Cycling, traffic safety, traffic justice, and legal topics; energy, transit and transportion economics
In a recurring theme, the air is polluted in Phoenix. Ground level ozone — formed by burning fossil fuels resulting in NOX and VOC emissions which forms smog — being the main culprit.
From the American Lung Association’s State of the Air report; Phoenix clocks in at 5th worst city for Ozone, and 9th for year round particulates.
Poor air quality is a direct threat to human health. Continue reading “Air Pollution in Phoenix?”
After appropriating $400MM of GENERAL FUNDS last season in order to widen the I-10 freeway between ~ just south of Phoenix to Casa Grande (towards Tucson); the legislature this year is on track to appropriate ANOTHER $360MM (also general funds) to the project, to backfill currently unavailable federal matching funds.
SB1065 appropriation; widening; I-10
Just to re-cap, general funds come from things like state sales taxes, property taxes, and income taxes. Notably, they do not come from gas-taxes, or other motor vehicle user fees. Continue reading “AZ Republican’s war on walking continues”
Parents would get paid to take their kids to school under Arizona bill
Meanwhile year-after-year-after-year our stalwart legislators have failed to generate adequate revenue to fund highway construction and maintenance for going on 30 years; leading to either both deferred maintenance and other funding sources, like sales taxes that are totally non-user fee based. Meanwhile “the big lie”, that drivers pay their way, get passed along by opponents of cycling. Continue reading “Arizona legislature busy working on more subsidized driving”
And as Dan Neil, car guy for the Wall Street Journal points out: “Are pickups really getting bigger, on average, or do they just look scarier? Both. The average pickup gained 1,142 pounds between 1990 and 2019.”
Safety failings: “(during Trump administration, the) NHTSA proposed that new pedestrian-safety tests for SUVs and trucks be included in the New Car Assessment Program in 2015. But as of this writing, the agency had not issued guidance on new standards. When asked, the industry trade group Alliance for Automotive Innovation had no comment.”
Being ever-heavier with ever-boxier body design, they use more fuel than a car, of course but what about pollution? nothing in the articles, Dan missed the boat here — pickups and SUVs are typically in “high” bins. They pollute a lot
4/23/2019 ~ 11pm victim Thomas Taraba and another person were walking on the sidewalk along McDowell Road near 37th Street. Police say river 20-year-old Zachary Showers was the driver; he was arrested on suspicion of DUI
“According to court documents, Taraba was thrown 75 feet” indicating the driver’s speed was very fast, perhaps too fast for any city street. 12news.com. a few more details at fox10news.
Continue reading “Vision Zero PHX, was: PD: Driver kills man on sidewalk”
This new and much-needed fee is the result of weak and/or duplicitous politicians who have neglected to honestly fund transportation in Arizona for decades; despite sporadic efforts that always fail in Arizona’s Republican-controlled legislature. They are so stridently, and uniformly ideological that they can’t even admit that gas tax revenue, because of the way it’s structured, have been going steadily down in real terms, for well over twenty years. The same is true at the federal level as well. Continue reading “Public Safety Fee going into effect”
…the season apparently just started in April 2011. Pollution — nobody wants to pay… Our state politicians want to block more stringent new-car standards. And meanwhile complain that the excessive number of alerts/advisories is caused by tightening air-quality standards.
State officials posted the Valley’s eighth ozone pollution advisory of the season Tuesday, a fact clean-air activists noted repeatedly as they argued against a plan to repeal Arizona’s vehicle-emissions rules barely six months after they took effect. Arizona’s plan to cut clean-car program criticized by activists
Here is the obligatory pollution story:
Maricopa County’s ozone season starts today with a fresh burst of heat and sunlight, two key ingredients needed for unhealthful levels of the smog to form.
Temperatures could rise to nearly 100 degrees today as a strong high-pressure system creates the ideal conditions for ground-level ozone. The other elements – vehicle exhaust, power-plant emissions, gasoline, paint and industrial solvents – are always in abundant supply. Read more…
My gripe? While I agree that vehicle exhaust is always in abundant supply, I don’t imagine power plants contribute any significant amount of pollution to the Phoenix area. The closest big power plant is Palo Verde nuke which is by definition smog-free. There are a bunch of small-scale power plants within the valley but they tend to be natural gas fired, which is very very clean smog-wise. The nearest big coal plant, which are among other pollutants very smoggy are hundreds (?) of miles away.
I wonder how much of smog is contributed other than from vehicle exhaust (and fueling)?? I doubt very much.
You have to read between the lines to even get the hint that much (most?) of this pollution comes from vehicle use — both from entrained dust (dust that is kicked up by cars/trucks whooshing by) or emissions (NOX -> ozone, and fine particulates from combustion, particularly from “clean” diesel engines. )
Experts warn of poor Valley air quality The Arizona Republic. A familiar brown cloud is settling over a cool, dry Valley, prompting air-quality experts to warn that residents could be in for a particularly dirty winter.
Bad air expected for Valley through the holidays Bob McClay/KTAR PHOENIX — The Valley’s brown cloud season has arrived, with poor air quality that irritates respiratory systems … Mark Shaffer with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. …said the high pressure creates an air bubble that collects ozone below 5,000 feet.
For those of you who don’t follow such minutia, the Phoenix area is what is termed a “Serious Non-Attainment Area” for various forms of air pollution. This leads to, of course, some amount of human misery especially via various lung diseases, but it also brings the specter of loss of federal funds if the air isn’t cleaned up. Some local (state, or maybe county?) agency must produce a plan to clean up the air to the satisfaction of the EPA; that plan (critique here dated 9/13/2010: EPA Disapproves Air Quality Plan for Phoenix ) was rejected in part because “EPA has determined that the SIP (State Implementation Plan) over-emphasized emission reductions needed from construction-related activities and de-emphasized emission reductions from other sources”, you know, other source like, for example, those produced as a result of using motor vehicles.
I thought that this story: Capital takes bag tax in stride, is an interesting example of a negative incentive. And it got me to thinking about incentives affect behavior. Incentives are entertainingly the central theme of the best selling book Freakonomics, which I disussed here.
So the story is that Washington D.C. enacted a law that mandates that anyone who sells food must charge 5 cents for each bag given. Customers can either bring their own bags, or not use a bag, or pay the nickel. There were the usual predictions of the world coming to an end, however the WSJ story claims no major disruptions have occurred, and even some who opposed the tax initially now have changed their minds.
The bags often become floating trash and muck-up the Chesapeake watershed — a negative externality. The tax is designed to cut disposable plastic bag consumption and, it is hoped, plastic bag waterway pollution by 50%.
Here where I live, we have no such bag tax, of course, but it is trendy for grocery retailers to offer customers a nickel credit for each bag brought in that is then reused — a positive incentive.
Looking around here, it is obvious that the (coincidentally) equal positive incentive has had very little impact on bag usage, whereas the incentive in D.C. has had a large impact. I’ve also noticed that initially the grocers offering the incentive volunteered the credit, and now they seem to “forget” or not notice to give the credit unless the customer points it out, and most/many aren’t likely to do that to earn a nickel or a dime.
I’m thinking there must be a lesson here for things like free parking; which is that positive incentives have little impact, while negative incentives have a huge influence on behaviors.
More externalities of mass motorization.
The Arizona Republic ran this USA Today story under the better-named headline “Gulf spill can’t rival oil seepage from cities: Over time, tiny drips add major pollution to oceans”.
“Human-caused spills send more than 300 million gallons of oil into North American waters every decade, an amount roughly double the highest estimate of the BP spill”… “the largest human-caused source of oil into the environment is the byproduct of millions of autos and other oil-powered devices.”
Land-based oil spills add up, too
USA Today, 6/30/2010 Continue reading “Little drips make a big mess”
An integral part of unrestrained car use is having somewhere to put the darn things when we’re not driving them. Enter the “free” parking space.
They aren’t, of course, actually free — thus someone else is paying, not the driver using it, it is external to the cost of driving; call it socialism for drivers. Thus leading to ever more demand for more driving and more parking spaces.
from the Arizona Republic 12/28/2009; Ahwatukee Park-and-Ride Lot Expanding.
In the example mentioned in the story, 353 spaces are being added to the existing 562 for a cost of $3M. That’s $8,500 per space. But that is only the cost of construction (or land but that is cheap); the ongoing costs aren’t listed but they are significant. A not exhaustive list would look something like; lighting, maintenance like sweeping and cleaning, and re-sealing asphalt, full-time(one employee ~ 50hrs/week) security during operating hours, cost of operating the small building (heat and cooled approximately 24×7, even though no one is usually there; didn’t these people ever hear of a programmable thermostat?).
see Doug Shoup’s book mentioned here; The High Cost of Free parking.
In the particular example of a transit park-and-ride lot it gets even more interesting because of the cross-subsidies involved in mass transit. One wonders if the best use of presumably limited transit funds is to build parking spaces for the relatively well-off remote suburban commuters. This lot serves only one bus line; a rapid/express (no intermediate stops) route between Ahwatukee and downtown Phoenix. The line only runs one way, and only in the morning and evening. Thus the parking spots have low turnover — one spot equals one round trip rider.
a book by Andrew Nikiforuk.
This was mainly a polemic against the tar sands (though the industry prefers the term oil sands) industry as practiced in Alberta, Canada, and how it connects to provicial politics there. The problems with the industry are legion: they use enormous amounts of natural gas to extract and upgrade the tar; loads of water is used; this load of water is then collected in highly toxic tailings ponds. Open pit/strip mining uses less natural gas than in situ extraction, but leaves obvious scars. And in any event, only 20% of the bitumen is available through mining — the other 80% requires in situ (referred to as SAGD, Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage). Continue reading “Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the future of a continent”
Lead is a powerful neurotoxin. Formerly (up until 199x?) US motorists put millions of pounds per year into the air via their fuel. Now we find that motorists remain the largest lead-polluters in the form of discarded wheel-weights, to the tune of 3.5 million pounds a year. Continue reading “Lead pollution”
The results of an 18 year long study published in the NEJM show that even low-levels of ozone exposure cause significant problems among those with respiratory problems. Continue reading “Low-level ozone exposure found to be lethal over time”