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Day 3

Biggest loser in Bay Area transit debacle may be the environment

By Mike Rosenberg

mrosenberg@bayareanewsgroup.com
Posted: 01/11/2010 01:51:00 PM PST
Updated: 01/11/2010 09:47:25 PM PST

Special Section

* Running on Empty:
Bay Area Transportation in Trouble

In the war over the future of public transit in the eco-obsessed Bay Area, the biggest casualty could prove to be the environment.

Without a doubt, air quality inventories show that the best way to cut greenhouse gases in the region is by removing cars from the road.

However, with the cost to drive plummeting and fare increases and service cuts making transit less practical, transit agencies are having problems retaining their old passengers, let alone attracting new ones. If that continues, the effects could be dramatic — more cars on the road could endanger human health, produce hazier air and contribute to rising sea levels.

California is the 12th-largest source of global warming emissions worldwide, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

A nasty chunk of those pollutants originate in the Bay Area, where cars and trucks are the largest source of ozone precursor emissions, according to Bay Area Air Quality Management District inventories. Vehicles account for 35 percent of all reactive organic gases and 45 percent of nitrogen oxides in the region, according to the air district.

If commuters keep ditching transit for their cars, the problem will get worse. Each transit rider who switches to a 20-mile round-trip drive produces an additional 4,800 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each year, a 10 percent increase in a two-car household's total carbon footprint, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

It is possible to curb driver emissions through other means, such as carpooling or greener vehicles, but the most powerful option may be transit.

Chris Peeples, vice president of AC Transit's board of directors, said the service cuts and fare increases that every major local transit agency has implemented recently are a blow to the Bay Area's crusade against greenhouse gases because they make it harder for commuters to get around without a car.

"The number of areas where you can get around completely on public transit are pretty limited," said Peeples, a 12-year board member who travels primarily by transit. "Every time you cut public transit, it becomes more limited."

Moreover, the environmental benefits of buses, diesel locomotives and electric rail cars are not realized unless enough commuters are riding, says Mikhail Chester, a postdoctoral researcher who studied green transportation at UC-Berkeley for six years. That's an issue in the Bay Area, where agencies have lost 66,000 daily passengers in just the past year.

Chester's study, published in June, looks "beyond the tailpipe" at 120 factors — from concrete and asphalt production to train and car manufacturing — to determine each mode of travel's real carbon footprint in the Bay Area. Chester and UC-Berkeley professor Arpad Horvath found that transit commuters have smaller carbon footprints than drivers only if the trains and buses are fairly full.

For instance, they discovered that a commuter driving an SUV with one passenger would have the same carbon footprint, per mile traveled, as a commuter on a bus carrying eight passengers. Similarly, a commuter on a light-rail train that is 34 percent full has the same environmental effect, per mile traveled, as a solo driver in a sedan.

Transit companies have an opportunity, however, to change that equation by investing money to make their fleets greener, much in the way automakers are rolling out more hybrids and cleaner cars.

Their funding problems, though, have erased many opportunities to do just that.

Most Bay Area operators have tested expensive zero-emission buses that use hydrogen fuel cell technology, but they have not had enough money for any mass rollouts. In some cases, the technology is not fiscally sustainable: The Valley Transportation Authority, for instance, says it costs about 32 times as much to operate a fuel cell bus as a traditional, dirtier diesel vehicle.

Caltrain has plans to electrify its diesel locomotive system, but it recently ran out of money in the environmental planning process.

The environmental problems are ironic because, before their funding problems, transit agencies said they had experienced a growing number of commuters citing the environmental benefits as a reason for riding. One-fourth of Caltrain riders, for instance, now say they ride in part because it is a greener commute, up from 10 percent in 2003.

source: http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-...on/ci_14166899