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they also think it should be instantly 100% effective in 5 minutes. they seem to forget its taken decades for fossil fuels to get as efficient as they are now even though they are still horrible polluters.

I really enjoy old school engines. The technology of them at any rate. If you go to Youtube you can see a lot of the old hit and miss engines, Heavy oil engines, Kerosene/gasoline hybrids.

But as cool as they are, They are incredibly primitive, and a maintenance nightmare. Today, when we regularly putt 200 300 K miles on our engines without a thought., we might lose sight of the broken wrists and arms, the constant breakdowns, the weight and amount of labor just ot get them to run.

Just for fun, here are a few: Enjoy!

A 1911 Chase touring car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Look at this beauty - a 1912 Cadillac. Superb, but can you see today's folks putting up with that starting sequence? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Here's an 1885 Benz Motorwagon. Not certain if an original or a replica https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Not an automobile, but this is one of my favorites,an old Fairbanks Morse it's just fun to listen to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And you know what? I'd bet my life that the horse and buggy people all had variations on what the fossil fuel fanatics say about alternative energy.

I'll leave with this - The polluted and death filled Horse drawn paradigm in the cities. Certainly more disgusting and grim than the automobile paradigm today, but some folks fought damn hard against th epetrofueld automobile. http://uctc.net/access/30/Acce...

One whole person in an apartment...

Wrong-way [automobile] crashes kill 11 in Florida, California yesterday.

Let's apply your `dangerous machines' yip yap to drivers and see how many minutes it takes the AARP to squash it.

You have no rational basis for your double standard. It's just the tyranny of the majority where pilots are a small constituency. Exactly what one expects from a government dominated welfare state self-inflicting its own decline.

Pulverized horse poop is orders of magnitude worse than anything that can come out of a car.

[citation needed]

You are either an idiot or a troll. Burning gasoline produces large quantities of very fine soot which are a major carcinogen. Also, unburned gasoline comes out of the tailpipe of every gasoline car at startup, and that is much worse than anything which can come out of a horse.

Here is one citation

Here is another

Perhaps you prefer the new york times

Other sources are easy to find

Like it or not, the car was the solution for one of the worst pollution problems in cities.

2. Is it to blindly uphold the law, irrespective of safety?

Please cite one proven example where going faster is in the interest of safety.

Since you asked: http://www.uctc.net/papers/069.pdf

Interstate Highways in the U.S. have rather strict design standards, especially relating to the intended rate of travel. Any and all improvements in the fatality rate on American roads during the dark days of the double-nickel limit can be attributed to factors other than the lower limit. Why? No one obeyed that limit because it was stupid.

In fact, it was worse than stupid. It was dangerous. An artificially low speed limit actually forces the brain to work harder because of the mismatch between expected and actual sensory inputs. In other words, it can be as taxing, if not possibly more so, on the mind to drive too slow than too fast. Unconsciously, you know how long it should take to get from A to B, given nothing but the physical characteristics of the roadway. Deviate too much from that, and reconciling what is with what should be is far less safe than driving in accordance with what the roadway is set up to allow.

Additionally, artificially low limits on superhighways tends to overload other streets, which tend to NOT be designed for long-distance travel. This, too, was an unintended consequence of the NMSL. That, however, is for a different discussion.

By all means, I agree. Nuclear seems to be a large part of the solution, and a most sensible one given current circumstances. I do feel however that perhaps my horse shit comment's meaning was somewhat missed. So here follows an excerpt consisting of the first three paragraphs of "From Horse Power to Horsepower" by Eric Morris:

In 1898, Delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. it was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.
    The horse was no newcomer on the urban scene. But by the late 1800s, the problem of horse pollution had reached unprecedented heights. The growth in the horse population was outstripping even the rapid rise in the number of human city dwellers. American cities were drowning in horse manure as well as other unpleasant byproducts of the era's predominant mode of transportation: urine, flies, congestion, carcasses, and traffic accidents. Widespread cruelty to horses was a form of environmental degradation as well.
    The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.

Full PDF (only 8 pages long) available at http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access 30 - 02 - Horse Power.pdf

I'm convinced a car that costs much more to own and operate than traditional vehicles is going to change the world.

Cars cost more than horses. Cars replaced horses.

You are seeing the world through the proverbial rose tinted glasses and are not accounting for the cost of the infrastructure needed to support horses, i.e. thousands of shovels to clean up their exhaust.

In 1894, the Times of London estimated
that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in
horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded
that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story
windows.

:-(

When the cars are all moving at different speeds, they flow past each other and you get more throughput for the same road.

False. Peak throughput occurs at around 60 mph. So when some vehicles are moving faster or slower than 60 mph, they are reducing throughput, not raising it.

Traffic congestion is almost exclusively caused by people going under the speed limit, in the fast lane, without any sense to yield.

That's partially true. Because maximum capacity occurs at around 60 mph, if you're driving faster or slower than 60 mph, you're contributing to traffic congestion.

Lower speed limits: two birds, one stone.

Yes, lowering the speed limit or at least enforcing existing limits, would reduce fatalities, attract smaller engines, make larger vehicles more fuel-efficient, and optimize traffic flow [pdf]. So I'm counting four birds with one stone.

Another "two birds, one stone" solution is to make it illegal to pass on the right. Then slower traffic would always need to be in the right lane in order to avoid impeding traffic, and that would (1) make it easier for smaller engined cars to come up to speed on freeway onramps, and (2) separate slow traffic from fast traffic.

So how do you think normal driving for truck looks like ? In europe it is highway driving at constant speed, more or less constant load for hundreds miles.

To avoid each person having a different metric, we use standardized drivecycles. The drivecycle that the EU uses to model how people typically drive for vehicle mpg ratings is called the NEDC -- the New European Drive Cycle. It is a combination of urban and highway driving that approximates typical european driving patterns (which, by the way, are lower energy than typical US driving patterns -- hence the US uses FTP75 (city) and US06 (hwy), which are higher energy, and correspondingly leads to lower MPG figures for the same car in the US). You can see the NEDC here.

If you want to talk about pure highway driving, even that is not constant speed. Speed on the highway varies based on traffic density, random factors (passing, being passed, etc), current weather conditions, stops (gas, rest, etc), start and end accel/decel, exits (to surface streets or other highways), and driver randomness. Beyond speed, energy consumption varies based on weather and especially altitude changes. For an example, here are actual measurements taken from a vehicle in the US. Here's a test drive that starts with city and progresses to intra-urban freeway. Your mileage may vary.

(I have my own drive data recordings, but I am not at liberty to disclose them, so I'm linking to publicly available ones)

Highway driving runs an engine much more efficiently than city driving. You're closer to the peak efficiency (although not at it), you brake less, idling is basically eliminated, etc. Now, there's obviously a big downside -- your aero drag is *way* higher, and your rolling drag slightly higher (yes). In non-hybrid vehicles, the upsides outweigh the downsides (sometimes significantly). In hybrid vehicles, the downsides usually outweigh the upsides.

No this is not from wiki. It is from book called "Automobile fuels" (translated)

Right. Which is why I said, "If you had cited ... you would have..." instead of "You cited... you did." Understand? I'm pointing out that different sources give different numbers because there is no single correct number because they're not a single chemical mixture. You've picked one source to latch onto, when there *is no single answer*. Check other sources; you'll see what I mean. Mixtures vary from location to location and even day to day (for example, summer versus winter blends). They even change from year to year, as standards and refineries are always changing. Their energy densities vary, too. But overall, the *current global average* is about 15% denser for diesel than gasoline.

I don't know how many times I need to stress this, but let me do so once more: There Is No Single Fuel Called Gasoline Or A Single Fuel Called Diesel. How about this -- how about I cite a bunch of random sources?

Simetric: 820-950kg/m^3
Alan Harvey, National Institutes of Standards and Technology: 850kg/m^3 typical, but 825-890.
Engineering Toolbox: 810-960kg/m^3
MSDS: 810-880kg/m^3

Gasoline:
MSDS: 710-770 kg/m^3
Simetric: 737kg/m^3
Engineering Toolbox: 680-740kg/m^3

There is a heavy economic price of speed limit, it cripples the throughput of the roads leading to megahours of wasted time of constituents.

That depends on the speed limit. Freeway throughput peaks at 60 mph [pdf]. Speed limits set higher or lower than that are what cripples throughput.

Many cities around the world deploy parking meters in places where there is no lack of parking places as a form of revenue for the local authorities.

Perhaps cities should stop using taxpayer money on parking in the first place. "Free" parking isn't really free, you know. One study found that a parking space at UCLA costs $124 per space per month (in 1994 dollars) in maintenance and amortization. That's $179 in 2009 dollars.

Parking revenue is maximized when parking is priced to maintain 85% occupancy at all times. If there are a lot of available spaces, the price is too high, and the city loses money. If the parking lot is full, the price is too low, and the city loses money.

While this is an insightful joke, it is very interesting that horses were a lot more dirty than the ICE cars that replaced them. Around the turn of the 20th century, horseshit was literally choking our cities. To say nothing about the dead horse carcasses rotting in the streets.

Do the figures you cite include the massive governmental subsidies of highway systems? The Federal Highway Administration alone will spend more than $32 billion in FY 2005. This goes up to $36 billion next year and doesn't include the massive expenditures by state and local governments. That's tax money coming directly out of your pocket and mine.

Believe me, I know. But I don't know whether or not those numbers include those costs. Unfortunately, they're quoted out of context in a class lecture, without complete citation.

However, the fact that they do include external costs implies that they're fairly complete. Also note that highway use has by far the highest proportion of externalized costs; this seems to match reality.

Based on your second link, you'd probably really enjoy the work that Donald Shoup is doing at UCLA. His big thing is parking. Check out some of his articles in Access Magazine. (He's a kick to listen to, also... if you're ever on the West Coast when he's speaking somewhere, check him out!)