Entries Tagged 'Transportation' ↓

Micheline Maynard reports for the Times from the Farnborough Airshow (official link to show here) that aviation manufacturers are trying to show their green credentials. It’s all well and good for Boeing to tell us that they’re working on algae as a jet fuel - but even without comparative energy figures (energy per passenger mile

From “The Wild Green Yonder“:

“It’s a matter for survival,” Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association, said at an environmental conference Wednesday.

With global air traffic expected to swell in coming years, government regulators, including the European Commission, are applying pressure to make planes quieter, cleaner and more efficient, and threatening penalties if they fall short.

“Our customers are under hellish pressures to come up with improvements,” said Tom Williams, an Airbus executive vice president.

There are no cheap or easy solutions. Lighter materials, new fuels and other innovations that promise to make planes more environmentally friendly mean more expense and development time. That includes the billions that engine makers are spending to develop new products.

All that could make it hard for the manufacturers to offer the discounts that their big customers have come to expect, potentially wiping out the savings that such planes might offer.

“It’s a bitter split,” said Mr. Williams of Airbus.

Mr. Bisignani said the industry was late to realize it needed to do more to stress its environmental credentials, leaving it open for attacks from environmental groups and threats of new taxes from Europe and elsewhere.

Read further - and you’ll find that aviation manufacturers are concerned that they’re being unfairly treated as other-than-green.

FuturePundit has a good analysis of comparative transportation fuel-efficiency - which relies in part on Jeff Radtke’s comparative table on Neodymics, “A Green Ride.”

No question that we’re going to have airplanes, no question that they need to be more efficient. But our objective needs to be to conserve energy and protect the ecosystem - not protect inefficient industries.

MTA Tunnel Progress - East Side Access - as of June, 2008

New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has announced great progress in its “East Side Access” project. In less than a year - two tunnel boring machines have dug tunnels of 5,421 feet and 3,705 feet. The longer tunnel is over a mile long - and by public-works standards, that seems pretty fast. Worth remembering if we need to build shelters, or more mass transit, or pneumatic mail or package delivery systems. The Times has a brilliant 360-degree panoramic image by Raymond McCrea Jones and Gabriel Dance, and other outstanding still images by Ozier Muhammad. From the Times’ print coverage by William Neuman,  19 Stories Below Manhattan, a 640-Ton Machine Drills a New Train Tunnel; note the discrepancy in reported progress between the number provided to Neuman and the figures in the MTA’s diagram, retrieved from their website on 19 July:

“No windshield? Don’t need one,” said the driver (or operator, as he prefers), Anthony Spinoso.

Over several months he has driven the machine 7,700 feet, from a spot deep under Second Avenue and 63rd Street, through the bedrock, to the depths beneath Grand Central Terminal, where the tunnel he has helped dig will someday bring Long Island Rail Road trains to the East Side of Manhattan.

Now he is backing the machine up several hundred feet to a point where it will begin boring a parallel tunnel. Another thing that Mr. Spinoso does not have is a steering wheel. Instead, he guides the movement of the machine with buttons in front of him, striving to hold a green dot (his machine) on the computer screen at the center of a narrow yellow line that represents his programmed course. He must keep the 22-foot-tall, 360-foot-long behemoth on track without varying more than 2 inches in any direction.

“You just push the buttons, it’s like a video game,” said Edward Kennedy, an engineer helping to supervise the work. “The guy has a screen with a yellow line on it, the yellow brick road. All he has to do is keep on the yellow brick road.”

The digging began last fall for the new Long Island Rail Road tunnels - there will ultimately be eight tunnel sections feeding into an immense new station below Grand Central. There are two machines working simultaneously on separate tunnel sections (the second one, which started later, has reached 48th Street). They can cut through 100 feet of rock a day but often move much slower. The tunneling and the excavation of a huge cavern under Grand Central to house the new station are expected to be completed in 2012, but the entire project will not be finished until at least 2015.

The boring is being done for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority by Dragados Judlau, a joint venture of large construction firms. The cost of the tunneling is $428 million, but the entire project, which includes building out the station and laying the tracks, is expected to cost $7.2 billion. The new tunnels will connect to an existing tunnel under the East River and from there (via more tunneling) to Long Island Rail Road tracks in Queens.

[Emphasis (bold/red) supplied.]

Cf. data in MTA diagram, supra; the two subtotals in the MTA diagram total, according to our calculations, 9,126 feet. This may be no more than a minor error, or a question of dating - as the general progress seems swift, at least by New York standards. (Note that, nearly seven years after the 9/11 attacks, we’ve not agreed on a plan, much less completed one).

Other Resources:

MTA Capital Construction - East Side Access

Wikipedia entry on MTA East Side Access project

Treehugger reports that Japan/Taiwan ferry services have ended, with fuel prices forcing the operator into bankruptcy. Read Peak Oil: The End Of Ferry Services Between Japan And Taiwan? See also our prior post on similar events in New York City.

Patrick McGeehan of the Times City Room Blog reports that

A few business executives have dreamed up a private-sector solution to the problem of secure bicycle parking in New York: the city’s first bikes-only parking lot. They have a space on West 33rd Street. All they need is a corporation willing to pay as much as $200,000 a year to sponsor it.

“We’re really looking for a big number to build something quite spectacular,” said Daniel A. Biederman, president of the 34th Street Partnership. “We want this to be the premier bike parking facility in the country.”

Already, the group has cleared one high hurdle: Stonehenge Management, a developer, has offered a 2,600-square-foot lot next to an apartment building it owns on the north side of 33rd Street between Eighth Avenue and Ninth Avenue, Mr. Biederman said.

The partnership, which is financed by businesses and property owners in a 31-block section of Midtown, has developed a preliminary design for the lot and has ordered up a prototype of the racks it would contain, Mr. Biederman said. At first, it would hold 100 bikes, with room to expand if there is more demand, he said.

A Bikes-Only Parking Lot in Midtown?

Jorge Chapa, writing in Inhabitat, reports that the Hungarian prototype for the Antro Solo, production planned for 2012, gets 150 mpg, and here’s how:

• The hybrid electric/fossil fuel engine, familiar now to most of us - which captures energy while braking, thus recharging the electric batteries;
• an exceptionally light carbon composite frame;
• solar panels on the roof which can provide power for a 15 - 25 km trip (the post doesn’t specify how long that charge takes);
• The two passenger seats (it’s a three-seater) come with bicycle pedals, which can offset the car’s energy consumption;
• So if it’s dark, the battery is exhausted, you and your passengers are exhausted, what’s the last option?

Trick question: two options - a dual-fuel petrol/ethanol engine. Sound like an easy fit for a “station car,” if there’s any light at all. TRANSPORTATION TUESDAY: Antro Solo gets 150mpg at Inhabitat, in turn via AutoFiends.

If this technology, and others like it, become competitive - whoever has developed it stands to make a lot of money - and contribute to a gradual drip-drip of oil company profits. (Today’s Times has a comment from a Saudi official, who articulated some anxiety that current price shock and anger might result in people remembering the current state of affairs, and reducing long-term demand for petroleum; we’ll try to post about this later - but - you read it here first - at least some of the Saudi leadership think’s we’re intelligent and adaptive. Flattery).

Inside Transit has a report and images of the new Shanghai maglev train. (AMTRAK, Washington D.C. to New Yor runs at  peak speed, 200 mph, for only a few minutes - in effect a novelty or a capability demonstration).  Check out the post on Inside Transit here.

Richard Peace of Bike Radar reports:

Numerous bike retailers in the United States are reporting a spike in sales on the back of the seemingly inexorable rise of gas prices at the pumps throughout the country.

In particular bike retailers are reportedly noticing a strong rise in commuter cycling queries – unusual in a market that is regarded as primarily a leisure and sports-based one. Recently the price at the pumps hit $3.60 a gallon and the net is full of reports from bike shops across the US noting the price squeeze effect on customers coming through their doors. Continue reading →

Harvard School of Public Health research concludes that airport security isn’t helping. Reuters, or Yahoo News.

The researchers could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks.

They found no evidence to suggest that making passengers take off their shoes and confiscating small items prevented any incidents.

The researchers conclude that it would be “interesting” to apply medical standards to airport security. Screening programs for illnesses like cancer are usually not broadly instituted unless they have been shown to work.

The TSA response:

The Transportation Security Administration defended its measures by reporting that more than 13 million prohibited items were intercepted in one year. … Most of these illegal items were lighters.”

The TSA needs to think things through and implement security protocols that work to stop terrorists, rather than those that work to inconvenience passengers, confiscate lighters, water, homemade pies, and toothpaste.

Bruce Schneier, in his blog on Security and Security Technology, sums it up well:

The goal isn’t to confiscate prohibited items. The goal is to prevent terrorism on airplanes. When the TSA confiscates millions of lighters from innocent people, that’s a security failure. The TSA is reacting to non-threats. The TSA is reacting to false alarms. Now you can argue that this level of failures is necessary to make people safer, but it’s certainly not evidence that people are safer.

So today, 6 years after Sept. 11, Airport Security, to put it mildly, is a work in progress. Or, as Schneier puts it, “the TSA has it completely backwards.“

The Swiss Firm MW Line makes solar boats that are ferrying people around lakes and rivers in Switzerland, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The only backup power, apparently, is on-shore charging from the grid. They’re also the shipbuilder for the PlanetSolar project which plans to have a solar-only craft in the water ready for a two-person, 120-day around-the-world trip in 2009.

The New York Times reported on January 4th that New York Water Taxi, the only operator of Queens/Manhattan and Brooklyn/Manhattan ferry service has cancelled service for the winter - largely because of fuel price increases. That notwithstanding a monthly subsidy from the real estate developers who established Schaefer’s Landing, a high-end project in Williamsburgh. A ferry powered by photovoltaic cells wouldn’t be directly affected, if at all, by petroleum price increases. Given the relatively short distances involved, on-board solar panels and batteries could be supplemented with electricity dockside. If that electricity is generated via wind (often best captured on or near water) or solar, ferry operating costs could be insulated from petroleum price fluctuations.

Marathons may save lives by reducing automobile traffic:

Worried about dropping dead if you run a marathon? Researchers in Canada say you can put your mind at ease. The risk of dying on a marathon course is twice as high if you drive it than if you run it, they find.

In fact, they conclude, marathons may actually save lives: more people would die in traffic accidents if the race course had not been closed to vehicles on marathon day. (Nor was there any spillover of extra deaths on alternative routes.) Their paper is being published Friday in The British Medical Journal.

“For each death in a marathon, two motor-vehicle crash deaths were averted,” said Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and the lead author of the new study. “It’s riskier if you decide to drive your car around on a Sunday morning than if you go out and run.”

As might be expected, marathon directors were pleased.

Continue reading →

This is the first of what we hope will be a group of articles about the costs of transporting liquid petroleum products (heating oil, gasoline, jet fuel, etc.). We’re going to start with this incident because the reporters and multimedia staff of SFGate.com ((SFGate.com is, we gather, the on-line presence of the San Francisco Chronicle)). did such an excellent job of explaining how this particular incident happened on April 29, 2007. Their multi-media illustration of the events - “How the Crash Happened” can be found here.

Here’s an excerpt from Demian Bulwa and Peter Fimrite’s piece ((written with assistance from Carolyn Jones, Michael Cabanatuan, Rick DelVecchio and John Wildermuth, )) published the same day

The single-vehicle crash occurred on the lower roadway when the tanker, loaded with 8,600 gallons of unleaded gasoline and heading from a refinery in Benicia to a gas station on Hegenberger Road in Oakland, hit a guardrail at 3:41 a.m.

Engineers said the green steel frame of the I-580 overpass and the bolts holding the frame together began to melt and bend in the intense heat

– and that movement pulled the roadbed off its supports.

California Highway Patrol spokesman Trent Cross said the driver of the tanker, James Mosqueda, 51, of Woodland (Yolo County), was traveling too fast in a 50 mph zone when his truck overturned and burst into flames.

Photograph by Mark Costantini/San Francisco Chronicle. More images here.

Mosqueda, an employee of Sabek Transportation in San Francisco for 10 months, got out of the truck on his own after it overturned and hailed a taxi that took him to Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, witnesses and police said.

He has been transferred to the burn unit at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco, where his father said he was “doing OK” this afternoon, having sustained burns on his face, neck and hands. The family expected Mosqueda to remain hospitalalized two or three more days.

- snip -

Oakland firefighters, the first public safety workers on the scene, arrived with two engines at 3:55 a.m., Capt. Cedric Price said.

“We didn’t know it was a tanker truck that was involved. As soon as that was established we immediately upgraded to a large scale incident response team and added two more engines and two trucks,” Price said.

Firefighters immediately noticed the upper connector ramp was buckling and seven minutes after they arrived — at 4:02 a.m. – it collapsed, Price said. Now there were no more structures threatened, the firefighters’ approach shifted.

“With no structures or lives in jeopardy and with 8,000 gallons of flammable fuel involved, you’re basically better off letting it burn itself out,” said Price.

Firefighters used only water to control the blaze, which took about two hours, he said. Had there been lives at risk, firefighters would have used foam to fight the blaze, but it would have run off into the nearby Bay water, polluting it.

“That this didn’t happen on a weekday morning might have been the only beauty of it,” said Price.

With the help of protective gear and breathing devices, firefighter exposure to the fumes was minimal, according to Price. A total of 29 Oakland Fire Department personnel were on scene as well as one engine from Emeryville. A smaller crew of Oakland firefighters remained there through the early evening to watch for potential dangers.

“Tanker fire destroys part of MacArthur Maze | 2 freeways closed near Bay Bridge”

We’re trying to learn how many of these incidents there are a year - and how many people get hurt. Apart from the risk to life - the risk to structures seems so great that we’d want to encourage great caution in transporting any form of petroleum fuel.

And take this sort of risk into account when we decide how much of it we’re going to use.

April Streeter has this in yesterday’s Treehugger:

As a result of half a century of planning, Copenhagen has achieved a fabulous cycling goal - during the morning rush hour more bikes and mopeds pound the inner city streets than personal cars and buses. Just a bit more than a third of inhabitants get to work by bike every day - the other two thirds take public transport or a personal car. But the news gets even better - Copenhagen’s municipal government is increasing spending to improve bike lanes and paths and the bike travel experience.According to this survey, Copenhagen is behind places such as Amsterdam (where a claimed 40 percent of traffic moves by bike) and Portland, Oregon in providing the best inner-city biking experience. This may be true, but Copenhagen has got to be the stylish bike capital - especially with the bloggers at copenhagengirlsonbikes and cycleliciousness making it look so cool to ride.

City officials now want to increase cyclists to make up half of all commuters by 2015, as well as increase cyclists’ speeds by 10 percent while reducing the risk of injury. How will they do it? Partly by investing more - they added about 25 million Danish crowns (US$ 3.7 million) in 2007 to the yearly budget of 75 million crowns.

Already in the city, subway stops and other open spaces sport large bicycle parking stalls - the best are the covered double-decker stalls - and the city will build even more of these to encourage cyclists to park away from pedestrian and other traffic. They’ll also widen lanes to accommodate more bikes.

In addition, some heavily-trafficked lanes will sport a new bicycle pictogram to show that they get a special ‘green wave’ - traffic lights will be coordinated so cyclists who maintain speeds of about 20 kilometers/hour can just keep on moving.

Across Öresund in Sweden cyclists are not quite so pampered, but some good things are happening - in Gothenburg cyclists will soon be able to use the same Internet service cars have long had access to to create individual bike destination maps for all locations in the city. Via ::Ecoprofile

In Copenhagen Bicycles Overtake Cars (TreeHugger)

Update: Colville Andersen - of cycleliciousness notes in a comment to TreeHugger:

Great post. Thanks for the big up about our blogs.
One thing, however, the “survey” you link to is not a survey at all… it’s a commercial website writing a opinion piece about bike cities, without any real research.
Love the treehugger world. Keep up the good work.

The delays on New York’s Second Avenue line are nearing pension age. Our ability to use additional underground capacity - to move passengers, to move freight, and as emergency shelter - is not matched by planning or construction.

Yet - our former colonial masters - at whom Americans snicker - (yes, marmite doesn’t quite make sense; but this is beside the point) - continue to surpass us in mass transportation and energy efficiency. They’re building new underground train extensions The “long train(s) of abuses and usurpations,” will, reportedly, carry 1,500 passengers  each. The “patient sufferance of these Colonies” perhaps now means that ‘we’ll build mass transportation systems when we’re good and ready.’ 

Thingsmagazine reports that the Brits have taken a decision to start construction on a long-planned extension to the London underground transit system - Crossrail. And plans for the “Thames2000″ extension remain under discussion. They could dither for another few years  - and they’d still get it done before the Second Avenue Subway. The following images are of the Thames2000 system.

Images from the thingsmagazine piece, linked here.

MetaEfficient posts (post undated) on the  Matra MS1 Electric Bike:

[Show as slideshow]

This could be a great commuting machine — it’s an electric-powered bike designed by the French company Matra. The bike was recently introduced at the Paris Motorshow. It has a range of 60 miles, in addition to the mileage you add by using pedal power. It has a top speed of 30 miles per hour, but this is an artificial limit set on the motor.

It can be rigged to go faster, but officially, you’d have to get a license to drive it, because it would be considered a scooter. The bike also incorporates disc brakes and a regenerative braking system — nice.

This electric bike should be available for sale in Europe in the not-too-distant future, but no word on whether it’ll make it to the States. It will probably be priced around $5000.

Via: AutoblogGreen and Bikes In The Fast Lane

Link to Meta Efficient post.