WastedEnergy

Most of the discussion surrounding peak oil has involved liquid fuel supply issues.  We must have continual growth in oil and other liquid fuel supplies, some say, in order to sustain the global economy.  We can’t live without our cars: what would we do?  How would we get our groceries from the store two blocks away back to our McMansions in the ‘burbs?

It makes me wonder if these people have ever heard of something called “transit.”  You see, here in the District of Columbia, there is no need to own a car.  In fact, the car owner is saddled with more costs and other burdens than anything else: parking, maintenance, traffic, road rage.  Meanwhile, I’m over here walking on sunshine, and don’t it feel good?  But certain distances do become burdensome to walk as well, and even bicycles come with their hazards and nuisances too: carrying around locks and helmets, the strain of long uphills, and the occasional raspberry from falling onto the asphalt or getting one’s leg caught in the chain.  Don’t get me wrong, I think bikes are a lovely way of getting around too, but sometimes it helps to be able to take a motorized vehicle around.  And while trains are lovely too, especially for central urban areas, subway systems can get a bit pricey at times too, and come with their own technical challenges – just look at the water damage to the Woodley Park and Cleveland Park stations on the Red Line, sitting under the Rock Creek watershed.  In fact, some studies have shown that bus rapid transit systems cost as little as one tenth as much as subways and light rail (although to be fair, these may not be including the costs of subsidized roads either).

Think about direction, wonder why you haven’t now…

Speaking of direction, it is worth noting that trends in automobile manufacturing, such as increased fuel efficiency, use of alternative fuels, hybridization, and electrification, apply to buses as well.  In fact, all the DC Metrobuses purchased since 2008 have been either hybrids, compressed natural gas (CNG)-powered, or both.  Since most buses run on diesel fuel today, it would be a relatively simple matter to convert fleets to run on some form of smart biodiesel, like that which could be produced from a versatile, multi-purpose crop like cannabis, if the dinosaurs could just get over themselves and legalize it already.  (Sidebar: I think that might save a few other costs as well, not to mention free up police to enforce the laws that actually matter, like anti-littering and speeding laws.  It might even turn those same cops into shiny, happy people, too, instead of the all-too-often brutal, thuggish types we know today).

Thanks for the gift of BRT, Greys.  You can go home now.

We can get smarter about the way we do buses, including next-generation electric buses, which probably will do less to force peak lithium than an electric car-based transportation system.  And while battery technology has largely reached its peak of efficiency and more or less stagnated, batteries are not the only means of electrical storage when all you need is a charge that can store for a few hours, the duration of a bus campaign in between charging stations.  Wait, bus charging stations?  Yes, that’s right: capacitors, by their nature, can charge up much faster than batteries, ultracaps on the order of a few seconds, actually. 
Ultracapacitors are getting big these days.  Just don’t cross the streams, or they might blow up!

Here’s another emerging bus technology of which you may or may not have heard: hydraulic hybrids.   Hydraulic energy storage systems work on the same principle as a pumped-storage reservoir for utility power, except using compression as the source of potential energy rather than gravity.  A hydraulic energy storage system uses energy released when a bus goes downhill or brakes that would otherwise be released as waste heat and uses it instead to pump fluid into a reservoir, where it can then be released through a motor (the pump acting in reverse) and used to spin the wheels.  Hydraulic compression systems occupy a smaller footprint on the physical vehicle and are cheaper, and require fewer and less scarce raw materials, than electric battery storage systems used in conventional hybrids.

And as long as we are on the topic of cost: one of the factors that frustrates me most about transit systems is that they are expected to support their own costs in isolation, as if the goal of implementing them had nothing to do with providing alternatives to unsustainable transportation options like driving.  Here in DC, for instance, we are facing fare hikes and a multi-hundred-million dollar budget gap for our Metro transit system.  And every day in the Express, the daily Metro-rider rag (unless you are type to read the Examiner, also known as a “numbskull”) I see comments from the paper’s online polls (as if those mattered or were representative of anything besides whatever group happens to be the most motivated to respond) ragging on Metro and snarking on “eco-green” types who they see as foolish for taking advantage of a system that actually works pretty dern tootin, when you get down to it.  These kinds of responses make me wonder: why are we not making drivers pay the true costs of the congestion, pollution, and aggravation they bring with them as they commute in from Northern Virginia and Maryland?  Congestion pricing or gasoline taxes would make perfect sense as methods of funding real transportation alternatives, but we all know how fired up those Tea Party types get when the price of gasoline goes up by a few cents per gallon and you start threatening to take away their subsidized highways.  Talk about a self-aware bunch!  What could be more satisfying than wiping the smug grin off their faces when they see the current, utterly backwards trend toward discouraging transit ridership in favor of driving suddenly shift into reverse?  Let’s get ‘em, I say!

Anyway, there are quite a few ways we could get smarter about our transportation systems that would help us deal with that whole “peak oil” thing.  In fact, I can barely even remember it exists after all the very viable alternatives to oil-based transportation listed above.  And those are just the options available today.  Who knows what the next generation of whiz kids will invent?

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?