The Transportation Issue

Boatcar, Traveling Legs, and Other Innovations

GOOD — Fri, 8 May 2009 14:01:54 PDT

We asked the students of 826 in Los Angeles to imagine how we might get around in the future. Here's what they came up with.

The Transport of Future Past

GOOD — Wed, 6 May 2009 09:00:00 PDT

We have built ourselves into a mess. An over-abundance of demand for personal mobility is rapidly draining our supply of fossil fuels. How did we get here? One part of the answer lies with a group of men and women who, a half century ago and more put into the public record their ideas about what our future world should look like. Their visions-sleek lines, orderly grids, automated systems, and fantastic structures-influenced our modern transportation infrastructure. Their ideas ultimately buckled under the weight of their own grandiosity, but the impulse that motivated these explorations-to envision a better future, and hope for its realization-is still relevant. It falls to us to imagine our own better tomorrow.

(Above: The Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair is often credited with instilling in Americans our current ideas about transportation. The exhibit, sponsored by General Motors, imagined a world two decades in the future as a vast network of high-speed roadways, connecting disparate suburbs with massive urban centers.)

Above Le Corbusier's concepts for future urbanism predate GM's vision, but are strikingly similar. His sketches for a "Ville Contempor-aine" show towering urban corridors conducting traffic on various levels at high speed through dense city centers.

Above Buckminster Fuller envisioned a time when giant geodesic spheres would float cities of thousands high above the clouds. Fuller hoped Cloud Nine (as he dubbed the project) would enable entire communities to migrate according to the whims of their inhabitants, and "converge and deploy around Earth without its depletion."

Left As part of the avant-garde architecture movement in the 1960s, the English architect Ron Herron of Archigram proposed the Walking City, autonomous robotic structures that could roam the earth depending on the needs or wants of the inhabitants.

Above In the 1970s, NASA commissioned a series of explorations about space colonies, and had artists render some of the concepts. The idea of space settlement is predicated on the notion that someday, humans will need to travel beyond earth and colonize the solar system.

Left The Italian architect Antonio Sant'Elia imagined "La Citta Nuova" in 1914; it showcased large transportation hubs servicing concentrated vertical domestic and industrial structures, common themes in futurist transportation visions.

FUTURMA Corbis
CLOUD NINES Courtesy of the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
SPACE COLONY Courtesy of nasa.gov
LE CORBUSIER'S 1927 vision of Paris and the world (re-drawn by Michael E. Arth)
THE WALKING CITY by Archigram

Space Oddity

GOOD — Tue, 5 May 2009 09:00:45 PDT

We called a licensed Virgin Galactic travel agent to answer our burning questions about the company's pioneering space-tourism trips.

GOOD: Let's say I wanted to go into space-there are some things I'd want to know. For starters, how high will I go?

VIRGIN: The plane elevates 60,000 feet into space. Then the rocket sort of launches into space for 60 to 70 miles, at which point you're floating out of your seat for a little while.

G: How long will the flight last?

V: The entire thing is about two to three hours. And the part where you are out in space floating lasts about six minutes.

G: So it costs $200,000 right?

V: The fee is $200,000, and the deposit minimum is $20,000, but the more your deposit is, the sooner you go.

G: Can I pay by credit card, like a regular flight?

V: No. You need to buy it outright, and money can be wire-transferred to the U.K. offices.

G: What should I bring?

V: You don't need to bring anything. You'll have time to prepare in advance and you get a suit in the plane, but you don't want to bring anything with you. I've done a weightless experience before, and it was the most amazing thing I have ever done. I tried it with a camera in my hand, and then again without, and trust me, you don't want to be carrying anything with you. Virgin Galactic takes care of all of that.

G: Can I bring my dog?

V: Um, I doubt it.

G: Another possibly stupid question: Are there bathrooms?

V: No, there's no time for that. Trust me, you won't be looking for that when you're 6,000 feet up.

G: How soon can I go?

V: The first-tier founder flight is sold out. There were 100 seats that basically were invitation only. Beyond that, it depends on how much you put down. I'm not 100 percent sure, but if you put down, say, $125,000 now you might be 250th on the list.

G: Will I get jet lag?

V: Based on what astronauts have shared, after the weightless experience, being up in space, seeing layers of air and the curvature of the earth, you definitely feel different. You won't have jet lag, but you will definitely feel different.

G: Do I need a passport?

V: Funny you should bring this up. You would fly out of New Mexico, so you might not. But Virgin Galactic might make something kind of like this for space.

G: So there's paperwork involved?

V: Yes.

The Future Is Wow

GOOD — Mon, 4 May 2009 09:00:04 PDT

What if the techy transportation of sci-fi movies isn't as far-fetched as it seems?

We asked Seth Shostak, scientist and film consultant, to rate them on a scale of 1 ("dream on") to 10 ("totally feasible"). Bring on the levitating cars!

Alien

Technology: Placing people in "stasis"-suspended animation-for long journeys
Release date: 1979
Future depicted:
Rating: 7
What's the holdup?

The Postman

Technology Horses as a dominant transportation mode in a dystopian , antitechnology future
Release date 1997
Future depicted 2013
Rating 2
What's the holdup? "Fuggedaboutit. Horses are kind of fun, and they taste good on whole wheat, but even if we let the nukes loose, we're not going back to horseflesh transport."

Back to the Future

Technology: Time travel
Release date: 1985
Future depicted: 1985 (and 2015)
Rating: 8
What's the holdup? "That high rating is for traveling into the future. All that's required is moving ourselves at a fair fraction of the speed of light-something we can't do now, but maybe in a few centuries. Traveling into the past? I give that a two. It would require both new physics and exotic technology, and it's not clear we'll ever have either."

Blade Runner

Technology: Flying cars and related infrastructure
Release date: 1982
Future depicted: 2019
Rating: 8
What's the holdup?

Minority Report

Technology: Magnetically levitating autonomous car
Release date: 2002
Future depicted: 2054
Rating: 7
What's the holdup?

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Technology: Transporter
Release date: 1979
Future depicted: 2273
Rating: 2
What's the holdup?

Logan's Run

Technology: Travel by pneumatic tubes
Release date: 1976
Future depicted: 2274
Rating: 5
What's the holdup? "Pneumatic tubes at every residence would allow people to shop on the internet and have their products delivered without jamming up the roads with delivery trucks. But putting people into pneumatic tubes runs into problems both technical (you need pumps every few hundred tube diameters) and physiological (do you want to be stuffed into a small cylinder and sent at high speed around a bendy tube roller coaster?)."

Build a Better Bike

GOOD — Sat, 2 May 2009 09:00:52 PDT

If your commute is too long for pedal power, just add a little juice to your ride.

By Jason Cozens, as told to GOOD

I've been an on-and-off bike commuter for about seven years. I enjoyed riding and being outside-not being confined inside a car-but I always showed up to work covered in sweat and beat up.

I read an article about a man in Africa who built a motorized bike. The picture in the article showed this bike that looked like it was from another era. It was delicate looking, but it could get him from village to village, and it transformed his life. So I started doing some research and discovered that the motor I had seen in the article is generally known as a Happy-Time motor. They're two-stroke motors, made in China.
So I ordered one.

They make these kits 49 cubic centimeters for a reason. If it's 50 CCs or more you're required to license it, to register the bike, and to license yourself. Those things might deter a do-it-yourselfer. It makes the project bigger, and it kind of takes the renegade aspect out of it as well.

When the kit came in the mail, I was shocked to find it came with no instructions. It was just a box with Chinese characters printed on it and a bunch of parts inside. The parts were all shiny and vaguely resembled the parts of a motorcycle or a car. I googled "motorized bike"-that's what they were calling them in the article I had read-and found this community of people who make these bikes. Without the help of this nation-wide community, I wouldn't have even attempted to make it.

I probably could have put it together in about a week, but I customized it a lot. I wanted the bike to be eye-catching and have a bit of character. I've always had character cars. I'll be at a gas station with my beat-up 1976 Celica, or my beat-up 1967 El Camino, and people will come up asking how much I want to sell the car for. I love having a car you don't see anywhere else on the road, and in the same respect I love having a bike that nobody else has. It's kind of like a Pee-wee's Big Adventure complex. He has his ridiculous bike and I have my ridiculous bike. Pee-wee and I were born on the same day.

It's about a one-horsepower motor, which means it's like riding a horse. It is a very natural amount of power to have. I don't have a speedometer, but people have pulled up next to me and said, "You're going thirty miles per hour." I'd say around 30 mph, 35 mph, is my top speed on flat ground. Since it's just a one-horsepower motor, on hills you have to pedal just like you do on a bike, but when you pedal you feel like Superman because you're barely touching the pedals and you actually feel yourself relieving strain on the engine.

Now that my engine is broken in, I get about 150 miles to the gallon. I have a half-gallon tank, which I usually don't fill up all the way. There's nothing quite like the feeling of going to a gas station and telling someone I'd like 75 cents on pump two, and then seeing the shocked look on his face when I come back in for change.

The two-stroke motors from China are EPA-approved, but to really comply with the law you need an EPA-approved muffler also. There are similar, four-stroke motors that are actually green. They have very low emissions, they get over 200 miles per gallon, and they are extremely reliable. A lot of those motors come from Japan and they're more than twice as expensive.

The quirks are what really endear me to this little machine: the fact that you have to pedal from a dead stop, or that you go faster downhill if you pull in the clutch and stop gassing-those things are unique to this form of transport. Also, the ability to use it as a regular bike is probably underemphasized in what you read about these bikes.

I spend a lot of time at The Home Depot. There are plumbing parts in and around this bike, as well as plenty of things from the 99-cent store, pieces of jewelry, and leather bracelets. You start to see the possibility of anything making its way into your own custom vehicle. Something like a doorstop becomes a fantastic way to hold a gas-tank in place.

I live a block off of Skid Row, and so many homeless people come up with a general interest. A lot of homeless people rely on bicycles for transportation, so I'm sure the gears are turning in their heads: "Wow, I could get out of town on one of these if I had a motor." When I tell them I got my kit for $130, they're usually blown away.

My current commute is about five miles through an older, industrial part of Los Angeles. It's kind of miserable to sit through in traffic. But on the bike it's actually a fantastic experience; it becomes transcendent.

LEARN MORE motoredbikes.com Want to buy a motor? spookytoothcycles.com

Photos by Will Etling

Buying the Best Bike For You

Zach Dundas — Fri, 1 May 2009 09:00:37 PDT

A bike novice and a bike nerd talk cycling options.

GOOD: I figured since you live in Portland, you must know everything there is to know about bikes. Can you help me pick one?

ZACH DUNDAS: Ah, Portland's reputation as the urban cyclist's paradise precedes it, I see. Well, it is a pretty great bike city. Ironically, I am probably in the bottom 20th percentile of Portland cyclists in terms of skills, strength, knowledge, and fanaticism, but maybe that makes me the perfect person for you to talk to.

G: So, I'm overwhelmed by the options and by the haughty people who tend to work at bike shops.

ZD: I find it appalling that you've encountered unhelpful service at bike shops. Bike-shop workers in Portland tend to be too friendly, if anything. They see a fresh customer walk in and a little evangelical gleam comes into their eye. I think the basic ethic here is that anything that gets more cyclists on the road helps all other cyclists. That being said, I do see that buying a bike can be intimidating. In my own cycling life, I've gone out of my way to avoid specialist gear and many of the trappings of hard-core bike culture-not that I don't respect it, or find it interesting, but because I want my bike to be a fairly seamless part of my life. I definitely appreciate the aesthetics and politics of cycling, but basically I need my bike to get me to work and to the store, and I suspect that's what you're looking for, as well.

G: That's exactly what I'm looking for. I want something that won't break the bank, that isn't complicated in any way, and is sturdy. Ideally, this is a bike I can ride to work on occasion, and all over my neighborhood.

ZD: To start, I wouldn't really recommend one of the urban cruiser styles that have come to the fore of late. I test-rode an Electra Amsterdam a few years ago, and was not impressed; I found it to be a case of style over substance. But if I had a wad of cash begging to be spent on a recreational cruiser bike, I'd probably go with the Bianchi Milano. Ladies look lovely on a Milano.

G: But they're not ideal for getting around?

ZD: You'll find all that stuff a little weak when you have to make it to work through city traffic. You might look at the Surly Cross-Check, an extremely tough, durable, accessible bike that retails for about $1,000. I have heard the Raleigh One Way, a single-geared bike but not necessarily a fixed gear, well spoken of. I'm also fascinated by Rivendell bikes: Check out their website at rivbike.com. They seem kind of crazy, but the bikes look cool and aren't too expensive.

G: OK, we're getting somewhere here. What do you ride?

ZD: I've had great luck so far with the Bianchi Volpe. I'm sure you'll find some caveats about it out there-I did meet a guy who said his Bianchi frame cracked really early on. But so far, for me, it's been just about ideal. I got it for less than $1,000 a couple of years ago. Bianchi's an Italian brand with a lot of history, though my Volpe was, like many bikes sold in the United States, made in Taiwan. I find the Volpe to be an excellent mix of sturdy and sleek; it's basically a hybrid bike, or maybe a road bike with a little mountain DNA, if that makes sense. It's also got just a bit of that Italian design thing going on.

G: Talk to me about custom bikes. All hype?

ZD: I will admit to some serious lust for custom bikes. Some day, when I'm rich and famous, I will get a tailor-made bike from one of Portland's many frame builders. I'll spring for an Ira Ryan or a Vanilla, something that costs my quarterly take-home pay and requires multiple personal fittings and a two-year wait. If you think I'm kidding, check out Vanilla's website. Their waiting list is five years, and they didn't even accept orders in 2008. Their bikes are, for the record, totally worth it.

G: What if I wanted to only spend somewhere around $200? At that price are you just talking about walking into a used-bike place, closing your eyes, and pointing? Do deals exist for decent bikes?

ZD: For $200, yes, you are basically trusting to luck on the used-bike market. That is not to say that you can't find good stuff. A friend of mine found a classic Schwinn in good condition for about $150. I spent $150 on a beautiful retro Schwinn from the early 1980s, which worked great-until I crashed it. I discovered that the relatively minor damage to the drive train and the pedals would cost more than $150 to repair because, of course, Schwinns of that era used a proprietary drive-train system that is no longer manufactured. If you're going to go used, I'd recommend looking for a well-maintained road bike from the late 1980s or early 1990s.

G: What about cheaper new bikes?

ZD: You can look at new bikes starting at around $500. I test-rode a couple of completely respectable hybrid bikes for around that price. I just decided, after the heartbreak with the Schwinn, to spend a little bit more on a bike that I hope to ride for a decade.

G: So you're saying if I plan to keep it, the best bet is investing in a good bike?

ZD: I figure, with a round-trip bus fare from my house to downtown Portland costing $4, the bike pays for itself pretty quickly. Plus, it is a key component in our household's ability to own just one car, which of course is a significant savings on insurance, maintenance, and fuel.

Illustrations by Taliah Lempert. See more of Talia's bicycle paintings at bicyclepaintings.com

How to Choose the Right Alternative-fuel Car for You

GOOD — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:23:03 PDT

Click above to launch our handy flowchart, "How To Choose the Right Alternative-Fuel Car For You."

More Burning Questions About Alternative Fuel Vehicles:

Whatever happened to hydrogen?

The idea is great: Take the most abundant element in the universe, turn it silently into electricity, and the only byproduct is a wisp of steam. To its fans, the hydrogen fuel cell is a transportation miracle that will cork our carbon output and curb our addiction to foreign oil. To its critics, it's vaporware.

Fuel-cell cars are, in essence, electric cars. With the electricity it extracts from hydrogen, the onboard fuel cell charges a battery. The battery then powers an electric motor that turns the wheels. Critics argue that because "producing" hydrogen requires an energy source, typically natural gas, that unless the energy used is renewable, fuel cells are just running on fossil fuels.

The other concern is that hydrogen cars may be a long-term solution at best-that it could take at least 40 years for a switch to make a marked impact on gas consumption and climate change. Quite simply, experts told Wired last year, we just don't have that kind of time. Still, many automakers continue to shake the pom-poms for fuel-cell vehicles, invoking images of a "hydrogen highway" dotted with filling stations (which would be, in truth, a new nationwide fueling infrastructure). VW is working on its; Honda has been quite aggressive with its FCX Clarity.

Where fuel cells do pull their weight is in the home. In Japan, hundreds of houses already use them to generate power and heat. So don't be too surprised if, in five years, the fuel cell that gives you electricity and hot water also charges the electric car in your driveway.

Are hybrid batteries toxic?

If the forecasts are right, electrons will replace hydrocarbons as the energy source in our cars. Then, of course, we'll have to face the question of batteries. The batteries favored in hybrid cars-nickel-metal hydride-have an encouraging track record of lasting at least as long as the cars themselves. The lithium-ion batteries used in fully electric cars are similarly enduring. But how bad are they for the planet? Depends on what you do with them when they die.

According to the Blacksmith Institute, which studies pollution in the developing world, contamination from lead-battery recycling, mostly in developing countries, is one of the 10 worst global pollution problems. So while experts say that the batteries used in electric and hybrid cars are significantly less toxic than the lead-acid batteries found in conventional cars, the same rules apply: They must be properly disposed of and recycled.

Meanwhile, Toyota alone sold 224,547 hybrids last year. If there isn't sufficient capacity to recycle these batteries, they could end up being shipped overseas to landfills, as is the case with many lead-acid batteries. Here's hoping we've learned enough from our (many) mistakes, and won't let it happen again.

The amazing Indian Air Car: Coming to America?

Perhaps you have heard that India's largest automaker, Tata Motors, has created the world's first commercial car that runs on air. The good news is that they're bringing it here. A few fun facts:

It is powered by compressed air • Zero Pollution Motors will produce the American version • It's priced at $17,800 • Reservations in the States will be taken midyear; delivery is early 2010 • ZPM estimates that its Air Car will run up to 1,000 miles per fill-up, and at speeds up to 96 mph • It's up for the Automotive X Prize (see below), and is considered a front-runner • Made out of fiberglass instead of sheet metal, it's expected to be safer and easier to repair than a traditional car and rust-proof • It seats six.

Who will build the best 100-mpg car?

After staging a high-profile competition for civilian spaceflight in 2004, the X Prize Foundation now has another $10 million on the table, this time for a 100-mpg car. And after the checkered flag flies and the winning team claims the Progressive Automotive X Prize, there is "no reason you should not be driving a car that gets over 100 miles per gallon," according to the prize's creator, Peter Diamandis.

Next year's contest will be held in six cities, in a Tour de France–like race that will include aggressive start-up companies, weekend warriors, and at least one global automaker. After a car has proven it can touch at least 100 mpg (or its energy equivalent), teams have to show that their vehicle is safe, practical (with amenities like air conditioning and a stereo), and could be priced to sell at least 10,000 units per year.

Candid corn: Is ethanol worth it?

A parade of studies has tried to decipher the pros and cons of ethanol. Depending on a multitude of variables, some studies find it environmentally better than gasoline, some much worse. The implications aren't light: The USDA says that nearly a third of all U.S. corn used this year will go into ethanol production. And globally, food prices have been ratcheted up as more corn is brewed into fuel.

A great deal of hope has been placed on cellulosic ethanol-a term that refers to an array of next-generation technologies. Cellulosic ethanol shows promise because it can be made from waste products-everything from orange peels to cow manure-or hearty plants like switchgrass that fare well in marginal soils. Most studies find cellulosic ethanol to yield a better energy ratio than the corn variety, but production costs are still prohibitively high.

Biodiesel-a diesel substitute made from vegetable oil or animal fats-shows a better energy balance than corn ethanol. But even if projections are right, and the United States produces a billion gallons a year by 2012, biodiesel will still constitute a tiny fraction of our fuel diet.

Call In the Designers

Geoff Wardle — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:00:04 PDT

In any field, designers have to synthesize competing interests to come to an elegant solution. Imagine what they could do to transportation.

Centuries of artificially cheap energy have established an expectation of ubiquitous personal mobility and freight transportation in the developed economies of the world. This expectation has caused four problematic consequences: serious ecological degradation, urban congestion, human health issues, and rapid depletion of finite energy sources.

As developing economies aspire to the same levels of materialism and mobility as the rest of us, our global community faces an untenable future. We are all faced with an enormous and complex problem that needs radical solutions. While this is a daunting task, there are tremendous opportunities to break some historically bad habits and create innovative, smarter ways to mobilize ourselves and to deliver the food and goods we need to live. Accelerated by some inevitable truths about energy that we will have to face in the not-too-distant future, such changes are possible.

However, it is not just science, technology, or astute business and political philosophies that will provide the answers. In order to make real changes that bring truly sustainable transportation and personal mobility, the populations of the world have to be inspired and excited about embracing these changes. Human beings are inclined to change when they see that it will improve on what they already experience. This is where the role of the designer comes into play.

Creating sustainable transportation, particularly in urban environments, will be a truly multidisciplinary effort. Engineers, sociologists, urban planners, scientists, architects, designers, policy makers, manufacturers, economists, and regulators all have to work together to create solutions. But it is my belief that designers can contribute far more to these innovative transportation solutions than just compelling design. I believe that while this will still be an important role for designers to play, an even more important one will be to facilitate all these diverse specialists and experts-to be what we call "systems balancers."

What's a system balancer? If you look at the role of an industrial or car designer in a large company today, they have a conflict of interest. On the one hand, they need to design products that their enterprise can sell profitably. On the other hand, they are also on the side of the customer, making sure that they design a product of value that excites them, but also meets all their needs and expectations. More often than not, they fulfill these conflicting roles with aplomb by working with all the other disciplines that design and develop complex industrial products. They frequently have to make judgment calls on issues that are not always popular with their specialist colleagues. Designers have to ensure that the end user benefits from a well-balanced product. This is what I mean by designers acting as systems balancers.

In the far larger and more complex challenge of creating sustainable urban mobility systems, designers will need to develop these skills to a much higher level to become big-picture thinkers as well as solutions experts. By so doing, transportation designers of the future can develop the wisdom, clarity of vision, and leadership to influence high-level transportation policy makers. This would ensure that transportation and mobility of the future would be as compelling as they are ecologically responsible and economically sustainable.

This is why Art Center College of Design, with its legacy of being a leader in transportation design education, felt a profound responsibility to create a series of summits on the topic of sustainable mobility. After the third summit, in February, we were very encouraged by the response from the diverse experts who attended all of the summits. It seems as though these beliefs are resonating all around. I look forward to accelerating the momentum for our remaining planned Sustainable Mobility Summits, after which we have promised to establish a set of guiding principles for creating future sustainable mobility.

Gallons to Go

GOOD — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:00:04 PDT

Knowing your car's miles per gallon isn't going to get you very far.

Last summer, Richard Larrick and Jack Soll, professors at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, published a paper arguing that Americans did not understand how fuel efficiency works. They found that most people assumed that improving a car's miles per gallon from 25 mpg to 50 mpg would save more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 10 mpg to 20 mpg. But when you do the math, the latter saves more than twice as much (see chart). "Miles per gallon," they argued, was misleading and did not help drivers understand how much gas they were using. The proposed solution: gallons per mile.

GOOD: So, miles per gallon doesn't actually measure how much gas you use?

RICHARD LARRICK: The paper was cowritten with a colleague of mine and we actually live near each other and carpool in his Camry hybrid, which has an mpg readout on it. One day, we were watching it and seeing the good and bad mileage. We were thinking about whether you could average together the miles-per-gallon readout to get total miles per gallon, and we realized that the math of miles per gallon gets tricky and it can be really misleading.

Imagine that you are driving uphill for 100 miles and you're getting 10 miles per gallon, and then you just turned around and drove down the same hill for 100 miles and you got 100 miles per gallon on the way downhill. And the question is: What is your average miles per gallon over that distance?

It feels like it should be about 50, but it turns out it's 20.

The amount of gas you're using to go 100 miles when you're getting 10 mpg is 10 gallons. And when you're getting 100 mpg as you're driving 100 miles, you use just one gallon. So you're using a total of 11 gallons to go 200 miles, and that gets you a little bit under 20 miles per gallon.

G: Do you have any idea how we ended up with this measurement of fuel economy that doesn't really tell us how much gas we're using?

RL: [My colleague and I] speculate that when we first had cars, and gas stations were few and far between, maybe it actually mattered that you knew exactly how far you could go on a tank of gas before needing to be able to refill it.

G: Are you seeing more and more people considering using gallons per mile?

RL: A little bit. One of the things we've discovered in the process of publishing this and having it be publicized quite a bit over the summer was that conversations like this had gone on at Consumer Reports and car magazines in the past. The engineers know that there's this problem with miles per gallon. But everyone assumes that because we're so used to mpg-which we are-that people are not going to be open to changing anything.

I'm kind of frustrated because I've tried to reach out to the EPA several times. The one thing they do [on fueleconomy.gov] is gallons per 25 miles. So that is there. And that's been there since before we did our research. But my problem with that is that 25 miles is too small a distance to actually see the difference in cars. So it's always .9, 1.2, 1.1-to me, all those numbers of gallons look the same.

We actually prefer 10,000 miles. The key thing about 10,000 miles is that is the distance that many people drive in a year. In fact, they often drive more. It really gives you a sense of, Okay, a year's worth of driving is going to use 400 gallons, or 700 gallons.

G: What about car companies? Any sense they'll start using different numbers?

RL: People are always curious-who does this benefit? I'm not really sure if Toyota or Detroit is favored more by this. But I think you can make the argument that it's Detroit, which was putting hybrids on SUVs and being ridiculed for it. Well, our analysis indicates that's exactly right. Because to get a car from 14 mpg to 20 mpg is just a huge, huge improvement in reducing gas consumption.

I do know that, in 2004, Honda and Toyota called for supplementing miles per gallon with gallons per 100 miles. And I only discovered this after we published the paper, so it wasn't something we were able to even cite because we didn't even know about it at the time. They heard people complaining that the Prius wasn't getting 50 mpg and that it was getting 42 mpg instead, and people were so frustrated to lose the eight miles per gallon, but once you flip the numbers over you realize you're talking about a few gallons per hundred miles.

G: So, what's the next step? How can we use this new knowledge?

RL: This helps us understand that pulling cars out of the teens [in terms of miles per gallon] is so much more valuable than pushing an efficient car even higher. That only becomes clear when you start thinking about gallons per mile. That tiny increase from 10 mpg to 11 mpg saves essentially the same one gallon of gas every 100 miles as does increasing 33 mpg to 50 mpg.

In no way do we advocate that people should stop at 11 mpg, but it at least focuses your attention on getting all those cars in the teens up into the twenties where literally hundreds of gallons of gas will be saved for every 10,000 miles of driving.

How To Double Your Car’s Fuel Economy Without Spending Any Money

Zach Frechette — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:00:58 PDT

Hypermiling-the art of beating the fuel rating given to your car by the Environmental Protection Agency-has gone from a fringe hobby to a mainstream movement, thanks largely to recent high gas prices and concerns about the climate. Bolstered by the success of hybrid cars, hypermilers have been gathering in increasingly large numbers around the country to see who can get the best gas mileage for their gallon.

Just ask Wayne Gerdes, proprietor of CleanMPG, an online resource and forum for those interested in squeezing every last mile out of their gas tanks. Gerdes knows what he's talking about: He once took a Prius from Chicago to New York on a single tank of gas, and he holds the current record for the highest sustained mpg and longest tank: 220 mpg and 2,254 miles, respectively (both in a Honda Insight hybrid).

We asked Gerdes for some of his best tricks, which he claims will improve any car's efficiency by 50 percent. Turns out what's good for the environment is good for the wallet: "Think of fuel prices last summer. It's like paying two dollars a gallon instead of four dollars."

Before you get in your car...

1. Do you really need to get in it? If it's a short distance, you should be thinking about walking or cycling. "The best hypermilers in the world walk, bike, or take public transportation."

2. Check your tire pressure. Properly inflated tires last longer, improve handling, reduce braking distance, and increase fuel economy. And don't just fill them to what is printed on the driver-side door. Check the reading for "max sidewall," printed on the outside of the tires themselves, and fill to that point. Your tires will stay at an ideal pressure for longer (think about it: If you fill to what the door instructs, they're technically underinflated the minute you drive on them), while still being in a completely safe range.

3. Add a fuel-consumption display. It's a simple device you can install on any vehicle manufactured since 1996. Nothing will wake you up to bad driving habits like watching your mileage rating dwindle to that of a Hummer as you accelerate. Drivers who install one typically see a 15-percent boost in fuel economy just by monitoring real-time mpg feedback. They cost around $160, and they pay for themselves in a matter of months through saved fuel costs. Gerdes recommends the ScanGauge brand.

Before you turn your car on...

1. Prepare yourself. Buckle your seat belt, adjust your mirrors, check your lipstick, set up your cell phone. Also, instead of turning on the motor and rolling down to the end of your driveway to see if it's safe to turn out, wait until you're sure that it is, and then start moving.

2. Choose your route. Driving the main interstates or arterials is not always the best way to get from point A to point B. There's often less traffic if you take a more direct route, even if the posted speed is slower. Besides, "speed is the enemy of fuel economy."

3. See how far you can roll. If you're on a slope, why do you need your engine? Put the car in neutral, take your foot off the brake, and coast until your first stop. Your top speed will probably be 5 to 10 mph. "That's about what you'd be doing in a parking lot," says Gerdes. "And there are probably fewer people around your driveway."

Driving around town…

1. Wait before pulling onto a main road. The more space you give yourself to accelerate gently and smoothly, the more fuel you'll save. "Just wait until it clears. No reason to get rushed. It only puts you a minute behind where you would have been."

2. Coast if you can.
3. At a long stoplight, shut your engine off. That's what a hybrid does. There are areas in the world where it's illegal to idle your vehicle for any period of time. "If you are a resident of Kawasaki, Japan, when you pull up to a stop light, they actually have employed people to stand there and shame you for leaving your engine running."

4. Limit the amount of heat and air-conditioning you use. In an urban environment, air-condition can lower fuel economy by as much as 30 percent. If you can't get by without it, try turning it off temporarily at a stoplight or stop sign, so you don't further reduce your car's efficiency during acceleration. "A lot of hybrids do that, too."

On the highway...

1. Drive without brakes. In fact, pretend your brakes are faulty: You'll use them less, allow more space between you and other drivers, and leave yourself more time to slow down-in short, you'll be safer and more efficient. And always anticipate the road 30 seconds ahead of your current position-look for brake lights, cars merging, jaywalkers-which should allow you to avoid most unnecessary braking situations. Bonus points: Play chess with stoplights. If you see three in a row, game the timing to coast through all of them.

2. Go slower. Remember, "speed kills fuel economy." There's no need to travel 10 mph over the limit. It's not going to save you much time over your normal commute. By way of example, Gerdes explains, "A Ford Escape Hybrid is rated at thirty-two mpg. Do you know what it gets at forty mph? About sixty mpg." That's because every vehicle has a certain speed that offers maximum horsepower for minimum fuel consumption. And that sweet spot is rarely 10 miles above the highway speed limit.

3. Keep a constant load on your engine. Imagine a roller coaster: It goes down hills and up hills, but never stops completely. You can do the same thing in your car-using momentum you've already generated-but without sacrificing as much speed. So instead of setting the cruise control to 60 and having the engine work overtime to maintain that speed on an incline, lock your foot on the accelerator in a fixed position; you'll lose a little speed cresting the hill, but pick it right back up going down the other side. And your engine will never know the difference. Ditto the cars behind you.

4. Experiment with "pulse and glide," a technique whereby you accelerate to the speed limit and then coast in neutral until you lose too much speed. You would get phenomenal results by speeding up to 50 mph and slowing down to 5 mph (which is impractical basically everywhere), but you'll see satisfying results in almost any range in between.

The Building of a Battery

Alissa Walker — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:00:25 PDT

The godfather of car batteries talks about the birth of the electric car. By John E. Waters, as told to Alissa Walker.

John E. Waters knows a thing or two about batteries. He's worked in the business for the past 25 years. Now, as CEO and president of Bright Automotive, he'd like to put all that work to good use-perfecting a 100-mpg hybrid. But first, we asked him to take a trip down memory lane, to a time when he was developing and producing the battery pack for GM's ill-fated electric baby, the EV1.

"[In the early days of the electric car], there was this sense of wanting to save the planet, of wanting to make a product that did not fail because it was so revolutionary-a paradigm shift for the consumer. And a lot of that had to do with perfecting the range of the vehicle as compared to the gasoline internal-combustion engine.

"Today, the concerns are almost identical to the comments and concerns I heard back in 1992 about the state of the art of the battery. They were specifically referring to the lead-acid-battery technology of the time. How are we going to get 100 miles of the charge out of the acid-battery pack? How is it going to be affordable? How is the warranty going to work? How do you replace them? All the same issues that you hear today.

"When we tackled the problem, within two years, we developed a battery-pack product that met the requirements. It was my job to integrate that product. It was huge-maybe five feet long and four feet wide. The battery was so large and heavy-half the weight of the vehicle-that it affected everything about the car: the dynamics of the drive, the braking and handling, the shipping, the interiors, the structure-everything.

"The battery had full impact on every component on the vehicle. And so when you saw how that component impacted the entire vehicle, you begin to analyze back to first principles: car design, and what you are really trying to do. Our goal is to move human beings from point A to point B, in some kind of device. And so the heavier the device is, the more un-aerodynamic that device is, the more energy it's going to take to move that device. It gave me great appreciation for efficiency and taking mass out of the vehicle to improve aerodynamics and the rolling resistance of the tires. The third generation [of that early battery] will be lithium-ion-based technology, which is kind of the last frontier of energy and batteries.

"Everyone's got an opinion on it. I can just tell you as the battery guy for the EV1, I never had a customer complaint about range. Also, customers are so preconditioned-they know how far they are going to drive their vehicle on a daily basis. Let's face it-something like 75 to 80 percent of Americans drive fewer than 90 miles a day. This has been seen as a challenge when it really isn't."

Top image: Bright Automotive is launching a "secret product" late this spring. This image is a rendering of the cleaner automotive future the company envisions.

The Electric Car Rides Again

GOOD — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:00:40 PDT

In his 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, the director Chris Paine attempted to get to the bottom of the case of the short-lived EV1-General Motors' first foray into plug-in cars, nearly all of which were ignominiously pulled off the road and crushed in 2003. Now, with all major car companies working on their own version of the plug-in, Paine has picked up his camera again to document the revival.

GOOD: So you're working on a sequel?

Chris Paine: Yeah. We're tracking down the big carmakers, and then we're tracking what Silicon Valley and well-financed independents are doing; looking at both electric cars and plug-in hybrids. The film is only focusing on plug-in cars, because I believe that renewable electricity is the killer app, and the hybrids are already old technology. I am no longer impressed by the Prius or the high-mileage car; until Toyota and everybody else gives us a plug on those cars, it's old technology. So we're trying to ascertain if, in fact, the revolution is coming.

G: What's changed between the first movie, where the conclusion was that the electric car was dead, and now, where you're documenting the various efforts of the car companies to reintroduce electric cars?

CP: The first film was about how change just stops because you have interests and forces that don't want to stop making the money they are used to making. So the car companies-not just General Motors, but all of them-went after these regulations that California had set up. And if those regulations had not been dismantled, it would have put everybody way ahead of the game. We would have had, arguably, hundreds of thousands of plug-in vehicles on the road today if they hadn't overturned those regulations in 2000. The next film is about how change happens anyway; it perseveres. We don't know how it's going to end up, but I think it may be a much more hopeful story. And what's happened since our film came out is that every major carmaker has said they are adding an electric car or plug-in to their portfolios.

G: So you envision a future where everyone is driving a plug-in car?

CP: The one mistake they made last time was saying that gasoline and diesel are the solution for everybody, for every transportation need. I don't think there's just one kind of car for the future. I think that there'll be a place for biofuel, a place for gasoline, a place for cleaner diesel. But I think the primary thing would be for cars and trucks to have a plug-in feature on them to allow them to take advantage of the efficiencies of electricity. We like to point out the studies that the NRDC did that found that even when you're running plug-in cars off of a 100-percent-coal grid, that car is still cleaner-not remarkably cleaner, but cleaner-than a gasoline vehicle. And the advantage with electricity, of course, is that you don't have to make electricity just with coal.

G: Right, because for the electric cars to really make a difference it requires a second step, which is totally revamping where we get our electricity from.

CP: Yes. I would say we don't have to wait for a total revamping. Right now there are zero electric cars on the road, statistically. And so we can build plug-in vehicles at the same time that we're putting up our new electrical system. And as we rebuild, hopefully Obama will help push to finally clean up coal; and then you've got geothermal going online, and hopefully some of these solar stations happening. So I'm really optimistic about the future. That's why we're calling the next film Revenge of the Electric Car.

G: What kind of car do you drive?

CP: I'm driving my 2004 Toyota RAV4 EV, and it's part of the generation 1.0 of pure electric driving cars. It gets 100 miles on a charge, and these cars have been driving for 150,000 miles without battery-pack changes. I'm pretty happy with that. I also have a Tesla. We put a Tesla in our first film and the producer put me up to buying one, and I'm glad I did when I had the money.

G: It goes really fast, right?

CP: It goes really fast and it puts me in midlife-crisis mode because it's so beautiful that people figure I'm one of those guys. I'm willing to take that to get to drive it.

Sharing is Car-ing

GOOD — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:07:00 PDT

On the (financial) value of sharing. By Robin Chase, as told to Eric Steuer.

Robin Chase founded Zipcar, the company that allows users to buy time in shared cars, in 1999. Now she has turned her attention to carpooling with GoLoco, a website she founded that allows you to use your social networks for cost-saving ride-sharing.

We have to get to a place where we are leveraging every investment and maximizing its utility. Zipcar is a good example of that. In older days, we would each own our entire car by ourselves, and it would sit idle for 22 hours a day. Zipcar developed a platform for people to share cars, and now we only pay for the amount we use. What strikes me about that example is that we-as individuals, as companies, and as governments-all have excess capacity that lies idle. And when we have this excess capacity, we're paying the entire cost and reaping all the benefits that we want. But there's typically a huge amount of excess benefit that's going nowhere while we're absorbing all the costs. I like the idea of us thinking as a society about ways in which we can create platforms for other people to share in that excess capacity.

I didn't think about these principles when I founded Zipcar, but what I saw at that time was a leveraging of scarce and expensive resources. I would say that today, as a planet, we have many more scarce and expensive resources than we ever imagined before. We need to be thinking about how we can maximize the utility and benefit we get out of our individual budgets. And the way to do that is by multipurposing every asset we have, and every investment we make, so that we don't have to buy seven different devices. We can buy one device.

A wonderful example is the transponders that people have in their cars that are used for collecting tolls. It's a $30 device that is used 30 seconds in a month. If we could look at that device and multipurpose it, make it open so people could add their applications on top of it, it could become a mobile internet provider or something like that. It could be that, by letting others get into that transponder, there might be fabulous other opportunities that EZ Pass (for example) isn't thinking of. I can't predict today what would be useful. I could make up a couple of things, but I don't have to if it's an open device and an open network-innovators and entrepreneurs around the country will be thinking of ways to exploit it and leverage those investments we've already made.

GoLoco offers the opportunity at the personal level to say, Where do I have incredible excess capacity in my car trip? Eighty-six percent of the trips we take in our cars we take alone. Each one of those trips costs about 50 cents a mile, so it starts to add up-to about $8,000 a year. So there's a real cost that we're incurring personally when we choose to drive alone in our cars and not take the extra effort to see if we can share that ride and share those costs. But there are unintended benefits from sharing any kind of resource-with carpooling, you get to spend time with people you know and like, make great networks, and meet new people. I look at that and I think that's just another place where it's a very high-cost resource that all of us have that we are squandering.

I Dream of Light-rail

Jordan Hruska — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:00:58 PDT
Soon, neighborhoods and suburbs that used to take hours to drive between will be connected by subways, buses, and light-rail. At least, that's the plan. Here are five of America's most innovative public-transit projects.

Baltimore: Red Line

Almost a third of Baltimore residents don't have reliable access to an automobile. That would seem progressive (from an environmental perspective, anyway) if the city had a reliable public-transportation system for its residents. Baltimore's current bus, subway, light-rail, and commuter-rail systems lack consistent integration, making it difficult for any rider to piece together a trip. Adding insult to injury, the city's only light-rail line shut down last fall due to the impassable obstacle of… wet leaves. Enter the Red Line-a transit project that will not only unify these existing modes on an east-west axis, but will also be the first to serve the new developments in the Inner Harbor and Fell's Point areas. It is envisioned as a 14-mile bus-rapid-transit line or light-rail train. In addition to shuttling crab-shucking tourists to harbor sites, the line would serve 42,000 daily riders commuting to Baltimore's burgeoning biotech research incubators, resource-sharing offices, and the new Inner Harbor East cultural district. If federal funds are granted, it could open as early as 2015.

The Red Line would serve 42,000 daily riders commuting to Baltimore's burgeoning biotech research incubators, resource-sharing offices, and the new Inner Harbor East cultural district.

LEARN MORE baltimoreredline.com

New York: TriboroRX

Since New York's subway opened, in 1904, outer-borough residents of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have been unfairly forced to traipse into Manhattan every time they want to travel north or south, even if their final destination is not in the city's heart. Sure, there's the G train, the only line that doesn't touch Manhattan, but it skirts only a sliver of Brooklyn and barely even enters Queens on a consistent basis. The proposed TriboroRX line could conceivably connect light-industrial and residential districts in these circumferential neighborhoods by using the Long Island Rail Road's dormant Bay Ridge tracks, which stretch from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx through Queens all the way to south Brooklyn (with an easy extension to LaGuardia Airport). Originally proposed in 1996 by the tristate urban advocacy group Regional Plan Association, the TriboroRX was conceived with information from census maps of the neighborhoods served by the existing 21.8-miles of tracks. The RPA expects that the TriboroRX's proposed 38 stations would serve more than 76,000 daily commuters and that the city would benefit from attracting an estimated 32,000 new riders. Sadly, the beleaguered Metropolitan Transportation Authority has only barely begun to work on a Second Avenue subway line that residents initially voted to fund way back in 1951.

Originally proposed in 1996 by the tristate urban advocacy group Regional Plan Association, the TriboroRX was conceived with information from census maps of the neighborhoods served by the existing 21.8 miles of tracks.

LEARN MORE transit.frumin.net/trx/TriboroRX

Washington, D.C.: Purple Line

Washington's notorious Beltway is said to constrict politicians' views and, at times, it also seems to have limited the area's foresight in terms of mass transit. The massive highway through Maryland and Virginia handles more than a quarter of a million vehicles a day and is so congested that there has been discussion of constructing another, larger beltway outside of it. But a 16-mile mass-transit line in suburban
Maryland might be a simpler and faster way to circumnavigate the city. If constructed, the Purple Line would run along one quarter of the Beltway as part of Washington's Metro, the second busiest transit system in the nation. The $1.6-billion line would serve 63,000 daily riders between the sprawling areas of Bethesda and Silver Spring in the west and the major academic center of the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the east. And the Maryland-D.C. suburbs need all the help they can get when considering the impending migration of 16,000 new Department of Defense jobs to the region by 2011. Funding roadblocks aside (Maryland's governor, Martin O'Malley, has been seeking federal help in funding the project), some residents oppose the idea of light-rail tracks astride a popular recreational
path, but it seems they're slowly turning purple.

If constructed, the Purple Line would run along one quarter of the Beltway as part of Washington's Metro, the second busiest transit system in the nation.

LEARN MORE purplelinenow.com

Seattle: East Link Light Rail

The sun is breaking through Seattle's endless transit woes. Washington State residents recently approved tax hikes to fund a regional transit system to combat some of the nation's worst traffic. The city's transportation organization, Sound Transit, has conceived the ST2 plan, which is dedicated to constructing 36 miles of new light-rail as part of a 55-mile system buttressed by increased commuter rail and express-bus service. A cornerstone of the light-rail development is the East Link, which will connect downtown Seattle to Mercer Island and the satellite urban areas of Bellevue and Redmond, terminating near the Microsoft campus. This area of suburban Seattle is also a hotbed of tech companies like Nintendo and Google, whose employees will be among the 48,000 projected riders able to travel to downtown Seattle without slogging through the traffic on the highway. Underground tunnels through Bellevue seem to be favored by the city government and residents, but it's unclear whether or not this pricey plan would drain funds from the final phase of the line's development to Redmond.

A cornerstone of the light-rail development is the East Link, which will connect downtown Seattle to Mercer Island and the satellite urban areas of Bellevue and Redmond, terminating near the Microsoft campus.

LEARN MORE soundtransit.org

Los Angeles: Westside Subway

It's been easy to criticize Southern Californians for staying parked when it comes to mass transit, but last November Los Angeles County residents made their interest clear with a sales-tax increase to fund a slew of new transit projects. Already, a projected $4.1 billion of this revenue is being allocated to fund the Westside extension for Los Angeles's often-overlooked subway, which, with a touch of manifest destiny, is dubbed
"the subway to the sea." This two-line extension project would include a Purple Line addition down traffic-choked Wilshire Boulevard, connecting the cultural, media, and academic districts of Beverly Hills, Century City, Westwood, UCLA, and, ultimately, Santa Monica. A Red Line extension, looping down through West Hollywood, would make a connection with the new Purple Line in Beverly Hills. Altogether, these two additions are projected to carry nearly 80,000 riders daily. The Westside subway has been a pet project of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa-he flew to Washington for less than 48 hours to lobby President Obama specifically for the other half of the funds desperately needed to complete the project. Even if the city does receive backing from Washington, the time line for completion stretches all the way to 2030-a destiny that needs a bit more manifestation.

This two-line extension project would include a Purple Line addition down traffic-choked Wilshire Boulevard, connecting the cultural, media, and academic districts of Beverly Hills, Century City, Westwood, UCLA, and, ultimately, Santa Monica.

LEARN MORE metro.net/projects_studies/westside/default.htm

Walking the Walk

GOOD — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:00:32 PDT

An overview of the truly moving stories of people who've walked across the country

JOURNEYMAN: George Martin, former NFL player

STARTING POINT: George Washington Bridge in New York City
ENDING POINT: North Embarcadero Park in San Diego
SPECS: 3,003 miles over the course of eight months
YEAR: 2007–2008
AGE AT TIME OF JOURNEY: 55
REASON FOR TRIP: Raised $2 million to benefit 9/11 responders, "the Heroes of Ground Zero."
IN HIS OWN WORDS: "There are thousands of true national heroes of 9/11 who are now suffering medically, and I believe we owe them our support for helping our nation survive and heal after such a horrific tragedy."
MORE INFO ajourneyfor911.info

JOURNEYMEN: Some 800 Native Americans calling themselves The Longest Walk 2

STARTING POINT: Alcatraz Island, San Francisco
ENDING POINT: Steps of the Capitol, Washington, D.C.
SPECS: Two different routes, one northern, one southern, totaling 8,200 miles over 175 days
YEAR: 2008
AGE AT TIME OF JOURNEY: Variable
REASON FOR TRIP: Thirtieth anniversary of the 1978 Longest Walk; to promote the message "All life is Sacred; protect Mother Earth," the group picked up trash and recyclables along the way and delivered a "Manifesto for Change" to representatives at the Capitol.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS: "As indigenous peoples, we face a common threat … extermination through corporatization. We need to coordinate our struggles, and we need to maintain our tribal sovereignty."-Michael Lane (who participated in both the 1978 and 2008 walks)
MORE INFO longestwalk.org

JOURNEYMAN: Rick Hammersley

STARTING POINT: Waters of Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco
ENDING POINT: Waters of Coney Island, New York City
SPECS: 3,206 miles over 216 days (and $100.95 in change found along the way)
YEAR: 2008
AGE AT TIME OF JOURNEY: 60
REASON FOR TRIP: Five years after beating colon cancer, he walked to raise money ($12,000) for cancer research.
IN HIS OWN WORDS: "I know now from my prior experience with cancer, and from the daily drudgery of a seven months' walk, that there isn't a whole lot you can throw at me that I haven't already experienced. But I found out a long time ago you need something to strive for-a goal, if you want to call it that-to just keep you going."
ANOTHER WALK: At the end of his journey, his cancer came back, but he hopes to beat it, after which he'll complete a second trans-America walk-this time from the border of North Dakota and Manitoba, Canada, to the southern border of Texas and Mexico, following Route 281. If he does it, his halfway point, in the Nebraska area, will be the same as on his first trek.
MORE INFO rickwalksamerica.com

JOURNEYMAN: Hakim Maloum

STARTING POINT: Union Square, New York City
ENDING POINT: Venice Beach Boardwalk, Los Angeles
SPECS: 3,300 miles (and about 70 lost pounds) over five and a half months with only a backpack and $217 to his name
YEAR: 2008
AGE AT TIME OF JOURNEY: 31
REASON FOR TRIP: To prove that nothing is impossible
IN HIS OWN WORDS:

JOURNEYWOMAN: Doris "Granny D" Haddock:

Starting Point: Los Angeles
Ending Point: Washington, D.C.
Specs: 3,200 miles over 14 months during which, according to her website, "She trekked through over 1,000 miles of desert, climbed the Appalachian Range in blizzard conditions, and even skied 100 miles after a historic snowfall made roadside walking impossible."
Year: 1999–2000
Age at time of journey: 89–90
Reason for trip: To call attention to the need for campaign-finance reform and to support what became the McCain-Feingold Act.
Fun facts: In 2003, she began a 22,000-mile drive around the country in an effort to register women and minorities to vote.
An HBO documentary, Run Granny Run, depicts her 2004 campaign for Senate in New Hampshire, during which she garnered 34 percent of the vote in an effort to, as she puts it, "raise a little hell."
MORE INFO grannyd.com

Interesting fact: The shortest coast-to-coast distance in the continental United States is 2,089 miles, on a line stretching between a point near Brunswick, Georgia to a few miles south of San Diego.

UPDATE: We've received some very sad news. On April 20, at 10:50 a.m., Rick Hammersley passed away. We at GOOD would like to extend our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends. You can find information about his memorial and his heroic fight against cancer here. May he rest in peace.

Walk On

GOOD — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:00:54 PDT

A look at America's most pedestrian friendly cities

Walking is arguably the most efficient mode of transportation, and you don't need petroleum to power it; some French fries will do. But disturbingly few of us take advantage of our built-in bipedal locomotion function. Are we to blame, or is it our environment?

A website called Walk Score aims to answer that question. It ranks U.S. cities based on their "walkability," a proprietary formula that measures population density, pedestrian-friendly design, public space, schools and businesses, and commerce.

Its algorithm is, admittedly, imperfect. It doesn't, for example, consider a city's public-transit infrastructure, nor does it account for features of the built environment-like block length, frequency of crosswalks, topography-or natural beauty, which influence walkability. But the site's editors are impressively committed to improving their methodology, and they're even more committed to making walking policy a more important part of the national discussion about transportation by pushing for changes in the 2009 Transportation Bill.

Here are the current top 10 most walkable cities in the country, and a graph of their walk-score distribution.

A city's Walk Score is the average of the walk scores (from one to 100) of all the neighborhoods in a city. The graphs show Walk Score Distribution-the range of scores of the neighborhoods in each city.

Walk Score

LEARN MORE walkscore.com

Get On the Bus

Aaron Naparstek — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:00:48 PDT

For proof that buses can solve most of our mass-transit problems, look no further than Bogotá.

Is there any less sexy form of transportation than the bus? To the degree that Americans have paid attention to them at all, we have traditionally regarded city buses as a form of third-class transportation, a necessary evil, a kind of welfare on wheels. It's not that we have an innate aversion to mass transit. Consider that in Brooklyn, where I live, we so completely identified with our early-20th-century streetcar system that we named our beloved baseball team the Trolley Dodgers. Then General Motors rolled into town, bought up the trolley lines, ran them into the ground, and replaced them with diesel-belching buses. Suffice it to say that no one ever nicknamed a sports franchise after the local bus system. Even in New York City, where 2.5 million people ride the bus every day, it is a much-unloved form of transportation.

And yet, an updated version of America's most boring way to ride may very well be the fastest, cheapest way to solve some of our nation's most pressing problems. You want to reduce traffic congestion, cut carbon emissions, and make America less automobile-dependent? Then it's time to get on the bus.

It's hard to believe until you've seen it for yourself, but the city bus can, in fact, be a sleek, fast, efficient, and first-class way to get around town. Unfortunately, you can't find that kind of bus service in any U.S. city. You've got to travel down to Bogotá, Colombia, and ride the TransMilenio bus-rapid-transit system. That's right: A city in a country that most Americans associate only with Pablo Escobar and Juan Valdez is now running the most modern, high-tech bus system in the Western Hemisphere. As you step aboard your first TransMilenio vehicle, it hits you pretty quickly: When it comes to buses, the United States is a Third World nation.

The city wants to do everything it can to encourage ridership on the TransMilenio, and it goes out of its way to accomplish that. The TransMilenio, like most top-notch bus rapid transit systems, has its own dedicated lanes. Fares are collected before passengers board, reducing wait time at each stop. Smaller "feeder" buses travel through neighborhood streets picking up passengers for free and delivering them to more centralized stations. The stations also include free guarded bike storage. The TransMilenio vehicles, meanwhile, are extra long, clean-burning, and have low floors that meet the platform for fast boarding and alighting. Real-time information systems let passengers know exactly when the next bus will arrive, and centralized traffic controllers keep buses running on time. On the TransMilenio you are never stuck behind a slow-moving car: Private motor vehicles have been relegated to their own lanes.

Some TransMilenio bus lines move so many passengers per hour that people call it "surface subway." But unlike New York City's Second Avenue subway project-which has been under development, off and on, for 80 years and will take tens of billions of dollars and decades more to complete-Bogotá's then mayor, Enrique Peñalosa, got the first phase of TransMilenio up and running in just 18 months. TransMilenio immediately produced dramatic increases in bus speeds, reliability, ridership, and economic opportunity for people living in neighborhoods far from the jobs in the city center. Along with the construction of extensive bike networks and new public plazas, Peñalosa's TransMilenio is a cornerstone of Bogotá's rapid transformation from a traffic-choked mess to a model of sustainable urban development.

It's hard to imagine that Americans would ever love the bus. But experiencing something like Bogotá's TransMilenio system makes you realize that the bus can be truly lovable-even kind of sexy.

Convenience Is King

Cliff Kuang — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:30:46 PDT

You can take the train to work, but your office is still a mile away from the station. Might as well drive, right? How we can solve the last-mile problem.

A couple of months after the presidential election, and a couple of weeks after Barack Obama signed his stimulus bill, the giddiness among transport advocates was enough to induce a contact high: $8 billion for high-speed trains, and another $8.4 billion for mass transit! They were excited for good reason: For years, the country has starved for any attempt to develop green transit, and finally we had the money.

But what if most mass transit is doomed to fail? It isn't the mere lack of trains and subways that keep people in their cars. It's what urban planners call the first- and last-mile problem. You know it, intuitively. Let's say you'd like to commute on public transit. But if you live in a suburb-and ever since 2000, over half of Americans do-it's unlikely that you live close enough to a station to walk. The same problem arises once you get to your destination: You probably don't work anywhere near the closest bus or train station. So even if public transit is available, commuters often stay in their cars because the alternative-the hassle of driving, then riding, then getting to your final destination-is inconvenient, if not totally impossible. "Denser areas don't have these same problems," says Susan Shaheen, who heads the Innovative Mobility Research group at the University of California, Berkeley. "The problem is really about land use in the United States."

It sounds nearly impossible to fix: Our suburbs won't soon disappear, even if some are withering in the present housing decline. But here's the good news: For the first time in three decades, solving the last-mile problem seems just within reach, owing to vehicle fleets and ingenious ride-sharing schemes that lean on mobile computing, social networks, and smart urban planning. "To make public transit viable, you have it make it just as easy as getting in a car," says Shaheen. "It can be done."

The challenge, according to Dan Sturges, the founder of Intrago Mobility, which creates vehicle-sharing technology, is that "no one's yet putting these innovations together as a system, and the public doesn't understand the broader problem. But if implemented all together, the things being invented now will make owning a personal car into a joke." The enemy is really the car's unequaled convenience; commuters need multiple, equally easy choices before they'll give up the steering wheel. Several such choices are in the works.

"Right-Size" Fleets

Zipcar-which is now being copied by Hertz and U-Haul-is a godsend for city dwellers who only occasionally need a car. But it can also be used to solve the last-mile problem, when linked with public transit. "We're at the tip of the iceberg with those systems," says Sturges. However, for many commutes, a car is overkill. What if the closest bus is just a mile and a half away? A "right-sized" vehicle, suited to your particular last-leg commuting need, is ideal. These might be anything from a Segway (dorky as it may be) to an electric bike or a high-powered electric golf cart. But the vehicles themselves aren't the solution, since commutes can change every day (say you're visiting a client one day, and eating lunch at your desk the next).

The solution, then, is a shared fleet of vehicles. Shaheen has studied the idea extensively, in programs where businesses pay as little as $150 a month to give small-vehicle access to their employees. Intrago is inventing new locking mechanisms that will allow shared vehicles to be securely parked and checked out, and also designing mix-and-match fleets tailored to the needs of individual communities. "What you're going for is a commute that's Tarzan swinging from a vine, with just as many options." says Sturges. CityCargo, a start-up in Amsterdam, began exploring an analogous model this year, shipping goods via hubs and preexisting trams, and delivering them the last mile using electric vehicles.

"To make public transit viable, you have it make it just as easy as getting in a car. It can be done."

PRT (Personal Rapid Transit)

In theory, subways and bus lines should solve the first- and last-mile problem. But in practice, only the largest cities have dense enough populations to justify the massive capital spending that subways involve.

And to get bus ridership high enough to be economical, bus routes will by necessity include fewer, less convenient stops. Better then to create cheaper networks of small vehicles that can get by on cheaper, easier-to-build tracks-elevated above roadways, at a tenth of the cost of light-rail and competitive with new roads. It sounds crazy, but the economics work, especially when existing roads can't support more bus routes: One of the first of these so-called personal rapid-transit systems, which run on demand rather than at set schedules, is under construction for London's Heathrow airport's Terminal 5. Its makers, Advanced Transport Systems, thinks it will soon be applied to urban centers and office parks.

Smart Parking

In places where park-and-ride mass transit is on the cusp of working-for example, in Atlanta, which has several very well-placed metro stations-simply finding a parking spot at the train station still deters many.

That problem could be solved easily by "smart" parking, which Shaheen has also researched extensively.

A company called ParkingCarma has already developed wired parking lots that track the number of empty spaces available, but future iterations could easily be much more powerful, creating brand-new incentives for carpooling, such as guaranteed parking spaces for carpoolers at transit parking lots.

Distributed Ride-Sharing

Carpooling can be a miracle. Studies have estimated that the average commuter might save $3,000 a year, even when gas prices are low; it can slash your carbon footprint by two-thirds or more; and HOV lanes often eliminate wasted time in traffic. But despite the benefit, there are profound barriers to carpooling. Every hour, dozens of cars might pass right by your house, headed to the same place as you, and you'd never know.

How do you find those like-minded commuters-especially when your daily routine might change slightly, and theirs might as well; and how do you know your ride or riders won't creep you out or chop you up?

After decades of failed ride-sharing schemes, those problems are finally on the cusp of being solved, thanks to mobile computing and online social networking. Avego Shared Transport just released a beta application for the iPhone that uses GPS to alert car drivers and potential ride partners when they're in each other's vicinity. Meanwhile, GoLoco is building a social-networking service that lets you find loosely connected friends making similar commutes and car trips; Ride.Link, an MIT project, is creating social networks for ridesharing based on referrals and participants' reputations.

Urban Planning

Some cities are so sprawled out that even ride-sharing or right-size fleets would be nearly impossible to implement. These programs might also be quite expensive, even in the best circumstances. Therefore, to make mass transit ubiquitous, we'll eventually have to retool our suburban fabric with transportation hubs, where ride-sharing and right-size fleets are available-which sounds extraordinarily easy, but will require historically short-sighted zoning authorities to rewrite rules that have made it difficult to build transit-oriented strip malls and communities based around mass transit, such as those designed by Calthorpe Associates, an architecture firm working on hybrid suburban developments with transit access. Either way, the hubs themselves would be prime real estate for businesses and housing, and could eventually reverse sprawl.