Tag Archives: transportation

August 2019 in Review

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My work-life balance situation continues to not favor a lot of blog posts. Or is it work-life-family balance? Or is family part of life? Yes, I guess so. Anyway, what there is not a lot of time for is personal leisure activities like reading, writing, and thinking. Not that I don’t enjoy reading Green Eggs and Ham for the 50th time. I do. Anyway, here are a few highlights of the slim pickings that constituted this blog in August 2019. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
Most hopeful story:
  • I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

hydrogen as a jet fuel

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I was curious if aircraft could be fueled feasibly by hydrogen in the future. Okay, I know this has been tried in the past – “Oh, the humanity!” – but, there must be advances in technology since then. 10 minutes of research reveals that battery-powered aircraft are now a going concern, although they tend to be unmanned or at least small. Current fuel cell technology sounds like it has pretty similar limits to batteries. On a larger scale, there is serious research on the potential of liquid hydrogen as a commercial aviation fuel. It sounds feasible but would require major changes in long-lived infrastructure systems around the world. But let’s say you happened to have lots of electricity and water in abundance. Maybe you are in a coastal location and have invested in nuclear power, or you just happen to have lots of geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever kind of power. You have also invested in desalination and you have created a major transportation hub. You might then be in a position to create liquid hydrogen and/or fuel cells at a cost-effective price. This could be climate friendly as burning hydrogen, in theory at least, creates only water vapor as a product, and fusing hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen creates the same – liquid water or water vapor. Hydrogen is dangerous, but so is jet fuel and so are the materials in modern batteries, so hopefully technology will eventually come to our aid and get the risk and environmental impact down to a similar or lower level than these other options.

hydrogen fuel cell buses

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The transportation agency serving the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is using fuel cell-powered buses and planning to produce and store its own hydrogen supply.

The cost of acquiring the two new buses, a fueling station and fuel storage equipment will be about $3.5 million, of which $1.5 million will be covered by federal grants…

MTD plans to produce the hydrogen for its fuel-cell buses itself. It could use solar power, wind turbines or, if need be, gas from the local landfill to separate the hydrogen from oxygen in water molecules for the buses.
The transit agency will soon be accepting bids for the equipment it will use for that conversion. It plans to add a total of 12 hydrogen fuel-cell buses by 2023, or about one-tenth of its fleet. By that time, the rest of its buses will be diesel-electric hybrids.

I’ve always thought that nuclear power, fuel cells, and membranes for water treatment would go together pretty well for a coastal city. You could size the nuclear reactor for peak demand, then use the excess energy to desalinate and electrolyze sea water whenever you are not at peak demand, storing the hydrogen to use in transportation vehicles and any other applications where you need decentralized or off-the-grid energy. You can use the membrane technology to produce drinking water and water for industry, either from seawater or treated sewage. I think you could substitute LNG for the hydrogen in this system if you need to for some reason, for example if the nuclear reactor were down for maintenance. You would have that occasional pesky problem of nuclear waste to deal with, but I am gradually coming around to the idea that managing the risks of nuclear reactors and nuclear waste may be preferable to the certainty of destroying the planet’s ecosystems and oceans. Inventing fusion power would be nice.

heavy water

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This article in TreeHugger suggests that one simple solution is not to ship so much water around as part of consumer products. It makes sense. Even if the water were added locally, say at the Amazon neighborhood distribution center, it could save a lot of weight and expense. Maybe local water utilities could get in on the game somehow, and at a minimum you would be using local water rather than transferring large amounts of water from one place to another without realizing it.

when do people travel

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Here’s an interesting article in Wired (sadly, my last free one of the month – Wired is one of the few magazines I might actually consider subscribing to) about an analysis of transportation data in L.A. What’s different about it is that they used cell phone data to understand not just longer commutes and trips to and from school, but also all the short trips people take near home for errands, chores and quick shopping. A conclusion is that public transportation, at least in L.A., is much slower and less convenient for these. It makes sense. In my neighborhood, in Philadelphia, these are going to be 95% walking trips, because there is only street parking on both ends, and giving up your spot on the street would not be worth it, not to mention making your trip slow and inconvenient. So free parking on both ends is a big contributor to this, and free parking obviously requires a lot of land, and once you devote all that land to free parking, your neighborhood is no longer walkable and you can’t go back.

Costa Rica

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Costa Rica is planning to go carbon free by 2050. The trick is that most of their electricity is already hydroelectric, so what is left is to electrify their transportation system and then use that electricity to run it. This exact recipe won’t work everywhere, but the lesson is that electrifying opens up options for how to generate that electricity down the road.

Philadelphia to Pittsburgh hyperloop

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The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission is apparently studying the idea of a hyperloop that could theoretically make the trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in half an hour. Initially they are looking just at freight. The larger context is that the Pennsylvania Turnpike has the right of way, is not doing well financially, charging trucks to carry freight is the core of their business, and they are worried about some killer app coming along. Good for somebody at a dinosaur organization like this to have a little bit of vision and actually get a real study funded.

Of course, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are not really connected in a socioeconomic sense other than being part of an anachronistic and mostly irrelevant political entity. Philadelphia is part of the Boston to DC metro corridor, and Pittsburgh is somewhat isolated but part of a loosely defined region that might include Cleveland, Cincinnati, even Chicago and Detroit if there were really good rail links in place. Put a really fast rail link in place between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and now you could buy a super cheap fixer up house in Pittsburgh and commute to your job in New York or Chicago.

August 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
  • Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

AAA study finds car ownership better than ride sharing

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My headline above is true, but misleading. What AAA really did is answer the question under what conditions owning a car is cheaper than ride sharing, and there are some. AAA found that owning a car can be more cost-effective than ride sharing…for people who drive about a thousand miles a month, have “free” parking, and choose a used car. That may indeed describe the average suburban American, and I am not criticizing people who choose that life style. But in my opinion, many people do not choose it but default to it without realizing other options are possible.

I live in a dense city (in a single family home with a small front and back yard, not a high rise apartment.) My family walks for most work, school, and shopping trips. Street parking is cheap but scarce, and garage parking is very expensive (you can’t have cheap, abundant parking and high density together.) Ride sharing has been a great innovation for the occasional trips where a car is the best option, and particularly great for getting home from somewhat far-flung places where calling a taxi used to be a very unreliable and expensive option. We simply don’t worry about getting stranded places any more, which used to be the single most annoying thing about not owning a car. I guess that means we take a few trips now that we wouldn’t have in the past, and if enough people are doing that it explains why ride sharing has increased traffic a little bit – and why that is a good thing.

Anyway, my point is that the AAA conclusion is not a general one that would apply to my situation. And my situation is one that anyone can choose to be in, maybe not tomorrow but if you want to live in a high-density, walkable residential area you can plan that and make it happen within a few years.