Bicyclists darn sure do pay taxes for roads.
Interstates are paid roughly 100% with federal gasoline taxes. Bicyclists don't pay those taxes, but don't use interstates either.
State roads, depending on the state, are paid approx 10% - 50% with state gasoline taxes, the rest with general revenue. Bicyclists do pay general revenue.
Local roads -- which are most roads -- are paid for with state/fed grants and a big chunk of local taxes. The most common local tax is property tax, and bicyclists typically live somewhere, and therefore pay the tax directly based on the home they own or indirectly through their rent.

If gas taxes paid 100% of the road maintenance costs, US gas taxes would rival the UK.

Zoning determines "how much" house you can build on a property. Single family only? Up to 2-3 family? Apartment, 3 stories or fewer? Larger? Parking requirements? All of that is determined at the local level in most United States states. Highway money is typically spent by the states. They decide which projects get funding, etc. Additionally, most new highway projects aren't long distance projects -- they're circular ring roads or spokes into cities. The funding for the highway infrastructure is nearly all federal. The US Congress decides how much money to spend on highways.

As a result, there is very little coordination, and we end up with sprawl because of it.

Making matters worse, high speed rail is clearly state-to-state infrastructure in most cases (San Fran to L.A. notwithstanding). However, the rail infrastructure isn't federal -- it's state. That means if you want to improve a rail corridor along five states, you need five sets of funding, five sets of state decision making, etc. That's one federal gov't, five state gov'ts, and dozens of local gov'ts all getting in each others way.

Building new roads is easier. Costs more, wastes more, but there are fewer barriers -- fewer abutters adjacent the road to complain, less pain caused by orange cones and lane reduction during construction, etc.

For better or for worse, our very government structure is designed in such a way that makes road repair/expansion far more difficult and painful on both politicians and constituents.

and I haven't read the article linked, but I have read the NHTSA press release.

First of all, the 2025 MPG is augural -- the NHTSA is statutorily prohibited from setting standards more than five model years in the future. Secondly, the numbers of 49mpg is based on their estimate of the maximum achievable fleet-wide technology. The 2025 number is a *projection* of the requirement the NHTSA estimates that they will propose sometime around 2020.

A better link is:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012/08/nhtsaepa-20120828.html

Voter reg data includes not just brief biological data [first, middle, last, address, DOB, sometimes telephone, date registered, political affiliation, the elections in which the person voted, which were absentee], but then state census data contains lots of other good stuff [first, middle, last, maiden, address, sometimes telephone, occupation as person reports it, head of household status, etc] and then if the person is a homeowner, you use the assessment database [date home purchased, assessed value each year, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, condition of each, any co-owners]. Then you can throw in the facebook, the google, the linkedin.

My concern: even private citizens like myself who know of and access this data don't flaunt it. I don't make it obvious to a neighbor that I know she votes in all Democratic primaries or only votes in November 0 mod 4 elections. I don't talk about her property tax bill either. Some people with this app will play it poorly because they will not understand that even the data is out there in the public, it is still impolite to treat it as common knowledge.

1. Giving IOC Observers the lights didn't "Make Sure" that London got the Olympics. A major overstatement to be sure.
2. While London may have used CCTV, it surely wasn't necessary. A few motorcyclists or taxi drivers with mobile phones and headsets could have just as easily kept tabs on the IOC Observers [so could GPS, though perhaps not as accurately as humans].
3. The idea of prioritizing traffic in a network should not be novel to /.ers. Not only do we do it with packets, we already to it on roads. Vehicles with sirens and lights have first priority, and at least in tUSA we give funeral parades second priority. Third priority goes to buses which have TSP [traffic signal prioritization] systems, thereby holding a light green or turning it green when a bus approaches. Last priority: us regular users. Giving a higher priority to IOC Observers might not be a great use of taxpayer dollars or appropriate for fairness, but that's a local political decision and certainly not a novel application of technology.

But hey, the story involves CCTV, traffic lights, and sports which don't always involve a ball or a puck. Perfect fodder for a silly /. article.

So why not just get a CFL? In general, it's probably not worth it. But if:

1. there's a high cost to change the bulb [ladder, scaffolding, or left required], additional lifetime is extremely valuable;
2. the color is different and that matters to you;
3. the warm-up time and process is different and that matters to you; and/or
4. the fragility or hazardous materials in a CFL is a concern,

then LED might be the way to go. I don't think that Philips nor other manufacturers are expecting a large-scale consumer switch from CFL to LED at these prices, but for the prices to get lower than these prices they need more research and more manufacturing experience, so they might as well bring 'em to market now and get the process started.

Dude -- think for a few more seconds.

1. They are almost certainly connected to the grid. Just like residential solar cells, a building can be BOTH connected to the grid AND have on-site renewable generation.

2. Apple is paying the industrial retail rate for electricity, not the cost the utility would pay. Sure, PV and biogas might not be purely economic for the utility in 2012, but they may well be for Apple because Apple's avoided cost is so much higher than the utility's.

3. North Carolina has an RPS -- a Renewable Portfolio Standard. Most states do. The utilities are required to purchase enough certificates so that X% of their retail sales have accompanying certificates, each of which represents 1 MWh of renewably-produced electricity. Apple's equipment will generate these, and Apple will sell them on the market to the utilities, generating even more revenue.

4. Low power lighting and better cooling tech are not mutually exclusive to renewable energy. You can bet that Apple is *also* employing technology which lowers their consumption of electricity for both lighting and cooling.

Apple isn't getting rich on this stuff. They're not getting rich on the vending machines in the break rooms either. It doesn't mean that they're relying on them for critical business purposes, and it doesn't mean they're taking a loss on them. In fact, it's almost certainly the contrary -- this will in no way reduce their data center reliability, and it will result in slightly lower costs than just relying on grid electricity.

We actually are mowing down the mountains in nearby West Virginia for coal. The coal extraction technique is called "mountaintop removal". Google it -- it ain't pretty. Mining the material for PV or bloom boxes doesn't have anywhere near that kind of impact, in part because the material is part of the generator, not part of the fuel.

This stuff is replacing the need for coal, and coal is what the mowing down of mountains is all about.

It's not that I disagree, it's that I sure wish you had added that we noticed that horses were difficult and walking was slow, so we added mass transit, and then about 100 years later we noticed that no matter how little autos emit from their tailpipes, they are still not very welcome in cities because they take up too much space, slow down mass transit buses and street cars, and are far too dangerous to pedestrians and bicycles. Because of this, [some] cities in the past 20 years have actively worked to reduce the number of autos in the city, through a suite of tools including car-free streets or urban centers, reducing parking minimums in zoning and even replacing them with parking maximums, increasing the price of on-street parking while reducing it's quantity, increasing the availability and efficiency of mass transit and, more recently, bicycle sharing, and rethinking roadway infrastructure to improve the flow and safety for peds, cyclists, and mass transit users even if it degrades the efficiency for motor vehicles.

Sorry, not entirely relevant but I couldn't resist!

I don't know how it works in the 1000s of other cities and towns, but in mine THE POLICE DON'T KEEP THE MONEY. The money from ticket revenues goes to the general fund, just like money from other enforcement fines [health dept, building dept, parking enforcement] and other fees [permits, parking, building, etc] and other revenues [property tax, state aid, grants, etc].

I've been involved in local politics for some time, and I've never heard of a police department that kept the ticket revenue. If you know of one, please provide a citation.

NHTSA FARS data, 2002-2006: 27 legally blind pedestrians were killed by automobiles. 27/5 == 5.4 per year. Blind people being run over by automobiles simply isn't a rampant problem. Blind people often rely on audio cues to cross the street, but not the sound of engines. Instead, the chirp or verbal commands from crosswalk signal heads is the audio cue for blind pedestrians, combined with the trust that motorists will look for peds when turning right at intersections.

It's noise pollution, and it's oh so unnecessary.

California also can't have much wind because there's not much shallow water. The geology results in California being near a shelf of sorts -- the water depth gets very deep very close to shore. Wind turbines are built in shallow water, for obvious reasons. Most of California doesn't have the geology for offshore wind turbines.

As part of the NStar-Northeastern merger, the new company has agreed to purchase 27.5% of the output from the Cape Wind project. See http://www.wbur.org/2012/02/15/cape-wind-power

That means that Cape Wind has got contracts for 77.5% of their output -- enough to satisfy the bankers that the project will have the cash flow to repay the bankers. Which is to say, that is no longer a Cape Wind hurdle.

A fair point, the grid needs both energy (which winds provide) and capacity (of which winds don't provide much). As a result, wind turbines don't get full capacity credit -- a 100MW wind farm doesn't get 100MW of capacity credit, but it doesn't get 0MW either. After all, given the amount of wind turbines in most regions, there is enough geographic diversity that there is always some wind generation. Each ISO determines their own capacity credit. MISO [midwest] uses 20% -- a 100 MW wind installation "needs" 80MW of gas to create 100MW of capacity.

The value in wind isn't to reduce capacity requirements (much). The value is that when the wind is blowing, you need to burn less fuel in those coal or natural gas power plants *which would be built whether or not the wind turbines are built*. It's that avoided fuel cost, avoided SOx and NOx pollutant permits, avoided Hg emissions, avoided ash ponds, avoided CO2 emissions, avoided water consumption, and so forth which all have value, and wind allows for less of all of those things.

NREL's ewits study modeled wind speed every 10 minutes at 1000s of sites both on- and -off-shore on the Eastern Interconnect, excluding the Southeast, at 80m and 100m hub height. They included a number of sites in VA and NC, both on and off-shore. I just happen to be working on a study now involving the data.

I chose 20 of their VA and NC offshore samples by sorting them by lat long and choosing every nth. I then ran the wind speed data of each sample through the power curve of a Vestas V112 3MW turbine [5MW turbines weren't appropriate for the study]. I then calculated the capacity factor at 100m hub height for all 8760*6*20 samples, and averaged. Capacity factor: 55.1%. Which is to say, the energy generated over the course of the year for a single 3 MW turbine at 100m hub height, expressed in MWh, will be 0.551 * 3MW * 8760. Of course, this is a model, not a prediction. The power density curve for a 5 MW turbine isn't exactly that of a 3 MW turbine, it may have maintenance issues, it may shut down during tropical storms and hurricanes, it may be in a site which is below the 20 site average, it may not be exactly 100m hub height (though 479 feet to tip of blade at max height seems close), it may and the NREL model which created the wind speeds may not be spot on either. I wouldn't bet the farm it hits 55.1% capacity factor, but I'd bet that it does significantly better than 33%.

This isn't to pick on the parent of this post, but more generally... like everything, the details matter. Like all things non-CS/CE, the /. collective is smart and educated enough to understand the conclusions, but not experienced enough in the specific area to produce quality conclusions. /rant

P.S. There isn't a "norm" for most wind... capacity factors on-shore in tUSA range from low 20s to almost 50. The capacity factor is only one input to determine the cost effectiveness of an installation. Other really important factors include the specific hours in the day that wind is expected to generating electricity, the challenge of installing turbines *at that specific location* [roads, foundation, transmission, etc], the requirements for permitting in that city/town and state (and sometimes Fed permitting too), the locational marginal price of electricity [if in ISONE, NYISO, PJM, ERCOT, CAISO, or to a lesser extent, MISO (ie New England, New York, North Atlantic ranging to Chicago, Texas, California, or the rest of the Midwest, roughly)] in the region, the value of capacity payments, the value of RECs or other environmental payments, and I'm sure I've left a few out.