Electric Charging Stations, Texting and Driving Part Deux, Weekend Fun, and More.
In this edition of Car Culture, just how green are electric cars? Plus, more on texting and driving, and the other side of “pleasure driving.”
Car Culture
In this edition of Car Culture, just how green are electric cars? Plus, more on texting and driving, and the other side of “pleasure driving.”
Electric Charging Stations
The City of Milwaukee is beginning to install electric charging stations at multiple locations around town in an attempt to promote and support electric vehicles. With the dual threats of climate change and peak oil bearing down on us, moving away from gasoline, and back, yes back, to electric vehicles is long overdue. The use of electric cars may reduce our dependency on oil, and in the long run (over decades) could reduce or eliminate auto emissions, but electric car technology is at this point far from perfect.
And even if these charging stations and our homes are one day putting out power that is 100% renewable an electric car still won’t be completely green, it won’t be any safer than any gas guzzling Impala, and doesn’t solve the land-use issues created by a car-oriented America. The green credentials of an electric car come up a bit short as approximately 50% of the pollution generated by a car comes during its manufacturing and disposal. Safer? No, people will simply get behind the wheel of an electric, instead of fossil fueled, car and proceed to crash into things and or people when drunk. And finally, land will continue to be gobbled up for parking, expansive roadways will continue to divide neighborhoods and cover over farmland, and these cars will only further our auto-dependent lifestyle by encouraging us to sprawl further and further apart.
Texting and Driving Part Deux
In the first edition of Car Culture I mentioned that Wisconsin teenagers were gathering to learn about the dangers of texting and driving. I believe the video below should have been required viewing at that meeting. The video comes from Belgium where a few new drivers got punked, and learned an invaluable lesson when they were informed they had to pass the “mobile phone test.” They all failed miserably when put to the “test,” showing just how dangerous it can be to text and drive. One of the punked drivers wraps up the message saying, “It’s too dangerous.” I agree.
Weekend Fun
A recent blog post on the First Weber website suggests taking a drive for some fun this weekend. On the surface it seems innocuous, but it is yet another example of how the automobile, which primarily is a tool to get from A to B, has become something more. I’ll admit it, when I was 16 “going for a drive” was a fun way to spend a weekend eventing. I understand now that while driving around aimlessly can be fun, but it can also be wasteful, costly, and pointless. Yes, we do have a car culture, as you can see from the following accidents of the week:
Dangerous Roads
- Three cars collide near 60th and Brown Deer
- Seven injured after school bus collides with car in Germantown
- Weather may be to blame for two-car crash on I-43
- Car smashes into tree, catches fire
- One dead in rollover crash near Wausau
- Woman run over and killed in West Allis may have been hit first by another car
Loosen Your Belt to Cure Obesity
You can’t reduce congestion by building more roads. But we’re still doing it.
- I-794 extension endorsed by Milwaukee County committee
- West Allis not happy with state’s plan to widen Highway 100
- Ground to be broken Friday for new Drexel Ave. interchange
Tweet of the Week
A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense. Stay alive, don’t drink and drive. twitter.com/TempePolice/st…
— Tempe Police (@TempePolice) May 6, 2012
Traffic engineers used to remove street trees, because they were dangerous to automobile drivers. I’m glad to see the Tempe Police understand trees aren’t the issue.
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I don’t see electric cars as a solution to anything. In most cases, they just move the point of pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack. Also, unless some better form of storing electricity comes around to replace the chemical battery, we’re just going to be trading petroleum for rare earth metals in the big nonrenewable resource we’re going to run out of next.
And, as you mentioned, much of a vehicle’s total pollution output comes from its production and destruction. I’ve even heard that the Jeep Wrangler is “greener” than a Prius dust-to-dust, because the manufacturing process on the Jeep (which hasn’t changed much at all in the past 50 years) has been streamlined that much.
This doesn’t mean that other sort of alternative propulsion are off the hook though, as for almost all of them you still pollute and consume a finite resource. Hydrogen fuel cell is the only exception to this rule, but to make that feasible it’s going to take infrastructure commitments that quite honestly aren’t feasible in this country any more.
@Garrick Yup!
Garrick – it’s true that electric cars powered by, say, coal do still indirectly contribute to pollution. However there have been many, many studies done that prove that it’s still far less than a gas vehicle – even if the power comes from coal.
The impact of manufacturing is more debatable but there are also a lot of studies on it as well that generally favor the electric. I’ll google a few up if you can’t find ’em.
Anyway, it’s clear the “solution” if you will, will be a combination of technologies, and perhaps most importantly – making cities more livable so folks are not required to use a car for everything they do – regardless of what powers it!
Great to see alternative energy critiqued. Obviously there’s benefits, as pointed out, but far from being solutions to our transportation problems. It would take a heck of a lot of renewable energy solar panels to replace the 18 to 20 million barrels of oil a day powering our automobile transportation system. Urbanism and mass transit run on solar energy is the far better solution. Imagine if we only had electric interurban trains connecting Milwaukee all the way to the east coast. Oh wait, we did! Sadly, we are a lifetime away from seeing it again.