[URBAN NOTE] "The Mismatch Between Population and Mass Transit In the San Francisco Bay Area"

[rfmcdpei]

Geocurrents' Martin Lewis has a post up that takes a look at population density in the San Francisco Bay Area and its intersections with mass transit. I thought it worthwhile to highlight it given the critical importance of population density in debates on transit in the Greater Toronto Area.

A sound urban system, environmentalists now argue, is

Comments

[mmcirvin]

I really like the Do The Math blog's summary of the energy situation:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/

There aren't any really magically good alternatives to fossil fuels, though there are several OK ones. I think thorium-cycle breeder reactors are probably a great possibility for the very long term. But that's a technology that is still in its infancy and will take a lot of time and capital to ramp up. Same with hydrogen cars, electric cars, etc.

The big surprise to me, given my perceptions from the 1970s and 1980s, is that large-scale solar power is actually looking more doable than many of the other options. It has one big problem, which is that it's too intermittent for baseload grid power without some kind of buffering technology, which is a whole matrix of imperfect alternatives in itself. (On the other hand, if what you want is to generate hydrogen to power cars, that is a buffer in itself; intermittency isn't a problem!)

I suspect that the big niche for algae-based or cellulosic biofuels is going to be aviation, because it's hard to get that kind of energy density for a lightweight power plant any other way.

I guess my personal attitude is that there's little reason to reject any plausible approach outright; we may need new energy sources and changes in land use and more efficient devices, etc. Personally, I'm fond of dense development with well-planned mass transit and I don't find that situation unpleasant; currently, in North America, there's actually an undersupply of such places to live relative to demand. So I don't much worry that people are going to have to be tyrannically forced to live that way.