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114 comments on An immodest proposal about fuel efficiency
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114 comments on An immodest proposal about fuel efficiency
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A couple of thoughts. Firstly personal mobility is a buzz which is why the developing countries want it so much. I'd frame the problem this way; if the world has too many people to eat steak, drive a car or enjoy air conditioning then maybe there should be fewer of us.
The second thing is that some people are now trapped into car dependence; example shift workers living on the rural fringe. Whether they moved out there because the kid wanted a pony or housing was cheaper they may no longer be able to move closer in to public transport. The depot of a bus service I used in 2004 had lines of parked farm utes from which people emerged to take the 6 am bus into the city. That bus ticket for non-season holders is now $28 a day I believe. If people have to work back late or do a night shift then they have to drive the whole way. I don't know what palatable options these people have.
Changing tack I think Rudd's $35m subsidy for the Camry hybrid is too little too late with 4% annual crude depletion. I think the suggestion of petrol/CNG dual fuel could save $10k per car and could run for many years.
Boof,
I couldn't agree more with your comment about Camry hybrid, 6 years too late, but then the Liberals were in power then.
Now, if Rudd can persuade GM to build 10,000 Chevy Volts, could really make a start, but not enough to reduce fuel use by 4% per year. Better still, >500,000 duel Petrol/CNG vehicles per year, is definitely one way of buying 20-30 years extra time at least in Australia. My understanding is that one of the problems with CNG is the tank size required for 400-500km range. Why not have a small CNG tank for all those short trips, and top up at home from domestic NG just like PHEV use short range battery power?
Aren't the home filling stations $8k? Feds will want x cents per gaseous litre so an extra meter may be required. Presumably the tank and fuel tweaking will cost around $2k per car same as LPG. I think Rudd took away Howard's LPG conversion rebate. If a million cars adopted it we would have to inject Qld coal seam methane into the southern NG network so some days might have 'hotter' gas than others.
On SBS now I see that Rudd is giving $35 million of our money so that Toyota will build a Camry hybrid at Altona. The auto freaks are saying diesel is better. Nobody has come up with this radical idea of "drive less", but they did roundabout say it by mentioning public transport.
Too much fuel being burned, and yet 30% of trips less than 3km, 50% less than 5km... and Australia has an obesity problem, third fattest country in the world after the US and UK... wow, wouldn't it be great if we could join these up somehow... hmmm, I wonder... could we walk a bit? Surely not, it's unAustralian, isn't it?
It's not like our climate is unsuited to walking. But perhaps the government could install a few long range travelators to ease us all into it ;)
While I'm all for walking, riding bikes and public transport (and have only rarely driven a car to work in the past 5 years - or never, in earlier years when I lived in London and Hong Kong), the simple fact is that these options aren't available for everyone.
For those who really are stuck in the god-forsaken, public transport free outer suburbs (or in rural areas), they really do need cars for the time being - hybrids (and eventually electric vehicles) are a step in the right direction, so I don't see them as a worthy target of criticism - they are just one more necessary option to exercise to deal with decreasing availability of fossil fuels...
And again, people living in public transport-forsaken outer suburbs vast distances from shops and work are not the majority.
If they were, the average time driving to work would be more than 31 minutes for each trip, and the average for shopping much greater than 13 minutes. And we wouldn't find that 30% of trips are under 3km and 50% less than 5km.
As I said, we can always drag out some poor bugger as an exception. "Oh but what about the elderly legless living in Dubbo?" But they're not the majority. Why focus on them? Why not focus on the majority? The majority can change, and their change can have a significant effect - more significant than making sure your tyres are pumped up.
Let's have people look seriously at their lives and how they live them, they're quite capable of coming up with excuses for themselves, we don't have to do it for them.
Kiashu,
I think you overestimate how much public transport exists in the US. I am thinking of midwestern/great lakes area states with cities around 20-40,000 people. These places do not have viable public transit. The best most of them have is Dial-A-Ride (on-request, mini busses) which is so inconvenient as to be useless in my city. It doesn't start running early enough or stay running late enough to get you both to work and back home. You have to schedule your pick up several hours in advance, which effectively means the night before. They will not guarantee a pick up time within an hour and cannot guarantee a destination time. The only purpose of the Dial-A-Ride system is to provide disabled people a way to get around so they don't have to move into assisted living.
Because any real social change must be effective for everyone except the true outliers. It isn't good enough to have a system that works for 50% of the people, you have to have a system that works for at least 90% of the people, preferable closer to 97%. This is why bicycling doesn't work as a solution. I'm not going to ride my bike to work when it's 10F or when there's 5" of snow on the ground. And there is a large segment of the population that can't. It's not a majority, but it is too many.
A final thought. Telling someone to move is easy, and is in fact the best overall solution. However, finding a place to live that is: close to work, schools, and stores; Large enough for a family; and affordable isn't nearly as easy as we'd like it to be. Moving is expensive. I can buy a lot of $5 gas for the cost of moving, not even counting the higher mortgage and insurance payments.
--
JimFive
Not at all. Firstly, I was responding to someone talking about Australia, not the US - I am not an American. As for the US and public transport, I realise it's mostly shit. But lots of parts aren't.
My point is that many options already exist, but because people reflexively jump in their cars, they don't consider those options. My immodest proposal is that people make themselves aware of how much they use their car, and how often they're ignoring other options.
For some people, this will lead to no change at all; for most, some change.
In this case I'm not talking about social change. I'm talking about how you can save fuel. And for the vast majority of people, how much they drive is far more variable and easy to change and will have a greater effect on fuel consumption than messing about with accelerators and tyre pressure.
Boof,
I would be surprised if a gas compressor costs 8K, would depend upon pressure required.Low range tanks could use lower pressure. A 2K cost for conversion would be a faster payback than the 10K extra for batteries in a hybrid. The real value would be if petrol imports are just not available. It doesn't seem to make sense to be importing petrol from Asia, and refrigerating, NG as LNG and exporting it back to Asia. Piping CSM from Narrabri or even QLD is always going to be cheaper. There would be lots of pressures not to tax NG because of the lower carbon content than petrol.
What you're saying is backed up by this website http://rosettamoon.copley.org.au/
which I only heard of this week. Scroll down to see the article on NG as fuel. There is also a map of the pipeline network.
Again, you're talking about people driving to work.
And on average that's 22% of all trips taken.
Okay, so for some people that's going to be 90+% of their driving. But that's not the majority, that's not the average.
I mean, you can always drag out cases of people who genuinely have little or no choices. But the vast majority of people do have a choice, they're like my mate - too lazy to walk or bike or whatever.
I'm just suggesting that each of us take a detailed look at our driving, record our trips and see how many are trips we could do by some other method, or which we could roll in with another trip.
So the guy whose only driving is to and from work from his godforsaken McMansion with no public transport in the area, he records that in his little logbook. But the guy who drives 15km along the railway line to and from work, 1.5km to the park, three times a week 2km to the gym, and six times a week 2km to the shops and then on Sunday goes for a drive to see the country, he records that, too.
Just take a look at your driving. Don't tell us fairy tales about the Poor Little Aussie Battler, just take a serious look at it and see what you can do without or reorganise.
And that'll reduce your fuel use a heap more than buggerising about with the accelerator pedal or any nonsense like that.
"And that'll reduce your fuel use a heap more than buggerising about with the accelerator pedal or any nonsense like that."
Sorry, but you're focusing too narrowly on one particular solution. As gasoline prices have a greater impact on people, they will resort to a wide range of responses, and everyone will adopt them differently, at least at first. A lot of people in the US are already using more public transportation, where it's available, driving less (combining and eliminating errands), using the most efficient vehicle in a household, etc. Very few are hypermiling today, but as the cost of fuel becomes more onerous, they will. They'll also feel much more downward pressure on the number of miles they drive, so they'll make even more changes to drive less. The optimal destination is to drive as few miles as possible and as efficiently as possible. Different people will take different paths to get from their present behavior to that optimal state. Insisting that one solution (driving less) is better or worse than another (hypermiling) as a first step without knowing the details of an individual's circumstances is just silly.
And by the way--I wrote about hypermiling just today over on TCOE, and I pointed out that people should do it in addition to those other steps, so someone has indeed said it:
http://www.grinzo.com/energy/index.php/2008/06/10/free-hybrids-for-every...
I couldn't agree more. For those of us who don't need to eat steak, drive a car, or have air conditioning though there's plenty of room on the planet. So what do we do? This is a matter of economics. I say we should price energy intensive lifestyles appropriately. If someone wants to eat steak while driving a Hummer with the AC on full blast, sure thing. I also think they should be allowed to heat their home with paper money. The thing is, that our infrastructure, taxes and government foolishly subsidize the Hummer, the AC and the steak. The war in Iraq is about securing access to oil and all US tax payers are paying for it. There are all sorts of tax subsidies for huge cars if you own your own business, regardless of whether its a construction company or a nail salon. There's this amazing transportation network of highways that you can't walk or bike on which tax payers paid for. And coal burning electricity plants produce tons of mercury, CO2 and other nastiness which ordinary folks and critters the world over suffer from. But the people sitting in front of the AC only pay for the cost of making the electricity.
The earth is plenty big enough for people to live simply. In fact the earth could support probably 10 times as many people as there are now if we didn't need to destroy the environment for a buzz.