Future Drive

Electric Vehicles And Sustainable Transportation

Daniel Sperling

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781559633284
  9781559633277
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610910736
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Biological Sciences

In Future Drive, Daniel Sperling addresses the adverse energy and environmental consequences of increased travel, and analyzes current initiatives to suggest strategies for creating a more environmentally benign system of transportation. Groundbreaking proposals are constructed around the idea of electric propulsion as the key to a sustainable transportation and energy system. Other essential elements include the ideas that:

• improving technology holds more promise than large-scale behavior modification
• technology initiatives must be matched with regulatory and policy initiatives
• government intervention should be flexible and incentive-based, but should also embrace selective technology-forcing measures
• more diversity and experimentation is needed with regard to vehicles and energy technologies

Sperling evaluates past and current attempts to influence drivers and vehicle use, and articulates a clear and compelling vision of the future. He formulates a coherent and specific set of principles, strategies, and policies for redirecting the United States and other countries onto a new sustainable pathway.

CHAPTER 1

Transportation as if People Mattered

I am going to democratize the automobile. When I’m through everybody will be able to afford one, and about everyone will have one.

Henry Ford

We [human beings] are a big mistake. We’re a case of gigantism. Our brains are too big and they’re killing us. We’ve created all these poisons, which are unknown anywhere else in the universe. Of course, we want our brains to become even bigger so we can increase our supply of ideas. That’s like elephants in trouble saying, “I think we’ll be okay if we put on another hundred pounds.”

Kurt Vonnegut

The world’s car population is booming. Cars are polluting the world’s cities, dumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other climate-altering greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and consuming vast quantities of petroleum. “The American dream of a car—or two or three of them—in every garage is beginning to look like a nightmare for our planet,” warns the former president of the World Resources Institute.¹ Is this true? Will our thirst for automobile mobility inevitably lead to environmental and economic cataclysm? Many believe so, and with some justification.

The alarming reality is that the automobile population is growing at a much faster rate than the human population, with saturation nowhere in sight. In 1950, there were approximately 50 million vehicles on Earth, roughly 2 for every 100 persons. By 1994 the vehicle population had soared to almost 600 million, roughly 10 per 100 people. If present trends continue, over 3 billion vehicles could be in operation by the year 2050, exceeding 20 per 100. Even then, world car ownership rates would fall far short of current U.S. rates of 70 per 100 people.²

A sobering assessment of the future? Yes. Is disaster inevitable? Not necessarily. The future need not be a simple extrapolation of the past; public policy can be changed and private investment altered. We can shift to a more environmentally friendly transportation system without unduly restricting freedom of movement. I envision a future only a few decades distant in which petroleum consumption, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions by new motor vehicles are reduced to near zero—at little or no additional cost.

Taming the Auto

What tools are available to craft this more benign future?³ I start with certain premises—that it is important to respect people’s preferred mode of travel; that we need greater diversity in vehicle and energy technologies; that government should take an active role in encouraging new technologies and industries (through more incentives and more flexible regulations); and that electric propulsion is central to this more benign future. Electric vehicles of various sizes and designs—including those powered by fuel cells—significantly reduce air pollution, greenhouse gases, and petroleum use. When powered by batteries they are especially suited to very small vehicles in a way that could expand mobility for many people and be a catalyst for reclaiming neighborhood streets for the use and enjoyment of people. Electric propulsion provides by far the best opportunity to create an environmentally benign transportation system.

Happily, we are not unrealistically far from realizing this vision. The stage was set in 1990 when the California Air Resources Board (CARB) galvanized a range of automotive and technology companies with what has become known as the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. This radical new program requires that a specified percentage of manufacturers’ sales consist of ZEVs. The ZEV mandate may be the single most important event in the history of transportation since Henry Ford began mass-producing cars eighty years ago. It set into motion a series of events that may revolutionize motor vehicles and perhaps transform the transportation system and motor vehicle manufacturing industry.

The California ZEV mandate has also been embraced by New York and Massachusetts and is being seriously considered by a number of other states. It is set to take effect in 1998 in California and shortly thereafter elsewhere.

The ZEV mandate promises to overshadow a trio of sweeping national laws passed in the early 1990s. These three laws—the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991, and the Energy Policy Act of 1992—were conceived as the cornerstone of efforts to put a lid on pollution and, by redirecting the transportation system, to make possible a more environmentally benign future. They represent a complex of policies and programs designed to reduce solo driving, enhance local flexibility in dealing with transportation problems, introduce alternative fuels, and incorporate “intelligent” technology into the transportation system.

The progress of these laws has been spotty. Although they provide some direction, they have two serious flaws: ineffectiveness in reducing automobile use, and a failure to embrace electric propulsion.

A call for less dependence on cars is appropriate and desirable. Greater use of public transit, walking, bicycling, and telecommuting should be encouraged. But travel reduction will be difficult to accomplish and, beyond a point, is not even desirable. In any case, cars by themselves are not deterrents to a sustainable transportation and energy system. Worse, those advocating fewer cars are likely to be indifferent to the urgent need to build clean and efficient vehicles. This is certainly the sentiment expressed in a widely distributed report sponsored by the Aspen Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Science. Written by a former high-ranking executive of General Motors in collaboration with a blue ribbon committee, it argues that the American love of the automobile has “atomized urban life and stunted people’s capacities to nurture and value shared forms of life: family, community and civic life.”⁴ This calls for “changes in policies and social habits that represent nothing less than a new transportation ethic for the twenty-first century.”⁵

Advocates of this mind see automotive technology as demeaning to the human spirit and destructive of urban landscapes, turning them into sterile, lonely places studded with parking lots.⁶ They resist solutions that would improve vehicles as implicit endorsements of a more central role for cars. To prevent expanded use of vehicles, extremists seem to imply that it would be preferable not to reduce vehicular pollution at all. Taming the car would embed it even more deeply in our lives. Such fear is out of touch with reality. There can be no turning back to a preauto-motive age, nor is there any need to. With creativity and political will, the car can be made more benign, it can increase mobility, and it can even be a tool to help restore the human face of our communities.

How Much Does It Really Cost to Drive a Car?

The public debate is skewed toward the ways in which cars threaten the fabric of modern life. Yes, cars pollute, deplete petroleum, affect climate, and consume space. But cars also provide large benefits.

First, consider the mistaken belief that drivers pay only a small fraction of the true cost of driving. According to one report,

Commuters going to work in major central business districts in the U.S. in their own motor vehicles directly pay for only about 25 percent of the total cost of their transport. The other 75 percent is typically borne by their employers (e.g., in providing “free” parking), by other users (in increased congestion, reduced safety, etc.), by fellow workers or residents (in air or noise “pollution,” etc.) and by governments (passed on to the taxpayers of one generation or another in ways that usually bear no relationship to auto use).⁷

This claim may be true in a few especially polluted and congested downtowns, but it is not an accurate generalization.

The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment examined this question with the most detailed and rigorous analysis ever conducted of the social costs of motor vehicles. The conclusion? Motor vehicle users in the United States pay 68 to 80 percent of the total cost of motor vehicle use.⁸ What they pay for are direct costs, including the car itself, fuel and fuel taxes, registration fees, insurance, and parking. What they don’t pay for in full, among other things, is traffic congestion, accidents, the cost of buying oil from a cartel (measured as the effect on world oil prices), national security costs associated with oil importation, environmental degradation, and traffic courts. Only in certain situations, such as driving at peak hours in polluted and congested downtown New York, is car use heavily subsidized—that is, only at those times and places are drivers paying only a small share of the total cost.

In general, it would be desirable to price cars and their use to absorb unpaid costs. The result would be somewhat reduced driving, along with less congestion, pollution, and energy use. The effect might be significant in some regions—if it were politically possible to charge motorists higher fuel taxes, registration fees, parking charges, and so on. But given the benefits of the car, these unpaid costs are not high enough to justify a radical restructuring of transportation systems and lifestyles.

It is also not true that U.S. fuel prices are wildly distorted. Many believe that the price of gasoline should be much higher to account for oil spills, leaking storage tanks, pollution, global warming, energy dependency, and other unpaid extraction, transport, and combustion costs. Studies that have put the unpaid social cost of gasoline at over two dollars a gallon suffer from major methodological and analytical shortcomings.⁹ For the Office of Technology Assessment’s far more detailed and sophisticated social cost study, Mark Delucchi produced a more modest figure: between 30 cents and $1.60 per gallon, and probably closer to the lower number.¹⁰

This is not to say that gasoline is an acceptable fuel. The problem is the tyranny of averages. Averages are misleading in this case because dramatic differences in pollution from one locale to another lead to large variations in environmental costs. One more ton of pollution in Los Angeles, for instance, will cause far more damage to health, buildings, trees, and crops than o...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 - Transportation as if People Mattered
• CHAPTER 2 - Sifting the Wheat from the Chaff
• CHAPTER 3 - Toward Electric Propulsion Towa ectric Propulsion
• CHAPTER 4 - Neighborhood Electric Vehicles
• CHAPTER 5 - Fuel Cells
• CHAPTER 6 - Hybrid Vehicles: Always Second Best?
• CHAPTER 7 - Accelerating Regulatory Reform
• CHAPTER 8 - Technology Policy for Sustainable Transportation
• Notes
• Index
• Island Press Board of Directors