Nobrainer’s Think Tank

It isn’t uncommon for me to hear people rave about the British TV show Top Gear, the “award winning car show.” But in the few times I have watched clips, I have failed to see what the fuss is about. What I have typically seen is a show where they go out of their way to be unimportantly correct. For example, this clip [thanks Fark]where it’s claimed that “Prius More Enviromentally Damaging Than BMW M3.”

In the clip, they compare fuel economy of a Prius driven at top speed with that of an M3 that followed it around. The test isn’t remotely fair and leaves false impressions. But eventually they get to the bottom line that “[i]t isn’t what you drive that matters, it’s how you drive it.” They cleared up false impressions by lying. The real bottom line, of course, is that it’s both what you drive and how you drive it that matters. Smart as dipsticks those Top Gear hosts.

A really cool photo gallery titled “A Walk Through Time“.

The talk of Chevy Chase recently made me think of an old Rolling Stone interview with Johnny Carson:

I did throw a line against Chevy Chase once. Somebody talked about ad-libbing, and I said that I didn’t think Chevy Chase could ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner. I think he took umbrage at that a little bit.

A somewhat interesting post at Econbrowser on whether the relative strength of the dollar causes changes in oil price. It’s a little technical but the graph at the bottom makes the most interesting point: at the time of the post, oil prices followed the same general pattern regardless of what currency it was priced in. Which raises some questions. Can global inflation occur? Or would that just be a red-herring to avoid admitting that commodity prices really are on the rise?

On the global warming climate change front, some scientists are looking past whether the models fit the data and instead questioning whether the data is even valid and of course because I’m linking to it, their answer is that it isn’t.

The Washington Post had a few good articles lately.
The first is about the area where I work, the construction being done, and about how any number of super-secret government data lines run underground just waiting to be snapped by construction workers.

The editors still fail to see why the government is nationalizing GM. I for one thing the federal government should go ahead and cut its losses now before GM inevitably turns into AMTRAK.

And they’re also calling BS on Obama and his claims that fixing health care are going to fix the current fiscal mess.

Not surprisingly, the current folks in charge in Washington willing to throw good money at anything that might have some good regardless of how bad an idea it might be in its entirety. Among those things is high speed rail. To be fair, I think high speed rail is extremely neat. In a world of limitless resources, I’d demand that it exist to an extent in the US much more than it does. But resources are limited and I have yet to see a real justification for why it is actually good and necessary.

What really bothers me though, is that one of the justifications for high speed rail is that you can travel without having to “take your shoes off.” In other words, the justification for federal intervention in and funding of high speed rail is the oh-so-wonderful federal intervention in air travel.

Brilliant.

Beyond that, am I really supposed to believe that the sprawling TSA, the Transportation — not Air Travel — Security Administration is really not going find a reason to, um, how should I put this, uh, “secure transportation”, in this case rail, by making sure that we don’t have bombs in our shoes.

Maybe that last point deserves a “nevermind” because I can believe that the federal government would be willing to tax one form of transportation (cars) to subsidize some other form that proves over and over again that it can’t pay for itself (Amtrak).

Congress had approved of 15 Billion new dollars for Amtrak over the next 5 years. Why? Because as best I can tell, poor people have to go on vacation, too. Even that explanation doesn’t make much sense because Amtrak’s prices are fucking ridiculous. But hey! It’s Congress. I’m sure it’s money well spent.

While watching C-SPAN today, I caught a bit of Congressional debate about Amtrak funding. Here’s what I recall:

• Funding is either set at 900 million, or 660 million. Either way they were trying to add 240 million. (Amtrak is seeking 1.6 billion)
• Some crazy black lady, who is apparently a Congresswoman from Florida, blabbered something about how Amtrak was so valuable in and around “the Katrina.”
• Last year’s legislation mandating changes at Amtrak saved 19 million dollars.
• It’s wrong to give up on Amtrak after they so admirably lived up to the challenge last year.
• According to some report, Amtrak is 17% more fuel efficient than autos, and 18% more efficient than planes.

Interested, I dug around a bit more.

From September 2004 through August 2005 (the latest data available here), Amtrak provided about 5.4 billion passenger miles at an expense of 2.94 billion dollars according to FY2005 data (which I think goes through September 2005, at least that’s what I gather from the FY2005 financial statement).

So, for FY2005, the cost of operating was 55 cents per passenger mile, while generating operations based revenue of 35 cents per mile.

In FY2004, it was 53 cents and 34 cents, respectively. Also in 2004, AAA estimated “[t]he average cost of driving a new passenger car in 2004 is 56.2 cents per mile” [emphasis mine].

Let that sink in. That’s 56.2 cents per vehicle–not passenger–mile for a new car that’s depreciating rapidly.

Surely the government investment is worth it since Amtrak has to be saving a ton of fuel.

Try again.

Let’s assume that those 5.4 billion passenger miles are each replaced by a person driving alone (a low estimate) in a vehicle that averages 20mpg (again a low estimate, since fleet vehicle fuel economy is closer to 25mpg). That means that without Amtrak, according to this estimate, Amtrak riders would instead be using about 270 million gallons of fuel to move themselves around. But, according to what I heard on C-SPAN, Amtrak is only a 17% improvement, which means maybe 46 million gallons of fuel are saved each year, thanks to Amtrak. And as usual that sounds like a lot. But that really translates to 3000 barrels per day, or about 0.015% of our daily oil consumption.

Looking at it another way, if the $900 million dollars of government money is applied only because of fuel savings, then the government is paying about $825 per barrel, or $19.66 per gallon of of fuel.

Again, I haven’t verified all this information, and certainly some of the comparisons and calculations aren’t really fair to Amtrak. It should, however, provide some food for thought.

UPDATE: I thought about that “17%” figure and thought it must be way low. Has to be. Well, it is what I heard (reading/listening to Congressional speeches inspires suicide by shotgun). It’s taken from a report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory… supposedly.

A report from the Heritage Foundation uses data from the ORNL Transportation Energy Data Book. It gives numbers for Amtrak’s energy use per passenger mile at a figure (4830) I can’t find contained in the book. I found 2935 BTU/revenue-passenger-mile for Amtrak (table 9.13). Using the book though, if you take fleet fuel efficiency at 25mpg, and average occupancy at 1.6 (figures 8.1 and 8.2), then a 17% fuel economy savings relates to an average energy density of our fuel of 137000 BTU/gallon, which is a little high I’d say, but pretty ball park.

I was using some data from the Heritage report below in comments about subsidizing other modes of transport. A government report does incidate that federal highways return a surplus. He author seems to mislead in the ability of airlines to do the same. I have little trust in the Heritage report at this point. Still, it would also be worth distilling the difference between highway funding and other road funding.

UPDATE 2: The Bureau of Transportation Statistics disagrees with Oak Ridge. Table 4-20 indicates that Amtrak, as of 2001, was about 42% more efficient than highway passenger cars.

I’m beginning to wish that I didn’t get curious.