The Green Transportation Heirarcy
We don’t need to remind ourselves why we brave the means streets of the Los Angeles region. We love to ride! The ocean breeze, the smells, the unexpected hills, and of course the sheer satisfaction of human-powered transportation (what a novelty!). It keeps us in the saddle. In that we follow a long-blazed trail by our cycling antecedents who bravely took to nineteenth-century roads, pitted and pockmarked and made hazardous by horse-and-buggy – and droppings – to assert their rights to ride. When you consider that in a relatively short time, we’ve refined our capability to motor ourselves more miles per calorie than ever before, you have to agree that humans have been extraordinarily creative in adapting the venerable two-wheeled device to constantly-evolving modern times.
Consider this gentleman with his bolt-on charcoal grill near a Shanghai park. Or the bike-mounted newsstand in Beijing. Add a third wheel and you obviate the need for diesel-powered trash trucks, as the Shanghai trash collector shows: he can accomplish his work with human power and an eminently practical transportation device.
We do need to remind others why our choice of transport is not only pleasurable and creative, and but energy-conserving and thus good for everybody too. Give us folks who burn calories, not gas and rubber, our due!
Transportation Alternatives offered a reminder of how important is the bicycle to the world’s daily business. Back in 2001 they developed an inverted pyramid of transport users that put people-powered transit at the top (where it belongs) of a new pyramid of road users (bottom). It was a subtle reminder that despite the prevalence (and negative effects) of auto transportation, there is an alternative. It also suggested that we’ve had our transportation investment priorities upside down.
When we consider cost and benefit, investment, and value, for example, motorists come out dead last every time. Multi-billion dollar shovel-ready highway projects prove the point: they sap funding for so many other needed improvements while returning a dubious benefit. Who ever says after the fact, Glad we have that HOV lane! They’re already clogged.
Every cyclist who enjoys the relative protection of a Class II lane knows how good it feels to have a designated space apart from the auto traffic. We can install a bike rack (an unfamiliar transportation innovation in many neighborhoods) for a couple of hundred bucks. Good luck finding that kind of value providing for motorists.
Transportation Alternatives argued that an ideal transportation funding and programming resource allocation should reflect this new ‘green’ transportation hierarchy. I think we can all agree that single-occupancy vehicle operators belong at the bottom of any pyramid of road users, and as depicted in the diagram should be treated accordingly where policy and subsidies are concerns.
This conceptual values hierarchy is also a great reminder that creative ways of visualizing the situation helps us all think more clearly about the benefits of increasing cycling and the often-obscured negative impacts of auto transit.