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Hybrids, Ethanol, Biodiesel, Fuel Cells, Butanol, Natural Gas, and Electric. Just a few of the alternative ways to build a car to compensate for peak oil and the growing green industrial revolution that's been going on. People are trying to figure out what the car will be in the future.

What if there is no car? How about that novel idea? At least we don't have to worry about all the R&D.

I'm sure there are quite a few people who have read "Plan B" or "Plan B 2.0" (you can read it for free on the internet if you wish). One of ways cities can be improved for a greener future that's suggested in the book is a tax on cars, or just eliminating them from the city entirely. Keep in mind that 25% of a city is occupied by pavement used for cars, and if we keep this up it may very well get larger than that, not only that but in really congested areas it's actually faster.

These disadvantages to a city built for car are only meant for cars that are clean, there's also the disadvantages that come from dirtier cars such as our current gasoline fleet, which produce unhealthy amounts of smog.

Now then, take a good look at this picture and think it over.



This is a little illustriation showing how much it takes to move 15,000 people in one hour, study it long enough and it makes sense.

I'm not saying we should completely eliminate cars, rather downsize them a good bit, and particularly in the cities, a car tax could be implemented and the funds from it used to jumpstart renewable energy research, by the time cars start to vanish from the city hopefully the funds will be used wisely enough to have benefitted renewables enough to really make a difference (not my idea by the way, taken from "Plan B", I'm serious here when I say that it's a great book).

Of course the more rural folk should still use their vehicles, but even if they still continued to use gasoline powered vehicles it's still a big improvement over the whole nation using cars.

So, what do you think, especially for those of you who own a car such as myself, and even enjoy it quite a bit, once again I'm guilty of this. What should we do about these cars. Mostly I just wanted to share with all the good folk of this guild this wonderful little picture, taken from the book "Transportation from Livable Cities" which also so happens to be available free from the internet.

EDIT: More information on my 2nd post down there if you're interested For those seeking more information about this idea you can check out a short section on Plan B 2.0 about urban transportation

http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/PB2ch11_ss3.htm

Hmm...numbers, I didn't get the numbers. What sort of numbers are we talking about anyway, reduction in carbon?

Finding numbers would be rather tricky, mostly because there are so many so many factors as to how many tons of CO2 and other pollutants a car emits over it's lifetime that the numbers would vary a great deal. Some surveys omit some factors while others include too many.

It would be a bit of a shock to the general population, that's why I'm more in favor of a tax, one that gradually gets larger over time. In fact, instead of funding renewables those taxes could also function as a jumpstarter for mass trans if necessary, so as taxes increase the alternatives become more attractive and people will gradually migrate to using mass transit.

EDIT: all right, I did find some numbers.

London introduced a tax on automobiles in 2003 (5 euros for motorist driving to the city center from 7 - 6:30) 3 years later (when this book I'm reading from, Plan B 2.0, was published) the flow of cars has been reduced by 65,000 - 70,000, or 18 percent.

According to this article (www.commondreams.org if you're really paranoid about it, the 6 tons thing is on the 4th paragraph) the average car produces 6 tons of carbon dioxide every year, with 65,000 cars off the road that would equal 390,000 tons of carbon dioxide no longer produced, 70,000 = 420,000 tons no longer produce.

Pretty big, and of course that's just for London, if implemented in somewhere such as...New York maybe, and we got the same 18% reduction in cars, wow.

London is joined by Singapore (pioneering the car tax) and many Norwegion cities including Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim.

Ah yes, that's the one major obstacle involving mass trans., For some cities you literally have to tear apart a good deal of the city to implement the needed infrastructure for light rail and subways.

But buses, that's one mass transit system where the infrastructure is pretty much already built, the roads are all already there, you just need to put in some bus stops which really aren't that much of a hassle unless you really plan to go all out on them, and get yourself a fleet of buses.

A lot of cities while rather large don't need that much of a light rail system or a subway system yet, a bus system will easily suffice if well planned with plenty of stops. Although a rail system would be really interesting if one were designed to connect towns that are only a few miles apart.

My city for example, a city of 180,000 people, already has a bus system but the thing is it only has a few stops and a small fleet. Increasing the fleet a bit and adding more stops is nothing with a good car tax. There's also a town a few miles away with a population with little over 10,000 people, those 10,000 people commute to my city pretty much every weekend to visit some of the businesses there, and some work in my city and commute every day.

This distance between the two is so short that in between these cities you'll find all sorts of businesses, nothing major right now but it's starting to fill up. Pretty soon the gap will be filled and it'll all be one big city.

Planting a rail system between the two would allow quick, efficient transportation, it could be closely tied to the bus system (which would hopefully be well developed if my city ever did such a thing) so that once the train stops the people can just walk or take a bus to their destination. Best part is the seeds are planted for what could eventually evolve into a more massive rail system.

And there are more locations like the place I just mentioned too, both places that could easily implement a bus system with a car tax and cities that could be joined together by a rail system.

Of course I don't know, I might be getting a little too far-fetched with the rail system idea, but it's still an interesting thought.

Thing is, my city is always spending money on road construction projects, it sits at the crossroads of two interstate highways, the maintanence needed is pretty annoying since there's always a construction project going on involving the interstate highways, a very expensive one at that.

So really, the potential costs don't sound too bad when compared to road maintanence.

I think people need to get over their fear of public transit. The local transit system is cheap, hell, you can get from Anaheim to Newport Beach for like $3.25, yet a small percentage of the population actually takes the bus. I really hope a light rail system gets put in soon.

I'm not so sure it's a fear of public transit as much as it is a fear of leaving their precious car.

I'll admit that I do love my car, the public transit system in my city is so underdeveloped concerning mass transit that it's essentially necessary to have one, otherwise I'd love to ride a bus or rail system.

Well, having had a fair amount of time with my car driving to and from school, friend's place, and anything else that requires me driving, I've really begun to fall in love with my machine. It's really easy to fall in love whenever you're teenager and stuff like that, the car is actually more private than your own room since your room is more prown to being intruded on, it's almost like one's inner sanctum.

That's the biggest thing, you just have a hard time breaking ties with something so powerful.

Still, what are we gonna do? Essentially every person on the Earth wants their own automobile of some sort, the number of people who have a car seems to only grow every day rather than decline, because of this we're adding more and more pavement.

Can't just pave and pave until the entire earth is a black asphalt slab, we gotta do something, no matter how much we hate the idea it has to be done.

Hmmm, then I will suggest the waste managment idea!

Yes, public transportation does have its negative sides, but I feel like I can deal with them. If planned right, you could catch your bus on time. And maybe borrow a friend's car or rent a car or something if you need to lug along some new furniture or something.

Speaking from my own experience, I very rarely have transfer time issues due to traffic on the road. Public transit takes longer because they have to stop more often. There's really no way around that since the whole idea is that you aren't the only person who has somewhere to go. Transfers take a while because there are only so many busses, trains, whatever to go around. For example, the bus I take to work runs every 15 minutes during most daylight hours. That's a pretty good interval, since it means I will never wait more than 15 minutes for a bus, excepting events outside of my control (such as the bus breaking down or being slowed by bad weather, and such incidents are not limited to public transit and so cannot be counted against it). However, if I have to take three different busses to get where I'm going, even if they all run every 15 minutes, I could potentially be waiting, say 10 minutes for each transfer. That's 20 minutes of me standing around waiting outside. It has nothing to do with traffic.

However, if all those people who stop driving cars are now riding the bus, and generating revenue to improve the transit system as well as demand for more frequent transit, it may then increase the frequency of the busses and then shorten the transfer times. 3nodding