Email
Print
Making the best of the worst
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: January 7, 2009
Been dreading '09? Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th century German philosopher, drew the admiration of the faithful and the scorn of the skeptical when he famously observed that if God is omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent, then this must necessarily be the best of all possible worlds.
For this simple statement of faith, Leibniz achieved immortality (of the earthly variety) at the hands of Voltaire, who lampooned him as "Doctor Pangloss" in the classic French novel, Candide.
The intervening centuries have more or less paved over Leibniz with existentialism. Today even the most devout among us would be more apt to agree with Æsop the Pagan's fable in which a carter, having got stuck in a ditch, prayed to Zeus for help. He received this answer: "Tut, man! Don't sprawl there; get up an put thy shoulder to the wheel!"
Today when so many of us are facing or living with joblessness, it would be callous to offer at the individual level either the Leibniz or the Æsop observation. But for the nation, the Æsop solution is a winner.
Don't try this at home kids, but there used to be an urban myth that a Stradivarius violin sounds better after being broken and repaired. No one since the Bolsheviks or Chairman Mao would intentionally do to the world what was done to it in the fourth quarter of 2008. But as the Obama transition team forms up and the Bush contrition team fades out, some things seem poised to come out better than ever — eventually.
For one thing, the Fed finally accepts that someone besides Lawrence Welk needs to turn off the bubble machine. Righteous Regulation is being hoisted back up onto its dusty pedestal after Allen Greenspan bowed and muttered, "My bad."
But while the financial mechanism flew apart like an engine with its fly-wheel governor disabled, replacing the governor with a hand-valve seems wrong too.
There is a third way: equip the national financial engine with a reliable set of gauges and hire people of the stature of the Fed's Board Members to keep an eye on them and sing out loudly to the markets and to Congress when the revs or the boiler pressure are heading out of bounds.
If the gang of experts charged with detecting bogus value is the same gang charged with framing remedies for it, over-caution may stifle safe, creative market innovation. If it would have been possible to assign a more "real" value for real estate, then putting it on the evening news and a Federal web site should give investors pause and Congress and/or the sitting administration a trigger to act.
But if "real" value could not have been determined back then, how can new regulators see what, and how, to regulate in 2009?
Here's one thing that's badly broke that a transportation infrastructure stimulus package can easily fix. Since the 1880's, streetcars have been powered by overhead wires called "catenaries." (The Internet identifies some five cities as having introducing "the world's first electric streetcar" in that decade. Success has many fathers.)
Streetcars were the joy of urban life until, so the legend goes, the car manufacturers, jealous of transit's market share, bought 'em up and shut 'em down.
Now streetcars are making a comeback for a lot of good reasons. For one, driving a car downtown is a pain in the bumper. Indoor parking in Charlotte can push $100 a month! Imagine the tariff in NYC or LA.
For reasons everybody understands but no one can explain, rail transit is just more attractive than bus rides. That makes developers love rail transit routes as places to build high-density urban housing, retail space and offices: "If we build it, they will come — on streetcars!"
Energy-wise, streetcars on rails have only 1/7 the rolling friction of rubber-tired buses, a Green dream.
So streetcars should be coming back with a vengeance. And they are, but there's a catch: Those overhead wires, the catenaries—and the poles, guy wires, transformers and power lines they require—now cost about $4 million dollars for every mile of track!
And then all that ugly hanging hardware has to be maintained. Just recently Bordeaux, France, pulled the plug on overhead catenaries. At $4 million a mile, it's a safe bet the US won't be far behind Europe.
And here's the local payoff. Because of Mooresville's pioneering advocacy of hydrogen rail, Proterra LLC — a builder of hydrogen fuel cell buses and likely manufacturer of the world's first fuel cell streetcars—wants to manufacture them here in Mooresville if the Town, County, State and Fed recovery wonks can help sort out the funding.
"Mooresville, home of the hydrolley" has a nice ring to it. So will local cash registers ... if we get the new hydrolley plant and the hundreds of jobs it will create. Obama says he wants to make jobs and boost economic recovery by funding new, clean transportation technology. Yo, Washington! Over here! We resemble that remark — a lot!
Call me Leibniz or Pangloss, but I see this as a way to make the current economic bust morph boomwards in Mooresville — if we put our shoulders to that bright new hydrolley wheel and really push for it in the New Year.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
Email
Print
