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Boats Too Costly to Keep Are Littering Coastlines
David Streitfeld
Boat owners are abandoning ship.
They often sandpaper over the names and file off the registry numbers, doing their best to render the boats, and themselves, untraceable. Then they casually ditch the vessels in the middle of busy harbors, beach them at low tide on the banks of creeks or occasionally scuttle them outright.
The bad economy is creating a flotilla of forsaken boats. While there is no national census of abandoned boats, officials in coastal states are worried the problem will only grow worse as unemployment and financial stress continue to rise. Several states are even drafting laws against derelicts and say they are aggressively starting to pursue delinquent owners.
(31 March 2009)
Clash of Subways and Car Culture in Chinese Cities
Keith Bradsher, New York Times
GUANGZHOU, China — Chan Shao Zhang is in the race of his life.
After four decades of false starts, Mr. Chan, a 67-year-old engineer, is supervising an army of workers operating 60 gargantuan tunneling machines beneath this metropolis in southeastern China. They are building one of the world’s largest and most advanced subway systems.
The question is whether the burrowing machines can outrace China’s growing love affair with the automobile — car sales have soared ninefold since 2000. Or are a hundred Los Angeleses destined to bloom?
… Western mass transit experts applaud China for investing billions in systems that will put less stress on the environment and on cities. But they warn that other Chinese policies, like allowing real estate developers to build sprawling new suburbs, undermine the benefits of the mass transit boom.
(26 March 2009)
Surveillance box to track UK drivers is backed
Paul Lewis, Guardian
The government is backing a project to install a “communication box” in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe, the Guardian can reveal.
Under the proposals, vehicles will emit a constant “heartbeat” revealing their location, speed and direction of travel. The EU officials behind the plan believe it will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. A consortium of manufacturers has indicated that the router device could be installed in all new cars as early as 2013.
However, privacy campaigners warned last night that a European-wide car tracking system would create a system of almost total road surveillance.
(31 March 2009)
Noted by Big Gav at Peak Energy, who writes:
The Guardian reports that Britain continues to lead the way in implementing George Orwell’s vision of universal surveillance with a proposal to track new vehicles (ostensibly o reduce congestion and pollution) that sounds similar to outrageous schemes proposed in Holland and Oregon in recent months.
