Monday, October 17, 2011
Running on empty
It’s a good thing that cars are so fuel efficient these days – back in our grandparents’ day, it was almost impossible to travel 100 miles without needing to stop at a petrol station, even on a full tank of fuel.
However, environmental considerations aside, fuel efficiency is becoming a practical necessity.This is because petrol stations are beginning to disappear from our nation’s roads. Even in my short driving life, just six years, I’ve noticed that petrol stations are becoming increasingly scarce.
More than ever before, I need to plan my fuel stops when making a journey otherwise there’s a very real risk I could be left short and stranded.
Perhaps supermarkets, which offer cheap subsidised fuel are to blame – as other sellers struggle to compete with their prices they shut up shop and disappear.
There are now only 9,000 fuel forecourts in the UK, which is 12,000 fewer than in 1991, and this is despite a doubling in the number of vehicles on the road in the same period.
Cheap car insurance, easy access to fuel, low house prices – our parents and grandparents don’t know how lucky they were.
Image © Adrian Wallett via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence
Labels: cheap car insurance, efficient, fuel, miles, petrol station, roads, tank, vehicles
Friday, July 15, 2011
The satellites which keep global order
It takes an eight-man team and a further 5,000 civilian employees to keep these objects 12,500 miles above Earth on course, while they travel at 4.5 miles a second, and “on a bad day there isn’t even time to go to the bathroom”.
What are we talking about? The GPS satellites, run by 2d Space Operations Squadron in America, which stop planes colliding with one another, keep ships on course, save the world from chaos – oh, and keep your sat-nav on track.
We don’t give a second thought to the fantastically clever little box on our dashboard – which guides us through the UK roads only occasionally telling us that we’re actually ploughing through buildings or driving in the sea – but we should.
It’s almost a miracle that the system works at all, and some of us would be very lost without it.
Maybe from now on, instead of shouting at it when it goes wrong we should take a deep breath and wait until our hard working GPS take a moment to sort itself out, it’s the least it deserves.
Photo by Lee Jordan via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence
Labels: driving test, GPS, roads, sat-nav, satellites, UK