Lane County Transit District
For the second year in a row (the only ones I’ve been paying close attention to) bus ridership in Eugene has increased by over ten percent, 10.4 percent this year. Part of the increase might be attributed to the EmX (pronounced Em-Ex) route between Eugene and Springfield. EmX buses are big, they are fast, they are frequent, they serve U. Of O., and they are so far free. They serve a worthy function. The older routes serving the U.of O. were becoming crowded beyond capacity. Another EmX route is in the planning process to serve busy West Eugene.

With growth rates like that, one might suppose the business would draw favorable attention in the business press. So far, not.

O-STAR
The new organization, O-STAR, again entered the planning process by proposing a re-evaluation of the old fashioned street car idea to the Lane County Transit District. Wouldn’t have to look like the old ones — could well be of contemporary design, fast and comfortable as are light rail lines. (The difference has primarily to do with boarding areas. Street cars can pick you up anywhere along the route, traffic permitting, and that should cease to be a problem in the future. Eugenians respond warmly to the notion of street cars that can be flagged down rather than trudging off to a designated boarding area.).

O-STAR lifted a notion from a commercial firm offering elaborate (and correspondingly expensive) maglev systems that included a self supporting energy system. They proposed covering the whole shebang with solar panels, collecting excess power and using electrolysis to create hydrogen. When nighttime falls, they’d use the hydrogen to derive electricity from a turbine. Good idea. Thanks, guys, but I think your entire system is too expensive. O-STAR proposes a streetcar, light rail and bullet train combination using just such an power system.

EB posted an brief article on the public transportation system of Grenoble, France. If you haven’t been there, it’s at the mouth of a formidable canyon leading to the heights of the French Alps. Two or three decades ago they hosted the Winter Olympics.

If you want to know what a transit system of contemporary design looks like, go there. Street cars! Connected, as O-STAR has suggested, to quicker modes for longer distance transportation. A picture of what might be the future for our kids — without something of the sort one wonders what sort of future it will be.

The Electric Grid
First Enron did it, now BPA is doing its thing. With the nationwide electricity grid performing such as it is, more and more people are buying into the European idea of taking control of one’s own power. Another community up in the mountains above the Willamette Valley have withdrawn from the power net, choosing to generate their own. We predict a growth in that form of public convenience and are attracted to the notion of leaving power brokers out of it.

Meanwhile, it has been predicted that with cheaper photovoltaic components becoming available, power generation by them will be part of the mainstream within four years. Planners take note.

Energy Tidbits
The tight oil situation and resulting high prices are largely due to the restricted refinery production suffered by the U.S., necessitating the importation of finished gasoline. The west coast has attracted most of the incoming gasoline, and it appears to this writer that prices have risen less severely in the west the past few weeks (verified the day after this was written by a piece in the paper offering a chart graphing the west coast pricing vs. the U.S.)

Meanwhile, vehicle sales are down, but 53 percent of the buyers still opt for trucks, which includes the SUV. What they might be thinking of was discussed in the last posting. China increased its petroleum imports by 23 percent last year. And people doubt the presence or imminence of peak oil?

Wave Power
It seems it’s finally gonna happen in Oregon. OSU has teamed up with a foreign company, I think Portuguese, to install the first generating buoy off the coast near Bandon. The immense attractiveness of the idea is that something will provide power whether the wind blows or not or whether the sun shines or not. The big test, I would suppose, is whether the anchoring system can handle Oregon waves. I do believe there is more power in an Oregon wave than there is in Portugal, where the things are installed.

If we didn’t mention it before, a contract in California has been let to develop wave power off the coast, in Mendecino County if memory serves. That’s pretty close to Oregon. I think they have the advantage of something like an Oregon wave pattern.

Ice
We noted a pair of cover stories in the library last week, the National Geographic and New Science magazines, both current issues, went into the mechanics of ice in Greenland and the Antarctic. Both took AR4 to task for misjudging the severity of the problem.

From another source, AR4 was challenged because they assumed carbon dioxide emissions as totally something less than 2 percent per year, but they are actually increasing at three percent, up from only one percent in 1990. And scheduled to keep rising, as east Asia looks to coal to satisfy their energy desires.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 7:18 am and is filed under Energy Future, Environment, General. 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.