The future of infrastructure in India will require $20 billion in infrastructure for 20 years if India is to compete in the global economy. Photo by Meena Kadri.

Akshima Tejas Ghate, a fellow at TERI , one of India’s largest think tanks, has highlighted India’s future transportation infrastructure investments.

According to Ghate, to keep pace with growing demand, the world’s largest democracy will have to invest $20 billion per year for the next 20 years, simply to accomodate the 450 million more vehicles that will tax India’s roads by 2030.

We sat down with her to assess the role that sustainable public transport will have in these investments, and what the state could do to implement affordable solutions for sustainable transport.

In your presentation, you note the incredible investments required to sustain growth in India, nearly $400 billion over the next two decades? Though that is small percentage of GDP for the $1.8 trillion economy, is there a nationwide commitment to this level of spending?

The nation-wide commitment to this level of spending would be clear only when the 12th FYP (Five-Year-Plan) is formally announced. However, the positive change that can be taken away is that the Ministry of Urban Development has proposed to the Planning Commission a detailed and thought-through investment requirement plan for the sector. A paradigm shift in estimating urban transport financing can be observed with a significant amount of investment being proposed for public transit and non-motorized transport, in addition to the conventional spending for road infrastructure improvements and expansion.

Is there institutional capacity to handle this level of investment?

The institutional capacity to see through this bold plan doesn’t exist. There is a lot that needs to be done on this front. Indeed, the success of hefty investments in the sector would lie only in creating robust institutional capacity to utilize these funds judiciously. Implementation of JNNURM-I has demonstrated inadequate institutional mechanisms, lack of staff, lack of understanding among staff on issues of sustainable mobility and so on. These institutional mechanisms have to be created and staff needs to expanded, sensitized and trained. Such a capacity building exercise will require more than what is currently being done by the national government. Holding cities’ hands in addition to developing toolkits, resource materials, organizing trainings will all be the key in my view.

What can India learn from China and their massive transport infrastructure build-out?

I feel that China is rightly investing in public transit systems, be it long-distance transport or intra-city transport. The massive drive in China to construct high speed rail system and the BRT indicates the direction that India could also adopt i.e. build more competitive mass-transport systems. The recent focus in many Chinese cities on demand management (car quota system in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing) is also something that India can learn from.

What are the political risks behind implementing a petrol tax to pay for roads, as in the EU and United States?

Firstly, I believe that petrol tax should go into public transit and non motorized transport; not roads. This will be a sensitive political issue for India as has been observed in the recent petrol price hikes. In my view, the central government would run risk of losing a significant urban vote share on account of such a measure and would be very cautious in further enhancing these taxes or introducing new taxes for investments in urban transport.

What can India learn from more developed countries and their past road and transit system build outs?

Developed countries as a case studies provide has focused on ‘car oriented planning’  and should not serve as role models. In fact if we look at the current state of affairs, we in India are progressing in this direction only. We have very high car ownership levels in our largest cities (75 to 200 cars per 1,000 persons in our 5 most populated cities) despite low per capita incomes as compared to cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, which have very high level of per capita income and still low level of car ownership. There may be some good examples from the developed world, but we need to be careful regarding whom we follow.

Is there a role for private finance in developing transport?

Private sector, as seen in some urban transit projects lately, would/can have a big role. City governments, which are quite weak financially can tap into the private financing by creating the right environment for them to invest.

Madison, Wis. has the most parks per capita in the United States, with 12.7 per 10,000 residents. Photo by Jonathan.

Welcome to “Research Recap,” our series highlighting recent reports, studies and other findings in sustainable transportation policy and practice, in case you missed it.

Urban Park Growth

The Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence released its annual review of U.S. city parks. This year’s report includes data on a total of 22,493 parks from the country’s 100 biggest metropolitan areas. The report’s biggest takeaway is that 120 new urban parks were created in the U.S. this past year despite a nationwide decrease in park operations and maintenance funding. Half of the cities in the report experienced decreases in funding, culminating in a 3.9 percent decrease in full-time park employees. According to researcher Peter Harnik, roughly $5.8 billion in scheduled park repairs and maintenance have been postponed because of financial constraints. The growth in the total number of parks was aided by an increase in capital, as opposed to operational, funding. This capacity-building financial support increased by 4.6 percent between 2009 and 2010, with help from federal stimulus funding.

Costly Air Emissions

Total automobile air emissions in the 86 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. cost a total of $145 million each day, according to a new study from a Carnegie Mellon and Arizona State research team. The team studied the monetary impact using county-specific air emission morbidity, mortality and environmental costs. Among the cities studied, total U.S. auto air emissions cost $0.64 per person per day and $0.03 per vehicle mile traveled. Los Angeles and New York City recorded the highest costs associated with emissions, with each accruing about $23 million per day. The study did not include information on auto emission abatement costs.

Building a Better Gas Tax

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released a new report, “Building a Better Gas Tax: How to Fix One of State Government’s Least Sustainable Revenue Sources.” The report argues that state gasoline and diesel taxes are the most important source of transportation funding under the control of U.S. states and that they are in need of adjustments to account for monetary inflation. By considering the rise in construction costs associated with inflation, the report estimates the average state’s gas tax has effectively dropped by 20 percent or 6.8 cents per gallon since its last increase. These foregone revenues across the country’s states amount to roughly $10 billion per year. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) calculates that this revenue loss translates into a $130 billion drain on the economy through the areas of higher vehicle repair costs and travel time delays.

New Delhi's Kalka Mail train derailed on Sunday, killing more than 60 passengers. Photo by Jag Pee.

Welcome back to TheCityFix Picks, our series highlighting the newsy and noteworthy of the past week. Each Friday, we’ll run down the headlines falling under TheCityFix’s five themes: integrated transport, urban development and accessibility, air quality and climate change, health and road safety, and communications and marketing.

Integrated Transport

An Indian train, the Kalka Mail, derailed while heading for New Delhi, killing more than 60 passengers.  The tragic event, following a 2010 accident that claimed the lives of more than 150 people,  brings heightened attention to the safety of India’s railways.

A dock-free bike sharing system is being developed by SoBi, who says the streamlined technology will eliminate 75 percent of the bike sharing systems’ upfront costs.

Vancouver mayors proposed a 2-cents-per-liter gas tax to pay for the city’s long-delayed, $1.4 billion SkyTrain project.

Car2Go, a Germany-based car sharing company, announced the launch of North America’s first all-electric vehicle car sharing program in San Diego, Calif. The program is scheduled to host 300 electric vehicles by the end of this year.

New York City is in the final stages of selecting the vendor for its bike sharing program, and a decision could be announced as early as the end of this month. With a proposed 10,000 bikes, NYC’s system will be North America’s largest bike sharing program.

China’s rail developments are expanding outside the country, as Chinese rail-building companies are constructing rail links in Turkey, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Interests have also been expressed to undertake projects in the United States and to complete a network that links China to its neighboring Southeast Asian countries.

Urban Development + Accessibility

The U.S. House Appropriations Committee passed legislation to eliminate funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Smart Growth. The House of Representatives will have the opportunity to vote on the proposed legislation.

China is currently home to 85 metropolitan areas with more than one million people, according to 2010 data from Demographia World Urban Areas. Projections indicate that 75 percent of the country’s population will live in cities by 2025.

Rogaška Slatina, Slovenia dons a new below-ground parking garage, complete with a city-park green roof.

As a part of its 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), Shanghai plans to shift development from its dense city-center out to seven new cities in the surrounding suburban area.

Air Quality + Climate Change

Fuel poverty in the U.K. increased by about 22 percent between 2008 and 2009, according to new statistics from the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change. Fuel poverty is defined as spending more than 10 percent of a household’s income on fuel to maintain a temperature adequate to keep warm.

The World Resources Institute released a report identifying significant weaknesses in the U.S. government’s assessments of the cost of carbon emissions on human lives.

With roughly 29,000 premature deaths each year stemming from poor air quality, tackling air pollution has moved to the top of U.K.’s environmental agenda.

The particulates in diesel fuel emissions, not the gas itself, are the primary culprits of the cardiovascular harm induced from diesel fuel emissions, a new scientific study from the University of Edinburgh indicates.

Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a new carbon pricing plan for the country, through which roughly 500 of the largest emitters will be subject to buying a permit for every ton of CO2 emitted. Emissions from transport fuels are excluded from the emission accounting program.

Health + Road Safety

The U.S. Department of Transportation is testing new Connected Vehicles communications technologies this summer at Driver Acceptance Clinics. The new technology enables vehicles to communicate information with other vehicles and with roadway infrastructure in potentially hazardous situations.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into effect stricter distracted driving legislation for New York, making the use of handheld electronic devices while driving a primary offense.

New York City’s MTA will be installing security cameras on 314 of the cities buses, responding to an increase in unruly passengers and threats to driver safety.

A new study from the U.S. National Highway Transit Safety Associations revealed that distracted driving involving the use of handheld electronic devices dropped significantly through the implementation of public service announcements and high visibility enforcement.

Motorist group AAA has taken an oppositional stance to a 3-foot-bicycle passing law in California, stating that it is a good idea but that it should be a voluntary practice of vehicle drivers, not an enforced law.

Communications + Marketing

The Memphis Area Transit Authority will install digital signs at the city’s trolley stops, indicating the date, time, expected trolley arrival times and other information. The new signs are a part of a transit system-wide, $10 million information technology project.

The city of Murcia, Spain creatively promoted its congestion-curbing Mejor en Tranvia (Better by Tram) project, which allows residents to trade in their personal vehicles for a lifetime tram membership (we covered the full story in a post earlier this week.) To promote the campaign, the city positioned cars in ridiculously unfit-for-parking spaces throughout the city.

To promote the development of transit-related electronic applications, the New York MTA released additional transit information for potential app-building, incentivizing development with contests and cash prizes.

Study finds that 45 percent of Americans would support a gas tax if its revenue contributed to global warming reduction efforts. Photo by Steve Rhodes.

Welcome to “Research Recap,” our series highlighting recent reports, studies and other findings in sustainable transportation policy and practice, in case you missed it.

Sustainable Transport Behavior

Transport technology advancements will not be enough to attain international greenhouse gas reduction targets, reduced automotive travel will also be required, a University of California, Berkeley research team asserts. Their report reads, “We find that innovation in a single area such as fuel economy does not offer a realistic, affordable, or resilient pathway to the LDV emission reductions necessary by mid-century.” The team posits that in order to meet the established 2050 targets, dramatic behavioral changes must occur, such as increasing carpooling, and decreasing average trip distances and total number of trips. These necessary behavioral changes will likely only be possible through policy implementation, the researchers state.

Agreeable Taxes

Americans are willing to support increased transportation taxes if the tax revenue recipients are clearly communicated and revenue is distributed to popular causes, such as global warming, a national survey by the Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) indicates. In investigating the example of a $0.10 gas tax hike, the survey found that when tax revenue recipients are unknown, the tax support level is 24 percent; when the tax revenue recipient is communicated to be global warming reduction efforts, the tax support level increases to 45 percent.

Personal Vehicle Priorities

A New Maritz Research study found that fuel economy will be the top factor in the next vehicle purchase for 41 percent of Americans, as well as that 42 percent of Americans feel that fuel economy will be “extremely important” to consider in their next vehicle purchase. The study polled roughly 200,000 American consumers.

Support for Land Use Policy

Yale University researchers found sizable public support for land use laws and the promoting of transportation alternatives in a new study. Among the study’s most notable findings are the following:

• 58 percent would support “changing your county’s zoning rules to require that neighborhoods have a mix of housing, offices, industry, schools, and stores close together, to encourage walking and decrease the need for a car”
• 58 percent would support “changing your county’s zoning rules to decrease suburban sprawl and concentrate new development near the center of cities and towns, reducing commuting times”
• 50 percent would support “changing your county’s zoning rules to promote the construction of more energy-efficient apartment buildings, instead of less efficient single-family homes”
• 80 percent would support “increasing the availability of public transportation” in their county”
• 77 percent would support “constructing bike paths and installing bike lanes on city streets”

Bike Helmet Debate

Bicycle helmets reduce the risk of head injuries by nearly 30 percent, according to researchers at the University of New South Wales. These findings were based on hospital data from the 18 month period following Sydney’s enacting of a mandatory helmet-use law in 1991. The researchers examined the ratio of cyclist and pedestrian arm-and-leg-injury to head-injury ratio to find that head injuries fell by 29 percent in the months following the new law. These findings oppose those of a similar study from University of Sydney researchers, which did not find that wearing helmets had a significant effect on the incidence of head injuries. Additionally, the same University of Sydney research team asserts that mandatory helmet laws should be repealed as they discourage bicycling.   

Electric Vehicles in India

GM deepened its electric vehicle development in New Delhi, where GM India began testing its Chevrolet Beat Electric Vehicle. The effort is part of GM’s goal of assessing the feasibility of electric vehicles in major metropolitan areas. GM India also hopes to exhibit the effectiveness of electric vehicle technology for its potential Indian customers, as well as identify possible areas of cost savings. The Beat Electric Vehicle is powered on a 300-cell, 20 kWh Lithium-ion battery that has a range of up to 130 km (81 miles).

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) created a short video explaining the true costs of our oil dependency by following a single gallon of gasoline refined and consumed in California. According to the video, this single gallon of gasoline emits 25 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions and a single driver in the United States creates about 10,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions every year. In order to absorb this pollution, each driver would need an acre of forest. To absorb the pollution generated by all of the drivers in the U.S., we would need a forest the size of California, Nevada and Arizona combined.

To calculate the amount of pollution generated from gasoline, CIR considered every step in the consumption process, including the extraction of crude oil from the ground and the evaporation of toxic chemicals, like benzene, when you undo the gas cap or lift the nozzle. After accounting for all of the costs of gasoline use, the CIR suggests that the actual price should be closer to $15. This price, however, does not reflect the cost of externalities, like oil spills, water pollution and reduced crop yields, in addition to increased rates of asthma and respiratory diseases caused by air pollution.

This is why the Environmental Protection Agency is arguing to reduce toxic chemicals in gasoline, which would make it even more expensive to fill up your tank. But, the EPA argues, the public health and environmental benefits of the Clean Air Act of 1990 far outweigh the costs by a margin of four to one.

Other countries, working to bear the cost of gasoline use, enact “eco taxes” to direct funding toward social programs and renewable energy. Germany, for example, charges about $1 per gallon as an eco tax in order to fund these programs. Germans pay more than $8 a gallon for gasoline and in Netherlands, gasoline is close to $9.

Here is a chart of gasoline prices from around the world by GOOD magazine.  Here is another chart by The Economist showing the change of fuel prices in the last two years.

What many nations realize, GOOD explains, is that oil is a finite resource, and they are utilizing gasoline taxes to reduce oil imports, create more efficient transportation systems, and better prepare for longer-term oil price volatility. And at $4 per gallon of gasoline, we haven’t even started to address the true costs of gasoline.

Policy makers will need to increase fuel taxes to curb the growth in vehicle miles traveled that drives transportation emissions, says a new report. Photo: respres, flickr.

Raising the price of gas to $7 per gallon may be necessary to meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2020 targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent, says a new report from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The report posits that reducing oil consumption and carbon emissions from transportation will be more difficult than previously assumed.  It will require substantially higher fuel prices, ideally in combination with more stringent efficiency standards.

Additionally, the study concludes that relying on subsidies for electric or hybrid vehicles – often the politically attractive option – is an ineffective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the near term.

“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”

On the other hand, fuel taxes proved beneficial in the study’s models.  Taxing transportation fuels stimulates the greatest reductions in oil consumption and CO2 emissions, and it is the only policy option modeled that curtails the growth in vehicle miles traveled.  VMT will increase by more than 30 percent between 2010 and 2030 unless policymakers increase fuel taxes.  Higher transportation costs are also closely linked to land use policy and development of mass transit systems.

Good news from the study: climate change policy will have little detrimental effect on the economy.  Even under high-fuel-tax, high-carbon price scenarios, losses in annual GDP relative to business-as-usual are less than 1 percent, and the economy is projected to grow at 2.1 to 3.7 percent per year assuming a portion of the revenues collected are recycled to taxpayers.

The researchers devised several combinations of steps that U.S. policymakers might take in trying to address the greenhouse gas emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consumes 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.  Most of the models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 per ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 per ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel, or both.

Interestingly, an economy-wide carbon price of $30 to $60 per ton of CO2 alone is unlikely to prevent significant growth in U.S. transportation sector greenhouse gas emissions and oil imports by 2030, nor will increased fuel efficiency alone.

U.S. policymakers must keep the effectiveness of fuel taxes in mind as they set to work on federal transportation reauthorization.