Health & Fitness
Planning For Reality: Plan Bay Area – A Recipe for Transit Disaster
Plan Bay Area proposes massive spending to encourage switching from using cars to transit. Is this cost worth the benefit? Will the needle even move the right direction - could CO2 actually increase?
Plan Bay Area proposes laudable goals such as reducing CO2 and improving transportation across the entire region. However it places a great emphasis on switching people to using transit and makes leaps of logic that dissolve under scrutiny exposing that the plan may in fact increase greenhouse gas emissions.
False Goals: Reducing CO2 Emissions, But Only for Cars & Light Trucks
Climate change is happening, it's bad and we need to do something about it. As a former European I was dismayed that President Bush took no part in Kyoto, but thanks to Obama the US is now on board and no longer in a state of denial. But the execution to achieve greenhouse gas reduction is being broken by distorted goals.
The real goal should be to reduce CO2 emissions, period. But somehow the state of California, through Senate Bill 375, and as a consequence Plan Bay Area has instead focused only on the goal reducing CO2 emissions for cars and light trucks. Transit gets a free pass - based seemingly on the assumption that switching people from transit to cars will reduce CO2. This assumption does not stand up to scrutiny...
Spending Billions to Make Tiny Impacts (Even if Assumptions are Valid)
Assuming that this goal is valid here is how Plan Bay Area lines up:
Passenger vehicle CO2 Emissions (Metric tons)
- Existing Conditions 2010: 19,383,000
- "No Project": 14,631,000 (-23%)
- Plan Bay Area alt #1: 14,970,000 (-25%)
- "Equity, Environment and Jobs": 14,427,000 (-26%)
The reason for such tiny reductions is that cars have become increasingly greener, and Obama mandated mpg targets (which directly correlate to CO2 emissions) are making the vehicle fleet greener every year.
A Tiny Reduction in CO2 at Massive Cost
But what does this small incremental reduction of Plan Bay Area and Environment really cost:
- a massive program of investment in transit costing billions of dollars
- extensive development of high density housing near freeways and railway lines that assume that people will live there, or subsidies will be spent to make them sufficiently attractive (which will be very high in Marin due to cost of land)
- significant increases in asthma and autism (including potentially deaths) cause by proximity of "sensitive receptors" (families) to diesel particulates, ozone and other pollutants
- increases in property taxes to support the additional populations' needs around police, fire, water (in Marin this is likely to mean desalination plants) and schools
- OR decreases in services levels
- urbanizing swathes of Marin with 4-5 story buildings that turn otherwise suburban neighborhoods of single family homes into dark alleys overlooked by tall buildings
“Residential Proximity to Freeways is Associated with Uncontrolled Asthma in Inner-City Hispanic Children and Adolescents”
Myth: High Density Residents Will Take Transit
Then there is the other major leap of faith of Plan Bay Area: the residents of the new high density housing near transit will actually be more likely to take transit. Only looking back in history a short amount of time and to nearby Portland exposes this as a myth.
The city of Portland has conducted just the same kind of highly aggressive “compact infill development” policies as Plan Bay Area, combined with significant transit investment. The transit cost $3bn and the subsidies required to encourage building and habitation of this housing was another $2bn (guess who paid for that). The results were that in downtown Portland the share of weekday commuting on transit actually fell from 46% of trips to 36% during the past decade (according to annual surveys done by the city auditor).
Review of Plan Bay Area presents no valid evidence of a causal link, or to use the technical term "sensitivity analysis".
Myth: Transit Produces Less CO2 than Cars
Despite what people would like to believe, transit, especially trains such as the SMART train, does not use less energy or produce less CO2 emissions than current generation automobiles, let alone the upcoming improved automobiles that are the more valid comparison. For instance a train bought today is likely to have a 30 year lifespan before replacement, so it must be compared to the likely emissions of a car or light truck of 15 years in the future.
Many of the myths around transit being "greener" than cars are built on misleading or false assumptions. For instance a full bus may well emit less CO2 per passenger mile than a car, but in the US in 2006 the average passenger load of a conventional bus was 9.2 passengers. Meanwhile while there may be many single occupant cars the average load of a car was 1.58 in 2006 (and HOV lanes since 2006 have encouraged this number to go up). Another key consideration is that buses must drive from the depot to the start of the route and also return at the end of the route. Whereas car journeys do not have the same overhead – people drive from A to B. Ultimately transit consultant Thomas Rubin concludes in his paper "Does Bus Transit Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions" that buses emit more CO2 per passenger mile than cars and light trucks.
Rail is even worse. Railway lines require sizable efforts around construction; they require feeder buses that tend to have low ridership. As a result Randal O'Toole of the think tank the Cato Institute concludes in his paper that most rail transit lines generate more greenhouse gases than the average passenger automobile.
Neglect of Highways will Cause Increased Congestion and CO2 Emissions
Finally Plan Bay Area places such a great emphasis on transit, and de-emphasizes highway investments that it will encourage congestion - and cars are at their worst emitting greenhouse gases in congestion. And it must not be forgotten that all the thousands of new residents that the plan anticipates will be adding cars to the freeway and not taking transit (see the Portland evidence referenced above).
So What is the Solution?
Living in the high tech Bay Area the visible strides in car technology are becoming self-evident. Cars can now park themselves, they keep you in lane when you drive on a freeway. Google has cars that have safely driven themselves over 700,000 miles (more than most people drive). The answer is that we are fast approaching the day when you can drive onto a freeway, hit cruise, and your car can "chain up" to other cars that are being computer driven. The consequences of chained, computer driven cars is that freeway capacities increase four-fold. So once again - is the massive cost of Bay Area, even if it achieves the stated benefits truly worthwhile?
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