Blinders are used to keep horses focused on the road ahead and not get distracted by people or other things on either side of them. Too many people who work on energy and greenhouse gases put on similar blinders that lead them to ignore many other social problems and goals.
A case in point is a recent study that found that people all over the world travel for about 1.3 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours, per day. While this is just a confirmation of Marchetti’s constant, the p…
Blinders are used to keep horses focused on the road ahead and not get distracted by people or other things on either side of them. Too many people who work on energy and greenhouse gases put on similar blinders that lead them to ignore many other social problems and goals.
A case in point is a recent study that found that people all over the world travel for about 1.3 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours, per day. While this is just a confirmation of Marchetti’s constant, the point of the new paper was that “significant decreases in future energy consumption can only be achieved by reducing the average energy used per hour of human travel.”
In other words, people don’t substitute energy for time: if they use a slower but more energy efficient form of travel, they won’t travel more hours (thereby using more energy) to make up for the slower speed. The paper presents this as some kind of revelation: saving energy means forcing people to use more energy-efficient forms of travel. As a practical matter, this means emphasizing walking and cycling.
The problem is that such a policy ignores numerous other important social goals. Want to maximize productivity to keep the nation competitive with other parts of the world? Increasing the average speed of travel is a key component of national productivity.
Want to reduce income inequality? Increasing the average speed of travel among low-income people will give them access to more and better jobs. That necessarily means increasing auto ownership. The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has found that the average resident of one of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas can reach almost three times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as a 60-minute bike or transit ride, and more than three times as many jobs in a 10-minute auto drive as a 60-minute walk.
Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.
Randal O’Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.
Bicycles may be the most energy-efficient mode of travel, but that doesn’t mean they are always the best mode. Photo by Carlton Reid, under CC 2.0 License.