$5.00 Diesel - time to put her up on blocks!

pure train brain nonsense, are those buses and trains powered by pixie dust? __________________________________________ Never argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Reply to
jdoe
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A new religion and a new priesthood.

Reply to
Gogarty

The light rail and buses are powered by electricity, which can be produced from renewable sources.

There is enough harvestable wind energy in North Dakota to provide the total amount of energy used in the U.S. today. And a lot of people have already installed wind generators on their farms and are making a lot of money. I read a story in Smithsonian Magazine about a farmer in the Buffalo Ridge area along the Minnesota/Dakotas border who was making $13,500 a day on windy days from the electricity sales from the turbines installed on his farm. The turbines were expensive, but he was able to find financing and he was operating them at a profit.

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Who likes working graveyard shift anyway? Or traveling at night? Our culture will have to adapt, but a green future is very much a real possibility, and it will not just be sustainable, it will be better!

Reply to
heav

And, even if powered by conventional fuels, buses and trains, especially trains, are far more fuel efficient per passenger. It really isn't that hard to figure out. Unfortunately this country (US) has built its cities around the automobile with sprawling suburbs and few mass transit options. It's a lack of foresight we are beginning to feel the pinch of.

Reply to
runbiodiesel

bwahahahaha, how simple minded an naive you must be

__________________________________________ Never argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Reply to
jdoe

Nothing simple minded and naive about it at all. The nation's electric trolley systems were done in by, mostly, General Motors, which persuaded municipalities to scrap their trolley systems and replace them with cheaper buses. Trouble is, trolleys lasted thirty years and buses last only five or so. And trolleys were powered from central efficient power plans. It was a huge error, one Europe did not copy.

Reply to
Gogarty

Update! $5.20/gallon for diesel this afternoon; $4.45 for premium gas.

Reply to
-->> T.G. Lambach

I don't know what your architecture looks like, but in my home there is a railing around the opening where the stairway that leads to the upstairs is and that railing is great for drying clothes. I also have one of those small, folding wooden racks for drying clothes that I inherited from my mother that works great for smaller items.

I never use and do not even have a dryer. I didn't even use the one I had when I lived in Seattle because they break the fibers in your clothes when they tumble them and cause your clothes to wear out faster. I don't really like shopping, so I want my clothes to last as long as possible.

Here in the desert things dry out almost as fast as you can hang them up. Even in Seattle they dry overnight.

Reply to
heav

You do realize that cars could be charged at night, when there is very little demand on our power grid? Rivers and the wind don't shut off just 'cause it's dark.

-tom!

Reply to
Tom Plunket

You could charge cars mostly at night. However, it's also fair to assume that a significant portion will have to be charged during the day. If someone drives a car to work for example, it could very easily require charging during the day so they could get home. Particularly given the short range you get with an electric car. Even if only 25% of the demand were during the day, it's going to require more generating capacity and more investment in the infrastructure to deliver it. And there is no reason to believe that energy is going to be delivered at prices less than what we pay today. Hydro is pretty much tapped out, because you can't build more rivers and dams. Wind power is only effective in the right locations with enough wind and then only when the wind happens to be blowing strong enough, and isn't necessarily cheap either. A commercial company recently abandoned plans to build an offshore wind farm off Long Island because it would not be competitive. Note I'm not saying wind or alternative energy sources can't play a role here. I'm just saying they aren't going to come at energy prices less than what we are already paying.

Reply to
trader4

I have Lovecraft's setup in my two cars, and I've been 100% wvo for some time.

Just did a trip up to LA over memorial day (from San Diego) and it was like a ghost town. Very odd driving through downtown LA at 70mph, on a holiday especially. I guess the fuel prices are getting people down. Dunno- I collect and filter my own veggie oil and I have just about the perfect amount coming in.

Yes, people following me says it does smell like french fries.

-tom!

Reply to
Tom Plunket

All of the busses in my community are powered by propane or natural gas. I don't know where it comes from, though, and don't know how much petroleum it takes to produce in the first place, but driving behind the busses is no big deal 'cause they don't belch sulfur into my lungs.

-tom!

Reply to
Tom Plunket

I've been taking the bus into work for about a year and a half now. I drive 13 miles to the park and ride, then the bus does the other 35 or so miles into the city where I walk for 13 minutes to get to work. It works great. With gas at 4 bucks, every day it saves me about 9 bucks in gas and parking. It is only about 20 minutes longer each way, yet gives me 45 minutes of free time to read each way.

It used to be that as long as I got to the park and ride by 7:20 I'd find a parking spot. Starting a few weeks ago I've noticed that parking spots are harder to find even at 6:50--three busses earlier. And forget sitting alone. Every seat is filled these days with a few people waiting for the next bus.

So people are definitely taking the busses.

Bill

Reply to
weelliott

Even the busses that do belch sulphur are getting much better mileage per person than any car would. I know my commuter bus gets around

6MPG. I'd imagine it seats about 60 people. If that pulls say 50 cars off the road, each of those cars woudl have to get 300 MPG to be as clean. Even if you include the extra distance the bus travels in addition to the driven route, you'd still need cars that get well into the hundreds of miles per gallon. Despite the fact that diesels are not as clean as most cars, they are much cleaner than they were just a decade or two ago. You rarely see diesels belch smoke any more.
Reply to
weelliott

PMPG = Passenger Mile Per Gallon.

I read an article yesterday on Huffington Post that compared the fuel consumption of a Boeing 737 relative to a Toyota Prius on a trip from New York to Los Angeles. The article referred to PMPG. But I think the author did not understand the concept because the numbers were all wrong as far as I could tell.

If you have 4 passengers in a Prius, and it travels 45 miles on a gallon of fuel, to figure the Passenger Miles Per Gallon, would you not just multiply 45 x 4 = 180 passenger miles per gallon? So my 300 TDT that gets 30 mpg and can carry 7 passengers, could get 210 passenger miles per gallon?

In the article the guy got 13 passenger miles per gallon in his Prius, which either is employing some obscure function or is just bad math or both, yet still argued that it was competitive with the airplane. . .

Reply to
heav

That is where the problem arises. What percentage of people using public transportation are doing it to save gas versus those that have no car at all? Also, our HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane was created to encourage carpooling and get cars off the road. In the morning commute, many cars you see are an adult and a child. They have done nothing to help take a car off the road but they get to use the carpool lane. And motorcycles and empty buses as well.

Reply to
wc98

wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@m73g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...

You could charge cars mostly at night. However, it's also fair to assume that a significant portion will have to be charged during the day. If someone drives a car to work for example, it could very easily require charging during the day so they could get home. Particularly given the short range you get with an electric car. Even if only 25% of the demand were during the day, it's going to require more generating capacity and more investment in the infrastructure to deliver it. And there is no reason to believe that energy is going to be delivered at prices less than what we pay today. Hydro is pretty much tapped out, because you can't build more rivers and dams. Wind power is only effective in the right locations with enough wind and then only when the wind happens to be blowing strong enough, and isn't necessarily cheap either. A commercial company recently abandoned plans to build an offshore wind farm off Long Island because it would not be competitive. Note I'm not saying wind or alternative energy sources can't play a role here. I'm just saying they aren't going to come at energy prices less than what we are already paying.

Nuclear power. It is missing from your list of options. It is a whole lot cheaper than anything else and emits zero pollution and zero greenhouse gasses.

Reply to
Roger Shoaf

I wasn't ignoring nuclear power. I was only directly commenting on another posters list of supposedly low cost options for providing energy to charge electric cars, which was hydro and wind..

I agree nuclear is something we should be actively pursuing as part of an overall energy solution. My point was that whatever you turn to for electricity to power cars, it's not going to be as cheap as today's electric rates. The cheapest available source for new electricity is coal, but that has obvious disadvantages, ie greenhouse gases, etc. And even new coal plants are going to cost more than the existing base, because the older plants were built to far less stringent environmental standards, are depreciated, etc. Nuclear is a little more expensive than coal. So, if you want to go with electric cars, you need a reasonable assessment of what the true cost of the electricity will be and you can't just look at your current cost per KWH and use that.

Reply to
trader4

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