your average traveler going through Tel Aviv spends 20-30 minutes in the airport.
This runs contrary to my own experience.
People now spend 2-8 hours on non-holiday weekdays depending on the airport in the US.
So does this.
Where did you get these numbers? I use 1-1/2 to 2 hours as a general rule in the US, and in Israel - which with 10 million passengers is not a very big airport, by the way - recommends that you show up 3 hours ahead of time, and I used every one of the minutes that I had.
But the pedant in me wants to point out the good rail service between DC and NYC. With virtually no security and frequent departures, your total travel time is literally 3 hours plus time to the station.
Sorry, I know that this has absolutely no bearing on your argument.:) Just move your scenario to Chicago - you just happened to pick two cities with a good rail route.
People are not rational, and expecting this to change can only frustrate you.
Society functions just fine, for whatever reason, with tens of thousands of people dying in car accidents each year.
The local economy of New York City nearly collapsed after the 9/11 attacks.
We can talk about why, and how bad people are at math, and how they are like sheep - but none of it matters. People want to feel like they are in control, even if control is largely illusory or (in the case of cars) dangerous. When a rail accident occurs, there are weeks or years of investigations and court cases and redesigns, etc... When a car crashes, people impatiently wait for the tow truck to come and take away the wreckage and the authorities to remove the bodies.
Fighting security won't get you anywhere, and implementing Israeli-style interviews is SOOOOO much slower than a body scanner. Metal detectors weren't finding underwear and shoe bombs, so what exactly do you propose? I will get irritated and then quickly forget the trip through the scanner, but I will remember my trip through Israeli security forever.
Yeah the original iPod used the then-new high-capacity 1.8" form factor. They had a monopoly on the drives for a while - one reason there wasn't any real competition for a while.
I never said that diesels weren't more efficient, and you are right on your reasons. Add to your list a lack of intake restriction (throttle plate). This doesn't make them light or cheap or easy to control their emissions, though.
Here in the US diesel is more expensive than gas, why?
Lots of reasons. - It competes with heating oil. - There is high demand from trucks and trains. - We get lots of crappy Venezuelan oil and the like that needs to be "cracked" whether you make it into gas or diesel, so the refining isn't really any cheaper in many cases. - It is more energy-dense than gasoline, and thus uses up more crude per gallon. - Refineries balance their product mix to maximize profit, not to equalize the price of gas and diesel.
I keep wondering about just having a beefed up starter that can propel the vehicle for a small distance
That's sort of how the Ford/Toyota hybrid systems work, IIRC. The "starter"/motor/generator is put in-line with the regular engine and serves all three functions.
The iPod was the first hard-drive based MP3 player with a pocket-able form factor. Before the iPod, you had a choice of a small flash-based player or a brick player that used a laptop hard drive. The iPod was the first to split the middle size-wise and use the new Toshiba mini drives. It also looked nice, felt solid, and was compelling enough that it sold to many Windows users even though it was initially Mac-only.
5GB doesn't sound like much today, and it was certainly not as much as the Nomad had - but it was a huge improvement over the 128MB and 256MB flash players of it's day. You'd probably chuckle a little at the size of the original iPod if you saw someone using one on the train today, but you'd completely loose it if you saw someone using a Nomad.
I'm presuming you are British? In that case, your gallons are bigger than ours! So 55 MPG in the UK is a hair under 46 in the US. Still very good, just by different standards:)
As an aside, anyone who thinks diesels are dirty, slow or smelly
I never said that:) Well, they are slow compared to an equal-cost gas engine. Spend a couple of grand to fancy it up, and the performance is good. Of course, that same money could be spent on the gas engine...
None of the best selling cars in the US (except the Accord coupe) can do 0-60 in under 8.4 seconds
I don't know where you live, but BMW is a premium brand in the US. People wouldn't bother with BMW if it pushed 10 seconds just to get up to highway speed. As I said, even my lowly Toyota minivan can best the English 3-series. They must be doing this for fuel economy? Also, when you said "top 10", I think you only counted base engines and included the trucks.
I might as well get the vehicle that best accomplishes those two goals while having the least impact on the environment.
the attack vector used by the 9/11 hijackers was foreclosed with something as simple as a locked cockpit door.
You realize that is true only because the hijackers were prevented from bringing anything more substantial than a box cutter on board? If "security theater" were not in place, then the locked cockpit door would not be an impediment.
Look, I don't expect to catch every terrorist. This is about making it harder - not impossible - to bring down or commandeer an airplane. If terrorists are driven to stuffing bomb parts up their asses and getting together inside the terminal to assemble them, well then that is good because it increased the complexity of their plan and reduced the pool of people with the talents and training to pull it off. You've raised the bar, and thus reduced the chances.
Well, I wasn't able to do that, since there is no X1 in the US and the UK website has it available only in diesel. But a person worried about handling wouldn't really be looking at a truck, right? So I pulled up the 3-series on the British website. They offer only one "petrol" engine: the 318i, which gives (a quite horrendous) 9.1 seconds for 0-62MPH. My minivan beats that by a second! But I digress...
Anyway, the diesel that matches just the 0-60 time is the 318d. The cost difference is 2570 pounds, or about US $4100. At $3/gallon, that's a lot of gas! At the stated 37.3 MPG, I could go almost 51k miles on that gas.
But assuming that you are doing it for the environmental benefits, the gasoline engine outputs 146g/km of CO2 vs the diesel's 119g/km - so that's pretty significant. Presuming you keep the car for 200,000 km you'll save 5400kg of carbon from entering the atmosphere. Of course, 3 tonnes of carbon credits can be purchased for about $50, so perhaps buying a diesel won't get you your money's worth there:)
Even so, if I were forced to buy such a slow car, I'd get the diesel. Tiny, rev-happy gasoline engines are not charming.
Diesel-powered vehicles are highly efficient. Why don't I see them in your "Greenest Vehicles" list?
It is still an open question whether diesel engines can be made clean enough at a competitive price to extensively exploit their efficiency advantage in the U.S. market. Most of the diesels on the market, such as Volkswagen's Jetta TDI (turbocharged direct-injection), score "Inferior" in Green Book ratings even though they are more fuel-efficient than their gasoline counterparts. The Jetta 1.9-liter TDI diesel automatic rates 35 MPG in the city and 42 MPG on the highway, for an overall average of 38 MPG. That's about 35 percent better than the 28 MPG average for the Jetta with a 2.0-liter gasoline engine. But the diesel version is certified to a standard that allows it to emit, for every mile driven, more than eight times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NOx) emitted by the gasoline-powered Jetta, which now qualifies as a Tier 2 bin 5 vehicle in the majority of the country.
Automakers are working to clean up the diesel vehicle. For example, Ford is developing a version of the Focus sedan that uses advanced control technologies targeted to meet California's ULEV II standards. It has equipped its laboratory test car with a special NOx clean-up device in which a solution of urea in water is sprayed on the catalyst to selectively reduce NOx from the exhaust stream. The vehicle also has a catalytic, soot-trapping filter to remove fine particles. Widespread use of such systems is still some years away, particularly if a new chemical such as urea needs to be widely distributed along with ultra-clean diesel fuel. Engineers at Ford and other companies trying to slash diesel emissions are making up for lost time, since today's gasoline engines benefit from over three decades of experience with ever-tighter pollution standards.
You aren't rambling; you have a bunch of good points.
Hey, thanks!:)
Yet another advantage is that diesel fuel is relatively stable.
It's also easier to make from biological sources. On the negative side, it gels up in the cold.
The ideal would be a diesel hybrid.
Hybrids already shut off the gasoline engine at idle. Hybrids also already have this immensely heavy and expensive battery pack... adding a diesel engine on top of that would really present a challenge to the engineers who are responsible for the cost and handling of the car! Then again, no one is buying a hybrid for the economics of it.
This is a useless measure for diesels when comparing to gasoline.
Diesel is more energy dense, so even a diesel with exactly the same efficiency as a gasoline engine will get a better MPG figure.
Diesels are more efficient than gasoline engines in general, and they tend to be more durable. The durable is because they are built heavier to withstand the higher pressures, so they tend to be much heavier. Thus you need a bigger engine to attain the same performance.
Now I'm rambling - my point is that it is very hard to compare diesels with gasoline engines on a 1:1 basis. Very few (any?) car companies offer a diesel that compares in performance and handling to their gasoline variant. And the ones that come very close (BMW) charge a huge premium for the diesel version.
No one is "compelling" you to get on an airplane. Further, you are only looking at the rights of the individual who is flying. What about the rights of the people on the ground? Don't they have a right to be protected from your negligent security? We tried the privatized security route and it didn't work.
The most dangerous part of flying is the drive to the airport.
This is a danger with statistics. Per mile, yes - airline travel is much safer. Per trip, no. Per hour, no. So yes, it's safer to fly from New York to Chicago than to drive - but it's not necessarily safer than the drive to the airport.
Tens of thousands of people die on the roadways every year whereas the 9/11 hijackers managed to kill 3,000 people.
I say this all the time, and you are absolutely right. We pay a terrible price for our car culture. It dwarfs even our war losses.
That said, it is pretty clear to me that our society CAN and DOES function with thousands dying in accidental car wrecks. Our society CAN and DOES function with hundreds of war dead and thousands wounded. It CANNOT function with random skyscrapers falling. Just that one incident devastated the economy of lower Manhattan, with companies moving out and people afraid to go to work in high rises.
I'm not a sociologist so I don't know why, and I wish this weren't the case but there you are. Compared to auto deaths, yup, the loss was mild - but it had a very disruptive effect on our society and I'd rather not repeat that.
Now, mind telling me why I should have to let some TSA employee feel me up or look at a grayscale image of my penis before I can board the aircraft?
Because you live in a democracy and that is what the majority has decreed. Sorry, but now you know how minorities feel. Want to hear my rant about preference based voting?:)
Even if they have guns, the hijackers are still outnumbered a hundred to one
That's not true. 9/11 was a lightly-traveled weekday, and they deliberately picked flights with only 30 or so passengers. 5 hijackers were only outnumbered perhaps 5 or 6 to one. An armed person could probably take 5 or 6 people.
kindly find some figures
I'm not going to get into some statistics war. In any event, whose case would it prove? Does the fact that the Israelis have zero hijackings mean that they don't need all of their security? Or does it mean that their security works, if only as a deterrent?
I'm approaching this very pragmatically. People, for whatever reason, get really worked up about air safety. Why fight that? Instead, try to do a good job and try to balance effectiveness and safety.
All I was saying is that a TSA agent seeing a nude black-and-white photo of me is preferable to what I had to go through in Israel.
We've been living with terrorism for a long time, but something about this specific form of terrorism short circuits people's brains and they can't seem to handle it with the same amount of perspective (what a funny thing to write) as they do and have done with other forms of terrorism.
I don't think that's true - it's just that air travel affects the politically empowered. Typical air travelers are pretty well-off and have a lot of pull in society. You can bet that the KKK would have had to stare down the gun of the US army if blacks ran the place.
No one got this hysterical over Oklahoma City or the olympic games or the Unabomber or even the attack on the WTC in the early '90s.
Well, Oklahoma was a one time, very local event, perpetrated by a whacko. Same with the Olympic bomber. The Unabomber was not local, but the subset of the country affected was vanishingly small, no matter how influential they might be. Also, these guys were all lone actors. It's much more frightening when there is a well-financed, organized suicide militia coming at you.
The first WTC bombing seemed like a NYC local thing, but people did react quite severely - they simply banned trucks from parking garages altogether. No option of screening even - just no parking at all for trucks.
Finally, there is the issue of death toll. 9/11 was on par with Pearl Harbor - and even a single widebody jet kills several hundred. Oklahoma City - the single worst terrorist attack in the history of the US until 9/11 - only killed about 150+, which is on par the payload of the smallish 737. So any time an airliner comes down, it's on the same magnitude as the 2nd worst terror attack in US history.
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Oh, I'm not a Paulian gold-standard type.
I was TRYING to make a joke about how everyone seems to be buying gold, so the change in the dollar value would affect their savings...
But I failed :)
What if your "troops" are buying gold?
The capitalist pig probably also drives a non-opensource car.
your average traveler going through Tel Aviv spends 20-30 minutes in the airport.
This runs contrary to my own experience.
People now spend 2-8 hours on non-holiday weekdays depending on the airport in the US.
So does this.
Where did you get these numbers? I use 1-1/2 to 2 hours as a general rule in the US, and in Israel - which with 10 million passengers is not a very big airport, by the way - recommends that you show up 3 hours ahead of time, and I used every one of the minutes that I had.
Good points.
But the pedant in me wants to point out the good rail service between DC and NYC. With virtually no security and frequent departures, your total travel time is literally 3 hours plus time to the station.
Sorry, I know that this has absolutely no bearing on your argument. :) Just move your scenario to Chicago - you just happened to pick two cities with a good rail route.
People are not rational, and expecting this to change can only frustrate you.
Society functions just fine, for whatever reason, with tens of thousands of people dying in car accidents each year.
The local economy of New York City nearly collapsed after the 9/11 attacks.
We can talk about why, and how bad people are at math, and how they are like sheep - but none of it matters. People want to feel like they are in control, even if control is largely illusory or (in the case of cars) dangerous. When a rail accident occurs, there are weeks or years of investigations and court cases and redesigns, etc... When a car crashes, people impatiently wait for the tow truck to come and take away the wreckage and the authorities to remove the bodies.
Fighting security won't get you anywhere, and implementing Israeli-style interviews is SOOOOO much slower than a body scanner. Metal detectors weren't finding underwear and shoe bombs, so what exactly do you propose? I will get irritated and then quickly forget the trip through the scanner, but I will remember my trip through Israeli security forever.
Yeah the original iPod used the then-new high-capacity 1.8" form factor. They had a monopoly on the drives for a while - one reason there wasn't any real competition for a while.
Tiny, rev-happy gasoline engines are a peach!
I actually managed just fine with my old '99 Saturn SC1 with a manual "gearbox" and a smoking 99 HP. It got nearly 40MPG, too!
This is an outdated FAQ.
I just googled their site and you are right, the information is obsolete. It looks like they control NOx emissions with a urea solution.
Sounds expensive (the equipment, not the liquid) :)
I never said that diesels weren't more efficient, and you are right on your reasons. Add to your list a lack of intake restriction (throttle plate). This doesn't make them light or cheap or easy to control their emissions, though.
Here in the US diesel is more expensive than gas, why?
Lots of reasons.
- It competes with heating oil.
- There is high demand from trucks and trains.
- We get lots of crappy Venezuelan oil and the like that needs to be "cracked" whether you make it into gas or diesel, so the refining isn't really any cheaper in many cases.
- It is more energy-dense than gasoline, and thus uses up more crude per gallon.
- Refineries balance their product mix to maximize profit, not to equalize the price of gas and diesel.
I keep wondering about just having a beefed up starter that can propel the vehicle for a small distance
That's sort of how the Ford/Toyota hybrid systems work, IIRC. The "starter"/motor/generator is put in-line with the regular engine and serves all three functions.
Creative Muvo2 was out before the first microdrive iPod,
A quick Google seems to show that the iPod came out in 2001 and the Muvo2 in 2004.
The iPod was the first hard-drive based MP3 player with a pocket-able form factor. Before the iPod, you had a choice of a small flash-based player or a brick player that used a laptop hard drive. The iPod was the first to split the middle size-wise and use the new Toshiba mini drives. It also looked nice, felt solid, and was compelling enough that it sold to many Windows users even though it was initially Mac-only.
5GB doesn't sound like much today, and it was certainly not as much as the Nomad had - but it was a huge improvement over the 128MB and 256MB flash players of it's day. You'd probably chuckle a little at the size of the original iPod if you saw someone using one on the train today, but you'd completely loose it if you saw someone using a Nomad.
There's nothing wrong with writing for your audience. If you see ft/ns in "Nature", feel free to flame.
t gets over 50mpg with no problem whatsoever
I'm presuming you are British? In that case, your gallons are bigger than ours! So 55 MPG in the UK is a hair under 46 in the US. Still very good, just by different standards :)
As an aside, anyone who thinks diesels are dirty, slow or smelly
I never said that :) Well, they are slow compared to an equal-cost gas engine. Spend a couple of grand to fancy it up, and the performance is good. Of course, that same money could be spent on the gas engine...
None of the best selling cars in the US (except the Accord coupe) can do 0-60 in under 8.4 seconds
I don't know where you live, but BMW is a premium brand in the US. People wouldn't bother with BMW if it pushed 10 seconds just to get up to highway speed. As I said, even my lowly Toyota minivan can best the English 3-series. They must be doing this for fuel economy? Also, when you said "top 10", I think you only counted base engines and included the trucks.
I might as well get the vehicle that best accomplishes those two goals while having the least impact on the environment.
I certainly can't fault you for that :)
the attack vector used by the 9/11 hijackers was foreclosed with something as simple as a locked cockpit door.
You realize that is true only because the hijackers were prevented from bringing anything more substantial than a box cutter on board? If "security theater" were not in place, then the locked cockpit door would not be an impediment.
Look, I don't expect to catch every terrorist. This is about making it harder - not impossible - to bring down or commandeer an airplane. If terrorists are driven to stuffing bomb parts up their asses and getting together inside the terminal to assemble them, well then that is good because it increased the complexity of their plan and reduced the pool of people with the talents and training to pull it off. You've raised the bar, and thus reduced the chances.
if you look at something like the X1
Well, I wasn't able to do that, since there is no X1 in the US and the UK website has it available only in diesel. But a person worried about handling wouldn't really be looking at a truck, right? So I pulled up the 3-series on the British website. They offer only one "petrol" engine: the 318i, which gives (a quite horrendous) 9.1 seconds for 0-62MPH. My minivan beats that by a second! But I digress...
Anyway, the diesel that matches just the 0-60 time is the 318d. The cost difference is 2570 pounds, or about US $4100. At $3/gallon, that's a lot of gas! At the stated 37.3 MPG, I could go almost 51k miles on that gas.
But assuming that you are doing it for the environmental benefits, the gasoline engine outputs 146g/km of CO2 vs the diesel's 119g/km - so that's pretty significant. Presuming you keep the car for 200,000 km you'll save 5400kg of carbon from entering the atmosphere. Of course, 3 tonnes of carbon credits can be purchased for about $50, so perhaps buying a diesel won't get you your money's worth there :)
Even so, if I were forced to buy such a slow car, I'd get the diesel. Tiny, rev-happy gasoline engines are not charming.
So you can feel confident that your model year 2009 or 10 TDI is one of the cleanest cars on the road.
I thought they had issues with NOx emissions?
In fact, when I look on the ACEEE web site, it says:
You aren't rambling; you have a bunch of good points.
Hey, thanks! :)
Yet another advantage is that diesel fuel is relatively stable.
It's also easier to make from biological sources. On the negative side, it gels up in the cold.
The ideal would be a diesel hybrid.
Hybrids already shut off the gasoline engine at idle. Hybrids also already have this immensely heavy and expensive battery pack... adding a diesel engine on top of that would really present a challenge to the engineers who are responsible for the cost and handling of the car! Then again, no one is buying a hybrid for the economics of it.
MPG
This is a useless measure for diesels when comparing to gasoline.
Diesel is more energy dense, so even a diesel with exactly the same efficiency as a gasoline engine will get a better MPG figure.
Diesels are more efficient than gasoline engines in general, and they tend to be more durable. The durable is because they are built heavier to withstand the higher pressures, so they tend to be much heavier. Thus you need a bigger engine to attain the same performance.
Now I'm rambling - my point is that it is very hard to compare diesels with gasoline engines on a 1:1 basis. Very few (any?) car companies offer a diesel that compares in performance and handling to their gasoline variant. And the ones that come very close (BMW) charge a huge premium for the diesel version.
By the way, here are the air safety statistics.
Being compelled
No one is "compelling" you to get on an airplane. Further, you are only looking at the rights of the individual who is flying. What about the rights of the people on the ground? Don't they have a right to be protected from your negligent security? We tried the privatized security route and it didn't work.
The most dangerous part of flying is the drive to the airport.
This is a danger with statistics. Per mile, yes - airline travel is much safer. Per trip, no. Per hour, no. So yes, it's safer to fly from New York to Chicago than to drive - but it's not necessarily safer than the drive to the airport.
Tens of thousands of people die on the roadways every year whereas the 9/11 hijackers managed to kill 3,000 people.
I say this all the time, and you are absolutely right. We pay a terrible price for our car culture. It dwarfs even our war losses.
That said, it is pretty clear to me that our society CAN and DOES function with thousands dying in accidental car wrecks. Our society CAN and DOES function with hundreds of war dead and thousands wounded. It CANNOT function with random skyscrapers falling. Just that one incident devastated the economy of lower Manhattan, with companies moving out and people afraid to go to work in high rises.
I'm not a sociologist so I don't know why, and I wish this weren't the case but there you are. Compared to auto deaths, yup, the loss was mild - but it had a very disruptive effect on our society and I'd rather not repeat that.
Now, mind telling me why I should have to let some TSA employee feel me up or look at a grayscale image of my penis before I can board the aircraft?
Because you live in a democracy and that is what the majority has decreed. Sorry, but now you know how minorities feel. Want to hear my rant about preference based voting? :)
Even if they have guns, the hijackers are still outnumbered a hundred to one
That's not true. 9/11 was a lightly-traveled weekday, and they deliberately picked flights with only 30 or so passengers. 5 hijackers were only outnumbered perhaps 5 or 6 to one. An armed person could probably take 5 or 6 people.
kindly find some figures
I'm not going to get into some statistics war. In any event, whose case would it prove? Does the fact that the Israelis have zero hijackings mean that they don't need all of their security? Or does it mean that their security works, if only as a deterrent?
I'm approaching this very pragmatically. People, for whatever reason, get really worked up about air safety. Why fight that? Instead, try to do a good job and try to balance effectiveness and safety.
All I was saying is that a TSA agent seeing a nude black-and-white photo of me is preferable to what I had to go through in Israel.
We've been living with terrorism for a long time, but something about this specific form of terrorism short circuits people's brains and they can't seem to handle it with the same amount of perspective (what a funny thing to write) as they do and have done with other forms of terrorism.
I don't think that's true - it's just that air travel affects the politically empowered. Typical air travelers are pretty well-off and have a lot of pull in society. You can bet that the KKK would have had to stare down the gun of the US army if blacks ran the place.
No one got this hysterical over Oklahoma City or the olympic games or the Unabomber or even the attack on the WTC in the early '90s.
Well, Oklahoma was a one time, very local event, perpetrated by a whacko. Same with the Olympic bomber. The Unabomber was not local, but the subset of the country affected was vanishingly small, no matter how influential they might be. Also, these guys were all lone actors. It's much more frightening when there is a well-financed, organized suicide militia coming at you.
The first WTC bombing seemed like a NYC local thing, but people did react quite severely - they simply banned trucks from parking garages altogether. No option of screening even - just no parking at all for trucks.
Finally, there is the issue of death toll. 9/11 was on par with Pearl Harbor - and even a single widebody jet kills several hundred. Oklahoma City - the single worst terrorist attack in the history of the US until 9/11 - only killed about 150+, which is on par the payload of the smallish 737. So any time an airliner comes down, it's on the same magnitude as the 2nd worst terror attack in US history.