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The other day my girlfriend and I went to this new restaurant up on Capitol Hill in Seattle called Boom Noodle. I had heard about it for quite some time and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Fitting in with the Capitol Hill area, it was definitely a trendy restaurant. The design is really hard to explain. There was a lot of bright green in the surrounding colors. They also had the air ducts exposed in the ceiling. This seems to be a popular design these days.

The seating was a bit odd to me. They had these long, skinny tables that were about 20-30 feet in length. These were about the only option for seating unless you sat in the bar. To me, this reminded me of my days of eating in our school cafeteria. Just hope that you get sat next to some normal people because quarters are somewhat slow. We ended up going during a slow period, so this wasn’t an issue for us.

On the menu they had a wide variety of choices of dishes ranging from about $7.50 up to about $11.50. Their drinks ranged from about $7-$9. I ordered a beef yakisoba. It showed up within about five minutes of ordering and had a nice presentation. The portions were large as well. Although our waiter was a bit odd, I thought that we got a fair value for our money.

I am not sure if I would go to Boom Noodle any time soon, but I would say that I left satisfied.

Here is a map that was taken from the Seattle P-I.

I have been meaning to take my bike down to the Colonnade bike park in Seattle for quite some time. Yesterday it was nice enough and I actually had the time to do it. I had a general idea of the location which made it quite easy to find. I crossed the University bridge coming from the UW area and then took Boylston Ave E over to the park.

I had seen pictures of the park, but to see it in person is quite impressive. It looked like a ton of work had gone into the park. Colonnade park is a mountain bike skills park that was built under the I-5 elevated freeway. The park is 2 acres and will cover about 1.5 miles of trail when it is completed. Phase 1 is completed and Phase 2 is currently in progress. From what I can tell, Phase 1 is more of a beginner course with some challenges thrown in for the more advanced rider. Phase 2 looks like it is set up as a free ride course with lots of wooden features.

It had been about 10 months since I had ridden any sort of mountain bike trail so I was a bit rusty. I started at the top of the Phase 1 trail and made my way down. It seemed like the trails were well put together. If you stayed on the main path it was pretty flat and straight forward. You could also choose to venture to the side to attempt to ride skinnies and rock obstacles. If you avoid these obstacles it is a fairly smooth ride to the bottom.

From first glance, my only gripe with the Phase 1 trail is that the switchbacks have too small of a turn radius. This may be because I am out of practice, but for a supposed beginner trail I thought the hairpin turns were a bit difficult. It probably didn’t help that the turns had loose gravel and no bank to help out. I think that a beginner would get frustrated by this. The other issue that I had was that the terraces of the trail were fairly high up. I can imagine a beginner coming up to some obstacle and losing balance and falling over one of the terraces onto the gravel trail 4 feet below or some rock feature. I don’t think that would go over well.

One think that I did like was the skill building area at the bottom. It had miniature versions of many different trail features one might expect when mountain biking. They had some short log rides and teeter totters as well as whoop-de-doo bumps. The other cool thing about the park is that it is covered by the freeway. This way when it rains you still have a dry place to go riding.

I wish I had a little more time to explore so that I could practice a bit more, but I wanted to get home before it got dark.

To see more details on the park, check out the official website.

Do you ever have those arguments where you know you are right, but it is not worth arguing your point because either the person is too hard-headed to admit they are wrong, or the concept is so far beyond their knowledge they won’t understand? A situation like this occurred to me today in the lunchroom. We were having a discussion on the price of gas. Gas prices in Seattle are much higher than in the rest of the country. Currently a gallon of regular costs about $3.51 a gallon.

A co-worker was discussing how he used to have a diesel car that got around 50 miles to the gallon and now drives a different car that gets only 35 MPG. He also talked about an SUV he had that got around 14 MPG. He started to go off about how he loved his SUV so much and didn’t care that it got such poor mileage and would be happy to pay even $5.00/gallon because it was worth it to drive that car.

Here comes the good part now. He then started to lecture the whole table that gas prices have been rising because demand has been dropping because of the higher prices. He claimed that when demand for gas dropped, stations would raise their prices so that they could increase their margins so that they can make the same amount of profit on less gas. Part of this is true. If a station increased prices while their costs remained the same, their margin would increase. If gallons purchased decreased by more than the increase in price, then the gas station will be losing money by taking this tactic.

Fortunately there are a few rules of economics that will prevail in a dense city environment such as Seattle. One of the main and most basic economic principles is the law of supply and demand. For instance, if you have a large supply and little demand you can generally conclude one of two things. The first could be that people just don’t want the product. With gas that is not the case since it is a necessity. The other could be that the price is just too high for people to want it. The other important principle is perfect knowledge of market prices. Sometimes stores will buy too much of a certain item. They notice that it is not selling very quickly and need to make room for a new shipment of the latest product. If they can’t get the old item sold, there will be no room for the new item. This is why stores often put items on sale. They have typically bought too much of the good because they anticipated more demand for it, and need to clear out the current inventory for new ones.

Another important economic principle is that all market participants have perfect knowledge of the market prices. This is especially true with gas stations. When a consumer sees two or three stations near each other, they can quickly gather all the price data and make a rational choice of what station will provide them with the best product for the money. If three stations are all near each other, they will tend to all have the same prices so that the consumer will just pick whichever one is the easiest to get to. When companies compete for attractive prices, they lower prices instead of raising them. If Shell is priced at $3.45/gallon and Chevron is priced at $3.51/gallon, people are going to go to Shell all day long because it gives them the best price. The Chevron will not gain by this increase because they will not have any customers. It we assume all consumers make rational decisions, we can assume that all consumers will choose to fill up at Shell.

In order for a station to raise prices in order to improve margins, all satations would have to be in on this pricing scheme in order for it to work. Remember, prices changes demand, and demand changes prices. This endless balancing act will continue until the product supplied is equal to the product demanded.

This weekend my girlfriend and I went down to Portland, Oregon to visit some friends. It is always nice getting away from all the hustle and bustle of Seattle and going somewhere different. Portland is a nice city that seems to be quite a bit smaller than Seattle, but is not lacking in any of the amenities of a larger city. One of the main draws for people to the Portland area is the fact that Oregon does not have a sales tax. According to Taxadmin.gov, there were only five states that had no sales tax as of 1/1/2007. Those states were: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon.

The sales tax in Seattle is roughly 9%. When we go down to Portland, we like to take advantage of the fact that there is no sales tax. I got to thinking on the way down that there is probably a decent population that drives from Seattle to Portland and back in one day just for shopping. These people have no other reason to visit the city (ie: visiting friends/family, sightseeing etc.) They only make the trek to save some money. I started to think about how much money a person would need to spend in Portland so that their tax savings would equal what they spent on gas to get there.

The trip from Seattle to Portland is roughly 175 miles. This would make the round trip (175 x 2 = 350 miles). Let’s also assume that the car being used is fairly economical and gets 30 miles to the gallon and gas is $3.10 a gallon for regular (which it currently is in our neck of the woods). It would take the car (350 miles/30 mpg) 11.67 gallons of gas to make the whole trip. At $3.10/gallon, it would cost (11.67 x $3.10) $36.16 to make the trip. In order to save $36.16 in taxes, one would have to spend ($36.16/.09) $401.77. At this spending level, you would be no better off than shopping in Seattle. Anything spent over this amount, and your trip would be a success. If you spent any less than this amount, then it would actually cost you more to shop in this tax free environment. If you decided to carpool with a friend, then you would only have to spend half as much to break even.

Let’s take a look at a chart that shows how much you would need to spend based on the mileage of your car in order to break even.

Obviously, the worse the gas mileage, the more you would have to spend on goods to break even. Here is something else to think about. The lower the differential between tax rates, the more you would have to spend to break even. Lets go back to the 30 MPG example. Imagine if the tax rate in Seattle was only 6%. Here is how much you would have to spend. 350/30 = 11.67 gallons of gas x $3.10/gallon = $36.16 to make the trip. Now, we divide $36.06 by .06 rather than .09, and we get $601. With a change of only 3 percentage points, a consumer must spend almost 50% more to break even!

The lesson learned in this story is that although tax free purchases may sound good on the surface, you must spend a lot to make the trip worth it.

I have attached to this post a graph I created in Excel that shows how as MPGs decrease, one must increase their spending to make the tax free savings worth it.