Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) Program

April 13, 2009 By 2 Comments

As a part of the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, funds have been allocated to the Department of Energy for local governments in the form of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) Program. The purpose of these funds is to stimulate the economy, create jobs and meet these environmental goals:

  • Reduce fossil fuel emissions in a manner that is environmentally sustainable
  • Reduce the total energy use of the eligible entities; and
  • Improve energy efficiency in the building sector, the transportation sector, and other sectors.

The EECBG provides local governments with an unprecedented and potentially unique opportunity to access federal funds to promote sustainability, conserve energy and address climate change. Key priorities of the EECBG include:

  • Linking energy efficiency efforts to long-term priorities (especially community economic development, community stabilization and poverty reduction efforts).
  • Targeting programs and projects that will provide substantial, sustainable and measurable energy savings, job creation and economic stimulus effects.
  • To the extent possible, develop programs and strategies that will continue beyond the funding period.
  • Develop comprehensive plans that benchmark current performance, set aggressive goals, and monitor and measure results over time.

EECBG funding can be used for a wide-range of projects, such as:

  • Planning efforts including General Plan Updates, Climate Action Plans, Travel Demand Model Enhancements to support VMT forecasting, and development of green zoning, building codes and ordinances
  • Program development such as incentive programs for energy retrofits, local engaged carbon offset programs, Energy Management Programs, or transportation demand management programs
  • Sustainable Facilities Management processes for government buildings, including energy audits, retro-commissioning and upgrades, recycling programs and purchasing policies
  • Installation of energy efficient equipment and renewable energy systems
Filed Under: Economy, Energy

Gas Tax Creates Certainty for Success of Hybrids

January 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Here is a short list of recent news posts:

Low gas prices have automakers worried new hybrids won’t sell

The Problem with Cheap Oil

With gas falling, trucks come back

Exxon to Congress: Give Us A Carbon Tax, Please!

California is in Desperate Need of a Gas Tax

Imagine being an automaker and trying to predict what will happen with gas prices and how it will affect the fleet of vehicles that you should construct?  These are decisions that generally need to made 10 years in advance of the roll-out of any new auto product to allow for product development and machining of factories.  And yet it is difficult to predict the price of oil (and therefore gas) next year, let alone next decade. 

Here is a simple solution – a floating gas tax increment.  How about if we set a minimum price for a gallon of gas and structure a tax that achieves that price?  We all noted dramatic progress in the number of people using transit, increased purchase of more efficient vehicles, and good, old fashion conservation when gas prices rose above $4.  So how about a $4 minimum gas price target.  In today’s market, that amounts to better than a $2 increase in the gas tax, which would generate about $29 Billion per year to a state (California) very much in need of new revenue.

During periods, such as in late 2008, when gas prices exceed $4, the increment would be zero so the benefit to the state budget would be negated, but we would continue to reap rewards from the relative predictability of gas prices.  These would include:  investment in clean fuels and alternative energy sources; changeover of a California vehicle fleet to one that is more efficient and cleaner; increased use of transit; greater conservation of a precious resource, and the resulting emissions reductions from all of these.  While some of the conservation may come from simple decisions to walk rather than drive to the store, long-term predictability also encourages long-term lifestyle changes such as relocating closer to work and school, or to be adjacent to a transit hub.  It enables car-free households after more investment in transit .  And it encourages change in land use patterns to locate complementary uses (for example houses and schools) in integrated communities such that walking is possible.

It is a tax that has enormous societal benefits and generates significant revenue.

Filed Under: Economy, Electric vehicles, Funding

Poor Transport Forecasting Results in Bad Economic Stimulus Package

January 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The problem with forecasts, be they economic, weather, or transportation, is that they generally assume the perpetuation of recent trends.  When something occurs that fundamentally changes the dynamics of the condition being forecast, our tools are ill-prepared to address them.

For transportation, we lack a full cycle from which to draw parallels. We are still in the first cycle of transportation post advent of the automobile.  Compare this to an economic cycle, where we can draw on prior experiences of market adjustments.  Even though Americans failed to respond appropriately to over-valued high-tech stocks early in this decade and poor market regulation and over-valued real estate more recently, there are economists with models built on data from prior economic cycles who predicted the outcomes of those market adjustments. 

In my view, we are at the critical turning point of a transportation market adjustment.  The pendulum swung away from streetcars and pedestrians toward automobiles in the 1920’s and 30’s (see Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic).  The pendulum reached the bottom of its swing (where it has the most momentum) in the 1960’s and 70’s, when Americans first raised the question, do we really want to build cities that are reliant on the automobile?  The pendulum began to slow but continued in the auto-dominant direction.  We are now at the point in time when the pendulum has stopped.  But what does the euphemistic reversal of the pendulum swing mean for transportation in American cities?

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Which brings us back to poor transport forecasting.  We have no basis to say, ‘the last time we shifted away from transportation policy focused on a single mode – the automobile, the consequences were…’  There is no last time.   So what do we do?  Well, what we are doing is assuming that land use and transportation will continue for the next 20 years on roughly the same trend as they followed for the last 20 years.  Actually, this assessment is a bit harsh.  Many regions are assuming that demand for housing will shift away from the suburbs and back to the central city.  But with respect to the resulting transportation patterns, we are stuck in the mind set that autos will continue to be the dominant form of transportation.  And when I say dominant, I don’t mean 50 percent of all trips, but rather 90 percent of all trips. 

We are so resigned to this future that even progressive transportation planners have focused our research on the trip-making characteristics of “smart growth.”  We are essentially saying, we know autos will be the preferred mode choice for any trip that is too long to walk or bicycle, but let’s arrange land uses to maximize walking trips and reduce auto trip lengths.

We are ignoring the reasons why autos achieved dominance.  When the auto became dominant, it provided the most travel flexibility, least cost (once you had purchased a vehicle), and the best travel experience.  With respect to flexibility, it provided access to more destinations without the need to wait for public transit vehicles or to transfer from one transit vehicle to another.  With respect to cost, it was free to drive an auto and often to park, while use of transit had an associated fare.  With respect to experience, autos provided good travel speeds with each person having personal space, climate control, music choice, etc.

These benefits have eroded:

  • Travel flexibility – Personal vehicles (autos) still provide access to more destinations, but with smart growth land use trends there will be less need to travel to remote housing developments and shopping centers, so the benefit of this flexibility will erode over time.
  • Costs – Parking costs were the first cost incurred by autos, and the trend is for more areas to enact parking costs and use parking fees to manage parking and traffic congestion.  Toll roads were the next cost to autos.  More recently, these have expanded dramatically.  Discussions of usage taxes based on miles of travel or carbon footprint could dramatically reduce the one-time cost advantage of autos and it is already less cost-effective to drive to most major metropolitan downtowns than to use transit.
  • Experience – While autos continue to become more comfortable on the interior, the experience of traveling by auto in nearly all metro areas has eroded.  We have even coined a new term to describe it – “road rage.”

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In addition to the erosion of these benefits, we are increasingly aware of the consequences of a transportation system without a diversity of travel choices – a less active population with resulting obesity and diabetes trends; poor air quality that contributes to rising levels of asthma in our children; loss of valuable farm lands to urban sprawl; loss of community, or neighborhood-scale, facilities (schools, sports fields, shopping, churches) resulting in an erosion of the neighborhood as a cohesive unit.  And global warming.

And yet our forecasting tools are insensitive to these changes.  Not only do they fail to acknowledge the changing dynamics of transportation market conditions, they also ignore city planners’ ability to influence transportation through policy actions.  Many cities are enacting policies that limit parking provisions; prioritize the movement of transit vehicles above the movement of autos; accept higher levels of auto congestion or eliminate auto level of service ; and incentivize alternative transportation modes through transportation demand management (TDM) programs like subsidized transit fares.  Emerging policies are likely to charge autos for the full cost of maintenance and operation of roadways, as well as of treating health and environmental consequences of autos.

Unfortunately, there is not yet an accepted body of evidence that these policy actions will counteract auto domination.  Nor is there recognition that the layering on of good land use, with provision of alternatives to the auto, with policies to promote a balanced transportation system have a compounding effect.  So we are stuck in the cycle of talking about the benefits of a more balanced transportation system but forecasting transportation based on the trends of the last 20 years.  The result, unfortunately, is the conclusion that we need to build more auto capacity.  And so, in the first draft of the transportation projects to be included in the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package, the large majority of the projects are auto capacity focused.

In fact, the timing of this economic stimulus package could not be worse.  Conventional wisdom among state departments of transportation, the primary group responsible for assembling the list of projects to be included, is still that we need more auto capacity, but shortly after we deliver the capacity (if the package goes forward as proposed) we will realize that the roads were a very poor use of resources and a huge lost opportunity to bring about a more balanced transportation system.  Lest the author of this article be labeled a radical and the points made belittled, a more balanced transportation system is one that assumes that autos continue to be the dominant transportation mode, but that makes investments in other modes to begin the trend of restoring balance.  The economic stimulus package should make strategic investments in roads and highways, particularly where such projects employ a Complete Streets philosophy, but should emphasize investments in facilities for pedestrians, transit riders and bicyclists.

Filed Under: Complete Streets, Economy

Economic Stimulus that Improves Main Street

December 10, 2008 By 6 Comments

With some of the worst economic news in many people’s lives occurring, so too does talk of an economic stimulus package that includes major infrastructure projects.  Something on the scale of Roosevelt’s Work Projects Administration (WPA) efforts during the Great Depression of the late 1930’s could be instrumental in putting unemployed and underemployed people back to work and making investments in new infrastructure which would stimulate additional growth in the economy.  As a child I frequently visited the Toledo (Ohio) Zoo, which was largely built out of the WPA program and I can personally attest that 40 years after the Great Depression, WPA projects were still contributing to the economy.

The 1930’s also represents about the end of the glory days of the streetcar.  Streetcars were a major transportation component before the advent of mass-produced, affordable automobiles.  At the conclusion of World War II in 1945, streetcar systems throughout the US were dismantled in favor of the faster, more flexible, longer trip mode of the private automobile.  But before this time, in the early 1900’s streetcars were built to facilitate development.  Often built by private developers in order to provide access to land that was otherwise relatively inaccessible (and therefore less valuable), streetcars were very much an economic stimulus tool.

Fast forward to the year 2000 and beyond.  The streetcar is once again becoming a key tool for economic development, this time to spur redevelopment of central city areas in transition.  Examples of streetcar systems in the US include:  Portland, Oklahoma City, and San Francisco.  Each of these streetcar systems has resulted in major private-sector investment in the adjacent properties with windfalls to local jurisdictions resulting from increased property values, sales taxes, and job creation.

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And yet in this go-round, the streetcar has not fundamentally changed access to an area.  Where the streetcars of the early 1900’s provided access to areas otherwise inaccessible, the current streetcar systems provide additional capacity to move people, but only nominally so and often at the expense of auto capacity.  And the streetcars are often very slow.  I have walked from Portland State University to the Pearl District staying ahead of the streetcar the entire mile-plus distance.  So while we are infatuated with the streetcar (what is it about trains that gets people so excited?), is it really the streetcar that facilitates change and economic development?  Or is it simply government investment? 

And if it is government investment, could we make such investment without the streetcar component?  Could we invest in streetscape improvement, façade improvement programs, development of strategies to create a unique character (or “brand” if you are a marketing person) for a street or neighborhood, public art, civic buildings, etc. and achieve the same results?  Not that streetcars are a bad thing, but they require planning and design and often difficult decisions about removing traffic lanes and on-street parking.  They also require operating revenue that might be difficult to perpetuate and are not appropriate for all locations.

My point is not to stop investing in streetcars, but to expand our view of investment to include any number of investments that could improve the economic viability of an area.  I posit that simply making an investment will result in similar benefits to streetcar systems.  The type of investments should be decided by property owners and community members in collaboration with the city.  What better way to gather community support and excite people to make private investment?  You might even incentivize private investment by selecting the neighborhood to benefit from the program through fiscal analysis of the benefits to the city based on stated and expected property-owner investments.

The intent of the fiscal stimulus package options currently being bantered about – bridge and highway construction project; roadway maintenance; transit system expansion – is to put people to work building these facilities.  The intent is to reduce the needs for social programs by lower unemployment and put wages in people’s pockets that they will spend on goods and services.  And while bridges and highways and other projects of this nature will arguably improve economic vitality by increasing mobility, local investment in failed streets and neighborhoods accomplishes all of the same goals, while resulting in greater mobility (even if for pedestrians and bicyclists).  Add to this the further benefits of direct impact on adjacent property values and the resulting investment in these properties and the planning, design and construction-related jobs resulting from private investment.

Filed Under: Economy