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Nissan exec: Car culture is fading
Alex Taylor, Fortune
Worldwide, people are losing interest in automobiles, one executive says.
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If you are looking for some insight into what the automobile of the future will look like you could do worse than talk with Tom Lane. An American, he runs all of Nissan's Product Strategy anad Product Planning from his office in Tokyo.

...he points to some discouraging global trends that don't bode well for the industry.

He notes that consumers in Japan are losing their mojo when it comes to cars. The population is aging, and younger drivers would rather spend their money on new cellphones and Internet access.

"Japan is increasingly not interested in new cars," he says.

The population in Europe is aging too, and Lane sees similar ennui spreading there. As car ownership becomes more expensive and cities increasingly impose congestion pricing on car usage in center cities, he sees car owners switching to mass transit for their daily commute, and then renting cars for longer trips.
(14 January 2008)

China to build 97 new airports by 2020
AFP
China announced plans Saturday to build nearly 100 new airports by 2020 to cater for soaring demand.

... The General Administration [of Civil Aviation] predicts passenger traffic will grow by 11.4 percent a year between now and 2020, and freight traffic by 14 percent.
(26 January 2008)

Sail transport: where theory meets reality
Dmitry Orlov, Culture Change
It has been about two years since I became seriously interested in sailboats. During that time, I learned a great deal about boats, sailed a variety of craft around Boston Harbor and the vicinity, bought a boat, fitted it out, moved aboard with my wife and cat, and sailed it all over the eastern seaboard -- from Maine to the Carolinas. As I write this, we are taking a break in Charleston, South Carolina, before heading further south into the Caribbean.

As a byproduct of my transition to a life afloat, in August of 2006 I wrote an article, The New Age of Sail, which some people have found quite inspiring. As happens so often, its inspirational qualities resulted to some extent from my ignorance at the time; had I known what I know now, the cold light of experience would have no doubt tempered the inspirational qualities of this text.

...As far as making use of this plan prior to economic collapse, thinking about this may shed some light on the limits to what can be done to organize in preparation for collapse. The problem is far more general than the one we are considering, boiling down to this: in order to organize and prepare for collapse, people need to act as if collapse has already occurred, and this is something that rational individuals will quite reasonably refuse to do.

Why would anyone who is of sound mind be willing to go into the business of provisioning sailboats with rice, flour, cured meat, and pickled cabbage? Sailboat crews prefer fresh-frozen produce, which can be obtained at a supermarket. For bulk items, there are wholesale clubs. Our provisioners may have a viable post-collapse business plan, but pre-collapse it is sheer nonsense.
(January 2008)