11. Transporting things

Figure 11.1 General Motors Hummers weren’t exactly flying off the lot in 2008. That year, movie and television stars discovered electric and hybrid vehicles, and Hummers were left sitting largely unvisited on new-car lots. (Photo by Daniel B. Botkin)

Key facts

• Almost one-third—28%—of the energy we use in the United States is for transporting ourselves and our goods.

• Because our transportation choices are flexible, transportation is a key way to start saving energy quickly.

• In the United States, trains move 40% of all freight. But this generates only 10% of the total U.S. freight revenue because it is so much cheaper and more energy-efficient to ship things by train than by truck.

• Cars and light trucks together use 63% of all energy used for transportation; trains and buses together use just 3%.

• More than 6% of all energy used in the United States is simply to transport coal, mostly so it can be burned as fuel but also as an ingredient of steel.

• Air freight accounts for less than 1% of the total freight moved in the U.S., but 12% of the total U.S. transportation revenue.

• The most fuel-efficient way to move people around on land today is by intercity bus. Trains are next. But for transporting goods of all kinds, you can’t beat ships for fuel efficiency.

The new status symbols: hard-to-get energy-saver cars

The big transportation news of 2008 was the rapid rise in gasoline prices, the subsequent flight from gas guzzlers, and the sudden popularity of smaller electric, hybrid, and hydrogen cars even among America’s glitterati. Joely Fisher, star of Fox’s Til Death TV show, managed to buy one of only 20 available BMW hydrogen cars. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, and opera star Placido Domingo also managed to get theirs. Meanwhile, basketball great Magic Johnson, The Tonight Show’s Jay Leno, and America Ferrera, star of Ugly Betty, were driving the $1-million Chevy Equinox powered by fuel cells.¹ Rumor was that George Clooney, Jay Leno, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were on the waiting list for the superfast-accelerating Testar all-electric car (0 to 60 in four seconds, range of 250 miles, top speed 130 mph).²

How could U.S. automakers not have seen it coming?

The mystery in all of this is why the big three auto companies of the United States didn’t see this coming and didn’t plan for it. General Motors hadn’t had a full year of profitability since the early 1990s but kept manufacturing Hummers, big pickups, and SUVs long after all the rest of us had realized that almost all the cars around us on the highway were smaller, fuel-efficient imports. Between May 2007 and May 2008, sales of SUVs fell 38%.³ Thus the real, fundamental transportation news of 2008 was the lack of foresight and planning, both by the big automobile corporations and apparently by much of the federal government.

It wasn’t an obscure forecast that oil prices were going to rise rapidly about this time. As discussed in Chapter 1, “Oil,” petroleum experts have been pointing out for years that when the time of peak oil discovery is reached and passed—estimated to occur between 2020 and 2050—the price of oil will go up. Thus warned, we didn’t have to wait until we were actually in the midst of a fuel crisis, with demand significantly exceeding supply. The rapid rise in the standard of living and the economies of India and China were no secret either. Clearly, oil and gasoline weren’t going to be cheap in the United States much longer.

A corporation that was thinking ahead would have tried to be ahead of the curve by focusing on technological development. Suppose Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, instead of inventing the iPod and the iPhone, and continuing to develop computers in advance of what the public was buying, kept trying to sell bigger and more expensive 1990s desktops forever. That seems to have been the Big Three automakers’ approach when Toyotas, Hondas, and other foreign cars were zooming past them with ever more reliable and fuel-efficient models that soon pushed American cars out of their long-held first-place spot and left them in the dust.

Now we’ve got some catching up to do

Transportation uses 28% of all the energy used in the United States. It is a large percentage, but one that is readily changed. We have great flexibility when it comes to transportation, and it is therefore a key way for us to save energy quickly. When fuel was plentiful and cheap, we became careless and wasteful. Now we need to make wiser choices in how we use transportation energy.

Transportation basics: how? how much? and how efficiently?

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the use of cars and light trucks for personal transportation consumes 63% of the total energy used in the U.S. for transportation. (Cars use 35%; light trucks use 28%.) This is remarkable—our personal transportation in those fashionable pickups and in cars often carrying only the driver uses almost two-thirds of all energy used for transportation in the U.S. Other trucks, including the big semis, use just 16%, aircraft 9%, watercraft 5%, construction and agriculture 4%, pipelines 3%, and trains and buses together another 3%.^{4, 5, 6}

Railroads can carry a ton of cargo 404 miles on just one gallon of fuel. (That’s how the cost of freight transportation is measured, by the cost to move a ton a mile.) A train can carry a ton 10 miles for 1 kilowatt-hour. Remember, that’s just the amount of energy needed to light ten 100-watt bulbs for an hour, and it’s likely that in moving that ton a mile, a railroad at the same time also has at least that many 100-watt bulbs burning an hour. In the United States, trains move 40% of all freight, and they do it with such energy efficiency that rail freight charges are much cheaper than for trucks. As a result, the total revenue received by all U.S. railroads is only 10% of the total paid for transportation—$54 billion.

For air freight, it’s just the other way around—planes move only a little of the freight, less than 1% of the total ton-miles, but at high cost, amounting to 12% of total transportation revenues.

As for boats, since their invention thousands of years ago, it has always been true that transporting freight by water is the cheapest and most fuel-efficient way to move it.

Coal makes up 44% of tonnage transported in the United States and 22% of the ton-miles, so transporting coal consumes 6.21% of all energy used in the U.S. If we did not burn coal, and therefore did not have to transport it, U.S. energy use for transportation would decrease by 6.21%, or 1,821 billion kWh. Thus, moving away from coal is a double savings: It reduces the use of the dirtiest fossil fuel and increases the nation’s energy efficiency.

Improving the energy efficiency of transportation

It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out some obvious ways to reduce the amount of energy we use for transportation. We can start with automobiles. Americans drive 3 trillion miles a year—10,000 miles a person for every man, woman, and child in the nation!^{7, 8} In doing so, Americans use 123 trillion gallons of fuel per year, or 412 gallons a person. If there is no change in miles traveled and average miles per gallon, then in 2050 the United States will use 173 trillion gallons of gasoline.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the average miles per gallon (mpg) for new automobiles in the United States reached 24.3 in 2004 (the most recent figures available at the time of this writing), up just 7% from 1980. This was an improvement of only about one-quarter of a percent per year, way under what the automobile industry is capable of.⁹ The most recent energy bill, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, requires that by 2020 the average will be 35 mpg, a 44% improvement overall but still asking for less than 1% improvement in gas mileage per year.¹⁰ If 35 mpg is still the average in 2050, when there will be an estimated 120 million more Americans, and if there has been no decrease in miles driven per person, then America will be at breakeven with today—burning about the same amount of gasoline each year. On the other hand, if cars got an average of 50 miles per gallon and the mileage per person dropped 50%, the amount of fuel used would drop to 42 billion gallons—34% of the amount used in 2007 and only 100 gallons per capita. This would amount to a 10% decrease in the total energy used for all purposes in the United States in 2007.

We saw a decline in miles driven in the late spring and early summer of 2008, in response to $4.00-a-gallon gasoline. According to the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Mary E. Peters, in the first quarter of 2007 Americans drove 20 billion miles less than in the first quarter of 2006, which would translate into a decrease of 2.7% in just one year.¹¹ Although there will be variations in the retail price of gasoline, we can expect the average price to keep going up unless government policies and subsidies force it down. Further hikes in the price of fuel will likely lead drivers to either drive less or trade in even more of the big gas-eaters for vehicles that are more fuel-efficient, as happened in mid-2008. Thus, even without any improvement in mass transportation, even without any change in laws, a 50% decline in per-capita miles driven is possible by 2050.

Of course, this may not happen—people may adjust to higher gasoline prices, refigure their household budgets accordingly, and resume their old driving habits. Then, too, there’s probably some minimum that could be reached in terms of miles driven per person each year unless mass transit expands and improves rapidly, with more and better trolleys, subways, and buses, and intercity high-speed rail and urban rail. Also needed are more and better bike lanes within urban areas and bike paths between urban areas. That’s where the ways to reduce energy used in transportation become complicated, requiring imagination, innovation, and insights more at the level of rocket science.

Railroads are a big part of the solution

In the United States, 23,000 miles of intercity railroads provide access to 500 cities with 260 trains a day.¹² Unfortunately, in recent years too few people have traveled by rail, complaining that it is expensive and unreliable. At the time of this writing, however, rail travel was up considerably and the question was whether Amtrak could keep up with the demand.

When I started to write this chapter, I assumed it would be very expensive to upgrade existing railroads and build new ones, with their nicely graveled and cemented roadbeds and all those signals and switches and grade crossings. But to my surprise, when I talked with some experts on rail travel—including Tom Payne, director of the Ferroequus Railway Company Limited and founder of RailLink Ltd., Canada’s third-largest railway—I found that restoring and building railroads isn’t all that expensive. Let’s go through the numbers.

Based on current costs, plans, and proposals, new high-speed railroad lines could cost as much as $2.5 million a mile to construct, but it could be lower in some situations. (That’s for one track and all the signals, bedding, and other accoutrements.)¹³ Add the cost to purchase the land or rights-of-way and the cost escalates to $20–40 million per mile, according to U.S. government information. Just restoring an existing rail line will cost from about $500,000 to $1 million per mile,¹⁴ but where there’s a need for a tunnel or bridge, and where the terrain has lots of ups and downs, the costs go up. These numbers give us a basis for making estimates, and taken alone they sound like a lot. If you don’t like railroads or are in a business that competes with railroads (like making or selling automobiles), these are the kinds of numbers to throw around, without mentioning the costs of other transportation.

But when people begin to depend more heavily on rail travel, and upgrading and expanding existing rail lines and building new ones become necessary to meet increased demand, then it will become clear that the total construction costs are quite reasonable compared with the cost to improve other kinds of transportation. Based on estimates by the Feds and by railroad experts, the cost to build a new high-speed railway from scratch between Los Angeles and San Francisco or Sacramento, construction and equipment only, would be about $700 million. (This is the cost of building a route directly down the Great Central Valley, much better terrain for a railroad than the scenic route along the coast that the present railway follows.) Adding in the cost to purchase land would bring the price to $7–14 billion.

That may sound like a lot, but just building the Denver airport that replaced Stapleton in the mid-1990s cost $4.8 billion,¹⁵ and $7–14 billion is actually a fraction of the estimated total cost of restoring the rest of America’s infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ “Report Card on America’s Infrastructure” estimates that $1.6 trillion will be needed over just a five-year period to get things back into shape, including bridges, tunnels, highways, airports, sewage lines, dams, hazardous wastes, schools, and navigable waterways.¹⁶ A piddling railway between two of America’s greatest cities, L.A. and San Francisco, would use up about a half a percent to not quite 1% including land purchases.

An energy-efficient United States will involve not only restoring and expanding passenger rail service but also keeping up with increases in freight transportation as the population and economy expand. The Department of Transportation estimates that freight traffic will increase 50% by 2020 and that meeting this increased need will cost $175–200 billion over the next 20 years.¹⁷

What would happen if the U.S. rail system essentially collapsed? According to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), if all freight moved by truck and none by rail, it would cost “an additional $69 billion annually,” costs that would be transferred to us, the consumers. Moreover, the increased truck traffic would pound away at existing highways, which AASHTO estimates would require “an additional $64 billion in highway funds over the next 20 years” to maintain. Not to mention the need for new highways to handle all that extra truck traffic.

The government funds highways and air travel, with little if any for railroads

Although increasing rail traffic is a sure way to decrease energy use, government funding works to the opposite effect: In the mid-1990s, the federal budget provided more than $40 billion for the Department of Transportation to spend annually in highway and transit grants to states. The 2005 “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, and Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU),” signed into law that year, provided $286 billion from 2004 to 2009 for highways, highway safety, and public transportation. The $286 billion included $815 million for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; $5.1 billion for highway safety programs; $517 million for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to provide grants to states for truck and bus regulation and enforcement; $100 million for up to five states to test various new ways to charge for the use of highways; $7.8 billion for “programs that address highway congestion”; $23.7 billion “to maintain and improve the National Highway System and to replace, rehabilitate, and preserve bridge and other infrastructure [of highways].”

What about railroads? The SAFETEA-LU did include $7.3 billion for “investments in buses, rail cars, and maintenance facilities,” but only $900 million for Amtrak. At the time of this writing, this bill has not been reauthorized.

The Obama administration announced on February 1, 2010, that the core highway program would be funded at $42 billion per year in 2011—about the same as in the previous administration’s 2010 budget but below the $67 billion actually spent by the federal government on highways in 2009—and that the Department of Transportation would spend $8 billion to develop the nation’s first high-speed intercity transportation. But the Obama budget lowers funding for conventional rail from $11.1 billion actually funded in 2009 to a proposed $2.9 billion for 2011. This means that total funding for new high-speed rail and conventional rail is about $10.9 billion, an actual decrease from the $12 billion spent by the federal government in 2009.¹⁸

This set of federal policies, favoring highways and complaining about railroads, is not a free-market approach, although, ironically, it was the policy advocated by the George W. Bush administration, which claimed to believe in a free market. Under this continuing policy, highways will get much greater federal subsidies than railroads.

Similar policies have prevailed within states. For example, in his 2006 State of the State address, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed spending $222 billion for infrastructure development, which included $107 billion for transportation and air-quality programs—1,300 miles of new highway lanes and thousands of miles of bike and pedestrian paths, but just 600 miles of additional commuter rail, and no mention at all of high-speed rail. This for the nation’s richest and most populous state.

We need more railroads and fewer cars and trucks

If the $40 billion given annually by the U.S. Department of Transportation to fund highways went instead to railroads, it could be used to build 16,000 miles of railway track, or 8,000 two-way rail lines, enough to cross the U.S. and more. Even if we assume that every inch of the land and rights-of-way for these rail lines would have to be purchased, that none of the new track would be laid on what is already government land—which would not be true—this would fund 1,000–2,000 miles a year.

Think about what this would get us. A new rail line could be built from New York City to San Francisco (2,900 miles), another from Boston to Miami (1,500 miles), a West Coast line from San Diego to Seattle (1,260 miles), from Seattle to Minneapolis (a northern route of 1,650 miles)—a total of 7,300 miles with just one year’s allocation of what has been going to highways. And in the second year, we could add a Midwest north-south route from El Paso to Fargo (1,450 miles).

Alternatively, we could divide up the funds, half for intercity railroad and half for intracity and suburbs-to-cities rail transportation. According to railroad expert Tom Payne, light rail and regular railroads can be built for the same amount, although light rail is often more costly, he says, because of options chosen that aren’t necessary for the basic transportation. (Light rail refers to intercity trains that are designed to carry lighter loads at lower speeds, but are more than trolley cars, like the trains in downtown Denver, Colorado.)

Like railways, air travel is vital to our economy

It has become fashionable among some environmentalists and “ecofriendly” advocates to focus on the use of fossil fuel by commercial airlines and private jets, but it should be clear by now that their focus should be on automobiles and light trucks. Although aircraft use just 9% of the transportation energy in the United States, air travel has become essential to America’s economy, and cities that lose commercial air service suffer economically. It is thus false economy and of little benefit to energy conservation to focus on reducing the use of fossil fuels for air travel.

As noted throughout this book, the solution to our energy problem involves a mixture of energy sources. Fossil fuels have been wonderful sources of energy, and what is left of them should be saved for the applications in which they are most useful—for making plastics and other organic compounds, and for situations where oil and gas are especially well suited to provide energy. Until the time comes when jet fuel can be obtained in large quantities by using the energy from electricity to produce small hydrocarbons, one of the most useful applications for fossil fuels will continue to be air travel.

Can we ever get ourselves out of our cars?

Getting out of our cars would save money and energy. Much more money is spent transporting people than freight in the U.S.—$1.01 trillion to move us around versus $580 billion to move our stuff in 2001, the most recent year for which there are data—a total of $1.59 trillion dollars spent on transportation.¹⁹ In the U.S., highways account for 89% of the total passenger-miles, air travel accounts for 11%, and local transit (city bus and trains, etc.) just 1%.²⁰

If things got so tough that people could travel in only the most fuel-efficient way, guess what that way would be. Surprisingly, right now the most energy-efficient passenger transportation, in terms of direct energy used to move one passenger one mile, is intercity bus. The Acela train is the next most efficient.²¹ According to the Minnesota Regional Railroad Association, “On average, railroads are three or more times more fuel efficient than trucks.”²² Cars and trucks take three times as much energy per passenger-mile as the Acela, and air travel takes 4.48 times as much. For every passenger who switches from traveling by car to the Acela, energy used per mile drops two-thirds. For every passenger who decides to travel on a standard U.S. train instead of by car, one-third of the energy per mile is saved.

Because it makes economic and energy sense to depend less on automobiles, trying to get Americans out of their cars has been a continuing effort by many experts and a primary emphasis of a number of university departments, such as George Mason University’s School of Public Policy under the direction of Kingsley Hayes. Most of the efforts haven’t succeeded very well, but a few have. I have some personal experience about this, which I would like to share with you.

First of all, I see it as a practical issue, not a moral issue. A growing debate about automobiles has taken on aspects of a moral argument, with some people seeming to believe that owning a car is immoral, while on the other side some appear to believe that it is a moral right, not just a practical convenience, to drive a personal vehicle. I can’t say that I fall on either side of such a debate, but I do confess that I enjoy driving a car. I grew up in a small town where every teenager couldn’t wait to be 16 and get a driver’s license. For us boys, it meant a chance to drive around neighboring towns and try to pick up girls, or at least impress them. In those days of carburetors and points, before fuel injection and electronic ignition, I used to tune up cars. Today, I list among my close friends Lee Talbot, one of our greatest conservationists and also a world champion formula Ford and vintage car racer. I’ve crewed for him now and again (never being much of a help, but having a good time).

At other times in my life, I’ve lived happily without a car. I’ve ridden a bicycle since I was a youngster, and when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin my only transportation was a bicycle and my feet. I remember that period as the time in my life when I had the fewest financial cares ever.

It was already obvious in 2008 that the more expensive gasoline is, the faster people move away from their personal vehicles. A July 28, 2008, front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal testified: “Funds for Highways Plummet as Drivers Cut Gasoline Use.” All things considered, however, my conclusion is that for people to use personal vehicles much less than they do now, mass transportation must become convenient, attractive, affordable—and fashionable. If George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cameron Diaz, Placido Domingo, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie started to take the train and, for local trips, used bicycles and their feet, that would become fashionable and people would start to imitate them.

Doesn’t this mean that a government intent on reducing energy use should help to make mass transportation more attractive rather than subsidize oil and natural gas corporations with the oil-depletion allowance and other ways that oil, natural gas, and highway travel are subsidized by the government?

Bicycles in cities

Today, my wife and I have an apartment in New York City and another in Florida and happily drive the 1,200 miles between the two. When we are in Florida, we drive everywhere because there’s no public transportation to speak of and almost nothing except the ocean is within walking distance. In New York, however, we rarely drive, choosing instead to walk almost everywhere within walking distance and use public transportation for the rest, because, although crowded and noisy, it’s the fastest way to get around. I bicycle for exercise in both places, but wish the Big Apple were better set up for cyclists. It has already improved greatly in that regard. It is well on its way to finishing the Hudson River Park, with a bike path that follows the waterfront from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan and connects several miles north to a route that crosses the George Washington Bridge. In fact, you can go several hundred miles by bike from the middle of New York City if you want to.

Both my children, now grown and married, bicycle all the time. My daughter Nancy and her husband Mike sold their last car years ago. Mike and my son, Jonathan, bicycle to work. Mike and Nancy do their grocery shopping by bicycle. And when they visit us in Manhattan, they put us to shame by going on incredibly long bicycle rides. The last one, a night ride, took them up Eighth Avenue, one of the busiest Midtown thoroughfares, and then over to the East River, where they enjoyed the spectacular nighttime views of the city while bicycling back and forth across ten different bridges.

I confine my bike riding in New York City to the separate, park-like bike paths because riding in the streets is too dangerous. I’ve seen car/bike accidents, and friends and relatives have been hurt bicycling in cities. I would love to bicycle more in the city—in fact, I prefer it to walking, driving, or taking a bus or subway, as long as it isn’t raining or snowing. When I meet neighbors bringing their bicycles up the elevator in our apartment building, I try to strike up a conversation about where they’ve been and how they feel about bicycling in a big city. Almost everybody tells me that they realize it’s dangerous, but they love it, so they do it anyway.

My conclusion is that the number one way to get more people out of their cars and onto bicycles is to make it safe to do so. The methods—well known, straightforward, and in use in many European cities—include bicycle lanes either separated from motor vehicle traffic by a cement curb or on a route entirely their own.

New York City recently took a tentative step in this direction by turning an entire lane of busy downtown Ninth Avenue into a bike lane, with cement curbs separating the bikes from motor vehicle traffic. I wish the lane were longer and that the entire city had them.

Of course, just as large numbers of motor vehicles on crowded city streets require driver adherence to strict traffic rules, so will increased numbers of bicycles. Right now, too many New York City cyclists seem oblivious to traffic rules, including stoplights, and routinely endanger pedestrians and themselves.

To be honest, I love to travel, and I haven’t met a form of transportation I haven’t liked. Trains, planes, cars, buses, ships, barges, canoes, kayaks, freight steamers in the Philippines, Amazon River boats—for me, again, it isn’t a moral issue but a matter of convenience, practicality, and fun. But it’s clear that we can’t go on driving as we have. There just isn’t enough cheap energy anymore, and also the heavy traffic negatively affects the quality of our lives. Riding down the Hudson River bike path on a Friday afternoon, I watch in dismay as thousands of cars, most with just one occupant, inch their way north at the end of the workweek, barely moving while their tailpipes spew exhaust that forms a haze over the city.

Cities that are especially friendly to pedestrians and cyclists

I lived in Portland, Oregon, as part of a project I once did, and loved the way that city made it pleasant to be a pedestrian. One way it did that was with pedestrian walkways cutting midway through some of the city blocks, paths planted with trees, shrubs, and flowers, and with miniparks along the way. This led me to imagine a city of the future where bicycle paths and walkways followed such routes. Of course, in cities like New York, where land is so valuable and so many buildings are already in place, this is going to be difficult. But it’s not impossible. Highway engineers working with landscape architects could lead a major step forward.

Another key that is growing in popularity is to make it possible and convenient to use a bicycle for short trips even if you don’t own one. Paris, France, has started to do this with a program that provides bicycles at many locations for a small fee and lets you pick up a bike at the location nearest to you and drop it off near where you’re going. Amsterdam has also adopted this program, and it’s highly popular.

Carless cities: what more can we do?

If offering attractive alternatives doesn’t make a big enough dent in inner-city traffic congestion, what more can be done? Nobody seems to have worked it out yet. One approach is “congestion pricing”—fining those who use personal vehicles in the busiest parts of cities at the busiest time of the day or week. One example is the charge to drive in downtown London, an approach that New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg tried to adopt for Manhattan, but the New York State legislature nixed it in 2008.

That’s the “big-stick” approach, and it appeals to some because it seems simple to just fine people for driving. But kinder alternatives—“carrots” that work—have admittedly not been easy to find. In New York City at the time of this writing, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had a big deficit, and badly needed improvements in the city’s huge subway system weren’t happening. New York City’s subways work amazingly well in terms of transporting a lot of people very quickly, and this system is the world’s largest and one of the few that operates 24 hours a day. However, they are screechingly, ear-splittingly noisy, often jam-packed, and none too clean. Also, many stations are far underground and have minimal people-movers to get crowds up to the street. If you want to tempt drivers out of their comfortable cars, it would help if this subway system could become as quiet and pleasant as the metros in Washington, DC, and Paris.

Many major cities are on seacoasts or major rivers—that’s because water transportation was so important that cities were founded at good river and ocean junctions. Ferries used to be common, but they too have become unfashionable and mostly abandoned in the United States. Still, there’s hope. A small comeback is happening in New York Harbor with yellow Water Taxis and other subsidized ferries taking people across the Hudson and East River much faster than they’d get there by bus and subway, or even by car sitting in long rush-hour lines at tollbooths (and then looking for and paying dearly for parking).

Which brings us to another approach: building or rebuilding cities so that cars just can’t get into them—or with few if any parking spaces—and at the same time improving bicycle and pedestrian pathways and various kinds of public transportation. You will probably be surprised to learn that the biggest close-to-carless area in a major U.S. city is not in one of the ecofriendly cities on the West Coast, like Portland. It’s New York City’s Roosevelt Island, a two-mile-long, 147-acre island in the East River. The main transportation to and from Manhattan for the island’s 10,000 or so residents is by subway or by aerial tram across the river.

Most other car-free areas of cities are historic districts like medieval portions of European cities, or newly built planned communities like Vauban, 1,700 houses on what was a military base in Freiburg, Germany; its 4,700 residents accept streets too narrow for most automobiles. In Great Britain, Prince Charles has promoted car-free parts of cities, but this has met with considerable criticism.

Ironically, as traffic jams decrease, people have less reason to abandon their cars. As long as there are highways, broad avenues, and freeways/interstates/turnpikes, the traffic level will tend to have a negative feedback and the amount of traffic on them will tend to stabilize—the lower the traffic, the greater the growth in traffic; the worse the traffic jams, the greater the decline in traffic. Thus, part of the solution has to be to stop building ever-broader streets, avenues, and freeways, and instead put transportation money into light and heavy rail, as well as bicycle paths and park-like walkways.

A further note: microgrids can help

The increase in microgrids, described in the Chapter 10 on transporting energy, would also lead to an overall decrease in the transportation of freight and people, because energy would be produced and used locally, and people would live nearer to their jobs. How much of an energy savings this might yield, however, is not possible to predict right now.

The bottom line

• Prior to mid-2008, cars and light trucks used more than 90% of transportation energy in the United States, while trains and buses together used only 3%.

• Energy use for transportation is the most easily and quickly changed and therefore is key to rapid improvement in energy conservation.

• U.S. energy use could drop more than 6% if we simply stopped moving coal around to generate electricity. This would offer a double savings, eliminating pollution from the dirtiest fossil fuel and increasing the nation’s energy efficiency.

• American society has never decided whether transportation is a public service and thus should be funded by government, or just another commodity that should fend for itself in a free market. America has to make this choice.

• If railroads replace cars and light trucks, energy use for transportation could drop by two-thirds.

• While restoring the infrastructure of the United States will cost $1.6 trillion, new railroads could be built along the major transportation routes in the United States for about $14 billion, less than 1% of the infrastructure-restoration costs.

• Government subsidies for highways cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year, while Amtrak gets less than $1 billion, along with a slap on the wrist.

• Rising gasoline prices have led to a rapid decline in automobile travel, suggesting that in this case the free market worked, but government subsidies have an opposite effect, promoting highway travel.

• The redesign and restoration of major cities can greatly reduce automobile traffic, improve the quality of life in cities, and be an important part of the long-term solution to energy use.