I grew up near Los Angeles in a baseball-loving family. We bled Dodger blue, went to games at Chavez Ravine and thrilled to Tommy LaSorda’s passionate leadership of his team. Like most people in the L.A. basin, I drove everywhere, usually by myself, on congested freeways. I hated the way congestion wasted my time, and the thick smog the millions of cars caused, but I saw no other way to get to college and work.
I moved to Oregon in 1989 (less congestion! whew!) and eventually entered the field of transportation options. My work funds and encourages bicycling, walking, teleworking, vanpooling and carpooling, and using public transit. My work helps reduce congestion and air pollution, the things I most disliked in California. Now, I can’t say I still follow the Dodgers. Rather, I’ve started liking the San Diego Padres, who at the time of this writing are leading their division, have the smallest payroll in the National League and the best record in the National League. That’s an unusual configuration of accomplishments. How do they pull it off?
Rather than hiring spectacular, homerun-slugging celebrities, the Padres do a lot of little things that score runs and win games. For example, they have excellent base-running, and timely hitting rather than power hitting. Their team has talented but young (read: low-cost) pitchers with one of the lowest team ERA’s in baseball. They typically sacrifice one runner to advance another into scoring position. The Padres brilliantly exemplify ‘small ball’ strategy.
Back to transportation, I wonder if the tradition of building more lanes and roads is something like the baseball strategy of hiring the homerun hitters and hotshot pitchers. Both the roads and the big-name players are high-profile, tangible, and produce concrete results (no pun intended). They please the crowds, at least some of the time. It’s easy to depend heavily on them because they seem like obvious solutions. They’re charismatic and attention-getting. At the same time, both road-building and celebrity players can be prone to controversies and criticisms. They’re high-maintenance, needing repairs (roads) and coddling (celebrities). And the costs of building new roads and hiring celebrity players, always high, can range into the stratosphere — as our economy is shrinking.
Transportation options (TO), in contrast, is a cheap date. I once heard someone term my desk’s budget a rounding error, in the context of multimillion dollar road construction budgets. But TO helps people make travel choices that reduce car trips. Fewer car trips build road capacity — at much lower cost than building new lanes and roads. TravelSmart programs, for example, have consistently and measurably gotten travelers to voluntarily switch their car trips to bike, walk and transit trips. Bicyclists, public transit users, pedestrians and people who carpool aren’t glamorous, and neither am I or my TO colleagues. Rather, the TO world is sort of the transportation version of the Padres’ small-ball strategy. We do little things that add up to big things. And some top-level leaders in transportation have declared recently they are moving to a multimodal emphasis. “We can’t build our way out of this,” I’ve heard them say. That’s good for transportation options, and the carbon emissions reductions linked to TO.
How do I get to work these days? I alternate between vanpooling in to Salem and teleworking from Portland. By the way, vanpoolers get free parking in Salem while people driving alone pay $40-$60/month . . . . and we build capacity for freight by taking 6-10 cars off the road daily. At peak rush hour, reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. But transportation options people are humble, low-profile folks, not celebrities or anything. Like the San Diego Padres.
photo courtesy of ryan lejbak
He arrived in the U.S. from Somalia three years ago. Now he is 14, and like his parents, he never learned to read or write in his native language.
