Last week I started to explore the possibility that British Columbia could become a 100 per cent renewable energy region, as 140 regions in. Germany are planning to become.

This week, we look at transportation. Is it possible that we could get where we want to be and ship our goods where they need to go without any use of fossil fuels?

Helsinki, capital of Finland, is taking a big step in this direction, with its goal that by 2025, nobody will need to own a car in the city at all, thanks to an advanced integrated ‘mobility on demand’ network of shared bikes, transit, LRT, and computer-automated Kutsuplus minibuses that adapt their routes to take you wherever you want to go.

The cars, trucks, ferries and planes that we use to go about our daily lives are 38 per cent of the cause of global warming in B.C., so this is clearly a big deal. So let’s start at the easy end, and work our way into the difficult, uncharted territory.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Have You Ever Tried Cycling in North Vancouver?

Cycling is easy: the bustling city of Copenhagen has already demonstrated that 35 per cent of its commuters can get to work by bike, and many cities in Holland can boast equally good numbers.

“Ah, but it’s flat,” you might respond. “Have you ever tried cycling in North Vancouver?”

“Ah,” I respond, “have you ever tried an electric bike?” Electric bikes defy gravity, making hills vanish with a twist of the hand. In so doing they open up new realms of possibility for older cyclists, and anyone who doubts their ability to cycle a 10 km round trip. Add safe protected bike-lanes, off-road bike trails, clearly marked intersections, good bike-sharing schemes with bike-attached tablets that give GPS based-directions, as they are doing in Copenhagen, and you’ve got a set-up in which cycling becomes irresistible.

There’s a cost to all this, of course – but in Holland, which has 35,000 kilometres of bike paths and spends $580m a year on bicycle infrastructure, the cost is 4.3 cents per kilometre pedaled by each cyclist, compared to 22 cents for a motorist. In other words: it is five times cheaper. For shorter distances of 5km or less the bike will also get you there faster than a car. In Copenhagen, they justify the cost of the bike infrastructure by the health care savings: the health benefit of cycling comes to $1 per km, creating an overall annual benefit to the Danes of some $388 million.

But even so—where will the money come from? It could come from existing transportation budgets, by spending less on roads. It could come from an increase in the gas tax. It could come by changing the way we use income from the carbon tax, spending it on positive climate solutions instead of returning it in tax reductions. It could come from a special green bonds issue. Or it could come from road tolls, which make sense in a post-carbon world when gas taxes will no longer exist. 

1,000 Kilometres a Day – in an Electric Bus

Next up is public transit, bus rapid transit and light rail transit. There are cities all over the world with excellent systems, from Portland to New York, Paris to Tokyo, Curitiba to Bogota. Light rail can be fully electric – and so can a regular bus. There are 100 per cent electric buses on the road without overhead cables in Seoul, Montreal, London, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Edmonton, Geneva (using a 15 second flash charge), Adelaide (solar electric), Umea (Sweden), San Francisco—and soon, everywhere. In the U.S., the Proterra electric bus has set a world record, travelling over 1,000 kilometres in a single day, using rapid fast charging during the day.

In China, the auto-manufacturer BDY recently received an order for 1,800 electric buses that can travel300 km on a single charge, with 1,200 going to Dalian in northeast China and 600 to Nanjing in eastern China. With that kind of range, fast luxury electric coaches travelling into Vancouver from Whistler and the Fraser Valley cannot be far away, equipped with tables, coffee and orange juice.

Next, there’s railways. The West Coast Express from Vancouver to Mission could easily be electrified, as railways are in many parts of the world. If you have never travelled on a fast, comfortable train, you don’t know what you’re missing. When I lived in England, I would regularly take the two-hour ride from South Devon to London. The seats were arranged in groups of four around a table, enabling you to spread out, work, and talk to fellow travellers if you wanted to. When I travelled on a high-speed train across South Korea, averaging 300 kph, the journey was so smooth you hardly knew you were travelling. It’s just a matter of commitment, to make the investment.

In the Lower Mainland, there is an existing Fraser Valley Interurban rail line that runs from New Westminster to Langley, Abbotsford and Chilliwack where a light rail train could operate, sharing the track with existing goods use. Maybe the rail line that carries coal to Roberts Bank at Tsawwassen could also share the track, allowing a light rail passenger service to operate there too.

The Electric Car – and Pick Up Truck

So now we come to the big one—the electric car. Among those who observe the scene, there is a sense of welcome inevitability that the future of cars and light trucks will be electric.

Not hydrogen fuel cell, since a fuel cell electric vehicle uses three times more energy than a straight EV.

Maybe not biofuel, since progress on second-generation biofuels grown on marginal land is slow, and most biofuel still has a large carbon footprint, with the exception of recycled biodiesel, as distributed by the Cowichan Biodiesel Co-op and other groups.

And not natural gas, since gas is a non-renewable fossil fuel that increasingly depends on fracking for extraction, polluting the groundwater with unknown chemicals and releasing fugitive methane emissions into the atmosphere.

EV prices are falling, and choices are increasing. EV drivers report a really positive driving experience, and B.C.’s charging infrastructure is spreading. If B.C. was to follow Norway’s example, with a well-organized system of incentives, 10 per cent of all new cars sold could be electric. The question is not ‘if,’ but ‘how soon?’

At today’s fuel-prices, a regular car costs $200 a month to lease and $150 for gasoline, which comes to $11 a day. A Nissan Leaf, offered for lease in America for $199 a month, and costing just $10 a month on electricity, comes to $7 a day. With prices like that, anyone who does not drive a leased EV will be losing $4 a day, or $120 a month.

And if you live out in the back-country, where you really need your rugged pick-up truck? They're coming: Tesla has plans for an EV pick-up truck similar to the Ford F-150, and Via Motors already has one on the assembly line. 

The best policy approach to accelerate the EV revolution is simply to set a high standard for fuel efficiency. In Europe, by 2020, new cars will need to produce no more than 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre, reduced from the current 120 g/km. The same approach could be used to reduce emissions to zero, giving auto-manufacturers time to plan and retool. This is not something B.C. could do on its own, however; it would require federal regulation to make it Canada-wide.

Could B.C. Produce Enough Electricity?

Would there be enough electricity if every car and light truck in B.C. were to be electric? If two million electric vehicles each traveled 15,000 kilometres a year at an average 25 kwh per 100 km, each vehicle would use 3,750 kwh a year, totaling 7,500 GWh, compared to the 60,000 GWh that B.C. consumes every year.

Solar PV on half of B.C.’s south-facing rooftops could produce 7,500 GWh a year; alternatively, since a 3 MW wind turbine can produce 7.5 GWh a year, sufficient for 2,000 cars, a thousand turbines could produce the power for two million electric vehicles. A 30 per cent efficiency improvement on every home could free up the same amount of power.

Given the potential for far more travel by bike and transit, a more realistic calculation might be for one million EVs driving 10,000 kilometres a year, resulting in 2,500 GWh of additional demand, or just 4 per cent of B.C.’s current power usage.

The Car-Sharing Revolution

In 1998, just 905 people belonged to carshare groups around the world. By 2012, that number had increased two thousandfold to 1.78 million. By 2020, carsharing revenues are set to hit $6 billion, with12 million members worldwide.

The real breakthrough, however, comes with peer-to-peer carsharing, when people put their cars into a shared rental pool. It started in San Francisco several years ago, and has spread through outfits such as Getaround, Buzzcar, RelayRides and Communauto in Montreal, with owners earning up to $300 a month. It is only a matter of time before it reaches Vancouver and Victoria.

So picture a 100 per cent per cent narrowed, creating space for trees, food and children’s play. With narrower, slower streets come more neighbourhood friendships, more green space, and an increase in our social and ecological wealth. What’s not to like about this future?

Next week: In Part 3, I will explore the more difficult challenge of achieving 100 per cent renewable energy for long-distance trucking, boats, ferries and planes. In Part 4, I will wrap things up by asking how we might be able to achieve all this.

This series originally appeared on the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association website.

Image Credit: Rush hour on the Dunsmuir separated bike lanes by Paul Krueger via Flickr.

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While federal and provincial politicians continually fail to reach international and national agreements to fight climate change, some civic governments are already beginning to deal with the biggest challenge facing humankind.

Pushed by a seemingly unstoppable trend to increased urbanization, cities are the new battle zone dealing with the consequences of our warming planet.

Vancouver, which wants to become the greenest city in the world by 2020, is already finding surprising successes in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

City Councillor Andrea Reimer, who heads Vancouver’s planning, transportation and environment committee, said it is important that cities take an even greater role in fighting climate change.

“Cities are at the front line of climate change, both in terms of being a source of emissions and by being most severely impacted by extreme weather events caused by climate change,” Reimer told DeSmog Canada via e-mail.

“When floods, fires and sea levels rise, it’s generally municipal infrastructure and urban residents taking the largest hits. On the adaptation side, cities have a big role to play through policy and regulation of transportation, built form (both individual buildings and community planning) and waste, which are the holy trinity of climate-changing emission producers.”

Reimer said Vancouver, which has more than 600,000 residents, has already seen positive results since city council adopted its Greenest City Action Plan 2.5 years ago.

“We’ve reduced waste by 40 per cent, increased active transportation by 10 per cent and emissions are 4 per cent below 1991 levels even as population and jobs continue to grow at a strong pace,” she said.

“Our emissions profile is less than half the national average and 60 per cent below other major Canadian cities showing that cities can get a lot done even without a supportive federal framework.”

Vancouver isn’t the only Canadian community leading in the fight against climate change. A DeSmog Canada report earlier this year shone a spotlight on five communities taking action that you rarely see in the headlines.

According to UN-Habitat, urbanization and climate change are converging in dangerous ways.

“Cities are major contributors to climate change: although they cover less than 2 per cent of the Earth’s surface, cities consume 78 per cent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 per cent of all carbon dioxide,” the UN-Habitat website says.

“At the same time, cities and towns are heavily vulnerable to climate change. Hundreds of millions of people in urban areas across the world will be affected by rising sea levels, increased precipitation, inland floods, more frequent and stronger cyclones and storms, and periods of more extreme heat and cold. In fact, many major coastal cities with populations of more than 10 million people are already under threat.”

UN-Habitat also says that despite climate-change-related threats, many cities have not significantly addressed global warming. Reasons include a lack of action plans, regulations that have not adapted to climate change realities and slow responses to climate disasters due to a lack of resources.

However, cities can be places of innovation and efficiency, UN-Habitat notes.

“Together with their local authorities, they have the potential to diminish the causes of climate change (mitigation) and effectively protect themselves from its impacts (adaptation).”

The United Nations Population Fund has noted that more than half of the world’s population in 2008 was, for the first time in history, estimated to be living in towns and cities.

Reimer says Vancouver is doing well so far with its Greenest City Action Plan. She added, however, that cities still need provincial and federal governments to get moving on policies that enable further GHG reductions.

Ultimately though, Reimer thinks cities like Vancouver will inspire provincial and federal governments to take up the struggle.

“I believe yes but it will take time, results and determination,” she said.

Photo: "Rush Hour on the Dunsmuir Separated Bike Lane" by Paul Krueger

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