Earth Day Lament

This earth day, I want to talk about how the biggest impediment to having a sustainable society and planet is not technology or money, it is the narrowness of our imagination.

I sound like a broken record, but the largest contributor of CO2 emissions is transportation.  Even if we completely decarbonize our electricity grid, we will still be emitting too much CO2 to prevent the planet from frying.

From today's LAT:

The tailpipes of the cars and pick-up trucks that flood California's freeways every morning and afternoon generate more than one-fourth of the greenhouse gas emissions in the state, according to air quality regulators.

Emissions from cars outstrip all other single sources of greenhouse gases in California, including the freight and shipping industry, oil and gas production, and all the state’s commercial and residential real estate combined.

We actually have a tool to reduce our CO2 emissions today and not decades from now when fusion reactors or battery storage breakthroughs may happen.  Consider the humble bike.

The big caveat is "with the right policies in place." Right now, we are incentivizing the wrong things.

South Bay employment is concentrated in the El Segundo (ES) employment center (~150,000 jobs) and Redondo Beach Spacepark, circled in blue.  LAX is another huge employment center, but it's hidden by the search bar at the top.

Employment centers in blue, transit centers in yellow, bike infrastructure in green, car hellscapes in red.

Professionals tend to commute to ES from the beach suburbs from the south (and sometimes from the north) while service workers commute in from the east.  I circled the light rail stations in yellow and the bus hub in yellow squiggles.  The < 6 mile commutes to ES and Space Park would be easily biked by many if we connected the job centers to homes.  Instead, we have short, disconnected bike lanes (in door zones squeezed between parked and moving cars) that go nowhere people really need to go.

People going to work and running errands need to use the arterials that we have given completely over to cars.  If we just remove free car storage on public right of way (on-street parking), there would be room to put in protected bike lanes that separate bicycles from the cars.

We've done the experiment one way, with cars, and look what we happened.

We have rivers of cars stuck at red lights, taking 45 minutes to go 6-7 miles.

We have buses trapped in the automobile traffic.

We have banished bicyclists and pedestrians.  Actually, we are killing bicyclists and pedestrians at alarming and increasing rates.

We have paved over acres of prime, central urban space to store cars 20% of the time.

Each car spews hot exhaust full of greenhouse gases like CO2 and water as well as smog (NOx, SOx and Ozone).  Making each car electric is not going to solve the problem of gridlock, parking/storage and deaths.

Want to weep even more? Take a look a bit further south at places where people go to school and shop.  I circled schools in blue.  (Why are we putting schools next to freeways?)

The top circle is a Green Line (light rail) stop and the bottom yellow circle is the South Bay (bus) Transit Center.  The rail stations are reasonably well connected to workplaces, but notice how poorly the bus hub is connected?  It's almost like we decided that people who ride buses don't matter...

Schools in blue, transit centers in yellow, bike infrastructure in green, car hellscapes in red.

We can limit climate change to 1.5 degrees C if we halve our carbon emissions.  That is doable today if we bike or walk our short trips and reduce our long trips.  (We also need to eat less meat and buy fewer things to cram into our over-stuffed homes.)  These are all things we can do immediately and would not be big sacrifices, if our elected officials give us safer ways to bike and walk.

So this earth day, do what you can on your own, but also *organize* and demand that our elected officials do better.

Give us a road buffet where we can choose to bike, walk, take transit or drive, with equal safety and convenience.