All jammed up in Seattle/Wikimedia Commons
SEATTLE – When stuck in the often nightmarish, 2019 traffic of this Pacific Northwest city, it is hard to avoid wondering if U.S. federal highway vehicle emission standards didn’t actually help move the country away from the goal of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Admittedly this observation sounds a little nuts, but let’s consider a few points of fact, the most important being American driving habits.
As gas and diesel prices started going up in the mid-2000s, Americans began driving less. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the more than 3 trillion miles people drove in 2007 fell below that bar in 2008 and dropped again in 2009.
This was a major behavioral change, a massive behavior change. Americans love their cars as much as they love their food, and their food has led them to eat their way into what has been described as an obesity epidemic.
Rising fuel prices, however, turned them off on driving for a while. Miles driven did rise slightly from 2009 to 2010, but remained below the 3-trillion mark and then dropped significantly to 2.95 trillion miles in 2011. That is the lowest number in the past 15 years.
As this was happening, experts who’d thought motor-fuel purchases wholly inelastic found instead that they do respond to the laws of supply and demand. As price went up, putting a limit on supply, demand went down.
“Estimates of long-run consumer demand elasticity suggest that a 10
percent price increase will result in only a 6 percent decrease in consumption,” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported in 2005.
Gas remained relatively inelastic compared to other goods. People who’d moved to the suburbs and yet worked in town still had to get there, but they modified their behaviors to save money and as a result, miles driven started falling for various reasons.
Some suburbanites moved back to the city and closer to work. People began to work remotely. Carpooling became more common. Zoning changes in some communities put local grocery stores within walking distance of people’s homes.
There were even Americans who started cycling or walking to save gas.
These are the kinds of fundamental, behavioral changes necessary to make real inroads on national output of CO2, the so-called “greenhouse gas” blamed for global warming.
Losing the war
These budding behavioral changes now appear to have in large part disappeared.
Higher prices for gas and diesel inspired oil companies to amp up exploration. They found more crude oil and as a result, motor fuel prices began to fall. Meanwhile, those federal energy standards were ensuring cars got better mileage.
When the lines crossed, the annual mileage driven started increasing:
- 3.03 trillion in 2014
- 3.1 trillion in 2015
- 3.17 trillion in 2016
- And a record 3.21 trillion in 2017, the last year for which full figures are available
A trillion, for those unfamiliar with crazily large numbers, is a thousand times 1 billion. So in talking about a decrease from 2.95 trillion miles in 2011 and the 3.17 in 2017, we’re talking about 220 billion miles – the equivalent of about 786 trips to the planet Mars and back.
Or, in simple language, one hell of a lot of miles. Americans showed they can conserve if they have to, but the monetary incentive to conserve has now gone away.
Looking around at the drivers in the flow of traffic here in the new California, you can’t avoid noticing that almost everyone is alone even though Washington is one of those states with so-called high vehicle occupancy (HOV) lanes on its freeways.
These carpool lanes are limited to use by passenger vehicles with two or more passengers. The lanes appear minimally used. There is no readily available data tracking use year by year, but a 2018 study of HOV lanes in general concluded that the lanes aren’t very effective at moving traffic and might actually be adding to air quality problems.
Sharon Shewmake, a resource economist now at Western Washington University, noted CO2 is largely a factor of how much people drive and reported there is “very little evidence showing HOV lanes deliver on their promise to reduce vehicle miles
traveled (VMT).”
The obvious reason for this would be that not enough people are carpooling. Americans like to have control of their mode of transportation even if all of us alone in our oversize motor vehicles jam up urban roadways so bad even 55 mph speed limits become a joke.
When you’re bumper to bumper doing 10 or 15 mph because that’s all the faster the traffic is moving, speed limits become irrelevant.
Sucking fuel
Cars crawling along in traffic because roads are overloaded don’t produce all that much more CO2 than cars speeding down the road, but there are other problems.
They blamed the deaths on increases of particulate matter, nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide. And then there is this from National Public Radio (NPR) as driving miles were going up in 2017:
Americans, unfortunately, are driving more and driving worse in large part because they are distracted by technology.
Whatever improvements the country might have been making in shifting Americans away from cars to environmentally friendlier means of transportation can’t be blamed on federal fuel-economy standards alone, but it is hard to ignore the fact that fuel-efficient cars make people think differently about lengthy commutes than did 12 mpg pickup trucks.
There are reasons the suburbs here have sprawled far back into the foothills of the Cascades to the east, and the traffic regularly jams up for dozens of miles north and south from the city center.
“Even with all the roads widened, transit lines built, ride-hailing services launched, and bike share systems introduced, we’re still looking at the same fundamental distribution of commuter choice.”
The “drove alone” trendline that took a nosedive in 2008 is once again going steadily upward. The walking, cycling, carpool, mass transit and work-from-home lines, which were showing some signs of improvement have been falling since 2015.
U.S. emissions of CO2 which began falling in the mid-2000s appear to have stalled, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. U.S. waistlines, an indicator of their spending too much time sitting behind the wheel or sitting elsewhere, continue to grow.
There is a case to be made that good intentions in this case made the problem worse not better. But what are the odds anyone will notice and think things through better next time?
Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska – long the scourage of national environmental groups for his advocacy of 49th state development – in 2007 called for a significant increase in the federal gas tax. Keeping gas prices high might have been the best thing the country could have done to reduce driving and encourage the slowly starting shift to other means of transportation and work-from-home programs.
Young’s proposal ran into a buzzsaw of opposition. There were complaints it would hurt business or the poor, and environmentalists were backing another horse.
As NPR noted, this hasn’t led to a decrease in gasoline consumption; it has lead to an increase in gasoline consumption.
It has worked so well that American businesses, led by Amazon, have been able to go back to the future to provide the sort of fuel-inefficient, home-delivery of once offered by the now-extinct milkman.
“‘With Amazon, it’s hard to be disciplined,’ said (Don) MacKenzie, a Prime member himself. ‘You’ve [got] an all-you-can-eat buffet as far as shipping goes. We don’t see that price signal telling us, maybe you wait and combine shipments.”’
MacKenzie leads the university’s Sustainable Transportation Lab. He and others observed that Amazon’s latest effort to provide two-hour delivery service has only exacerbated the emissions problem.
“Drivers are going from their home base to a warehouse to your house, and back to their home base. And warehouses are farther than the store you would have gone to,” said Anne Goodchild, director of the university’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center.
This works as a business model only because cheap fuel and fuel-efficient cars hold down the cost of delivery. The law of unintended consequences doesn’t seem to care about good intentions.
Categories: Commentary
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
“…As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
Cities actively & deliberately create highway congestion. It’s a ruse, intentional & purposeful.
Cities are granted powers to enable them to control their population and other forms of development. They know how much sewer capacity they have, how many households their electrical grid can carry … they decline additional building permits until the utilities are upgraded to carry the load.
Not so with highways & streets. Instead, the common utility – transportation – is allowed to become swamped, whereupon they appeal for grandiosely funded schemes, usually barely-cloaked versions of making silk purses from sow’s ears. It’s a problem far to valuable to allow it to be fixed.
For one thing – a recently widely acknowledged thing, but importantly for quite a few decades – it’s a cultural & polarization thing. Shift the balance away from traditional & conservative lifestyles, to urbanization. For power at the ballot box.
Congestion isn’t about our love of the steel steed, which goes back thousands of years and is rooted deeper than the oak (so good luck, pretending it dates to Henry Ford & petroleum wells). It’s about politics.
The High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes in the Seattle area are no longer only for HOVs. Washington DOT has converted them to toll lanes so that single occupancy drivers can use them for a demand based fee.
can they text in their payments while driving? and what about the poor?
There’s always the unintended consequences. Fine tuning needed. Of course we’ve become so numerous, that we’re now ungovernable. Gotta keep trying though. I feel sorry for the young people and the innocent animals that are filling up on and getting tangled up in plastic. All because we want a more convenient life.
Seattle has invested billions in rail, the sidewalks are littered with electric bikes and scooters, traffic still sucks. They replaced the Alaskan Way viaduct with a tunnel … that has the same number of lanes, 2 lanes each way. $3.3 billion at last estimate, accomplished nothing.
Bottom line: too many people.
James,
I would not say nothing was accomplished…
“But this is only a start in explaining why Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue enjoys one of the strongest economies in the nation…
How strong?
Per capita gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, was nearly $81,000 in 2017.
That compares with $61,000 in San Diego and $63,000 in Minneapolis-St. Paul.”
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/the-seattle-area-economy-defies-an-easy-peg-and-thats-a-huge-strength/
Hi Steve,
You’re not suggesting that those failures of HOV lanes and the tunnel to the tax payer’s wallet is / was the reason behind the insane economy of the Puget Sound are you? Because that would be pushing the boundaries of reality to the point where a black hole may develop inside the space that used to occupy my brain… Have you been down there lately? Construction laborers making $43.50/hr (last years pricing!), skilled construction guys making up to $100/hr. That place can’t build new buildings fast enough to fill the needs of the business community. However, I believe that they are going to be in for a pretty major ‘correction’ in the next decade or so. Last person in Seattle turn out the lights please? Probably not that bad, they’ve diversified their economy since the ’80’s, however, it may be bad enough where the tunnel and the HOV lanes might seem like they’re working as planned…
Jack,
Don’t forget…
We get closures on King Salmon runs here in the Mat Su while the Washington based fishing industry rapes our waters of Chinooks year after year.
This is on top of AK subsidizing the entire hatchery industry and floating loans to fisher people who buy boats and sell their catch to Seattle based distributors.
Seattle has a lot going for them including the Costco franchise that feeds thousands of Alaskans week after week.
It seems like their early investments in the Banana Republic of Alaska have really paid off…
Jack,
Was just reading MRAK and it seems like others are talking about the businesses in Seattle that profit from Alaska’s Economy…
“There are hundreds of businesses that operate out of Seattle and supply dozens of companies working on the North Slope.
Companies like Lynden, Alaska Air, and even Amazon, which has become a significant part of the supply chain for Alaska’s business community are based in Seattle and supply goods, services, and workers to the North Slope.”
https://mustreadalaska.com/rep-sara-rasmussen-to-seattle-city-council-knock-it-off/
Jack Smothers,
Yeah it’s true what they say about wages in Seattle.
My cousin born & raised in Forks, big strapping guy naturally became a logger. Then came the Spotted Owl Shutdown. His father in law gave him a job driving beer truck, which worked for a long time. Then came the divorce.
In desperation he goes to Seattle, just to catch up on the bills, ya know. Then he gets his first – wut?! – $400/day paycheck … 20 years ago. Today he wipes out major annual expenses (he’s a granddad now) with a single day’s pay. Still lives out here on the Peninsula, though … but wat a house.
And he’s still basically just a good-natured grunt who can stay out of the bight.
It works like this, oil companies will explore, drill, and then cap a well depending on rhe price of a barrel. They may wait 10+ years to tap into that well to meet their profit margins. They hit natural gas first, which pays for a large portion of the drilling. They are constantly exploring and not necessarially removing. The cost of a gallon of gas should be around .80/gallon (gestimating here) in America. The Obama Admin wanted it closer to $6, not for any other reason then to bring pain to the people.
I say for all those nuts on the West Coast, put your money where your mouth is, and walk to work. All of you! Put the “Green New Deal” to use. I’d love to see it. For me, well, I’d just keep on driving thinking about what my gokd buddy King Solomon used to say “nothing changes under the sun”.
I post this because these are the same HYPOCRITES pushing the whole “Global Warming” nonsense. Frauds!!!
“Another high level employee of the New York Times made racist, antisemitic, and disparaging comments on social media.
Jazmine Hughes, an associate editor of the New York Times Magazine, has made a series of racist and antisemitic comments on social media over a multi-year span. A number of the tweets came from Hughes’s personal account, which is associated with her Times email, after she was hired by the outlet in April 2015 and continued well into 2017.”
A full deck? Anybody?
https://www.thecollegefix.com/video-college-students-think-world-will-end-in-12-years/