To Decarbonize Transportation, Unshackle Cities?

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To Decarbonize Transportation, Unshackle Cities?

With the Trump administration actively working against action on climate change, a lot of hope has been placed in cities picking up the slack. Cities, after all, have more incentive than most to tackle this problem, since they suffer most acutely from the closely related scourge of air pollution. Programs like the American Cities Climate Challenge, among others, have been reminding them of that, while pushing them to take meaningful action to reduce emissions. 

American cities do have tools at their disposal: supporting higher density development and getting rid of parking minimums (see below for news from Edmonton on that front); allocating car-free street space (as we’re seeing during the pandemic), working with transit agencies on priority lanes and signals, procuring electric vehicles for publicly owned fleets, etc. 

But when it comes to directly regulating vehicle emissions, American cities are largely powerless. That’s a big contrast with Europe, where cities have created ‘low emission zones’: areas where heavily polluting vehicles are either charged a hefty fee or banned outright. In London, one of cities leading the charge on low emissions zones, I saw up close how powerful a tool it can be: Uber is committed to a 100% electric fleet there by 2025. 

US cities (likely) don’t have the power to follow suit. The regulation of fuel economy standards lies with the Federal government, and even California’s long held exceptionalism is in the midst of a crisis brought on by the current administration. Cities have been stymied in past efforts to wade into regulating vehicle emissions: New York, as only one example, had its effort to convert its taxi fleet to hybrid vehicles shut down on the grounds that it would preempt federal jurisdiction. 

How might American cities overcome the legal obstacles that have stopped them from instituting things like low emissions zones in the past? I’ve heard that some sharp minds are working through approaches that could survive legal challenges. 

But one approach has gotten less attention than I think it should: federal action. What might a supportive federal government do to make city-led and city-scale action on vehicle emissions easier? A number of federal plans on transport decarbonization have been published recently, including one from House Democrats last week (see below for more on that). But none, to my knowledge, has included language aimed at allowing local jurisdictions to move more aggressively in declaring parts of their cities off limits to polluting vehicles. 

What if the Federal government set out to enable, rather than hinder, this kind of city-led action on low emission zones? If things go well this November, that’s a question I’m hoping we get the chance to find out.

New & worth a read:

• House Democrats release their much anticipated Climate Action Plan. It’s got a lot of content on transportation, starting on page 86. I started a short twitter thread summarizing some early highlights here. Here’s a broader look at the whole plan from Dave Roberts at Vox. While most of the priorities here have no chance of being enacted in the short term, it’s a blueprint for what 2021 could look like.

• Edmonton - capital of Alberta, cornerstone of Canada’s oil industry - becomes one of the largest cities in North America to abolish parking minimums. Getting rid of parking minimums is a necessary first step to denser urban development. Hopefully Edmonton can shame a few other cities into following suit.

• Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, wins reelection on the back of her dramatic moves to expel cars from the core of the city. She was once left for dead in this election, but demonstrated that dramatic changes in urban transportation can be a winning political strategy.

• I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing.

Till next time,

Andrew