ECONOMICS AND TRADE | Achieving growth through open markets
03 December 2008
Greener Transit Rides High on Energy, Climate Concerns
Portland, Oregon, shows it works best when tied to “smart growth”
This is the third article in a series on Portland’s smart growth.
Portland, Oregon — This city got lucky when the private company that ran its public transportation system went bankrupt in the 1960s. The situation created an opportunity to build from scratch a transit system that would fit Portland’s “smart growth” strategy — limited suburban expansion revolving around compact, self-contained neighborhoods.
Since then, the city has built an extensive and well-functioning network of bus, light-rail, and street-car connections to limit pollution from cars and ease traffic on highways and city streets. Some 15 percent of its population uses the network, making Portland one of the top 20 U.S. cities in public transit use.
In many other cities, where suburban sprawl continued unabated, car commutes became longer while traffic congestion and related air pollution worsened. Many city governments, often with federal support, have responded by building … more highways.
As a result, “we’ve got a lot of roads but not necessarily well-built cities,” said Rex Burkholder, a council member of Metro, the Portland regional government.
The wake-up call came in recent years when oil prices skyrocketed and the prospect of global warming became alarming. Even cities where autos had been king have discovered the benefits of public transit. Today, almost every major U.S. city looks at transit improvement options, and making public transport “greener” has become trendy, said Erin Flynn, director of economic development at the Portland Development Commission.
According to the American Public Transportation Association, 16 percent of America’s mass transit systems use alternative power sources. In Portland, regular buses are powered by low-sulfur diesel and minibuses by biodiesel. In a few other places, city buses run on natural gas or biodiesel derived from used restaurant oil. Several municipalities — including Portland, Indianapolis and Minneapolis — run pilot projects with hybrid-electric buses or plan to use them in the near future. In Denver, business leaders for the first time joined the campaign to build a light-rail system.
Transit-modernization efforts are not limited to grand schemes. For example, New York’s comprehensive transit plan calls for such small-scale improvements as digitally controlled traffic signals and energy-saving bulbs at subway and bus stations. In Portland, the transit agency adjusted the transmission on buses to improve fuel efficiency by 15 percent.
A number of cities also provide incentives — discounts and direct grants — for commuters to switch from cars to trains and buses. Disincentives to discourage driving, such as tolls, ramp signals and higher parking costs, are more controversial and often politically unacceptable. Some cities cautiously tinker with such disincentives to see how much the public will accept.
Experts caution that transit systems must be well designed and modernization efforts well thought out to make economic and environmental sense. Brad Templeton, a software and Internet entrepreneur who researched U.S. transit, said in his blog that, in some big cities, massive carpooling would produce more energy savings than the use of their transit systems. Buses and trains tend to be overcrowded during rush hours and underused at all other times, a pattern that undermines economic efficiency. (Portland’s transit agency is trying to get major employers to differentiate their work hours.)
A transit system can be only as green as its power sources. If, for example, it uses electricity derived from hydropower, the benefits are clear; if power is derived from coal, they are less so. Some of the first-generation alternative-fuel vehicles are more costly to maintain and not as energy-efficient as advertised. (Portland is ready to give up on its pilot project with hybrid-electric buses because its results are disappointing, according to Burkholder.) And efforts to discourage driving by limiting access to highways or highway lanes often lead to more congestion and air pollution.
Burkholder is quick to say that the debate about transit often misses the most important point: Public transportation is a means to an end — economic development, healthy environment and a higher quality of life — not an end in itself. He said the best designed transit system will not produce desired results if, for example, it serves a sprawling city. According to studies cited by Burkholder, people who live in denser neighborhoods consume less energy and use less transportation per capita than those in typical neighborhoods. Thus, the way to deal with the energy and climate-change challenges is not to tinker with transit, Burkholder said, but to make an urban growth strategy more sustainable and design a transit system that meets its goals.
Greater Portland hopes to achieve this and accommodate an expected 50 percent population increase by 2035.
However, the Portland metropolitan region, like many other U.S. metropolitan areas that require huge infrastructure investments, faces a large financing shortfall.
“We are trying to look at how to focus public money to trigger private investment,” Burkholder said. In partnership with the private sector, he said, Portland hopes to meet the challenge.
