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Fuelling a Revolution
by author Barbara Yaffe

With a climate-change crisis and depleting oil reserves, the world is facing a period of great uncertainty and potential upheaval.

As scary as that sounds, for North Americans, the end result could be happier, healthier towns and cities.

Two Canadian experts have sketched a scenario for the future that is riveting, one that politicians and urban planners have yet to candidly discuss.

In Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil (Earthscan, 2008), the authors outline what life will be like as the planet moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and turns away from oil as world reserves begin to decline when “peak oil” occurs in 2012, or thereabouts.

Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, both urban planners and academics, contend that conventional automobiles are on the way out. Their demise will be part of a transportation revolution as significant as the one that occurred when society turned from horse-drawn carriages and big sailing ships.

Oil-Free Energy

Transportation currently is fuelled almost entirely by petroleum-fed internal combustion engines. Such engines are the driving force behind freight transport and most of public transit, as well as cars.

With oil being depleted, transit options clearly have to change.

Still-plentiful coal is not a viable alternative to oil because of concern about greenhouse gases (coal is the fossil fuel with the highest uncontrolled CO2 emission rate).

A shift will have to be made toward electrically fuelled transit modes with power generated by renewable sources such as hydro, geothermal, photovoltaic, wind, tidal, and solar.

Let the Conflicts Begin

Gilbert, who lives in Toronto, and Perl, in Vancouver, outline a transition they say will take place roughly from 2010 to 2025.

It had better happen soon, they warn, noting that “a lack of preparation and difficulty in keeping modern mobility functioning during oil depletion could trigger massive social unrest, economic decline, and international conflict.”

At present North Americans are addicted to their cars. In Toronto 79 percent of people drive (for work and other reasons), 15 percent take public transit, and 6 percent cycle or walk. In Chicago 88 percent drive, 6 percent use transit, and 6 percent walk or cycle. Over the next few decades people could find themselves and their freight moving quite differently.

The Power of Electricity

Within communities, electrically fuelled transit vehicles are likely to dominate: trolley car, light rail, conventional subway systems, and what Gilbert and Perl call PRTs (personal rapid transport systems).

PRTs would feature a new type of vehicle, with room for between one and six passengers, that will move along a dedicated transportation corridor, connected overhead to electrical wires. These “e-cars” would provide “direct origin to destination service on demand.” For cargo, the authors envision deployment of solar-powered airships, water-based transit using wind power, and electric rail cars and trucks.

Aviation would be far pricier and thus more limited than today, restricted to larger, more fuel-efficient aircraft travelling on fewer, higher-volume routes.

All of this suggests a huge transformation in our urban environment.

Cleaner, Quieter, Friendlier

Can you imagine how deliciously quiet communities will be without the sputter and revving of vehicle engines? Without the honking and other noise associated with what we’ve come to know as traffic? Noise, note the authors, has been linkedto sleep loss, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

Air pollution will decrease. Levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds comprising a pollution stew that people have lived with for decades will be no more. Cars also have been a big contributor to a depleted ozone layer.

People can look forward to less water pollution from oil spills at sea and less runoff from highways containing road salt and other pollutants.

Think of all the fragmentation and destruction of natural habitat and soil erosion that has resulted from North American highway infrastructure.

The use of electrical grids for transport could result in fewer road accidents, deaths, and injuries.

Urban sprawl that has flowed from expansion of auto use is likely to be curtailed. Communities will become denser, and possibly, feelings of isolation and societal alienation will diminish.

Barbara Yaffe is a national political columnist at the Vancouver Sun. Her column is read across Canada in CanWest newspapers. Born in Montreal, Yaffe has lived in Vancouver 19 years.

Source: alive #312, October 2008