From the Eisenhower Highway--in Afghanistan, that is!

True to the adage that we learn something new everyday, now I know that there is an Eisenhower Highway in Afghanistan. 

Here in the US, we are all too familiar with how Eisenhower participated in the army’s exercise to study the logistical issues in moving military vehicles and equipment from coast to coast, which was a huge factor in President Eisenhower leading the charge on building the interstate highway system that we now take for granted. 

But, I certainly had no idea that there was an Eisenhower Highway all the way in another part of the world!

The road, known as Highway One, runs in a massive arc from the capital Kabul in the eastern part of the country southwest to Kandahar, Afghanistan's second major city, and then northwest to Herat, an economic center near Afghanistan's borders with Turkmenistan and Iran.
By a strange coincidence President Dwight Eisenhower, who is remembered as the father of the U.S. interstate highway system, has a similar legacy among Afghans: The Kabul-Kandahar-Herat road has been known locally as the Eisenhower Highway because it was built with U.S. assistance in the 1950s and 60s.

Jonathan Steele's description of it is sadly poetic:

Built in the 1950s, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed peacefully for Afghan friendship, this US-funded 300-mile ribbon of tarmac was plied for two decades by lorries and garishly painted buses with no concern for security. Among the passengers were half-stoned Western hippies on the overland trail through Asia. Then came civil war and in 1979 the Soviet invasion.

As one can imagine, this highway is in a state of disrepair after years of war.

More than a quarter of the 745-mile highway is dirt and gravel. Depending on weather conditions and the mood of local bandits, the trip from one end to the other can take from 28 hours to a week.

In other words, yet another evidence that the Afghanistan of today is in a worse shape than the country that it was forty years ago. Perhaps we have invented the time machine after all--bomb a country enough, and time reverses!

Global warming. Trade. Economic savings?

The NY Times:

Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming.

Good news, or bad news?

[The] Russians hope that the transit of the German ships will inaugurate the passage as a reliable shipping route, and that the combination of the melting ice and the economic benefits of the shortcut — it is thousands of miles shorter than various southerly routes — will eventually make the Arctic passage a summer competitor with the Suez Canal.

And where is this headed?

Though the window for sailing the route north of Russia is only a few weeks a year, it trims days to weeks off trips and saves fuel. For example, the voyage from Yokohama, Japan, to Rotterdam via the Northeast Passage is about 4,450 miles shorter than the currently preferred route through the Suez Canal, according to the Russian Ministry of Transport.

Neils Stolberg, the president of the Beluga Group, said this week that the Arctic transit was not an experiment but the beginning of opening the route to outside traffic. He said his company already had new contracts for taking 1,000 tons of goods from Asia to Siberia next summer.

On Obama's High speed rail plan

"I'm happy to be here. I’m more happy than you can imagine," said the Vice President, a noted rail enthusiast, before introducing the President for the release of his strategic plan for high speed rail in America. Revolving around the $8 billion in the Recovery Act and the $1 billion per year for five years requested in the President’s budget to get these projects off the ground"
That was VP Biden's remarks back in April to launch the administration's vision for high speed rail.

So, four months later, what do we think?

First, here is Sam Staley at Reason:

For transportation investments to have a meaningful economic impact, they will need to cost-effectively improve America's ability to move goods, services, and people from one place to another. High-speed rail doesn't do that. It is an extremely costly way to achieve limited portions of these goals, and it inevitably fails as a broad-based solution to the country's transportation challenges.

In the end, high-speed rail's contribution to the economic recovery and the nation's economic productivity is being oversold. Elected officials, from Rep. Cantor to President Obama, would do a far greater service to the public's understanding of the economy if they would focus on economic fundamentals, not glitzy boutique policy programs that will inevitably fail to meet grandiose expectations they have created for them.

Staley's bottom line is that the high speed rail plan fails as a stimulus program and does not create jobs.

Ed Glaeser looks at whether the proposed high speed rail would help America's other great problems--sprawl.
For illustrative purposes, Glaeser considers the Dallas-Houston corridor, which, as he points out, is not in the Obama plan. Glaeser notes that:

Despite the lack of any positive evidence linking centralization to high-speed rail, I certainly accept that there is a great deal of uncertainty. To give rail the benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume that high-speed rail will cause 100,000 households to switch from suburb to city in both Dallas and Houston. This change would create extra, annual environmental benefits of $29.7 million. These benefits would be real, but they would still do little to offset the $524 million or $401 million net annual loss discussed above.

What do I think? High speed rail is so 19th century a solution for a 21st century Great Recession!

Lies, damned lies, and 'eat locally'?

It's hard to open a magazine without finding an article about a photogenic farmer making handcrafted cheese or a happy family that has reduced its carbon footprint by planting a victory garden. ....
There are consequences, too, for oversimplifying. If we all think in food miles, the answer is obvious: Buy local. But new studies show that in some cases it can actually be more environmentally responsible to produce food far from home.

That is an excerpt from Jane Black's essay on how the press got the idea that food travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate. Worth reading the entire essay.

Students in my summer online class will be all too familiar with this topic because that is the task I gave them for the final 2000-word paper, and I have copied/pasted it here:

The Oxford University Press declared that the new word of the year for 2007 was "locavore", which perhaps you are already familiar with. A true commitment to being a locavore has implications for international trade and transportation.
In order to help you explore the issues, I had put together a few articles--on food miles--as readings for Week#6, which I am sure all of you have already read a gazillion times!

Your task:
* Carefully, and critically, read the five articles on food-miles.
* Think about related issues from Levinson and the mini-questions/responses.
* Articulate a thesis statement that relates to international trade and transportation. Provide this as the "abstract" in about 50-100 words.
* Develop your abstract with logical arguments, with supporting evidence from any number of materials used in this course. Make sure that you do not write a paper exploring a theme that is not quite central to this course. E.g., do not end up writing a paper on the farmers' market in Corvallis.
* You need to carve out your own thesis idea that relates to "locavore" and international trade and transportation.