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The road fix
Jonathan Leake, New Statesman
Why do we keep building more roads? Because when it comes to planning, the deck is cynically stacked in favour of the road builders – and against the environment.
Britain’s environmentalists have won every argument against expanding the roads network – but still the government keeps pouring billions of pounds into new highways.
Studies show that new roads do not solve congestion – they just generate more traffic. They add to pollution and, of course, they raise Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions. Road transport already generates 142m tonnes of CO2 a year – about 25 per cent of Britain’s total. As the European emissions trading scheme puts an ever-higher price on carbon, those emissions could cost the taxpayer increasingly dearly.
The Treasury and Department for Transport know this, so why do their economists give their blessing to Labour’s £13bn roads programme?
The answer lies far away from public scrutiny in the arcane and biased rules under which proposed roads are assessed. These New Approach to Appraisal (Nata) rules were introduced by La bour in 1998 under the integrated transport policy designed by John Prescott, then overseeing environment and transport. Most of Prescott’s plans were chucked out by Blair and Brown as being far too green, but the Department for Transport (DfT) loved Nata and now the reasons are becoming clear.
Under Nata, road builders such as the Highways Agency and local authorities must submit detailed assessments of proposed transport projects to the government. These are meant to be balance sheets showing the costs, benefits and environmental impacts. In theory this is a good thing, but in reality the rules are designed to make road schemes look better than any greener alternative, every time.
Take section 3.5.1[1] of the Nata rules. This awards extra points to schemes that generate more traffic because more cars and lorries on the road mean more fuel sales – and hence more tax revenue for the government. By contrast, public transport schemes, which take motor vehicles off the road and so reduce fuel sales and tax revenue, have points deducted.
Then there’s the rule on journey times, where planners can claim that a road will bring economic benefits if they can show it will cut the average journey time of each user. Every minute saved for a car driver is valued at 44p – which can be offset against the cost of building the road.
Forty-four pence may not sound much, but multiply it by the number of minutes saved per trip, then again by the millions of drivers using the road each year – and then yet again by 60 years, the notional lifetime of most road schemes. The result, invariably, is a huge positive value for every proposed road. ..
(9 Aug 2007)
Contributor Norman Church writes:
Another excellent article on how governments move the goal posts and use spin to deceive us.
Tunnel vision clouds freeway link
Brian Buckley, The Age
SPENDING $10 billion on a tunnel linking the Eastern and Tullamarine freeways ( may be economic in a decade or two but it is not a high priority now.
The first reason is that fewer than 5 per cent of the trucks on the Eastern Freeway proceed to the Tullamarine Freeway. The second reason is that fewer than 10 per cent of the total Eastern Freeway traffic ends up on the Tullamarine Freeway. Most of the trucks, vans, buses and cars go to the CBD and its nearby suburbs.
A third consideration is that there are great savings possible in cost and congestion reductions in more efficient use of trucks. ..
A fourth factor arguing against the $10 billion tunnel is that road transport is not accurately costed by governments. Cabinets and their advisers rarely consider the hidden subsidies (such as the fringe benefits tax concession for cars), the opportunity costs (as in devoting 33 per cent of a metropolitan area to roads and parking), and the external costs (such as illness, injuries), or the large overall operational costs. ..
Brian Buckley is a public affairs consultant specialising in factors distorting markets.
(10 Aug 2007)
Have you driven a Fjord lately?
Todd Woody, CNN
.. Did someone kill the electric car? You wouldn’t know it on this bright May morning in Scandinavia, where the idea of a mass-produced battery-powered vehicle is being resurrected and actual cars are scheduled to begin rolling off the production line by year’s end. ..
Think’s factory in the rural town of Aurskog is more reminiscent of Ikea than of Henry Ford, with its louvered wood exterior, bright open spaces, and shiny surfaces. There’s nary a drop of oil or smudge of grease on the factory floor. This is an assembly plant, and the company puts together the Think City much the way a child builds a model car.
“It’s a rather low investment,” says Think managing director Ole Fretheim. “We can put up new factories quite easily.”
He points to the black steel chassis of a City standing on a nearby pallet; it’s shipped preassembled from Thailand. At one station, workers attach the car’s aluminum frame — made in Denmark — and drop in a French motor. At another station, prefabricated rust-and dent-resistant polymer-plastic body panels produced in Turkey are hung on the frame of a nearly completed car.
The modular design means that Think can change body styles — a prototype of a sporty convertible is parked in one corner of the factory — without major retooling. It also means that Think can set up shop near its primary markets so it doesn’t have to export the finished cars. ..
Think plans to sell the car but lease the battery as a way to overcome one of the biggest conundrums of electric cars. The battery is by far the most expensive component of the City, which will list for about $34,000 in Norway. Take the battery out of the equation, and Willums says he can sell the car for about $15,000 to $17,000 in the United States, with a “mobility fee” of $100 to $200 a month that might also include services like insurance and wireless Internet access. ..
(31 July 2007)
Aviation and Oil Depletion
Christopher Smith, The Oil Drum: Europe
TOD editor Euan Mearns:
This is a guest post by Christopher Smith who is a Captain with the airline BA Connect. It was first published in December 2006, the discussion generated then can be read here. The post is based on a presentation (pdf) made to the oil depletion conference held in London last year.
Aviation is one of the fastest growing industry sectors in the world, growing at 2.4 times the rate of world GDP. The industry consumes over 5 million barrels of oil per day worldwide, almost one tenth of all the oil used for transportation. In the UK, according to the Department for Transport, the UK aviation industry is growing at approximately 5% per year while its fuel consumption is growing at 3% per year.
Carbon dioxide emissions from aviation vary directly with kerosene consumption. The resulting CO2 from UK aviation accounted for 5% of the national total in 2003. The UK Environmental Audit Committee forecasts the value will be 10 to 12% in 2020 and could rise to 40% by 2050 if not checked. The unconstrained growth of aviation CO2 emissions is incompatible with the UK government’s target to reduce national CO2 levels to 40% of the 1990 level by 2050.
In this discussion we will look at issues specific to jet aircraft fuel. Jet fuel has several unique requirements that complicate the search for a replacement. Next we will examine the possible alternatives and weigh their pros and cons. Finally we will look at what the airline industry is doing today with the fuel it has available.
…The Aviation Energy Trend [Conclusions]
There is currently no alternative to the use of kerosene in aircraft engines. The hydrogen economy is still decades away and it will be decades after that before the majority of long haul transport aircraft are hydrogen powered. By that time there is likely to be serious supply problems with petroleum kerosene and fuel efficiency and fuel conservation strategies will continue to dominate airline fuel policy. These efficiency strategies are currently driven by high fuel costs but in the very near future these costs will be compounded by the cost of the fuel’s associated greenhouse gas emissions. The switch from petroleum to synthetic kerosene will be driven by availability and price. The lower switching costs in other industries may help aviation avoid a kerosene supply crisis but is unlikely to mitigate the rising cost. The increasing cost of fuel and associated emissions may mean some of today’s flying will no longer be viable. A lot of short haul point to point flying could be pushed onto alternative transport systems that are better able to switch to cleaner fuels
Hydrogen powered aircraft in particular offer little hope until there is a world wide supply in a mature hydrogen economy. Global warming emissions will continue to be a problem whichever fuel is being used. Even ultra clean hydrogen has global warming issues and we can expect that aviation will eventually be called upon to account for all its climate change effects, not just carbon dioxide. The cost of switching to non kerosene fuels is extremely high. The aviation industry is likely to accept very high fuel costs before any wholesale switch to an alternative.
(9 August 2007)
