Nancy Kete, a program director at the World Resources Institute, knows that in order to create the bright green cities of tomorrow, we must reimagine how we move about and in between them today. For decades, heavy reliance on the automobile has shaped cities globally, but arguably most dramatically in the United States. To reverse this trend and its harmful side effects, we need a new vision of transportation that will work both for those already entrenched within this system and for those who are seeking to replicate it.
Helping developing nations seek out and implement alternative mobility solutions is one of the main goals of the World Resources Institute's Center for Sustainable Transport, EMBARQ. Although the team spends most of its time working on transportation systems in places like Mexico, Brazil, India, and Turkey, they often use their research and experience to influence other political leaders from their headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Kete, who is a senior fellow and program director at EMBARQ, recently spoke out about the Obama administration's plan to dedicate billions of stimulus dollars to constructing high speed rail. Kete warns that high speed rail is not a silver bullet solution, and urges the administration to proceed with caution, careful planning and a holistic solution that reflects regional needs. I recently spoke with Kete to discuss this and other issues surrounding the future of transportation in the United States.
Sarah Kuck: What does transportation look like now in most U.S. cities? And where can we go from here?
Nancy Kete: In most U.S. cities, except for New York particularly and a couple of others, transportation is dominated by car travel. There are a few cities that have a significant amount of trips on rail or bus transit. And then there’s intercity travel, which is dominated by air at this point, with some rail depending on where you are.
But the question is where do we go from here? And I think the right way to think about this depends on where do we want it to go from here? What do we want it to look like? Do we think that today’s situation is OK? And if not, what’s wrong with it?
We know from a climate perspective that we really ought to be emitting 80 percent less CO2 by the year 2050, at the minimum. And then we want to ask ourselves, “If we wanted transportation to carry its proportional share of that, what would the transportation system look like in 2050 if it was 80 percent less CO2?” It’s almost impossible to imagine that system having the amount of personal travel and the same land use patterns of the sprawl we have today. Even if all the cars people were traveling in were zero carbon, with clean engines, or powered by solar electricity – at a certain point you have so many vehicles on the road and you only have a certain amount of land you can use for all that technological solution, so you have to start to deal with the combination of land use and transportation together. Which is were transit and planning come in.
SK: A few weeks ago, you commented on the Obama administration's plan for High Speed Rail. What do you think the future of high-speed rail should look like in the United States?
NK: The answer is, it depends. One of the issues is that our cities are farther apart than in Europe or Japan, where the high-speed rail has worked really well.
So we have to be careful as we use the stimulus money for high speed rail to put it on corridors where there are enough passengers to justify all that embedded carbon. It will be very carbon intensive to build the rail and the trains. If they go often and they're full, then it's good. But a train running empty between Chicago and Minneapolis would be a worse outcome than a car in a carpool lane with a couple people driving.
But that said, air travel itself is very carbon intensive. We need to carefully pick the corridors that are shortest ones or the ones that are likely to have the highest demand. There are some less carbon intensive ways to connect our cities. You can do that with high speed bus, but if you really want to use high speed rail to connect people faster even than bus could, you would want to concentrate on cities that are reasonably close together to make sure you are going to have the demand for it. And you are going to have to make driving alone or driving more expensive, make it reflect the environmental and infrastructure costs of supporting the driving economy.
SK: What advice would you give the Obama administration?
NK: Do some really careful demand estimations for each corridor, and start with the corridors where there is a certain density, and a high demand for something other than driving and flying. Prove out the concept with truly high speed rail, and then as people see the benefit of it, the demand for it in other places might increase.
In addition, we have to think about tolls and higher fuel taxes to discourage driving on the same corridors that have a lot of congestion on the road so that you drive people appropriately to the transit option. And then the third thing is, the U.S. has a growing population. You want to make sure that growth occurs along these corridors so that you have more density and more riders. Not just to get the riders, but so that you have your infrastructure and your demand in the same place because that’s the only thing that will make it cost effective and carbon efficient. And all that’s called planning, and planning has to become not a dirty word.
Planning, pricing and investment all have to align together.
SK: What do people commonly misunderstand about how transportation works in the United States?
NK: Most people don’t know how much it costs them to drive their own car. We have these externalized costs associated with owning the car, which we don’t pay every time we drive, so once we own a car and we’ve paid those costs, we only see the fuel costs. And when fuel is cheap it looks really cheap to drive our car, and that’s just on the personal side.
If we made it clearer, like with pay-as-you-drive insurance, and with fuel prices that more accurately reflected the cost of building and maintaining the road system and protecting the fuel supply, which is related to keeping peace in the Middle East and keeping our access to a steady supply of oil and all the environmental costs..if the driver paid all those every time he/she filled the tank, we would be paying much higher costs all the time and would make different decisions about how much we drove our cars.
SK: Would that knowledge of the real costs of driving make people more willing to support public transportation measures?
NK: We saw that when gasoline was $4 a gallon last year, ridership on public transport went way up. And then once the demand for public transportation goes up, customers who want to use it, who are citizens, will then want better service. When a lot of people started using it for the first time or went back to it last year that they realized that this is easy, it can be good, it can be convenient. But a lot of people realized too that they needed to increase the quality of it. And then you had constituents for it, for the first time.
That’s the way you get better public transportation systems: by increasing the demand for it. I just think the way human nature is, it’s not very likely that people who never use it are going to be very passionate supporters of it for somebody else.
SK: Do you have a vision for what intermodal transportation will look like in the future?
NK: It is the right vision. It is much more holistic than thinking about Bus Rapid Transit or rail, or even walking and biking. Many people live so far from their home that they can’t do it just with non-motorized transport.
The heart of intermodality is information. For example, a smart card will allow you to integrate your fare so you have an advantage for using multiple parts of the system. And then you use the IT section of the system – you optimize the operations part of the system to make it easy for the consumer to get to where they are going as fast as possible -- that’s linking communication information and transportation all as one system, which is all doable.
In many places, though, the operations are managed by different companies, so institutional change has to happen. If we don’t merge companies, then there has to be different incentives for multiple companies to want to be operated together, or to redefine the companies so that they are all under one operator. Those are not small changes.
Posted to WorldChanging by Sarah Kuck
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