The new road forward might well be on rails.

Straight Goods: January 20, 2009

General Motors and Chrysler are facing some angry public criticism after pleading for and receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer aid. There’s no need to be too hard on them. After all, auto corporations produce and promote products, and lobby legislators for an easier ride — that’s their business. Our political leaders are the ones who (are supposed to) make (intelligent) transportation policy — that’s supposed to be our (the public’s) business.

Can we do better than perpetuating our grossly inefficient and expensive car-centred system for getting around? This is a good time to ask that question.

Helping Chrysler and GM produce cars won’t produce car buyers.

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The inefficiency of our transportation system starts at home. Every year, the average motorist forks over more than $10,000 in after tax income (the cost to own and operate a car) just to participate in the system. Next to a house, a car is usually the biggest investment a family will make. Unlike a house, a car sits empty 95 percent of the time, and depreciates right after being driven off the dealer’s lot.

Communities are victims of a related waste of resources. The lives and health of citizens are squandered. The public purse is drained to build, maintain, and police roads. Since 1980, car crashes have claimed over one million lives in Canada and the US — and caused tens of millions of injuries and disabilities. Property damage from accidents in Canada costs billions of dollars each year. And, according to Transport Canada, traffic congestion carries a $3.7 billion annual price tag for our major cities.

Our nation pays an equally high price in wasted natural resources. Several millions of barrels of oil are refined and pumped into Canada’s 17 million cars and light trucks every week — then puffed into our air and atmosphere as toxics. Traffic pollution leads to premature deaths in our major cities: 1,400 victims in Toronto alone each year, according to the city’s health authority.

Land resources are another casualty. Historians may marvel at how much fertile land we paved over just to store our cars. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from major sources like cars and light trucks make global warming a more urgent crisis than the economic one. Tail pipe emissions are just the start of the problem — building roads, manufacturing cars, and extracting and refining oil resources like the tar sands also create massive amounts of GHGs.

There are alternatives.

Mass transit spreads the cost of buying and operating vehicles over more users. Unlike private cars, buses and streetcars don’t sit idle while we shop. The professional drivers of transit vehicles keep us safer — accident rates per passenger- kilometer are a fraction of that of automobiles. Fewer vehicles on our roads means less congestion and less need for road space. Transit vehicles use far less fuel per passenger and therefore emit a fraction of the GHGs and other poisons of private automobiles. Re-directing some of the high individual spending on cars to public transit would produce a first class system — safe, fast, reliable, efficient and clean — and leave money in people’s pockets.

Car advocates will protest that cars’ engines can be made more efficient and that cars themselves provide important convenience for their owners, and jobs for society.

First, improvements in fuel efficiency are more than cancelled out by increases in overall fuel consumption. The problem is the increasing number of vehicles and kilometers travelled. Even the much-touted California standard for new cars — around 41 miles per gallon by 2016 — (presently stalled by a lawsuit by car-makers) will merely stabilize, at current levels, the total GHG emissions from all cars on California roads by 2020. In other words, there will be no reduction in overall GHG levels — just an improvement in the carbon intensity of individual cars.

A far more aggressive European Union proposal would require car-makers to meet a 94 mpg standard by 2025, achieving CO2 emissions per kilometre of 60 grams. But Transport Canada data shows that the GHG emission rate per passenger on a Canadian mass transit vehicle is already significantly lower than the 2025 EU target. Improved occupancy rates in transit vehicles could cut emissions even more.

If you really have your heart set on a zero-emission vehicle, put on a helmet and ride a bicycle. Zero emission cars will soon become a reality, but only in TV commercials. Hydrogen and electric cars, for instance, still need an energy source (dirty coal for the foreseeable future) to produce their power.

Second, when it comes to jobs, Ontario’s auto industry has followed a path of declining numbers for years, with car-makers sending jobs south even while making billions of profits. Helping Chrysler and GM produce cars won’t produce buyers — a useful consideration, except for make-work projects.

Moving towards better mass transit, on the other hand, can bring hundreds of thousands of new jobs developing and building streetcars, buses and trains; building the necessary mass transit infrastructure; and operating transit vehicles and systems. Indeed, according to the Sierra Club, investment in public transportation creates 19 percent more jobs than investment in roads and bridges.

Good mass transit can include a supporting role for private vehicles — of a different type. Short range, low power, low cost and low emission vehicles — the Canadian-made ZENN vehicle comes to mind (as do bicycles) — would get people who live in low density suburbs to mass transit nodes. The high cost of the products of mainstream car-makers drains buyers of the incentive to pay an additional fee to take public transit. Is there really a good reason why groceries must be transported in vehicles that can go 0-to-100 kph in 5 seconds or achieve speeds of 180 kilometres per hour, particularly when city traffic averages under 40?

Finally, suggesting our car-based system is “convenient” is like calculating only the time savings from speeding through red lights. Yes, cars are “convenient” — even make us “independent” — but are we including time sacrificed working for our cars, cost of accidents, depletion of finite resources, foreign oil dependence (most of eastern Canada’s supply comes from abroad), diversion of public funds, high fatality rates for school children, smog and global warming?

Supporters of the status quo suggest public transit needs too much in public subsidies. Nice try. Private car-makers have received immeasurably greater subsidies through public investment for road infrastructure and maintenance necessary to accommodate their delicate products (even a small snow storm causes turmoil, and requires tens of thousands of tonnes of toxic salt). Other burdens like poisoned air and global warming are simply socialized, or exported. Road tolls and carbon taxes would begin to put more of the real cost of our car-based system on the motorists who use it.

Some political leaders are beginning to understand the problem.

Toronto, for instance, has an ambitious plan to expand its streetcar network, potentially setting in motion an Ontario revival of clean electric rail networks. The City of Windsor had the province’s first electric streetcar system in the 1880s. (There was a similar, successful system across the river in Detroit.) Other Ontario cities like Niagara Falls, Kitchener, and Ottawa followed suit until the 1930s and 1940s when private automobiles took over. The irony is that Toronto’s current plan may be delayed by the federal government, which is being slow to commit needed funding.

Now might be the time to apply collective solutions like mass transit to communal problems — instead of trying to improve cars that serve individuals. Once we seriously consider where we are going and how we get there — and the high cost of the status quo — we might decide there is a better road to be travelled.