Progress report: 1/3 complete.

Since I'm going to be at a CE all day tomorrow (have to maintain my RPh, even though I've had jack and shit in the way of work in over a YEAR), I thought I'd get some revisions in today, because I just had the one scene left from Atesh's POV. And I finished it.

+319, 81,486, 61 days left. Two POV characters' arcs left to revise. One month for each.

I don't know whether the 5-year-old is realistic in this scene (she's Azar's daughter, and Atesh's, uh, 1st cousin once removed? or something), because kids are Not My Thing. She's curious and asks questions that aren't exactly polite. I'd rather not post the excerpt in question because SPOILERS. I don't recall my first reader having any comments on that, so it may be fine. I'll ask whoever my next round of readers are to let me know on that part, I guess.

A follow-up

Last week, in a fit of frustration at the utter lack of transportation alternatives in the US than the automobile, I wrote this post.

Turns out, in a bit of synchronicity, The Economist took a look at America's transport infrastructure and found it appallingly lacking. When I read the two opening paragraphs, I knew I had to link the fuck out of this article.

ON FRIDAY afternoons, residents of Washington, DC, often find a clear route out of the city as elusive as a deal to cut the deficit. Ribbons of red rear-lights stretch off into the distance along the highways that radiate from the city’s centre. Occasionally, adventurous southbound travellers experiment with Amtrak, America’s national rail company. The distance from Washington to Raleigh, North Carolina (a metropolitan area about the size of Brussels) is roughly the same as from London’s St Pancras Station to the Gare du Nord in Paris. But this is no Eurostar journey.

Trains creep out of Washington’s Union Station and pause at intervals, inexplicably, as they travel through the northern Virginia suburbs. In the summer, high temperatures threaten to kink the steel tracks, forcing trains to slow down even more. Riders may find themselves inching along behind a lumbering freight train for miles at a time, until the route reaches a side track on which the Amtrak train can pass. The trip takes six hours, well over twice as long as the London-Paris journey, if there are no delays. And there often are.

APPALLING. Now, whether you think there's not enough density between Austin and Chicago to merit train service or not, the Eastern Seaboard, especially if you look at the metropolis between DC and Boston and factor in its southward expansion to Richmond, toward Raleigh, Charlotte, and Atlanta, is certainly dense enough to merit better train service than we have, and to merit high-speed rail. (As is California from SFO to San Diego, btw.)

Regarding density, which conservatives like to say is why Americans can't have trains, here's an interesting point. It's not actual DENSITY per se, because rural Switzerland sure ain't dense and it HAS working transit, but the way things are laid out.

Also appalling is the number of traffic deaths we've deemed acceptable.
More time on lower quality roads also makes for a deadlier transport network. With some 15 deaths a year for every 100,000 people, the road fatality rate in America is 60% above the OECD average; 33,000 Americans were killed on roads in 2010.

Even if you "need" your car for some things--and it's true, hauling furniture or cubic yards of top soil isn't going to work on a bus or train--the vast majority of single-passenger car trips (and even a goodly portion of multi-passenger ones, tbh) could be replaced by public transportation if we had any. Most people drive from home to work (100 hours a year!), with other excursions to places like the grocery store or a friend's house and occasional longer road trips. If we could replace most commuting with bus or rail options, and even half of the long road trips with trains, we'd save a lot of CO2 going in the air.

If you want to talk about sustainability, you HAVE TO talk about decreasing your CO2 emissions. Is it more sustainable to live on a farm 30 miles from the nearest town, and you have to drive in there once a week to shop, and to other places to sell your goods at the farmers market or to shop at the farmers market, even if you're super-mega-off-the-grid/composting toilets/grow your own food, (and if you do online shopping, the delivery guy still has to DRIVE to your house or you have to drive to the post office to pick it up) or to live in a denser urban area, not even own a car, bike, walk, or take public transit everywhere, keep your thermostat low in winter/high in summer, maybe have a small urban garden, buy as much regionally-grown produce as possible, etc?

That depends on how you define sustainability. If you're talking survivalism and self-reliance, obviously growing your own organic vegetables and keeping chickens is more sustainable. If you're talking about all the effects your lifestyle has on the planet, from fertilizer runoff to less non-degradable waste (eg plastic), you can't ignore the very unsustainable pollution spewed by internal combustion engines, which is contributing to global climate change.

Is it a tradeoff? Does not using fertilizer or supporting factory farms offset the pounds of CO2 your car emits when you drive to go shopping? Is growing your own food greater than contributing to climate change?

"Central planning"

Comments on a friend's annual tax day rant led to her explaining her definition of central planning to include anything the government does to incentivize one technology/industry over another (for example, tax incentives for citizens buying more energy efficient appliances, or for companies to invest in alternative energy research).

Are the massive tax breaks to oil companies and the seriously messed-up formulas that govern road money (from fuel taxes) distribution also central planning, or does that not count?

From the Economist article linked in my previous post:

The federal government is responsible for only a quarter of total transport spending, but the way it allocates funding shapes the way things are done at the state and local levels. Unfortunately, it tends not to reward the prudent, thanks to formulas that govern over 70% of federal investment. Petrol-tax revenues, for instance, are returned to the states according to the miles of highway they contain, the distances their residents drive, and the fuel they burn. The system is awash with perverse incentives. A state using road-pricing to limit travel and congestion would be punished for its efforts with reduced funding, whereas one that built highways it could not afford to maintain would receive a larger allocation.

Also, In 2006 German road fees brought in 2.6 times the money spent building and maintaining roads. American road taxes collected at the federal, state and local level covered just 72% of the money spent on highways that year, according to the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. So, yes, kids, roads and driving are heavily subsidized, moreso than Amtrak, even. Other things that are subsidized: airlines.