitrucks ties in with some chatter I have heard here in central IL. It seems a few farmers are opting to scoot around in one of these rather than climb into the old Ram and burn a few gallons of $5 diesel.

Each Japanese Mini Truck may have some slight variation (with respect to mileage or features) however here are the most common characteristics of a vehicle:

* Dimensions: 10 feet long, 5 feet high, 4 feet wide
* Weight: 1800 lbs
* Truck Bed: 4’ x 6’ with fold down sides.
* Bed capacity: 880 lbs
* Engine: 550-660cc, Liquid Cooled, 2, 3, or 4-Cylinder, Gasoline-powered, with approximately 40 Miles per Gallon
* Transmission: 4 or 5-Speed manual transmission, Low/High range
* 4x4, 12” All Terrain Vehicle tires, some trucks with differential lock or axle lock
* Standard heat, defroster, windshield wipers, headlights. Some units have A/C.
[More]

I had heard of a guy around here driving one after he ...umm, lost his license to drive. But then I saw one on Route 41 in Indiana last Friday. I'm pretty sure these vehicles are not sanctioned for road use, but debate continues about that.

Oddly, for $5K, it might be an answer for me. I gave Aaron my Colorado pickup to drive when he came back, and rather than plunk down for a Gator-type ATV, one of these babies would suffice to zip around our farm. It would also keep my commuting car - a studly Pontiac Vibe - clean and uncluttered with tools, parts, etc.

Sooner or later fuel costs make all kinds of formerly silly choices reasonable. When all you want to do is travel 3 miles to see if a field is dry (which after last night could be a week or so...) a minitruck could be ideal. I like the dump feature too.

How about it? Any experience/recommendations?