If you’re a thirtysomething USF grad that’s still riding the HARTLine bus for free with your old-as-dirt student ID (cheater!) get ready for a rude awakening.
As part of re-negotiations on the UPass program, HARTLine is considering installing card readers on HARTLine buses, to insure that people riding the bus for free with their USF ID are in fact still affiliated with the University. This was always something I wondered about, now I know that others were wondering about it too. How many of the USF fare-free riders are USF students?
Another important question is how many fare-free riders are staff and faculty? Changes to the current program go into effect in December, and should continue through June, a brief reprieve from the impending loss of fare-free rides for USF students and staff.
How much are the “readers” going to cost? And who’s paying for them? Knowing government and psuedo-government beauracracies the way I do, they’ll probably spend more than they would have lost just to thwart cheaters. And there is really no loss in that the buses are going where they are going anyway. Oh yea lost fares. how many eccentric greenies or poor over 30′s are really using the buses? Come on. Get real. Let the losers have free lifetime fare.
They take a slightly different approach to this in Austria and Germany (well, in the big cities at least): to ride public transportation, you have to buy a pass, but there’s no automated verification. No card readers, no turnstiles, nothing. Instead random checks are performed (dunno how often, I was only there a couple weeks and never got checked). If you’re caught without a pass, you have to pay a non-trivial fine.
I’m not sure how much it would cost to have a government employee perform a random check every couple weeks, but I have a feeling it would be less than retrofitting the entire bus fleet with card readers.
Then again, maybe Germans are just more honest.
What if the government invested the energy bill’s $9,500,250,000.00 allocation to the oil industry for the purpose of reducing our dependence on foriegn oil in public transportation. Then instead of citizens paying fares we would recieve tax credits for every ride. This would conserve energy, cut down on pollution, and cut the cost of road maintenance and development. Local systems that go hybrid could be rewarded with higher level of investment and credits for riders. Well maybe. This idea has no real data or science behind it.
The problem is, and always has been, that outside of a few major cities the US just isn’t set up for public transportation. We have a lot of land and tend to spread out, since people like having backyards and such. At least bus systems don’t require huge capital investments to set up, like subways and light rail do, so there’s a little hope there. In the end I think market forces will slowly move people towards alternatives, as oil gets more and more expensive. Probably some combination of telecommuting, moving closer to work, buying a diesel/hybrid, or taking the bus.
However, I think one of the easiest steps we can take towards energy independence is just to build more nuclear plants. Safe-by-design reactors exist now, and feeding all those coal-fired plants has put more radioactivity in the air than nuke plants ever did.
Can we store the waste in your backyard?
Nah, that’s what Yucca Mountain is for.
Solid waste that you can stuff inside a steel vault deep underground is a lot easier to manage than a million smokestacks slowly toxifying the air everybody breathes (and possibly contributing to global warming). Until fusion is invented (“real soon now”), every method of producing energy also produces waste or has other drawbacks, so it’s a question of picking your poison. And no, solar/wind/hydro aren’t sufficient.
Now that this has moved away from public transit and into energy consumption/conservation, I feel requalified to comment.
In many ways I have to agree with the statement that “oil is too good to burn for power.” With uses ranging from plastics to pesticides, oil seems to be to useful in other forms to be used as a combustible energy source like coal. It’s almost a shame that we’ve moved so far away from coal since it’s caused spikes in demand of oil.
Additionally, since we’re talking about stopgaps, there are a ton of kludgy solutions that might get us closer to energy independence. Solar/wind/hydro aren’t sufficient individually, and hydro at least causes serious environmental damage when used on a large scale, but they may lessen oil demand over a larger time scale.
As far as fission goes, we can recycle low-level waste pretty easily. We only have to look at France to see how an all-nuclear power generation system could work. However, France, who has been building a nuclear infrastructure since the 1970′s still has no long-term storage solution for high-level waste. Yucca Mountain may be suitable, but we’re still investigating whether it’s an acceptable site for storing radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years. Consider that our civilization excavates “long-term storage solutions” of civilizations from 8000 BCE, ten thousand years ago. One pities the future civilization that tries to do the same thing to our “long-term storage solutions” ten thousand years from now.
Since you bring up fusion, it could be a very viable solution. There are other similarly sci-fi solutions as well. One need only look at the title of this blog for one. The Casimir Effect is a phenomenon of quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. It’s a great example of zero-point energy, or energy that exist even at absolute zero, in theory. It’s a form of energy that would outlast even the so-called “heat death” of the universe. Not that any of us have to deal with that, anyway.
But back to the matter at hand, the people paying for thirtysomethings to ride the bus are the same people who are paying tuition at the University, or more precisely, the people who are buying parking passes at the University. There really is no such thing as a free ride, which is I suppose the point that I was trying to make. Maybe I would have been more to point to say there is such thing as a free anything. Except maybe software.
I was going to try to summarize this info but I decided it would be easier to copy. The info below is from various articles in The Economist.
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The costs of nuclear power produced by existing plants are likely to be far lower than the costs of newly built plants, because the capital costs of nuclear plants—typically reflecting half to two-thirds the value of the project in present-value terms—are long forgotten. Most of today’s plants were built in an era when central planners or state utility boards had no idea of the true cost of capital. Today’s low interest rates are good for big capital projects like nuclear, but those rates may change sharply in the future. At the same time, gas and oil prices—whose current astronomical levels enhance nuclear’s charms—may well fall.
The other source of uncertainty is the disposal of radioactive waste. That’s what messed up the economics of Britain’s nuclear programme: Britain decided to reprocess its waste, which proved hugely expensive. America, by contrast, just stuck it in swimming pools—literally—at the power plants. The current consensus is that the best solution is geological storage—that is, to bury the waste very deep. The bad news is that nobody is making much progress getting there, or knows how much it will all cost in the end.
President Bush is trying to shoehorn a provision into his energy bill that would give the nuclear industry about $500m in insurance against the risk of regulatory delays, and a further $6 billion or so in subsidies now being considered for new nuclear plants. American utilities want several billion dollars for the engineering and construction costs associated with building the first three or four such plants. They are also hoping for over $500m in subsidies to go through the licensing process, and an extension of the government’s blanket insurance policy against catastrophic accidents.
Liability insurance is a good example of this. The American industry’s official position is that there is no subsidy involved in the Price-Anderson Act, by which Congress limits the civilian nuclear industry’s liability for nuclear catastrophes to less than $10 billion (a small fraction of what a Chernobyl-scale disaster would cost in America). Since there is no subsidy involved, why not let the act lapse when it comes up for renewal next year? Mr Cheney’s response is revealing: “It needs to be renewed…[if not], nobody’s going to invest in nuclear-power plants.”
The emerging combination of hydrogen fuel and fuel-cell engines may go further. Fuel cells are essentially big batteries that combine hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the air to make electricity that can power anything from a laptop to a home or a car. The hydrogen can be made from any primary energy source, be it fossil fuels or wind energy.
The beauty of this combination is that it produces no local emissions, and if the hydrogen is made from renewables or coal with carbon sequestration technology (which captures the carbon emissions from hydrocarbon use and stores them underground), no greenhouse gases either. That is why, says GM’s Mr Burns, “fuel cells will finally take the automobile out of the environmental debate.” And because hydrogen can be made anywhere by anybody, no OPEC would hold sway.
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So we are/will heavily subsidize the nuclea industry, take a relatively small if any pay back in energy pricing and be limited to how much we can be compensated in the event of a catastrophy. If there are survivors. The environment may or may not be better off depending on for one the outcome of disposal which will be a problem for the next 100,000 years. How about taxing emissions? Hydrogen? Wind? Or free mass transportation. Again I say let them ride for free. It might be cheaper than subsidizing the energy industry.
Very useful post. where can i find more articles about this issue?