THE GREEN FILES
By Sonia Green-Brown, PE
Issue 225- Organize Bus System and Eliminate Taxes on EV & Hybrids
Our public transport sector has a ways to go. It appears to have not changed much from when I was at COB almost 30 years ago. Buses generally stop running around 6pm and there are a lot of areas of New Providence that cannot be accessed.
This void in the public transport system can burden those at the lower end of the job market who may struggle to make it to work and often out of necessity one of their first purchases after getting a job is a car they can ill afford, thus adding more cars to the road. Cars are more than likely used, near retirement age and would soon be headed for disposal somewhere, creating another environmental concern.
Reform of our public transport system has the potential to prevent or delay that car purchase.
Bahamians are not averse to using public transport and certainly find it useful when traveling to larger cities around the world. The key points are that if persons know that they would be safe on the bus and that it could be counted on to show up at the appointed time and take you to the stop nearest your destination it could be more widely used.
To make this prospect even greener these buses could be run on biodiesel, tried and proven technology.
Besides the effort to add fewer cars to the road and fewer old cars, I might add, we want to influence the types of cars being driven by eliminating tax levies on hybrid and electric cars. With all manufacturers trying to take a bite out of this market, units are available from luxury to economy.
The options on the market exploded after Elon Musk of Tesla Motors decided to share his company’s electric vehicle research.
According to the Berkeley Energy & Resource Collaborative, an examination of the electric vehicle from production to use to disposal, shows that for countries using fossil fuel powered plants, like The Bahamas, the benefits are there. The results are less promising for Natural Gas and Coal users.
If you rack up 62,000 miles the greenhouse gas footprint is the same for electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles when examining European data and even better in California. By 93,000 miles of driving the electric vehicle outperforms the internal combustion engine vehicle by 20% if it is gasoline driven and 10% if diesel driven.
Hybrids, just like electric cars are criticized for the emissions and power usage that exceed that of traditional car production, however the lifetime performance of the cars outweigh the harm caused to the environment during production.
If we have the will we can make these changes. There is nothing extraordinary or new about these suggestions. As we look to another Earth Day on Friday, April 22nd can we say we have moved the needle in making The Bahamas more green. Do we even want to?
Send questions or comments to sbrown@graphitebahamas.com. Sonia Brown is Principal of Graphite Engineering Ltd and is a registered Professional Engineer.
