BIKE: Ozone Action and our bike commuter lungs

[Roger Baker]

Help is on the way!  By far the best news for ozone pollution sufferers 
is the fact that the NY price of oil is now up to $45 per barrel!!!

A month or so ago when the price hit $42 a barrel, it sent the price of 
gasoline above $2 per gallon, so its only a matter of time until it 
goes above $2 again. And since all the oil producers in the world are 
now pumping their aging fields at capacity, world oil is near peak 
production and it will only get more expensive -- forever into the 
future.

Austin has a very serious habit of suburban sprawl land use caused by 
the exceptional political clout of land speculation and road 
contracting interests (which is the real reason why congestion is 
especially bad here), but it also means that the average commuter trips 
are quite long. Roads in Texas have become a form of socialistic 
welfare scam for all these special interests, which is why most 
politicians starting with Rick Perry strongly supported toll roads as a 
cure-all despite massive public opposition.

So far CAMPO has managed to conceal the true cost of widening all the 
central Austin arterials to handle the traffic generated by the toll 
roads, but the local long-range cost is now estimated by CAMPO at $27.8 
BILLION!!! This is far more money than Austin can ever hope to devote 
to road construction, even if after they cut out all the bike and ped 
and transit to help feed the road budget.

Therefore the Austin area economy is especially vulnerable to 
increasing fuel costs. Another important nega-trend for this area is 
the fact that central Texas takes a lot of electric power to cool homes 
during the summer and the cost of electricity produced by natural gas 
is headed up sharply, along with the cost of driving home in the SUV. 
Has anyone seen the new excellent video "The end of suburbia"?

www.endofsuburbia.com/

Bottom line: the competitive basis for growth of the central Texas 
economy is much weaker than the growth boosters want to admit because 
of our inefficient infrastructure. Austin's days as a low cost high 
tech center are mostly over. Wait until we have $3, 4, 5 a gallon gas 
and residents start to abandon the suburbs and you'll see the air clean 
up a whole lot, (even if we did just violate the ozone standard again 
according to today's Statesman).

OZONE REMOVAL FROM AIR

Speaking as a chemist, meanwhile, ozone is not really very hard to 
remove from air since this oxygen molecule is so extremely reactive. 
Once it gets inside a house or in your lungs, it quickly reacts with 
organic material inside and disappears. All it takes to decompose (not 
absorb) ozone is activated charcoal. The Japanese even have honeycomb 
diffusion filters designed to do just that as you can see from the 
following link. You could thus design a bicycling filter pack made with 
these filters as you wait for gasoline prices to rise enough to clean 
up our air. -- Roger

http://www.toyobo.co.jp/e/seihin/ac/kf/