Letters to the Editor
-
Coasting And Rambling
A feature on many cars of the mid-Twentieth Century era was "free-wheeling", with the transmission automatically disconnecting the engine from the drive-train if the car was going faster than the engine would have been driving it, so the engine could throttle back to idle as you sailed down a hill. Anyone with a manual transmission can do the same thing by shifting into neutral at the top of the hill or approaching a stop sign. However, I don't think automatic transmissions like being slammed back into gear from neutral at highway speeds. One must monitor one's speed, of course, to be safe. In a mountainous are such as I live in, I estimate I can safely be in coasting mode between 5 and 10% of the time.
Smaller, lighter cars need to be developed and marketed, as do all-weather human powered vehicles (velomobiles), which are moderately popular in places like the Netherlands where the climate is wet and the ground is flat.
The ultimate challenge of the Twenty-first Century is likely to be the conversion of the American infrastructure from energy inefficiency to efficiency, spurred by increasing energy costs. The sprawl of single-family homes across the landscape is terribly inefficient for home heating as well as transportation, and certainly does make the best use of agricultural land. The European pre-industrial era pattern of scattered villages made up of apartment houses over stores and workshops has much to recommend it from the standpoint of optimal energy and land use.