NYC Transit on STRIKE!
Posted by Glenn on December 20, 2005 - 8:29am in The Oil Drum: Local
For the first time in 25 years New York City is largely shutdown today as the Transport Workers Union local 100 rejected a final offer from the MTA and went on strike. I could tell that the strike was on early this morning because of all the honking horns out my window (traffic will be a nightmare today). As I have mentioned before, a lot of wealth rides on NYC rails and buses. Which is why the Taylor law was enacted, making any strike illegal, resulting in fines that increase exponentially everyday.
This could be a watershed in how New York City views it's all its transit systems, including biking, walking, carpooling and even skating to work. The 1980 strike is largely given credit for making people more comfortable wearing sneakers to work and then changing into their dress shoes at the office.
To our riders, we ask for your understanding forbearance. We stood with you to keep token booths open, to keep conductors on the train and oppose fare hikes. We now ask that you stand with us. We did not want a strike. Evidently the MTA, governor and the Mayor did.We call on all good will New Yorkers, the Labor Community, and all working people to recognize that our fight is their fight, and to rally in our support with solidarity activities and events. And to show the MTA that TWU does not stand alone.
They have also set up a blog.
Bloomberg fired back with this statement:
Tonight, Roger Toussaint and the TWU have taken the illegal and morally reprehensible action of ordering a citywide strike of our mass transit system. For their own selfish reasons, the TWU has decided that their demands are more important than the law, the City and the people they serve. This is not only an affront to the concept of public service; it is a cowardly attempt by Roger Toussaint and the TWU to bring the City to its knees to create leverage for their own bargaining position. We cannot give the TWU the satisfaction of causing the havoc they desperately seek to create.
also ending with a similar plea to riders:
Rush hour will begin in few hours. I will join fellow New Yorkers going to work by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to lower Manhattan. Let's show our determination by walking, cycling or carpooling, to get to work and school. We will show that New York City works even when our buses and subways don't. I have no doubt that, by working together, we can and will get through this.
Both have taken extreme positions in my opinion, but I think they will come to agreement soon. My question is, why did we wait for a strike to start talking about walking, cycling, carpooling as primary ways for people to get to work.
As people walk around the city, they will find pedestrian paths squeezed into narrow areas that in places only allow a single file in each direction.
As people ride their bikes they will find that biking in NYC is dangerous with cars cutting them off, dooring them and double parked in bike lanes, where there are bike lanes.
And even with the carpool restrictions in place, many people will realize that even with those requirements, everyone can't just get in their cars in New York City.
This should be a wake-up call to all local officials to build more Alternatives for local residents to get around other than overcrowded subways and cars.
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http://nyc.theoildrum.com/story/2005/12/20/10122/640#2
We squawk about what is "fair" (whatever that means)
We squawk about "the markets" doing their thing.
If put to a test, most of us squawkers (me included) have no idea what the "fair" noise really represents or what the "markets" noise really represents. We just make noises.
Meanwhile, the sustainability of our "wealth" based society continues to spiral down to demise. How do we more fairly pay for TWU labor when everyone else's labor job gets offshored?, when all the factories get offshored? when all our brain power jobs get offshored? Why does Wall Street have to remain in NYC? Can't it be moved to a cheaper offshore location?
I just hope that the city decides to institute this 4 person/car policy or some version of it for use throughout the year. At least during certain seasons you have to have two or three people in a car to get into Manhattan.
I can't tell you how many people I see every day driving through the Lincoln Tunnel in a large SUV or minivan all alone.
Many people commented to me today how easy it was to hail a cab within the restricted zone.
So, regardless of which side you think is right, can we all agree that mass transit is a very valuable asset that should have the best management, the best well trained workers, the best maintenance and best investments in technology? And that businesses benefit tremendously from a well functioning transportation system?
"'If you live in "the rest of the country,' count yourself lucky, for you almost certainly have a car. Spiking gas prices may be an annoyance, but at least you know you can always get where you want to go."
What price freedom from being held hostage by a self-inerested group like a municipal union?
I highly doubt Mr. Taranto takes mass transit out to the area's airports. What he's really complaining about it traffic congestion, which NYC does not do a good job of regulating during non-strike times.
Ask folks out in any other major urban area if they have ever missed an appointment because of traffic and I'm sure they will answer "yes".
But you are right that people should have good transportation alternatives and not be completely dependent on one system for all functions. Not just for strikes, but for blackouts, terrorist attacks, etc. That's why we need better cycling infrastructure, more carpooling, congestion pricing, and other ways of getting people from from point A and B.
He does normally take mass transit and does NOT have a car (as I understand). The strike prevented him from getting to the airport and he wishes he had a car - at least at that moment!
If I lived in Manhattan, Queens, or within San Francisco, I would think about not owning a car either. But most Americans do not live in such crowded places and a personal automobile remains a vital and prized possession with great economic benefit to the owners and to the economy as a whole.
That's the most wasteful form of utilizing fossil energy: By walking an extra 10 miles per day, your body consume so much more energy that you need to eat more food to balance it. You probably end up eating 3 extra hambergers a day. And producing of food consumes 10 times fossil fuel of the weight of the food produced. You are better off driving an efficient hybrid vehicle and save some body energy so you can eat less and make less number of trips to grocery stores. Of course the better bets would be mass transportation systems and car pools.
The lesson is automatic machineries are still a more efficient way of utilizing energy than any form of biomass. The problem with current automobile based transportation is they are moving way too much more mass than is necessary in order to transport the weight of a few human bodies. More efficient ways must be invented, like ultra-light vehicles. Electric bicycles or skooters may be the best choice if they can be made safe and convenient. In any case, an electric driven bicycle beats out a manually ridden one every time.
Additionally you argue from a perspective of what is possible for mechanical transport (hybrid vehicle carpools, electric bicycles) while ignoring the typical (SUV or van) but you take a typical case for food (burger, 10x chemical energy in petroleum input) while ignoring the possible (vegetarian, sustainably farmed meal).
And even if the person ate burgers to regain calories lost, if we compared (human-powered) bicycle to 4-person SUV carpool, I'd bet on the person biking to use the least energy.
As for dramatic changes in diet(3 extra cheeseburgers or equivalent) the average American diet is NOT tailored to the sedentary lifestyle(Niether is the human body)!
*(Sorry about the lack of citation on such a info-dense website, but I needed to put this forth. Hopefully data will be forthcoming. First post on a site I've been following for sometime. Such a great forum!)
The trick is putting this all in a standard format: How many calories to propel a person 1 mile. I think walking is 100 calories/mile, while biking is 35-50 calories/mile, thus much more efficient. Not sure what a Hummer is...
On top of that, people who live close to work tend to live in dense areas where apartments are more common than detached single family houses. Apartments are smaller and thus a lot less costly to heat. And they have fewer surfaces exposed to the outside, and thus more efficient and trapping heat.
Whoops. Got off on a little tangent there that had nothing to do with your original point.
I ride my bike everywhere (or take mass transit) in the SF bay area. (I work at an upscale hamburger joint, how ironic). I eat mostly vegetarian, with meat maybe once or twice a week in small quantities. I eat a lot of carbohydrates, either as bread, pasta, dried beans or as vegetables and fruit. I get protein just fine, but never have I even considered eating three cheeseburgers in a week, let alone a day. Compared to my friends, I eat only a little more, and considering it is all (nearly) from CSAs and farmer's markets I think its cheaper than riding a 2000 pound car (that gets 40 mpg).
You hardly provided any specific number how much more you have to eat and how much distance you ride your bike so it doesn't count as evidence of any kind. Let me do some estimate. Let say your body weight plus your bike totals 200 pounds. And you can effortlessly ride up a slope of 5 degrees. That means your drag force when riding on a flat road is equivalent to approximately 5 degrees of slope. That's a drag of about 100 newton force. Times that by one mile, which is 1609 meter. That's a work of 160900 Joules per mile of distance ridden, which is 38 KCal energy. In medical term we call 1 KCal (physics unit) one calorie. Consider some efficiency factor, you consume about 50 calories of food energy riding one mile, that's a number in par with peakguy's estimate above of 35-50 Calories.
Now to compare with your vehicle, you ride your bike 40 miles, that cost you 2000 calories. According to this web site an average adult male consumes about 2200 calories a day being lightly active. So riding a bike 40 miles (no, I do not expect you to do 40 miles in just one day) cost you about three regular meals to replenish the food energy. That's about $15 cost in food if you spend $5 on a meal.
On another hand, driving your vehicle 40 miles costs you one gallon of gasoline. Let's say it's $3/gallon. It costs you $3. I do not think you can buy three meals in just $3. At the end of day, energy from biomass, especially from human muscle, is still way too much expensive than direct burning of fossil fuel.
Getting closer to your work is definitely a good idea. But that does not diminish the fact that comparing riding your bike and driving your car, consuming your biomass by riding bike is still more expensive, not to meantion that you also save gas if you have a smaller distance to drive. I am not trying to promote SUV or any type of vehicle. I still think the most efficient solution would be battery/electric driven bicycle. This way you save your body energy while also enjoy the eficiency of a bicycle.
Quantoken
I also use a 50 calories-per-mile rule of thumb. Since I, like most people in the United States, tend to eat too much, I consider this one of the big advantages of bicycling--but I'm still living in a cheap-energy world where empty calories are cheap and plentiful. I've known people for whom the extra calorie consumption for long-distance riding is a big deal. (In particular, a friend of mine had to abandon an summer bicycle tour around Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, because he hadn't budgeted for the extra 5000 calories a day he was eating.)
In practice, though, the extra few thousand calories needed to support a long communte by bicycle doesn't multiply your food budget; it's a pretty small incremental increase. A big peanut butter sandwich can give you 500 calories and power you for 10 miles. If you buy cheap bread ($2-$3 a loaf?) and cheap peanut butter ($3-$4 a jar?), the cost for 4 such sandwiches (to power you for 40 miles) comes in well under $3, I think.
I bicycled to work all last summer, and took many long weekend rides. Although the savings in gasoline was substantial, any increase in my food budget was unnoticiable.
Once you're bicycling regularly, there are further savings available. I haven't told my insurance company yet, but I meet the rules to say that my use of my car is "pleasure" (i.e., I drive to work less then 3 days a week), so I could save a bunch of money on insurance. Maintenance is probably reduced by the fewer miles as well. Partly because I bicycle and ride the bus, my wife and I only need to have one car. In the last year we've probably reduced our use of the car to the point where it might make economic sense to sell the car and just rent one when we need one. (It is a great luxury to have our own car, though, and we can afford it, so we haven't taken that step yet.)
As you said we still live in an era when food is cheap and plentyful and people are generally over-nuitritioned. I am trying to argue what happens when that's no longer the case, when food is scarce and expensive and not so plentiful any more, just like oil is. The high food productivity todayis maintained by huge consumption of fossil fuels, you know that. But that will change. There will be massive die off in poor countries due to lack of food. And in better off countries, over-nuitrition will not be the case. People will barely absorb enough nuitrition to maintain their daily physical activity. The amount of calories you absorb and the monetary cost will be highly correlated, so you will have to carefully budget your daily calorie intake and consumption.
Under that situation, you will find out that it is more economical to burn fuel to drive a vehicle to bring you around and conserve your body energy, rather than purchase food to supply you extra calories and burn them out in more active physical activity.
Plus, there is no room for improvement in utilizing your food calorie energy. You just consume that much calorie to ride that many miles. You can't improve it. You can't eat less and also ride more miles, at least not in a sustained way.
On the automatic vehicle end, there is still plenty of room for improvement. You can get rid of SUVs and drive a hybrid. My Prius gives me 60 miles on a gallon. And these vehicles can be made more efficient. And if you move to battery/electric driven bikes, it's even more efficient. And a better designed electric bike to reduce air drag will give you more mileages per kwh of electricity.
So even in an energy depleted world, it is still a good virture and econimical to move your body less and let the machines do the work.
BTW I doubt your calorie figure of peanut sandwiches. If each of the sandwich you made by spreading peanut butter onto two slices of bread contains 500 calories, and an average adult needs 2000 calories. I should be able to eat just 4 such sandwiches a day and not feel hungry or lose weight. But my perception is that's far from being enough!!!
On the other hand, the cost of a car will also go up with the cost of fuel. (It takes a lot of energy to make steel, aluminium, plastic, glass, etc.) That's where bicycles will have an enormous win. When we see gasoline at, say, $15 a gallon, we may see peanut butter and bread costing five times more than they do now (although locally produced bread made from locally grown wheat may not go up as much as gasoline). But, if we see the cost of raw materials go up by a factor of five, I would expect that to add a only a few hundred dollars to the cost of a bicycle, while I would expect it to add tens of thousands to the cost of a car.
About a month ago, I switched from occasionally commuting by bike (about 10 miles or 16 kilometres five days a week) to always commuting by bike. Except for the first few days, when I was constantly hungry (this was likely just dehydration mistaken for hunger), I noticed no change in the volume of food consumed. But I do tend to drink a lot more water.
Before riding, I had to spend about four-and-a-half hours a week at the gym to keep my weight stable. Now that I'm riding, I can just heft some cheap dumbbells in the basement for strength training. No gym membership saves me $55 a month.
Now that I only rarely (maybe once every two weeks) take transit, I don't need a transit pass. That saves me $70 a month.
But the reason I went with the bike, over the bus, is that it saves me time. My weekly commute by transit, plus time spent in the gym, added up to 9.5 hours. My weekly commuting time by bike, including changing time, is 6.5 hours. Add the hour of basement dumbbelling, and cycling ends up saving me two hours a week.
Saving one-hundred hours and about $1400 a year (can't forget bike and clothing maintenance and replacement costs), with physical fitness as a side-effect, sure seems like an easy sell to me. And that's comparing a bike to transit. The bike-car comparison is staggering.
Anybody who thinks that a car, even a hybrid, generates less carbon-dioxide emissions than a cyclist's increased metabolism should really open up their high school physics texts. Even accounting for wasteful food production, this conclusion should be so obviously untrue that nobody should go to the trouble of offering numbers. As noted above, the relevant weight of a car and a bike are the crux of the argument.
I am NOT claiming that your body's metablism releases more CO2 than your vehicle. However I am claiming that the production, transportation and preparation of your food are very energy intensive, and hence lots of fossil fuel were burned and lots of CO2 were emitted to produce the extra food calories you need to consume in order to ride your bike. So much that they are actually more than the alternative, which is you eat less food but drive your vehicle more. The CO2 from your body's metablism is but a negligible portion that I do not even count.
Clearly you are a typical case of Americans who eat too much food and need intensive gym exercises to burn off extra food calorie and keep your body weight down. Had you been from a third world country and do not eat that much, you do not need to waste away any food calories to keep yourself fit. Americans are eating way too much more than their bodies need, probably twice as necessary. Producing all those extra food costs lots of extra fossil fuel in American agriculture industry. If we all eat less, the agriculture could use only a fraction of fossil fuels it current use, but still produce enough food to keep us fit and healthy.
But never mind, when the oil depletion really kicks in and food becomes expensive and scarce, every one will be forced to eat no more than the minimum amount needed, and you will be more careful not to waste your body calories in un-necessary physical activities.
Sorry, but you're not convincing me. Riding my old Trek 15 minutes to the office and back has to be easier than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, which certainly involved very lean times.
Riding a bike 15 minutes is not a lot of physical activity. Assuming you are going 20 mph that's a 5 miles ride one way, or 10 miles round trip. At 50 calories per mile you only need 500 calories, one quarter or one fifth more calories than your regular daily dose. However driving my prius 10 miles does not take much gasoline either, at 60 mpg it costs me 1/6 gallon, or 50 cents. All things considered, you still save more by save body calories.
The problem with most people is you do not feel the correlation between physical activity and the amount of food intake is because you guys are over-feeding all the time and so when you increase your physical activity some what, you are still getting enough calories even if you eat no more than what you usually eat. Should you be put in a situation where you intake just enough calories and not a little bit more, then when you increase your physical activity, you either feel the urge to eat some more food, or you lose some of your body fat to compensate.
Isn't that how most of the weight-loss program works? You exercise more to burn off body fat because there will be a deficit in your calorie intake through food. Clearly those weight-loss program works. So you do consume more calories when you have more physical activity in your body.
BTW, most weight-loss programs don't work.
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"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. "
~ George Orwell, 1984
I don't know the details of the stupid offer the drivers voted against or what special interests were behind not giving the drivers something acceptable. Back in the 80s I went from being a private employee to a public employee. I did not vote for any contract after that. The anti working family anti strike laws caused us to be losers every time. Unjust laws must not be obeyed but peacefully resisted until repeal.
I know well that some people have more skills and contribute more to society than others. Doctors should be paid more than engineers or bus drivers. But on the whole that is not what determines what someone is paid in this society. Look at what we pay teachers vs football players. What determines what someone earns is how much money they can make for the already wealthy. So the union's job is to demonstrate what having them not work is going to cost, and the further they can raise that figure, the more likely it is that they will succeed. The elites howl about how much money is being lost due to the strike, but that's only because the well-off are losing - no one would give a shit about those on the bottom of the pile not being able to get to their minimum wage jobs otherwise.
The "scolding" tone that Bloomberg uses is irritating, as if somehow he would do otherwise if he were a bus driver. How righteous they become when someone else tries to get a little.