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Walk, Baby, Walk
Benita Beamon, WorldChanging
Is muscle power an overlooked climate solution?
What would happen if Americans got all the exercise they were supposed to – and they did it by replacing short car trips with walking or biking? Would it make a difference to our oil consumption?
Two articles conclude that it could. In “A Healthy Reduction in Oil Consumption and Carbon Emissions” by Paul A.T. Higgins and Millicent Higgins (appearing in the journal Energy Policy) and “Exercise-Based Transportation Reduces Oil Dependence, Carbon Emissions, and Obesity” by Paul A.T. Higgins (appearing in the journal Environmental Conservation), the authors contradict the “widely-held view that meeting current and future energy needs requires either extraction or technological development.” They argue that, by replacing some of the miles we drive with the daily recommended amounts of physical exercise, we could simultaneously reduce CO2 emissions, ease oil dependence — and slim our waistlines.
(24 February 2009)
High speed, high cost, high income rail
Sam Smith, Undernews
There’s nothing wrong with high speed rail except that when your country is really hurting, when your rail system largely falls behind other countries’ because of lack of tracks rather than lack of velocity, and when high speed rail appeals more to bankers than to folks scared of foreclosing homes, it’s a strange transit program to feature in something called a stimulus bill.
One might even call it an $8 billion earmark.
I watched this development with a sense of deja vu. Long ago, I was a rare critic of DC’s Metro subway plans, not because I was against mass transit, but because it was a highly inefficient way of spending mass transit funds compared to light rail or exclusive bus lanes. At the time we could have had ten times as many miles of light rail for the same price of the subway system.
… I mention these examples because they illustrate the sort of complexity that transit planning involves, a complexity that rarely gets any attention in the media or by politicians. There’s nothing like something as streamlined as a bullet to make everyone put away doubts, analysis and comparisons and just sit back and say, “Wow.”
The problem became permanently embedded in my mind after I asked a transportation engineer to identify the best form of mass transit. His immediate answer: “Stop people from moving around so much.” So simple, yet so wise and so alien to almost every discussion of the topic you will hear.
(26 February 2009)
Ignoring trains puts U.S. on the wrong track
Richard Bernstein, International Herald Tribune
… The truth is that when it comes to rail transport, from subways to transcontinental lines, Americans haven’t made much palpable improvement, at least not compared with our friends and competitors in Europe and Asia. It is as though we got fixed in amber someplace between the 1920s and the 1960s with our big cars, our slow trains and our crowded, legroom-challenged skies.
And while the rest of the world forges ahead with new and better ways of moving people from place to place – namely on super-fast trains – we are waiting in the tunnel for the train ahead to cross.
But now, at long last, there are at a few signs of change, at least on the rail transport front. President Barack Obama’s stimulus package provides some $8 billion for the development of high-speed trains, presumably along the lines of those that rocket over the landscape in Europe, Japan and, most recently, China.
(25 February 2009)
