So What, Who Cares (vol 3, issue 4) How transit spending might affect your e-commerce buys

Hello!

Happy February! Today, I'd like to share with you something I just learned about the president of my alma mater, Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson: This theoretical physicist -- the first black woman to earn a PhD in theoretical solid state physics from MIT -- conducted the breakthrough research that led to the touch-tone telephone, call waiting and caller ID. Everyone who was a teenager in the 1980s and 1990s owes her a debt of gratitude.

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The age of e-commerce is causing UPS and FedEx to freak out, especially now that Amazon.com has decided it can build out its own delivery network and Lord knows drones can avoid potholes and congested airports.

FedEx Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Frederick Smith testified Wednesday before the House Transportation Committee, saying this:

FedEx and other transportation and logistics companies cannot continue to help grow the U.S. economy and increase jobs without improved infrastructure and wise policy decisions from Washington.

And while FedEx is doing just fine in year-over-year earnings gains, fellow shipping concern UPS is flailing: rising e-commerce costs have walloped the company -- delivering packages to individual residential addresses is much pricier than delivering to businesses, and the 6.1% drop in revenue per residential package has prompted the company to say they'll be examining how to reduce costs on their end and pass along those costs to consumers.

Circling back to Amazon: It's got a fleet of 40 delivery planes, which is ... a start? FedEx and UPS have 4000 delivery hubs worldwide with 1000 planes and 200,000 vehicles to go with all that. But you know, back when Amazon started, Barnes and Noble and Borders stood astride the U.S. bookselling business like a mighty colossus, so ... it'll be interesting to see how Amazon's delivery network all works out, and whether Jeff Bezos will develop a passionate interest in public policy and infrastructure here on Earth.

So what? Infrastructure spending in the U.S. is underfunded on a federal level -- the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it will cost more than $3.3 trillion to keep up with road repairs and replacements through 2026, but based on current funding levels, we're $1.4 trillion short on the bill -- and it gets even trickier on a state level, since different states have wildly different budgets and wildly different regulations on what constitutes acceptable roads.

And civil aviation is responsible for $1.5 trillion in U.S. economic activity (or 5.4% of the gross domestic product, according to the 2014 Department of Transportation report, "The Economic Impact of Civil Aviation on the U.S. Economy." That's only going to increase as e-commerce vendors get more aggressive about reaching more customers in America.

When you have a bunch of businesses complaining about the state of infrastructure or saying, "We might just invent our own," expect to see some political movement and money on state and federal levels.

Who cares? Infrastructure nerds -- and people who count on transit infrastructure to get things done. (So, basically, those of us who don't fuel our primary transport with a bag of oats and a lump of sugar.)

U.S. roads are in mixed shape -- an estimated 28% of the nation's interstates, freeways and arterial roads are so awful, they can't be repaired, only rebuilt. (FedEx is claiming roads are so bad, it's replacing tires at twice the rate it did in 1997.) Bad roads cost businesses money and they cost consumers money. Good infrastructure is an economic stimulus. As Agri-Pulse reported in its series on keeping rural America competitive:

Josh Bivens, economist with the Economic Policy Institute, takes a different tack to analyze what would happen if there were steady federal investment in infrastructure. He projects gains if, for example, $250 billion were added to annual spending for seven years, concentrated in traditional transportation and utilities investments.

“Productivity growth has slowed significantly in the U.S. economy, beginning even before the onset of the Great Recession,” Bivens says. But, he reports, projected investments “would likely increase productivity growth by 0.3 percent annually, a boost more than half as large as the productivity acceleration in the U.S. economy between 1995 and 2005.”

Further, Bivens reports, “A productivity acceleration of 0.3 percent would have measurable impacts on (the U.S. inflation rate, which) could be lowered by as much as one full percentage point by a sustained $250 billion annual increase in infrastructure investment.”

Historically, infrastructure spending is a fraught partisan issue. But if there's a bright line drawn between infrastructure and economic growth -- especially in industries that rely on transit for their profit -- then perhaps it becomes easier to build consensus when funding highways and airports.

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Your pop culture recommendation of the day: I initially began watching The Girls Next Door on E! out of a sense of Aughties Irony and ended up genuinely fascinated by the show. It was about Hugh Hefner and his three steady "girlfriends" (Holly, Bridget and Kendra), and every week, the manufactured foursome would have manufactured adventures and manufactured interactions with one another. The show was like a matryoshka doll of artifice, and I watched every episode trying to figure out how to crack open each layer to see what was underneath.

The least-examined character on that show was the setting, i.e. the Playboy Mansion. The aesthetics of the place are fascinating, in part because they suggest who Hugh Hefner is: Someone who has literally never paid attention to domestic work; someone who is resolutely convinced of the superiority of his tastes and experiences; someone who staked out a position at a moment in time and has remained there since.

And that is why Jeff Minton's photo series of the Playboy mansion is today's pick. I was sucked in by the photo of Hefner standing proudly in front of a rack of tangled wire hangers, and each subsequent snap in the gallery only builds on that initial juxtaposition. Let me know when you get to the shot of the woman with the woman with the monkey. I can't stop thinking about it. (And you can see even more photos from the series on Minton's website.)

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