Mass Transit is an Efficient Way to Move People
FACTS
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Sustainable Mobility
Facts, Comments and Statistics
- In Ernest Callenbach's book Ecotopia, Boeing technology was diverted from building weapons and fighter jets to building a magnetic rail mass transit system to interconnect all sites. All local travel was done by bicycle and electric vehicles.
- In the late 50's a children's sticker book about the future predicted that by the year 1970 people would be traveling in flying cars.
- Another prediction was that all roads and highways would be converted to large conveyor belts, and vehicles would have no wheels. Your car would sit on the conveyor belt that led from your garage out to the street, then would glide onto the faster conveyor belt on the street, which would then lead you onto increasingly faster conveyor belts until you were on the freeway belt. Since all vehicles sit dormant on the moving belts, there would be no accidents from speeders, weavers or passers. These electric belts could be run off huge solar electric panels, and there would therefore be no more air pollution.
- Japan has the most efficient magnetic rail system in the world.
- Sweden could not afford its nationally supported network of rail travel. Trains are one of the most common forms of travel in Sweden. When the head of the transportation department announced that the train system would be greatly reduced due to lack of funds, he was fired. Swedes continue to travel by train.
- In New York the bicyclists finally managed to have a beautiful series of bicycle trails built throughout the city so that bicycle travel could be safer and more accessible. Shortly after these bike paths were constructed, the motorists decided they didn't like them and voted to have them all converted into roadways for cars.
- Arcosanti is a futuristic city designed with no cars, and linked to other population centers by various forms of mass transit.
- Think of ways many people could be moved from place to place: elevators, conveyor belts, escalators, buses, trains, subways, monorails, magnetic rail, boats and ferries, air travel.
- Now think of ways to avoid the need for excessive travel: live close to work, shop by mail order catalogues and the internet, plan trips more efficiently, increase the financial cost of physical travel and particularly any form of travel that pollutes, support local companies.
- The problems with individual travel, particularly in automobiles, are: accidents, anger at other drivers' behaviour, sellfishness, pollution, waste, misplaced values and priorities (is the car and all its expenses more important than what we really want out of life?), and wasted space (over 50% of a city's space is devoted to the car: roads, parking lots, garages, sales lots, repair shops, services stations, junk yards, etc.).
- There are other ways besides those that currently exist to accomplish the same goal of getting from one place to another.
- Personal Rapid Transit [PRT] systems represent a revolution in urban transit. They are the only transit systems which offer many of the advantages of the automobile and thus are the only transit systems that will get large numbers of people to use them instead of their automobiles. Go to http://www.taxi2000.com and http://www.skywebexpress.com/
- A popular PRT implementation idea is SkyTran. Go to http://www.SkyTran.net
- Take a look at the first PRT implementation that is being constructed in Great Britain: http://atsltd.co.uk
- The Green Door Newsletter -
The concept of sustainable mobility will surely change
many times throughout our lifetimes. Today we define it as transportation
with minimal or no fossil fuel dependency and we aim to cut CO2 emmissions.
Tomorrow we may be looking at transportation that actually produces valuable
resources. Ironically, new sustainable solutions come
with the rising cost of fuel? If our oil supply has hit its peak
and started decreasing and global demand is still rising, there is only
one price direction for fossil fuel: straight up. Consumers and businesses
are feeling the pressure to figure out how to manage their costs.
Oil will eventually get priced out, forcing the transition to another energy
source. If we were to tap into unconventional sources of oil we would still
be looking at a much higher cost of production without considering the
environmental costs.
Cars impose a heavy public burden. By some estimates,
over 50% of all America's urban land is devoted to accommodating cars.
Furthermore, most of America's cars are parked over 90% of the time. That
means a lot of urban land and a lot of vehicles aren't being used very
efficiently. Sustainable mobility can be addressed through increasing
the options for alternative transportation and fuels. Google, for
example, runs a biodiesel shuttle between its main office in Mountain View
and San Francisco. The company calculates that, based on reducing employees'
driving back and forth in cars, it is saving some 2,325 gallons of gas
per week. Austin, Texas is taking an active role in promoting plug-in hybrids
(the city also owns the electric utility).
Ultimately, though, for any of this to work, the
bulk of us have to want it to work. We've been through one oil crunch
a few decades back, and had we maintained a path of efficiency and conservation,
we'd be in a different situation right now. Why is it so hard to get people
out of their cars and onto public transportation or their bikes or even
just walking? Habit and preference? Being able to go where
you want to, when you want to, with a minimum of physical effort, a maximum
of comfort, and little immediate visible downside? It is not a phenomenon
associated with just the U.S., although we are currently the extreme example
of it. There have been a number of studies done on the direct correlation
between economic development and vehicle-miles traveled. This is
one of the reasons that the rapid development of the Asian economies will
have such an impact on global oil consumption.
"To counter the individual impulse, you need a combination
of education and incentive/disincentive (stick your hand in the flame,
it burns; drive a big gas guzzler, pay a lot of extra money). The incentive/disincentive
can be altruistic (I want to improve, not befoul my world) or pragmatic
(I can't afford to drive this beast)". - Mike Millikin
Government comes into play for both incentives (tax
breaks, investments in new technologies) and disincentives (carbon tax,
fuel tax, etc.). But the market ultimately will have its say.
So what does the future automobile look like? Well, If you bought
a new Prius recently you know that alot of people are interested in the
47 miles to the gallon it gets. The Oak Ridge National Lab last year
did some work forecasting possible hybrid share of the vehicle market in
the U.S. They calculated that diesels and hybrids together could capture
40 percent or more of the light-duty vehicle market by 2012. You
can now also find biodiesel distributors serving just about every state,
but most especially on the two coasts and in the Midwest. The National
Biodiesel Board estimates that U.S. producers have a combined current capacity
of 150 million gallons per year, although in 2004, they produced only 30
million gallons. So the potential to meet demand is there, but when
will demand meet the potential? There are also people out there who have
been driving fully-electric cars for years and have not been to the gas
station once in that time. Yet present-day electric-vehicle
technology (which allows you to plug into the power produced by residential
solar panels, for example) is not being talked about by mainstream media.
The same thing (relative oddball obscurity) would have happened to hybrids,
were it not for the doggedness of Honda and Toyota. A new technology
needs a resolute champion. Some of the more amazing success stories
needed corporate "parents." No automaker took on electric vehicles
in that manner. Honda and Toyota did take that role with hybrids, even
though it did not necessarily look like a winning strategy.
Common sense tells us that the hydrogen fuel economy is many years
away at best, especially when considering the larger issues of infrastructure
and support. The vision of hydrogen generated from renewable energy
or bio-sources is a compelling one. The vision of hydrogen reformed from
natural gas (as 95 percent of U.S. production is currently), is not environmentally
or financially beneficial. As the price of natural gas rises, and
as natural gas peaks and declines, the projected cost of hydrogen soars.
However, there are plenty of opportunities for commercial fleets to convert
to hydrogen produced on site with renewable technologies (wind, solar,
bio-mass). Those efforts should be encouraged, as the more knowledge
and experience we get, the better off we'll be in having a shot at making
this a reality in the passenger car market.
We need time to do it right, time we can get by
relying on other technologies (plug-in hybrids, electrics, biodiesel) to
reduce our fuel consumption. We can not use the coming hydrogen economy
as an excuse to not take immediate action now. Unfortunately, the issues
of global warming and fossil fuel depletion are less than immediate for
the majority. People tend to generalize based on immediate experience.
It doesn't seem hotter, so how can the world be warming? They also read
or hear contradictory reports.
"The end of our oil-based economy will be the single most critical
event in the long history of human civilization, and each of us will live
to see it and be responsible for dealing with it". - Anonymous
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