Commercial Shipping Returning to the Eerie Canal

Commercial shipping is making a comeback in the Eerie Canal after decades of decline. Soaring gas prices have caused some companies to rethink sending goods via truck, turning instead to barges – and they’re not alone. More companies are beginning to look into it. So far this season, there have been 42 shipments up the canal – up from 15 last year. 42 shipments is still far from the numbers seen during the Eerie Canal’s heyday, when 33,241 shipments passed through the lock at Frankfurt, 54 miles east of Syracuse.

From The New York Times:

The canal still remains the most fuel-efficient way to ship goods between the East Coast and the upper Midwest. One gallon of diesel pulls one ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, 202 miles by train and 514 miles by canal barge, Ms. Mantello said. A single barge can carry 3,000 tons, enough to replace 100 trucks.

As the price of diesel climbed over $4 a gallon this summer — the national average is now about $3.31 a gallon — more shippers rediscovered the Erie Canal. On one trip in mid-October, the Margot motored down the canal at about seven knots, pushing a barge loaded with a giant green crane. The machine was being transported from Huger, S.C., to the Pinney Dock, operated by the Kinder Morgan Company in Ashtabula, Ohio.

“It really just came down to economics,” said Lee Demers, the dock’s manager. The other option was to move the crane through the St. Lawrence Seaway, adding more than 1,000 miles and greater fuel costs to the trip.

Wow, who knew barges were so green? If a single barge can replace 100 trucks, that’s really getting somewhere.  Of course, the environmental impacts of a huge increase of barges in the canal would have to be considered, but it’d still be a hell of a lot better than having all those trucks on the road. Interesting, how we’re returning to simpler ways of doing things in so many cases.

Link [The New York Times]

Behind Automakers’ Petulant Resistance to Higher Car Mileage Standards

Every time the government proposes legislation to improve fuel economy standards, you can practically hear a collective groan from the automobile industry.  In early July 2008, automakers made a big fuss over proposed new mileage standards, saying they’re too tough.  The new standards would require automakers’ fleet of cars to meet an average of 35.7 miles per gallon for passenger vehicles and 28.6 mpg for light trucks by 2015.

This will be the first time the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has raised its ‘Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards’ (CAFE) since 1985, which is really appalling in itself.  That’s more than 20 years that automakers could have been working on better, more efficient cars.  Instead, they spent that time developing gigantic sports utility vehicles and heavy duty trucks, leading up to a rather sickening pinnacle in recent years with the Hummer.  What’s more, the agency’s mileage standards assume gas prices of $2.42 per gallon in 2016.  What parallel universe are they living in?

Meanwhile, many consumers feel the new standards would be far too lenient.  The Consumer Federation of America wants the standards raised well over what the government has proposed, to 39.5 mpg for passenger vehicles and 30.9 mpg for light trucks.

Even that’s not good enough.  After all, it’s obvious that car companies can easily reach these standards, and far sooner than 2015 – and what’s 35.7 miles per gallon if gas is completely unaffordable or not available at all? Those of us who rely on personal or family vehicles to get around want the auto industry to step up to the plate and start getting innovative.  Challenging times fuel innovation, and it seems like we should be seeing leaders in the industry eagerly savoring this chance to really show us what they’ve got.

What reason is there, we wonder, for automakers to drag their feet like bratty, fit-throwing children on raising mileage standards?  Why aren’t they leading the charge toward the future, with cars that meet and even exceed customers’ desires for greener, more energy-efficient vehicles?

Part of it is fear.  They’ve made good money off the market as it has been for the last two decades. They’ve built their companies around the assumption that they could continue operating like that indefinitely. Completely restructuring their businesses around making more fuel-efficient vehicles will cost them.

Their biggest excuse is that ‘it’s not feasible’.  But, that certainly seems like a weak argument when hybrids as they are today are already more efficient than the proposed standards and are set to become even more efficient as improvements to the batteries and drivetrain systems continue to be made over the next few years.  Plug-in technology is well on the way.  Other alternatives to fossil fuels are being researched and developed at this very moment, and who knows what else could crop up.

Even without raised CAFE standards, automakers will be forced to green up.  They don’t have much choice anymore. High gas prices will undoubtedly be a great catalyst for improved fuel economy, simply because automakers no longer have a choice, regardless of how they feel about the new standards. Having low gas prices for so long encouraged automakers to keep on producing huge, gas guzzling vehicles, and encouraged consumers to buy them. Over the last few decades, car companies grew to depend upon sales of SUVs and trucks as a large part of their profits.  Now, they’re being forced to reevaluate the entire industry.  That’s because consumers have dropped SUVs and trucks like they’re radioactive.

High gas prices, in effect, forced consumers to take responsibility for their share of the problem: they’re now clamoring for smaller vehicles. Consumer desire for big cars and trucks was the biggest obstacle car companies would have faced in making their fleets more fuel efficient, so the rest of the onus is on them.  That doesn’t mean that we’ll never have affordable SUVs and heavy duty trucks again – it just means that most of us can get by on smaller, lighter cars during this shift toward cleaner energy.

One thing that will likely happen during the shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles is that prices will rise a bit for consumers.  Without those SUV profits, automakers will be forced to raise prices on their current lines of compact cars as well as new models that debut in the next few years.  While consumers will have to swallow those price increases up front, the vehicles will be less expensive to run over time.

The funny thing is that the Big Three automakers – GM, Ford and Chrysler – have seen huge drops in profits because they failed to anticipate this shift toward smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.  Strange, when it seems as though everyone else could see it coming from miles away, but perhaps they were too busy rolling naked in money, luxuriating in the profits brought to them courtesy of low gas prices and at the cost of the environment.  It almost seems as though they’ve engineered their own downfall, and they’re just now starting to realize it as plants close and thousands of workers are laid off.

GM, for one, is finally accepting reality and said just yesterday afternoon that they’re prepared to make hard choices in order to survive.  They plan to sell off $4B - $7B worth of assets in order to afford upcoming changes to their product line.  We hope to see more of that in the upcoming months.  The loss of jobs is, of course, very unfortunate, but hopefully those people will be able to become a part of the new, greener industries starting to sprout up.

The times, they are a-changin’, and the auto industry is going to have to change with them, just like everybody else, like it or not.  The only way out is through.  As we all try to find our way out of the Era of Oil and into a better, greener future, it’s going to be a bit painful for everybody, but there’s no doubt that it will be worth it in the end.

Link [CNN]
Photo credit: Make Your Own Gas Station Sign

‘Pulse and Glide’ to Save Gas

A group of five ‘efficiency aficionados’ drove an unmodified 2nd generation Toyota Prius to a fuel economy record of 109.3 miles per gallon over 1397 miles in Pittsburg, PA using a driving technique they call ‘pulse and glide’. This was in 2006, but many people still don’t know about ‘pulse and glide’ and how it can save them gas – even if they’re not driving a hybrid. It could cut down on pollution, too, due to decreased emissions while the car is in neutral.

From Metrompg.com:

Pulse and glide works like this: let’s say you’re on a road where you want to go 60 km/h. Instead of driving along at a steady 60, you instead accelerate to 70 (that’s the pulse), and then coast in neutral with the engine off down to 50 (that’s the glide). That’s it. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat…

By doing this, you’re still averaging 60 km/h, but it turns out that pulse and glide is significantly more efficient than driving along maintaining a steady 60 km/h.

Metrompg.com put the technique to the test in a Geo Metro, modifying the technique to eliminate the ‘turning the engine off’ part, since that wouldn’t be practical – he just put the car in neutral during the ‘glide’ part. (If you’re not familiar with hybrids, the engine shuts off automatically when you lift of the accelerator).

With the engine idling, and the car in neutral, the average mpg shown on the ScanGauge in the glide down from 90-70 km/h was 550 mpg. When you average that against the 34 mpg of the pulse, it works out to an average of 64 mpg. Now we’re at an 8% increase over the steady-state mpg.

I would name the difference between the two techniques “full” pulse & glide (neutral, with engine off in the glide) vs. “mild” (neutral, with engine idling in the glide).

So, now you know the next time you find yourself cruising down a lonely road at a steady speed, you’re not getting the best mileage you could. You could be pulsing & gliding to maintain the same average speed, and saving lots of fuel in the process.

This technique isn’t always practical in real-world driving; it’s best for those long lonely roads where they’re aren’t many other cars around. Of course, it’s all a bit more complicated than the summary above - get all the details at Metrompg.com.

Link [Metrompg.com]

FuelFrog Makes It Easy To Keep Track Of How Much You’re Being Bent Over At The Pump

I’ve recently caught the hyper-miler bug. Hyper-milers drive their cars in a way that eeks out crazy high milage, sometimes upwards of 100 miles per gallon with non-hybrid cars. Hyper-milers accelerate slowly, using a feather touch on the gas and try to keep all momentum going- hitting the brakes is a waste of speed and a waste of gas. Drafting on big rigs on the highway can squeeze in a few percentage points of efficiency and the really serious hyber-milers look for places to turn off their engines to coast, which is actually not a smart idea- the power steering and braking in modern cars shut down when you turn it off, dropping into neutral is a slightly less efficient but way more safe technique.

FuelFrog is a web app that easily keeps track of your gas mileage- a hyper-milers dream come true, and pretty damn cool for the rest of you too. It’s super simple to use- you just enter in the miles traveled since your last fill up and the amount and price of the gas you got. After a few fillups FuelFrog gives you stats on how much road you’re getting out of your gas in an easy to read web 2.0y graph. I just signed up for my account (as you can see above) so my graph has no data to populate yet.

You can enter the information in via the web or by using Twitter, which would allow you to do it as you are at the station paying. That’s a great feature for those of us who would suck at faithfully entering in the info back at home.

I love seeing stuff like this- great mashups of green, technology, mobile devices, and the internet. Maybe we can work ourselves out of the eco-hole we’ve dug into.

Link [FuelFrog] via [ReadWriteWeb]