Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
I don’t like driving, and I don’t like having to drive. But since I often have to, it becomes clear to me why attempts to limit car use in most of the United States, to get people to shift to bicycles and public transit (usually buses), are doomed to fail. Reducing the carbon footprint of our transportation will thus require a more practical, less virtue-signaling approach.
In my own case, it is possible that I will not be able to drive at some point in the foreseeable future. So I made sure that I live somewhere that is close enough to some stores and transit that I don’t absolutely need to drive all the time in order to take care of my basic needs. This puts me in a minority in America where most suburban housing is too far from stores and transit to be really walkable. And while I live near public transit, I rarely use it, because I rarely need to go to downtown Boston, which is what the MBTA transit system (and I use that last word loosely) here is designed for.
Here’s the point. You can divide car trips into two categories:
- One is where you are moving yourself from place to place.
- The other is where you are moving more than yourself from place to place. That more than yourself might be kid(s), groceries, pets, a sack of pet food, take-out dinner, whatever. Stuff.
I notice that most of my car trips are in that latter category. I am rarely driving me; I’m driving someone or something.
So in that driving more than yourself category, public transit is generally not useful. It isn’t designed for that and it doesn’t go where those car trips are to. And even if a bus went to the grocery, the frozen food could melt while waiting for the next one to come. I do know of one local bike fan who says he does carry groceries on a bike, but that’s pretty freaky, and even then it limits the amount and type of groceries you can carry. This need may help account for the popularity of luxury trucks a/k/a SUVs, as well as the station wagons now called crossovers. They carry more stuff. Yes, you could arrange to have some of that stuff delivered, but that just means someone else is doing the driving, often from a more distant warehouse.
In the driving-yourself category, even if you are near transit, it may not go where you need to go. In practice, the most prominent form of driving yourself is commuting to work. That is where public transit works best; those trains running through town on the legacy trackage, after all, are called the commuter rail. So we need to encourage its expansion and use when practical.
But even then, public transit tends to focus on the CBD, and by that I mean the central business district, not an herbal extract. Hence the MBTA focuses on downtown Boston. But it has poorer service to the new Seaport district (just a fancy bus), which has a lot of jobs, and to East Cambridge, where a gazillion biotech firms have sprung up, mostly several blocks from a T station. And it is essentially useless to the vast numbers of jobs along the Rt. 128 ring or the more distant suburban office parks. To be sure, those are no longer in fashion and employers are more likely to want to be near the T, but a whole lot of jobs are in car-only places.
Let’s not even talk about more obvious reasons why lots of bike lanes are being built without being used. Like the weather, which we have a lot of in New England. And hills, which are no fun on bikes. And cars, which are pretty dangerous to bikes, and aren’t going away. There are a few bikeways but they tend to be recreational.
It is axiomatic in the transit world to say that building more highways does not alleviate congestion. This was “proven” in the 1950s and 1960s, after a wave of highway building. The reason, though, was because those new highways begat new suburban sprawl, new subdivisions, almost all just single-family homes on wide lots, designed around cars, far from commerce and employment. And that’s what Americans mostly wanted in the 1950s. Especially affluent white ones leaving the cities behind, cities that their grandchildren now wish they could afford to move back into. The problem, then, was not actually the roads, but the sprawl, and the zoning codes (and racism) that encouraged it.
Yet the current fad among young city planners is the “road diet”, wherein for example a 2-lane each way main city street is reduced to one lane plus a bike lane on each side. And new buildings that no longer require parking, just bike racks. The theory is that if more roads led to more congestion, narrower roads will lead to less congestion, or something like that. Sort of like unscrambling eggs. Magical thinking.
Yet we have a problem. We are dumping way too much CO2 into the air, and the streets are clogged. What can be done? For one, we have to stop zoning for rows of single family homes on large lots. But the suburbs already exist. And most proposed “transit-oriented” housing consists of 5 or 6 story wood (“platform”) apartments, with high rent (usually >$3000/mo for 1BR), aimed at yuppie commuters. Nothing for families.
Thus we first need to mitigate car damage rather than pretend we can do away with cars. In the rest of the world, taxes help — higher gas taxes discourage wasteful cars, and gas guzzlers can be taxed (that was tried here but loopholes the size of an Escalade made it meaningless). Electric cars are a niche market too; there are many reasons why most people today won’t buy them. Electric delivery vans and even many transit buses, though, make sense — they have a known service area and can charge overnight at their base. Hybrid cars are a good compromise for now. In fact I suspect they are environmentally better than Teslas, as the all-electric models need a lot of environmentally-damaging (from common mining practices) batteries and the electric grid is still using carbon-based fuels for all of the incremental power being demanded by rapid electrification. A hybrid needs only a small battery and reduces fuel consumption by 30% or more. Encouraging smaller, lighter cars would also help.
We also need to reduce the average length of car trips, when we have to drive to get stuff. Big box stores on the highway are farther than neighborhood ones. In Manhattan, the most transit-oriented place in the US, there are stores everywhere; you don’t need to drive or take transit to do your routine shopping. Overall, driving one mile to a store is less harmful than driving ten miles. Again, zoning in the last 75 years tended to separate residential from business zones, but we should have more neighborhood commerce as well as transit stops within walking distance of most homes. That won’t take care of everything but it will reduce total travel. And that in turn can reduce road congestion, something bike lanes won’t do.
These are practical changes that can be evolutionary and won’t be rejected by voters who are not interested in giving up a house and yard in favor of a small city flat. Most Americans don’t actually want to live in an ersatz Manhattan (there can only be one!). But there are things that can be done without creating another front on the culture war.
