Last month, President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the global climate pact, the Paris Agreement, prompting cities, states, investors, businesses, organizations of all sizes, and everyday Americans to step forward and pledge to continue fighting climate change.
But passive support like gathering signatures isn’t enough. If you really want to do something, you can change your own transportation behavior. And elected officials, institutions of higher learning, and business leaders can make good on their pledges by enabling, encouraging, and adopting more environmentally-friendly public transportation technologies and infrastructure.
We know that making the switch to public transportation can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by providing a low-emissions alternative to driving. The average passenger vehicle produces about 1 pound of carbon dioxide per mile traveled whereas bus transit only produces 0.18 pounds of CO2 at full capacity. By the year 2020, when the first round of long-term plans are due from countries participating in the Paris Agreement, it’s estimated that more than 50 percent of carbon emissions could be abated “by the combined impact of second-generation biofuel, traffic flow, shifts to public transportation, and eco-driving measures.”
Yet each day, millions of Americans reverse out of their driveways in concert and begin their commute to work. The majority of them—77 percent—do it alone, despite the fact that their neighbors are often traveling to a similar location. While these empty passenger seats represent a substantial waste in resources, they also represent an easy and available opportunity to combat climate change.
A report from Deloitte estimates that a simple switch to carsharing could reduce nationwide car ownership by nearly 2.1 million. That switch alone could save $185 million in wasted fuel and result in almost 1 million metric tons of reduced carbon dioxide emissions (equivalent to 500 Empire State Buildings). If simply increasing the passenger load factor in a four-person vehicle can reduce such a significant amount of emissions and wasted fuel, imagine the impact of switching to public transportation.
An added bonus to taking public transit is, of course, the reduction of teeth-grinding gridlock—especially if you’re an urbanite. City dwellers assume that buses and trains take longer, but the truth is that driving is most often the transportation mode that causes delays.
While public transit represents an immediate action individuals and organizations can take toward combating climate change, it also represents the beginning of a more sustainable future. In the last century, cities were designed with personal automobiles in mind. Now, these same cities—with the support of their mayors and other elected officials—have the opportunity to become key actors in the transition to sustainable practices. In particular, by enacting policies that favor transit options built around public transportation at the center.
According to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), public transportation could play a larger role in saving the environment but “only 54 percent of households in the U.S. have access to public transportation.”
As Laura Bliss points out at CityLab, it’s also imperative that cities and transit authorities provide residents with transportation options they like and will use. This doesn’t mean relying on Uber and Lyft or introducing autonomous vehicles (it’s uncertain that AVs will have an immediate impact on congestion or emissions problems). What it does mean is providing the public with mobility options that fit their needs.
An essential first step transit agencies can take is to provide residents with desirable transportation options by incorporating on-demand transit. Ride-hailing companies like Lyft and Uber have reshaped the public’s expectations of transportation. Purely demand-driven, these ride services appear when you need them, at the click of a button.
It’s possible for municipal transit agencies to supplement their current services with a demand-driven, microtransit option that addresses the needs (and newfound expectations) of riders while leveraging the existing infrastructure of fixed-route services. As an added benefit, microtransit is flexible enough to address today’s coverage issues while being inherently flexible enough to adjust as demand does in the future.
The combination of mobile phones, sensors and GPS tracking, traffic data feeds, data analytics, and mapping software can put all the options at commuter’s fingertips – whether walking, biking, bus, train, ferries, or shared rides – including the multimodal combinations that are quickest and cheapest.
It’s estimated that if demand-driven transit could facilitate 30 percent of New York City’s trips, the total number of vehicle miles travelled (VMT) would be reduced by 52 million trips per year, resulting in 431.2 million VMT eliminated. A reduction of that size signifies congestion savings to commuters of $495 million per year and 14 million hours in delay saved. For the city of New York, the same reduction in VMT would save the city $959 million on road construction over 25 years and result in a 139,000-metric-ton annual reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
Imagine these same results applied in your city and cities all over the United States.
Imagine the time, money, and frustration that public transportation could save you and your community.
Now, imagine how significant the impact could be across the globe.
From Paris to Washington, and throughout the rest of the world, transit is the key to making good on our pledge to support the Paris Agreement today and to building tomorrow’s sustainable future.
Photo of woman in China by theglobalpanorama/Visual Hunt. The U.S. produces 18 percent of the globe’s CO2 emissions, second only to China’s 20 percent.