Results tagged “public transit” from Green Flow

A new report by a United Kingdom industry taskforce predicts steep oil price rises and gasoline supply shortages by 2014-2015, which will put the global economy at similar risk to the 2007-2008 rapid rise in oil prices that helped trigger the Great Recession.

"The time period would be 2014-2015 when the oil market would be starting to experience rapidly rising prices and tightening oil supplies...It is notable that the CEO of Total, Christophe de Margerie, is already warning of such an outcome in the 2014/15 period," says the report, "Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security," funded by Virgin Group, Arup Engineering, Foster and Partners, and Scottish and Southern Engineering.

What can cities, businesses and individuals do to prepare for such energy price volatility, buy hybrids? Actually, the report asserts, "there is real danger that the focus on technological advances in cars is making consumers and government complacent."

More urgent steps need to be taken by policymakers in particular to avert this impending crisis:

• Support greater planning and funding for public transit, including taxation to benefit public transit and allocate road space based on most fuel efficient modes (i.e., congestion pricing).
  
• Support planning for less energy-intensive forms of development (less sprawl, more transit-oriented housing, retail and businesses).
• Transition to more energy-efficient transportation fleets or vehicles.
• Coordinate policy mechanisms and organizational practices to create a behavioral shift from private car use to other more sustainable forms of mobility, including public transit, car sharing, cycling and walking.
• Encourage, enable and practice smart green city tactics: telecommuting, video conferencing and public work centers, such as those being piloted in Amsterdam with Cisco.
  

At the state and national government level, preparations for another "oil crunch" similar or worse than 2008 and 1980 should include: 

• Ending subsidies for oil in order to reduce economic dependence on oil-based industries.
• Transition agriculture and food production from operations highly dependent on the use of oil-based products such as diesel fuel, fertilizers and crop treatments, while encouraging bio-regional food production from urban foodsheds for nearby population centers. 
• Planning and support for high-speed rail networks (though this would be a longer-term preparation for post-carbon transportation era beyond 2020)

Daniel Lerch of the Post Carbon Institute authored a guidebook for cities and local government on how to prepare for an oil crisis. I have also written a study looking at US oil crisis readiness in the largest 50 US cities, "Major US City Post-Oil Preparedness Ranking" (second publication from top).

Whether, it is called "peaking oil" or an "oil crunch," many experts see total global oil production reaching a plateau of around 91-92 million barrels a day by 2012-2014 unless, as the report says, "some unforeseen giant, and easily accessible, finds are reported very soon."

With fast-growing demand for oil in developing economies such as China (which overtook the US in 2009 for total automobile sales), India and the Middle East, developed nations in North America and Europe need to consider wholescale industrial and societal shifts.

The United State and Canada in particular should start reducing oil dependency now in preparation for oil price volatility and possible supply disruptions that would force such shifts without warning, with dire consequences for the economy, nationally and locally. Many cities (New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington, D.C.) are already somewhat prepared to make this shift because of infrastructure for public transit and other oil-free mobility options.

The world is heavily dependent on 120 oil fields that account for 50 percent of world production, and contain two-thirds of remaining reserves of fields in production. New discoveries of oil fields off Brazil's coast, under the Arctic and elsewhere, will not be enough to replenish the "drawdown" that is occurring. Besides, many of these fields take investments that require oil to be priced over $100 or $120 a barrel, so they will not be producing for a number of years after such investments are made: in other words, far beyond 2015.

"The challenge is that if oil prices reach the levels necessary to justify these high-cost investments, economic growth may be imperiled," says the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security.

Another so-called energy "ace in the hole," oil sands deposits in Canada, are not a viable option. Oil sands produce at least three times the amount of atmospheric carbon over conventional oil when they are processed and used, which would exacerbate global climate change significantly, while also fouling the region's water supply.

What is being raised by this report is that the era of cheap oil is over, and that the consequences will be ugly, unless we start preparing for this profound change.

"Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did," said Virgin CEO Richard Branson and other corporate executives in the introduction to the report

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.



    

 

The boldest move by a US city to remake its transportation system occurred five years ago, when Denver metro area voters in 31 communities committed $4.7 billion in sales tax funding for its FasTracks initiative. 

 

It turns out not one of the 119 miles of promised light rail have been built yet because of material and land acquisition cost increases, a poor economy and other complications. Through city-wide strategies for making public transit, walkability and bikeability the modes for addressing freeway and city arterial congestion, however, Denver has so-far succeeded despite the snafus.

 

The city has almost doubled its public transit ridership since FasTracks was passed in 2004. In 2004 about five percent of city commuters used public transit; that figure hit nine percent in 2008, figures recently released by the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

 

So how did the Mile-High City make itself into a case study for how to take a car-dependent Sun Belt metro and move it toward multi-modality?

 

First, the city created a regional mandate for public transit, combined with tangible, measureable goals. Mayor John Hickenlooper told me in 2006, "We passed the most ambitious transit initiative in the history of the United States. It was because all 31 mayors in the seven-county area unanimously supported it."

 

Hickenlooper said the city wanted to reach 20 percent ridership by 2020, even 25 or 30 percent if it could. Little did he know at the time that the city would be on its way to hitting its goal without even laying one mile of new rail under the FasTracks. (Denver has recently extended its southern light rail line through a federal funding initiative separate from FasTracks, so that did help boost its ridership to a degree).

 

Peter Park, Denver's chief city planner, credits a number of approaches with the big gains in transit use. Strategic transit plans laid out in the 2002 Blueprint Denver document are explicit about not adding extra freeway lanes or widening city streets; these acts often occur as a panacea for traffic congestion. Most studies show such isolated approaches only eventually create more congestion.

 

Instead, Blueprint Denver took the radical tact of not projecting how many vehicles would be needed to get people around the growing city, but instead projected the number of "person trips": driving, transit, walking and riding bikes.

 

Another strategy was the Living Streets program, created by the public works department in collaboration with a range of civic and commercial organizations, including Kaiser Permanente. "The idea was that roads are for cars: streets are for people," said Park.

 

A video on Denver's city site has Kaiser's Dr. Eric France discussing how and why cities can be less auto dependent: "The way you build your neighborhoods can influence the way we live," France said. "Incorporating active transportation into our lives is one of the best strategies for keeping people healthy."

Park and others from the city have been working with a new citizen's academy, The New Transit Alliance, to raise awareness about the economic benefits of transit with businesses and community leaders.

Denver's creative approach to transportation, health and the green economy even helped it this summer get selected as one of three US cities in the federal government's new Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities.

 

All three heads of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency came to Denver earlier this month (others in the program are Philadelphia and Kansas City, Missouri) to figure out ways to collaboratively increase quality of life and reduce automotive reliance in affordable housing and beyond.

I remember working on a charrette for the "greening" of the one of the largest federal housing projects in the West. No matter how green the materials, landscaping and energy systems were, one of residents' biggest concern--besides not getting caught in gang cross-fire--was having to run across a freeway on-ramp to get to the only nearby store.

FasTracks is by no means dead in the water. Under the measure, the city will still be extending its light rail lines through 2018, though some of the plan might get scaled back unless another tax increase is levied. The system expansion should lead to exponential increases in ridership because of the new light rail stations being created--six neighborhood station plans have been completed and 10 are underway, according to Park. Bus service, including Bus Rapid Transit, is also being significantly expanded.

Denver's metro light rail and Bus Rapid Transit system, if FasTracks is built out to the original plan

"Each station will create a portal into new neighborhoods, breathing life into the streets and the economic vitality of businesses," Park said.

Denver has a long way to go before it gets anywhere near the 55 percent transit commute rate of New York City, or even the low to mid 30's commute rates of DC, Boston and San Francisco. But the city is an important model--good and bad--for how newer US urban areas can create a landscape and way of life that will no longer be defined only by the car.  

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and co-author of a forthcoming book from the Post Carbon Institute on urban and societal resiliency.