Yesterday’s news today
Posted February 13th, 2007 in Advocacy, Roads, Energy
After a self imposed day off from blogging yesterday I’m just catching up on some items that caught my interest. Like rust, the feed reader and media cycle doesn’t sleep.
There was this analysis in yesterday’s Australian business section of the senate report into Australia’s energy security.
The federal Government in its 2004 energy white paper acknowledged that Australia’s oil discovery rate was falling and that essentially the country would have to rely on imports. It suggested that this increase in the balance of payments could be offset by high volumes of LNG exports. But what the past two years have shown is that while the price of crude oil has soared, there has not been a similar sustained increase in export LNG prices.
This has been confirmed by the senate’s rural and regional affairs committee, which warns in its report on the future oil supply and alternative transport fuels, released last week, that mandatory fuel-efficiency targets may have to be adopted for new cars, and major cities may have to adopt measures to halt vehicle congestion as a way of reducing demand.
This next link from The Age is relevant to the above idea of adopting other measures, a nice positive story on a great program in Victoria that hopes to encourage the kids (that should be read as encouraging parents) to ride to school.
So far, about 300 schools have registered with the Ride2School program, which is aimed at 10 to 15-year-olds. It encourages schools to set targets to reduce driving, promote “active transport” to parents, start bike clubs and organise “ride to school days” and cycling excursions. Schools also conduct “hands up” surveys of how students got to school on the first day of each month, then send the results to the Ride2School team.
Mr Barber says it’s important that schools work closely with families and the community to encourage “active transport” - for example, by informing bike shops about the program and meeting police youth resource officers and local government transport officers.
Fairfield Primary principal Judy Walsh says the school is encouraging the entire school community to “make an extra effort to use active transport”. On its “ride to school” day last November (organised by grades 5-6 students with water bottles donated by the local bike centre as prizes), 76 per cent of children walked or used bikes, scooters, skateboards, skates and even a unicycle.
We are obviously well at the pointy end of awareness on many of these issues. Of course roads pricing is going to be a big part of awareness about energy security and climate questions, so I like to keep track of any mainstream media commentary on that solution. The NY Times business section brings us all the congestion charge news thats fit to print.
Beyond that, congestion pricing holds out the possibility of harnessing people’s innate economic rationality and self-interest in order to promote a series of public goods. Every time a driver turns onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, she slows down the travel speed of all the other drivers, imposing a cost — or, as economists say, a negative externality — on countless fellow citizens. “Everybody wants fewer people to drive, and everybody wants people to use less gas,” said Gregory L. Rosston, deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research in Palo Alto, Calif.
But so far, high gas prices and concerns about emissions haven’t led Americans to alter their driving patterns significantly. By making people take into account the true cost of driving — beyond gasoline, insurance and lease payments — congestion pricing in theory encourages people to car-pool, or to drive at different times of the day, or to take the train or bus.
Carpooling you say? A visit back to the present brings us this confusing piece in the SMH. I’m not entirely sure what they’re trying to say here and I think the headline should be rewritten to read - No more roads for you! Unless you pay.
Carpooling won’t do much to reduce US highway congestion in urban areas, and a better solution would be to build new highways and charge drivers fees to use them, the White House says.
“It is increasingly appropriate to charge drivers for some roadway use in the same way the private market charges for other goods and services,” the White House said in its annual report on the US economy.
While some urban areas have designated roads for vehicles with two or more passengers, those high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes are often underused because carpooling is becoming less popular, the administration said. Based on the latest data supplied by the White House, only about 13 per cent of motorists carpooled to work in 2000. That compared with 20 per cent of daily American commuters in 1980.
“This trend makes it unlikely that initiatives focused on carpooling will make large strides in reducing vehicle use,” the White House said.
Building more highways won’t reduce congestion either, unless drivers are charged a fee, according to the administration.
This sounds to me like an argument has been won. I don’t think the US Govt. has slammed carpooling; whatever the reasons, it’s pretty obvious by the numbers that people don’t see it as a useful or convenient option, instead the Govt. accepts the facts for what they are and looks to an alternative solution - roads pricing.
Importantly it also accepts that there is no point in building more roads without this mechanism in place. That’s good government and something that does not pander to the incessant demands by motorists and their lobbyists to be protected from the true cost of their activity.
I’m sure that tomorrow will bring us news of more arguments being won.
technorati tags: cycling, bicycles, energy, congestion
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