Roads to Rails
The Streetcar of the Future
http://places.designobserver.com/feature/roads-to-rails-terra-nova-streetcars/37854/
By Eric W. Sanderson, June 10, 2013
Streetcar tracks awaiting installation, Toronto.
STELLA: He smashed all the lightbulbs with the heel of my slipper.
BLANCHE DUBOIS: And you let him? Didn’t run, didn’t scream?
STELLA: Actually, I was sorta thrilled by it.
— Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
When we begin to value the land for what it is and build cities worth living in,
density develops, and density makes things happen. Some of those
happenings are economic, in the sense of improved productivity; others
are environmental, in terms of fewer resources consumed. Density also
has a lot to offer in terms of our trades of time for space.
Past transportation revolutions have been rooted in land. The railroad
companies were encouraged to expand west by massive giveaways of public
land; the streetcar operators were given monopolies to encourage their
development; and the automobile industry received the greatest gift of
all — roads — carved out of the public domain, bought or appropriated
from private citizens. Many people and innumerable beasts were hurt in
the process, so that other folks could be whisked on their way. Such
radical efforts were necessary to make 20th-century transportation
feasible, affordable and widespread in America.
A similarly
radical approach is required today, but without all the giving and the
taking. It’s simple. We just need to decide to make better use of the
land we all already own together: the public roads. Our roads today
suffer from an identity crisis. We want them to provide thoroughfares
for private cars, routes for public transit, spaces for parking, lanes
for bicycles, sidewalks for pedestrians, access for people with
disabilities, space and light for buildings, drainage for storm water,
and even room for trees and flowers! Take a look out your window — the
streets are contested territory, trying to be all things for all people.
The suburbs at least did this part right: They were decisive.
Streets were for cars, not for bikes or pedestrians or anything else.
Sidewalks were to be narrow, ornamental or nonexistent, since it was
assumed people would be driving. Public transportation was not a
priority, because everyone has a car or two or three. As suburbs
expanded, zoning codes mandated off-street parking for houses, offices
and mini- and jumbo-malls, which like medieval castles surrounded by
moats of asphalt, are best approached on a trusty steed: the motorcar.
Though decisive, these choices were all decisively wrong from the
perspective of energy efficiency, national security and long-term
economic productivity. Let’s see what we can do to make them right
again.
Top: Spadina Streetcar, Toronto. Bottom: Light rail, bus and streetcar, Portland, Oregon.
A Brief Physics Lesson
In choosing how to use our precious street space, we need to begin with
the laws of physics, rules of the universe that explain how and why
different kinds of transportation use different amounts of energy.
Better streets will move more people and use less energy. Lower-energy
forms of transportation will be easier to supply with fuels other than
oil; denser cities will require more efficient ways of moving. How much
energy and how many people is a matter, at least initially, of physics.
Recall
that energy is “that which changes the physical state of a system”;
physical state includes your geographic location. In a frictionless
vacuum, the energy applied to accelerate an object would be all that is
ever needed; once in motion an object would never stop. Sir Isaac Newton
showed three and a half centuries ago that the energy of motion — the
kinetic energy of an object — is one-half its mass times its velocity
squared (½ × m × v²). This means heavier objects require more energy in
proportion to their weight; faster objects require four times as much
energy to double their speed. Thereby Newton gave us the first two rules
to increase transportation energy efficiency:
Rule 1: Be lighter.
Rule 2: Go more slowly.
Note: Rule 2 matters four times as much as Rule 1.
The energy to put a vehicle in motion is lost when we stop at a red
light or to let a pedestrian cross. It hasn’t disappeared in a universal
sense because energy is always conserved, but for our immediate
purposes, it is gone, turned into manifestly less useful heat,
vibrations and brake squeal. The amount of energy required to get back
up to speed is the same as what was lost, which suggests for efficiency:
Rule 3: Minimize starts and stops.
Note: Rule 3 explains why most cars make better mileage on the highway than in town.
Since we don’t live in a vacuum, moving requires additional energy to
overcome friction. Friction for most vehicles comes from two sources.
One is rolling resistance from tires scraping along the ground. It is a
function of gravity, the vehicle’s mass, tire design and the road
surface. Different materials scrape differently: An inflated tire rolls
with 6–7 percent less friction than a poorly inflated one, enough to
affect your gas mileage; steel wheels running along steel rails, in
contrast, roll along with 400 percent less friction than an inflated
tire. Since less friction means less wasted energy, we have:
Rule 4: Slide, don’t scrape.
Note: Rule 4 explains why trams are so successful at moving heavy loads.
The other source of friction is air. Air resistance describes how much
air gets pushed around as a vehicle moves through it. It is a function
of the vehicle’s cross-sectional area, drag coefficient (which measures
its aerodynamics) and speed. Think Camaro vs. Lincoln Navigator: The
Camaro tries to slip through the air, while the Navigator just busts
through. In either case, the air resistance increases with the velocity
cubed (½ × ρ × d
c × A × v³, where ρ is the density of the air, d
c
is the drag coefficient, A is the cross-sectional area of the car, and v
is velocity or speed), which means that doubling your speed requires
eight times more energy, assuming no wind.
Rule 5: Be sleek.
Note: Rule 5 is why racecars and jets are streamlined.
Putting these five rules of physics together, as David MacKay does in
his book on sustainable energy, means that the break-even point between
rolling resistance and air resistance for heavy, rubber-wheeled vehicles
like cars is about 15 miles per hour. Below 15 miles per hour your
car’s weight and speed matter most in how much energy it expends. Above
15 miles per hour, shape and, especially, speed matter most. For an
average car, energy consumption bends upward more stiffly as speed
increases, which is why back in the 1970s, the Nixon administration
introduced national speed limits of 55 miles per hour or less. These
tradeoffs also present a design problem for automakers: How do you make a
car efficient both in town and on the open highway? The answer is, you
can’t really. But you can make
different choices about how you travel.
Click image to enlarge.
In town, where motion is dominated by low speeds and frequent stops,
you can save energy by choosing a mode of transportation that is lighter
(Rule #1), rolls with less resistance (Rule #4) and moves less rapidly
(Rule #2). Walking, bicycling and in-line skating all suggest
themselves, rather than automobiles. Personal modes move a minimum of
mass (our bodies plus the bike or skates) at low speeds, with little
rolling resistance and smaller cross-sections. Though some of the energy
is wasted in the inefficiency of our legs and backs, we don’t mind: We
call it exercise. Biking beats out walking for efficiency because the
small gain in vehicle mass is more than compensated for by the increased
efficiency of the bicycle’s gears and pedals, making biking fast and
fun, especially on
paths uncluttered by pedestrians or motorcars.
Out of town, where higher speeds are required and stops are less
frequent, vehicles make more sense. For fast-moving objects, like cars,
energy loss is dominated by drag from pushing the air around. Under
these conditions, your vehicle’s weight matters less than its shape, so
you can save energy by making your mode more streamlined (Rule #5) and —
unhelpfully — by moving less rapidly (Rule #2). Since making better
trades of time for space is the point, especially over longer distances,
the least you can do is split the energy use. More heads per
cross-sectional area, like on a train, dramatically lowers the
per-capita energy expenditure. The very best way to improve the fuel
efficiency of your car is also the easiest way: Share with someone else.
Car
pools are the only practical way to make up for the notorious
inefficiency of internal combustion engines. Although it’s been over 120
years since Benz sold his first motorwagen, automobile energy
efficiencies remain stuck in the 18–25 percent range, not so different
from you riding your bike. (Both you and your V6 are turning
carbon-based chemical energy into motion.) Cars weigh more than people,
so on a per-passenger basis, their energy efficiency drops even more.
Consider that if you weigh 200 pounds and drive a run-of-the-mill
3,000-pound car, then your weight is just 6.25 percent of the total mass
moved. If the energy to move you is consumed at 20 percent efficiency,
then only 1.25 percent of all of the energy in all of the gasoline in
your car is used to move you down the road. Energy loss accelerates as
you do. Electric motors for electric vehicles do a better job.
Electrical engines typically obtain 80–95 percent efficiencies, because
they are lighter and because electromagnetism skips the explosions and
attendant hot gases, noise and vibrations of combustion. But there’s a
catch. Electric motors need a constant supply of electrons to turn the
wheel. Those electrons come from either a power cord connected to a
power source, which is sending them in real time, as in streetcars, or
they supply them on-board using a rechargeable battery. As Edison and
Planté discovered in the nineteenth century, batteries are heavy because
of the metals (like lead) required to hold the charge. Conventional
lead-acid batteries add to the weight of the vehicle, which requires
more energy to move because it’s heavier, which requires a larger
battery, which adds to the weight, etc. This ugly feedback loop leads to
rapidly diminishing returns, and explains why,
a century after Edison and Ford gave it a go,
we are still struggling to make a speedy, long-distance, affordable
electric car (though we will consider a few modern takes on the
Electrobat
below). The physical truth is a pound of gasoline holds 350 times more
energy than a pound of lead soaked in sulfuric acid. (Lithium-ion
batteries, the ones in your laptop, do better — gasoline:lithium-ion,
118:1 — but are more expensive.)
SUVs zooming down the
expressway at 70 miles per hour break every rule of energy efficiency,
but manage to do what they do by relying on the remarkable energy
density of their fuel. Aircraft, heavier and airborne, are even more
dependent. Thus, if we value the ability to fly across the country, or
to another continent, we might want to save our energy-rich oil for air
travel. Back on the ground, we need to find a better way to trade time
for space. [1]
Click image to enlarge.A Better Car
A curious fact about cars is that most of them are designed to carry
more than one person. At maximum occupancy (four to eight people per
vehicle), modern cars are actually reasonable in terms of their energy
expenditure: They use only 300–500 percent as much energy per person per
mile as someone walking or bicycling, but go on average a lot faster.
As we all know from counting heads during the morning commute, most
trips in personal motor vehicles are taken by lonesome drivers. Add some
carpooling trips and family errands, and the overall average vehicle
occupancy for personal automobiles in America works out to 1.59
passengers per trip (in 2009).
At this kind of occupancy, a
car’s energy efficiency, never great, collapses: A solo driver in a Ford
Focus uses 600 percent more energy per person per mile than a
pedestrian; a Camaro spends 1,000 percent as much. Thus, if you are
going to drive, please share.
Hybrid cars are more energy
efficient by making the best of a bad situation: They have two power
trains, one electric and one internal combustion. They use a battery to
start the car and run at low speeds; at higher speeds where more energy
is required, or when the battery is drained, the gasoline engine takes
over. Most hybrids also have regenerative braking that recaptures about
20 percent of the energy of slowing and stopping and shunts it back to
the battery. (Gas cars can’t have this feature because brakes can’t
regenerate gasoline, just electricity.) Despite the extra pounds
required by the extra machinery and battery, hybrid cars are typically
twice as energy efficient as internal-combustion-only automobiles of the
same model. The problem with hybrids, beyond their purchase price, is
that they still require gas as their sole energy source. Though more
efficient, they are just a lighter version of oil’s chains.
Better automotive energy efficiency can be obtained from a plug-in
hybrid. As late as the summer of 2012, there was only one such vehicle
for sale in the United States: the
Chevy Volt,
though others were in the works. Plug-in hybrids are truer “hybrids” in
the sense that they can use energy from electricity or from gasoline,
but can get by on just one or the other. The Volt also deploys
regenerative braking to save energy, and though its range is only 35
miles on electricity, that’s enough to push its energy consumption per
mile to only 1.5 times as much as a person walking at maximum occupancy
(four passengers per Volt), and only five times a person walking at
usual occupancy. Not bad, considering the Chevy Volt weighs in at almost
two tons.
Click image to enlarge. The most
energy-efficient automobiles
are, not surprisingly, electric. True electric cars eschew gasoline
entirely and instead receive all their energy from a power plant or a
wind farm stored in a battery and delivered via a plug. The most
efficient electric car on the market in 2012 was the
Nissan Leaf,
which at full passenger capacity is actually more energy efficient than
a person walking (!), and only three times more energy-consuming per
person than biking. The Leaf is the latest in a small collection of
electric cars sold by Ford, General Motors and various foreign vendors
over the last twenty years. Probably the best known American electric
car was
General Motors’ EV1,
the first and only one to carry the GM nameplate, which developed a
small, incredibly devoted following in California at the turn of the
21st century. When GM canceled the three thousand leases on the EV1 in
2003, insisting all its owners return them, and then crushed the cars in
the desert or disabled them for museum objects, stunned customers
complained, picketed and made a movie:
Who Killed the Electric Car?
It turns out that many agents
contributed to the demise of the EV1,
not the least of which was the electric car’s old nemesis: the
rechargeable battery. The EV1 originally had a range of about 60 miles
on a charge; battery upgrades, using nickel-hydride batteries, like the
rechargeable ones in a toy car, eventually pushed the range up to 160
miles, but also upped the cost considerably. The 2012 Nissan Leaf has 48
lithium-ion battery modules, which weighs 660 pounds, affording the
Leaf about a 100-mile range between charges.
Batteries, lest
we forget, also need to be charged. Fast charging requires a dedicated
charging station at high voltage (240 V; the usual household voltage is
110 V). Buying a Leaf doesn’t include the purchase and installation of a
garage-mounted charger for rejuvenation at home. Communal charging
stations, the equivalent of gas stations, are doable, of course; we had
plenty of them in electric truck garages of the 1920s. Perhaps they
could be deployed again in take-out, drop-in battery exchanges such as
the ones imagined back on Broad Street in 1895, if manufacturers adopted
consistent standards for battery shape, size and connection.
There is another automotive solution, though, suggested by the problems
of the Leaf, which is to give up on range and speed expectations based
on gasoline, and instead design electric cars that work well on their
own terms, in town, at lower speeds. Mrs. Ford by all accounts was very
happy with her electric car, which in fact was an early prototype of
what we would call today a
“neighborhood electric vehicle” (NEV),
a kind of souped-up golf cart. These smaller, slower vehicles have
conventional lead-acid batteries and an electric motor, they charge at a
standard household outlet and can speed very happily up to 25 miles per
hour while carrying 1,000 or more pounds of cargo. You have probably
seen them zipping about in a gated community or amusement park. The
police, the military and zookeepers use them, too. The government does
not allow NEVs to play with gas cars on fast-moving boulevards or
highways, restricting them to streets where the speed limit is under 35
miles per hour. (35 is not bad; it’s the limit of many city streets.)
Chrysler has a division that sells six models of NEVs under the brand
name GEM for $8,000–$12,000 each, doors extra. [2]
Click image to enlarge.A Better Streetcar I
wish electric cars, small or large, could elegantly sweep in and
replace gasoline cars and solve all our problems with a wave of the
technological wand, but I can’t see how it happens without a major
breakthrough in automotive battery technology, which has eluded us for a
century or more. The fact is that the only forms of powered
transportation that give the kind of per-person
bang-for-the-microwave-minute that we need are shared modes of
transportation, particularly ones on rails: trains, light rail and the
streetcar.
Streetcars are the closest we know to the ideal
motorized transportation. They roll with low resistance on steel wheels
on steel rails, driven by efficient electric motors attached to the grid
via overhead wires or underground cables, deploying regenerative
braking for stopping. And they carry tens to a hundred passengers at a
time, which gives more heads per cross-sectional area, thus dramatically
dropping per-capita energy use. At full occupancy, streetcars best
rival walking and biking in energy efficiency. Compared to a bus, they
are more energy efficient, have more leg room, offer better views and
are more genteel; they are also more fun. Who doesn’t like to ride a
streetcar? Once they are laid down, the rails reflect a tangible,
significant investment in the city, something a bus stop can never hope
to do. Some people don’t like the overhead lines, but those can be
buried so as not to interfere with the view of the phone and power lines
that parallel so many American roadsides.
If streetcars ran
on streets where they were the only vehicle, we could make them lighter,
streamlined and more stylish. They could also go faster because there
would be no unpredictable cars to cross them. 21st-century streetcars
can be designed for contemporary times, to reflect a community’s sense
of itself. New York’s can be sleek and elegant, Seattle’s innovative and
green. In Los Angeles streetcars can have sun roofs and surfboard
racks. They could all provide free wifi, vending machines and cup
holders.
How viable is a nation of streetcar riders? Try this
out: Sometimes I play a game with my son to pass the time while we wait
for the bus. We count the cars going by and say: “One – two – three –
four – five – streetcar!” We count to five because five cars use about
the same amount of energy as one streetcar. On some residential suburban
streets, you might need to wait ten minutes to get to five cars, but on
City Island Avenue, our main thoroughfare, we could have a streetcar
every other minute for most of the day for the same amount of energy we
already lavish on cars. On busier city streets, they’d come in a
constant stream. And whereas five cars might move five to eight people,
each streetcar could handle 70 sitting or 100 standing.
Try it
next time you are stuck in traffic; if you can count four cars in
addition to your own, then imagine yourself relaxing in a spacious,
stylish streetcar, with a small number of your fellow citizens, quietly
being transported by chauffeur toward your destination through clean,
unpolluted air, unhindered by congestion, able to read the paper, text
your friend and admire the view. It could happen. It might be sorta
thrilling: A streetcar to desire.
Here’s the plan. [3]
Roads to Rails
For short distances, it’s clear we
should do everything humanly possible to make walking and bicycling the
preferred modes of transportation for as many people as possible.
Currently, 49 percent of trips are already three miles or less, and 70
percent of them are taken by car, which suggests a huge potential. The
ingredients are fairly simple: Pedestrians and bicycles need their own
separate, pleasant spaces for movement — sidewalks and improved bicycle
paths — and people need their everyday destinations within reach,
whether they are for work, shopping or school. Better, denser towns and
cities designed for people are the means to the end of making walking
and bicycling the cheapest, healthiest, fastest way to go for some 189
billion trips per year.
Walking and related modes, however,
are not ideal when the weather is unpleasant or when we need to travel
farther than a few miles. They also don’t work for the very old, the
very young and the disabled, who need modes compatible with how they
move; and businesses, emergency crews and others need ways to move
objects heavier than a person can conveniently carry. To obtain better
trades of time for space, we still need vehicles powered by engines to
apply greater energy than our bodies can. Small fleets of NEVs can help,
streaming people and goods down to that paragon of motor propulsion:
the streetcar.
When imagining the streetcar revolution, don’t
rely on your experience of public transit today, with long unpredictable
waits, dingy subway tunnels and motorbus diesel fumes. Instead, imagine
what every city once had — lots and lots of streetcars running all the
time (one for every five of today’s cars) along every big street. Your
wait won’t be long, and it won’t be uncertain, because thanks to GPS,
wireless technologies, smartphone applications, countdown clocks and a
glance down the avenue you will know exactly when the next streetcar
will arrive to whisk you away. As the transportation planner Jarrett
Walker writes: Frequency is freedom.
Streetcars, NEVs, your bicycle and your legs are the distributed
beginnings of a new transportation network, reaching into New Town
districts across America and bringing people to light rail trains
running along major thoroughfares. Light rails are close cousins of the
subway and elevated railway, except they run on the ground. They are
heavier and faster than streetcars, able to race cars at 60–80 miles per
hour. In the future, these local trains will shuttle between nearby
cities, delivering people to high-speed rail systems that go
cross-state, and eventually cross-country.
America already has a
world-class freight rail system, moving 1.7 billion tons of goods each
year. Today freight railways connect to trucks for the final delivery;
in the future, they will connect to streetcars, and in the cities, the
old subway tunnels. Subterranean movements will be set aside for
inanimate things, rather than for people. At night specially designed
flatbed streetcars will pull up to businesses or neighborhood receiving
stations, the post offices of the future. Curb cutouts with loops of
side track will provide lading sites out of the main flow. Small
containers of standard size, and designed to fit within the large
containers used by the shipping industry, will travel by rail and NEV.
In the morning NEVs and folks with hand trucks will make deliveries to
your door.
Instead of asking the car to do every
transportation job for us, as we do today, transportation will be sorted
by task. We will choose modes that work better and more efficiently for
different distances and prioritize investment according to a formula
that prefers human power over railways and railways over cars.
Many
people think American railroads are a thing of the past, and while it
is true that passenger rail fell on hard times during the late 20th
century, the U.S. freight rail system moves 1.7 billion ton-miles of
freight (as of 2011), including nearly all of the fossil fuels that
power the nation's over 4,800 coal-burning power plants. If the
Interstate Highway System were converted to the Interstate Railway
System, then we could have fast and furious (and energy-efficient)
passenger trains, too. Current rail system: 110,772 miles; current
Interstate Highway System: 47,013 miles. Click image to enlarge.
We
make this happen by committing roads to rails, literally. Dedicating
road space to rails resolves two problems simultaneously. First the
roads turn out to be an excellent place to build railways at lower cost.
The budgets of most rail projects today are based on an assumption that
automobile traffic will continue ad infinitum. For streetcars, sharing
the roads with cars necessitates extra staff to steer and see, extra
weight for safety, limited choices about alignment (the technical term
for where the rails will go), and extra expenses for switching and
signaling. These problems are exacerbated for light rail and high speed
(trans-region) rail systems that must have dedicated space to operate;
they literally have nowhere to go in today’s world because all our land
is already given over to established public and private uses. (I shake
my fist at you, John Locke!) What remains of the rail lines of the
nation are mostly already spoken for by the freight industry (mixing
freight trains and passenger trains is not recommended — different
speeds, different agendas). As a result, the budgets for current railway
plans, like the beleaguered high-speed rail plan for California, are
swollen with funds to purchase right-of-ways and construct tunnels,
overpasses, elevated lines and other extraordinarily expensive acts of
engineering necessary to find a route without disturbing the dominant
car.
Making the counter-assumption of no cars provides
extraordinary relief — now there is lots of space and reduced costs.
Roadways are already engineered for transport, with bridges and tunnels
in place. The electricity is already there in the power lines
paralleling many roads. Dedicating roads to rail means that capital
costs drop dramatically because land acquisition and grading expenses
evaporate; it also means eventually we need less land dedicated to
mechanized transportation, so we have more room for sidewalks, bike
paths, parks and garden cafés. Instead of dedicating a third of our city
space to transportation, perhaps we can get by with only a quarter or a
fifth, meaning that broad swaths of city land could become available
for other uses. Think what we can do with all those parking lots!
Deploying railways down Main Street provides a second great advantage:
It competes with the cars that remain. As streetcars on streetcar-only
streets become more prevalent, they will force cars into a smaller
number of crowded car-only streets. As congestion worsens for
automobiles, and fuel costs rise, and free parking — and then all
parking — vanishes, more people will see the wisdom of giving up on cars
entirely and join the rest of the nation walking, biking and on the
rails. You can still get to work and your trip will be faster and more
pleasant. Driving will persist in rural areas, where work necessitates
infrequent trips over long distances, and on a recreational basis. (I’m
particularly fond of the drive over the magnificent Million-Dollar Highway in Colorado.) Driving will become a hobby, not a burden.
Click image to enlarge.
Do
you hear that jingling in your pocket? That’s the 20 percent of your
income now freed to be deployed elsewhere in the economy. Some of it
will go back to transportation, but spent on an as-needed basis. Rather
than writing out the insurance, registration and car payments in lump
sums each year, regardless of how much you drive, now you pay only when
you ride. (Businesspeople call this process replacing fixed costs with
variable ones.) Or we could establish a system where everyone makes a
down payment — say, 50 percent of what we used to pay — and then all
local transportation is free. You show a badge stating that you are a
resident of New Oldtown, USA, and climb on board. Exchange privileges
give you free access in other towns, too.
To get the process
started, we need to redirect funds from roads to rails. In 2008
government at all levels (local, state and federal) spent a collective
$182 billion of taxpayers’ cash on capital and operating expenses
related to roads and highways; the same year, we spent another $51
billion on transit projects. That’s three dollars for cars for every one
dollar for passenger trains and buses. Reversing this ratio would have
enormous immediate effects on shared transportation in America without
costing taxpayers a cent more than we are already paying.
Construction costs for new streetcar systems in the U.S. over the last
decade have run between $2 million and $20 million per track-mile.
(Streetcars have grown in popularity over the last decade; as of summer
2012, at least 35 cities had streetcar or light rail lines.) If we
assumed that we could achieve the lower end of this range through
economies of scale and by building rails on roads without having to deal
with car traffic, then a $150 billion investment could buy 75,000
track-miles. If we assume track density and alignments so that everyone
lived within a quarter-mile of a streetcar line, then those 75,000
track-miles could serve 18,750 square miles of urban area. If those
towns and cities were inhabited at a density of 5000 people per square
mile, encouraged to move there by New Town districts, home-to-work
rebates and the new system of gate duties on fossil fuels, then those
streetcars could serve 94 million people. If in a burst of enthusiasm
and economic growth, the residential density pushed up to 10,000 people
per square mile (remember that’s only one-seventh of Manhattan density),
then 188 million people could ride those streetcars, or 60 percent of
the American populace.
In other words, scratches on the back
of an envelope suggest that after only a few years’ worth of spending
the money we already spend on roads, everyone in the country could have
access to a streetcar, assuming that they inhabited happier, healthier,
moderately denser locales than where most people currently live. [4]
Transportation
in a democracy needn’t be complicated, but it does need to be clever.
Here is what not to do: (a) Do not give away the land to railroad
companies that then exploit the public; (b) Do not give monopoly access
to companies and then limit the fares, thus ruining the companies; (c)
Do not provide free roads and subsidies for cheap oil, damaging the
economy, national security, and the environment; and please (d) Do not
let the government run transportation companies, because then everyone
loses. Here is a better way: (e) Let the government own and manage the
public infrastructure in the public interest; let companies run the
railways to make a profit and serve the people, subject to market
competition; and let the citizens ride the rails to success, while
speaking politely and specifically about necessary improvements. Click image to enlarge.
What Happened?
I know what you are thinking: If streetcars are so great, why didn’t
they succeed the first time around? And don’t we need to know why they
disappeared if we ever hope to rebuild them? It’s like a beautiful
forest eerily silent because all the animals have been hunted to
extinction: We must understand why the forest is empty to fill it again.
I don’t think the answer to why the streetcar expired is as simple as
some commentators have indicated — that there was a great conspiracy to
replace it with automobiles, and that was that (though some unsavory
things did happen). Rather, the answer lies in the uneasy institutional
relationships surrounding land, transportation and money during the time
of the first great streetcar blossoming at the turn of the last
century.
The trouble started because city governments thought
it was clever to give monopolies to the streetcar companies. In the
heyday of the Standard Oil trust and the Selden patent,
monopoly was considered good practice in transportation. Granting
local, long-term exclusive franchises induced companies to make large
upfront investments in infrastructure (the railways and the rolling
stock), relieving the government of those costs. In return companies
would recoup their expenses plus profits indefinitely through a captive
ridership and real estate development.
To limit the monopoly
power, however, local governments controlled the fare. At first, both
sides agreed that five cents a ride was a fair deal. In the deflationary
environment of the late 19th century, when the real value of every
nickel was spiraling upward, each fare paid represented accelerating
profits for the companies. For a time, they and their real estate
subsidiaries made money hand over fist; a list of the richest men in
America of 1900 included municipal transit magnates Peter A. B. Widener,
Thomas Fortune Ryan and Nicholas F. Brady.
We don’t speak of
Widener, Ryan and Brady in the same reverential tones we do of the
Rockefellers, Fords and Carnegies because the streetcar kings’ glory
days faded fast. Inflation, labor strikes, World War I and competition
from electric and motor vehicles overtook the streetcar. Owners wanted
to raise fares to keep up their lines, but government, subject to public
pressure, refused. (New York Mayor James “Jimmy” Walker became famous
by beating back a fare increase in 1928, for example.) Unionization was
on the rise, demanding a greater proportion of profits, and during World
War I, the War Labor Board instituted mandatory pay raises for railway
workers, including on the streetcar lines, to compensate for wartime
inflation.
With no way to raise revenues to cover their costs
and with development along the lines already peaking, the companies had
to make cuts to stay afloat, which meant deferring investment and
reducing service. Even though ridership continued to increase through
the 1920s, the trams and trolleys crowded with passengers were beginning
to fall apart. Meanwhile, the automobile companies — producing vehicles
that were newer, faster and affordable, if relatively energy
inefficient — had all the capital they needed. After 1931, the Texas
Railroad Commission and interstate commerce legislation ensured everyone
paid consistent, low prices for gas.
Gas and rubber rationing at
home during World War II extended the streetcar’s era for a few more
years, but by midcentury, when General Motors, Firestone and Standard
Oil of California cobbled together their racket to replace the last
streetcars with buses and then close the bus lines, the streetcar
industry was economically crippled, the victim of deferred maintenance,
high costs and subsidized competition; the GM conspiracy was just the
coup de grâce.
Top: Removal of streetcar track, 3rd Avenue, Seattle, 1943. [Photo via Seattle Municipal Archives] Bottom: Concrete pour for new streetcar track, Jackson Street at 2nd Avenue, Seattle, 2013. [Photo by Gordon Werner]
Shared transportation in America is still haunted by the demise of the
streetcar and its aftermath. In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
government realized it had made a terrible mistake in its handling of
the streetcar lines, and responded by making another terrible mistake:
It took over transit. With a young president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
in the White House in 1960, northeast politicians like Richardson
Dilworth, mayor of Pennsylvania, and Senator Harrison “Pete” Williams of
New Jersey, despairing of ever reversing the flight to the suburbs, saw
an opportunity to win federal support to at least bring people back
downtown for shopping. Thus began a subsidy war pitting us against us.
With one hand, the government subsidized transit as a way of encouraging
urban renewal, while with the other hand, it rolled out pavement for
cars on a continental scale to help people flee town. In the epic battle
of cars vs. transit, in the age of cheap oil, free roads and
low-density sprawl, transit couldn’t win, no matter how big the
subsidies. And many people questioned why we were writing checks for
both in the first place. They still do. Like a gardener who planted two
seeds that are now competing with each other to the detriment of both,
we have to choose which will survive. One already seems to be failing.
[5]
What Business Does Best
Resolving the
problems of public transportation means reforming the relationships
between government, business and the passenger once again. This time, we
have to be realistic about the strengths and interests of each and play
to them. Government owns the roads and looks out for the general
welfare, for people today and in the future. Business is good at making a
profit given a fair and competitive market with clear rules. Passengers
know where they need to go and how much money they have.
Here’s what I think we should do. Let’s imagine that the government makes long-term investments in the necessary infrastructure
for streetcar and other local rail systems. The public, via our
self-instituted government, will own the tracks, signals and maintenance
yards and manage them in the public interest on the public land. The
people will then rent out the rail lines to private companies to provide
transportation services. The companies bring their knowledge of
efficiency and the ability to flex and innovate; they also bring their
own rolling stock and labor agreements. Passengers get a better bargain
as a result.
Every few years, municipalities put out bids for
contracts of limited duration, for example, three years. Short-term
concession agreements ensure that companies are under the gun to provide
excellent service, or the municipality will seek a different vendor
next round. Companies are relieved of the capital costs of the rails and
the real estate buys that have been the traditional argument for the
necessity of long-term arrangements. The public runs the contracts on
essentially a nonprofit basis, only asking for rent based on what is
necessary to maintain the infrastructure, insure the rails and keep up
with inflation; no subsidies are involved, but no profits either to
support other aspects of government. Contracts express the public
interest: minimum levels of service, coordination across lines,
bracketed fares, non-discrimination, electronic notifications and
bonuses for on-time service records and minimal passenger complaints.
Within those bounds, companies are free to deploy service as they see
best, including adding service to enhance profits. They can run more
trolleys to accommodate the morning commute or the rush to the ball
game.
In some cases, in coordination with the local
authorities, companies might collect fares up front on an annual basis
from residents, and then everyone could ride for free, with exchange
privileges across connecting lines, facilitated by the same technologies
that credit card companies use. Private service providers invest
profits in advertising, better rolling stock and transit-oriented
development (e.g., shopping centers, housing stock) near the value-added
transportation corridors, thus enhancing the market and bringing
additional private funds into the towns and cities growing around them.
New jobs will be created directly in service industries (steering and
maintaining streetcars, local freight delivery, track maintenance), in
manufacturing supply chains for streetcar construction, and through
agglomeration economies generated by connected American neighborhoods,
towns and cities.
Detail of Market St. Railway Mural, San Francisco. [Mural by Mona Caron]
Once the streetcar is rooted within communities, then we will have the
basis for a high-speed rail network between cities, not before. When
streetcars and light rail systems bring people to the periphery, then
high-speed rails can develop along the existing highway systems to
connect cities across the vast expanses between. (In the meanwhile,
temporary garages on the edge of town can store the cars reserved for
rural travel.) Over time we transform long-distance travel from cars and
trucks to trains, so that the Interstate Highway System morphs into the
Interstate Railway System, with the federal government owning,
maintaining and coordinating regional rails, and private companies
instead of government-owned corporations (like the hapless Amtrak),
providing the service. Gate duties alter the economies of fuel and land,
and higher functioning American towns and cities facilitate walking,
biking and public transport. The goal is to make American travel
affordable, pleasurable, sustainable and easy, a system to last for
centuries, not just until the oil or the money runs out.
There
is one final benefit to turning transportation over to the smooth whirr
of electric motors: Those motors will use electricity. To produce it,
we could continue to burn the black fossil fuel MacKays [6] or build
more radioactive nuclear power plants — or we can see the roads to rails
program as a welcome opportunity to get our MacKays from warmer,
breezier, brighter sources: the gifts of earth, wind and the fire in the
sky. [7]
Editors’ Note
“Roads to Rails” is excerpted from Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs, by Eric W. Sanderson, published this month by Abrams. It appears here with the permission of the author and publisher.
Notes, Sources and Elaborations
1. Notes on “A Brief Physics Lesson”
Later
in life
Sir Isaac Newton haunts this article. A younger contemporary of John
Locke, Newton made major contributions in mathematics, optics, astronomy
and mechanics, mostly from a brief, productive 18-month period. Later
in life he was Master of the Mint, where he controlled the British money
supply, and by fixing an exchange rate between silver and gold in 1717
put the United Kingdom effectively on the gold standard, which the Brits
would adhere to until the horrors of World War I forced them off in
1914. David Berlinski,
Newton’s Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World (New York: Free Press, 2012), provides a readable biography; Edward Dolnick,
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (New York: Harper, 2011), describes his world.
The strange notion that an object in motion will stay in motion
perpetually in a vacuum is a restatement of Newton’s First Law of
Motion. What a motor does is apply a force; Newton’s Second Law of
Motion says that the acceleration of an object is proportional to the
force applied and inversely proportional to the object’s mass, which
follows from the conservation of momentum and applies to light as well
as matter. Although energy was not understood while Newton was alive,
the discovery of conservation of energy in the early nineteenth century
was entirely compatible with the foundations he had laid two centuries
before.
My simplistic description of the physics of vehicles follows David MacKay’s lucid account in Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air (UK: UIT Cambridge, 2009), which you can read online or by purchasing his book; see in particular Chapter 3 and Technical Chapter A. You can also read more in Kyle Forinash, Foundations of Environmental Physics (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010), or any standard undergraduate physics textbook.
The force of friction on a wheeled vehicle depends on the coefficient
of rolling resistance. James D. MacIsaac and Dr. W. Riley Garrott
provide details on how rolling resistance changes with changing tire
pressure in Preliminary Findings of the Effect of Tire Inflation Pressure on the Peak and Slide Coefficients of Friction (Washington,
DC: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2002).
Well-inflated car tires not only save gas, they are safer to drive on;
see Transportation Research Board, Tires and Passenger Vehicle Fuel Economy: Informing Consumers, Improving Performance (Washington,
DC: National Research Council, 2006). Typical coefficients of rolling
resistance for automobile tires vary from 0.0098 to 0.0138; steel wheels
on steel rails have coefficients of 0.0015–0.0035; see Erik Lindgreen
and Spencer Sorenson, Driving Resistance from Railroad Trains
(Lyngby, Denmark: Technical Univ. of Denmark, 2005). Train cars on a
level track have such small amounts of rolling resistance that they
sometimes roll down the tracks on a windy day, even though they might
weigh 30 tons or more. Did you know the study of friction, wear, and
lubrication is called tribology? For more, see tribologists Ulf Olofsson
and Roger Lewis, “Tribology of the Wheel–Rail Contact,” in Simon
Iwnicki, Ed., Handbook of Railway Vehicle Dynamics (Milton Park, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2006),121–141.
The U.S. Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency have collaborated on a useful website called fueleconomy.gov,
where you can check out the fuel mileage for different car models in
city, highway, and combined driving, back to the 1987 model year; they
also have a nifty figure showing where the energy goes when you drive your car — yet another reminder that it is not information that is wanting.
Forinash writes of electric motors: “The limits to efficiency of
[electric] motors and generators due to the second law of thermodynamics
are exceedingly small. An ideal motor with no friction or other loss
can have a theoretical efficiency of more than 99% and real electric
motors have been built with efficiencies close to this limit. ... For
real electric motors there are mechanical friction losses and
resistance. ... Well designed lowhorsepower (<1,000 W) motors
typically have efficiencies of about 80%, and larger motors (> 95 kW)
have efficiencies as high as 95%” (p. 123). The Nissan Leaf’s motor
consumes 80 kW; and the Chevy Volt’s consumes 110 kW, according to their
respective websites.
Vaclav Smil, Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007), makes a big deal over the amount of energy
different fuels can contain, as do I. Unfortunately some misguided
apologists for the fossil fuel industry use this data to argue that we
can’t replace the car ever (cf. Robert Bryce, “The Real Problem with Renewables,”
Forbes, May 11, 2010), but that’s not to say we can’t have something
else (e.g. streetcars) instead. Smil provides some fun energetic
comparisons: The energy of a flea hopping (1 x 10-7 J) to the annual
global interception of solar energy (5.5 x 1024 J); the power of
ephemeral phenomena, from a hummingbird’s flight (7.0 x 10-1 W) to a
magnitude 9 earthquake (1.6 x 1015 W); and the efficiency of common
energy conversions, from some ecosystems that manage only a paltry 1–2
percent, to a large electric generator with efficiencies of 98–99
percent.
The search for more energy-dense batteries has been
underway for a century now. See reviews of the 21st-century state of
play by Eckhard Karden, “Energy Storage Devices for Future Hybrid
Electric Vehicles,” Journal of Power Sources, 168.1 (2007): 2–11, and A.K. Shukla, et al., “An Appraisal of Electric Automobile Power Sources,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 5.2 (2001): 137–55. Don’t hold your breath.
2. Notes on “A Better Car”
Vehicle occupancies can be found in Adella Santos, et al., Summary of Travel Trends: 2009 National Household Travel Survey (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, 2011), based on calculations from the National Household Travel Survey.
Occupancy varies by trip type: commuters average 1.13 people per trip,
shoppers and errand-makers 1.78 and 1.84 people per trip, respectively,
and socialities, 2.20 people per trip. Alan E. Pisarski, Commuting in America III
(Washington DC: Transportation Research Board, 2006), shows that
commuting alone varies dramatically between different American cities,
from a low of 56.3 percent of trips in New York to a high of 84.2
percent in Detroit in 2000. With streetcars for the commute of the
future, no one will have to travel alone.
I calculated energy
consumptions per person per mile at usual and maximum occupancy for
different modes of transportation. Walking, biking and skating energy
consumption were drawn from FitWatch. Automobile fuel consumptions were calculated for combined driving fuel efficiencies reported in fueleconomy.gov
for the various models indicated; curb weights and maximum occupancies
are from manufacturer websites. Usual vehicle occupancies for different
automobile types were derived from averages calculated from the 2009
National Household Travel Survey. Public transportation energy
consumption and usual occupancy for the various transit lines indicated
were calculated from the 2009 National Transit Database.
Maximum occupancies for transit modes were estimated from transit
authority websites or estimates from similar lines when I couldn’t find
the exact numbers. MTA subway occupancy is based on 200 passenger
capacity for a 10-car train. The Staten Island Ferry maximum capacity is
for the “Molinari” Class ferries. Vehicle weights for trains are car
weights, not including the locomotive. Fuel consumption rates for the
Boeing 737 and 747 aircraft were deduced from the graphs provided in Boeing documents,
and are estimated for trip distances of 3,000 and 3,400 nautical miles,
respectively. Aircraft usual occupancies are based on the maximum
occupancies multiplied by the average passenger load factor for 2010 (U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics).
Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon, “Advanced Passenger Transport Technologies,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources
33 (2008): 63–84, provide an entertaining review of the recent
developments of electric, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and fuel cell cars.
David B. Sandalow, ed., Plug-In Electric Vehicles: What Role for Washington?
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), and colleagues
make the case for plug-in hybrids; though wonkish, this book brings
together some of the best thinking on how to generate an electric
vehicle revolution; many of their recipes could be applied to streetcars
and NEVs as well, where the physical challenges aren’t so daunting. My
issue with writers like Sandalow and Sperling is their fundamental,
undeniable, unshakeable (it would seem) assumption that personal
automobiles are the only way. It’s a bit like the Catholic Church in
1517. Be careful who is knocking at your door!
A note on fuel cell vehicles: Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy
(New York: Tarcher, 2003), gives an impassioned appeal for the hydrogen
economy based on fuel cell technology for cars; however there are
numerous debilitating technical problems, which, it seems, may keep
chemical engineers busy for some decades (see Rakesh Agrawal, et al.,
“Hydrogen Economy — An Opportunity for Chemical Engineers?”, AIChE Journal
51.6 (2005): 1582–89), the most important of which may be the small
size of hydrogen gas molecules (literally just two protons), which means
hydrogen is difficult to bottle up. Hydrogen fuel cells also are
carriers of energy since hydrogen gas does not exist in any quantities
in nature (it’s too reactive to stay around long). So hydrogen gas as a
fuel needs to be produced from another fuel, which might be renewable or
might be a fossil fuel; either way each energy transition costs energy,
which means, for now fuel cells are just another version of the Siren
song, albeit a bubbly, explosive leitmotif.
Who Killed the Electric Car? was made by Chris Paine (Sony Pictures, 2006). More details about the Nissan Leaf are available from the Nissan website,
including costs of charging; costs estimated for the battery follow
comments Nissan executives made to the Wall Street Journal and other
outlets — see Josie Garthwaite, “Nissan: LEAF, Like Other Electric Cars, Will Lose Money at First,” GigaOM, May 17, 2010, and Eric Loveday, “WSJ: Nissan Leaf Profitable by Year Three; Battery Cost Closer to $18,000,” Autoblog, May 15, 2010.
Learn more about neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) in Sam Abuelsamid, “What Is a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV)?”, Autoblog, February 6, 2009. J. Francfort and M. Carroll, Field Operations Program: Neighborhood Electric Vehicle Fleet Use?
(Idaho Falls, ID: Idaho National Engineering and Environmental
Laboratory, 2001), describe operational characteristics of NEV fleets,
and Roberta Brayer, et al., Guidelines for the Establishment of a Model Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV) Fleet
(Idaho Falls, ID: Idaho National Laboratory, 2006), describe guidelines
for deploying NEV fleets in the future, based on studies done by the
Idaho National Laboratory. Brayer and colleagues write: “NEVS are
designed to meet most light-duty applications, such as people movers and
light utility use. NEVs are significantly faster than golf carts, which
typically have top speeds of 12 to 15 mph. Typical NEV payload
capabilities range from 600 pounds to 1,000 pounds (including
passengers). When the batteries are functioning properly, a fully
functional range is typically around 30 miles for each full charge in
mild climates. In cold climates, the range can be reduced by as much as
half. Options are available, such as fast charging, that allow the range
to be extended to over 100 miles per day by opportunity charging in 20
to 30-minute increments throughout the day.” A. Moawad, et al., Light-Duty Vehicle Fuel Consumption Displacement Potential up to 2045
(Argonne, IL: Argonne National Laboratory, 2011), share a similar
vision of smaller, lighter, more efficient vehicles in America through
2045 and back it up with simulation of over two thousand different
vehicle types. For a beautiful vision of what is possible for these
kinds of vehicles, see William J. Mitchell, et al., Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
3. Notes on “A Better Streetcar”
For the good news about streetcars, see Gloria Ohland and Shelley Poticha, eds., Street Smart: Streetcars and Cities in the Twenty-first Century, 2nd ed (Oakland, CA: Reconnecting America, 2009). Edson L. Tennyson, Impact on Transit Patronage of Cessation or Inauguration of Rail Service
(Washington, DC: Transportation Research Board, 1998), makes the case
for streetcars over buses; for more fun and less reverence, see The
Infrastructurist, “36 Reasons Streetcars Are Better Than,“ June 3, 2010
(via Internet Archive). A lot of writing about streetcars is nostalgic (e.g., John W. Diers and Aaron Isaacs, Twin Cities by Trolley: The Streetcar Era in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2007) or dismissive (e.g., David W. Jones, Mass Motorization and Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 2010), but we have more than
enough experience with streetcars to know what a lovely, efficient,
cost-effective solution they are for urban transportation, which is why
they have seen a renaissance, in spite of auto-dominated streets. In
2009, the United States had 74 urban/suburban railway systems in
operation (commuter rail, heavy rail, light rail, including streetcars,
cable car and trolleybus). They collectively provided 4.5 billion rides
covering 30.3 billion passenger-miles in 2009. What streetcars really
need, though, is streetcar-only streets. One sign of the potential for
streetcars is the success of bus rapid transit (BRT), which is
essentially running buses like trains, but without rails. I like
streetcars better for reasons described in the text, but in a pinch will
go with BRT, too. See Robert Cervero, The Transit Metropolis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), and Annie Weinstock, et al., Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit: A Survey of Select U.S. Cities (New York: Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, 2011), for more.
The streetcar counting game depends on the amount of energy required
per vehicle-mile for cars vs. streetcars. For example, one Seattle
Streetcar trundling down the street in 2009 used 7.98 kWh/ vehicle-mile,
which is equivalent to the energy used by 3.95 Ford F-150 pickups
traveling the same mile, 5.99 Honda Accord LXs, or 10.93 Toyota Priuses.
The actual streetcar-to-car count in your traffic depends on its
vehicle composition; five is approximately what I see on City Island in
the mornings, where there seems a proclivity toward pickup trucks and
SUVs even though the Bronx is a long way from the countryside and rarely
sees lasting snow any more.
Of course you could play the same
game on a per-passenger basis, in which case at average occupancy, 1.29
streetcar passengers could go by for the same amount of energy as every
Prius passenger, 2.19 streetcar passengers for every Accord passenger,
and 3.74 streetcar-straphangers for every pickup truck rider. That is a
potential 29 percent, 119 percent, and 274 percent improvement in energy
efficiency of streetcars over those personal motor vehicle types,
respectively.
According to the historical census from the U.S. Bureau of the Census
(1975; Series Q264-273), the apex of streetcar development in America
was 1917, when the streetcar network extended over 44,835 miles of track
servicing 32,548 miles of streetcar line (some lines had multiple
tracks.) According to William Mott Steuart, Street and Electric Railways, 1902
(Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1905), in 1902 there were
813 street railway companies serving 4,774,211,904 fare-paying
passengers with 1,144,430,426 carmiles traveled (Steuart, Table 7).
Although one might suspect Steuart’s precision, the numbers are
impressive considering the national population in 1902 was only
79,163,000, or just 26 percent of the 2010 American population, which
means in 1902, the average person took 60 streetcar rides. Forty-three
of 48 states plus the District of Columbia had streetcar service that
year, not only in 33 large cities with population of 25,000–100,000
people, but also in 46 towns with population less than 25,000.
4. Notes on “Roads to Rails”
Many works extol the advantages of walking, bicycling and other forms of personal mobility: see Robert Hurst, The Art of Urban Cycling: Lessons from the Street (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2004), David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries (New York: Viking, 2009), and Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities
(Corvallis, OR: Oregon State Univ. Press, 2009), on bicycling, the most
energetically efficient form of personal transportation ever invented;
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001), on walking; and Katie Alvord, Divorce Your Car!: Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2000), and Chris Balish, How to Live Well Without Owning a Car: Save Money, Breathe Easier, and Get More Mileage Out of Life
(Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2006), on getting out of your car. The
number of short trips less than three miles is from analysis of the 2009
National Household Travel Survey. The current rail system, including
freight trains, is described in Freight in America: A New National Picture (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2006); Association of American Railroads, Railroad Facts 2010; and Surface
Freight Transportation: A Comparison of the Costs of Road, Rail, and
Waterways Freight Shipments That Are Not Passed on to Consumers,
Report to the Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures, Committee on Ways
and Means, House of Representatives (Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Accounting Office, 2011). Read Jarrett Walker’s sage advice in Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011).
Transportation planners use the concept of “level of service” (LOS) to
determine transportation capacities. Streets can move more people but
pay the price in delays, congestion, and pollution. To estimate maximum
capacities, I used statistics on LOS-D, which is not good, but not the
worse it could be. Sidewalks with LOS-D levels can accommodate 900
persons per hour per foot of width; cars move 11,000 vehicles per day
per lane at the same LOS. See U.S. Federal Highway Administration, Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009).
Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil
(Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2010), provide a detailed
analysis of the space and energy uses of freight and personal
transportation compared to other modes. They conclude, as I do, that
grid-connected electric rail is the most flexible and efficient way to
move us and our stuff. Their perspective is more global than mine; in
particular, see their analysis for China. Highly recommended. Also see
J. H. Crawford, Carfree Cities (Utrecht, The Netherlands: International Books, 2002).
To read the detailed difficulties of the California High-Speed Rail Plan see the newly released Revised 2012 Business Plan. For some academic viewpoints on the current debate over high-speed rail, see Andrew Ryder, “High Speed Rail,” Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012): 303–05; Bradley W. Lane, “ On the Utility and Challenges of High-Speed Rail in the United States,” Journal of Transport Geography
22 (2012): 282–84; Adib Kanafani, et al., “The Economics of Speed —
Assessing the Performance of High Speed Rail in Intermodal
Transportation,” Procedia — Social and Behavioral Sciences 43
(2012): 692–708; and Javier Campos and Ginés de Rus, “Some Stylized
Facts about High-Speed Rail: A Review of HSR Experiences around the
World,” Transport Policy, 16 (2009): 19–28.
Transportation funding is summarized by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (2012). Construction costs for streetcars are from Ohland and Poticha (op cit.).
5. Notes on “What Happened?”
For more on empty forests, read Kent H. Redford, “The Empty Forest,” BioScience 42.6 (1992): 412–22.
Although I disagree with his interpretation that the streetcar’s
decline was inevitable or that they are forever gone, Jones (op cit.)
nicely lays out the statistics, documenting the rise and fall of the
street railways. See Scott L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1991), and John Anderson Miller, Fares, Please! A Popular History of Trolleys, Horse-Cars, Street-Cars, Buses, Elevateds, and Subways (New York: D. Appleton Century, 1941). The list of streetcar magnates is from Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
(New York: Broadway, 2003). Senator Williams is perhaps more famous for
his conviction for bribery and conspiracy in the “Abdul scam” or Abscam
case of the late 1970s, wherein Federal Bureau of Investigations
personnel disguised as a wealthy Middle Eastern sheik offered bribes to a
number of U.S. politicians, including gullible Pete.
In 1962,
President Kennedy called on Congress to approve federal capital
assistance for mass transportation, saying “To conserve and enhance
values in existing urban areas is essential. But at least as important
are steps to promote economic efficiency and livability in areas of
future development. Our national welfare therefore requires the
provision of good urban transportation, with the properly balanced use
of private vehicles and modern mass transport to help shape as well as
serve urban growth.” In 1964, the Urban Mass Transportation Act passed
and was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. This act required
coordinated planning between mass transit and personal transport in all
urban areas with more than fifty thousand people, and opened up the
first federal funding sources for public transportation. For a detailed
account of the “golden age” of urban transportation planning, see
Michael N. Danielson, Federal-Metropolitan Politics and the Commuter Crisis New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965.
6. Note on MacKays
To measure the flow of energy in time, I like the suggestion of David MacKay to use kilowatt-hours per day. In Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air,
MacKay shows in a straightforward, no-nonsense way the physics of
different forms of energy generation and consumption. As MacKay writes,
one kWh per day is “a nice human-sized unit,” since most personal
household devices use energy at that scale. For example, one 40-watt
bulb left on for 24 hours would use almost 1 kWh per day; your
1000-watt microwave left running continuously day and night would use 24
kWh per day. One kWh per day is also roughly equivalent to the amount
of work you or a human servant can do in a day. MacKay’s book is so
clear and his contributions are so important that I propose we name a
new unit of energy after him: the MacKay, equivalent to 1 kWh per day.
7. Notes on “What Business Does Best”
The current financing model for transit is ripe with the problems of
public managers, subject to the ballot box, trying to run a
transportation company. Consider the case of New York City Transit,
managed by the Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA), by far the
country’s largest and best-used transit agency. Approximately one-third
of all public transit trips made in the country each day are made on
vehicles owned and operated by the MTA; a city the size of Seattle rides
on the subway each night, and yet even with a massive customer base in
the country’s densest city, the New York subway and buses haven’t been
able to break even. The problem is not the energy costs, which in 2010
were less than 5 percent of the operating budget (a mere $131 million),
or even depreciation of the rolling stock, switches and rails, estimated
at $1.29 billion (or 15 percent of the budget); the problem is the
labor costs, which are 70 percent of the budget ($5.76 billion including
postemployment pensions and other costs paid to former transit
workers). Similar high labor costs plague transit systems from Chicago
to Denver to San Francisco. See Ken Gwilliam, “A Review of Issues in
Transit Economics,” Research in Transportation Economics 23.1 (2008): 4–22, and the National Transit Database. For more on the MTA, see Tri-State Transportation Campaign, “Transportation 101: What’s Up with the MTA?”, and then try to decipher the MTA’s own budget numbers available online.
To put these big numbers in perspective, consider them on a per-fare
basis. To break even without government support, each of the 2.31
billion paying passengers on New York City Transit in 2009 would need to
pay a full fare of $2.50 just to cover the costs of the people driving
the trains, staffing the tollbooths, running the back office, and on
retirement from the system. A fare of $3.60 would cover all operating
costs. However current fares are $2.25 per ride, and after various
discounts and reduced price schemes, the average fare paid plummets to
only $1.50 per rider actually received by the system, which leaves a
several billion dollar hole each year in the MTA budget — a gap
currently plugged by dedicated taxes on property, mortgage recording,
business licenses in a seven-county region around New York City, and the
proceeds from the RFK Bridge connecting Manhattan, Queens and the
Bronx.
Meanwhile the longest commutes in the nation? Not stuck
in traffic in Los Angeles. Not trapped on the highways around Atlanta.
The longest commutes are for the poor straphangers in Queens County and
Bronx County, New York, for whom public transportation is the right
choice economically, patriotically and environmentally, but which
returns them long, slow, packed rides, based on schedules enforced by
labor union rules and lack of investment in street-level infrastructure.
See John McCormick and Tim Jones, “New York City Area Has Among Longest U.S. Commutes, Census Estimates Show,” Bloomberg News, Dec. 14, 2010, for overview, and Brian McKenzie and Melanie Rapino, Commuting in the United States: 2009 (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011), for details. The entire story is remarkable, unsustainable, and in need of change.
