 | Australia Pumping Empty: the Looming Peak Oil Crisis | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | The Bullroarer - Friday, 18th April |  |
45 comments on Policies to Develop a Low Emissions Transport Sector in Australia
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Ships are the most efficient carriers, but they cannot deliver goods where there are no water ways.
Heavy rail is efficient at long haul freight movement, but they cannot go where there are not rails. They are not efficient if they have to start-stop for congested transport.
The point is there are niches. If confined to their niche, many things, including cars can provide great value at a reasonable cost.
My contempt for regulatory monopolies is the same as my contempt for political monopolies, they do not allow niche ideas and solutions. In the niche of highly repetitive transport ultra-light rail can provide the convenience of a chauffeured car with the energy use of an elevator. This systems are limited in carrying capacity and length of trips. But in the niche of urban transport, only bicycles are competitive.
Neither bicycles or automated guideways are aggressively supported by the current flock of "urban planners."
Then they need to be educated. I do not see how we can move away from an automobile dominated urban infrastructure unless the public and their elected representives agree that we need to do so and plan accordingly. I can buy a bicycle or invent new and better bicycles on my own, but I cannot create a bicycle friendly infrastructure without community planing and consent.
I absolutely agree with you. If we made every 10th street in a city into an automated guideway/bike safe corridor, we can make the corner.
Here is an illustration of green space recovery:
Well, it seems like progress was made on this thread insofar as I understood positions better after their elaboration.
As an aside, I have a friend who is an urban planner and although largely informed by the dogma of economics, his opinions have shifted greatly on the topic of peak oil as I'm sure has been the case with many others in bureaucracies around the world.
Can changes be made quickly enough? I don't know, but that's the struggle and the push no matter the innovations. Planning & bureaucracies are slow, but we've never seen the pressures mounting so quickly for dramatic change that quite probably will affect the processes of planning and bureaucracies themselves!
There is an extraordinary book Black Swans.
Survivors will be the ones that adapted. Graveyard, which we largely ignore, will bare silent testimony for those who do not.
Which ones we will be is being determined now.
Here are two questions for your urban planner:
1. Do they have a 2020 plan?
2. Is their 2020 plan based on oil at $50 or $300 a barrel?
Plans built on uncertain forecasts (note all forecasts) are grave exposures to Black Swans, like Peak Oil.
They are not efficient if they have to start-stop for congested transport
Factually incorrect, as I have pointed out to you before.
Regenerative braking recycles the electricity from braking back into the system with quite good efficiency.
OTOH, your jpods that you are promoting are quite inefficient aerodynamically. One pod for every 1 or 2 people verses *MUCH* more aerodynamically efficient/person trains.
You are trying to create a philosophy (with several errors) to support your commercial enterprise, instead of deriving a solution from an underlying philosophy.
Alan
Oddly enough Alan, our first paying customer is a commuter railroad that wants to provide feeder networks.
I thought that your first line was going to be open at the Mall of America by now.
I question promoter claims.
And only VERY poor management at a commuter rail line would waste money on unproven gadgetbahn. Many better ways to spend money at EVERY commuter rail system in te USA.
What you are promoting, and spending so much effort on, is simply wrong. You cannot debug and prove your technology in time to make a difference, but you will confuse and delude people away from proven, GOOD solutions.
I wish that you had chosen a constructive, rather than destructive, path for your energy and efforts.
Alan
BTW: just HOW are you going to provide ADA access to wheelchair passengers stranded in mid-air ?