Hybrids change future of American travel
By University Wire
February 15, 2008
The United States loves its cars.
Automobile use is so convenient to the lives of so many Americans, and distances between cities in the geographically large United States are great enough, that public transportation will always have a hard time playing catch-up to personal transport.
Train and bus travel between cities and around large metropolitan areas are available, but use of services such as Amtrak pales today in comparison to the use of automobiles when Americans travel.
In other words, people are not going to give up car travel outright. So if we can't shake our driving habits, we're going to need to face the fact that automobiles leave a gigantic environmental footprint. We can talk about saving the environment all we want, but cleaning up the mess made by the hundreds of thousands of cars we drive every day will loom heavy over any environmental effort we put together.
On another note, we are dependent on automobile travel and truck transportation to a degree that we depend on oil not just as a matter of convenience, but as an issue of economic and military security.
The United States needs to find an alternative to the gas-powered car as soon as possible.
That's why we're excited by press reports that hybrid cars have been getting recently and the interest shown by universities and state governments in promoting hybrid car use in everyday life. Hybrid cars -- cars whose power comes from both traditional gasoline and a rechargeable electric battery -- do not emit near the levels of harmful greenhouse gases as their gas-guzzling counterparts, and they would reduce smog problems in large cities by limiting the amount of air pollution caused by transport.
Now we just need to get people to use these cars.
This week, the state of North Carolina announced plans this week to team up with Progress Energy and Duke Energy to launch a research and infrastructure program focused on the cars.
The Advanced Transportation Energy Center will be housed on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University. It will research batteries for hybrid cars and study the best ways to implement a statewide system to recharge the cars.
It's true that hybrid users are in the minority today. This isn't surprising, given the lack of a national infrastructure to accommodate people using the cars. The North Carolina research should be seen as something that can happen in every state, including Nebraska.
State governments should also be willing to invest resources and get involved in the promotion of the electric car before people start buying them en masse. That's how we'll end up in a future where citizens prefer the use of hybrid vehicles to gasoline vehicles. Cities across the country have started offering "charge stations" to replenish batteries in cars, for example.
Hybrid vehicles are the future for this auto-obsessed nation. We're excited every time we see more news on the development of the vehicles, and we hope that the trend will continue at a more rapid pace into the future.
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