Planetary Thinking

Archive for the ‘Cities’ Category

The Kind of Plans the Planet Needs

In Carbon neutrality, Carbon Zero on March 27, 2012 at 11:37 am

A few people have asked me what I think of a recent study finding that in California cities (and perhaps by extrapolation other cities) having a city climate plan doesn’t seem to produce any deeper emissions cuts than would have otherwise happened in environmentally conscious cities.

What Will Make Our Cities Truly Green?

I don’t have time for a detailed response, but here are a few quick thoughts. Some of the furor around the study seems to stem from a degree of people fitting the findings to their viewpoints. These views have merit, but they don’t tell us a lot about what the study actually says.

Atlantic Cities sums up the actual findings pretty well:

“[The study] looked at the climate plans and greenhouse gas emission reductions of cities in California to find that there doesn’t seem to be any causal connection between greenhouse gas reductions and climate action plans.

“That’s not to say that emissions aren’t going down, but that the plans aimed at bringing them down aren’t necessarily what’s driving the change. [The study's author] says it’s not so much that the climate plans are driving emissions reductions, but rather that environmentally conscious tendencies of the people in these cities are reducing emissions [my emphasis] – and creating an atmosphere in which the creation of a climate plan is politically viable.”

Which, I suspect, is probably largely true (I haven’t had a chance to dig into his numbers), though my take on the meaning of this finding is different than some other observers.

I think climate plans haven’t made much of a difference because in North America most of them aren’t designed to make much of a difference. To really drive down emissions in a city, you need to change its systems: you need to grow a much denser city, actively de-prioritize cars (not just build a few bike lanes), raise building standards across the board (not just encourage a few green buildings), make possible new forms of living and consumption and aggressively improve the climate performance of energy, water, waste and other infrastructure systems.

To do this, you have to get at the core of how a city works. You have to change things that really matter. Only a handful of climate plans in the US are integrated with bold land use, transportation and infrastructure plans. But that’s what it takes.

So, my take on this debate is not that climate plans don’t work, but that we haven’t yet seen the kinds of climate plan the planet needs. What kind of thinking might go into such plans? What kind of city might they aim at?

Well, I’m just finishing my own attempt to imagine what such a city might look like, my booklet Carbon Zero. Stay tuned!

How Google’s Estimated Driving Costs Misses the Train

In Bright Green, Carbon Zero, Cities, Design, Walksheds on February 23, 2012 at 10:50 am

I am a huge fan of Google maps, using them pretty much every day as a core part of my navigation through life. They’ve done a lot of great things (like offering built-in transit directions and walking maps). I’m a fan.

Google's "estimated driving costs" tool

But, but… Google has added a new tool — “estimated driving costs” — that’s broken, conceptually and factually. I think it may even be actively un-helpful. I want to riff a bit how it’s broken, and why that matters, and what it says about the American debate on transportation and cities.

First, a caveat: I am sure that this tool was provided with the best of intentions. I’d bet money that the developers’ thought process went something like this: more metrics must equal more informed decisions, which is an obvious good, right? I’d also bet that at least part of the intention was to show transit users that for many trips, they’re saving money, thus bolstering the case for taking transit. I’d further bet that the budget for creating this tool was far from vast, and the developers did the best they could with a new idea and limited resources.

But the conceptual map underlying the “estimated driving costs” tool and the calculation chosen to provide its result are both deeply flawed, meaning that the tool doesn’t actually offer good metrics for decision-making, and in some ways undercuts the case for transit by not actually comparing apples and apples when setting cars and transit against each other.

This a blog post, not a research paper, and I don’t have time to fully explore and argue every aspect of the challenge. I hope this can start a discussion and others will debate the issues at greater length. Here, though, are obvious flaws I can see without digging:


A) Flaws in how the number is calculated:

1. “The cost of driving is based on the distance driving between your start and end addresses, multiplied by the standard cost per mile that tax regulations allow businesses to deduct.” Because the mileage deduction is calculated for “average” American drivers across the entire rural – exurban – suburban – urban transect, and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) rises as density drops, the IRS deduction is almost certainly not an accurate prediction of the cost of urban car ownership per mile (because if you drive less, but pay the same in car payments, maintenance and insurance, each mile you drive costs you more). The direct costs of car ownership are likely considerably higher per mile for urbanites who drive infrequently.

2a. I strongly suspect the IRS mileage numbers don’t actually include all the direct costs of ownership (for instance, I doubt the cost of owning and paying a mortgage on (or paying a rent premium for) a garage or driveway is ever factored in)… but others can probably address this better than I can.

2b. On an even larger scale, of course, the driving costs engine doesn’t even allow for the possibility of not owning a car at all. Simply owning a car with the attendant costs of purchasing, maintaining, storing and insuring that car, but also the costs of financing all of the above and paying the appropriate taxes, is expensive, even before you ever turn the ignition. Because car-free life means you are saving all those costs, at this point, the driving-vs.-transit cost comparisons for individual trips break down completely for many urban dwellers. (This is also why, when the time spent earning the money to pay for owning a car is factored in, driving is actually seen to be considerably less of a time-saver than it appears.)

3. Google driving costs engine “doesn’t consider” tolls or parking fees. This is sort of crazy, as in many cities the cost of parking alone runs higher than the entire driving costs Google engine cites for some of the short trips I searched out of curiosity.

4. The driving costs engine obviously doesn’t count at all the indirect costs to drivers of driving (like the costs to your health of auto-dependence and its increased risk or obesity and heart disease, or the increased likelihood of death in a car accident [riding transit is dramatically safer than driving], and so on).

5. On an even geekier note, the Google comparison fails to account for the fact that driving and transit are different kinds of trips. People who drive go one place, park, go another, park, and so on, scattering their trips across the landscape based on a variety of factors, of which distance is only one concern (and depending on the person, perhaps a not very important concern, as evidenced by people who will drive two miles to save 10 cents a gallon on the price of gas). People who walk/bike and take transit (the modes are inexorably linked) tend to string their trips, meaning they plan routes that will allow them to accomplish multiple tasks along the route (for instance, grabbing coffee on the way to the transit stop, meeting a friend for lunch nearby the office, picking up the dry cleaning or doing the shopping on the way home) instead of making a number of discrete trips to complete those tasks. The result is that people who use transit take fewer trips overall, and travel shorter distances. This produces my favorite odd urbanism effect, that of “transit leverage.” Transit leverage, simply put, tells us that a person traveling a mile by public transportation does not therefore simply travel a mile less by car: in the U.S., he or she actually drives between 2.9 and 9.0 miles less (depending on the characteristics of the neighborhood and transit system). So, to be a fair comparison, the driving costs engine should in theory figure out how to account for the trips that the transit user isn’t making because she or he didn’t drive in the first place.**

B) Flaws in how the driving costs tool is framed, and in the conceptual map underlying the tool:

1) As far as I can tell, it only shows up when asking for transit directions, not when asking driving directions. Therefore, the obvious implication is that when taking transit, we should consider whether or not we’re saving money; but when driving, we should just worry about the fastest way to get there.

2) In a time when exurban conservative politicians are fiercely attacking public transportation (while lauding the car and promising $2/gallon gas), we need to be more rigorous in looking at the true costs of car ownership both to us as individuals and families and to our neighborhoods, cities and nation. To provide a tool that severely underestimates the cost of using cars by limiting what it counts is to offer a certain amount of momentum to ideological and counter-factual arguments about transit’s costs to society. If we’re going to put a number to these things, let’s make it a true-cost number.

3) There is no mention at all made of externalities. Because, though the costs of driving are inarguably higher for many-to-most people in cities than the costs of taking transit, the costs of cars to society and the planet are huge. From climate change to oil spills, geopolitical instability to highway welfare, sprawling exurbs to broken health care, cars exact a terrible toll on all of us. Choosing not to drive once is a small, perhaps positive choice. Choosing to drive rarely or never is probably the single best lifestyle change a person who cares about the world can make. (And though the societal costs of driving are the subject of great debate, and range from large to inconceivable based on what we choose to count, a cost calculator that in the 21st century completely excludes the externalities of an action is not making the contribution it might.)

I could go on, but you get the point.

What could Google do to fix this? Well, given the incredible access to data and in-house genius that Google has, it could choose to completely remake this tool, creating a completely new measurement that aims at a full-and-complete cost accounting of these individual trips. It could look to find a way to service trip-stringing and compare it to trip-scattering, showing transit users how many trips they’re avoiding by using transit and walking. It could remake the whole service, moving partially towards meeting Walkscore‘s excellent work offering information for people who live in neighborhoods and not at exit ramps: this could mean, for instance, offering an engine that would attempt to calculate the VMTs a person would likely accumulate living in different places with a menu of different destinations and trip choices; or a tool that allowed individual users to aggregate trip data and calculate their actual transportation expenditures over time, whether driving or riding/walking. Again, I could go on and on, and Google could probably find a way to come up a practical version with every idea I reeled off. All it would take is the will to make Google maps as excellent a service as it could be. The result would be an extremely useful set of tools, and perhaps some momentum towards a country that makes smarter choices about where to live and how to get around.

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**This, by the way, is also why many arguments against the utility of transit in lowering climate emissions are so deeply flawed. For, even in cases where it’s true that a mile ride on a train produces no fewer (or even, conceivably, more) direct emissions than a mile of driving, they are not actually comparable on a mile-by-mile basis, and the overall life-system that transit in a walkable neighborhood produces is without doubt a much lower emissions way of life than an auto-dependent one. The more things you include in your transportation emissions calculations, the better and better walkable urbanism served by transit looks.

A little update on Carbon Zero: Illustrations, Manuscript, Talks

In Carbon neutrality, Carbon Zero on October 26, 2011 at 9:18 am

I just wanted to give a quick progress report on Carbon Zero, for those who are following the project. Continuing to work away here. Exciting progress.

The manuscript is coming together. Now for expert feedback and copy-editing and it’s ready!

OPEN has come up with the first round of iconic illustrations. We’re still working on some of them, but I’ll be posting some here when it’s ready.

Finally, I’ve given a couple talks around these ideas, exploring the material with an audience. One was at the Royal Geographical Society. One was at the London School of Economics.

LSE posted a podcast of the talk. You can listen here.

(Thanks to Kyra Davis for setting up the LSE event!)

So, more news soon, but things are getting closer!

Thanks again for all your support, encouragement and patience!

-Alex

Pogo-sharing

In Walksheds on October 11, 2011 at 11:09 am

I jokingly floated the idea of an urban pogo-stick sharing network last week. Weirdly, everyone seems to love it. I have no interest in trying to build one, but I chuckle every time I think of commuters pogo-ing down the sidewalk.

Future-Ready Cities: Why the capacity and willingness to change trump everything.

In Bright Green, Carbon neutrality, Cities, Innovation on August 18, 2011 at 3:06 pm

Anybody who thinks at all seriously about climate and our other planetary crises has probably thought at least a little about their own choices and prospects.

Many of us wonder whether we live somewhere that will be a good place to be in 10 or 20 or 30 years. People are starting to think about questions like, What will the local climate be like in coming years? Will the local infrastructure prove rugged in the face of natural disasters and economic shocks? How good is the water supply, the energy supply, the food supply? How heavily dependent on fossil fuel is the local economy? What will sea level rise mean to this place? A few people are actively relocating solely for big picture reasons, but right now, I hear it more often as a concern, one piece of the calculus used in making life choices.

So, how do we choose?

There are some places that are dealing with natural attributes and human legacies that will be almost impossible to address (Bangladesh, for instance, will find it very hard to adapt to sea level rise under the best circumstances; many auto-dependent American suburbs will likely experience economic distress as resource and energy costs rise; the US Desert Southwest will be extremely stressed by both anticipated heat waves and fossil-fuel dependent land uses and economies). How temperate the local climate is likely to be, how stable the surrounding ecosystem services are likely to remain, how wise (or lucky) the region has been in growing energy-efficient cities, how rich the local people are, and how much strength and integrity their national governments have — all these will matter, undoubtedly.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that readiness to act matters more than any of these. Places that invest boldly in the next decades in ruggedizing their systems, growing civic resilience and building up the local capacity for innovation, adaptation and rapid cultural change… these are the places that will be most prepared for the storms on the horizon.

Being a city region ready to meet the future (whatever it looks like) is more important than being luckiest in location or wealthiest at the moment. Successful engagement with future turmoil will demand leadership, strong civic cultures, commitment to change, tough choices, aggressive action on big systems. No city out there is moving fast enough, yet, but some are beginning to show signs of understanding the scope, scale and speed of the change demanded of them. Others look great now, but are changing only incrementally and slowly. There comes a point where lack of action means further incremental change can no longer keep up with exponential problems.

Personally, I’d rather live in a city that’s moving fast to meet the future, than one that started father ahead, but is stuck and complacent, or simply unwilling to go beyond mere incremental change. If I became confident that any city was in fact poised to be a real global leader, I’d move in a heartbeat.

I know I’m not alone. In fact, I suspect that a city that really through itself to the forefront of urban innovation (and had a clear commit to further innovation ahead) would find itself a magnet for civic talent, entrepreneurial efforts and global investment.

It may be a city few of us think of a leader now (though I think several well-established metros are positioned to rocket ahead, if they ignite bolder strategies). It may be a city in the developing world, though most of the obvious lead contenders have problems at least as big (and politics at least as stuck) as any of their developed world competitors. I doubt, unfortunately, that it will be an American city, unless an absolutely extraordinary leader comes to the front in one of them: the gridlock is too severe, the legacy of sprawl too large, the civic culture too frayed and poisoned. I would love to be proven totally wrong.

Wherever it may emerge, the edge a leading bright green city gains in the next 20 years could put it in a position of increasing prosperity for a century, even in the midst of hard and turbulent times. The solutions it invents and tests could also benefit the entire world, even help smooth some of the rough waters ahead. The best possible scenario would be one in which several (or many) cities hurl themselves into fierce competition to lead in a bright green urban boom.

Cloudcharging

In Carbon neutrality, Energy, Uncategorized on April 25, 2011 at 12:27 pm

People who’ve followed my writing will know that I’m deeply skeptical of electric vehicles as a solution, not because I don’t think they lower emissions (they do), but because

a) so much of our lack of sustainability stems from the direct and indirect effects of auto-dependence as a system, from the roads and infrastructure to the sprawling land use to the health and ecological impacts; and EVs do little to fix any of that;

b) at current rates of adoption, there is simply no way to electrify the global car fleet in the scant two or three decades we have to create carbon zero societies.

That said, where we do have cars, they should clearly be EVs. And since a large barrier to wider adoption is EVs’ limited range, PlugShare is a pretty cool idea for an ap: a tool that maps available charging stations, shared private outlets and so on, helping drivers with vehicles that have limited ranges to plot out longer trips.

This might be, it seems to me, a step towards a more general availability of charging stations for EVs misted over the landscape, a sort of cloudcharging function.

Deep Walkability

In Cities, Walksheds on April 5, 2011 at 8:31 am

(This piece originally appeared on Worldchanging.com)

Walkability is clearly critical to bright green cities. You can’t advocate for car-free or car-sharing lives if people need cars to get around, and the enticement to walk is key to making density wonderful, to providing realistic transit options, to making smaller greener homes compelling and to growing the kind of digitally-suffused walksheds that post-ownership ideas seem to demand. So knowing how to define “walkable” is important.

That said, I’m skeptical of most measurements of walkability. Though I’m a fan of efforts like WalkScore, I think it’s important to acknowledge their very real limitations. WalkScore, for instance, is a measurement not of walkability but proximity. If we’re going to make decisions based on algorithms, we’d better make sure we’re using the right formula.

The big thing I think falls out of most walkability formulas is a quality critical to the actual experience of walkability, and that’s the extent to which the place in which you live is connected (by walking routes and easy transit) to other places worth walking to.

Unfortunately, in North America many great neighborhoods are islands of comparative pedestrian friendliness in seas of sprawl and pedestrian hostility. They may offer a lot of services close by — you may be able to walk to buy a quart of milk or drink a cup of coffee in the cafe — but going anywhere else involves a choice of long walks through forbidding surroundings and along dangerous streets or unhappy waits for inconvenient and underfunded transit.

To live in such a neighborhood is to understand the full impact of a half century of planning and public investment that treated a person walking as at best an afterthought, and very often as an inconvenience to cars that ought to be discouraged. No matter how great the cafes, sidewalks and street trees are in these ‘hoods, they are not actually truly walkable because unless you want to feel like a prisoner trapped within their boundaries, you still must own a car.

The true test of walkability I think is this: Can you spend a pleasant half hour walking or on transit and end up at a variety of great places? The quality of having a feast of options available when you walk out your front door is what I’m starting to think of as “deep walkability.”

It’s this deep walkability that ought to be the top priority driving urban design and development in our communities. We ought to be looking at how to knit our walkable communities together and how to make friendlier the unwalkable streets between them.

In most cities, serious walkers (and bikers) share stories about the routes they’ve taken, hidden paths through the fractured landscape that let you walk safely and happily from one people-centered place to another. A killer urban ap would be one that revealed these urban songlines. A smart urban policy would be one that aimed to weave new walking routes through the whole urban fabric, until places walkers feared to tread were the exception rather than the expectation.

Basically, that would mean redevelopment and curative street design, which in turn often means making a conscious choice to slow down car traffic, to convert road lanes to train rails or bike trails, and to disincentivize parking and auto-oriented development in favor of sidewalk-focused density and transit-oriented development.

I think we need to recognize that the idea we can “balance” cars and sidewalk life is a dangerous illusion. The only way to make pedestrians and bikers safe and welcome is to slow cars down, to make it clear that the place through which they’re driving is one in which they need to pay attention, and, whenever possible, to get those cars off the streets and out of way of trains, bus, bikes and strollers.

Assert the primacy of people enjoying the act of walking, and density begins to become community, transit begins to become an essential amenity rather than a safety net, and life begins to orient around experiences and access rather than accumulation and convenience. The act of walking is, I think more and more, at the very foundation of every other bright green possibility.

A place that embraces deep walkability could almost be considered the very definition of a great city.

Carbon-neutral Seattle, Carbon-neutral Delhi

In Bright Green, Carbon neutrality, Cities on February 21, 2011 at 7:21 pm

Sunrise in New Delhi, by Alex Steffen

Sunrise in New Delhi

Cities and their metro regions are where climate change happens. Counting and assigning responsibility for climate emissions is an arcane art, but if we make consumers responsible for the emissions of the things they use (making urbanites, rather than the farmer, responsible for the emissions from the steak they eat, say), it appears that the large majority of the world’s climate emissions come from less than 200 metropolitan era. The top 1,000 cities’ emissions essentially define the problem of climate change.

Cities, therefore, are a natural leverage point for climate action. Create carbon-neutral cities, and you will have gone a long way to solving the climate crisis. In addition, cities offer a unique leverage point, large enough to make a difference, but small enough for citizens to make a change.

Back in 2009, I gave two talks in Seattle in which I proposed that Seattle claim a North American leadership position by becoming a (net) carbon-neutral city by 2030. The idea proved pretty instantly popular (one Councilmember told me he has never seen meetings as consistently packed as those the City holds on carbon neutrality), and the City Council adopted the goal of carbon neutrality in February 2010… but without a firm commitment to the timeline.

Since then — and I’ll have more to write about this later — the debate within both City Government and civic circles has produced a lot of push-back from the powers that be on the pace of change that would be demanded by a 2030 goal. There are many reasons for that opposition — some legitimate concerns about the realities of changing a major city, some mere turf-guarding, some political maneuvering (like Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, who says he supports rapid climate action, but doesn’t want to support the goal of carbon neutrality lest it give the City Council grounds to avoid hard choices now), some simply reactionary (Seattle has more than its share of NIMBYs and denialists) — but the combined effect has been, it would seem, to vent a lot of the momentum out of the effort. Certainly Seattle is fast losing the initiative that might have been gained by clear, bold and immediate action.

In the meantime, the idea of carbon-neutral cities is spreading quickly (in case it’s not clear, I’m no neutral observer here and I’m glad to have played a role in its spread). Copenhagen plans to be carbon-neutral by 2025. Five cities in the Finnish Carbon Neutral Municipalities project have committed to an 80% direct reduction in emissions by 2030, making net carbon neutrality an easy reach with offsets and other financial instruments. These Finnish projects are already way ahead of schedule, too: Uusikaupunki cut its emissions 14% in 2010, and is committed to 30% by the end of the year, for instance. Vancouver already aims for a 30% reduction by 2020, and friends tell me that momentum for carbon-neutrality by 2030 is building fast.

Nor is business lagging here. Lots of small businesses have already gone carbon-neutral with a mix of efficiency changes, green power purchases and a bit of offsetting. Now bigger companies are moving fast as well. Just recently, for instance, the Co-operative Group (the UK’s fifth largest retailer, employing 120,000 people) pledges net carbon neutrality by the end of 2012. (Another post will examine the benefits and perils of these kinds of pledges.)

All of this, however, pales in significance next to the efforts starting to emerge in the megacities of the Global South. Lagos, Sao Paulo, Dakar and Bogota all have serious discussions afoot about achieving climate neutrality in the next 20-30 years. New Delhi has gone even farther.

In a conference being held now, Delhi officials are plotting out a plan for taking the world’s 4th largest city carbon-neutral by 2030. As Chief Secretary Rakesh Mehta told reporters:

“We have been witnessing economic growth of over 10% in the past few years. …[W]e will have to meet their energy demand but without compromising on our green agenda. This will require energy efficient methods, energy conservation and tapping wealth from waste.”

“Our per capita energy consumption is among the lowest in the world, a third of Beijing’s per capita demand. However, there are all chances that it may rise with increase in our consumption patterns. Hence, it is very important that we have a long-term plan to combat climate change and incorporate it as a matter of principal in policy matters.”

“We want to make Delhi a carbon-neutral city.”

Of course, vast challenges lie ahead of these good people as they work to bring 24 million residents along a bright green development path. Huge questions have only begun to be answered. But if the people of Delhi can answer those questions at such a large scale, their example will inform the world.

It is a commonplace in climate debates in North America (and, unfortunately, increasingly in Europe as well) for conservatives to make the claim that climate action here will simply mean handing a competitive advantage to firms in developing countries with laxer regulations. That argument is a relic. Climate action produces far more economic advantages than costs, helping spawn new industries, reducing materials and energy costs and spurring innovation.

What’s more, it’s not at all clear to me that the other part of the argument — that the Global South will pollute its way to competitive advantage — is at all a given. Indeed, I see more and more signs that at least some nations are moving far more quickly than the U.S. and perhaps as quickly as world leaders like Denmark. In 2030, the most ambitious, creative, transformative carbon-neutral cities may well be found in nations like India, Brazil and China.