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A lesson from the trains in Spain
Clayton McCleskey, Dallas Morning News
While Texas has been hemmin’ and hawin’ about high-speed rail for the past two decades, Spain has been laying tracks. And the nation of bull fighting is now the nation of rail riding.
Just 17 years ago, Spain didn’t have much of a rail system, let alone a high-speed one. Trains were slow, late and unreliable. And much like Texas today, the only real options for getting between Spain’s spread-out cities were car or plane.
But now trains are all the rage here as Spain positions itself to be the world’s leader in high-speed rail. The rapid-transit revolution started in 1992 when then-Prime Minister Felipe González Márquez pushed for the construction of a high-speed rail line from Madrid to Seville. At the time, Spaniards were skeptical and critics contended that the train would be a novelty amusement ride nobody would actually take.
Those early critics have been silenced as Spain has fallen in love with high-speed rail
(10 April 2009)
Transformers: Protecting Pedestrians From Killer Cars
Nic Fleming, New Scientist via ABC News
Automatic Exterior Airbags and Radar Sensors Could Decrease Injury
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While vehicle drivers and their passengers are cocooned in a crash, people hit by a car have no such protection. Now that could change, thanks to a variety of systems that when built into a vehicle will improve a pedestrian’s chances.
Every month approximately 3400 people are killed in traffic accidents on the roads in the US, and a similar number die in Europe. Some 30 per cent of the injuries sustained by this group are caused by an impact with a windscreen or its frame.
A Europe-wide collaboration led by Roger Hardy of the Cranfield Impact Centre at Cranfield University near Bedford in the UK has developed an experimental system for cars that aims to cut this death toll and reduce the severity of injuries.
When the system detects that the car is about to hit a pedestrian, it automatically raises the rear of the bonnet (hood), releasing a giant airbag in front of the windscreen.
(18 April 2009)
Epicycle upon epicycle. The basic idea of personal transportation powered by fossil fuels is seriously flawed. We try to “fix” the catastrophic effects by inventing one complex system after another – each with its own set of side effects. Bill Mollison, co-originator of permaculture, calls such problems “Type 1 Errors”:
One of the great rules of design is do something basic right. Then everything gets much more right of itself. But if you do something basic wrong – if you make what I call a Type 1 Error – you can get nothing else right.
China Influence Grows With Car Sales
Keith Bradsher, New York Times
After a century in which American tastes largely set the course of the global automotive market, China is poised to increasingly take on the role of global trendsetter.
Automakers say just as car buyers around the world saw more sport utility vehicles and cup holders because that was what Americans wanted, they will probably see more features that the Chinese favor, from greater fuel efficiency to more comfortable backseats.
Vehicle sales in China passed those in the United States in the first quarter, as China has weathered the global downturn much better, and there are growing signs that China will become the leading market in the long term as well. Those signs were not lost on automotive executives from around the world who gathered Monday for the opening of the Shanghai auto show.
(20 April 2009)
