Articles by Andy Brett

The big three automakers, mass transit, and Zipcars

The "big three" have all announced that they will extend their employee discount to all customers through August 1st, making the battle to get people out of cars and using mass transit all the more uphill. The G8 bombings have also steepened the slope.

The move by Ford, Chrysler, and GM highlights one of the disadvantages that proponents of mass transit face regularly though -- the fact that once a person buys a car, there is a large incentive for that person to put many many miles on it. The cost to the owner of the first few miles of driving after buying the car is incredibly high, since the cost per mile is the full cost of the car divided by only a few miles. In order to get the most out of the purchase, and to not feel like a complete idiot, the car has to be driven a pretty significant number of miles. Other overhead costs are present with cars as well, such as insurance and possible parking considerations.

Mass transit has no such overhead. While some systems have monthly or even yearly passes, there is no mode of transport that locks the user in quite like the automobile.

In a lot of ways, though, modes of transportation are changing and getting away from this simple dichotomy. The Zipcar is one way the overhead for cars is being eliminated, collapsing all costs into an hourly rental rate. Zipcar also claims some green benefits: reducing total miles driven by 50 percent and eliminating the need for up to 10 privately owned cars. The reason, according to their website, is that "people have to pay the full cost of using the car each time they drive," and so "they choose to drive only when it makes economic sense." It's only in a few places along the east coast right now but is expanding to fourteen more cities all over the country soon, and is already popular in Europe.

The rise of civilization, part one

I'm watching Guns, Germs and Steel on PBS right now. It started at 10 pm here in Eastern Daylight Time land so if you are located on the other side of the Mississippi and have a free hour coming up I'd recommend it. The way it depicts the interaction of humans and the environment is reminiscent of many topics discussed on this very blog. Even if you've read the book by Jared Diamond or his related work, Collapse, the program is not simply a summary. And I've just been informed that part two will be shown on another night, so I'll have a little more warning than the two minutes I got tonight when I saw a banner ad online at approximately 9:58 ...

The ever-encroaching wireless web

I think it was Tom Friedman who first referred to the web of communications technologies currently encircling the globe as the "Evernet." Always on and always growing, the net has many beneficial effects, especially in developing countries, as The Economist notes and Emergic and WorldChanging elaborate on.

Of course, some side effects advise caution. To paraphrase Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the result looks more like millions of Little Brothers than one Big Brother.

While that may be slightly less scary, I think there's something to be said for leaving some parcels of land not only untouched by development, but untouched by the Evernet. The New York Times ran an editorial this morning about the "Frankenpine," a cell phone tower disguised as a white pine tree in the Adirondacks. Setting any visual blight (or attempts to disguise it) aside, however, the whole point of going into a wilderness area is to be "off the grid" and unable to immediately call someone, even in the case of emergency. A concerted effort needs to be made to prevent this Evernet from reaching into every corner of the world.

Even left unchecked, though, there are some places where the net probably just won't go. And there is always the option of choosing to leave whatever communication device you have at home when you go somewhere. But in the same way that it is exciting to think that you are 50 miles from the nearest passable road, it is exciting to think that it is physically impossible to immediately reach someone or be reached.

The Nature Conservancy and others already focus on the proximity of roads, but the proximity of the Evernet is looming just as large, if not larger, on many wilderness areas.

Thoreau vs. central climate control

It's hot. I am coming to understand that spending the summer outside and below the Mason-Dixon line is slightly less pleasant than spending the summer outside and in the Green Mountains, where I read Walden (not for the first time) last summer (it's a different experience when you read it in the woods).

But the combination of those two experiences has got me thinking. Thoreau talks about the "animal heat" that we all need to maintain if we're going to stay alive. He notes that in warmer weather, we consume less food than in colder weather. Makes sense -- we need less fuel to keep our bodies at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit if the ambient temperature is close to it anyway.

So global warming is good, right?