Posted by pfairley on July 15, 2010
Paris threw open nearly one thousand one-way streets to two-way traffic this week — that is, for travelers willing to pedal. Whereas other cities such as Boulder and London have created a handful of designated counterflow bike lanes, the new rules taking effect in Paris this week allow bicyclists to cycle upstream against automobile traffic within all of the city’s 30 kilometer-per-hour zones.
Generally speaking these 30-kph zones comprise knots of narrow streets serving primarily neighborhood traffic. But Paris city hall expects a big impact for cyclists. According to Paris planners the move will expand route options for cyclists and may also (seemingly against all odds) improve safety. The mayor’s office notes that on some streets cyclists heading upstream will be further from parked cars, minimizing their risk of ‘winning a door prize’ from innattentive automobile users stepping out onto the roadway.
Counterflow cycling is part of a long-running push by Parti Socialiste mayor Bertrand Delanoe to pump up bicycling’s role in Paris transport, and their second major innovation. Their first was Vélib, which brought bike sharing to the big cycle on a previously unheard-of scale. Parisians (and the millions of tourists that visit the city annually) can grab and drop bikes from any of 1800 parking spots across the city.
Reporting by the New York Times last year left many Americans with the impression that Vélib was on the brink, its bikes paralyzed by rampant vandalism. That’s not what this visitor to Paris is seeing. And it’s not what London sees. That city is in the process of rolling out a bike share of its own this summer.
Up next in Delanoe’s urban transport innovation program: an electric car share system dubbed Autolib that the city hopes to launch next year. Paris envisions 3000 electric cars available at 1000 locations in the Paris metro region. City hall is in the process of choosing between the three finalists for the contract to launch and operate the system.
The New York Times ran a suprisingly optimistic report on Autolib last month, despite starting the article with yet another misleading swipe at Vélib.
This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate
Posted in Cycling, EVs, Transportation | Tagged: Autolib, bicycles, counterflow cycling, cycling, Paris, Velib | 1 Comment »
Posted by pfairley on June 8, 2010
Ethnic and economic tensions may have stalled Turkey’s longstanding bid to join the European Union, but electrical circuits can be color blind. As of September the alternating current on the Turkish power grid will flow in synchrony with Continental Europe’s, according to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), which took control of Europe’s power grids last summer.
Yesterday’s announcement means that Turkey can trade electricity with Europe and benefit from the bigger grid’s stability, in turn helping to stabilize the lines in neighboring Bulgaria and Greece. The link will run for at least one year, with power exchanges ramping up in stages.
Turkey’s integration provides hope for would-be regional developers in the Mediterranean, who face rising protectionism, ethnic tensions, and seemingly endless diplomatic bombshells from Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Middle East troubles caused the Union for the Mediterranean organized by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to delay a second summit scheduled to convene in Barcelona yesterday until November, according to the AP. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Energy politics, Integrating renewables, Photovoltaics, Power Grids, Renewable Energy, Solar thermal power | Tagged: Mediterranean Ring, Medring, Middle East Peace, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, North Africa, entso-e, Union for the Mediterranean, Gaza, Turkey, interconnection, power grid, solar thermal | Leave a Comment »
Posted by pfairley on June 7, 2010
How is one to bridge the gap between BP’s latest oil collection stats and visual reality?
The oil and gas giant claims to be sucking crude straight off its stricken mile-deep wellhead and pouring it into the drillship Enterprise at a rate of 11,000 barrels per day, thanks to a cap and tube installed on Friday. And, yet, video feeds from ROVs present a plume of oil and gas that looks as angry as ever, gushing plenty more black goop destined for dispersal into the Gulf of Mexico’s already beleaguered ecosystems.
“Clearly alot of people are looking at it and trying to understand what does this mean,” acknowledged BP senior vp/exploration Kent Wells of the top-rated video images during in a media briefing this afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Diesel, Fuels, Offshore oil and gas, Petroleum | Tagged: BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico, hurricane season, hurricanes, lmrp, oil spill | Leave a Comment »
Posted by pfairley on June 4, 2010
BP is capturing oil at a rate of 1,000 barrels-per-day via its latest containment scheme — a cap and new riser installed on its gushing Gulf spill last night — according to Federal response coordinator and Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen. But video feeds confirm that far more crude is still spilling into the sea from under the cap — at least 11,000 barrels per day if one subtracts 1,000 bpd from the minimum flow estimate of the Deepwater Horizon spill released by a federal task force last week.
BP Americas chief operating officer Doug Suttles told a media briefing this morning that the cap (BP containment scheme #4 by Carbon-Nation’s count) could ultimately capture over 90% of the leak. Suttles and his company have proved unreasonably optimistic before, and could be once again. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Fuels, Offshore oil and gas, Petroleum, Transportation | Tagged: BP, oil spill, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico, lmrp | 1 Comment »
Posted by pfairley on May 27, 2010
BP Americas chief operating officer Doug Suttles says the ‘top kill’ operation initiated this morning to stanch the Gulf oil spill is “performing as expected” and could be completed within 24 hours. But U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry, who spoke with Suttles at an early-evening media briefing, took a more reserved tone. “I do not want to express optimism until I know for sure that we’ve secured the well and that the leak has stopped,” says Landry.
By 5pm Houston time on Wednesday BP had already pumped over 7,000 barrels of heavy drilling mud into the damaged blowout preventer on the wellhead created by the Deepwater Horizon rig whose destruction last month unleashed the spill. Much of that mud appears to be flowing up into the Gulf. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Fuels, Offshore oil and gas, Petroleum | Tagged: blowout preventer, BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico, offshore oil and gas, top kill | 1 Comment »
Paris threw open nearly one thousand one-way streets to two-way traffic this week — that is, for travelers willing to pedal. Whereas other cities such as Boulder and London have created a handful of designated counterflow bike lanes, the new rules taking effect in Paris this week allow bicyclists to cycle upstream against automobile traffic within all of the city’s 30 kilometer-per-hour zones.