Category Archives: ecology & energy & climate

Regrets, Mr. President?

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Take it from Dear Leader: “Our energy policy has not been very wise… we, frankly, have got policies that make it harder for us to become less dependent on oil.”

Well, five years ago (even six years ago), when the Dear Leader was obsessing with illegally invading a sovereign nation that posed no threat to our security, some of us were arguing that a better strategy, on many levels, would be an energy policy that released the United States’ dependence on oil. But no. Now the Dear Leader looks back and sees that “our energy policy has not been very wise.”

Higher oil prices will cost the U.S. economy approximately $200 billion in 2008. The war in Iraq has had direct costs approaching $1 trillion over five years, and ultimately may cost upwards of $3 trillion (including indirect costs, primarily borne by Iraqis). Now, suppose that an energy tax — equal, or nearly equal, to today’s energy prices, which appear to be at the limit in terms of the economy’s ability to readily handle — had been imposed in 2002, phased out if oil prices soared. Easily $1 trillion could have been raised over five years to support high-ROI investments in energy efficiency and renewables — and trillions of dollars could have been saved on an unnecessary endless war.

Assorted collected

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Recent quotables. No common theme.

Bill McKibbenin Yes! Magazine:

The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

From the Baffler, “The flight of the creative class: a bohemian rhapsody” (satire), Paul Maliszewski and Thomas Frank:

“Creative people do have certain needs, however, They require hip entertainment, organic street-level culture, and artistic environments—from restaurants serving mind-boggling fusions of world cuisines, like Thai and Tex-Mex or Indian and Australian, to experimental theaters, avant-garde galleries, and authentic coffee shops with mismatched cups and saucers and deteriorating couches. Creative people crave lively street scenes and late-night music venues serving up pricey energy drinks in test tubes. In short, creative people insist they lead the sort of lives that feed their creativity, inspiring them.”

Thomas Geoghegan, “The Law in Shambles” (Prickly Paradigm, 2005), excerpted in same Baffler:

“In a plutocracy, we don’t trust the government. Why should we? It does nothing for us, it is underfunded, and it’s unreliable. This attitude, in turn, makes the problem worse. The more arbitrary and unfair we think things are, the more we drop out. We don’t simply stop voting. We stop reading the paper. Stop following it at all…

“Remember the teaching of the great law professor Clyde Summers: ‘It costs a lot of money for people to have “rights.”‘ […]

“Where I live, in Chicago, I’m in a ring of nuclear power plants. I’d be in terrible danger if we ever successfully muzzled the trial lawyers. It’s only the tort system that saves us from another Three Mile Island. Yes, I agree, it might be nice if we had more nuclear plants. We could cut down on Mideast oil. We could slow down global warming. And if I lived in France, with all its nuclear energy, I might think it was a good thing. So why do I oppose it here?

“Because France has a real administrative state, a real civil service, and the best and brightest do the regulating. In America, we can’t even keep the trains on the tracks. And so, sure, as a citizen, Id like to curb the trial lawyers.

“But I also want to live.”

Some bits from the January 2007 SMARTRAQ report, about the market demand for sprawl vs. walkable neighborhoods, for my future reference:

page 9. Residents of the least walkable neighborhoods generated 20% more CO2 from travel then residents of the most walkable neighborhoods, about 2 kg more CO2 per person per weekday.

Residents of the most walkable areas are 2.4X more likely to get the level of daily activity necessary to maintain health (30 minutes): 37% vs. 18% in the least walkable neighborhoods.

page 10. About a third of metro Atlantans living in conventional suburban development would have preferred a more walkable environment, but apparently traded it off for other reasons such as affordability, school quality, or perception of crime in addition to lack of supply. It is likely that this mismatch between community preference and choice is due to an undersupply of walkable environments.

page 32. 55% of survey respondents preferred a shorter commute, even if residential densities were higher and lot sizes smaller. 33% of respondents preferred such an option, but did not currently live in this type of neighborhood.

56% of respondents would prefer a neighborhood where they had easy travel choices, even if it meant a smaller house, over a house in a neighborhood where they had to drive for everything. 37% would prefer such an area, but did not currently.

Stretching the truth about walking

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A disturbing junk-science meme circulating out there on the internets — apparently propagated by misguided animal-rights campaigners who are trying to hitch a ride on the climate train — makes the specious (yet how alluringly contrarian!) claim that driving is somehow ecologically superior to omnivore walking. This claim ignores all kinds of inputs, some of which are deconstructed by Clark Williams-Derry and others by the commenters. (In particular, the calculation focuses on the “upstream” impact of producing food, but not of extracting oil and refining it into gasoline; ignores the substantial ecological costs of manufacturing cars; and appears to assume that cars are robots that drive around dead [or at least non-respirating, non-calorie consuming] people [zombies?], rather than living, breathing, likely meat-eating people.)

My first reaction, upon first seeing this claim last October, was thus: ” ‘We need to get rid of these “or” arguments, that we can either do this or do that. “Or” has got to become “and” because we need to do everything.’ [Lawrence Frank] I really wish that… animal-rights groups wouldn’t use this either/or angle. If they really cared about global warming [and are not just using it as convenient political cover for other agendas], they’d understand that our society needs very broad, systemic changes to address this monstrous challenge, and that mouthing little platitudes that further confuse the public does NOT help.” Yet another case of blindered, single-issue people who see a single tree, not an entire forest.

Of course, that warning was not heeded. Such a seductively specious claim will inevitably find its way into the lying, scorched-earth right-wing echo chamber (what Mother Jones helpfully terms “the cold earth society“), which will stretch and simplify what was already a tenuous claim, then shout it from the rooftops until it drowns out any reasoned debate. And guess what? It’s happening. No less a light than John Tierney, the original “Skeptical Environmentalist” (whose “exposé” on landfilled recyclables still gets spat out at me on occasion, a good twenty years later) brought it into his blog — ahem, Science Lab. He even issued some sort of reader challenge: can someone else pull numbers out of their ass to claim that a car taxi is superior to a bicycle taxi? Reader Julian Lamb responds:

If selected as the winner, instead of rewarding me with a book, I’d prefer you push me from my home to my office (8 miles and over the Brooklyn Bridge) in a TAXI cab without assistance from the engine. That ought to cure you of any skepticism. If you make it over the bridge I’ll even buy you breakfast.

Regardless of how efficient a car’s engine might be, it still has to move a huge vessel in addition to its payload — as evidenced by the ethanol claim below. And even the original, highly suspect “calculations” that Tierney references regard walking and driving alone — yet bicycling is far more efficient than walking, and being hauled around in a cab (in city traffic, no less!) is less efficient than even driving alone (since cabs’ time spent cruising for fares pulls their occupancy rates down below 1).

The road up and ahead

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Last week, Kirk Johnson reported in the Times about the I-70 corridor that rises up into the mountains west of Denver — a four-lane rural road which now faces many of the same congestion issues as any urban commute corridor: crushing traffic loads for a few hours a week, with sort of capacity enhancement proving to be frightfully expensive. Much of this results from settlement patterns that resemble nothing so much as the old “pearls on a string” commuter rail towns: dense, pedestrian-friendly nodes clustered along a single corridor, although unfortunately a freeway rather than a railroad in this case.

Appropriately, many of the solutions that have been implemented to date are similarly incongruous urban fixtures dropped into stunning mountain wilderness: HOV lanes along Hwy 82 into Aspen, all-day transit equipped with advanced ITS, and even several proposals for rail service. (The principal difficulty: I-70 follows an available rail alignment west of Vail, but the section through Summit County and east to Denver is too steep for conventional rail service — and would likely require an additional tunnel at the continental divide.) Now, the ultimate in urban congestion solutions is on the table:

[Colorado State Senator Chris] Romer’s suggestion — congestion pricing using financial incentives to encourage people to drive or not drive at peak times on I-70 — drew 500 e-mail messages in the first 24 hours after it was reported in The Rocky Mountain News. About 70 percent opposed the plan, he said, and many of those called him exuberantly bad names… “But we’re not going to solve this problem by being cautious, which is what government does best,” he said, explaining that reliance on gasoline taxes and highway construction will not work… “We have to get creative,” Mr. Romer said. “And if we fail, we adjust and we try again.”

The long shadow haunting the Sunbelt’s growth (and any future long-term infrastructure investments), is the potentially disastrous changes in precipitation that will accompany global warming. Some climate models predict that snowpack in much of the Rockies could become un-skiable during my lifetime. (I’ll be 70 years old in 2050.) The result would destabilize existing ecosystems in an area where human settlements closely abut wilderness; increasingly catastrophic floods, mudslides, and wildfires would further threaten . Economically, the resulting economic losses could be monumental, similar to a hurricane wiping away another beach city.

Meanwhile, cities across the nation’s southern tier, like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Raleigh are all already sinking deeper straws to suck up even the pond scum from their drought-ravaged reservoirs. Georgia has resorted to desperate new lows, some of which actually date from the 18th century — not just praying for rain (perhaps more of a strong-arm tactic to embarrass Florida to reduce its claim to downriver flow), but recently seeking to move its Tennessee border. Yet these areas continue to grow; as with electricity, the expectation is just that water will be provided regardless of cost or future prospects — and reporting on the crisis continues to focus on such short-term thinking. Sure, conservation pricing has resulted in higher water bills for many (Mayor Franklin in Atlanta pays about $100 a month for water) — but how high would water bills have to go in order to dissuade new arrivals, or to convince non-water-intensive industries (e.g., not manufacturers) to begin looking elsewhere? My guess is that prices would have to go very high indeed.

Bright green suburbs

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There’s been a lot of press attention lately around the “green cities” theme, especially in regards to climate (which, of course, I’ve been writing about for years). Much of the attention has been heartening but sometimes it’s brought out some of the usual misconceptions.

Alex Steffens, who can be reliably counted on for wordy strokes of brilliance over at WorldChanging, posted a draft article (to be delivered to auto-design students, no less!) titled My Other Car is a Bright Green City. (A version appeared this week in BusinessWeek.) One of the more interesting gems: car ownership (and particularly SUV ownership) appears to be wholly incompatible with the notion of “one planet living”:

Teresa Zhang of UC Berkeley, in a recent environmental analysis of the average American car (PDF), found that the tailpipe emissions from the average car alone equal 50% of a one-planet footprint. “The actual footprint,” she notes, “may range from 30% to over 100% of one’s ecological budget, corresponding to fuel efficiencies between 55 mpg and 12 mpg.”

The response I posted.

I’d like to echo the praise and the caution: changing our settlement patterns requires collective action — which 20+ years of the Reagan/Thatcher Revolution has taught us to not just distrust, but to deny. You’ve written eloquently before about how environmental solutions inherently cannot rely solely on individual choices, and borrowing some of that language might help here. Similarly, it’s a challenge to juxtapose different potential solutions against one another; when faced with a crisis of global warming’s proportions, our society will need to learn to speak of “both/and” rather than “either/or.”

Thank you in particular for pointing out the rate at which our built environment changes. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived in fast-growing places for most of my life, but the cities I’ve seen have changed immensely in the past decade. In fact, our built environment will probably change more, 2008-2030, than our electric generating mix over the same time period — and although everyone has ideas for future inventions to revolutionize “the other people” who run the oligarchic electricity sector, we are overlooking a proven and cost-effective technology that we the people can use to effect similar change in the broadly-held building industry.

Density by itself is a necessary, but insufficient, part of a “bright green city.” I like to sum up the New Urbanist vision as “compact, diverse, and walkable,” and more alliterative sorts say “compact, connected, and complete.” Even I won’t walk if I have nowhere to walk to, nor a pleasant way to walk there. A thriving, resilient human ecosystem (err, community) must house a full range of people and a complete array of activities, all arrayed along streets designed to make walking enjoyable — both traits of which require density beforehand, but which do not necessarily follow from it.

I hope that those who understand this message, and perhaps who further understand that such communities do a superior job of fulfilling the triple bottom line, will help to fight NIMBYism on the ground. With some prodding from the citizenry, the vast machinery that churns out conventional suburban sprawl with breathtaking efficiency can be re-trained. However, even in the tiny slice of America where a developer can legally “do the right thing”, the political and social realities (from block-club politics to municipal infrastructure decisions) can still make doing so nearly impossible.

@Donald Jackson, the lower housing costs in far suburbia typically balance out against higher transportation costs, especially as fuel prices increase. Many residents of sprawling suburbs spend more on their cars than their houses, and those of us living closer in can ditch that money-pit of a car and spend more on housing instead.

@Brave New Leaf, yes, indeed, the American landscape is littered with dead malls, dead subdivisions, dead office parks, dead towns, dead cities, the works. Detroit is but the largest example of a city that’s been left to the dogs, but hardly alone; I’ve seen long stretches of abandonment and decay even in several Sunbelt boomtowns. If you thought disposable plastic bottles exact an immense environmental toll, how about throwaway cities?

Steffens’ post was referenced in Andrew Revkin’s NYT blog earlier this week, which (since it reaches a somewhat broader audience) drew some less favorable responses. Mine:

No torch-wielding mobs of Deep Greens are roaming the exurbs, setting fire to wastrels’ McMansions and forcing their occupants at knifepoint into dingy cement high-rises. However, from some comments here, you’d think that simply altering the immense social constructs that drive suburban growth would be tantamount to violence. For decades, government policies (or the lack thereof) have made low-density living seductively cheap and easy, partly by ignoring the plumes of pollution it created: most of America’s carbon dioxide emissions either come from buildings, or from people moving between buildings.

Sunday’s article by Alex Williams closes by noting that “the eco-friendly, futuristic, post-automobile suburb” interestingly resembles the old-fashioned city. I applaud Mr. D’Souza for recognizing that we don’t need to wait around for future technological breakthroughs to start fighting global warming. Instead of pondering a fuel cell car powered by cellulosic ethanol, he’s already largely switched to a clean, renewable (and tasty) fuel source: food, which powers walking. And instead of waiting for a fully automated personal rapid transit train to be built to his front door, he moved his door close to the existing, mostly-automated rapid transit. Amazing, huh?

Interestingly, this gradual re-urbanizing of the suburbs — with mixed uses, more transportation choices, and higher densities — is something championed by not only New Urbanist architects and planners, but also by many of their best-known critics. Joel Kotkin calls his version “New Suburbanism,” but it’s still the same.

Meanwhile, Trevor Boddy of the G&M sees Vancouver’s future as a walking-biking city tied to new crosstown transit corridors featuring a balanced mix of uses and an even more diverse array of housing types than downtown’s towers & townhouses. (One of EcoDensity’s most interesting features is its focus on dense low-rise housing.) The most obvious location for a first test seems to be the False Creek Flats, which is about as well transit-served as downtown.

“we have seriously erred in balancing job with living spaces downtown – with space running out there, arterials are where we can set things right. Copenhagen demands a fifty-fifty split of work and living spaces in its redeveloped zones, and putting both close together makes the walking and biking city so much easier, reducing costly transit investments.”

Many European and Asian cities have a form of dispersed, low/mid-rise style development which doesn’t focus all employment into a single core. It would be interesting to try such an approach on a corridor basis in North America.

Talk is cheap

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Certain prominent politicians have been touting their commitment to the environment (and thus to environmentally minded voters) by signing their governments up for carbon-cutting promises.

Of course, the instant those targets come due, the politicians have moved on to the next promise without any substantive action — because signing ceremonies are easy, but actually cutting carbon, the lifeblood of industrial economies, is not. Last summer, the Economist noted that California is nowhere near track to meet its self-imposed, easier-than-Kyoto targets, even though it does have a fairly thoughtful plan to achieve emissions reductions on several fronts:

Despite making some optimistic assumptions about future contracts, the public utilities commission has concluded that the state will miss its target for renewables. And the aim of cutting emissions from electricity production to 1990 levels by the end of the next decade may be just as unrealistic… It is a bad sign that California’s electricity suppliers are struggling, because electricity is something over which the state wields considerable control. It has less power over carmakers, who are fighting to prevent California imposing emissions standards on them. If they succeed, even temporarily, California’s goals will become unreachable… The state has even less power to slow the growth of its population, or to dictate where people live. It hopes “smart growth” policies (which encourage people to live closer together, and to take public transport) can get it a whopping 15% of the way towards its overall 2020 goal. But the news from that front is discouraging.

Even more off the mark, of course, is Chicago; the Tribune revealed city government’s energy use to be spiraling almost inexplicably, even as the mayor eagerly accepts awards touting his “pro-active steps to address climate change“:

Records show that officials fell well short of targets for curbing electricity usage by city buildings despite the construction of energy-efficient buildings and the installation of green roofs across the city.

Most recently hurricane-, drought-, and heatwave-stricken Florida has signed on to carbon reductions. We wish them the best of luck, but fully expect future journalists to expose the false promises therein.

Perhaps local action on climate change, while admirable, ultimately has to be ineffective; after all, the promises signed aren’t binding targets with penalties, and most state and local governments work in isolation, without control over broader issues like the electric grid or auto emissions standards. As Felicity Barringer in the Times points out, most localities don’t have the authority or resources to effect big changes requiring, yes, social engineering:

Constraints on budgets, legal restrictions by states, and people’s unwillingness to change sometimes put brakes on ambitious plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions… “It’s really hard,” Ms. Hancock said. “It’s like the dark night of the soul.” All the big items in the inventory of emissions — from tailpipes, from the energy needed to supply drinking water and treat waste water, from heating and cooling buildings — are the product of residents’ and businesses’ individual decisions about how and where to live and drive and shop.

Pick up and go [updated]

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[I’ll be traveling for the latter half of December, perhaps without benefit of computer or phone! The horrors!]

A few assorted things from the past few weeks of being away:

* “If I lived 17.5 miles from work, I wouldn’t bike to work, either — I’d move. Remember, location and locomotion are two halves of an equation where neither is constant.” [posted at updated metrorider link]

Todd Litman calculates that every nonmotorized (active) trip displaces about seven vehicle miles traveled — not because active trips are seven miles long, but because they’re associated with smarter patterns of development.

“Not every walking or cycling trip causes seven miles of reduced driving. The lower vehicle mileage in cities with relatively high nonmotorized mode split reflects various land use and transport system factors, such as density, mix, street design, parking supply, and pricing which affect the relative attractiveness of motorized and nonmotorized travel. But programs that increase nonmotorized travel tend to create such communities, which is to say that smart growth supports nonmotorized travel and nonmotorized travel supports smart growth.”

* The Pacific Northwest spends more on oil and gas — 100% of which is imported — than on public K-12 education in 2006 or hospital care, and more than 3.5 times total spending on prescription drugs. [Sightline Institute] All that goes “up in smoke,” as they say. Interestingly, Idaho is separated on that counter — an interesting point of comparison, since as many people live within 10 miles of my house than in all of Idaho.

* An interesting “List of Privilege Lists” — ways of “unpacking the invisible knapsack” that accompany those of us with unspoken social privileges, whether racial, sexual, class, religious, gendered, or ability.

* Jay Mouawad in the Times notices that the oil producers fear the geo-green agenda:

“What we are worried about is for industrialized countries to use climate policy as a pretext to discriminate against oil,” [said Mohammad al-Sabban, a senior Saudi government adviser on climate change].

Over in the UK, $100/bbl oil has led gasoline across the magic 1.00 line: one pound per litre. That translates to about $9.50 a gallon, so really, quit whining about gas prices in America already.

* While in Toronto, I picked up a brochure distributed by Alphabet City — not the Chicago Humanities Festival, not an academic symposium, but rather something in between — outlining a program of events around local food in the Toronto area. (Ongoing online discussion hosted by the Walrus.) It opened up first to a manifesto (er, open letter) that posits food distribution as another problem of internalized profits and socialized costs, principally because “healthier, tastier” food is not necessarily more profitable. Indeed, it’s often less so. As such, it calls for market intervention and political action:

Ontario’s working landscapes, farms, rural communities, and cities are linked in a web of complex exchanges. But our food policies to date have usually ignored that web, dividing rather than connecting. If we are going to build a healthy and sustainable village, we have to make the connections… [W]e believe that food is connected to every major problem being raised in the current provincial election campaign—rising medical costs, poverty and hunger, declining farm incomes, the paving-over of farmland, wildlife protection, urban sprawl, youth unemployment, and communities at risk.

These problems will only be solved when we connect the dots.

Local farmers markets, community and school gardens, food co-ops, urban gardens, food access centres—all of these emerging possibilities support healthier, tastier food for all villagers. As this happens, everyone benefits and communities become stronger and more inclusive.

Draining

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Today’s award for best acronym goes to SWIM: Storm Water Infrastructure Matters, a group advocating natural approaches to water management in New York. Stormwater on its own is a little too esoteric, but swimming — most people can get behind that.

It comes to mind because this month’s Landscape Architecture magazine has three great articles on stormwater, about integrating natural drainage into the layered history of Minneapolis’ Grand Rounds necklace; restoration trial and error along a mostly buried, slag-lined stream in Pittsburgh’s East End, and a call by longtime smart growth advocate Lisa Nisenson for municipalities and regions to think globally, not site-specifically, about stormwater. The new stormwater regs popping up, while well intentioned, have already started adding yet another layer of regulatory discrimination against infill projects — which must be stopped before they proliferate much further.

Locally, I’m pretty confident in the efforts of MWRD board member Debra Shore’s ability to work with CNT to bring this research into Cook County’s future regulations — and maybe eventually transition to the bold “eco-boulevards” concept that would finally heal Chicago’s breach in the Great Lakes watershed.

Leadership (and trailership)

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The most amazing thing I read last week was mayor Michael Bloomberg’s speech to a USCM meeting on climate change. Emphasis added:

Leadership is not waiting for others to act, or bowing to special interests, or making policy by polling or political calculus. And it’s not hoping that technology will rescue us down the road or forcing our children to foot the bill. Leadership is about facing facts, making hard decisions and having the independence and courage to do the right thing, even when it’s not easy or popular. We’ve all heard people say, “It’s a great idea, but for the politics.” And let me give you just one example from New York.

Last spring, as part of our PlaNYC initiative, we proposed a system of congestion pricing based on successful programs in London, Stockholm and Singapore. The plan would charge drivers $8 to enter Manhattan on weekdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., which would help us reduce the congestion that is choking our economy, the pollution that has helped produce asthma rates that are twice the national average, and the carbon dioxide that is fueling global warming.

Now, the question is not whether we want to pay, but how do we want to pay. With an increased asthma rate? With more greenhouse gases? Wasted time? Lost business? Higher prices? Or do we charge a modest fee to encourage more people to take mass transit and use that money to expand mass transit service? When you look at it that way, the idea makes a lot of sense, but for the politics, because no one likes the idea of paying more. But being up front and honest about the costs and benefits, we’ve been able to build a coalition of supporters that includes conservatives and liberals, labor unions and businesses, and community leaders throughout the city.

There is no problem that can’t be solved if we have the courage to confront it head-on — and put progress above politics. Mayors around the country are doing it — and those in Washington can, too.

Just a few days later in Seattle, the transportation bond proposal that I referenced earlier failed — possibly because it wasn’t pro-transit enough. Chris McGann reporting in the P-I:

Though voters rejected Proposition 1, an extensive poll commissioned by the Sierra Club showed that if the transit element of the measure had appeared on the ballot alone, it would have passed.

The Sierra Club joined forces with the anti-transit crowd and campaigned against Proposition 1, believing the measure included too much freeway expansion, relied on general taxes, including the sales tax, and did not address global warming.

According to the poll, 52 percent of voters say they would have voted for the transit portion had it been presented alone… “The single largest reason [a group of voters who we would describe as pro-transit defectors] gave (for voting no) was environmental impacts like global warming,” [pollster Thomas Riehle from RT Strategies] said… 20% [of No voters] objected to Prop 1’s impact on the environment.

Meanwhile, back here under the clouds in Planet Illinois, the Tribune‘s Jon Hilkevitch notes that CTA’s facilities are falling apart.

Rail passengers aren’t spared from the ills of ancient infrastructure either. They must endure longer commutes each year as trains crawl as slowly as 5 m.p.h. through numerous “slow zones” caused by crumbling viaducts or deteriorated tracks.

In fact, the slow-zones cover about 50 miles of track, more than one-fifth of its rail network, according to the CTA.

The neglect of the rail system has also led to derailments, including one in July 2006 in which a Blue Line subway train jumped tracks held barely in place by rusted screw spikes and fastening clips…

The cost of repairing and maintaining the old buses is soaring. The CTA said it spends $16 million a year to keep the old buses in running order, more than five-fold the $3 million cost for upkeep on newer models.

Despite the clearly inefficient use of public money, the failure to renew transit infrastructure has received much less attention among politicians and other decision-makers than the prospect of hundreds of thousands of commuters losing their bus routes to service cuts.

Even if the current transit operating crisis were resolved, the system would remain under siege until a funding stream is established to overhaul and replace aging equipment, transit officials said…

Increasing amounts of the CTA’s capital budget — more than a combined $150 million since 2003 — have been diverted to operations to help balance annual budgets and reduce the threatened service cuts and fare increases under the CTA’s doomsday plans…

Without the state launching a successor to Illinois FIRST, non-federal capital funding to the CTA during the next five years is projected at one-tenth the level in 2002, according to CTA budget documents.

Shoring up, modernizing and expanding the mass transit system in the six-county Chicago metropolitan area comes with a breathtaking price tag that exceeds $10 billion during the next five years for CTA, Metra and Pace combined, according to the Regional Transportation Authority…

“My concern is Springfield passing the kind of capital bill they are talking about — totaling only $425 million for all three transit agencies — and that there won’t be discussions about another capital bill for years,” [CTA chair Carole] Brown said. “It would just put us in such a difficult position.”

Of course, the city’s half-billion dollar annual take from TIF revenue — the same buzz-worthy “value capture” revenue stream that’s building new rail systems in Atlanta, Portland, and NoVa — would be an ideal source of funds to seed the system renewal that CTA so badly needs. After all, improving transit is an almost sure-fire way to raise property values. (I’d point out that many of the exceptions listed there, as in Miami, San Jose, and San Diego, placed rail through low-value industrial corridors in the interest of reducing ROW acquisition costs.)

Yet it’s going to take a whole lot more money to get this done. NYC Transit spent nearly $20 billion in the 1980s on renewing its capital stock, about $40 billion in today’s dollars; upgrading the signals to allow automated operations just on the L line cost nearly $300 million. And yet — the governor, and even more shockingly Emil Jones, would rather pick the pockets of Chicago’s math-challenged to gold-plate a bunch of empty Downstate roads.

Economic cadence

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Q. In the post-auto age, what will the autoworkers do?

A. “They can make BICYCLES, naturally.” And, in Portland, not only has a local-loop, labor-intensive, high-value-added, craftsman economy coalesced and (re)grown around food, but another has developed around bicycles. One estimate says the number of direct jobs in cycling in Portland has quadrupled. William Yardley reports for the NYT from the thicket o’ hipsters:

[I]n a city often uncomfortable with corporate gloss, what is most distinctive about the emerging cycling industry here is the growing number of smaller businesses, whether bike frame builders or clothing makers, that often extol recycling as much as cycling, sustainability as much as success… [T]he city is nurturing the cycling industry, and there are about 125 bike-related businesses in Portland, including companies that make bike racks, high-end components for racing bikes and aluminum for bikes mass-produced elsewhere…

[City councilor Sam] Adams said he was preparing a budget proposal that would spend $24 million to add 110 miles to the city’s existing 20-mile network of bike boulevards, which are meant to get cyclists away from streets busy with cars. Doing so could “double or triple ridership,” he said…

“I think the biggest thing that’s come from the effort the city has put into this is the vote of confidence,” [frame-builder Sacha] White said, speaking of bike riders and bike makers. “They want us here.”

And, of course, the story’s opening and closing hook? Susan Peithman, who used to work here in Chicago for CBF.

They’re invading, too: I’m curious about the “PDX Lounge” installation I’ve been invited to — a conscious attempt, going even beyond the Canadian products pavilion at Greenbuild Expo, to set up a vision of Portland as an outside-the-[exhibit hall]-box, coordinated, social nexus of sustainable design.

Not really related, but here’s a route map for last week’s Wicker Park Critical Mass. I’m especially proud of the little stretch of Burling (quote: “my, someone’s doing well”) and the winding about in Old Town Triangle (“I love these tiny little streets!”). We even had a few people speaking wistfully about Lincoln Park when it was all over.

Greenbuild is this week, so expect infrequent updates. For conference coverage, see Greenbuild365 (includes keynote videos) and, of course, a blog from Oregonian.

You have been warned

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A couple of car-culture blurbs for Monday. First, a report by Eric Pfanner in the Times:

Quick, what’s more dangerous: automobiles or cigarettes?

The European Parliament proposed last Wednesday that car advertisements in the European Union carry tobacco-style labels, warning of the environmental impact they cause.

Under the plan, 20 percent of the space or time of any auto ad would have to be set aside for information on a car’s fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, cited as a contributor to global climate change.

So, should we prepare for warnings along the lines of, “Driving this car may damage the health of the planet”?

The real goal is, as usual for Brussels, to scare the industry into “voluntary” submission — but also to counteract automakers’ more-is-better message. Perhaps they need some scare, though: Wendelin Wiedeking, the chairman of Porsche, was quoted by Mark Landler in an article covering the Frankfurt Auto Show as saying “We need to be a little realistic. People need transportation; we’re not all going to start riding bicycles.”

* The same Frankfurt Auto Show package of articles includes a ho-hum piece by Keith Schneider on Seattle’s livability initiatives (from the same mayor proposing a 50% widening of the waterfront freeway). “The result is that cleaner, greener, safer cities are attracting legions of new employees and residents. But municipal leaders in Seattle and elsewhere say they are determined not to turn their cities into warehouses for the vehicles that come with all the newcomers. However, there’s also this:

This November, residents of Seattle and other Puget Sound communities will vote on whether to raise the sales and vehicle excise taxes to generate $7.8 billion for road construction and $10 billion to build 50 more miles of light-rail lines and other transit projects.

Contrast that 56.2%-for-transit figure with the “casino capital” bill advanced by the Illinois Senate, as analyzed by Julie Hamos:

Within SB 1110 is funding for “transit capital”, pegged at $425 million in new state funds – only 1/10th the amount included for roads. This is quite a contrast to the last capital bond program in 1999, when roads received twice as much as transit – not 10 times as much!

* Word leaked last week that the administration is investigating privatizing the city’s parking meter operation, which brings in about $22 million in revenue each year. Unlike downtown garages or even the Skyway (which is paralleled closely by the Bishop Ford freeway), parking meters serve other social purposes besides revenue. Apparently, aldermen agree; from Fran Spielman’s story in last Monday’s Sun-Times:

Aldermen were intrigued by the idea. But, they were also concerned about the loss of control — over jobs, benefits and, most of all, parking meter rates.

“We saw that in the Skyway. Fees went up. If we lose control of that, the citizens have nobody to complain to. That’s like complaining to General Motors. They’re not going to listen to John Q. Citizen,” said Transportation Committee Chairman Tom Allen (38th).

Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd) called privatization of city assets a “slippery slope.Where do you stop? At what point does a for-profit hospital want to run our clinics?”

Parking meters, unlike the downtown park garages, reach deep into the neighborhoods (where they are often the only pay parking option) and serve (or could serve) policy purposes broader than simply raising revenues for the city. This move would come just as the city, prodded by some neighborhood groups, is embarking on significant and revenue enhancing price-optimization strategies (in fact, San Francisco estimates that it can quintuple revenues through better management) which would be stifled by this action. Worse yet, privatizing before the upside has been milked takes what could easily amount to $50 million in additional annual revenue and puts it in the bankers’ hands.

A private operator won’t have the same incentives to work with neighborhoods — to, for instance, put down free bike parking spaces in lieu of paid car parking (as in Brooklyn or Montreal, which also adds some scooter spaces).

And then, of course, there’s the fact that taking out second mortgages left and right is not exactly a sure sign of an organization’s fiscal health. Contracting out operations or management (writing in new incentives for higher yield — like how energy auditors get paid out of the net energy savings) could achieve the same end, but the net rewards would still accrue to the public instead.

* Fran Spielman also reported last week on Alderman Tom Tunney’s talking-while-driving ticket:

[Ald. Tunney] question[s] why officers in an “understaffed police district” with serious unsolved crimes are “assigned to pull people over solely for cell phone violations.”

Um, well, maybe that’s because cars kill more people in your ward than guns do, Alderman.

* Speaking of cars killing, Alan Durning continues his excellent Bicycle Neglect series of articles with an investigation of bicycle safety, finding naturally that not bicycling kills more people than the alternative. The good news: urban cycling is getting safer, at least one study shows that cycling is 40% safer than driving (using a strange per-hour measurement), and the cardiovascular health benefits of cycling vastly outweighs (by a factor of four) any health risk from crashes. Indeed, every minute spent walking or cycling adds three minutes to an individual’s life. In other words, don’t think of time spent walking; think of time invested walking, since that time will pay back interest later in life. (Quite literally, in fact!)

The bad news: cycling is three (per trip) to ten (per passenger km) times more dangerous than driving — although, to be fair, driving, in turn, is 10 times more dangerous than mass transportation (buses, trains, planes), and walking is three times still more dangerous than cycling per trip.

Still, bicycling could be much safer — and by making it safer, societies stand to gain immensely in terms of health, safety, environment, and energy security, not to mention livability. Indeed, Dutch cyclists are ten times safer per passenger-km; in other words, as safe from harm as American drivers. He also underlines that the key to this isn’t blaming cyclists for not wearing helmets — in other words, personalizing the problem of safety — but in taking collective action: facilities, law enforcement, education, and getting more people [and fewer cars] on the streets (a.k.a. “safety in numbers“).

(A quote from aspiring-Brit Noah Raford that “in numbers” article: “From a public policy standpoint, from a safety standpoint, the message is, if you want safer streets, have more people on them.”)

Reminds me of Tom Friedman last week: “But actually, the greenest thing you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.” Al Gore’s wecansolveit.org echoes the sentiment:

When we solve the climate crisis, it will be because of regular people like you and me. It will be because we, along with our neighbors, co-workers, and friends around the world, took a stand and demanded that our leaders make stopping global warming a top priority.

* Speaking of collective green action, the national Step it Up rally — intended by author Bill McKibben to create a mass movement around climate change — returns on 3 November.

Pound-foolish

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Fran Spielman reports at the Sun-Times about a new hybrid vehicle commitment by the city: “The 300 new Toyota Prius, Camry and Highlander hybrids will replace old Ford Crown Victorias driven by city inspectors and other non-safety employees.”

From FuelEconomy.gov:
2000 Ford Crown Victoria (gasoline): 10.2 tons/year CO2
2007 Toyota Highlander Hybrid 2WD: 7.1 tons/year CO2
2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid: 5.4 tons/year CO2
2007 Toyota Prius: 4.0 tons/year CO2
Assume that 100 of each Toyota will be purchased. (I think they’ll use this as an excuse to buy up to the Highlander SUVs, though, as a Prius is way smaller than a FCV.) Average of the Toyotas: 5.5 tons/year CO2.

Savings over 300 cars: 1,410 tons/year CO2
Forcing 100,000 riders off CTA: 29,500+++ tons/year CO2

AAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH.

In other news, it looks like a bike share program will happen “very soon”; however, a March RFP asked for the costs for 500, 1000, and 1500 bikes — not far beyond the 750 bikes envisioned by Adshel. From Libération: “Daley a indiqué que la ville de Chicago envisageait d’installer «très prochainement» un système de location de vélos en libre-service…”