Brad Ideas - Is Green U.S. Transit a whopping myth? - Comments

It's not that easy

brad — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:23:27 -0800

Indeed, many of those things happened. But I am afraid that people have come to love the personal car lifestyle without government pro-car regulations and subsidies to help them. And in many cases, those pro-car rules were passed with the glowing support of the people. When traffic is congested and parking is hard to find, people do get frustrated with their cars, yet they still demand their cars even when they understand their true cost, which can be many times more than the cost for non-owners. People will pay many times more for door-to-door, no waiting to start convenience, the ability to carry stuff with them (and leave it in the vehicle) and not having to sit next to random strangers and homeless dudes. They want that even when the transit is faster, but in the USA it rarely is; the transit is often much slower, sometimes even an order of magnitude slower. Even in cities with great transit like Tokyo people wish for cars and will pay a fortune to have them.

But robocars will replace transit because they could fix just about everything people prefer about transit, except transit’s ability to avoid congestion when it has private right-of-way. But that’s not a virtue of transit, it’s a virtue of private right-of-way, and if we need to, streams of robot cars, jitneys and the occasional van on private ROW will provide people with the best of both worlds. I don’t think we’ll actually need to.

People can use this tech to be much more efficient than today’s transit systems or cars, but some will also use it to be more wasteful (by living further away because the trip is so pleasant.) But we won’t stop them from doing what they want to do, not very easily.

Not as hard as you might think

MythoftheNobleSavage — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:47:07 -0800

Don't get me wrong, consumer adoption of new technology, mainly widespread car ownership had a substantial impact on our built environment. But, we voted transit oriented communities OUT when we allowed policy changes to occur at the federal and local level that favor auto-oriented development. If you read Fighting Traffic by Peter Norton (http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Traffic-American-Inside-Technology/dp/026...) you’ll see that it was not an easy battle for the motorist lobby to win. I’m not old enough to remember, but you may recall “Urban Renewal” projects in the 1960s and 70s where we took a good idea: the interstate and DEFENSE highway system (originally envisioned as a way to rapidly transport our military to any point on the mainland and facilitate the movement of goods) and made the bonehead mistake of deciding it should become the backbone of personal transport in this country. So we carved wholes through our neighborhoods and constructed monstrous concrete and asphalt barriers in the name of progress and fragmented our cities in many cases accomplishing the very opposite of the program’s goals.

Today we continue to subsidize driving by spending 40 billion dollars a year on highway and roadway infrastructure while most local municipalities collectively mandate billions more dollars a year in construction and maintenance of parking facilities through minimum parking requirements (basically a driving subsidy yoked to new development). Never mind that we haven’t been paying the real cost of this infrastructure, the ASCE gave roads a” D-“ this year, estimating we need to invest 930 BILLION dollars, just for roads, over the next 5 years, just to make up all the deferred maintenance and get back to an “OK” level of safety and service. http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/fact-sheet/roads

The original streetcars that were present in almost all small and large American cities at the turn of the last century are almost non-existent today, not because they were an inferior mode of transportation, but because most of them were built and operated by private companies and continued to be taxed while our government pumped huge amounts of money into the largest construction project in human history (China’s Great Wall might as well be a sandcastle compared to the US interstate highway system) and subsidized driving by mandating minimum off-street parking requirements. Ask any economist what happens when you tax one competitor and subsidize another, the one being taxed loses every time. I’m part of a broad and growing coalition that is working to make policy changes NOW because I know it will take a long time to address these infrastructure issues and I don’t want my kids and grandkids to still be dealing with this by the time they are in my shoes.

It's hard to vote it in

brad — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:48:51 -0800

What I mean is it’s very hard to vote in lifestyle changes. People do what they want to do regardless of what the government tries to make them do. The challenge is to avoid the wall-e world by making it less attractive, not by outlawing it.

RE:Public Health and the true costs of Parking

MythoftheNobleSavage — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:26:11 -0800

Come on Brad,
I was hoping for a little more than just and antidotal response. You're correct that there is not much that can be done to get people to adopt healthy lifestyle routines that scientific research says are good for them. That is partially due to the reality that the suburban, auto-dependent environment we have built in america for the last 50-80 years is not conducive to a convenient healthy lifestyle. When I flash forward to a future full of automated personal vehicles a few scenes from the movie WALL-E come to mind. I also realize that there is very little that I can do to cure cynicism. What I can do is chose to live in an urban walkable environment, design compact walkable communities, and vote to support policy that favors transit and transit oriented development. It only took one human lifetime for us to make a mess of our cities, maybe it wont take us that long to heal them. You probably wont be around to see it, but maybe I will.

No robo-electrics in the city?

brad — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:18:37 -0800

That’s entirely backwards — you want people to drive gasoline cars in the city? You’re not going to get a walk&transit-only city, not in the USA, not even in Europe. There are still tons of cars on the streets in Manhattan and London and even Tokyo and Shanghai. I’ve seen a few Asian cities where the cars are rare like Hong Kong but this is both unusual and often a product of geography.

There is only so much you can do, or want to do, it forcing people to do what you think is “best for them.” It is far more effective to offer solutions that they think are better, which also meet your agenda. Well, not just far more effective, because it’s binary. It works, the other one doesn’t.

You can figure out what you want — healthy living, pleasant environments, quick trips, serendipitous meetings — but it doesn’t work to tell people how to get it. You always get it wrong. People want these things and you can arrange so they can get them when they want them.

Robot cars of course do not require garages in any significance, and where they do require garages they don’t require them to be in the expensive or concentrated areas. (The further away they wait, of course, the longer they take to summon and the more energy they use, but they are so efficient that a few miles doesn’t hurt and if you just want the next available taxi you don’t have to wait because most of them are stored 2 miles out of the CBD.)

Public Health and the true costs of Parking

MythoftheNobleSavage — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:03:11 -0800

Brad,
You point out that there are considerable external costs and benefits to both auto-centric transportation and transit-centric systems. You also seem to recognize that it is impossible to speak about transportation without also discussing its relationship to land use. What do you say to those who see transit as an important component that enables safer, healthier, more livable communities? Wouldn't you agree that encouraging compact, walkable, transit oriented communities is an attractive way to reduce the need to supply copious amounts of parking which is expensive at $2-3 thousand a space for surface lots and about $15 thousand per space for structured parking to construct, not including long term maintenance. According to Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking, the economics of free parking is what drives our destinations further and further apart.

What are your thoughts on the effects of an auto-centric environment on public health? Some connections are obvious 4,000+/- pedestrian deaths each year in the US, 40,000+/- annual deaths in motor vehicle crashes...
(http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx)

other connections are being made by health professionals between health and our built environment:

365,000+/- annual deaths due to sedentary living (Mokdad, A.H., et al. 2004. Actual causes of death in the US. JAMA 291: 1238-45)

$40,000,000,000+/- direct cost to tax payers due to inactivity and poor nutrition. (www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/
(Obesity Research, Finkelstein et.al., Jan, ’04)

It appears that the best way to help people get the recommended 30-60 minutes of aerobic exercise per day is to create an environment where they get that exercise without even noticing it, for example: walking to/from work, school, or a transit stop. To make this lifestyle feasible it requires destinations to be within close proximity. Transit oriented density makes for a much more livable environment when compared with auto-oriented density (places like Los Angeles which has the density of a city but the relative parking supply of a suburb). To that point, fixed guideway transit is the only way to send a clear message to private developers that it is okay to reduce their parking supply because the presence of the transit infrastructure signals that service will continue. (Bus routes can change overnight, but its hard to re-route a streetcar)

On the earlier discussion of infrastructure funding, I agree that we have a pretty dumb system in America. The Barchan foundation has done an excellent job of analyzing the way that the world's infrastructure is paid for, and I would be for a system much like much of the rest of the developed world uses where contracts for public asset for design/build/operations/maintenance are bid together as a package instead of separately. (You'd design and build something very differently if you were the entity that was ultimately going to have to create a system to fund the operations and maintenance of that asset.)
http://www.barchanfoundation.com/

I only propose this approach for urban developments were the market can be supported, and mounting evidence suggests that generational preferences in the U.S. are shifting towards a more urban lifestyle.
http://www.rclco.com/pdf/Gwinnett_Redevelopment_Forum-Gregg_Logan-8-10-0...

Transit is not especially viable for rural areas and by accommodating new population growth in an urban form we can ensure that those great rural areas stay rural, let rural residents drive robo-electric vehicles, but keep them out of the city, we don't want to inflate our costs of living by having to provide parking garages.

As the numbers are not far apart

brad — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:51:36 -0800

Because the transit numbers and car numbers are within reasonable range of one another, it is not really important to consider improvements in transit which are not on the order of doubling or quadrupling the efficiency (or ridership with same energy.)

For people to ride transit as the green choice, it is not enough for them to save 20% or even 50%. That’s because in the USA in most cases, riding transit is a big sacrifice in time, convenience and other factors. Transit can be more convenient in a few cases, like private ROW in a congested rush hour (when it is also efficient) but outside those cases, people are already willing to spend tons more money for private transportation. They will not accept the inconvenience of transit just to be a little greener. They want to be 4 to 10 times greener, and it’s very hard for transit to deliver that.

I'll need a cite here

brad — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:47:54 -0800

as I know it’s not every system, since BART’s SFO extension in right in my own town is way under projections.

So please give me a cite for this underestimation? Is it related to the brief transit peak that took place in 2008 during $4 gasoline?

One version of peak oil: It

Nathanael — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:49:10 -0800

One version of peak oil:
It doesn't mean that the volume of oil extracted per year will necessarily peak (though it is likely to), it simply means that the real price of oil is going to go continuously up from here, apart from short-term fluctuations. This seems to be fundamentally correct -- the cheap oil era is over and over for good.

Of course, what that means is that oil becomes poor return on investment compared to solar/wind/electrical/hydro/coal/whatever, and so people stop putting money into extracting it for fuel, so the total volume extracted drops and the investment in extraction drops, and then you get a feedback loop driving money away from oil.

It's still a great feedstock for plastics -- if I were running a 50-year investment and I had the capital and political ability, I would tie up some good, easy-to-pump oil fields and refuse to extract anything from them until after oil was abandoned as a fuel. Then I would jump back into the market as the lowest-cost producer of oil for plastics and make a killing.

The burbs may not waste away

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:44:08 -0800

The burbs may not waste away entirely, but there are already entire abandoned foreclosed subdivisions outside of LA.

And as for "our current densities", we have many current densities. Road convoys and lightweight electric personal vehicles aren't going to handle Manhattan densities or Boston densities, but would have no trouble with San Jose densities.

"What’s the source of the

Nathanael — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:40:18 -0800

"What’s the source of the 8000 btu/pm figure for NYC? That’s 15 mpg for a solo driven car, and 10 mpg if a 1.5 passenger average is used. That’s pretty low even for city driving, I think."

Ever driven in Manhattan? I can believe it. You rarely exceed 15 miles per hour and spend most of your time idling. Electric vehicles are a big help here because they use so much less energy when idling, but the subway's a faster trip anyway. And this isn't "at rush hour", this is practically any time except 2-3 AM.

"Note that a city bus is also horrible in stop and go traffic. A dedicated ROW vehicle like a subway has its best win at rush hour. My figures show that buses and street cars often pull more weight per passenger than cars, other than when fully packed, and sometimes not even then."

The "common wisdom" among transit planners nowadays seems to be "if you can't get exclusive or nearly-exclusive ROW, don't bother," for core lines, anyway. (Feeder lines and "subsidy for the poor" lines are judged differently.) If mass transit is to function as congestion relief it needs to have ROW separate from the low-occupancy vehicles, period.

"However, I can’t see any

Nathanael — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:34:51 -0800

"However, I can’t see any rail system competing with a robocar system. If you can summon a vehicle and it shows up at your door/garage/elevator lobby in under a minute,"

You're fantasizing.

If you have the volume of passengers to actually implement guaranteed under-a-minute arrival, you have the volume that you need mass transit due to congestion.

Otherwise, you face the problem that if (say) three other people in your neighborhood call for cars, the car for *you* has to be summoned from a great distance, and will take quite a few minutes to arrive.

You're (trying to) use

Nathanael — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:31:29 -0800

You're (trying to) use per-passenger-mile figures. Is the DOE car occupancy averaged over the correct base? If it's the total number of people in cars at time X divided by the total number of cars on the road at time X, it's the wrong number for your purposes; if it's the average number of people in the car per trip, it's the wrong number for your purposes; if it's the average number per mile driven, it's *STILL* the wrong number for your purposes.

Check your math very carefully.

"However, I do believe we

Nathanael — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:25:47 -0800

"However, I do believe we can have a greener electric grid."

*That* is actually the key, #1, way to become greener. Practically everything can be converted to run on electricity at this point, and the trends are naturally pushing in that direction, but it's all for naught if we don't have a renewable electric grid.

There is no alternative fuel which can currently plausibly be generated renewably in a reasonably efficient fashion, other than electricity.

Every new transit system

Nathanael — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:23:11 -0800

Every new transit system opening in the US in the last ten years has experienced significantly *higher* ridership than predicted, with the exception of Cleveland's Waterfront line.

I rest my case.

Is Green U.S. Transit a whopping myth?

brad — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:11:22 -0700

As part of my research into robotic cars, I’ve been studying the energy efficiency of transit. What I found shocked me, because it turns out that in the USA, our transit systems aren’t green at all. Several of the modes, such as buses, as well as the light rail and subway systems of most towns, consume more energy per passenger-mile than cars do, when averaged out. The better cities and the better modes do beat the cars, but only by a little bit. And new generation efficient cars beat the transit almost every time, and electric scooters beat everything hands down.

I encourage you to read the more detailed essay I have prepared on whether green U.S. transit is a myth. I’ve been very surprised by what I’ve found. It includes links to the sources. To tease you, here’s the chart I have calculated on the energy efficiency of the various modes. Read on, and show me how these numbers are wrong if you can!

I have added a follow-up post on the comparison between lots of small personal ultralight vehicles and larger shared transit vehicles.

Note: If you want to comment on the cyclist figure, there is different thread on the fossil fuel consumption in human food which details these numbers and invites comments.