cars

Our culture of overcompensation

Mark Morford:

Bottom line: You can hope for the big shifts. You can hope for some sort of grand awakening, some sort of removal of the tumor and a relief from the pain of excess waste and abuse and happy ignorance.

But, of course, what you get instead is, well, a nice drive to the megamall in a shiny 2008 Escalade for a couple of aspirin and some compact fluorescent lightbulbs and a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth" on DVD. Ain't that America.

More excerpts beneath the fold.

Big Applers breathe easy

Starting in 2008, every new yellow taxi purchased by the city of New York will be a hybrid vehicle, according to an announcement yesterday by Mayor Bloomberg. By 2012, the entire fleet -- some 13,000 cabs -- will have been replaced with a mixture of Toyota Priuses, Highlander Hybrids, Lexus RX 400h's, and Ford Escapes.

Thirteen thousand may sound like a drop in the ocean, given that 232 million cars are currently registered in the U.S. alone. Still, cabs are a great target for greening, both because of their high public profile and because of their disproportionately large carbon expenditure. New York City never sleeps, and neither do its taxis, ever spewing their emissions, even while they mostly idle in traffic.

Bloomberg certainly is the consummate businessman, as you can see in this Today Show clip -- adept at rubbing shoulders with corporate execs from Yahoo!(which donated 10 hybrid vehicles to one of the major cab fleet operators) to the American Lung Association. One gets rolling advertisements, the other gets less asthma ... and we all get slightly cleaner Big Apple air.

Three wheels, 40 mph top speed, and 20-mile range I can live with …

… but zebra stripes?!

Do gas prices affect behavior or not?

Despite record-setting gas prices, U.S. drivers haven't changed their gas-guzzling habits, says AP. Not only are we consuming as much as we always have, new vehicle sales seem to be tilting even more in favor of trucks than cars.

But wait, USA Today disagrees. They say that drivers are, in fact, starting to cut back on how much they drive -- a clear sign that higher gas prices are starting to bite.

Who's right? Who cares! Either way, the consumer response to massive increases in gas prices over the last five years has been teensy-tiny.

A123 introduces new battery

From the Energy Blog:

A123 Systems today introduced its 32-series Nanophosphate^TM Lithium Ion cells, specifically designed for Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) use.

The 32-series cells are designed with abuse-tolerance in mind. A123 Systems Automotive Class cells take advantage of lessons learned from the mass-production of ANR26650M1 cells, used in DeWalt's and Black & Decker's power tool lines, in order to deliver 10+ year and 150,000 mile projected life requirements in engineered automotive battery packs. The cells have shown minimal power degradation and impedance growth after 300,000 cycles. The battery is able to operate at a temperature range of -20 F to 140 F (-29 C to 60 C).

Personally, if I owned a plug-in hybrid that could go thirty miles on a charge, I would fill my tank about twice a year.

From the guy who wrote the book on the GM EV1, literally

Michael Shnayerson, who literally wrote the book on the ill-fated GM EV1, has an excellent piece in last month's Vanity Fair about the Tesla Roadster.

Quoting is redundant -- the whole article is fun and packed with attention to personal detail. Eventually, someone is going to have to write a biography of Alan Cocconi, who seems to be at the center of all the electric car efforts of the last quarter-century or so.

Critical Mass Seattle style

I participated in my first Critical Mass ride a few Fridays ago. I thought I'd better post on it and get this photo out of my cell phone. Can you spot the guy with no pants on?

There was also a dude with a drum on his handlebars and someone else with a nice sound system on a trailer. I'm guessing that there were about 300 riders.

What if city hall had to disclose its assumptions like Wall Street does?

For those unaware, Michigan has been hard hit by the increasingly insistent intrusion of an unpleasant reality (that the era of cheap energy is over). Detroit and Wayne County are especially hard hit, as the economic malady destroying the auto industry hit a city already weakened to the point of collapse by stark racial segregation and disinvestment.

What Michigan likes to do is imagine that "big projects" will save it, so it tends to build enormous temples to optimism, much in the same way the pharaohs built the pyramids as monuments to themselves: "I may pass on, but my mighty empire will last forever," the pyramids say.

Well, in this country, not so much. Instead, you just get big tombs and sad little stabs at pouring big rivers of public money down leaky drains, hoping that somehow it will stick around long enough to fertilize some growth in the ruined soil.

The latest fantasy in Southeast Michigan is "Aerotropolis," a gigantic industrial park centered on, you guessed it, the airport, because we all know that every day, in every way, flying's getting better and better.

Sterling writer and columnist Jack Lessenberry wrote an article about the scheme here, which caused me to realize that one of the biggest reasons we have a hard time finding the capital needed to build a sustainable infrastructure in this country is that we squander it all on the kinds of investments that are:

• killing us, and
• clearly stupid at the time, no hindsight needed.

Hmmm, I thought -- when Wall Street wants to issue a new stock, they have to put out a prospectus that warns the rubes about the key assumptions made and the vulnerabilities of the company being touted. Like when they want to sell stock in a company whose profits all depend on cheap energy, they have to include some warnings about that dependence in the prospectus.

There’s more to freedom than free parking

I keep seeing the phrase "social engineering" used to describe policies that don't kowtow to the car. See, for example, this inexplicable subhead about a third of the way through this Seattle newspaper story. Not only is this usage annoying, it's exactly backward (as others have noted before me).

First, let's look first at specifics. The paper reports that the city will put parking meters on some formerly-free spots in a rapidly urbanizing district near downtown Seattle. The newspaper calls this "social engineering."

I suppose that's right, at least to the extent that parking meters alter the incentive structure for parking, which ultimately may change some people's behavior. But if anything, the alternative to the city's plan -- continuing to provide public rights-of-way for exclusive, uncompensated use by a handful of private car owners -- is closer to "social engineering" than charging a small fee for the privilege. Really, the question is not whether the city will engage in "social engineering," but what kind of social engineering. And in particular, will government continue to use public resources to subsidize private cars?

Speaking more generally, just about any transportation policy -- or any policy at all, for that matter -- can be described as "social engineering." And using that inflammatory language is a game anyone can play. Consider some (slightly) overheated rhetoric: today's car-centric system is the result of Soviet-style social engineering.

Governments used the awesome power of the state to take money from the populace. Then central planners used the money with an ethic of brutalism, forcing gigantic car thoroughfares across neighborhoods, into the hearts of cities, and then out into far-flung farmlands and wild places.

In town, America's Soviet-style planning wasn't much different.