How Green is Rapid Transit?

Sorry, rather a dull title, but the subject is anything but... The thing is, we all want our cities to be Greener, and in transport terms that means getting people out of cars and onto buses, trains, bikes, scooters, heelies, flying carpets, etc. With rocketing oil prices even Groans are becoming quite keen on forms of transport that don't involve them shelling out for petrol that will soon cost as much as wine. Imagine - a wine-drinking car, tooling along with a tank full of claret...

So we're all agreed. Every city needs a good transport infrastructure, with affordable buses, trams or what have you whizzing in all directions.

But where do these vehicles go? In our city the roads are already horribly congested, so any new bus or tram or 20-person electric scooter will have to crawl along at the same speed as everyone else. So our elders and betters hired professional plan-makers (a species in no danger of extinction) to make some plans for new routes that would unroll across the city like so much red carpet, allowing buses, trams, etc, to zoom at will.

These highly-paid professionals looked at the map and found a network of ready made corridors, where there were few houses and few roads. Quite an achievement in a built-up 21st century city. They marked out nice new transport routes in coloured felt tip pen and went away to count their loot. Job done.

One of these proposed routes runs not a million miles from my house. It comes rushing out of the city centre, over a new bridge, across a busy shopping street, under a railway bridge and then along a stream called the Malago, using a route known to people round here as the Malago Greenway. I say along. In fact the stream will most probably disappear under the new road. The trees along the stream will be cut down. Oh, and the many uncounted, quiet, non-motorised people who walk, ride and play along this mile-long ribbon of green will have to find somewhere else to go instead.

Except that there isn't anywhere else. We're surrounded on all sides by busy roads and railways. What these planners have found and seized upon with glee are the only remaining paths people can follow at their own pace and under their own steam. Yes, these are also wildlife corridors - places where slow worms and bats eke out a meagre urban existence - but they are, first and foremost, human corridors. You can't measure the value of city children being able to walk to school beside a stream under the shade of big trees - no one's cutting four and a half minutes off their journey time or earning an extra £3.75 - but we all know deep down that this is important.

Further along the Malago flows through a poorer neighbourhood, and city officials are keen to point out that the new route will bring prosperity to its people. Will it? And at what price? Aren't the stream and surrounding greenery already giving people there a kind of prosperity?

The truth is that city officials and planners have goals and targets. They want to get certain numbers up and others down. They think in traffic volumes and journey times, and their thinking is constrained by ingrained beliefs: you can't interfere with motorists' freedom; bikes and pedestrians are always less important than cars; a piece of land that doesn't have a measurable economic output needs to have one.

So how Green is Rapid Transit? If it replaces cars on the same roads, it gets my vote. Otherwise, it's just another Groanish scheme designed to speed things up for no good reason.

Rainy Week at the Seaside Anyone?

I keep coming back to this rather gloomy thought: many people still think that Greens want to take the fun out of their lives. Too many Green scribblers seem to take pleasure in the thought that our civilisation is on the verge of collapse. They love to tell us that unless we stop doing everything we like RIGHT NOW the sky's going to fall on our head.

Maybe this is true. Maybe we're all doomed. Ho hum.

Greens aren't the only ones who think like this. There are people holed up in cabins in America waiting confidently for the world to end. We think they're crazy, but that we're right. As I said, maybe we are, but why bother being Green and talking about these things if you don't have anything positive to add to the human experience?

Too often activists try to sell the Green message as if they were selling the world's worst holiday. Come and have a week in the rain, in Weston-super-Mare, with the tide out all the time! I think the Transition Man says this in his handbook, that we have to offer people a vision of something better than they have now - a sunny week in Weston, maybe, with the tide in.

Here's a great example: my kids' primary school is on the edge of a lovely city park, but until recently the playground was the traditional expanse of tarmac - easy to maintain and unlikely to make anyone muddy. Then some Greenish parents got together and dug up a corner and planted a funky little willow tunnel and some little bushes. It really isn't an Eco-anything, but it's a patch of non-tarmac and the kids love it. They play in it is if it were an enchanted wood.

There was a story in America recently about an insurance company cancelling an advert that showed a man forced to ride a bike because petrol (gas) was too expensive. Basically all the joy had gone out of this guy's life because he couldn't drive. Lots of Greens protested about this and the ad disappeared. BUT THE ATTITUDE HASN'T. Most people still think that bike-riding is a stage of growing-up between riding a scooter and driving. They will do anything to keep their car on the road, even if it means turning all the world's food into Biofuels. Yet riding a bike is usually much more fun than driving. You get the buzz of exercise, the thrill of zooming about, and in most cities these days you get where you're going quicker than you do in a car.

How to change the attitude, though, that's the question.

Coconut Jet Fuel and the Icarus Moment

The idea of a plane powered by coconuts sounds quite funny, but when I read about this in the papers the other day it didn't make me laugh. Instead it made me think of Icarus, the unfortunate flying boy. He tried to fly too high and melted his wings, confirming the view that people ought to stay put on terra firma and not act like gods. The Greeks had a word for this sort of behaviour: Hubris. In their myths people who put on airs and graces were guilty of hubris and generally came to a sticky end. Prometheus is another example.

Cut to 2008 and people are concerned about the environmental impact of cars and planes. We want to go wherever we want quickly, but oil is getting more expensive and our journeys are releasing ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. I don't claim to be an expert Carbon-cruncher, but wiser heads have pointed out that carbon released high in the atmosphere causes more trouble than the same amount released at ground level. Yes, we're back with Icarus...

Airlines are attracting more and more customers but they're not enjoying the bad publicity. So a certain British businessman, who owns an airline, hit on the idea of putting biofuel in the gas tanks of a 747. Of the jet's four tanks, three contained ordinary jet fuel, while the last had a mixture of 80% jet fuel and 20% fuel made from coconut and babassu palm oil. Apparently 150,000 coconuts were used, along with an unspecified amount of palm oil. I'm no mathematician, but that sounds like an awful lot of coconuts to provide a small percentage of one airplane's fuel.

The entrepreneur in question described the flight as 'historic', and perhaps it is. Perhaps this was the moment when the human race finally took leave of its senses. The Icarus moment.

Biofuels are made from living plants, which absorb carbon as they grow. The idea is that, on balance, a car or jet running on biofuel emits less carbon than one using ordinary fuel. Groans point to this and say, Here is the future of transport! And that future is bright leafy Green!

What they never mention is that all these plants - oil palms, rape, wheat - have to grow somewhere. Land which might have been used to grow food or left alone for wildlife has to be cleared and planted with biofuel crops. These are not cosy little farms but vast plantations run by big companies that want to make as much money as they can - what they do is called Green because people have this obsession with carbon, but isn't even remotely Green. It's hugely destructive. Oil palms grow in the tropics, which means rainforest is being cut down and burned to make way for them. The oran utang is losing its home so that people in Europe can put biofuels in their petrol tanks and feel all virtuous and Green.

And now people want to power jets with coconuts! This isn't Green, this is Gruesome, Grisly Groanishness of the first order. It's unbelievably stupid. By contrast, Icarus was just a kid who forgot where he was.

What does Green mean?

It's a tricky one, isn't it? We're always telling each other we should be Greener, but does anyone really know what this means? I have an idea in my head, but I doubt it's the same as yours. For instance, my Green vision isn't limited to worrying about Carbon. I'm not sure that all our attention should be focused so narrowly on this one element, because it allows accountants and technical people and marketing whizzkids to dictate how we think about changing the world for the better.

If you're obsessed with Carbon you can't think rationally about nuclear power or dams across the Severn. Of course this suits big corporations just fine, because a thinking public is not good for business. After all, if you think in broad terms about being Green you soon realise that the most important Green qualities are THRIFT (ie not wasting stuff), MODERATION (ie not consuming too much), SELF-RELIANCE (ie doing things for yourself) and CRAFT (ie making and doing things rather than passively consuming them). If you have these qualities you will have a small Carbon footprint. You will have lower Carbon emissions than other people. You won't need to waste any of your precious time thinking about this incredibly tedious subject.

But can you think of a business that wants its customers to be thrifty, moderate, self-reliant and crafty? What about the government? Our leaders want us to be healthy and reasonably content, but they also want us to consume. They want us to buy a lot of everything. For the economy to keep booming we have to buy more this year than we did last, and if we're Green we won't.

Carbon is a good get-out for government and business. Think about it. If you're a business person you want people to keep buying stuff, but there's only so much a person can buy. So you keep creating new products and new markets, and this is what's happening with Carbon. Instead of buying less, people are buying more, only they're buying stuff that seems to be Green because it involves less Carbon floating about the place. Biofuel is a classic example of this, as discussed in How To Turn Your Parents Green:

Don’t be Fooled by BioFuel
Car owners, manufacturers and petrol companies are always looking for ways to seem Green, and biofuels are the New Big Thing. Instead of powering cars with the energy from long-dead plants (ie oil), biofuels are made from plants grown for the purpose – crops like wheat, oilseed rape and oil palms. The idea is that the growing plants consume as much CO2 as the car engines will emit, but does this make biofuels Green? Not in the slightest. So how can you be a Green driver? By riding a bike instead

Don't get me wrong. I'm nervous about Global Warming and I know that we need to change our ways. But when you're thinking Green, have some imagination. Have some vision. Conjure a great life. The future needs hard-working, thoughtful, creative people, not a bunch of Carbon-crunchers.

Travelling Greenly

So Christmas is over and everyone's thinking about the summer holidays. I suppose it's pleasant to think about blue skies and hot sunshine when the weather outside is cold and grey, but for budding Greens the subject of travel is tricky. I mean, we like to travel as much as the next person, but we feel bad about the consequences.
Mostly people worry about carbon emissions from flying, driving long distances and so on, but there's another side to the story. Here's a little snippet from 'How to Turn Your Parents Green':

The Plane Truth about Stonehenge
You know the story of Daedalus and Icarus? Dad makes wings. Son gets over-excited and flies too close to sun. Wings fall to pieces. Son plummets to death.
Moral: THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE LEAVING TERRA FIRMA.
In the old days flying used to be dangerous, but now it’s safe and cheap, and Groans love it. They love buzzing over to Paris or Prague for the weekend, and because everyone else is doing it too they assume it must be a good thing to do. Of course people used to feel like that about sending little boys up chimneys and putting little girls in charge of dangerous machinery.
The trouble with flying is that it uses an amount of energy way out of proportion to the benefit gained, ie a Groan lying by a pool or trawling around the shops. And there are Hidden Costs.
Take Stonehenge. I don’t mean literally. Just as an example. Not so long ago you could wander among the stones, but now there’s a huge fence round them. Why?
1. Because otherwise the stones might escape?
2. Because a gang of dastardly international criminals is planning to steal them? Or
3. Because so many people come to see them that if there wasn’t a fence the stones would be worn away like the noses of cathedral saints?
A trip to a foreign country used to be a rare adventure, but now you just drive to the airport, hop on a plane and hire a car when you get to the other end.
Groans may grumble about how they used to wander round Stonehenge but they themselves want to go everywhere and see everything. They want More, Cheaper.
So Stonehenge is now hidden by a giant car park full of coaches and a fence, and none of you will ever see the old stones sitting quietly on the grass.

Still, even the Greenest among us will be thinking wistfully of a sun-soaked beach right now, because that's what we do in winter when we're hunched in our woolly hats and scarves. As we dream of the sun, travel agents offer to make our dreams come true. We book our exotic summer holidays so that the thought of them can sustain us through the winter. But when the summer comes around we don't really need to go anywhere. England (or any other northern country) is beautiful in the summer, wet sometimes maybe, but green and temperate when more southerly countries are roasting.
So what we need is a new way of dreaming through the winter. We need to invent imaginary journeys, magical cities, fantastic voyages. We need to read Marco Polo or Gulliver's Travels or The Odyssey. These adventures have helped people cope with hundreds of winters, and they can help us now.
In the future, when the human race has grown bored of zooming all over the place and Stonehenge is open to all again, people will sit in their gardens imagining fantastic journeys. Travel guides will no longer be published. Instead, there will be books full of imaginary journeys, while visitors to unfamiliar cities will be given puzzles instead of maps. Travel will be a test of character, undertaken only by those with a genuine thirst for knowledge and adventure.
In the meantime, try reading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - you'll never need to leave home again.
PS The exotic desert island in the picture is called Steep Holm. Can you find it?