Spare tire, jumper cables, and… wading boots?

A couple of new government studies assess the impacts climate change is going to have on U.S. transportation infrastructure, including roads, ports, and rail lines. Some of the quoted statistics are a little nerve-wracking. According to today’s New York Times the report put out by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program highlights some major vulnerabilities:

Produced by a collaboration among agencies that included the United States Geological Survey, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Transportation, the report offers three estimates for sea-level rise by 2100: about 16 inches a century, a rate it said had already been exceeded; about two feet, an estimate many scientists regard as optimistic; and up to three feet, which the report says would be catastrophic for wetlands and other coastal features but that is “less than high estimates suggested by more recent publications.”

…

The multiagency report cited the Port of Wilmington in Delaware as an example. The report says that if the sea level rises by two feet or even a bit less, 70 percent of port property will be affected.

Meanwhile, it says, such a rise in sea level would leave almost 2,200 miles of major roads and almost 900 miles of rail lines in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and the District of Columbia “at risk for regular inundation.”

I guess if I live long enough I am going to be boating to work.

Here’s the lede from the NYTimes’ story, and some further info on the other report:

Transport: fees or subsidies? [update]

James Joyner does some private calculus and comes out with an explanation for why more people don’t commute on Metro:

I’m now commuting into D.C. on a near-weekdaily basis. According to GoogleMaps, the office is 13.5 miles from the house. I can usually drive there in 45-60 minutes during off-peak hours, although it can sometimes take much longer if there’s an accident. I can park in the garage next to my office for the day for $12. Conversely, I can drive 15-20 minutes to a Metro station, pay $4 to park, wait as long as 15 minutes for a train, pay another $2.65 to get two blocks from the office 35-50 minutes later, followed by a 5-10 minute walk to the office.

So, in order to save $2.70 (plus a nominal amount of gasoline), it would cost me 30-75 minutes each day for the round trip, plus the privacy and autonomy I enjoy in my own vehicle. Given that I earn enough that $3 is poor compensation indeed for that much of my time, I drive unless there’s a really good reason not to.

I’ll note that he’s commuting at off-peak, which is probably skewing his decision toward “drive”, but for the most part I’ll assume he knows how to solve his own travel optimization problem. His solution for increasing ridership, however, has problems:

Can my ethanol bum a ride from one of you guys?

The New York Times reports that ethanol prices are crashing as supply outstrips the distribution network:

Because ethanol is corrosive and soaks up water and impurities, it cannot be shipped through the country’s fuel pipeline network. So it must be transported by train, truck and barge, a more expensive transportation network that is suddenly finding it hard to keep up with the surge in ethanol production.

Oops. With high demand on the coast, and a huge amount of corn in the heartland, it turns out that we actually need infrastructure for the market to work. Since corn ethanol is so inefficient in terms of energy balance (not to mention the economic inefficiency of doubly-subsidizing corn), we should be taking this ethanol boom as incentive to invest in fuel transport infrastructure. If we make a breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol, hopefully production will be less concentrated in my beloved home state; still, we’ll be needing to distribute it to truly harness market forces.