In late 2007, President Bush and Congress agreed to raise CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards for the first time in 20 years. The legislation mandates that any car manufacturer’s fleet must average 35 mpg.
Excuse my cynicism, but: whoopdee-friggin-doo.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the current average fuel efficiency in the US is 21 mpg – lower than it was in 1987 (22.1 mpg). During that time, gas prices have risen dramatically and global warming concerns have come to the forefront. Yet the nation continues to guzzle gas.
Unfortunately, the key acronym in this debate may not be CAFE, but rather “VMT.” VMT, or Vehicle Miles Traveled, has consistently been on the rise both in the US and throughout the world. According to the Wall Street Journal, the annual number of miles driven by Americans has risen by 151% from 1977 to 2001. This rate is five times faster than the population growth.
The reasons for the big growth in miles traveled are pretty obvious if you don’t live in the center of a big city endowed with functioning public transport. To make space for ever larger suburban homes, housing developers pushed further and further from city centers and shopping areas. New neighborhoods often had street layouts cluttered with cul de sacs that forced people to drive farther to get to main roads or stores. Local zoning laws — reflecting the preferences of residents — tended to separate commercial and residential uses, and single family from multi-family dwellings.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the money spent on transportation infrastructure was directed to building more and bigger highways. We could have subsidized bullet trains and more light rail systems, but we didn’t.
Unfortunately, biofuels and other alternative fuels don’t provide the answer. Two papers published in Science magazine have brought much-needed attention to the limitations of biofuels, Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt and Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change.
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While in Europe I also bike shared with automatic systems in Stockholm & Oslo (powered by ClearChannel Advertising) as well as Marseille (which, among a few other bike-sharing French cities, is powered by JCDecaux advertising, and uses bikes similar to Lyon and Paris). Copenhagen also has a popular, but more rudamentary coin-deposit bikesharing sytem, with a shopping-cart deposit system.
Also, in Germany, most major cities use the DB national train company’s automatic bikesharing service. Bikes are located outside many train stations and on corners throughout the cities. You simply tap the bike’s code into your cell phone, beam it up, and the satellite unlocks the bike. When you’re done, leave it on a corner somewhere and lock it up again.
The bike program in Paris was great. I find the D.C. maximum of three hours to be interesting but in some ways I like how Paris did it better. After the minimal initial fee it was a progressive scale of free for 30 minutes, 1 euro first 1/2, 2 for the second, and so on. I found I could get almost anywhere in 30 minutes but it never cost more than 1 euro to do it. With European gas prices that was amazing. I just hope they implement this in NYC and Philly.