Sustainable New York...by 2030?
Posted by Glenn on December 17, 2006 - 11:48am in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: michael bloomberg, new york, new york city, oil, peak oil, sustainability [list all tags]
There are many very good and far reaching proposals, such as reducing NYC's greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, increasing parkland, upgrading NYC's aging infrastructure and building new housing on brownfields near transit. He was also downright dour about the consequences of inaction, saying that we risk a breakdown in basic systems that keep the city functioning and a deteriorating quality of life for its residents if we don't act NOW.
This is exactly what I and many other people have dreamed about for quite some time. It's a little overwhelming to consider how well this could be done and worry greatly about how badly this could be botched.
Bloomberg also says that he will be engaging in a serious period of listening to what the people recommend on making the city more sustainable. So what advice would us Oil Drummers give to Mayor?
One major issue that the mayor will quickly run into is that many of the easy proposed fixes to infrastructure, improving mass transit, building thousands of Green Building, etc will cost Billions of dollars that the city does not have. Our public debt has already increased dramatically under Bloomberg's tenure and there is little additional money available from the MTA or Port Authority. However, changing the patterns of current and future expenditures will have an impact over time. Moreover, changing tax incentives can leverage much larger resources in the private sector.
But perhaps the largest source of power to make New York more sustainable is political will to stand up to special interests that will fight major reform efforts toward sustainability. They will either try to defeat or seriously compromise the efforts that would make New York more sustainable. By bundling many of the easy wins like "More parkland and playgrounds" with something more controversial, like "less free on-street parking" on the many diverse issues that impact sustainability, the Mayor might be able to enact the plan within the three years he has left in office.
The City Council is very "green minded" at this point too. Many of them want to have something concrete accomplished before the next election or to use as a platform to run for higher office after term. The two councilmembers in my area have very strong pro-environment views that are probably a bit ahead of their constituency in many ways. The mayor's sustainability initiative will give councilmembers a chance to educate their constituency and bring them up to speed.
If ever there was a moment to put together the political will to serious address environmental sustainability, it is now. And I believe the way to do it is to engage in a series of neighborhood experiments to spur innovation in public policy to try solve a set of issues in different ways and see if they work. For instance, the "Green a Block" initiative is a wonderful experiment to see how to renovate existing housing stock, educate apartment dwellers and local businesses and see how much impact there is on energy efficiency. Other experiments are needed to start building truly bike friendly neighborhoods with grade separated bike lanes and secure indoor bike parking.
One set of conservative institutions that will need serious education and horizon widening are the city's 59 community boards. These local boards have typically been very parochial, NIMBY oriented and tend to defend the status quo on most issues. While this served a useful counterpoint during the days of heavy handed Robert Moses behavior by City Hall, they now seem more concerned about protecting every last parking spot in the city - hardly a plank in the sustainability platform. It is incumbent on every city council member and borough president to review who they nominate to the local community boards and ask one simple question: "Is this person open-minded and shows a willingness to experiment?" If not, they will be an obstacle to experimentation and innovation in public policy rather than a positive partner for community input into city policy.
I've written for the last year and a half on what I think should be included in making NYC more sustainable. In many cases I have found policy ideas that would be fairly cheap to implement and I believe are truly win-win-win, like more greenmarkets, more sidewalk space and bike lanes. The main obstacle to implementation are unfounded local fears of change and that continues to be the main reason they remain undone. In addition to the many specific proposals that many people will offer, I think creating a culture of local community experimentation offers the best bang for the buck in building a more sustainable city.
DK
Local governments tend to be dominated by NIMBYism. For example, many outer suburbs of NYC have lobbied to be zoned exclusively for single family dwellings.
Metro governments may be for economic growth, but local forces are dead set against it.
For NYC this is OK. Moving more people into NYC is a huge environmental win regardless of anything else. NYCers don't (in general) have cars, and don't drive them much if they do. They have small to medium sized apartments surrounded on 5 sides by other apartments at roughly the same temperature.
Moving people into dense cities will do more for the environment than any sort of "green" work done on the suburbs.
In any case, realistically, just force all cabs (and busses) to be hybrids, ease zoning restrictions to get more housing built in the city, and try hard to expand the subways. That would be an excellent start.
-G
It's by far the most energy efficient way of housing millions of people. It's much easier for a farmer to send one truck (or train) to NYC where they have a huge market, rather than sending trucks in every direction.
It used to also be where most of the nation's manufacturing occurred. And it can return if fuel prices continue to increase and transportation becomes more expensive.
And we may have a flat to declining budget in real dollars as inflation runs away. Just because the dollars are going up doesn't mean they are worth the same amount.
This is why I'm advocating for low cost community based solutions that simply require political will to implement. The cost of installing bike lanes, greenmarkets, separated Bus/HOV lanes, closing off streets and roads is fairly little compared to the Second Avenue Subway, but politically requires more trade-offs that politicians hate. They would rather just add than trade-off...
And I think this is the most important point - we need to make sure that as little sewage makes it out into the surrounding waterways. On this point he did speak directly:
He then later sets the goal of
Still, our rates of asthma and lung disease are incredibly high and the air needs to be cleaned up quite a bit.
I have photos of myself in my last year in the city with dark circles and a pastey face. After five years in California, I can actually think more clearly and feel ten years younger. All my NY friends couldn't believe the change when I went back.
I loved New York and I left because of a family emergency. I had no idea how hard it was on my health and I would encourage all New Yorkers to demand better mass transit and a 80% reduction in cars. Life in the city would be awesome. In the meantime, enjoy the rat race!
Pollution could very well be a part of the problems you were experiencing, but at the same time LA is not renowned for its clear blue skies.
Remove all on-street parking. If you have a car, you can afford a garage. It would discourage people from driving in the city, and do away with most of the traffic congestion that causes the pollution. The few things that do need to drive in the city (busses, delivery trucks) would be moving along quickly rather than being stuck idling in traffic.
Also, ban diesel anything, or at least require better emissions standards. I made the mistake of sitting near a bus route outside a cafe once. Every time a diesel bus rolled by, my water was full of black specks. Hybrid busses, nothing.
HOV lanes on every anvenue. Make life for solo drivers a living hell. Make people share cabs as well to enjoy the lanes. If they fill up, then make 2 HOV lanes.
Imagine your express bus loading up at anyplace convenient, driving to the rail siding, catching up to a train of similar buses going by and cruising into town at 70 MPH. Once there, the buses pull up their rail wheels and, with batteries fully-charged, head to their destinations over the pavement. This would allow non-stop service between any two points within several miles of a rail siding, and it could be up to 100% electric.
Oh, and if you want an electric bus, the way to do it is not batteries. Those are rather inefficient, take a long time to charge, and are made of things like lead, which are both really heavy and not at all good for the environment. Instead you can just string up overhead wires along the route of the bus, and have the bus run directly off the power grid, at which point it gets called a trolleybus. These things exist in Boston, Philadelphia, Dayton, Seattle, and San Francisco, and by all accounts work pretty well.
It takes lots of money and time to extend rail to new areas. If you can achieve door-to-door service with a dual-mode vehicle, even if it only goes a mile or two off the rail network, it's a huge advantage.
Tacking on a "train" of 20 buses following a commuter train wouldn't increase traffic much, but when you consider the buses' ability to fragment "car" by "car" in a way that trains can't, it would greatly increase the effective capacity of the system. Express buses using rail to bypass road congestion would increase their lure; if they were powered by electricity, they would be better on every measure of efficiency I can think of.
And all that is assuming the technology even works, and works cost effectively. Oh yes, and if you're talking about peak oil, electric rail is about 20 times more energy efficient than diesel road vehicles, of which a factor of about 8 is the difference between rubber tires and steel wheels.
Extending the reach of rail networks with dual-mode buses creates economies of scale and fosters further growth of the system. By moving the loading and unloading process off the rails, it increases the throughput. We're going to need these advances, especially if cities get a lot more dense.
The big advantage is the elimination of transfers. This isn't just the difficulty of synchronizing the arrival of a bus and allowing enough time to switch, but the train's loading time and the exposure of passengers to weather conditions. Getting on a bus a short distance from home and not having to get off until in front of the office would eliminate all that and make the rail-bus far more convenient than a car and perhaps even more comfortable (no walk from parking to the office).
You're thinking about problems, and nothing but. Can't you think of any ways around difficulties, or reasons to try?
Which the conventional trains have too. Everything slows down under those conditions.
But they can't provide the kind of service or efficiency I'm talking about. However, hard-coupling the buses to the trains after docking isn't a bad idea.
Thus my mystification at your refusal to consider a method of increasing the available "rolling stock". ;-)
Anyway, rather than arguing that your system won't work, how about I explain the basic safety principle of railroads: that trains must always be a minimum braking distance apart. This ensures that no matter what, a train will be able to stop before hitting the train in front of it. Yes, it decreases througput compared to highway-style operation, but it also greatly decreases the chances of collisions, which is important, since trains, unlike cars and buses, are confined to their linear track.
Now, this safety criterion is normally enforced using some manner of block signal system, where the track is divided into sections called blocks, and the rule is that only one train can be in a block at a time. Thus, when a train enters a block, its wheels complete a circuit through the rails, and the signal behind it turns red. So that the train behind has time to stop, there is a yellow signal before the red one. The LIRR and Metro North use a variant of this system where instead of (or in addition to) little colored lights next to the track, the signals are transmitted by coded electrical signals through the rail. There is equipment on the train to decode the signal, display it to the driver, and to ensure that the train is going at the appropriate speed. Some very modern systems have tried to do away with blocks entirely and have the train communicate its position to some central computer, which then tells the train how fast it can go. This can either be done via induction loops along the track, which seems to work, or via radio transmission, which seems to not work, at least in the case of the L train and BART, both of which seem to have given up on the system.