public transportation

The RTID package doesn’t give Seattle voters a fair choice

Those of us who live in and around Seattle will vote this November on a huge package that's being sold as "roads and transit." Stay with me -- it's complicated but important, and it could have implications for transit projects around the US.

Of the $18 billion in the package, about $10 billion will pay for 50 miles of new light rail; the rest will pay for roads projects, including 152 new miles of general-purpose highways (and 74 miles of HOV). Because our state legislature, in its infinite wisdom, tied the two unrelated proposals together, rejecting roads means rejecting transit, and vice versa. Pro-transit supporters of the package (and there are lots of them) pretty much stop there. How, they argue, could we turn down the first opportunity we've had in a generation to more than double the region's light rail system? Yes, there are roads in the package -- including bad roads, like the four-lane widening of a major suburban freeway -- but a lot of those will actually help transit. Expanding SR-520 from Seattle to Bellevue, for  example, will create two new HOV lanes. And look at all that light rail! Shiny, shiny light rail. How could you say no to all that light rail?

Well, let's look at what happens if this region does pass the joint roads and transit package. That will be our last chance to make a truly ambitious investment in transportation for a generation. It is, in other words, our last chance to do it right. As local Sierra Club chapter chairman Mike O'Brien told me, "It's not like we have pools of $18 billion just sitting around." If we pass this package, we'll have light rail, but we'll also be stuck paying for, and building, all those new roads -- roads that will just fill up, as roads do; roads that will contribute more to global warming than light rail takes away; roads that certainly won't be much help in easing congestion without a much larger investment in transit than the one in this package. And we'll send a message to transportation planners around the country: "It's OK to have transit, as long as you throw some new roads in there too."

A better message would be: "People want transit, so why do you keep giving us *$%! roads?"

Residents in over 100 Chinese cities urged to walk, bike, or use public transit this Saturday

China, once famed as a bicycling nation, tries to put the genie back in the bottle.

How green is California?

The State of California just passed a budget that, thanks to Governor Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in the Assembly, removes $1.3 billion from the public transit budget. Yes, this is the same state and governor that passed a cap-and-trade bill that seeks to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020. But so far, the only thing being cut is the one way to get cars off of the roads.

You know all of those ways we could allegedly do the equivalent of removing cars from the road, like buying compact fluorescent light bulbs? Trains and buses actually replace cars. In addition, more public transit leads to absolute and certain reduction in emissions. Even mandating greater efficiency of cars does not eliminate the possibility of greater emissions. More efficient cars might simply delay an increase in carbon emissions, since miles traveled keeps going upward -- unless there are trains or buses.

With peak oil looming, the situation is getting more critical, both for drivers who have to pay more for their gas, and might therefore prefer to take public transit if it was available, and for nonelectrified buses and trains, since their fuel costs increase. So, the logical thing to do would be to increase public transit funding. Enter the convoluted state of budgets in most states, particularly California:

Los Angeles City Council OKs a peak-hour bus-only lane

An update from me and my colleague Francisca Porchas of the Labor/Community Strategy Center:

For the first time in L.A., the car capital of the world, a bus-centered public-transportation system has been given priority over the auto -- a big victory for environmental justice and the reduction of auto-based air toxins and greenhouse gases.

On Aug. 15, the Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union secured an important environmental and public-health victory at the Los Angeles City Council: the approval of a $27 million project to implement peak-hour bus-only lanes on Wilshire Boulevard. The Wilshire bus-only lane would run from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica and would operate during rush hour, 7-9 a.m. and 4-7 p.m. Wilshire Boulevard has the largest transit ridership in the county with over 90,000 boardings a day. The bus-only lane is expected to reduce travel time by 20 percent for current transit users and would attract new riders to public transportation.

Seattle enviros face a Hobson’s choice in November

This November, those of us who live in and around Seattle will vote on a $17.7 billion transportation package that would expand light rail (by 50 miles) but also include billions for road expansion -- including roads that will primarily serve sprawling developments to Seattle's south and east, making the package a Hobson's choice for environmentalists. (The state legislature tied the roads and transit votes together last year, on the theory that road supporters will only support transit if it's accompanied by pavement, and vice versa.)

A lot of the debate around whether the package is good or bad, environmentally speaking, has centered around whether the roads part of the package (known as the Regional Transportation Investment District, or RTID) consists mostly of "good" or "bad" roads. There are a lot of elements to this debate, the first of which is: What constitutes a "good" road? Are new HOV lanes "good" (because they serve people who are carpooling) or "bad" (because they're still new road miles), and could they have been created by converting preexisting general-purpose lanes to HOV lanes?

Another issue is whether roads that are designated primarily for freight, but can be used by single-occupancy cars, count as "good" or "bad." Further confusing matters is the question of whether already-clogged roads produce more or fewer greenhouse gases when they're expanded to accommodate more traffic, because traffic moves more smoothly (at least for a little while.)

Given all those variables, it's not surprising that Seattle's environmental community is split on whether RTID/Sound Transit is a good or a bad thing.

Will bikes or cars win?

China has an environmental problem. No, I'm not talking about weathering huge dust storms, opening one coal power plant a week, surpassing the U.S. as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, or flooding ecosystems with huge dam projects. I'm talking about something serious: If pollution does not get better in Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics, the long-distance track events may be canceled.

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "China's new middle class in love with cars -- big cars":

The auto boom has dire implications for next summer's Olympic Games in Beijing because it contributes to the noxious cap of smog that makes it the world's most polluted capital city.

Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, suggested at a ceremony in Beijing on Aug. 8 that events such as long-distance races might have to be postponed if the smog remains too heavy a year from now. "My concerns, which I believe are the concerns of everyone, are the climate and the environment, and especially the air environment," he said.

This weekend, in a test of the drastic anti-pollution measures expected for the eve of the Games next year, Beijing authorities are banning half of all vehicles from city streets, alternating days between odd-numbered and even-numbered license plates.

Also, Chinese car ownership is projected to increase dramatically:

The biggest car-buying boom in world history is under way in China as vast numbers of people join the middle class, abandon their bicycles for autos and sport utility vehicles -- and, in the process, add to China's already fast-growing emissions of greenhouse gases ... total car ownership is expected to surpass the U.S. level by 2025.

Would the biosphere care?

Recently we've had a couple of discussions here at Gristmill concerning various aspects of peak oil; that is, the assertion that very soon (if it hasn't happened already) the global supply of oil will peak, and even though demand is going up, supply will start to come down, so prices will skyrocket.

It seems to me that some of the contention in these discussions boils down to the question: would it really be so bad if the oil started running out? After all, we would stop mucking up the planet with the pollution, carbon emissions, and infrastructural damage we have been inflicting for these hundred-years-plus of the petroleum age.

Wouldn't it force humanity to live within our means if gasoline was $10 or even $20 dollars per gallon, as it will eventually be?

As it so happens, I've recently been investigating the question of what kind of civilization we would need to have if we wanted to live without fossil fuels, and I wanted to know how we are currently using oil in order to understand how to live without it.

Using government data detailing the use of oil, in dollars, the conclusion I came to was this: over 90 percent of petroleum in the U.S. is burned by internal combustion engines. So the question needs to be reframed: would it really matter if we couldn't use internal combustion engines?

The answer, in the long run, is that it would be much better if we didn't use internal combustion engines. But that leads to another question: How do we get from here to there, and how will that transition affect the planet?

Fear of traffic snarls led to easier commutes in Seattle

We tend to think of traffic as an immutable -- that there's literally nothing we can do in our day-to-day lives to drive less.

But Seattle's continued and mostly unexpected free-flowing traffic -- in the midst of a major construction project that some feared would trigger a morass of congestion throughout Puget Sound -- shows that this is simply false. Far from being rigid and incompressible, traffic and travel patterns are surprisingly fluid. Seattle's experience demonstrates that, when drivers are given good travel choices and the right kinds of information and incentives, they can get out of their cars. And in Seattle's case, when lots of people got out of their cars, it made getting to work a relative breeze.

Subways are the best

Recently I tracked down an article on the annual electricity use of the New York City subway system: 1.8 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh). To put that in perspective, the entire U.S. economy uses about 4,000 billion kwh annually. According to the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, there were 1.499 billion trips made on the subway in 2006. So it takes a little over 1 kwh to move one person on trips, of varying length, in New York City.

That's 4.1 million riders per day, on average. So if 200 million trips a day are required in the U.S. for everybody, and if everybody rode a subway, we would need about 90 billion kwh for personal transportation -- about 2 percent of our current electricity use.

For comparison, let's use Gar Lipow's estimation that a super-duper plug-in hybrid would travel 65 miles using 8 kwh.  If the average trip was 8 miles, we would also have 1 kwh per trip. Something to strive for?