God, Guns, and NASCAR

I find it highly interesting, highly, that our nation's Republicans are chanting "No government health care," obviously decrying government intervention, yet when it comes to one of the most heavily subsidized programs in America, the funding for our National Highway System, somehow it's all OK.

The NHS is important, so our government says, for our economy, for national defense, and for mobility. I particularly like the one about national defense...ever since 1956 when it was first begun we've heard that our highways were a vital component to our national defense. Really. Really? What, exactly, have we had to defend against in the last fifty three years where some fucking road played a crucial part in protecting our way of life? In protecting our freedoms?

In my little opinion, it's our building of roads that has underwritten our defense budget. If we didn't have 3.4 million super-commuters in our car obsessed nation, consumers who spend north of 1 1/2 hours each day commuting, I'd wager we wouldn't be in Iraq. The ability of anyone with a pulse to motor down the highway is independent of whether they pay income taxes or not. A woman living in Oakland who commutes to SoMa to wait tables? If it's indeed true that 47% pay no income taxes, then nearly half of all those who use the freeway are only paying a fraction of what they use via gasoline taxes, which don't come close to covering the true cost of driving.

Yet, for some reason, Republicans are more than happy to overlook that subsidy. Yes, more than happy, because roads provide for the economy, for their defense from infidels, for their mobility. What God, gun and NASCAR loving Republican doesn't approve of that government intervention, huh? One would think they'd be marching on Washington to get government out of road building and get the free market managing, building, and maintaining our roads...but no...when it comes to the NHS, more government is more gooder.

CHIMSL

SMUD represents 4% of the total electrical load in California, but was recently awarded 64% of all the federal stimulus monies borrowed dollars allocated to California for a new, more smarter smart grid.

I am wont to decry the smart grid and the funding mechanisms of federal stimulus, but hey, SMUD built a fantastic vacuum cleaner earlier this year with our funding proposals and is now sucking up all those loose nickels floating around Washington. Good for us!

I hasten to add that SMUD was going to move forward with the installation of smart metering regardless of stimulatory funding. All this did, in my little opinion, was shift the burden of funding the smart grid from SMUD ratepayers to general taxpayers. Now, a SDG&E ratepayer in the suburban slums of Mira Mesa, CA will file her taxes in April 2010 and get to watch a portion of that fly northward to offset the cost of a new meter installation in Orangevale. Likewise, a CenterPoint ratepayer in Houston will help fund my Elk Grovian smarter smart meter.

I will offer that my new smart meter will provide absolutely zero demand side management value to SMUD. Here's why:

• I am already knowledgeable about how and when I use electricity.
• I'm rich. Fabulously wealthy. I can afford all discretionary uses of electricity. When it's 105 outside, the AC is coming on...regardless of how much the time-of-use energy will cost me.
• If I am spurred on to use electricity more efficiently, I don't need a new meter to tell me that. Energy efficiency measures have already been employed at my housal unit using my old dumb meter.
• I will not shift any more electrical use. I will not drive to the library to enjoy publicly provided conditioned air while I wait for the price of a kWh to drop a nickel before conditioning my own air. I will not choose to read a book instead of watching TV or vice versa because some smart meter told me it's more economical to do so.
• SMUD will still have to dispatch a meter reader to my housal unit as my PV production meter is un-smart. If SMUD decides to swap that one out as well, then I will have doubled the cost to SMUD to smarten my house, offsetting all possible future gains from any supposed demand shifting.
• I always pay my bill, so SMUD will never have to utilize the remote disconnecting means that come with the meter...a hidden cost in all these meters.

My own move to a smart meter will not provide any load shifting to SMUD, as it will also likely not apply to anyone living in Land Park, Folsom, Silver Springs, Arden Arcade, or East Sacramento. Tell me that these people will sit and sweat it out inside their Garage Majals and defer air conditioning until kWh rates drop by a nickel, or Horrors! engage the public in an air conditioned public venue.

That is, demand side management won't work for a fair number of installations, say, 15%, while the remaining 85% will try but will run up against Our Way Of Life. The second refrigerator in the garage will not get unplugged when rates are high. People won't sit in the early evening dark without lighting. When it's cold at 5:00 PM the heater will come on. People won't defer watching TV until 2:45 AM. If you enable your smart washing machine to come on when rates are cheap and it starts washing at 12:05 AM, tell me our residents will get up at 12:55 AM (because the smart washing machine sent an e-message to your Boysenberry at your bedside to alert you that the clothes are done) to put them in the dryer and allow their wet clothes to sit until their smart dryer determines it's cheap enough to run.

OK. Perhaps you might defer running your dishwasher until midnight. But if you are already on time of use rates, do you really need a smart meter to tell you to do that?

When the department of transportation decided to mandate the use of the center high mount stop light (CHIMSL) on vehicles, they expected a 15% reduction in rear-end crashes because that's what study after study revealed, but in practice, while there was a marked early reduction in crashes as the lights were phased in, the actual rate didn't stay at the supposed 15% but rather reverted back nearly to the pre-CHIMSL level, a levelized 4% reduction. Perhaps, yes, an argument can be made that we've received a 4% benefit and so the new CHIMSLs are a good thing, but this represents the diminishing returns of new technologies. Side question: if your CHIMSL is burnt out, can you be stopped for a busted tail light?

I would argue that smart metering will follow a similar trend. As soon as that first ridge of high pressure parks itself over Four Corners with 109 degree days in Elk Grove, after the third day of that heat wave Elk Grovians are going to say fuck it and will turn on the AC no matter how much it costs. Yes, there will be some load shifting, but I would suggest that it ain't gonna be as big as SMUD or Smarte Grid proponents believe, particularly in light of the costs associated with managing all that data and keeping it hacker proof. This isn't just some new wiring and a new tail light, folks -- this smart grid represents technological complexity of the highest order.

I have yet to "Come to Jesus" regarding this smart grid, but in a follow on post I will describe the expected benefits to distribution automation that really should make headways in system reliability. This is where our smart grid will likely provide some very tangible benefits. More to come.

The Dignity of Place

The Michigan Theatre
Built in 1926, this glorious building functioned as a performance space until 1976, when it was converted into a parking garage.


This photo and caption from Time Magazine discloses many of the ideas I ruminate on The Franklin Monologues: parking is king; failure to provide for and maintain viable public realms; evisceration of our national manufacturing base; private cars vs. alternative modes of travel; and failure to respect the dignity of place.

Free parking in downtown Detroit! Sorry -- parking is never free...it comes with substantial hidden costs that are rarely revealed to and rarely directly levied upon our motoring public. It most certainly costs less to house vehicles in a dilapidated shell of a former [public] venue, yes...but hardly free.

When I decry the loss of manufacturing jobs, take note that I'm an electrical engineer who works in the support of the manufacturing of electricity. I not only lament the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs but by practical necessity many engineering jobs that support that production are also lost -- all the engineers designing robotic controls in manufacturing facilities, civil engineers designing factories, etc. I don't know much about global economic theory but my gut feeling tells me that our service/financial sector and consumer economy can't be sustained without a productive floor. With the loss of manufacturing jobs, Detroit workers and their families failed to attend theatre anymore. A parking lot it became.

In your city, if your city happens to have a pre-automotive central core, perhaps you've also witnessed that when an old building was at the end of its life it was often razed to the ground and paved over for parking. The lot below might just become a surface parking lot:


If the original building stood with other buildings in a coherent, walkable downtown core, the creation of a parking lot would destroy the street enclosure, destroy the connectivity of buildings. These aren't trivial things, because once you start going down that road the rest of the core is compromised. When you further consider that the property taxes paid by the lot owner are likely less due to it being undeveloped, and that better economics arise from building suburban sprawl instead of infill projects, the core turns to liquid shit.

The core deteriorates while the first suburban ring approaches the end of its newness and a second suburban ring is built, then a third. Property wealth migrates farther out. Look at my Sacramento region -- sure, we are finally recognizing the substantial potential of our downtown core, but the real property wealth has migrated out, to Elk Grove, to El Dorado Hills, to Folsom, to Lincoln, while the earlier inner rings of Del Paso Heights, Carmichael, Valley Hi, Orangevale and Fair Oaks are going the way of the Michigan Theatre...perhaps not quite so dramatically, but nonetheless they are going.

Indifference

I'm amazed at the indifference my Elk Grovian neighbors have towards one other:


House on left -- occupied by people who care about their pristine landscape.
House on right -- foreclosed on due to default on deed of trust.
House on left -- occupied by people who don't give a flying fuck about their neighborhood.
House on right -- man-sized weeds due to nature.
House on left -- occupied by people who think they are an island of their own.
House on right -- clearly neglected by rightful owners.
House on left -- clearly negligent of their own neighborhood and everyone else who might live among them.

Seems to me that if someone is willing to keep up their property, the very nature of living next door to a foreclosure should spur them to provide for a modicum level of maintenance even if it means doing some manual labor like cutting weeds. Certainly these neighbors of mine don't give a rat's ass about where they live, only about where they live. We can bash the people who bought a house they couldn't afford, yes. But why these next door neighbors couldn't spend a few minutes of their time to maintain the landscape of a bank owned property is really telling of what kinds of people we have in our communities. People who don't give a shit about anything but what they own, their own property, their own private realm.

This is what Elk Grove is -- a land of private realms with no public realms filled with indignant people who only care about me, me, me, my, my, my, mine, mine, mine, and fuck everything else. This is what suburbia gives us. It gives us people who are failures at being citizens because there is no reason whatsoever to become a decent citizen. So long as the roads are maintained to perpetually drive, so long as the big box stores are regularly and cheaply filled with 12,000 items, they couldn't give a shit about their neighbors because they mean nothing to them, they provide them nothing of value.

Nothing of value.

Permanence

While I was preparing my relays at the Orangevale substation earlier this month, someone left the April 1977 National Geographic magazine in the control room. A nice old article on how the North Sea was just streaming on line and how, within a few short years, Britain would become a net oil exporter after having been dependent on foreign oil for three decades.

And yes, by 1980 the North Sea was producing loads of oil -- Britain & Norway became oil exporters. Even Germany, Holland, and Denmark all had their slice of that North Sea pie, too.

Yet now, some thirty years later, Britain is once again a net oil importer. And in that time they built an economy where one of every five people work in the financial services sector. That is, one in five are managing the monetary affairs of the other four people's money, other four people's labor, and other four people's productivity. That seems quite a racket, don't you think? A sector that ostensibly produces nothing taking in about a fifth of that nation's GDP. We have the same thing going on here, with Long Term Capital Management, Goldman Sachs, each player taking their slice of the national productivity in the form of fees, interest rates, and the like.

But I digress. This graph is a few years old but illustrates how the bonanza of the North Sea (along with Alaska's North Slope) was what helped propelled Thatcher and Reagan out of the early 1980's recession:



Once again, Britain is an importer of oil and will continue to import for as long as it remains a nation. Importing is now a permanent feature of the U.S., the UK, Indonesia, Australia, Germany, and so on.

I'm a simple minded Western American blogger that likely can't digest all the nuances of our modern global economy, our global financial systems, etc -- but I think -- if we emerge from recession and oil stays at $80 a barrel and/or increases more over time, how exactly is our economy going to get going again? And what, pray tell, does "emerging" mean? Back to suburbanized sprawl fueled on cheap credit, the selling of 2.3 cars per housal unit to service the housal unit, and the thousands of new freeway miles and strip mall centers needed to keep our obese, socially impaired citizens tooling along? Is this all our economy consists of? Tire shops, radiator shops, Asian foot massage parlors, Q's sports memorabilia, U-Stor-It storage pods filled to the brim with cheap imported shit you can't live with but you can't live without, cell phone stores and bluetooth kiosks? This is it?

Obama won't have a South Slope and Brown won't have a South Sea to help spur suburbanized oil-fueled sprawlish expansion keeping our unsustainable living model going. They are wishing, really, wishing, for a "green" sector to come along and magically provide for 3,000,000 new jobs on top of the 965,432 coal, oil, automotive and natural gas jobs that would be eliminated for not being "green." Imagine an American force of 625,000 Americans out installing solar panels! Imagine 323,000 Americans building and installing wind turbines!

Can you imagine it? Yes? That's all you're going to do, imagine it, 'cause it ain't gonna happen. These Americans will be too busy selling cheap imported Chinese shit to each other to give a rat's ass about sustainable living. They will be too busy mounting and balancing low profile tires and pimpin' rims on SUVs, too busy trucking Mexican cantaloupes to Montana in February, and burying themselves in the latest Japanese/Taiwan electronic gadgets surfing porn or socially "networking" without the social part.

I might sound like I'm anti-American, anti-Our Way Of Life and all that, but in reality I am a balanced person with fine principles and a good loving family -- I'm someone who wants better but who realizes that Americans are incapable of doing better. I've resigned to accept that our string has been played out -- so I hope for a crash and burn to force us to change because we won't do so voluntarily. That's why I blog, to cheer on our crash and burn. We are crashing socially, economically, and environmentally. I only hope we continue to crash because this is the only way I see us turning ourselves around as a people, as a species. If it means we lose our extraordinary American birthright to consume as much as possible whenever we feel like it, well, so be it.

Speed Kills

Speed kills.

Well, in this case, not a killer event, but it damn well could have been:


Just another night in Elk Grove, just another car accident due to nothing but excessive speed, just another waste of our EGPD dollars responding to just another dumbshit driver, just another dumbshit driver adding to the cost of all our insurance premiums.

And just in front of my house...or rather, on Frye Creek and Deepdale, just to the side of my house. I don't park on the side anymore, but for twelve years my truck was parked on that side and it didn't get hit but it was only a matter of time. This time it was a parked car on the neighbor's side and this lady hit the parked car and careened it into the brick wall on the other side of the street.

It very easily could have been a pedestrian or a bicyclist fatality had we actually had any bicyclists or pedestrians in our city...but we don't, 'cause everyone drives, so in this case only the young female driver was shaken up. Her family members were quite indignant with me as I was taking photos of the wreck, clearly pissed that I was doing so. "Hey, you want to take photos of me, I'm photogenic," and "Hey, you a policeman, you got a right to do that?" but the EGPD just let me do it. I did it to document the wreck so perhaps my fucking city will install some "calming" devices on this street.

Not that I expect them to work even if I can convince them. It isn't the calming devices, it's the dumbshit drivers that need to be calmed. And Elk Grove is full of them.

Thirteen Days

I remember when oil hit $70 the first time we were screaming that it would kill our economy...but now that it's above $80 how come we aren't chanting "Drill, baby, drill?"

Just looking for a little consistency, that's all.



The world burns roughly 80 million barrels per day. A billion every 13 days. Every thirteen days another billion is burnt. Our recession has only marginally slaked the worldwide consumption of oil.

The U.S. consumes 25%, or 20 million a day. Based on percentage of population alone, my little Elk Grovian hamlet uses about 8,525 barrels per day, or 3.1 million barrels per year. Doesn't seem like a whole lot, does it? That's less than one hour's worth of world production.

Well, I hasten to add that any Elk Grovian likely consumes above the national average as he or she is totally, 100% beholden to his or her car. Thirty miles a day to get to any job, to the doctors office, to the store, to recreate. Every Elk Grovian simply assumes that every thirteen days another billion barrels are found, pumped, and timely and cheaply delivered to her local gasoline dispensary.

Consider that ANWR holds, on the high end, 16 billion barrels. That's about 2/3rds of one year at the rate the world uses oil. Consider that that the U.S. holds 120 billion, or about 16 years at the rate the U.S. uses oil. This is why we import oil, why we will continue to import oil, why we will continue to be even more dependent on foreign oil as we perpetually motor along, why we are entrenched in wars in oil exporting regions of the world, and why we will wage wars around the globe in the future to ensure Elk Grovian automobiling continues.

Of course I've not considered our free market...when the price signals are right we will make an easy wholesale swap to batterized cars and continue our motoring. I've been wrong about a great many things -- perhaps I shouldn't be quite so doomish. When the market deems it so, we'll then have a cheap blanket of Danish wind and Chinese solar farms over our desert southwest and so 'lectricity will be powering all our Japanese battterized vehicles, while we continue to enjoy beef jerkey in our air conditioned vehicles as we drive them 85 miles a day to work and back as we sprawl ever outwards. We won't need oil then, now will we?

The Housal ATM

Cuts are coming to our Elk Grove School District...but everyone with their eyes open could have seen this coming a thousand miles down the road.

But no, all our Elk Grovian eyes were wide shut, and now we get the heart wrenching news that programs will be cut. Counselors will be laid off. Boys water polo and girls soccer programs will be curtailed. Horrors! Perhaps this could have been ameliorated if we didn't have a city so wholly dependent on the performance of residential real estate.

Yes! When housal units were rising in value at 20% per annum ad infinitium, we built more schools, hired more teachers, offered more programs, but not once did we plan for the remote contingency that this hallucinated money machine of ours would stop working. Now that it has stopped working, and now that we've delayed any real action for a good 30 months, the cuts are coming.

Here we go -- the very first thing irate Elk Grovian parents do is bitch about how much our EGUSD administrators are making. We've got a forty million dollar hole and all eyes are on how a couple extra thousand are going to "fatten the pockets" of the school leadership. This is misguided. For one thing, they are well paying jobs in Elk Grove, some of the very few we do have, and their marginal tax rates are about the only thing keeping this whole racket working. What's not to like about the taxes they pay to keep the schools running?

Instead of uber-expensive administrators, these parents say, how about axing some of their income to keep counselors counseling? This is the same as this "wall street vs. main street" saga but played out on a smaller level. Anyone making more money must somehow be culpable, be the cause of all these problems.

Our city was built on a scheme predicated on perpetual suburban growth and the economic bliss of its residents drunk on cheap credit and their liberal use of their housal ATM machines. Perhaps had we not allowed the 5,500 unit starts per year, starts that starters couldn't afford in the first place, we wouldn't have nearly as many foreclosures, we wouldn't have nearly the property value declines and we wouldn't have nearly the same level of cuts necessary to our schools.

But we do. We think fat school administrators are the problem, that if we somehow cut their salaries all this will go away. I wonder what school system we graduated from. Maybe the same system that told me it was OK to end my sentences with a preposition...

Hypothetical Pedestrians

An article in our Elk Grove Citizen newspaper on Oct. 14th highlighted how walkable Elk Grove is. It most certainly is...provided you have absolutely no need to get anywhere or do anything while on foot.

We have miles and miles of sidewalks, all of which, yes, are in fantastic shape. The problem is the miles and miles part -- caper about by foot to the store or anywhere else and you'd better prepare to spend a few hours walking.

The woman writing the article, Katie Freeman, exposed two very important points about why, in my opinion, our Elk Grovian low density suburban design is so damn bad. Her first point was how she would love to be able to walk to work. This implies she doesn't live close enough today to do that. Truthfully, it's never likely that many of us would ever have an option to walk directly to work from home no matter the density or layout, but if we did things right, then Katie would have no more than a 1/4 mile walk to a transit stop that would provide a sufficient level of service to get to her job. In most cases, the vast, vast majority of Elk Grovians don't even have that option because their jobs aren't even in the city and even if they were, many Elk Grovian homes and businesses aren't easily accessible to transit.

The next point is more telling -- a fifth of her article isn't about Elk Grove at all -- it's about the civic design of another city, Campbell, in the South Bay. She waxes on how she could walk to the cute downtown area, how she'd run into friends or acquaintances on the way, how two groceries were within the range of the foot, although to access them she'd need to be exposed to the brutal traffic of the expressway.

So, let's take a hypothetical walk here on my monologues, shall we? Let's consider a walk to downtown Elk Grove from my house, near Franklin Blvd. and Bighorn.

So...tell me...which way do I start walking? West? South? East? Where exactly is our cute downtown area?

Well, unless you believe that Elk Grove Boulevard is a real downtown, clearly a stretch of anyone's imagination, there ain't one. Don't even have one. Once I start walking, all I'm ever going to get is a mile along a collector road followed by a commercial strip mall clusterfuck followed by a mile of more collector road followed by another commercial strip mall clusterfuck followed by another mile of co...

There are no real destinations in our city, because we didn't build any. Didn't think they were important.

So I can't even start my hypothetical walk because I have no downtown to walk to. Just like all 135,000 of my neighbors -- they are all hypothetical pedestrians, too. Nowhere to walk.

So let's change my hypothetical destination; instead of a non-existent civic/public realm, let's just say I want to walk to get $40 from the bank and buy a cup of joe. I exit the house and unless I want to walk two miles more than I really have to, I need to avoid every curvilinear street. So that takes 79% of my walking options off the table. All our non-car dominated streets are suburban curvilinear, so I'll either end up walking in half-circles or I'll dead end and have no choice but to get out to Franklin, our sole N-S collector road. Along Franklin I walk, alongside four lanes of traffic. Sure, I have a nice walkway, and a nice physical separation from the traffic, but I get to listen to the din of engines the entire time. I walk a mile to get to the bank, buried in a strip mall across the six-lane Laguna Highway, our local E-W collector road. The bank is set back another 200 feet from the sidewalk, across a sea of parking and I jockey for right-of-way with all the cars endlessly circling the parking lot looking for the spot closest to the entrance. I extract my cash and set out for another 4/5th mile walk along Highway Laguna to the non-local coffee shop, buy my java and rest at the outdoor table, with a wonderfully relaxing view of all six lanes of traffic. I finish my joe, and then return home the same way. I spend a total of nine minutes waiting for the light to change at all the intersections to cross legally. I spend fifty five minutes walking the 3-3/5 miles. I spent nearly as much time waiting to pedestrianate across the intersections as it would have taken me to get in my car and drive.

Katie's last sentence is sublime: "The next time you're lacking something to do, try taking a walk in your neighborhood."

Yes, you'd better have nothing else to do if you're going to walk.

Lease Laws

I am nearing my first gallon donor star -- eight weeks from today, if my iron holds up, I'll reach that milestone. Donating blood is a local product, produced locally, and [presumably] consumed locally. That's something I take to heart! Today at the mandatory snack table after donating blood, the drinks offered were water, OJ, and apple juice...and wouldn't you know it, the apple juice came in these quart liter sized cartons stamped -- in clear English -- Made in China.

Really. We probably have 776,478,343 apples ready for harvest not six hundred miles away, and even around here we have Apple Hill that can provide enough for all of Northern California, but no. Our food is more and more being outsourced overseas, and 'cause of only one reason -- it's cheap. Buy apple juice by the pallet -- at our newest Sam's Club.

I am not surprised that three of our local Elk Grove high schools held a drumline competition to celebrate the grand opening of our new Sam's Club on October 8th. Throw a parade for the opening of a new warehouse bulk merchant, and slowly watch our local mercants wither on the vine.

Fine. When these students graduate, when they lay down their percussion instruments for the final time, they can go to work at the Sam's Club...because that will eventually be the only employer left in Elk Grove. We have no manufacturing precisely because we decided we preferred cheap Chinese shit in bulk...like our apple juice.

Why don't we bus our drumline students up to the Yakima Valley and have them parade around a newly fallowed acre of a former apple orchard? The farmer and his hands won't be clapping and cheering them on.

Why don't we bus our drumline students out to Courtland to march around a former pear orchard? Although pears are declining due to demand, more alternate trees might have been planted had we not outsourced our food production to Asia.

Why don't we bus our drumline students out to the now-vacant big box parking lot of the old Sam's Club site? Have them help celebrate the new ghostbox, further contributing to the blight of an inner suburban ring.

Do you see the pattern here? Sam's Club moves farther south, moves to capture the market from the newer, farther out suburban rings, moves ever farther and farther away from the true job centers of the region. As they do, as they have the right to do, they give up on the old sites and leave the empty shell the problem of that ring's suburban residents. And I would bet, I would bet, that whatever new tenant occupies that old site cannot be a direct competitor to the new Sam's Club by lease law. Like I said, this is your precious free market at work.

The new store has 70 more employees than before. Wa-hey! Won't that help our recession! I don't discount work that people do, I never have, but these are associate jobs. Tell me that these are jobs that are marked black on Elk Grove's ledgers. Right. The cost of services used by these associates, e.g., the roadways and public safety, are in excess of the payroll taxes Sam's Club pays. These are non-jobs -- although the newly hired people are likely hardly in any position to quarrel about that. They are employed, "it's a job, man," and that's all that matters at this point.

Elk Grove can't see the forest for the trees. This sort of job base is what forces the city to continue to sprawl until there's nothing left. As existing payroll and property taxes can't support the local government needs, they are forced to count on future tax revenues from more sprawl. At some point this will have to stop. One way or another. It is unsustainable. We refuse to make the hard choices today and we will pay an even higher price tomorrow.

A Public Display of Hesitation

My Franklin Blvd. intersection with Mack Rd. was listed in the top ten most dangerous intersections in Sacramento, while our fair city was named among the most dangerous in the whole state.

In my opinion, the absolute best preventative measure anyone can take, in any intersection, is to wait two seconds after the intersection clears to enter. The vast, vast majority of intersection crashes occur within two seconds after a changing light. Doing this would significantly reduce your odds of an intersection crash.

But it will also totally infuriate the drivers behind you. It will also infuriate your passengers.

The thing to do is to let off the brake as soon as the light changes...wait two seconds, then proceed. The action of releasing your brake lights lets the impatient asshole behind you know that you recognized the green light -- this will minimize the actions they might take against you down the road for being such an idiot. That you decide to take the intersection with an intentional delay, that you decide to take the intersection having checked that it was cleared...well, that most certainly would piss off the pope were he behind you, wouldn't it? Remember -- anyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac. You are always the most perfect driver...isn't that right?

As a bicyclist, timing the green light and beating everyone through the intersection is a bad, bad practice, but man if I don't see this a thousand times a year by other bikers. What's absolutely fascinating to me, however, is that when I intentionally delay my entrance into an intersection, the first cars in the traffic lanes also hesitate...that is, they cue off me when to start accelerating. I do this all the time. I pretend to start the moment the light changes but suddenly I hesitate; every time I do this there is an obvious hesitation by the first cars as well. They mentally process it as "that bicyclist isn't going...he sees something I don't see...it must not be safe to enter...so I'll hesitate too." They will eventually begin moving forward, and only when they get half way through the intersection will I begin to move forward. They will be the ones t-boned by a red light runner, not me.

This is an amazing dynamic! Something so trivial that only a moronic blogger late at night would bother to mention but it happens...and I have to say that I think I, as a bicyclist, make intersections marginally safer because my intentional public display of hesitation forces drivers to delay their entrance into dangerous intersections.

As a bicyclist, I am what would be known as an obstacle to traffic. Drivers are forced to acknowledge my presence, another hazard to be dealt with, and this works to slow them down. The safer you feel as a driver, the more you ought to be on guard because roads that feel safer always kill more people. Roads that feel dangerous are always safer.

Draft SUV Drivers First

In East Sacramento I was behind a Toyota Prius today with a license plate frame from Berkeley, but more interestingly, with a bumper sticker that said "Draft SUV Drivers First." Driven by a solo white guy. No surprise there; I would have been floored if the driver was a West Asian woman.

In my little opinion, I seriously question that the choice of rig is what matters. In the grand scheme of things it's a minor point.

Presumably if we somehow converted our vehicular fleet of 62 million to foreign sourced hybrids we'd never need to engage in foreign wars. Really? Our waring nation wouldn't engage in wars anymore? Is this the premise of that bumper sticker? Or is it something more?

Our contemptuous attitudes towards each other, our low density suburban slum blowout from Berkeley to Boston, our crush of traffic, our destruction of open land, our building of cities and towns to the scale of the Prius instead of the scale of the human, the need for solo motoring at all costs to avoid others, and the waves of pedestrian deaths that will ensue due to inattentive hybrid drivers and their silent propulsion -- not one of these would in any way be mitigated by selling your Yukon and opting for a hybrid.

So, Al Gore's son is exempt because he's driving a Prius. No matter that he was driving in excess of 100 mph in Orange County. He's exempt because of what he drove, but the 17-year old attentive driver borrowing her parent's Tahoe goin' the speed limit to the high school prom? Send that pig to Afghanistan!

So, driving a Prius daily from Berkeley to Sacramento (23,000 miles a year) should exempt some white guy's son from military service, but a brown South Sacramentan woman who bought a used Jeep Cherokee and who drives it less than 1,500 miles a year -- send that bitch to die in Tora Bora!

This is an amazingly stupid bumper sticker. I could just as well plaster a sign on my bicycle tomorrow with the slogan "No Soldiers Died to Fuel This Bike, but Thousands of Iraqis Died to Fuel Your Prius." You think your precious Prius is powered from a separate, special pool of oil? Think your fuel to drive in Berkeley comes from an environmentally friendly well in the Bay Area? No! It comes from the same ravaged Nigerian coastline that fuels your SUV driving neighbor. Think your batteries are produced in a wholly environmentally responsible manner? Think your batteries, the same batteries that will need replacement in 2016, will be disposed of in a correct manner? Think your cheap Chinese tires are manufactured with the same tender loving care that our own tire manufacturers provide?

A fine example of how pretentious our American Prius drivers are. So special they are. So environmentally superior. So deserving of meritorious recognition. Get out there and walk, slick, if you're so damn vain, and put your life at risk pedestrianating alongside all those other Prius drivers who'll run you down while blackberrying, and then tell me how distinctive you ought to be for saving the world.

The Thundering Herd

I've long followed SACOGs forecasts for jobs to housing ratios for each of our region's cities. Their preferred metric is the jobs to housing ratio. Elk Grove has among the worst jobs to housing ratios today at 0.6, and 0.8 forecasted out to the year 2035.

This only measures employment vs. the number of housal units. This would be an OK metric if the median income in the city was equal to the median housal unit value, but in a city like Elk Grove, overrun with low wage retail jobs, this metric fails to provide a true picture of just how many Elk Grovians have to commute to higher wage areas of employment to buy that median house.

Not only is our jobs to housing ratio bad, the jobs we do have don't allow most of us to live here and afford the median house. Our city fares much worse than the statistics suggest, so into our cars we climb and commute elsewheres to work.

This morning was one of the very few times I was forced to commute by car, due to a combination of family and job constraints. It happened, unfortunately, to coincide with the second worst October storm in recorded history and it happened, unfortunately, to coincide with the Elk Grovian crush of traffic between 7:45 and 8:45 AM. If I had had any opportunity to avoid grinding out a commute, today would have been the day to do it, but...I followed the Thundering Herd -- no, not the EGHS footballers, but the daily Elk Grovian northward migration to jobs elsewhere. We are a nomadic, cattle-like people, forced to migrate with the herd when the herd says it's time to move.

There is absolutely no doubt, whatsoever, that excessive speed directly contributed to virtually every freeway accident today. Some observations: I passed a wreck at Hwy 99 and 47th going home this afternoon, and as soon as I passed it the freeway opened up. No more traffic -- I could drive as fast as I wanted. While I kept it at 42mph, a seemingly reasonable speed for the shitty conditions, I was passed left and right by everyone else on the road. I was passed by tractor-trailers doing 60, by drivers who merged right up on my ass and jerked into the next lane to pass me, by SUVs and compacts. The herd mentality kept them clustered into groups, tailgating, leaving no exits if an exit is needed. These are my neighbors, a plethora of dangerous drivers. No need to wonder why we have 41,000 traffic deaths each year. Today, it was a tractor-trailer that wrecked on I-5; we're not just talking about commuters -- when your job is to drive you have other incentives than safety to consider.

I believe it prudent to identify the relationships between the way we drive and the way we live. I'm suggesting that if we didn't build suburban slums twenty miles from our employment parks we wouldn't find it as necessary to speed, to hurry up and get there, to fail to yield and signal, to distract ourselves by trying to incorporate other daily living tasks (like Blackberrying, eating, or texting) with the task of driving. We collectively worshipped Jimmie Johnson's NASCAR win last Sunday and emulated our hero by turning our own residential streets into oval tracks...and, of course, by patronizing Lowe's...

I was part of the Elk Grove Thundering Herd today, and yes, it sucked wending for two hours in traffic, but it was a fascinating study to observe the poor driving habits of my neighbors.

Energized!

The energization of our two new SMUD 230kV transmission lines to the Folsom substation proceeded yesterday without incident. The breakers closed and stayed closed; no arcs, no sparks, and the flow of power directly from Folsom dam to Sacramento resumed as it did fifty four years ago when the dam was completed in 1955.

My function is to set the protection for these transmission lines, to set relays to identify faults and isolate the faulted equipment to prevent cascading failures and blackouts. There is both an art and a science to this work, the combination of which provides immense job satisfaction and a career that will last until the day I die. My retirement party will likely correspond with my funeral wake.

I again had the privilege to drive to Folsom, the privilege to patronize the Broadstone Marketplace. A co-worker bought me a sandwich from the Pita Pit, a wholly non-local franchise. The Pit is located in the bowels of this power center alongside PetSmart, Linens 'n Things, Borders, Steak Escape, Old Navy, Ross, Marshalls, Java City, Cost Plus...all with Home Depot glue anchoring these non-local businesses together.

This place is a total zoo.

A hundred thousand vehicles on Scott Rd. daily, six lanes of progress, stores set back six hundred feet to provide for ample parking, a pedestrian's no man's land.

So, this is why I should move to Folsom? Because the facades on the big box stores are nicer than those in Elk Grove? Because they use faux stone instead of stucco? Because most jobs are twenty five miles away in Sacramento instead of Elk Grove's fifteen miles? Because Folsom housal units cost $65,000 more than Elk Grove?

I almost feel bad about being an engineer, knowing how many fellow engineers are paid to engineer slums like this, knowing that my new transmission interconnections are only going to power more suburban slums like Folsom and Elk Grove all the way to the El Dorado, Amador, and San Joaquin county lines. I usually feel good about my work, until I'm reminded how much better our world would be if it were run by artistic vegetarian women instead of engineering flesh eating men. Yep, it's us engineers who are out there bulldozing prairies, felling valley oaks, and erecting structural steel moment frames as big box power centers, to house consumables to be consumed by our consumers. It's us engineers out there building transmission lines that fucker up the pretty valley views from those expensive Folsom hillside custom homes. Us engineers...the destroyers of worlds...

Black Gold

How many times in the past has someone suggested that we "are about to run out of oil?" Quite a few times, I think. I hold the minority opinion that we are entering an era, not of "running out of oil," but of running out of cheap, easy to access oil. While I have followed the idea of peak oil for some time, I hasten to add that this idea is not, nor has is ever been, about running out.

It is about the inability of our global supply to meet rising world demand.

The Wall Street Journal posted an article Friday on how engineers are squeezing new oil from old wells in central California. The means to do this, however, is substantially different from how we extracted oil forty years ago. Today, we need to build steam generation plants to heat the oil in situ, to make it less viscous, and only then can we pump it to the surface. It doesn't take an engineering degree to understand that the extraction of oil today is more energy intensive than it used to be when natural pressures were sufficient to drive oil to the surface. It costs more to extract.

Seventy years ago the US was the global leader in oil production. We had tremendous supplies in Oklahoma, Texas, California, Pennsylvania -- even before Prudhoe Bay. We were a net oil exporter. The thing is, we extracted the easiest to get, the cheapest to get, and the highest quality oil first. Consider where we, today, are going to extract our future native oil supplies. Think about it -- our next native oil sources are going to come from the Gulf of Mexico, from offshore California, from ANWR -- these weren't the first places we went drilling for oil because they are obviously more expensive to extract than West Texas.

We clearly imported Venezuelan, Saudi Arabian, Canadian, Mexican, Alaskan, Angolan, Nigerian, Indonesian, British, and Norwegian oil first because this was far, far cheaper to extract than the oil shales of Colorado, the tar sands of Canada, the deep GOM, or ANWR.

Now, consider that Mexico, the US (including Alaska), Indonesia, Britain, and Norway have all peaked -- all these nations are no longer producing at their maximum production and all of them are producing on average 2% less each year.

The reason I follow this, the reason I want to see an oil constrained world, is so that we are forced to make better decisions about how we live. Gas at $7.32 a gallon would stop all those South Sacramento Mexicans from speeding their Chevy trucks through residential streets putting all people at risk. Gas at $748 would stop Asian speed racers from barreling up and down Franklin Blvd. in modified Acuras. Gas at $7.87 would stop all those bedroom Tracy residents from clogging up I-205 to commute to Oakland each morning. Gas at $8.04 would find five thousand new Elk Grovains taking the bus, both forcing improved service while decreasing traffic on our freeways to get us to work quicker. Gas at $8.47 would find light rail brought to Elk Grove now, rather than three decades from now. Gas at $8.56 would get more people on bikes, both improving the overall health of our constituents and improving the safety of bicyclists overall through sheer numbers. Gas at $8.82 would force our policy makers to promote infill, to build closer, to stop exurban sprawl.

I want to see an oil constrained world. Because we refuse to price gasoline correctly at a level that promotes all the things I want to see, I hope we really do see a real resource constraint. I hope that new battery technology doesn't come along, just in time to save us, to enable us to keep trudging down the same sorry path of open space consumption, of suburban sprawl, of more energy consumption. I don't give a shit if it ruins our economy -- the EU does just fine with much lower per capital energy use and we will simply learn to do the same.

But if history is any teacher, we've heard this cry for wolf a hundred times before. I just should stop believing that we will every run into any resource constraints. I should believe that the earth has a creamy nougat center filled with oil, just waiting for a long enough drill bit or technology to come along and allow us to extact it at will. We will never run out of fresh water, either; I should use as much as I damn well please. I shouldn't carry the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch guide in my wallet -- the earth will provide for as much sturgeon, bluefin tuna, and rockfish as I choose to consume. We have never run out of natural resources and we never will...

Elsewheres

Some good news here on the light rail front. Our local Siemens light rail car factory has an order to build 75+ cars for the San Diego MTS, and we are about to extend our own Sacramento RT light rail out to the railyards -- an additional mile of track leading north out of the Sacramento city core to the future Railyards development.

First, however, note that even while we make the claim that these light rail cars are built here in California, note that Siemens manufactures the axles, the chassis, the HVAC system and wiring harnesses -- the big components -- in Europe. The Sacramento facility does the final assembly. So in a sense, yes, we are building local, but the true manufacturing is done elsewheres. This is a lot like my electric power system -- many of the things used to create local power generation are created elsewheres.

Building a light rail to brownfields, well, this is still good news, good in that the building of transit before the building of strip malls and low density sprawl might prevent the building of strip malls and low density sprawl. Granted, the plan for the Railyards is exactly the sort of development we ought to be building -- a correct mix of retail/residential with low-rise buildings to provide a sufficient density to keep and attract transit, to provide a sufficient number of people day and night to patronize local businesses at all hours. This sort of development thwarts extreme energy use by people just to live. A handful of residents can choose to live without a car and can get by easily, provided a sufficient level of basic services are provided within a 10 minute walk and by short trips on transit.

The low density of Elk Grove is exactly why Elk Grove doesn't yet have light rail. The failure of county leadership to force transit beforehand and the failure of Elk Grovian leadership to build a correct city is exactly why Elk Grove doesn't yet have light rail. When the RT beans are counted they suggest an insufficient volume of ridership to justify the extreme cost of shoehorning in tracks through existing suburban sprawl...yet they can justify the starting of the new Green Line to the yet-to-be-developed Railyards with no initial ridership. This should tell Elk Grove that light rail will never come. Never. That is, not unless gasoline approaches $9 a gallon; er, no, never.

The Kia Kilovolt

I have a cordless 18V Bosch drill. I've had it probably four, maybe five years. One of my two batteries is now not keeping charge for any appreciable time. Every time I need to use it I have to plan ahead and charge the battery. I've always liked Bosch tools, they seem to hold up better than other brands in the shop. That said, after only a half decade the battery on a small tool in my garage is in need of replacement.

The other day near Folsom, as I was watching the crush of traffic coming down off the Bass Lake Grade on Highway 50 (all those people living in the country to escape suburbia), I was wondering what it will be like in 30 years when all of their cars will [presumably] be battery powered. Here are my suggestions for some car names:

• Chevy Volt
• Oldsmobile Ohm
• Alfa Romero Ampere
• Suzuki Susceptance
• Infinity Impedance
• Izuzu Inductance
• Mercury Megawatt
• Kia Kilovolt

I was wondering -- if I can't get a small shop battery to last longer than a couple of years, how in God's name can we expect to batterize all of our existing and future exurbia, so that someone living on the margins of Placerville can drive her Kia Kilovolt 74 miles daily to work in Rancho Cordova? If I can't get a 5 year old battery to twist a 1/4 inch drill bit through some wood, how will a five year old Oldsmobile Ohm battery twist a drive shaft pushing some overweight foothillian thirty seven miles and 2,300 feet up to their country villa?

Do you think all of El Dorado county could be batterized? I suppose stranger things have happened. Perhaps battery technology will come along and save us -- save us from foreign oil, save us from having to rethink and re-engineer our suburban living arrangements, save us and allow us to continue to build suburbia all the way to Kyburz. One gigantic eighty five mile long carpool lane to save the world.

Gone Yellow

I drove a company car to Folsom this morning, to assist with looping in a new 230kV transmission line into the Folsom substation. If things go well this project will be energized this Sunday and I will be able to breathe easier.

Noting, however, the tremendous crush of foothillian traffic coming down highway 50, I can't imagine I'll really be breathing easier, what with all that pollution created by the throngs of people who've "escaped suburbia" by re-locating to the foothills.

The City of Folsom is just another car dependent suburban slum, but compared to Elk Grove, it's most certainly a higher class suburban slum. It costs more to perpetually motor in Folsom because home values are more expensive and their power centers are more spread out. It also costs more because their residents are required to own more expensive vehicles due to their need to project status to their neighbors. This is how it is in above-median suburbia.

I spent some time in a power center at about 10:30AM today, after the commuters had all scattered but before the lunch crowd, and I was particularly observant of how many suburban housewives, either alone or with children, would navigate their SUVs through the immense parking lots to conduct their daily rituals of latte purchasing, drive through pharmacing, dry cleaning drop offing, or fast food consuming. Not a single one walks. Elk Grove doesn't have nearly the same quantity of these women roaming around its strip malls during these shoulder hours...and I wonder why. I had assumed that in order to drive two $31,000 rigs and own that $477,000 Folsomite house that both housal unit occupants would have to work but apparently not. It seems as if Folsom has more single wage earners than Elk Grove, and I wonder if this is true.

Nonetheless, the California DOT has plans to create an uninterrupted carpool lane all the way from Placerville to Sacramento over the next fifteen years, to better get all those single foothillian wage earners to their jobs in the valley. On one hand, the purpose is to promote higher vehicular occupancy to reduce the number of cars on the road (and presumably less pollution), while on the other hand they are forced by law to create a new lane instead of converting any existing lanes while building a forty mile long carpool path to encourage even more suburban growth as far as possible from employment.

Then, we have GM heavily lobbying CAL DOT to add more carpool stickers to the 85,000 already doled out to Prioria owners, only to encourage sales of their own future Volts.

Does this make any sense? Spending federal tax dollars to subsidize the building of another 30 highway lane miles to enable the happy motoring of rich white solo commuters who elect to commute 75 miles a day while offering economic incentives to purchase "green" cars capable of using these lanes by themselves? This is total horseshit if you ask me. A Prius with a yellow carpool sticker is worth a few thousand more than one without, because it's obvious that carpooling isn't about "saving the world" and it never has been. It's only about keeping highway workers employed building more highway lanes, about keeping solo commuters commuting in their own private vehicles, about assuaging the guilt of white environment trashers, and about enabling our economy of sprawl to continue to edge ever farther out into the hinterlands.

Forcing Change

I've been reading a local news blog, ElkGroveNews.net, that provides a nice source of local news with a bias similar to my own -- many of their short news articles are written by people (none of whom I know) who clearly decry the suburban landscape that Elk Grove has become.

I am not alone. I am not the only one who thinks our suburban sprawl and auto dependency over the past fifty/sixty odd years is what's contributed to the wholesale destruction of civility, of our environments, of our open spaces, of our global environments, and of our culture. I am not the only one who would prefer us to live differently, to live in more humane surroundings.

It's easy to blog about our bad living patterns. I can back it with observation and with facts, but the end result is that this is just a blog...it offers nothing to society as a whole, nothing -- not unless I back this up with action. But I don't take action. I don't, mainly because I don't identify with any particular group but also because I know that this city was bought and paid for a long time ago by pro-sprawl proponents. I have neither the energy nor the requisite money to piss away to attempt to effect change.

I live in a city whose council members require funds to get into and remain in office and those funds don't come from non-sprawl or local sources. Every city council candidate I've ever voted for in my city was pro-responsible growth. None of them have ever been elected and none of them ever will. To the extent that any candidate meets my requirements I vote; otherwise, I don't vote. Regardless, my candidates always lose.

That said, I don't maintain any hope we are going to willingly change our city's pattern of cancerous sprawl all the way to the Consumnes River and all the way to Galt. You can't confuse me with someone who maintains hope because I am smart enough to know that I cannot possibly yield enough consensus around better/sustainable-growth. I am smart enough to know that we will never collectively willingly change course. This is why, in my humble opinion, I am wholly looking forward to something that will forcefully effect change -- such as a water, oil, or some other resource scarcity, an economic meltdown, or a natural calamity. These are the only things that I see will have any real effect in curbing our insatiable lust for material growth, for culling the miscreants, assholes, and non-contributors from our ranks, and for forcing a change in our living arrangements where neighbors matter, where people matter...

I am open about my opinions, I identify myself, and I am not afraid to express my views. Interestingly, ElkGroveNews.net had a wide variety of anonymous comments on their articles until just last week, until the website required commenter registration due to uncivil comments from our "neighbors." As soon as Elk Grovians had to identify themselves they stopped commenting. As soon as Elk Grovians were required to take responsibility for their actions they stop taking action. If this doesn't show you how wretched a society we've become then I don't know what would.

H One, N None

I came down with a cold yesterday. This will seriously affect my bicycle commuting into work this week, but I should also consider not riding the bus tomorrow with a cold, to avoid spreading my disease to others.

But come on, do you really think that in our weak economy people will want to voluntarily not go into work as a health preventative precaution? Don't you think instead most will try to grind through their workdays feeling like shit, willing to spread their infections to others, simply because to not show up might be reason enough to get fired? As packed up as our E-Tran 52 routes have become due to our city council's deference towards perpetual solo-automotive bliss instead of transit, my first though a few weeks back while standing in a packed bus was "wait until winter when 1/3 of us will be coughing, wheezing, and spreading the disease to others." Well, it's fall, and I have a cold, and I'm going to board a bus tomorrow to get to work because I'm "green" and "environmentally conscious" and if I pass on this cold to fifty others, well, they should all be thankful because I'm not out there destroying the earth by driving my car. Besides, if someone else gets my cold and stays home, well, there's gonna be one more seat available on Friday. Wa-hey!

I mean, the bus is as packed in as humanly possible. Should I decide to cram myself into all that with a cold, with my H one, N none? What will happen when someone else decides to cram themselves in with H1N1? The spread of disease, that's what. Instead of Elk Grovians bitching to the city council about having to stand on a bus, one of us should have made an argument that the spread of infectious diseases will be elevated due to the sharing of each other's bodily fluids via sneezing, coughing, and flem discharging. Wa-hey!

If I am to get H1N1 it'll likely be due to a bus ride; therefore, we all have one more reason to climb into our own private vehicles and grind out private solo commutes -- to ward off infection. Can't catch it from others if you ain't around others.

Thirteen Years

I wonder -- would the City of Elk Grove have better weathered this economic shitstorm slowdown if we had limited growth to, say, 500 housal unit permits per year?

I'm almost positive it would have. I believe that if we had adopted a slow growth ordinance, we'd have been better able to limit speculation, dramatically decreased the number of foreclosures, dramatically stemmed the plunge in real estate prices, dramatically increased the value of the existing housal unit stock, and we would have a much nicer city in which to live.

I want to compare a section of a city that I admire to my own city:


Show me, anywhere in Elk Grove, where a lady her age rides her bike to get places. Show me, anywhere in Elk Grove, where she can ride without having to compete against crushing traffic. Show me, anywhere in Elk Grove, where I could buy a place to live that doesn't require mandatory motoring. Show me, anywhere in Elk Grove, where I can take a walk, or ride a train, or ride a bus, to an outdoor stand for a beer or a lunch at work.

This isn't even offered here. While we decided to destroy our open spaces with sprawl, why couldn't we have also built up a town core so that there are options for people who want to live without mandatory motoring?


Instead, all we got was this:

where nobody can walk, where nobody is willing to bicycle, where nobody interacts with neighbors, and where everybody will spend a full thirteen years of their working lives simply to pay for the purchasing, maintaining, insuring and the gassing of the dozen cars they will need just to live.

If we had also subjected that limited growth mandate towards transit oriented development, and if we could have allowed even just 4% of our residents to live without a car or 6% of our residents to live with just one instead of multiple vehicles, my guess is that we would have had even fewer foreclosures.

Elk Grove is and will remain in terrible shape precisely because we failed to build it correctly. Any person willing promote slow, controlled and TOD based growth can't possibly get installed on the city council. This city's perogatives aren't about living well, it's about sprawling more.

Bathtub Curve

You should understand that SMUDs projected capital work over the next several years is significant -- SMUD will be upgrading key transmission infrastructure, much more so than was done over the last seven years.

I spent some moments at work looking at where we are buying some of our equipment. The control center is primed to get a new digital mapboard, and the dozens of new 46" monitors were all built in...China. I noticed some 954 MCM ASCR transmission cable at a substation on Friday, built in Tempe, AZ. And for the first time, several of our bulk 115/21kV transformers and many distribution pad mounted transformers are now being manufactured in China.

This isn't anything new. Over decades SMUD has purchased dozens of 224MVA transformers from South Korea and from Italy, two hydro turbines from Japan, digital relays from England, the list goes on. Truthfully, I expect the majority of our physical (and software) property to be made elsewhere in the coming decades.

I like to think that I have a manufacturing job in the U.S. -- granted I'm an engineer and not a lineman or factory worker, but I do manufacture electricity, a [more or less] locally made product. It seems odd, then, to say this while the stuff used to produce that electricity is more and more outsourced.

One of the biggest hurdles for SMUD is notional reliability. It isn't just that our network is "rusting away," but rather the grid isn't built up to modern standards for reliability. To redesign our substations providing a larger degree of operating flexibility will cost hundreds of millions over the next few decades, while we have yet to seriously address the substantial cost of equipment replacement that will rear itself over that same timeframe. The average age of SMUDs bulk transformers is 34 years. This really should be reduced, in my opinion, to something nearer the 25 year range. Transformers and oil filled cables installed in the 1970's or even earlier are going to fail at an accelerated rate based on the bathtub curve:


This isn't something our Smart Grid can address. Our expenditures in our more smarter smart grid are only in addition to these physical costs that are coming. Not to mention, many of these supposed pie-in-the-sky ideas also suggest that the distribution networks themselves will need substantial improvement to accommodate our more smarter smart grid.

To me, this all implies that SMUD specifically and utilities in general are going to substantially raise rates in excess of inflation over the next twenty years to address all these changes. I am entering my protection engineering career just at the beginning of the wearout period for a substantial volume of SMUDs physical infrastructure. To top it off, I have to think that Chinese made electrical equipment, if it's anything like everything else that nation produces, will further push that failure rate even higher. Sounds like I'll have a job for life.

The Cesspool Of Humanity

Very clearly the recession is near its end. Not based on any economic indicator -- leading this, lagging that, GDP this, debt ratio that; no, my observations on the volume and kinds of traffic on Franklin Blvd make it clear -- we are at the end. I mentioned before the increase in traffic; that much is clear. But yesterday was the first Friday after the first of the month, and regardless of what this suggests there is a obvious difference in the kind of cars and the kinds of people driving them on Franklin Blvd.

Fridays have always brought out the worst in people. When I get junk thrown at me, passengers giving me shit, or when they drive right up behind me in the bike lane and honk or swerve at me in some feigned show of power, I can tell it's a Friday.

I wear a helmet as much for protection from my "neighbors" throwing stuff as it is from a concussion if I crash. I wear an iPod as much for thrash metal as it is to provide an obvious means that I can't hear them calling me out as they drive by (although I can).

I wonder...why do I do this? I've not gotten into any serious accidents, not once crashed, but with all these meatheads out there, is it only a matter of time before I disrespect one of them or a car full of them and get myself crushed?

This is Franklin Blvd. for you, a cesspool of humanity between 41st and Valley Hi on Friday afternoons. It was so much better during our little recession; these people didn't come out. Franklin Blvd. was dead, traffic was muted, they stayed at home causing grief to each other, not to me. Now, the speed racers are back, the SUVs and Harleys bypassing stacked cars in the bike lane are back, the bling is back, the spinners are back...the recession is unfortunately over...

Happy Motoring

As I stand on the bike, overlooking Highway 99 on the 41st Ave overpass, I don't look down on a pack of happy people -- these are people whose expressions and actions certainly don't exude happyness (sic). I suppose my expression doesn't either, with an elevated heart rate and all...

What happened to us? Forty five years ago, Esso had the "Happy Motoring" slogan -- the Oil Drop Man was a smiling caricature of us Americans, all of whom enjoyed happy motoring, as well as the Esso station attendants with their happy motoring jingle. Where did we go so wrong?

Where? Perhaps the day we decided that it was an acceptable allocation of our national resources to subsidize the daily commute from unit five in tract twelve of Pheasant Hollow Estates in Tracy to a job in unit B of the Loon Landing office park in Milpitas. As everyone in Tracy now grinds out their own commutes by solo occupant driving, so goes their collective happiness, jockeying with others for their own piece of the public asphalt, with expanding waistlines and shortened tempers.

The best days of happy motoring are evidently behind us

even though we now have technology to help keep us happily motoring: InCarNav systems, cellularized telephones, drive-thru food purchasing, satellite radio, LED powered roadside advertisements, in-dash DVD players, 4wheel-on-the-fly, heated seats, dual-zone climate control... With all these enhancements, how come our drivers aren't beaming with joy?