Gaia: Appropriate Transportation

Re: Introductions: ideas and people [sticky]

http://creativeandfresh.gaia.com — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:09:23 GMT

Heya!

Thanks Rob for creating this pod and discussion. Personally, I think we need to revolutionize transportation here in America.
I suppose I live a dual life, because I work for the Airlines (flight attendant) to supplement my start-up company "Fresh Communications, yet long for a better way to get from point A to Z.

Soooo...one day, back in Winter '06 I stumbled upon a contest on Gather, and had an idea.
Although I didn't win (the winner did place a comment on my page though if you want to read about his proposal, click on his name "Dave"), I still wish to develop this idea further. Here is a link to my submission on Gather. I'd love some feedback...and please, feel free to dissect the idea as you wish, I'm not opposed to completely re-working this idea. (I mean lets face it, several brains have got to be better than my crazy brain, right?!)

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976962424

Cheers All,
Cecelia

Tango

http://WaterOne.gaia.com — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 03:03:40 GMT

I have been lusting after a small electric vehicle I got to sit in during a trip through Spokane, WA in 2004. It's now commercially available, but way too expensive. It appeals to my sense of “small is beautiful” and my desire to avoid burning fossil fuels just to haul my lousy carcass to and fro.

You may have already figured out that the first “Tango” vehicle was purchased by George Clooney:
    4/27/2006: George Clooney and his Tango are featured in the Green Issue of Vanity Fair.
    "If you're doing a movie about oil consumption and corruption, you can't just talk the talk,"
    Clooney--who drove his fully-electric, zero-emission, two-seater Tango to the cover
    shoot--told Leibovitz and her crew. "You gotta walk the walk."

If you are interested:
http://www.commutercars.com/

In the mean time I'll work harder and save my money up.

tom

Re: Solar Chariot

http://iloveyou.gaia.com — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 04:53:13 GMT

This is fascinating!

Yeah, as I was watching it, my first thought was - "Why legs? Is it more efficient than wheels?"
And my question was immediately answered!

But I still don't quite get how legs could be faster than wheels or even more efficient. The exact way or reason why was not really explained in that video - he just said something about Mother Nature not using wheels, but that does not explain the exact mechanism or physics by which legs or walking could be more efficient than wheels, or faster.

Would anyone kindly explain this to me or send me to a link with the explanation?

Thanks very much

Re: Introductions: ideas and people [sticky]

http://WaterOne.gaia.com — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 19:52:05 GMT

OK, I love the concept of minimal impact transportation. I struggle with the reality. I am 54. I sometimes bike or run to work. I'm seeking a better vehicle for those numerous times when I cannot bike. I have gone so far as to rent a bike while attending out of town conventions. But, that does little to counter the use of fuel on the jet which I used to get to the convention in the first place. Living in a rural location presents additional challanges. My preferred transportation (below) is in a home-made SOF (skin-on-wooden-frame) kayak or baidarka. Unfortunately, even this requires transportation by vehicle to a body of water. tom

Who Killed the Electric Car?

http://WaterOne.gaia.com — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:16:50 GMT

I was awake late last night/early this AM when I turned on my TV and flipped through a couple late night movies. I came across a title I had seen but was not really aware of the content of the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?".

It is a painful review of how special interests, federal government corruption, corporate greed and the apathy of the American public can combine to steer our society in a decidedly backwards direction. Instead of progressing forward into the future, the combined effects of these to cover up truth and replace it with misinformation, effectively stifling progress towards petroleum-free transportation.

It is sad to se how we as a society shot ourselves in the foot, but the lessons we could learn from this apply to many other areas - climate change, health care, poverty, food and control of the internet, etc. Beware the opinion of experts who may have alternate agendas!

Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the birth, limited commercialization, and subsequent death of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.

tom

Re: Hummer vs. the Prius

http://sacredsong.gaia.com — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:40:21 GMT

I doubt it's worse than the Hummer, but it is scary.

I think I'm gonna go ride my bike.

Angela

Re: Tesla

http://silverfire.gaia.com — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:31:28 GMT

oh my...

-.-;;; lol i know I won't be getting THIS car on my 16th birthday...

but it certainly is beaauuutiful, no?

And... the batteries are even recyclable!!! ^o^

Re: My Hybrid!

http://matthew.gaia.com — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:12:10 GMT

I was thinking the same thing, Julip! Also, supposedly the next-generation Prius will get ~94mpg. There's speculation that it will be a plug-in. Then we have the Chevy Volt, which has officially entered the production pipeline. But my personal favorite up-and-coming PHEV is Visionary Vehicles, which Malcolm Bricklin (the guy who brought Subaru to America) is working on.

Re: My Hybrid!

http://juliptulip.gaia.com — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:49:05 GMT

On the subject of http://calcars.org/... If you'd like to go a little more "alternative" sooner than later :) Enjoy!

My Hybrid!

http://quadrinity.gaia.com — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:40:08 GMT

Ok, I got myself a Toyota Prius and I feel better already! :)
The nice thing about the car is that when you drive it - your first reaction is NOT " so how much can this baby do?" It's more like - "How far can I possibly go on a tank. It looks like 900km per 45 litre tank... I haven't had it long enough yet. My 6 cyl Audi 2.4 got 400km on a 65 litre tank!

And then the toys! I love toys! For someone who gets lost as easily as I do Navigation is the coolest! And with Fourplay kicking on the 9 speaker JBL system! Lots of little compartments to store stuff in - and when you want the power, it's there! Very powerful for a 1500...

I'll also go for a fully alternative car as soon as it's available.

:( This country charges almost R100 000 (almost $15 000 ) more for the Prius as than they land it for. Vested Interests! Pah! Penalise those who are conscious of carbon emissions. I'm so tired of this mindset.

Veg-Oil Biofuel Options

http://mrobert.gaia.com — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:10:57 GMT

The following is an excerpt from an email I wrote regarding biodiesel and WVO options. It seems relatively coherent and on topic, so I'll include it here too. This particular discussion focuses on the Mercedes W123 family of cars from the late-70's to mid-80's.

I would characterize the vegoil biofuel options on a diesel (especially on these W123
Mercedes) as a spectrum. Here are a few waypoints:

1. Commercial biodiesel. Meets ASTM standards, should run through the
vehicle without any noticeable effect on performance, economy, or
maintenance requirements with the exception that you're likely to go
through two fuel filter changes (actually four, since the car has two
filters that will probably need to be changed twice) within the first five
or ten tankfuls. On some older cars it may be necessary to replace a few
rubber fuel lines after a year or two of use, and on the W123 MBs the
gasket around the fuel filler neck will probably look "melted" by
overspill. Around here, getting up to B20 at filling stations is becoming
feasible, but if you find a local or regional distributor it is possible
to have this fuel delivered to your home. This is what I generally do - I
receive 55 gallon drums at a cost of about $3 a gallon plus $20 delivery
and have a hand-cranked rotary pump for filling the tank.

2. Homebrew biodiesel. For a conscientious tinkerer with adequate time
available, a high quality homebrew can be achieved using good quality
restaurant oil (upscale Chinese and Indian places have the best). Your
investment starts with building a reactor (the Appleseed Processor
designed by Girl Mark - Mario Alovert - can be built for around $100) or
buying one (about $3000, give or take $1500). Then you purchase methanol
and lye (which is getting scarce due to meth lab fears) at a cost of about
$0.80 - $0.90 per finished gallon of fuel. Making a batch takes about 2
weeks including drying time, but only a handful of hours in the processor
and washer, and probably only an hour of direct involvement of the
operator.

3. Straight Vegetable Oil. With high quality WVO or purchased SVO, a good
conversion kit, and proper operation, this option is probably as safe as
the homebrew option, and may be a little less time consuming. Instead of
acquiring the processor, you'll have comparable (but probably higher)
costs involved in converting the car, and comparable (but lower) time
commitments in filtering and drying the oil.

4. Waste Vegetable Oil. The only difference between this option and the
previous is the quality of the oil, and realistically you can only tell
that by titration. When oil is overheated, or heated for too long, the
triglycerides break down into di- and mono-glycerides plus free fatty
acids or FFAs. The FFAs are the problem really, and if possible you want
to remove them from the oil before you burn it in your car. The process
for doing this is de-esterification - really, a partial biodiesel
(transesterification) process. Without this process you may be looking at
taking significant life off the engine - or you may not. The research is
still quite unclear whether running VO at all is bad for modern engines,
let alone running bad VO.

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

http://mrobert.gaia.com — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:18:58 GMT

I'm so glad you asked, Barbara! As it happens, I am still driving the van I already had - even to work today, against a friend's advice who was concerned about me falling asleep at the wheel because I spent all night talking with her.

But that's not the whole story. A week ago Sunday after much deliberation I bought a 1992 Ford E-350 diesel van. The van itself is pretty interesting. It lived its first life as a fire chief's command control vehicle, so it's fire-engine red with a glow-in-the-dark white stripe down each side. It has a built-in countertop/desk unit with shelves and cabinets, lots of interior lighting, and two flip-up sunroofs. With only 116k miles on the clock, it runs like a top and has been well maintained. The previous owner bought it at auction and was a Ford diesel mechanic himself. He drove it for 4k miles and fixed most everything it needed. It can tow a household-full of furnishings from the Pacific Northwest to middle America.

The story is compelling even beyond this van, though. I hit another dilemma - deciding between two vehicles the seller had for sale, this one and a 1991 diesel ambulance. It, too, made for an excellent choice - spacious, ideally suited not only to a vegoil conversion but on-board WVO filtering and easy configuration as a vegoil demonstration vehicle, a feature almost as important to me as running on a byproduct non-petroleum fuel. Unfortunately, it needed a little more work than the van and represented, to me, too much inertia - both in terms of its weight and fuel requirements and in terms of its size and navigability on the road and in my life. I wanted it; I tried to make it work in my head; but I chose the van.

To complicate the decision even more, a close friend who is also an auction-jockey (as he claims) or auction-junky (as I claim) found a smaller, lighter box ambulance at auction last weekend, in "twice as good a shape" by his claim, and bought it for significantly less than half the price of the ambulance I looked at. And although he encouraged me toward the van (and drove down with me to pick it up), he liked the idea of the ambulance so much that he bought this one in hopes I might like it. He even offers to carry the financing for me, since I've just blown a good portion of my wad on a firetruck ;-) (I'm not really that much like a four-year-old... the firetruck reference plays much better with my son than with me!)

So I may still end up with an ambulance to convert as a vegoil demonstration vehicle. My difficulty is in justifying it, and the tack I'm taking is three-fold:

First is the aforementioned demonstrations, which not only will satisfy me deeply, but may get me into some pretty cool venues for free - like, for example, the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair ("the world’s largest renewable energy educational event of its kind" - a Wisconsin event even bigger than anything the crunchies on the west coast have to offer ;-) and the various peace-justice-community-and-sustainability music festivals I like to attend. Since these events also represent the four or five times a year I would use such a vehicle most effectively, this justification is two-fold.

Second is the possibility of offering it as a community-operated vehicle, sharing it cooperatively with others who respect what such a vehicle offers, both practically and symbolically.

Third is the consideration that I may take my professional skills back "on the road", migrating to contract engineering and programming jobs, in order to pursue the work I find most fulfilling while also having the ability to spend time with the people I love, where they are, and also transport the people I love to where they need to be.

Equally important in this discussion, however, is the process I went through before making these decisions. It was a stringent analysis from both rational and emotional directions, but the rational procedure may be interesting. Among other things, I built a spreadsheet that evaluated the relative costs - both financial and environmental - of operating each car I currently own or considered buying, and then put pairs of cars together (my practice of driving older, less reliable vehicles requires me be redundant) and considering each of those costs as parts of a system of transportation.

Unfortunately, I don't know exactly how to put that spreadsheet into this post. Actually, I think I do know, but even then it may not be an easily-decipherable communication tool, so I'm not posting it from here but offer it on request to anyone interested.

I have to mention also that many, many friends participated in this decision, and I can't overstate my appreciation. That includes the members of this forum who listened patiently through my original post, offered succinct advice, and have suffered through this update. Yet, the process isn't complete yet - I still need to decide on the second ambulance (I see it this weekend) and replace the Mercedes soon with a 50+ mpg commuter car.

Stay tuned!

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

http://senvara.gaia.com — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:10:08 GMT

So, I'm curious...did you ever resolve this dilemma, or did you decide to just keep on driving the van you already have?

Hummer vs. the Prius

http://senvara.gaia.com — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 05:27:22 GMT

I'd like to see some real world figures to back up the assertions in this, particularly having just learned that the embodied energy of most manufactured items is only around 5% of the full lifetime energy hit.

http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/editorial_item.asp?NewsID=188

Re: The Air Car

http://matthew.gaia.com — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:16:11 GMT

~C4Chaos found some video of both the MDI (French) and Australian air cars:

Solar Chariot

http://senvara.gaia.com — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 22:43:26 GMT

I think we all need one of these. ;-)

Solar Chariot (on YouTube)

Re: FutureCar on Discovery Channel

http://ox.gaia.com — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 02:37:59 GMT

Episode 3 of the 4 part series premiered Wednesday, and it was all about alternate fuels. Covered were photovoltaics, Lithion Ion charge banks, Hydrogren generated Electric, and Compressed Air.

Best,
Ox

Re: The Air Car

http://ox.gaia.com — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 02:34:47 GMT

Sorry, I've been away from Zaadz for about two weeks.

At no time did I claim that a small gasoline generator was involved. I'm not sure why you would take your calculations there... using such a device makes no sense whatsoever in this case. My argument was for a small, grid-powered electric compressor for home use.

For the record, I don't live near a big hydroelectric dam. However, I do live by two tiny dams and one big nuclear reactor. And I pay 7.1 cents per kwh, peak.

This argument is not specific to my location. You can check out your own residential peak rate, without involving irrelevant factors like the price of gasoline or non-utility generation. You can also go to WalMart, like I did, pick out a typical small electric compressor off the shelf, and see how little electricity it take to compress enough air. Remember, the Australian car only takes 1 PSI to overcome it's own rolling resistance.

Did Detroit know about compresed air? Did Toyota? My friend, EVERY car on the road today is a compressed air vehicle. Think about it.

In most of them, the combustion of a fossil fuel is used to heat and pressurize the air, which in turn moves a piston. The only difference here is that the air would be pre-compressed. Once again, there's nothing magic in this. We've been running factories (yes, even Detroit and Toyota auto factories) for decades.

There is an increase to be made in miles per charge, but it will come from weight reduction, because we would no longer have the powertrain or the weight of liquid fuel. It is not likely to be the 4.5x leap that you have somehow calculated. Precisely because moving the piston with air pressure is really nothing that different from what cars already do today.

Now, the Austrialian car doesn't use a traditional piston, so there's some intrigue there. I personally believe their design will yield greater reliability before it implies greater miles per charge over the French vehicle, apart from that gained by further weight reduction. The weight reduction over the French car's drive system is significant.

The big gain here, as I have claimed from the start, is in dollars per mile.

Actually, the Discovery Channel just broadcast two days ago that my argument here is incredibly conservative. Episode three of the four-part series "FutureCar" was all about alternate fuels, and included the French air car. They announced that the next French air car will carry it's own air compressor on board, which will not even be driven by electricity, but rather by the wasted motion of the vehicle and recycled compressed air! This running recharge means that, with the exception of the initial charge, and possible rescue charges, we're are now talking about fueling the vehicle virtually for FREE.

That means instead of my rather conservative estimate of fuel economy gain, we could now approach infinity.

The Skateboard Car

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 20:45:29 GMT

~Matthew is salivating over his dream car. Nice. I still dig hybrids and hydrogen cars but I'm now convinced that the future belongs to cool electric cars like the Skateboard :)

Re: IMHO The ultimate answer

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:55:15 GMT

Okay, but i still have two problems with that system. First it needs a
WHOLE new infrastructure installed (i.e. tracks and stuff). Second..
and this is the big problem, this system isnt very conceivable for
spread out suburban type cities (as all our cities are slowly becoming).

Good points, both. PRT is best seen as an alternative to conventional rapid transit, not cars. As for infrastructure, the sci-fi system needs cars that drive themselves. This is not today's technology. You can't complain about the cost of tracks and then assume that it won't cost anything to make the cars drive themselves. Autonomous vehicles are probably going to require special roadways with buried sensors every few feet. Maybe it's cheaper to dig up the roads and bury the sensors than to put in tracks, maybe not.