The Bay Area’s Spare the Air / Free Transit program made quite a splash during the recent heat wave.
Editorial By David Schonbrunn
Published: September, 2006
We have met the enemy ... and he is us. — Pogo
The Bay Area’s Spare the Air / Free Transit program made quite a splash during the recent heat wave. As a result of all the publicity, the public gained an understanding of the connection between auto driving, hot weather and smog. But was it worth $13.6 million to accomplish this? What should we do in the future? Here’s the view of a long-time transit activist who specializes in air quality.
Smog, known to chemists as ozone, is harmful to the lungs, especially those of active young people. Hot days cook the pollution creating levels of smog that by state and federal ozone standards are considered unsafe for human health. Other days, winds blowing off the ocean keep levels safe by pushing Bay Area smog into the Central Valley.
The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is the agency responsible for achieving healthful air here. In the past, it succeeded in reducing pollution from burning garbage dumps, industrial plants and refineries. While the air is much healthier now, it still fails to meet clean air standards.
For over a decade, BAAQMD has been stuck, unable to make any progress towards achieving the standards. Its Board of Directors, composed of city council members and county supervisors, has been too timid to take on the biggest source of smog: the motor vehicles of everyday voters. Over half the pollution that forms into smog comes from cars, trucks, boats, trains, construction equipment and garden equipment.
The problem for BAAQMD is that now the polluter isn’t some industrial bad guy -- it’s us. The elected officials who make up the Board have, so far, been unwilling to deal with the adverse health impacts of our auto-oriented way of life. They are afraid of an electorate satisfied with how it travels.
Ignoring its state-mandated responsibility to protect public health, the agency consistently does the minimum. Instead of aggressively moving to reduce the biggest source of smog, BAAQMD maintains a hands-off attitude towards the amount of driving taking place in the region.
Recent awareness of global warming hasn’t changed this posture, even though reducing driving will be necessary if we are to avoid further climate change. (Motor vehicles produce 40% of the global warming-causing greenhouse gases in CA.)
This is the universe from which the Spare the Air / Free Transit program emerged.
Using a few extra-million dollars lying around (after narrowly winning the appeal of a successful lawsuit brought by this writer’s non-profit) Spare the Air / Free Transit was designed to look like something was being done about smog.
Spare the Air / Free Transit is a feel-good program that doesn’t accomplish much, while spending large sums of money. By increasing transit ridership by 15 percent, the Spare the Air program has managed to increase public awareness of air quality and reduce pollution slightly. However, this program does not reduce driving enough to protect air quality on the bad days it is activated (4 of the 6 recent Spare the Air days exceeded federal ozone health limits; 6 of the 6 exceeded state ozone health limits).
Shockingly, no one at BAAQMD has any data to demonstrate that the recent Spare the Air days did anything to improve air quality.
While the additional people who rode transit were carefully counted, it is unknown whether the reduced driving resulted in any actual reduction in smog.
We do know that many regular commuters were inconvenienced by people who don’t usually ride transit, making buses, trains and ferries overcrowded. Ironically, this encourages commuters to drive on Spare the Air days when they would otherwise take transit.
There is no one to blame for our air quality problems. It is our car trips that cause the smog.
Rather than spending millions of public dollars to provide free transit rides on special days, it would be wiser for each of us to reduce the amount of driving we do every day. Not only would this help lower daily smog levels, it would benefit the people of the Central Valley, who breathe our exported smog. Less driving would provide the complementary benefits of lower congestion, lower household transportation costs, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and, thereby, fight global warming, too.
BAAQMD needs to inspire the public to join in a new social contract that values healthful air quality and the prevention of global warming.
In the same way that alcoholics have to first acknowledge they have a problem, each driver needs to acknowledge the harm their car’s emissions does to public health and to climate stability, and take responsibility for reducing them.
The most effective method of reducing driving comes down to simple economics: increase the cost of driving, and decrease the cost of taking transit.
By connecting the cost of driving directly to its impacts on the environment, the following would reduce the amount of driving and its associated pollution:
1. Auto registration fees based on how many miles are driven annually, and how much pollution is emitted.
2. Auto insurance based on how many miles are driven annually, and the weight of the vehicle (a measure of the potential liability in a crash).
3. Programs to encourage employers to offer employees the option of receiving cash or transit passes instead of free parking. This would encourage employees to not drive alone to work.
4. Substantially higher bridge tolls on Spare the Air days, with the additional funds going to support better transit.
Higher driving costs are not meant as punishment. They act as a strong incentive to switch to a more economical mode of transport.
For the switch to take place, attractive, affordable and convenient transit needs to be in place. That means shifting the region’s transportation funding into providing a comprehensive cost-effective transit network.
While everyday free transit is an attractive idea that’s received a lot of attention lately, more transit ridership would be achieved by making transit fares affordable and then expanding service. Longer distance travel by transit would be made more convenient with the adoption of a simplified regional fare zone system.
As individuals and as a society, we need to start taking full responsibility for the impacts of our way of life on the environment and on public health. Hopefully, we can transition to a more sustainable way of life — one that is far more healthy.
David Schonbrunn leads the Transportation Solutions Defense and Education Fund (TRANSDEF), a Bay Area non-profit advocate for comprehensive environmental planning based on cost-effective public transit, clean air and Smart Growth. www.transdef.org
Know California’s Ozone? www.cleanairstandards.org
Know Walt Kelly’s Pogo? www.igopogo.com/we_have_met.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo
