Killing the Car Not So Easy, Even Among Mass Transit Fans
By John O'Dell August 4, 2008
Portland, Ore., encourages mass transit with convenience and cheap fares. It costs $2.05 for the 11-mile trip from downtown to the Portland International airport on the city's electric trains.
B y John O'Dell, Senior Editor
There are a lot of people trying to get us to give up on the ides of independent, personal transportation - i.e., the private automobile.
But I've come away from a two-day "Meeting of the Minds" program in Portland, Ore., with a new example of just how difficult it will be to kill the spirit of independence that has made ownership and use of private vehicles in the U.S. as sacrosanct as the right to vote.
The upshot of the program , convened to examine ways of making our cities more sustainable, was that we are rapidly approaching the point of no return - some pessimists believe we stepped over the threshold years ago.
Change Is Needed
We have got to make some radical and rapid changes in the way we approach transportation if we wants our urban core, indeed our entire society, to survive the 21st Century.
It was largely an urban planning and policy wonk crowd, so while there was some enthusiasm for hastening the arrival of plug-in hybrids, (Toyota Motor Co. was a principal sponsor) there was little discussion of other green transportation alternatives that would leave people with personal vehicles.
Instead, the focus was more on things that could be done to get us out of cars, or at least out of single-occupant cars, and into carpools, transit buses, trains and other means of mass transit.
Pay to Go
Suggestions abounded for carbon taxes, higher gasoline taxes, toll roads and other plans that would have us pay for the privilege of driving. Such disincentives probably would make most of us greener drivers, simply by making us cut down on the amount of driving we do in order to have a few bucks each month for things like food and rent.
I'm not opposed to such ideas - after all, if we don't change the way we do things, we sooner than later may not be able to do things at all.
But there needs to be as part of any such scheme an efficient way to funnel some of the funds collected from drivers to help the poorest among us offset the ever-climbing cost of basic transportation.
If that could happen, higher car, fuel and/or road taxes or user fees wouldn't be so onerous. Annoying, yes, but not onerous. It is only fair that we pay proportionately for the impact of our cars and trucks on our environment and infrastructure.
Pooling Plans
One of the low-cost ideas I heard was the volunteer, informal carpool - something in operation already in the San Francisco Bay and Washington D.C. areas.
Folks queue up at agreed-upon gathering places outside the city center and wait - usually not very long - for a driver with extra seats in the car to pull in. The gasthering places pool riders into groups of people headed to similar destinations.
When a driver heading to that destination pulls up, the riders pile in and are delivered to or near their downtown workplaces, and are picked up and taken back to the suburban gathering point each evening.
The system takes hundreds of cars off the roads during rush hours, saves a lot of people a lot of money they'd otherwise be spending on gas, and, one presumes, gives the volunteer pool drivers a psychic reward (and quite possibly free gas if the riders kick in for fuel).
An extra benefit in the San Francisco program, which operates between the residential East Bay area and the downtown, is that the driver gets to cross the congested Oakland Bay Bridge into and out of the city in the carpool lane.
One of the meeting participants, Paul Minett, manages a New Zealand-based startup company, Trip Convergence, that is trying to formalize the system to provide things like security screening of travelers and organized pickup points with convenient park-and-ride type parking.
His website offers a great explanation of how volunteer "flexible" carpooling works, along with an explanation of the business model for a plan he is discussing with officials in Seattle and Ann Arbor, Mich.
Another model for car-pooling is the pooled car, a la Zip Car - in which people "rent" blocks of time - from an hour or two to full days or even weeks -- in a car that is shared among "Zip" members. The system is popular in universities and is gaining traction in a number of cities. You can learn more about it here.
Can't Kill the Car
All that said, perhaps the most interesting tidbit I walked away with was that even those who heartily support massive reductions in single occupant car trips, the idea of actually living without a personal vehicle is still pretty scary.
In one of the several instant polls taken during the meeting's various sessions (we were all armed with electronic clickers and were asked to vote from time to time on ideas and proposals), we were asked whether we'd want a private car if we lived in a place where public transportation made car ownership unnecessary.
Almost 80 percent of the 200 people in the audience said that yes, even with abundant, affordable mass transit, we'd still want to have our own cars stashed away in a garage or parking lot somewhere, ready for those times when we need - or just want - to hit the road on our own.
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