Transportation and infrastructure projects are a constant balancing act of priorities — environmental, economic, utilitarian, sociological, the list goes on. And while many projects try to incorporate all, or as many as possible, of these — increasing energy efficiency saves money on power bills while also lowering emissions and upping sustainability — sometimes the spectrum of priorities becomes jumbled and ultimately turns on itself. And so what was once an attempt increase sustainability while also boosting local economies of scale becomes a potential environmental goal-killer.
Take our current plans for HSR. In theory (and hopefully in practice) the priorities of HSR in the U.S. are a wide mix of economic, environmental, and urban planning, goals. But some urban planners are arguing that an unintended consequence of actually building HSR lines could be a major step backwards in the notion of sustainable living.
Common sense, and the realities of fuel, water, and electricity use, decree that an urban life is a more sustainable life. The recent population growth of urban centers has boosted efficiency and sustainability on multiple levels, from lessening water use to reducing our dependence on oil-fueled automobiles for basic transportation. And now we’re building an HSR system to further cut this reliance on autos and bring quick and efficient mass transit to wide swaths of the country. Except that, according to some experts, what we’ll wind up doing is simply creating more efficnency-killing suburban sprawl. Wired reports:
[Take] California as an example, [where] high-speed rail has made the most progress. The Golden State, long known as a trendsetter for transportation and environmental policy, has received more than $2.3 billion in stimulus funds toward a proposed line linking San Francisco and Los Angeles…. If and when the line is completed by 2030, riders will zip between the two cities in 2 hours and 38 minutes and pay less than half what it would cost to fly.
But that convenience could increase emigration from California’s urban centers to the exurbs and beyond. In other words, it could lead to more sprawl.
An example of this can be seen in cities like Palmdale, which is 58 miles north of Los Angeles. By cutting the commute time between those two cities from 1 hour and 25 minutes, to 27 minutes, outward growth of the Los Angeles area will undoubtedly continue. It’s easy to see why — home prices in Palmdale are more than half of those in L.A., and high-speed rail could make getting downtown as quick and easy as living downtown. Pushing people further into the exurbs runs counter to a major goal of high-speed rail, namely cutting our carbon output while creating denser, more sustainable communities.
Granted, Wired writer Jason Kambitsis notes that this reasoning doesn’t mean we should scratch our plans for HSR — quite the contrary: “[H]igh-speed rail is fundamental to the country’s economic vitality because it provides cost-effective transportation options that link major commerce centers.” And its use could mitigate some of the worst offenses of all the new suburban sprawl — the use of automobiles to commute to work every day (which, as we’ve seen, is only eating up more hours and fossil fuels as time goes on). Still, unless we take preventative measures, Kambitsis warns, we could wind up enabling a new quagmire of messy sprawl.
Granted, as Yonah Freemark points out, this foretelling of sprawl takeovers could be all speculation — there’s been no link established between existing HSR stations in France and Spain and an epidemic of suburban growth. Also there’s no evidence that the “commute from afar” attitude has been embraced en masse in the parts of the U.S. serviced by fast trains — how many people live in Philadelphia and take the Acela to New York City every day? (more…)