Right – but raising taxes on gas while businesses remained scattered and housing in denser areas is expensive does not solve the problem
Yoshie:
>Who says it can be done overnight? The point is, however, that it
has to be done, or else we won't have any future at all. The fastest
we can manage is probably still too slow to make a necessary
difference, but it seems to me that there is no excuse for not
trying
My point is that raising gasoline taxes is the slowest not the fastest way. Regulation, energy saving public works and feebates (green taxes/subsidies on capital rather than operations) will make the change the fastest.
>Michael Perelman wrote:
>Gar, is the poor gas efficiency for busses related to the number of
empty seats?
>Here is Chico we have an ill-conceived bus system that has only a
couple of people onboard except at rush hour. The town is spread out
in a way that makes buses impractical.
>Michael Perelman
That is one problem. Any transit system has to have off peak travel, because not everyone who travels one way at peak will travel the other. Joanna's suggestion of smaller buses would help tackle this obstacle, but would run into another. As buses get smaller, the driver to passenger ratio increases, and the economics get closer to that of a taxi. This is why I'm so strongly in favor of automated ultra-light rails systems. A system with tracks can be automated, and an automated driverless system can have smaller cars so that even off peak you are using at least ten or twenty percent of any car that is actually running. Also smaller systems run on smaller tracks. Tracks are the major cost of a rail system; railbed for a system that consists of small automated ultralight rail cars are one tenth of the cost of tracks for a conventional light rail system. Stations are cheaper too. This would make rail practical even for spread out places like Chico, or my own current home in Olympia Washington, or possibly even in Carrol's town which sounds a lot like suburbs of Houston.
Another problem with buses is the frequent stops. A bus has to stop every time a car does (stop signs, lights etc.) plus passenger stops as well. Remember basic physics is that power equals mass time acceleration (or deceleration) squared. Much of the energy used by buses is used in starting and stopping. So long as buses share streets with cars they will always use energy less efficiently than systems with separate tracks.
Carrol (re sprawl)
>In smaller and midsize cities the problem can be much worse. Retail
establishments are scattered all over the place on the outskirts of
the original city. So for the kind of shopping that once could be done
by going downtown (by car or public transportation) and walking from
store to store now can require 5, 10, or more miles of driving around
from one strip mall to another.
Yup. But we don't have to wait for people and businesses to relocate to provide sustainability. An automated light rail system could work in most parts of the nation; not everywhere of course but most. If you have 10,000 people traveling daily within a 20 mile radius (which is true where about 90%+ of the U.S. population lives) an automated ultralight rails system is economically feasible. And since such a system computes routes on the fly, and you don't have long waits for a light rail car, and can travel by fairly direct means, they are more convenient than buses, and more convenient than most fixed route light rails systems as well.
For uses where ultra-light rails is not practical, electric cars still provide five to ten times the thermodynamic efficiency of IC vehicles (the difference depending upon whether the electricity is generated from burning fuel or from direct generation such as wind or hydro).
And since development tends to cluster around rail systems, putting them in place is a good start to reversing some of this sprawl in the long run.
What is the point of pointing this out? Well, among other things if a solution to a major problem is feasible from both a technical and cost standpoint and is not being done, that is one hell of secondary critique of capitalism as it currently exists.
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