The Wasteland at the End of the Street

The shopping district in our neighborhood has two main streets. Germantown Avenue, the older of the two, follows an old Indian trail (later a turnpike) starting from the oldest part of the city and meandering through Northwest Philadelphia and into suburbs that were once countryside. Its shops are struggling or abandoned in many places now, but it was once a major retail center in many of the neighborhoods that it touched.

Crossing Germantown Avenue, about three blocks from where I live, is Chelten Avenue. Chelten Avenue is straight, running roughly east to west. Going west from Germantown Avenue to Wayne Avenue (another major cross street), Chelten passes through our main shopping district. It ends about half a mile west of Wayne Avenue. At its west end is Alden Park Manor, an impressive apartment complex that was the first co-op apartment in Philadelphia.

For most of the distance between Germantown and Wayne Avenues, Chelten Avenue retains the air of an urban shopping street. The shops are close together and easily reached on foot. Many are owner-operated and actually provide the kind of personal service that big box stores claim to offer.

But, like many urban shopping streets, Chelten Avenue is in trouble. It has lost the mid-size department store that anchored it at one end in the glory days. The smaller department store at the midpoint of the district is long gone, replaced by a charter school with discount stores at street level. Competition from big box stores and the current recession have left many of the shops closed and shuttered. And at its west end, the district has been hurt by poor design and planning choices.

The western anchor of the district has for many years been a supermarket with its attendant parking lot. The supermarket is still there and doing good business. Its parking lot fronts on the street, but it has done this for many years. The problems at the end of the district lie on the other three corners of the intersection.

Directly across Wayne Avenue from the supermarket is a building that once housed a local branch of Sears, Roebuck. The Sears branch closed about 25 years ago when Sears decided to close smaller local branches and concentrate on the suburbs. This was bad for Chelten Avenue, as it was for many other urban shopping streets with small Sears branches.

Diagonally across from the supermarket is a school designed, or so it appears, chiefly for security. It resembles nothing so much as a prison built of the reinforced concrete that was fashionable during the 1970s. One can imagine it withstanding intensive shelling. It is now a successful charter school. The new proprietors have improved the color scheme, planted trees, and done extensive landscaping. They have done their best, but even their best efforts cannot overcome the building's design problems. Among those problems is a featureless wall that runs along Wayne Avenue for more than half of a city block.

Across Chelten Avenue from the supermarket is a Burger King with its attendant parking lot. After a record-breaking snowstorm in February of this year, Burger King carefully plowed its parking lot but did not clear its sidewalks—this, in a neighborhood that is still one of the most walkable in the city, and on a street where, despite its problems, there is still a great deal of foot traffic.

The west end of our shopping district has become a wasteland of parking lots and blank walls, with yet another fast food franchise under construction in the old Sears parking lot.

Germantown is in fact a strong, beautiful and walkable neighborhood, with history, trees, gardens, and a diverse population. It has many active neighborhood associations, several good schools, and major churches with good community programs. It is an interesting place to live.

But, like many neighborhoods, it survives in spite of our planning (or lack of planning, which is itself a kind of planning-by-default), not because of it. What happened to Chelten Avenue in the last thirty years is repeated in neighborhoods and suburban towns throughout the country: competition from malls and big box stores hurt the local shops. The need for parking damaged the streetscape and made walking less attractive.

The sad part is that we cannot go on like this. Fuel costs even now are discouraging driving and making walkable neighborhoods more desirable. The future of the classic suburban shopping mall is in doubt. We are going to need our neighborhood shopping districts. The question is whether we will have them.

The City Fix Highlights Noteworthy Stories

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

• Mobility;
  
• Quality of life;
  
• Environment;
  
• Public space, and
  
• Technology and innovation
  

The first two in the series are full of useful links:

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.

Three Modest Proposals

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.

• Delivering the Goods: Driving to a store and back uses fuel. Multiply this by tens of thousands of cars, and it uses a lot of fuel. If more stores offered free delivery service, more people could avoid driving to the store and back, which in turn would economize on fuel because one delivery truck on a well-planned route uses less fuel than hundreds of cars driving to the store and back. Free delivery would also allow small businesses to compete with big box stores, which generally do not deliver. To encourage delivery services, why not offer businesses below a certain size an up-front tax credit if they provide free delivery? This would be simple to do; it would be a tax cut for the sector that generates more new jobs than any other; and it would economize on fuel.
  
• Cap and Reward: Why not create a voluntary fuel-saving program for households? Households which enrolled in the program would receive a fuel card based on their annual use of fossil fuels. They would present the card each time they paid for fuel, and it would be debited according to how much fuel they used. At the end of the year a household that used less fuel than the previous year would get a tax credit for economical fuel use. There would be no penalty for going over the previous year's usage—just a strong incentive to economize. The program would be voluntary, and hence not intrusive. It would be popular—who doesn't want a tax credit? And it would almost certainly save fuel and help to cut emissions.
  
• Rides for Clunkers: The original Cash for Clunkers program was designed to move cars off dealers' lots. Rides for Clunkers would try to cut fuel usage and move people to public transit. A family which traded in a high-fuel-use car for one that was more economical would, instead of cash, receive a transit card worth, say, $3000 in free rides on public ground transit, including trains, buses, and light rail. Transit riders who commute often pay less than half of this amount in a year, so the card might provide as much as two years in free rides. Those who abandoned their cars entirely and sold them for scrap would receive $6,000 in free rides. This program would require some setup, and Congress doesn't really like public transit very much, so it has the least chance of being implemented. Still, it is worth presenting for discussion.

In the long run, cutting fuel usage and emissions will become so important that, if we don't find alternatives based on incentives and attractive voluntary programs, we will almost certainly have to resort to rationing in some form. Starting now, with programs that encourage economy without coercing it, is the best way to go in a free society. Whether Congress and state legislatures will see that is quite another matter. One can only hope.

Cash for Clunkers: Not Very Green

The City Fix has a good roundup of reporting on the environmental effects of the popular "Cash for Clunkers" program. The conclusion? That the program will have little or no effect on overall emissions.

The clearest presentation of the arguments is in a Washington Post article by Lee Schipper, founder of EMBARQ, and his colleagues.

On the evidence so far, the program is helping car dealerships a lot. The environment, not so much.

The Best, the Worst, and the Good

The climate change bill that passed the House earlier this month is predictably full of compromises. Climate change deniers, of whom Congress has more than its full share, wanted no bill at all. House members who supported the bill were under pressure from energy companies, mining interests, and car manufacturers to preserve jobs and industries. The result was a cap and trade approach to controlling greenhouse gases, with givebacks to polluters, that was far from the best it could be.

Cap and trade systems are more complex than the alternative—a tax on carbon—favored by many environmentalists. They are harder to administer fairly and far more difficult to understand. Cap and trade, even without the givebacks in the House bill, is not the best approach to curbing emissions.

With all its faults, however, the bill is an important step forward, assuming the Senate passes it as well. For the first time, at least in the United States, it sets a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Imperfect as its price mechanism is, it will force businesses to consider environmental costs when setting prices, purchasing supplies, replacing equipment, and choosing shipping methods. It will not make as much difference as a more perfect approach, but it will make a difference.

The key here is to recognize that the good is not always the enemy of the best, and to avoid making the best the enemy of the good. The House bill becomes a problem only if we see it as a final policy rather than a step toward a better policy. It can also become a problem if we reject it because it is not the ideal bill. It is better than having no policy, as long as the nation follows it with more efficient and more stringent systems. If there is no followup, then, by encouraging complacency, the good has become the enemy of the best; but it is still better than doing nothing.

This general principle—that we should not let the best become the enemy of the good, and vice versa—applies in many areas. And in all these areas, the worst is usually the enemy of both the good and the best.

Consider land use planning. Better land use is essential to any program to control greenhouse gases. If shops, services, and jobs are not accessible without a car, then Americans will depend on their cars and use them all the time. They will have no choice. The best planning encourages walkable shopping districts, jobs that are within a short walk of home, and public transit connections to shopping and work located further away.

The picture at the head of this article shows the worst, both in design and in environmental impact. The fast food restaurants, each surrounded by its own parking lot, are far from where their customers live. The parking lots complicate and pollute water runoff. There is no public transit in the picture, and probably none for miles (if there is any at all). The highway that leads to these eateries is dangerous for walking and biking. This little complex is a disaster in almost every way: it is a threat to the environment and an affront to the eye, and the food is pretty bad as well (not to mention its own impact on the environment).

The best solution to the problems posed by this complex is to change the incentives so that locating a restaurant in the middle of nowhere makes no economic sense. This is unlikely all at once, but a good first step would be zoning reform to allow mixed land use (shops and offices located near, or even among, houses where people live). This will not satisfy those who think fast food complexes should all be torn down, but in the long run, well-judged zoning reform could rebuild communities and transform them. Zoning reform would begin to change the incentives, even if it did not immediately reshape the community.

The worst, however, is in this case the enemy of the good and the best. In the long run, if we do nothing about places like this fast-food complex—or worse, continue to build more of them—both our good proposals and our best proposals will no longer matter. Climate change and the damage that comes with it will be impossible to reverse or control.

Many people see nothing wrong with miles of stand-alone, plastic eateries surrounded by parking lots. No one considers environmental costs in locating a new MacDonald's or Burger King—or no one has until recently. These attitudes are deeply imbedded in our culture, and they must change. By putting a price on carbon emissions, even a flawed cap and trade system will encourage corporations to ask themselves hard questions about location, food production, and nearly every aspect of their operation. Walkable locations and smaller parking lots will become more attractive, as will locally-produced food products.

This will not be ideal—the ideal would include radical changes in the American diet, for example—but it would be a step toward lower carbon emissions. That is not the best, but it would help us to move in the right direction.

Car Sharing Reaches a New Milestone

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.

Fixing Transit, Creating Jobs

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.

Two Suburbs—An American Journey

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.

Two Good Articles on Transportation

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.

Going Car-Free

The May 12 New York Times blog, Room for Debate. features "Car-Free in America?", a wide-ranging and enlightening discussion on whether, and how, the developed world can reduce or eliminate its heavy dependence on private automobiles. The issue is particularly important in the United States, where most households support more than one car, walkable suburban neighborhoods are unusual, and public transit investment very low by European and Pacific Rim standards. Well worth reading.

Getting There from Here—Mobility and Freedom

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:

• The Ethics of Mobility: Should we be able to move freely from place to place? If not, how are we to determine restrictions on our movements? More important, who can legitimately make that determination? (Here I am speaking about policy decisions; the ethical questions facing individuals are different from those facing policymakers.) If we have some sort of right to mobility, we face a series of decisions about the best modes of transport. Hence the second aspect of the discussion:
  
• The Efficiency of Our Transportation: How can we move individuals and large numbers of people from place to place at the lowest cost in fuel, money, stress, and emissions? Once we have a proposal to do this, we need to determine how to apply it in practice:
  
• Implementation of Transportation Plans: How can we persuade people to use the most efficient method to get to their destination?

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.

Recycling the Suburbs—Followup Notes

Alison Arief has now posted a followup note on the suburbs in her By Design blog. Based partly on comments from readers, it is enlightening not only for Arief's analysis and resource recommendations, but for what it reveals about the attitudes of urban dwellers toward suburbanites and vice-versa.

Since the suburbs as they now stand are becoming less viable every day, it is up to all of us to find humane, sustainable ways to retrofit them. Arief's followup note shows how difficult this may be. Teamwork begins with the sense of being on the same side. With respect to making the suburbs more sustainable, there are a lot of good ideas out there. And there are a lot of unhelpful attitudes. Let's hope this can change, and quickly.

Powered by Qumana

Recycling the Suburbs

The American suburb—fuel-intensive, automobile-based, and without walkable neighborhoods—is coming to the end of its useful life. Rising fuel costs and the collapse of the mortgage market mean that some planned developments will not proceed, some developments that have begun will never be finished, and many suburban residents will have to move to smaller and less expensive houses.

Those who, like James Howard Kunstler. dislike the suburbs, expect and hope that they will collapse of their own weight. Others, including this blog, have tried to find ways to make existing suburbs more sustainable by measures like connecting them with public transit and revising zoning codes.

One of the most interesting recent discussions of the design problems posed by the decline of the suburbs is a recent posting in Alison Arief's By Design blog. Although the article reaches no conclusions—Arief admits that she has no perfect solution—it outlines the difficulty of finding creative approaches to recycling the suburbs even while it hopes they will be found.

Well worth reading.

Powered by Qumana

A Follow-Up Note

Just over two years ago, I posted a three-part series on a proposal to build a ten-story parking lot (instead of the originally proposed condominium) in the heart of Philadelphia's downtown. The series can be found at "Design for What," Part I; Part II; and Part III.

In the intervening two years, the developer has found enough tenants to justify building the full condominium, and the building's exterior is nearly complete. While this outcome does little to address other issues discussed in the post, such as creating jobs in the city and the proliferation of parking lots, it is at least better than a parking garage, however "beautiful" (the developer's term when making the proposal).

Powered by Qumana

Suggestions for Rebuilding

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.

Powered by Qumana

Bailing Out Futility

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:

• Making the whole package contingent on a commitment by the automakers to develop fuel-efficient vehicles and to seek a minimum efficiency of 50 mpg (already common in Europe) within ten years.
  
• Increasing and extending unemployment benefits so that people displaced by necessary changes (even bankruptcies) in the auto industry need not suffer.
  
• Making additional funds available to help automakers develop and retool for innovative public transit solutions. These funds would be contingent on automakers' developing a plan for the new work, and supervision of their use would be strict to keep them from being used for business as usual. And finally,
  
• Making the whole package contingent on replacing the management which has so badly failed a major industry with people of vision and imagination.

These measures, even taken together, would not solve all the problems of the auto industry or transportation in the U.S. But they would be a start. Whether the Congress has the vision to consider them or something like them is another question—and perhaps the most difficult of all.

Smart Cars, Hybrids, and Our Spaceship

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.

How We Got into This Mess

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.

Houston recycles 2.6 percent of its waste, as compared with other cities like San Francisco (69 percent) and New York (34 percent). As many as 25,000 Houston residents have been waiting ten years for city-provided recycling bins. And city officials are not optimistic: Houston is too sprawling for efficient recycling collection, and its citizens are too independent to accept recycling requirements easily.

Houston is sprawling because its planning system effectively encourages sprawl and because nearly every city planning function is subordinate to the need to move automobile traffic and park cars. Its downtown is a wasteland of tall buildings in a dead zone full of parking lots. It is LeCorbusier's vision of high-rise buildings in a park; but the park has become instead a paved-over nightmare, and after dark the streets are empty.

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.

Biofuels Revisited

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.)

Common Sense and Fuel Prices

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.

• offshore drilling would endanger beaches and not produce any actual oil for years;
  
• blaming speculators for high fuel prices merely postpones the day when we have to adjust to those prices, according to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman;
  
• a gas tax "holiday" would encourage greater usage and probably drive prices up rather than down.
  

The obvious way to deal with high fuel prices is to use less fuel. This would make life less expensive. It would also cut greenhouse gas emissions. Using less fuel is a common sense solution which helps in many ways. Unfortunately, it makes for dull rhetoric: Drive less! Ride the train! Use a Bike! Walk to the Store!

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.