Short post today since work is so active right now. I learned a key thing from one of the people who prepared the report for the Governor on global warming. It’s this: reducing our vehicle trips is the only way to reduce the carbon emissions from our ground transportation. (Carbon emissions are the main driver of global warming.)
I work in transportation options, and I admit my thinking had not been honed nearly as sharp as that. I hadn’t gotten to the heart of the matter, but just to the arteries.
I’ve focused on the benefits of bicycling and using the bus, and the joys of taking the train and walking. I’ve written about electric vehicles and Oregon’s solar highway, about carpooling, vanpooling and bike-commuting while pregnant (not me, my friend Noelle Studer-Spevak, now the happy mother of Ozara June).
All those are good things. But here is the heart of the matter: all those good things only help us solve global warming if they reduce car trips. If you and I take recreational walks and bike rides but still drive as much as ever, it’s good for our personal health, but does nothing for the planet. If a person carpools to work but then drives extra errands and trips feeling he/she has earned the right to do that, no carbon reduction has happened.
Reducing our vehicle miles is the heart of the matter concerning global warming, at least the heart of the ground-transportation part of it.
Love your site!!!
Indeed, reducing the miles consumed by individual occupant vehicles is a creative passion of mine, on multiple levels…
A few years ago I had a dream where I met a gathering organization of enlightened folks that called themselves “N.A.R.?” It did not stand for national association of realtors, but it was explained in the dream that NAR? stood for Need A Ride? This bright green organic amoeba shaped ‘NAR?’ logo was on everything in the dream: armbands, t-shirts, cars, hats, windows, computers, coffee cups, bicycles, skateboards… and even Twitter. Hmmm, imagine that? [handheld phone ride connecting devices...] The dream did not get into equitable cost expense donations for sharing rides, but I am sure that could be worked out. And the Twitter accounts could be used as a screening device to make sure the ride share connections were cool and not shady realities… [an uncool rider or driver would soon be exposed online pretty fast, so self policing would come in handy...]
Anyway… we will get there, once we realize how to commonly utilize this planet’s largest congregation of mostly empty, and extremely expensive to individually operate vehicles, that if used logically and consciously, we could probably reduce our combined travel miles by 50%. I am not a math person, but I would guess that would easily translate into the annual national economic savings in the multiple billions of dollars saved. Money saved that could reignite our slumbering economy, rather than sending billions and billions of dollars right out of our communities and our country…
Car sharing makes economic sense, and is one of the easiest, and fastest ways to stimulate holistic recirculation of capital that would benefit Americans most. I do not have the link handy, but some research has been done that shows that people that give up personal automobiles for twenty years can save upwards of $500,000.
Yes, $500,000 green dollars…
That is a ton of money that stays in America, and in local communities.
I will not even get into the environmental, and personal health cost benefits here…
NAR? Would be a really cool, and ultimate ‘Patriotic’ statement, on a hugely massive scale.
Since I have just landed on your site, after moving to the Bend area in central Oregon, are you connected, or have a link references with any like thinking minds in this area?
Thanks! And I look forward to getting to connect with your work here!!!
Chris