On Increasing Mass. Revenues

by: briancady413

Fri Jan 18, 2013 at 13:09:34 PM EST

Together we, the people of Massachusetts, have made our home state a nice place. So most people moving or living here really want to buy land here. 'Location, location, location' they say, controls real estate value. That location is in relation to the rest of us, and in relation to the communities we've built together. It is that location that gives most market value to land, and it is that location which our communities made valuable in the first place. Returning a portion of the market value we created through our communities to maintain our communities makes sense. A state tax on land purchases would return a portion of the value we created as we built these fine communities.

Where are we going, why, and for what? This, in re-designing transport systems, while seeming frivolous, actually gets to the heart of the matter: The opportunities for our region in understanding and re-devising transport are enormous. We can spend less time in traffic, less money on fuel, insurance, repair, etc. and spend less of our lives suffering from car accidents, asthma, bronchitis, etc. Additionally, with less of our earnings leaving the region for fuel and car expenditures, we'll have more to spend on each other.

When public transportation expands, many gain, but few gain more or more directly than the landowners near new stops. Reportedly the land value increase yielded to them is often about the same as the cost of the expansion. One way to afford such public transport expansion is taxing those of us who stand to gain the most; the land-owners near new subway stations and facilities, as reported on here.

It's good to see more and more people bicycling.. Bicycling is very energy-efficient transport, the exercise promotes physical health, and it leaves the nation less reliant on imports, while polluting much less as well.

Outer space, where there is not air enough to breath, is closer to us on earth than Dorchester is to Medford. With only about 7.5 miles of air above us, and 400 ppm of CO2 now in our air, there is no longer airspace above earth for all the carbon in the fuels we could burn. We need to encourage each other to burn less, in order to maintain the climate, the agricultural systems and thus the food we all rely on. Nothing says 'Slow down' like taxes. A carbon tax will encourage all of us to develop the methods and the equipment all the world will need tomorrow, for our food system to continue to yield our meals.

Those before us, to eliminate scarce labor, substituted plentiful energy resource use via technology, which was brilliant in a world empty of people and full of resources,, but now we're running out of resources and have plenty of labor. We can now afford, in creating new methods and technology, to use more labor and less rare resources, which will yield less pollution and more jobs. Resource taxes like carbon taxes inspire this needed change in technology to proceed faster.

With the current five plus percent sales tax applied to real estate sales, and a carbon tax inspiring development of lasting infrastructure, we can assure each of us, when young, of a fair chance at life, and when old, of the help we all deserve. We can build the strength of our bridges and our schools. We can insure each of us access to the jobs we need to survive, and we can aid and guide those building the businesses that address the challenges before us.

Energy and Equity: Underequipment, overdevelopment, and mature technology

by: eli_beckerman

Thu Mar 24, 2011 at 10:00:00 AM EDT

Underequipment, overdevelopment, and mature technology

The combination of transportation and transit that constitutes traffic has provided us with an example of socially optimal per capita wattage and of the need for politically chosen limits on it. But traffic can also be viewed as but one model for the convergence of world-wide development goals, and as a criterion by which to distinguish those countries that are lamely underequipped from those that are destructively overindustrialized.

A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission as a bonus for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free motorized public transportation (though at bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic, or ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its will.

Energy and Equity: The elusive threshold

by: eli_beckerman

Thu Feb 17, 2011 at 08:30:00 AM EST

The elusive threshold

Paradoxically, the concept of a traffic-optimal top speed for transport seems capricious or fanatical to the confirmed passenger, whereas it looks like the flight of the bird to the donkey driver. Four or six times the speed of a man on foot constitutes a threshold too low to be deemed worthy of consideration by the habitual passenger and too high to convey the sense of a limit to the three-quarters of humanity who still get around on their own power.

Energy and Equity: The radical monopoly of industry

by: eli_beckerman

Mon Feb 14, 2011 at 18:14:01 PM EST

The radical monopoly of industry

A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered transit and motorized transport, and comparing the contribution each component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I have called traffic.

Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic, and transit indicates the labor-intensive mode. Transport is the product of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more severe as the speed-and with it the cost-of the service increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best, such a conflict allows for the optimum in the Prisoner's Dilemma: by cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time in the cell.

Energy and Equity: The ineffectiveness of acceleration

by: eli_beckerman

Mon Feb 14, 2011 at 18:05:34 PM EST

The ineffectiveness of acceleration

It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a different price than high speeds for all. Social classification by levels of speed enforces a net transfer of power: the poor work and pay to get left behind. But if the middle classes of a speed society may be tempted to ignore discrimination, they should not neglect the rising marginal disutilities of transportation and their own loss of leisure. High speeds for all mean that everybody has less time for himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget on moving people. Vehicles running over the critical speed not only tend to impose inequality, they also inevitably establish a self-serving industry that hides an inefficient system of locomotion under apparent technological sophistication. I will argue that a speed limit is not only necessary to safeguard equity; it is equally a condition for increasing the total distance traveled within a society, while simultaneously decreasing the sum total of life-time that transportation claims.

Energy and Equity: Net transfer of life-time

by: eli_beckerman

Wed Nov 10, 2010 at 14:51:19 PM EST

Net transfer of life-time

Unchecked speed is expensive, and progressively fewer can afford it. Each increment in the velocity of a vehicle results in an increase in the cost of propulsion and track construction and-most dramatically-in the space the vehicle devours while it is on the move. Past a certain threshold of energy consumption for the fastest passenger, a world-wide class structure of speed capitalists is created. The exchange-value of time becomes dominant, and this is reflected in language: time is spent, saved, invested, wasted, and employed. As societies put price tags on time, equity and vehicular speed correlate inversely.

High speed capitalizes a few people's time at an enormous rate but, paradoxically, it does this at a high cost in time for all. In Bombay, only a very few people own cars. They can reach a provincial capital in one morning and make the trip once a week. Two generations ago, this would have been a week-long trek once a year. They now spend more time on more trips. But these same few also disrupt, with their cars, the traffic flow of thousands of bicycles and pedicabs that move through downtown Bombay at a rate of effective locomotion that is still superior to that of downtown Paris, London, or New York. The compounded, transport-related time expenditure within a society grows much faster than the time economies made by a few people on their speedy excursions. Traffic grows indefinitely with the availability of high-speed transports. Beyond a critical threshold, the output of the industrial complex established to move people costs a society more time than it saves. The marginal utility of an increment in the speed of a small number of people has for its price the growing marginal disutility of this acceleration for the great majority.

Energy and Equity: Speed-stunned imagination

by: eli_beckerman

Wed Aug 25, 2010 at 22:30:15 PM EDT

Speed-stunned imagination

Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.

Equal speeds have equally distorting effects on the perception of space, time, and personal potency in rich and in poor countries, however different the surface appearances might be. Everywhere, the transportation industry shapes a new kind of man to fit the new geography and the new schedules of its making. The major difference between Guatemala and Kansas is that in Central America some provinces are still exempt from all contact with vehicles and are, therefore, still not degraded by their dependence on them.

Energy and Equity: The industrialization of traffic

by: eli_beckerman

Thu Jul 29, 2010 at 11:18:21 AM EDT

The industrialization of traffic

The discussion of how energy is used to move people requires a formal distinction between transport and transit as the two components of traffic. By traffic I mean any movement of people from one place to another when they are outside their homes. By transit I mean those movements that put human metabolic energy to use, and by transport, that mode of movement which relies on other sources of energy. These energy sources will henceforth be mostly motors, since animals compete fiercely with men for their food in an overpopulated world, unless they are thistle eaters like donkeys and camels.

Energy and Equity: The Energy Crisis

by: eli_beckerman

Fri Jul 23, 2010 at 12:10:38 PM EDT

Thanks to Steven for pointing me to it, and if you just have to read the whole thing NOW, you can do so here.

1. The energy crisis
   
2. The industrialization of traffic
   
3. Speed-stunned imagination
   
4. Net transfer of life-time
   
5. The ineffectiveness of acceleration
   
6. The radical monopoly of industry
   
7. The elusive threshold
   
8. Degrees of self-powered mobility
   
9. Dominant versus subsidiary motors
   
10. Underequipment, overdevelopment, and mature technology
    

The first installment, The Energy Crisis, below the fold.

Energy and Equity
Ivan Illich

El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta.
--José Antonio Viera-Gallo, Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of Salvador Allende

This text was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. Over lunch in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my manuscript, recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little known and as technical as "energy crisis" had no place in the opening sentence of an article that he would be running on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language and issues have shifted in less than five years. But I am equally struck by the slow yet steady pace at which the radical alternative to industrial society-namely, low-energy, convivial modernity-has gained defenders. In this essay I argue that under some circumstances, a technology incorporates the values of the society for which it was invented to such a degree that these values become dominant in every society which applies that technology. The material structure of production devices can thus irremediably incorporate class prejudice. High-energy technology, at least as applied to traffic, provides a clear example. Obviously, this thesis undermines the legitimacy of those professionals who monopolize the operation of such technologies. It is particularly irksome to those individuals within the professions who seek to serve the public by using the rhetoric of class struggle with the aim of replacing the "capitalists" who now control institutional policy by professional peers and laymen who accept professional standards Mainly under the influence of such "radical" professionals, this thesis has, in only five years, changed from an oddity into a heresy that has provoked a barrage of abuse. The distinction proposed here, however, is not new. I oppose tools that can be applied in the generation of use-values to others that cannot be used except in the production of commodities This distinction has recently been re-emphasized by a great variety of social critics The insistence on the need for a balance between convivial and industrial tools is, in fact, the common distinctive element in an emerging consensus among groups engaged in radical politics A superb guide to the bibliography in this field has been published in Radical Technology (London and New York, 1976), by the editors of Undercurrents. I have transferred my own files on the theme to Valentina Borremans, who is now working on a librarians' guide to reference materials on use-value-oriented modern tools, scheduled for publication in 1978. (Preliminary drafts of individual chapters of this guide can be obtained by writing to Valentina Borremans, APDO 479, Cuernavaca, Mexico.) The specific argument on socially critical energy thresholds in transportation that I pursue in this essay has been elaborated and documented by two colleagues, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Jean Robert, in their two jointly written books, La Trahison de l'opulence (Paris, 1976) and Les Chronophages (Paris, 1978).

--Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978

Resisting Friction

by: robc

Thu Jul 22, 2010 at 17:26:25 PM EDT

     We have written about the "friction of distance", explaining why travel was more challenging-and communities therefore more compact-in the time before humans discovered the enormous energy sequestered in ancient carbon sinks.  Alas, those sinks are not infinite so we must contemplate the return of the friction of distance to the level of the pre-oil days.  Fortunately, humans can look to past experiences to reduce the height of the learning curve.