“EVERYONE IN America wants their town to hit the list of the top five places to live in the U.S.—clean streets, amazing mixed-use housing, and an easy walk to the corner grocery. But the question most developers fail to ask is: “At what cost?””
Searching for a balanced urban growth model. – By Rebecca Horton – Patrol Magazine
It is a rare spectacle when broadly respected national organizations and analysts condemn an initiative by some of the most influential players in the Washington establishment. Yet that is exactly what has happened to the Moving Cooler report, authored by the consulting firm Cambridge Systematics, published by the Urban Land Institute and sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and others.
Forcible Removal: Moving Cooler proposes a radical agenda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions pushing people out of their cars, whether forcibly or by making it so expensive they can no longer drive as much as they need to. Moving Cooler would employ such measures as charging home owners up to $400 annually to park in front of their own houses, placing tolls on now-free interstate highways (up to $0.05 per mile by next year) and pushing as much as 90 percent of future development into existing urban footprints, in the vain hope that cutting driving would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a similar amount. In fact, as traffic congestion increases in more densified urban areas, the one-to-one relationship between reduced driving and reduced greenhouse gas emissions is materially diminished.
More Huddled Masses: If this plan, endorsed by at least some in the Administration, occurs densification policies would impose urban growth boundaries and other restrictive regulations. Planning decisions would be removed from counties, cities, towns and villages to regional planning organizations forced to implement federal mandates as a condition of receiving back federal funding, most of which had been taken from their own taxpayers.
These restrictions would force up to 125,000,000 new residents into existing neighborhoods many of whose residents probably think are already crowded enough. Think of it as adding as many people as live and Mexico and Guatemala, without allowing urban areas to expand. All of this would worsen traffic congestion, lengthen travel times for those who can still afford to drive and severely intensify the unhealthful local air pollution that the nation has fought so successfully to reduce over the past four decades.
Ignoring Productivity: Alan Pisarski, author of the acclaimed “Commuting in America” series and one of the most respected names in transportation policy issued a cutting indictment on these pages. For example, Pisarski notes that Moving Cooler does not count travel times, “so shifting from a 15 minute car trip to an hour on transit or walking has no penalty.” In a world where time and productivity are inextricably associated, lost time is lost time, whether in a car, in transit or walking. In the broader economy, lost time is lost jobs, lost income and lost economic productivity.
Misleading Policymakers? C. Kenneth Orski, whose career has included assignments at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris and as Associate Administrator at the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration) reported in Innovation Briefs that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), an original member of the Moving Cooler coalition, walked away from the study, saying that Moving Cooler overstates the greenhouse gas emissions that can be realistically expected from its strategies, underestimates the potential of more fuel efficient cars and telecommuting and minimizes the returns from improved transportation operations and car pooling, which are already yielding “remarkable” results. AASHTO further charged that the Moving Cooler report “did not produce results upon which decision-makers can rely.” In the polite world (really) of Washington transportation policy, these are damning words indeed.
According to Orski, researchers provided AASTHO with a litany of criticisms including findings that Moving Cooler relied on “assumptions that are not plausible,” analysis that was “flawed and incomplete” and an “invalid” peer review process. Costs were characterized as “incomplete and misleading,” greenhouse gas emission results were “not comparable or plausible” and “many assumptions are extreme, unrealistic and in some cases, downright impossible.” Moving Cooler was dismissed because of its “Heroic assumptions about land use and travel behavior and extraordinary pricing do not come close to the GHG reductions needed by 2050.”
Orski himself characterized the report as containing “flawed analysis and unrealistic assumptions that could mislead policymakers and the public and raise unreasonable expectations about how much progress can be achieved using these strategies.”
There is plenty of reason to be concerned. Already Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) had introduced legislation that would require annual reductions in how much Americans drive. The senators have confused reducing driving with reducing greenhouse gases. They are not the same thing. After all the federal government is dedicating literally billions of dollars to improving vehicle fuel efficiency. The President himself has promised 150 mile per gallon automobiles. There is significant potential for improving the carbon footprint of cars without forcing people to reduce their driving.
Land Use & Transit: Meager Returns: Orski strikes a nerve, especially with respect to the Moving Cooler coalition’s favored policies of densification and transit expansion. Moving Cooler itself produces embarrassingly modest (and probably exaggerated) estimates of the potential for densification and transit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to Moving Cooler, these combined strategies would reduce greenhouse gas emissions no more than 7 percent from a 2050 base, and woefully short of any meaningful contribution. Not surprisingly, Moving Cooler ignores the fact that banning development on most suitable land around urban areas would raise land prices and thus home prices, a relationship noted by economists from the left, center and right of the spectrum and grudgingly admitted even in smart growth’s most influential advocacy document, The Costs of Sprawl — 2000.
As the Tomas Rivera Institute said in a report decrying the barriers to home ownership that California’s similarly restrictive land use policies impose on Hispanic and Latino households: “While there is little agreement on the magnitude of the effect of growth controls on home prices, an increase is always the result.” (Note 1).
Transit and High Speed Rail? Cross Them Off the List: Moving Cooler endorses significant expansion of transit service and establishment of high speed rail systems, but its own data speaks to the contrary. The maximum necessary cost for removing a ton of greenhouse gas emissions is $50, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Moving Cooler’s data puts transit expansion at more up to 20 times the $50 standard ($900) and high speed rail at 14 times the standard (more than $700). To put the matter in context, if the nation were to spend as much per ton to reach the Waxman-Markey “Cap and Trade” legislation’s greenhouse gas reduction target, the annual bill would be more than $5 trillion, more than one-third of the gross domestic product of the United States. With all of the talk in Washington about cost control and reducing the budget deficit, such extravagantly expensive strategies like transit expansion and high speed rail should be crossed off the public policy list.
And, indicative of the implausible greenhouse gas results noted by the AASHTO researchers, Moving Cooler excludes the greenhouse gases emitted in construction. This leads one to wonder if there are “good” greenhouse gas emissions (like from building high speed rail) and bad greenhouse gas emissions (like from driving). Construction emissions can be very substantial. For example, it has been reported that construction emissions from proposed high speed rail lines in the United Kingdom would offset any reductions achieved in daily operations compared to airplanes.
Incompatible Bedfellows: Pitifully, Moving Cooler attempts to associate itself with a highly respected study by McKinsey & Company and The Conference Board that concludes significant greenhouse gas reductions can be achieved by 2030 at less than $50 per ton. Moving Cooler cites itself as “companion piece” Yet, the McKinsey/Conference Board study specifically rejects the high-handed social engineering proposed by Moving Cooler, indicating that its strategies would involve “maintaining comparable levels of consumer utility,” which they defined as: “no change in thermostat settings or appliance use, no downsizing of vehicles, home or commercial space and traveling the same mileage annually relative to levels assumed in the government reference case” (Note 2).
The Mantra: Moving Cooler chants a mantra about how automobile fuel efficiency will improve, but that continued growth in driving will largely cancel out those gains. However, to do so Moving Cooler lumps automobile and other light-duty vehicle data in with railroads, trucks and buses.
In fact, the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy projects a 13 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from cars and other light-duty vehicles by 2030, and that is before accounting for the more stringent fuel economy standards adopted by the Obama Administration a few months ago. Further, Moving Cooler buries its laughingly ineffective and expensive policy favorites, smart growth, transit expansion and high speed rail, among a panoply of other strategies that would account for the “lion’s share” of the emission reductions it anticipates.
The Real Agenda? As Pisarski indicated: Maybe the saddest part of it all, the authors appear not to take global warming or energy security very seriously at all. Rather these public concerns are just a convenient hook, the cause du jour, on which to hang their favorite solutions. Given this apparent reality, it is probably not surprising that two of the three Moving Cooler cover pictures are from Europe, which the smart growth movement has worshipped for years.
The Moving Cooler strategies would not only force people to live in ways they would not voluntarily choose, and for scant gain and no reason. Moving Cooler’s radical measures need to be rejected forcefully. There are better, more effective and far less intrusive ways to reduce greenhouse gases.
That would, however, probably take the fun out of fighting global warming for those whose real intent is telling others how to live.
Note 1: “Growth controls” is a synonym for smart growth strategies, such as urban growth boundaries and development impact fees.
Note 2: The 2007 government reference case used by McKinsey and The Conference Board assumed that per capita driving would increase more than 50 percent between 2005 and 2030. Later estimates have reduced that figure.
Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.
Urban politicians have widely embraced the current concentration of power in Washington, but they may soon regret the trend they now so actively champion. The great protean tradition of American urbanism – with scores of competing economic centers – is giving way to a new Romanism, in which all power and decisions devolve down to the imperial core.
This is big stuff, perhaps even more important than the health care debate. The consequence could be a loss of local control, weakening the ability of cities to respond to new challenges in the coming decades.
The Obama administration’s aggressive federal regulatory agenda, combined with the recession, has accelerated this process. As urban economies around the country lose jobs and revenues, the D.C. area is not merely experiencing “green shoots” but blossoming like lilies of the field.
To be sure, the capital region has been growing fat on the rest of America for decades, but its staggering success amid the recession is remarkable. Take unemployment: Although the district itself has relatively high rates, unemployment in Virginia and Maryland – where most government-related workers live – has remained around 7% while the nation’s rate approaches 10%.
The reason is obvious: an explosion of government amid a decline in the private sector. Factories may be closing in Michigan, tech jobs and farms may be disappearing in California, but the people who grease the skids of the ever-expanding federal machine seem to be doing just fine.
This is most evident at the top of the job market. The capital region now boasts the healthiest technology employment picture in the nation. Virginia has the highest proportion of tech workers in the nation. Maryland ranks fifth, and the district itself is seventh.
The area also continues to enjoy continued growth in the lucrative professional and business service jobs category. Over the past year, according to latest estimates by www.jobbait.com, the D.C. area was the only region in the nation to enjoy growth in this field.
Signs of Washington’s ascent abound. The local real estate market appears to be on the mend even as others suffer continued strong declines in values and rising foreclosures. Hotel prices, dropping virtually everywhere else, look to be rising as well.
Occupancy rates, falling in most places, actually increased during the first half of 2009, as did revenues, which have taken a nosedive elsewhere. In New York prices have plunged – even the mighty Waldorf has been slashing rates.
In many ways, the economic disasters in New York and other cities have proved a boon for Washington. Wall Street’s demise, for example, has been D.C.’s gain as the locus of financial power leaves New York for the Treasury, Fed, White House and the finance-related congressional committees. K Street is the new Wall Street, where you play for the really big stakes.
This shift may soon spread beyond the financial sector. Want to get into the energy business? You can bypass Houston and head to the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency – they are the ones handing out subsidies and grants to “deserving” applicants. Thinking of expanding your city to accommodate new middle-class families? The people at the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development have their own ideas on how your cities and regions should grow.
Manufacturing might be important to your economy, but Washington – a region with virtually no history of productive industry – generally regards factories as polluters, greenhouse gas emitters and labor exploiters. If you have enough lobbyists you might be able to hang on, but don’t really expect much in the way of positive help.
Some “progressives” may like this model – after all, it originated in Europe, the supposed fount of all that is enlightened. Since the 18th century, Europe’s urban history has been largely dominated by great imperial centers – London, Paris, Moscow and Berlin – that treat other cities like something akin to poor relations.
Even today European cities and localities tend to have far less control over their destiny than in the U.S. Zoning, planning decisions and even economic strategy often originate from the center, as does the power to tax and spend. For decades, Europe’s legacy of ancient urban privilege – so critical in emerging out of the dark ages – has ebbed before the increasing power of the national capitals. More recently the super-capital of Brussels, like Washington, thrives in hard times that are decimating other European urban economies.
The great European capitals rose largely because they also served as the domicile of princes, bureaucrats and, until recent times, the clerical establishment. Other cities might have enjoyed a boom – such as Manchester during the industrial revolution – but, ultimately, hierarchy served to concentrate power in the great capital cities.
In contrast, American cities and communities traditionally have retained control over planning, development and other critical growth factors. Equally important, American cities, noted the great sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, were not dominated by aristocracy but were “heterogeneous from top to bottom.” Urban growth came primarily not by central design but as a result of the often ruthless schemes and lofty aspirations, often ruthlessly expressed, of local political and business leaders.
For example, the quintessential American city, New York, started as a commercial venture. As early as the mid-17th century 18 languages were spoken on Manhattan Island (population of 1,000) and numerous faiths practiced. In early New Amsterdam, the counting house, not the church or any public building, stood as the most important civic building.
Even after the Dutch were pushed out by the more powerful British military, the bustling island city – renamed New York – retained its fundamentally commercial character. It served briefly as the nation’s capital, but its power grew from its port and its immigrants. The city’s entrepreneurial spirit and social mobility startled many Europeans. As the French consul to New York complained in 1810, “The inhabitants…have in general no mind for anything but business. New York might be described as a permanent fair in which two-thirds of the population is constantly being replaced; where huge deals are being made, almost always with fictitious capital; and where luxury has reached alarming heights.”
This entrepreneurial pattern also drove the growth of New York’s many competitors – first the great industrial cities such as Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit and, later, West Coast metropolises like Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area and Seattle. More recently, there has been a similar spectacular rise of formerly obscure places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Miami.
Through much of this time Washington barely registered among the ranks of American urban centers. Despite early expectations that Washington would become “the Rome of the New World,” it lagged behind other American cities through much of the 19th century. The city was widely reviled as a fetid, swampy place with atrocious cuisine – hog and hominy grits were its staples – that offered little in the way of commerce, industry or culture. Even its great buildings were compared to “the ruins of Roman grandeur.”
The First World War, the Depression and then the Second World War each boosted Washington’s status but hardly into the first rank of cities. Few entrepreneurs were attracted to a city dominated by regulators, clerks and lawyers. The cultural center lay in New York and Boston – and later Los Angeles. The Bay Area, Massachusetts and later Texas evolved into the primary technological centers.
Not until the 1960s did Washington begin to emerge as something like a traditional national capital, with a large permanent population of well-educated and cultured citizens as well as a robust economy based on the defense industry and the expanding welfare state.
But the financial crisis of 2008 has set the stage for an unprecedented growth of the region, with a Democratic president and majority seemingly determined to expand federal mandates into every crevice of community life. There is an eagerness to use federal authority in unprecedented ways that could bring federal influence into virtually every minute decision made in an urban area.
This concentration of power is also bad news for urban economies, including New York’s. As New York University’s Mitchell Moss has observed, Gotham may be losing its perch as the true national financial center. But other cities also should take note of the trend. Polycentric sprawling cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta soon may find themselves forced to reorganize themselves along lines preferred by federal urban “experts.” Hard-pressed industrial cities may find new environmental restrictions on ports and other key infrastructures an impediment to a much-needed renaissance.
American cities are at a critical moment. Our competitive, commercial urban tradition certainly has its flaws, but it also has produced the advanced world’s most dynamic roster of modern cities and regions. Ceding the power of urban planning to Washington will cripple the American city – except, of course, for the one that reigns as locale for imperial control.
This article originally appeared at Forbes.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History
By Richard Reep
Regions have a bad habit of getting into ruts. This is true of any place that focuses exclusively on one industry – with the possible exception of the federal government, which keeps expanding no matter what. This reality is most evident in places like Detroit, but it also applies to one like Orlando, whose tourist-based economy has been held up as a post-industrial model.
This has not been helped by recent diktats from DC Central Control. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Ephemeral City, among others, has now been branded a Sybaris. Private interests continue to book conferences in Central Florida due to its good value, but the closed circle of federal government has prudishly proscribed the family leisure capital of the world in favor of destinations like Chicago. Central Florida’s chagrined congressional delegation, caught in reaction mode, will fight to remove this ban, but the damage has been done. A cold new era has firmly settled into the Sunshine State’s former playground.
Since welcoming Walt Disney with open arms in 1964, Orlando proudly built its reputation as a family leisure destination. With over 116,000 hotel rooms, Orlando competes with Las Vegas in both the national and global tourism market. Indeed, Europeans, Middle Easterners, Asians, and Latin Americans make Orlando their playground, and if physical evidence is needed, the exquisitely messy honky-tonk of North International Drive testifies to this reality.
Many couldn’t fault this strategy – at least until until now. Orlando’s mania for tourism, supported by local, regional and state policies, yielded growth beyond the wildest dreams of this once-sleepy agricultural town at a railroad crossing among orange groves and cattle ranches.
But in the current economy, leisure can be seen as a waste of time and money. “I think Orlando got put on the list of not to go because of the perception that it is a resort and vacation area,” read a July email from a Department of Agriculture employee to an Orlando conference planner. Business in Central Florida has slowed to a trickle, anxiety is increasing and doors are closing. It seems that Orlando’s tourism bubble has popped with visitorship dropping from a high of nearly 50 million in 2005, to a projected high barely above 43 million in 2009, and while civic leaders are huffing and puffing to blow it back up again, Central Florida’s leisure industry is a shadow of its former boisterous self.
Corporate trainers, state and local government conferences, not-for-profits, trade associations, and incentive groups still find Central Florida a decent place to hold meetings. Airfare is cheap, the vast quantity of hotel rooms makes for competitive rates. The renewed emphasis on bringing the family along makes Orlando a natural fit for many groups seeking a destination, especially in the winter. They may book rooms in more affordable Osceola County rather than pricey Orange County, but are still a few minutes’ drive from Disney’s front door, the beach, and dozens and dozens of food and shopping outlets. Some hotel owners are even contemplating new meeting rooms to keep up with shifting demand.
The new mood in Washington, however, does not favor Orlando as a destination. Central Florida may be a good value, but this is irrelevant to the equation, for it is the overriding perception of Orlando that seems to worry our national government’s travel planners. And this perception tells us quite a bit about the real thinking that is happening at the federal level.
If the new policy were to plan trips only to destinations under the median cost, it would send a message that government does not want to waste money. It might also send federal conferences to destinations in overlooked parts of America that could open beltway eyes to the bleak turmoil enveloping so much of the country, despite the steady drumbeat of recovery news.
Meanwhile, sellers already know that Washington is really the only game in town, as businesses turn towards grant programs, rebates, and other incentives to backfill lost private sector revenue in goods and services. But if one looks closely at the actual investment pattern, Washington seems to favor the financial market, green energy, and possibly its own future health care program – none of which plays to Orlando’s strengths. This extremely narrow set of interests belies a harsh ideology, as harsh as the ideology it replaced, and as bad for the average citizens of America.
Yet for all this, Central Florida should share some of the blame. Orlando cursed itself by growing around a single specialty, rather than a diverse set of interests. Favoring theme parks over agriculture was certainly an opportunistic decision, but reinforcing tourism and ignoring all other investment has proved a vast miscalculation. The Sunshine State could have been #1 in solar energy research by now, making it Obama’s darling. So Central Florida, without any other true industry, now grovels at the government’s feet to restore itself into good graces and allow a National Park Service meeting to take place at the Ramada Inn again. It is likely that Orlando will be shut out of this closed circle for some time to come.
Central Florida’s best hope lies in a recovery of the private sector economy, a regained sense of profitability by corporations, and a renewed faith in the future by individuals. Lacking these now, Central Florida hibernates, its giant engines of escapism in low gear, mothballed, or abandoned.
One almost hopes The Recovery will be delayed long enough to suffer some sense into the politicians and business leaders who can diversify the economy of the region. After all many of things that attract tourists – low costs, good infrastructure, warm weather – should also lure entrepreneurs, skilled workers and capital, foreign and domestic. You wonder why our leaders have not yet thought of this, or put a plan to diversify into action.
Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.
Photo by Carlos Cruz.
With the home building industry in peril, you would think that legislators would come up with immediate solutions to help foster new home construction. And there are now two well known Federal programs regarding housing: one is the $8,000 tax credit for first time home buyers, and the other is the 30% energy tax credit for a select few components of home remodeling.
The $8,000 credit for first time home buyers is a good idea, and seems to have helped at least a few buyers purchase homes. Of course, it’ s not clear how many purchased bargains on previously owned homes and how many actually purchased new homes.
The 30% energy tax credits are a different matter. I’m against the current incarnation of the program for a host of reasons:
Problem No. 1: The 30% tax credit applies to only a few select items that somehow qualified, and there’s no (simple) way to get on the approved list. In addition, Energy Star certification assures that the “product” has gone through some scrutiny on performance and reliability. But what of the equally important installers?
Problem No. 2: New construction gets very limited tax credits. When retrofitting existing houses, tax credits apply to the installation of efficient windows and insulation. But new construction (along with remodels) is not eligible unless it includes Geothermal, Solar Hot Water, or Solar Electricity. These benefits are meaningful only to those with enough income to make a credit of this size enticing. The middle and upper class homeowners who are willing to finance these upgrades hope that the after-tax benefits will make the investment worthwhile.
In theory, of course, the ticky-tacky downtrodden neighborhoods built after World War II can also be upgraded…to become energy efficient ticky-tacky downtrodden neighborhoods. But the energy credit will not benefit those that need it the most: those in the lower income strata that find it difficult to survive from pay check to pay check. A 30% tax credit does them no good at all. Even if the tax credit made sense for downtrodden neighborhoods, none of the older homes would ever become nearly as energy efficient as new construction.
As an example, let’s say 50 homes in a low income neighborhood did take advantage of the tax credits and upgraded their windows and insulation, and added geothermal design because that was the only option approved for the benefits. This would easily add up to well over $50,000 per home – at least $2,500,000 – of which almost a million dollars is funded by you, the tax payer.
As an alternative, the 50 houses could be leveled, and excess streets abandoned to create a large developable contiguous tract of land. New home builders on the verge of bankruptcy, and even corporate national builders, could easily reinvent their business to build new urban neighborhoods using more efficient development patterns. To upgrade a new affordable home with more energy efficient windows would cost $2,000, an inch of foam insulation added to exterior walls would be another $2,000, and a high efficiency heating and cooling design just another $2,000. This highly efficient new home would use a fraction of the energy of an upgraded old home, and would add only $300,000 for all 50 homes. New neighborhoods could also have a fraction of the environmental impact of older ones, if planned using newer techniques. Low income families can live in new green neighborhoods, and the home building industry can find a new market while curbing sprawl at the same time…
Any politicians reading this? (see study).
Problem No. 3: The current tax credits promote overkill. Almost all the recent Green Certified Homes sold in the Minneapolis area had geothermal design as part of their package. Certainly a home builder increases profits by including a complex geothermal system instead of a simple, highly efficient and low cost conventional heating and cooling system. Building a new, well insulated home results in a significant reduction of heating and cooling energy needs, and the upgrade to a highly efficient system on a new home costs as little as $3,000 extra. But if the home design is not geothermal it will not get tax credits. A passive solar designed home gets free heat on sunny days — also not eligible for tax credits — but a $50,000 geothermal system is.
Problem No. 4: The current tax credits are creating a false economy for the very few businesses that manufacture approved items. Without the tax credits, these suppliers and manufacturers would need to come in at a reasonable price point/payback ratio to generate the volume of sales necessary to be profitable. In other words, they would have to invent, innovate, and deliver systems that make sense or fail in the marketplace. As soon as the tax credit ends many will not survive. An article on energy tax programs of the 1980s and the “tin men” that sold under-performing systems shows how 95% of the manufacturers of that era went out of business when the Carter era tax benefits ended. What happens to the warranty and guarantees when the company is no longer around?
So what’s the solution to the problems? Either fix the tax credit program, or do away with it.
Make the program flexible enough so that new innovations can be accommodated, and make the system itself easy to access. This would encourage companies to be competitive, and give hope to start-ups that cannot right now get financing. The current application system favors well-funded, big corporations, and is far too restrictive in its scope. Have the tax credit apply to window and insulation upgrades above the “standard for code”, and include all heating and cooling systems that are above the 90% efficiency typically included in new construction. Even a tax credit limited to the price difference created by the upgrade would jump start both the green industry and new home construction.
And while we’re jumpstarting…let’s not forget a little history. During the dot-com crash earlier this decade, unscrupulous promoters bilked investors out of billions of dollars on false promises. These promoters did not disappear, they simply moved to the next opportunity: mortgage and real estate. Quick profits from flipping real estate created an economy that was un-policed and unsustainable. Let’s not permit energy upgrades supported with a 30% tax credit to become the next unsustainable wave.
Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable. His website is rhsdplanning.com.
In these hard times the New Zealand public is somewhat excited about the travel costs incurred by our Government Ministers and MPs. Overseas travel attracts particular rage and fury.
A particularly galling example is a proposal by Christchurch City Mayor Bob Parker, his CEO Tony Marryat, and an urban planner, to visit the US to investigate the performance of light rail in Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Vancouver.
These cities seem unlikely to provide any relevant information, if only because their populations are many times those of Christchurch, a metropolis of roughly 370,000 and a downtown population of a mere 8000. In comparison:
The reason the Christchurch team cannot investigate a rail system in the US serving a metropolitan area of only some 350,000 people, and with a CBD of only 8,000 people, may be that because so far, at least, even the most enthusiastic Smart Growth planners in the US are not that silly.
Randal O’Toole, who has made many studies of urban rail systems, points out in “Unlivable Strategies” that spending money on expensive forms of rail transit is fundamentally inefficient because other transportation systems cost far less to build.
Light rail, he argues, has become popular in the United States precisely because it is expensive. Congress gives transit grants to cities on a first-come, first-served basis. So the cities that build the most expensive transit systems get the largest share of federal transit funding.
Naturally, dozens of cities are in line to get their share of the pork.
But that does not prove that light rail is worthwhile. Too many cities have built expensive rail lines and then found that, due to overruns, high operations and maintenance costs, or heavy mortgages, they have to cut back bus service. The result is that rail construction has actually led to reduced transit ridership in many, if not most, cases.
The Grand Tour: My Version
Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay
Here is what the Christchurch Mayor and his team should learn from their visits to the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay.
Furthermore, despite (or because of) several extensions of the BART line, transit ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area has fallen by more than 10 percent since 1982. Several transit advocacy groups, including the Sierra Club (Piper, 2004), the Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition (BATLUC, 2003), and the Bay Rail Alliance (Carpenter, 2007), actively oppose a proposed extension of BART to San Jose because they know investments in other forms of transit are much more cost effective.
Overall, US urban areas with rail transit have not fared as well as areas with bus transit. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people in regions with rail transit who commute to work by transit actually declined, while the number in regions with bus-only transit systems increased.
The saddest part of these stories is that the people who lose tend to be those most dependent on transit due to low incomes or an inability to drive, while the people who end up riding rail lines tend to have higher incomes and plenty of auto-mobility. (Winston and Shirley, 1998, p. 9).
Rail transit actually represents a transfer of resource from the poor to the well-off – Robin Hood at work in reverse gear.
Seattle
After getting voter approval for rail transit in 1996, Sound Transit began operating 31 miles of commuter rail service between Tacoma and Seattle in 1999. It also built a 1.6-mile streetcar line in downtown Tacoma at a cost of $50 million a mile, a third more than planned. As of December, 2003, Sound Transit also operates a 35-mile commuter rail line from Everett to Seattle.
Sound Transit’s Seattle-Tacoma commuter-rail line is one of the least productive in the nation, carrying less than one seventh as many passenger miles per route mile as the average commuter-rail line. As a result it has one of the highest operating costs per trip or per passenger mile of any commuter rail line. Despite starting out with free service, the Everett line has been running more than 70 percent empty.
Transit’s growth in travel and market share is almost entirely due to bus transit, not rail transit. But the growth in the region’s congestion is due to decisions made early in the decade to concentrate on rail transit rather than highway construction. Those decisions have harmed Seattle area residents in many ways, including cost overruns, congestion, transit’s cost ineffectiveness, and housing prices.
Future plans: The Sound Transit agency originally projected that the cost of building a 24-mile light-rail line from the Seattle-Tacoma airport to the University of Washington and Northgate would be $2.4 billion. Shortly after receiving voter approval, the agency increased this estimate to $3.6 billion.
After many stops and starts, last year voters endorsed an $18 billion Sound Transit plan for a 53 mile network which they hope will attract 25,000 daily riders by 2030.
Our Christchurch team should learn from the Seattle story that, once embarked upon, these rail plans tend to eat ever increasing amounts of money.
Vancouver
We can only wish them luck on getting useful information out of Vancouver. There seem to be no collections of the statistics on the performance of the transit systems as are available to US researchers here and here (Excel files).
However, we do note that in 2008 the operating cost of the Translink Sky Trains was C$773,737,000 and this was ‘covered’ by C$359,911,000 of fares and advertising, $262,298,000 motor fuel taxes,$255,741,000 property tax, parking site taxes $8,758,000 and others of $33,313,000.
So the transfers from motorists and property owners are greater than the fare revenues.
In 2008 the Long-term debt was C$1,822.7 million.
Grand Plans
Christchurch Mayor and his team are presumably looking at these rail systems as a means of supporting their Smart Growth plans for the Greater Christchurch area.
If the Mayor and his team ask the right questions, and collect the right data, it will be evident to Blind Freddy’s dog that if these boondoggle systems have failed in these major cities, with their major concentrations of employment, then there is no way that light rail can provide a cost effective and efficient service to Christchurch and its environs.
Sorry about that. Enjoy the trip.
Owen McShane is Director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies, New Zealand.
Last summer, Sharon Owens had a problem. The Burlington, VT mother of three was trying to satisfy the wishes of her soon-to-be 14-year old daughter who wanted to celebrate her birthday with a canoe outing with friends. The problem was that renting the necessary canoes would have cost hundreds of dollars. Interestingly, it seemed that nearly ever other house in Sharon’s neighborhood had a canoe in the backyard, or parked under a tarp next to a garage. But Sharon, like many of us, did not know her neighbors, and felt uncomfortable asking them.
The solution to this dilemma came in the form of a website called Front Porch Forum (FPF), a micro-community site geographically focused on a neighborhood within Burlington encompassing a couple hundred households. Within days of posting her situation to the site there were over a half-dozen canoes on her front yard. Problem solved. But more than that, a community built. As Sharon says, “not only did my daughter have a great birthday and I saved a couple hundred dollars, but now I have a genuine connection to a half-dozen neighbors. Why didn’t I know these good people years ago?”
Front Porch Forum is the brainchild of Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife Valerie who faced a similar challenge back in 2000. Newly moved in to the Five Sisters Neighborhood in Burlington, they too had trouble connecting. When they missed word of the annual block party, a neighbor later told them: “Oh, well, I guess you gotta live here 10 years before you’re really on the grapevine.” Michael and Valerie weren’t about to wait around for a decade; they had an idea. They set up a simple neighborhood email list and stuck a flier in each of the nearby 400 front doors. As Michael tells it, attention grew slowly, but surely: “We live in a neighborhood full of active people with something to say. So people saw it as an easy way of being in touch.” Nine years after the “grapevine” conversation, more than 90% of Five Sisters subscribe with a recent survey indicating that more than half of them had posted an item to the service recently.
But the Wood-Lewis’ did not stop there. Actually, they had little choice. When surrounding neighborhoods heard about Front Porch Forum, they wanted in. Wood-Lewis said no, since he had a better idea: he’d build one for them. Today more than 14,000 households (all in Vermont’s Chittenden County) subscribe to FPF – each in subgroups of 200-400 households – small enough to “feel like a neighborhood/local community”, says Wood-Lewis. All told, Front Porch Forum hosts a network of 130 online neighborhood forums covering its pilot region. More than 40% of Burlington, the state’s largest city, subscribes.
Some readers at this point are no doubt saying to themselves, “Well isn’t that a nice little story, but I already use Craigslist/Facebook/MySpace”. With the birth and persistent growth of Front Porch Forum, Wood-Lewis is demonstrating something quite different from those sites: the incredible power of the internet to build physical “community”, while at the same time showing the web’s effective limits. At its root, Wood-Lewis is proving two, vital axioms pertinent to all community building, online or off: size and proximity matter.
This isn’t a mini-Craigslist, as Wood-Lewis himself says (in words that might make Craig Newmark cringe): “Craigslist is wonderful and huge. But FPF is different. We’re all about helping clearly identified nearby neighbors connect, while Craigslist helps somewhat distant strangers have a single and often anonymous transaction.” Even as local as Craiglist tries to get it doesn’t begin to approach FPF’s micro-communities. For example, I live in the Los Angeles area, and even though that Craigslist page is broken down into six geographic sub-regions, the one where I live, westside-south bay is still home to well over a million people, spanning dozens of square miles. And, unlike FPF, I can venture into other geographic areas in search of, well, anything. It is not without reason that Craigslist’s two most popular “product” areas are “erotic services” and “casual encounters”. The latter phrase must seem oxymoronic to Wood-Lewis: a “casual encounter” in your neighborhood?
That’s not to say that you can’t find a good used car on your local Front Porch Forum. In fact, Wolfgang Hokenmaier recently sold his minivan to a neighbor in his FPF, noting, “We had more people… showing up to look at the van who found out through the Forum than the interest generated by the Burlington Free Press, Cars.com and Craigslist combined.” Along with cars sold, there are also cats found, block parties organized, and local council meetings advertised. Community is built not just by searching for a futon, but by checking their FPF for what is happening around them. While it is not a mini-Craigslist, it isn’t a mini-newspaper either. Requests for canoes and lost cats do not an exciting newspaper make, but as a recent survey showed, over 95% of Forum members tune in to their local edition almost daily.
FPF members are illustrating the simple truth that we’re interested in what happens around us. In part, this is de Tocqueville’s oft-quoted “self-interest rightly understood”: we want to be aware of proximate things that might help (a cheap desk) or hurt (a council meeting about a big apartment complex moving in) us. But the success of the Forums also demonstrates the power of geographic closeness in creating that “glue”, which builds communities: trust. The Forums have proven to be a great place to find baby-sitters. Of course, this is because people tend to trust those within a certain geographic area; in very real ways, we are bound to them and they to us. They are our “neighbors” (our “bors” or “dwellers” who live “nigh”). We see them and they us, whether it’s in the driveway of our neighbor’s ranch house or in the elevator of our 50-story apartment building. At the same time, FPF’s methodology builds a virtual “hedge” around that neighborhood, making sure that only neighbors can participate.
This increase in social capital paired with a small daily dose of neighborhood news often results in people getting more involved in their local community. An independent survey found that 93% of respondents reported heightened civic engagement due to Front Porch Forum. Put another way, how much more likely is canoe-borrowing Sharon to help rebuild the local playground or volunteer with a local nonprofit after her experience around her daughter’s birthday?
So how come we’re not seeing millions of FPF’s springing up around America? Well, it demands the two things that are often difficult to find: unremunerated time, and love for where you live. At the base of each Forum are one or two “Neighborhood Volunteers” who act as important local boosters for the site, promoting its existence and encouraging civil participation. They have no admin/editing privileges, but, interestingly, experience has shown that keeping dialogues civil is self-enforcing when neighbors know they’ll actually see each other at some point after they post. The Volunteers’ only compensation is a hearty “Thanks” from neighbors who almost unanimously appreciate the service and, of course, the benefits of living in a more connected neighborhood. As Wood-Lewis tells it, “getting folks to sign up is hard and slow work. People do NOT want to sign up for one more thing, and they procrastinate, and they hit technology hurdles, and they forget.” Still, he concludes, “FPF is incredibly successful at generating word-of-mouth neighbor-telling-neighbor buzz… this gets people to actually sign up.”
FPF is a for-profit company that, after some initial foundation funding is only beginning to see some revenues from local advertising and fees paid by municipal departments for access to the neighborhoods. With four employees and steady growth in its pilot area, Front Porch Forum is eager to expand to other regions and is open to finding other financial partners as it helps build communities one neighborhood at a time.
Google “online community”, and you’ll receive over 60 million results. From the “ASPCA Online Community” to the “children with diabetes community”, all of the participants have entered in to a group due to some affinity – common experiences, hobbies, ethnicity, religion, etc. – but most will never actually meet. Along with these “communities of support” are “communities of practice” – sites like Flickr and Wikipedia, where participants with particular skill sets or knowledge edit/critique/contribute to a particular product. What Michael Wood-Lewis is building in Vermont turns these models on their heads. He has created FPF to force interaction, and while people are free to sign up, they “qualify” only because of where they live, not who they are, or what they know. With this micro-geographic focus, Wood-Lewis is deepening community ties by bringing people together who may have very little “in common” save for their street address.
What does all this mean nationally? A couple months ago, I wrote about the White House’s well-intentioned efforts to convene “national discussions” around particular policy issues. The whitehouse website, in fact, calls itself an “online community”. While it has been focused on gaining public input on policies ranging from transparency to health care, much of the online “community organizing” has taken place over at DNC headquarters, with Organizing for America, or OFA 2.0.
Gathering local supporters to talk about the president’s policies is a far cry from the community-building of Front Porch Forums. As online gatherings get more focused on a particular subject, or expand geographically, they diminish the chances of enabling the kind of reciprocating community – the kind of neighborhood – which is most naturally found when geography is focused and interests broadened.
Pete Peterson is Executive Director of Common Sense California, a multi-partisan non-profit organization that supports civic engagement in local/regional decision-making. His views here are not meant to represent CSC. Pete also teaches a course on civic participation at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.
When the British troops laid down their arms at Yorktown, Virginia, a colonial band played “The World Turned Upside Down,” a popular air marking the absurdity of the occasion. Now the American economy is turned upside down, and the small businesses that once fortified it have exchanged places with Asian manufacturers that America once sought to protect. No man’s enlightenment is complete without the deepening amazement that comes with having seen such a reversal.
In the case of the US economy, it happened in a piecemeal fashion — with Fair Trade laws playing a pivotal role — that was all the more insidious for being deliberate. The national agenda that was followed was intended to prevent the fragile nation states of the world from going communist.
As a kid, I had a zoomed-in view of the transition. My father was part of it, as president of a company that attempted an end run around the nation’s Fair Trade laws, which, for those too young to remember, specified the minimum retail price at which a product could be sold. These laws were intended to protect small mom and pop businesses from being bankrupted by chain stores during the Great Depression. And they largely succeeded in their mission. Main Street thrived because outfits like Wal-Mart were prohibited from rolling back prices.
Needless to say, the Fair Trade laws weren’t fair to consumers, who were forced to pay virtually the same price for goods sold at linoleum-floored outlets like Wal-Mart as they did at marbled emporiums like Saks Fifth Avenue.
The complexity of the market, which created gray areas in the laws and made their enforcement difficult, was seized on by my father as an opportunity. He bought surplus stock from well-known manufacturers, re-labeled it, and sold it for considerably less. His private label, “Amcrest,” is still remembered fondly by smart shoppers as having been an economical way to buy everything from mouthwash and undergarments to watches and refrigerators. The brand became so big that the government sued my father and nearly put him out of business.
End of story? Not quite. Shortly after the government filed suit, someone at the State Department had a bright idea. While the government would not permit my father to continue to buy surplus output from American manufacturers, it encouraged him to do the same thing…from manufacturers in the Far East.
The State Department considered this an act of enlightened self-interest along the lines of the Marshall Plan. Experts opined that it would save Japan and Taiwan, and possibly the rest of Asia, from falling into the communist orbit. After all, China and North Viet Nam had already fallen to communism. Singapore was toying with the ideology. Who could say where it would pop up next? People like my father would bring jobs and prosperity to Japan and Taiwan, and the grateful citizenry would form vibrant democracies and become bastions of anti-communism. Nobody ever imagined that these once backward nations would someday be eating our lunch – and our dinner.
The U.S. policy further allowed manufacturers in these nations to sell their wares largely free of American tariffs. So what began as a trickle of surplus output became a flood of finished goods. At the beginning, most of the stuff was simply cheaply made. But it didn’t take long for Japan to learn the gospel of quality from the American engineer Edward Deming, whom American manufacturers shunned.
Japan moved up the value chain. My father was among the first to begin importing Sony TVs, which were leagues better than American sets. South Korea followed Japan’s arc. Taiwan, too, stepped up, though it did so with industrial policies that targeted the software and microprocessor industries.
As these trends were taking shape, the U.S. was hit with high inflation. By the 1970s, most states decided to repeal their Fair Trade laws, setting Wal-Mart on a trajectory to become the nation’s largest corporation. Later, under pressure from Wal-Mart and others, Taiwanese businessmen moved their factories to China, where they could turn out the same umbrellas and Tupperware at one tenth the cost.
Taiwan didn’t suffer. It went on to manufacture the first IBM desk-top computer, and to found Taiwan Semiconductor, whose chips run most of Dell’s products. By the mid nineties, Taiwan, no bigger than New Jersey, had a larger store of foreign currency reserves than the United States did.
Wal-Mart and other American firms that were committed to low cost production then lobbied the U.S. to permit China to join the World Trade Organization. This would allow China to sell its wares in America without tariffs. Once China was accepted as a member, American-based factories found themselves unable to compete with the cheap goods that flooded in from the Middle Kingdom. To survive, they, too, moved their production and jobs there.
By the new millennium, the government policy that had begun years earlier to prevent nations like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan from going communist had been turned upside down. The economic forces that our policies unleashed effectively mandated that all production take place in China, a communist country that has no interest in democracy, freedom or human rights. The transplantation into China of millions of American jobs and thousands of U.S. industries that once paid taxes to the U.S. Government has forced that government to borrow from China, now America’s largest creditor, just to meet expenses.
Ironically, China is providing a significant amount of the money needed to bail out our sick economy. The U.S.’s high unemployment, tottering banks and vast trade and government deficits actually mirror conditions in Japan and Taiwan after World War II, conditions that our own government believed to be fertile ground for communism.
It is as if the points of the compass were reversed, and the United States was suddenly in the grip of antipodal forces intent of turning our world upside down. And what’s left of our treasure is falling fast from our pockets, and into the iron rice bowl of a communist dictatorship.
Tim Koranda is a former stockbroker who now works as a professional speechwriter. He can be reached at koranda@alum.mit.edu.
The 230 Miles per Gallon Claim: The General Motors (GM) announcement last week that the Chevrolet Volt would achieve 230 miles per gallon in city driving and a rating of more than 100 miles per gallon with combined city and highway driving sadly contains more hype than reality. The Chevrolet Volt is a plug-in hybrid vehicle that GM intends to begin marketing in 2010. GM has indicated that the car will be able without gasoline for 40 miles, on its rechargeable battery. After the battery is depleted, the car would begin to use gasoline. The 230 mile per gallon figure, according to GM, was calculated using a proposed but yet not revealed Environmental Protection Agency fuel economy testing procedure. Similarly, the details of the GM calculation were not revealed.
Criticisms: Rather than the expected praise, the GM claim was met by a barrage of questions and criticism. Consumer Reports said that the 230 miles per gallon claim might be the exaggeration of the century. Automaker Nissan, facetiously responded with a claim that its forthcoming all electric (not hybrid) “Leaf,” would achieve 367 miles per gallon in a Twitter post. Nissan, unlike GM can be excused for not providing the details of its calculation, since it was “making fun.” EPA distanced itself from the GM announcement, indicating that it had not yet tested the Volt.
The criticisms and questions revolved around a single issue: How had General Motors calculated the 230 miles per gallon figure. Regrettably, General Motors has yet to provide a complete answer.
From the sketchy details released, it appears that the 230 mile per gallon rating was based upon the assumption that a driver would travel less than 40 miles each day and recharge the battery at night. Using this methodology, there would never be a reason for the car to use gasoline, so long as the daily mileage is less than the battery capacity.
A New EPA Rating System: Reportedly, the EPA’s fuel economy testing procedure for plug-in electric vehicles (whether hybrid or not) will report kilowatt hours (KWH) of electricity consumed per 100 miles. Presumably, this rating will be placed on the fuel economy window sticker on new cars, perhaps alongside some miles per gallon conversion. GM indicates that the Volt will consume 25 kilowatt hours per 100 miles in city driving.
Policy Imperative for Improving Fuel Efficiency: The impetus for improving automobile fuel economy is being driven by public policy objectives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide (Note 1), and away from the consumption of petroleum .
Even though the Volt will produce no greenhouse gas emissions from its tailpipe when operating in the electric mode, the electricity that drives its battery would come from power plants, many of them relying on fuels like coal, which produce high amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, coal accounts for roughly 30 percent of all electricity production in the country; other fossil fuels another 35 percent.
A Flawed EPA Fuel Economy Rating System? Neither the GM calculation nor apparently the proposed EPA rating system include greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. A greenhouse gas gram emitted from an electric power plant smokestack has the same impact as one from an auto tailpipe. Any EPA fuel efficiency rating system that does not take into consideration power generation emissions would be shockingly incomplete and misleading. Consumers would not be given reliable information on the greenhouse gas emissions from cars they might purchase. One would expect that a government committed to greenhouse gas emission reduction would task its implementing agency with ensuring the availability of relevant and reliable information.
Power Generation and Plug-In Cars: On average in the United States, the generation of each KWH produces 610 grams of carbon dioxide (1.35 pounds). By comparison, combustion of a gallon of gasoline emits nearly 8,900 grams of carbon dioxide. Thus, nearly one gallon of gasoline is the equivalent of approximately 15 KWH of electric power in its greenhouse gas emissions (Note 2).
Thus, if the Volt uses 25 KWH to travel 100 miles in an urban area, then the greenhouse gas emissions from generating its power will be somewhat over 15,000 grams (Note 2), or the same as 1.7 gallons of gasoline (Note 3). Under these average operating conditions, the Volt would achieve approximately 60 miles per gallon (Note 4).
Exaggeration Doesn’t Help: Now there is nothing to be ashamed about 60 miles per gallon, unless, that is, you have claimed 230 miles per gallon. Regrettably, General Motors, which could have claimed a great environmental advance, has diminished it by failing to “level” with the public. This kind of public relations will not help a company whose performance has cost it market share for well over a generation. .
The Volt (and the Leaf) Will Get Better: Of course the equivalent miles per gallon would be much higher if US power generation were more efficient. And, it will be. For example, it has been proposed that electric power generation needs to become at least 80 percent less greenhouse gas intensive by 2050. If this is accomplished, the Chevrolet Volt could indeed achieve 230 equivalent miles per gallon and perhaps the Leaf 367. But neither car will reach these plateaus in the short term.
A Better Fuel Economy Rating System: Since the EPA fuel economy rating system has not been finalized, its potential defects can be corrected. Any EPA fuel economy rating system should include a greenhouse gas emissions indicator. This should be provided for city driving, for highway driving and a combined overall figure. Moreover, such a rating must include the very real emissions that occur at the power plant. It would be appropriate for EPA to continue reporting miles per gallon and adding KWH per 100 miles, so that the cost impacts are clear to purchasers.
Regional Variations: There is another complicating factor – regions. For example, in North Dakota fuel economy would be approximately 35 miles per gallon equivalent with full electric operation, well below the average 60 equivalent miles per gallon. On the other hand, in the state of Washington, the Volt would achieve its 230 miles per gallon equivalent, nearly 7 times the North Dakota fuel efficiency. This is not because people in Washington are more environmentally sensitive than North Dakotans. The difference is in type of power generation. Nearly 80 percent of Washington’s power is generated by hydro-electric and nuclear plants, which produce virtually no carbon dioxide emissions. On the other hand, nearly 80 percent of North Dakota’s electric power is produced with fossil fuels. These differences will be moderated as electric power production becomes less greenhouse gas intensive.
The Bottom Line: Despite the exaggeration and misleading information, this story is far more positive than negative. Congratulations to General Motors (and Nissan) on the strong advances they have apparently made in vehicle technology. This is just further evidence of the potential of human ingenuity. From the 150 mile per gallon cars to which President Obama is committed to the zero emission petroleum car system demonstrated by a Georgia Tech team, the good news is that people can continue to live as they like, while admirably reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to meet whatever objectives are ultimately adopted.
Notes
1: Carbon dioxide accounts for the overwhelming share of greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.
2: Calculation: 8,900 (divided by) 610
3: Calculation: 25 KWH (times) 610
4: Calculation: 15,000 grams (divided by) 8,900 grams
5: Calculation: 100 (divided by) 1.7
6: A grams per mile rating system should include “upstream” activities, such as the greenhouse gas emissions required to produce and distribute petroleum, which by various estimates increases the emissions by 20 to 25 percent. Similarly, upstream electric power production emissions should be included.
Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.