Month: March 2010

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Yonah Freemark wonders if affordable electric cars like the Nissan Leaf will decrease the American public’s well-known appetite for more public transit.

Freemark argues that even electric cars have environmental problems: electricity comes from dirty sources, electric cars have short lifespans, and they still encourage sprawl.

I think this is right, as far as it goes, but I’d make a couple of broader points. First, smart growth is good in and of itself, and we need to make that argument independent of vehicular powertrains. As I argued a couple of years back:

The link between miles driven and GHGs (Greenhouse Gases) is only going to get more tenuous over the next few decades. As that happens, environmentalists will lose another weapon in our arsenal. We need new arguments for smart growth that are directly about smart growth (like preserving wetlands, for example) instead of related issues like carbon emissions or national security.

In other words, there are other reasons to advocate smart growth that have nothing to do with the environment. For example, as David Brooks wrote this week, commuting sucks:

The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting” [Emphasis added].

[I think of this every day as I walk home over I-5 and gawk at the sea of red lights.]

The other point I’d make is that energy-efficient electric cars will simply hasten the arrival of congestion pricing. The highway trust fund is running a deficit. Raising the gas tax is politically treacherous. One way or another, we’re going to need to finance the roads on which these electric cars will drive. If we can’t finance it through an energy tax, we’ll have to revert to a VMT or congestion tax. There are no free lunches.

Bonus Fun Fact: I just clicked on the Sightline blog post that I referenced a couple years back, and noticed a smart commenter named “Michael McGinn” in the comments section. Heh.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Public Transit spending is more popular than health care reform:

More than four-in-five voters (82 percent) say that “the United States would benefit from an expanded and improved transportation system,” including modes of transportation like rail and buses. An overwhelming majority of voters agree with this statement — no matter where they live. Even in rural America, 79 percent of voters agreed with the statement, despite much lower use of public transportation compared to urban Americans.

Some in Washington believe that building or expanding more roads is the best way to tackle congestion — but the majority of Americans don’t agree with them. Three-in-five voters choose improving public transportation and making it easier to walk and bike over building more roads and expanding existing roads as the best strategies for tackling congestion. (59% to 38%).