The Oil Drum

Dedicated members of the TOD audience and public transport fans may be interested to hear the call for papers from UITP, the International Association of Public Transport, for a conference to be held in Vienna in June 2009. The theme for the 58th World Congress and Mobility & City Transport Exhibition is Public transport: making the right mobility choices.

Here is another guest post from Austin, Texas for TOD:LOCAL from Colin Clark.

Holding local elected officials accountable for their words and deeds can be a frustrating experience. One day they are standing up denouncing the Federal government for making the wrong investments in our future and not tackling global warming or our addiction to oil by signing the Mayor's Climate Change Agreement. The next day they announce the latest in highway funding touting new roads, less traffic, more jobs.

As we consider the collision course of peak oil and global warming, we should start look around our own communities and see if our transportation plans, policies, and construction projects are anticipating higher gas prices and a future with reduced vehicle miles traveled by automobile or stuck in the "building our way out of congestion" mindset.

With motorized transportation using 40% of US oil consumption, it's important to examine what we are doing on a local and regional level with transportation plans, funding, and construction. Are we digging ourselves deeper into the hole of oil dependency for mobility?

This is a guest vision by friend of The Oil Drum, Alan S. Drake.

After an extended period of bewildering, painful and rewarding transition, the people of the USA finally feel that they have found their feet underneath them, with a clear and hopeful path to the future. Oil consumption is down to 6.6 million barrels/day, 30% of our 2007 peak oil use, and CO2 emissions are 26% of their 2011 peak, a matter of pride for most Americans.

Rapid reductions in world carbon emissions (almost as great as US reductions), plus some negative feedback loops, have kept Global Warming effects manageable. Persistent and prolonged droughts in the American Southwest have been the largest effect so far in the USA.

At long last the goal of “Not One Drop” of oil is being burned to transport people and freight over the nations railroads. All of the main and secondary lines are electrified with battery locomotives for some short spurs.

The good folks at NYC's PlaNYC 2030 sustainability office have just released a series of short powerpoint presentations establishing a baseline on a variety of sustainability metrics and their analysis on future trends.

It paints a somewhat troubling picture of where we are now and where we are headed. Moreover, only some of this is within our own control. Because Global Warming is by definition not locally controlled, NYC might do everything in its power and still face major consequences of rising sea levels along with many other global port cities. In many senses though the point is not that NYC will be the decisive place where carbon reductions are found and the battle is won. Rather it's to show that NYC is doing more part in the fight against global warming and can continue to make great strides in reducing it's contribution. My hope is that NYC can be a shining light in the fight to reduce greenhouse gases, a showcase city proving that reductions in Greenhouse gases are not just possible, but economically efficient and increase quality of life. And when I say NYC, I'm really talking mostly about the infrastructure built in the 19th Century (dense, walkable, mixed use land use) and early 20th Century (extensive mass transit system complete with subways, regional train system and trolleys).

Average weekday subway ridership rose to 5.076 million in September, the highest level since transit officials began making monthly calculations in 1970, New York City Transit said yesterday. It was the first time since 1970 that the average weekday figure passed 5 million on the subway. Combined subway and bus ridership in September was 7.61 million on an average weekday. That was the highest combined figure since December 1970, when it was 7.627 million.

However this is still significantly down from December 23rd 1946 when almost nine million (8,872,244) trips were made on NYC transit subways and buses.

Photograph of crowded L train from lauratitian on Flickr

Liquid transportation fuels are not the only option for transportation. There is a general consensus on The Oil Drum that shifting long and medium distance inter-city freight from heavy trucks to electrified railroads is an essential "silver BB" with an implied expansion of inter-city passenger rail service on these electrified tracks.

This modal transfer trades about 20 BTUs (or joules) of diesel for 1 BTU (joule) of electricity. The massive gain in efficiency makes electrified railroads sustainable if social order can be maintained. The history of railroads in the 1800s shows that oil is not essential for railroad operation and maintenance. Some "doomers" have suggested that "running the railroads" with their essential freight and passenger service may be a key to maintaining social order.

John Dingell, D-Michigan, Ranking Democrat on Energy and Commerce Committee

With the Democrats now back in charge of the US House of Representatives, I thought it would be interesting to review their latest working document on energy and transportation policy. Back in July, a group of House Democrats released their vision of an energy and transportation policy to reduce dependence on oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Leading House Democrats, including Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer (MD), Rep. John Dingell (MI), Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Democrat, Rep. Jim Oberstar, Transportation Committee Ranking Democrat, Rep. Mark Udall (CO), co-chair of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, Rep. Stephanie Herseth (SD), co-chair of the House Democratic Rural Working Group and member of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, member of the House Transportation Committee and Task Force on Livable Communities, and Rep. Adam Schiff, member of the House International Relations Committee and co-chair/co-founder of the Democratic Study Group on National Security, released the following statements today after unveiling a comprehensive energy independence bill entitled the "PROGRESS Act."

So what's inside the Progress Act?

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Roger Bezdek is one of the co-authors of the "Hirsch" reports, AFAIK the only official US Government analysis of what to do about Peak Oil. Below is a link to an interview with Dr. Bezdek with links to his two reports.

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/713

I have reservations about the proposed mitigation strategies (~$5 trillion for coal-to-liquids, oil shale, enhanced oil recovery and better vehicle efficiency) and believe that he has overlooked mitigation via electrified rail.

It's impossible to think of ways of curing our overwhelming addiction to oil and other fossil fuels or significantly cutting our greenhouse gas emissions just through altering the source of our primary energy production. If one truly wants to achieve greater efficiencies and demand reductions, you have to start including two important policy areas: Transportation and Land Use.

We recently discussed New Jersey's Transit Oriented Development projects in local communities - the Transit Village program that encourages mixed use development around mass transit hubs.

Today, Jeff Zupan of the Regional Planning Assocation and Martin Robbins and Scott Weiner of Rutgers University calculate the efficiency difference of workers commuting to suburban office complexes, versus those that commute to downtown business centers. They write about it in today's NY Times opinion section:

A recent Rutgers study documented the energy benefits that derive from commuting to cities by public transit versus commuting by car to suburban work sites. We found that driving to a suburban office campus in Morris County's Parsippany-Troy Hills area consumed 57 percent more energy than taking a train or a bus to downtown Newark. If the substantial job growth predicted over the next two decades was in downtown Newark and similar cities instead of in distant suburbs along highways, New Jersey would see huge energy savings. Nearly 11.5 million gallons of gasoline a year would be saved by increasing the number of jobs in downtown Newark, essentially doubling them, instead of locating them in the suburbs.

This shows that energy, transportation and land use policies are all connected. So, how can we change the path of job creation and development away from the suburbs and closer to denser population and mass transit hubs?