Let's face it: even if we developed high-speed rail networks everywhere, air travel is the only practical means to carry people and highly-valued cargo over medium to long distances and to remote locations.
One of the means airlines have been using to gain productivity is seat pitch. The more bodies on thinner, lighter furniture packed tighter together that they can squeeze into the maximum certifiable capacities of today' well-engineered aircraft the less BTUs-per-customer they must expend while achieving more per-passenger revenues.
Yet there are limits to this as anyone taller than 5'5" can testify. Today's seating arrangements make online work next to impossible in economy i.e. hoi-polloi class while making flying close to becoming unbearable.
(Replacing much-maligned but actually very nutritious and overall very good airline food with salt-and-fat-laden fare at most airports adds to the discomfort further because salt makes the joints ache)
Air travel though is about pushing the limits. An Italian company, Aviointeriors is promising to go beyond it when it comes to human endurance with its new 23-inch pitch (compared to typical 28-inch-31-inch pitch) "SkyRider" seat.
Not yet FAA-approved, the "SkyRider", is says Aviointeriors "an ultra-high density seat presently completely engineered and to be finally tested. The SkyRider has been designed and engineered to offer the possibility to even further reduce ticket prices while still maintaining sound profitability, which, even with a dual or three class seating arrangement, will allow maximum certified passenger capacity of the aircraft. With a much reduced seat pitch, the SkyRider preserves a comfortable position for the low fare passengers."
"Furthermore, in the SkyRider arrangement, a partial overlapping of the passengers seating between rows is allowed, thus further increasing the cabin density. The seat structure itself also provides space for personal baggage."
The seat row roughly resembles like those on amusement park rides without the over-the-shoulders harnesses, or the comfort. But don't give the airlines (or the FAA) any ideas. We've all been on flights that would merit such contraptions.
"The SkyRider is intended as a new basic class," says the firm. "The passenger's seating position is similar to that of a touring motor-scooter rider. This posture permits that the overall longitudinal space occupied by the seat."
If the Aviointeriors release had come out April 1 it would have been treated as a joke. Yet with domestic air travel--with the laudable exception of JetBlue--becoming a commodity where cheap-and-timing is what matters; if the FAA approves this cross between a seat and-straphanging don't be surprised if one carrier then another then another follow suit. Lowest common denominator. This is despite condemnation from reporters and users if the site Farecompare is any indication.
After all, the carriers know that if you have to fly, because your company tells you to or that you have to see your family or bury them you will have no choice, or so they think to endure the torture.
The only thing--barring Congress-driven mandates to the FAA--barring such a discomfort-inflicting device from being contemplated is for the individual business customers and for powerful consumers organizations like the AARP--to tell the airlines "don't even think about it or we'll switch/tell or advise our employees and members to switch to video/webconferencing, and Skype."
Given the airlines' better-but-still razor-thin profits, it doesn't take much of a shift in customers to change their ledger colors from black to red. For while the air travel experience has been deteriorating and prices climbing that for online virtual communications has been taking off and declining respectfully.
And one doesn't have to worry about strip-searches, what's in the other's person shoes, weather delays and lost bags, or tolerate the food on a Skype, web or videocall...the greenest "transportation" there is.
]]>My wife and I live in the Metro Vancouver. We park-and-rode into the downtown yesterday to get a feel of the crowds, the activities and the excitement just before the Opening Ceremonies on Friday. One of our stops was at the big downtown Hudson's Bay department store that had a half a floor dedicated to Olympics merchandise; 'The Bay' is a sponsor. I saw a Vancouver 2010 umbrella and cracked to my wife "you'll need this on Cypress" and she laughed. With even more rain and high temperatures forecast this weekend spectators and the athletes' retinues will need them.
The Orange County Register has called it right with a Feb.8/9 story 'Global warming a threat for the Olympics?'
"One morning last week, environmentalist David Suzuki looked across English Bay from his Vancouver home to Cypress Mountain, usually covered in snow this time of year but now left all but bare by a warm winter.
"I've watched in horror as the snow has just melted away from Cypress Mountain," Suzuki said, referring to the 2010 Olympic Games snowboarding and freestyle skiing venue.
"The view from Vancouver, Suzuki and others say, provides a glimpse into the future for the Winter Olympics.
"It's certainly an early warning sign and I think and a wake up call to the Olympic movement," said Ian Bruce,
"Global warming has placed the future of the Winter Olympics and winter sports from the Sierras to the Alps in peril, according to interviews with environmental scientists, Olympic officials, historians and athletes in recent weeks.
"As the 2010 Olympic Games open this week in Vancouver and Whistler, there is a growing concern within the Olympic and environmental movements that the Winter Games are in jeopardy of being significantly diminished if not eliminated all together by climate change.
"The tenuousness of the Winter Olympics has become increasingly more obvious with global warming," said Derick L. Hulme, an Olympic historian at Michigan's Alma College. "It (the International Olympic Committee) should be very concerned about the Winter Olympics. I think many people look out 20, 30 years from now and are concerned about whether the Winter Olympics will still be viable."
The culprits are in the mirrors. The SUVs, the monster homes, sprawling subdivisions, the office parks, big box stores, and expressways we drive and select and with this the destruction of farmland, forests, open space and wetlands and the air, water and land that we depend on. The treating of the environment as a free lunch whose price is now becoming due but no one wants to pay, and the amount owed is climbing rapidly.
Ultimately the human species, as well as that of every other life form is doomed, as is our planet and solar system and the universe. There is the fatalism that 'in the long run we're all dead' that has created greenlighted wanton materialist, environment-be-d**ned attitude as evidenced in the bumper sticker 'The one who dies with the most toys wins'. The Algeria-born French philosopher Albert Camus summed it up nicely: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide" and we're quickly collectively doing in ourselves before the sun going red giant, the collision between the Milky Way with Andromeda and heat death does us in.
So is there a reason to go green, to try and save the planet, when ultimately it is a futile exercise? The answer lies whether each of us has a reason to go on living, or to kill oneself, as Camus posits. We can decide not to look after ourselves and choose to ingest dangerous substances to oblivion too.
My attitude is that each of us are born without being asked into this world, a gift as it were, and we have an obligation to repay the givers if you like by making the best of it in the brief times we are here. Like Zen art just because life, like the planet and the cosmos is not permanent does not mean it is not worth while to create and maintain for it has a unique beauty that is to be cherished for that instant there is.
And that means looking after ourselves and our planet.
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Peter Foster, a columnist in Canada's National Post, along with associated commentators have come up with a few more points to consider, in his column Wednesday subtitled 'Today's alternative vehicles are all profit graveyards or subsidy pits'.
Mr. Foster correctly pointed out one of the fallacies behind assuming that people will buy electric vehicles (EVs) and that is it isn't the average amount of driving per day that matters but the farthest that one usually wants to go.
"Apparently, Americans on average drive their cars less than 35 miles a day, but to suggest that this supports the viability of short-range electric cars is like suggesting that a five-foot tall person should be in no trouble if forced to spend alternate one hour periods in water six feet deep and two feet deep. After all, the average depth is only four feet. What is critical is not the average but the farthest distance you want to travel.
"With gasoline-powered cars or hybrids there is no distance limit, since there is a vast network of gasoline stations at which you can fill up in minutes. With electric cars, you have to plug in for a matter of hours. Battery exchange depots are an obvious idea but likely an impractical one.
I can attest to Mr. Foster's point. I work from home and the farthest I drive is 15 miles and that is on those days when I have to pick up my wife late at night from her part-time job, when the buses stop running. Yet we live in a small city in a rural area, so when we need to do shopping or conduct other business in a larger metro, or to just get out of town for something to do, our journeys are 100 miles to 150 miles round trip.
Mr. Foster's column also points out about controversy over ethanol whose fuel-driven demand has sparked starvation and food riots. And one of the commentators said that they had once read that a Prius has 37 pounds of copper wiring. A standard gas powered vehicle has 25 pounds of copper. "Did copper start growing on trees or is it ok for us to feel green while some guy works in a hole in South America?" asked the respondent.
What would be handy is to have a reasonably objective report from a well-respected organization (by environmentalists and industry alike) that cuts through the greenwash and the charges and PR and compares the total direct and indirect green impacts of transportation and transportation alternatives: i.e. private vehicles, transit, and telework. That way consumers and government decisionmakers spending their money would have a fair basis on which to choose the greenest option, weighing that factor against cost, need, and convenience.
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