Yes, It's the Cars

It's nice to see a front page piece that states it plainly: "Drivers account for most of Salem carbon emissions."

Front page today

Yes, it's the cars.

And we will do most anything to avoid facing this.

Against the City's downtown pilot for mid-block parklets
But also a statement about autoist privilege and fragility

We saw in the SRC debate, and in continuing eruptions around it, the sentiment that the best way to reduce emissions is to speed traffic along. Capacity and speed increase are the solutions for emissions.

But this is only a reactionary attempt at reassurance and business as usual, and it is patently false.

Even the techy utopianism of electric cars will not save us.

EVs alone won't do it
via "2018 Progress Report
on California’s Sustainable Communities
and Climate Protection Act,"

We have to make shorter trips and make fewer trips. We have to reduce the total miles traveled in addition to converting the auto fleet to electricity.

We will need to change our zoning and shift away from vast swaths of single-family housing, no matter how much "neighborhood character" we fear might be lost. But doing so will help with housing affordability. We will also need to make transit work much better. More people living near frequent service lines will help generate demand for even more frequent service.

via Twitter

And we will need to get serious about right-priced parking. In his new book, Walkable City Rules, Jeff Speck recommends a suite of actions around parking. And others have picked up the way priced parking can function as decongestion pricing. (And a Portland advocate has a local take on all this, "Six Parking Policies That Could Be Better Than Congestion Pricing." You might also recall Jeffrey Tumlin's talk at the Library in 2013.)

Jeff Speck's Walkable City Rules

via Twitter

Yes, it's the cars, and we have to figure out ways to drive less. Once we are willing to talk for real about our overreliance on cars and drive-alone trips, problems with pollution, housing cost, congestion, road safety, and even city budgets and infrastructure costs start to look more solvable. But as long as we do not contemplate disturbing our autoist system, these problems remain intractable.