cars

What’s in a Lot?

- Adam Clare

Here’s a challenge from Eran Ben-Joseph: name a great parking lot.

Couldn’t do it, could you? Neither could I, and neither could Ben-Joseph. In a new book ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking he explores the horribleness of all that space that car drivers demand. If you look at North American cities in the 60s and 70s all you’ll see is a giant slab of pavement for automobiles instead of people. Today, those cities are dealing with the car-created destruction.

Where’s the good news in this? Well, Ben-Joseph’s book is all about finding ways to make these wastes of space practical and helpful to the areas around them. Some solutions might be to design a parking lot to serve the local community or to make these parking spots actually green.

So what can be done to make parking lots greener and better integrated into their civic surroundings? Ben-Joseph recommends a menu of ideas to improve parking lots according to their settings — which he regards as “a healthier approach to planning, rather than giving prescriptive ideas about how to design them.”

For one thing, planners might simply plant trees throughout parking lots, as the architect Renzo Piano did at Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy. Low-use parking lots need not be entirely paved in asphalt, either: Miami’s Sun Life Stadium features large areas of grass lots that are environmentally better year-round.
“The whole space does not have to be designed the same way,” Ben-Joseph says. “Overflow parking can be designed differently, and not paved with asphalt.”

Lots can also incorporate green technology. Some parking spaces in Palo Alto, Calif., have charging stalls for electric vehicles. A Walmart parking lot in Worcester, Mass., has 12 wind turbines that generate clean electricity for the store. The Sierra Nevada Brewery parking lot in Chico, Calif., has solar panels built into its lattice structure.

Read more at Physorg.

Mobile Phones for Better Public Transit

- Adam Clare

For reasons that I don’t fully understand people equate car ownership with freedom (I primarily see it as an increase in transportation costs). As a result a lot of people are hesitant to give up the cars as they perceive their supposed freedom of mobility as a necessity.

Thankfully some new research has come out from Latitude Research that shows how the use of mobile phones combined with transit can get people out of their cars and onto the streets.

The results of the study indicate that, while users value the freedom and control a car provides, mobile information solutions could replicate this sense of autonomy without needing to own a car—primarily by helping users to make informed, in-the-moment decisions about what’s available near them and the best ways to get around. “Real-time and personalized transit information has the ability to make public transit a more flexible, equitable, and enjoyable experience, thus minimizing the perceived experience gap between car ownership and other modes of transit typically thought less convenient or accessible by would-be users,” explains Marina Miloslavsky, study lead and Senior Research Analyst at Latitude.

Study participants—18 regular car users who agreed to go car-free for one week—experienced unexpected benefits as a result of re-thinking their daily transit. Two-thirds reported that the car-free week exposed them to new things, and twice as many participants felt more integrated into their communities than had expected to before the study week, with the majority also citing health and money-saving reasons to reduce their reliance on driving.

The full study can be found here.

New in Biofuel: Cellulosic Ethanol Plants to Ease Gas Consumption

- Adam Clare

Cars love inefficiently sucking down dead dinosaur juice, though hopefully for not much longer. In the meantime some companies have figured ways to produce cellulosic ethanol cheaply using more sustainable ways – basically a cheaper way to make biofuel for cars to burn on their way to wherever cars go.

Modern biofuels are better to use than dinosaur-based biofuels (which take millions of years to manufacture and I haven’t seen dinosaurs in years) so until we kick humanity’s gas addiction let’s use biofuels.

Novozymes, the world’s largest industrial enzyme producer, today launched a new line it says will yield ethanol from plant wastes at an enzyme price of about 50 cents a gallon. The latest product of a decade of research, this marks an 80 percent price drop from two years ago, according to Global Marketing Director Poul Ruben Andersen.

The advances, Andersen said, will help bring cellulosic ethanol production prices to under $2 a gallon by 2011, a cost on par with both corn-based ethanol and gasoline at current U.S. market prices.

Yesterday, Novozyme’s competitor, California-based Genencor, a division of enzyme giant Danisco, announced its own new enzyme product, which falls within a similar price range of about 50 cents to make a gallon of fuel, according to Philippe Lavielle, executive vice president of business development.

Keep reading at the New York Times

Toyota to Plant Flowers at Prius Plants

- Adam Clare

Toyota has received a lot of criticism over the production process of their Prius because the production process is quite awful for the environment. Toyota has reacted by designing new flowers to absorb bad air from the production facilities.

Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere.

The flowers, derivatives of the cherry sage plant and the gardenia, were specially developed for the grounds of Toyota’s Prius plant in Toyota City, Japan.

The sage derivative’s leaves have unique characteristics that absorb harmful gases, while the gardenia’s leaves create water vapour in the air, reducing the surface temperature of the factory surrounds and, therefore, reducing the energy needed for cooling, in turn producing less carbon dioxide (CO2).

The two new plants are part of a wide-ranging plan to reduce the impact of Prius manufacture on the environment. Since 1990, the plant has reduced CO2 emissions by 55 per cent.

Read more at Drive.

France to Charge Batteries

- Adam Clare

It looks like France is getting really serious about curbing emissions and supporting electric cars by building a network of charging stations throughout the country.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

The government will make the installation of charging sockets obligatory in office parking lots by 2015, and new apartment blocks with parking lots will have to include charging stations starting in 2012.

A group of public and private fleet operators has already identified a need to purchase 50,000 electric vehicles through 2015, Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo told a press conference, and the government reckons that by pooling purchasing there is potential to reach a fleet of 100,000 vehicles by that date.

The plan involves setting up a battery manufacturing factory at a Renault SA facility at Flins, west of Paris, at a cost of €625 million, of which €125 million will be contributed by the French state’s strategic investment fund.

The plant will have an annual production capacity of 100,000 batteries and will supply other French electric vehicle manufacturers, including PSA Peugeot-Citroen.

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