Mike Tomasky wants to know why jet planes haven’t gotten any faster:

But here’s my question. Ever since the development of the noble Boeing 707, which started flying in 1958, transatlantic travel has taken what it takes today: seven or eight hours. Doesn’t it seem weird that they’ve never been able to improve this at a price regular people can afford? We had the SSTs, but a seat on one ran $10,000 a pop and they’ve now been discontinued anyway. [...] We have ovens that cook food faster than they did in 1958. We have computers that compute a million times faster. In 50 years’ time, the advance in innovation and speed in any number of areas has been breathtaking. Trains are faster (usually, where governments have invested in it, which excludes my beloved nation). So how is it that jet travel reached its technological end point in 1958? I’ve always wondered about this and would appreciate explanations.

My understanding is that this mostly has to do with fuel consumption. The underlying technology of “making planes go fast” has advanced quite a bit and was applied to the Concorde and a variety of military applications. The way a jet works, if you want to generate more power you need to use (and carry) more fuel and that costs money for reasons that have nothing to do with the R&D or production costs of the plane. Existing passenger jets typically operate at somewhat slower speeds than their engines are capable of achieving precisely for fuel economy reasons. Modern jet engines are very efficient at converting fuel into power already; the technological improvement needed would be some way to make the fuel itself cheaper. It’s also worth noting that passenger jets are already quite fast. To go substantially faster, you’d be traveling supersonically and that would restrict the number of routes your plane could actually fly on due to sonic boom issues. That, in turn, would make it hard to amortize the R&D costs in a way that made the planes a reasonable deal on a per-unit basis.

All this adds up to a situation in which the thing airlines are looking for from Boeing and Airbus are ways to make planes more efficient in the sense of moving more passengers per unit of fuel.

It is interesting, however, that based on the rapid pace of advance in aerospace technology in the roughly sixty years between the Wright Brothers getting their patent and 1969′s double-wammy of the Concorde and the Moon Landing you would have thought the ensuing 40 years might be full of further exciting innovations. Instead we decided that neither supersonic passenger travel nor landing people on the Moon was a particularly economical use of fuel.

(cc photo by NicestAlan)

Today I got to go on a bicycle tour of Copenhagen guided by two representatives from the Dansk Cyklist Forbund (Danish Bicycle Federation). It was a great way to learn about Copenhagen’s bike infrastructure by actually riding around and experience it, stopping periodically to have things explained. I’d been to European cities with impressive bicycle infrastructure before—Berlin and Stockholm very recently—but those places seemed like a difference in degree compared to the United States. Copenhagen was a difference in kind. There’s just not—at all—a sense of danger or even competition with the automobile. On streets that are heavily trafficked, there are bike lanes, and the lanes are usually physically separated from the road. On streets where there aren’t bike lanes, there isn’t much traffic. And most of all there are tons of people on bikes wherever you go. Thirty-seven percent of Copenhagen commuters use bikes. And given that presumably some people are walking to work, some people are using the bus, some people are using the Metro, and some people are using the S-Tog the resulting situation is one in which cyclists and drivers are really equals.

It’s actually impressive to a degree that’s somewhat unsettling. Regular bicycle commuting in the United States is, among other things, a somewhat meaningful identity category. Initially it’s thrilling to see so many of “your people” everywhere. But looking closer you start to see exactly what was explained to me—the whole reason you have so many people biking around is that cycling is totally mainstream in Copenhagen and doesn’t constitute an identity at all.

From a policy perspective, what you’re basically seeing in Denmark is path-dependency on steroids. Back in the 1970s there were a substantial number of cyclists in what I guess you would call the “pre car” mode where people ride bikes because the country is too poor for everyone to afford a car. Then came the oil crisis and driving got even more expensive. And alternative policies started to be explored where for the first time the country started consciously trying to encourage bicycling. And the policy was never really dropped. So you have lots of cyclists which creates a constituency for more infrastructure which leads to more cycling which creates a constituency for more infrastructure. Denmark is the country with the highest share of GDP going to taxes, and part of that is very high taxes on cars and on gasoline so even though Denmark is a very rich country today lots of families still have a strong financial incentive to limit car ownership and car use.

I think you can already see embryonic versions of this positive reenforcement cycle in some American cities—New York and Washington to name two—but it still looks very different and I think something dramatic would have to happen to really change the path dependence dynamic. Then again I think that if you look at where oil prices were before the financial crisis hit it’s not all that unlikely that something dramatic will happen, comparable to the oil crisis of the seventies. At any rate, the current center-right government in Denmark hadn’t actually been very interested in bike-promotion over the past eight years (the Copenhagen city government is another matter) but no they’ve changed their tune and are appropriating about $200 million in competitive grants to municipalities for bike projects.

Olympia Snowe looks set to reprise her roll in hobbling the stimulus bill in exchange for providing the key pivotal vote for it by killing John Kerry’s amendment, “Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers.” Jon Cohn explains:

In the bills that passed three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the exchange would be a “prudent purchaser.” In other words, it would have a staff that bargained with insurers to bring down premiums — and that made sure all plans lived up to strict guidelines for coverage and customer service. In effect, any insurer that wants to offer coverage through the exchanges has to get the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” from the administrators. This is precisely how it works in Massachusetts.

By contrast, the Senate Finance bill envisions much weaker exchanges. Instead of choosing which plans to make available, the exchange administrators would, by law, have to accept any plan that meets a relatively minimal set of standards.

There are several problems with this. One is that it’s going to be a mess for consumers. Another is that it threatens to turn the exchanges into playgrounds of implicit risk-shifting efforts wherein companies try to design policies specifically around dissuading high-need people from signing up. Thus ever-more burden is going to be placed on the untested risk-adjustment machinery that’s supposed to even this all out. Ezra Klein observes that Jon Kingsdale is basically the only person in America’s who’s run anything like the exchanges envisioned in all the different bills—he does the job in Massachusetts—and he views the prudent purchaser rule as absolutely essential. Against that Snowe is pitting, I guess, her intuition that this is too much government involvement.

PASOK Leader George Papandreou

Proving that social democracy’s not dying all across Europe, Greece’s opposition Panhellenic Socialist Movement scored a big win in today’s election, acquiring an absolute majority in parliament. Having the election at all looks to have been a tactical error on the part of the governing right:

Mr Karamanlis called the election in early September, half way through his four-year term.

He said he wanted a new mandate to tackle Greece’s economic problems, but his opponents say he has failed to fullfil promises to clean up public office and to modernise the country.

The government has also been hit by a series of corruption scandals.

Mr Papandreou has promised he will build a green economy and bring in foreign experts to help Greece overcome its problems if elected.

From an American perspective there’s something interesting about the idea of a politician avowing a desire to learn from foreigners. Of course rather than reading broad ideological significance into this the main thing to say is probably that it’s natural for opposition parties to benefit from an economic crisis. That’s what’s happening in the UK and Spain where the left is in power, and you also saw it in Iceland earlier in Greece today and probably in Ireland soon. What’s interesting is that France, Germany, and Italy you aren’t seeing this kind of clear anti-incumbent effect. Part of the explanation is probably that the center-left is unusually divided in all of those countries.