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In Amsterdam, The Bicycle Still Rules
Ben Block, WorldChanging
The Netherlands has been regarded as the cycling nation since before World War II. In a 1938 newspaper article, the bicycle was dubbed “the most Dutch of all vehicles.”
Decades since, bike infatuation still appears to be on the rise. In Amsterdam, residents now choose bicycles rather than automobiles for more of their trips, according to a recent study.
Between 2005 and 2007, Amsterdam residents rode their bicycle 0.87 times a day on average, compared to 0.84 trips by automobile. It was the first time on record that average bike trips surpassed cars, the research group FietsBeraad reported last month.
Although additional bike trips are often necessary to complete errands that could be done in a single car ride, the findings reflect a decreasing reliance on automobiles throughout Dutch urban centers.
“In town, the car is not the mode of transport,” said Hans Voerknecht, international coordinator for FietsBeraad. “The bicycle is the grease in the traffic system, and in part, the economic system…. It makes everything possible.”
(20 February 2009)
Slice of Stimulus Package Will Go to Faster Trains
Michael Cooper, New York Times
It may be the longest train delay in history: more than 40 years after the first bullet trains zipped through Japan, the United States still lacks true high-speed rail. And despite the record $8 billion investment in high-speed rail added at the last minute to the new economic stimulus package, that may not change any time soon.
That money will not be enough to pay for a single bullet train, transportation experts say. And by the time the $8 billion gets divided among the 11 regions across the country that the government has designated as high-speed rail corridors, they say, it is unlikely to do much beyond paying for long-delayed improvements to passenger lines, and making a modest investment in California’s plan for a true bullet train.
In the short term, the money — inserted at the 11th hour by the White House — could put people to work improving tracks, crossings and signal systems.
That could help more trains reach speeds of 90 to 110 miles per hour, which is much faster than they currently go.
(19 February 2009)
Aviation lobbyists enlisted to tackle rebel climate MPs, leaked papers show
John Vidal, Guardian
Civil servants at the Department for Transport (DfT) asked a top aviation lobby group for help to win the parliamentary battle over keeping aircraft emissions out of key climate change legislation, according to papers seen by the Guardian.
The documents, leaked from industry-funded group Flying Matters, which is backed by Heathrow airport operator BAA and airlines including BA, Easyjet and Virgin Atlantic, also state that the group “helped ensure” that the Conservative party dropped plans by senior advisers for a tax on carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft.
In addition, Flying matters claims to have influenced the Soil Association’s decision to drop plans to withdraw organic status from food flown in from developing countries.
The disclosures are contained in a draft of Flying Matters’ confidential 2009 Strategy document and provide a unique insight into the closeness of the industry with the DfT. (18 February 2009)
How the World Works, lesson 312 -BA
Drop in passenger numbers delays Stansted expansion by two years
Dan Milmo, Guardian
BAA has admitted that the opening of a second runway at Stansted airport will be delayed by two years because there are not enough passengers to meet demand.
Amid warnings from green campaigners that the admission undermines the case for expansion, Britain’s third largest airport will instead open a new runway in 2017 if it secures planning permission at a public inquiry due to start in April.
The airport’s owner, BAA, said the economic downturn had affected passenger demand and made it less likely that expansion will be needed by the original opening date of 2015.
(19 February 2009)
Maximum overdrive
Bradford Plumer, The National (United Arab Emirates)
A new book assesses the myriad technologies available to make cars pollute less as they spread across the world. But, Bradford Plumer writes, no new gizmo is likely to change one hard truth: we need to rethink our automotive way of life.
Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability
Daniel Sperling & Deborah Gordon
Oxford University Press
Dh88
Late-19th-century Germany gets bragging rights as the birthplace of the four-stroke internal combustion engine, but all due credit for humanity’s long-standing love affair with the automobile must go to the United States of America. “The motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism,” Sinclair Lewis rhapsodised in his 1922 novel Babbitt, noting that car ownership in America had already become “an aspiration for knightly rank”. By 1950, 60 per cent of US households had what Lewis dubbed “a shuttle of polished steel” in the garage. A circular, self-sustaining logic came into play: the fact that so many people were driving meant that the nation’s planners had to pave more highways and freeways, had to widen city streets and de-emphasise mass transit, had to build sprawling suburban neighbourhoods with cul-de-sacs so that children had quiet refuges to play, far from the roaring traffic – and all this infrastructure meant the motor car evolved from a knightly aspiration to an outright necessity for
the peasants.
… Now China, India and the rest of the developing world want to join the party. Already, honking hordes of cars and lorries are muscling aside bikes and passersby on the streets of Mumbai and Beijing, while the prospect of ultra-cheap cars like the Tata Nano, expected to retail in India for a piffling 100,000 rupees (Dh7,360), will only accelerate this trend. Between 2000 and 2020, the global car population is expected to double to more than one billion vehicles; by midcentury it could zoom past two billion.
Two billion petrol-guzzling, fume-spewing cars. On one level, it’s natural to embrace this diffusion of prosperity. Who’d want to deny millions of Indians and Chinese the pleasures of the road trip, the freedom to pack up and rumble off wherever they please? But there’s a problem: Apart from the congestion and carnage (China saw at least 73,000 auto fatalities in 2008), those cars and lorries also emit all sorts of toxic pollution. Beijing’s air has already curdled into a thick grey soup thanks to its growing vehicle emissions. Worse still is carbon dioxide. The climate science is clear on this: if China and India add one billion new standard-issue, gas-guzzling vehicles to the road, the Earth will heat to calamitous levels.
To avoid that unhappy fate, as Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon warn in their new book Two Billion Cars, the world has to rethink the automobile as we’ve known it for the past century. Until now, western countries have just tinkered around the edges of the basic car concept – adding catalysers to soak up air pollution or tweaking mileage standards – hoping that painless tech fixes can forestall the day
we need to make more radical changes, or worse, alter our auto-centric way of life. But that day may finally be upon us.
(10 February 2009)
