Spirit in Action
Future Movement - The Evolution of Transportation
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along For Spirit in Action, we try to find inspirational voices all over the place. Some of them are authors with cutting-edge ideas Or maybe founders of organizations changing the world. But some of the most hopeful and inspirational for me personally Are the people I meet face-to-face right in my own community People like biking advocate Jeremy Graggart Or environmental scientist and teacher, Chris McPierce And today we have another quiet and powerful presence, Steve Turwilliger. Steve retired a few years ago from the University of Wisconsin-O-Claire Where he was the chair of the Art and Design Department And since then, he and his wife Ellen have sped up the environmental transformation of their home Including installing geothermal heating, photovoltaic solar panels, rain barrels to capture water, and much more. Plus, Steve has delved deep into the possibilities, pros and cons Of transportation alternatives for our country and for its future. And he shared the analysis in several venues Including as part of the Sustainability Study Group we were both in this past spring. His passion is profound, his analysis deep, and the results are exciting. And I joined Steve Turwilliger today in the living room of Steve and Ellen's home. Steve, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. No, Mark, thanks for asking me to have this conversation with you. I really enjoyed the presentation you did this past spring About alternative choices for transportation. Your best vision at the moment of where our transportation system might be going. You were part at that time of the Sustainability Study Group that we had. And this fall, you're connected with the Transition Town Study Group we're doing. When did you get involved with environmentalism? How big a part of your history of your life has that been? Well, it depends on how far back you want to go, I guess. And I grew up on a farm. So, you know, in a sense, you could say that's a lot closer to the production of food and the earth and those sorts of things. So I think, although we wouldn't have characterized environmentalism at that time, it's the idea of growing up as a farm kid. I think that's probably really where it started. And when did you explicitly recognize yourself as environmentally motivated, environmentally? I mean, your house that we're sitting in right now, you've got solar panels over there. You've got water barrels, gear, you've got geothermal. Is that something that came upon you in later years? Or has that been something you've been carrying for a few decades? I would say it's been around for some time. I think the fact of finishing my teaching work at the University allowed me a lot more time to work on things I'd be concerned with. I think certainly in the 60s, that was very conscious of environmental concerns. My life has always been one of, at a certain point, you can talk about things too much and at some point you have to do something. So I think a lot of the things we've done recently have been maybe kind of a doing part of that. And your motivation for the study that you did about transportation? I mean, you taught at the University, but that was in the art department. You weren't in the geopolitical arena at the University. When did your interest in this, the future of transportation come about? Well, again, I think I would have to go back quite a ways on that. As a kid, we always designed things. I think probably that was one of my... Maybe an underlying obsession of mine is design things. I like to figure things out. Big things work the best that they can. We worked on adolescent concepts of transportation. When we were younger, that usually was pretty auto-centric, but we dreamed about the future and kind of what that would look like. So it's been around for some time. In terms of your ecological footprint on the earth, how do you think about the various aspects of it? You know, your food, your transportation, your house. Where do you see yourself as having achieved some lessening of your impact? And what areas do you see as left to be worked on? Everything can't be done at once. You know, we aren't going to leap from the present to the future. I think everything, like this group that we're working with this fall, everything really needs to take place as a transition. So I think your term lessening is a good one. Well, it could start with the house, since you mentioned that. We thought about, well, let's try and see if we can go to carbon neutral more or less on the house. So we wanted to take out all combustible fuels. We had a gas, forced air gas furnace, and of course we were hooked to the grid for electricity. So the first thing we did, we went on the wind source program through Excel, which is a way you can pay, it's actually about over 10%. There's an additional charge. We paid 13 cents a kilowatt hour versus 11 cents from Excel for electricity that we used from them. But then they used that offset production of wind energy in western Minnesota. So that was one thing we did immediately when that program became available. We put in the solar PV system almost two years ago now, and that allowed us to take out the gas water heater. We also put in our geothermal, our ground heat loop heating system, and that allowed us to take out the gas furnace. And that really puzzled Excel as to why we wanted that. So we moved the gas water heater and the gas meter itself. We discovered we were paying $10 or $12 a month just to have that meter there. When we kept getting that after we took everything out, we said, we want the meter out. And they said, well, why? I said, because we don't use any gas. And they said, what? They kind of reaction like, why don't you? Well, I got the impression that it was applied. That's stupid. Because gas costs less than electricity, don't you know? That's the house thing. We did a lot of work on it. We did the energy audit. Did quite a lot of caulking and sealing to reduce energy use in the house. We shut off parts of the house in the winter. It's kind of like Dr. Zhivago. I always remember that scene where they escaped to Siberia in the winter house and it's all snow and ice inside. That was a riveting image from a popular film that I just remembered today. It's graphic in my mind. So we have kind of a summer in a winter house. We closed down the unused sections to help heat less space. I'm going around right now. I just did an experiment with a second house envelope where we'll put a double wall on the house to further reduce heating needs in the winter. Automobile, we went from driving kind of whenever we felt like it to really organizing our trips. So we basically right now don't drive for just strictly for pleasure. It's always to go somewhere to do something and combining trips that greatly reduced the amount of fuel we're using in the car. So that was a really big one. I would say at least 20 or 30 percent right there. We obtained a hybrid car, a Prius, and that uses about half or less than half. The gas of Prius car. You got rid of your Hummer? Yeah, right. We had kind of a normal sedan before that, but in your averaging year round. Maybe 22 miles per gallon, maybe a little more than that in town. It's quite a bit less actually. So now we're averaging year round somewhere in the upper 40s. So it's at least double the efficiency. So that's another one. We actually produce a lot of our own food. Surprisingly, quite a lot of it. So we've done that too, but we enjoy the gardening. So that's kind of a win-win right there. You've already mentioned, Steve, that your work on this went up a lot, as soon as you retired from teaching at the university, that you had the time to put into putting panels up on roofs or doing the research sometimes for this kind of thing. And one of the things that you researched is transportation. You did this presentation this past spring to our sustainability group. So what was the impetus for why we have to do something about transportation? Why is that a big deal? Simplifying things somewhat, but we have the sort of dual concerns of fossil fuel depletion and climate change, which are events which will profoundly affect all of our lives. So if you don't plan for it, do something about it, just let things happen, then you're looking at an unhappy conclusion to those situations. So it's everyone's responsibility to work towards solutions, have kind of a family history of designers and engineers, architects, college professors. So I kind of discovered that along the way that I'm sort of falling into old family habits. And I just like to design things. So if you've got a problem, perceive a problem, say, "Okay, what's the solution?" and just dive into it. And it's a lot of fun. Transportation is somewhere between 230% of our energy budget in the U.S. I like to see things done well. I like to see people advantaged. I think transportation, again, I guess I would go back to earlier in sort of childhood and we were always interested in transportation, various forms of it. My first two words were choo-choo. So -- and I used to dream extensively of trains in particular, and model railroad setups. I mean, I would have these fantastic and wonderful dreams about the penultimate model railroad setup, which, you know, ran everywhere through our house. And you'd dig down into the nap of the rug and find the rails, that kind of thing. So I guess that's kind of what it started. My mother remembers finding me a sleep at the window watching a train go by. We had a train track, which went across one corner of our farm. And when I'd hear it, I would get out of bed and go over the window to watch it and sometimes fall asleep there. So can I guess that trains have some part to play in your vision of transportation for the future for the U.S.? I would say not trains specifically, but something that it uses the best parts of trains, yes. I think when you look at all transportation forms and part of the study and the way I go about looking at things is I always very systematically look at pros and cons for things. So what are some of those alternatives that you looked at that you do as part of your presentation? What are some choices that we could look at? Well, I think immediately what you look at is what do we have and how can we make that work better? And I think that's part of what I would think of as a transition once again. I don't believe in sudden changes as a rule of thumb. I mean, I think sometimes those things just happen. But I think if you're looking to make a change, you want to have a human transition, something that really works for people. You don't just say, "Hey, you got to quit that. Give that to me. We're going to tear that up and throw that away." And here's what you got now. I like it. You know, that's totally the wrong approach. I know a lot of people who think that way and work that way. And I think that's one of the quickest ways to make something ineffective and not happen. Back to your original question. I would see that we're going to need to use some of our existing infrastructure. We're going to need to wear it out because we've built this huge elaborate system. And I think that within that we're going to be looking at basically multiple occupancy taxis, which are called for on demand. I think that's the only thing I can see immediately that's going to solve that point-to-point transportation need that the automobile now provides us with. But it will do it at a fraction of the cost that we now have invested in actually all owning our own automobiles. It would be a community transport system. That end buses, of course, for an intermediate sort of between cities. I don't think they work as well in cities. And I think eventually we'll see the buses probably leaving the cities to going further out and basically becoming our between-city transport system. Why doesn't everybody just go to driving a hybrid? Why isn't that the solution? Or why don't we just all go to bicycling everywhere, like New York City where they have those bikes that you can rent? I think one of the things I did along the way here, which was very interesting to me, is I rode my bike to work every day for about three years. And I just didn't drive. Unless I had to carry a piece of equipment, which happened once in a great while. Usually I'd forget where I'd parked my car and get a parking ticket. Because I rode my bike, I rode it all seasons. I rode it on the ice in the winter. I rode it 20 below zero. I always rode the bike. I was quite happy doing that. It worked. But I think practically speaking, most people are not going to be able to do that. Winter seasons, those are problems. But I think that what you look at is not a single solution you're to. I think there's multiple things that you're going to walk, bicycles, you know, as much as you can, as much as people are able. I think that really takes some of the pressure off in transportation. Let's say I think those things are all part of a transition. And some of them I think the walking in bicycles are part of a solution which really exists right now. We've got it. We'll do more of it. We'll be healthier because of it. It can't provide all of the things, but it's certainly a very important part of the mix. Hybrids, I think, are excellent for transitions. And I would certainly encourage people to consider that if you're looking at a new car. You know, a Prius, or a Chevy Volt, or one of the other many other hybrids that are now in the market, instead of the battery electrics. I think the difficulty is sometimes people think, well, I bought a Prius, so I solved that problem. Oh, no. You gave us more time to solve the problem, but you didn't solve it. I think it's a really good thing. I would certainly advocate that. So far, Steve, you haven't said anything that's revolutionary, but I had the feeling when I watched your presentation that you looked quite a ways down the different avenues where people would have advocated. Let's all just drive Priuses or whatever, right? You looked down those avenues and said, this doesn't lead to a solution that's effective enough that will get us really where we want to go. Could you talk about some of the avenues that it is not going to be profitable to go down, and why that is? You had the very shortly on the Nordenspiritradio.org website. You've promised Steve to give me the links that I can point people to some things about, you know, how you put the PV electric on your house or some of the background information, the charts and graphs about the transportation issue. Could you talk about some of the things that you considered as possibilities for a future transportation that you've ruled out because of your research? Well, I think once again, I look at as a transforming of how things work mechanically, the mechanical systems themselves. And you look at using, you know, the best aspects of what we now have. And my thoughts as to what a future transport system might look like. I'm not relying upon G whiz someday or when the technology discovers how to. I'm looking at things that actually exist and function right now. And how can we use known technologies to devise a system that will work quite well? We have all of these things. But you look at, for instance, trains, which, of course, have been kind of a symbolic thing in my life since I was very little. You look at the good aspects of trains, their tracked system. They can be fully automated, and these are two wonderful advantages for efficiency and transportation. They have some disadvantages in the fact that they're very large. They have a lot of weight relative to their passenger load. They run along the ground, which is a great disadvantage weather-wise. So what you look at is saying, "Let's have a tracked vehicle." But one which isn't massive like a train or something that's very lightweight. So let's take the tracks off the ground, so you put those up in the air. How would that work? Well, actually, the world's, I believe it's the world's oldest existing mechanical transport system, which was designed in the 1800s, still operating today very busily in Wupertal, Germany. It's an overhead monorail system. It moves. Incredible numbers of people every day, it's still running. So you look at an overhead rail rather than something on the ground, protected from weather, as an example. Looking at, rather than massive vehicles, you look at what's the minimum vehicle size and weight that you could have running on an overhead rail system. You look at system designs. There's one which I've looked at with quite a bit of interest called Skytran. It's developed by an engineer, former engineer, aerospace engineer in San Diego. You're looking at, again, extremely lightweight. Anywhere from a single to perhaps to a multiple occupant vehicle, you wouldn't own these. You would simply call for them with your cell phone or some sort of electronic device. And you would get on and you would go from wherever you are to where you want to go, non-stop. Because this particular system doesn't have intersections. The switching is all automated, it's all computer run. You have low vehicle weight, absolutely on demand scheduling, very low mass vehicle. It's all electric. It's run by electric renewable energy, very low power usage. It's relatively fast, relatively automobile certainly, probably two to five times faster than an automobile. So, I mean, this is one of those things that's out there. The technology has all existed. It's all been tested. It all works. So this is something that could just be built today. So you say it could be built. Has there been a pilot project? Is there a place where someone's used it so they actually know that it'll work? Because there's a lot of things that look pretty good on paper when they get put into the physical form you find. Oh. Yes, I think it's a good point. Because as I look at this and study it, I try to look at the full picture once again, all of the parameters. And not just the vehicle. People, I oftentimes keep thinking, "Oh, we're going to save the car. We're going to make it work into the future." And they look only at something like fuel mileage. Or running it on batteries. But they don't look at the whole system. They don't look at the roads that it has to run on. They don't look at the way it interacts with people in a community. So you've got to look at the whole picture. The Skytran system, if you go to their website, it's Skytran.net, I believe. You can go and look at this particular system and what they're trying to do. There have been pilot projects suggested, one in Israel and Tel Aviv. Another one in Vancouver, British Columbia, I believe. You do face difficulties when you try to come up with something new. You know you are facing industry pressures and established ways of doing things in interest groups. You have virtually every form of transportation has its emotional interest group, I would call it. People who are just given to that mode of transportation as somehow given by a higher power and one doesn't question it. And it's obviously better than what all sorts of those groups feel the same way about their own group. It's obviously better than theirs. So how is it that Skytran is the thing that you centered on that's going to be a part of the final thing? What alternatives are out there that people are touting that they're arguing in favor of that you said no, this won't work for this reason. How do we separate the winners from the losers in terms of what's good for the future? And which ones did you discount? Well, I wouldn't say that I've centered on this one as the solution. I'm looking at it as a very interesting possibility. And I think it's like anything you have to build it, make it work, get the bugs out of it and see if it really does work. I think that the proof is always in the pudding. Again, you've asked a big question here, Mark. It's a little bit hard to put in a capsule because you look at all the aspects of what a transport system needs. And I'm going to refer to something people can't see, it's the writings on this. And I have charts at the end with all of the parameters of transport and from fuel efficiency to occupant efficiency to infrastructure durability to sustainable materials use. And what the potentials in the strengths and drawbacks are of all these various systems. And of course, I start with the ones that exist. Automobile, train, plane, ship to some extent, although I haven't looked into that one quite as much, you know, bus, taxi. And then I analyze them all in terms of the aspects of what a transportation system needs to provide us. And then I give them a score and when you come down to it, you say, okay, here is what a good system should be providing us with. And which systems, maybe that are blue sky systems, really supply that. You can look at all kinds of personal rapid transit systems, you know, personal rapid transit vehicles and modifications of the car, little electric cars, things on tracks of various sorts. Most of them suggested running on the ground, some of them elevating a two rail system above ground. But each time you can say, okay, well, a two rail system has these disadvantages compared to a one rail system. You know, a two rail system, for instance, the vehicles can always come off the rails and have an accident. A one rail system actually captures the wheel on the rail. So the idea of derailment is lessened, it's greatly lessened, sort of profoundly lessened. It also has a single rails of a dual rail, so it's more compact in that sense. And there are all these things that you weigh, pros and cons in any of these proposed new systems. You look at energy use, you look at, in particular, one thing that I like to describe as the 19th century ocean liner notion of travel, where you have a massive luxury device, which makes an occasional trip between two large population centers. The device is very large, it's very complex, it moves a great amount of people very slowly between two points. And I look at this as kind of a 19th century concept of transport, that people come together to go on to the ocean liner, to have this grand transport experience between two continents. And I think what we're looking at in terms of current times is something that you would describe much more as like the internet. The automobile was that first attempt to kind of provide ourselves with "internet style transport". You could walk to your car, which is part right next to your house or in your house, getting the car and go from there non-stop to wherever you want to go and get out and it's done. Do it on demand, spur the moment for any reason. And I think that interest is a very important one, and I think that one that you do have to address in a future transport system, because I don't think it's one that you're going to be able to say, "Okay, we're all going to get on the ocean liner, and we're all going to get on the Orient Express. We're all going to get on our horses and ride to Chicago to get on the Orient Express to ride to, you know, I'm speaking figuratively here, to San Francisco." And I think that in looking at what I see as an effective transport device, it needs to address that issue, because that's a human obsession. I think one that's involved in time. I don't think it's an unreasonable one, usually. Sometimes it is. I want to remind you that you're listening to Spirit and Action. I'm your host. My name's Mark Helps-Meet, and this is a Northern Spirit Radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org. We've got more than eight years of programs for your free listening and download. We also have a place where you can find links. So, for instance, for Steve Twiliger, who is our guest here today, talking about the future of transportation, you'll find a link to some of his knowledge experience graphs. You'll find a lot of the information behind what we're talking about today. That'll be up here in the future, so keep visiting the interview here with Steve Twiliger to find that. I want to also remind you that you can post comments on these programs. On our website, we like to hear what you're thinking, your feedback, your input. Perhaps you know the solution for transportation that Steve didn't know about, and we'd be happy to pass the information back and forth. Conversation that's two-way is the best, which is one of the reasons we do Spirit and Action. I also want to remind you that we depend upon your support. So, please, you can visit on our website, you can click on the donate button, you can send us a check. Above and beyond that, I want to remind you to support your local community radio station. It's such a valuable alternative. We have a limited view on the news and music of the times because of the portals, which we normally see things through. Community radio station gives you options, you get nowhere else. So, please, with your time, energy, your money, please do support your local community radio station, bringing you this program. It is Spirit and Action. My guest is Steve Twiliger, retired chair of the Art and Design department here at University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire. Again, in the future, you'll find a link connecting you to Steve's research. So, I'm very pleased to have Steve here today to share in this conversation and how we're going to learn about this. One of the points that Mark just made in his announcement is really important. Everything is a two-way conversation. Certainly, when I look at things, I have a great appetite for finding out new things and ideas and things that people are working with. One of the things I actually have worked with on my transportation research is, to me, a really wonderful thing. It's all of the kinds of alternate transportation systems that have been proposed and even built over the years. It's just fascinating. To me, that's really interesting. And I've looked at so many of these, and I didn't leave it as part of my presentation because you have to cut something out. I originally had some of those in there because some are really startling. Some are quite amusing. The more people you have working on it, generally speaking, as long as you get somewhere the better because you are bringing in ideas. And that's why I spend a lot of time actually looking at the various interest groups, like people who are romantically interested in the car, that the car is forever, or people who are romantically interested in the era of the train, bring back the train kind of thing. I always go to the websites, and actually amongst the very strange ideas, there can be some really good points. So I look at any and all of it. Well, there's a couple that I thought about that you haven't said much about. You've mentioned Monorail that works well, like in Skytrans. Obviously, in large cities, at least, subways have been one of the modes of transportation. And I've experienced that in Paris, and I've experienced it as a dramatically better way to get around Paris than the other alternatives. Why are subways not future? Well, I think existing subways will be there for quite some time. I'd share your interest in subways, you know, certainly. Many, many times I've spent in New York City. It's wonderful. You don't have to have a car, and you can just jump in the subways and go all over the place. You know, they work beautifully. In terms of building more subways, they're exceedingly expensive to build. And basically, they contain a train and by current designs, which, again, is a relatively inefficient mode of transportation. But, yeah, I love subways. Any time I go to a city and get a chance to ride the subways, rather than other modes of transport, yeah, it's wonderful. Well, then let's talk about another possibility. When I watch the Jetsons, and it's been some years since I've actually seen one of them, you have your personal little hovercraft, whatever it is, that flies around and whips you around the place. Why isn't that the future? I've got some great alternate systems designed around that idea, too, and my little folder of alternate systems. Well, maybe that leads to a, I'm going to make a tangent answer on that one, to social justice and fairness that everybody has access to a transport system. I believe that if you looked at this seriously, and you would see that our world resources and the numbers of people couldn't provide everybody with one of these transport devices and leave the planet alive. So maybe that's a quick short answer. And also, I think there might be a few people who can ride some kind of a hovercraft around, but the skies would get very crowded very quickly. You know, I say this in a relative of mine actually invented the first flying saucer. He proved that flying saucers could fly by making one. It was a, so interesting, maybe side personal out there. Yeah, Richard P. Hill. Another alternative, which maybe you looked at, maybe you've seen. It's one of those strange ones. I read a story by Robert Heinlein. I'm a science fiction fan. It was called "The Road's Must Roll." And the future of transportation in that thing included, basically, people would walk from one place to another, but you'd get on this pathway, which would be moving, like you would experience in airport or maybe an escalator or something. And then you step over to the one next to it, which is going slightly faster and the one next to it. So you can get up to great speeds, but you're just walking on them or you're just standing on them as they move along. Why isn't that the future? You mentioned science fiction, which is a wonderful source of ideas. I'll have to admit, too, having been an obsessive science fiction. Also, I started reading it when I could first read and back in the single-digit years and, you know, read on and on and on and on. Back to actuality on this one particular idea. My initial look at it would say that you're looking at a massive transport device in terms of its weight, because a movable roadway weighs quite a bit relative to the number of people being transported. Again, it gets to be the question of an idea, which is, I think, science fiction allows us to look at any ideas, but this one, if I look at it from an engineer's standpoint, you know, I'm going to look at it in another way, which is going to be to say, okay, mechanically, how would this work? What kind of resources are required to have this type of a system and for this type of a system to really serve equitably all the people on the planet? And my brain immediately doesn't compute resources available. One element that you talk about, Steve, in your presentation, I think, is the amount of resources we put into the infrastructure. We have roads, bridges, et cetera, that make it possible for a car to go from one place to another. And they wear it down because we have millions of vehicles going over them each year. How big of a part does that play in your analysis or in terms of what kind of burden society is carrying? Well, I think oftentimes, again, when people look at transport systems, they tend to segment them. They look at one part, and they look at the vehicle. Primarily, especially when you're looking at the automobile, which is 85% of our transport in the U.S. right now, what you have to look at is the whole system. And in doing that, if you look at it in terms of weight of vehicle to weight of infrastructure or what the vehicle runs on, what transports the vehicle, you come up with a ratio there. The more efficient, more sustainable systems have a lower weight infrastructure relative to the vehicle that are being transported by it. So I think that's one of the parameters you look at for an efficiency and a sustainable system, one which will run with greatly reduced resources. The infrastructure itself needs to be not massive. If you look at our current road system, cars on roads, you're looking at probably, as I have seen it, the worst possible ratio between weight of infrastructure to weight of vehicle, and then after that, the weight of the occupants that actually are transported. So you want to reduce weight of vehicle, you want to reduce the amount of infrastructure it takes to run the vehicle. That's kind of all those levels down. In the longevity of the infrastructure is also critically important to understand. Roads basically I replaced about once every 25 years. That's the engineering standard in the U.S. Some last longer, some don't last as long. If you have infrastructure which lasts even 50 years, you've doubled its efficiency because it takes half the time and energy to build the infrastructure then because it's lasting 50 years. The last 100 years, the system I mentioned in Wupertal Germany is still running, and it was put into service right about 1900. One of the other ingredients in your formula, one of the other factors, is convenience. I was intrigued when you talked about what you and Ellen have done in terms of reorienting your life, is you figured out, okay, we can cut down an unnecessary transportation, and you actually did your three years of traveling by bike to work. But you also said, okay, we're not going to drive other than for needs. And different people draw the line of need at different place. It seems to me that convenience is the big if in the United States because right now, we think that we need to do an awful lot of things that we don't really need. The consequences are minor at most if we didn't have them. What's your analysis of the American society, what we'll put up with, what we'll be willing to accept when Jimmy Carter said, you know, this is the moral equivalent of war that we've got this dealing with the energy shortage, our need for conservation turned on your thermostat. A lot of people said, screw you, you must be a socialist or something, and I think that played a part in voting him out of office. So what's your sense of the American public and where that line between need and convenience is and what we're willing to accept? Well, I think any time you're dealing with a community, you do have to prove that something is effective and is going to solve their needs. I think that that's important, and I think that oftentimes people will make decisions based on just how convenient it is or how much fun it is, that kind of a thing. And I think some people want to scare other people sort of morally into thinking, well, you have to think this different way. I don't think that's a very effective way to do things. You know, it might be that people are being selfish or responsible, but I think that's part of human nature. And I think that's part of the lives we all have at a certain point. I think the idea as well, you can get together as a community and think about things and try to provide for your interests, whatever those are, your entertainment, your pleasure, your convenience. And I think that those are important elements to plan into any system. And I think that again, you can look at clues to how to do this the best way based on what now exists. I think the automobile is actually as awful as it is. Does really address those issues, some of those key interests, very, very strongly. And I think you have to pay attention to that when you're looking at designing something for people. I think that in the future we may discover we indeed don't need to drive places or travel places quite as frequently as we do. And with a little bit of effort, we can certainly, I mean, that's what we found. It didn't take that much effort to say, well, we don't need to jump in the car to go to a store, to browse for something when we don't really even know that we need something there. Probably my worst offense was to go to the bookstore. Because, hey, I had a spare hour or two, and gosh, I needed a break. And I would just go to a bookstore and look at books and current publications and things like that. Now I would go to a bookstore if I was in the area for other reasons. And it's not that I don't go to a bookstore, but it's just organized differently. Big deal, it's easy to do. I think that convenience can be looked at in other ways too, though. Oftentimes we have a difficulty, once again, of saying, well, this is the way it is now. If I didn't have this, then I wouldn't be able to do that anymore. And I think that oftentimes future planning, sometimes when people talk about the future, they fall into that, what I would call kind of that negative-est rot, you know, like, well, you're going to have to do without this. You're going to have to do without that. And it starts to get to be this kind of can't have, won't, shouldn't, kind of thing. And I think that really is not helpful to future planning because I think what you look at is, okay, you may not be able to do that thing this way, but you'll actually be able to do it this way. Or that the thing that used to take you several hours to do now, maybe you only spend an hour doing it. That last time you drove in a snowstorm and your blood pressure was going through the ceiling because of the icy road. Okay, well, at that same time, think of that, spending that in a nice, warm travel device of some type where, you know, you don't mind the weather, it could be terrible, blizzard outside, 20 below zero. Your warmness can be in your playing cards with somebody or you're reading a book or you're snoozing. And it only took you half as long or third as long to go that distance. And it cost you half as much. So you look at all the incentives, okay, what is it that people really would appreciate? Look at those, how are those designed into a system? How are those explained to people not as, well, you can't have your car anymore. You can't do this anymore because that gets to be just kind of negative description doesn't go anywhere. And that's one of the things that's really good about the Transition Town discussion. It's got such a positive outlook for it. It's fun. And doing things in fun, creative ways is an energy giver instead of an energy taker. I did want to talk a little bit about the historical analysis. The petroleum phase of our history, which has really been around 150 years or something so far. You know, we started extracting and finding that oil could be refined and used for transportation and a lot of other things. I note that that corresponds to when slavery was ending. And when a Quaker Earthcare Witness publication talked about slavery of the Earth, that before we would enslave animals, use them as our transportation and for hauling loads, we'd use people. I mean, you could be carried on a litter or you could have a pyramid built by enough slaves working together. And now we have petroleum fossil fuels that we can use to drive machines to do those tasks. When we're looking at the end of the cheap fuel era and we have to switch to something else to get those big tasks done building our current day pyramids, one of the possibilities is we go back to animals in a greater role in our society. And another one is that slavery and the social justice thing that you mentioned is part of that. You know, if you can have some people who can still travel and do anything as long as enough people suffer with deprivation. So your thoughts about those different alternatives? I guess you've actually described the world somewhat as it exists now in actuality. I mean, certain people have because other people don't have. But yeah, I think social justice thing is a big issue. And let me put this maybe in a short statement. I'm going to try this because you mentioned that I think if you make your transport systems or any systems as far as that goes, very efficient, you achieve a much higher level of social justice. You do this in two ways. You don't take the resources from someone else so that you can use them for your own inefficient, consumptive, luxury lifestyle. Sorry if that sounds too, whatever. But you also can then provide the same level of transportation availability to everybody. And I think those are two extremely important motivations of mine for looking at transportation design at a very, very basic level. One other element of the loss of the big car, I think of the cars of the 1950s with their big fins. And there's a sense of manhood and dominance that's included in those. I'm imagining that some people when you went to driving a Prius, they feel a loss of testosterone or manhood or something like that. How does that play into your vision of the future? Well, a couple of words about the Prius. It's actually a mid-sized car. It weighs 3,150 pounds, which is considerably more than cars similar size and smaller. So, you know, it's a car. It drives us like any other car folks. If you haven't driven one, you just get in and turn it on and away you go and you really don't know the difference, which is pretty cool. But let's see, back to the original question, which was the loss of the great male symbol of achievement in the United States promoted in advertising, as we all know. We all seen the ads in the Super Bowl or whatever TV you might have watched. Yeah, and I think that's a really real stumbling block. I think there is that ultimate thing that the automobile supplies is that idea of power, possession, demonstration of one's ego to others. You don't care if you know the people or not. You're just out cruising, showing off, you know, whatever you've got there. And in a sense, I mean, I could even come back to the Prius. The Prius does the same thing. It shows off your current state of thinking. And so you can say, "Well, hey, I'm dry in a Prius." And it will go, "Oh, yeah." So I mean, in a sense, it kind of does the same thing. And I don't know if there's anything you can do to avoid that tendency in human beings. You know, again, I think that you have to look at the human being and their interests and kind of say, "Okay, this is the way we'll deal with those things." And again, I think this gets back to your earlier point. I think if you're looking at explaining and trying to develop a discussion for a future transport system, which is considerably different than what we have now, you have to, again, keep looking to explain how this is going to work and what the advantages are going to be. You know, you'll be spending less money. You'll be more comfortable. You won't be surrounded by cars everywhere. What I call the asphalt death zones that surround us all. If we weren't savvy to what cars were, if we were put down here as innocents, we would step out there and probably be the end of us. Yeah, you look at the advantages. And I think a lot of that comes to the pocketbook. I think that also in discussions with people, they keep saying, "Well, I won't be able to my boat anymore. I won't be able to have my four-wheeler anymore. I won't be able to have." And you say, "Well, I don't think you need to think of things that way." And when you look at it, you'd say, "Well, maybe you won't drive your recreational vehicle as for everyday transportation." And what you look at is what is most transportation for. You know, it's for shopping. It's for visiting family and friends. It's work. Actually, work is not the largest one. Sometimes people think it is. You know, it's for school and back. It's for a number of different things. So how are you going to accomplish that bulk of transportation? And then leave your recreation to whatever wind-powered sports you want or machine-powered sports you want. That'll answer itself. It'll take care of itself, I think. One of the factors in our psychology that I think is pretty significant is that we've been told that our vehicles give us freedom, give us independence. You know, you get in your car and you can fly free like a bird. And one of the things you don't have to do is knock on your neighbor's door and ask if you can borrow a cup of sugar because, you know, the store is a couple miles away and you can't make that trip right now. So right now, we can ignore our neighbors, our connections with independence on other people because we're depending and set on our roads, our vehicles. Does that play a part in your estimate of what people are going to accept going into the near future? I think it really does because I think that for those few moments when you suddenly burst out of your driveway in the car or you escape so to speak in your car, those are very real moments and I think of very strong feelings for people. It's interesting to see that not counterbalance with, and you certainly don't want, you're having a good time, you don't want to think about how much this is costing me, you know, how dangerous it is, you know, what else could I be doing with this money? Kind of a thing, you know, it's that moment of exhilaration and escape. And I think that's very much part of human nature to think of things that way. And it's something you have to deal with when you're looking at and planning for a future transport design. I think if I could use, again, the Skytran as an example of that, I mean, you're looking at something that really is pretty nifty. I mean, basically, you press a button, something appears, maybe not right at your door, but, you know, close by, you can walk there, you can get into it, and it's a little bit more like, well, it's kind of like a low-flying airplane, basically. And it's very inexpensive, takes the places very quickly, don't get a traffic jam. I mean, so you start to look at all these things, okay, well, this is pretty cool. And I can spend more time playing music or playing volleyball or whatever it is that you would like to do and maybe thought you should be doing more of, and have more time for all that. Because you won't be spending the time earning the money to afford the car to have those few exhilarating moments. You just simply won't be spending as much time driving around the cars. They're really quite slow. I mean, the average speed of travel in the car is about 32 miles an hour, I believe. So you don't get places very quickly in a car. You're not suggesting, though, that SkyTrans is the solution for all of our transportation needs, are you? If we look 25 years down the road or 50 years down the road, what is the mix of transportation that you think is plausible and desirable? Yeah, I think it's a really good question. You know, again, I'm not set any particular system. As I've looked at the SkyTrans system in particular, I have looked, spent some time studying that one. I've already put on a whole list of modifications of things I would do differently in that system, given efficiency needs, practical needs, how things would actually look, where they would be located, how dense they would be in terms of reaching populations. They've looked at all those kinds of things given that system, which modifies it compared to what you see on their website. But some system like that, I think, is a really good thing to look into. I think that we really need to do that. But there might be something quite different than that that we end up with. So a lot of times when you're projecting into the future, of course, you always realize that the future is not going to look like you think it is, no matter what you think. But if I was spinning out there something, so you had SkyTrans would be inner city, ground transport. Basically, I would say, and this is, again, I hate to contradict myself, but domestic error, I don't think is sustainable. I don't believe we'll have that for anything more than emergencies. Occasionally for some very quick transportation needs to be done. It'll be quite expensive and very limited if there is any at all. Travel between continents will have to be by air because that's the really very most efficient way to do it. If you look at just physically, sides of transportation device, the amount of fuel used per passenger mile, we don't have any across ocean transport device like the airplane that's that efficient. Very safe, very efficient, but we'll probably have much less of flying to Paris for breakfast, that kind of a thing, or even pleasure vacations. I just think that that's going to happen whether we like it or not. And I think that's one of the things that makes a lot of us kind of go sigh a bit, but I just think that's what's coming. For ground transport, I think that a simple high efficiency system, something like a Skytran or something like that, was probably what we'll look at. I think for very close local transportation, especially in urban areas, you're going to be looking at multiple occupancy, very high efficiency taxis, something that's entirely electric. Probably biofuels are not a viable alternative. Biofuels, I think, will provide us with some things, but not a lot. So I think a lot of times people dismiss biofuels too quickly. There'll be some available, but it'd be a very small percentage relative to the amount of oil fuels that are available now, very small percentage. In outlying areas, they live in the ranch in Wyoming, I think you're still going to have a truck. It's going to probably be a hybrid electric truck, but that's the only way you're going to get to any other transport centers. So I think that, again, a lot of this is a question of looking at it, what's possible, and then also applying your common sense and saying, well, this is not a political stance, it's not a moral stance so much. But I would say that something of that sort probably is what I see taking place. It'd be multiple occupancy, high efficiency electric taxis for very close to short distance travel. If you're going much further than that or any further than that, you'll go to an inner city travel system. It might be initially, in my planning, I've done a whole map of the state of Wisconsin as an example of where you would find your inner city route connections, and then where you would have your taxi zones, which would be five mile radius of population centers. Some of it is just fiscal necessity. People are going to say, this is going to be cheaper. I'm going to choose this because this is what I can afford. You are not, I think, at the situation where you need to spend less on transportation. You could blow more money on your vehicles, and it would be okay. I mean, you wouldn't suffer, and you could have that male status symbol. What's the part of the big picture from your point of view, and I'm talking about personal motivation, and maybe what would serve as a good source of motivation for the world? What is, I'd call it a spiritual outlook that is why you've done what you're doing and why it might be something that other people want to look at as spiritual motivation? So much of it, again, is that idea of fairness, and the idea that I grew up with is that everybody has an equal right, and that we don't have greater and lesser human beings. We only have human beings, so maybe that's a very good starting point for that discussion, so we need to give everybody fair access. We need to give everybody fairly a chance to be what they can be, and I think that when you have a system that doesn't do that, it's out of kilter. We also look at the long-term sustainability of the human thing, whatever it is we're doing here, and I believe that that's extremely important. I think some people would say live for the day, some people see apocalypse of being a rightful end to the human activity. That's as far away from my thinking as anything could be. They're entertaining notions, and they've driven to some entertaining thoughts, and books, and films, and things like that. I think we just really need to look long-range into the future. I'll put one of my personal stories in here. When I was in third grade, as I remember correctly, and forgive me if I don't remember this exactly right, year-wise, but I believe it was a third grade. We had these gray science books, and in the science book there was a section on natural resources, and one of the natural resources they had a little paragraph on was coal, and it says the US has great resources of coal enough to last for at least 500 years more. I looked at that and I panicked. I thought only 500 years. What right do we have to use it now and take it away from the people who will be alive after 500 years? I don't know if anybody else had that reaction, but that was really strong to remember it to this day. I think it's probably where the whole thing started from. You see yourself as connected to the people in the future. My sense of view also is that you're connected to the other species on the planet, that it's all part of this whole big community, and that you want to take your fair share, not only in terms of those in your neighborhood or your city. I think you see it globally. You're seeing it in the future. What about the other species? Are certain forms of transportation more just or less just to other species? Well, I think if you reduce your resource needs for a transport system, you immediately take a lot of pressure off of eco environments. So that's probably the big one, certainly the massive one. That's first place. I mean, it kind of takes a precedent over virtually everything else. If you're looking at measuring things in terms of scale, you know, the pressure on ecosystems by reduction in use of resources, and actually I haven't mentioned yet, but in fact that everything has to be recycled, not just some things. There is no such thing as consumption, only recycling. That's a good thing to put in your mind. I think one of the other things, it's proportionally a small thing, but I think to me an important thing is that if you build a system that's designed properly, you kill less animals. You don't run over so many. You don't run into so many. You also, if it's not ground-oriented over long distances, this is just a design thing. If you have a ground system like a road or a tracked system that runs along the ground, you divide an ecosystem. And you divide it for populations of whoever lives there, whether they're human beings or buffalo, or lots of ground living creatures that can't cross that, or they do it peril. You also interrupt watersheds to some extent. You know, people try to avoid that by putting in culverts and things. But essentially you do disturb your ecosystems more with heavier, larger infrastructures, and particularly ones that require massive ground support. You put so much thought and energy into this. I can see it's fun for you, and I can also see that it's a deep part of who you are to do this. Listeners, we've been speaking with Steve Terwilliger. He's a retired chair of the Department of Art and Design at University of Wisconsin-O-Claire. Clearly, his passion and his research has gone far beyond his official dictates in that department. He's a fascinating person to know. I hope you've come to know some of it, and I hope you've come to my site, followed the link that we'll have to Steve's research so you can see some of the details behind this. We've only scratched the surface. Steve, it's wonderful stuff that you've been doing, and I'm so impressed with what you do with your house. What Ellen particularly does with the gardens around here, we've benefited personally from it, and from having you as our friends, thank you for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thanks, Mark. It's been great to be here and great to talk with you. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)
Steve Terwilliger talks about his environmental transformation of his home, and an in-depth study of potential futures of our transportation system.