Electric Vehicle Week Coming to Vancouver

The Mitsubishi i-MiEV

I’ll take good news anywhere I can find it these days, and one of the brighter lights now visible on the low-carbon horizon is the electric car. With the looming launches of the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt (check out my Volt test-drive report from earlier this year), I’m convinced we’re on the cusp of a transportation and mobility revolution.

To that end, I’d like to draw your attention to a few key events coming to Vancouver in the weeks ahead.

First, on Sunday, September 12, The Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association (VEVA) and Concord Pacific are co-hosting ElectraFest 2010 - A Celebration of Electric Transportation. If you’re curious about how you can boost your mobility beyond your bike without benefiting our friends in the petroleum industry, then make a point of checking out this free public event. Expect a showcase of battery-powered cars, trucks, buses, conversions, plug-in hybrids, bicycles, scooters, off-road vehicles… even skateboards! The organizers are even mooring a few electric boats at the nearby False Creek dock. Located at Concord Place, 88 Pacific Boulevard in Vancouver’s North East False Creek. 10am - 4pm. Free.

The following day marks the start of EV2010 — more properly known as EV 2010 VÉ Electric Vehicles/Véhicules Électriques Conference & Trade Show. This one is “Canada’s premier electric mobility event,” and it’s for transportation planners, elected officials, sustainability consultants, and policy wonks—and those lucky enough to find a career in the budding electric-vehicles industry.

Attendees will hash out the political, technical, and business challenges of the electric revolution and I’ll be there with them, tweeting the opening plenary. On hand: Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, British Columbia Minister of State for Climate Action John Yap, and Green Party of Canada deputy leader Adrianne Carr, and many others who are working to bring this dream to life. If you’re there, too, use the hashtag #EV2010.

Finally, the organizers of EV2010 are throwing open the doors to the public at the Sheraton Wall Centre, on September 15. Catch the premiere of the new short video “The Life Electric,” and say hello to Chelsea Sexton, former GM EV1 Specialist and one of the key players in Who Killed the Electric Car? (Heads-up: The sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, is now in production.) Check out the most advanced electric vehicles, and learn more about home and fast-charging options. 6pm to 9pm.

Be there, or be a can of BP Premium Unleaded.

Density Is Not The Boogieman

Individual Submission
Bowen Island Official Community Plan Update Committee

February 28, 2010

Dear Members of the Committee:

My name is James Glave and I’m a father of two. Ours is a young commuter family, and my wife and I actively participate in many aspects of island life. I love this place, and I am proud to call it home.

My personal passion is climate change solutions, and the transportation, energy, and land-use strategies that have been shown to reduce per-capita greenhouse-gas emissions here in our region and around the world. We can talk about any number of issues, but in my mind, carbon is the ultimate deal-breaker. We simply don’t have an option other than finding ways to slash the stuff from our lives and community. If we don’t “act locally” on this “global” issue, it will eventually come home to our doorstop and find us where we live anyway.

The science suggests that climate change will, in the near-term, overwhelm our first responders and social services, exhaust our municipal budget, and place hardship on our population via skyrocketing food prices. In the long term (which is what community planning is all about, right?)  it will ultimately result in waves of climate refugees flooding into Canada, and ultimately our community. This is not chicken-little stuff, it is exhaustively documented in reports by The Global Humanitarian Forum, the World Health Organization, Oxfam, and many other public agencies and non-government organizations.

Climate change is not an “environmental” issue, it is a civilization challenge. I believe we have a profound moral obligation to address it, wherever we live. I personally believe that we do not get an excuse or “opt out” pass to address climate just because we choose to live in a beautiful place that is “seen to be rural,” where fawns dance at the roadside and salmon thrash in the lagoon. We are not entitled to an exemption because we are surrounded by great natural beauty. This is not just “China’s problem.” We should see our emissions as an opportunity to lead, not barely squeak through our statutory obligations and hope nobody is noticing. That’s how we are not dealing with it now.

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Voltage Test: Behind the Wheel of the Car that Could Save Detroit

On Saturday, General Motors, invited me to test-drive a working prototype of the automaker’s potentially business-saving 2011 Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle. The company, an official 2010 Olympics sponsor, has wheeled a pair of the cars up to Vancouver for the biggest show on Earth.

GM cordoned off a generous section of the he HR MacMillan Space Centre parking lot and–with the car’s lead project engineer riding shotgun, plus my kids in the back seat–I ran about 15 laps around the perimeter. It felt a bit like a rat running around the outside of his cage, but since there are only about 80 of these cars in the world, I can hardly blame the company for keeping them on a tight leash.
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Cool New Low-CO2 Transportation Video Released

One thing that frustrates me is that our low-carbon future is too-often depicted with slick architectural renderings that are designed to show how a certain infill development will make the world a better place. They’re populated with bus stops and stick figures on bicycles, but they don’t often adequately convey the potential flavor of a neighborhood, what it’s like to live there, how people will do things differently.

We have simple and powerful visualization tools out there. We need to be using them to show citizens what life might be like were we to embrace a range of better-living best practices and policies. And we don’t need any fancy CGI rendering to do the job.
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Superfast Bullet Trains Are Finally Coming to the U.S.

If you don’t count the various efforts to commercialize aviation biofuel, electrified high-speed rail (HSR) is our best bet when it comes to preserving continental mobility in the post-carbon age. Thing is, unlike much of the rest of the world, Americans are only just now figuring this out (and please don’t get me started on Canada). HSR represents a truly massive infrastructure project for the Lower 48 — comparable to the building of the Interstate system in the 1950s.

Here’s an infographics package that Rachel Swaby and I put together for WIRED. The piece unpacks the various HSR plans now underway in the States, explains the technology, and outlines the challenges that stand in the way — particularly in California, where plans are furthest along. Please forgive the slightly breathless intro.

Believe it: Bullet trains are coming. After decades of false starts, planners are finally beginning to make headway on what could become the largest, most complicated infrastructure project ever attempted in the US. The Obama administration got on board with an $8 billion infusion, and more cash is likely en route from Congress. It’s enough for Florida and Texas to dust off some previously abandoned plans and for urban clusters in the Northeast and Midwest to pursue some long-overdue upgrades. The nation’s test bed will almost certainly be California, which already has voter-approved funding and planning under way. But getting up to speed requires more than just seed money. For trains to beat planes and automobiles, the hardware needs to really fly. Officials are pushing to deploy state-of-the-art rail rockets. Next stop: the future.

Superfast Bullet Trains Are Finally Coming to the U.S., WIRED, February 2010. Illustration by Paul Rogers.

Portland’s Mayor on the “20-minute Neighborhood”

Notes from “Active Transportation in Portland,” a lecture by Portland Mayor Sam Adams, at the SFU City Program, Vancouver, earlier this evening.

- Stats: Population 570,00. 143 square miles, surrounded by urban growth boundary.

- Sam is the mayor but also the city’s transportation commissioner.

- Out of 143 square miles, 73 miles are pervious pavement, ie water flows through and into the ground rather than over.
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Rees’s Thesis

What’s the best way to stump one of the greatest minds of the global sustainability movement? Kidnap him and take him to Wal-Mart. That’s what I did last November, when I took Bill Rees—the University of British Columbia professor who coined the term “ecological footprint”–into the belly of the consumer beast. I escorted him into big-box hell, gave him $50 cash, and asked him to shop.

It was a fascinating experiment, because it revealed that the professor is in one sense, just like the rest of us. But in many other senses, he is not. Rees is an intellectual rock-star, wandering alone in a world of Blue Light Specials, and his cart contains peer-reviewed science proving that everthing we have built our dreams around is leading us to “a collapse from which there will be no recovery.” Thank you for shopping. Have a nice day!

Check out my feature profile of Rees, in the March 09 edition of Vancouver magazine:

Web version, from vanmag.com:  Rees’s Thesis.

1.6 MB .PDF version of magazine layout:  Rees’s Thesis.

High Time for High-Speed Rail

If you believe the soothsayers at The Department of Energy, by about 2020 or so, America’s transportation sector will reach a dubious milestone. At that point it will be kicking out around two billion metric tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide per year.

Or not. There is another option, and President Obama again reaffirmed his support for it today at a town-hall meeting in Fort Meyers, Florida: Electrified high-speed rail, also known as HSR.

“Transportation is not just fixing our old transportation systems,” the president said. “It is also imagining new transportation systems. I would like to see high-speed rail, where it can be constructed.”

The president first pledged his support for HSR in his transportation plan, released a year ago on the campaign trail. “Providing passengers with safe high-speed rail will have significant environmental and metropolitan planning advantages and help diversify our nation’s transportation infrastructure,” he wrote.

They figured that out a long time ago in France, Germany, Spain, and Japan, and many other places, but in this country, there has always been something uncomfortably socialist about the idea. The official excuse was usually that America has too much geography without enough density.

It was more likely, though, that HSR didn’t have a voice inside the beltway, or a sympathetic ear in the White House. With the exception of Amtrak’s troubled Acela Express, for decades the country has shunted the concept onto the national passing track. The notion of comfortable and efficient 200 MPH+ Zephyrs and Flyers has proven a fringe crusade for a handful of academics and visionaries. You’d have about as much luck pitching a National Dirigible Fleet.

At least, until recently. The same day Obama swept to power, California voters passed Proposition 1a, which will establish a 220-mile-per-hour HSR system between Sacramento and San Diego. The state says the network, which it expects will be powered by renewable electricity, will reduce its dependence on foreign oil by more than 12 million barrels per year while heading off the annual release of 5.8 million metric tonnes of CO2.

Meanwhile, Amtrak ridership in the last federal fiscal year increased to 28.7 million, an 11 percent gain over 2007 — marking the sixth straight year of increases and the highest ridership since congress forged the company in 1971. Last fall, President Bush signed a bill that gave the railroad nearly $13 billion in new funding. The legislation encourages development of HSR corridors, and contains $2B in grants for states to establish or enhance service between cities.

There are other encouraging signs that HSR is inching closer to reality in the United States.

“Over the past few months, I have been hearing so much about it — like, ‘We have to do this’ — from places we haven’t heard it from before,” says Richard Harnish, director of the Midwest High-Speed Rail Association — a nonprofit that has long worked to knit the region’s cities together with welded steel.

“There are people coming into the conversation who have a lot more oomph behind them, private executives who are tired of taking their pants off to get on an airplane.”

High speed rail is more than just an smart next move that could enhance continental mobility and American competitiveness. It taps into bigger themes: Within a matter of years, petroleum-based travel is expected to become so expensive that only the most affluent members of society will be able to take advantage of it. Americans are entitled to comfortable and efficient continental mobility, with dignity, and they know it.

How might this nation fund such a system? Pulling out of Iraq would help. You could also put a price on carbon, and funnel the revenues into a green infrastructure fund. There are obviously no quick fixes, here — but ever-wider highways and sprawl are not answers.

“We have crossed the tipping point,” says Harnish. “The question is, are we going to continue to dig the hole we are in, or do something to get out of it? Bailing out GM… that is really the wrong approach. We have to start figuring out how to convert our trips to trains and bicycles.”

What might slow HSR? In the early 1990s, Southwest Airlines hired lobbyists to kill a proposed HSR project in Texas. Politically, there’s no way that company, or any other airline, could get away with that today — though short-haul air routes will be impacted the most.

Taiwan’s recently-completed HSR system, while enjoying spectacular growth, is presently strangling domestic carriers: Most air routes between Taipei City and the island’s western cities have been discontinued. The trains are simply easier and more comfortable that the planes, for about the same fare.

It’s inevitable that America will decarbonize its energy sector. But it’s vital that the country begin double-tracking the task by planning an efficient, low-carbon interstate transportation network. The proven technology exists. And we have the leadership to make Interstate 2.0 happen. Let’s do so.

First published on The Huffington Post, February  12 2009.