Typical hotatory and utopian "improvements" produced by hectoring everybody.

Intolerantt toatalitarians have been trying to "perfect Man" since time immemorial. It only leads to dystopias and consequent misery, concentration camps, and dictatorship.

People gave up the right to complain about energy efficient devices when they allowed efficient refrigerators to be required and the 100 watt incandescent bulb to be outlawed. Inefficient automobiles and their inefficient operation costs the US the extortionary demanded price of speculators in oil rather than free market prices. Automobile energy from electricity is about one fourth to one fifth the price of energy from gasoline. Energy from coal converted to liquids could be one third the cost or less than the cost of petroleum energy.

Hydraulic hybrids can reduce fuel use and cost to half.
..HG..

@ "D"
We can't change the nature of man, but we can reward socially desireable behavior and disincentivize deleterious behavior. We've been doing it since we mandated driving on the right side of the highway (or a consistent side0 and outlawed murder. Trickier behaviors are those with less binary definitions. For those we need gradations of reward and disincentive.

A few weeks ago we talked about using the ecodriving coach capabilities of Honda Insights and other vehicles, combined with a black box that logs data for occasional rewards or fines, perhaps during smog checks. Any system can be gamed positively or negatively, but if we set up meaningful incentives, rational individuals will on average do rational things.

EP, most of the items you mention do have economic rewards already. Granted the EVs are too expensive. But we have proved they work. And as cost decreases and people realize the 35 EV miles costs them less than a dollar (140MPGe) - they'll think hard on buying one.

The best incentive for many "behavior mods" is economic. If people save money they can use for other items: education, entertainment, homes and improvements - they will practice some of the items you mention. D, is a reactant to the idea he must do this stuff at someone else' demand - with no reward except loss of choice. Imagine how that would pis*off pregnant women.

One problem with using the economic incentive for "behavior mods" is that the extra costs are usually upfront and the payback is spread out over a long period of time. Too many people are "penny wise but pound foolish."

ai_vin: that's what feebates are for.

Every automobile made today can be limited in speed and acceleration by the built in computers. It is also now cheap enough to have the automobile computers record and report every road and speed traveled on that road and when, and it could be made mandatory that the data would be downloaded by the pump when buying gasoline. ..HG..

Thanks, Henry. You just set back the idea ten years by effectively equating it with the imposition of a surveillance/police state.

This amuses me because in the UK, local transport officers are justifying their own jobs by bidding for "sustainable transport projects" involving:- narrowing roads badly with random pinchpoints; painting acres of centre hatching; forests of traffic lights and signs; and putting in the odd token cycle lane here and there which stop and start where the other random pinchpoints have been created (thus creating conflict spots between cyclists and vehicles).

Is this sustainable transport? No, its simply engineering in congestion which paradoxically increases fuel consumption through more stopping and starting and queuing?

Worse still most of these measures are turning streets into the urban equivalent of a "Total Wipeout" course. They are poorly designed, disrespect street character, usually with uneven gobs of tar filled islands and paint laid by people who have no concept of the words "neat", "symmetry", "quality" or "pride". In turn, these traffic engineered (read vandalised) environments make places feel more unsafe than they were to start with.

Approches like this stink of doing something for the sake of it, instead of making true efforts to provide more walkable streets and smoothing the flow of traffic and both aren't necessarily incompatible if schemes can be planned and implemented properly.