Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
I got a kick out of New York’s reaction to a report released back in April, showing that carbon emissions in the city had increased by about 8 percent since 1997. The news stories were alarmist and the leaders angry, promising to do whatever it took to reverse the trend and reduce emissions within 25 years. Admirable sentiments, but it made me chuckle to see how many New Yorkers buried the biggest story in the report, as far as I was concerned. The average New Yorker, you see, contributes about one-third the carbon emissions of the average American. If we all lived like New Yorkers, we’d immediately make the United States’ share of the climate crisis a great deal more manageable.
New York has to face the same challenges as other cities in reducing emissions from buildings and from power generation. Its main advantage over the rest of us is that more than 50 percent of its daily commuters use mass transit. Many of those that don’t will walk or bike, or use car-sharing services like taxi cabs. No city in the country has committed to abandoning the personal automobile trip like New York has, and so we all spew out carbon at rates much greater than the Big Green Apple.
Of course, New York hasn’t committed to mass transit because it’s green to do so. Instead its subways, commuter rail systems, buses, ferries, and cab companies arose and were built to handle the population size and density that makes New York unique among American cities. It’s that density that supports the commercial dynamism and diversity that define New York. It also allows New York to house nearly half the population of its massive 20 million large metropolitan area in the 300 square miles at the center.
But that’s New York, right? Even if we wanted our city to feel like our neighbor to the north, and most of us don’t, the barriers standing in our way are insurmountable–the Freedom Tower, to take one example, will be more than ten times taller than our city’s height limit. But if our future (probably) doesn’t include avenues lined with 60 story buildings, we can nonetheless learn important lessons from the things New York does best. For starters, one of the main things we can do to reduce our own carbon emissions is to reduce our dependence on automobiles. The District is already well ahead of the national average in this respect—over one-third of D.C. residents commute via mass transit—but we can do better. It should be the official policy of the city government to reduce the use of automobiles by residents and non-residents alike. This doesn’t have to be hard; much of the work can be done by pushing mixed-use developments and avoiding suburban style errors like the Brentwood Shopping Center. The city should limit the amount of space given over to parking and improve alternatives like bike lanes and trails, as well as the cab fare system and bus routing. The city should also be thinking seriously and creatively about how to create new transit lines.
But let’s be honest: Washingtonians, they of the one trip in three via transit, are not the big carbon offenders in the region. For that we have to look to the suburbs, where transit use is minimal, congestion is epidemic, and commute times stretch into the triple digits. In many ways, the struggles of the exurbs are the problems of the exurbs, but emissions and pollution don’t stay put, warming and dirtying tiny areas over Centreville and Tysons Corner. Sadly, their failure in that respect is our problem, but we, good people that we are, can help them solve it.
Picture taken by {ryan}.
