Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
California: So Many Cars, So Little Money
Maria L. LaGanga and Dan Weikel, LA Times
California’s spending on its crowded, crumbling highway system falls far short of drivers’ needs.
—-
Every dime of California’s $116-billion plan to shore up levees, schools and other eroding facilities could be spent on the state’s overtaxed transportation system.
And it still wouldn’t be enough.
California’s highways, the system’s most costly feature by far, were once the nation’s gold standard. But as the interstate highway network celebrates its 50th anniversary and the summer driving season accelerates, the state is known for something else: some of the busiest, most dilapidated and under-financed roads in the country.
Over the last several years, money for highway projects has virtually disappeared, the victim of budget crises, stagnant federal funding and a gas tax that has not been raised in a decade.
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger posed near Interstate 405 earlier this year, proposing to relieve congestion there as part of a statewide public works blitz, it seemed that, finally, some relief was in sight.
But the state’s transportation system — especially its crumbling highway network — has a long list of unfunded needs with a price tag of at least $140 billion, said Sunne Wright McPeak, secretary of the state Business, Transportation and Housing Agency.
(10 July 2006)
Sidebar: California’s Worst Roads.
Two trends were not mentioned in the article:
- Rising cost of asphalt.
- The questionable merit of investing in a highway system predicated on cheap oil.
-BA
Davis: The Best Bicycle Town in North America
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
Bicycles are tools for urban sustainability. In North America, however, bikes are largely relegated to a recreational role, and people who use them as their main means of transportation often do so at great incovenience and danger
One city, though, has pedaled against the trend. Bicycling Magazine calls Davis the best town in America for cyclists: I’m here to check it out and on the ground it’s hard to argue. Davis is a biker’s nirvana.
This small city of 65,000 people has over 100 miles of bike lanes and bike paths (indeed, some claim that Davis was the first city in North America to create separate bike lanes). Bicycle infrastructure is everywhere – from bike shops to bike maps to artistic bike racks on the sidewalks. Most people here own bikes, and 17% of Davis residents commute to work on them. Davis even has a local Critical Mass group, though as my traveling companion said, CM seems a bit redundant here, as at least in the residential areas it’s hard to find any car traffic from which you could reclaim the streets in the first place.
How did Davis do it, though? The climate and location – hot, flat and dry, with a large population of university students – certainly help. But even more, Davis has made a series of really far-sighted policy and planning decisions which have de-emphasized the car and made biking and walking easier and more attractive.
For one thing, though not a particularly dense city, Davis is fairly compact, with a well-defined downtown that flows into the university campus. (The university bans almost all car traffic). Slow-growth policies and good planning have kept the city relatively tightly woven (though it shows definite signs of sprawl on the fringes). The result is that most destinations within Davis are bike-able, and the surrounding agricultural lands both provide for great recreational riding and act as something of a greenbelt.
Davis has also made bicycling a top transportation priority, putting real funding into bike infrastructure, even building bike overpasses so that cyclists can cross the freeway more safely and easily. The city has an amazing comprehensive bike plan (big PDF) which details the wide variety of innovative ways the city aims to support and promote bicycling. (A more reader-friendly overview of Davis’ efforts is David Takemoto-Weerts’ Evolution of a Bicycle Friendly Community — the Davis Model.)
And the innovations continue, such as the bike signal head:
The most recent Davis innovation that may soon see use in other cities is the bicycle signal head. Modeled after similar devices used in Europe, the bike signal head has been approved by the California Traffic Control Devices Committee for certain specific uses, generally where large volumes of bicycle traffic are encountered. In Davis most of the devices are used to control bike traffic at mid-block bike path crossings of roadways. However, at one particular intersection, a significant interface between the campus and city with over one thousand bike crossings per hour at peak times, the special lights have been employed to provide cyclists with their own separate phase during which only they may cross a busy arterial. Bicycle collision rates at the site have been dramatically reduced since the signals’ installation, and the device shows promise for similar situations where bike traffic volumes warrant their use.”
Bicycles won’t work everywhere, all the time, but they are a key tool in the chest of innovations we’re putting together for building bright green cities, and there’s probably not a city in North America that couldn’t learn something from Davis.
(11 July 2006)
Blacktop cost curbs road work
Jeff Switzer, Herald (W. Washington)
Record-high oil prices are driving the increase, which means the county will have to limit planned paving
—-
The rich smell – and price – of summer blacktop is rising across Snohomish County. The cost for one ton of asphalt is about 23 percent higher than last year, mostly because of record-high crude oil prices.
“The end result is we’re going to be able to pave fewer miles of roads this year,” said Bobann Fogard, a county public works division director. On average, taxpayers are paying nearly $53 a ton this year for summer asphalt paving projects. That’s an increase of more than $10 per ton since last year.
Also known as blacktop, asphalt is a mix of sand, rock and liquid asphalt – the black goo that binds the mix. Last year, liquid asphalt cost about $200 a ton.
Now it’s $350 a ton and heading for $400, said Dax Woolston at the paving firm Lakeside Industries in Issaquah. Liquid asphalt comprises 5 percent of each ton of finished pavement.
Volatile asphalt prices are a national problem, state transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald said. “They’re about double what we were paying last year,” he said. “We’re somewhat in the same position as somebody paying high gas costs, but still needs to use the car.”
(11 July 2006)
We’ve seen a number of articles in local newspapers aboutthe rising cost of asphalt – none of the national media seem to have picked it up. -BA
Fuel costs may benefit Boeing
Airlines could seek to replace fuel-guzzlers with 787s, 747-8s
Bryan Corliss, Herald (Washington state)
Increasing fuel prices will likely push airlines to retire old aircraft sooner, which in turn will push demand for new jets, a Boeing Co. executive said Wednesday.
As a result, Boeing is raising its 20-year market forecast by about 1,400 planes, vice president for commercial jet marketing Randy Baseler said.
…Baseler said rising fuel prices are having a “tremendous impact” on the new aircraft market.
Both Boeing and Airbus had record years with more than 1,000 orders in 2005, and Boeing has sold 488 more this year. That’s “partly an indication of airlines certainly looking for more efficient airplanes,” Baseler said during a conference call from London.
Airlines are being “more aggressive” in retiring older planes, and that leads Boeing to believe they will be more active ordering new ones, he added.
But rising fuel prices are a two-edged sword, Baseler continued. Right now, economists hired by Boeing believe oil prices will eventually fall back to $50 a barrel, down from the nearly $75 they are at now.
If prices get too high, that will slow down economies around the globe, and that will hurt air travel, Baseler said.
(13 July 2006)
How to hack a hybrid
David Kushner, Business 2.0 Magazine via CNN Money
For ‘hybrid hackers’ selling plug-in kits for the Prius, high gas prices add up to a big opportunity.
—-
Rising gas prices and booming sales of the Toyota Prius mean a big opportunity for Pete Nortman. A year and a half ago, the Monrovia, Calif., engineer hacked his Prius by replacing the battery with a lithium-ion version and adding a system that plugs into an ordinary 110-volt socket.
After charging in the garage overnight, the souped-up Prius gets about 100 miles per gallon–roughly twice what a regular Prius gets at best. “This is just the beginning,” Nortman says.
Now EDrive, the startup Nortman co-founded, and Hymotion, a competitor based outside Toronto, are set to turn such tinkering into cash. They’re the first two companies to market PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle) kits for Prius drivers.
The EDrive kit will debut by December with a price of $12,000, installation included.
(13 July 2006)
