Orphan Road

Depending on the season, the weather, and my mood I carpool, take a bus, pedal, drive, walk, or ride a scooter to get around. Although I'd love to be able to use public transportation or my own motive power to travel everywhere, it's nice to have the option of using fast personal transportation. However, millions of people choosing the convenience of a car has led to our current oil and environmental situation.

I'd like to recommend a partial, temporary, imperfect, yet practical solution: the scooter. Sure, I only get to drive mine four months out of the year. Yes, I can only fit two people and perhaps 3 bags of groceries. But these are really the only two compromises compared to a car. The benefits include:

* 100+ mpg
* much faster in city streets in traffic
* easy to find parking
* you travel outside, in contact with your environment
* you can park around 4 of them per parking spot
* garages downtown charge you as little as $4/day

If small personal vehicles were used more often for short trips, this could save quite a bit of fuel, parking, and traffic. It's no replacement for a good transit system, but it's nice to have something to get around in until we get build one. It looks like the council is interested in doing something to help scooterists out, but it's at the early stages at best. Seattle would be doing itself a favor by making the city a bit more scooter friendly.

Did I mention they get over 100 mpg?

Tranportation is the theme of this week's Wired magazine photo contest. Lotsa good pics, but not nearly enough Seattle ones. So... light 'em up!

I've been remiss in not linking to Sightline's widely-discussed report on gas consumption in the Northwest. The upshot is that gasoline consumption per capita in the Northwest declined 11% since 1999, despite the fact that it's been holding steady nationwide.

Three factors are cited for the decline: increased fuel economy, increased transit ridership and the decrease in total vehicle miles traveled (VMT). What we don't know is the relative impacts of these factors. For example, Sightline cites the fact that fuel economy increased 5% in just the last few years. And since fuel-efficient cars sell better in the Northwest than anywhere else in the country, we could chalk up a good chunk of the 11% decline to increased fuel economy. That's all well and good for global warming, but it doesn't make for a more transit-friendly region, just a more gas-friendly one.

Still, the increase in transit ridership and the decrease in per-capita VMT are great news for transit and density advocates and cannot be denied. Oddly, WSDOT's VMT forecast, also used in the study, shows per-capita VMT declining between 2003 and FY 2008, but then inexplicably trending back up in the future. Check it out in chart form. Current data is in blue, projections for the future are in red:

You'd think with a Growth Management Act in place, gas topping $4/gallon and likely to increase, and a huge increase in transit investments, per-capita VMT would continue to decline. But WSDOT thinks the past four years are an abberation, and the figure is going to go back up. This doesn't make sense to me. In fact, it reminds me of this chart (below) from Gen. Petraeus' testimony before congress last week, showing U.S. expenditures in Iraq taking a whopping 90-degree turn. It doesn't pass the straight face test, does it?

Update: only a couple of hours after publishing this, I see that Clark Williams-Derry, the author of the report, has a strikingly similar post up at Sightline's blog. His blog post is datelined Friday (in my RSS reader), but it didn't show up in my RSS reader until 20 minutes ago for some unknown reason. Anyway, read his post because he has better data and prettier charts, which comes with being a full-time researcher instead of a lowly blogger. Still, it's reassuring that even he doesn't know what's going on!

"Along with other panelists, Beth Osborne, an aide to Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., agreed that "smart growth" planning principles can help cut the growth in vehicle miles traveled and make a substantial contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But she warned that transportation and land use are unlikely to get much federal money for climate change because the electric utilities and coal companies are doing a better job of lobbying Congress."

More here.

Neat opinion piece in the Ottowa Citizen that makes use of a metaphor about building transit that I hadn't heard before:

The world's great cathedrals took generations to build. Although their original builders knew it was impossible to finish the work in their lifetimes, they drew up plans and started construction anyway. Why? Perhaps they had a better perspective of time, and a more clear understanding of the importance of handing down something wonderful to future generations.

The new Golf diesel-hybrid. Greener than the Prius. Not on sale in the U.S. yet, though.

Innovations like this make me even more convinced that high gas prices are not enough to dissuate the majority of us from our SOV lifestyles. You could trade in a 22mpg Ford for one of these Golfs, and gas would have to hit $11/gallon before you started feeling it in the wallet.

To take this one step further, I'm generally concerned with the idea of guilting or shaming people into density: "get rid of your house in the suburbs or the polar bears will die and the ice caps will melt!." People are psychologically and developmentally attuned to reject those sorts of arguments.

Transit-oriented lifestyles can (and should) be spun positively:

• Nightlife is cool.
• Walking to the grocery store and not having to circle for parking is cool!
• Being able to walk home or take the bus home drunk from the bar is really cool!!
• Being assured that your teenage kids aren't driving around drunk is extra super cool!!!
• Being home in time to help your kids do their homework and not just tuck them in to bed is ZOMG the coolest thing ever!!!!
• Etc...

You catch more flies with honey, right?

I'm not trying to discount the role of public policy here. Clearly I support policies like denser zoning, mixed use, carbon-sensitive zoning, etc. But the point is that you build support for those sorts of things by making the lifestyles associated with them attractive and compelling.

Great op-ed in WaPo today about why America's infrastructure is falling to bits. Apropos of our transportation discussion on B&P yesterday, thought I'd post some of it here.

Thomas Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, writes:

You'd be hard-pressed to convince the American people that we don't need to spend more on infrastructure after the tragic collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis in August. Signs of decay are everywhere, from crumbling bridges to pothole-ridden streets to exploding manhole covers and underground steam pipes.

Yet Transportation Secretary Mary Peters is making precisely that argument. She has said that we could meet all of our transportation infrastructure needs if we spent current funds more wisely. She is only half right. Spending money wisely is important, but it's not nearly enough.

There are three things we must do to ensure that our nation has a superior physical platform capable of serving a growing economy: stop diverting dedicated transportation funds to wasteful or unrelated projects; unleash private infrastructure investment by removing regulatory impediments; and invest more federal, state and local dollars in infrastructure.

He continues:

What must our nation do to meet the urgent infrastructure funding challenges? Where is the money going to come from?

We can start by unlocking potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment just waiting to be spent on power plants; pipelines; shipping and hauling routes to railroads and airports; privately constructed and operated roadways; and more. The money is there if government regulators would get out of the way. Countries around the world use an array of innovative financing approaches and public-private partnerships to bring key projects on line quickly. It's about time America did the same.

There must also be a significant increase in government funding for infrastructure, which means we will have to consider an increase in the federal gasoline user fee. This could mean a straightforward increase in a fee that hasn't been raised in 14 years, or it may be in the form of a carbon fee designed to address global warming. Either would work as long as the proceeds are dedicated to transportation and other infrastructure.

What will we get for these investments? We will save lives, create American jobs and set the foundation for a more robust, productive, globally competitive economy.

Now, I don't want to get too partisan (check out B&P for that), but I do find it extraordinary that the leader of one of America's venerable business organizations goes out of his way to propose a increase to the gas tax as the only way to get enough funding to rebuild our infrastructure. Put another way, our infrastructure is in such bad shape that business leaders are calling for tax increases in order to raise the funds to fix it.

America may be great, but our infrastructure is no longer extraordinary. Good to see the business community -- if not yet the median voter -- starting to recognize that.