On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Doyle Saylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Doyle; > At first I was thinking sort of your response to Doug's query but I realized > he was asking how sprawling suburbs can survive? No matter what you do > according to the above the suburbs must be rebuilt. True suburbs emerged > before car culture, but they can't survive without cars as they are. I > don't see a combination of trains and electric cars offering a smooth > transition from the present sprawl to the same spread out car culture. > > The first reason is that oil will rapidly become a problem before trains can > be built to replace car commuting. > > Second electric power is not itself free of carbon dioxide which means a > lengthy process of substitution that strangles car culture long before the > electric car infrastructure gets implemented. > thanks, > Doyle Saylor
1) Electric cars and trains are not a solution by themselves. You have to add renewable electricty tod drive them. 2) With electric trains we can use much more modest electric cars - ones with only a 40 or 50 mile range. 3) We can in fact put electric trains in place fairly quickly at a sufficient level to support these modest electric cars. We currently have about 215,252 miles of public bus route miles in the U.S. http://tinyurl.com/5trsfk. Though only about 4% of the population use these, they are accessible to about half the U.S. population. http://www.apta.com/government_affairs/aptatest/testimony070725.cfm (The 54% estimate the testimony gives is generous. 49% is more reasonable.) The cost of an automated ultralight rail like CyberTran is around 8 million per mile. http://advancedtransit.org/doc.aspx?id=1061 So if we are put in CyberTran at triple the route miles of all current bus routes the total cost would be 422.5 billion dollars - less than a year of military spending, not that many years of direct military spending on the Iraq war. Ultralight rail such as CyberTran is elevated, does not displace pedestrians, bicyclists or use up existing lanes of traffic. All ultralight proposals are automated thus available 24 hours a day. With such systems you either don't need transfers or are guaranteed you won't miss your transfer. While mass transit will seldom match personal autos in time (except when they bypass extreme congestion) systems such as this shrink the time difference - instead of twice the commute time you have one third more commute time. A lot of people will be willing to trade that extra time for the stress reduction of being able to read the paper while you travel. (That is another advantage of automated systems over conventional ones. You really can read the paper, whereas on a bus or even some conventional rail systems you often have to stand. Because routes are computed on the fly as people buy tickets you don't have to worry about just missing the bus or train. Because such automated systems minimize transfers, and if they require one plot it on the fly so you will neither miss your transfer nor have to wait for they minimize that source of stress too. Conventional rapid transit is often as or more stressful than cars; you don't get much stress reduction for your longer commuted. A system of this sort really will offer lower stress. And the time difference is small enough that a lot of people will find it a worthwhile tradeoff. ) At the same time you can see how much it goes against the political grain of our current system. 422.5 billion is trivial compared to what you get. But diverting that much from military spending to public investment of this sort is also freakin radical. It would only come about as part of a major shift in social conciousness and political balance of forces. And it is more likely to be a result of than a driver for this kind of change. The shorthand I sometime use is that single payer health is the single best solution to global warming - because this is more likely than most of the direct solutions to advance the political change that leads to being able to implement those solutions. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
