The City Fix, an excellent blog on sustainable cities, has inaugurated a new Friday series "highlighting the newsy and noteworthy" stories about cities that appeared in the past week. The series will cover five general themes
February 26: Driving on the Rise, Transport Contributes to Climate Change, Sidewalks Improve Relationships
March 5: Olympics Transport Legacy, Obese Cities, BRT in NYC
Well worth following.
Buildings and transportation are the sectors of the U.S. economy that generate the most greenhouse gases. Refitting our houses, public buildings, and neighborhoods to make them sustainable will take time. It will create new industries and jobs, but it is a long-term, not a short-term solution.
Transportation is both a long-term and a short-term problem. The Cash for Clunkers program, which recently concluded, was touted partly as a way to cut fuel use, and therefore greenhouse gases. Most reports showed that it effectively cleared auto dealers' inventory but did little for fuel use or the environment.
Cash for Clunkers was a camel—a horse designed by a committee—but it is not too late for other ideas that could, if implemented, have more impact on fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.
Herewith, three such ideas. They are simple in principle and easy to understand. They would help lower fuel use and emissions. They are not, however, camels, and because they are not, they may never make it through Congress. I present them in the order of likelihood.
The City Fix reports that Zazcar, a Brazilian company,has launched a car-sharing service in Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo thus becomes the 1,000th city in the world to have a car-sharing service, and the first in Latin America.
The City Fix reports that a Portland, Oregon, firm has begun producing streetcars—a type of transit vehicle not produced in the U.S. for 60 years, yet common in many other developed countries.
The posting includes links to United Streetcar, the manufacturer, and its parent company, the Oregon Iron Works. Also included is a link to a history of streetcars in the U.S.
Those who think the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler spells the end of transportation-oriented manufacturing jobs in the United States should consult this posting. Converting the U.S. transportation system to a more sustainable model will generate thousands of new jobs to help replace those lost as the older, car-centric model becomes less viable.
A few weeks ago, I had a business appointment in Springfield, Pa. From my neighborhood to my appointment in Springfield it is just under 15 miles. There is no practical public transit route, so I reserved a car from PhillyCarShare for the journey.
Google Maps was handy for finding a route, but its estimate of travel time was, to put it mildly, overoptimistic. The computer estimated a 27 minute drive. Any driver who has experienced the route, or part of it, myself included, estimates a driving time closer to 1 hour because of expected traffic and adds at least half an hour to that estimate to allow for unexpected traffic.
Getting from my neighborhood to Springfield was an object lesson in why the private car is a very bad people-mover. It was also an opportunity to compare two suburbs from different eras.
My home is in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, just outside the Tulpehocken Station Historic District. This historically certified group of houses, most built in the mid-to-late 19th Century, forms an early "railroad suburb" near the Tulpehocken stop on the local train to Chestnut Hill (another early railroad suburb). For the homeowners who built their houses in the district, the presence of a convenient rail stop was an incentive to settle there. Tulpehocken Station became a kind of transit hub for the district. Houses there reflect the affluence of those who commissioned them, and some of the finest Philadelphia architectural firms designed them. The result is an area that is as attractive as nearly any in the city. The affluent homeowners no longer live in the district, and many of the houses are now divided into apartments. But the district retains its charm. (Here are some pictures of the area.)
The district and the neighborhood surrounding it are handy to shopping areas, medical offices, and schools. Most addresses in the area score 85-90 (highly walkable) on walkscore.com—which means that residents need not drive in order to have access to shops, services, and restaurants. Walkability like this is one of the virtues of many city neighborhoods, and so it is with the Tulpehocken Station district area.
I set out from my home just after lunch, and almost immediately ran into the expected traffic. To get from Germantown to Springfield, there are only two practical routes. One follows U.S. Route 1 (called variously City Avenue and County Line Road). The other uses Route 76, the Schuylkill Expressway. Both routes are notorious for heavy traffic at all hours. The Expressway has, with some justice, acquired the nickname "Surekill Crashway," so I chose Route 1.
Route 1 is also not a particularly pleasant drive. It has stop-start traffic most of the way, and it was laid out by a series of township governments who had quite differing ideas about turning lanes and traffic lights. Most people who use it regularly are very relieved when they turn off to get to their final destination. So was I when Google Maps' directions took me away from Route 1 and into a series of back roads through an area of Springfield that, judging by the architecture, had been a suburb in the 1950s and was now well-settled and older, but still well-maintained and well-off.
It was a pleasant drive through an area that was clearly designed during the ascendancy of the private automobile. I saw no bus stop signs and only one light rail station in four miles of driving. The houses were more attractive than those in most subdivisions, though not quite as elegant as those near my home. Some were surrounded by woodlands, which gave them almost a fairy-tale quality.
But getting food, medical services, and laundry detergent required a car. The nearest shopping location was just over a mile from the edge of this suburb, and it was a mall that was closed for refurbishing (which these days is often a euphemism for closed permanently). The only school I passed was out of walking range of most of the homes in the neighborhood. A typical address in this area returns a walkscore rating of 35-40 (not walkable). Rising fuel prices and diminishing supplies will not be good for this neighborhood. Whether it will adapt only time will tell, but it is not well-situated for an era of limited resources.
I completed my business in Springfield and set out for home again. The pleasant suburb I had passed through earlier was the best part of the return journey, which provided yet another lesson in the defects of the private car as people mover. With less than five miles to go on Route 1, I learned that ahead on my route there had been a major accident. Traffic, which was now at rush hour levels, was so stalled that I managed less than half a mile in twenty minutes. Home began to look very good.
Once I had returned the car to its PhllyCarShare pod (parking space), I walked home. Germantown's economy has many problems, but as I walked I realized that, with a very short detour, I could get food, and without detouring at all I could get a fresh vegetable at the corner store a hundred yards from my house. I could walk to the shops. I did not need to fight traffic, use fuel, and maintain a vehicle in order to cook supper. I was grateful for that.
The City Fix, an excellent blog on cities, has just posted two major articles on transportation policy. One, Call for Wholesale Reform, Not Just Reauthorization, of Transportation Bill, is particularly timely with so much stimulus money going to infrastructure repair.
The second posting is a summary and link to a good overview of transportation policy posted on the WorldChanging blog.
Both items are well worth reading.
First in an occasional series on the ethics and practicalities of mobility.
How, in a finite world, can we get from here to there? Should we even be traveling at all? How much, and how freely?
For most of us most of the time, broad questions like these do not come up. We worry about getting to work, keeping the car fueled and running, getting to the train on time, and similar problems. Underlying all of these, however, is the question of mobility—how much we should have and how we can achieve it most efficiently.
Any discussion of mobility has three aspects:
I begin with ethics because most commentators don't discuss them. Most of our discussions concern how to make our transportation more efficient and less destructive, how to manage traffic, the state of our highways, and similar questions. To the question of whether we should be able to travel from place to place, most of us answer, "Of course," without further justification.
This is the most defensible position, but it never hurts to remind ourselves why we adopt it. The ability to move from place to place—to change cities, to change countries, to get from home to our place of work—is a fundamental component of human liberty. Countries that have restricted it, as Czarist Russia did with internal passports, are unattractive models for the future. An internal passport under the Czars was a means of social control that required a large and intrusive enforcement apparatus. Unlike a mere identity card, it could be, and was, used to restrict peoples' movements.
In order to save fuel and reduce our carbon emissions, it might be useful to restrict travel, limit the use of automobiles, or force travelers to choose certain modes of transport over others. We would do this, however, only at the cost of becoming a quite different, and far less free, society. It is no accident that totalitarian societies restrict mobility as well as speech, requiring exit visas for those who wish to go abroad and proper paperwork even for those who want to go to a different city.
Choices about mobility are also choices about what kind of society we will have. The wrong choices may change us in ways we might be unable to bear.
That, in brief, is part of the ethical case for preserving freedom of movement. Stated generally like this, it does not provide much practical guidance. The practical question is whether we can preserve mobility without destroying the planet, and if so, how. The next article in this series will take up this question, along with other ethical questions it raises.
President-elect Obama's economic recovery program includes a great deal of funding for infrastructure repair and green development. Herewith a few suggestions for infrastructure repair that would also be green development—and good strategy as well.Rebuild the Railroads: The United States was once the leader in developing railroads. Now, as its rail system has been allowed to decay, it has fallen far behind other developed countries and some, like China, that are still emerging. Environmentally and strategically this makes no sense. Rail transport is the most efficient way to move freight, far more efficient than trucking goods or flying them. With better track and rolling stock, freight hauling by rail would be competitive with trucking—as it has to be if we are to cut greenhouse gas emissions and become less dependent on imported fuel.
Make Passenger Rail Competitive: For those seeking alternatives to driving or flying, passenger rail is frequently not an option. Trains are infrequent, sometimes more costly, and often much slower than they could be with improved track and rolling stock. As with freight, rail is the most efficient way to move passengers. It makes little sense to continue policies that encourage air travel, or even driving, when investing in passenger rail—even subsidizing it—would save fuel and cut emissions.
Connect the Dots: Fuel prices, although temporarily in retreat, will not remain low indefinitely. The supply of oil for making gasoline is finite, and the cost of extracting it will go up, not down, in the future. Over time, this will doom the U.S. suburbs to—depending on who is talking—decline or collapse. The suburbs may be, as James Howard Kunstler maintains, the worst misallocation of funds in recent memory; but they are there, and people live in them. The best way to make them viable again is to connect them with rapid, efficient public transport—light rail for preference, or low-emission buses.
Create Walkability: Walkable neighborhoods are in vogue for good reason. They are the future, if we are to have one. In the long term, it would make sense to give businesses incentives to build stores within walking distance (or easy public transport distance) of the dots which the infrastructure package has just connected. This would make it easier for us to lower our dependence on the private car, and hence lower emissions and dependence on imported fuel.
All of these items would cost money—as would other components of any stimulus package worth doing. But unlike simply repairing roads and bridges, however much they need repair, these suggestions would build for a future of high fuel prices and environmental constraints. That, after all, is the future that we face.
Further Thoughts
Coordinate Electric Cars and Public Transport: Commentator Lorcan suggests that roads should be made electric-car ready so that rail passengers could take the train to a depot or station, then pick up an electric car for the trip to their final destination. This imaginative suggestion echos Israeli architect and planner Moshe Safdie's concept of the utility car, which would be available for short trips at transit points like train stations. His book, The City After the Automobile, repays study. By making roads electric-car ready, I assume Lorcan means adding electric car battery-charging stations at intervals on the roads—also a fine suggestion.
The larger issue here is whether we can coordinate our transportation system to encourage users to take the most efficient transport mode for their journey. A future post will address this question.
Mountaintop Removal: Lorcan also argues for abandoning the notion of "clean coal" as a dead end and ending mountaintop removal. Both are important points. For a discussion of mountaintop removal, see "The Price of Coal" on this blog.
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As anyone who follows the news knows, the United States automobile industry is in trouble. Sales are down, particularly among sport utility vehicles (SUVs), which appeared to save the industry for a few years and are now killing it. So the Big Three, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors, are seeking a government loan. Ford claims that it has enough cash to keep going, but supports the bailout because a General Motors bankruptcy, which is the most likely, would devastate the industry, threaten the livelihood of auto parts makers, and worsen an already grim economic situation.
There is no doubt that a sudden collapse of the auto industry would be ruinous for auto workers, parts suppliers, and the general economy—though perhaps less so for top management at the Big Three, who arrived in Washington separately in private jets and would no doubt escape the wreckage with very fat wallets, as did the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard, Lehman Brothers, and various hedge funds before them. The major question, which Congress is right to ask, is whether a bailout would merely reward bad management without changing a badly-flawed industry very much, if at all.
The auto industry's problem has little to do with costly union contracts and pensions, although these are favorite scapegoats among conservative commentators. A thriving, far-seeing, and innovative industry could pay the contracts and pensions and still make money. But an industry which has tried to thrive by fighting fuel economy requirements and basing its future on SUVs and pickup trucks is neither far-seeing nor innovative. The car companies have used more ingenuity in blocking and trying to avoid fuel economy legislation than they have in adapting to a world with limited and expensive fuel supplies.
It is as simple as this: Oil, which fuels the automobile fleet, is becoming harder to extract and will be more expensive in the long term. Americans are driving less, and many who were interviewed by news agencies intend to drive less in the future even if the price of gasoline comes down because they know the price drop will be temporary. Fuel economy, not size or power, is the new standard for judging cars.
Climate change also factors into buying decisions for many Americans. This reinforces the need for fuel economy and will make low-carbon cars, if they come on the market, very popular.
On fuel economy and low emissions, American car makers have done little or nothing. They did not, for example, develop hybrid technology. They fought gas mileage regulations. They concentrated on building and selling SUVs, which, because they are built around a truck chassis, are technically trucks and not subject to the same requirements as passenger cars. Now General Motors has discovered hybrids, electric cars, and hydrogen-powered vehicles. But they made little or no effort to do so in the past twenty years.
There is a larger problem, not yet discussed, that will become urgent in the long run: The private car as a major people-mover is beginning to see the end of its days. It is simply too expensive and inefficient to remain the transportation of choice much longer. Already, public transit in the United States is seeing large increases in ridership, which it is ill-prepared to handle because we have starved it of resources. Over the next 20-30 years, as fuel becomes even more expensive, this trend is likely to continue. We will still have cars, but they will not be the main part of our transportation system.
There is no reason why car makers cannot adapt to this situation by diversifying into public transit vehicles, but the Big Three have not done so. Instead, they have behaved as if oil is a renewable resource and the chief problem facing them is increasing sales.
Bailing out the car industry in its current form would reward not only bad management, but a disastrous vision of the future. Instead, Congress might consider a different financial aid package that would encourage the car makers to innovate, help displaced workers, and build for a long run in which we must use less fossil fuel. Some elements of that package might include:
For just over a year now, I have been using a Toyota Prius from PhillyCarShare (see my short description) when only a car would do the job—for hauling items too heavy for a hand cart, a long trip to a place with no public transit, and similar tasks.
The Prius is unquestionably a fine piece of engineering. On a 200-mile trip with city and highway driving, it averaged about 45 miles per gallon of fuel. It provides feedback on all its systems, and most of its controls are digital and easy to use. It rides comfortably, accelerates smoothly, and has a sleep mode for the engine that virtually eliminates idling at traffic lights. If the solution to our transportation problems were merely a change of automotive technology, the Prius would be a good candidate for the assignment.
So, to be fair, would the so-called "smart car," a small vehicle which is becoming popular among sport utility vehicle (SUV) owners and others looking for fuel economy now that gasoline in the U.S. is hovering at $4.00/gallon. Automobile makers, even those in the U.S. who previously didn't get it, are rushing to fill the demand for efficiency even as they struggle to sell thousands of unwanted low-mileage SUVs. General Motors, which has been staggering toward bankruptcy for the last nine months or so, is even advertising alternative fuel cars powered by hydrogen, electricity, and hybrid technology similar to that of the Prius.
All of this sounds good, and it cannot hurt if we begin to drive more efficient vehicles. But the problem goes beyond fuel efficiency. The private car has always been the least efficient way to move people from one place to another. Making our cars smaller and more economical will do little to change this. One city bus, for example, can replace 40-50 cars if each car carries one person. If each car has a passenger and a driver, the bus can still replace 20-25 cars. This saves road space, speeds up commuting, and uses less fuel per passenger-mile than even the most efficient car.
The private car has another and more important inefficiency. A high percentage of an automobile's carbon footprint stems from the resources used to manufacture it. Buses and trains also have a built-in footprint, but because they carry passengers more efficiently than a fleet of cars, their total footprint per passenger-mile is lower than a private car.
There is also the question of parking space. One of the major problems with a car is that you have to put it somewhere. Central Philadelphia has over 500 parking facilities, many of them surface lots that break up the urban fabric, complicate water runoff, and turn some areas of the city into treacherous wastelands—literally: empty, deserted areas like parking lots can encourage crimes against persons.
The earth, which is in effect a kind of spaceship, does not have this kind of room to waste. Shared cars, on the PhillyCarShare model, would, if widely used, take up less space than a fleet of cars that outnumbers licensed drivers (as in the United States). There would be fewer of them—one shared car for every 20-30 drivers instead of more than 1 private car per driver. They would come close to the architect Moshe Safdie's concept of the utility car, which would be available for short trips around a city after a traveler or commuter had arrived in the city by train or bus. The Prius or a smart car would make an excellent utility car. It also makes a good shared vehicle.
What these new car models cannot do is transform the world merely by replacing the current car fleet. Replacing all our SUVs with Priuses would save fuel. It would not save the planet.
The July 29 edition of the New York Times includes an article on recyling in Houston, TX, that gives a capsule demonstration of how we got into our environmental mess, and the barriers to fixing it.The city of the future? Not quite, but Houston's problems remind us how far we have to go, and how hard it will be to get from here to there. In Houston, we have met the enemy, and he is us.
A little over 18 months ago I posted a critique of President Bush's State of the Union message and its emphasis on increased use of biofuels, particularly ethanol. Unfortunately, the posting lumped ethanol with biofuels made from wood. This was incorrect, as commentator sverdalov reminded me:
Please do not insult those working on the development of wood to biofuels (ethanol is the presidents favorite, not theirs) or their choosen feedstock. Wood is a renewable resource when managed properly as the US forest products industry has learned to do. High yields (measures in tons/acre/year) can be achieved with a great deal of success. Also, the use of wood does help with global warming, as the net CO2 to atmosphere is 0, as the trees will regrow, recapturing the CO2. Further, since non-fuel products are likely, some of the carbon captured would be in the form of products (such as plastics) to be sold to the consumer. This would aid in decreasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
I stand corrected on the use of wood for biofuels. The larger point, made in this and other postings, is that biofuels will not spare us from the need to become less dependent on the private automobile and improve our public transit. Private cars are the least efficient way to move people, no matter how they are fueled. We have to do better at providing alternatives.
I am grateful to sverdalov for this correction.
Afterword, July 28, 2008: Commentator Marshall Massey reminds me that trees are a precious resource and not to be used lightly to create products like biofuels which, at bottom, only facilitate inefficient transportation like the private car. He is correct. If this contradicts what I said earlier in this posting, so be it. I believe, with Emerson, that the search for perfect consistency is "the hobgoblin of little minds" and can often impede the search for truth.
In my reading, sverdalov was defending wood-based biofuels and criticizing me for lumping them with corn-based ethanol. His critique was correct to that extent, and I still accept it. The larger question is whether we should be expending effort and money on biofuels at all. sverdalov's original comment did not directly address this policy question. I agree that wood-based biofuels are different from and less harmful than biofuels based on food crops.
On the larger question of substituting biofuels for gasoline, I was not explicit enough. Our problem is not how to fuel our cars; it is how to use them less, or not at all, and still retain that freedom of movement which is one of the hallmarks of a free society. A change in the fuel mix does not and cannot address that problem. Creator Spirit, come.
(See the related article, Requiem for the Car Industry, for one possible scenario on the fate of the private car.)
Official Washington is buzzing with proposals that allegedly would help to bring down fuel prices. The most loudly proclaimed, probably because they make good rhetoric, are permitting offshore drilling for oil, cracking down on oil futures speculators, and giving motorists a "holiday" from federal gas taxes.
All of which sounds good and would achieve precisely nothing. Or worse than nothing.
For policy suggestions on using less fuel, The City Fix has two recent postings that are relevant. One, "Easing the Pain Caused by High Fuel Prices," includes three practical suggestions for city design and social investment that can help. The second and more recent is a series of photographs of the Beijing subway system, which was built to ease travel at the Olympics but will also help control fuel use and pollution in one of China's major cities.
Well worth reading.
Judith Warner's New York Times blog, "Domestic Disturbances," has a very funny posting on the family's Land Rover, which now sits in the garage except for trips to the local Metro stop, the supermarket, and the gas station—all less than a mile each way.
Warner's speculations about the ways the family might actually use the Land Rover in future are hilarious. A good, short read with a serious point lurking among the laughs.
Everybody in the United States is in a lather about fuel prices. Airlines are scrambling: they are cutting service (for which read personnel), charging for services that once were free, and passing fuel surcharges through to customers, just to avoid losing money. Two of the three candidates for U.S. President advocated a summer Federal gas tax "holiday" which, economists universally pointed out, would not save consumers any money and might raise the price of gasoline in the long run. Automakers like Chrysler, suddenly unable to sell the SUVs and trucks that had become their staple, are now offering protection from gas price increases. Finding the best gas price has, in fact, become a cottage industry, with new Web sites springing up every day.Little of this is surprising. Americans have lived with cheap transportation fuel for so long that life without it is inconceivable to many. Worse, we, more than any other developed country, are unprepared for fuel costs which, in the long run, will go up, not down. We fly and drive everywhere, and until recently, fuel economy (let alone the effect on the planet) was not a factor in planning and transportation decisions. Now we have few alternatives, and our failure to provide them will make the transition to a future of fuel economy and high fuel costs that much more painful.
Consumers, showing more common sense than many politicians, have begun leaving their cars at home, consolidating car trips, and using public transit, according to a recent Washington Post report. The increase in ridership in Philadelphia is somewhere between five and 10 percent—not enough to bring our fossil fuel usage down significantly, but enough to show a trend that could do this if it keeps up. The problem is that our public transportation, both here and in the rest of the country, is not ready for the increases in ridership that will (and should) come as fuel costs remain high.
Politicians and policy-makers still don't quite get it. Conservatives suggest that oil prices are experiencing a speculative bubble, and prices will go down as market forces act—all of which could be true but would not prevent higher prices as oil becomes more scarce and harder to extract. Liberals attack the oil companies for enormous profits—which they certainly have made in the past few months. The problem is that attacking the oil companies will not prevent oil from become harder to find because there is only so much oil in the ground in the first place. To adapt to a future of expensive oil, we have to stop living as if cheap fuel is a human right. This means investment in old infrastructure like railroads, and new ideas like light rail and alternative energy. Many politicians, however, still insist that building roads is an investment, while funding public transit is a subsidy.
A future with cheap oil is not on offer. Nor, unless we want the earth to become uninhabitable, is a future based on massive use of fossil fuels. Whether we can get to a future that is not based primarily on fossil energy is the central question of our age. We will not do so by giving ourselves gas tax holidays, inveighing against the oil companies, or deceiving ourselves about the nature of the problem.
The six-story, 882-space structure at the Civic Center features photovoltaic roof panels, a storm drain water treatment system, recycled construction materials and energy efficient mechanical systems.It's hard to decide whether the city is serious. A parking garage can, apparently, aspire to a green building certificate. But its function is to hold hundreds of parked cars, which encourages driving, which increases the concentration of greenhouse gases. And on and on.
The $29 million structure—which sits near the entrance and exit ramps at the end of the 10 Freeway—also features ground-floor retail, art works on every floor and sweeping city and ocean views.
City officials hope the 290,000-square-foot-garage will become the nation’s first parking structure certified by the U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).
The structure’s photovoltaic panels—which cost $1.5 million—will pay for themselves in 17 years by generating $90,000 a year in electricity,” said Craig Perkins, director of Environmental and Public Works Management for the City.
