in the Indivisible North Seattle Environmental Group Facebook page, I was asked:
I voted for the Sound Transit 3 expansion in the hope that it would allow me (and countless others) to get rid of our car-fueled commutes. The author of this piece, a former Secretary of Transportation for WA State, brings up the unfortunate issue of the emissions during the construction process of the train lines. Thomas White, can you shed any light on this issue of carbon savings versus carbon cost?
which was generated by the content of this op-ed article
The response is too large for a Facebook post, so here it is:
The ST3 discussion is not simple. The numbers are what they are, but the article isn’t really objective.
> “What is the scale of the negative carbon effects from all the construction activities to built big concrete-and-steel intensive projects years before any benefits at all might offset those greenhouse gas assaults?”
> “But we do know from other Sound Transit projects that the construction carbon impacts are huge: 60,000 or more metric tons of emissions just for construction activities alone, not counting concrete and steel manufacture, for the short light-rail construction from Northgate to Lynnwood that is already scheduled.”
The alternative to rail is highway. Highways are massive structures of concrete and steel. Highways require the dedication of vast amounts of land, much greater than rail for the same capacity. Highways are not as safe as rail, leading to additional use of motor vehicles for police, fire, ambulance, and cleanup. Since there are 2.5 million highway collision injuries every year, highways contribute substantially to hospital construction and maintenance. Yes, we need police and fire services, but highways generate much more of their own need for these services than rail transit does.
A significant element of ST3 carbon emission is the bus service. The primary advantage to bus service is the ability to establish service quickly on existing roads. In that case, there is virtually no construction-related carbon footprint. However, transit buses are typically overweight (more weight per axle than allowed) vehicles. Transit buses get an exception. A truck driver with transit bus axle loading would be stopped at a weigh station and not be allowed to continue. This condition generates an additional carbon footprint for road repair when they operate on existing roads.
Bus transit advocates cite the routing flexibility of buses. However, there are limitations to the streets are routed over, based on lane width, roadway width, pavement strength, and configuration of intersections to allow turning of vehicles of that length.
Roads that are built for transit buses, including Bus Rapid Transit busways, are built with the additional structure needed to support transit bus axle loading. The roadway requires fewer repairs generated by overweight vehicles. That is a matter of pay up front or pay later.
The bus component of ST3 involves substantial highway construction. That is the strategy that was used in passing the original Sound Transit program. The original ST ballot measure in 1996 involved Everett – Tacoma light rail within a decade and extensive commuter rail service between Everett and Lakewood. That measure failed, as did the Westlake Avenue parkway (called the Champs-Élysées of Seattle) and the new baseball stadium the Mariners demanded as bag money to prevent them from packing up and leaving town. The baseball stadium initiative failure was considered an emergency for which the Legislature called a special session to arrange funding. Sound Transit changed their proposal to give the voters what they wanted: more highways. Bus transit became the basis for extensive road construction.
One day over a decade ago (during the initial Sound Transit configuration), I rode a Sounder train from Tacoma to Seattle. I had to return to Tacoma on a Sound Transit express bus. There was no rail service for the return trip. To occupy the time, I used the Sound Transit timetable book to do some transit analysis. There were 53 individual Sound Transit buses competing with the (much less extensive) Sound Transit rail service between Seattle and Tacoma. The people want roads; they get roads. People want roads because of the propaganda telling them how cool they will be in the car that everyone takes off their sunglasses to stare at them driving.
That story is an old story. The US government has been competing with railroads for almost a century. Highway and air transport are heavily subsidized by the government. The US government ran most of the eastern US railroads out of business in the 50s – 70s with air, highway, and marine competition. Ultimately, they did the same to about half of the Western US railroads. Amtrak is one of the results of that competition and running railroads out of business, salvaging a bare minimum, not quite sufficient to be effective passenger rail service as a token gesture. Amtrak is under annual threat of elimination, and has been by virtually every Congress and Administration for almost 40 years. One need only go as far as Enumclaw (The Courier-Herald, May 2 2017) to find an op-ed article advocating the elimination of Amtrak as a national system. Investment of public money in rail transit, outside of the major cities of the east, is a relatively new phenomenon. Even more rare is the investment in private railroad infrastructure in order to operate passenger service, such as the Washington State Amtrak Cascades service.
Collusion of oil and auto related industries to eliminate rail “competition” has been powerful. General Motors and Firestone were involved in a scheme, over 60 years ago, to purchase electric street railways, dismantle them, and sell buses to city transit agencies. In Chicago, for example, this transition created a condition of more vehicles providing less service. Americans are indoctrinated into their preference for and admiration of anything on roads. This article is more of the same.
Part of the enormous cost of ST3 is rooted in the delay involved in building an effective urban transit solution. Even 1996 was a late start, but the Puget Sound region was in love with cars, just as they had been taught to be. Seattle built a really fine subway for Atlanta over 40 years ago. There was a Federal transit grant for Seattle. The ST, ST2, and ST3 programs could have been built 45 years ago with less disruption, less cost, and greater effect, but Seattle told the Federal government no thanks. The money went to Atlanta.
Los Angeles and the San Francisco bay area learned the hard way. Both had extensive electric rail transit systems. Those systems were dismantled and replaced with bus service. Within about a decade in the Bay Area and a little later in Los Angeles, plans to restore electric rail service were being developed. Of course, the cost of building a system anew in lieu of upgrading the existing system that had been dismantled was substantially greater (as was the carbon footprint), but it was a boon for folks who build things out of concrete and steel.
Face it. The presence of a vast number of people is not environmentally friendly in the first place. Part of that environmental effect is found in mobility, which is a fundamental requirement of society. The more advanced the society, the greater the need for mobility and the greater the environmental impact of people. There have been advocates of abandoning motor vehicles for horses. Using horses for transportation of vast numbers of people has a great environmental impact. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, horses in the large Eastern cities were a significant environmental problem, substantially including dead horses in the streets and, of course, the solid and liquid emissions generated by the conversion of energy in hay to propulsion energy.
Rail transportation has the inherent advantage of very low friction. Part of the propulsion energy of a vehicle must overcome friction before inertia can be overcome. Highway vehicles depend upon friction. The greater friction of rubber on pavement over steel on steel is required in order to prevent undesired lateral motion and to effect steering.
Electric trains have the further advantage of regeneration. When braking, the energy being taken out of the train is directed into the propulsion power system (by turning the electric motors into generators) for the benefit of other trains rather than dissipating into the atmosphere as heat.
High speed electric trains, the Bullet Trains as Americans love to call them, require more energy than conventional trains. That is a simple matter of physics. Going faster requires more energy. Those trains operate at much higher speeds than would be possible (or at least practical) for highway transport. A high speed train uses 4% of the energy per passenger mile at 200 mph than an automobile at 60 mph. They require only about 25% of the energy required for air travel. The friction encountered by airplanes at high altitude is small. However, the friction encountered at the low altitudes on the way to and from high altitude is greater, as is the energy required to oppose gravity when lifting the plane from the ground.
The biggest problem with ST3, beyond the extensive reliance on buses, is the time that is needed for construction. I really don’t know the reason, other than they can’t spend the money faster than it comes in (which is a function of building what should have been built in 1975 in 2017+). As a comparison, the 7.8 mile long Cascade Tunnel, on the BNSF route between Everett and Wenatchee (if you have ridden the Amtrak Empire Builder, you have gone through it) was constructed in three years, using the technology of the time (1925-1929): horses, manpower, explosives, and steam drills. Northern Pacific constructed today’s BNSF line between Tacoma and Vancouver WA, 136 miles, in about six years, using the technology of the 1908-1914 era.
Without discussion of the entire circumstances that have generated the numbers used in the article, I consider it just more oil industry propaganda.
Yeah, I know. This is long and there is a lot in it. The subject is not simple. This is as simple as I can make it and convey the information. Simplification of a complex subject is often a way of manipulating opinion about the subject.