Public Transportation

Cities need to innovate to improve transportation and reduce emissions: 91�Թ� expert

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 13:56:55 +0000

Cities need to innovate to improve transportation and reduce emissions: 91�Թ� expert

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 11/25/2019 - 08:56

Cutline

Singapore is touted as an example of forward-thinking urban transit planning; vehicle ownership permits are limited and available by lottery (photo via Shutterstock)

Shauna Brail

Topic

Our Community

School of Cities

Cities

Climate Change

Innis College

Public Transportation

Sustainability

The Conversation

Urban Studies

Mobility is essential to urban life. It contributes to people’s ability to access work, food, education, leisure and more. It also contributes to climate change.

According to C40 Cities, cities are both a significant contributor to the climate crisis, responsible for 70 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions, and the place where actions can make the greatest difference.

Transportation is one of the leading contributors of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution worldwide. Given the role that cities play in climate change, we need to re-think and plan for a future in which cities work intentionally to direct change.

Sixty-four per cent of all vehicle kilometres travelled on a global basis are in cities, and this is anticipated to grow exponentially.

Finding alternatives

To address the stubborn challenge of reducing transportation-based emissions, cities need to lean on car-free alternatives such as public transit and active transportation. They also need to effectively engage with private firms to leverage disruptive transportation technologies, such as ride-hailing apps. Amongst urban pundits, there is tension between these two.

My research on ride-hailing, regulation and cities suggests, however, that both strategies are necessary.

Car-free or car-lite?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

In Paris, Mayor Ana María Hidalgo successfully eliminated cars from the Seine’s quayside. The strategy is enabled by extensive investment in public transit, improved features for pedestrians and significant political will.

In Singapore, the government is moving towards a “car-lite” society. In this unique city-state, the right to purchase a private automobile is granted by lottery and the government caps the total number of vehicles permitted to operate. In addition, Singapore boasts a globally admired public transit system, with continuous building of transit stations, integrated bus networks and strong transit connections to mixed-use neighbourhoods.

Vancouver has implemented a strategy to encourage active transport – walking and biking – by investing in public realm improvements and protected bike lanes. The Greenest City Action Plan established a goal of having 50 per cent of trips by walking, bicycle and transit by 2020, representing a 10 per cent increase from 2008. The city exceeded this goal, reaching 53 per cent in 2018.

Sidewalk Labs is proposing that private automobiles be prohibited in Toronto’s Quayside neighbourhood. If the city approves, active transportation, public transit and a system of shared vehicles would be the primary mobility options in this proposed community.

Cities approach the wicked challenge of reducing transportation-based greenhouse gas emissions in different ways. There are, however, three strategic directions in which many places have found success in changing transportation options, travel behaviour and, ultimately, transportation-based emissions.

1. Conducting pilot studies

Pilot studies (also known as trials) are an increasingly popular way for governments to test out whether and how an idea might work in practice. Pilots can be limited in terms of geography, and also can have a limited period of time in which testing is conducted.

The King Street Pilot in Toronto is an outstanding example of a transportation pilot developed by the city. Initially implemented as a trial in fall 2017, the initiative prioritized transit on a 2.6-kilometre stretch of a congested downtown thoroughfare. As the city’s busiest surface transit route, limiting cars and privileging transit sped up commute times and made the street more appealing to cyclists while keeping pedestrian volume essentially the same.

Establishing the transit priority of the route resulted in a 16 per cent increase in ridership overall. In a fall 2018 survey, seven of every 100 riders indicated that they had switched from travelling by car to travelling on the King Street streetcar. On April 16, 2019, the King Street Pilot was made permanent.

Transit agencies are also experimenting with innovative technologies to increase ridership and efficiency. On-demand bus hailing essentially uses the algorithms and technologies that underlie ride-hailing apps and applies it to public transit routes. In September 2017, Belleville, Ont. replaced its nighttime bus service on some low ridership routes with an on-demand bus-hailing system. The pilot saw an increase of 300 per cent in ridership, while the number of kilometres driven per vehicle declined by 30 per cent.

2. Looking for work-arounds

Sometimes, firms make decisions to look for work-arounds in order to test emerging transportation options. For example, autonomous vehicles are not allowed on public streets in New York. However, private streets have private rules. An autonomous vehicle pilot running on private roads in the Brooklyn Navy Yards is an opportunity to test the technology, build public trust in driverless cars and prepare for a possible future in which self-driving cars are permitted to operate on public streets.

Taking a page out of the work-arounds playbook, Bird Scooters launched a trial in Toronto’s Distillery District in September 2019. Though roundly criticized for testing scooters on the Distillery District’s cobblestone streets, the firm was attracted by the fact that the Distillery is private property. They thereby evaded government regulations. While the firm may have been hoping to help encourage the city to permit scooters on Toronto’s streets, the city elected to do the opposite – unlike Edmonton, where the scooters are in use. Shortly after the scooter trial, council voted to prohibit scooters on city streets and sidewalks until further study.

3. Partnerships

Innovation in transportation requires significant and concerted effort, investment, specialized expertise and the participation of people from different sectors.

One common thread running through all of the above examples is partnerships with universities. From the King Street Pilot to Belleville’s on-demand bus hailing system, Brooklyn’s autonomous vehicles and – most likely – the City of Toronto’s upcoming study on scooters, universities and university researchers are involved. University partnerships span the full spectrum of transportation innovation – from development of autonomous technology, software and algorithms to the study of travel behaviour, air quality, efficiency and best practices in regulation.

Only with intentional and strategic effort can we hope to move the needle on transportation-based emissions while also ensuring that people have access to the mobility resources they need.

Shauna Brail is an associate professor of urban studies at the 91�Թ�.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What is public transit's effect on the environment? A 91�Թ� researcher crunches the numbers

ullahnor — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 15:30:56 +0000

What is public transit's effect on the environment? A 91�Թ� researcher crunches the numbers

ullahnor Wed, 03/01/2017 - 10:30

Cutline

Professor Shoshanna Saxe analyses the environmental and social impact of large public transit infrastructure projects, equipping policymakers with data as they decide which investments to make (photo by Tyler Irving)

Tyler Irving

Author legacy

Tyler Irving

Topic

Public Transportation

Greenhouse Gas

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Sustainable Cities

Smart Cities

Subheadline

The latest extension of the London Underground “turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag,” and Toronto's Sheppard subway line initially struggled to provide greenhouse gas savings with low ridership

The benefits of building public transit include reducing greenhouse gas emissions, relieving traffic congestion and expanding a growing city. Yet each transit project is unique, and often the immediate environmental benefits can be a mixed bag.

Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Shoshanna Saxe crunches the numbers on existing infrastructure to provide key decision-makers with a reality check on the environmental and social impacts of today’s transit investments.

“Engineers usually aren’t involved in policymaking, and policymakers usually aren’t involved in engineering,” says Saxe. “I’m trying to bridge that gap.”

Read about her work at the Toronto Star

Saxe joined 91�Թ�'s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering in August 2016.

Before completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, she spent three years at a major consulting engineering firm in Toronto, working on projects such as the Eglinton Crosstown transit line and the Toronto-York Spadina subway extension.

“I love design – it’s amazing,” she says. “However, when you’re building things that people are going to use, you have to stay well within the limits of what you know for sure. I was curious about questions that we didn’t already know the answers to.”

During her PhD, Saxe conducted a detailed analysis of the London Underground’s extension of the Jubilee Line, which was completed in 1999. She gathered data on the greenhouse gases produced during construction and operation of the line, then used transit and land-use surveys to estimate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions attributable to people using the line and living near it. By combining the two, she could calculate the net environmental benefit of that transit project.

“It turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag,” she says. “If you make some optimistic assumptions, you could say that it broke even in terms of greenhouse gas emissions around 2012 or 2013. If you are more pessimistic, you’re looking at a greenhouse gas payback of twice as long.”

Saxe says that the Jubilee Line extension sees approximately 175 million trips per year. On projects where ridership is low, the environmental payback period can be much longer.

Saxe also studied the Sheppard subway line in Toronto and found it initially struggled to provide greenhouse gas savings with a much lower ridership. Over time, the Sheppard Subway Line has benefited from the decreasing emissions associated with electricity in Ontario. The results of the Sheppard Subway study were recently published in the journal Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment.

“If you’re at Don Mills station, and you want to go north, east, or even southeast, the network doesn’t serve you yet,” she says. “We still see people from that area driving 70 per cent of the time so unfortunately there’s just a lot less opportunity for savings.”

Saxe says that her dream project would be to follow a major piece of infrastructure such as a new transit line from conception through construction and use for 20 or 30 years.

“I want to answer questions like: why did we originally build it, how did we originally build it, how did it perform over its lifetime, how did we maintain it and what did it need?” she says. “If we know how our present decision-making affects things decades from now, we can make better decisions.”