EVs: Missing the Sustainability Forest for the GHG Trees
Electrification of cars is distracting us from real solutions
*$#/!!* Traffic
For as long as I can remember, traffic concerns have always polled in the top 3 issues for residents in pretty much every community in Canada. Whenever asked, people just want to be able to drive around their city more easily.
In the past, and in too many cases still in the present, the response of local government has been to build more roads and interchanges. This has been a natural response of decision makers for a variety of reasons: it seems logical that building more road capacity will alleviate congestion; and building more roads and interchanges is a very overt way that elected officials can show they are “listening” to residents. Conveniently as well, a road or interchange can get built, or at the very least have construction started, within one election cycle. Building more roads is great optics, even if it accomplishes very little to address the problem.
Induced Demand
Thankfully, over the past 10-15 years cities are beginning to understand that building more roads does not solve congestion, or as Enrique Peñalosa elegantly put it: “Trying to solve traffic problems by building more roads is like putting out a fire with gasoline.” Research is abundant that more roads, wider roads, more lanes, simply results in more traffic. A simple google search will give you a list of research papers and articles explaining this fundamental law of road congestion, also known as induced demand: building new roads results in new drivers and new car trips.
Building Bigger Roads Makes Traffic Worse: Wired 2014
Why building more roads has environmental effects & won’t ease gridlock: CBC 2021
Sadly, Winnipeg has still not learned this lesson and seems to be moving forward with a plan to spend close to $1B to expand less than 4km of roadway, which their own research shows will have little to no benefit for traffic congestion.
The New Hierarchy
But, for most cities in Canada, there has been an increased focus on biking, walking, and transit as key transportation choices for residents. The focus has shifted away from the car as being the most important means of transportation to walking, cycling, and public transit. The new hierarchy for sustainable transportation places personal cars at the bottom of the list.
Transportation plans are now being based on the sustainable transport triangle, where private cars use to have primacy, to now people being the most important aspect of a transportation system. According to this vision, going forward we should see a significantly decreased focus on cars within our cities. Again, sadly, Winnipeg doesn’t seem to understand this.
Enter Climate Change
In the last 15 years or so, addressing climate change has entered the picture of our urban transportation networks, with good reason. Outside of the oil & gas sector, transportation is the largest emitter of GHG’s in Canada.
Within the transportation sector, personal vehicles, cars, SUVs, and light trucks are huge proportion of the GHG emissions, creating more than 50% of the greenhouse gasses emitted across the entire transportation sector.
In the last 5 or so years electric vehicles have made a huge leap in technology, allowing them to be a reasonable replacement for the traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) car. Looking at where the majority of urban GHGs are coming from and the urgent need to address climate change, that is impacting our majority urban population, governments have naturally focussed on replacing ICE cars, SUVs, and light trucks with EVs.
Federal rebate programs for EVs, commitments to phase out ICE car sales, provincial rebate programs for EVs, and municipal commitments mandating charging stations for personal electric vehicles have all been prime government action to meet our commitments to being a net-zero country by 2050. Sales figures for electric vehicles in Canada clearly reflects that governmental commitment to personal electric vehicles.
The Problem with EVs
I have owned a hybrid electric vehicle since 2007. Without a doubt, the 2 Prius’ I have owned are the best cars I have ever had. When I bought my 1st Prius in 2007, I knew that I would never have a strictly ICE car again. My gas consumption is low. In the summer I average about 4.0l/100km, in the winter that goes up to about 5.0.
But, I am still traffic!
Switching to an electric vehicle does nothing to solve the larger urban issue of car-dependency. Our current focus on electrifying our transportation network does not alleviate traffic congestion. Cars are still stuck in traffic, whether it is an ICE or an EV.
Switching to electric vehicles does not make our roads any safer for all the other users out there. Children walking to school, seniors crossing the street, cyclists being run over by a distracted driver do not care one whit whether they are run over by an ICE car or an electric car. In fact, electric vehicles may make our roads and streets less safe, as they are heavier and accelerate faster, meaning greater stopping distances and more devastating impacts.
Replacing ICE cars, pickups, and SUVs with electric versions, as the data show is happening, does nothing to reduce the wear and tear on our roads. Again, the heavier versions of the personal vehicles will actually increase that wear and tear. The result will be increased infrastructure spending to maintain our pothole ridden streets, which of course comes from taxes.
The Status Quo Manifested
We are trapped in a cycle that rather than being visionary for a better future, is further embedding the status quo. The focus on electric vehicles is just one more example of how we are truly missing the forest for the trees when it comes to urban challenges and the what is needed.
Governments, unironically, reduce the gas tax to support “affordability” at the same time as they offer rebates on electric vehicles to address climate change. One works directly counter the other. Both cost a lot of money, in the end achieving very little.
Municipal governments reduce parking rates and mandate downtown EV charging stations at the very same time as they lament the lack of transit ridership. Again, polices working in direct opposition to each other, achieving very little.
Missing the Forest…
There is no question, we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is the existential crisis of our time. While we are heading in the right direction, so far it looks like we are going to miss the targets Canada is committed to. There is no question we need to do more. Much more. And electrification is part of that solution. But only part of the solution, not the whole thing.
But we have gotten distracted from the bigger picture of what sustainability looks like. As I written before, the status quo needs to die. We not sustainable path on any account, environmentally, socially, or fiscally.
Let’s go back to the transportation sustainability triangle:
If we do this, put people at the top of the decision pyramid and cars, regardless of their engine, at the bottom, we will achieve the transportation GHG reductions we need. The solution for our cities to be livable, safe, sustainable, and yes, net-zero, is in putting people first.
The limits of our collective imagination to think of our cities as being fundamentally different than they are today is what is driving decision makers, and pretty much everyone else, to think that a short-term fix, such as getting an electric car or widening a road, is going to change the world.
In the end, we are focussed on a slightly different version of the status quo, spending a lot of money, achieving very little.
brian