Expanding people’s access and mobility through public and active modes of transportation is, will be, and always has been key to mitigating climate change and alleviating related disasters. Fenger had even made it clear more than a couple decades ago the significant air quality benefits resulting from increasing public transportation use and decreasing single-vehicle occupancy use (Fenger 2000). To add further, Josyana Joshua of CityLab reports that “organizations are calling for $208 billion in annual investments for the nearly 100 cities in the C40 network, which together make up about 25% of global GDP.” From a report by C40 Cities and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), Joshua goes on to mention that “electrifying transit fleets, expanding bus and rail infrastructure, and improving system accessibility would not only slash transport emissions and air pollution but also boost quality of life and economic opportunities, particularly for low-income urban residents.”
Joshua mentions that the report highlights cities that are already making similar, ambitious and bold public transportation infrastructure investments, such as in Austin, Texas, where “ voters approved a $7.1 billion plan to add new rail lines, bus rapid transit and all-electric vehicles to the city’s transit offerings;” and in Jakarta, Indonesia, “which is on track to provide access to transit within 500 meters of 95% of residents’ homes by 2022.” Everyone residing in rural and urban areas would benefit from the positive climate change mitigation outcomes if more urban areas followed the leads of Austin and Jakarta. But still, Joshua highlights the stark difference in investment spending within the U.S. infrastructure bill between public transportation, rail, and roads and bridges — $39 billion for public transportation, $66 billion for rail, and $110 billion for roads and bridges. Giving credence as to why this disparity in funding is so alarming, Joshua references that “continued investment in roads and highways will make it hard for public transit to compete as an attractive alternative.”
Joshua references further that “[to] draw large numbers of riders out of cars, transit has to be more appealing and efficient than private vehicles … [requiring] dramatic changes in land use policies that have promoted auto-oriented sprawl in cities around the world and ending government subsidies for driving, such as free parking.” Moreover, Joshua references that “even a rapid transition to zero-emission cars would not avert catastrophic climate change if vehicle-miles traveled are not also dramatically reduced.” So, this provides further evidence to the notion that investing significantly in roads and highways is grossly counterintuitive and counterproductive to the general needs of public transportation in all of its forms. Also, this provides evidence to the notion that investing in electric vehicle infrastructure, which is $7.5 billion in the infrastructure bill, will not be enough to mitigate climate change to the extent that is needed.
Joshua does not speak in length regarding bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure investments that are a part of the infrastructure bill. But unfortunately, these investments have the lowest funding allocation at $5 billion, among all of the other infrastructure investment categories. Even electric vehicle infrastructure investments, which ought to be considered analogous to single-occupancy vehicle use investments such as investments into road and highway infrastructure, have a higher funding allocation. The miniscule funding allocation to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure investments is also counterintuitive and counterproductive to the goals of mitigating climate change in order to avert catastrophic disasters, as Joshua similarly mentioned previously regarding the disparity between public transportation, rail, and road and highway infrastructure investments. But using Fenger’s article as a clue, if more public transportation use and less single-vehicle occupancy use could help society realize the associated air quality benefits, then cycling and walking could help society realize even more significant air quality benefits that are associated. Intuitively because cycling and walking do not have any associated emissions from their use, these modes of transportation would have the most beneficial climate change mitigation impact than any other transportation mode.
But of course, implementing cycling and walking infrastructure at a large scale would require a significant change in the current land use policy paradigm, as Joshua mentioned previously regarding public transportation. Marginally in contrast to the change that would be needed in land use policies to more attractively implement public transportation, land use policies would have to support even denser areas than they would for public transportation, in order to implement cycling and walking as viable, attractive transportation modes. But as Joshua and many other experts in the field have alluded to and directly pointed out, the most difficult part of implementing viable, attractive public transportation and cycling and walking infrastructure is conveying and ensuring the associated, prerequisite behavior change.
By Asif Haque
Peer-reviewed literature
Fenger, J. “Urban Air Quality,” Atmospheric, 33: 4877-4900 (2000).
Other sources
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