Category Archives: looking back
A Year Ago on Zero Resource – January 2011
A Year Ago on Zero Resource – December 2010
A Year Ago on Zero Resource – November 2010
- Blue Roofs
- Photo – The Elevator
- More Tiny Houses!
- Home Energy Improvements
- New LEED Draft Open for Comment
- For The Truly Nerdy – An ASHRAE Download
- 3rd Round of AC Transit Cuts Averted – For Now
- PCL’s 8 Affordable Water Strategies
- Historic Vote by US Building Officials
- 10 American Cities Running Out Of Water?
- Prop. 26 and the Environment
- Regional Bike Sharing in the Bay Area
- Election Day 2010 – Go Vote!
A Year Ago on Zero Resource – October 2010
- AC Transit Cuts Take Effect Today
- Is the Grid Ready for Electric Cars?
- $274 Million for Water & Sewer Upgrades
- Substandard Workmanship in Weatherization
- Cool Planet – Art Rosenfeld
- L.A.’s Electric Vehicle/ Mass Transit Experiment
- Cool Pavements – Melvin Pomerantz
- Cool Roofs – Ronnen Levinson
- Cool Roofs – Melvin Pomerantz
- 33% of California Energy Renewable by 2020
- Berkeley Gets Shiny New Recycling Bins
- Chris Field – Director of Dept. of Global Ecology
- Don’t Call It A Retrofit… Or An Audit
- Gigaton Throwdown
- Alex Wilson, Founder of EBN – Part 2
- Alex Wilson, Founder of EBN – Part 3
A Year Ago on Zero Resource – September 2010
- Alex Wilson, Founder of EBN – Part 1
- Death Rays
- Local Target Stores & Hazardous Waste
- Cut Energy Use 50% in Commercial Buildings
- Lighting, Light Bulbs, and Lingering Habits
- Tracking Water Resources in Real Time
- Update on AC Transit Cuts
- The Koch Brothers and AB 32
- Hot Water, Lights, and Solar as a Service?
- Peter Gleick on Cash for Water Clunkers
- Luxury or Necessity?
- Water Footprint Calculator
- Dan Kammen, Clean-Energy Czar
- The House of the Future?
- The Next Million Acre Feet of Water
- Peter Darbee, CEO of PG&E – Part 1
- Peter Darbee, CEO of PG&E – Part 2
- Peter Darbee, CEO of PG&E – Part 3
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A Quote
“If we priced water accurately, there wouldn’t be any water shortages, period. It would eliminate, surely, 80 or 90 percent of the distributional problem,” says Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior under President Clinton. “We have essentially built a water supply culture in this country which says water should essentially be free. And you see the results in the way water is used, particularly in the arid regions of the west.” – via CNBC.
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A Quote
Roger Revelle, 1957:
Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.
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Lighting, Light Bulbs, and Lingering Habits
2Highlighting a few recent stories…
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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
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Research by the California Public Utility Commission staff indicates that if enough existing lighting and lighting for new buildings incorporate the latest technologies, the state could achieve a 60 to 80 percent reduction in light-related energy use. New policies adopted by the commission promote that goal by encouraging utilities to rethink their current consumer subsidies, which tend to focus on compact fluorescents, in favor of the newer and more energy-efficient technologies. “We need to move on and look at how best to spend our resources on the next step of lighting,” said Theresa Cho, an aide to Commissioner Diane Grueneich. “Our goal is market transformation.” The shelves of Wal-Mart and other big-box stores are already full of compact fluorescents, she said – via the New York Times Green Blog.
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A trio of House Republicans, Joe Barton and Michael Burgess of Texas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, have introduced the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, which would repeal the section of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that sets minimum energy efficiency standards for light bulbs and would effectively phase out most ordinary incandescents – via the New York Times Green Blog.
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The Department of Energy’s inspector general released an audit on Wednesday showing that it is continuing to buy obsolete fluorescent lamps, bypassing the more modern technologies that it spent tax dollars to develop. Yet even more surprising, it is still buying the familiar incandescent bulbs in place of compact fluorescents. The department operates at 24 sites, and the auditors visited seven of them. “Despite the substantial benefits of C.F.L.’s, all of the sites we visited continued to purchase incandescent lights,” the report said – also via the New York Times Green Blog.
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The Key System
2Since the decline of bus service in the East Bay has been on my mind lately, this installment of Looking Back asks the question: What was AC Transit before AC Transit?
Image of a historic Key System map housed in UC Berkeley’s Earth Science and Map Library
The Key System, a privately held company, provided transit in the East Bay from 1903 until being sold to the public entity AC Transit in 1960.
The first cable car appeared in the East Bay in 1886 on the arterial road, San Pablo. Electric street cars followed in 1891, knitting togther Berkeley and Oakland with intercity rail lines. By 1893, the street cars were being consolidated into the Key System by Francis Marion “Borax” Smith. Although the conglomeration of tracks already served the East Bay from Richmond to San Leandro, Smith furthered the service by building a pier that pulled a track out into the bay, with the final 3 mile leg of the transbay service being completed by ferry. This jutting feature into the bay along with the maze of tracks on land resembled an old fashioned key in plan view, thus giving the Key System its name.
This image was originally posted to Flickr by jaycross at http://flickr.com/photos/66151780@N00/220773099.
By 1924 the Key System had reached a peak of 18 million riders and was typical of integral rail systems in cities across America. However, by the 1930s street cars were already losing major ground to automobiles. The transbay bridge was primed for car and truck crossing in 1936, but did not accomodate rail for another two years. Locals already calibrating to the speed of the auto era, were abandoning the leisurely street car-and-ferry crossing. In another blow to the Key System, tolls at bridge crossings dropped drastically, further driving up competition from auto commuters.
Although the lean war years did temporarily provide a second wind for the mass transit system, the system was beginning to age and infrastructural funds were not ready at hand. With the suburban boom that followed the end of WWII, transit began to decentralize. National City Lines backed by oil and tire companies began to buy up ailing rails across the country and replace them with bus service. In the East Bay, all electric street car lines, save the transbay route had been replaced by buses by 1948.
In 1956 voters approved the establishment of the publicly run Alameda Contra Costa Transit District. AC Transit bought out the nearly bankrupt Key System in 1960.
Credits: All information was gathered from the AC Transit website, and “The Rise and Fall of the Key System“, a slideshow presented at AC Transit Transbay Taskforce November 10, 2009 by Will Sparger.
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