Frustrations of Interstate Driving

I just returned from a lengthy, but brief, road trip. My wife and I drove 1700 miles spread out over only 3 days. 850 Dallas to Knoxville on Friday, and 850 Knoxville to Dallas on Sunday. On a good day with sunshine and light traffic, 850 miles is about my driving limit. On a bad day, with heavy traffic and heavy rain, it's just too far.

The Sunday trip was a fiasco of bad alternatives. About 6 hours of the 14 hour trip were in heavy rain. Visibility was down to about 200 yards, and the road between Memphis and Texarkana was loaded with traffic. Interstate 40 between Memphis and Little Rock is always heavy 18 wheeler traffic, and dealing with it in the rain is espescially stressful.

The alternatives are drive the speed limit and go with the flow, even in poor visibility; slow down and risk being run over or contributing to a traffic problem; or just get off the road or find another route. I chose go with the flow, even though the visibility was extremely poor, probably bad judgement and high risk. This brings me to the point of this post: Driving our interstate highways can be a high risk activity!

Here are some of the frustrations:

Speed Limits and Speed enforcement vary from state to state.

Different speed limits in different states are certainly understandable. Miles of open road I-90 in Montana or I-80 in Wyoming certainly justify higher speeds than I-95 in New England. What's more difficult to understand is the wide variations in enforcement. Why isn't a speed limit a speed limit? It's a guessing game to figure out what the magic number is. As a law abiding citizen, I drive at the speed limit on the open road. In some cases, this is more hazardous than going with the flow.

On the otherhand, I passed no less than 10 radar checks in Tennessee enroute between Knoxville and Memphis. The speed limit was generally 70, and much of the traffic was flowing at about 75. What speed was too much? Who knows?

There is way to much speed variations among vehicles on the road

No matter how fast you drive, someone will go faster. No matter how slow you go, someone will go slower. Extremes in either direction created hazardous and frustrating situations.

The dangers of average speed

In hilly or mountainous country, trucks especially seem to practice the concept of average speed. What this means is in a stretch of road with a speed limit of 65, you may find trucks slowing to 45 going uphill and accelerating to 85 going downhill. It is so frustrating to get behind trucks going uphill, trying to pass each other, with one going 45 mph and the other going 46. If you are able to get by this problem, you are promptly blown away by both of them going downhill at 80 a few minutes later.

The lower the speed limit, the greater the violations

As I said before, I usually drive the speed limit. Last summer, driving through West Texas where the speed limit was 75, I drove 75. Almost no one passed me, and I passed very few myself. It seems most people just don't want to go faster than about 75.

Friday, as I approached Knoxville, in East Tennessee, the speed limit steadily is reduced from 70, to 65, and then to 55 as you near the city. At 70, the ration of cars passing me to cars I was passing was about 50/50. At 65, it was probably about 60/40, and at 55, it was about 90/10. This is frustration at it's extreme. Why adopt a speed limit you have no intent to enforce?

Size Matters

Trucks are way bigger than cars, all cars. All cars lose when they hit trucks. But! as we trend toward smaller cars, the matter gets worse. My wife and I used to own a Mercedes SLK. This is a really small car. On several occasions we were nearly pushed off the road by an 18 Wheeler whose driver simply didn't see us.

Self imposed solutions

I can't fix this problem. Maybe, over time, our efforts to reduce our oil dependence and switch to alternative fuels will also bring changes to our transportation infrastructure which may address some of these problems. Meanwhile, I'm going to impose some changes on myself to try and lower both stress and risk when I travel.

As a retired citizen, time is not as important as it used to be. So, for starters, I am going to try and avoid the very busiest of the Interstate Highways, and enjoy more of the countryside. I get way better gas milage in my SUV at 60 than I do at 70 anyway, so slowing down and taking the less traveled byways may be both more scenic and less stressful.

Obama is saying some good things on energy

If you listen to President Obama, he's saying some good things about energy and environment. Here's a recent quote:

"So transportation, when it is not just fixing our old transportation systems, but it’s also imagining new transportation systems. That’s why I’d like to see high speed rail where it can be constructed. I would like for us to invest in mass transit. Because potentially that’s energy efficient and I think a lot more people are open now to thinking regionally in terms of how we plan our transportation infrastructure. The days where we’re just building sprawl forever? Those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats… everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to design communities. So we should be using this money to help spur this kind of innovative thinking when it comes to transportation. That’ll make a big difference.”

My daughter is an environmental planner. Here's what she had to say just last week:

"...Increase densities in cities with growth boundaries and incentives to decrease build-out. Make residential green building design affordable..."

I can see that idea beginning to work in my community of Las Colinas in Irving, Tx. Las Colinas has been a planned development for nearly 30 years now. It had an explosion in the early 80's, and then some stagnation in the 90's, Recently, the activity in the Las Colinas urban center has picked up dramitically. Why, because light rail is coming. With the Las Colinas light rail connection to downtown coming in 2011, and then connecting to DFW airport shortly thereafter, a major influx of high density building is taking off.

Light rail centered development has already occurred in Dallas at Mockingbird Station, downtown at Victory Plaza, and others. And it isn't just Dallas. Other cities have seen this as well. What I hope for is that this goes beyond using rail to travel around the metroplex. High Speed rail interconnecting major Texas cities like Dallas-Austin-San Antonio, Dallas-Houston, Dallas-Denver, would open major new realms of low cost, environmentally friendly travel.

We need not only the spending, but an attitude change by Americans to make this possible. The attitude change is already underway in our younger generations, it just needs to spread to the old folks in congress.

A New Electric Grid should be multi-purpose

In his major speech on the economy, President-elect Obama mentioned the electric grid as one of his infrastructure investment proposals. This is a much needed investment that could be made much more useful if it could be implemented as a multipurpose right-of-way as I first proposed in this blog on Nov. 13.

The two most important elements of the multipurpose right-of-way are the underground electric grid and the high speed electric powered passenger rail service.

With the exception of a few routes, passenger service in the United States is provided over rails designed many decades ago and most Amtrak trains are limited to 79 mph maximum speed. This speed limit severely limits the ability for rail travel to compete with airlines or automobiles. High Speed, environmentally friendly, electric trains would change this equation, and in my judgement significantly change preferred alternatives in favor of rail for travel of 500 miles or less.

Flying has become such a hassle. TSA delays, weather delays, luggage restrictions, and ground transportation all make us seek an alternative. I believe such an alternative may be rail, and we can began by coupling it to our planned grid infrastructure improvements.

Super Highway Corridor of the Future

Why not build a new kind of superhighway consisting of an integrated set of components.

1. An underground high voltage transmission line as a part of our next generation transmission grid.
   
   The underground transmission grid is already being proposed by advocates of a new grid system. The advantage of integrating the transmission grid with tracks and roadway are to take advantage of this proximity to massive power to make adding the infrastructure for the trains and the roadways significantly less expensive because of the power availability.
   
2. Tracks and supporting infrastructure for high speed magna-lev and / or conventional electric trains
   
   Inexpensive high speed transportation point to point could provide a quality alternative to air travel over short to medium distance hauls. For distances of 500 miles or less, high speed 'bullet' type electric trains or magnalev trains would likely be able to provide shorter total transit time from downtown to downtown than air travel.
   
3. Roadways for electric cars.
   
   The electric car roadways would both power and charge electric cars using this roadway. This roadway would be a limited access toll road providing not only and electricity supply to power and charge the cars using it, so that batteries would be fully charged on exit of the roadway. Toll charges would automatically be computed based on KW used. There could be automated lanes, similar to the HOV lane concept, that provided computerized control, such that, once entering the lanes, the cars could literally drive themselves along the route with drivers taking over again on exiting the automated portion of the roadway.
   
   This concept could work with any of the electric car designs currently in progress with the addition of electrical pickup hardware and control logic. The cool thing about this proposal is that once a pickup and charging standard were developed, there could be benefit even if the road segments were discontiguous as they would provide a 'charge on the fly' capability for whatever length they exist.

This is probably not an original idea. It may not even be a good one, but it seems so logical to me. It rolls a set of ideas and directions proposed by so many of our energy leaders into an ultramodern composite. It's the stuff of sciencefuture.

If the next administration is going to invest in a massive energy independence program, a massive jobs program, and a massive infrastructure rebuilding program why not build the future, not just more of the past. Integrate the ideas I say.

Energy Priorities of the candidates

With all of the obfuscation caused by the financial crisis, it's hard to figure out where the candidates are relative to energy priorities. If you look at the websites http://www.barackobama.com and http://www.johnmccain.com, you will discover that each has a well articulated energy policy.

Barack Obama would, on the surface, seem to be more agressive. John McCain's police is actually more believeable, having slightly more conservative but possible more realistic goals.

Here's the rub. With all of the recent economic calamities, where do each put their energy priorities? Reading their websites leaves me not totally clear on their priorities. Obama seems to put social issues first. McCain isn't clear at all.

Inquiring minds want to know where they stand on the energy independence/environmental issues exactly,

Oh! The perils of the energy alternatives

It's not easy being Green! Kermit was so right!

So very many of the alternatives are so themselves frought with hidden costs.

• Opponents of wind power claim it kills birds and bats.
• Opponents of Corn Ethanol claim it takes almost as much energy to create it you get from it, and that it uses some of the worlds food supply
• Opponents of Nuclear Energy claim we haven't solve safety and spent fuel disposal issues
• There are hidden CO2 production issues in making Hydrogen, which burns polution free in fuel cells
• Fuel cells themselves require elements and compounds which are in short supply
• Electric car batteries use materials we buy from China and may be in short supply

Issues, yes. That doesn't mean we should stop, it just means we have a lot of problems to solve before we can declare fossil fuels obsolete.

It's not easy being Green!

Pickens Plan: Importance of electrical infrastructure

T. Boone Pickens has proposed a plan to produce 20% of the electricity needs of the U.S. from wind energy in 10 years. There is sufficient wind power to do this using existing wind turbine technologies, but there's a catch. The places that are best suited for wind power are not near the existing transmission grid.

Both T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore agree that rebuilding the national electric grid is of the highest importance, and possibly the most difficult to achieve politically. T. Boone's 4000 Megawatt wind farm in the Texas Panhandle is in the boonies (no pun intended), as are many of the other premium sites in the Texas to North Dakota wind corridor. This is among the more remote areas in the nation, most of it 500 miles from the nearest major metropolitan area where the power is needed. Opponents of the Pickens Plan may see this as a reason why not.

There is no doubt that getting the electricity to the market is a big hurdle, but one that must be overcome. A new electric grid is necessary for all forms of alternative energy. Solar energy's prime location is in the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona, and West Texas. These, too, are far from consumers. Further, no one wants the nuclear plants that McCain is proposing in their backyard either.

A major investment in electric grid infrastructure could enable all of these technologies to function efficiently. It would be like an interstate highway system for electricity. This above all needs national leadership and commitment for us to get started toward ending our foreign oil dependence.

No Silver Bullet?

Is there a Silver Bullet to solve the energy and global warming crisis? Not yet, but maybe some day. Sustainable Hydrogen Fusion might be, but it has remained elusive for decades now.

For now, and until this or some other Silver Bullet solution comes along, we need a comprehensive menu of solutions to address 4 issues:

1. Global warming and pollution as a result of burning carbon fuels
2. Financial impact of being a net importer of fuel resources
3. Exponential growth in energy demand
4. The reality of legacy investments in planes, trains, trucks, and automobiles

I admire Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens challenges and plans. We should work to implement both, as they are not contradictory. But there is much more that will have to be dones as well. I believe both of the proponents of change believe that too. In the recent book, "Earth: The Sequel", authors Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn outline many technologies which can contribute to addressing the four issues I outline above. This book should be required reading for everyone who is in a position to influence our leaders.

All efforts to change the status quo are expensive, but perhaps the most expensive of all in this case is to just try and maintain it.

On opening the continental shelf to exploration and development

The views on this one are mainly Republicans = Yes, Democrats = No. Here, I side with the Republicans. Here are some common arguments and my response.

"It will be 10 years before we get the first drop of oil from it"

Jim: Even if it is 10 years, which it probably won't be, it's from when we begin, so let's get started.

"We should drill where there are already leases"

Jim: Geologically, there are places where oil is commonly found, and there other places. Some of the best prospects are not in the current lease areas.

"It could foster an environmental disaster"

Jim: So could the Chinese drilling off the coast of Cuba. We need to be environmentally responsible, use the latest technology, and ensure some funds are diverted directly to National Parks and other environmental budgets.

"We'll end up selling the oil to the Chinese"

Jim: We should have that problem.