San Francisco non-stop to Charles DeGaulle. Fourteen hours. We endured.

From the basement of the airport terminal we caught the train into Paris. Change to the inner city subway at a designated station. We know which one. You can buy a Metro map before you leave home or perhaps consult one in your public library. Got off a block from the hotel we have chosen, which is a block from the train station we will be using tomorrow morning – about $50 cheaper and an hour quicker than grabbing a cab from the airport.. Check in, bop right back out for a look at the fabled city. It was, after all, April In Paris. Singing In The Rain also figured in. Ducked into a café during a shower and had our first glass of Parisian wine. When in Paris do what the French do, right?

Next morning get up. On advice we purchased breakfast in a sack from a kiosk in the station (pastries – it’s what the French do – and not the overwhelmingly sweet stuff you get over here). Walk over to the platform, get on the train, a slick sleek thing of many, many coaches. It pulls off silently and smoothly exactly on time. We munch our breakfast through the glorious yellow fields of mustard around Dijon. Up into the Alps, change crews at the border, through the long, long tunnel and down the canyon into Torino. I’m out of kilter from the flight and the smooth quiet motion lulls me into a nap while slipping down the valley of the Po. Arrive downtown Milan in time for lunch. Yup. Breakfast in Paris, lunch in Milan. It’s Europe, folks. Bullet trains. No security checks, no early check-in Be there on time, get there on time. The Japanese and Europeans have had them for over a generation.

We had a lick of sense in this country we’d get ‘em. It does require commitment. Bullet trains need their own special track. Existing trackage would be useless. European trains are heavily used – why not? Something like hourly schedules Paris-London, Paris-Lyon, Paris and just about anything you can think of though not necessarily hourly. Several trains during the day, probably. Get to “Rail Europe” on the internet and check the schedules yourself. Or buy a copy of the ‘Thomas Cook European Timetable’ for a few bucks and use it as a dream boat instead of turning on the tellie. You can do nearly as well buying the railroad route map of Europe – I paid eight bucks at Barnes and Noble recently, and it gives time between cities and frequency of trains (Thomas Cook provides much more detailed information.).

I made some rough calculations – very rough. I wanted to know how much we spend as a nation on personal vehicles and the average cost per vehicle. Newspaper says there are about 200 million vehicles operating in the U.S. and they get on average 25 mpg – figures from the stickers on new cars I would suppose – how else they gonna know?. We know that about 9 million barrels per day – 378 million gallons per day — is what those vehicles consume each day. Divide by the number of autos and we get 1.89 gallons per auto per day. Multiply by 25 mpg and 365 days per year and we get an average of 17, 246 miles per year per auto. What’s our cost per mile?

AAA says $0.65, others say as much as $1.25. Depends on how much you count as cost. AAA doesn’t count as many things as others, like property & medical damage, road maintenance and so on. Let’s say a buck a mile to make things easy. (You think you’re traveling for a nickel or a dime a mile, consider recalculation.) By those calculations, what do we spend annually as a nation? Try three and a half trillion dollars. How much per vehicle? $17,246. Sounds too high? Do the math. I’m not sure that really covers all expenses. How much did it cost to have that garage built, how much does it cost annually to insure it? How much did it cost for the driveway?
See what I mean?

Actually, it turns out, I might be substantially underestimating the cost per year. An article in the business section of the Register-Guard 7/8/06 cited a person driving a Nissan Maxima 16 miles each way to work. They figured it took 6000 gallons per year, or about $18,000/yr for the gas alone. Oh dear. Cost of gas used to be only a small part of the cost of operating an automobile. The article was about a Portland employee who, at her employer’s urging, had decided to ride the bus instead. For all practical purposes, she got a huge raise. The article also gave our consumption now as 9.5 mbd, up from the 9.0 cited above. I begin to think those cost-per-mile estimates need serious revising.

What kind of alternate transportation could we have with $3.5 trillion a year to work with? How far do think you could go if you and had fifteen hundred bucks a month times the size of your fleet to spend on public transportation, approaching $400/week per vehicle? I dare say you could get to work and to the grocery store and maybe go out of a Saturday night.

The problem with an electric car is range. If we had a proper rail system it would put you close enough to where you want to go to make an electric work just fine. Bullet trains, electrically driven, can go 200 mph, so speed and pickup needn’t be a problem, ‘cause it’s the same kind of engine. You’d see an awful lot less congestion on the road because anybody with a brain greater than a toad would choose the quicker, cheaper option that offered comfort and relaxation.

We could do it. For a tiny fraction of what we spend on the freeway system and trying to service the automobile in the cities. Several people – including Kevin Phillips new book “American Theocracy” – recall that GM back in the 20s and 30s purchased streetcar systems across America and dismantled them. Forced us into automobiles.

Peak oil Price of gas is almost a buck a gallon higher than one year ago. It’s going to get worse. I can’t call the timing on that and won’t even try. But it’s gonna get worse.

We are almost certainly going to learn to live without the fliver. Some sooner – the lucky ones, the intelligent ones. Others will go down with the ship. That means they will be bankrupt. Lose the car, the house, the whole nine yards. If enough of us were smarter than the average stump we’d get on our government’s back and insist on preparing for the future. We keep trying to ride that tired old swaybacked sorry critter of internal combustion transportation we’ll never get there.

Could we really have an electrically based transportation system? Is there energy enough for one that really, really works – gets you where you want to go quickly and deliver your purchases to your house? The engineers at Oregon State say there is enough energy right there in oceanic waves to replace all the energy the entire world uses and take less than one percent of what’s out there. If they can keep the barnacles off the shafts of those rigs they’re talking about, I don’t see what’s to stop them from harvesting the energy. What we will wind up with is electrical energy, not liquid fuel. Europeans can live with that. We could. Having tasted the European model I could do so happily.

I liked trains when I was a kid. Never stopped. I was sorry when private railroad passenger transportation ended. Happy when AMTRAK was formed. Deeply sorry that recent administrations have been ignoring it to death when they weren’t trying to stab it to death. Deeply sorry the AMTRAK system is presently in such a sorry state. Shabby equipment, unrealistic scheduling in most places – if the trains get there at all. Back in the 70s, when I was an active environmentalist, I frequently traveled up to New York from Washington for a little R&R. Ahhh, Lincoln Center. Rode AMTRAK’s Metro, the then fast trains between D.C. and NYC. Paid an extra ten bucks to ride first class. Sat in those ultra comfortable swivel arm chairs with a table at my elbow, nursing a cup of coffee fetched by the porter, watching Chesapeake Bay slide past the picture window. It was quicker than traveling out to a D.C. airport (this was before that awful airport security stuff), catching the flight, traveling from the NYC airport to downtown Manhattan. Quicker, a whole lot more relaxing and a whole lot more comfortable. Drive that route … are you nuts?

The energy is there, the form is different. Imposes new habits. But our lifestyles could use improvement. We’re not doing so good as a nation. Between bopping around in a truck and being captured for long hours by the tellie while munching snacks and popping sodas we just aren’t doing so good. We don’t look very good either. Bunch of pudgy people who could use a little exercise. Waddle when we walk. Compared with Europeans, Africans or Asians we’re kind of a sorry sight.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 7:54 am and is filed under Energy Future, General, Livability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.