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For Bicyclists, a Widening Patchwork World (text and video)
Blaine Harden, Washington Post
U.S. Lags Behind Two-Wheeled Boom
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TACHIA, Taiwan — Antony Lo is one happy biker. He is 60 but looks younger, with a body buffed by commuting 130 miles a week on his bike. He is also president of Taiwan-based Giant, the world’s largest bicycle company, where sales are soaring, helped along by global anxiety over oil prices. With undisguised glee, Lo says: “High-priced gasoline is here to stay. I tell my people we are just at the beginning of a very big cycling boom.”
Boom it is. The number of cyclists has doubled in a decade in cities as disparate as Berlin and Bogota. Global bicycle production has increased for six consecutive years, according to a report by the Earth Policy Institute. Sales at Giant have doubled since 2002 and continue to accelerate, up 24 percent in the first half of this year.
Yet when it comes to using a bike for everyday transportation, the boom appears to have bypassed many countries. While Northern Europe and Japan have figured out how to make bicycle commuting a safe, cheap alternative to driving, the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain have not. And the world’s two most populous nations, China and India, are discarding bicycles in favor of cars. A rising middle class in both countries views cycling as an unhappy reminder of the recent past, when nearly everyone was poor.
(31 August 2008)
Related: Curbing our love of autos to reclaim city streets (Seattle Times)
IATA: Airlines forecast to buckle under £5.2bn of losses over two years
Dan Milmo, Guardian
Airlines will post losses of $9.3bn (£5.2bn) over the next two years as a “toxic combination” of high fuel costs and dwindling demand ravages their finances, the industry’s trade body has warned.
The latest gloomy forecast from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) comes as more airlines are expected to join UK-based Zoom and Silverjet in the bankruptcy courts over the next 18 months.
… “The situation remains bleak. The toxic combination of high oil prices and falling demand continues to poison the industry’s profitability,” said Giovanni Bisignani, IATA director general. Record fuel costs have forced 25 airlines out of business since January, with Zoom the latest to ground its aircraft and disrupt the travel plans of thousands of passengers when it ran out of cash last week.
Further bankruptcies are expected this winter as the industry enters a traditional quiet period after the peak summer season, resulting in drastically reduced cash flows as ticket revenue falls.
(4 September 2008)
An Inside Look at the Boeing Plant at Everett
Byron W. King, Energy and Oil
How big is the Boeing Everett plant? It’s big. Very big. (It’s also big on energy an technology, we’ll get to that in a minute…)
You could fit the Pentagon inside the Boeing Everett plant. It’s the world’s largest building, by volume. There are literally miles of utility tunnels underneath a concrete floor that averages 6-8 feet thick.
The Everett plant is so big that it makes its own weather inside. That is, the heat of the lights and machinery alters the climate inside the vast plant. So Boeing uses fans to push the warm air down to heat the plant floor.
The Everett plant floor space is equal to about 75 regulation football fields. You could put all of Disneyland inside the hangar with about 12 acres left over for parking.
Here is a giant plant where literally millions of things all come together to build some of the most complex machines in the world. This surely says something about the scale of effort involved in doing complex things, whether it’s building large aircraft or energy systems.
When you are building something big and complex, scale matters. Size matters. It takes a lot of skilled people to do things. It takes a lot of organization. It takes a system of systems to manufacture parts and get them to the right place at the right time. And it takes a lot of work, spread out over a lot of ground.
… Broadly speaking, there is plenty that the energy industry could learn from Boeing about building large numbers of immensely complex systems that will have to operate safely and efficiently for many decades.
(3 September 2008)
UK car sales stall to lowest level since 1966
Emma Thelwell, Telegraph
New car sales have plunged to the lowest level since 1966, as Britons slammed the brakes on making major purchases last month.
… [Paul Everitt, chief executive of SMMT] expects the number of new registrations to fall a further 10pc by the end of the year. He said that forecasts suggest a low point will hit the market at the beginning of the new year, before any modest recovery is achieved.
He added: “Industry is encouraged by the growing interest in lower carbon cars, but is concerned by the reluctance of consumers to commit to major purchases. There is a clear need for sustained action by the Government to boost the economy.”
(4 September 2008)
Driven: Shai Agassi’s Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road
Daniel Roth, Wired
… At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee [at a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy]. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world’s largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he’s SAP’s head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO. But he’s not here this morning to talk about business software. Instead, his topic will be the world’s addiction to fossil fuels. It’s a recent passion and the organizers invited him to counterbalance the man speaking now, Daniel Yergin, the famed energy consultant and oil industry analyst. Yergin gives them his latest thinking: Energy independence is unattainable. Oil consumption will continue to rise. Iran will get richer. It’s not exactly what this audience wants to hear.
Now it’s Agassi’s turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He’s got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future-and possibly the world’s.
… The problem, he decided, was oil-consuming, CO2-spewing cars. The solution was to get rid of them. Not just some, and not just by substituting hybrids or flex fuels. No half measures. The internal combustion engine had to be retired. The future was in electric cars.
This was hardly an original insight; electric cars had been the future for over 100 years. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Electric Vehicle Company was the largest automaker in the US, with dealers from Paris to Mexico City. But oil, in the end, supplanted volts on American highways because of one perennial problem: batteries. Car batteries, then and now, are heavy and expensive, don’t last long, and take forever to recharge. In five minutes you can fill a car with enough gas to go 300 miles, but five minutes of charging at home gets you only about 8 miles in an electric car. Clever tricks, like adding “range extenders”-gas engines that kick in when a battery dies-end up making the cars too expensive.
… Crazy. That’s what people say when they first realize the scope of Agassi’s project. He’s tilting at electric windmills, fighting a fight that has undone countless well-funded, well-intentioned entrepreneurs before him. In a time when Silicon Valley is all about small-scalable startups like Flickr, Tumblr, and hundreds of other vowel-deprived minicompanies-Agassi is thinking big. Google, Ford, and Exxon Mobil big. His brother tells me that Better Place is going to become one of the biggest companies in the world. When I ask Shai if he’s worried about a competitor stealing his idea, he stares at me like I’m an idiot. “The mission is to end oil,” he says, “not create a company.”
… Agassi, in a black leather jacket, a stiff blue-and-white button-down, and faded jeans, stops the moderator. “We still think we’re selling to them,” he says, after one of his long, drawn-out pauses. “We’re not. It’s not us to them. It’s them to us. You see, people want this to happen; we just happen to be in the way of their getting what they want. We can’t give them the car fast enough. That’s something we need to capture: ‘We’re here to serve you,’ not ‘We’re here to sell to you.’ We’re a facilitator, not the creator. This is going to be a community. We just need to get out of their way. They’re going to push for policy, they’re going to sell the cars, they’re going to be zealots.”
I start thinking about the people he has already hooked: mayors, CEOs, investors, statesmen, even car dealers. At one point, Tal had marveled to me about Shai’s ability to convince you that the answers to the most challenging problems are easy and obvious. “He tells you the story, and it sounds so simple. Why don’t we have it today? Why isn’t it here already?”
It’s true. Shai Agassi has only one car, no charging stations, and not a single customer-yet everyone who meets him already believes he can see the future.
(18 August 2008)
