Volpe’s Pickrell takes on EPA

Don Pickrell, chief economist at USDOT’S Volpe center in Cambridge Mass goes at several major conventional wisdoms about transp planning in an article “Clearing the Air” in TR NEWS (TRB) Mar-Apr (p32). He says the USEPA’s statements about the contributions of motor vehicles to air pollution are “astonishingly at odds with the facts.” [Never let a fact get in the way of a good scare, as the EPA-ers say.] The EPA claims in its “Plain English Guide to the Clean Air Act” that increased vehicle-miles traveled “is why air pollution from cars has gotten worse...” It has of course gotten a lot better.

Several previously important forms of automotive pollution have “virtually disappeared” according to the data, Pickrell says, and ozone formation attributable to vehicles has declined substantially. New cars are “squeaky clean” in the EPA’s modeled test cycle and the remaining problem is that in real driving conditions cars more often than not emit far more than suggested by the test cycle. It would be far more effective to identify the polluting vehicles directly than to continue to drive down test cycle emissions, he suggests.

Pickrell says that the California approach to legislate increasing sales of zero-emission vehicles “will not work with current technology.” The extra cost will slow the replacement of older vehicles and perpetuate old smokers.

Short-term, hybrid gasoline or diesel/electric vehicles and direct injection systems offer the best hope for reducing emissions.

Pickrell is dismissive of EPA’s and metro planning attempts to reduce driving: “(T)wo decades of experience with demand management have produced few measures that detectably reduce automobile travel. Even the minute reductions tend to be one-time effects that rapidly erode...”

The only effective reductions in demand come from significantly higher prices for parking, and tolls. But charges designed to reduce driving will meet strong political resistance. The other favorite of the we-can’t-build crowd is “better” land use planning to reduce the need for travel. This too has always proven ineffective in the past and will continue to be ineffective, Pickrell writes. Markets are the dominant determinant of where activities are located, he says, reflecting the powerful intersection of popular preferences and relative costs. Markets tend to overwhelm any plans. Further the major tool of plans, zoning is only crudely suited to guiding development. And, by separating landuses, zoning has actually promoted dispersion and lower densities, which the anti-sprawl planners are trying to reverse. (‘Better’ land use planning might be no planning!)

Even if it were possible to reshape landuse it is unclear this would affect travel patterns in a predictable way, Pickrell says. The envrios argue better planned development would reduce the need to travel. It is unclear however that planners have sufficient knowledge of present, let alone of future travel needs to be able to ‘plan’ development location to reduce travel better than the market, and it is most unlikely they are going to be given that kind of power anyway.

‘Better land use planning’ is one of those feel-good but empty phrases used to divert attention from real solutions.