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Needed: A paradigm flip
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Published: June 17, 2009
A paradigm, per Webster, is a "pattern, example or model." A "paradigm shift" is a profound change in what's expected -- taken to be the norm -- from something well established to something new, different and perhaps unknown.
Paradigm shifts don't usually happen quickly. Horses and draft animals were the sources of land locomotion mankind employed for thousands of years until steam trains, buses and cars shifted the paradigm over several decades. The dawn of the ICE age (Internal Combustion Engines) proceeded much faster than the age of steam.
We are told by media pundits that the oil age will be decades in fading away and that its successors -- battery and hydrogen electric vehicles -- will emerge only slowly. If that proves to be the case it will fly in the face of many factors: global concern about climate change; diminishing confidence in petroleum availability and price stability; and, at a mundane level, the growing cost and hassle of storing cars: parking.
A new but growing urban demographic perceives car ownership as a restrictive ball-and-chain, not the blend of magic carpet, adolescent right of passage, and the material implementation of liberty that post-war generations took driving to be.
For these and a lot of other urban Americans, even in the Bush years, the idea of urban rail streetcars began to appeal. Per Jim Graebner, a streetcar expert and member of APTA, the American Public Transportation Association, the number of US streetcar systems grew from just eight in 1980 to twenty-eight by 2005. Mr. Graebner's circa 2006 forecast saw existing and planned US streetcar systems in the eighty–plus range in the not-too-distant future.
If eighty were envisaged in 2006, I'd venture to forecast a total of something like a hundred within a few years, given the Obama Administration's greater emphasis on Green transportation infrastructure and combating urban sprawl.
Until recently, "streetcar" and "trolley," used in describing at-grade urban rail vehicles (sharing the street with cars and trucks) were synonymous terms. That's no longer so.
In the past year or so, at least five major manufacturers have responded to public objections to overhead electric power supply systems by announcing and building wireless streetcar systems.
These innovations can't properly be called "trolleys," since the word trolley specifically refers to the contact arm on top of the vehicle that draws traction power from the overhead wire or "catenary."
Where stops are fairly close together, some of the new wireless systems draw electric energy at passenger stops to propel the streetcar toward the next stop, storing it in a battery, a flywheel device, an ultracapacitor or some combination of these.
But where longer distances must be covered between stops, a more sustained power source is needed. Hydrogen, converted to electricity onboard by either a fuel cell or an internal combustion engine, is the only carbon- and pollution–free alternative.
To change streetcar power from external to onboard electric is to shift a paradigm that has been in place since the 1880's. Because of the long gestation time a streetcar project requires, there is a grave risk that by the time the early planning and environmental permitting process for an overhead system is complete, the technology may have become obsolete and the millions of early dollars spent on it abandoned as totally sunk cost.
But because the hydrogen streetcar or "hydrolley" has not yet been demonstrated as such (it's not very different technology from hydrogen buses used around the world), many transit operators are squeezed between two very unpleasant options: invest in a proven technology that costs $4-6 million per mile of track and could be outmoded before the shovel hits the dirt, stranding a huge public investment; or risk committing to a much cheaper hydrogen-fuelled wireless hydrolley that is the clear future but which has not been demonstrated, and whose exact price is uncertain.
The third option -- wait and see -- may be the worst of all, leaving congestion, climate, air quality and oil import dependency issues unaddressed indefinitely.
While there is no comfortable choice for individual transit operators, there is a clear way forward for the US: pick an alpha site (Charlotte would be ideal), build and demonstrate one or more hydrolleys and -- if they work -- cut off funding for overhead supply streetcar projects except in special cases where steep grades or other special cases require it.
The longer it takes to prove or disprove the viability of the hydrolley, the more sunk cost the 50-to-60 new U.S. streetcar lines will put at risk. Nationally, it could amount to well over a billion dollars.
This is a time when a paradigm shift with all deliberate speed is a luxury the U.S. can't afford. Instead, we need a paradigm flip.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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