DIY electric cars

Ever wondered what it would take to convert your car to an electric-powered vehicle? A Finnish group is launching what it hopes will be the start of a global movement for retrofitting petrol-powered vehicles. eCars - Now is a forum for people wanting advice from experts, and to bring together buyers and sellers, and mechanics with the know-how to carry out electric car conversions.

And if you want to see what electric and other alternative-fuel vehicles can do over long distances, the Zero Rally Africa takes place in January 2009 from Victoria Falls to Cape Town, followed by a conference focusing on renewable energy and potential applications for development, especially in the context of Southern Africa.

gobsmacked

If we ever manage to reduce reliance on private cars to any appreciable degree, the benefit will extend beyond reduced emissions from driving and from making the car in the first place. There will also be less space dedicated to cars - on the roads, in parking lots and household driveways - and more for green lungs, play areas, community gardens or whatever tickles our fancy. Using that logic, conventional wisdom among progressive planners is that if we actually reduce the number of parking bays provided at offices, shopping malls and so on, we can encourage a reduction in driving.

But wait! North York, part of the City of Toronto, thinks paved driveways are a good thing. So good, in fact, that people have been stopped from ripping up driveways that they want to replace with greener alternatives. On their own private properties! Is this just plain dumb, or what?

Dabbawallas of Mumbai

Seth Godin wrote about the Dabbawalla phenomenon in Mumbai back in April 2007. This is a low-tech organisation that delivers food to hundreds of thousands of customers a day. The magic of this operation, and the reason that big western organisations are queuing up to hear about it, is that the employees deliver the right goods to the right destination with an error rate that is the envy of just about any other delivery organisation you can name: less than one error in 6 million transactions.

The 5,000 employees in the flat organisation build customer relationships, and also use a simple colour-coding system to maximize efficiency and minimize errors; but what really appeals to me is that they use a level of technology that suits who the employees are (largely illiterate) and where they work. There's more about it on the Dabbawalla website.

if you want to get somewhere - slowly

I'm not sure how this would work, but here's a post claiming that you can sail across the ocean on a wave powered boat: not wind power, wave power.

Hey, I'm back :-) no thanks to Telkom, the "dis"utility I have now ditched for leaving me without Internet access for a month :-( and blaming everyone but themselves ("Have you checked that the cable is plugged in?").

speed wobble

Apologies for the lack of activity on Carbon Copy, but I am busy using up my carbon allowance on a one-week study tour of a few cities in the UK and Europe. I should be refreshed on my return, but I'm not sure I will be able to keep up the frenetic pace of posting that I maintained over the past year. I will do my best, though.

I am writing now from Amsterdam, city of bicycles. I knew there were a lot of bikes here, but this is phenomenal. The older areas are teeming with young and old cyclists, and I am having to be alert to avoid getting hit by cellphone-wielding riders. You may have seen pictures of row upon row of bikes at railway stations, but what really amazes me is a massive parking garage built under a new square, just for bicycles. People cycle there from home, and either walk or catch a train to work, giving new meaning to the term 'park and ride'. I have never seen so many variations on bicycle style, from three-wheeled taxis to two-wheeled versions customised to carry cyclist, two children, and packages on the front and behind the driver. People are walking and cycling everywhere at all hours of the day and night, and the only hint of crime is on signs at railway stations, warning of pickpockets. Apparently most theiving is on public transport, not on the streets. Groups and individuals seem happy to use dimly lit, quiet alleys. It makes me feel like getting out and walking all night, just because I can.

moving products in cities

One of the challenges in greening transportation is in improving distribution systems for local freight. With the trend towards centralised warehouses and fewer but bigger shopping centres, transport is getting less efficient for the sake of "cleaner" distribution processes. Each individual business, such as Woolworths and other big distributors, will optimise its own distribution chain, but this is repeated for every other business so that overall there is more traffic. And more of the transport requirement is being placed on the final consumer, who must drive farther to get to the shops.

Amsterdam recently repurposed an old technology to make a dramatic change to the distribution of goods by sharing facilities among businesses and using less polluting technologies. A new inner city distribution system consists of freight trams that will carry goods in and out of the city on existing tram lines, and electrically powered vans ('e-cars'). The vehicles work with a docking centre that accepts goods from customers that need to deliver to the city, and one company prepares the goods for distribution on the new system.

Startup company CityCargo hopes to reduce the deliveries made by 2,500 trucks that enter Amsterdam daily. The system allows for greater flexibility without the negative impacts of truck traffic, as the new system allows smaller deliveries throughout the day, while the City restricts regular truck traffic to cretain hours to reduce traffic congestion and pollution.

pedal powered taxis

Introducing the new-generation pedicab: a three-wheeled, solar-assisted tricycle that even looks cool. And for those who need to carry groceries by bike, this may be your answer. The main challenge with this ecocab is finding space on the road. A few of them may not pose a problem, but if these babies really caught on, traffic safety could really suffer. Less cumbersome than rickshaws, though.

paving paradise

Parking is one of the most emotive of urban planning issues. Why? Because it's a powerful force. Without places to park, cars would be useless. So developers who happily say they support public transport suddenly develop hives if you ask them to reduce the parking supply for their shiny new buildings. Tenants want parking for their employees and for their customers, so developers figure they need to provide parking in order to sell or lease space.

And municipalities go along with this. They want to attract development, and even if they are not concerned about chasing potential developers away, they want to make sure that a shortage of parking doesn't cause cars to spill over to quiet streets and raise the ire of local residents. Even municipalities that are trying hard to maintain or increase the viability of public transport will lose heart when it comes to limiting or charging for parking. As Rory Sutherland pointed out on Wednesday, politicians go weak at the knees when faced with demands for free or cheap parking.

But parking is not only politically powerful; it has the strength to change the physical shape of cities. Parking is the automobile's partner in crime. Together they have trashed urban areas, and increased our reliance on a carbon-intensive lifestyle. This dangerous duo doesn't want you to walk or cycle or ride the bus, and has made it progressively more difficult to do so, effectively limiting choice.

the brutal art of persuasion

I grew up feeling suspicious of the marketing industry. Admen tried to convince me that I wanted something that I'd never heard of, and needed something I thought I only wanted. Levi's and Coca Cola have left their mark on my psyche. Like Freddie Mercury, I want to break free. These days I'm more accepting that branding is not all bad, but I still bristle when it's about the cult of personality, or a company image that has nothing to do with the product or service on offer.

Despite lingering fears of manipulative messages and subliminal stereotyping, if I am honest about my own field of transport planning, I have to ask: Why is it OK to change behaviour by building a new road, but not by persuading people to change their transport habits by convincing them that it would be better for everyone? Rory Sutherland poses the question in the April 12, 2008 edition of The Spectator. He suggests that if 15% of people drove to work later, we might discover we don't have a transport problem, we just have a timing problem. As long as problems are defined by civil engineers, we find that the solutions are - surprise! - more civil engineering.

That's an oversimplification, to be sure, but as much as the transport planning industry is starting to grasp the concept of integrated planning as a way out of unsustainable urban growth patterns, it has failed to recognise the extent to which current transport problems are a direct result of the way we plan.

Transport planners have deliberately and systematically created a transport system that favours private vehicles, at the expense of other transport modes. The result is that we have actively changed the way people move from place to place - we have manipulated societal norms of behaviour, and done so almost without question, without admitting that we have engineered an unsustainable situation. We can talk about improving public transport or creating better walking environments, but these plans will only bring about the necessary change if we alter our planning mindset, and undo the travel patterns we have created.

Should we enlist the admen to make it happen? Many will argue that it is not the job of government (or anyone else) to change public opinion, but the other way around. But such arguments fail again to recognise that traffic engineers have been doing that for decades. Is it worse to make people aware of the impacts of their behaviour than to force them to change, as engineers have done? Government might not always know best, but neither, apparently, does the general public. So who is going to step up and turn things around? (If you're interested, the comments below the Spectator article provide an intelligent debate on the issue of persuasion vs. coercion.)

electricity on the go

Generating electricity from rooftop solar panels or wind turbines is the start of a move to repurpose existing infrastructure - a trend that should gain momentum over the next few years. And it doesn't have to be limited to buildings. Distributed generation can also go mobile, with dramatic potential.

One of the big challenges for renewable energy is storing energy for later use, or for transport to another location. Conventional batteries have made some progress, but they don't provide industrial-strength storage. Fuel cells, on the other hand, are scaleable to serve a variety of needs, and the hydrogen they use as fuel can be transported using a number of methods. Hydrogen fuel cells hold promise for cars and other transport vehicles, but their potential goes way beyond just powering vehicles.

Berkeley professor Daniel Kammen suggests that when you fill up your fuel cell vehicle with hydrogen, the electricity generated by the fuel cell in your car can be used for just about anything. Drive to the office, hook up to a special plug-in station, and the building's emloyees can all power the office building, receiving revenue in return. And do the same thing at home.

The trick, of course, is that while hydrogen is plentiful, it takes energy to capture it for use in fuel cells. This energy might be sourced from coal, natural gas, nuclear or renewable energy. Like electric trains running from overhead lines, or subway trains runnng from an electrified third track, it makes no difference to the vehicle where or how the energy was sourced, so the options are limitless. This means the mix of energy sources might be dirty at first, especially in countries that are coal-rich, but the mix can be changed over time, without having to change the vehicles that use hydrogen cells.

The benefit with this mobile fleet of electricity generators is that they bring the energy to where it is needed, and the owners of the FCVs can offset the investment with supplementary income, which could accelerate adoption of the technology. As Kammen points out, it's a whole new way of looking at power systems.