Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Carson Tak has made history as the first known modern-era sail-powered passenger service captain/entrepreneur… Such a life as Carson Tak’s is enviable. However, what he’s doing for a living is more than just float and gloat. He raises awareness on the world’s oil crisis every time he hoists his sails, and on land as well as sea he participates in sustainable economics: utilizing and promoting the gift economy.
The British government’s recent decision to cancel construction of a third runway at London’s Heathrow airport marks a major milestone in our adaptation to post-carbon mobility. This is the first time that a government has canceled plans for major aviation infrastructure expansion due to global, rather than local, concerns about environmental degradation.
The Mayor of Oklahoma City is recommending that bus service to the “fringes” of the city be discontinued, for fiscal reasons, thereby proving that he “gets it”, in terms of the realities of the peak oil future.
Michael Lind is the Policy Director of New America’s Economic Growth Program and a frequent contributor to Salon.com. He recently published an article regarding the future of transportation—fixed/high-speed rail. He offers up an attitude regarding our approach to transportation and automobiles that can only cause us more problems as we confront Peak Oil.
There is a way we can stretch our oil use, decrease our involvement in the Middle East, reduce climate change, dramatically lower the number of traffic deaths, extend the life of our cars and increase neighbourhood safety all at once. It’s called driving slowly.
What struck me during a recent visit to Houston is that efforts to create a downtown with the kind of round the clock activity one sees in other world class cities such as Chicago or New York have so far not succeeded.
Flying dwarfs any other individual activity in terms of carbon emissions, yet more and more people are traveling by air. With no quick technological fix on the horizon, what alternatives — from high-speed trains to advanced videoconferencing — can cut back the amount we fly?
Cars promise mobility, and in a largely rural setting they provide it. But in an urbanizing world, where more than half of us live in cities, there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility, as well as increased air pollution and the health problems that come with it. Urban transport systems based on a combination of rail lines, bus lines, bicycle pathways, and pedestrian walkways offer the best of all possible worlds in providing mobility, low-cost transportation, and a healthy urban environment.
-Transit as a Development Tool, but in Whose Interest?
-Better Bikeways: Guerrilla Improvements and DIY Signage
-What’s not to like about high-speed rail? The case simply hasn’t been made
Most discussion on transportation alternatives to single-occupant fossil fuel-powered vehicles focuses on moving people from place to place. Options might include electric trains, walking, and bicycling. But also important for functioning cities is moving goods around, and most of the above options would seem to have severe limitations when one considers the variety of things that need to be moved. How does one carry a sheet of plywood across town? Surely not on a crowded subway. But a recent trip to China demonstrated for me that almost anything is possible.
Last week I spoke before a very committed group of juniors and seniors taking a college class on sustainable cities. One student challenged me saying, “I’m tired of people in your generation saying that everything we really need to do is politically impossible. All of us here are graduating soon, and we will be moving into positions of responsibility including ones in government. When we’re the generation making the decisions, the things we need to do won’t be politically impossible.” Point taken.
Electric motors and batteries have improved substantially over the past one hundred years, but today’s much hyped electric cars have a range that is – at best – comparable to that of their predecessors at the beginning of the 20th century. Weight, comfort, speed and performance have eaten up any real progress. We don’t need better batteries, we need better cars.
