[sustran] Re: [NewMobilityCafe] CDM Projects (Clean Development Mechanism) - public transport

Lee Schipper schipper at wri.org
Sun Nov 30 07:47:51 JST 2008


A key question, Carlos is "Who is coming to Poznan or (next year)
Copenhagen who is empowered to grant bus concessions, build apartments
around metro stops, put up bike racks and start bike sharing in large
cities, or turn a street into a pedestrian zone."

I fear that answer is "no one". Some officials who will be there can
affect fuel economy standards -- the event I organized with ITF last
December around that theme in Bali was packed. But as you say, one has
to go far beyond what technology can do to vehicles and fuels. The
people who can do that are far beyond the COP process. Are they out of
reach?  Is development strategy itself in reach of this conference?

Hopefully some of the events Sergio and Cornie have organized will
address these issues. I'll be waiting in Berkeley for the news. 

Lee
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------


-----Original Message-----
From: Carlosfelipe Pardo [mailto:carlosfpardo at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2008 2:24 PM
To: Todd Alexander Litman
Cc: Lee Schipper; NewMobilityCafe at yahoogroups.com;
sustran-discuss at list.jca.apc.org; Holger Dalkmann; Cornie Huizenga;
jleather at adb.org; Cities-for-Mobility at yahoogroups.com;
akopp at worldbank.org; Sergio Sanchez
Subject: Re: [sustran] Re: [NewMobilityCafe] CDM Projects (Clean
Development Mechanism) - public transport

Hi,

This discussion goes directly to the issue of what measures can have a 
long term (positive) effect in transport. Recently I've been having 
discussions with city planners and urbanists about it, and to an extent 
they may be right when they say that before jumping to measures on 
transport one should work on the purposes of trips and how to reduce 
those trips. This would be similar to the shift from purely 
technological measures (i.e. change the bus, use cleaner fuels) to more 
demand-based measures. In this case, it would be going further back and 
asking why demand is there and trying to reduce those motives (the 
typical answer being higher densities and mixed land uses, etc, but more

measures can be implemented!). It may be easier to work on this with 
high-income population than low-income (similar to the Annex I and 
Non-Annex I issue), but the former are those who are more mobile than 
the latter and probably more polluting in some cases.

A related anecdote: I was once in a conversation with an employee of a 
UN agency who worked in transport. He told us that he loved his 4500 cc 
car, and that regardless of increasing fuel prices he'd still come to 
the office by car. Thankfully, he was seldom at the office...

The above is not really a novel idea, but good to think about it in the 
context of carbon, transport and financing, and what to do and discuss 
in Copenhaguen (all the best to those who can make it there).

Best regards,

Carlos.


Todd Alexander Litman wrote:
> I agree with Lee on two points. First, investments in alternative 
> modes by themselves are an inefficient way to conserve energy and 
> reduce emissions. It is far more important to implement pricing 
> reforms which discourage automobile travel and encourage the purchase 
> of more efficient vehicles then to simply invest in public transit, 
> since only about 5% of fuel savings result from shifts to public 
> transit - the rest results from other changes such as the purchase of 
> more efficient vehicles, and shifts to walking, cycling, ridesharing, 
> and closer destinations.
>
> Second, public transit service improvements are justified on many 
> other grounds besides climate change emissions, so focusing on this 
> one objective would result in underinvestment in public transit. It 
> is far better to justify public transit improvements due to their 
> economic and social benefits (congestion reduction, road and parking 
> facility cost savings, consumer savings, accident reductions, 
> improved mobility for non-drivers) rather than focusing on energy 
> conservation and emission reduction benefits.
>
> That being said, climate change concerns are stimulating a lot of 
> rethinking about transportation planning goals and practices. If the 
> CDM can help justify some additional investment in efficient 
> transportation, I'm all for it. Ideally, climate change emission 
> reduction advocates should work with other interest groups (economic 
> development, traffic safety, equity, public health, consumer 
> interests, etc.) to build support for the substantial changes 
> required to create truly sustainable transportation systems.
>
> Let me tell you a related story. I'm currently writing a paper 
> concerning methods for monetizing (measuring in monetary units) 
> carbon emissions. There are two general approaches: damage costs, 
> which may be hundreds of dollars per tonne, and control costs, which 
> are probably much lower, perhaps $30-50 per tonne. A colleague wants 
> to use the higher value for analysis because he assumes that will 
> justify greater reductions in vehicle travel, but I'm not convinced. 
> A very high climate change value will justify technical solutions 
> that ONLY reduce emissions (such as regulations and incentives that 
> increase fuel efficiency or shifts to alternative fuels) since the 
> high value implies that climate change is the dominant, while a lower 
> value will justify more mobility management solutions that reduce 
> total vehicle travel and therefore help achieve multiple planning
objectives.
>
> For more information see:
> "Win-Win Transportation Emission Reduction Strategies" 
> (<http://www.vtpi.org/wwclimate.pdf>www.vtpi.org/wwclimate.pdf )
> "Smart Transportation Emission Reduction Strategies" 
> (<http://www.vtpi.org/ster.pdf>www.vtpi.org/ster.pdf )
> "Carbon Taxes: Tax What You Burn, Not What You Earn" 
> (<http://www.vtpi.org/carbontax.pdf>www.vtpi.org/carbontax.pdf )
>
>
> Best wishes,
> -Todd Litman
>
>
> At 09:24 AM 23/11/2008, Lee Schipper wrote:
>   
>> Why would you want public transport in CDM, when the 
>> values/costs/benefits of time saved, lower air pollution, less 
>> noise, greater rider security and safety etc DWARF the carbon 
>> values...and when adding a CDM component slows the entire 
>> improvement of transport down immensely while all of us don our 
>> green visors and count carbon.
>>
>> Counting that carbon is VERY hard 
>> (http://embarq.wri.org/en/Article.140.aspx examined some of these 
>> issues including a paper we wrote for the 2007 ECEEE conference on 
>> measuring CO2 emissions CHANGES from transport projects).
>>
>> I'm VERY worried about CO2 in transport, but I'm convinced CDM and 
>> like process that link to "carbon finance" either slow the process 
>> down (see GEF grant progress), put too much focus on reducing CO2 
>> rather than improving transport (they are not the same), filter our 
>> vision to projects whose carbon savings are relatively to measure 
>> (hybrid buses, proven but expensive) or ones with tiny and often 
>> questionable savings (like small additions of biodiesel to bus fuel).
>>
>> I'm not against rewarding carbon saving or efforts at mass transit, 
>> but the proportions of $ for carbon are tiny compared to the overall 
>> pot of time, transport, urban development.  Can Mexico City honestly 
>> say that their Metrobus was "additional", ie., would not have been 
>> undertaken to save $$ millions in saved time, accidents, local air 
>> pollution, reduced numbers of cars on the road (according to a nice 
>> report by the Instituto Nacional de Ecologia published in 2006) for 
>> a few hundred thousand $ of carbon finance funds arranged after the
fact?
>>
>> Juerg Gruetter has made a good case for CDM and carbon financing of 
>> BRT projects, but in the end these only affect a small amount of CO2 
>> (in buses) and, while they draw a modest number of riders from cars, 
>> still leave the rest of cars untouched. My fear is that CDM draws 
>> interest to those easily bankable projects and away from the much 
>> greater challenge, use of cars and other light duty vehicles.
>>
>> In four Latin American cities (Mexico City region, Bogota, S Paulo, 
>> and Santiago) cars and taxis appear to account for 65-70% of all 
>> direct GHG emissions from road traffic (including trucks).  Without 
>> policies and projects that reduce that traffic (and its growth) 
>> SIGNIFICANTLY, the savings from 'urban transport projects" in 
>> general will be small.  Since most fo the carbon is in cars, most of 
>> the change has to come from cars. How do you measure that and sell 
>> the results against a rapidly growing baseline? And cars and trucks 
>> are not "cdm-able", i.e., owned by the kinds of entities that can be 
>> part of CDM directly. Of course $$ could be given to cities who 
>> undertook strong transport measures, but again, why would they not 
>> undertake those measures anyway? And why would national governments 
>> not want to promulgate fuel economy standards to save oil?
>>
>> In short, is this really about $$ or political will?
>> Finally, consider the following very rough numbers that illustrate 
>> the scale of the problem.
>>    * World GDP 60 Trillion (until the crash)
>>    * World gross investment $10 TN (remember buildings burn energy 
>> leading to CO2 emissions, too)
>>    * Investments in transport infrastructure (road, rail, port, 
>> air, facilities like transfer stations) - my guess $1-2 TN
>>    * World purchase of private household transport equipment $1TN 
>> (40 mn cars $25 000/car)
>>    * World purchase of road fuels (roughly 2 TN)
>>
>> Are we really talking about  putting hundreds of billions YEARLY 
>> into doing what is the right thing even if CO2 was not a problem. 
>> Conversely, if we had a CO2 free fuel tomorrow, we'd still have a 
>> traffic mess worldwide. So maybe focusing on transport and Co2, 
>> rather than more broadly clean development - and understanding why 
>> developing cities' traffic is such a mess even before CO2 is 
>> considered - is higher on the agenda. If there are going to be N-S 
>> transfers, aka Overseas Development Assistance, is CO2 "abatement" 
>> the most cost effective way of using money for development?
>>
>> Realistically, how can CDM have more than a demonstration effect? If 
>> so, then let's forget CDM as such and move to  a wider effort to
>>
>> Demonstrate various regional policy and technical solutions, 
>> investing (for once) in enough competence building and data 
>> gathering so localities can monitor traffic, emissions, fuel, safety 
>> etc better. Our EMBARQ project in se Asia (PSUTA) discovered that 
>> authorities' ability to monitor even the most elementary problems of 
>> transport was pretty meager 
>> --http://embarq.wri.org/en/ProjectCitiesDetail.aspx?id=9
>>
>> Some of these issues will be discussed at the upcoming COP (Dec 5). 
>> Maybe Climate negotiations are not the right place to decide how to 
>> use the streets? There will also be a spirited discussion during 
>> Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington DC, both 
>> during the meeting itself and at a special side event Friday 16 
>> January.  This note is copied to several of those involved in these 
>> discussions. Watch this space!
>>
>> Lee Schipper, Ph.D
>> Project Scientist
>> Global Metropolitan Studies
>> 2614 Dwight Way 2nd floor
>> University of California Berkeley
>> CA 94720-1782 USA
>> TEL +1 510 642 6889
>> FAX +1 510 642 6061
>> CELL +1 202 262 7476
>>     
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Todd Alexander Litman
> Victoria Transport Policy Institute (www.vtpi.org)
> litman at vtpi.org
> Phone & Fax 250-360-1560
> 1250 Rudlin Street, Victoria, BC, V8V 3R7, CANADA
> "Efficiency - Equity - Clarity"
> -------------------------------------------------------- 
> IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via
YAHOOGROUPS. 
>
> Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran-discuss
to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership rights. The
yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' there cannot post to
the real sustran-discuss (even if the yahoogroups site makes it seem
like you can). Apologies for the confusing arrangement.
>
> ================================================================
> SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred,
equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries
(the 'Global South'). 
>
>   


More information about the Sustran-discuss mailing list