Category: Travel

My actual travels, those I aspire to, and those of others

‘Door prizes’ for cyclists

Bike wheel

The ‘door prize’ is apparently the most common type of accident to injure bike riders in cities. Riding along beside a row of parked cars, someone opens a door on the driver side, leaving too little time for an approaching cyclist to stop. The cyclist thus slams into the door, quite probably injuring themselves. Sometimes, it can be lethal.

Awareness seems like the first mechanism for avoiding such accidents. While it is theoretically possible for cyclists to ride in the middle of lanes, doing so requires extremely thick skin, so as to endure the endless rage of motorists who want to go faster. Cyclists can avoid door prizes by keeping an eye on whether someone is sitting on the driver’s side of a car: as well as for clues like lights being on and engine noise. Well justified concern about the door prize risk makes me do this, though I find that it makes me less situationally aware overall. Having to check one parked car after another leaves less time and mental focus for evaluating other threats, such as cars passing you on the left or making right turns in front of you.

Drivers can be aware that cyclists may be passing them and do more to check for cyclists before opening doors. Glancing at the side-view mirror and back over their shoulder only takes a moment, and will protect the people stepping out of their cars from oncoming vehicles, as well. Doing so is sometimes an explicit legal obligation, as under section 208 of the Manitoba’s Highway Traffic Act:

No person shall,

(a) open the door of a motor vehicle upon a highway without first taking due precautions to ensure that his act will not interfere with the movement of, or endanger, any other person or vehicle; or

(b) leave a door of a motor vehicle upon a highway open on the side of the vehicle available to moving traffic for a period of time longer than is necessary to load or unload passengers

Section 203 of British Columbia’s Motor Vehicle Act is similar, as is section 165 of Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act. Drivers can also partially open doors for a little while, so as to make them more visible to anyone approaching.

Potentially, some kind of automated system could help. I don’t know how much it would cost, but it should be possible to set up a motion sensor that looks backwards on the driver’s side of a car. While it might sometimes be obstructed by vehicles close behind, one would think it would more likely be able to spot cyclists that drivers might have missed. Some kind of light could then give a warning against sudden door-openings, or even prevent doors on that side from being opened.

Arguably, the best solution is to isolate car and bike infrastructure from one another in city centres. I would personally be delighted if most downtown areas were car-free. There would be dramatically more social space, less noise and pollution, and arguably more of a neighbourhood feeling. In the absence of such a transition, perhaps we can aspire to more bike lanes physically separated from car traffic (by a barrier, not a painted line), as there are in the Netherlands and some other European states.

Brief Smoky Lake recap

Smoky Lake canoe trip group shot

After four days in the Ontario wilderness, Emily and I are safely back in Ottawa. All told, the trip was successful and a lot of fun. We spent two days traveling and two hanging around our serene camping area, largely while others fished (more on that later). Wildlife sightings were fairly limited – though we did manage to inadvertently terrify a Canada goose and her greenish goslings – though it was nonetheless refreshing to be immersed in nature. While the weekend did include some serious rain, thankfully none of it fell during times when we had to decamp or travel. The smell of campfire smoke will doubtless linger on our clothes and selves for some time yet.

Getting out into the wilderness was certainly a most welcome break from city life. Similarly, the time spent in Toronto was a nice break from relatively parochial Ottawa.

For the visually inclined, some photos are on Facebook.

Gone paddling

This weekend, Emily and I will be canoeing on Kawigamog, Noganosh, and Lost Lakes – near Sudbury. It should be a good opportunity to explore the Ontario wilderness, in the general area of Algonquin Park.

This will be my first big canoe trip since the second Bowron Lakes expedition in August 2004. Canoe-camping is an especially enjoyable sort. You can bring lots of gear, which means more comfort and better food. You also cover quite a bit of ground, which allows for variety and real expeditions.

We should get back to Ottawa on Tuesday.

Vehicle efficiency

Fire station on Preston Street, Ottawa

My friend Mark sent me a link to a book in progress about sustainable energy. One of the more interesting sections is on vehicle efficiency. The author stresses that, while some kinds of efficiency gains are physically possible, others are not:

Could we make a new car that consumes 100 times less energy and still goes at 70mph? No. Not if the car has the same shape. The energy is going mainly into making air swirl. Changing the materials the car is made from makes no difference to that. A miraculous improvement to the engine could perhaps boost its efficiency from 25% to 50%. But the energy consumption of a car is still going to be roughly 40 kWh per 100 km.

The story is a familiar one: efficiency can get you a long way, but there are no free rides. Another interesting comment from this chapter is the major design differences between an efficient city car and an efficient highway car. Since the former is always stopping and starting, low weight is really important. Brakes that regenerate energy also make a big difference. For a highway car that avoids major acceleration and deceleration, the most important thing is reducing drag. Weight is comparatively trivial.

One other interesting assertion is that the energy involved in making a car is actually pretty trivial compared to the amount used in driving it around:

The energy cost of making the raw materials for a one tonne car is thus equivalent to about 3000 km of driving; an appreciable cost, but probably only 1% of the lifetime energy-cost of the car’s fuel.

If correct, that makes it seem a lot more reasonable to upgrade from an old and inefficient vehicle to a newer and less gas-thirsty model. It also suggests that government programs to replace inefficient cars with better ones might have strong justification, in terms of climate change mitigation potential.

In order to move to a low carbon society, we need to do a slew of things. We definitely need to increase the energy efficiency of accomplishing most tasks. We definitely need to reduce the quantity of greenhouse gas produced in the process of generating a unit of energy. We probably need to significantly reduce total energy consumption. Finally, we need to take actions that manage the greenhouse gasses that will inevitably be produced by some actions. The protection and enhancement of carbon sinks (mostly forests and soils) are essential for this.

When it comes to reducing total energy usage, the chapter does make one excellent suggestion: “a cyclist at 21 km/h consumes about 30 times less energy per kilometre than a lone car-driver on the motorway: about 2.4 kWh per 100 km.” Those who cycle more slowly are likely to be even more efficient, since doubling the time it takes to travel somewhere apparently reduces energy usage by three quarters.

Driving’s declining appeal

Spring leaves

While they are generally an urban and environmentally aware bunch, it still seems notable that most of my friends who grew up in cities never chose to get driving licenses. With the notable exception of friends who live in rural areas or distant suburbs, driving seems to have become something that relatively few people find worthwhile. An article from The New York Times suggests that they are less unusual than one might think:

In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

While it would be better to have data extending up into people in their mid-20s, it does seem safe to guess that numbers there are also falling. I have personally never had a license that permitted me to drive a car alone. Even my learner’s license has been expired since December 2003.

There are a number of causes I would attribute to the trend, at least among those I know:

  1. Graduated licensing schemes make it more and more annoying to get a license. In British Columbia, it now takes more than a year before you can get a license that is useful for anything other than practicing with a fully-licensed adult driver.
  2. Partly due to longer licensing processes, a good number of people now head off to university before they can get through to a license they can use alone. By the time they are at school, they have more pressing uses for their time and reduced access to adults willing to serve as observers.
  3. Cars, gas, and insurance are expensive. Also, people are choosing to spend longer in school and spend more in total on tuition. Twenty or thirty years ago, a fair number of 25 year-olds had probably been on the job and debt free for a while. Among my friends, there is a good chance they will be in grad school and still collecting student debt.
  4. People are more mobile. They don’t stay in one place long enough for it to be worth getting a car or license.
  5. People are more environmentally aware. Whereas once cars were symbols of wealth and freedom, they are increasingly symbols of greed and an anti-social willingness to harm those around you.

What other reasons would people give for the trend away from driving? Personally, I think the trend is a positive one – comparable to the increasing rareness and social unacceptability of smoking.

Two Toronto discoveries

My weekend in Toronto yielded knowledge of two new interesting places:

The first is a Louisiana Cajun restaurant called Southern Accent. It is located at 595 Markham Street, near the Honest Ed discount store. Their serving staff are very friendly and accommodating, the decor is pleasantly unusual, and the food is novel and tasty.

The second is an excellent used book store called A Good Read. It is located at 341 Roncesvalles Avenue. It is a boutique-style shop, rather than an encyclopaedic warehouse like Chapters, and it seems to be stocked almost exclusively with the kind of books you would feel lucky to find in a normal used book shop. I picked up a massive tome on the history of cryptography that I mean to work through over the course of many lunch hours.

Hurricanes and climate change action

Bike beside the Rideau Canal in spring

At several points in the past, I have mentioned the possibility that the majority of people will not be willing to accept serious action on climate change until at least one big, unambiguously climate related disaster has taken place. The same point is made in Joseph Romm’s book but, whereas I have speculated that it could be vanishing icecaps or large-scale climate induced human migration in Asia, he seems to think that Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States may make the difference.

There is good reason to find this plausible. The strength and frequency of hurricanes both have a lot to do with sea surface temperature (SST). While it isn’t feasible to attribute the occurrence or harmfulness of a particular storm to climate change, it is relatively easy to show a correlation between rising global temperature, rising SST, and more severe hurricanes. Simulations conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory led to them concluding that “the strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth’s climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” Within decades, rising SSTs could make the kind of extraordinary hurricane seasons that have proliferated since 2000 the low end of the new scale.

This matters partly because a hurricane-climate change connection would affect Americans directly and very visibly. Insurance prices would rise further, at the same time as more areas became uninsurable and serious questions arose about whether to rebuild at all in some places. The cost trade-offs between insurance, protective measures like higher levees, and storm risk would be thrown into sharp relief. The perceived damages associated with climate change would also shift from being associated with people outside of North America at some distant point in the future to being both physically and temporally immediate.

Obviously, it would be better if serious measures to combat climate change (eliminating non-CCS coal, pushing hard on energy efficiency, building dramatically more renewable capacity, etc) could come about simply as the result of a reasoned assessment of the IPCC’s scientific conclusions and projected associated costs. If, however, it is going to take disasters before people and politicians are ready to embrace real change, we should hope that they will come early, carry a relatively small cost in human lives, and not exacerbate the problem of climate change in and of themselves, as fires and ice loss do.

Air travel and looting

In some ways, engaging with the ongoing debate about air travel and greenhouse gas emissions feels like being among a crowd of looting rioters. People are happily smashing windows, grabbing cameras and iPods. There you stand, wondering what ought to be done.

The easy option is to loot. Your small contribution to the total level of theft and damage will not be recognizable after the fact. Immediate benefits can be secured for yourself, with costs being born by some unknown other person at some point in the future. In choosing to refuse, you accomplish nothing noticeable. Furthermore, you risk cursing yourself in the future for having missed out: for having not gotten ‘while the getting was good.’

The people around you want you to loot. Having a non-looter around is uncomfortable. It draws attention to the way in which the choice to loot is a moral choice, and how it is made on an individual basis. It forces people who are looting to justify their choice somehow – both publicly and in the confines of their own thinking.

The comparison above risks infuriating people and generating accusations of hypocrisy. How can anyone who has flown before say such a thing? It is true that past misconduct damages a person’s credibility. At the same time, it has no bearing on the fundamental rightness of wrongness of the position being adopted. As individuals, we need to consider whether the environmental harm associated with flying is somehow akin to being one tiny node in a million-person mob. If so, we need to question whether it is something we can continue to do.