http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-et-notebook30jan30,1,411934.story
Christopher Hawthorne notes a recent USC study that living near freeways permanently stunts kids lung growth and infers it will have a vast effect on upcoming new building planned in the shadow of freeways.
The recent study, validating common sense and prior studies, shows that living within a third of a mile of a freeway has significantly more impact than living a mile away. But this does not mean that kids living a mile away are without lung damage, it just means their damage might be less devastating.
The implications affect not only new projects; there are many places in L.A. within a third of a mile from a freeway. Truthfully, we all knew that it's not the freeway, it's the vehicle emissions, and there is no way to move everyone in L.A. away from all freeways.
The core problem is the unquantified cost of air pollution created by the oil companies; not only from vehicles, but also from the 17 refineries in a ring upwind of our air basin's breathers.
Planners back in 1990 figured this out, and devised a future of Electric battery-powered cars. It isn't the vision of freeways mixed with residential that's the problem, it's the oil-fired vehicles that run on them as well as the oil refineries that serve this ocean of polluting vehicles among us.
There are other problems with oil, too, of course, from the politics of oil, oil wars, oil spills, oil drilling, oil pollution runoff, oil fires, and foreign entanglements with oil dictators. And other polluters of our air basin, from diesel port and train operations to airport emissions.
This immense unquantified cost of the oil economy is bearable only if there is no alternative. But visionary planners, noting the march of technology, devised a plan that makes oil not a necessity for our lifestyle, but a choice. A choice that can be eliminated by use of battery powered cars, mass transit and judicious urban planning.
The theory, back in 1990, was elegant: most gas is burned, as General Motors recently noted, on trips less than 40 miles from home. Hence, a good urban vehicle would need at most a 120 or 160 mile range on a charge, which is just exactly the range the Toyota RAV4-EV and the GM 1999 EV1, respectively, achieved on Nickel Metal Hydride ("NiMH") batteries. Even good lead-acid batteries on the 1997 EV1 gave it a range of 110 miles.
GETTING THE ELECTRIC IS NO PROBLEM
Planners noted the electric usage curve, which peaks for four daytime summer hours. The rest of the time, we have unused electric capacity, as generators are shut down. Utilities must plan for the maximum, even one minute is a blackout; amortizing that expensive generating equipment is made more difficult because it sits unused much of the time.
Recharging these clean plug-in Electric cars, planners decided back in 1990, should be done not by fast charging, but by slow charging overnight on this otherwise unused off-peak capacity. Utilities like SCE need to find ways to expend this unused capacity. One
strategy is to pump water up to Lake Castaic at night via six giant pumps for use the next day to generate peak electric.
SCE would love to sell its otherwise unused nighttime electric to charge Electric cars.
THE MISUNDERSTOOD RANGE ISSUE, AND WHAT ABOUT MY SUV?
Electric cars don't need a range of 300 or 600 miles on a charge; they were designated for inter-urban travel on short trips. For those needing to drive a passenger car 300 miles per day, they could drive a gas car, fast-charge the Electric car, or, really, get
another more sensible job. Even trucks and SUV used for ski-trips could be powered by serial plug-in hybrid power, similar to a diesel-electric locomotive, which operates a gas or diesel engine at constant speed only to run the drive motor or to charge the battery. It's much easier to control pollution on such occasional use vehicles.
It's an illusion, the attractive idea of freedom, that the same car that drives us to work 20 miles away could also, like a magic carpet, carry us away to San Francisco, New York or Missoula, far from our troubles and daily humdrum life. It's just not true, and
makes less sense; the car we drive on the daily grind is mostly not the car we take on 2000 mile trips, or even 200 mile trips. Mostly, we dream of far away places, but these visions flash across our mind while we are stuck in traffic on the way to work, school, or shopping.
The idea of car travel over long distance, too, is not something that should affect urban design or car choice. It makes more sense and is more efficient, when travelling to New York, to take the train, or even the plane.
Do we want to condition the lives of our kids and the design of our cities on the false idea of using our commuter car for speed-runs to Chicago.
A better idea, for those who travel, is to meander around the country in RVs, enjoying the scenery, burning less gas, overall, than the average commuter. And not a problem for the breathers in our air basin.
LIVING WITH AUTOS: OIL-FREE IS THE ANSWER
Talking about reducing our dependence on overseas oil imports, or bemoaning pollution, is just that: empty talk, hot air, unless targeted against the real problem and directed toward real solutions. Talk is cheap, and it's really tempting to ignore the giant, scabrous ogres in the meeting hall, because their gnashing teeth and evil disposition are really frightening. There's a lot of money at stake, and the oil-mongers and their oil-fired cars just don't want to give up their immense profits.
The twin monsters that politicians want to ignore are the sacred-cow oil refineries, upwind of the entire air basin, and the sneering, slobbering beast of air pollution from carbon-based dino-cars.
The refineries consume immense quantities of subsidized potable water each day, are the largest industrial user of electric and natural gas, and flare giant plumes of unpleasant, toxic smoke into the nighttime lungs of sleeping children and adults. Refineries are thought necessary, because oil-based cars seemed to be the only choice. They are granted "pollution credits" for cleaning up upscale areas, enabling them to freely spew emissions over those unable to move away from it.
The autos emit not only pollution into the air, but billions of oil droplets, brake lining particles, and other debris that get washed into the streams and Ocean, forming the recondite problem of "urban runoff". We depended on oil-fired cars, because, again, there seemed no choice.
Unless these two problems are confronted, there will be no solution to global warming, toxic air emissions, and poisonous dependence on overseas oil dictators.
The only thing the oil companies really fear is the Electric car, and they go to great lengths to vilify it, arguing that no one wants it, that it would burn coal, that it's too expensive, that the batteries don't exist, and all sorts of other distortions. They try to divert attention to false goals, waiting for one panacea or other, from fuel cells, bio-diesel, E85, flex fuel, or even to the chimera of the Hydrogen Highway.
GM broke the news, with the plug-in serial hybrid VOLT, that the majority of oil is burned with 40 mile trips, and that it only takes a small gas engine-generator to run an EV if it's only used to charge the batteries. But GM is not being honest when it claims it is "waiting for the battery research", and begging for government aid. GM knows, or should know, that the batteries exist now, and work fine.
THE POTENTIALLY OIL-FREE VOLT AND THE EV LIFESTYLE
The EV1 was not spurned or rejected; in fact, there was always more demand for the EV1 than GM was willing to satisfy.
GM had no intention of producing them at all, and, when forced by California's Air Resources Board, leased them only under onerous conditions. GM only produced 465 of the 1999 EV1, and dribbled them out only to selected lessees. It wasn't a case of needing more demand to produce more EV1, there were just the 465 cars, and it was just a matter of who got them.
The EV1 was a fast, fun car to drive, like all full-function electric cars. Frankly, 300 miles range is too much to drive around town, where most of the gasoline we import under such ruinous terms is burned. With the 1999 EV1, we often only charged twice a week, because that car was only driven 300 miles a week. Its battery pack was larger than we needed.
Our family has driven EVs for over 470,000 miles, including thousands of daily commuting trips to San Juan Capistrano, Carlsbad, Century City, Eagle Rock, downtown L.A., Santa Ana, Orange, and other places, as well as long-distance trips to Oregon, Las Vegas, even Toronto and Florida as well as San Francisco and Sacramento.
But for most occasional long trips, we take a gas or rental car, or take the plane. Running off to Montana may seem attractive, but it's not an argument against Electric cars; mostly, you drive to work, shopping, errands or school, not to "Montana or bust".
But even if you don't like a 150 mile-range car, why stop others from driving it?
GM's hatred of Electric cars went beyond the logical, as they destroyed them rather than sell 5-year old used EV1 for $25,000 each, even under a salvage title that rendered them undriveable. Moreover, they went the extra mile, charging EV1 lessees for "scratches" on the very EV1 cars it had crushed. Instead of trying to validate its bogus claim in court, GM violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act by miscategorizing the claims to credit agencies as "charge-offs" instead of "disputed".
The excuses that GM gave for not selling the EV1 ring hollow.
Toyota sold the last 328 RAV4-EV Electric cars, which are still on the road, running fine, and beloved by their drivers. And the RAV4-EV only has, at freeway speeds, at most a 120 mile range.
The intransigence of GM about the EV1 bodes ill for any chance GM's storied VOLT will ever be more than a Public Relations exercise. GM claims it needs to "research" new Lithium technologies for the batteries, but the 1999 EV1 used existing Nickel Metal Hydride batteries, the same sort still running after five years and up to 100,000 miles in the 80 mph Toyota RAV4-EV. Even worse, GM is partnering with Cobasys, a Chevron company, to "research" the Lithium batteries. Chevron won't have much interest in helping do away with oil, if history is our guide.
So by these facts, GM is not serious about the VOLT. It seems to be only a public relations ploy to answer the public relations disaster about its having killed the Electric car.
Don't be taken in by GM: even lead-acid batteries gave the much heavier 1300 pound lead-acid battery pack EV1 a range of up to 110 miles, while the GM VOLT only needs a 40 mile range. If GM were not just engaging in a PR exercise, it would produce the VOLT with these existing, cheap lead batteries, or the much better NiMH batteries it used on the 1999 EV1. GM reluctantly dribbled out the EV1, a few a month, kicking and screaming, unwilling to face the 21st Century and our need to reduce oil imports.
The proposed VOLT is a potentially oil-free car, a plug-in serial hybrid that uses the engine only to charge the modest-sized battery pack. But it only needs a pack half the size of the EV1 pack, and about a third the size of the RAV4-EV pack, as little as 250 lbs., less than the weight of the transmission and clutch it replaces.
So GM is just not telling the truth when it implies that expensive, government-paid "battery research" into unproven Lithium is needed; they already know, or should know, about their own NiMH 1999 EV1 and the NiMH batteries which are still running today in the RAV4-EV.
The car that is needed to solve the problem of intra-urban mixing of roads, schools and homes is, and has been for a while, available, cheap, fun to drive, and very much kept from the public view.
Notably, the facts presented here are ignored by the major media outlets, which largely reproduce the GM company line, without comment, inquiry, or analysis. Reading the news, one would imagine that hundreds of Toyota RAV4-EV oil-free all-electric cars are
completely invisible, despite their contining daily use without help from even a drop of gasoline or one RPM from an on-board Internal Combustion generator.
How many reporters even know that the Toyota RAV4-EV, with its 80 mph top speed and range more than 100 miles, even exists, and has been running largely faultlessly in hundreds of valued 2001, 2002, and 2003 all-electric oil-free EVs?
How much easier it would be to make the VOLT, with a smaller battery pack and generator only used to charge the battery.
Talk is cheap; the only way to make a dent in oil consumption is to face and defeat the power of oil companies such as Chevron. Big oil is the "drug lord" of gasoline addiction, GM is only the lowly, scabrous pusher. Like all pushers, they don't tell us the true result of our addiction, or tell us about the alternatives.
California breathers need the Air Resources Board and Legislature to force GM to build the VOLT, now, and sell it on the open market to willing buyers, without trick or artifice. Anything less is a betrayal of our lungs, our national interest, and the generations that come after.