The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

Boof,
I couldn't agree more with your comment about Camry hybrid, 6 years too late, but then the Liberals were in power then.
Now, if Rudd can persuade GM to build 10,000 Chevy Volts, could really make a start, but not enough to reduce fuel use by 4% per year. Better still, >500,000 duel Petrol/CNG vehicles per year, is definitely one way of buying 20-30 years extra time at least in Australia. My understanding is that one of the problems with CNG is the tank size required for 400-500km range. Why not have a small CNG tank for all those short trips, and top up at home from domestic NG just like PHEV use short range battery power?

Again, you're talking about people driving to work.

And on average that's 22% of all trips taken.

Okay, so for some people that's going to be 90+% of their driving. But that's not the majority, that's not the average.

I mean, you can always drag out cases of people who genuinely have little or no choices. But the vast majority of people do have a choice, they're like my mate - too lazy to walk or bike or whatever.

I'm just suggesting that each of us take a detailed look at our driving, record our trips and see how many are trips we could do by some other method, or which we could roll in with another trip.

So the guy whose only driving is to and from work from his godforsaken McMansion with no public transport in the area, he records that in his little logbook. But the guy who drives 15km along the railway line to and from work, 1.5km to the park, three times a week 2km to the gym, and six times a week 2km to the shops and then on Sunday goes for a drive to see the country, he records that, too.

Just take a look at your driving. Don't tell us fairy tales about the Poor Little Aussie Battler, just take a serious look at it and see what you can do without or reorganise.

And that'll reduce your fuel use a heap more than buggerising about with the accelerator pedal or any nonsense like that.

I'd frame the problem this way; if the world has too many people to eat steak, drive a car or enjoy air conditioning then maybe there should be fewer of us.

I couldn't agree more. For those of us who don't need to eat steak, drive a car, or have air conditioning though there's plenty of room on the planet. So what do we do? This is a matter of economics. I say we should price energy intensive lifestyles appropriately. If someone wants to eat steak while driving a Hummer with the AC on full blast, sure thing. I also think they should be allowed to heat their home with paper money. The thing is, that our infrastructure, taxes and government foolishly subsidize the Hummer, the AC and the steak. The war in Iraq is about securing access to oil and all US tax payers are paying for it. There are all sorts of tax subsidies for huge cars if you own your own business, regardless of whether its a construction company or a nail salon. There's this amazing transportation network of highways that you can't walk or bike on which tax payers paid for. And coal burning electricity plants produce tons of mercury, CO2 and other nastiness which ordinary folks and critters the world over suffer from. But the people sitting in front of the AC only pay for the cost of making the electricity.

The earth is plenty big enough for people to live simply. In fact the earth could support probably 10 times as many people as there are now if we didn't need to destroy the environment for a buzz.

It's hard to judge how the time driving translates to fuel use. You seem to be imagining that when people drive to work it's along easy freeways, and driving anywhere else is chockers with traffic jams. It ain't necessarily so.

I wouldn't say that more than 70+% of travel is "non-essential", rather that it's "discretionary" or "avoidable." A lot of people go to the shops a few times a week, it's not very difficult to sort yourself out and go just once. And there are other things which can be combined like social/education/active leisure - okay, so Jane goes to night school on Tuesdays and Jim goes to soccer, let's say Jim drives Jane to school, goes to soccer, has a brew or two with his mates afterwards, and Jane goes for coffee with her friend Mary from class. That's better than Jane and Jim taking their separate cars, and going out on different nights, and so on.

How about buy less useless stuff from concrete jungle malls!

No seriously we ahve to look at how people actually live in a typical suburb, where they work, how they get their food supplies, how they fill in all the spare hours they have now that FF does most of their household work and what they are doing when they leave their locales at all.

Then when we understand this, we can start to take a look at the avaialble resources in the suburbs themselves adn see if any of the infrastructure can be adpated so that people don't have to do as much travelling.

I fully agree with Kiashu that we should first look at not driving the car or reducing it as much as possible. Lecturing people about it is likely to be counterproductive and waiting for petrol to hit the screaming pain barrier is agaonisingly slow for some of us, but get over it, you can't control the oil price anymore that the next guy so just accept it and do what is within your own control.

Here is my personal list of goals I can achieve in my own community:

1. Set up a point to point ad-hoc car pool from the neighbourhood to the CBD (regional city). We can add other popular routes later like down tothe local shops and back from them if it works out.

2. Start a neighbourhood association with the intention of running the above car pool and maybe extending it in the future to pooled ownership of fewer but better cars shared amongst more people. (big goal)

3. Lobby to build a community wood fired oven in the local park. We teach all the local kids how to bake bread which is done once or twice a week saving people from having to buy stale commercial bread trucked from 300Kms away and save all those two kilometre trips tothe shops to buy it.

4. Around the oven, take over some of the unused grass areas in the park and start growing food. Co-opting the kids again.

5. Germinate and give all my neighbours a fruit tree to plant this Christmas. I ahve peach, nectarine and cherry in the fridge at the moment seeing as we just don't getreally coldwinters anymore.

6. Eventually I would like to see a community workshop built around the garden/park/oven which may be the germination of work opportunities. Small cottage industries with small shops.

7. The community hub is a bustling social hub which attracts home based workers who have learned to telecommute to their slave jobs. Far more people will stay put if they can walk to the local market in five minutes from their house.

8. Build resilience in the local community (as much as I like you guys, real people are also cool) to share knowledge , provide support to those doing it tough, i.e elderly, unemployed, mortage defaulters.

9. My favourtie - start a beer brewing network with all my new found friends and neighbours. Drink locally - no taxis, booze bus etc.

Everything on my list is doable, reduces car use by the whole neighbourhood and will make this a better place to live.

Wow, most of the people (in the Twin cities, Minnesota) I talk to on biking complain their distances they need to travel are too far, but there certainly are places (and times like rushhour) where I don't like to bike at all because of nonexistent shoulders (or parked cars) for safe biking.

We have an extensive biking community in the core cities and inner suburbs with interest in making roads safer for biking. (We also have usually senseless "critical mass" bike rides that purposely ride in the highest traffic times and ignore all traffic rules - not helping with any greater cooperative spirit with drivers.) But it seems improvement comes from participation - people interesting in biking need to get together and express their frustrations and difficulties to local governments/councils/boards and it surely takes time for change. Our buses and LRT also can carry bikes which I see frequently used.

WORSE than unsafe biking, unsafe walking is an even greater craziness of modern cities designed for cars. Getting a safe path for people walk a half mile to a bus stop is a hurdle too. Many neighborhood streets curve around in long blocks to discourage through-traffic, but also discourage walking when you have to go way out of your way just to get around a block. Insane stuff everywhere.

So "Get Political" is the answer in most cases, but change is slow.

Hate to say it but have you considered moving?

While driving today I was passed by small, medium, and giant SUVs and pickups, and by expensive midsize autos doing ten or more miles per hour over the speed limit. I was tailgated by a small car driven by someone who was angry because I wasn't driving over the speed limit. I was given a hard stare by a driver who had to pass me to the right because I was in the left-hand lane, doing the speed limit, to make a left-hand turn. Even at that, I drove only about 10 miles during the day, doing the following:

• took my wife to work, a fifteen minute drive that takes about 40 minutes by bus (one transfer necessary, and fare has to be paid at each boarding); my wife can't walk, and to pull her in a wagon to her school, and then pick her up to pull her home would take about a 2 hour round trip, morning and evening.
• took the dog to the dog-park on the way home, a slight swing south; I could have walked the dog to the park in about 40 minutes; however, knowing it would take another 40 minutes to get back, would I be supid enough to stay another hour at the park with the dog?.
• in the afternoon, I drove back to pick up my wife at work, dropping by a post office box on the way because a letter can't be left in the mail box because of the danger of it being ripped off.
• yesterday I had about the same schedule, but took a slightly modified route on my way to pick up my wife to do a quick shop at Costco; if I had walked to Costco earlier, it would have taken about 15 minutes to get there, though I would have had to pull that wagon again to collect all my loot, and would need a cooler and some ice in the wagon to keep the frozen goods through the trip back.
• eventually, if I kept up a wagon-wife/dog-park/wagon-shopping routine, I would probably attract the attention of the local newspaper and get my picture in the newspaper (Youtube?) as that eccentric who lives in north-county, or I would attract the attention of muggers (probably the same one's ripping off the mail), or I would get run over by one of those vehicles doing 10 mph over the speed limit.

I really do try my best to save gas by combining trips, and don't go anywhere unless I have saved up things to do during the trip, but beyond that the car-based life style around here isn't going to end until the gas does. In addition, for most people, there is a disconnect between buying gasoline and using it. When people are filling up, they grumble and shake their heads and blame everyone else for the problem. However, when they are driving, the gasoline becomes like air, always there and used without thinking.