According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the average miles per gallon (mpg) for new automobiles in the United States reached 24.3 in 2004 (the most recent figures available at the time of this writing), up just 7% from 1980. This was an improvement of only about one-quarter of a percent per year, way under what the automobile industry is capable of.9 The most recent energy bill, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, requires that by 2020 the average will be 35 mpg, a 44% improvement overall but still asking for less than 1% improvement in gas mileage per year.10 If 35 mpg is still the average in 2050, when there will be an estimated 120 million more Americans, and if there has been no decrease in miles driven per person, then America will be at breakeven with today—burning about the same amount of gasoline each year. On the other hand, if cars got an average of 50 miles per gallon and the mileage per person dropped 50%, the amount of fuel used would drop to 42 billion gallons—34% of the amount used in 2007 and only 100 gallons per capita. This would amount to a 10% decrease in the total energy used for all purposes in the United States in 2007.
We saw a decline in miles driven in the late spring and early summer of 2008, in response to $4.00-a-gallon gasoline. According to the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Mary E. Peters, in the first quarter of 2007 Americans drove 20 billion miles less than in the first quarter of 2006, which would translate into a decrease of 2.7% in just one year.11 Although there will be variations in the retail price of gasoline, we can expect the average price to keep going up unless government policies and subsidies force it down. Further hikes in the price of fuel will likely lead drivers to either drive less or trade in even more of the big gas-eaters for vehicles that are more fuel-efficient, as happened in mid-2008. Thus, even without any improvement in mass transportation, even without any change in laws, a 50% decline in per-capita miles driven is possible by 2050.
Of course, this may not happen—people may adjust to higher gasoline prices, refigure their household budgets accordingly, and resume their old driving habits. Then, too, there’s probably some minimum that could be reached in terms of miles driven per person each year unless mass transit expands and improves rapidly, with more and better trolleys, subways, and buses, and intercity high-speed rail and urban rail. Also needed are more and better bike lanes within urban areas and bike paths between urban areas. That’s where the ways to reduce energy used in transportation become complicated, requiring imagination, innovation, and insights more at the level of rocket science.
Railroads are a big part of the solution
In the United States, 23,000 miles of intercity railroads provide access to 500 cities with 260 trains a day.12 Unfortunately, in recent years too few people have traveled by rail, complaining that it is expensive and unreliable. At the time of this writing, however, rail travel was up considerably and the question was whether Amtrak could keep up with the demand.
When I started to write this chapter, I assumed it would be very expensive to upgrade existing railroads and build new ones, with their nicely graveled and cemented roadbeds and all those signals and switches and grade crossings. But to my surprise, when I talked with some experts on rail travel—including Tom Payne, director of the Ferroequus Railway Company Limited and founder of RailLink Ltd., Canada’s third-largest railway—I found that restoring and building railroads isn’t all that expensive. Let’s go through the numbers.
Based on current costs, plans, and proposals, new high-speed railroad lines could cost as much as $2.5 million a mile to construct, but it could be lower in some situations. (That’s for one track and all the signals, bedding, and other accoutrements.)13 Add the cost to purchase the land or rights-of-way and the cost escalates to $20–40 million per mile, according to U.S. government information. Just restoring an existing rail line will cost from about $500,000 to $1 million per mile,14 but where there’s a need for a tunnel or bridge, and where the terrain has lots of ups and downs, the costs go up. These numbers give us a basis for making estimates, and taken alone they sound like a lot. If you don’t like railroads or are in a business that competes with railroads (like making or selling automobiles), these are the kinds of numbers to throw around, without mentioning the costs of other transportation.
But when people begin to depend more heavily on rail travel, and upgrading and expanding existing rail lines and building new ones become necessary to meet increased demand, then it will become clear that the total construction costs are quite reasonable compared with the cost to improve other kinds of transportation. Based on estimates by the Feds and by railroad experts, the cost to build a new high-speed railway from scratch between Los Angeles and San Francisco or Sacramento, construction and equipment only, would be about $700 million. (This is the cost of building a route directly down the Great Central Valley, much better terrain for a railroad than the scenic route along the coast that the present railway follows.) Adding in the cost to purchase land would bring the price to $7–14 billion.
That may sound like a lot, but just building the Denver airport that replaced Stapleton in the mid-1990s cost $4.8 billion,15 and $7–14 billion is actually a fraction of the estimated total cost of restoring the rest of America’s infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ “Report Card on America’s Infrastructure” estimates that $1.6 trillion will be needed over just a five-year period to get things back into shape, including bridges, tunnels, highways, airports, sewage lines, dams, hazardous wastes, schools, and navigable waterways.16 A piddling railway between two of America’s greatest cities, L.A. and San Francisco, would use up about a half a percent to not quite 1% including land purchases.
An energy-efficient United States will involve not only restoring and expanding passenger rail service but also keeping up with increases in freight transportation as the population and economy expand. The Department of Transportation estimates that freight traffic will increase 50% by 2020 and that meeting this increased need will cost $175–200 billion over the next 20 years.17
What would happen if the U.S. rail system essentially collapsed? According to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), if all freight moved by truck and none by rail, it would cost “an additional $69 billion annually,” costs that would be transferred to us, the consumers. Moreover, the increased truck traffic would pound away at existing highways, which AASHTO estimates would require “an additional $64 billion in highway funds over the next 20 years” to maintain. Not to mention the need for new highways to handle all that extra truck traffic.
The government funds highways and air travel, with little if any for railroads
Although increasing rail traffic is a sure way to decrease energy use, government funding works to the opposite effect: In the mid-1990s, the federal budget provided more than $40 billion for the Department of Transportation to spend annually in highway and transit grants to states. The 2005 “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, and Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU),” signed into law that year, provided $286 billion from 2004 to 2009 for highways, highway safety, and public transportation. The $286 billion included $815 million for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; $5.1 billion for highway safety programs; $517 million for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to provide grants to states for truck and bus regulation and enforcement; $100 million for up to five states to test various new ways to charge for the use of highways; $7.8 billion for “programs that address highway congestion”; $23.7 billion “to maintain and improve the National Highway System and to replace, rehabilitate, and preserve bridge and other infrastructure [of highways].”
What about railroads? The SAFETEA-LU did include $7.3 billion for “investments in buses, rail cars, and maintenance facilities,” but only $900 million for Amtrak. At the time of this writing, this bill has not been reauthorized.
The Obama administration announced on February 1, 2010, that the core highway program would be funded at $42 billion per year
in 2011—about the same as in the previous administration’s 2010 budget but below the $67 billion actually spent by the federal government on highways in 2009—and that the Department of Transportation would spend $8 billion to develop the nation’s first high-speed intercity transportation. But the Obama budget lowers funding for conventional rail from $11.1 billion actually funded in 2009 to a proposed $2.9 billion for 2011. This means that total funding for new high-speed rail and conventional rail is about $10.9 billion, an actual decrease from the $12 billion spent by the federal government in 2009.18
This set of federal policies, favoring highways and complaining about railroads, is not a free-market approach, although, ironically, it was the policy advocated by the George W. Bush administration, which claimed to believe in a free market. Under this continuing policy, highways will get much greater federal subsidies than railroads.
Similar policies have prevailed within states. For example, in his 2006 State of the State address, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed spending $222 billion for infrastructure development, which included $107 billion for transportation and air-quality programs—1,300 miles of new highway lanes and thousands of miles of bike and pedestrian paths, but just 600 miles of additional commuter rail, and no mention at all of high-speed rail. This for the nation’s richest and most populous state.
We need more railroads and fewer cars and trucks
If the $40 billion given annually by the U.S. Department of Transportation to fund highways went instead to railroads, it could be used to build 16,000 miles of railway track, or 8,000 two-way rail lines, enough to cross the U.S. and more. Even if we assume that every inch of the land and rights-of-way for these rail lines would have to be purchased, that none of the new track would be laid on what is already government land—which would not be true—this would fund 1,000–2,000 miles a year.
Think about what this would get us. A new rail line could be built from New York City to San Francisco (2,900 miles), another from Boston to Miami (1,500 miles), a West Coast line from San Diego to Seattle (1,260 miles), from Seattle to Minneapolis (a northern route of 1,650 miles)—a total of 7,300 miles with just one year’s allocation of what has been going to highways. And in the second year, we could add a Midwest north-south route from El Paso to Fargo (1,450 miles).
Alternatively, we could divide up the funds, half for intercity railroad and half for intracity and suburbs-to-cities rail transportation. According to railroad expert Tom Payne, light rail and regular railroads can be built for the same amount, although light rail is often more costly, he says, because of options chosen that aren’t necessary for the basic transportation. (Light rail refers to intercity trains that are designed to carry lighter loads at lower speeds, but are more than trolley cars, like the trains in downtown Denver, Colorado.)
Like railways, air travel is vital to our economy
It has become fashionable among some environmentalists and “ecofriendly” advocates to focus on the use of fossil fuel by commercial airlines and private jets, but it should be clear by now that their focus should be on automobiles and light trucks. Although aircraft use just 9% of the transportation energy in the United States, air travel has become essential to America’s economy, and cities that lose commercial air service suffer economically. It is thus false economy and of little benefit to energy conservation to focus on reducing the use of fossil fuels for air travel.
As noted throughout this book, the solution to our energy problem involves a mixture of energy sources. Fossil fuels have been wonderful sources of energy, and what is left of them should be saved for the applications in which they are most useful—for making plastics and other organic compounds, and for situations where oil and gas are especially well suited to provide energy. Until the time comes when jet fuel can be obtained in large quantities by using the energy from electricity to produce small hydrocarbons, one of the most useful applications for fossil fuels will continue to be air travel.
Can we ever get ourselves out of our cars?
Getting out of our cars would save money and energy. Much more money is spent transporting people than freight in the U.S.—$1.01 trillion to move us around versus $580 billion to move our stuff in 2001, the most recent year for which there are data—a total of $1.59 trillion dollars spent on transportation.19 In the U.S., highways account for 89% of the total passenger-miles, air travel accounts for 11%, and local transit (city bus and trains, etc.) just 1%.20
If things got so tough that people could travel in only the most fuel-efficient way, guess what that way would be. Surprisingly, right now the most energy-efficient passenger transportation, in terms of direct energy used to move one passenger one mile, is intercity bus. The Acela train is the next most efficient.21 According to the Minnesota Regional Railroad Association, “On average, railroads are three or more times more fuel efficient than trucks.”22 Cars and trucks take three times as much energy per passenger-mile as the Acela, and air travel takes 4.48 times as much. For every passenger who switches from traveling by car to the Acela, energy used per mile drops two-thirds. For every passenger who decides to travel on a standard U.S. train instead of by car, one-third of the energy per mile is saved.
Because it makes economic and energy sense to depend less on automobiles, trying to get Americans out of their cars has been a continuing effort by many experts and a primary emphasis of a number of university departments, such as George Mason University’s School of Public Policy under the direction of Kingsley Hayes. Most of the efforts haven’t succeeded very well, but a few have. I have some personal experience about this, which I would like to share with you.
First of all, I see it as a practical issue, not a moral issue. A growing debate about automobiles has taken on aspects of a moral argument, with some people seeming to believe that owning a car is immoral, while on the other side some appear to believe that it is a moral right, not just a practical convenience, to drive a personal vehicle. I can’t say that I fall on either side of such a debate, but I do confess that I enjoy driving a car. I grew up in a small town where every teenager couldn’t wait to be 16 and get a driver’s license. For us boys, it meant a chance to drive around neighboring towns and try to pick up girls, or at least impress them. In those days of carburetors and points, before fuel injection and electronic ignition, I used to tune up cars. Today, I list among my close friends Lee Talbot, one of our greatest conservationists and also a world champion formula Ford and vintage car racer. I’ve crewed for him now and again (never being much of a help, but having a good time).
At other times in my life, I’ve lived happily without a car. I’ve ridden a bicycle since I was a youngster, and when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin my only transportation was a bicycle and my feet. I remember that period as the time in my life when I had the fewest financial cares ever.
It was already obvious in 2008 that the more expensive gasoline is, the faster people move away from their personal vehicles. A July 28, 2008, front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal testified: “Funds for Highways Plummet as Drivers Cut Gasoline Use.” All things considered, however, my conclusion is that for people to use personal vehicles much less than they do now, mass transportation must become convenient, attractive, affordable—and fashionable. If George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cameron Diaz, Placido Domingo, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie started to take the train and, for local trips, used bicycles and their feet, that would become fashionable and people would start to imitate them.
Doesn’t this mean that a government intent on reducing energy use should help to make mass transportation more attractive rather than subsidize oil and natural gas corporations with the oil-depletion allowance and other ways that oil, natural gas, and highway travel are subsidized by the government?
Bicycles in cities
Today, my wife and I have an apartment in New York City and another in Florida and happily drive the 1,200 miles between the two. When we are in Florida, we drive everywhere becau
se there’s no public transportation to speak of and almost nothing except the ocean is within walking distance. In New York, however, we rarely drive, choosing instead to walk almost everywhere within walking distance and use public transportation for the rest, because, although crowded and noisy, it’s the fastest way to get around. I bicycle for exercise in both places, but wish the Big Apple were better set up for cyclists. It has already improved greatly in that regard. It is well on its way to finishing the Hudson River Park, with a bike path that follows the waterfront from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan and connects several miles north to a route that crosses the George Washington Bridge. In fact, you can go several hundred miles by bike from the middle of New York City if you want to.
Both my children, now grown and married, bicycle all the time. My daughter Nancy and her husband Mike sold their last car years ago. Mike and my son, Jonathan, bicycle to work. Mike and Nancy do their grocery shopping by bicycle. And when they visit us in Manhattan, they put us to shame by going on incredibly long bicycle rides. The last one, a night ride, took them up Eighth Avenue, one of the busiest Midtown thoroughfares, and then over to the East River, where they enjoyed the spectacular nighttime views of the city while bicycling back and forth across ten different bridges.
Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence Page 24