The Pankian Metaphor 3083

transportation has gotten significantly less expensive than it was many years ago. for a large physically distributed country ... overcoming distance sensitive issues is good policy.

there are trade-offs. some of the cheap transport can because it has actually gotten cheaper and less expensive.

However, some may appear to be less cheaper than it actually is. My original post on this subject

referenced the (state of cal. transportation) documents (that claimed to be industry standard) for the criteria for building highways ... aka criteria for building highways is based on the number of planned heavy truck axle-loads ... and that considerations like normal consumer and other light vehicle use has no impact.

subsequent posts proposed some methodologies for estimating the quanbreastive effects (i.e. the basis for the qualitative factors are somewhat established in the highway design documents) ... and some guesses for the range of possible values (and suggestions for obtaining more exact values for the calculations)

for a little drift, in the past couple years that has been a number of articles about the highway infrastructure in Wash DC (as oppsed to the state of washington) ... that maintenance on significant portions of the highway infrastructure was deferred for a large number of years As a result, certain parts of the highway infrastructure is now in danger of failing ... like some of the bridges and regular application of paint was deferred so now some of the structural members may bave been allowed to nearly rust through. As a result there is some possibility that some of the existing structures may have to be torn down and replaced.

this may have analogies to other varieties of funding deferrals ... like choosing to not have fully funded pension plans ... and carrying pension payments out of existing operating revenue

a similar but different story was in the news a couple years ago, the utility (gas and electricity) company in the state of cal. was getting an allowance from the state public utilities company (as part of what they were allowed to charge customers) for cutting back brush and tree limbs around power poles. the company had gotten into the habit over a period of years of taken the allocated amount and paying it to executives in the form of bonuses. then came a series of storms with higher than recently experienced winds. There was a high incidence of power outages because of wind blowing limbs and taking out power lines. Some number of these events, in turn, resulted in fires and other types of things buttociated with electrocutions.

various past postings mentioning other types of deferring activities

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