Responding to a recent blog post of mine, a reader made this comment:

This raises an essential point about retrofitting our cities and suburbs for low-energy transportation. I've often thought that trying to make American / Canadian cities and suburbs less car-dependent simply by adding more buses, streetcars and light rail is like trying to make a bowl of chicken soup vegan simply by picking the chicken out. Dependence on private vehicles powered by gasoline is ingrained in nearly everything we've built over the last sixty years -- like the chicken broth in my chicken soup, car dependence is an inherent property of our settlements.

That said, it's not necessarily impossible to quickly scale up public transport across the US and Canada. Cities and, yes, suburbs throughout Western Europe have proven for decades that many people will opt for a mix of walking, bicycling and public transit over personal cars if the price is right and, especially, if the trip quality is superior. For local buses and rail, that means headways well under fifteen minutes, and a whole experience that is safe, reliable, fast, and clean. For bicycling that means extensive networks of dedicated, wide, uninterrupted paths with minimal stops, and secure, covered parking at destinations.

So high and medium-density urban areas can boost their transit and bike systems in just a few years. But what about the countless low-density urban and suburban areas where low densities and sprawled layout make even buses infeasible? Rather than the usual approach of building a light rail station surrounded by a lot of parking, these areas could benefit rather quickly from a combination of improved bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure, hybrid transit services like the 'Smart Jitney', and modern car-sharing, all with an eye to serving a nascent but steadily growing bus network, and absolutely with densification (or perhaps re-ruralization) in the long-term plan.

Back to the original comment: The reader went on to suggest that mass production of a new generation of electric vehicles would be the best solution to our transportation conundrum.

On this I disagree. We face rapidly rising costs and looming scarcity of petroleum products, natural gas, steel, and many other essential industrial resources. It just doesn't seem economically feasible to manufacture, sell, maintain and service hundreds of millions of units of a whole new generation of personal vehicles plus the required supporting infrastructure.

To be sure, there are some suburban and rural areas of the US and Canada that will have no choice but to shift to private electric vehicles -- and they're going to have serious economic and social equity issues if they're not careful in how to go about making that shift. For the rest of society, personal electric vehicles will indeed have a role, but they'll likely be most feasible in, again, car-sharing, which is growing and proving successful all over the western world.

We have limited time and resources to make an incredibly large shift in our land use and transportation patterns. We have roughly eight years to get our carbon emissions under control, and every month the 'peak' year of global oil production as discussed in even mainstream media shifts ever closer to 2010 (which is what we at Post Carbon Institute are projecting for the likely start of permanent decline). We need solutions that use existing technology and proven practices, that don't exclude middle- and low-income households already dealing with their own challenges with regard to rising costs.

Scaling up public transport in our sprawling cities and suburbs may well be a dream, but given the time we have, it may also be our only option.

Photo credits:
Easy Chicken and Rice Soup by DawnsRecipes (via flickr.com)
The big bad bendy Orange Line bus by Eleventh Earl of Mar (via flickr.com)

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