Encouraging Mister Toad
Mar. 19th, 2004 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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glitzfrau's latest entry spun out of control.
Driving's a funny kettle of fish altogether. I started learning when I was 17, without any political agenda, simply because I was excited by the idea (and yes, I am acutely aware of how lucky I am that it was this easy). My parents yielded to my blandishments to insure me on their car; I paid for the lessons. (It turns out that their malleability stemmed partly from a hope that I'd drive my siblings to school. Tchah.) I found I enjoyed driving quite a lot. Car ads notwithstanding, it certainly heralded unprecedented freedom for me, as I'd never been allowed to have a bicycle, my father being a hypercautious nut.
In college I was the default Designated Driver in my circle of friends. Long treks through suburbia at 4:00 a.m. with a car full of drunken and variously amorous passengers - ah, happy memories. I adhered firmly to the theory that chauffeur duty served to balance the unspeakable privilege of having access to a car. My friends raised no objections. I also saved a big wodge of cash on booze. Probably paid for my lessons, now that I think of it :-)
When I moved out in 1999 I lived for 18 months without a car and didn't miss it much. Work was on a bus route, door to door. Town was fifteen minutes' walk away. Large-scale grocery shopping was a pain, and so was visiting my friends in Co. Leitrim. Then in summer 2000,niallm came into a bit of money and decided it would be a good idea to learn how to drive. So we bought our car (stalkers, it's a 1996 Nissan Almera).
It's convenient. The house move would have been a much more gruelling ordeal without it (we'd either have had to line up fleets of willing friends or shell out to hire a vehicle, neither of which would have been much fun given everything else on our plates at the time). The sort of shopping one has to do when one buys a house was also made infinitely easier: laundry racks and compost bins and buckets of paint and sanders and saws and ladders and lampshades and mirrors and all the sundry paraphernalia of home maintenance and beautification aren't easily transported by bus.
We've settled into a routine now, the car and its owners. I use it between three and five times a week: once on Wednesdays to drive to choir practice (an utter indulgence, since it's fifteen minutes' walk, but not having to walk makes the hurdle of getting out the door that bit easier); once on Thursdays to go grocery shopping (and here is where it really comes into its own: it allows us to buy non-perishables in bulk, and it saves the time and strain of carless shopping); once on Sundays to drive to other choir practice (again, an indulgence, but I really wouldn't go if I had to walk); and perhaps once or twice more, for instance to visit parents or bring stuff to the recycling centre. Niall uses it when he's working somewhere he can't cycle to, or when he needs to bring heavy equipment with him. We take it on Irish holidays. Overall, we put about 5,000 miles less than the national average on the clock each year.
It's not ecological. But then, neither is heating our house or using nice thin sanitary towels with plastic layers or wearing nylon tights or eating out-of-season produce. Or chewing gum, for that matter, which I haven't done since someone told me how long it takes to degrade (decades, if I remember rightly). One compromises, to the extent that one can live with oneself.
I aspire to being an early adopter of the electric car, as soon as one becomes affordable. (Yes, there's an element of gadget-worship in there.) When the time comes to replace the incumbent I'll seriously investigate buying a car that can be adapted to run on vegetable oil (don't laugh: I'm told it's perfectly feasible). In the meantime, though, we're not doing too badly.
glitzfrau's latest entry spun out of control.Driving's a funny kettle of fish altogether. I started learning when I was 17, without any political agenda, simply because I was excited by the idea (and yes, I am acutely aware of how lucky I am that it was this easy). My parents yielded to my blandishments to insure me on their car; I paid for the lessons. (It turns out that their malleability stemmed partly from a hope that I'd drive my siblings to school. Tchah.) I found I enjoyed driving quite a lot. Car ads notwithstanding, it certainly heralded unprecedented freedom for me, as I'd never been allowed to have a bicycle, my father being a hypercautious nut.
In college I was the default Designated Driver in my circle of friends. Long treks through suburbia at 4:00 a.m. with a car full of drunken and variously amorous passengers - ah, happy memories. I adhered firmly to the theory that chauffeur duty served to balance the unspeakable privilege of having access to a car. My friends raised no objections. I also saved a big wodge of cash on booze. Probably paid for my lessons, now that I think of it :-)
When I moved out in 1999 I lived for 18 months without a car and didn't miss it much. Work was on a bus route, door to door. Town was fifteen minutes' walk away. Large-scale grocery shopping was a pain, and so was visiting my friends in Co. Leitrim. Then in summer 2000,
niallm came into a bit of money and decided it would be a good idea to learn how to drive. So we bought our car (stalkers, it's a 1996 Nissan Almera).It's convenient. The house move would have been a much more gruelling ordeal without it (we'd either have had to line up fleets of willing friends or shell out to hire a vehicle, neither of which would have been much fun given everything else on our plates at the time). The sort of shopping one has to do when one buys a house was also made infinitely easier: laundry racks and compost bins and buckets of paint and sanders and saws and ladders and lampshades and mirrors and all the sundry paraphernalia of home maintenance and beautification aren't easily transported by bus.
We've settled into a routine now, the car and its owners. I use it between three and five times a week: once on Wednesdays to drive to choir practice (an utter indulgence, since it's fifteen minutes' walk, but not having to walk makes the hurdle of getting out the door that bit easier); once on Thursdays to go grocery shopping (and here is where it really comes into its own: it allows us to buy non-perishables in bulk, and it saves the time and strain of carless shopping); once on Sundays to drive to other choir practice (again, an indulgence, but I really wouldn't go if I had to walk); and perhaps once or twice more, for instance to visit parents or bring stuff to the recycling centre. Niall uses it when he's working somewhere he can't cycle to, or when he needs to bring heavy equipment with him. We take it on Irish holidays. Overall, we put about 5,000 miles less than the national average on the clock each year.
It's not ecological. But then, neither is heating our house or using nice thin sanitary towels with plastic layers or wearing nylon tights or eating out-of-season produce. Or chewing gum, for that matter, which I haven't done since someone told me how long it takes to degrade (decades, if I remember rightly). One compromises, to the extent that one can live with oneself.
I aspire to being an early adopter of the electric car, as soon as one becomes affordable. (Yes, there's an element of gadget-worship in there.) When the time comes to replace the incumbent I'll seriously investigate buying a car that can be adapted to run on vegetable oil (don't laugh: I'm told it's perfectly feasible). In the meantime, though, we're not doing too badly.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 07:43 am (UTC)My august publication happens to track electric vehicles fairly closely. An affordable pure electric car for regular drivers is a few years off (and, significantly, has been just a few years off since we started publishing in the sixties). Really, hybrids are the only game in town right now: yes, you still have to put the demon petrol in, but the fuel efficiency is terrific. They're fairly competitive price-wise too, if not exactly bargain-basement. Plus, a demonstrated demand for hybrids today brings a completely non-petroleum vehicle that much closer.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 07:48 am (UTC)What's the state of the art in non-affordable vehicles?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 08:11 am (UTC)Ahahahaha. We sensibly decided to buy our car six months after moving into the house (though we couldn't actually have bought it earlier; up until February this year Mark only had a US licence [and I don't have one at all] so we couldn't have insured the car). It wouldn't have helped much for the move itself - we have so much stuff that we would have had to rent a van anyway, as we couldn't really do multiple trips between London and Nottingham - but I have all sorts of lovely memories of trekking down the road from our local hardware shop, trying to balance foot wide, three-foot-long shelves on my shoulder. It wasn't a lot of fun. And it's the reason why we still have mountains of cardboard boxes in our back garden, because we had no way to get them to the tip.
...bring stuff to the recycling centre
Oh, I'm so glad you said this! We have done no recycling since we moved into the house, for the simple reason that we had no way to transport the stuff (to complicate things further, we don't have a recycling centre - the nearest place that recycles paper is a local school, the nearest place for glass is a pub in the other direction, etc. etc. - none of which are on bus routes) - but I'm all too aware of the irony of using one's car in order to try and be more ecologically sound. I do think it's worth it, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 08:50 am (UTC)See, that's depressing.
Hybrid would be a big improvement, needless to say. Are there hybrids with diesel engines (which can, I understand, be adapted to run on vegetable oil - I'm fixated on this idea)?
Policy determined by narrow interest groups is an obscenity, if you ask me. Still, as you point out, "demonstrated demand" is a powerful weapon in the long run.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 09:00 am (UTC)I feel your pain!
We moved probably less than three miles from our old place, just down the canal (ten minutes in the dead of night; fifty minutes in rush-hour). The frenzied endgame occurred between Christmas and New Year, and involved two memorable days of maybe a dozen well-stuffed trips altogether, with manic and increasingly random packing in between. Luckily, our builder organised a van for us as a nixer one night to transport the bulky stuff (futon, shelf units, chests of drawers), but our Himalayas of stuff went carload by carload.
...no way to transport the stuff
This is of course the problem. Recycling is a middle-class luxury. At least we do have "bring centres" in the Dublin City Council area now, but unless you're very lucky you need a car to get to them. We have a paper and tins collection at our house once a month, but the bring centre takes practically everything that can be recycled.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 09:37 am (UTC)It boils down to two problems, which I think of as the "Oomph" and "Jerrycan" problems. "Oomph" is all about energy density and energy extraction. Energy density means that the power source has to pack a lot of power in a small space and weigh not so much. Gasoline is very energy dense -- it didn't become the fuel of the 20th century for nothing! But batteries (as any laptop owner can attest) suck. To store enough juice to make car trips practical you need either a lot of batteries (very heavy), or less batteries and some way of charging them on-the-fly. Batteries also have problems on the energy extraction side, which boils down to being able to get power out of the source easily enough that you can, say, accelerate around a truck on the freeway. You can do this with batteries, but the electrical conditioning equipment to do that is a lot heavier, more expensive and complex than simply attaching a throttle valve to a gas tank.
The "Jerrycan" issue is about infrastructure to a large extent: even accounting for the legacy of subsidized gasoline distribution infrastructure, gasoline is pretty easy to transport and store: you can keep and move it around at more or less ambient temperature conditions (and as noted gasoline is very energy dense, so you can move a lot of energy in a oil tanker). You can carry enough gasoline to power a car for many miles in a single jerrycan. But pure electric vehicles have to be charged: electricity is notoriously difficult to store (the battery problem again) and, as you noted, electricity transportation can be a problem, even in the first world (witness the blackouts in the U.S. the last few years).
(So you might think, hydrogen is the answer. We'll store energy in hydrogen, use it in fuel cells and drive the motor and charge some batteries that way! Well, hydrogen has a whole set of Oomph and Jerrycan problems of its own, which also helps to keep it just a few years off).
Which is where the hybrids come in: using gasoline as the ultimate energy source, but vastly improving the bang you get for your buck. (Gloomy warning: there is a persuasive line of argument that indicates that, somewhat counter-intuitively, that if you're trying to conserve a resource like power, making things like lightbulbs and cars more efficient will make things worse, not better. In a nutshell, you're making things cheaper to run, and in the long run that translates to greater demand as individuals' consumption expands to meet their wallets). Still, there's only so many miles people can commute in a week, and hybrids can certainly reduce emissions.
Yes, there are vested interests that have kept petroleum-based cars front and center, but honestly, I don't think we could go pure electric tomorrow, or even next year, with all the will in the world: as suggested by the "few years off" observation, electric vehicles have been historically oversold (usually by well-meaning developers and reporters, but in fact, the illusion of viability so created may be doing more harm than good as people reject "good enough" solutions while awaiting the perfect solution which may never come).
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 09:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 09:45 am (UTC)Thank you for that excellently-researched article!
I suppose what I am saying is that I, desiring elegance in my gadgets, am annoyed that I have to buy one for which the energy source is guaranteed to run out - in the order of decades, and probably not many of them.
A pure electric car, OTOH, could survive as long as the national grid was still alive - and even partially on (say) individual solar panels in the right climate etc etc.
All much of a muchness when the most populous nation is also the most energy-inefficient... in terms of personal transportation anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 09:45 am (UTC)Not good. When you run the total energy and consumables budget out for taking trips to the recycling center, it turns out that you lose the net benefit if you make a specific trip to and from the center just to drop stuff off: you only beat breakeven if you add the recycling journey as a sidetrip to a car excursion you were going to make anyway. I'l try dig out the exact reference to support this ASAP.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 09:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 09:53 am (UTC)Unfortunately, even maintaining the grid on renewable energy resources requires non-renewable materials. Just take, for example, the iron and steel needed for electrical distribution. Something like 20% of annual carbon emissions are due to steel and iron refining.
If we really want effectively infinite resources, we'll have to go off planet, which I why I'm willing to accept a number of "good enough" solutions, especially when the money saved in not pursuing a perfect solution (and possibly an unattainable one ) can go toward unlocking those resources.
I knew they were around here somewhere...
Date: 2004-03-19 12:42 pm (UTC)http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3355927.stm
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/gec/pubs/briefing/brief-11.htm