The good news is that we can do something about all that traffic and smog by modernizing our transportation system, with the help of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (Ramon Palencia-Calvo, director of Chispa Maryland, a program of the Maryland League of Conservation Voters Education Fund.What got the environmental group gush over Hogan's pavement-over-transit policy which transportation experts across the nation have considered anachronistic at best? Based on the op-ed piece in which there is talk about cap and trade, powerplants and all kinds of other stuff, what made them so happy was simply that Hogan's plans include a boost for electric charging stations. Electric cars are generally considered clean or even "zero emissions" because pure electric cars have no tail pipes (while plug-in hybrids only have the potential of being used in a no emission mode).
Misleading title: Transformation through what?
Even if one sets aside all the problems which electric cars still have, from the carbon footprint of electric power generation to the environmental and social impact of the lithium-ion batteries to the to date unanswered question how the power demand of a large number of electric vehicles could be covered, a single focus on electric cars misses the biggest point: Land use. The Maryland Conservation Voters have thrown themselves way into the deep end of the transportation waters without understanding the basic dependencies between land use and transportation, admittedly a somewhat esoteric field which Maryland's Governor also likes to ignore. But it is the biggest environmental detriment, far outpacing tailpipe emissions.
Simply put: Roads bring sprawl. The post-war priority of individual cars over everything else has produced the dispersed land use pattern that is so characteristic for the US and which functions only if everybody drives a car. The low density sprawl pattern has not only killed streetcars, railroads and even bus companies because transit depends on clustering people around reasonable service routes but is destroying and degrading the environment moree than anything else, bankrupting communities, states and the entire country in the process.
Just witness all the lamentations about the state of our infrastructure. The problem isn't so much that our bridges and roads are all falling apart (they are not) but the insight that from year to year it becomes more impossible to finance the necessary upkeep. Why? Chiefly, because we have so much of it and we keep building more (exactly what Hogan proposes: billions of dollars in Maryland alone for additional road lanes and new and bigger bridges, even another span over the Chesapeake Bay. Every expert that has studied transportation and its demand and supply has concluded that we can't build our way out of congestion. Why? Because every time we build a new or quicker road connection we induce more sprawl land use and thus increased demand.
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| "Relief Plan": More questions than answers |
This demand that comes from inefficient land use has already led to the curious result that Americans have to drive twice as many miles as Europeans to conduct their everyday lives. Make no mistake, Europeans don't drive less because they have a lower standard of living or because Americans just love their cars more. Both is false. Nor is the cause that America is a big country. The size of America may cause more people to fly more often, but very few drive for distances bigger than 300 miles or so, just like in Europe. Instead, Americans simply have to drive much longer distances to get to work or to the grocery store or school or just about anything else while Europeans live in denser cities, towns and villages surrounded by largely unspoiled green spaces.
Many trips in Europe (or Japan) are not only shorter, they are not being undertaken by car at all because the origin and the destination are close to transit or in such proximity that one can walk or bike there. That in turn requires more Americans to own cars, more cars need to fit on wider roads, need be parked at home, at the stores and at work, which in turn, contributes to pushing everything even further apart. This vicious cycle has long been decried not only as inefficient but also as environmentally disastrous because it not only paves over fields, farms and forests but also ruins streams, creates heat islands and fouls the air. All of which should be of extreme concern to an environmentalist. The electric car changes only one thing in this spiral of destruction, it makes the air better. Everything else remains exactly as bad as before because the electric car, well, it is still a car!
The MD Conservation Voters, or at least their spokesperson Ramon Palencia-Calvo, doesn't get this very simple land use transportation nexus. How else can one explain this introductory sentence of the op-ed:
One of the most congested parts of the United States is the greater Baltimore/Washington, D.C., area. Traffic and population density is so intense in some parts of this vast metropolitan area that it is known as one of the half dozen or so major “megalopolis” areas in the nation. Pollution — including climate-altering carbon emissions — can be every bit as intense here at times as it is in Los Angeles or Dallas or Chicago.Notice the word "density" in there as the culprit for congestion? Notice how the sentence throws LA, Dallas and Chicago all into one pot, places that are dense (Chicago) and totally dispersed such as LA and Dallas? Places which have only recently begun to build transit (Dallas and LA) with Chicago, which has a vast system of effective rail system? The Conservation voters use the same populist tactic that Governor Hogan also likes to use, namely to equate many people with much traffic, as in cities are bad and the country side is good, the very bias that promoted the suburbs for ages. This view is negating that congestion increases with sprawl and decreases with density if a comparison is based on the same number of people just spread over a larger area.
It seems counter-intuitive on first blush to say that the lack of density causes traffic until one recalls the connection between sprawl type land use patterns (low density) and transportation demand. Sprawl patterns not only force everybody to use a car, it also forces everybody to driver longer: Voila: Congestion.
The Streetsblog response to the foolish Conservation Voters op-ed calls the inability of some environmentalists to look beyond the edge of their home plate their "blind-spot".
The Maryland League of Conversation Voters is hardly the only environmental group that meekly accepts the climate damage caused by car-centric sprawl while putting all of its “clean transportation” eggs in the electric vehicle basket. (Streetsblog)Conservation Voters and the 1000 Friends of Maryland, an anti sprawl group, and other environmental groups, such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, have had many fruitful alliances to fight bad environmental policies. It is therefore especially disappointing to see the Conservation Voters give the Governor what looks like a free pass on one of his most disastrous policies: His approach to transportation.
Hogan has unilaterally killed Baltimore’s much-needed Red Line light rail and a major mixed-use, transit-oriented development project in the city, while diverting transportation funds to highways and proposing a massive suburban toll road expansion. Under his watch, Baltimore’s sole metro line reached such a state of decrepitude that it had to be closed for a month of emergency repairs. (Streetsblog)A few new electric charging stations are nice, but they certainly can't make up for the Rahn/Hogan policies in which they use the funds from the Transportation Trust Fund (which had been clearly earmarked to fund more and better transit in Maryland) to pave more roads.
Instead of decrying the misuse of those funds in favor of a transportation policy that takes us back to the fifties, and instead of demanding that Metro, Light Rail and MARC not only be improved and maintained but expanded, the Conservation voters tell the readers of the SUN that:
Implementing a modernized clean transportation system is vital for Maryland. Sure, it’s an enormous challenge, but our state has already rolled up its sleeves and done the hard work on innovative policies to reduce emissions while improving the economy.If the Conservation Voters thought they could successfully graze in conservative fields to gain new supporters for the organization, they failed: Even a reader of the op-ed who likes to build roads instead of transit and who similarly doesn't understand the folly of increased road construction didn't find the Conservation Voters op-ed plausible or illuminating.
And the last good news of this long piece is answering the problem with everybody purchasing electric cars and more name dropping — BGE, Delmarva Power & Light, Pepco, Natural Resources Defense Council and, naturally, the EV-charging companies, Greenlots and ChargePoint. Really? You have got to be kidding me. (SUN letter writer)Indeed, who are the Conservation voters trying to kid?
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
League of Conservation Voters op-ed
Streetsblog about the limited transportation view of some environmental organisations: The blindspot
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