Transportation

An Extra 32 Minutes a Day for People in Greater Toronto

- Adam Clare

Your32 is an effort by CivicAction to promote a financially sustainable and more efficient transit solution for people living in the greater Toronto area (GTA). This project is a great way to engage the people in the GTA as the region is regressive when it comes to transportation, even going so far to remove bike lanes – the opposite of every other city of comparable size.

Your32 is promoting a region-wide plan that will improve transportation for everyone and echoes what other major cities are doing around the world.

There’s a plan in place to dramatically improve transportation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area – one that could actually save you an average of 32 minutes on your daily commute. But it will take all of our support to help make it happen. Together, we’ll make transportation in the region more efficient and connect people in ways never dreamed of before. With your help we can create a Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area that’s, well, greater than ever.

Find out more and contribute at Your32.com.

Why Drivers Don’t Understand Cyclists

- Adam Clare


As an average cyclist I often find it confusing when drivers get their hate on for sustainable transit. Anyone who knows anything about the environment or living in an urban centre would acknowledge that bicycle infrastructure is important and creates a more vibrant city than car-dominated streets.

Yet, car drivers still demand more space and want to take away space from cyclists, what’s up with that? According to a columnist at Slate it has to do with the fact that car drivers can’t conceptualize riding a bicycle as a form of everyday transportation.

Moreover, bicycling as a primary means of transportation—I’m not talking about occasional weekend riders here—is a foreign concept to many drivers, making them more sensitive to perceived differences between themselves and cyclists. People do this all the time, making false connections between distinguishing characteristics like geography, race, and religion and people’s qualities as human beings. Sometimes it is benign (“Mormons are really polite”), sometimes less so (“Republicans hate poor people”). But in this case, it’s a one-way street: Though most Americans don’t ride bikes, bikers are less likely to stereotype drivers because most of us also drive. The “otherness” of cyclists makes them stand out, and that helps drivers cement their negative conclusions. This is also why sentiments like “taxi drivers are awful” and “Jersey drivers are terrible” are common, but you don’t often hear someone say “all drivers suck.” People don’t like lumping themselves into whatever group they are making negative conclusions about, so we subconsciously seek out a distinguishing characteristic first.

Now that we know what one of the problems is in North America it would be great to see more public awareness programs like car drivers for Jarvis.

Read more at Slate.

Tesla Motors Builds Solar Charging Stations

- Adam Clare

Tesla, the electric car company, has unveiled solar powered electric charging stations in the USA. This is a good step toward sustainable personal transportation.

Not only has Tesla created battery charging stations called Superchargers for electric cars but they are giving the energy away for free to some lucky people. If you own a Model S car made by Tesla then you will soon be able to travel for free right across the USA.

The six California locations unveiled today are just the beginning. By next year, we plan to install Superchargers in high traffic corridors across the continental United States, enabling fast, purely electric travel from Vancouver to San Diego, Miami to Montreal and Los Angeles to New York. Tesla will also begin installing Superchargers in Europe and Asia in the second half of 2013.

The Supercharger is substantially more powerful than any charging technology to date, providing almost 100 kilowatts of power to the Model S, with the potential to go as high as 120 kilowatts in the future. This can replenish three hours of driving at 60 mph in about half an hour, which is the convenience inflection point for travelers at a highway rest stop. Most people who begin a road trip at 9:00 a.m. would normally stop by noon to have lunch, refresh and pick up a coffee or soda for the road, all of which takes about 30 minutes.

Read more.

California High Speed Rail is Green

- Adam Clare

Trains are way more efficient than cars and trucks when it comes to transporting people and goods, yet in North America, trains are often shunned for more wasteful transportation systems. This negative attitude towards sustainability is changing, notably California citizens voted for a high speed rail line in the state.

Opponents to economic and environmental efficiencies argued that the high speed rail line would be too expensive to build. It turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that California’s new rail system is better for everybody!

While several competing proposals are on the table for what the system will look like once it’s completed, high-speed rail promises to be more environmentally friendly in several ways. Cars and planes, for example, run on fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gases and other pollutants. The extraction and refining process also emits pollutants. High-speed trains, however, run on electricity, which produces no greenhouse gases at the point of use. Pollutants become an issue for high-speed rail at the power plants generating the electricity. The plants may burn fossil fuels. However, the study’s authors note that the number of renewable energy plants, which produce no greenhouse gases, will continue to grow in California as the high-speed rail system is built. Hydroelectric power produces the bulk of the electricity for the Swiss High-Speed Rail network.
…
The new study’s findings track closely with research commissioned in 2009 by seven of Europe’s leading high-speed rail systems. “Generally, what you tend to see around the rest of the world is a similar pattern where high-speed rail does have a lower environmental footprint than the automobile or aircraft,” Chester said.

Read more here.

A Fossil Fuel Free Freighter

- Adam Clare

ship
Cargo ships make the global economy work as goods need to be transported around the globe. These large ships have a large impact on the environment due to their fuel consumption and regulations around the ships can be lax.

While the global maritime industry is responsible for three percent of global emissions, it is yet to be subjected to global emissions agreements. With emission levels set to mushroom as more goods are freighted across the oceans, unstable and spiking oil prices also make for an increasingly unpredictable future for worldwide shipping trade.

If we want (and we should) a carbon neutral economy then we need to address this goods transportation issue, and companies are looking into this already. We’ve looked at the issue of cargo ships before and how a giant sail can help lower fuel costs and emissions.

With that in mind, a company, B9, has set out to create a ship that would work without fossil fuels.

“The design process is evolutionary,” Gilpin enthuses. “We’re combining proven technologies to develop a ‘future proof’ technically and commercially viable small (3,000 dwt) merchant dry bulk vessel.”

This holistic design process combines technology transferred from offshore yacht racing with the most advanced commercial naval architecture available, as well as incorporating fuel derived from food waste, thanks to B9S’s sister company B9 Organic Energy.

Read more here

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