Transportation is one of the keys to civilization, and a necessity for industry.
Roads tied the Roman empire together and ships carried grain from Egypt to feed the cities of Italy. In later years ships enabled Europeans to open sea-lanes to the Orient and to colonize North and South America and Australia.
In England the construction of canals led to the industrial revolution and riverboats opened both the Canadian and American wests to settlers. Around the world railways completed the industrial revolution, opened aboriginal lands to colonization and revolutionized warfare.
Electric streetcars made it practical to live in one part of a city and work in another and Henry Ford's Model T created suburbs, the assembly line and factory complexes the size of cities. Ford's River Rouge complex was intended to produce a whole automobile including the steel from which it was made but, thanks largely to the semi-trailer developed by Detroit blacksmith August Fruehauf, modern industry often spreads the production of one assembly over many factories.
A survey of industry in Toronto found that, on average, transportation accounted for 16% of the cost of goods manufactured and sold in Toronto. If goods travel further, transportation is a bigger factor. Transportation makes up about 30% of the cost of lumber and, because this cost along with others is marked up when the wood is processed, the cost of transport for the raw wood is about 7% of the total cost of a typical kitchen table.[1]
Auto makers say the average American car is made in about 100 separate factories, but that's a conservative estimate. The engine is made in one plant, the body in another, the tires in another and so-forth, and each one of these components is itself the product of several factories. Part of the cost of your car is the cost of shipping iron ore and coal from the mines to a steel mill.
Efficient transportation can reduce costs. One modern development is the system called "just in time" deliveries. Instead of buying the parts and materials for a month's production, having them shipped by the trainload and storing them in a warehouse, modern factories order only the parts they need and they use them as they are delivered.
Many automobile factories keep parts on hand for a few hours' production, and count on trucks to deliver "just in time" to keep the plant working. General Motors has taken this to a fine art in some plants, which are laid out with multiple loading docks so parts are unloaded from the truck within 100 yards of the work station where they will be installed in a new car.
Freight is also important to our diet because we import, rather than grow, much of the food we eat. We get lettuce from California, for example, and one survey found that trucking accounts for 34% of the wholesale price in Toronto. Trucking accounts for about 19% of the cost of tomatoes from Florida, 38% of the cost of onions from Washington State, 29% of the cost of California oranges and about 38% of the cost of grapefruit from Florida. Wholesalers mark the goods up about 15% when they sell to retailers and retailers add another 15 to 25%, and the cost of trucking is part of the cost they mark up. Transportation is a smaller percentage of the cost of local produce, but it's still a factor.[2]
Most of our food is moved by the transport trucks we see on the roads every day. Our society could not operate without them but they crowd the roads and, even though trucks are fairly efficient, between them they burn a lot of diesel oil.
Railway trains move more ton-miles to the gallon of fuel than trucks and they are very efficient movers of heavy bulk freight -- like coal, for example -- but they don't do so well with general freight.
If you have a trainload of TV sets, most of the tons in your ton-mile are the weight of the train rather than of the TV sets. More important, from the businessman's point of view, very few people want a trainload of TV sets and most of the people who want TV sets don't have railway sidings.
Suppose you have a store somewhere and you order a load of TV sets from a wholesaler. If you get it delivered by truck they load the truck at the warehouse and the driver takes it direct to your store. Between the factory and the store there is just one man responsible -- the truck driver -- and if the TV sets don't all make it to your store you know who to talk to.
If your order were shipped by rail the chances are the warehouse would still load it onto a truck, but the truck would go to a railway warehouse where your TV sets would be unloaded, stored for a while, then reloaded onto a boxcar. The boxcar would then be pulled to a switchyard where it might sit for a day or so before it gets hooked onto a train, then pulled to another warehouse where your TV sets would be unloaded and reloaded on another truck.
Your TV sets would still travel a long way by truck but they would be at least a couple of days en-route, they would be loaded and unloaded several times and maybe 50 or more people would have access to them. If anything were broken or lost, you could talk to the railway's lawyers about it.
Theft is a problem whenever freight is loaded and unloaded by people who are, for practical purposes, anonymous. In 13 years a ring of thieves at Toronto's Pearson Airport stole more than $15 million dollars worth of freight but police were unable to find which of about 300 freight handlers were involved.[3]
Trucks are the most efficient way to haul consumer goods but they could be considerably more efficient. Railways and some auto clubs lobby to limit the size of trucks, but most road users would be better off if we allowed bigger ones. For any given amount of freight, smaller trucks means more trucks on the road and bigger trucks means fewer trucks.
The biggest highway trucks allowed in Ontario pull two medium-sized trailers and have a gross weight of just over 60 tons but Australian "road trains" pull three big trailers with a gross weight of up to 150 tons.
Australian road trains don't run on busy roads, of course, but we have a lot of roads in Canada that are not busy and some times of day when very few roads are busy. If we allowed road trains to run when normal traffic slacks off -- from midnight to 4 or 5 am, perhaps -- we could move more freight with less fuel and we would significantly reduce daytime traffic. I don't suppose that many truckers want to drive at night, but if they can make more money at night they will do it.
We need regulations to allow road trains on some public roads and we might also consider converting abandoned railway lines to dedicated roads for road trains. A lot of branch lines, especially in the west, have been shut down because they were built in the 1890s and they can not safely take the weight of modern locomotives. When the branch lines were shut down local grain elevators had to close, effectively destroying the towns and villages that had depended on them, and farmers now have to haul their grain to main railway lines.
But the rights of way are still there and if the roadbed is not strong enough to support a modern locomotive it could easily support a road train. With the tracks pulled up it could serve as a dedicated road on which a highway tractor could pull three or four or more big trailers, moving wheat and other freight cheaply.
Because railway road beds are not wide enough to allow trucks to pass each other traffic would have to be controlled, but that's no problem. Many logging roads are not wide enough to allow two trucks to pass on a curve, so truckers report their positions by radio to avoid meeting on curves. In the same way road trains using converted railway roadbeds could arrange to meet where the rail line had a siding.
Trucks and trains work together to haul piggy-back freight, in which loaded semi-trailers are carried on flatcars, but they load the trailers on trains from the end. A trailer to be carried on the front of the train is loaded on the back, and has to be backed the full length of the train to the car that will carry it. The process is slow because trailers have to be loaded and unloaded one at a time in a specific order, and a piggy-back train can't afford to pick up or deliver at a small station.
But if a section of track were sunk into the ground, the decks of flat-cars on that track would be at ground level. If the cut were just a bit narrower than the beds of the flat-cars, and the edges lined with rollers that would support the bed as a trailer was loaded or unloaded, trailers could then be loaded from the side. At a big station a dozen tractors on each side of the track could load and unload trailers at the same time, and small stations could have ramps big enough to load or unload one or two cars at a time.
PASSENGER TRAINS
Trains don't do very well with general freight but they are a wonderful way to move passengers. Trains now running in some countries could make the trip from Toronto to Montreal faster than planes, if you consider the time saved by leaving from downtown rather than an airport and that you don't have to go through a security check to get on a train. In the United States fast trains could beat air traffic through most of the 500-mile Boswash corridor that is home to most of the air traffic in the country.
In order to run high-speed trains we would have to build new dedicated tracks and that would be expensive, but the Japanese and the Europeans have found it worth while. They have higher population density and more traffic than we but they also have more expensive real estate and much higher costs to clear a dedicated route.
An investment in high-speed rail could pay off in several ways. For one, trains are safer than planes. The airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been hijacked but planes can and do crash by accident. In 1945 a US Army bomber crashed into the Empire State Building and in July of 2000 a Concord supersonic jetliner crashed into a hotel in the town of Gonesse, France. When you consider the density of air traffic around any big city, and plans for even bigger airliners, the potential for catastrophic crashes is unacceptable.
Even if we could avoid accidents we have to expect more hijackings because no matter how expensive, slow and annoying the security procedures, someone will find a way to beat them. If they can't hijack passenger airliners terrorists can take freight planes, or steal planes from storage and maintenance hangars. When the prize is a world-shaking act of terrorism, we must expect fanatics to keep trying until they succeed. It is possible to hijack a train, of course, but you can't take it off the tracks. It is true that terrorists bombed a Madrid railway station, but the station was no more or less vulnerable than any public building with a large crowd of people.
With increased security at the US border trains offer another advantage for cross-border travel, because immigration and customs inspections can be and often are carried out aboard trains while they move.
A shift from planes to trains would also benefit the environment because, as we noted before, contrails left by high-flying jets reduce the intensity of sunlight and, at the same time, are part of the greenhouse effect that traps heat.
We need planes to cross oceans and to fly long distances but we don't need them near major metropolitan areas. Trains are better for short to medium distances, and direct rail service to and from a few airports would make life easier for long-haul travelers.
In a rational world there would be high speed trains in our future but, unfortunately, it looks as though Canadian bureaucrats and politicians continue their love-affair with air travel. In November of 2004 CTV News reported that the federal government still plans to build a $2 billion new airport at Pickering, northeast of Toronto. Land for the project was expropriated in the 1970s but the airport was not built because it was not needed.
The federal government has closed one ill-advised airport at Mirabel but now bureaucrats want to build another at Pickering. We don't need it and people don't want it but it will provide jobs for bureaucrats and that seems to be the objective.
It appears that the federal government plans to back Bombardier in the development of a mid-sized intercontinental passenger jet, to compete in an already-overcrowded market.[4] Industry experts say the plane has no chance in the world market but that's no problem for the people who will be paid government money to develop it, and who may well be retired before the project collapses.
The federal government may itself kill air travel with high rentals on airports and out-of-control airport authorities that keep building bigger and "better" airports. Toronto's Pearson is now one of the most expensive airports in the world for a plane to land at and, in March of 2005, the Israeli airline El Al said it might drop service to Toronto if landing fees are increased. It costs them about $3,000 to land a jumbo jet at Tel Aviv, and $12,000 to land the same plane at Toronto.[5]
While I was working on this section of the book I experienced Toronto's new mega-terminal for the first time. I can see that it must be very profitable for concessionaires and good for the egos of the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, but it's no improvement for passengers.
We need to start now to begin the shift from air to rail transport. For a start, the government should pull out of the development of new airliners and super-airports. We could also start assembling land and/or rights of way where high-speed rail lines may be needed.
We might also encourage our aircraft industry to look in different directions. In years gone by the Canadian aviation industry ruled the world of bush planes with the Beaver, the Otter, the Twin Otter, the Caribou and other STOL (short take-off and landing) aircraft. It made sense to make these planes in Canada because we needed them ourselves but, in the spirit of the "global market," we now try to compete with other countries in the production of planes for use mostly in other countries.
But we used to do very well with STOL planes and we could consider a return to that market. Nearly 30 years ago, when I was writing for a magazine published by Transport Canada, I did a story about a new wing for the Canadian Armed Forces' Hercules transports.
Government officials of the time knew that the Hercules were wearing out and that it would be very expensive to replace them, but they also knew that the fuselages and other parts would still be good. Rather than plan to buy complete new planes they had a new wing designed, with twin jet engines. Tests showed that a Hercules with the new wing and engines would perform better than the standard model.
One sample of the wing was built, tested and stored at the DeHavilland factory in Downsview before the plant was closed. It's probably lost by now but the design is still available and we could not only rebuild our own Hercules, we could rebuild them for dozens of other countries. This could be a big business, because armed forces around the world have hundreds of Hercules which could, and perhaps should, be rebuilt.
We have already made most of the investment in this. All we have to do now is collect the returns.
CITY TRANSIT
Trains beat airlines for medium-distance inter-city runs, but Toronto's streetcars are a disaster. Most modern cities have given up on them but both the city and the province are not just maintaining Toronto's streetcar service, they are trying to expand it.
That's good for the Toronto Transit Commission, but a disaster for the city.
It's good for the TTC because as long as the city keeps renewing streetcar lines it will have to keep subsidizing the service. Streetcars also help the TTC by slowing other traffic and making private cars, (and delivery trucks and taxis and ambulances and fire trucks and other vehicles) less efficient.
But streetcars are bad for the city and for the environment for a number of reasons. One is that the tracks themselves are a dangerous nuisance. We have no count of the number of pedestrians who trip on streetcar tracks and who may break or twist their ankles on them, but is there anyone who walks in downtown Toronto who has not had at least a close call?
How many cyclists have been caught in streetcar tracks, or put in danger because they had to avoid them? How many cars have skidded on them? If the TTC were held liable for accidents caused by streetcar tracks, it would need even more subsidies.
If that's not enough, consider the damage to roads! Pavement breaks down where cracks let in water, and streetcar tracks provide miles of cracks. Look at any tracks that have been in place more than a couple of years and you can see the damaged pavement around them. It costs more to maintain streets with tracks and the cracked pavement and potholes around the tracks present a further hazard to pedestrians, cyclists and cars.
Business suffers when streetcar tracks have to be replaced because the street is closed to traffic for weeks or months. I noticed this years ago, when the tracks were replaced on Queen St. East. By the time the street was re-opened, dozens of small stores had closed down. Stores also lose business when a street is re-paved, of course, but re-paving doesn't take as long as laying new streetcar tracks and, as noted, pavement has to be repaired or replaced on streets with tracks more often than on streets without them.
The wires that supply electric power to streetcars are ugly, expensive, and a possible health hazard.[6] Streetcar islands are a general nuisance and traffic hazard.
And so far we have not considered the streetcars themselves! They are nice to ride, but a nuisance to other traffic.
A bus pulls to the side to load or unload passengers but when a streetcar stops all other traffic has to stop behind it. When a streetcar breaks down, even other streetcars must stop until it can be towed. When an accident blocks a streetcar line, all traffic is blocked.
Streetcars produce electronic interference that jams AM radio for up to a half block, and they produce far more pollution than an average diesel bus.
We get some of our electric power from Niagara Falls and some is nuclear, but most Ontario power plants burn carbon fuels and we have to assume that any single electric load uses carbon fuels. If we stop using streetcars Hydro will reduce output from a fuel-burning plant, not from Niagara Falls.
Most of the electricity that powers a Toronto streetcar is produced by burning coal and, because the combination of the coal-burning power plant and long-distance transmission is less efficient than a diesel engine, a streetcar in effect burns more carbon fuel than a bus. The electric motor of the streetcar also produces ozone gas, which is poisonous. Ozone in the upper atmosphere filters ultraviolet rays, but ozone at street level helps produce smog and ozone generated on city streets will never become part of the ozone layer.
I'm not boosting diesel but it's cleaner than electric power from coal or oil fueled central power plants and there are alternatives -- such as propane and natural gas -- that would make buses even cleaner. In 1989, the Japanese began using hybrid buses that combine a diesel engine and an electric motor/generator for peak efficiency.
When the power fails, a streetcar stops. If it happens to be blocking a major cross street, that's tough. In a general power failure hundreds of streetcars block Toronto traffic and even with a local failure -- if a transformer blows up or a power line comes down -- a half dozen or more streets may be blocked.
I'm not against streetcars per se, because they do a great job in many European cities. The difference is that most streetcars in Europe have their own right-of-way, and they don't damage the streets or interfere with other traffic.
Toronto gives a few streetcars their own right-of-way too -- the far west end of the Queen St. line is not bad -- but most Toronto streetcars run down the middle of crowded streets. Others, such as the Spadina line and an "improved" line proposed for St. Clair Avenue, block off dedicated rights of way in the middle of streets. These are very good for the TTC but even more of a nuisance for other traffic. They may also be dangerous -- the Spadina line is said to be involved in more accidents than any other in the city.
As long as they have streetcars the TTC has a high profile and can hold us to ransom for subsidies. If the tracks are old and the streets are dangerous it's because the TTC can't afford to replace them, and will the government please help?
One alternative to streetcars is bus service. Hybrid diesel-electric buses are much more energy efficient than streetcars and, with dedicated bus roads built in hydro corridors and other open land, buses can offer fast transport. The city of Ottawa, for example, has express bus services that travel part of their routes on dedicated roads.
And buses can compete with each other. In Manchester, England, I was surprised to find three bus companies plying the same route. One offered a high-priced premium service and the other two just competed. They all used the same stops. If the city owns the roads, buses could even compete on dedicated bus roads.
Mexico City has a wonderful service with thousands of twenty-passenger micro-buses (they call them "meeckros") which offer cheap, fast and dependable service. Most of the micros are affiliated with big companies but many of them are owned and maintained by the driver. That's not an unusual arrangement -- many of the big trucks you see on Canadian highways are actually owned by the driver rather than by the company they haul for.
The advantage of small buses is that they can offer more frequent service than big buses, they cause less problems for other traffic and they can offer special routes with relatively low traffic. The TTC does not like small buses because they require more drivers per passenger but the Mexican system makes up for that by having fewer parasitic executives, managers and supervisors. It's also an advantage if the driver owns the bus, because he has good reason to take good care of it.
The advantage of private buses is that they will compete with each other. Where there is no competition the municipal service, no matter how bad, is the best you can get. With competition you have a choice, and competitors have good reason to offer the best service they can. Further, if there is competition in bus service -- with a requirement that the same union not represent drivers for different companies -- citizens would have some protection against a strike that can shut the city down.
If unionized bus drivers want to shut down their employer that's their employer's problem, but if they want to shut down the city that's everyone's problem and I don't see why we should tolerate a system that allows it.
Subways work well in many cities -- the inefficiency of electric power is balanced by the efficiency of big trains that carry a lot of passengers -- but there is some question about where and how they are built. Toronto's first subway, on the south end of Yonge Street, made sense because the traffic was already there and the subway was built to handle it. Toronto's latest subway, on Sheppard Avenue, is a bad joke because the area has little traffic. Construction of this subway was pushed by a wealthy mayor who had wealthy friends, and a cynic might suspect that it was built in the hope that it would increase the rental and/or sale value of property owned by the mayor and his friends.
Subways work very well where they are needed but it takes a lot of traffic to justify them. Unfortunately, it's very expensive to build a subway in an area with a lot of traffic because land prices are high and because people don't want their streets shut down. In general, buses have the advantage that they are flexible and that routes can be changed as required when traffic patterns or other conditions change.
A responsible government would not subsidize streetcar lines on city streets but would encourage and even subsidize the construction of dedicated bus roads on hydro and other rights of way. A responsible government would not subsidize a municipal bus service in municipalities that refuse to allow competing private bus service.
We could ease private buses into municipal service by allowing the kind of communal taxi service that Mexican "peso cabs" used to offer in the 1950s. When a taxi driver had no fare he would cruise slowly up a main street with his window open and his hand hanging out. He would stop when flagged and for a fare of one peso -- about eight cents Canadian in those days -- would take you as far as he was going up the street. On the way you shared the cab with whoever was in it when you flagged it, and anyone else who flagged it afterward.
In the early years of the last century such bus/taxis were common in the United States. They were called "jitneys" -- apparently the word was slang for a nickel, or for a five-cent fare -- and most of them were shut down by municipal bylaw at the request of big bus and streetcar companies. A city like Toronto could allow licensed taxis to operate as jitneys, and then allow the jitney operators to trade up to vans and small buses. It would be reasonable for the city to set stiff safety, efficiency and emissions standards for vans and buses to be licenced as jitneys.
I also question the need for school buses on streets that are already served by public buses and that could be served by jitneys. Where service is available, kids could and should use regular buses, perhaps with passes issued by school boards. It's ridiculous to maintain huge fleets of buses that make only two trips per day.
Taxis are also an important part of urban transportation but, in Toronto, taxi licences have been a shameful scandal. Because the total number of licences was limited they were wonderful investments and, because of that, much too expensive for working drivers to own. Instead, investors held the licences and working taxi drivers rented the car and the licence, one shift at a time, for a share of their take. The driver did the work and took the risks, and the investor collected the profits.
The city of Toronto now offers some licences for "ambassador cabs," which are owned and licensed by the driver. In a rational world taxi licences could be held only by people who owned and drove, or directly managed, taxis. All taxis should be allowed to operate as jitneys, at the driver's option.
English taxis have always been custom-made for the job. Some are diesel-electric hybrids which emit much less exhaust than the large American sedans used as taxis in Toronto. It would be reasonable for the city to specify what kinds of vehicles could be used as taxis, especially in the downtown area.
PRIVATE AUTOMOBILES
The core of our transportation system is the private automobile and it's easy to criticize cars but most of us would be seriously inconvenienced without them. Like it or not private automobiles have shaped most of the industrial world, and most of the non-industrial world is doing its best to get enough cars to shape it.
The hitch is that the cars we have now are not sustainable, and neither are most of the alternatives that are being offered. For most of the past 40 years or so cars and the exhaust they produce have been a political football that has been played to the advantage of government and big business, and to the detriment of the environment and the public.
The obvious answer to our problem is a simple one -- smaller cars with smaller engines that burn less gas and produce less exhaust -- but while that works for the environment it does not work for the auto-makers, the oil industry or the government.
The auto industry likes big engines because they cost more, and because a car with a big engine can be sold as an ego-booster rather than as transportation. The oil industry likes big engines because they burn more fuel and the government likes big engines because when people burn more fuel the government collects more tax.
But rather than smaller engines we get bafflegab about so-called "alternatives" to gas-powered cars. Most of the alternatives are obvious non-starters but the promoters who offer them collect millions in subsidies from governments and from commercial corporations that can write their "research" off for tax benefits. Because "alternatives" are being developed there is obviously no need for the more-efficient cars that could have been produced at short notice when the need was recognized.
The state of California even passed laws that forced auto-makers to offer electric cars. These were not new -- electric cars were popular 100 years ago -- but they are not practical for the modern world and, more important, they do more harm to the environment than gasoline-powered cars.
The problem is that most of the electricity used to charge the batteries of electric cars is produced by burning fossil fuel. If we're going to burn fuel somewhere, it's more efficient to burn it in cars than in central power plants.
Efficiency is important because no matter how clean the emissions you always generate carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas that promotes global warming -- when you burn fuel. The more fuel you burn the more carbon dioxide you produce, and the only cure is to burn less fuel.
Emissions count too, of course. In theory it's easier to control emissions from power plants than from cars, but that's just theory. In practice it's very expensive to clean up a power plant, and well worth-while for utilities to bribe inspectors and politicians or to hire lobbyists to argue for delays.
Individual customers pay for emissions controls on cars and the auto makers, who make a profit on everything they add to a car, don't argue against new and more expensive standards.
Besides, cars last only about eight years but power plants last at least fifty years. Because of that, most of the cars on the road will always be at least one generation newer, cleaner and more efficient than most power plants.
Even a new power plant can't compete with a car engine, because the power plant can't drive the car directly.
Power from a central station goes through a grid of wires and transformers to a battery charger, then to a battery and finally to an electric motor. That's at least five steps, and power is lost in every one of them.
If an electric car needs the same amount of energy as a conventional gasoline-powered car, the plant that provides it must burn more carbon-based fuel than the gasoline-powered car. In fact an electric car needs more energy than a gas-powered car, because it weighs more.
The European Ford Escort van weighs just over a ton in its original form. An electric version of the same truck, with enough batteries to drive it about 100 miles, weighs 3,200 pounds and would need about 50% more power than the gas-powered Escort to produce equivalent performance.
And a gas car doesn't need power plants, substations or wires. If many people used electric cars we would have to double or triple the power grid we have now.
In my apartment with electric heating I use between 35 and 40 kwh of electricity per day in winter. That's equivalent to about one gallon of gas and if I burn an average of one gallon of gas a day in my car, an electric car would double the electrical load on my apartment.
Electric car advocates say that wouldn't matter because cars would be charged at night, when normal power demand is low, but that's not true. Electric cars would be plugged in when people come home from work, and before they start to cook dinner. They would draw their peak load at peak hours, and if we all used electric cars we would have to double or triple the power grid.
With electric cars we would use more electric power in residential areas, and be exposed to more leakage. We don't think of electricity leaking but it does -- that's what produces the interference that affects AM radio reception -- and leakage from high tension lines, transformers and substations has been linked to cancer and other problems. Power utilities insist that nothing has been proved, but the issue is very much open to question.[7] Maybe the people who stopped making electric cars nearly 100 years ago knew what they were doing after all.
Some dreamers still hold out for fuel cells -- an idea that has been in the works since about 1860 and is still not ready for wide use. Fuel cells are more efficient than internal combustion engines but they are very expensive to make, because they depend on a catalyst made of platinum, and they work best with hydrogen fuel. That's a problem for a couple of reasons.
One is that we don't have any hydrogen wells or mines or farms. To get hydrogen from water we need huge amounts of electricity -- most of it generated by burning fossil fuels -- and when we extract hydrogen from fossil fuels we consume the fossil fuels. One way or another, the industrial plant it would take to produce hydrogen for fuel would do at least as much damage as do gas-burning cars. Another problem is that hydrogen is very dangerous to store and use, and we don't have the facilities for it.
If hydrogen were a practical fuel we could use it now. We already run some cars and trucks on propane and, with carburetor adjustments and different fuel tanks, these same vehicles could burn hydrogen. As advertised by the promoters the exhaust from a hydrogen-burning car would be mostly water but, somehow, the promoters never seem to get around to using hydrogen themselves.
Several companies are experimenting with fuel cell cars, but that does not mean they believe in them. With grants and tax breaks the experiments cost virtually nothing, and the pretense that they are "working on a solution to the problem" helps justify their failure to make the more efficient cars that we need.
Cars can also burn ethanol and some governments subsidize production of ethanol from farm crops but, because modern farm crops are heavily dependent on fossil fuels, this is a losing business. One study found that it takes 29% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol from corn than the gallon of ethanol contains.[8]
Further, a car running on ethanol will produce almost exactly as much of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as it would if it ran on gasoline. If we ever do fuel cars with ethanol, it will be a net loss of the environment.
One option that appears to be practical is the "hybrid" car which combines a gas or diesel engine with an electric motor. Hybrid cars are now being offered as a "new idea" but there is one in the Canadian Automotive Museum that was made in 1914.
There are two common types of hybrid power systems. The one that was in production in Canada in 1914, and that is used on most of our railway trains and on very big construction trucks and earthmoving machines and even on many ships, uses an internal combustion engine to drive a generator which produces power to drive an electric motor. Essentially the generator and electric motor combination work as a transmission to allow the internal combustion engine to run at its ideal speed, whatever the speed of the car. In addition the electric motor can work as a generator to produce power when it's used to slow the vehicle and, in a car or other light vehicle, batteries can store the surplus energy for use later.
In the other system, used in many Japanese buses, the engine is connected to the drive wheels through a conventional transmission but there is a large electric motor/generator built into the driveline. When the bus accelerates the motor/generator draws power from batteries to help the internal combustion engine. When the bus decelerates the motor/generator produces power which is stored in the batteries. The advantage of this system is that the bus performs well with a much smaller diesel engine than would be required without the electric motor/generator to help. It saves fuel because the energy absorbed by the system when the bus slows down can be re-used to accelerate it again.
Both hybrid systems offer advantages but neither is new and either could have been put into production 40 years ago to solve the problem that appeared at that time. In fact neither was really needed then, or is needed now, for private cars.
The obvious answer to our pollution problem is smaller cars with smaller engines. Auto makers say Americans won't buy them but they won't buy electric cars either, while gas-guzzlers are still practical.
But small cars with small engines are certainly viable, and are popular in many parts of the world. Forty years ago I drove a French-made Citroen 2CV that seated four adults in superb comfort, cruised at 60 mph and got about 60 miles to the gallon of gas -- or about 4.5 liters/100 km. That car is history now, but others with comparable fuel mileage are available almost everywhere except in North America.
My 2CV had 425 cc of engine displacement, compared to 6000 cc and more for a big V8. Some people tell me they need a big engine because they do a lot of highway driving but when I had the 2CV I lived in Owen Sound and, as a free-lance reporter and photographer for an assortment of newspapers, magazines and TV stations I covered an area that stretched north about 90 miles to Tobermory, east and north about 150 miles to Parry Sound and south about 120 miles to Toronto.
My three-cylinder 1991 Chevrolet Sprint got about 50 miles to the gallon on the highway. It was also a wonderful car to drive -- on the highway or elsewhere -- and I took it on a lot of long trips, through Canada and the U.S.A. The first job I took it on was to Pickle Lake -- northeast of Sioux Lookout and more than 1,000 miles from Toronto. I worked right across Canada in those days and because I enjoyed the run to Pickle Lake so much I decided that, rather than head back to Toronto, I would do another job in Winnipeg. Then I remembered a story I had planned to do in Saskatchewan and another in Alberta, and I decided to visit some old friends in Kamloops. In the end I turned back at Hope, BC, because I don't like Vancouver traffic. After driving the Sprint for a year and a half I traded it because the 4,500 run from Dawson City to Toronto convinced me that I really did want cruise control -- which was not available on the Sprint.[9]
Tell me again about how you need a big car for the highway. Twenty five years ago I used to cross Canada three or four times a year, and I always preferred to do it in a small car. That's partly because I like getting 40 or 50 miles to the gallon, of course, but it's also because I like the feel of a small car.
About 30% of all private cars in Japan are "mini-cars" with less than 650cc engine displacement, compared to 3,000 cc and more for a typical American "compact. The United States and Canada are the only countries I know of in which you can not buy cheap, safe and efficient cars.
But Canada could lead the world in efficient cars. For an exhibit at the Expo '86 world's fair in Vancouver Transport Canada paid automotive engineering students at the University of Saskatchewan to build a super-mileage car. The choice of the University of Saskatchewan team was obvious because they were regular winners in the Society of Automotive Engineers' annual super-mileage competition, beating the best of American universities with experimental cars that got more than 1,000 miles to the gallon of gas.
You would not want to drive one of their competition cars to work but, even now, I would love to be able to buy the single-seater Nexus car the team built for Transport Canada. As built it got about 245 miles to the gallon but it could have been better because Prof. Barry Hertz, who advised the team, likes fast cars and the Nexus was more than efficient -- it was also very fast. If the team had used a smaller engine, Hertz told me, the car would still have kept up with normal traffic and it would have got close to 350 miles to the gallon. The original carried only the driver, but it could easily have been stretched to make a two-seater.[10] The Nexus met all safety standards of the time and it would still be a good car today.
And we need it desperately, because the world is running out of oil. We all know that but most of us think it will happen in some distant future. Apologists tell us that we will still have oil 50 years from now and that's true, but it's also true that for practical purposes we will have run out when we want to consume more than we can produce.
That will probably be within five years, because billions of people in China and India are now buying cars. Oil production is expected to peak at about 85 million barrels a day in 2008 but demand is expected to keep rising -- to about 121 million barrels within 25 years if the oil were available. Even if we allow oil men to invade every wilderness preserve in the world they can't produce that much and the crunch will come when the production and the demand lines cross.[11] After that oil will still be available, but it will be so expensive that most of us will not be able to afford to drive the cars we have today. One financial analyst with a very good record of predictions believes that demand will outstrip supply early in 2006. On August 5/05, CTV News reported a US government warning that the US may run short of gas before the end of the summer.
If a Canadian company were to make a car like the Nexus we might not be able to sell it in the States this year but we could sell it around the world and Canadians driving Nexus cars could still visit the States. Over the years Canada and the United States have had different standards and Canadian cars that do not match American standards can't be imported to the US but they can enter as visitors. Many of the cars we buy in Canada could not be legally sold in the US.
Comes the crunch, when we can no longer afford to drive gas-hogs, we will all demand more efficient cars.
SAFETY STANDARDS
American 'safety' regulations bar the sale of many efficient cars in the USA but many of those regulations seem to have more to do with improving profits than with improving safety. Some pundits like safety regulations but I lost faith in pundits back in the 1960s and 70s, when I worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer.
In those days so-called "safety experts" told people to lock their doors to avoid being thrown from the car in an accident. That's bad advice for two reasons.
One is that the lock on a car door does nothing to keep the door closed. All it does is disengage the outside door handle, so the door can not be opened from the outside. This won't stop the door from opening in an accident but it can and will prevent bystanders from helping victims after an accident. I have personally seen the burned-out hulks of three cars in which a total of ten people burned to death because the doors were locked and -- in the few seconds before the fire drove them away -- bystanders could not open them. In all three cases people in the cars survived the crash, but were not able to open the doors themselves.
In one case, bystanders had to listen to five children screaming as they burned.
I know it's a good idea to lock car doors in some American cities -- my brother was stabbed by a man who got into his car at a stoplight in Memphis -- but none of the cars I refer to here was in an American city. Some cars lock their doors automatically when you put them in gear, and I have no doubt that this "safety feature" must have killed people.
Seat belt regulations also bug me because in airplanes around the world seat belts are standardized and they all work the same way. Cars have at least three different types of seat belts, with different release mechanisms. When I ride in an unfamiliar car I sometime have trouble undoing the belt, and sometimes I have to help people undo the belt in my car. If the car is upside down and burning, I don't want to have to fumble with an unfamiliar seat belt.
I have a real problem with the air bags that are now fitted to all new cars sold in the United States and Canada, and to some cars sold in other countries. Air bags were offered to Americans as a voluntary option in 1974 but consumers didn't want them and they were discontinued after two years. In the 1990s the US National Traffic Safety Administration enacted a rule that all new cars sold in the US must have an air bag and, in 1998, a rule that all new cars sold in the United States must have two front seat air bags.
Promoters said air bags would save the lives of about 40% of the people who were killed in traffic accidents but we now know that they save few lives and that they may actually kill more people than they save.
Even without accidents, air bags can kill. Before the end of 1998 the official death toll rose to more than 108 people killed by air bags, including at least one driver who died when the air bag deployed even though he had not hit anything. To date literally millions of cars have been subject to official recall due to air bag defects. Some of the recalls were ordered because air bags went off when wiring corroded, others because the bags went off when the car hit a pothole or a curb. Air bags in some pickup trucks went off when the passenger door was slammed and the bag in one car sometimes went off when someone touched particular areas of the steering wheel during dry weather. Some air bags went off when ignition keys were switched on, and others when engines were switched off.[12] In one horrifying case in Boise, Idaho, an air bag set off by a low-speed bump against a garbage can actually tore a baby's head off.[13]
We'll never know how many accidents have been caused and how many people have been killed by defective air bags, but we do know that even air bags that are not defective can kill people if they escalate a minor accident into a major one. That can happen if a minor bump sets a bag off and a driver with a bag in his face and his hands pushed off the steering wheel drives into a bridge abutment or oncoming traffic. There is no count of the total number of minor accidents that became serious because of air bags, but I suspect it is significant.
One high-profile accident that may have been caused by an air bag killed Diana, Princess of Wales. The actual cause of the accident has never been established but paint from another car was found on the wreck and there is evidence that the air bags inflated before Diana's car hit the concrete pillar.[14] After the driver's air bag inflated, he had no chance to keep control of the car.
That's not the official theory but it is obvious that, in an emergency, it is very difficult to control a car with an exploded air bag in your face and your hands pushed off the steering wheel.
Even in minor accidents, air bags are very dangerous for children. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Marketplace TV show on Oct 3, 2000, cited studies by Transport Canada which found that seat belts reduce the chance of injury in an accident by 47% and, for people using seat belts, air bags reduce all injuries by another 2%.
If people use seat belts, air bags reduce a man's chance of being injured in an accident by 11% but they increase a woman's chance of being injured by 9% and they increase a child's chances of being killed by 21%.[15] You would think a device that increased the chances of a child being killed by 21% would be banned, not mandated.
No country except the United States mandates air bags but no auto maker offers new cars without air bags in Canada. Canadians can get permission from Transport Canada to have air bags de-activated but they must pay a mechanic to do the work. According to the CBC some dealers charge up to $800 for the job, and they may take more than a month to order the parts required.
American drivers who fear special risks are allowed to have switches installed, to prevent the "safety device" from killing them.
Air bags and other "safety" devices are probably here to stay because they increase our costs -- and therefore business' potential for profit -- by billions of dollars a year. A new car costs more because it has airbags and minor accidents cost more because a bump that does not even bend a fender may set off airbags that will cost thousands of dollars to replace.
The requirement for air bags also boosts new car sales because the cost of replacing airbags makes it impractical to repair some cars. According to Forbes magazine it can cost up to $6,000 just to replace the air bags in some cars after a minor collision. Because insurance companies won't repair a car if the repairs will cost more than 65% of the value of the car, the percentage of cars written off after collisions has increased from 8% in 1992 to 16% in 2003.[16] In fact we can assume that some cars might be written off after a bump that did no damage at all to the car, but set off the air bags.
This is obviously good for auto-makers and it's also good for insurance companies because insurance rates are set on a cost-plus basis and, as the cost of collisions increases, the insurance companies' profits increase.
I don't want an air bag in my car because I live in Canada and I sometimes drive on secondary roads in winter. These roads are sometimes blocked by snowdrifts and, to get through, I may have to hit a drift at high speed. If I do that with airbags they may injure or kill me and, even if I am unhurt, it will cost thousands of dollars to replace the bags. This for a device that has not been shown to offer more protection than danger in an accident![17]
Even if it were not for the danger of snowdrifts I don't want an air bag because I know that if someone hits my car when it's parked, the bag could go off in my face when I turn on the ignition. Another consideration, of course, is that I don't want anything in my car that is liable to kill children.
Several other American regulations seem to contribute more to profit than to safety. When my 1992 Toyota Corolla was a few months old a stone on the highway cracked a headlight lens. No problem, I thought, because the lens was designed to be replaceable and a new one should cost only a few dollars.
But no. The replaceable lens was glued in place and, instead of a few dollars for a new lens, I had to pay nearly $300 for a whole new headlight. Toyota told me that the law requires them to glue the lens in place, but that's not true. There is such a law in the United States -- one of several laws that make American cars more expensive to maintain -- but not in Canada. My car was made in Canada and it could not have been sold in the States because the seat belts did not meet American standards of the time.
The lens of my headlight was glued in place for one reason only -- to make me pay nearly $300 for a repair that should have cost less than $20. I have since cracked and chipped the new headlight three times but now, instead of a buying a new one, I repair the lens with vinyl tape.
Some safety devices work well but do not necessarily improve safety. Anti-lock brakes, for example, will help you stop faster and safer on slippery roads but a study in Germany found that taxis with anti-lock brakes were involved in more accidents than taxis without anti-lock. A taxi company in Munich ran 91 cars, 21 of them with anti-lock, and drivers drove whatever car was available when they started a shift.
On good roads the cars with anti-lock were involved in fewer accidents following full braking, but they were involved in more minor accidents while parking and maneuvering in tight spots.
On slippery roads, drivers with anti-lock were responsible for more accidents than drivers without it.
We might expect that cars with anti-lock would be safer than those without but -- as has been shown with other "safety" devices -- the fact that they have anti-lock seems to change drivers' behavior. Observers who posed as ordinary fares found that the same drivers took more risks in cars with anti-lock brakes than they did in cars without.[18]
On the other hand I consider cruise control to be a valid safety feature, because I'm more relaxed and less aggressive when I use it.
But to get it I have to buy a high-end car, usually with a lot of junk I don't want. In a rational world manufacturers would be required to offer cruise control as a standard, or at least as a stand-alone feature.
In theory you can add cruise control to any car, but I have bad memories about the time I had the dealer install an aftermarket cruise control on a new Nissan. It never did work and, when I had it removed, the dealer's idiot mechanic cut the control wires rather than remove them and, a couple of weeks later, the cut ends jammed the throttle wide open.
If I had my druthers I would get the "smart" cruise control that is available on some European cars. "Smart" cruise has a sensor that tracks the car ahead and when it's going slower than I am, smart cruise control slows my car to follow it at a safe distance.
I would also like to be able to buy a small, efficient car, but to make that practical the government would have to relax regulations for emission controls on very small engines. Considering that we now allow motorcycles up to 1,500cc and SUV's and pickup trucks with engines displacing 6,000 cc and more to run without emission controls, I see no problem with cars up to, say, 650 or 1,000 cc.
Higher fuel taxes will not do much to encourage people to buy cars with smaller engines, because many people who buy new big cars can afford to pay high taxes. The US tried a "gas guzzler" tax but that did not work because it was charged only on new cars. In Canada, I suggest an annual surtax of -- say -- $10/100 cc per year on licence fees for private cars with more than about 1,600 cc of engine displacement. This would be effective because it would reduce the resale value of cars with big engines.
Hot Rod Harry the terror of Main St. may not mind that his ten-year-old six-liter super-car gets only five or ten miles to the gallon because he drives less than 50 miles a week -- most of it from stoplight to stoplight -- but he might think twice about a $440 a year surcharge on his licence.
Because it would demand a change in production schedules and would destroy the resale value of many expensive cars, such a tax should be phased in over five or ten years.
It would be nice if the Canadian government would demand that cars sold in Canada meet Canadian, not American, regulations. At the very least seat belts should be standardized, air bags should be optional, headlight lenses should be replaceable and automatic door locks should be banned.
ROADS THAT WILL LAST
I also like good roads and it bothers me that I don't think we're getting the roads we should have. Nearly ten years ago I wrote several stories about a new pavement roller, developed at Carleton University, that could make pavement that would last much longer.
In a nutshell -- Carleton professor Abd El Halim had studied special super-strong pavement mixes for his PhD and found they didn't work. Later, as a professor of engineering at Carleton University, he discovered that the key to stronger pavement is the way it is rolled.
A conventional roller applies high pressure for a fraction of a second as it rolls along, but it leaves thousands of tiny cracks behind it. El Halim designed a roller that applies gentle pressure for several seconds, and produces a denser pavement with no cracks. He built a small model to prove his theory, and used it to roll the driveway of his Ottawa home.
In 1988 he built a full-size prototype with help from Canada's National Research Council's Industrial Research Application Program, but Canadian paving companies were not interested in a machine to make pavement that would last longer. Eventually an Australian company bought the idea, but don't look for longer-lasting pavement in Canada.[19]
I don't know whether El Halim's roller will make better roads or not, but I know that we need better roads and that we can't count on commercial road builders to develop them. We need to build a stretch of road with El Halim's roller and, if it turns out to be significantly better than other roads, government contracts should specify the use of that type of roller on public roads.
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