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Practical Question and Answer series

For more questions and answers see the Q&A Index.

Practical Q&A #5: Transportation

5) How will I transport myself if my car is toast because it's gas-based?

We can look at various categories of transport based on the source of energy. So let us look at combustion engines, human powered transport, wind powered transport, non-human animal powered transport, and electrical vehicles.

Combustion engines (Automobiles):

When I first started writing In the Wake I sketched out a short list of criteria by which tools, technologies and approaches could be judged to see if they were consistent with the goals of the project. I wrote:

• They must sustainably apply either broadly and generally to a variety of bioregions, or have the potential to be exceptionally beneficial to people in some bioregions.
• They should permit a reduced impact and/or reduced consumption, rather than increasing consumption.
• They should operate with "found resources" and remnant resources as much as possible, as opposed to cultivation or metalworking, so as to maintain the wilds and minimize labour.
• They should be relatively simple, so that they can be learned quickly.
• They should be as compact as possible, to maintain the wilds (That is, a technique that allows a 1000 square foot garden to meet food needs sustainably, would generally be preferred to a 1500 square foot garden which yields the same amount of food, since the smaller garden leaves more room for wilderness. That assumes that both gardens are equally sustainable).
• They should include easy to find or make items, so as to permit rapid scaling up, democratic application, and reduced scarcity.
• Whenever possible, their use should be creative and fulfilling, rather than repetitive.
• They should be portable, and rapidly scaleable and expandable.
• It should be possible for a small group to build and maintain them.
• Wherever possible, their use should involve the degradation of remnants of the industrial system, and the rejuvenation of the land.
• Techniques chosen tend to make societies more egalitarian and distribute resources and power more fairly.

And to be completely frank, combustion engines and the vehicles they power don't meet any of these criteria, whether they run on gasoline or biodiesel or magical pixie dust. In fact, combustion engines fail miserably by every criterion. They can be used in many bioregions but their fuel must be imported (and in the case of biodiesel, the source crops can not be grown everywhere) and are not sustainable in any of them; they increase consumption of materials and energy; they don't operate with found resources; they are technically complicated; their use requires sprawling roads and energy-intensive infrastructure; their parts cannot be found in nature or easily made; their use is not creative; they are portable but that portability comes at a tremendous cost of energy; it is not possible for a small group to build them; their use requires the maintenance of the industrial system and damage to the land; and their use does nothing to contribute to egalitarianism or the fair distribution of wealth and usually has quite the opposite effect.

And goes for automobiles in general -- it doesn't matter whether they run on gasoline or biodiesel or any magical pixie dust. In fact, the immediate human and ecological damage from biofuels would very possibly be worse than the the immediate damage from petroleum because of the massive amount of land that would have to be taken over for biofuel production.

Columnist George Monbiot has an good take on the situation. After having previously determined that the "adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster", he recently wrote that he "underestimated the fuel's destructive impact" and the the situation is worse than even he thought.
He underlines the futility and destructiveness of efforts to replace oil with biodiesel in his article "Worse Than Fossil Fuel". (Monbiot has been writing insightful articles about fossil fuels and climate issues for some time now. Years ago he observed that "either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses." Source: The Bottom of the Barrel.) Monbiot has also written an excellent critique of cars.

Ivan Illich also wrote an excellent critique of cars in general, which you can read here on RanPrieur.com, and which discussed the advantages of other methods of transportation as well.

So suffice it to say that cars and combustion powered vehicles are pretty much out of the question.

Human powered transport:

Walking and hiking are the most obvious and widely accessible forms of non-industrial transport. Depending on your situation and your inclination, you may end up walking for much longer distances than many people normally walk in the industrialized world today.

Good foot care is absolutely imperative for travel without machines, especially when walking or hiking. Here are some suggestions to make travel by foot easier and more pleasurable:

• Keep your feet clean by washing every day, if possible, with warm water and soap.

• Keep them dry, to avoid blisters and fungal infections.

• Keep your toenails trimmed. (In general, paying attention to your feet will help you to notice problems before they become impairing.)

• Keep socks dry, clean, and in good condition — holes and rough spots will encourage blisters. Socks which are too small or too large (and bunch up) will also encourage blisters. You can rotate socks at midday, to keep them dry.

• Wool socks are excellent for drawing away moisture and will keep you warm even when damp.
  

• For long distance walking trips, try to get a pair of sturdy, lightweight hiking boots. Boots with the soles stitched on, rather than glued on, will generally last longer.

• Waterproof your boots if possible. There are plenty of commercial waterproofing substances available, but in a pinch rubbing petroleum jelly into the boot leather will help.

• Find a well-fitting pair of boots, and "break them in" by walking around on shorter trips to soften them and mold them to your feet before going on a longer trip.
  

• If you do find a tender or red spot caused by rubbing, make sure to deal with it immediately. Cover it with an adhesive bandage, "moleskin", or even a small piece of duct tape (but with duct tape, if the spot is already blistering, be sure to cover it with a thin piece of gauze to prevent the tape from sticking painfully).

Walk and hike regularly now, if you can, to get in shape.

There are a number of good books about travel by walking and backpacking. Check out The Complete Walker IV by Colin Fletcher and Chip Rawlins and Allen & Mike's Really Cool Backpackin' Book: Traveling & Camping Skills for a Wilderness Environment by Allen O'Bannon & Mike Clelland. On the subject of lightweight backpacking see Lighten Up! by Don Ladigin.

Gaiters can be a helpful item piece of clothing for walking in the backcountry. Gaiters cover your ankles and legs below the knee to keep them dry when walking through wet underbrush or snowy conditions.

In snowy winter skis and snowshoes are extremely useful. Snowshoes are generally more suitable for softer snow since they prevent you from sinking in, but skis will generally allow you to go faster on more packed snow. Snowshoes vary greatly in design, and some types are very long and narrow, approaching the shape of skis. Cross-country skis are effective on packed snow, but "backcountry" skis are widely, more suitable for offroad travel, and resemble traditional skis shape. You can improvise or more properly construct your own showshoes.

A good book on skiing and winter transit and long-distance travel in general is Allen & Mike's Really Cool Backcountry Ski Book.

Biking is a great option for transportation. The bicycle is the most energy efficient form of land transportation available. As Ivan Illich noted, a person "on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process."

There are three main types of upright bicycles: mountain bikes, road bikes, and "city" or hybrid bikes. (There are also recumbent bicycles on which the riders have a larger, more comfortable seat they lean back into, usually closer to the ground. They can go quite fast and are more comfortable, but they are also relatively rare, expensive and not generally designed for off-road use.)

Mountain bikes are the most durable all-around. Their large-diameter, rugged frames are difficult to bend or damage. Their thick, wide tires are more resistant to puncturing and flats. They'll do the best under rugged conditions on rough trails, or even on roads with a lot of pot-holes or debris, which is why they're called "mountain bikes." Fortunately, mountain bikes are quite common and relatively inexpensive used.

The downside is that mountain bikes are heavy, so road bikes are a better choice for speed and long distances on paved surface. They can be quite light, which means that you could probably carry them on your back or shoulder along with gear for short distances, which is more difficult with heavy mountain bikes. The downside is that their frames are more likely to bend or buckle if you take a serious tumble, and that you are likely to get a lot of flats in areas where the surface isn't very smooth. The narrower tires tend to "pinch" and rupture the inflated tube on sharp bumps, and also make it harder to ride and steer on gravel or sand surfaces.

Something of a compromise is the "city" or hybrid bike, which is essentially a road bike frame from mountain bike wheels. That means that it is lighter, and the tires are more resistant to flats.

Flat tires are one of my main considerations in choosing a bike style. Not only are they very annoying when they happen day after day on a months-long trip, but they can slow you down a lot if, say, a twelve person group had to stop half an hour for each person in a day (that's six hours of lost time). Also, though tubes can sometimes be patched, they don't last forever and there isn't an infinite supply. The slower speed on a mountain bike may well make up for potential time lost on flats, depending on your route. However, you can make your bike more flat-proof by using heavy-duty tubes or putting in an anti-puncture tire liner like "Mr. Tuffy."

In terms of carrying gear, you essentially have to choose between panniers ("saddlebags") or a bike trailer. (Backpacks can be used in a pinch, but they'll make you less stable by raising your center of gravity, let you carry less than trailers, and cause a lot of strain on your back.) Panniers are cheaper, and put your gear in a more compact mass. However, trailers have a number of advantages over panniers. Panniers put more wear on your rear wheel and tires. They may also make it more difficult to steer, and put your center of gravity higher than a trailer. Sturdy trailers protect your gear more than panniers, and can carry much more weight and volume than with panniers.

Eugene A. Sloane has written many books on cycling. I would recommend Sloane's New Bicycle Maintenance Manual as a comprehensive (and physically light) book on repairs. Sloane's Complete Book of Bicycling: The Cyclists Bible is more extensive, but definitely too heavy to carry in your pack.

Other human-powered vehicles exist as well, and are worth looking at for inspiration. See International Human Powered Vehicle Association and the British Human Power Club. You can also look at some modifications you can make to recumbent bikes.

People with with reduced leg strength or impaired lower limb use can still ride bicycles by using different bicycle design. There are many available hand-powered recumbent two or three wheeled vehicles which can be more stable than an upright bike and significantly faster than a hand-powered wheelchair. You can see a good introduction to the subject from at US Handcycle Federation's Handcycling 101.

On water, in a kayak or canoe or in a sailboat, someone without reduced use of their legs can be just as or more mobile as someone with the full use of their legs.

Boat transport using canoes, kayaks, rafts and rowboats is an excellent option for a collapse context. With boats you can carry significantly more than you could on your back or even a bike, and you can move more quickly than walking would allow. And even better, the internet (and probably your local library) are full of designs for boats and sailboats you can build yourself.

Online, check out SimplicityBoats.com for various design for really neat, simple boats that you can build yourself. You can also look at Bateau.com, Free Boat Design Resources. There are also books on fast-to-build boats like Build the New Instant Boats by Harold H. Payson.

There are some extremely portable boats that you can build as well. Take a look at FoldingKayaks.org and the book the Complete Folding Kayaker by Ralph Diaz.

Wind powered transport:

In terms of efficiency of transport the sailboat can exceeds even the bicycle, since in favourable winds the sailor requires only a minimal effort to travel. Sailboats can also be made out of available non-industrial materials (and also remnant resources) as they have been for countless millennia. A modern fiberglass or aluminum sailboat hull will also last for a long time, but there are countless designs for sailboats you can build yourself. See the links for homebuilt boats above, and also look at the very simple Firebug sailboat.

Wind powered transport is generally limited to the water (such as sailing vessels) but there are also sailing vehicles used on land, sometimes called "land yachts" (see the North American Land Sailing Association). There are also sailing vehicles used on ice called "iceboats" (see another source on iceboats). Some people are working to combine land sailing with bicycling, like the Terra Sailer. Another category of wind-powered vehicles are pulled by large kites, and are sometimes called "kite buggies" (see link for information about designing appropriate kites).

A general limitation of wind-powered transport is that it works best in a open, flat and windy area. That's great for oceans and lakes, but restricts the effective use of land sailing to a small number of regions and terrains. Beaches, dry lakebeds and the like are popular. An open area is beneficial because a sailing vessel sometimes needs to zigzag back and forth to make the best of a given wind angle, which is why you can't just pick a windy roadway and land sail along it reliably.

Non-human Animal powered transport:

There are a number of non-human animals that have been traditionally ridden or used to pull loads including horses, donkeys, camels, mules, and oxen. In some places dog teams and goats (though too small to be ridden) are used to pull loads like sleds.

A major advantage of this category of transport is that it requires no industrial infrastructure whatsoever. Even bicycles, as incredibly efficient as they are for transport, require a fairly heavy infrastructure to manufacture and create certain replacement parts for. Bicycles also work most effectively when used on paved or reasonably flat terrain (although mountain bikes are very adaptable). In contrast some animals can provide transport on rough terrain that human-powered vehicles are not suited for. For example, dog sleds can run on snowy terrain where bicycles simply could not be used.

In terms of energy, though, the widespread use of animals for transport has some major ecological implications. Currently the planet's soil is being eroded, and lands desertified, faster than at any point in history. Agriculture and logging (including logging to clear land for agriculture) are the primary culprits. To stop and reverse soil erosion and desertification we will have to eliminate unsustainable land practices, change food-growing systems almost beyond recognition, and stop farming or pasturing animals on land that is particularly vulnerable or damaged. And since the Earth's human population is much larger than it can support sustainably we'll have limited food supplies anyway in a collapse context.

The problem comes because a working horse, for example, requires ten times as many food calories as a human being. Which means that (ignoring non-food energy use) if only one in nine humans had a horse, the human-directed caloric demand on the planet would double. And if every human had a horse, the demand would increase by a factor of eleven. Not very promising. It's true that horses eat lower on the food chain than most humans and therefore get calories from the land more efficiently, and that horses also eat foods that humans do not, like grass. But that energy is used far less efficiently than human powered transport in terms of calories per kilometre.

It's likely that animal transport will be limited to a minority of the population, and much more prevalent in low-population density areas with plenty of grasslands (or in the case of dog teams, where meat is available). Urban and suburban areas won't have much land to spare for pasture, but in those areas paved roads and pathways will allow for human-powered vehicles to be used. In any case, it would still be far more ecological than the widespread use of biofueled vehicles.

There are many ethical issues surrounding the use of non-human animals for transport. In addition, transport with non-human animals is not the sort of thing that you can learn solely from a book. If you are interested in learning more your best bet is to find people in your area with horses or donkeys or what-have-you and learn by working with them.

If anyone out there has experience with any particular form of non-human animal transport and wants to share useful information about its application in a collapse context, please let me know.

Electrical vehicles:

Although it will difficult or impossible to manufacture the components of electrical vehicles without a lot of industrial infrastructure, electrical vehicles may still have niche applications in a collapse context. Some kinds of electric vehicles, including golf carts and electric wheelchairs and scooter, have become quite commonplace and will likely be available for some time no matter what happens to the grid. Unlike cars, they can still be useful with very minimal paved area since they require a narrower pathway.

Golf carts may be useful for emergency vehicles or to move some supplies in areas with roads and paved paths. Electric wheelchairs and scooters are useful for people with disabilities. Since so many of them have already been manufactured and only require electricity and minor maintenance to continue being used, they may cause less ecological stress than even transportation by non-human animals in some niche applications. For example, in an urban or semi-urban area there may be limited unpaved space available for growing plants. To reduce population disruption, most of the unpaved areas in an urban area would need to be used for growing food. That would leave little land as pasture and cropland for, say, horses. However, electricity can be generated on a small scale with improvised systems to charge batteries for electric vehicles without causing and additional ecological impact.

Electric motors and mechanical components for electric vehicles will last a long time with proper maintenance. Tires and batteries will be the main components to wear out first, so you may want to stock up and learn how to repair them.

Like with communications, I expect that collapse will yield a patchwork of creative, overlapping transportation systems that vary from landbase to landbase and group to group. Eventually some options will no longer be possible, but by then various cultures will have restructured to adapt.

Update: Bob Welsh writes in about all terrain wheelchairs that might be useful for people with disabilities in a collapse context:

I do know some folks who had very rugged "all-terrain" wheelchairs that they used to essentially go mountain-biking. These wheelchairs were pretty amazing. Here's a link to one such wheelchair: http://www.titaniumarts.com/content/handcycles/press.html.

I also remember from my earlier days in a wheelchair that the magazine addressing many mobility-related issues well was "Sports 'n Spokes". They have a website, but most of their info is available only in print via subscription. Here's one of the pages with a variety of links on equipment and resources: http://www.pvamagazines.com/resources/index.php?pub=0

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