Sure, transportation isn't all of it. Most of it is probably labor and real estate. But how awful it is to drive a truck in NYC versus how easy it is to make commercial deliveries in just about any other city or town in America has a lot to do with it, especially because the article babbles an awful lot about the challenge of delivering stuff to cities from rural areas. It's way more complicated to deliver goods to Manhattan (an island) than in most American places which just involve pulling off an interstate exit and making a delivery.
If the question is whether or not it makes sense to focus on
a( Heavy public investment into fake-tech urban farms
or
b( Identifying the really big sources of the costs and working to bring those down
I think b( is the better way to go. I think we could probably agree on that. I don't really know the specifics because I'm shooting off the hip about another lame urban farming article. Come to think of it real estate prices are probably what make up the bulk of the added cost on top of what the consumer pays in other markets and not delivery costs. But the purported problem that these farms are supposed to fix are the cost of bringing food from rural areas to cities.
Personally I doubt that even if the magical infrastructure fairy gave the mayor a quintillion dollar grant to spend on infrastructure improvements that anything positive would happen (it would probably get much worse somehow). But again, the problem that this is supposed to fix is the cost of bringing food in from rural areas.
These are the prices I get from going to nearby fine fare / key foods type places in the Lower East Side, and they're pretty much the same prices I remember seeing in NJ and Arkansas, with some variation. Individual supermarkets do vary a lot though, so if you don't have a bike/car and just go to the one that happens to be closest to you, it may seem way worse than it actually is.
I don't know if real estate makes a difference. The dollar pizza places stay in business somehow, making it up on volume. Suburban supermarkets seem to compensate for their cheaper real estate by wasting way more of it, with huge stores with tons of aisles and 100 brands of each kind of product, and then 4x that land spent on parking. I wouldn't be surprised if such a facility spends the same or more on their lease as a random C-Town in Brooklyn.
Also, I kind of agree with a lot of other stuff you said, just responded to what I found interesting to respond to :)
However most of the costs for urban farms have to do with replicating things that rural farms have for free. Instead of using the sun urban farms have to pay for electricity, lighting, wiring, etc.
* Sunlight: electricity costs and capital costs for lighting * Water: even with an efficient hydroponic system city water is more expensive * Growing medium: either dirt or a hydroponic system, which requires maintenance and a capital outlay * the farm building itself: unlike fields, buildings cost money to build and maintain
An efficient urban farm could theoretically use land more efficiently (by growing more crops per square foot) and use less water, but those inputs are cheap. Transportation would also be less expensive.
Iowa farmland is less than $9,000/acre[0]: in Staten Island (the cheapest borough) land prices are $37.62/square foot[1] or $1.64 million/acre: so yields would need to be over 180x better to break even on the land alone!
Absent some huge breakthroughs on the pricing of all of the inputs (or astronomical increases in transportation costs) the economics for generally don't work for crops.
[0] http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/2016/12/13/iowa... [1] https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/486631/
> Commercial truck traffic gets redirected to cramped streets while personal car traffic gets access to the expressways and parkways. That's one of the reasons why it costs you 4x to buy a pound of worse quality bacon in NYC what it costs in many other US towns and cities.
Let's do a little estimating: A crate of milk at $4 per gallon is $24 and is about 1x1x2 feet. If you pack an 8x16x8 box truck, which is way smaller than the maximum size limits, that's 512 crates, so about $13,000 back there. That's also about 26000 lbs, which is within the MGW of some trucks that size.
You're lucky I didn't use bacon as an example because a 1x1x2 crate filled with up to 48 pounds of bacon can be sold for much more than a 1x1x2 crate filled with 48 pounds (6 gallons) of milk.
Now consider how long it takes a truck, even denied access to parkways (in NYC, trucks DO have access to interstates, such as the BQE, Van Wyck, Verazzano, Triboro, GWB, I-95, etc etc etc) to get around. Maybe a couple hours. How much better could you make it? How much driver pay and extra gas and such is being spent in the extra hour or so? Let's be generous and say $500. So we're talking no more than a 5% change in the price of the goods in there. Stop and go traffic with that kind of weight is not great for fuel, but it's a lot better when deliveries are done off hours. Off hours, it's easy to catch a "green wave" on the wonderful one-way avenues in Manhattan and never have to stop again till you need to make your turn.
You're alleging a 400% increase, not a 5% increase. My numbers are off, this is an estimate, but this is probably the order of magnitude of this effect. You are going to need sources to make such a shocking statement.
Part of the reason your food costs so much is you're shopping at the wrong damn stores. Go to Key Foods or something. A real normal cheap grocery store, not like, Gristedes or some such. Most foods costs about the same as NJ or Arkansas.
Also, most food goes through the Hunts Point distribution centers, which are conveniently located off of I-95 which permits heavy trucks including full 18 wheelers. No idea where you're getting your info. From there they can take the BQE all over inner Brooklyn/Queens with access to Manhattan via any of the major east river bridges except the Brooklyn (some smaller trucks may even meet the restrictions for the tunnels)
Making our "Freight infrastructure" any better with roads is a waste of money that at best, may, at the cost of billions, reduce food prices 5-10%. It'd be much better to use a fraction of that money to subsidize food stamp programs or something, with much more effect.
The only real problem with all the trucks on our local streets, is it's annoying and dangerous to pedestrians. A good start here would be just enforcing (and educating regarding) the existing mandatory truck route system better. Trucks have an extensive map of permitted routes in NYC, and it's really not that hard to deal with, but you do regularly see trucks violating the same.