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Page 26

Rejecting Rail

An excellent example of a report that ignores its own

conclusions is Clean Air through Transportation, jointly

published by the Department of Transportation and the EPA.51

Using data from San Diego and Los Angeles, the report

indicates that huge investments in both rail and bus transit

systems are likely to reduce CO pollution by less than 1

percent and HC by only 1 to 3 percent (see Table 3).  By

comparison, relatively cheap investments in signaling to

improve the flow of auto traffic can reduce pollution three

to six times as much.52

Although the report rejects huge investments in rail,

it strongly endorses land-use policies aimed at reducing

trip distances.  The report indicates that a 10 percent

reduction in home-to-work distances may reduce pollution by

1.4 to 2 percent, and a 25 percent reduction in home-to-work

distances may reduce pollution by 4 to 12 percent.  But the

report fails to assess the costs of reducing home-to-work

distances by 10 to 25 percent.  In fact, it would be almost

impossible to achieve such reductions through land-use

policies.

Portland is proposing major expenditures and huge

impositions on its residents, including

· increasing overall population density by 70 percent;

· tripling or quadrupling congestion;

· charging for parking throughout the urban area;

· requiring all work and retail developments and many

residential developments to meet pedestrian-friendly

and transit-oriented design standards; and

· constructing 90 more miles of rail transit at a cost

of roughly $6 billion to $10 billion.

The transportation model used by Portland planners

projects that all of those things will reduce trip lengths

by less than 5 percent.53  That would correspond to roughly

a 0.7 to 1.0 percent reduction in air pollution--about a

third of what might be obtained with traffic signaling

improvements.  So the endorsement of New Urbanist land-use

planning goals by the authors of Clean Air through Transpor-

tation makes no sense except as an ideological stance.