Today's top tragedy
Top story on the New York Times website all day today is carnage--the tragic helicopter crash in Iraq that killed 31 Americans and the tragic train smashup in California that killed at least 10.
But here's an even bigger tragedy: on average, in the United States, 116 people die from motor vehicle crashes every single day. Auto accidents are the leading cause of death at every age from 4 to 33.
The media gravitates toward big-bang stories like trains or helicopters crashing, but largely ignores the steady grind: The dull but far more important story of more than 41,000 Americans killed by cars in a single year.
BC's Resource (In)dependence?
Editor's note: We asked Thomas Michael Power, Chairman of the University of Montana's Economics Department, to comment on a new report by BC's Urban Futures arguing that the province's primary economic engine is its natural resource exports. Power disagrees--and argues that true economic development has little to do with exports and everything to do with creating a web of local economic relationships.
Two and a half centuries ago, early economists in France postulated that all wealth springs from the earth: farming, timber harvest, mining, and fishing were the sole sources of value, value that then circulated throughout the rest of the economy. It was not a coincidence that the ruling landed gentry who controlled the dominant resource, agricultural land, supported this theory. In England, at about the same time, a different theory dominated: All wealth results from exports that bring in the outside income that circulates through the economy. It was not a coincidence that the rising commercial trading class strongly supported that theory.
Economics as we know it, starting with Adam Smith, developed as a critical attack on such self-serving narrow conceptions of the "origins of the wealth of nations." But two and a half centuries later we still have self-interested parties flogging these theories rather than treating them as long discredited and abandoned historical curiosities. The Urban Futures, Inc. consulting group's "Regions and Resources: The Foundations of British Columbia's Economic Base" (article here; pdf of executive summary here); is the latest example.
The report argues that the BC economy continues to be almost exclusively dependent on natural resource industries operating in the rural areas of British Columbia. The greater-Vancouver metropolitan economy is simply an avaricious parasite living off the wealth generated by the hardworking folks in the hinter land.
Commuting Sentences
Pop quiz: What share of personal trips in the U.S. are to or from work?
Answer: just 15 percent, or about one out of seven trips.
And according to this (somewhat dated) study by the Puget Sound Regional Council, even during the peak afternoon rush hour, only a minority of trips actually take us from work to home. We make lots of different kinds of trips during that time -- shopping, school, errands, social visits, and the like.
Still, the issue of commuting -- particularly, how to make it faster, and how to accomodate more drive-alone commuters -- dominates transportation planning decisions, probably well out of proportion to its importance. But perhaps the real place to start isn't with the commute itself, but with the places where we live. Improvements in community design that let us drive less to go shopping, or to drop the kids off at school, could make a bigger difference to our commutes than highway projects specifically aimed at increasing traffic capacity.
Just a thought...
Energy Security
The little-noted vulnerability to terrorism of Cascadia's energy systems-and solutions to this problem-is a theme of Cascadia Scorecard 2005, which we'll release in a month.
We can't yet reveal what we say in the book, but this week has brought three news items that provide hints:
1. The FBI reports that "jihadists" trained in Afghan terrorist training camps are living in Oregon, according to the Seattle Times.
2. California's attorney general has petitioned the US government to tighten security at nuclear power plants, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. (Cascadia's sole operating power reactor is on the Hanford Reservation in Washington.)
3. Proposals to build liquefied natural gas terminals on Cascadia's coast, as on other North American coasts, are raising fierce opposition because of their vulnerability to attack. Rare LNG leaks are potentially explosive on a massive scale, as the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer report. (On the other hand, natural gas is a better alternative than coal or oil, and North American supplies are waning. So importing the fuel from abroad, on LNG tankers, has some tremendous up sides.)
Fortunately, the region's energy vulnerability is a problem whose solution unleashes a torrent of benefits.
