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$8 billion could help revive travel by train
Marilyn Adams, USA TODAY
Americans started falling out of love with trains 50 years ago, when thrilling silver airliners left locomotives far behind.
Now, President Obama and leaders in more than 30 states say it’s time to embrace trains again — but newer, faster ones that can transport passengers past gridlocked airports and highways on electrified railroads at up to 200 mph.
They’re betting billions of federal and state dollars that high-speed railroads can someday move travelers between major U.S. cities within two or three hours just as they do in Western Europe and Japan. And along the way, they argue, such systems can ease travel congestion, reduce the nation’s dependence on oil, cut pollution and create jobs.
“For so long, Americans have viewed the automobile and the airplane as our transportation vehicles,” says Anne Canby, a former transportation secretary for Delaware and train advocate. “Until now, rail hasn’t been a major player in the discussion.”
Driving the new-found interest in trains is $8 billion that was tucked into the president’s economic stimulus legislation signed last month.
(17 March 2009)
Start-ups are racing to get electric motorbikes to market
Susan Carpenter, Los Angeles Times
… Led by pioneers with impressive resumes, these firms predict growth in spite of the down economy, and they’re laying claim to niche markets with such boasts as “first” and “fastest” as they stake out territory in what many believe is the future of transportation.
“It’s amazing how inefficient the vehicles we’re driving today really are,” said Forrest North, founder and chief executive of Mission Motor Co., a San Francisco company that unveiled the prototype for its 150-mph, 150-mile-range electric motorcycle at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference in Long Beach last month. “Electricity is just so many orders of magnitude more efficient that it’s the only way to go,” said North, a former mechanical designer for Tesla and leader of Stanford University’s solar car team in the mid-1990s.
Like many EV entrepreneurs, North, 33, had looked into hydrogen and biodiesel as power sources but found them impractical.
(17 March 2009)
Related: Slick cycle offers an ecofriendly alternative.
New book: “Pedaling Revolution”
Joe Kurmaskie, The Oregonian
Pedaling Revolution
Jeff Mapes, Oregon State University Press
$19.95 paperback, 288 pages
Ten years ago, if an established reporter had devoted an entire book to the bicycle as political statement and tool for making cities more livable, publishers would have greeted it with folded arms and awkward silence.
What a difference an oil war, Wall Street excess, $4-a-gallon gas and a global recession make. But calling “Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities,” by Jeff Mapes, The Oregonian’s senior political reporter, a happy accident of timing shortchanges it.
To date, “Pedaling Revolution” is easily the best book-length examination of cycling culture and its connection to big-picture issues. It could do for bicycling what “Fast Food Nation” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” did to put food choices on people’s radar, and what “The Long Emergency” has done to educate people about peak oil.
(13 March 2009)
Electric Cars and Peak Lithium
David Biello, Scientific American
The people of the world will drive some two billion cars by 2030, up from roughly 700 million today. One of the leading hopes for avoiding greenhouse gas overload from all those tailpipe emissions is electric cars.
From the Chevy Volt to the Tesla Roadster, cars that run on battery power rather than gasoline are fueling hopes for a cleaner transportation future. Even if we switched all U.S. cars to run on electricity from coal-fired power plants we’d emit less than we do now, according to a study from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
But, in terms of economics, are we trading peak oil for peak lithium? Lithium is, obviously, a primary component of the lithium-ion batteries powering the first generation of electric cars. The bulk of it is found in Bolivia.
Even worse, according to some, most of these advanced batteries are made in Asia. In fact, General Motors selected a battery from Korean company LG over American start-up A123Systems for its initial Volt.
(12 March 2009)
Powerdown Toolkit # 5: Getting Around- Transport and Mobility
Graham Strouts, Zone 5
This is the introduction to week five of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
According to Ivan Illich { Illich, I. Tools for Conviviality 1973}, a society that travels faster than a bicycle is actually going slower than a bicycle- by the time you have counted all the road construction, repairs, disposal of used cars, mining of metals and of course the consumption of oil for fuel, as a population we may not be traveling very fast at all.
The domination of the private motor car has been an essential feature of the rise of industrial society. As described in the Peak Oil cult documentary The End of Suburbia, the oil industry developed in the early part of the 20th Century by systematically dismantling convivial mass transport systems such as trams in order to sell more oil.
Early assembly line production was introduced first to mass-produce private cars. The development of new urban areas in many American cities followed patterns suitable to the private car: long stretched out suburbs with relatively low population density making them unsuitable for public transport.
(15 March 2009)
Heathrow’s third runway: planning for aviation boom times is no way to deal with economic bust
Joss Garman, Guardian
Even without the overwhelming environmental case against airport expansion, the economic case is crumbling too
(17 March 2009)
