Hop a Bus to the Future
Almost half the land area of the City of Los Angeles is located in the San Fernando Valley, better known as simply "the Valley." With 224 square miles and 1.76 million people, the portion of the Valley that lies within the city limits would be the nation’s sixth most populous city, just ahead of Philadelphia, if it were a municipality unto itself. It wasn’t until 2000 that rapid transit began serving the region, and in 2005, when Los Angeles chose to open a new transit line in the Valley, it didn’t build a train or a trolley or a subway. It added a busway, the Orange Line, and people here love it. The Orange Line doesn’t look or operate like a regular city bus. The vehicles sport sleek, bullet-train silhouettes and shiny silver paint, and they run along a path that is separated from street traffic by barriers and trees — much like train tracks — and from which all other vehicles are barred. The trainlike features don’t end there: outdoor stations have ticket vending machines, bike racks and enclosed bike lockers, and illuminated signs that alert riders to the arrival time of the next bus. Between some stations the buses reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour — much faster than the cars inching along Highway 101 at rush hour. Special sensors in the roadway detect moving buses and switch street signals up ahead, halting cross traffic so buses can pass through without stopping. Just like the train. This system, known as bus rapid transit, has begun to emerge as an appealing alternative to trains in many metropolitan regions: it’s more flexible, cheaper, and in some cases more environmentally friendly than building a new rail-based mass transit system. Los Angeles opted for a busway because it offered comparable benefits to an aboveground rail line, at one-third the price, and could be built in half the time it would take to lay tracks and launch rail-based service. And unlike the train, the bus has the ability to leave its dedicated roadway and make stops on regular city streets, delivering riders to destinations they could not otherwise reach by mass transit. The idea has held sway in other cities around the world for many years. High-speed busways augment rail-based transit in Mexico City, where buses move as many as 315,000 people a day. In Brisbane, Australia, a city of nearly two million people, bus rapid transit services have a daily ridership of 93,000. In Beijing, Bogotá, Colombia, and Curitiba, Brazil, buses are the high-speed transportation method of choice. The success of bus rapid transit as a twenty-first century transportation alternative in the United States will depend in part on efforts to dispel the image of the bus as a poor man’s conveyance. Los Angeles, because of the Orange Line’s trainlike features, has made progress. In a survey conducted by city transit officials in 2009, riders rated their busway experience as comparable to that of a new light-rail line elsewhere in the city. That’s music to the ears of Martin Wachs, director of the Transportation, Space, and Technology Program at the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit think tank headquartered in Santa Monica, California. "We want to get people into public transportation — we want to make it more attractive," he says. Transportation officials in Cleveland agree. "Bus rapid transit is probably the hottest public transit product on the market today," says Joe Calabrese, the CEO and general manager of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, which operates perhaps the sleekest bus rapid transit system in the United States. Cleveland overcame the bus’s poor-man’s image by building glass-enclosed stations and designing vehicles that feel like train cars. For instance, their doors open on both sides and allow platform-level entry for easier boarding. The buses run for 6.8 miles along Euclid Avenue, serving many of the city’s medical, cultural, and educational institutions. The so-called HealthLine has also attracted new businesses to areas where passengers get on and off, adding an estimated $4.3 billion to the local economy. The benefits of bus rapid transit came with a sticker price of $200 million, relatively low compared with other options that would cover the same distance, such as a $650 million light-rail system and a $1 billion subway line. But bus rapid transit’s more affordable price tag could not win over transportation officials in Maryland, who were looking to expand connecting service to the Washington, D.C., Metro system. They opted for rail over bus, despite cost estimates and environmental studies that came out in the bus’s favor. The World Resources Institute, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, D.C., conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions that would result from light rail and the bus rapid transit alternative. A train’s emissions depend on the source of the grid power used to run electrified cars. In western Maryland, that’s coal-fired power plants, making hybrid-electric and natural gas–powered buses the lower-emission choice. People tend to forget that "the train isn’t emitting, but the power plant is," says Dario Hidalgo, a transportation engineer at the institute. Though the rail system will cost $1.5 billion — nearly three times the low-end estimate for the bus — state officials argue that the train will allow them to serve a large ridership (projected 65,000 daily) without service delays. Wachs argues that there is no single factor that determines whether buses or trains are the better option. The bus can be upgraded to accommodate higher passenger volumes by making vehicles longer and requiring riders to purchase tickets in advance to facilitate on-time departures. "It’s not like there is a rule, one is better, one is worse," he says. "There’s a big fuzzy area. That’s what makes it interesting."
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NRDC in the News: Spring 2009
"Advocates for mass-transit and passenger-rail service scored two victories…adding $3 billion in mass-transit spending and beating back a proposal to cut Amtrak funding. ‘This will go a long way to improve our rail systems and maintain the jobs needed to keep them running,’ said Deron Lovaas [of NRDC]. ‘Congress is clearly catching up with public support for more and cleaner transportation choices.’" –From "House Bill Pleases Rail-Transport Advocates," Wall Street Journal , January 28, 2009 "’[President Obama] has been a consistent advocate of sustainable energy policies," said Ralph Cavanagh of [NRDC] in an e-mail message, ‘and he has focused on making sure these resources are treated fairly in energy markets (many of which had been notorious for hostility to these relative newcomers).’" –From "A New Energy Regulator Takes the Helm," New York Times , January 26, 2009 "The most common knock on efficiency is that it can’t possibly reduce our consumption enough to reverse our energy growth or stop global warming….’The limits of efficiency have never been tested,’ says NRDC’s David Goldstein.’We’ve run out of political will long before we’ve run out of opportunity.’" –From "Wasting Our Watts," Time , December 31, 2008
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NRDC in the News: Spring 2009
This Is How We Will Live in 2029
With this issue, OnEarth is launching an occasional series that will examine what our world will look like in, say, the year 2029. And we begin with our cover story, "Selling the Sun," by Michael Behar . The topic of solar energy may seem a bit ho-hum. If solar is so great, so promising - as we’ve been told all these years - why hasn’t it really caught on? Why aren’t there solar panels on every roof in America? The sun is free, right? Behar found some intriguing answers lodged inside the brain of Jigar Shah . Shah is not a scientist. He’s a businessman, an entrepreneur - and a visionary. He understood that a fundamental obstacle to the widespread adoption of solar energy was not primarily technological (although there are still significant hurdles here), but economic. The key is to remove the financial roadblocks: his customers don’t have to buy expensive equipment that can take years to budget and pay off, that require endless hassles to obtain and maintain. No, the company he founded, SunEdison, takes care of all that. His customers simply sign on the dotted line, stand back as panels are installed, and then pay their (solar) electric bills like every other Tom, Dick, or Harriet. Suddenly, solar becomes affordable - and competitive with conventional forms of energy. This groundbreaking business model, along with falling prices for raw materials and, inevitably, federal limits on fossil-fuel carbon emissions, convinces Shah and others that we are finally seeing the true beginning of the solar era. Contributing editor Craig Canine has also seen the future. Although, to be honest, in Europe and Asia that future already exists: it’s called high-speed rail. But in the United States, it has yet to arrive - until right around now, give or take a couple of decades. It’s a matter of simple necessity. If we are to cut greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to preserve a livable planet, we will have to travel fewer miles in cars and planes. We will have to take trains - sleek, fast, luxurious, quiet, efficient, punctual, electric-powered machines that will transform our hoary concepts of rail travel. What we eat could soon be revolutionized too. Richard Manning examines one particularly controversial and difficult item in our diet: beef. Let’s face it - the razing of our lands to produce vast amounts of corn for cattle feedlots and our polluting, fuel-intensive farming methods, all orchestrated to produce a juicy steak or a medium-rare burger, are clearly unsustainable. Most Americans are not going to stop eating beef. But Manning shows us that we can have the beef without the environmental havoc. Natural, grass-fed beef can break into the mass market for exactly the same reason solar energy can: it has become profitable for those who produce it. More profitable, in fact, than the cruel and destructive practices of the past. OnEarth will continue to explore the ways our world will soon change. If all of us make the right choices, we’ll be able to say: you know, 2029 was a pretty damned good year. And you will have heard it here first.
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This Is How We Will Live in 2029