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Reading Chuck Plunkett's article, the Prius
Effect,
in Sunday's Post inspired a thought
experiment.
In essence, the article argues that as automobiles
become more fuel-efficient, their carbon footprint
(the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide produced
per passenger mile) correspondingly shrinks. Indeed, it
shrinks below the carbon footprint of light rail, whose
streetcars are generally powered by electricity produced
from coal.
Calculating a carbon footprint can be exceedingly complicated. My winter woodstove burns biomass from the current carbon cycle, rather than fossil fuels from some ancient carbon cycle, so presumably it's wholesome. But the cordwood is generally cut with gasoline-powered chainsaws and hauled to town with gasoline-powered vehicles, all with carbon footprints.
Then you need to get into the manufacture, shipping and maintenance of the cast-iron stove (let's not forget the annual visit by our chimney sweep, based in Leadville, and the electrical consumption of his cleaning equipment), the wood-cutter's trucks and tools, the ratio of dead wood (emits carbon dioxide as it rots) to recently live wood (absorbing carbon dioxide before the tree was felled) in the wood pile, the amount and source of the electricity used by my little wood-splitter -- reckoning all this could take weeks, and the numbers could change with every cord.
So to avoid all that work, let's get to the thought experiment. Posit an extremely energy efficient automobile that has no carbon footprint. For our purposes, we can imagine it runs from rooftop solar panels or batteries charged by nuclear power plants or, for that matter, pixie dust. The point is that it is cheap to run and does not consume fossil fuels.
All our transportation problems are thereby solved, right?
Not exactly.
1) Cars need roads, and roads need maintenance, everything from snow removal to rebuilding bridges as they decay.
Traditionally, we've paid for that with fuel taxes, and without fuel to tax, there would have to be another method. We could go to toll roads built and operated by private entities, or some sort of Big Brother system based on mileage and vehicle weight, or perhaps funding from general tax revenues.
Thanks to reduced driving and better fuel economy, we've
already seen the start of creative highway financing
from our General Assembly. Instead of taking the honest and
sensible course of making the public case for a gasoline
tax increase to meet a highway funding shortfall, the
legislature raised auto registration fees, which have at
best a tenuous connection to highway wear-and-tear. More
unfair taxes loom.
2) Our thought-experiment Imaginary Green Car doesn't pollute and it has no carbon footprint. But as noted, it will use roads. And the more of them on the road, the more congestion, gridlock and general aggravation.
Thus there will be a demand for more freeways and more lanes on existing freeways, as well as wider streets to handle the traffic. More space devoted to roads means less space available for productive enterprise.
Meanwhile, a light-rail corridor has a much smaller physical footprint, even if it does have a carbon footprint in our thought experiment.
3) Where do we park all those cars? About 30 percent of
the typical American city is paved either with roads (see
above) or parking lots. More cars mean more need for paved
parking, which has pernicious effects ranging from urban
heat islands
to polluted and intensified storm-sewer
runoff. Meanwhile, you don't have to worry about where the
streetcar will park after you step off it.
So even if we could build cars with no carbon footprint, that wouldn't come close to solving urban transportation problems. The carbon footprint may be the fashionable tool of analysis these days, but it can obscure as much as it illuminates.
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