The Transportation Challenge
This could (and will) be the subject of a long series of posts, but with the horrible news on oil and gas prices over the last month, including the past week, when the price of oil per barrel passed $140 and CIBC World Markets predicted that gas would cost over $7 per gallon in the near future, it seems appropriate to take a quick look at how much we drive in this city (and, therefore, how vulnerable our local economy is to the rise in the price of fuel).
A study from 2005 ranked Atlanta 1st among 39 U.S. metropolitan areas in miles driven daily per capita. In that year we averaged 31.7 miles driven per person per day. Orlando and Kansas City were the only other cities where drivers averaged over 30 miles per day. Most cities averaged between 20 and 30 miles per day, while Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans (undoubtedly because of Hurricane Katrina) all averaged less than 20 miles per day. (According to a 2008 report by the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, miles driven per person in Atlanta dipped below 30, to 29.6, in 2007.)
Spending as much time on the road and in traffic as we do in this city has a lot of consequences. It takes time to drive all those miles, time which could be spent doing something else. The more we drive, the less we tend to walk, meaning we have to get our exercise (if at all) in another way- one study showed that rates of obesity and hypertension are higher in areas that sprawl (though the difference is small). As someone who made the switch from driving to work every day to walking and taking the bus, I can attest that driving on roads as crowded as ours is much more stressful and competitive than the other ways of traveling, which may well harm our emotional and even physical health. Maintaining the infrastructure necessary to move so many cars is expensive, and filling those cars up with gas is becoming financially ruinous very quickly. Death and serious injury are occurrences on our roads.
Then there is the pollution. The American Lung Association’s State of the Air report for 2007 lists Atlanta as the 15th-worst city for year-round particulate pollution and 25th-worst city for ozone pollution. The air pollution problem is sometimes, unfortunately, confused with the greenhouse-gas issue (see this column by Larry Kudlow, for instance, which advances the supposed cleanliness of the air in the U.S. as a reason not to regulate greenhouse gases!), but the fact is that particulate and ozone pollution kill.
And, of course, there are the emissions of carbon dioxide. According to a recent report from scholars at Georgia Tech, The average Atlanta resident emitted 1.634 tons of carbon dioxide annually as a result of highway transportation (Atlanta’s profile can be viewed by clicking the link at the bottom of the page). The national average was 1.31 tons.
This writer, for one, would have predicted Atlanta to be a bigger emitter relative to the average than it is, but the presence of mass transit and a certain degree of density in the city help. And the important thing to remember, of course, is that the average is way too high to begin with. The climate operates according to physical laws, so what matters is whether we and the rest of the world are emitting so much that climatic instability will result, not whether we have succeeded in being not that much worse than everybody else. Assuming the average stated above and a metro population of 5 million, Atlanta emitted over 8 million tons of carbone dioxide last year from highway transportation alone. This, it goes without saying, is much, much higher than it ought to be.
Look for an upcoming post on a potential way, not much discussed, to reduce the number of miles we drive.