Is a US economic implosion (aka Greece) inevitable?

[KrauserKrauser]

It is 20% inflation in gasoline, it is not 20% overall inflation but I never said it was. Gas prices are what I like to use as it is the major source of energy in the US. To get commodities and finished prosucts almost everythig involves the use if gas at some.point. most other commodities dont have as wide of an impact on the broader economy as oil/gas.

I also feel that gas is a leading indicator of future inflation as increases in gas prices are going to trickle.down into the other commodities.
N
So while gas is not.overall.inflation. I would say that inflation in the gas and energy index is more negatively.impactful than most.any other commodity.

[Ariphaos]

Our house isn't powered by gasoline. Our garden is not grown with gasoline. My bicycle is not powered by gas, and neither are my feet. This is true for just about everyone in the country.

1) Gasoline is not, in fact, the major energy source in the US. That would be another substance commonly known as coal.
2) Gasoline isn't even the major source of fuel for transporting goods in the US. That would be diesel.
3) You are essentially claiming that US Government policy is responsible for the worldwide rise in the price of oil. Considering that US consumption of not exactly on the rapid uptake, this is laughable.
4) Using gas as a predictor of future inflation is ridiculous. Not just because of the first two points above. According to this, by your logic, we've had 13% deflation since 1980!
5) Transport fuel has a fairly decent long-term price elasticity, of about .3. Using it as a raw gauge of inflation first requires you to assume that no effort is going to be made to improve fuel economy.

[K. A. Pital]

Krauser is still correct on No.3, abeit in a more complex and a more subtle fashion. The spread of capitalism and corporate outsourcing to the Third World prompted a rise in demand for fuel. So indirectly US policies are responsible. After all, I would be surprised if US consumption would be on the uptake after the massive de-industrialization which occured in the late 80s-1990s.

[KrauserKrauser]

Our house isn't powered by gasoline. Our garden is not grown with gasoline. My bicycle is not powered by gas, and neither are my feet. This is true for just about everyone in the country.

No, your house is likely powered by coal which is at about the price it was in 2010 due to the abnormally warm winter. Well down from 2011 and 2008 but still 20% above 2007 prices.

Your garden is likely using gasoline to some degree. Either to get your seeds to market or in the fertilizers you use. Unless you use all natural stuff, if so, good for you. I am sure that you are entirely able to sustain yourself on your garden and never have to go to the store to get food there. Wouldn't want to think of all the gas it took to bring everything to the store (all the way from the industrial farm it was grown in and the route it took to get in your shopping cart).

I'm glad that you live in an urbanized area and area able to travel only by foot or bicycle. It must be nice. Too bad for the majority of Americans that have a 16 mile one way commute(Mine is 17 miles). Guess we'll just have to pedal really fast to make it work on time and enjoy the 90 minutes added to our daily commute.

I would love to know how everyone can live with just a bike and their feet and be able to function in this car-centric society.

1) Gasoline is not, in fact, the major energy source in the US. That would be another substance commonly known as coal.

And luckily for us Coal is actually well off the 2011 highs and substantially lower than 2008. We are still 20% above 2007 prices and are benefiting greatly from an abnormally warm winter.

2) Gasoline isn't even the major source of fuel for transporting goods in the US. That would be diesel.

And good thing Diesel is super cheap now, right? Oh wait...

Diesel price now: $3.95
Diesel price in Feb 2011: $3.56
Diesel price in Feb 2008: $3.40

So 11% higher than last year and 16% higher than the peak of the market in 2008. That's got to be a sign of a booming economy right? Oh, GDP grew less than 2% in the last 12 months, well I guess that's out.

3) You are essentially claiming that US Government policy is responsible for the worldwide rise in the price of oil. Considering that US consumption of not exactly on the rapid uptake, this is laughable.

As Stas stated gas consumption in the US is actually falling drastically. Almost worryingly. But that has not yet resulted in lower gas prices.

My beef is with the Monetary Policy that is being used by the Federal Reserve. You know, the Chairsatan himself, Ben Bernanke? Zero Interest Rates while inflation is running above target, QE1, QE2, Operation Twist 2, Unlimited dollar swaps with Europe, the man is printing US dollars like they are going out of style. Surprise, surprise the dollars are showing up in commodity inflation and since Oil is one of the most liquid and critical assets in the market, speculation fueled by Ben's printing presses are driving energy costs up.

Since Oil is priced and traded in dollars and Helicopter Ben is flooding the market with dollars, not surprisingly it takes a larger number of dollars to buy a barrel of oil.

The great part is with US debt at 101% of GDP the Fed is going to have to monetize the debt even more aggressively going forward as no one else will want to buy US bonds at the rates that the Treasury can afford. He's trapped in a box of his own making. Sadly, we are the ones that are going to suffer because of his hubris and short sightedness.

4) Using gas as a predictor of future inflation is ridiculous. Not just because of the first two points above. According to this, by your logic, we've had 13% deflation since 1980!

I guess by that link you are saying that since the inflation adjusted price of a barrel of oil from 1980 was over $100 dollars, we aren't seeing any inflation now?

I am saying that the price of oil has impacts on alot of other commodities. It is involved in getting to the commodities, producing the commodities and getting the finished products to market. Oil has impact on the price of Pork bellies, or at least the price of the end product of pork bellies (Bacon). The reverse is not normally true for most other commodities. Inflation in oil supports broader general inflation and then current rate of inflation we are seeing now is going to result in bad outcomes for the economy.

5) Transport fuel has a fairly decent long-term price elasticity, of about .3. Using it as a raw gauge of inflation first requires you to assume that no effort is going to be made to improve fuel economy.

Well, lets look at the gains and trends in fuel economy we are seeing right now.

A brief review of the CAFE standards and results for the last few years shows a gain of about 1mpg per year starting around 2006. So since 2008 we have gained ~4 mpg putting us around 34pmg (Cars only) a gain of ~12.5%.

And yet in that time gas prices have actually increased so obviously this is not a demand issue. It is more dollars chasing the same (or even less) amount of oil, raising the price faster than the gains being made in efficiency.

[Simon_Jester]

Krauser, it's not that gas prices have no effect on inflation. The problem is that they aren't all of inflation, and that any predictive power they have to work out what inflation will be in the future is very tenuous. Fuel costs are part of the cost of other things, but only part- there are a lot of things where doubling the price of fuel would only increase the price of the commodity by a small fraction.

If you want your argument to be strong, look beyond gasoline.

[Ariphaos]

I would love to know how everyone can live with just a bike and their feet and be able to function in this car-centric society.

I would love to know why this is even required. America needs to cut or otherwise supplement its per-capita oil usage by about 40% over the next two decades. I see no reason why this isn't feasible.

Diesel price now: $3.95
Diesel price in Feb 2011: $3.56
Diesel price in Feb 2008: $3.40

Those are nominal values.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/realprices/

Feb 2011: $3.67
Feb 2008: $3.61

What's hilarious is - look at the chart the spreadsheet there provides. If what you were claiming is true, we should have experienced drastic inflation in consumer goods from 2001-2008. According to you, we should have seen drastic inflation during that period.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united- ... lation-cpi

Inflation in the US seems to doggedly persist around 2-4% regardless of long-term trends in oil prices.

Alternately, you could click on 'gas prices' to see something even funnier.

So 11% higher than last year and 16% higher than the peak of the market in 2008. That's got to be a sign of a booming economy right? Oh, GDP grew less than 2% in the last 12 months, well I guess that's out.

The real peak in 2008 was $4.92. We'll see if we break that this year. Trucking companies took 2008 as a lesson.

As Stas stated gas consumption in the US is actually falling drastically. Almost worryingly. But that has not yet resulted in lower gas prices.

Stas made no such claim, because it simply isn't true. Stas said he'd be surprised if industrial usage isn't falling - which did heavily collapse from 2007-2009 and is now on the rebound again. Gas usage, however:
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHa ... FUPUS1&f=A
- After 2007, Gasoline usage is slowly decreasing. It is certainly not falling 'drastically'. In almost every other case, however, 2010 usage surpassed 2009.

My beef is with the Monetary Policy that is being used by the Federal Reserve. You know, the Chairsatan himself, Ben Bernanke? Zero Interest Rates while inflation is running above target, QE1, QE2, Operation Twist 2, Unlimited dollar swaps with Europe, the man is printing US dollars like they are going out of style. Surprise, surprise the dollars are showing up in commodity inflation and since Oil is one of the most liquid and critical assets in the market, speculation fueled by Ben's printing presses are driving energy costs up.

Yeah, because it couldn't possibly be demand outstripping supply.

The great part is with US debt at 101% of GDP the Fed is going to have to monetize the debt even more aggressively going forward as no one else will want to buy US bonds at the rates that the Treasury can afford. He's trapped in a box of his own making. Sadly, we are the ones that are going to suffer because of his hubris and short sightedness.

2% is such an atrocious interest rate, truly.

I guess by that link you are saying that since the inflation adjusted price of a barrel of oil from 1980 was over $100 dollars, we aren't seeing any inflation now?

You're the one making the claim that oil prices are predictive of inflation. The data does not back you up - the link to US inflation I posted above rather easily disproves you.

I am saying that the price of oil has impacts on alot of other commodities. It is involved in getting to the commodities, producing the commodities and getting the finished products to market. Oil has impact on the price of Pork bellies, or at least the price of the end product of pork bellies (Bacon). The reverse is not normally true for most other commodities. Inflation in oil supports broader general inflation and then current rate of inflation we are seeing now is going to result in bad outcomes for the economy.

And it's generally assumed that yes, it does. But the data suggests that oil's effect on inflation is easily to marginalize. If we take the spike in inflation in 2008 to be caused by oil, a ~60% inflation rate in oil caused a ~1% spike in the inflation rate. That's not exactly highly predictive, especially considering the collapse into deflation that quickly followed.

Well, lets look at the gains and trends in fuel economy we are seeing right now.

A brief review of the CAFE standards and results for the last few years shows a gain of about 1mpg per year starting around 2006. So since 2008 we have gained ~4 mpg putting us around 34pmg (Cars only) a gain of ~12.5%.

And yet in that time gas prices have actually increased so obviously this is not a demand issue. It is more dollars chasing the same (or even less) amount of oil, raising the price faster than the gains being made in efficiency.

The rest of the world wants oil, too. Not just the US, but also India and China. These nations have built up more wealth and more of this wealth is being directed at the acquisition of oil. Your claim of "Obviously this is not a demand issue" is false on its face.

Regardless, those aren't the only items mitigating rise in consumption. A better value to look at would be usage of fuel per ton of shipped goods, which is not going to be the same as average vehicular mileage - rail is more efficient than road transport, likewise with transporting barges downriver.

Even that doesn't give the full scope of it. Just because not everyone is walking/biking/etc. doesn't mean that the reduced demand by those people gets ignored in pricing. The same goes for measures that otherwise reduce or eliminate the need for transportation period - some of which does actually include reopening factories in the US.

[K. A. Pital]

I would love to know why this is even required. America needs to cut or otherwise supplement its per-capita oil usage by about 40% over the next two decades. I see no reason why this isn't feasible.

Because the USA has carefully built an automobile-centered industrial society for 50 years? And that's not easy to just undo?

[Ariphaos]

And yet US oil consumption dropped 10% in two years.

Gasoline makes up roughly 45% of our oil usage as is (see stats above) and is falling, slowly, on a total basis. Even adding diesel, you get to about 65%. Even with that, not all supplemental supply precludes auto traffic - liquefaction, biodiesel, shale oil, and other increased US outputs of what amounts to oil supplement the figure sufficiently.

Unfortunately statistics for truck versus rail and water shipping aren't yet available for 2010 or 2011, at least that I can find. But if they increased faster than trucking did, that would be a positive sign.

[K. A. Pital]

And yet US oil consumption dropped 10% in two years.

During the most massive crisis in recent history? Which is quite possibly a systemic first world crisis? I would be impressed if it was falling that much during a boom.

Even with that, not all supplemental supply precludes auto traffic - liquefaction, biodiesel, shale oil, and other increased US outputs of what amounts to oil supplement the figure sufficiently.

But this still consumption of oil. Except with low energy efficiency. I was referring to the concept of reducing oil consumption by 40%, not replacing these 40% with some other source of such fuels.

Unfortunately statistics for truck versus rail and water shipping aren't yet available for 2010 or 2011, at least that I can find. But if they increased faster than trucking did, that would be a positive sign.

Indeed. However, one should note that we are operating in crisis conditions when capitalist credit is very sparse. It follows naturally that in such conditions individual trucking (a very inefficient transportation system, which also has low stress tolerances compared to massive rail-cargo syndicates) would decline in importance, while large companies could be able to still get credit and possibly maintain their operation with sparse credit, too.

This is an important observation. The future of car-centered society depends on whether the system will continue to operate in conditions of increased difficulty of obtaining a credit, or whether it will return to the liquidity bonanza of the pre-crisis years, in which case I'm afraid the pattern will simply repeat.

[Ariphaos]

During the most massive crisis in recent history? Which is quite possibly a systemic first world crisis? I would be impressed if it was falling that much during a boom.

And? It shows that a 10% drop in oil consumption does not equate to a 10% drop in economic output. Moreover, shocks like 2008 cause individuals and companies to make more efficient use of oil. It's not like capacity will drop by 10% over the course of any given two-year period.

But this still consumption of oil. Except with low energy efficiency. I was referring to the concept of reducing oil consumption by 40%, not replacing these 40% with some other source of such fuels.

And I said reduce or supplement for a reason. Those methods don't magically go away just because you say so.

A 40% reduction is a very rough guess of how much oil, produced by proven methods, will be available to the US in 2032. It makes no statement except that that shortfall has to be addressed through a combination of reduced consumption and finding other, 'unconventional' means of increasing production.

Indeed. However, one should note that we are operating in crisis conditions when capitalist credit is very sparse. It follows naturally that in such conditions individual trucking (a very inefficient transportation system, which also has low stress tolerances compared to massive rail-cargo syndicates) would decline in importance, while large companies could be able to still get credit and possibly maintain their operation with sparse credit, too.

This is an important observation. The future of car-centered society depends on whether the system will continue to operate in conditions of increased difficulty of obtaining a credit, or whether it will return to the liquidity bonanza of the pre-crisis years, in which case I'm afraid the pattern will simply repeat.

Large corporations are sitting on ridiculous piles of cash that aren't getting invested.

However, I don't think a solution to our current 'crisis' is going to come without some reckoning for corporate power in general, across the board. If banks get addressed I don't see e.g. oil subsidies and increased investment in mass transit being far behind.

[K. A. Pital]

It shows that a 10% drop in oil consumption does not equate to a 10% drop in economic output.

Overreliance on existing rail infrastructure is generally thought to be a great compensator capable of supporting such rapid shifts, since rail is very efficient and if it was underloaded in the age of cheap credit, there's lots of excess capacity. However, it has a limit. And I doubt that limit stands at 40%.

It makes no statement except that that shortfall has to be addressed through a combination of reduced consumption and finding other, 'unconventional' means of increasing production.

That can be fixed by adopting a zero-growth paradigm (I can't feasibly imagine how an economy much more massive than it is now by 2032 would consumer less oil, since 20 years of 3% growth would result in a doubling of the economy's size at the very least), but capitalism ceases to function properly in such conditions and we encounter a prolonged stagnation and crisis.

[Darth Wong]

I would love to know why this is even required. America needs to cut or otherwise supplement its per-capita oil usage by about 40% over the next two decades. I see no reason why this isn't feasible.

Because the USA has carefully built an automobile-centered industrial society for 50 years? And that's not easy to just undo?

It's theoretically easy to undo: you just have to accept that people will take a serious hit to their standard of living, which the average person would consider almost unthinkable.

The cost of living in sprawling car-centric suburbs would shoot up, and the convenience would go down. This would cause housing values to crash in these overpriced suburbs. I'm not saying this would be a bad thing; it would probably be a good thing for society. But we would no longer be able to expect that every middle-class slob gets to own a 2500 square foot house with a nice big yard.

[ray245]

You don't really need a 2500 square foot house with a nice big yard to live a comfortable middle house income. If people living in urban jungles can live a decent middle income lifestyle with a decent TV, Iphone, Computer and relatively cheap transport, I don't think people should consider sub-urban lifestyle as middle-income lifestyle to begin with.

[madd0ct0r]

when you've go kids having a garden becomes more important. But you could halve the size of the plots with no real issues.

[Sea Skimmer]

Oil prices could go up a lot and have little effect on Americans being car centric as long as the fuel economy of passenger cars keeps rising, and fewer people buy light trucks they don't need. Reasonable cars already exist in the world which get over 45mpg with no special technology other then direction injection, simply because they are small. The average right now for passenger cars in use in America is more like IIRC 26mpg. A more certain problem is the dependence on trucking and diesel rail for moving freight, neither industry has much scope for serious reductions in fuel economy over what they already do, though if oil went high enough natural gas would become an economical option. Shifting from trucks to rail cuts fuel use about in half, but trucking is simply vital to sustaining the US the way its setup right now. Rail as it exists now isn't really under utilized in the US, some routes are worked harder then ever in history, but coastal and above all inland shipping certainly is underused, and all three could have a lot of capability restored at moderate cost.

[Darth Wong]

That's a fair point: the US has plenty of room to improve its efficiency with regards to gasoline consumption, although I suppose the big question is just how much China's growing consumption could suck up the global supply and overwhelm any efficiency improvements.

Switching to rail and shipping would certainly help in terms of efficiency, but it would change the dynamics of the supply chain. The vast networks of retail outlets that we've become accustomed to would become really difficult to maintain. It's one thing to ship things via train or boat to major hubs, but it's quite another to service a sprawling megalopolis of suburbs, all dotted with little retail outlets, all at the low costs we're accustomed to. That whole network is set up for trucks. It used to be that a small community would have very limited retail outlets and high prices because it was far from distribution centres; today every community seems to have the same shopping centres, and the same prices.

[TimothyC]

You could improve some of the retail efficiency by increasing the amount sent by rail to locations closer to the retail stores.

Example: I used to work for a big-box store. We would get trucks in three times a week from Indianapolis, a good 200+ km. They could have trimmed at least 70 km off of the truck route (or a 35% improvement) if they had simply supplied us out of the Cincinnati warehouse. If you instead run a train to Dayton, and then truck from there, you're down to 50km - or a quarter of the distance by truck.

I could see more of things like this being an incremental improvement that happens before many of the big-box stores have to start closing.

[Sea Skimmer]

At the rate people are shifting to buying stuff from the internet, a lot of retail stores are bound to die out anyway. Of course, the shipping rates for buying anything and having it delivered would increase, but it eliminates shipment of unwanted items and employment of store staff. Home delivery trucks are also one of the few kinds of truck that could really gain something from going hybrid since they make so many short distance stops.

Ever increasing use of intermodel would facilitate more short haul rail use, but for the moment its infeasible because all the sidings and required switches have been torn out. It'd help if someone came up with a railcar and truck trailer that could transfer containers without needing a gantry. Right now that's kind of a problem for unloading containers, and nobody is going to go back to extra hand transhipment because it leads to so much pilferage.

[Simon_Jester]

Maybe I'm missing something, but a big box supplied from a single massive warehouse that only uses a few trucks a week might actually be more fuel-efficient than a huge constellation of smaller stores that require swarms of delivery vehicles shuffling around to drop everything off. The more deliveries you make, the more fuel is spent bouncing around in stop-and-go traffic, as Skimmer alludes to talking about hybrids.

If so, then I'd think the trend would be towards denser residential areas packed around big box 'general stores' the size of football fields, which are in turn supplied from the nearest railroad yard.

[Darth Wong]

Maybe I'm missing something, but a big box supplied from a single massive warehouse that only uses a few trucks a week might actually be more fuel-efficient than a huge constellation of smaller stores that require swarms of delivery vehicles shuffling around to drop everything off. The more deliveries you make, the more fuel is spent bouncing around in stop-and-go traffic, as Skimmer alludes to talking about hybrids.

If so, then I'd think the trend would be towards denser residential areas packed around big box 'general stores' the size of football fields, which are in turn supplied from the nearest railroad yard.

Of course. That's the point; "denser residential areas" is just another term for "cities". It would involve a reversal of the suburban sprawl effect that we've seen accelerating out of control over the past few decades.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The cost of restoring a saturation level rail network would be great, but for the most part corridors exist for that purpose. For example in flat ground the space under high-tension power lines is relatively underutilized. What hasn't been mentioned is the conversion of the rail network to electric power would substantially reduce hydrocarbon consumption as well, particularly if we could get a very targeted effort based on "energy independence" to replace all oil-fired powerplants in the country with nuclear; this might work better than a general nuclear promotion strategy by focusing on "we must do this for energy independence" rather than actually trying to counteract charges of the lack of safety in nuclear power production. A lot of the lines have not been reclaimed into redevelopment sufficiently to massively drive up costs of reconstruction and some are intentionally mothballed. The real issue would be restoring all the little ripped out switches and quarter-mile branch stubs to various businesses and creating the restrictions to force businesses to ship by rail.


That said, shipping by rail is relatively economic in general. For example at any distance over 35 miles the shipping of gravel by rail is even more economically efficient than truck, rather than just fuel efficient. Above around 200 - 250 miles that's true of all cargoes, trucking about 250 miles distance and beyond is essentially something that exists due to the government subsidizing highways as a profitable way of doing business. No other economic consideration makes it viable.

In terms of energy per tonne-mile I've actually seen figures much worse than Skimmer; that railroading is 5 - 6 times more efficient trucking and that barge traffic is 13 times more efficient in energy per tonne-mile than trucking, though these may be extreme examples selected for advocacy. Barge canals can be opened and improved on a very large scale with sufficient political will. An excellent example is Germany where barge transport down to the very small scale remains in common heavy use and the government has massively expanded the canal network within the past two years. Generally however this would require regulation of industry to force companies to eat the holding cost of having an actual stockpile of material on hand again and accept a slightly slower transfer system, though getting more seamless container transfer would help mitigate this a lot.

One interesting idea I've had from time to time goes with the relatively painless electrification of city bus networks into trolleybuses, which exists in San Francisco and Seattle but nowhere else in the US to my knowledge. If you invest in total saturation of the catenary to all bus routes you could eventually use it for more than just buses; at night you could run electric delivery vans along the same routes. Instead of internet delivery being to the home, each neighbourhood in a city would have a little corner lockbox that your goods get slid into at night and you can walk over to physically pick up with your key to your container there you get when you move in. It has the added benefit of getting people to walk a short distance to pick up their goods, encouraging exercise. Such measures would however require radical intervention and regulation of government in business, and therefore are quite unlikely.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well, you can have much denser housing then the worst US suburban sprawl and still not be what would called a city today. Older US suburbs are far more reasonable then the newer ones. A different of 10 feet between houses vs. 30 feet between houses ect... Going back to having straight roads instead of curvy land wasting exercises in street grid design also helps. Another option is also just to decentralize the cities, which is more or less already happening in many parts of the US when major shopping and office complexes get built in remote areas for cheap land and then have residential areas built up around them. Cities are more efficient, but only to a point. After a point the congestion they create, a fair bit of which is created, at least in Phily, by public transport and garbage trucks stopping on narrow roads all day long, begins to hurt you. You've also got a major health and water quality penalty from the higher pollution density, these costs are hard to measure but they very much do exist.

When you start basing planning on how economical delivery trucks and rail are, you aren't going to find unlimited advantage to cities because congestion slows them to down so much, making the fuel burn and time used to travel a greater distance outside the city unimportant. Modern cities also generally lack much scope to expand rail delivery since all the old stuff was ripped out and built over, and generally people are not fond of 150 ton locomotives in the streets, though we still have a few tracks like that in Phily which once had absurd amounts of street rail like all east coast US cities did, while in the suburbs finding space for new sidings and transhipment spaces would be easy.

[Sea Skimmer]

In terms of energy per tonne-mile I've actually seen figures much worse than Skimmer; that railroading is 5 - 6 times more efficient trucking and that barge traffic is 13 times more efficient in energy per tonne-mile than trucking, though these may be extreme examples selected for advocacy.

I'm certain they are, even the railroad industry in its own TV propaganda they air around here doesn't claim such high figures. Most likely those figures, if they have any basis in fact, involve ONLY fuel burned while traveling on a route, and not all the other times you burn fuel not moving, unloading, transhipping ect.. or else its something really dumb and heavy like coal shipments. Railroad companies leave diesel engines running for days, even weeks with hot refuelings because they don't want to damage the engines with cold starts. This consumes much fuel before you consider all the other ways to burn it.

One interesting idea I've had from time to time goes with the relatively painless electrification of city bus networks into trolleybuses, which exists in San Francisco and Seattle but nowhere else in the US to my knowledge.

Philadelphia has several routes, plus several which are not operated due to lack of equipment but the wiring still exists. I know Boston also has them, but not many others still do, they used to be fairly commonplace. The electrification is a bit expensive because you don't have a return rail for the ground, and fire departments hate all the wire work. Also while better for traffic, since they can pull out of the way to pick up people, they still suffer the problem of being stopped by accidents and street construction and assholes double parking that plague the rail trolleys. Also like any electrification system they always have the problem that the electrical gear must support the max number of vehicles you ever need, and yet most systems won't operate at full capacity all the time. This is a big reason why freight electrification never got that far in the US, our love of totally massive super freight trains makes it very expensive to install. Now that we have reduced the number of trunk lines and added double stacked container trains that approach the weight of coal trains, it'd be more viable. Running mixed electric/diesel trains is also a possible solution and used in some cases in RUSSIA, but not a highly attractive one.

[Simon_Jester]

Of course. That's the point; "denser residential areas" is just another term for "cities". It would involve a reversal of the suburban sprawl effect that we've seen accelerating out of control over the past few decades.

What I mean is, the big boxes aren't the problem, the suburbs are- and quite a few of the suburbs would survive in some form if they compacted into clusters on the order of ten thousand people crowded in around nodes of an urban-area light rail network.

I think we agree that the sprawl of the residential areas is going to be a casualty of higher gas prices. If a determined statistician looked at housing patterns and found that it hasn't started to happen already, I'd be surprised- though the recession has everything out of whack.

Barge canals can be opened and improved on a very large scale with sufficient political will. An excellent example is Germany where barge transport down to the very small scale remains in common heavy use and the government has massively expanded the canal network within the past two years. Generally however this would require regulation of industry to force companies to eat the holding cost of having an actual stockpile of material on hand again and accept a slightly slower transfer system, though getting more seamless container transfer would help mitigate this a lot.

Although in the US, it would entail digging the canal network- large parts of the country simply don't have it, or have canals that are tiny compared to the modern demand on the infrastructure. Germany's been building canals continuously since medieval times, updating and expanding as they go; a similar project in the US would require far more political will than it's taken to create the German network because so much of it would be done from scratch.

So here in the US, we're much more likely to see rail expand than canals. Other countries might have a different experience, of course.

In terms of energy per tonne-mile I've actually seen figures much worse than Skimmer; that railroading is 5 - 6 times more efficient trucking and that barge traffic is 13 times more efficient in energy per tonne-mile than trucking, though these may be extreme examples selected for advocacy.

I'm certain they are, even the railroad industry in its own TV propaganda they air around here doesn't claim such high figures. Most likely those figures, if they have any basis in fact, involve ONLY fuel burned while traveling on a route, and not all the other times you burn fuel not moving, unloading, transhipping ect.. or else its something really dumb and heavy like coal shipments. Railroad companies leave diesel engines running for days, even weeks with hot refuelings because they don't want to damage the engines with cold starts. This consumes much fuel before you consider all the other ways to burn it.

Though electrification would fix that particular problem, and Duchess seems to be cheerleading for that too... of course, that runs into the other problems you mention.

[MKSheppard]

Or we could just use the rail lines that were laid down to feed earlier suburban sprawl, with commuter trains from the 1920s and whatnot?

Rockville/Silver Spring was got a boost in the early 20th C as a suburban community for workers in Washington DC; who would live out here; then commute down to DC via THE TRAAAAAAAAAIN.