Car Traffic (Letter Of The day)

SIR – Your gibe that “public transport in Los Angeles has a great future, and always will” threw a spotlight on the common misunderstanding that adding more road capacity is the best way to ease traffic congestion on highways (“Carmageddon”, July 9th). Traffic will always expand over time to meet the available capacity. But the problem remains that those who use highways a lot and in peak periods pay the same as those who do not. In effect, we subsidise peak-period drivers.

A solution to this is to charge motorists for their decision to drive by time and location. A driver’s monthly bill could be based on the total amount of travel over that period. At the same time the taxes that are paid by others to subsidise the heavy use of the highway would be reduced. A system where the user pays is the only way forward to attaining a reasonable transport system in the future, which would include an optimal mix of car and public transit. Such a system could be implemented gradually to allow people to make adjustments to their choices of housing, vehicle, route and time of travel.

In a democratic society we have the freedom to use whichever mode of transport we deem necessary, be it car, bicycle or foot, but that should come with a responsibility that the user has to pay the true cost of his or her choice of transport, just as we do for our use of water and electricity.

Chan Wirasinghe
Professor of civil engineering
University of Calgary
Calgary, Canada  

Need A Ride?

CAR clubs, whose members pay an annual fee and then rent a car by the hour on a pay-as-you-go basis, are moving from a fringe fad for greens to a big global business. Carmakers have no choice but to pay attention: one rental car can take the place of 15 owned vehicles.

Car-sharing started in Europe and spread to America in the late 1990s, when the first venture opened in Portland, Oregon, a traditional hangout of tree-huggers. For years it was organised by small co-operatives, often supported by local government. It still has a green tinge. One in five new cars added to club fleets is electric; such cars are good for short-range, urban use. But sharing is no longer small.

Frost & Sullivan, a market-research firm, estimates that by 2016 the market will be worth $6 billion a year, half of that in America, with a total of some 10m users. Outside America, most of the growth is in Britain and other north European countries such as Germany. The market leader is a company called Zipcar, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is now headed for a public listing. Zipcar already has 400,000 members, mostly in America where it is thought to have 80% of the market. It recently bought Streetcar, the market leader in London, though competition authorities are still scrutinising that deal.

Zipsters, as members are called, book their car by phone or online, pick it up from a nearby parking bay and unlock it with their Zipcard. When they finish, they leave it in a neighbourhood parking bay, rather than having to return it to a central depot. Hertz and Avis, two conventional car-hire firms, are trying something similar, fearful that their daily and weekly rental business will suffer if they ignore the new trend.

Carmakers are interested, too. Daimler launched its car2go with a pilot scheme in Ulm, in Germany, where it now has 19,000 members nationwide. It has also set up a scheme in Austin, Texas, where members can pick up the car in one place, leave it in another and pay by the minute. Such car-sharing schemes have been boosted by American university campuses banning student cars to ease congestion. Daimler, which makes Mercedes cars and trucks, uses its tiny smart fortwo cars for the service. In Germany the market leader in car-sharing is a company owned by Deutsche Bahn, a railway giant, based around railway stations. In France, Peugeot is experimenting with its own scheme.

Frost & Sullivan calculates that a car owner doing 12,000 miles (19,000km) a year can save $1,834 by shifting to a car-sharing service. So car-sharing will stimulate short-term demand for new cars while threatening a proportion of carmakers’ longer-term sales. There is one way that car-sharing might actually help carmakers, however. The main car-sharing firms are keen to promote electric vehicles, since that fits with their green ethos. So they could become a reliable source of demand for such cars, which carmakers feel they ought to make but are unsure if they can sell. And if sharers like their electric vehicles, they may even go on to buy them.

Big Boys: Cars

A Desert Of Salt

Stand in the middle of Salar de Uyuni, the world's greatest salt desert, and the first word that springs to mind is ­nothing. As far as the eye can see, ­nothing. Not a shrub or tree, not a hill or valley, just an endless expanse of white.

This salt flat in Bolivia, the landlocked heart of South America, is a harsh and eerie landscape, perhaps the closest thing nature has to a void. From the Incas to the present day, humanity has made little impression here.

But that may be about to change. Dig down and you find brine – water saturated with salt – rich in deposits of lithium, the lightest metal.

As the invention of the pneumatic tyre turned rubber into a precious commodity in the 19th century, the world's tilt towards greener energy is expected to do the same for lithium in the 21st. For years, tiny amounts have been used in laptops, BlackBerrys and other devices, but now its main use is expected to be in batteries for electric cars, which campaigners, manufacturers and governments say will – or should – replace petrol and diesel vehicles.

For Bolivia, this is good news. It is thought to possess 5.4m tonnes of lithium, half the world's supply. "Lithium is very important for us and the world," Bolivia's mining and metallurgy minister, Luis Alberto Echazú, said. "We hope to extract 1,200 tonnes next year and that's just the beginning. When we're up and running we'll be producing 10, 15 times that."

Four wells have been dug in Salar de Uyuni and a state-run pilot plant is being built near the village of Rio Grande on the fringe of the desert.

But there is a problem. Bolivia's socialist government has a habit of clashing with foreign multinationals in other sectors and has not clinched a deal – and, according to some, may never seal one – with the investors needed to extract significant quantities of lithium.

Foreign companies are afraid to deal with a government that confiscates assets and rips up contracts, said Carlos Alberto López, a former energy minister and consultant with Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Bolivia's ­ideological face does not square with business and commercial realities. I doubt lithium's potential will be realised in the short or medium term." Pessimists fear a fiasco: carmakers lacking batteries to power electric vehicles and Bolivia, one of the continent's poorest countries, losing an opportunity to develop. President Evo Morales, a former llama herder and trade union leader, has a different fear: that western multinationals will suck the wealth of Salar de Uyuni like capitalist vampires. Morales swept to power in 2005 promising to end 500 years of plunder. Lithium is a test case. "The government of Bolivia will never give away control of this natural resource," he said. He acknowledges, however, that a foreign partner is needed.

The government is talking to France's Bollore Group, South Korea's LG Group and Japan's Sumitomo and Mitsubishi. Bollore has been asked to join the government's scientific commission on lithium, suggesting it has the edge.

The government said it would choose as a partner the company which will help Bolivian industry and not just ­mining. The idea is to process and add value to the lithium after it is extracted, for instance by making batteries or even fleets of electric cars in the impoverished country. The $6m (£3.6m) state-run pilot plant near Rio Grande is the first step. At the end of a dirt track dozens of workers are building barracks to house technicians and miners. Over a generator's hum Marcelo Castro, 48, the site manager, exuded patriotic pride. "We are building every­thing from scratch. This is a historic moment. We are working for ourselves." Rich countries would no longer plunder Bolivia's resources. "There is a new dialectic."

Sceptics say that is delirium. Work at the pilot plant has proved slow, talks with multinationals remain inconclusive and there is no production timetable.

The 2006 nationalisation of the oil and gas industry is a troubling precedent. Foreign investment evaporated, production fell and the state-owned energy company, YPFB, became mired in corruption. "The trustworthiness of the Bolivian state has come into question," said López, "and I don't think investors will expose themselves to being hammered on the head."

Time will tell. With a lithium shortage forecast for 2015, Bolivia may also have the upper hand. "We have had bad experiences in the past," said Paulino Colque, leader of an indigenous workers' group Uyuni. "If there are any investors that want to come, they can come – but as partners, not patrons."

Running on lithium

Lithium ion batteries, first proposed in the 1970s but not commercialised until 20 years later, are the technology most likely in the short-term to make the clean electricity dream viable. Several times lighter than current rechargeable batteries (usually made from nickel compounds) and with a better performance and longer lifetime, ­Li-ion cells have already been developed for laptops and mobile phones. Now they face their biggest challenge. For cars, they will have to be more powerful, more reliable and – a big sticking point – far cheaper. Most experimental electric vehicles today use some form of Li-ion batteries and many experts agree the technology is ready for the first generation of electric vehicles. The other big hurdle is size: the batteries are still too big.