Transportation

Flying dwarfs any other individual activity in terms of carbon emissions, yet more and more people are traveling by air. With no quick technological fix on the horizon, what alternatives — from high-speed trains to advanced videoconferencing — can cut back the amount we fly?

by Elisabeth Rosenthal

In most departments I have excellent green credibility, and my carbon footprint is small. I have not owned a car in more than 20 years and commute to work by subway. I walk to the market and generally no longer buy produce flown in from far away. I recycle. I have an air-conditioner, but use it only on the hottest of days. I have gone paperless with all my bills.

But my good acts of responsible environmental stewardship are undercut by one persistent habit that will be hard to break, if it is possible at all: I am a frequent flyer, Platinum Card. Last year, I traveled nearly 100,000 miles of mostly long-haul travel. And that figure puts me in the minor leagues compared to legions of business consultants, international lawyers, UN functionaries — and even climate scientists — who certainly travel much more.

Flying, particularly on long-haul flights, is so highly emitting that it dwarfs everything else on an individual carbon budget. Many climate groups have calculated that in a sustainable world each person would have a carbon allowance of two to four tons of carbon emissions annually. Any single long-haul flight nearly “instantly uses that up,” said Christian Jardine, a senior researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.

Despite the fact that most governments have vowed to reduce carbon emissions by a significant chunk by 2020, most of us are flying more and more. So while emissions from most other sectors are falling, they are relentlessly rising for aviation and will continue to do so.

According to various estimates, emissions from aviation currently represent 2 to 3 percent of CO2 emissions and are likely to double or triple by 2050. The United States’ Federal Aviation Administration projects that even after the air travel slowdowns caused by 9/11 and the recent economic collapse and the rise in fuel prices and the bankruptcy of several major carriers in the past few years, the number of general aviation hours will grow an average 2.5 percent a year through 2030, according to the latest projection.

While jobs and housing and car sales are only slowly recovering from the economic crisis of 2008-9, airline travel has rebounded with a vengeance: In March, international air travel, measured in paid passenger miles, was 10.3 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the International Air Transport Association. Airfreight, measured by the weight of goods flown, was 28.1 percent higher. In fact, current levels of air travel and freight are only 1 percent below their early 2008 highs. Can the stock market replicate that?

The current vogue of canceling out the emissions effect of plane travel by purchasing carbon offsets to support activities like tree-planting in Africa has come under fire as a feel-good illusion and, anyway, cannot be scaled up to cover the amount of flying going on. Although the airline industry is working hard to improve efficiency with more direct routes and less idling time on the runway, it acknowledges such activities yield limited, one-time gains. There is no quick technological fix, like fully renewable airline fuel, on the horizon.

Given the math, it is easy to feel all is lost. George Monbiot concludes in his book, Heat, that to meet current environmental targets set by the British government for 2050, almost all flying will have to stop and the current fleet of planes grounded. “I recognize this will not be a popular message,” he writes.

Many of us by now have adjusted our land transportation habits — buying hybrid cars, revisiting public transportation, or biking to work, for example. But few have addressed what I call the “flyers’ dilemma”: When do we really need to fly on an airplane, and can or should we change that? With business and life so dependent on air travel, it is hard to even imagine how to do with less. In 2005, Allianz employees flew 490 million kilometers a year — 12.5 thousand times around the world, according to the company’s filing with the Carbon Disclosure Project, whose corporate members agree to report their carbon emissions, with an eye ultimately to reducing them.

Anyone who cares about a future with lower emissions and less fossil fuel must face the problem and some, like Paul Dickinson, executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project, say change is inevitable: “I’m absolutely, definitely sure that people like you and me will be flying a lot less in 5 to 10 years.” Last month the European Environment Agency started a series of workshops with representatives from all over Europe assembled in Copenhagen to think about how Europe might function in the future without air travel — or with much less of it. (Participants, ironically, flew in.) But how to reduce or eliminate an activity that has become as reflexive as hopping in the car?

High-speed trains will steal market share from flying — they are already doing so on some short-haul routes in Asia and Europe. Emissions estimates of train versus plane vary tremendously, depending on the how you do the calculation. Christian Jardine notes that estimates for airline travel range from 98.3 to 175.3 grams of CO2 per kilometer for each passenger, depending on things like aircraft type and whether the warming effect of airplane contrails is added in. Reasonable estimates for trains depend a lot on the source of electricity the train is using (coal versus nuclear versus renewable). Jardine says he uses a per-person estimate of 17.7 grams per kilometer for international train rides and 60.2 for British national travel. (Much of Britain’s electricity comes from coal, while France’s is from nuclear.)

Where there is very high-speed rail and the distance is less than 350 miles, such as Barcelona to Madrid, train is a no-brainer, quicker than flying. Once you’ve ridden Spain’s AVE on the 2 ½-hour ride between those cities, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would fly the route.

Some of the reason, perversely, is price: The explosion of low-cost airlines on routes like Barcelona to Madrid and Paris to London means that it is often cheaper to take a flight than a train, regardless of the emissions consequences.

For businesses, Dickinson of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) believes that high-quality video conferencing, like Cisco-AT&T’s Telepresence, will displace a huge amount of flying. (Full disclosure: Dickinson has financial interest in a company that sets up conferences). Video conference? I know. Videophones have been on display for decades at Disney’s EPCOT Center but, in real life, the concept has never quite gelled; it long had the feel of those telephone chats with astronauts floating in the Space Station. But with Broadband it can really be different, with images and sound so clear that it appears that the people you face on a large screen are actually in the room.

Indeed, even though Dickinson has been promoting the idea for several years, he, himself, continued to fly a lot. But when a volcanic ash cloud recently turned London into a no-fly zone, he was forced into a serious road test: On April 18 he was scheduled to interview candidates for the job of CDP’s China director in Beijing. When his flight was canceled, he decided to nonetheless proceed with the interviews, virtually. “I interviewed three candidates and chose one — it was unbelievably good,” he said. “Next time I won’t buy a ticket.”

I think this attitude will spread, and is embedded already in the generation now emerging from universities and graduate schools. While people of my generation feel the need for eye contact to negotiate or a handshake to seal a deal, this new generation is far more comfortable with the reality of virtual presence. My two teenagers happily do group school projects and debate team preparation over Skype, MSM or Google chat. When I (50-something) suggest they should meet up in person, they roll their eyes. What would be the point of schlepping across town for tasks like this? You schlep for fun things, like movies and parties.

Price pressure, too, I think will force us to rethink this flying habit. In 2012, airlines enter Europe’s emissions trading scheme. If airline fuel or emissions are ever taxed or traded — and I’d guess they will be — ticket prices will rise, and travel will decline.

Of course all this won’t be enough to totally solve the aviation emissions problem, and will not be the solution that airlines want. I can’t imagine my job — or many jobs — getting done with one long-haul flight each year. But we could reduce our flying and emissions from air travel an awful lot. Whatever gains can be achieved through behavior, policy, and technical changes in different sectors will be important.

So now a challenge for 2010: Last year more than 40,000 people flew to Copenhagen to attend the United Nations Climate Conference, COP-15. There were scientists, negotiators, students, journalists (myself included), as well as politicians, many with 20-person retinues in tow. They were there because they cared passionately about climate. Perhaps, as COP-16 in Cancun approaches this year, each of us should ask what we add, or take away, by being on site? Do we really need to fly there?

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Image of airplane courtesy of Flickr photographer AMADEUS KANAAN under a Creative Common's License.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Transportation at 10:37 AM)

by Noah Kazis

New York City residents save at least $19 billion each year by driving less than other Americans, according to a new report from the non-profit CEOs for Cities. "New York City's Green Dividend" [PDF] makes the case that investing in transit, walking, and cycling isn't just better for the environment, it's great for our wallets and essential for the local economy.

(Graphic: CEOs for Cities)

As Pete Donohue reported in the Daily News, the report also shows how New York City simply doesn't have the space for car-dependency. To match the car-ownership rates of the average American urban area -- not even the worst of the worst -- New York would require room for 4.5 million more cars. If each car was given only one very small parking space -- and cars demand more than one parking space each -- we would have to construct 25 square miles of new parking. That's the size of Manhattan.

CEOs for Cities is broadcasting the benefits of sustainable transportation to public and private sector executives in order to bring the message to a new audience. "Janette [Sadik-Khan]'s office has made large strides in a quick amount of time, but congestion pricing didn't get through the state and there are other initiatives they're now pushing," said Julia Klaiber, the director of external affairs for CEOs for Cities. "Getting the economic development folks behind these policy arguments" would greatly strengthen the green transportation coalition, she added. That would certainly help in New York City, where the economic development corporation is a leading promoter of car-centric growth and our state representatives block transit improvements that pay for themselves.

After CEOs for Cities produced similar reports for Portland and Chicago, Sadik-Khan requested one for New York, said Carol Coletta, the organization's president. Both Sadik-Khan and Mayor Bloomberg "intend to use it," she added.

At CEOs for Cities' national conference yesterday, the NYC Department of Transportation commissioner told the crowd that the $19 billion in annual savings are a reminder of why we need to keep up our investment in non-automotive modes of transportation.

The $19 billion number is a quick, conservative estimate that almost surely understates the savings New Yorkers reap by not driving. The study estimates that, per capita, New Yorkers drive nine miles per day. It then multiplies that figure by the national average cost of operating a vehicle, 40 cents per mile. Compare that total -- how much New Yorkers spend on driving, per capita -- to the national average, and you get $19 billion in savings.

Here's why that's a conservative estimate. The study calculated average VMT rates in New York City by distributing the average daily distance driven in the entire metropolitan region according to the city's vehicle ownership rates. If New York City car owners drive less often than their Suffolk County counterparts, or drive shorter distances when they do -- both reasonable assumptions -- then nine miles per day overshoots the mark. Moreover, the cost of driving is almost certainly higher in New York than it is nationally, due to elevated costs for parking, insurance, and gasoline. In other words, it's likely that New Yorkers save much more than $19 billion.

Whatever the number may be, New York's transportation choices make living here more affordable and provide a boon to the local economy. As the report notes, spending on cars and gas ends up in Detroit or Dallas; the money saved gets reinvested in Dumbo or Ditmas Park. In Coletta's words, "continued investment in alternative transportation makes great economic sense for the city of New York."

This piece originally appeared on Streets Blog.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transportation at 12:15 PM)

What’s infrastructure?

Colleagues at the Berkman Center have spent a lot of intellectual energy on this question lately. They’ve been lucky enough to have Christian Sandvig, communications scholar and technology critic, with them this past year, and he’s convened a group dedicated to the discussion, dissection and understanding of the infrastructures that make our contemporary world possible.

I, for reasons of a transportation infrastructure that makes it expensive, environmentally irresponsible and inconvenient to commute the 300 miles round trip to Boston more than a couple of times a month, haven’t been part of Christian’s infrastructure group. And so I don’t know whether my definition of infrastructure is wrong, derivative or merely flip:

Infrastructure is the stuff we ignore until it breaks. Then it’s the stuff we’re stunned to discover we’re dependent on.

I wrote about this idea fifteen months ago as I tried to figure out an apparent paradox – the very existence of some infrastructures make us feel more connected to the rest of the globe, even if we seldom use that infrastructure to make non-local connections. I ended up suggesting that we start making maps of how traffic flows on top of infrastructures and contrast these to the maps of the infrastructure themselves, and that we pay very close attention when infrastructures break, because we learn more from dysfunction and failure than from their transparent success.

So the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano and the resultant closure of northern European airspace seems like a great time to think about air travel.

At least six Twitter friends were stranded in different corners of Europe on trips interrupted by volcanic ash. They’re a good-humored bunch, despite what’s obviously a frustrating situation. One friend took extraordinary measures (including a 24-hour bus ride) to get from one corner of the continent to the other to give a speech. Another did his best to enjoy an involuntary trebling in length of his Barcelona holiday. All were, I think, reassured by the social permission that comes from a natural disaster – it’s hard to be angry with someone for missing a professional commitment when they’re blocked from travel by the mighty god Vulcan. It’s starting to sound a little bit like a hemispheric snow day – perhaps the best example of this was the TEDxVolcano conference, organized in less than 24 hours to take advantage of the fact that a lot of very smart people were stranded between gigs in London and willing to get together and live-stream a conversation.

The immediate consequences of airspace closure are clear. People were stranded on the wrong continent for quite some time. Perishable commodities – fresh flowers, produce, some pharma – were in short supply and their producers lost revenue. Airlines lost revenue, and will probably lose more even after the disaster, as nightmare stories of being stuck in Europe or North America tend to interfere with summer vacation fantasies.

As Jeff Jarvis noted, airlines aren’t really networks. They have a lot of trouble reconfiguring to cope with partial system failure. It would be great if everyone could have hopped on the train from the Netherlands, Barcelona or Berlin and converged in Rome, where flights could run around the clock to ferry stranded travelers to the US. That’s how internet engineers would try to address the problem. My guess is that Rome’s airspace is already pretty congested and can’t double or triple the number of flights that land at FCO…while most internet infrastructure is built to sustain peaks of activity that dwarf everyday traffic, which makes this sort of rerouting possible. And, unlike well-architected data networks, there’s not a ton of redundancy built into airline networks. Hundreds of smaller airlines use Heathrow as their main hub for international traffic. Qatar wasn’t directly affected by the ash cloud, but much of their travel hubs through London and the disruption likely had some financial impacts.

What’s interesting to me is what will happen if the airspace closure wasn’t a one-time thing. As many commentators have observed, it will be bad for airlines, good for trains, ocean liners and videoconferencing companies. But I wonder whether the changes won’t be more subtle and pervasive.

Because the infrastructure of international air travel is generally so reliable, we assume that physical presence over long distances is constrained primarily by time and money. A conference organizer in London invites me to speak at an event – she’s conscious that I’ll say no unless she pays for the airfare, and usually works to make the request for my time as modest as possible. Because we both assume that air travel almost always works, we can agree on a plan that would have seemed absolutely ludicrious even a generation ago – I’ll fly in Thursday night, speak Friday morning and head back early on Saturday, spending less than 24 hours on the ground. (Yes, I’m scheduled to do this in June. Yes, I understand how ludicrous this is.)

(Visualization of CO2 impacts of volcanic eruption, aerospace closure from Information Is Beautiful.)

It’s possible that Eyjafjallajökull could change this. If a 24 hour trip to London has a significant risk of becoming a 5 day trip to London, the calculus changes. As much as frequent travellers gripe about delays and cancellations, they’re pretty infrequent, and mass delays like the ones currently being experienced are downright rare. If they become commonplace, I personally would expect to say no to travel lots more often and do a lot more appearances via Skype and videoconferencing.

When the price of gas shot past $4 a gallon in the US, people started selling off their large SUVs and buying hybrids. Almost every organization I work with has a policy that they’re going to start travelling less, using more telepresence and trying to minimize their environmental impact. But I haven’t seen those policies actually change behaviors – I still get asked to travel far more than I get asked to appear via Skype video. Getting stranded, and the threat of possible future stranding could be an impetus towards actually changing our behavior as regards how we hold meetings, conferences and other events. And perhaps we’d actually get better at doing virtual events.

I gave a talk at MIT earlier this month that reminded me both how powerful and how limiting videoconferencing is. I moderated a panel in an auditorium at MIT with a live audience, but all my guests appeared over Skype. When we initially set up the room, there was no way for me to see the monitor where our guest speakers appeared. I found that so disconcerting that I ended up moving the monitor and repositioning my chair, so I could make “eye contact” with the panelists. They, however, couldn’t see me… though they could see Chris Csikzentmihayli, who was managing the feeds. More than one of the participants sent a note expressing their happiness with the event, but commenting on the challenge of not being able to see a moderator. Obviously, we’ll do better next time, putting an iSight camera on my face and perhaps another on the audience.

But the mechanics of the panel aren’t the problem – it’s the social contact that falls off in virtual events. As much fun as my conversations with panelists were, the unexpected, serendipitous connections were the ones I made with a Nigerian science journalist and an Iranian hacker in the bar after the panel. I suspect that tools like Twitter could make these virtual events a lot more social than they’ve been in the past, but it’s very hard to imagine getting the same level of informal interaction that we have in real life

Or maybe we haven’t tried hard enough. If travel between North America and Europe becomes difficult or impossible – i.e., if the infrastructure we usually ignore forces us to pay attention to the challenges of physically convening meetings – maybe we’ll force ourselves to get better at being virtual. I put this question to a group of friends who’ve organized a number of conferences and got some good suggestion: perhaps we could set up terminals running Skype in the venue, so that the audience could crowd around and ask speakers questions after the formal presentation? Perhaps we combine this phase of the event with a cocktail hour, where the speakers are encouraged to open a beer and continue the conversation with whoever comes by to talk to the screen. (One friend insists that there’s nothing more depressing than drinking alone and suggests that whoever presents remotely assemble her own audience, even if it’s an audience of one, to root her on and celebrate alongside.)

What happens when infrastructure’s no longer reliable? If it’s no longer invisible, do we start questioning our dependence on it? Is that what we need to motivate us to look for different solutions?

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transportation at 12:29 PM)

[Image: Strato Lab; photo via Gregory P. Kennedy]

The Strato Lab project was a manned, high-altitude balloon project from the 1950s that ascended with its crew above 80,000 feet several times. The pilots performed scientific observations there, including taking observations of Venus through an on-board telescope.

The specific experiments interest me less, however, than the architectural possibilities of inhabited balloons in the stratosphere. The Strato Lab was a kind of sky-throne, regal and airborne over the continents below.

[Image: Strato Lab as sky-throne; photo via Gregory P. Kennedy]

Historian Gregory P. Kennedy has the story over on his website; he includes technical details about how the Strato Lab worked, as well as some thoughts about its position in design history.

Strato Lab had two inward opening hatches mounted in flat frames. Having two hatches made normal entry and exit easier and facilitated rapid exit in case of an emergency. Simple air pressure sealed the hatches. Within the cabin, a pressure equivalent to 17,000 feet was maintained. When the balloon ascended beyond that altitude, the pressure difference between the inside and outside atmospheres forced the hatches against their frames. A silicone O-ring around the outer diameter of each hatch created a pressure-tight seal. During descent, the hatches opened automatically.

The lab was also backed up by a "64-foot diameter nylon cargo parachute," and, if that should fail in addition to the balloon, the crew members themselves had their own emergency chutes.

"Strato Lab retained the configuration and certain design elements of balloon gondolas of the 1930s," Kennedy writes. "Thus, it bridged the gap between pressurized gondola designs of the 1930s and modern spacecraft."

[Image: Strato Lab; photo via Gregory P. Kennedy]

All of this takes on a further, slightly different air of possibility when seen in the context of recent questions about the future of air travel in light of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano; if the Katla volcano—ten times the size of Eyjafjallajökull and less than six miles away from it—were to erupt next, for instance, the European airline industry as it currently exists could be put out of business for weeks or months at a time. The New York Times took this as a cue to ask what might be next: high-speed rail, dirigibles, airships...? And that, of course, is if a future supervolcano doesn't simply cause extinction.

But perhaps high-altitude—and "super-high-altitude"—balloons could be both destination and route: airborne rooms enthroned atop wind systems accessible to civilians for the first time, future platforms for housing at the forecourt of the sky. You build a pressurized village of linked pods, spanning acres—the architectural legacy of Ant Farm—on some land in Nebraska; the final step clips oversized polyethylene balloons to roof-hooks, and then there you go: hauling your project to its rightful site, skybound, where an emerging race of balloonists will evolve massive lungs 95,000 feet above the Great Plains.

This post originally appeared on BLDGBLOG.

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(Posted by Geoff Manaugh in Transportation at 11:33 AM)

If Katla (above: she's Eyjafjallajökull's much bigger sister) blows, and grounds flights forever, will this finally be Dr Storkey's moment?

The blogwaves are already filled with links to Seat 61. But as I've Cassandra'd repeatedly (yes, I've made it into a verb) train travel is not all that light once total system costs are factored in.

As the graph shows, the best motorized way, by far, to move long distances is by coach. Buses produce 29g of CO2 for every passenger kilometer traveled, compared with 52g for trains and 170g per passenger km for cars and airplanes.

[Plug-in electric cars are very popular with politicians and car companies: they embody the myth that we can all carry on driving around in private vehicles as normal, and the planet gets saved. It's a dangerous con: the true costs of electric cars - from the heavy metals in their batteries, to the coal-generated power needed to run them - mean that their viability as a long-term alternative to unsustainable mobility is an illusion].

Car, road, and aviation industries have had a death grip around the necks of policy makers in most countries, so bus travel has not flourished. But this could be its moment.

To develop as a mass alternative to flight, what's needed next is an integrated combination of enhanced vehicles, improvements to existing infrastructure, web 3.0 platforms and social innovation to make each step of a journey easy and fun.

A few weeks ago I asked a group of senior car designers to consider coach travel as a product service system. I asked them to identify what elements would need to be improved, in such a system, to persuade them to consider coach travel seriously. Here's a summary of what they came up with:

COACH TRAVEL DESIGN ISSUES
Time
Comfort
Independence
Connectedness
Free parking at hub
Shuttles from home/work
Convenience
Weather
Security
Noise
Lighting
Social status
Crash safety
Privacy
Web-booking
Frequency
Cost
Info at hub and on web
Clear route data
WiFi
Better experience than air travel

Can you add to this list? Have you done a project on any of these items?

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(Posted by John Thackara in Transportation at 3:44 PM)