I recently received an email from Peter Green the owner of the website www.frixo.com pointing out his website to me as it might be useful to some of the users. Given that most of my readers live in the UK I thought it would be a good idea.

While I suspect that there are many other websites reporting traffic incidents, the key concept to take away here is that communication is important. If people know what is happening on the roads they are likely to take routes that would make them go faster. This would help reduce the pressures on the road network and decrease the effects of bottlenecks. Knowledge is power and there could be a lot of money and time saved by simply knowing whether the queue you are stuck in is becuase someone had a burst tyre and is likely to get off the road soon, or because there was a major accident and you are better off abandoning your vehicle and walking home.

Even if you fail to find a route to evade whatever is causing the traffic problems, you might be able to make a phonecall to avoid other negative effects of not arriving on time. You should be able to do all that while sitting in your car, since most phones and service providers allow you to access the internet at low cost now. It is quite difficult to put a monetary value on the cost effectiveness of such information systems, especially when intangible things are involved. How much would you value avoiding the strain on your relationship that could have been caused by arriving late to your romantic dinner?

The end result is that people’s lives are made easier. So the next time you are using the roads, check the traffic reports first before you get yourself stuck without any clue why this is happening to you.

In my previous post I suggested at the end a three lane road transport system. One lane for public transport, one lane for electric vehicles (EV) and another lane for bicycles. Let’s see how this will work.

Bicycles are the most efficient mode of transport known to man. It is the next step up from walking. All able members of society, who want the freedom of going anywhere whenever they feel like it should use a bicycle. You should normally average above the 12 mph and thus would be arriving at your destination in the same time, if not faster. Parking your bike is also easier. The parking of bicycles would also take less space and time for the same amount of people than cars. Your input fuel is food, and your output emissions are breath. Brilliant invention.

Cycling also has some health effects. In general, cycling is good for you, as a form of exercise. It should make your heart muscle stronger; improve your circulation, etc… If most of society is running around on a bike, then we should expect to see less expenditure on health. There are issues with elongated cycling times for men (see here), however this can be solved by redesigning the seat.

Now, for those who are not able to cycle, or those who want to go somewhere in a fancy suit or dress, we have the EV. As discussed before they do have a number of advantages in an urban settings over your average fossil fuel burning gas guzzling box on wheels. So now we come to the issue of where to get your car’s electricity from. While green electricity is nice, once the carbon trading schemes have been set up, there is no need to worry. If you get your electricity from a coal power plant then you can be sure that the price of carbon has been passed along to you. So you have reimbursed society for the damage your electricity has cost, and it is now up to the governments to reduce the caps and make carbon more expensive. This means that more people will start moving to greener electricity generation, but this is all beyond your control. So this is not an issue you will have to deal with in your everyday life.

Public transport should also get a lane. In London it pretty much already has one. So if you are not able to cycle, and you are not able to buy an EV, or you are not from this city and don’t have anything to use here., if you don’t want to park your bike, or if you are wearing a fancy suit/dress and can’t afford an electric cab, or the many other ifs that exist in life, you will need public transport. It will provide a reliable method for anyone to be able to go where they want. There is no need discussing the merits of public transport. The idea then would be to make public transport greener. Already you are using economies of scale, when sharing your bus with a million other people. But there is still room for more, electric buses, fuel cells, etc… and work on that is already on its way.

We might have to compromise and let in some fuel burning trucks at night to get cargo in the city, until we find a greener way. But even if we start with many compromises, it’s better than nothing. With time we can then iron them out until we have our clean road transport system.

Cars are an amazing invention. They are mainly a combination of two inventions, the box and the wheel. Put a box on a set of wheels and voila you have a car. While it might not be practical to drive your car in a Flintstones style, with your legs popping out from under and pushing you through, sometimes it seems like that would be more efficient than what we did now. Your input will be biofuels and your carbon emissions is the CO2 in your breath.

Of course this arrangement will not allow you to go as fast as modern cars, but if you are in a city such as London, you might never need to.  A Transport for London report shows that the average traffic speed in the inner London area is between 11 and 12 miles per hour (17.5 – 19Km/hr). That is not particularly fast. We already know that internal combustion engines (car engines) are not terribly efficient, but they are even worse at low speeds.  Electric cars tend to have  flatter efficiency curve, that means they have the same efficiencies across the different speeds, and would thus serve quite well in a busy city situation.

What’s even more interesting about electric cars is that they have batteries, and a large number of cars will have a large number of batteries that can store a large amount of electricity. Now if we plug those in whenever we park them we have a large amount of electricity storage on hand to use in the grid. This means that in times of peak demand, instead of having a very expensive power plant start up just for that we can draw electricity from the parked cars. The car will make sure it does not give out a lot of electricity so that its owner can still go home. This should decrease the difference in demand on the grid between peak and minimum times, which means a lower planning margin, which means higher load factor, and which also means less money. (See comment on the Micro-CHP post).

Now why would I help the grid people with their problems and use up the lifetime of my battery? Because you would probably make some money out of it. You charge up at night, when electricity is cheap, and demand is low. Then you sell the electricity back during the day, when your car is parked and you are reading Dilbert cartoons at work.

Now aside from all the possible benefits of an electric car or electric vehicle (EV), here is a suggestion for Transport for London. The three lane system. One lane for public transport, one lane for electric vehicles and one lane for bicycles. Hmmm no normal cars there, exactly. This is the solution I came up with while day dreaming today, in the next post I will look for arguments why it could actually work.