When electric isn’t good enough

Within a 15 minutes’ drive in any direction from the palm-fringed Greek Revival rotunda of California’s State Capitol, the road dead-ends in a verdant field of crops. Virtually every variety of fruit and vegetable consumed in the U.S. is planted here, on land kneaded by farmworkers, crisscrossed by rivers diverted for irrigation.

Sacramento might be ground zero for policy-making bigwigs and high-rolling lobbyists, but as a city it has more in common with farming communities 200 miles to the south. The state’s capital is positioned at the northern edge of California’s Central Valley, where geography traps a dangerous haze over some of the country’s poorest communities. Some of that pollution is from agricultural impacts—the valley produces about one-fifth of the country’s food—but much of it is from vehicles. In some parts of the Central Valley, average commuting times are among the longest in the state.

The Central Valley will also bear the brunt of climate change in California, according to the state’s fourth annual climate change assessment, prepared in August by the state’s natural resources and energy departments. By 2050, the valley’s residents will be subjected to a triple-whammy of extreme heat, wildfire risk, and poor air quality. The 6.5 million people living in what is the fastest-growing region of the state will experience increased stress, illness, and mortality “especially in areas with air pollution from transportation and other industrial sources.”

But another report from state agencies released this past summer—during the hottest month in the state’s records—offered a glimmer of hope: California had met its climate goals four years early.

It was a remarkable accomplishment. Not only were the state’s 2016 greenhouse gas emissions back to below 1990s levels, the data proved that emissions could plummet as the state’s wealth increased. While California dramatically reduced its reliance on fossil fuels, its economy had grown by 26 percent since emissions peaked in 2004 .

Under Governor Jerry Brown—who has served twice, from 1975 to 1983 and again from 2010 to 2018—California has taken the most aggressive action against climate change in the U.S. Brown framed the state’s 2018 climate report as a victory capping his final year in office.

A second part of the announcement didn’t receive as much fanfare. During the same period, transportation emissions had actually gone up. And not in the commercial sector, since the push for efficient freight management has cleaned up shipping.

Idling ships have historically had a huge carbon footprint. But thanks to recent efforts (having ships plug in for power instead of burning fuel, automating container movement), ports are cleaning up their acts. In 2017, the Port of Los Angeles—the largest in North America—announced it would be zero-emission by 2035.

Private, passenger vehicles account for a full 28 percent—the largest single chunk—of California’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“People don’t understand the impact of the personal car,” says Lezlie Kimura Szeto, manager of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) sustainable communities group.

To help Californians understand how their daily decisions could help the state achieve its climate goals, CARB came up with a metric related to the number of vehicle miles traveled—what transportation planners call VMT. CARB estimates that to get the state back on track toward its 2030 target goals, each Californian would have to reduce their daily VMT by 1.6 miles. “When you put it that way, people can say, what does that mean to me? Does it look like carpooling with someone, or taking one bike trip?” says Kimura.

In her role, Kimura also works with regional transportation groups to track the implementation of SB 375, a 2008 law that requires local planning organizations to reduce emissions through transportation and land-use policy. Ten years in, “we seem to agree that we want a more sustainable transportation system,” she says. “But we don’t know how to get there with the systems we have in place.”

The bike ride between the State Capitol and Sacramento’s City Hall is a stress-free five minutes, a trip made even easier thanks to protected lanes that connect both centers of government, symbolic and practical reminders of recent transit wins.

Sacramento already had good bones for transportation innovation: a flat grid, a handful of pedestrianized streets, and the densest urban canopy in the nation , which makes getting around the city’s downtown pleasant even on a 90-degree day. Light rail loops through well-preserved Victorian neighborhoods now seeing some vertical infill development. Earlier this year, upon completion of the downtown bike network, the city welcomed hundreds of shared electric Jump bikes—priced at as little as $1 per ride.

Thanks to a utilities manager in the 1980s who saw planting shade trees like sycamores, elms, and native oaks as way to cut down on energy costs, Sacramento has the most trees of any major city in the U.S. (only Vancouver, Sydney, and Singapore have more worldwide).

It’s becoming one of those textbook sustainable communities that might have been envisioned by the author of SB 375—the same author who is, in fact, now mayor of Sacramento, and charged with implementing the state law he helped pass.

“It’s the non-sexy bill,” laughs Mayor Darrell Steinberg, when asked about 375. “It isn’t exclusively about new technology or a hot idea, it’s pretty basic. If we’re going to meet our climate change goals, we have to build our communities to allow people to not be in their cars for so long—and certainly not in a single-occupancy car.”

While the Jump bikes have been a bigger hit than the city ever imagined, he admits, an even larger shift is on the way, one that Steinberg thinks will be able to help his constituents achieve their daily needs without owning a car. “People have to change, in some ways, the way we act and the way we think and our norms about what’s acceptable in terms of a commute,” he says. “That’s not on one person or one community—it’s a societal question.”

Sacramento has a $44 million plan to become the electric vehicle capital of the U.S., a plan underwritten by Electrify America, the initiative formed by Volkswagen’s dieselgate settlement . The idea is to provide a wide range of options for Sacramento residents to access electric car share, electric buses, and charging infrastructure.

In 2016, Volkswagen was found guilty of cheating on emissions tests, leading car owners—and environmentalists—to believe their diesel cars were cleaner than they actually were. As part of a $14.7 billion settlement, $2 billion was set aside for initiatives to promote zero-emissions technology.

Through one car-sharing service, Envoy, electric vehicles (everyone calls them EVs) will be available to rent at 71 properties around the city, many in low-income neighborhoods. Another car-sharing service, Gig, will deploy 260 electric vehicles that can be parked at any legal public parking spot, including metered spaces on downtown streets.

As senior director of marketing and communications at Electrify America’s Green City initiative, Richard Steinberg (no relation to the mayor) says Sacramento was picked because its commuting patterns look like those of a typical American city. “Sacramento is large enough to have demand for car sharing, but small enough to be a test bed,” he says. But the city also offered the greatest opportunity to change lives. “With 59 percent of the city’s Census tracts low-income or disadvantaged, and the city full of people lacking access to zero-emission technology, we concluded that the societal impact of a Green City initiative in Sacramento would be substantial.”

That’s the hope of Jennifer Venema, Sacramento’s sustainability manager for its Department of Public Works. The city hopes to have 35 percent of the city’s households use EVs, but currently, whether or not a household uses an electric vehicle is largely determined by income. “Right now, the biggest indicator is wealth,” she says. “We want to flip that to make it about access.”

Beyond the car-share programs, she points to a just-launched, on-demand microtransit shuttle (which will soon be electric, thanks to Electrify America) in an underserved South Sacramento neighborhood, where passengers can use an app or call a number to arrange a pickup or dropoff anywhere within the specified zone.

Through a community-based partnership, the city found that lower-income neighborhoods even further from the city’s downtown are home to families with the highest rates of car ownership. And because they are forced to drive more, these families end up paying for and shuffling between multiple cars due to reliability issues. “So here we have high numbers of cars per family fulfilling low-density needs,” says Venema. “We need to make sure the service delivers for these households.”

It takes less than 15 minutes to walk from the headquarters of the California Air Resources Board to the California Transportation Commission, the two organizations that drive the state’s policy on climate and transportation. Most employees likely walk by each other on their way to lunch.

Yet it took the passing of a new state law by freshman state Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes for the two agencies to meet. The first meeting was this past June, the kickoff for the two joint sessions they’re now required to hold each year.

“It was strange,” says Melanie Curry, who covered the historic meeting as editor of Streetsblog California. “These people are working on what are really very interconnected issues, and they don’t know each other, and they don’t discuss the issues with each other.”

The disconnect became even more apparent as the meeting progressed and transportation people (CTC) didn’t seem to grasp why the air quality people (CARB) were focusing so heavily on recommendations to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

At one point, CTC Commissioner Paul Van Konynenburg appeared perplexed by the testimony of Joe Jordan, who had driven a solar-charged electric vehicle to Sacramento from Santa Cruz, picking up meeting attendees along the way.

“We heard a lot of talk today about making a big push to reduce VMT,” said Van Konynenburg. “So if everyone…had a zero-emission vehicle, give me the breakdown of how that wouldn’t…help us meet our greenhouse gas goals?”

It’s something that most Californians—even elected and appointed officials—don’t understand, says Matthew Baker, policy director for the Planning and Conservation League, who was also at that meeting.

“There is a persistent belief, among both state officials and the public, that clean cars and clean fuels alone can achieve California’s climate goals, but this is fundamentally untrue,” he says. “Even if we have 100 percent zero-emission vehicles and 75 percent renewable energy production by 2050—both ambitious goals—we still need a 15 percent reduction of VMT beyond what current regional plans project to achieve.”

Plus EVs are not a public health panacea. “EVs don’t relieve congestion, and the dust from brakes and tires are a major source of particulate matter air pollution, which causes respiratory illness,” says Bryn Lindblad, associate director of Climate Resolve. “That last fact doesn’t really seem to be on people’s radar as they look to EVs to be the solution.”

One obvious way to reduce VMT would be to promote housing density . The other way is by getting people out of cars and into active or shared transportation methods. This is what planners call mode-shift—in this case, moving trips from emissions-generating cars to other zero-emission modes.

Senate Bill 827, introduced in 2018 by Senator Scott Wiener, proposed adding taller residential buildings along transit corridors statewide. It was also exceptionally controversial due to concerns about displacement. Although the bill failed in committee, a revised version is expected to return to the legislature in 2019.

In most California cities, the percentages of trips taken by walking, biking, and transit are currently single digits—except for one city famous for achieving what much of the state has not been able to do.

It is a short 14-minute train ride from downtown Sacramento to the Davis station on the southbound route of Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor. The bike racks, well-used in Sacramento, are overflowing in Davis, a jumble of wheels and handlebars. But what’s most striking is the people of all ages, including young children—five or six years old—riding unassisted on wide, dedicated bike paths.

Davis is one of the most pedestrian- and bike-friendly cities in the U.S. About 20 percent of Davis residents use bikes to commute, a mode-share that’s equal to many European cities. Davis wants to do even better—the city aims to get to 30 percent by 2020.

Naysayers like to point out that Davis is an anomaly—it’s small, it’s flat, it’s home to the University of California, Davis, and of course students ride bikes—but the important thing to know is that it wasn’t always like this, says Bob Bowen, the city’s longtime public relations manager. Change didn’t happen overnight; rather, it was gradual policy shifts that affected culture . In 1967, a group of local politicians worked to get the state law changed so bikes could officially share space with cars on streets, resulting in the first protected bike lane in the U.S.

Precedent-setting European counterparts include The Netherlands, where, as of 1975, cars killed people at a rate 20 percent higher than the U.S. A series of protests in Amsterdam demanded physical changes to streets to prioritize walking and biking. Now 27 percent of all trips within the city are made by bike, and there are more bikes in the city than people.

Now walking and biking are not only included in all the city’s transportation and neighborhood planning, they’re prioritized. Bowen points to the grade-separated bike tunnel that connects the city beneath the I-80 freeway. “It was the first time, I’m told, an interstate highway was diverted while they built a bike path under it connecting the two communities,” he says.

That’s only one of dozens of improvements that the city’s senior transportation planner Brian Abbanat shows visitors on a tour of some of the 100 miles of bikeways Davis has built. Some are purpose-built paths, but many are retrofitted arterials—the wide, car-centric streets ubiquitous in most California cities. “You can put in these facilities for other modes,” he says, “and not affect vehicular driving at all.”

When developers want to build housing in Davis, it comes with high expectations for physically integrating connectivity with the bike network, which developers help pay for, often making the decision to travel without a car easy. When Target wanted to open a new store in Davis on a busier, freeway-adjacent street, the city demanded the retailer build a back entrance accessible by a dedicated bike route.

Similarly, every school has a designated “safe route” that connects local neighborhoods. Because the infrastructure is so safe, students can bike to school without supervision.

When planners from other cities ask him where to start with mode-shift, Abbanat points to the schools. “It’s a trip that’s made every day, you know the destination, it’s easy to figure out what the infrastructure can offer, and you’re building culture,” he says. “Plus, typically in residential neighborhoods, people would like to see traffic slowed down anyway.”

Not every Californian lives in a walkable or bikeable distance from school. But for many, that’s an easy 1.6 miles that most Californians could eliminate from their daily VMT diet—especially if the infrastructure was safe enough for kids to get there themselves.

Around two-thirds of Californians would bike daily if their cities built protected lanes, according to a 2017 survey by the California Bicycle Coalition. Yet over two-thirds of state transportation funding is devoted to highways, according to another report from 2018, co-authored by Climate Resolve and ClimatePlan.

The 70-mile trip from Davis to San Francisco takes about two hours in a Lyft Line at rush hour. University of California at Davis professor Daniel Sperling usually rides Amtrak to the Bay Area, but for this mid-September trip he and two of his colleagues were testing features of a shared, long-distance hailed ride on their way to the Global Climate Action Summit, hosted by Governor Brown.

In addition to teaching in UC Davis’s transportation studies department, Sperling is a board member of CARB, and author of a movement known as the 3 Revolutions. He believes that the state’s emissions can be reduced up to 80 percent if most vehicular transportation undergoes three revolutions: becoming electrified, automated, and—most critically—shared. Fewer vehicles will mean more room on streets to prioritize the movement of other modes, like electric scooters, says Sperling. “I like to say our goal is to increase passenger-miles traveled, and decrease vehicle-miles traveled.”

Sperling’s work is part of the reason that Lyft and companies like it—which until recently had been blamed for increasing VMT in U.S. cities—are shifting away from single-passenger rides in cars. Lyft now says it wants 50 percent of all rides to be shared by the end of 2020. It’s paying riders in 35 cities to give up their cars, and adding scooters, bikes, and integration with public transit. And just days before, the ride-hailing giant had announced that it was offsetting all of its emissions to become one of the largest fully carbon-neutral companies.

Lyft’s announcement was prescient. On September 10, right after he signed a bill requiring the state’s energy production to be 100 percent renewable by 2045, Brown surprised the world by signing an executive order for the state to become carbon-neutral by 2045—meaning the state would not only run on clean power, but all other carbon-polluting activities in the state would be eliminated or offset, including private cars.

For transportation advocates, Brown’s goal for the planet’s fifth-largest economy provides a clear mandate: A moratorium on car-centric infrastructure.

“Every new freeway lane locks us into decades of more pollution,” says Carter Rubin, a mobility and climate advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “To get to carbon neutrality, we need to shift from encouraging driving, to investing in walking, biking, public transit, and shared electric vehicles .”

Electric vehicles are embraced by mayors with an almost zealot-like following: “If you build it, we will drive,” says Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Yet for LA to achieve its own climate goals by 2050, transit and alternate modes (walking, biking) will need to account for 45 percent of daily trips—compared to the present-day 16 percent.

California did not invent the car, notes Sperling, but it invented car-centric cities. Now the state can serve as a good example of how to repair this damage, said Matthew Rodriguez, secretary of California’s Environmental Protection Agency. “If California can do this, it’s something other places can learn from because people are so mindful of our car culture.”

It may require even more work than the state has estimated. California’s most updated emissions data is from 2016. It doesn’t yet include the carbon pollution of two back-to-back years of the largest wildfires in state history. A dire report issued by the United Nations in October 2018 said even if states like California achieve their current climate goals, it is likely not enough to avoid climate change’s most devastating impacts.

And in Sacramento, the fact that the governor was in San Francisco hyping the state’s two-year-old emissions reductions to a global audience was little comfort to a city experiencing a record-breaking fifteen straight days of air quality deemed so unhealthy that residents were told to stay indoors.

That morning, the I-5 freeway, which slices through the Central Valley, had begun to reopen a 45-mile stretch of road closed for six days after a wildfire straddled the interstate. The Delta fire had moved so quickly that it had forced drivers to abandon their vehicles. The charred trucks created a landscape that was at once both post-apocalyptic and disturbingly of-the-moment—the state’s most vital economic corridor paralyzed by smoking skeletons of steel strewn across empty lanes of traffic.

Alissa Walker is Curbed’s Urbanism Editor.