Whole Travel Blog

Recharging electric cars has always been a bit of a pain to get done, but in the Bay Area, it is about to get a lot easier.  The mayors of San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland have plans to spend up to $1 billion to put up a service network to make charging your electric rig a lot more convenient.

Better Place, a Palo Alto company backed by private investors, will be building the system.  According to SFGate.com, “The firm proposes installing thousands of parking-meter-size plugs in homes, lots, garages, and shopping centers for an electric fill-up.  Also planned are battery swapping spots, where a depleted power package can be switched for a fresh one withing minutes.”

The article is not clear as to whether the electricity used at the recharging stations will come from renewable sources.  To read the full article, click here.

In a recent New York Times Article, writer Elisabeth Rosenthal highlights the intruiging bicycle sharing programs available all over Europe.  She claims that in Europe there are “only two kinds of mayors: those who have a bicycle-sharing program and those who want one.”  Paris’s program might be one of the largest as it boasts some 20,000 bicycles.  One of the things that makes the programs so successful is the ease of use by customers.  Not only do the programs inundate the cities with massive amounts of bikes, access to the bikes is easy - Riders can access the bikes at computerized stands by using electronic cards that can deduct the rental fee right from their bank account.

Rosenthal suggests that the programs are not as successful in the US because of “issues like insurance liability, a stronger car culture, longer commutes and a preference for wearing helmets.”  To read the whole New York Times article, please click here.

Photo by: Lourdes Segade for The New York Times

Committed to doing their part to fight global warming and reduce green house gas emissions, airplane manufacturers are vowing to become less oil dependent and transition to a 30% biofuel blend in the next three to five years. Boeing spokesperson Andrew Davis declared that, “the industry has signed up to a pledge of trying to gain carbon neutral growth, which we don’t claim at any point is an easy target to make but we have to have that kind of goal.”

The great news is that the planes won’t have to be rebuilt or altered in any way in order to use biofuels. However, the big challenge lies in fulfilling the huge demand of biofuel that’s needed to get planes green.

According to Boeing’s environmental expert, Darrin Morgan, “fueling the world’s 13,000 commercial planes with soya bean-based fuel, would require setting aside the equivalent of the entire land mass of Europe for soya bean production.”

Via The Guardian.

Snow and pleasant air travel hardly go hand in hand. That is, unless you’re New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido, Japan which, come 2010 will start converting the mounds of annual winter snowfall into air-conditioning for the summer months.

Known for its icy winters where temperatures drop to well below freezing, Hokkaido will begin utilizing the abundance of snow to replace 30% of the airport’s cooling energy needs. This translates into a reduction of 2,100 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

What other natural resources can airports harness to reduce their carbon emissions?

Tired of having to endlessly listen to your neighbors’ cell phone conversations on your daily train ride? C2C, a British train company, might have found the perfect solution. While British train companies already have cabins designated as quiet and cell-phone free, ensuring that riders abide by these rules is costly and nearly impossible. This is where C2C’s new technology comes into play.

Currently in beta and being tested on trains traveling between Essex and London, C2C has created cabins that are technologically unable to receive cell phone signals. The windows in these cabins have been painted with a high-tech coating that blocks wi-fi, radio, and cell phone signals from both entering and leaving the cabin, rendering cell phones useless.

And because only certain cabins have been dedicated as quiet zones and coated with the high-tech film, passengers have the choice between riding in silence or spending time on the phone.

Check out this post on greenUPGRADER.com for an overview of the latest innovations in eco-friendly aviation.

My personal favorite: the flying Eco-Saucer.