To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
UPDATED 1:25 pm: Electrical outlets in Metro
stations get a lot of action in this smartphone era, but although
they're constantly being used to charge riders' devices, that's not
actually what they're intended for. The outlets are supposed to be there
so maintenance crews—and only maintenance crews—can power their tools
at stops and in stations so they can do repairs, wash platforms, and
buff floors, a Metro rep tells KPCC. "It's not free electricity," he adds, which is why Metro considers taking that power stealing and has seriously arrested people for doing it. Update:
Mayor/Metro board chair Eric Garcetti has ordered Metro to stop
arresting people for using the outlets; according to a statement,
"Moving forward, Metro customers will be permitted to charge their
phones unless it causes interference with Metro operations."
While no one got a ticket in 2014 for plugging in, there have been three arrests/charges
for stealing electricity. Weirdly, the people arrested were also
charged with possession of drugs and counterfeit money. So Metro is
either throwing in the illegal charging charge on top of more serious
crimes, or using illegal charging as a way to snoop for other things.
Most people seem to just get warnings; three people is a small fraction
of the people charging their phones up at stations every day. But one
rider brings up an important safety concern: "What if you're out here
late at night and you need your phone charged, you need a ride?"
DRIVING an electric car confers a badge of greenery, or so
the marketing departments of their makers would have you believe. Yet a
report which analyses the life cycle of car emissions (ie, all the way
from those created by the mining of materials for batteries, via the
ones from the production of fuel and the generation of electricity, to
the muck that actually comes out of the exhaust) presents a rather
different picture. A battery-powered car recharged with electricity
generated by coal-fired power stations, it found, is likely to cause
more than three times as many deaths from pollution as a conventional
petrol-driven vehicle. Even a battery car running on the average mix of
electrical power generated in America is much more hazardous than the
conventional alternative.
Christopher Tessum, Jason Hill and Julian Marshall of the University of Minnesota have just published this study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They estimate how levels of fine particulate matter and ground-level
ozone—two important constituents of air pollution, which kills more than
100,000 people a year in America—would change if each of 11 ways of
powering a car were to be responsible for 10% of the vehicle-miles
expected to be driven in America in 2020.
It was no surprise that electric cars whose batteries were
topped up from wind, solar or hydroelectric sources came out cleanest,
causing 231 putative deaths over the course of a year, compared with 878
for petrol cars. Electric cars recharged with power from
natural-gas-fired stations were also a lot less lethal than
petrol-driven ones, with 439 deaths. But if those same electric cars
were recharged ultimately by coal, they would be responsible, according
to the model, for just over 3,000 deaths.
Biofuels also caused more health problems than petrol. But
diesel, which is generating concern about pollution in parts of Europe,
where it is a more popular fuel than in America, was marginally cleaner
than petrol. This is because the Minnesota model assumes for all cars
that present and future emission-control technologies will be more
widely used in 2020, especially particulate filters which have a marked
effect on cleaning diesel exhausts. Diesel cars also have better fuel
economy than petrol-driven ones.
Overall, the research shows that electric cars are cleaner
than those that rely on internal-combustion engines only if the power
used to charge them is also clean. That is hardly a surprise, but the
magnitude of the difference is. How green electric cars really are,
then, will depend mainly on where they are driven. In France, which
obtains more than half its power from nuclear stations, they look like a
good bet. In China—which is keen on electric cars, but produces some
80% of its electricity from coal—rather less so.
When considering how to summarize the Year in
Transportation that was 2014, it's tempting just to compile a list of
Uber-related incidents or scandals or lawsuits or absurdities and call it a day. But as much as the human and hive minds are drawn toward negative news,
there were some truly uplifting mobility breakthroughs this year far
more deserving of a digital curtain call. Though you probably haven't
heard the last of them: much of what happened in transportation in 2014
will change the way we'll travel around cities for many years to come.
The Self-Driving Car Conquers Cities. As CityLab first reported, back in April, Google's self-driving car has graduated
from the relative simplicity of freeways (speed up, slow down, shift
lanes) to the dynamic hazards of urban roadways. The company upped the
ante a month later by releasing
early (and adorable) design prototypes for an autonomous car that it
hopes to produce and test on California streets. It's only a matter of
time before these transformative cars—or ones inspired by them—will reach streets near you.
High-Speed Rail Comes to America. History may well
look back at 2014 as the year that American high-speed rail passed a
tipping point. California's Los Angeles–San Francisco line finally found
some stable funding, announced a winning bid, and set a groundbreaking date.
But with that project tough for others to copy, what with the many
billions in public money, perhaps more intriguing were the non-trivial
advances made by private high-speed rail projects: the Dallas–Houston service shopped around for terminals, and the Miami–Orlando line began actual construction.
SuperpedestrianAs Does the Electric Bicycle.
The Cambridge-based mobility company Superpedestrian began to mass
produce and accept pre-orders for its innovative Copenhagen Wheel this
year. The wheel transforms an existing bicycle into an electric-powered
bicycle—and could transform American cycling practices in the process.
In his CityLab piece about the wheel, Nate Berg reported that experts believe the United States will be one of the world's top e-bike markets within the next 20 years.
And Driverless Transit, Too. The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation took some key steps toward completing the first fully automated, wide-scale urban transit system in the United States this year—soliciting bids for nine stations, and unveiling designs
for one at the airport. A number of cities around the world use
driverless transit systems, with London announcing this year that it
planned to join this group. In addition to safety advantages the service benefits are just as great, with more trains capable of running closer together.
Europe Strikes Back Against Traffic. Several major European cities issued dramatic restrictions to drivers this year. Madrid will ban cars in the city center for non-residents; Paris will do the same and reserve some roads exclusively for cleaner hybrid and electric cars; London will enhance its low-emission zone into an ultra-low-emission zone.
These policies help address two of the huge invisible social costs of
driving—congestion and pollution—and will hopefully inspire other major
global cities to follow suit.
With California Joining the Fight. In July, CityLab broke news
that California planned to replace a car-friendly engineering metric
known as "level of service" with a transit-friendly alternative that
focuses on vehicle miles traveled. That's a lot of jargon, but the
upshot is simple: road projects should get tougher to complete in
California cities, moving forward, and bus and bike and train projects
should get noticeably easier. A case in point is San Francisco's Van
Ness BRT project, which likely would have saved years of work and
millions of dollars under the new system.
California High-Speed Rail AuthorityNew York Declares Its "Vision Zero." Borrowing a page from Sweden's phenomenal road safety record, New York City under Mayor Bill de Blasio announced its own Vision Zero—a
bold plan to eliminate traffic-related deaths and injuries. Several
Vision Zero elements have been implemented to date, the most notable
being a speed limit reduction to 25 miles an hour. Street safety in New York still has a long way to go, but the conversation is moving in the right direction, and other metros have taken notice; San Francisco has a similar initiative in the works.
The Rise of On-Demand Transit. This summer, reports emerged that the City of Helsinki, Finland, is entertaining the idea of establishing a point-to-point, on-demand transport system
that would render car-ownership unnecessary. Just how serious the city
is remains to be seen, but general interest in on-demand transit is
clearly on the rise, with related bus services such as Bridj
entering beta tests in the United States. On-demand transit may never
replace high-capacity fixed-route buses and trains, but it can expand
mobility options, encourage multi-modal behavior, and reduce
single-occupancy driving in cities.
