The Highway Trust Fund depends on federal fuel taxes for its finances. And those taxes have remained stuck for two decades at 18.4 and 24.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and diesel, respectively. State taxes tack on another 31.1 cents per gallon on average.
Keep this fact in mind: There were about 260 million Americans in 1993 when the tax was last raised. Today there are over 315 million. And we travel more miles than we did two decades ago. That means the transportation infrastructure has to do more with less per-mile spending, adjusted for inflation. That’s why we see crumbling bridges on the news, outdated traffic-light patterns and clogged roads.
And, as we move into cities and use mass transit we will drive less. As cars become more fuel efficient they require less gasoline. At the same time, alternatively fueled cars such as electric vehicles don’t pay gasoline taxes at all, and others, such as natural gas vehicles, pay a lower rate on average, so the current system subsidizes their use. That means our gasoline purchases — and our gas taxes — are declining, putting a strain on our trust fund.
Norway is starting to have more electric cars than it can handle
When Hilde Charlotte Blomberg reached the University of Oslo last Friday, the first thing she did was to send a mass email to the Department of Informatics:
I arrived at work now and all the spaces for electric cars are taken. If you think your car is charged, I would appreciate if you could park somewhere else. I won’t get home if I can’t charge my car. I am standing downstairs and waiting and hoping that someone will come
Millennials move away from car ownership
High costs and a constantly expanding array of other options are spurring more Americans – especially young ones – to kick the long-running American car habit.
Cars, long a status symbol for American youth, are increasingly being passed-over by millennials the New York Times reports. According to a study released Tuesday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the driving boom of the past sx decades is over. Even though the U.S. population increases every year, 2013 marked the eighth year of declining driving. In aggregate, America’s vehicle owners are driving fewer miles than they used to. As federal data shows, total vehicle mileage driven in the U.S. is essentially back where it was in 2005. And many millennials aren’t even picking up the habit.
The Internet Of Cars Draws Nigh
The Internet of Cars could be coming sooner than you think.
In August 2012, the University of Michigan launched a massive project to get 3,000 cars in Ann Arbor, Mich., to speak to one another via Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). That project was partly designed to inform the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration whether or not it will mandate the use of DSRC modules as a critical safety device in all future vehicles on U.S. roads.
The clock is ticking on the mandate decision, which is expected by the end of 2013. The decision is potentially the biggest development for auto safety since the seat belt, and the biggest thing ever for the Internet of Cars.
Tablets facilitate impulse shopping for many
But it might be even harder for shoppers to stop themselves if they happen to use their iPad to peruse the wares of online retailers. New research out of Boston College indicates that consumers feel a deeper affinity for products they touch on a screen than those selected using a laptop touchpad or a mouse.
When consumers participating in the study reached out and touched an image on a touchscreen, the experience nearly rivaled their feelings of touching merchandise in a brick-and-mortar store, according to the measure of satisfaction used in the study.
“It’s kind of surprising how strong the effect is,” said S.Adam Brasel, a Boston College business professor and lead author of the study. “And we’re not necessarily aware it’s taking place.”
This holiday season, shoppers appear more connected to their iPads and touchscreen phones than ever, helping to drive online sales to more than one-third of all holiday purchases, according to retail analysis firm NPD Group Inc.
Report: Bot traffic is up to 61.5% of all website traffic
Last March we published a study that showed the majority of website traffic (51%) was generated by non-human entities, 60% of which were clearly malicious. As we soon learned, these facts came as a surprise to many Internet users, for whom they served as a rare glimpse of “in between the lines” of Google Analytics.
Since then we were approached with numerous requests for an updated report. We were excited about the idea, but had to wait; first, to allow a significant interval between the data, and then for the implementation of new Client Classification features.
With all the pieces in place, we went on to collect the data for the 2013 report, which we’re presenting here today.
Photographer finds beauty in decay, loneliness of abandoned breweries
You just can’t keep Paul Bialas and his cameras out of abandoned and crumbling brewery buildings.
A year after his photo book about Pabst came out, he’s back with another one featuring Schlitz, known for — say it with me — “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.”
Like a vulture circling its lunch on the highway below, Bialas has an insatiable fascination with the history of these once-thriving Milwaukee giants and the carcasses left behind when the workers disappeared.
“I love it. Going in there gets me fired up, and few things do that. I wonder if I have just peaked and now I won’t have that feeling again. These two buildings — Pabst and Schlitz abandoned buildings — how do you top that?” he said.
The self-published “Schlitz Brewing Art” is available on Amazon; Bialas’ website, LakeCountryPhoto.com; and at local bookstores, including Best Place gift shop at the old Pabst site, Barnes & Noble, Books & Company and Boswell Book Company.
Just to be clear, Bialas had permission to photograph both brewery sites. It was easier at Schlitz, he said, because light poured in through the skylight atop the seven-story building that housed two brewhouses, two labs and a malt house.
Why the cult of hard work is counter-productive
Loafing around can be an act of dissent against the ceaseless demands of capitalism.
Recently, I saw a man on the Tube wearing a Nike T-shirt with a slogan that read, in its entirety, “I’m doing work”. The idea that playing sport or doing exercise needs to be justified by calling it a species of work illustrates the colonisation of everyday life by the devotion to toil: an ideology that argues cunningly in favour of itself in the phrase “work ethic”.
We are everywhere enjoined to work harder, faster and for longer – not only in our jobs but also in our leisure time. The rationale for this frantic grind is one of the great unquestioned virtues of our age: “productivity”. The cult of productivity seems all-pervasive. Football coaches and commentators praise a player’s “work rate”, which is thought to compensate for a lack of skill. Geeks try to streamline their lives in and out of the office to get more done. People boast of being busy and exhausted and eagerly consume advice from the business-entertainment complex on how to “de-fry your burnt brain”, or engineer a more productive day by assenting to the horror of breakfast meetings.
A corporate guru will even teach you how to become a “master of extreme productivity”. (In these extreme times, extremity is always good; unless, perhaps, you are an extremist.) No one boasts of being unproductive, still less counterproductive. Into the iron gate of modernity have been wrought the words: “Productivity will set you free.”
Strategies to enhance the “productivity” of workers have been formalised since at least Frederick Winslow Taylor’s early-20th-century dream of “scientific management” through methods such as “time studies”. The latest wheeze is the Big Data field of “workforce science”, in which everything – patterns of emails, the length of telephone calls – may be measured and consigned to a comparative database to create a perfect management panopticon. It is tempting to suspect that the ambition thus to increase “worker productivity” is aimed at getting more work out of each employee for the same (or less) money.
Driving Is Going Out of Style
A new study from U.S. PIRG gives us perhaps the most detailed yet look at the “peak car” phenomenon whereby America’s passenger-miles driven keeps falling. As Ashley Halsey writes, perhaps the most important contention of the report is “data that show the cities with the biggest drop in driving suffered no greater unemployment peaks than those cities where driving declined the least.”
Specifically, the second- and third-largest declines in car commuting were seen in the Washington, DC and Austin, TX metropolitan areas which had two of the most robust job markets during the recession.
PIRG’s takeaway is that it’s time to stop lavishly funding new highway construction and instead focus money on a mix of maintaining existing infrastructure and improving mass transit services. I agree with that, but the budget allocations are in some ways the smallest pieces of the puzzle. The real gains are to be made in rolling back the implicit subsidies to parking and barriers to multi-family apartments, leveling the regulatory playing field between private cars and private transit, and looking at operational issues that prevent cost-effective transit operations in the United States. All of which is to say that while money is nice, what’s really needed is a much broader change of mind that doesn’t regard all alternatives to living in a detached single-family house with one car per adult as deviant behavior that needs to be regulated into a special box.
Let’s Bring The Polymath — and the Dabblers — Back
I noticed recently that books with the phrase “The Last Man Who Knew Everything” all share in common that their subjects lived during the period close to the Scientific Revolution, roughly between 1550 to 1700. (The examples I own are about Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest born in 1602; Thomas Young, who studied topics such as optics and philology and was born in 1773; and Philadelphia area professor Joseph Leidy, who was born in 1823.)
It’s as if the Scientific Revolution — and the knowledge it spawned — killed the ability to Know Everything. Before then, it was not only possible to be a generalist or polymath (someone with a wide range of expertise) — but the weaving together of different disciplines was actually rather unexceptional. The Ancients discussed topics such as ethics, biology, and metaphysics alongside each other. The Babylonian Talmud discusses everything from astronomy and biology to morality and law, weaving them together into a single compendium.
So what changed? Scientific knowledge exploded in size, mainly due to the application of the scientific method to our surroundings. As that knowledge base and its domain experts grew exponentially, we began classifying and ordering all that we understood — from the classification taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to manuals for categorizing mental disease. We made sense of our world by dividing information into manageable portions and distinct areas of proficiency.