Our house is on fire
Credit to Author: ROBERT SIY| Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2019 16:45:59 +0000
Today, I write about our future, and what little there might be left of it.
In October 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued an alarm calling for action to reduce carbon emissions by at least 50 percent in 11 years’ time. Carbon emissions, a major factor behind global warming, reached an all-time high in 2018. Without drastic measures to contain carbon emissions, the rise in temperature could exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 with dire irreversible consequences for most living beings. Our children and grandchildren will face rising sea levels and more severe storms, floods, droughts, famine, and epidemics and more.
Sir Richard Attenborough, who has shared the wonders of the natural world in numerous award-winning video documentaries, issued a stern warning at the U.N. Climate Change summit in December 2018: “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”
The strongest words, however, have come from Greta Thunberg, 16-year old climate activist and leader of the Global Climate Strike Movement: “I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear that I do. Every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as if you were in a crisis … as if the house were on fire. Because it is.” She’s asking us to wake up and change while there is still time.
Harmful emissions are not a disaster waiting to happen. The emergency is already here, and the victims come in all ages. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 4.2 million deaths every year globally are linked to air pollution. Children, elders and the poor are the most vulnerable.
In WHO’s 2018 report, dirty air is cited as a major cause of asthma and low birth weights in children; the cause of 43 percent of all deaths and diseases from chronic obstructive pulmonary illness; 29 percent of all deaths and diseases from lung cancer; 25 percent of all deaths and diseases from ischemic heart ailment; and 24 percent of all deaths from stroke. Emerging evidence suggests that air pollution is also linked to diabetes and neurological illnesses.
What does this all have to do with transportation and with our mobility choices? A lot. In the Philippines, an estimated 70 percent of carbon emissions and polluted air is linked to transportation, and many of the worst violators are in the public transport industry. Any campaign to reduce harmful emissions has to focus on transportation.
In our cities, motor vehicles—cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses and jeepneys–sit in slow-moving traffic every rush hour, burning diesel and gasoline, adding to the tons of carbon and other harmful substances in the atmosphere.
After a day of moving around the city, you can smell and feel the diesel residue on your skin, hair and clothes. On every surface, including in our lungs, a layer of black particulate matter is accumulating constantly. Living under these conditions, we can expect to have shorter lives.
Because the issue of carbon emissions and air quality is a life and death matter, we must harness all our energies and resources to reverse this path towards self-destruction.
How do we reduce carbon emissions by 50 percent within 11 years as the IPCC requires? In the Philippines, our highest priority should be to shift as many people out of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles and into walking, cycling and low-emission public transport. A combination of big and small initiatives, national and local-level actions, will be needed.
Local and national governments should revise their budgets away from car-oriented infrastructure and into investments that enable low-carbon modes of travel. Instead of building and expanding roads for cars, funding should go into proper sidewalks, protected bike lanes and mass transit.
On key roads, lanes should be dedicated to public transport use, even if it means more congestion for cars. This may be politically challenging, but we need to get to the point where car users view public transport as an attractive means of moving around a city. Public transport should be regarded as a safe, efficient and reliable way to travel; car users need to think, “if I took public transport, I would be home by now.”
Streets can be redesigned to recognize the needs of pedestrians and cyclists. Sidewalks should be widened and made fully accessible for wheelchairs and strollers. Protected bike lanes should be established on every major corridor. At every stop light, traffic signals should be adjusted to give sufficient time for pedestrians and cyclists to cross safely.
Policies that subsidize motor vehicle use, such as free or cheap parking, should be eliminated. There are building regulations (including the National Building Code) that require a minimum number of parking slots in every new development (usually in proportion to the total floor area of a building called “parking minimums”). Such rules end up attracting more car use and creating heavier congestion. Less parking (and more expensive parking) encourages people to leave their cars at home and use climate-friendly transport options instead.
New York City may soon join London, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Singapore in implementing a de-congestion charge for motor vehicles that enter the city center. Why not something similar for Metro Manila or Metro Cebu?
Several rail systems are being developed under the government’s ‘Build, Build, Build’ Program. This is most welcome, but urban rail expansion by itself will be insufficient. Road-based public transport is what the vast majority of Filipinos use every day and is a major source of harmful emissions.
In the Philippines, there is no better time to move to low or zero emission public transport. Already, the government’s Public Utility Vehicle (PUV) Modernization Program requires the replacement of buses and jeepneys that are non-compliant with the Euro IV emission standard. Over 95 percent of the current PUV fleet will not meet this requirement and will need to be replaced.
The good news is that prices of electric vehicles and battery storage continue to drop year after year; fully electric buses will soon be at par or even cheaper than diesel buses. Easier to operate and maintain, electric buses report much lower total cost per kilometer over a vehicle’s lifetime, compared with combustion-engine buses. For this reason, major bus manufacturers such as Volvo are abandoning the production of fossil fuel-powered buses and focusing on electric buses instead.
In this context, the Department of Transportation (DOTr) and the Land Transportation and Franchising Regulatory Board (LTFRB) need to guide the transport industry towards climate-friendly and environmentally-sustainable technology options. Rather than continue with Euro IV diesel as the emissions standard (already an outdated standard), we should take a bold step and target electrification of the entire public transport fleet, as many other countries and cities are already doing.
Because of the significant health and environmental benefits of clean air and carbon-neutral transport, attractive incentives and funding support should be offered for electrifying transport services of all kinds—buses, taxis, jeepneys, UV Express and delivery vehicles (including tricycles and motorcycles).
Government should work with the private sector to establish infrastructure on a massive scale, linked to new renewable energy supplies, such as wind and solar, so that public transport operations can be truly zero-emission.
Electric scooters and e-bicycles, offered for sharing, will soon be appearing in many cities and “disrupting” the transport industry. A person using an electric scooter or e-bicycle is likely to be someone who might otherwise have used a car or motorcycle. Because these innovative devices represent highly efficient travel with hardly any pollution or emission, cities need to find ways to accommodate and incorporate them, rather than to bar or limit their carbon-reducing potential.
The transport sector has a huge role to play in reducing harmful emissions and combatting climate change. Cutting our carbon emissions by 50 percent in 11 years’ time is a tall order. We will not achieve this target unless we undertake a major transformation of the transport sector and discard our prevailing car-oriented and fossil-fuel dependent approaches. For sure, a lot needs to be done, but the environmental, social and economic benefits are immense.
We need to act now. We have no choice. Our house in on fire.
Robert Y. Siy is a development economist, city and regional planner, and public transport advocate. He can be reached at mobilitymatters.ph@yahoo.com or followed on Twitter @RobertRsiy
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