... traffic lights, congestion and pollution

Traffic circles or round-abouts are fairly common all over the world except for North America. Basically, they allow two or more roads to intersect while conducting traffic in a circle. Rather than having to stop and wait for other cars to pass, in a traffic circle cars merge into a circular road that aggregates and disburses cars as their respective roads come along. As the result, cars do not have to come to a complete stop rather only to slow down to merge into the circular traffic. While traffic circles could be somewhat difficult to navigate especially for novices, they have a number of interesting benefits:

• there is no need for a traffic light, which, on its own, is a significant cost to power an maintain
• traffic does not have to come to a complete stop, thus reducing the probability of traffic jams
• since cars do not have to stop, there is little idling and hence much lower emissions
• even though traffic does not stop, it does slow down causing reduction in dangerous driving
• it is easier to manage intersections of more than two roads since there is no longer any need to determine priority, order and turns
• finally, presence of circles makes otherwise straight roads look more natural and pleasing to the eyes.

The aversion to traffic circles in North America is difficult for us to understand. Even in a such a cosmopolitan city as Toronto we were able to find only two of them - both in the posh neighborhood of Rosedale. And one of them had stop signs on all approaches thus defeating the main advantage of the circle.

...gas-hungry airplanes

A couple of month ago we paid another tribute to almost forgotten GM EV1, the first modern mass-produced electric passenger car in the United States. Some people loved them for the looks, others for the ecological impact, yet others for pure economy. The same rules could be applied to the aircrafts. Take a look at the Taurus plane designed and built by Slovenian aircraft manufacturer Pipistrel. These machines of pure beauty are truly electric and have a minimal carbon footprint (not counting the carbon-based fuselage).

The Taurus uses the electric engine for take-off, landing and in-flight manoeuvres, but most of the time it simply retracts the engine and operates like a glider.

Is this the future of the individual means of transportation, or the sign of the new turn in aviation industry? Either way, it is a definite Existing Alternative to what we currently see and hear in the air.

Article on Taurus on Wired.com
Article on Taurus on PopSci.com

... Gas-Powered Cars

As Honda rolls out a lease program in Southern California for its new FCX Clarity hydrogen powered vehicle, one can not resist but to draw analogies with an almost forgotten saga of GM’s EV1.

Back in 1997 GM introduced our generation’s Existing Alternative to gas powered vehicles – fully electric plug-in car.
It is hard to imagine that the technology which could have allowed us to curb emissions and lower our reliance on foreign oil existed and was more than fully functional over 10 years ago.
A great film “Who Killed the Electric Car” documents the last years of that great engineering achievement.


While the movies premise of pinning the fault of the project failure (hence the name) is pretty lame, the information contained within is priceless.
All 457 cars were easily leased out (not sold), all in California, huge waiting lists were generated, all drivers were instant fans, and yet it was not enough to render the project sustainable for GM, which killed the project recalled all the vehicles and … crushed them.

These days there are plenty of Existing “grassroots” Alternatives to the gas powered vehicles, Wikipedia maintains a long list of those, headed by the best car of all times Tesla Roadster, but it did take the big automakers more than 10 years to get back to the market with a new viable alternative.
Makes you wonder how long Honda's one will last.