143. ALTERNATIVES TO CARS AND AIRPLANES
The vast majority of journeys are less than 400 miles; in fact most journeys are less than 5. In Britain, for example, 72% of car journeys are less than 5 miles, where cycling, buses or battery cars could replace journeys. Better still 50% are less than 2 miles where walking and cycling could replace virtually all journeys – indeed this is the reason why cars are a wasteful form of transport, they promote laziness!Source
And weight gain, costing health authorities billions.Source
Most other journeys are intercity journeys and for all but the ones that are over 400 miles or over large bodies of water, high speed rail (with speeds up to 220mph for conventional rail and 300mph for maglev) is a perfectly good replacement for the car and airline in many cases. Indeed time is money. The time savings between city centres and the ability to work while travelling (with access to internet wi-fi) is a powerful draw in Europe and Japan. Power can be taken from hydro, nuclear (the norm in France) and even renewable sources, bypassing the need for liquid oil transport.
High speed lines have very little difference in construction to highways - apart from they take less space. Typical maximum gradients are 1 in 28 (3.5%). France, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Italy, The Netherlands, UK, Korea, Spain and China have already built lines. Spanish railways refund your ticket if their AVE high speed train is more than 5 minutes late, but then 99.82% arrived on time in 2000. Source
-- by Wildwell
posted by JD @ 4:34 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
This is the future. Nuclear power and high speed rail.
And yet funding for Amtrak gets cut. Go figure!
Also, cars will probably not be made totally extinct. Rural areas often have few options to get around. Relocalization in rural settings may help to shorten the distances.
Urban areas should incorporate all available measures to discourage auto use, from carrots (increased light rail lines, tax breaks for non-ownership of private autos) to sticks (heavy tolls to drive into city centres like London has, surcharges for cars that get under 30 MPG average, etc)
These technologies are ideal alternatives to the car, which could greatly mitigate the effects of PO.
A greatly misunderstood concept in the doomer camp is that a techno-fix involves waiting for some Star Trek style of technology to come around – and hence the doomers consider technology solving anything to be highly unlikely. The truth is that there are plenty of techno-fix’s that we could implement right now, such as high-tech rail and nuclear power.
Technology can solve peak oil.
I think doomers also make circular arguments, whenever you present alterantive Y, they present consequence X (eg: people in car industry losing their jobs), as if we are trying to say everything will 100% sure be dandy and no one will experience any problems.
People lose their jobs, it happens, recessions and even depressions come and go, it does not mean the end of the world (infact, unless I understand economics very badly, a depression would severely diminish the effects of peak oil due to high unemployment and give the government a perfect time to do something about it)
I am a tentative doomer, spar with me.
Say we go all for high speed rail and absolutely minimize cars, make them as efficient as possible etc. We build nuclear plants and get wind and solar and everything together, and quickly all before said peak whenever it may arrive.
As hydrocarbon supply diminishes beginning in whatever decade, how are these technologies maintained, all of which required massive amounts of hydrocarbon power to produce. The train needs a new drive system (or whatever it has), the nuclear plant needs reactor repairs, a new roof, more and more uranium, all of which technologies have again required massive hydrocarbon power input to produce--where is the new power going to come from? Are we factoring in the full amount of hydrocarbon input for these technologies in insuring their ability to sustain themselves once the hydrocarbon supply is gone, whenever that may be?
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