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Transportation: Getting About

The document discusses transportation and its impact on energy consumption and climate change. It states that transportation accounts for about half of the energy used by the typical North American household. To significantly reduce energy consumption and address climate change, changes need to be made to how society approaches transportation. This requires changes not just in technology but also how individuals and societies accommodate different transportation options. The widespread use of personal automobiles over the past 50 years has increased distances between locations like homes and shops, creating automobile dependence particularly in suburban and rural areas. More dense urban planning that places common locations closer together can reduce transportation energy use.

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20 views

Transportation: Getting About

The document discusses transportation and its impact on energy consumption and climate change. It states that transportation accounts for about half of the energy used by the typical North American household. To significantly reduce energy consumption and address climate change, changes need to be made to how society approaches transportation. This requires changes not just in technology but also how individuals and societies accommodate different transportation options. The widespread use of personal automobiles over the past 50 years has increased distances between locations like homes and shops, creating automobile dependence particularly in suburban and rural areas. More dense urban planning that places common locations closer together can reduce transportation energy use.

Uploaded by

costi.sorescu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Transportation

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Getting about
Transportation accounts for about half of the energy
consumed by the typical North American household.
If we are serious about reducing our energy consumption
and doing something about this climate change
thing, we are going to have to do something about our
transportation-related energy consumption. This is one of
those things that is going to involve more than just a
change in technology, like a hybrid or even hydrogen fuel
cell. In addition, we also need to become smarter both
about how we as individuals travel, and how we as a
society accommodate different types of travel in general.
Consideration of this large chunk of emissions is far too
often shied away from by otherwise environmentally
conscious people, because the scale of change required
seems to boggle some minds. It need not be so.
Think about how you got this book. You may have
traveled to a bookstore to buy it, perhaps you drove.
Could you have walked instead? Why not? In too many
cases the answer is because the distances are too great.
This is particularly true in suburban and rural areas of
the country. The widespread and growing use of the
automobile for the past 50 or so years has closed what
were once small but thriving rural and suburban
commercial centers and increased the distance between
locations people frequent, such as their home, office,
and shopping centers. When there is not an alternative
to a car available for people to use to reach those
locations, a condition of automobile dependence is
created. The alternative is to increase density and have
those common locations we all visit spaced closer
together (see Figure 2-1). Urban centers, by their nature,
have a greater concentration of people and services, and
people who live in such centers might have had a
greater chance to buy this book from a store they
walked to.

Green cities
Studies that looked at individual energy consumption
patterns have found that the typical urban (living in a
high-density city) dweller’s energy consumption is far
below his suburban or rural counterpart. The efficiencies
in living in urban centers come from many areas,
including transportation. Having many people on a train
is far more efficient than having many cars on the road
(see Figure 2-2), and having shops and houses close
together means that people don’t have to travel so far in
the first place. This flies in the face of my early
exposure to what being an environmentally conscious
person meant. Like many Canadian children, our family
spent the summers camping in the national and
provincial parks. We lived in tents, with bugs, carried
our own water to the campsite, went fishing, and
enjoyed the great outdoors. When I started exploring the
environment as an issue later on in life, I, like many
Figure 2-1 This scene from the busy metropolis of
Istanbul shows what transportation options in an urban
center look like: trains, cars, and pedestrians.

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