About This Blog

About The Author

Mike the Highwayman is currently a courier living in South Carolina. He drives approximately 330 miles each weekday to Myrtle Beach and back. He has driven to every county in South Carolina and 30% of the counties in the United States. Before this, he worked in the energy industry, focusing on consumer natural gas and electricity. He has a BA in Economics from Virginia Tech and has taken graduate courses at Clemson University. He also has a minor in Political Science.

He is a libertarian-conservative. Libertarian on economic issues and socially conservative. He loathes Lindsey Graham and has stated from the beginning of the primary season that he would not vote for John McCain if he was the GOP nominee. No amount of talk radio/Republican scare tactics will change this. And he listens to a lot of talk radio, as he drives for 8 hours each day. He likes to use the two-dimensional political compass, and currently has a home in the northeast quadrant.

He believes that the combination of NIMBYism and radical environmentalism have significantly weakened the country’s transportation infrastructure and along with a self-serving government, combine to not allow this country to modernize and repair crumbling infrastructure. He also believes that global warming/climate change will be a defining issue for this generation. How much we allow this issue to shape policy decisions will have a wide ranging impact, from social policy to government spending to the shape and direction of transportation issues.

About This Blog
This blog is intended to fill a niche in the blogosphere: transportation and energy policy. While the internet is a vast place, nowhere in my searching did I find a blog touching on transportation policy. There are some that touch on energy policy, but as energy is an integral part of transport (Newton’s First Law still applies). Without energy, nothing moves, including us. So energy policy is an integral part of transportation policy. An electric train is different than a diesel train, and both much different from a MAGLEV. An policy that emphasizes electricity is going to have to work really hard to transform aviation, an industry almost entirely reliant on fossil fuels.

About Comments
As the author of this blog, I control the content. As such, comments reflect on this blog as much as my writing does. I was initially reluctant to allow for commenting here, as it would require some level of policing and I would rather write than police comments.

Therefore, I take a much more restrictive policy on comments. No trolling or flaming will be allowed. Comments serving as advertisements will be more or less reigned in. If you don’t have anything intelligent to say, it’s not going to be allowed here. You can start your own blog if you’re so inclined.

Also as such, I will first approve comments before they are posted, but only for the first post by a particular person. After that, they aren’t screened. However, I retain the right to remove any comment at any time without reason. You can email me if you have any problems.

I tend to not reply to comments as I’m not to interested in conversation. I’m much more likely to have a conversation privately, through email. I’ve generally found that commentors on blogs aren’t too likely in having a logical and thoughtful discussion. Email is more likely to do that as it privatizes the issues. Less grandstanding, and less trying to get someone’s goat up to impress other people.

About Email
I have no problem with emails about topics or questions. In fact, it’s more likely that there will be a response if there’s an email, rather than a comment. My email address is ( name )@( domain ), where the name is highwaymanblog and the domain is gmail.com