Climate and environment
It simply isn’t possible to slow climate chaos and environmental issues without a radical recommitment to public transportation.
Fossil-fuel-powered transportation is killing the planet and our communities. That’s no exaggeration. Burning coal to create the steel used to make the chassis of a vehicle. Extracting the crude oil that’s refined into gasoline and diesel and combusting that fuel to emit toxic air pollution and greenhouse gases. The ecological devastation of highways and concrete jungles. Petroleum-propelled vehicles are exacting catastrophic harms in seemingly endless ways.1 Climate chaos is only beginning.
Proponents of the “three revolutions” are convinced that a new generation of vehicles can help fix this situation. Electric vehicles, they say, will radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, and sharing the vehicles will mean fewer cars are required to transport more people. Autonomous technologies are promised to nearly eliminate the need for parking spaces, opening up large portions of cities and towns for densified redevelopment that further cuts down on the need for motor vehicle travel. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick once gloated about an Uber-oriented city as “a cleaner city, where fewer cars on the road will mean less carbon pollution—especially since more and more Uber vehicles are low-emission hybrid vehicles.”2
All things considered, it sounds like a promising vision. The problem is that it’s almost completely fabricated. Given the incredible lobbying powers of private industry and its ability to rebuff or delay regulatory impacts, the chances of best-case conditions emerging are extremely slim. Though public transit has also routinely dropped the ball on the environment, it remains the best opportunity to make rapid progress if political power is democratized and leveraged.
Compared to internal combustion engines, electric motors do offer greater energy efficiency and emit less toxic air pollution.3 So it’s easy to see why proponents of the “three revolutions” in automobility view environmental benefits as a justification for rolling out a new generation of personal vehicles. While manufacturing an electric vehicle emits about 15 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than a gasoline- powered equivalent, the driving of the vehicle is staggeringly more efficient. The U.S. average greenhouse gas emissions for an electric vehicle are equivalent to those of an 80- miles- per- gallon gasoline vehicle, ranging from 38 miles per gallon in the coal-heavy Midwest up to an incredible 191 miles per gallon in Upstate New York.4 To put that in perspective, the average U.S. vehicle on the road in 2016 reached only 24.7 miles per gallon.5
Many governments that offer subsidies for electric vehicles make explicit reference to climate change and air pollution as a motivator. In 2018, California governor Jerry Brown announced a whopping sixteen bills to accelerate the rollout of electric vehicles, as they “will help get more clean cars on the road and reduce harmful emissions.”6
The sharing of electric vehicles via ride-hailing apps has also been marketed as accelerating low-carbon transportation. Lyft’s founders have written on the company’s blog that cost savings from its future electric and autonomous vehicles “will dramatically accelerate the rollout of electric vehicles, displacing millions of gasoline-powered cars and helping the U.S. and world reach their climate goals.”7 Studies have suggested that if all three “revolutions” happen simultaneously and within predicted timelines, they have the potential to cut greenhouse gas emissions compared to the business as usual scenario by an incredible 80 percent.8
But electric vehicles, ride-hailing services, and autonomous technologies all come with significant impacts of their own. Both the lessons of history and contemporary research indicate that, if these developments are not severely limited, they may rapidly worsen climate and environmental conditions.
Let’s start with the most widely critiqued environmental impact of electric vehicles: their immense use of raw materials, which requires a massive escalation of mining around the world.9 The global market for lithium-ion batteries—the main type used in electric vehicles—is projected to skyrocket from 15.9 gigawatt hours in 2015 to 93.1 gigawatt hours by 2024.10 That will result in an unprecedented spike in demand for materials. Some 63 kilograms of lithium carbonate—more than 10,000 cell phones would use—is required for a 70 kilowatt hour (kWh) battery to power a single Tesla Model S.11
Many high-tech devices in our society require such materials. But personal electric vehicles will explode demand to a much greater level. Replacing all two billion cars worldwide with electric vehicles would require a 70 percent increase in the production of neodymium and dysprosium, a doubling of copper output, and over a tripling in cobalt mining.12 Mining giant Glencore has estimated that about three times the copper is required for an electric car than for a regular vehicle.13
Hypothetically, mining can be done responsibly and ethically. As in every sector, processes could be dramatically improved with strong union density, environmental regulations, and public accountability. But there’s very little precedent for that in the places where the most mining takes place and where its impacts are unfolding. Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic, told me that an explosion of personal electric vehicles and autonomous ride-hailing services could quickly accelerate resource depletion, abusive labour exploitation at mines, and toxic waste. As he puts it, “Electric vehicles and autonomous driving don’t necessitate these things, but they do entail the risk, and the profitability means that there will be a strong pressure to go in this direction.”
Over half of the cobalt mined in the world comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mining practices have resulted in devastating pollution, illnesses, displacement, and use of child labour.14 Graphite mining in China has also caused rampant pollution of air, water, and soil.15 The extraction of rare earth minerals necessitates large quantities of toxic chemicals and waste products, while copper can result in heavy metal contamination and major tailings dam breaches.16 Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador, told me that mining in the so-called lithium triangle of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia has major effects on the hydrology of the water-scarce salt flats, compromising an already vulnerable water system that over a dozen Indigenous communities rely on. Bolivia’s Indigenous president Evo Morales has attributed the Western-backed coup that forced his resignation in late 2019 to the country’s nationalization of lithium resources, which private corporations desired control over. “I’m convinced that it’s a lithium coup d’etat,” he told the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald.17
By 2030, the world may have created 11 million metric tons in lithium-ion batteries that need to be recycled.18 Recycling rates of lithium batteries currently range between 2 and 5 percent, depending on the country.19 Analysts predict that a recycling industry will emerge in tandem with the increased demand for materials, but many questions remain about how much can and will be recovered.20 Recycling plants are expensive to build and operate, require specialized equipment to mitigate toxic pollution, and cannot recover all the material. Further, wide swings in materials costs may undermine the economic case for large-scale recycling.21
Private cars as a whole are a wildly inefficient way of using energy, even if that electricity is generated by low-carbon power plants. The average weight of a passenger vehicle in the U.S. dropped from 4,060 pounds in 1975 to 3,220 pounds in 1987, only to rebound to 4,070 pounds in 2014 due to a significant increase in pickup truck and SUV sales.22 Although a great majority of trips are taken in the city—perhaps 30 or so miles per day—some electric vehicles are being built with over 250 miles of range.23 Manufacturing for longer ranges, and bigger batteries, decrease the energy efficiency that electric vehicles boast.24 The battery alone makes up about 20 or 30 percent of an electric vehicle’s curb weight, ranging from 650 pounds for a Nissan Leaf to 1,200 pounds for a Tesla Model S. That mass requires more electricity to run. David Roberts of Vox observed: “Personal vehicles are probably the most challenging to electrify cost-effectively” and “dragging one or two passengers around over long distances in a 2-ton vehicle takes a lot of energy.”25
Electric motors also fail to reduce the amount of fine particulate matter emitted from tires and road surface wear, a problem that has links to cardiopulmonary toxicity and a wide range of respiratory issues.26 New research indicates that automobile tire particles also contribute an enormous amount of microplastics, which wash into nearby water sources.27
Autonomous vehicles are expected to weigh even more and use even greater amounts of energy than standard electric vehicles. An autonomous vehicle’s on-board computer currently accounts for 45 percent of its weight and consumes 80 percent of the power; there’s a risk that energy efficiencies from electrification could be “diminished or vanish completely” if factors like computer demand and weight aren’t meaningfully addressed.28 Prototypes for autonomous vehicles consume the equivalent of having 50 to 100 laptops continuously running in the trunk, “giving engineers a fuel economy headache.”29
It might not be immediately clear why such energy consumption matters, given that electricity is often much cheaper than fossil fuels and comes with less supply volatility and damage to the climate and environment. Electric vehicles do indeed use energy more efficiently than their internal combustion engine counterparts, but they require a huge amount of electricity for operation and manufacturing; an estimated 50 percent of an electric vehicle’s lifetime emissions comes from producing the battery itself.30 That, along with the power to operate the vehicle day to day, has to come from somewhere.31 In many parts of the U.S., electricity generation still requires the burning of coal or natural gas—which can have significant climate and environmental impacts, even if consuming electricity is proportionately less harmful than burning gasoline or diesel.32
At current rates, it will take many more decades to transition away from fossil fuels, especially natural gas. Jeremy Michalek, director of the Vehicle Electrification Group at Carnegie Mellon University, observed: “Some plants, like nuclear, hydro, wind and solar are generally fully utilised and will not change their generation output if you buy an EV [electric vehicle]. What changes, at least in the short run, is primarily that coal and natural gas plants will increase generation in response to this new load.”33 Renewables are being deployed at an alarmingly slow rate, exacerbating this concern.34 The International Energy Agency has warned that a stagnation in the world’s annual growth in renewables is “deeply worrying.”35 As Daniel Aldana Cohen of the University of Pennsylvania put it to me: “The less energy people are consuming for heating and cooling and transit, the less new clean energy you need to build.”
New electric vehicles—whether for personal or shared use—will take a very long time to proliferate: time that we don’t have, given the imminent threat of climate change. A vast majority of North Americans travelling by automobile continue to do so in vehicles that don’t include any of the three revolutions and likely won’t for a long time yet. Only 2 percent of the 17.3 million new vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2018 were electric.36
Many people who purchase electric vehicles aren’t replacing gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks, but highly fuel-efficient hybrids and other smaller vehicles, lessening the relative improvement in emissions.37 And the rapid rise in popularity of SUVs and pickup trucks, at 68 percent of sales in 2018, is greatly undermining fuel efficiency gains. The class of “light trucks” receives a larger pollution allowance under fuel economy regulations, incentivizing manufacturers to produce larger vehicles that they can sell for more money.38 In late 2019, General Motors announced a new generation of fossil- fuel-powered SUVs “whose profits will help fund development of electric vehicles that the automaker promises for the future.”39 In other words, auto manufacturers plan to keep rolling out climate-change-causing vehicles for many years yet.
There’s also a curious tendency by car owners to stick with driving even when a public transportation mode would be far cheaper and more predictable in service.40 This matters a great deal because new vehicles are lasting longer than ever. The turnover of household vehicles has slowed since 2009; an average vehicle in 2017 lasted 10.5 years.41 “The thing that we forget is that cars are capital assets,” explained Costa Samaras, the director of the Center for Engineering and Resilience for Climate Adaptation at Carnegie Mellon University, in a 2018 interview. “This idea that people are going to give up a capital asset because a newer product is maybe saving some operational cost is not in line with what we’ve typically seen.”42 Another report echoed this concern. It calculated that the average American vehicle remains in use for 16.6 years, and that if every U.S. vehicle sold were electric starting today it would take until 2040 for 90 percent of the vehicle fleet on the road to be electric.43
That’s very contrary to current vehicle buying trends. It also assumes that ride-hailing and autonomous vehicle companies actually embrace electric vehicles, which, as evidence suggests thus far, is an awfully big assumption. Fewer than 0.2 percent of vehicles driven for Uber and Lyft are electric.44 Uber announced that it would start paying drivers with a small per-trip incentive of between $1 and $1.50 to switch to using electric vehicles, hoping to increase rides taken in electric vehicles from four million in 2017 to five million over twelve months in both Canada and the U.S.45
But Uber provided a total of four billion rides in 2017, meaning electric vehicles are only a tiny percentage of the total (and will likely be for a long while yet).46 As Peter Slowik, researcher in the International Council on Clean Transportation’s passenger vehicle program, put it: “Even their more bullish announcements about future electrification activities still amount to less than 5% of their operations by 2025.”47 Almost all operating costs of ride-hailing are downloaded onto their drivers, who often live in precarious, near-poverty conditions. It’s difficult to imagine how a one-dollar-per-ride bonus—or even grants to encourage drivers to make the change—would help foster the financial stability to purchase a new electric vehicle. Slowik noted that time spent charging an electric vehicle is lost revenue for a ride-hailing driver, with faster and convenient charging infrastructure requiring large upfront costs.
Lyft has committed to one billion trips in autonomous electric vehicles by 2025, but that commitment may make up less than 5 percent of the company’s rides by then.48 The company has introduced an electric vehicle option to its app that allows riders to request a low-carbon ride, rewarding drivers who opt to use such vehicles.49 Lyft also announced that it would be going “carbon-neutral” by purchasing carbon credits to plant trees, build wind farms, and capture greenhouse gases from landfills.50 However, the purchasing of emissions offsets doesn’t fundamentally address the reality that cars spew significant quantities of greenhouse gases and air pollution into the atmosphere; it only displaces the solutions elsewhere.51
A serious problem with ride-hailing is the amount of “deadhead” miles between trips without any passengers, which accounts for roughly half of the 600 million miles that these services have added to New York City’s roads since 2013. The offsets that Lyft purchases don’t include those miles—and the company has opposed the introduction of a zero- emissions vehicle mandate in California that would require all ride- hailing vehicles to be electric by 2028.52
So far, Ford, Waymo, and Uber have used hybrid vehicles for most of their autonomous vehicle testing.53 The Waymo fleet that’s racking up million of miles in testing is made up of hybrid Chrysler Pacifica minivans; in May 2018, the company ordered another 62,000 of the models.54 While hybrids have a higher fuel efficiency than regular vehicles, such testing still requires a significant amount of gasoline.
Waymo doesn’t disclose how often they charge their hybrid vans, leading some to speculate that batteries are being used to power the energy-intensive computer systems while gasoline is being used to actually drive the vehicles 25,000 miles per day. This could represent massive greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.55 Waymo announced in early 2018 that it would also purchase 20,000 all-electric Jaguar SUVs—but new hybrid purchases would continue to outweigh all-electrics by a ratio of roughly three to one.56
It was reported in late 2017 that “Ford expects its vehicles will be on the road for roughly 20 hours a day, and [Ford’s president of global markets Jim] Farley said using battery-electric vehicles doesn’t make business sense because they would need to recharge multiple times a day, cutting into profits.”57 Farley explained that hybrids also help provide the immense electricity required to run the autonomous sensors and computers.58
In response, California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols tweeted: “Earth to Ford: what part of sustainability do you not understand? Driverless hybrid vehicles running 24/7 delivering pizza and passengers means more tons of pollution/GHGs in cities!”59
Pulling off the “three revolutions” in tandem could mean an 80 percent decrease in emissions. But if vehicles are only automated and electrified—but not shared—and electricity isn’t completely decarbonized by 2050, we will face a scenario that, euphemistically, “may produce more CO2 emissions in 2050 than is consistent with targets to limit global temperature rise to 2°C (or less) compared to preindustrial levels.”60
Only automating vehicles while failing to ensure electrification and sharing would increase vehicle travel by 15 to 20 percent, with an alleged “increased efficiency of AVs” meaning that energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions would remain around the business as usual levels that will likely result in global collapse.61 It’s a spectacular gamble. Failure could mean a massive overshoot of the 2°C threshold, greatly jeopardizing the survival of humanity—especially in the Global South and in low-income communities in the Global North.
A truly enormous behavioural shift would be required to achieve widespread pooling. Americans are not in the habit of sharing private automobiles. From 1980 to 2013, carpooling decreased by 19.7 percent of workers to a mere 9.4 percent.62 Decades worth of high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes and car-sharing programs haven’t proven to be successful.63 Tesla’s growth strategy is oriented around the continued sale of personal vehicles to consumers, with increased autonomous technologies baked in.64 Waymo and Fiat Chrysler announced in 2018 that they were working on a licensing agreement to sell autonomous vehicles directly to consumers.65
Options like Lyft Line and UberPool are arguably incentivizing a return to genuine carpooling; Lyft has pledged that 50 percent of all rides by 2022 will be shared. But even if Lyft does achieve that goal, it will still produce 2.2 ride-hailing miles for every personal vehicle auto mile taken off the road, as some of every shared trip involves just one passenger between pickups.66 These shared rides are widely despised by drivers, who are effectively forced to accept the most labour-intensive rides to keep their acceptance rate up. Uber’s Express Pool and Lyft’s Shared Saver are new services that require riders to walk to a designated pickup spot to reduce driver detours. One review of Uber’s version observed that it “takes a few minutes for the app to determine the pickup and drop-off locations, and then it takes a few more minutes for a car to arrive,” concluding that readers should take a bus instead.67 The constraints facing genuine ridesharing are huge, and largely unresolved outside of wishful thinking and fundraising hype.
Even an absolutely best-case scenario of rapid and widespread electrification, sharing, and autonomous technologies will necessitate the maintenance and expansion of the ecologically devastating infrastructure of roads, highways, and suburbs. Highways have destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands that serve as complex ecosystems for a tremendous variety of species, as well as natural flood mitigation—until they are wiped out by roads to facilitate more and faster passenger vehicles.68 Road systems result in high runoff of toxic pollutants including grease, road salt, and pesticides into streams and rivers.69 Making driving easier will likely result in induced demand that makes people more comfortable with living farther away from their work, in turn requiring more of this ecologically devastating infrastructure.
“The extensive land dependency will not change,” says Stefan Kipfer, an associate professor at York University who focuses on urban politics. “The energy use remains very high compared to public transit, irrespective of what the source of energy is. The profit orientation of the for-profit platforms, of course, means that there’s an incentive on these people’s part to push that means of transportation for its own sake.”
Much of the public transit in North America is currently noisy, dirty, and very bad on fuel economy—with disproportionate impacts in working-class communities. Constant stopping, starting, and idling by diesel buses to pick up riders creates plumes of nasty air pollution and undercuts fuel efficiency. This effect is worsened by pothole-strewn roads that slow vehicles and require more acceleration.70 Resulting fumes can cause and worsen respiratory issues, including asthma.
Diesel buses have an average fuel efficiency of only four or five miles per gallon.71 That matters a great deal from a climate perspective, given that city buses can be driven between 40,000 and 60,000 miles a year.72 Relative improvements have been made with the proliferation of natural-gas-powered buses (28.5 percent of the U.S. fleet in 2018) and hybrid electric buses (21 percent).73 But the production of natural gas is plagued by methane leakages, a serious concern given that, over a 100-year period, methane has a global warming potential 25 times greater than carbon dioxide.74 Passenger rail also has issues with spewing pollutants. Fine particulate matter in the Toronto subway system, for example, is around ten times higher than the levels found outside.75
Madeline Janis, executive director of Jobs to Move America, emphasized to me that the environmental impacts of transit are most pronounced in low-income communities of colour, as public transit vehicles are often maintained in such areas. West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT), for instance, has long fought the presence of polluting bus depots near the community’s homes and schools.76 Moreover, frequent exposure to peak noise levels at subway, bus, and streetcar stations can cause hearing loss, particularly for passing cyclists.77 Decades of austerity have resulted in people with the least access to reliable service coping with the worst environmental consequences of dirty transit. These are extremely serious issues.
Yet even in its current underfunded state, transit remains far less polluting on a per-passenger basis than personal automobiles. A lot of it comes down to sheer weight. An average automobile weighs around 4,000 pounds without passengers. A standard two-axle forty-foot transit bus weighs in at between 20,000 and 33,000 pounds.78 With only eleven passengers, a transit bus gets better mileage and emits slightly less in greenhouse gases than a passenger car with one rider (which is how most cars are driven).79 It requires considerably less energy to propel one passenger a single mile on a semi-full bus or train than in an automobile.
There are a wide range of factors for this. Trains are more efficient because of the very low “rolling resistance” of steel wheels on steel rails, compared to rubber tires on pavement. There are also efficiencies from reduced aerodynamic drag in closely coupled vehicles (the same case that autonomous vehicle proponents make for “platooning” on highways, and why freight rail is more efficient than trucks).80 But all transit, including buses, can fit far more people in a vehicle than a private automobile with five seats. This passenger capacity—combined with the efficiencies found in fixed-routed transportation, due to not having to drive to pick up every individual rider from different locations—makes public modes far less energy-intensive than private counterparts.
Critics of public transit will point out, often accurately, that buses and trains frequently run with only a handful of passengers aboard at any time. But that ignores the tremendous ridership potential uniquely available to those modes. Transit’s historically low fuel efficiency can be rectified in many ways: driving in dedicated lanes with priority at intersections, faster loading systems like all-door boarding, and encouraging densification of communities through building and preserving public housing.81 These are not particularly radical changes. When combined with free fares and comfortable rides, expanded transit service can trigger a virtuous cycle of less vehicle ownership and congestion as people feel more confident in their ability to rely on transit. The better the service, the more people who ride buses and trains. That in turn lessens the amount of energy required on a per-person basis. Increasing ridership on existing transit is far better climate policy than getting everyone into their own electric vehicle.
Existing air pollution problems can be mitigated by transit agencies with just a bit of commitment, a process far easier than trying to regulate and retrofit all personal automobiles on the road. After all, a transit agency has only a few thousand vehicles and can deal with them and related systems in a relatively rapid fashion. A study of Toronto’s dirty subway system recommended improved ventilation, filtration, and rail dust cleaning: all fairly straightforward solutions, although the TTC has repeatedly refused to implement such changes, which the union is fighting. (In late 2019, a retired TTC worker filed a private prosecution against the transit agency for alleged adverse health effects resulting from air pollution in the subway system.)82
Following a study into Toronto-area commuter GO trains, Metrolinx installed new filters that removed 80 percent of black carbon and 25 percent of ultrafine particles. Upcoming electrification, long fought for, will eliminate them altogether.83 Centralized control over a transportation system makes it possible for change to happen far more rapidly than if it is privately owned.
Electrifying public transportation will massively cut emissions, air, and noise pollution. It takes an estimated 100 personal electric vehicles to provide the same “environmental relief” as can be gained by a single sixty-foot electric bus.84 Every 1,000 electric buses on the road displace 500 barrels of diesel, while 1,000 battery-electric vehicles only remove 15 barrels of oil demand.85 Unlike personal vehicles, which tend to be used for only an hour or two per day, buses run up to eighteen hours per day. Electric motors have extremely high torque that can be administered at low speeds, making them a perfect fit for buses that have to constantly start and stop, and through regenerative braking, the kinetic energy from frequent braking can be captured to recharge batteries rather than lost as heat.86 An electric bus running in peak conditions can be at least five times as efficient as an old diesel bus.87
Of course, electric transit would require resource-intensive materials and inputs to manufacture the required batteries and components. But quantities would be hugely reduced on a per-person basis compared to widespread ownership or use of personal electric vehicles.88 Given the sheer number of passengers they can carry and the hours per day spent on roads, electric buses prove to be a far superior use of resources than personal vehicles, even if those cars are occasionally shared.
“It’s not a solution to climate change to create a billion Teslas. Each of those cars has an enormous carbon footprint for everything that’s extracted and all the energy-intensive processes to create it. The more we can just make one bus instead of twenty cars, the better.”
—Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals
While electric buses are currently more expensive to buy than diesel buses, transit agencies would end up paying much less to operate them than current models. It’s about 2.5 times cheaper to power a bus with electricity than with diesel, and maintenance costs would be considerably lower as well.89 There are several ways to charge a bus, including a plug-in overnight at the bus depot or an overhead charger at main bus stops. Charging en route requires a massive amount of electricity at once, which may cause sudden spikes in load demand and requires an integrated approach between transit operators and the grid; rapid charging can also cause faster battery deterioration. There are ways around such harmful effects, such as committing to an off-peak overnight charge when electricity demand and costs are at the lowest, or a hybrid trolleybus-like approach using overhead wires for a few miles between longer stretches that are wire-free.
Transit agencies across North America are experimenting with different ways of charging buses and integrating them into their networks. It’s not enough to simply purchase electric buses: a great deal of collaboration is required with electrical utilities to prepare the infrastructure before rollout.90 There’s plenty of talk about the potential for personal electric vehicles to serve as “batteries on wheels” that fill up in off-peak times and sell electricity back to the grid during peak times if they’re not in use. But there’s no reason that public transit agencies couldn’t do that as well—and potentially better. Buses have more battery capacity, are often parked for long periods of time, and run on predictable schedules.91
Unfortunately, there have been challenges in deployment of electric buses in some places. Both Los Angeles and Albuquerque experienced performance, battery range, and mechanical issues in buses from the Chinese manufacturer BYD.92 There are also ongoing issues with battery range in electric buses, particularly in cold weather; immense heating requirements can suck up almost half of the battery power, reducing the number of hours a bus can spend driving its routes.93 However, they continue to spread: New York City’s MTA introduced its first 60-foot electric bus for service on the new 14th Street Busway in late 2019, with plans to buy 500 electric buses by 2024 for all five boroughs.94
Moataz Mohamed, a civil engineering professor at McMaster University, told me that every brand of bus has its own unique plug-in technology. That means that transit agencies trying out a certain type of bus, like a New Flyer or BYD, become effectively married to that technology. They would have to install a new set of charging stations if they changed brand. Transit agencies are notoriously risk-averse, so they’ll tend to stick with the technology they know—even if it’s a dirty diesel bus. Mohamed says having operational data for electric buses would help agencies decide if the mode is right for them, especially given questions around wintertime battery life and breakdown histories. But private bus manufacturers usually require nondisclosure agreements with municipalities, keeping that data unavailable to the public.
While electric buses cost considerably less to operate over their lifetimes, few transit agencies are in a financial position to invest in replacing a significant portion of their fleet with what many consider a still-unproven technology. Mohamed told me that his team interviewed a dozen transit managers in Canada about electric buses. “They said repeatedly, ‘I don’t want to see my picture on the front page of the newspaper saying I wasted taxpayers’ money.’ The risk-averse mindset is controlling a lot in the industry.” Austerity by another name.95
Battery-related concerns about resource usage and range can also be meaningfully addressed by providing transit agencies more funding to experiment, and investing in public transportation modes that don’t require batteries in the first place. Trolleybuses, streetcars, light rail, and subways run on electricity delivered through overhead power lines or third rails. Trolleybuses are arguably the best option for cities at the present moment. The mode has a century-long track record of proven success in places including Beijing, Milan, and Vancouver, and, without the need to carry a heavy engine or battery, higher energy efficiency.96 Range issues are also solved with these vehicles. They’re far less reliant on battery power; some alternate between requiring charge from overhead lines and driving without connection, which requires a smaller battery than standalone buses.97
Essentially, the more coordinated and well-funded a transit system is, the fewer batteries it will likely require. Instead, the system will rely more on fixed-track options like trolleybuses, streetcars, trains, and subways—with buses filling the gaps. Each of these options greatly decreases the amount of space that needs to be dedicated to roads and highways, which are accompanied by wetland destruction, road salting, and toxic runoff.
Low-carbon solutions that dramatically reduce greenhouse gases, air pollution, and other ecological impacts are well within reach. All they need is increased and sustained public funding, political support, and a desire by all for a greener city and world. And they can have near-immediate, desperately needed effects in communities poisoned with air and noise pollution. There’s no need to wait: the transition can happen immediately.
Cohen told me that in the wake of protests in 2013 in response to worsening congestion and a nine-cent hike in bus fares, the mayor of São Paulo, Brazil, demarcated hundreds of kilometres of dedicated bus lanes just using paint (rather than constructing separated bus rapid transit lanes). Cohen says that within about six months, the new lanes resulted in commute time being cut by about 15 percent, with a corresponding reduction in diesel and greenhouses gases. That demonstrates the speed at which a city can massively improve bus service and environmental conditions, he says.
A similar example can be found in Everett, Massachusetts, which saw an incredible 20 to 30 percent decrease in commute times at peak hours after using red paint to install a “tactical transit lane.”98 “I don’t think there’s any form of land-use politics in the city that can be as dramatically reshaped as quickly as you get when you make dedicated bus lanes with paint,” Cohen told me.
Such projects can help reduce political opposition and give a tangible example to riders and other commuters who may have doubts about the possibilities. With escalating enthusiasm from creatively deployed interventions, a transit agency can build constituencies of support for further advances, including electric buses and more well-planned options that reduce the need for resource-intensive batteries.
There are many recent instances of public transit offering a lifeline to impacted communities: following the 2013 floods in Calgary, the devastating 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, and the Houston Metro’s evacuation of thousands of people with buses following hurricanes Harvey and Irma. “Public transit remains the number one travel option for mass transportation, and for those who don’t own a car in times of natural disasters, that can mean their only chance of survival,” the Canadian Urban Transit Association wrote.99
Getting people out of spatially inefficient vehicles and onto buses, trains, bikes, and sidewalks also allows cities and towns to take steps to mitigate harms from climate change impacts—including flooding, sea level rise, and extreme temperatures.100
Public transit as it exists has clear environmental issues. But such issues are proportionately far less significant—and easier to fix—than the impacts of maintaining and expanding the supremacy of private automobiles. We can very quickly electrify and expand public transportation in a coordinated and predictable manner. That’s much better than naively hoping that dozens of Silicon Valley–backed companies competing for monopoly control of city streets will somehow save the day by convincing million of drivers to self-select for low-carbon vehicles. It simply isn’t possible to slow climate chaos and environmental issues without a radical recommitment to public transportation as a communal force for good and a collective struggle for a decarbonized, ecological, and decommodified future.
“What’s optimistic is people organizing in whatever form that takes,” author and academic Kafui Attoh told me. “Elon Musk and Silicon Valley capitalists are organized to some degree. What that requires is organization from below and by those who will be immediately affected by ecological disaster.”