If you have time, see if you can track down a copy of a book called Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2008). They talk a lot about how automotive emissions and the various regulations created to fight their effects…a losing battle in the pollution-challenged Los Angeles Basin.

My name is Enzo, I am a 5th grade student in Los Angeles.

I am on a team competing in FIRST LEGO League, which promotes science and technology for kids. This year’s theme is Climate Connections, and our team chose to study the connections between rising temperatures and car emissions in Los Angeles. Did you know that these two things both affect each other?

Our team needed to think of a creative solution for our topic. We found that a lot of car emissions come from people who drive a long distance to work every day, such as from Palmdale or Riverside to the downtown area. These areas have commuter trains called MetroLink, and our idea is to add a rail car for bikes only. This would encourage more people to leave the car at home, and get to work with bike and train.

We were surprised to learn that MetroLink has room for only 2 bikes per train car. The other LA train system is a subway called Metro that travels shorter distances. Metro is adding bike lockers at some stations, but this means you have to buy two bikes if you really want to stop driving the car to work.

In LA and other cities, train companies do not want to remove more seats to make room for bikes, because it would reduce their income. Passenger train cars are expensive and take a long time to get. So our idea is to take older rail cars that were used for something else, and make some changes to allow bike racks and ramps to get on and off. After parking your bike in this rail car you just go sit down in a regular passenger car. Adding these simple rail cars to the commuter train would not reduce income, and might even sell more tickets from all the people that could now take their bike to work.

We made several designs of rail cars that could hold between 34 and 80 bikes. We estimate that each bikes-only rail car could reduce 408 to 960 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, if these commuters stopped driving 60 miles each way. This is based on 0.8 pounds of CO2 per mile driven.

We also researched to see if other parts of the world have tried this idea. Some cities in the US are adding more room for bikes by taking out seats, but this is going slow. Some cities in Europe have taken out most or all of the seats, with people standing next to the bikes, but this was on subways and different than our topic of long distance commuters.

If you have read all this, thank you very much, because another one of our assignments was to share our project with people who might be interested. Internet blogs are a good way for our team to try and share our work with a lot of people. Hopefully you like our idea, and please wish us luck in our competition.

Enzo

I’m working on it.

Wow Mark… lol even if they are cropped, bikes don’t take up as much room as a suv!? that’s just common sense. You guys are some anal commuters lol.

And Christ said let there be bicycles and there were, and they were good.

Yes thank you for the link, that one looks much better. They did adjust the camera btw shoots but it doesn’t looked cropped or zoomed at different levels like the Germany photo. And your right I have no problem with the point it is trying to get across, I have a problem with the deceptive nature the Germany picture embodies with the image cropped and zoomed at different levels.

There were also illustrations of how different areas would look if the space for auto’s were reduced to a single, one way lane for delivery vehicles and trolley like transport.

If anyone has that URL it would be worth taking a look.

“When the oil runs out, they’re ALL bike lanes!”