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While futuristic and unlikely to occur anytime soon, the following article outlines an interesting alternative method of transportation.

CNN 10/13/2008
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/10/13/podcar.city.ap/index.html

ITHACA, New York (AP) -- The thought of a driverless, computer-guided car transporting people where they want to go on demand is a futuristic notion to some.

Computer-guided electric podcars like these carry small groups of people on their own networks.

To Jacob Roberts, podcars -- or PRTs, for personal rapid transit -- represent an important component in the here-and-now of transportation.
"It's time we design cities for the human, not for the automobile," said Roberts, president of Connect Ithaca, a group of planning and building professionals, activists and students committed to making this upstate New York college town the first podcar community in the United States.
"In the podcar ... it creates the perfect blend between the privacy and autonomy of the automobile with the public transportation aspect and, of course, it uses clean energy," Roberts said.
With the oil crisis reaching a zenith and federal lawmakers ready to begin fashioning a new national transportation bill for 2010, Roberts and his colleagues think the future is now for podcars -- electric, automated, lightweight vehicles that ride on their own network separate from other traffic.
Unlike mass transit, podcars carry two to 10 passengers, giving travelers the freedom and privacy of their own car while reducing the use of fossil fuels, reducing traffic congestion and freeing up space now monopolized by parking.
At stations located every block or every half-mile, depending on the need, a rider enters a destination on a computerized pad, and a car would take the person nonstop to the location. Stations would have slanted pull-in bays so that some cars could stop for passengers, while others could continue unimpeded on the main course.
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"It works almost like an elevator, but horizontally," said Roberts, adding podcar travel would be safer than automobile travel.
The podcar is not entirely new. A limited version with larger cars carrying up to 15 passengers was built in 1975 in Morgantown, West Virginia, and still transports West Virginia University students.
Next year, Heathrow Airport outside London will unveil a pilot podcar system to ferry air travelers on the ground. Companies in Sweden, Poland and Korea are already operating full-scale test tracks to demonstrate the feasibility. Designers are planning a podcar network for Masdar City, outside Abu Dhabi, which is being built as the world's first zero-carbon, zero-waste city.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen cities in Sweden are planning podcar systems as part of the country's commitment to be fossil-fuel-free by 2020, said Hans Lindqvist, a councilman from Varmdo, Sweden, and chairman of Kompass, an association of groups and municipalities behind the Swedish initiative.
"Today's transportation system is reaching a dead end," said Lindqvist, a former member of the European parliament.
Cars have dominated the cityscape for nearly a century, taking up valuable space while polluting the air, said Magnus Hunhammar, chief executive officer of the Stockholm-based Institute for Sustainable Transportation, the world's leading center on podcar technology.
"Something has to change," he said. "We aren't talking about replacing the automobile entirely. We are adding something else into the transportation strategy."
Skeptics, however, question whether podcars can ever be more than a novelty mode of transportation, suitable only for limited-area operations, such as airports, colleges and corporate campuses. Detractors, mainly light-rail advocates, say a podcar system would be too complex and expensive.
"It is operationally and economically unfeasible," said Vukan Vuchic, a professor of transportation and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania who has written several books on urban transportation.
"In the city, if you have that much demand, you could build these guideways and afford the millions it would take, but you wouldn't have capacity. In the suburbs, you would have capacity, but the demand would be so thin you couldn't possibly pay for those guideways, elevated stations, control systems and everything else," Vuchic said.
Podcars typically run on an elevated guideway or rails, but they also can run at street level. As a starting point, pilot podcar networks can be built along existing infrastructure, supporters say.
Ithaca Mayor Carol Peterson said a podcar network could be part of her upstate city's long-range transportation plans and its mission of developing urban neighborhoods that are environmentally sustainable and pedestrian-friendly. Ithaca has a long history of progressive achievements -- this summer, it began the first community-wide car sharing program in upstate New York.
In Ithaca, a network could connect the downtown business district and main business boulevard with the campuses of Cornell University and Ithaca College, which sit on hillsides flanking the city. When the two colleges are in session, Ithaca's population balloons from about 30,000 to about 80,000, causing big-city congestion on the city's roads.
Santa Cruz, California, recently hired a contractor to design a small solar-powered podcar system that would loop through the city's downtown and along its beach front.
The Institute for Sustainable Transportation predicts a podcar system will be installed in an American city within the next five years, although it is likely to cost tens of millions of dollars. Because of the huge initial investment, funding would have to come from both public and private sectors, IST officials said.
The capital cost is about $25 million to $40 million per mile, which includes guideways, vehicles and stations, compared with $100 million to $300 million a mile for light-rail or subway systems, according to the IST.
Although the plan for Ithaca is only in the conceptual stages, Roberts sees the city as a logical place for the country's first community-wide podcar network, noting that construction of the Erie Canal across upstate New York in the early 1800s revolutionized commercial transportation in a young America.
"Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany are connected along a single line, the Erie Canal. Now, they are connected by the (New York State) Thruway. It would be easy to adapt. You could have a high-speed rail line, or even buses, deliver travelers to the podcar stations, and the podcars take them wherever they want to go in the city," he said.
But podcar developers say they have overcome most technological obstacles and now must overcome the political and cultural barriers that lie ahead, equating it to the mind-set revolution that occurred when Americans hitched up their horses for good to become a nation of motorists.
"We are introducing an alternative to the automobile for the first time in 100 years," said Christopher Perkins, chief executive officer of Unimodal Transport Solutions, a California company that builds podcars that operate on magnetic levitation instead of wheels.
"But if you look back 100 years, you saw that we made the transition from the horse to the car. I think we are ready to make another transition," he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/10/13/podcar.city.ap/index.html

Labels: efficiency

Here is an interesting article about why economic incentives are needed for both consumers and producers.

Read the article here.

Labels: economy, efficiency

The article below appeared today in the Wall Street Journal, and is right on the mark in regards to the vehicle miles driven issue and its ramifications and causes...


Next Car Debate: Total Miles DrivenFebruary 5, 2008
WSJ – Joseph White
I lead a double life.
Monday through Wednesday, I get to work by walking a block and a half from a high-rise apartment building to a stop on Washington, D.C.'s Metro subway. I emerge three stops later a half block from my office. My commute is pretty close to a zero petroleum experience (never mind how the Metro gets its electricity.)
The rest of the week, I am back in Detroit, where I return to the 20th century. I drive about 20 miles to my office, which is located by the side of a freeway in a suburban "edge city." I sometimes walk to a sub shop for lunch, but it's an arduous slog along busy four lane streets that sometimes have sidewalks, and sometimes don't. To get just about anywhere from my office requires another car trip.
It turns out I am straddling the frontier of the next big debate over the role of the automobile in America. Congress and President Bush late last year agreed to order car makers to boost the average fuel efficiency of new vehicles to 35 miles per gallon by 2020.
Last year's energy debate centered around CAFE, the acronym for Corporate Average Fuel Economy. The next phase of the energy/climate change debate over cars will force us to learn another piece of technical jargon: VMT, or vehicle miles traveled.
Car makers and consumers will bear considerable costs to switch to a fleet of cars that meets the 35 mgp CAFE goal. But that might not result in a significant reduction in U.S. petroleum consumption or cut the CO2 we add to the atmosphere if we keep driving more and more miles.
From 1977 to 2001, the number of miles driven every year by Americans rose by 151% -- about five times faster than the growth in population, according to data compiled for a 2006 report to the U.S. Department of Transportation written by Stephen Polzin, a transportation researcher at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The reasons for the big growth in miles traveled are pretty obvious if you don't live in the center of a big city endowed with functioning public transport. To make space for ever larger suburban homes, housing developers pushed further and further from city centers and shopping areas. New neighborhoods often had street layouts cluttered with cul de sacs that forced people to drive farther to get to main roads or stores. Local zoning laws -- reflecting the preferences of residents -- tended to separate commercial and residential uses, and single family from multi-family dwellings.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the money spent on transportation infrastructure was directed to building more and bigger highways. We could have subsidized bullet trains and more light rail systems, but we didn't.
Now, many of the environmentalists, politicians and scientists who made the case for boosting vehicle fuel efficiency are turning their attention to the problem of how much we drive -- and the legacy of 20th century land use and transportation choices.
Just how much more driving Americans will do is a matter of some debate. Higher gas prices, changes in demographics, and a recent upturn in urban redevelopment aimed at luring empty nesters back to city neighborhoods all could result in vehicle miles traveled growing more slowly in the future than it did during the past 30 or so years.
Still, the U.S. Department of Energy projects that miles driven will keep increasing in coming years, and by 2030 could grow by 59% compared with 2005 levels -- still outpacing population growth, though not by as much in the last three decades of the past century. That means even though we'll be driving vehicles that slurp less petroleum per mile, carbon dioxide emissions could grow by as much as 41%, according to a report titled "Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change," published by the Urban Land Institute.
Deron Lovaas, a transportation researcher with the Natural Resources Defense Council, predicts that the debate over how to curb driving will come to the fore next year, when Congress is scheduled to debate a massive bill to fund transportation projects using federal gasoline tax revenue. The NRDC and other environmental groups, fresh from their victory in the fuel-efficiency debate, are turning their attention to issues such as reforming land use rules to promote denser development and concentrating more public spending on better mass transit systems for metro areas, he says.
Meanwhile, the Energy Department, in response to a 2005 congressional mandate, has enlisted an arm of the National Academy of Sciences to study how travel behavior will change as people live in communities that are designed to have different services closer to their homes, and more homes closer together.
How all this will affect the experience of driving and what we want to drive is a problem that's starting to keep executives of big car companies up at night. If you live the way I do in Washington, you don't really need a $35,000, all-wheel drive luxury wagon. On the other hand, the challenge of dictating to Americans where and how they should live is a problem that will likely keep politicians up at night. There's a reason why so many of us live in big single-family houses, and it's not because living in a small apartment wasn't available as an alternative.As for me, I think it's time for a pair of new shoes.

Labels: efficiency, energy policy

A recent article on the front page of the New York Times makes some excellent points regarding the proposed increase in CAFE standards sought by the energy bill currently under consideration by congress. Some key excerpts:

“Gas mileage would go up under the compromise reached by Congressional leaders last week, but not as high as the trumpeted numbers. And despite the tougher 35 m.p.g. standard, a growing population of drivers would push up total fuel use, as well as greenhouse gas emissions — but not as rapidly as would occur without the legislation. Those are some of the conclusions of auto policy experts, who were still struggling on Monday to determine exactly what the proposal would do…”

“The fleet average for vehicles in the 2020 model year would be set at 35 miles per gallon, versus about 25 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks today. Both numbers, though, come with a familiar caveat: actual mileage may vary. In fact, the actual performance falls short of the current standard by about 20 percent, as would be true as well of the higher standard if the proposal becomes law.”

“Even if the bill becomes law, the fuel-economy improvement that it calls for will probably not be great enough to prevent some increase in American fuel consumption because of the expected growth in the number of cars on the road and miles traveled. In 2020, the combined total of gasoline and ethanol use would be slightly higher than it is today, according to David Friedman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, on whose calculations the Democratic leaders relied.”

Clearly every option for efficiency must be evaluated for the ACTUAL affect it will have on consumption in order to sort out the best policy options. While estimates are just that, we must be careful to stick to the facts when analyzing each option.

Labels: CAFE standards, efficiency, energy policy