Transportation planning in Metro Vancouver

TransLink, the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority, is responsible for roads, bridges, public transit, and cycling in the Vancouver region. TransLink’s revenues come from transit fares and advertising, property taxes and fuel taxes. The regional transportation authority regularly consults with the public on transportation planning issues including financing, rapid transit, bus, and cycling options. Their online Transit Advisory Board, launched a few years ago, allows Metro residents to have a say in all sorts of decision making. Their current survey deals with their 10-Year Transportation and Financial Plan, a step towards Transport 2040, their 30-year plan. The survey presents three scenarios: spending $460 million more annually to expand transit, road, and cycling capacity, spending $260 annually to maintain the current situation, or cutting back service drastically.

As they have been in existence for just a decade, TransLink also published a list of accomplishments from 1999-2008. Among these are a 37% increase in transit hours, 38% increase in bus fleet size, 99% increase in annual funding for transit operations, and a whopping 283% increase in capital investments. While those who use TransLink on a daily basis complain about it regularly, and Metro Vancouver doesn’t have nearly the transit service it needs to service almost 2 million people, these are some impressive results over a ten-year period.

TransLink is an excellent example of how complicated it is for municipalities and regions to fund, plan, and provide transit services. Power struggles between all three levels of government are played out every time budgetary consultations are due. While TransLink is unique in providing services and capital improvements for roads, bridges, transit, and cycling, this balanced approach frequently puts the provincially-created body at odds with its creator. The transit strike in 2001, the struggle over funding for the Canada Line, and increased pressure on the UBC line are all potent examples of biting the hand that feeds transit in Metro Vancouver. An effort in 2001 to add a vehicle levy to funding sources was rejected by the Province, which put a stop to service expansion, fuelled service decreases and led to a four-month-long transit strike. One of the other funding challenges is that the income from fuel taxes (about 30% of TransLink’s funding) fluctuates with gas prices.

These struggles occur because often the upper levels of government are at odds with the municipalities; it is one area that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities has fought to reconcile. Municipalities know what works best at the local level: in this case, more funding for public transit, cycling, and walking. Funds can be raised through taxes on less sustainable transportation modes. But the Province of BC has long fought this approach, like other Provincial governments, sticking to the postwar status quo: fund road and highway infrastructure to cut down on traffic and make goods movement easier and cheaper. An excellent example is the Gateway proposal, a $4.5 billion dollar road and highway expansion project bitterly fought by Vancouver and Burnaby councils and decried by environmentalists, will now be funded entirely by the Province. BC Minister of Transportation Kevin Falcon’s spearheading of the Gateway proposal, against the recommendations of cost benefit and environmental analyses, made lifelong enemies of many GVRD transportation advocates. Falcon was replaced as Minister of Transportation by Shirley Bond when Gordon Campbell was recently re-elected as Premier on May 12, 2009. It isn’t known yet how much Bond will support public transit, cycling, and walking in the Province; it may not matter, considering Campbell’s support of the proposal. A glance at the Provincial Ministry of Transportation website indicates its primary interests in goods movement and airport management; public transit is clearly low on its list of priorities. The Province of BC released a Transit Plan in 2008 that contradicts TransLink’s long-term plan. Clearly, these power struggles indicate that transportation, at the level of public transit and commuter services, is an area that should be wholly given over to Canadian municipalities. There is considerable dissention in the ranks, because without funding from the upper levels of government, municipalities would face the same challenges in transportation that they do in housing: responsibilty with out much-needed cash.

But despite these struggles, TransLink has accomplished a lot in a city that is rapidly growing and needs transportation alternatives. As I write this, the new 19-km Canada Line is being tested for its Labour Day opening, a new SeaBus glides across Burrard Inlet, and the 24-km Central Valley Greenway has just opened. These victories, in addition to the gains in capital investment, and sheer numbers of passengers using the system, are worthy of celebration.

June 29, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Street eats

The City of Vancouver is one of a growing number of cities concerned about local agriculture and food availability; the City set up a Food Policy Council in 2003. So far, the Council’s interest is confined to homeowners producing their own food (beekeeping and possibly backyard chickens), or producing food for the poor with its Grow-a-Row program. It has not extended its reach to the larger issues: ensuring households have better access to fresh fruits and vegetables (grocery store location) or enabling more local farmers to sell their produce in the city. Another ongoing debate for City of Vancouver planners is whether or not to allow street vendors to operate on busy street corners. While we have the commonplace hotdog/sausage vendors, portable kitchens are not allowed. As Tim Pawsey wrote in the Vancouver Courier, “Zealous health authorities suppress any deviation from predictable food service that might be remotely interesting.”

While Asian cities seem to have the best variety of street food (fresh pakoras in Delhi, sizzling potstickers and skewers of meat in Shanghai), many North American cities offer a variety of quick eats. In New York, there are carts selling pastries, soft pretzels, muffins and bagels; in San Francisco’s Berkeley there’s a giant vending machine with all manner of hot meals available. The City of Richmond is slightly better off than Vancouver, with sizzling meat, Chinese dumpling, and fresh fruit vendors at their weekly Night Market. Hot dog/sausage vendors can always be found at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square, but recently Toronto City Hall approved eight new ethnic street food vendors.

Street food has even reached the epitome of high art. The Vitra Design Museum in Basel, fittingly located on Charles-Eames-Strasse and designed by Frank Gehry, is currently hosting a Global Street Food Exhibition featuring all kinds of portable kitchens.

In practice, getting street vendors approved in Canadian cities has proved daunting. Toronto’s process required the vendors to invest $21,000-28,000 for carts and pay an annual location fee of $5,000-15,000. As Vanessa Lu reports in the Toronto Star, a rigorous selection process included scoring for nutrition, food safety, locally produced food, ethnic diversity, taste and an overall business plan. Best of all, the new vendors reflect the city’s diversity: passers-by will be able to choose from Persian, Middle Eastern, Greek, Afghan, Korean, Caribbean, Thai, and Eritrean food at the eight busy downtown locations. This is only a three-year pilot project, but the City of Toronto hints at expanding the program in due time.

While the City of Vancouver still claims health concerns, perhaps Toronto’s pilot project will have some impact on the stodgy minds of the health authorities here.

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Suburban nostalgia

Among my colleagues in urban planning, suburbia is seen as one of the most powerful forces shaping our towns and cities. Suburban sprawl, which eats up prime agricultural land, forces residents to drive ever further to widely dispersed retail and employment locations. The suburb has an exclusive history, as many were designed to exclude those of lower socioeconomic classes or certain ethnic groups. In this era of recessionary caution, they are the epitome of wasteful. And yet, they remain the preferred landscapes of the vast majority of people living in both American and Canadian cities.

Like many people my age, I grew up in suburbia and return there periodically. To this day, suburbanites provide me with endless comedic fodder. This is particularly true of those considered to be “average people.” You know, the people you see on sitcoms who live in giant two-storey houses and drive SUVs, who shop at Costco and are completely paranoid (read: boomers like my parents and others of their generation). On the surface, they seem so safe and isolated in their brick-and-aluminum-siding cells; and yet, under the surface lurk nightmarish thoughts.

A couple of years ago on a visit to the ‘burbs, my mom told me to take a large stick with me on a walk around the suburb, as there had been a rash of dog attacks lately (I assured her that a stick would be little protection against an angry Rottweiler, but this did little to placate her). I once said I’d walk to the corner store to pick up milk, and was told that I should take the car since it was too far to walk (15 minutes, the same distance I’d walked to school as a child). One evening, I mentioned I’d go for a walk; my mother looked at the clock in alarm (it was 9pm). On my walk, I saw at least twenty different homeowners out trimming their hedges, mowing their lawns, or gardening; at one house a couple of kids were out playing. My mother shook her head at these convention-flouters: didn’t they know it wasn’t safe to be out after dinner?

My suburbanite friends get their milk at one store, eggs at another, and vegetables at a third, endlessly trolling for deals (and by deals I mean savings of twenty cents). They choose the apples from Chile over the apples from Canada (cheaper). They assure me that nobody could ever live happily in a rental, and wouldn’t I need a yard once I had children? The fact that I’ve been renting for 14 years doesn’t convince them, nor the fact that most kids stop playing in the yard around age 13. They read about greenhouse gases in the daily paper but shake their heads sadly (there’s nothing they can do about it). They rail at the traffic in their city and insist on road widenings; they fume if they’re ever behind a city bus or have to give road space to a cyclist. They comment on every pedestrian brave enough to cross the busy multi-lane collector roads. Nighttime TV consists of CNN, 60 Minutes and The National, to recharge the paranoia levels.

On the other hand, suburbanites have space to compost, space to grow those organic veggies, space to pick local fruits and tuck them away multiple deep freezers. Space to store the 20-lb bag of onions or the cases of mangoes, pomegranates or oranges so easily found at Costco. They get good deals on virtually everything, the costs of food, clothing, shelter, and entertainment being vastly lower than in the city. And then there are the smells: freshly cut lawns, sprinklers, chlorinated pools, beds of carefully tended flowers. While these scents may smack of greenhouse gases, pesticides and non-biodegradable plastics, even a whiff of water from a garden hose transports me back to my childhood; they are oddly comforting.

Suburbanites live in the type of neighbourhoods that we have long been told are good for us: good for families, free from crime, with lots of open space…basically, the landscapes of The American Dream. But to planners, suburbs are more accurately portrayed in films like American Beauty (1999) or Lymelife (2009). My planning friends might be car-free, child-free, renters, and supporters of local farmers. They might support gay marriage, encourage supportive housing in their neighbourhoods, or walk to work instead of driving. But these urban eccentricities are frowned upon in the ‘burbs, and attitudes and behaviour are some of the hardest things to change in planning our communities.

There are glimmerings of environmental awareness in the ‘burbs; even a hint of planning comprehension. My suburban friends have heard of car-sharing programs, LEED-certified buildings and New Urbanism. They understand the benefits of organic gardening, public transit and community development. They just seem to be having a bit of trouble connecting these ideas to their everyday lives. They need to know how much money they could save by growing their own veggies, and how much weight they could lose doing all that gardening. They need information on local agriculture versus buying from vast supermarket chains. They need practical information, maps, schedules, and cycling workshops if they are ever going to transition from two- and three-car families. They need to understand what housing options might suit them best: it may be a condo or townhouse if they really don’t use their yards or live in one- or two-person households. They need to understand their municipality’s Official Community Plan and its social, economic, and environmental impacts so that they can get involved in creating better communities. This is grassroots-level work, the same kind of marketing and promotion that was done in the 90s to advertise composting and recycling, two activities that most suburbanites now do on a regular basis.

Aside from workshops and social marketing, the crux of the matter is that some suburbanites define themselves as drivers, as those who live in large detached houses, as people in the upper echelons of society, even as bargain shoppers. The very ideals that we attack as planners are in fact prized in the ‘burbs. But we should remember that these ideals were created in the 1950s, supported by government funding and policies, and we have the power to create new ones. There is a wave of new developments in the US that includes organic farms in their subdivisions; people who buy homes get access to fresh local produce, which is increasingly appealing for many. In Canada, many people are drawn to smaller homes, neighbourhoods with sustainability features (Greenbrook in Surrey, BC, will derive 10% of its energy costs from solar power) and urban neighbourhoods with access to transit. We need to create neighbourhoods that have the appeals of suburban living but are more sustainable, which can translate into more affordable; in the organic farm suburbs, farmers’ rent is initially paid to the developer, but after all the lots are sold the revenue goes to the homeowners’ association. There are many ways to market sustainable neighbourhoods and communities, and eventually replace the old suburbia with something more socially and ecologically rewarding. More crucial, we need to market these ideals as the hip new trend in housing.

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Modern racism in “the most multicultural city in the world”

Most Canadians would deny that theirs is a racist country. Scholars refer to the White Paper (1976) on multiculturalism and the Multiculturalism Act (1988) as proof that Canadians “celebrate diversity.” But there are many sides to this story. While the idea of race has officially been dispelled since geneticists working on The Human Genome Project found as much genetic variation between members of the same ethnic group as between different groups, the idea of difference persists. The Multiculturalism Act encouraged people of every ethnic group to retain their own languages and cultures while integrating into their lives in Canada. Yet there are constant barriers to this in practice.

Structural and institutional racism

Canadian banks may no longer practice mortgage redlining, but there are plenty of other examples of structural and institutional racism in our society. Carlos Teixeira, an Associate Professor at UBC (Okanagan), did a study in 2006 comparing housing trajectories of Portuguese immigrants from Angola, Mozambique and the Azores. He found that black Portuguese immigrants faced significant racism in the housing market compared to white Portuguese immigrants. Robert Murdie, who has now retired from York University, found similar results in his comparison of Portuguese and Somali housing trajectories (2002). There are many studies documenting the difficulties immigrants to Canada face in the labour market: employers will not hire anyone without “Canadian experience.”

While most Canadians with anglo-sounding names would probably urge incoming immigrants to keep their names, in everyday life it is often just easier for Chinese immigrants to go by their English variants, like Josephine for Ji Ling. Indian immigrants often shorten their names to anglo-sounding equivalents: I recently met a Kal who had shortened the considerably lengthier Kalvinder, and a Dee whose full name was Deepali. Indeed, my adolescence and young adulthood was peppered with anglo-ethnic hybrid names. While we were often criticized for “wanting to become white” (by our co-ethnics) or “losing our roots” (by our white friends), in practice it is just annoying to have your name mispronounced and misspelled on a daily basis.

Philip Oreopolous’ study at the University of British Columbia suggests prejudice against ethnic names may be more than just an annoyance. A Professor of Economics at UBC, Oreopolous created 6,000 mock resumés to represent recent immigrants and Canadians with and without non-English names. They were tailored to job requirements and sent to 2,000 online job postings from employers across 20 occupational categories in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada’s largest and most multicultural city. Applicants with English-sounding names got almost 40% more callbacks from employers than those with Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani sounding names. All applicants had at least a Bachelor’s degree, plus any additional qualifications specified in the job ad, and each applicant listed three previous jobs. Changing only the location of the applicant’s job experience, from Canadian to foreign, lowered callbacks by 5-10%. Employers valued Canadian work experience far more than a Canadian education. Oreopolous concluded that there is considerable employer discrimination against ethnic Canadians and immigrants; even when the person evaluating resumes spoke with an accent or had an ethnic-sounding name, they still preferred English-sounding names by a factor of 1.42. Oreopolous points out that this type of discrimination is illegal under the Ontario Human Rights Act. In this case, both the employer and the potential employee lose; the employer has purposely overlooked a potential employee with the appropriate skills and education. Oreopolous’ results cannot help but highlight institutional racism, which is more than a little surprising in the GTA, which is 46% foreign-born; China, India, and Pakistan are the three top source countries for immigrants. In a city and region so multicultural, that has been an immigrant reception center for over a hundred years, there is no way for employers to tell whether a person is a first-, second-, or third-generation immigrant, solely by looking at their name.

Modern racism

While Oreopolous points out the obvious legal implications of this discrimination, many scholars would call this modern racism rather than institutional or structural racism. Modern racism is a slippery concept: the Ontario Human Rights Commission issued a policy in 2005 stressing the subtler forms of discrimination. Examples of modern racism in the workplace are:

  • Exclusion from formal or informal networks
  • Denial of mentoring or developmental opportunities such as secondments and training that was made available to others
  • Differential management practices such as excessive monitoring and documentation or deviation from written policies or standard practices
  • Disproportionate blame for an incident
  • Assignment to less desirable positions or job duties
  • Treating normal differences of opinion as confrontational or insubordinate
  • Characterizing normal communication as rude or aggressive
  • Penalizing a person for failing to get along with someone else, e.g. a co-worker or manager, when one of the reasons for the tension is racially discriminatory attitudes or behaviour of the co-worker or manager

Differences in name, accent or manner of speech, clothing and grooming, diet, beliefs and practices, and leisure preferences can bring out subtle acts of racism. Because of language differences, member of various ethnic groups communicate in different ways. For example, in some cultures it is normal to wait several seconds after a person is finished speaking before responding; in anglo-North American culture the pause time is under one second. Those with the longer pause time would think they were being constantly interrupted by those with the shorter pause time. Underlining, or repeating the last few words of a person’s sentence at the same time as they are speaking, is common in some cultures but considered rude by North Americans.

Another common form of subtle racism is co-opting part of an ethnic culture: it is considered fashionable for a white person to wear a sari or practice yoga, but not an Indian person. I would add that in Canada we have the practice of “celebrating diversity” by having silly cultural festivals, yet we do not tolerate difference on a daily basis. A few years ago, a friend of mine told me his daughter was asked to return one day from school because she had henna tattoos on her hands. My friend, a Canadian of Indian ethnicity who is married to a white Canadian, said the school official told him the school did not allow tattoos at school. A few months later, the same official asked if his daughter could bring some sort of Indian food to a school multicultural festival.

Assuming that members of the same ethnicity are all the same is another example of subtle racism. Most of my Indian friends fend off questions about where the good Indian restaurants are, if we like Bollywood movies, and whether we have been to India; yet in most cases, we would have been teased mercilessly for liking Indian food, movies, or culture during our childhood and adolescence. In Outliers (2008), Malcolm Gladwell addresses the assumption that Asians are better at math. We even find examples of racism in terminology: what groups fall under the heading of “Asian”, and can they be grouped together as if they are all similar?

Joe Darden, a Professor of Geography at Michigan State, argues that denial of subtle and institutional racism allows Canadians to avoid changing legislation or monitor practices that discriminate against non-whites. Along with most other scholars, Darden points out that Canada has a long history of racism in immigration policy (The Significance of White Supremacy in the Canadian Metropolis of Toronto, 2004). He suggests that changes in the economy, and not changes in attitudes among white policy makers, were responsible for the removal of discrimination in immigration policy. In the post-war era, the need for skilled workers opened up immigration to non-European countries, while racist attitudes have remained. Like many African American scholars, Darden believes that there has been a transition from overt and institutional racism to subtle racism. Although significant Aboriginal populations have lived in Canada for thousands of years and British Columbia had small Chinese and Sikh populations around the turn of the century, Canada’s racist immigration policies only began to change in 1952. Most non-Europeans in Canada entered the country after 1967 changes to the Immigration Act. Fifty years is not a lot of time to eliminate racist ideologies.

The idea of racism in Canadian society may seem impossible, but various studies have proven there are subtle forms of racism in the housing market, labour market, and in social interactions. Oreopolous’ study shows that racism is present in the most multicultural city in Canada, therefore it must exist in cities with less cultural diversity. Many believe that cross-cultural education is the key to breaking down preconceptions about other cultures, understanding how different communication styles and values. In a multicultural society, cross-cultural training should be offered for all ages, from kindergarten to university, in schools and in the workplace. But Oreopolous’ study, as well as the earlier studies by Murdie and Teixeira, indicate there is also some legislative work to be done, as well as monitoring of employers, housing agencies, real estate agents, and landlords to ensure discrimination is not a factor in hiring, promotion, renting or buying a home in Canadian cities.

June 12, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments »

Now it’s really over: Margaret Wente says the car-free culture is here to stay

I wrote recently about the end of GM, and noted that many advocates of sustainable transportation were looking forward to a new era of cycling, walking, transit, and reduced car use. While I count myself among these, I also acknowledge the difficulty of this transition for most North Americans considering our economic dependence on oil and the car-dominated spatial patterns of our cities. But when Margaret Wente says the love affair is over (“Object of desire or necessary evil?”, Globe and Mail, Saturday, June 6, 2009), the times they are a-changin’.

Let me explain. Wente is conservative, irreverent, controversial. She’s stirred up so much anger the Globe won’t even allow her column to be read online anymore. She writes from a white, upper middle-class perspective, and often comments on current affairs, politics, social issues, and lifestyles. Her attitude towards people of different cultures came under fire last October when she agreed with IOC Dick Pound’s controversial comment that Canada was a country of “savages” a few hundred years ago. Many of her columns show an insensitivity to the variety of ethnic cultures and religions that make up mainstream Canadian cities. An American and naturalized Canadian, Wente once called Newfoundland “the most vast and scenic welfare ghetto in the world.” As far as social trends go, Wente is regularly surprised by lifesyles of younger people, including Facebook addiction and commitment to environmentalism. She became a climate change convert at the same time as Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in September of 2006: very late in the game, when it became a sign of insanity to deny it any longer. Most environmentalists, democrats, and transportation advocates consider her laughable, a symbol of the type of conservative boomer culture that keeps Canada from achieving any real success in enviromental protection, alternative transportation, race relations or tolerance.

Today’s column is a case in point. Wente begins her article profiling people she finds truly unusual: young 20- and 30-somethings who live and work in the city and do not own cars. While this is news to none of us living in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and a growing number of other cities, Wente still finds the lifestyle surprising decades after the terms yuppie (young upwardly-mobile professionals) and dink (double income no kids) were coined. She then moves on to profiling several of these other oddball car-free types closer to her own age: “Fifteen years ago, it was almost unimaginable for a middle-aged, middle-class family man not to own a car. Such a person would have been regarded as mildly eccentric. Now I seem to be surrounded by them.” She writes about the average $8,000 it costs to run an average car each year (the Toronto Transit Commission has been advertising this info on posters for over a decade), the growing popularity of cycling and car sharing (which she feels the need to define) and of course the death of the automotive companies. But halfway through her article, there is a change in tone: Wente, that conservative bastion of right-wing ideology, concedes that “Maybe our love affair with cars is over.” In response to a man who confesses there is freedom in being car-free, she asks, “Isn’t freedom the very thing that cars used to stand for?” Halfway through the article she writes “For most of us, cars aren’t much of a status marker anymore…It’s really just a very big, very costly appliance with cup-holder.” She characterizes cars as shifting from “the wheeled embodiment of outsize ego and swattering masculinity…the product of the American empire at its peak” to representing “arrogance, deliberate disregard for the enviroment, and wretched excess.” While she confesses she still believes cars have the potential for personal liberation, progress and opportunity, “these days there are fewer and fewer who agree with me.”

Perhaps most advocates of alternative transportation would not see much hope in Wente’s article: she’ll probably continue driving until the steering wheel is pried out of her cold dead hands. But considering her personality, socio-economic profile, and personal beliefs, just admitting the times are changing indicates that, indeed, they are. They’d have to be for her to notice.

June 6, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments »

R.I.P. G.M.

General Motors, the world’s largest car manufacturer from 1931 to 2008, filed for bankruptcy today. In consequence of its receiving more than $20 billion US in federal aid, 60% of the company will now be owned by the US Treasury. It is truly the end of an era. As Michael Moore writes, “It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one — has now made itself obsolete.”

While most seem to credit GM’s lack of innovation during the 1980s as the beginning of the end, the company’s stubborn commitment to gas guzzlers was probably the culprit. Soon after gas prices reached new highs in 2007, GM was “surprised by auto buyers’ dramatic shift toward the smaller, more fuel-efficient cars and away from the pickups and sport utility vehicles that had served as its mainstay,” to quote the NY Times article cited above. Yet GM had a chance to develop cleaner-burning cars over a decade ago. Chris Paine, the writer and director of Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) documented the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric car in the US, in particular the GM EV1 in the 1990s. The film is particularly vicious in its portrayal of the bizarre plot by GM to convince California, the only state that had passed zero emissions regulations, that there was no demand for their product. The company’s subsequent decision to take back every single Ev1 and destroy it, as the cars were available only by lease, seems suicidal in hindsight. Just a couple of weeks ago, Katherine Mieszkowski reported on electric cars for Salon.com (“Electric cars are coming!”), saying, “We’re sorry to be buzz kills. But we’ve heard this one before. Like in 1990. And 1910. Do the automakers have the juice this time?”

Trying desperately to save its skin after two years of sharp declines in sales by the fall of 2008, GM asked for federal funding to make the switch to more efficient cars. Too little, too late. Just a few weeks ago, GM announced it would close over 2600 of its dealerships in the US, 40% of the total. In order to survive, US taxpayers would have to invest an additional $30 billion in the company; this leaves the government as “reluctant shareholders” in this little drama. Moore understandably shies away from propping the company up with taxpayer dollars: “The only way to save GM is to kill GM.”

While most are sensible of the tens of thousands of jobs lost, the fall of GM (and Chrysler a month ago) has raised hopes for alternative transportation supporters, many of whom were enraged by the US government bailouts of the Big Three Automakers in November, one of George W. Bush’s last actions in office. Moore writes, “we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices.” He envisions a future similar to AASHTO’s recommended plan, with high-speed rail and local LRT connecting US cities, noting that the demise of the car giant was predictable…twenty years ago, in fact. In Roger & Me (1989) Moore chronicled the negative economic impacts of GM plant closures on his hometown of Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of GM. His exposure of GM CEO Roger Smith’s actions was an early look at corporate downsizing and outsourcing to other countries (in this case, Mexico), which proved to be prescient. Smart Growth, transit-oriented development, and complete communities advocates have always said that more efficient cars are only part of the solution, which includes changing travel behaviour: increased walking, cycling, and public transit use. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) has released a new report calling for a national rail policy in the US covering both passenger and freight rail and the creation of an intercity passenger rail account, funded at $35 billion over six years. The Federal Government plans to distribute $8 billion in economic recovery grant funds for intercity passenger rail, and AASHTO Board of Directors wasted no time in presenting its policy recommendations, which include high-speed rail corridors, regional corridors, and long-distance rail service. Even developers are excited, as they see prime sites opening up with the closure of GM and Chrysler dealerships.

In addition to the federal economic recovery grant, the US may well see their first national regulation on greenhouse gases. If the proposed regulation passes, cars would have to be 40% more fuel efficient than they are now. As Mieszkowski reports, Ford recently declared it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to convert an SUV plant near Detroit to churn out the Ford Focus. By 2011, the plant would be producing battery-electric versions of the diminutive car. Nissan recently claimed that 10 percent of its new cars will be electric by 2016. Mitsubishi plans to unleash its i-MiEV in Japan this year and bring it to the U.S. in 2012. Toyota, which has dominated the hybrid market with its Prius, plans to launch an electric Prius by 2012. And Chevrolet has launched the Volt, which promises to go 40 miles on its electric battery before switching to gas. The Mini Cooper’s Mini E has been released to 450 test drivers in three states. Mieskowski’s sources tell her that the only reason car companies are going electric is to get at those federal subsidies; at any rate, companies will be forced to kill off their gas-guzzling models and improve fuel efficiency on all their combustion engines while supporting electric technology.

All told, the death of GM is probably the best thing for America. Let’s watch those VMT plummet while walking, cycling, and transit become as attractive as they once were before the onset of the Oil and Gas Era. And hopefully, let’s see the thousands of newly-unemployed auto workers and retailers back at work in alternative transportation production and infrastructure development.

June 1, 2009 | Tags: , | No Comments »