SKCEA.ORG » Transportation

U.S. CO2 emissions to stay below 2005 levels

admin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:02:20 +0000

U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions will be 7 percent lower than their 2005 level of nearly 6 billion metric tons in 2020 as coal’s share of electricity production continues a steady descent over the next two decades, according to new government data. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released an early version of its annual energy outlook on Monday, which predicted a slowdown in growth of energy use over the next two decades amid economic recovery and improved energy efficiency. The report highlights the fact that carbon-intensive coal generation will see a major decline in the power sector in the coming decades, which will ensure energy-related CO2 emissions will not exceed 2005 levels at any point before 2035. The report also showed that emissions per capita would fall an average of 1 percent per year from 2005 to 2035 as the new federal standards, state renewable energy mandates and higher energy prices would temper the growth of demand for transportation fuels.

EPA maps the worst greenhouse gas offenders

admin — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:15:10 +0000

by Jess Zimmerman. The EPA has organized its data on major greenhouse gas emitters into a handy interactive map . You can zoom in on your area to see where the emissions come from near you, or scan around for the worst offenders.

Take off your pants and hop on transit

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:29:37 +0000

by Jess Zimmerman. D.C. is having its annual No Pants Metro Ride this Sunday, to raise awareness of … public transit? Indecency laws? People's bottoms? (Actually, according to the Facebook page , they're just trying to raise awareness of how funny it is when 400 people are not wearing pants, but let's go with “public transit.”) This will easily be the most fun day of the year to take public transportation in D.C., so if you're in the area, this is the weekend to try ditching your car for a few days.

Slum residents get a giant escalator for Christmas

admin — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:27:08 +0000

by Greg Hanscom. If you had $7 million to use on behalf of the residents of your poorest slums, how would you distribute it? For Medellin, Colombia, that’s a no-brainer: Blow the whole wad on a MONSTER ESCALATOR . Wait, wait! It’s actually a good idea. The giant escalator helps slum residents get to their hillside homes from the city center — a nonsensically steep climb of more than 1,200 vertical feet. To fully appreciate how radically this thing changes the landscape of the slums, you need to watch the video above — the BBC reports that the moving stairway turned a more-than-30-minute hike into a “ six-minute glide .” It’s essentially vertical public transit; like a train, it improves quality of life and makes commutes less soul-killing. But in Medellin it makes them less quad-killing too. Like Bogota to the south, Medellin earned a reputation as a bastion of crime and drug trafficking in the 1980s. Bogota turned that around using transportation infrastructure, among other things; a new bus system and bike lanes that would be the envy of even Minneapolis have helped empower impoverished people and cut back on crime by putting more “eyes on the street.” And Medellin’s following suit with Escalatorzilla and cable cars to other hillside slums.

Don’t count on that shale gas revolution

admin — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 22:10:21 +0000

by Christopher Mims. Over at some raggedy-rag called Slate, energy futurist Chris Nelder takes a deep dive into the available data on how much natural gas we can get out of the rocks beneath the U.S. via fracking. His conclusion is that we could run out of natural gas in a decade, especially if we make a mass transition to it as a source of electricity and transportation fuel. (Our proven reserves, as opposed to our potential or likely ones, are only good for a decade’s worth of energy.) Or we could run out in 100 years, which is the supply all the industry-fluffing hacks at the Wall Street Journal insist we have . We simply don't know. Nelder’s article provides some eye-opening insight into just how much the industry hypes the size of potential gas reserves. But his larger point is that with this much uncertainty, we are taking a huge risk in thinking that natural gas is anything other than a temporary solution to our energy woes. I suppose I don't need to remind you that sources of renewable energy aren't projected to peter out for billions of years.

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Don’t count on that shale gas revolution

Cops mock Seattle jogger nearly killed by a truck

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:45:55 +0000

by Sarah Laskow. In Seattle, a semi truck hit a jogger, nearly killing him. While the jogger lay almost dying, the police officers who responded to the accident were busy sneering at his decision not to drive a car. This being 2011, their comments were caught on video: Here's the most relevant excerpt, from the local TV station that obtained the video: “That's why you drive a car!” the first one remarks. “Yeah, don't try to jog to work, you dumb (expletive),” said the other. Now, bikers are often subjected to such 'tude, but joggers? Isn't it a god-given right in this country to get your jog on? Or at least a right endorsed by Bill Clinton in the 1990s? Washington state has even been encouraging good citizens like the injured man to use alternative forms of transportation while a major route, the Alaskan Way Viaduct, is closed. Really, this sort of incident is how we know the country is deifying the car to a ridiculous extent. And also how we know that cops still haven’t mastered the concept of “everything, including phones and cars, has a camera in it now.”

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Cops mock Seattle jogger nearly killed by a truck

How bikes can solve America’s most pressing problems

admin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:34:10 +0000

by Christopher Mims. (click to embiggen) Air quality, obesity, commute times, strained family budgets, unnecessary deaths, runaway health care expenses — is there anything that a mass shift to bicycles transportation wouldn't solve? And it's not like this is a fantasy — Europe has demonstrated that not only is this possible, it's the future.

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How bikes can solve America’s most pressing problems

Critical List: Brazil notices oil drilling has consequences; bikes made out of wood

admin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:53:53 +0000

by Sarah Laskow. Brazil discovers that oil drilling is not good for the environment. Also, Congress is kicking renewable energy to the curb the way a mean person would a really cute puppy. Like these . Oh, wait, don't buy those, they came from puppy mills. People collectively put their fingers in their ears and go LA LA LA so as not to think about climate change. The Loch Ness monster wants to participate in the London Olympics. Geoengineering is cool and all, but it would be much cheaper to just not put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to begin with than to try and suck it back out later. You can make bikes out of wood .

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Critical List: Brazil notices oil drilling has consequences; bikes made out of wood

New York’s bike commuters have doubled in four years

admin — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:11:47 +0000

by Jess Zimmerman. Despite the best efforts of bike lane opponents and overprivileged New Yorker columnists , bike commuters in the Big Apple have increased by 102 percent since 2007, according to new figures from the New York Department of Transportation. Bicycle commuter numbers have almost quadrupled since 2001. Just imagine what it will look like when their bikeshare debuts! This presents some infrastructural challenges, of course, but the city is up for it. There may be some bike lane growing pains, cough cough John Cassidy and his Jaguar, but there are also ambitious plans to expand the bike lane network. As for parking, the city has kind of an ingenious solution: They're repurposing 6,000 old parking meter poles, now that the two-car coin-op meters are a thing of the past.

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New York’s bike commuters have doubled in four years

New York City’s new plan to improve street safety: Throw haiku at it

admin — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:10:22 +0000

by Jess Zimmerman. Janette Sadik-Khan, DOT commissioner of New York City seems to think the main challenge to street safety is not enough short poems. Thus, her new campaign : Making bikers and walkers safer through haiku. Not good haiku, either. Certainly not as good as the ones I can write! A sudden car door, Cyclist’s story rewritten. Fractured narrative. Too averse to risk To chance the lottery, yet Steps into traffic. Anyway, go figure: Advocacy groups don't think this plan is enough: Safe street designs: check. But where is the enforcement? It’s your turn, police.

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New York City’s new plan to improve street safety: Throw haiku at it

Adorable video defends public transportation

admin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:23:24 +0000

by Christopher Mims. Here's a sweet 30-second plea for the improvement of the public transportation used by 35 million Americans every day. Because there should be many tens or hundreds of millions more of them, but at the rate we’re going now, that’s not looking likely. Eighty-four percent of transit systems have raised rates or cut service. Is this any way to handle the inexorably increasing price and environmental consequences of our ever more desperate quest for oil?

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Adorable video defends public transportation

How Baby Boomers doomed the exurbs

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:35:06 +0000

by Christopher Mims. Homes and strip malls in America's outer-ring suburbs, which contained most of the country's most expensive homes in the 1990s, are now worth less than what it cost to build them. And the land beneath them is worth effectively zero, says Brookings Institution senior fellow Christopher B. Leinberger, in a powerful op-ed arguing that the future of the country is urban and walkable . Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered. What's driving this transition? The two biggest demographic groups in the country, Baby Boomers and their children, the Millennials, who collectively represent half the population, don't want to have anything to do with the suburbs. Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors. The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars. Almost all of America's most valuable housing is now in dense urban areas that were slums just thirty years ago. This is more than just gentrification — it's a hard correction so swift that it's been teeth-rattling for everyone who doesn't have the resources to keep up, which is most of us. Leinberger points out that the only way for cities to thrive in this new world is to stop pretending that “alternative” transportation — i.e. mass transit — is a fringe phenomenon. Cities that don't enable a car-free existence simply aren't going to last, or if they do, it will be in a much-diminished state.

California’s high-speed rail gets $1 billion

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:46:43 +0000

by Sarah Laskow. California is going to have high-speed rail. Despite grumblings about the cost, Gov. Jerry Brown supports it , and now the project, which will link San Francisco and Los Angeles, is getting close to $1 billion from the Department of Transportation. The department came up with this chunk of change and more after other governors (Florida's Rick Scott, Ohio's John Kasich, and Wisconsin's Scott Walker) rejected the DOT's funds. Because in Republican World, nothing spurs the economy like not investing in large infrastructure projects.

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California’s high-speed rail gets $1 billion

U.S. proposes to double auto fuel economy by 2025

admin — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:42:47 +0000

The Obama administration proposed on Wednesday doubling auto fuel efficiency to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a White House energy priority that has come under scrutiny in Congress. The plan grew out of an uneasy agreement between the administration, automakers and environmental groups to reduce U.S. dependence on oil imports and cut tailpipe emissions. Regulators hope to finalize the proposal by summer following a 60-day public comment period. The administration wants to give industry five years to develop fuel-saving technologies further and plan products before the rule would start taking effect in 2017. “We expect this program will not only save consumers money, it will ensure automakers have the regulatory certainty they need to make key decisions,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement. Current standards require automakers to raise efficiency from 27 mpg today to 35.4 mpg by 2016. Targets beginning in 2017 would require a 5 percent annual efficiency gain for cars and 3.5 to 5 percent for light trucks, which include SUVs, pickups and vans.

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U.S. proposes to double auto fuel economy by 2025

Your canned Thanksgiving staples are full of BPA

admin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:58:39 +0000

by Jess Zimmerman. I get the sense that everyone who can cook (i.e. pretty much everyone who isn't me) is going the foodie route with Thanksgiving these days, all free-range individual Cornish hens and Brussels sprout slaw. But if you like to go the easy/traditional/pull-stuff-together-at-the-last-minute route, use caution when reaching for the canned pumpkin or beans. The Breast Cancer Fund tested a number of Thanksgiving staples, and found that nearly half their samples were positive for BPA. The report, “BPA in Thanksgiving Canned Food,” tested Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, Campbell's Turkey Gravy, Carnation Evaporated Milk (by Nestle), Del Monte Fresh Cut Sweet Corn (Cream Style), Green Giant Cut Green Beans (by General Mills), Libby's Pumpkin (by Nestle), and Ocean Spray Jellied Cranberry Sauce. Single servings of almost half of the products tested had levels of BPA comparable to levels that laboratory studies have linked to adverse health effects. Using those canned products doesn't necessarily mean you're ingesting BPA — the investigation found a really wide range of contamination in the samples, which came from four different cans of each tested product. This could come from variations in storage, transportation, or canning process at different facilities. What it does mean, though, is that there's a risk of BPA with any of these canned foods. On the up side, Ocean Spray canned cranberry sauce was clean in all samples! So if the photo above doesn't hurt your feelings as it does mine, you can go ahead and eat canned cranberry sauce to your heart's content.

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Your canned Thanksgiving staples are full of BPA

U.S. roads are built to break

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:29:42 +0000

by Jess Zimmerman. Why do we have to pour so much of our transportation money into highway infrastructure? Well, because 50 years ago, the U.S. decided to structure roads in a way that was cheap to build but expensive and difficult to maintain. It's the infrastructure equivalent of buying a cheap crappy blender and then having to replace it every year. In the early days of the interstate highway system, most freight went by train. Because highways only had to support private vehicles, the priority was quick, cheap construction, not durability. Once shipping companies took to the streets, their trucks quickly made a hash of the asphalt-over-dirt construction. Heavier vehicles did disproportionate damage to the highways, because they made small leaks in the asphalt into giant, street-eating potholes. When a road is not properly sealed, water or ice can sneak underneath the asphalt, settling into the then-tiny void between the pavement and whatever is used as a base for the road. In the quickly-constructed roads of America, this is usually compacted dirt. Then, “when big trucks drive over a section of pavement, it pushes down on that water pocket,” explains Lomax. “The water has to go somewhere.” Now put yourself in the water's place: Where would you go? Up, through the asphalt, or down into the dirt, aided by gravity and the pressure from above. Exactly. The water goes down, and it forces some dirt out of its way in the process, creating an enlarged pocket underneath the pavement. The water or air pocket beneath the road will eventually allow what's on top of it to crack. And the more pressure on the rift and the space below it, and the bigger the hole. It didn't have to be this way. In Germany, highways are built on a foundation of concrete, rather than packed earth, and they require a lot less maintenance. But that requires higher up-front costs, which taxpayers balk at. And cutting corners in construction means a maintenance nightmare — especially if, like so many roads, your highway ends up seeing more traffic than anticipated.

U.S. roads are built to break

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:29:42 +0000

U.S. roads are built to break

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:29:42 +0000

U.S. roads are built to break

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:29:42 +0000

Why cities should destroy their highways

admin — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:03:08 +0000

by Christopher Mims. America has a huge transportation infrastructure deficit, which means lots of our highways are due to be rebuilt. But according to Next American City editor at large Diana Lind, we'd be better off simply knocking them down, especially the ones that blight our cities. It's been done before, reports Andrew Nusca at SmartPlanet : After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the city of San Francisco faced the tremendous task of rebuilding the structurally-damaged Embarcadero Freeway. Instead, they tore it down, replaced it with a people-friendly boulevard that encouraged development. The surrounding area has since rebounded, Lind said, with higher property values, more tourism and more housing for city residents. Boston and New York have also obsoleted highways, or decided not to build them in the first place, thus trading in urban no-man's-land for thriving, economically productive streetscapes. And how will people get around without all those highways? Mass transit, of course. America is relearning what countries in Europe and Asia never forgot — in cities, cars are often the least good way to get around.

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Why cities should destroy their highways