Sustainable Transportation Blog

Cars generate a lot of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Each litre of fuel burned in a car emits almost three kilograms of GHGs.

The Centre’s research work using on-board vehicle feedback systems, known as OttoView^TM, have estimated emissions from light duty vehicles operating in Winnipeg. The Centre is currently working with Blue Mountain Resort to reduce vehicle emissions in their light duty commercial fleet. A principle finding from this innovative research indicates that drivers underestimate the emissions generated from vehicles. The Centre proposes additional studies to improve driver understanding and awareness of vehicle carbon- footprint.

Copenhagen, for those who have never been, is an amazing city and the hub of the capital region of Denmark. It is amazing for its copper roofs and numerous spirals. Storks, Tivoli Gardens, Carlsberg beer, and the Little Mermaid are landmarks in this old capital city. Shakespeare must have visited a cheese shop here to understand that “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.” And he chose the northern community of Helsingør and the Kroneborg Castle as the setting for Hamlet.

This capital region was modernized and expanded by the famous finger plan: a network of radiating arterial roads and alternative transportation corridors, including cycle paths and commuter rail. It will become famous again in a couple of weeks when world leaders meet to decide global measures to address climate change.

The current media is flooded with articles, pro and con, about climate change, leading up to the upcoming high level discussions in Copenhagen. The Centre for Sustainable Transportation (definition) works to reducing transportation emissions and using energy resources in transpiration more efficiently.

Results of a transportation study by the Oslo-based Centre for International Climate and Environment Research (CICERO) in Norway are reported in Atmospheric Environment. The study estimates and forecasts the contribution of transportation sector emissions to global climate change. The researchers admit there are some uncertainties in the estimates they calculated due to the limitations of understanding the role of clouds and aerosols affecting climate. But they also find that their results agree with the general conclusion of other atmospheric scientists.

The printed article includes intriguing data, graphics and discussion. The take-away for the Centre’s purposes is that this study estimates transportation “…has contributed 9% to the total net man-made warming in 2000.”

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has produced a series of socio-economic scenarios that drive energy use for purposes of estimating future emission of GHGs. Depending on the scenario, the study forecasts that by 2050 transportation will account for between 10% and 16% of total global warming. By 2100, the IPCC forecast transportation will contribute roughly 20% to total global warming.

Future temperature increases in this study are forecasted based only on emission records after 2000. This method is used to minimize the influence of different emission histories within transportation sectors, e.g. vehicles, rail, air and ships. Road transportation is found to be the most dominant contributor. This sector is forecast to increase global temperature between 0.13°C and 0.18°C by 2050. Given this conclusion it is apparent that addressing emission reductions in road transportation vehicles is critically important.

The Centre will be very interested to find what the climate negotiations and agreements will decide to do about reducing emissions from this sector. We’ll keep you posted!

by Terry Zdan, CST Research Director

Labels: cars, climate change, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, politics, sustainable transportation

It's been a busy couple of days for transportation news over at Planetizen, the primo source for urban planning news on the Web!

Consumer electronics such as computers, cell phones and iPods have long followed a predictable economic arc: the first generation will be highly expensive and desired; early adopters will pay the hefty price; industry will make rapid improvements for subsequent generations, which will be cheaper; and eventually the product becomes mass-produced and affordable for a wide range of consumers.

The same thing may not be the case with electric and hybrid cars. The rapidly escalating demand for electrified motor vehicles may be driving the price beyond the reach of affordability. Mischa Popoff, writing in the Winnipeg Free Press, believes that the economics of battery technology are revealing hybrid cars are a costly mistake, because the batteries are so costly and the growing popularity of hybrids is only driving the cost of the raw materials up:

"A run-of-the-mill hybrid battery is currently triple the cost of a gasoline engine, about $8,000. Raw materials comprise 70 per cent of this cost. [T]he high-performance 2010 GM Volt hybrid['s] lithium battery costs a whopping $21,000. Let me stress, that's just for the battery at today's price for lithium."

For these reason, Shai Agassiz believes that the only to way to make electric cars viable is to separate the ownership of the cars and the batteries. His California-based company A Better Place is making a lot of headlines with its innovative and potentially game-changing approach to electric cars:

"To ensure that we can confidently drive an EV anytime, anywhere, Better Place is developing and deploying EV driver services, systems and infrastructure. Subscribers and guests will have access to a network of charge spots, switch stations and systems which optimize the driving experience and minimize environmental impact and cost."

The scheme involves a vast infrastructure of stations for swapping out the batteries. As the Globe and Mail reported recently,

"The business plan takes its inspiration from the mobile phone industry. As with cellphones, where most customers pay by the minute or buy fixed-rate plans, Better Place customers will pay by the mile driven or buy a fixed-rate plan that allows unlimited miles and battery swaps...Of course, the battery-swap concept requires a standardized battery pack and electric vehicle design. If every EV has a different design and battery, the robots won't be able to swap batteries efficiently...But this is not a small problem. Many in the auto industry do not believe that a critical mass of car makers will agree to design cars around one battery standard. Battery technology is advancing too quickly for the industry and individual companies to settle on a standardized battery design."

However, even if this problem were resolved, others argue that not even a total switch to electrified transportation systems will solve our problems. Lynn Sloman, writing in the Guardian, acknowledges that technological advances need to be a part of the transition to sustainability, but worries that an overdependence on this approach allows us to get ourselves "off the hook" in terms of our behaviour:

"The worry is that the government will focus on long-term technological solutions and do little to encourage short-term behaviour change. But trusting exclusively to future technology is the Superman solution. It's like ignoring the gently downward sloping footpath and hoping instead that at some point in the future you will be able to safely jump off a cliff to get down to sea level. The only trouble is, unlike Superman, we may be heading for a crash landing."

The tension here is between what is referred to as “weak” and “strong” sustainability. For adherents of “weak” or “technological” sustainable development, continued economic growth is considered essential, and indeed should be encouraged so as to raise living standards in developing nations. It also accepts that human beings as economic actors will not be able to control their habits as consumers. Therefore, unsustainability becomes a matter of more accurate pricing, better policies and sufficiently “green” technologies (like electric cars) to more effectively manage consumption.

“Strong” or “ecological” sustainable development, by contrast, rejects these assumptions. Far from being a matter of adjusting prices and policies within the existing system, it is the current paradigm associated with economic growth and development that is itself seen as the problem. Relying solely on the development of “green” technology will be at best an interim measure: a fleet of electric cars, for example, while less polluting in use would still require the consumption of vast resources to produce and generate undesirable social consequences in terms of urban form, quality of life, congestion and so on.

Here at the Centre for Sustainable Transportation, we see the electrification of the vehicle fleet as only one component of a much broader strategy. Electric cars – or plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) – will not on their own constitute a sustainable transportation system. Rather, we envision a strategy premised on a “Hierarchy of Modes”, with the priority placed on those with the greatest benefits to society with the least costs. At the top of the hierarchy then is no travel or E-work, followed by active transportation (cycling, walking etc.). Then the priority must be placed on mass transit, then carpooling. Only then can we see the potential for plug-in hybrids and other electric cars. Finally, we must do what we can to make conventional internal combustion vehicles as sustainable as possible for the duration of their usable lives.

There will be electric cars, but we cannot pretend that they will see the same phenomenon of mass ownership that the case for the car in the 20th Century. Our needs and more importantly our constraints -- from strained resources to strained economies -- will not likely allow us that fantasy again. But the electrification of the vehicle fleet does have a vital role to play within a wider, broader and most socially equitable strategy of sustainable transportation.

On September 13th, Winnipeg hosted its -- and, not incidentally, Canada's -- first Ciclovia street festival.

Hosted by the Downtown Winnipeg Biz and backed by many local sponsors (including the City of Winnipeg, CTV and the Winnipeg Free Press), Ciclovia was the result of months of planning that included significant participation by the Centre for Sustainable Transportation.

Ciclovia (Spanish for "bike way/path") is a car-free street festival which originated in Bogota Colombia. Surprising as it may seem now given Ciclovia's global reach, but Bogota was not a promising place for such an event. According to StreetsWiki:

“Bogota is the sprawling capital of Colombia with a population of over seven million. Its congested streets carry over 55,000 taxis, 18,000 buses, and more than a million private cars. The traffic culture in the city is notoriously lawless, resulting in 56,000 accidents and 900 deaths annually."

However, in the 1990s, parks commissioner Guillermo Penalosa initiated a cycling renaissance that was later taken up by his brother Enrique, who, as the city's mayor between 1998 and 2001 radically transformed Bogota's transportation culture:

"He engineered perhaps the most swift and dramatic livable streets renaissance ever seen in a major international city. In just three years in office...he led a transportation revolution so complete that Bogota was transformed from a traffic-clogged mess into one of the most transit and bike friendly cities in the world."

Among the Penalosa brothers' accomplishments is, of course, Ciclovia, during which

"every Sunday and holiday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., Bogota, Colombia closes off--or, rather, opens up---more than 70 miles of city streets. Closed, that is, to cars and open to bicyclists, skaters, walkers, and mass aerobics. When that happens, 1.5 million people come out to enjoy the safety, community, and exercise that a seemingly car-free city allows. According to many participants, the Ciclovi a has transformed life in the city all around for the better. People feel happier, healthier, and more united."

The idea has now spread around the world, and numerous cities have held their own Ciclovias. Winnipeg's event received enthusiastic promotion in the local media and now has its own Facebook page.

The Centre for Sustainable Transportation was instrumental in raising awareness of and organizing the event. Back in 2007, Executive Director Arne Elias wrote in a proposal,

"Ciclovia allows a city to showcase the best of its artists and musicians, to exhibit its cultural industries and parade the best of its urban features to itself and the world. It combines healthy living with arts and culture and engages citizens in active alternatives to motorized transportation, bringing life back to otherwise car choked streets. And it does something else that is exceptional. It allows a city to dream of different ways of living well, of other community aspirations in an urban environment. What does it mean to have a significant stretch of streets free of cars and open to travel, entertainment and new social possibilities."

I attended the festival with my family and we had a terrific time taking in the entertainment and new social possibilities. But it would have been difficult to actually use a bicycle the street was so filled with pedestrians, booths, activities and, every few minutes, a horse-drawn wagon. The range of activities was also exciting: bicycle polo; dance classes; musicians; advocacy; children's games and of course, lots of food.

And bikes! There were recumbents and child/cargo human powered vehicles, pedicabs and unicycles.

Alas, or course, mine was not among them; we came on foot. Since moving to Winnipeg in 1998, we have faithfully attended all the city's street closures, from former mayor Glenn Murray's "Get Together Downtown" street festival on Portage Avenue to the annual Canada Day street festival on Osborne street. We found this event had its advantages over either of those locations. As you can see from the photo, Broadway was ideal: plenty of green space and trees provided shaded spots for attendees and musicians alike. And the sheer length of Broadway meant that it was difficult to take it all in: it was truly an impressive sight.

However, what Broadway lacks that the other Winnipeg street festival locations have in abundance is an active street wall with stores and restaurants. Broadway is largely built up with low-rise office towers, and, being a Sunday there were few destinations open.

That aside, Winnipeg's first Cyclovia, like its predecessors around the world, was not just about bicycles but was all about returning the street to people for human-scaled activities, for fun, for conversation and for celebrating the best aspects of city life.

It's amazing what people can accomplish without cars around.

By Michael Dudley

One of our car culture's most powerful forces of acculturation is film & television. I'm not referring simply to car advertising, but rather to the glamorizing of the automobile in films. From Sean Connery's Aston Martin in Goldfinger to Steve McQueen's flying Ford Mustang in Bullit to the various incarnations of the Batmobile, cars have long been as important -- if not more so -- than the characters who drive them. Through filmic depictions of the car, we are encouraged to fantasize -- and more importantly -- to aspire.

Such fantasizing has been particularly true of science fiction TV and films, in which viewers have been treated to both the fanciful (the flying Spinner in Blade Runner), and the dystopic (the turbo-charged, jerry-rigged world of Mad Max). Regardless of whether or not the future depicted is a desirable one, the one thing we have been able to count on is that we will still be driving -- and that those cars will be real cool.

Which is why the new ABC television series Defying Gravity is so refreshing. Set in the year 2052, the show deals with a multi-year mission through the solar system, and -- in flashbacks set 5 years prior to launch -- the training the crew went through.

And in this future, there is nary a car to be seen.

Unlike the recent series Battlestar Galactica -- in which almost every action of the characters reflected the intensely-detailed political and religious structures of Colonial and Cylon society -- Defying Gravity has been slow to reveal much about life in the mid-21st Century. The characters' cell phones are certainly thin. And abortion is illegal. But life looks much the same as it does now.

This recognizability was a deliberate decision on the part of the show's creative team. According to series director David Straiton,

"Fifty years from now, it's not The Jetsons. There will be inventions that we can't even think of yet, but I think life will look pretty much the same. So that's really the approach, that life isn't all that further advanced except for maybe a few gadgets along the way."

The one element of that future that Straiton was convinced about, however, was public transit. The series is filmed in Vancouver, so the SkyTrain was an immediate inspiration:

"I rode my bike home the other day underneath the SkyTrain and I thought, this is the future...Vancouver embraces a lot of ideas that the world should become. [It has] a really strong public transit infrastructure...the SkyTrain and bike paths. A lot of people live in high-density housing, where they're building up instead of building out, and smaller apartments. That's the future."

This car-less future is subtle: nobody talks about the absence of cars, they simply accept that they have to take public transit everywhere. As a result, the characters are regularly seen conversing on buses and trains, and key moments of their relationships occur "in transit" as it were. In one emotionally powerful sequence, Zoe Barnes (Laura Harris) collapses at the bus stop as a result of taking an abortificant, and Maddox Donner (Ron Livingston), who was waiting with her, is able to save her.

This casual use of public transit in a popular television series is notable for another reason: the show's sexiness. The crew is as busy dealing with their frustrated sexual desires as they are with the hazards of space, and so the divorce of beautiful people from any depiction of cars is commendable.

But not unique or unprecedented. Most notably, none of the various incarnations of Star Trek have ever featured a car, although a helmetless Chris Pine did drive a motorcycle in the recent blockbuster film, and, in a flashback, an 'antique' corvette.

However, Star Trek has largely posited a far future, one in which life on Earth is radically different, even utopian.

Defying Gravity, by contrast, offers a future anyone under 50 may live to see. That this future offers both the wonders of interplanetary travel and ubiquitous -- and sexy -- public transit makes it a show with considerable potential to contribute to our acculturation for a low-carbon future.

By Michael Dudley

In his massive two-volume book Endgame (2006), author Derrick Jensen holds that civilizations cannot be sustainable -- or, indeed, redeemed. Every aspect of what we refer to as civilization is in his view merely a form of violence and domination and therefore must be “brought down” by whatever means necessary before it destroys the global biosphere and with it, humanity.

This past week Jensen offered another provocative thesis on the Orion Magazine website: that we have been suckered in by a campaign of what he calls "systematic misdirection." His essay, "Forget Shorter Showers" argues that

"consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide."

The basis of the argument is that we are not as individuals responsible for the rapaciousness of industrial capitalism, and our individual contributions to problems of environmental degradation and climate change pale when compared to the impacts of industries, government and the military. He quotes Kirkpatrick Sale, who says

"For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution...The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them

Note that Jensen isn't arguing against living simply; what he is saying is that we shouldn't mistake voluntary simplicity for political revolution. Our simple lifestyle allows us to feel virtuous, yet the industrial strip-mining of the natural world still goes on unimpeded. However, while some of the acts of voluntary simplicity he describes (e.g., shorter showers) can't be called political acts, this is not true of Sale's example: cycling. Riding one's bicycle on city streets is a highly visible act, and one that inherently stakes a claim on public infrastructure. As the leftist Daily Kos website put it last week, "Biking is a political act, and each additional cyclist opens the door to safer and saner roads just another crack."

As well, many cyclists supplement their bicycle use with involvement in advocacy organizations. For example, this has been quite true of Winnipeg, home to the Centre for Sustainable Transportation.

What's really changed dramatically in the past few years is the extent and the sophistication of the bike advocacy in this city: there are now no fewer than a dozen active groups out there working to improve cycling conditions. These include:

Bike to the Future promotes cycling as transportation, by advocating for the development and use of bike lanes, designated routes on traffic-calmed streets, and multi-use pathways as part of an interconnected bicycle route network.

Green Leap Forward is an umbrella initiative that includes many organizations and government bodies. It promotes green commuting and recreational options through public events such as Bike to Work Day and the Manitoba Marathon.

One Green City is an advocacy organization that contributed an original plan for a first-class, comprehensive network of
bikeways while attempting to coordinate active transportation groups in Winnipeg.

The Bike Dump is a volunteer-based community bicycle shop that offers tools and the space for users to repair their own bicycles. As well, they offer workshops on various aspects of bicycle mechanics.

The Winnipeg Trails Association represents more than 40 organizations that advocate for - and build - trails and trail connectivity.

The Manitoba Recreational Trails Association helps in the construction of the TransCanada Trail and other trail network.

The Orioles Bike Cage is a community bicycle shop in Winnipeg's West-end that provides expertise, tools, and space, to aid in bicycle repair. Recycled bicycles are sold on a sliding scale.

The Bike Dungeon is a cycle repair teaching shop located at the University of Manitoba.

Sanctoral Cycle Canadian Mennonite University's bike co-op. Sanctoral Cycle seeks to cultivate goods habits of physical health and environmental responsibility by promoting the use of the bicycle as a form of transportation.

The North Winnipeg Commuter Cyclists group was formed to link individuals and organizations committed to promoting the bicycle as a viable mode of transportation in Winnipeg and specifically connecting North Winnipeg to the
rest of the city with active transportation corridors.

West Central Commuter Cyclists is a neighbourhood-based cycling advocacy group which takes on a similar role to North Winnipeg Commuter Cyclists.

As in other major cities, Critical Mass Winnipeg is a leaderless parade of many forms of active transportation which occurs on city streets the last Friday of each month. The aims of those involved in critical mass vary from highlighting sustainable transportation to reclaiming public space.

There is now substantial momentum behind the incorporation of the bicycle into the city's transportation planning. And events such as this week's Bikefest are showing that this movement isn't just about sustainability, but can make the city more fun and livable, too.

Contrary to Jensen's argument, then, simple acts can be political; and in the case of the bicycle, revolutionary. As H.G. Wells once wrote, "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle I no longer despair for the human race."

By Michael Dudley and Andrew Kaufman