UPS Tries Out Small Electric Trucks for Localized Delivery

Even when delivering packages, bigger is not always better. ZAP, the quirky maker of electric vehicles, has announced that an office of United Parcel Service in California will be using their vehicles for localized delivery. From their press release:

The UPS branch in Petaluma, California has leased an initial fleet of 42 ZAP Xebra® electric city cars and trucks for their small parcel deliveries. This is the first time that UPS has used electric city-speed vehicles for this purpose.

Small parcel deliveries are becoming more challenging for the trademark big, brown UPS delivery vans, which is why UPS is using the electric city cars and trucks to handle small parcel deliveries. The ZAP vehicles lessen fuel consumption and reduce automotive emissions produced by current delivery vehicles. Drivers will be monitoring their electrical usage to carefully analyze cost-savings and emissions reductions.

I should note here that I am a shareholder in ZAP. Not much, just a few hundred dollars worth.These vehicles travel at city speeds up to 40mph. Not much but if you’ve driven in California traffic you’ll know that 40mph is often hard to attain. Certainly trying to squeeze one of these little Xebra trucks into a small space for a delivery is much easier than the big brown box of a truck UPS normally drives. Of course, there are more conventional alternatives — a minivan or small SUV could also do the trick, although without the fanfare, the fuel savings or the reduced emissions.

Other choices exist on the open market. Chrysler has the GEM electric NEV (Neighborhood Electric Vehicle) on the market. You’ve probably seen a few of the all passenger versions running around downtown or on the SLU campus. These are great little electric vehicles that are street legal but are limited to 25mph to avoid additional requirements.

I’m also a fan of the Bajaj 3-wheel gasoline vehicle, available in passenger, pickup or delivery van versions (shown left). This Indian company make the classic 3-wheel passenger taxi we think of when we see images of India. Like the ZAP Xebra, these 3-wheel vehicles are regulated as motorcycles. The Bajaj is available locally at the Extreme Toy Store in Rock Hill.

With Limited World Resources, Now is the Time to Limit Population Growth

The planet is at a breaking point, us humans have been raping the planet for all its worth for decades now and mother earth is doing all she can to continue to provide for us. We’ve been abusing and polluting her for some time, pushing the limits everywhere we can. This includes industrialization, clear cutting rain forests for meat production to auto emitting toxic gases. But we’ve also been populating the planet like never before.

The 20th Century saw the biggest increase in world population, going from 1.6 billion people to over 6 billion in the course of one hundred years. It was our industrialization of farming techniques and improved medicines that has contributed to this increase in population. But are we, collectively as a planet, better off with all these increased mouths to feed? By the middle of this century the world is expected to have 9 billion inhabitants.

Earlier today, in my Environmental Planning course, I suggested we limit the number of future users in addition to looking at methods of conservation. The topic doesn’t really matter — could be energy we consume, water we drink, shelter for us to sleep in — can we handle this many more people in the world?

Frankly, I don’t think so. We are already fighting over resources now so I can only imagine in a few decades with another couple of billion people around fighting over the same amount of water, food and a place to sleep. Add in cars and other luxuries we’ve grown to think of as minimal necessities in the U.S. and it will get really ugly.

The solution? In class I jokingly asked if we can neuter people? Trust me, I’m not advocating castration — just wondering aloud about how we as a global society addresses the issue of world population. Personally, I’m gay so I know that I am not out there adding to the world’s population.

So how can we control the world’s population without invading bedrooms to check to see whom is sleeping with whom? In the U.S., one way to address the population increase is to phase out the tax deduction for kids. What kind of tax policy rewards people for having children? It is not rocket science to bring a child into the world and certainly not deduction worthy. I think we need to tax people that procreate or at least reward those of us that don’t. Too radical? Well, probably so. But what are the alternatives?

Technological advancements got us to where we are now — 6 billion strong. Increasing technology to be able to feed 9 billion, if possible, will only encourage the world to continue increase in population. Sadly I think it will take some radical shift in the world to alter this course.

This, I believe, is coming in some combination of peak oil, limited fresh water supplies and the big daddy of them all — global climate change. I believe the drought in the Southeast U.S. is part of the bigger shift in the world climate. What will happen to the 5 million in the Atlanta region that are running out of fresh water in the next few months? I say anybody from Georgia that moves into the City of St. Louis should get our best-tasting water free for a year.  That should be our new marketing slogan — “St. Louis — We Have Water.”  Well, assuming the global climate and states upriver don’t limit the amount of water flowing down the Mississippi River.

The big thing will be the rise in sea level to the point where literally hundreds of millions of people are flooded.  Not to be overly grim here, but I see millions not surviving.  I’m sure some geeks are watching the melting of the ice caps and we’ll know in advance if one is about to drop off into the ocean but how quickly can you evacuate hundreds of millions of people from coastlines all over the world?  It is not going to be pretty but I do think it will be a necessity to rebalance the planet.   It will take such a catastrophe to get the world to see we cannot continue down this same path.

Sprawl, World Climate Change, and Aldo Leopold

The following is an essay I wrote for my current Environmental Planning course at St. Louis University.  The assignment was to look at a current issue in the context of the writings of Aldo Leopold.  Leopold’s book, the Sand County Almanac, was published in 1949 — the year following his death at age 61.

Aldo Leopold missed the most horrific land-use crime, suburban sprawl.  Decades after Leopold was thinking like a mountain, men were blasting the mountain to flatten it for big box stores and acres of free parking.  Leopold’s writings give us much to ponder
about the conservation of wild areas but little to work from with respect to the rapid development of land for human use.  The amount of land consumed per person has steadily increased with each passing decade, and combined with an increase in total  population the natural areas which Leopold worked to conserve are disappearing at an alarming rate.

With the exception of Pearl Harbor, the United States was untouched from the ravages of WWII.  Just shy of six decades since his passing in 1948 at the age of 61, the world has changed considerably.  Leopold would not be pleased with our progress of the last sixty years.  In these passing years nearly equal to his life on this planet, we’ve ravaged our own landscape unlike anything seen in Europe during the war.
We’ve spent lifetimes attempting to seize control of the planet only to have it shake us off at different turns.  Not to say this is right, just an acknowledgment that this is where society has taken us to date. There is no question that we humans have not been thinking like a mountain, but how to overtake and develop the mountain and everything around it.  Ironically, while Leopold’s writings started an environmental movement for the conservation of wildlife areas he seemingly did nothing to abate the consumption of land for “normal” society.
Leopold’s time saw few suburban communities.  Those he would have seen would be the “Garden City” developments offering pastoral settings ringing urban cores, radically different than today’s ex-urban areas.  However, a year prior to his passing, the rise of suburbia was on its way with the 1947 start of Levittown.  Interstate highways, drive-thrus, bedroom communities, and the cloverleaf interchange would all come following his death.
My personal land-use ethic relates to this sprawl and our consumption of land.  In short, I believe that we humans are here for a short time and perhaps do get to consume the land — but only so much.  Humans have been building civilizations for thousands of
years but never has planet earth seen a more destructive group of people.  We crossed the line decades ago.  So much so the line can no longer been seen in the rear-view mirror.
We are at a point where today’s generations must make up for the mistakes of past generations.  In growing regions they must seek to rebuild in a more compact manner while any new ground taken needs to be developed in whatever term you like to use —
old urbanism, New Urbanism or just plain urbanism.  Multiple modes of mobility need to be accommodated in whatever we build, in any region, from this day forward.  Anything less is without a doubt, immoral.
So where does this leave Leopold?  Nature should still be front and center in our minds — we must be aware of why it is that we are reversing our past mistakes.  Nature, and the preservation of the planet as we know it, absolutely must come first.  Interestingly, this involves building human habitats that has little to do with nature in its pure form:  commercial districts lined with streetcars and rows upon rows of multi-unit housing stacked over retail, for example.  Every region, large and small, needs an Urban Growth Boundary to contain it from encroaching onto the natural environment surrounding it’s borders.  Many regions, from the Springfield Missouri’s to the St. Louis’ of the world, have already developed all the land they will need for the next 60 years.
The era of the ‘ranch’ house in the 1/4 acre ‘country’ subdivision are over.  The naturalist packing the Subaru with Chinese-made camping equipment purchased at REI is also done.  Our fundamental relationship with nature must shift.  Just as Leopold
suggested multiple generations ago, we must make a major shift in our society in how we view nature.  Our land ethic is no longer simply including land (soil, etc…) in with humans but we have to think globally as we never have before.
We Americans are warming the planet as no other country is doing and it is up to us to make sure we don’t heat the planet to the point where New York’s subways are flooded, that Miami beach’s deco hotels are not under water, that once lush areas of the world do not become arid and so on.  Of course, other countries are doing their best to catch up to the U.S.
Leopold’s guidance has proven helpful with respect to managing wildlife preservation areas but has fallen way short in the rest of the earth.  Although we’d never advocate hunting humans, we do need to learn to manage ourselves and the land we consume
so that we can get ourselves back in line with nature.  At this point we have little choice.

Traffic Congestion, Friend or Foe?

London is getting tough on traffic congestion, charging drivers extra to drive in certain parts of town (see wiki). New York is debating a similar measure in Manhattan. At last week’s Rail~Volution conference, many attendees concurred that addressing congestion was a top priority. After all, cars stuck in traffic are not productive — they are just stationary polluters at that point.

But not all are in agreement. In fact, the keynote speaker Doug Foy indicated that, “congestion is our friend.” How can having motorists stuck in traffic be good? What is the upshot? Transit, of course. Well, except buses and streetcars that operate in traffic with cars.

To get federal funds to offset the costs to install a transit system one main thing must be shown — a time savings. This is why streetcars are not generally funded — while they offer great localized transit they suck at getting the suburbanite back to the park-n-ride after work or a game. So planners and engineers, trying to meet federal funding guidelines, focus on making the systems as fast as possible. Fast enough, to show a savings in time over the same A to B trip done by car.

Transit systems can only go so fast so the longer the trip by car, the better the transit looks. This is true for both new riders and for funding approval.

Engineers currently in court over the new Shrewsbury line found ways to save overall trip time. For example, the Clayton station is in the middle of the roadway rather than off to one side and more connected to the city. So while the trip time is probably less each time a train passes through that station I think it also has less passengers due to the highly disconnected means in which to get to the platform. Is this time savings really a gain if the total number of users are reduced?

Some were critical for a transit line not being run down the center of I-64 (highway 40 to locals) but in terms of time savings it never would have been justifiable. Stops along the route to pick up riders would have consumed more time than any delays from say Chesterfield to downtown.

The recent North-South study for future transit in St. Louis was focused on time savings too — how quickly can we get to the edges of the city limits to pick up suburban riders? Oh sure, we’ll stop and get some city folks along the way as long as they don’t slow us down too much.

Travel times throughout the St. Louis region just are not that great. That is, getting from the Illinois to St. Charles, from Chesterfield to South County or pretty much anywhere just doesn’t take that much time by car. This assumes, of course, that you have a car. Some of our worst congestion is getting a half billion dollar fix via the new I64.
So do we want to increase congestion in the St. Louis area to make transit a more interesting option? Hardly. So is congestion a friend or foe in St. Louis? I’d say neither. Increased congestion will only result in more money being spent on road projects. Besides, we are such a large region that a line or two of rail transit may never even impact where the congestion may appear.

In NYC, transit is simply a factor of life — so many people use the subways — reducing traffic congestion isn’t going to suddenly wake up New Yorkers to the idea of transit. However, it will free up road space so that buses, taxis and other vehicles have some room to function. In London the studies show that while some people use transit as an alternative people have also begun carpooling or altering schedules to avoid central London. Auto use in the core of the city is down a dramatic 25%. Back here in St. Louis we’ve got more road width than we know what to do with. In the city our streets were widened decades ago for the day when we had over 800k residents and streetcars.

So while it is easy for someone to claim congestion is a friend or foe, I think it really must be taken into context. The foe for St. Louis transit advocates, in my view, is our sprawling nature and divided political context. If the St. Louis County voters are going to pay for much of the expansion, it should serve them. Hard to argue with that logic. Still, I think a city/inner ring suburb series of streetcars serving local riders is the way to go.

Congestion will never be an issue in St. Louis. Never. We are so spread out and our population is stagnant. No, we have no congestion worries to help us justify transit expenditures. Oil running around $100/barrel, however, is our new best friend. Once gas prices make their steady climb past $3/gallon, with no return to the lower territory, we’ll begin to see some minor rumblings although nothing major. Once it passes $4/gallon, people will be calling out for more transit options and then we can hopefully raise the Missouri gasoline tax to levels say equal to Illinois.

The trick then will be do we try to run transit lines out to the far reaches of the region or do we focus in the central section of the region? Do we skip transit lines and stick with less costly methods like BRT (Bus Rapid Transit)? Regular readers know my thoughts, streetcars are the best solution for localized transit service — they offer the convenience of a local bus route while having the permanence of a light rail line to assure developers the line is there to stay. To those outside of the I-270/I-255 loop — you are screwed.

Our whole 16-county MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) could live well within a much tighter geography such as inside this highway loop. But market forces, combined with suburban zoning that mandated sprawl, has led us where we are today. Our homes and jobs are dispersed throughout the region to the point we have no congestion — just cars criss-crossing the region daily.

In our region congestion pricing is a mute point. Take care of the traffic signal timings and a few other things and we are good. In other cities, I think we need to work to reduce congestion through means such as congestion pricing. Letting congestion build for the sake of making transit look better is simply careless with resources and the planet.

St. Louis May Be One of Few Cities in the World With an Elevated Bikeway

The message to the crowd was simple — the Great Rivers Greenway District already owns the old elevated railway trestle that runs from Hadley and Cass to the McKinley Bridge and they want to turn it into one of the world’s few elevated bikeway and walking trails. Inspiration comes from Paris’ Promenade Plantée and New York’s planned High Line.  Chicago and Philly are also working on similar projects.

A good crowd (a “few” if KSDK were counting) gathered last Thursday evening at the Confluence Academy in Old North St. Louis to hear the early thoughts on the proposal. Questions centered around specifics and planners had to continue to remind everyone that this in the very beginning stages — no specifics are known other than what it is they own and control.

Paris and New York are the only two cities with elevated bikeways. Chicago is looking at doing the same thing but they don’t yet have control over the trestle they have in mind. The following are some of the images from the presentation:

The idea is to have a bike path, a walking path, message boards, native greenery and to make creative use of the old supports for the electric wires that powered the old interurban lines.

Some of the concepts they presented included wind, sun and rain collection.

They hope to encourage adjacent buildings to add green roofs to improve the experience, reduce the heat island affect and reduce energy costs for those owners. Taller trellis’ would be added where necessary to prevent people from gaining access to roofs from the trestle.

One idea they explored is to widen the trestle at a point or two to gain more “plaza” space and room for viewing.

One nice thing is the prominent view from I-70. Greening up the trestle and incorporating signs would hopefully increase the curiosity of motorists.

A small portion of the trestle is already being prepared for such a use — connecting to the soon to re-open McKinley bridge. This will give cyclists an easy route to Illinois.

One potential issue is the proposed Mississippi River Bridge — it would intersect with I-70 immediately south of where the trestle crosses. Although the clearance from the highway to the bottom of the trestle is fine, it does not meet current standards. MoDot is seeking Federal approval to allow for an exemption so the trestle can remain in place. Of course, no final design or funding has been worked out between Missouri and Illinois on this bridge so it is anyone’s guess when and if I every actually happens.

I’d like to see I-70 removed from the area between downtown and the arch but part of me doubts that would every actually get removed even if a new bridge for I-70 traffic was built. I’d like to see the MacArthur Bridge, located to the south of the Poplar Street Bridge, reopened to auto traffic, or perhaps as another bike/pedestrian bridge like the Chain of Rocks (the MacArthur still carries railroad traffic below the former auto deck).
Despite the potentially high cost, I think retaining these old industrial structures and reusing them for bike connection is a worthwhile pursuit. The connection with the wonderful North Riverfront trail at Branch Street would be great.