No new highways

For many years now we've dealt with extreme weather events. They can be very discouraging, but that's why some of us do climate advocacy. It's good to remind ourselves and others of that, and to hopefully convert some of that discouragement into action. That's why I've started responding to news of climate disasters with "No new highways!"

Sloganeering has a long and mixed history, but recently we've seen advocates get traction with slogans like "tax the rich," "defund the police" and "medicare for all." In the transportation sector we have "ban cars."

Most of these slogans have gotten pushback. Is "defund the police" too extreme? Will "ban cars" alienate too many people? I've seen people on Bluesky twist themselves into knots trying to explain that they didn't really mean "ban cars." I personally think it's healthy to get pushback, because it means we're getting our message across. But we should mean what we say, and the best slogans are the ones that get meaningful action.

I personally don't see a way out of this climate disaster without ending car use, and I'm not going to go out of my way to criticize anyone who says "ban cars" in a debate. But I'm wondering if there's a slogan that's just a little bit outside people's Overton windows, that might help them to see a way out.

There are lots of places where we can push back on the cycle of car dependency. We've seen over the years that it's not enough to build abundant transit while other people are building abundant roads and parking. We could ban cars. We could charge more for driving. We could ban new highways.

The best slogan to use may depend on the context. In New York, we used to respond to some events with "congestion pricing now!" but now that we have congestion pricing, we might come up with a slogan about raising the congestion pricing fee. I used to say "tear it down" about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but we really need to start talking about the Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel.

We really need to get people thinking about not wasting our public money on new highways and parking. That means we need to associate highways and parking with climate disaster in their minds, the way we associate them in our minds. That's why I've been saying "no new highways." But I'm open to other possibilities. What slogans are you using?

Making all the polluters pay

Some climate advocates have adopted a strategy that they call "Making Polluters Pay." They argue that most carbon pollution is caused by a handful of large corporations, which means individual actions are a waste of time, and we should focus our efforts on various laws that would charge those corporations for pollution. Broadly speaking, I think this is a misguided, dishonest and ineffective strategy. There are many actions that individuals can and should change, and those changes should be a major focus of our climate activism.

I've written a bunch about "Making Polluters Pay" on Twitter and Mastodon, and I've wanted to write a blog post about it for years, but it's a difficult topic. Different advocates have slightly different versions of this argument, blaming different corporate polluters, criticizing different individual actions and advocating different legal measures. Some of the arguments are based on plain misrepresentation of the facts. Some are based on facts, but the facts don't support the conclusions. Some are valid arguments, but the measures they advocate would not be enough to keep us safe from climate change. And I want to be careful about how I criticize the advocates, who generally seem to have their hearts in the right places.

I'm going to start by simply saying that some of the observations are completely true. There are people who are selfish, dishonest and corrupt, and happy to lie, to abuse others and to destroy public resources to increase their own wealth and power. We have structures that grant phenomenal power to people in certain positions, limit their accountability and pass the costs on to less powerful people and to the taxpayers. We also have structures that make less powerful individuals complicit in the abuse, by limiting their awareness of it, helping them to deny it, and making them dependent on it.

A prime example of this is the way that wealthy capitalists have ordered their employees to burn fossil fuels, sold carbon-intensive products to the public, lied to them about the environmental impact of carbon pollution, and misled them about our ability to mitigate the damage through recycling and cleanup measures. If the handful of corporate owners and managers were the only ones at fault, the remedy would be simple: hold them responsible - with fines, restrictions, prison time, whatever it takes. Take them out, and let all the good people of the world rebuild a safe, loving society.

Of course, it's not just the petroleum, plastics and fertilizer industries: wealthy capitalists have similarly created industries in cement, beef, cars, shipping and air travel that pollute massively, while divesting from more sustainable industries like rail freight and transit. And all these industries are connected. Now how many fines and restrictions are we talking about? How many investors and managers are going to prison?

Even where there are a few corporate owners and managers, they are not the only people responsible. There are other owners - millions, in fact, because these corporations are considered safe and uh, responsible investments. They employ millions of people worldwide. They sponsor popular sporting events and television shows Thousands of corrupt politicians and captive regulators benefit from them. Everyone on earth is a customer, in some sense. Get rid of the top managers, and others will rise to take their place.

And yes, there are divestment campaigns and anti-advertising campaigns that target these corporations. There are anti-corruption campaigns. There are individual responsibility campaigns encouraging people not to buy their products. You could have campaigns urging people not to work for them, although I haven't heard of any. But these take time and energy, and they're not what the "Make Polluters Pay" campaigns focus on. In fact, the main thrust of the "Make Polluters Pay" campaign is that the employees and customers bear no responsibility for buying cars, gas, plastics or beef. They're just innocent and/or captive tools of the capitalists.

Okay, so how about this example: the way that wealthy landowners have used their control of city, state and federal governments to pass laws that restrict the amount of housing and workspace that can be built in any given area, and mandate large parking lots and garages. They divest from sidewalks and transit. This leaves most of the buildable land in areas far from existing housing and job centers, and with a growing population, pressures people to buy cars and drive them long distances. Even if we convert all internal combustion engines into electric engines, we could not build enough renewable power for all these cars.

Unlike with the petroleum or car industries, in the residential property system, power is not concentrated in the hands of a small group of owners and executives. It's spread across millions of property owners, thousands of homeowner and condo associations and cooperatives, and thousands of zoning boards and city councils, not to mention the state legislatures and Congress, almost all of whom are landowners. You've probably met many of them. You may even be one - I'm a co-op owner.

This group holds a lot of privilege and power that the non-property-owners don't have, and most of the laws are set up to favor the property owners, but it's not a tiny group. Property owners are polluters, though. They support the system that forces people to drive. Not passively as customers, or under duress as employees, but as owners, managers and lobbyists. And as polluters, they should pay, right?

What about the voters who elected politicians that campaigned on expanding roads and parking, and defunding transit? The residents who take the time to attend meetings and speak for roads and against trains, buses and anything that slows down cars? Are the governments they elect not polluters? Do these voters and advocates not have a responsibility to pay?

Can transit save the environment? Not without riders

The latest Eric Morris Freakonomics post, which I hate, got picked by Stephen Dubner for Marketplace Radio's weekly Freakonomics segment. Kai Ryssdal's interview, and whoever wrote the Marketplace headline, trashed Morris's carefully constructed pox-on-both-houses framing and turned it into a standard Tom Rubin muddle-headed transit advocates attack.

As I said last week, the funniest thing is that Morris's general thrust is actually the main point that I've been hammering at for years. That said, given his earlier writing, I'm not sure that Morris didn't want all along to write a muddle-headed transit advocates attack, but then ditched it for the pox-on-both-houses frame. If his point was really that we should have congestion pricing, he sure buried it. So here's the article Eric Morris should have written - or at least what I would have written.

A major reason for supporting transit expansion is that increased transit use will draw people out of their cars and thus reduce pollution and help save the environment. That part is true, but we have to be very careful how we do this, because transit expansion will not automatically lead to increased transit use and decreased car use.

Increasing transit service without increasing its use can even be counterproductive: today in the United States, the average bus trip requires more energy than the average car trip, because the average bus only has about ten passengers. If the energy powering transit comes from a dirty source, like coal or diesel, it can compound the problem. Environmental advocates not only need to get more transit, but they need to make sure people ride it.

The key to this is realizing that if transit is going to get people out of their cars, they have to choose it over driving. When people choose to make a habit out of taking the bus or the train, it's because it provides a greater value than driving. When people choose to live in a place with convenient transit access instead of choosing to buy a car, it's because they want that transit-oriented lifestyle. Instead of just building transit, environmental advocates need to make it a greater value and a more attractive lifestyle. Here are five ways we can do that:

1. Stop building roads that compete with transit systems. Last year a faithful reader wrote a post about disappointingly low ridership on seven new commuter rail lines. For each of these lines I was able to find a parallel road expansion that had been built at roughly the same time, increasing the value of driving and keeping people in their cars.

2. Give transit its own right-of-way. Transit systems that operate in mixed traffic - buses and streetcars, typically - have very little advantage over driving. When transit can get through a bottleneck quicker than private cars, it offers greater value. The highest-ridership bus systems in the country all make use of a single high-capacity queue-jumper, the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane.

3. Charge market prices for driving-related expenses. Those Lincoln Tunnel buses are all competing (and winning) against high tunnel tolls. There is no easy way to drive from New Jersey into Manhattan without paying the tolls. Similarly with heavily subsidized purchases of gas and parking. You'd be surprised at how much better the bus looks if you have to pay five dollars for an hour of parking.

4. Sunset your park-and-ride lots. Having people drive to the bus or train may bring down the "cost per new rider" numbers, but the longer people drive to transit, the more pollution they emit. They will also probably drive for most evening and weekend trips. It may be strategically appropriate to build a park-and-ride to get people riding the new line right away, but the plan should be to get rid of the park-and-rides as soon as possible.

5. Legalize true transit-oriented development. The best way to keep people from driving to the station is to make it so that they can live near the station and walk to all their daily shopping needs. Sadly, in most of the country it is illegal to build an apartment building with a supermarket on the ground floor a block from a train station. We need to change that.

Of these five principles, Morris focused on number 3, charging market prices. That makes sense, since Freakonomics is mostly about prices, but at least three of the other factors are also Freakonomics-worthy. Number 1, keeping the road supply down, and number 4, keeping the parking supply down, are central to economic theory. Market prices tend to be lower when supply is higher. Number 5, legalize transit-oriented development, fits with Steven Levitt's libertarian leanings. Number 2, giving transit its own right-of-way, is the only one that requires substantial state intervention.

The main reason you didn't see these factors on Freakonomics, I'm guessing, is because they're not condescending or snarky enough for them. Sorry, guys.

Governor Cuomo, climate change and transit

Nathan H. was following my train of thought when I wondered whether a politician - specifically, Governor Andrew Cuomo - could be a "car guy" and still be an effective advocate for transit. That train of thought started with Cuomo's statements on climate change in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy:

It's a longer conversation, but I think part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable. Climate change is a controversial subject, right? People will debate whether there is climate change … that's a whole political debate that I don't want to get into. I want to talk about the frequency of extreme weather situations, which is not political … There's only so long you can say, "this is once in a lifetime and it's not going to happen again."

The next stop on that train was the Governor's numerous statements announcing storm precautions and service restorations on the transit system, which Noah Budnick of Transportation Alternatives took as an admission that the Governor controls the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It's obvious that the MTA is a state agency, but from the beginning governors have distanced themselves from it, in part to avoid responsibility for raising fares. Cuomo could not resist taking credit for the positive things the MTA has done in this storm, prompting speculation that he may continue to acknowledge ownership of it for the rest of his time in office.

Governor Andrew Cuomo and MTA Chair Joe Lhota brief New York residents on transit service restorations after Hurricane Sandy. Photo: governorandrewcuomo / Flickr.

Let's connect the two. Despite the shell game played by Tom Rubin and perpetuated by his followers like Eric Morris, the more people we can get to shift from cars to transit, the slower our climate will change. The bigger the rail network we can leave for our children and grandchildren, the easier it will be for them to get around without putting more carbon dioxide into the air.

You may ask why we should bother curbing New York City's carbon emissions. Dense, transit-oriented cities already have low per capita pollution; New York's is half as much as Denver's. We emit a small portion of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions (less than one percent), and an even smaller portion of the world's. True, but Cuomo is the governor of the entire state, and a large percentage of the state's population lives and works in dense, older areas easily served by transit. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if the Governor could shift half the state's population from cars to transit, he could cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions in half.

Beyond that, New York City and New York State may have a reputation as weirdo outliers whose ideas won't fly in Peoria, but there are a lot of people around the country and around the world who are paying attention to us. If Cuomo leads on transit, many of those people will follow. If he ever succeeds in his goal of becoming President of the United States, getting the country to shift to transit would have a huge effect on the world's carbon dioxide emissions. New York State could provide a proof of concept for him.

Until last week, I was sure that Cuomo - who admitted to not having ridden the subway in years - was both clueless and uninterested on these issues. His raising of the climate change issue, awkward and fumbling as it was, changed that for me. It seems now that, like the President, the Governor had chosen to be silent on the issue, afraid that it would make him a magnet for reactionary mockery and ruin his carefully crafted reputation as a Democrat that Republicans could do business with. On October 30, it was clear that he had made up his mind that it was foolish to remain silent.

Similarly with transit, it is clear that Cuomo realizes that the city is dependent on its subways, buses and commuter trains to function properly. He knows what Joe Lhota repeated many times: that millions of people depend on the system every day. He knows that keeping it running smoothly means happy voters.

Has Cuomo gone beyond that and made the connection between a smooth, ubiquitous transit system and slowing the rise of the oceans? Unfortunately, that is not clear. Let's hope he has, and that his days of treating the subways as a trivial service are over.

The cost of climate change denial

One thing I've heard in several places is how much surprise there has been in the areas hardest-hit by the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy. I found that a little puzzling at first. You live in a designated flood evacuation zone. There have been articles about it for years. Why would you be surprised?

On reflection it makes sense. These areas haven't seen such severe flooding, at least in living memory. Then there's the climate change denialism that can be felt even here in New York. Although most people here are cosmopolitan enough to pay lip service to the scientific evidence of global warming, many only believe it on an intellectual level. It seems so abstract, this idea of the sea levels rising, that it's hard to imagine it happening in our lifetimes.

This may explain why so much of Zone A seems to have been geared towards spewing out as much carbon dioxide as possible. The Lower East Side is one of the densest, most walkable places in the country, despite the best efforts of Bob Moses' urban renewal team. Red Hook is pretty urban, even though it's cut off from the subway system. Hoboken is one of the least car-dependent towns in Hudson County, and Mayor Zimmer is trying her best to turn it around, but it's still has less than 39% carfree households.

But the City Council districts containing the Rockaways, Gerritsen Beach, Coney Island and the South Shore of Staten Island are some of the most car-dependent in the city. They're zoned for low-density sprawl, and they fiercely attack any effort to improve non-car transportation.

At climate change events, some of the most dedicated countries are those that could be sunk by rising sea levels, like the Pacific island nations of Tokelau, Kiribati and Tuvalu. Is it time for the Rockaways, Coney Island, Gerritsen Beach and Red Hook to follow Hoboken's lead and be a force against climate change?

Rob Hopkins's Urban Challenge

Last month I discussed my suspicions that the transition movement may be just the same old back-to-the-land movement with renewed energy from the peak oil and climate crises. I'm not prepared to dismiss it completely out of hand, but I do think that it needs to let go of its contempt of cities and tone down its agriculture fetish to be truly effective.

I think it's worth quoting in depth the paragraph on page 37 of the Transition Handbook where Rob Hopkins dismisses New York:

If we see climate change as a separate and distinct issue from peak oil, we risk creating a world of lower emissions but one which is, in terms of oil vulnerability, just as fragile as today’s – if not more so – as energy prices rise.

A good example of this is New York, which recently emerged in a study as having one of the lowest per capita CO2 emissions of any large Western city, less than a third of the per capita US average. This is due to the density of living, the walkability, good public transport and the low heating requirements of apartment living. So, from a climate change perspective we can argue that New York is a good model of low carbon living we would all do well to emulate. Now let’s weave peak oil into that mix. What happens to New York in the event of a power shortage, or when the price of importing food starts to rise sharply? New York experienced such a power cut in August 2003, and although it only lasted for a day, its impact was keenly felt. While New York may have a small carbon footprint, it has little or no resilience to declining oil supplies (a concept explored in depth in Chapter 3).

You can read more of that section on the publisher's website.

When I read this, I immediately disagreed with Hopkins's conclusion (which seems to be that cities are doomed and we should all be living in small towns where we can use horsecarts to get our produce to market) but I had trouble defending New York against his specific accusation. The 2003 blackout did point to a particular vulnerability that the city has.

At 4:15 on August 14, I was working in Lower Manhattan in an enterprise that was essentially dependent on the Internet to function, so the boss told us to go home. The subways were non-functional, there was gridlock on the streets, and we didn't even think of taking a bus or a cab. I found a co-worker who lived near me and we walked six miles back to Queens. It took us a couple of hours. At least two car lanes on the Williamsburg Bridge were allocated to pedestrians. My wife had brought our infant son with her to work in the Bronx, and was not prepared to carry him ten miles home. One of her co-workers drove them to her apartment in Harlem, where they spent the night. The next morning they took three buses to get home. Power was restored the following evening.

Our resilience was tested in a less dramatic way three years later, when mismanagement by Con Edison resulted in sections of Queens losing power. At first there were two days of low power (our air conditioner and desktop computers wouldn't work, but the fans and laptops would), followed by a day of no power. At that point, Con Ed brought in several diesel generators in trailers and parked them next to large apartment buildings. Switching the apartment buildings to the generators freed up some electricity for smaller customers, but it took over a month before our generator was disconnected and driven away. In the meantime it was spewing diesel fumes around the clock under our bedroom window, which didn't help our son's asthma any. It was kind of a surreal experience, because in this case the subways were running normally and other neighborhoods had power. We could go work or shop in Manhattan or Forest Hills and it would be just another day with lights and air conditioning, but then we would get off the train and see stores with the lights off and the doors open.

There are two main questions that Hopkins's challenge raises. In both cases we made it through with minimal loss of life and property, but both cases were relatively temporary. What Hopkins is saying is that when peak oil finally catches up with us we will have to make do indefinitely with a much lower energy level. Is it possible to power a metropolitan area of nineteen million at roughly a thousand people per square kilometer without fossil fuels? What is a truly sustainable size and density?

In both cases we had a certain amount of redundancy between electrical, liquid and muscle energy that allowed the city to function at a reduced level while the problem was fixed. When the subways weren't running, there were gasoline and diesel powered buses, taxis and cars to transport those who couldn't walk or bike. When the cables couldn't bring enough power to work our lights, computers and air conditioners, we had diesel powered generators to supplement them.

In some visions of the future of cities, most transportation is powered by electricity, using energy ultimately supplied by sustainable sources. We already have electric subways and elevators, and in the past we've had electric streetcars and trolleybuses. Ultimately, I would like to see most car and truck trips replaced by electric rail and bus, and of course walking and bicycling.

But isn't that putting all our eggs in one transmission basket? What happens if we get another blackout like in 2003, and we don't have any cars or diesel buses to travel in? What if we get a brown-out like in 2006, and we don't have any diesel fuel to generate more electricity with?

Some of the answer is generating power locally, and in fact there are buildings in the neighborhood that have installed solar generators on the roofs and natural gas co-generation systems in the basements, but these only provide a fraction of the electricity needed, and the co-generation requires a supply of natural gas. I suppose we could have a completely redundant system of generators and buses powered by natural gas, but that presumes that we will have enough natural gas available then.

If any of you out there have information or insights, I'd love to hear them. Maybe you think Hopkins is right, and we should all move back to the land? In any case, please assume that we will reach peak oil, and that climate change will make other fossil fuels like "clean coal" and natural gas unsustainable. Feel free to disagree with those assumptions, but they are the premise of this discussion.

Climate change

It's right there at the top of the blog: getting people to shift from cars to transit will reduce pollution. Transit is regularly cited as a potential strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But how much could we reduce with transit?

It's funny, I haven't been able to find a good answer to that question. Many of the papers and websites are full of nutty things like electric cars and pumping carbon dioxide underground. But I did find a few useful figures around the web. Still, this is a back of the envelope calculation, so make sure you stick lots of grains of salt onto it. Any pointers to better figures would be welcome.

First of all, what kind of decrease are we talking about? Well, no one seems to know. The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the air is about 390 parts per million, and the scientific consensus seems to be that we need to get it down below 350 ppm as soon as we can. More timid people have pushed for 450 ppm or even 550 ppm. Usually it's expressed in terms of reducing greenhouse gases by 20% by a certain date (say, 2030), and 80% by another date (say, 2100).

How much of that is transportation-related? Well, this paper from the EPA (PDF, page ES-15) says that in 2007 the US produced 7,150 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent (which includes things like cow farts and laughing gas), of which 2,000 megatons were from transportation (up from 1,547 in 1990). This includes the emissions involved in generating electricity to power subways. So if we could eliminate all transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, it would reduce our total by 29%. Well, it's a start!

Okay, seriously, how much of those two gigatons could we eliminate through transit? Again, people were very timid about this. A report by SAIC for the American Public Transit Association (PDF) says that two-car households could reduce their carbon footprint by 30% if they use enough transit to get rid of one of the cars. Lame! I want to know what happens if they get rid of both cars!

Transit advocates seem very keen on telling you how much greenhouse gas would have been emitted if every transit rider had driven instead; the SAIC report gives it as 6.7 megatons, and on page 9 of this PDF from the APTA puts the figure at 4 to 25 megatons. Sounds impressive until you remember that the total annual transportation emissions are 2,000 megatons. You can kind of understand why they don't put it that way.

Still, I'm happy for transit that it's sparing us from all those gases, but even though it's labeled in the SAIC report as "Potential Role of Public Transportation in Reducing CO2 Emissions," it's not. It's the current role. What is the potential role? Well, two University of South Florida researchers interpret the National Household Travel Survey to indicate that the mode share of transit is currently "1.59% of person-trips." In other words, one sixty-third of the total person-trips. So if we multiply that figure of 25 Mt by 63, we get 1,575 Mt.

So shifting the entire population of the US to transit would eliminate three-quarters of our transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, and 22% of the total US emissions. How do we manage that? This APTA report (PDF) argues that a 10% annual compound growth in transit ridership would reduce annual carbon emissions by 142 Mt in 2020 and 910 Mt (13% of the total 2007 US emissions) in 2040. I personally think their model is limited and would like to see a logistic model that takes into account the increasing difficulty of shifting people to transit, but maybe that will appear later. It probably doesn't affect the estimates for 2040 significantly.

Since the transportation sector only accounts for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions, other contributions will probably have to come from the commercial, industrial and residential sectors (agriculture is relatively small). But we can do a lot with transportation, if we can find the will.