Daily Score Blog

I've become a bit obsessive about oil prices -- I check them online several times each day, just out of habit.

But most other commodities remain something of a mystery to me.  I keep hearing, for example, about the tremendous increase in corn and soybean prices, along with other grains and oil seeds.  Still, until last night, I'd never taken the time to find out just how steep that increase has been.

So to satisfy my curiousity, I put together the following chart, using figures from the phenomenally helpful futuresource.com, comparing the rise in recent futures contracts for corn and crude oil.  Behold:

Remarkably similar, no?  Obviously, price trends in corn and oil aren't completely identical.  But starting last September or so, they start moving up more or less in tandem, with roughly the same percentage increase since then.

What's going on here?

Here's an interesting ranking. For each major US city, the list-happy editors at Men's Health calculated the negative effects of driving. They aggregated scores on transit ridership, air pollution, fuel consumption, and driving miles. (Presumably, the data are for metropolitan areas, not city limits.) Northwest cities do exceptionally well: Seattle ranks number one, Portland ranks third, and Spokane is eighth.

Men's Health doesn't appear to include a methodology on the web, but I'll take a stab at the explanation. First, a minor point. Seattle and Portland benefit from a felicitous geographic situation: prevailing westerly winds tend to keep our air some of the cleanest in the country, so we do relatively well on air pollution scores. But second, and more importantly, the list illustrates that urban areas control their own destinies. Smart policy matters, even if it's relatively small-caliber.

Little things add up: the Northwest leads in bus service, commute trip reduction programs, carpools, vanpools, parking cashouts, bicycle infrastructure, transit-oriented development, and other innovative strategies. And it's here that next-generation tactics get their first airing: congestion pricing, pay-as-you-drive car insurance, and so on. These are not the kind of things that make their debut in Arlington, Texas -- dead last in the rankings. 

If this sounds like stuff that transportation wonks dream up, that's because it is. (And that's probably a good thing.) When it comes to transportation, Northwest cities don't have much that's big-ticket and flashy. So while there aren't many ribbon-cutting ceremonies or photo-ops for politicians, it's still true that a hundred good ideas, implemented locally, can add up to an emerging success story.