Gas Pains and SUVs

By Jane Holtz Kay

In the legacy of the American dream machine, it's the vehicle we love to hate-and buy. It's the King of the Road that banquishes lesser brethren, the beast that blocks our views, the wobbly brute that torques and turns over. The SUV is the McCar that gluttonizes its parking space and those around it. The hog that shrouds neighborhood sidewalks, blocking the child's-eye view of the street. It is the suburban attack vehicle.

And if you think that's a bit strong, just listen to the man that makes them. In his May "corporate citizenship report," William Clay Ford, inheritor of the Ford mantle, 'fessed up that the SUV did all those bad things. And more.

Ford didn't exactly concede that the Sports Utility Vehicle is neither "sporty," nor a social "utility," nor, for that matter, a motor "Vehicle" at all. (By mis-slotting the SUV into the "truck" category, it gets permission to guzzle all that gas.) But Ford did grant its place at the pinnacle of fossil fuel consumers that pollute the air and aggravate global warming. "The Joe Camel of the auto industry," as the Sierra Club's Dan Becker puts it.

After the apologia came the capitalist credo for the vehicle that brings in $10,000 to $20,000 a year per car. Sorry, said Bill Ford, we're in business. Even the Wall Street Journal bashed him for that two-faced swivel.

And, yet, as a Texas recumbent bicycle builder and anti-auto activist recently wrote: You don't understand. To us, ALL cars are SUVs. Her point was that all cars pollute (causing 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions); they clog; they crowd, they cause sprawl, habitat erosion, wetland paving, congestion and all that.

But that may be the good news. If Ford's culpa mea wasn't one giant step for mankind, growing dismay at the clunkers-and rising gas prices-have put the lid on the notion of untrammeled gas-swigging. The timing couldn't be more auspicious. Motorists handing out $20 bills at the pump as summer vacations come are getting peeved and pennypinching. Simultaneously, some Congress members have been at work to constrain the champion gas hog and its peers.

Three years after a rider affixed to the transportation act forbad research on tougher fuel standards (yes, forbad mere research, not change), a new Clean Air Resolution is on the agenda this month. As the number of SUVs produced reaches two million cars of this year's fleet of 17 million new vehicles, some legislators are joining environmentalists in the battle. With ecological concerns rising and climate change alerting yet another cadre, we could see a start to trimming the fat from their fossil fuel diets.

Locally, too, Boston is moving to reform its transportation system. Prodded by the Big Dig cutbacks (speaking of overweight) and the general chaos of congestion and public transit, the transportation reform committee for Access Boston 2000-20l0 is churning over the future of mobility by train, trolley, bus, bike and foot.

No better (or is it worse?) time could be at hand to do so.

So, in the spirit of Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth which sold l.6 million copies, we offer "Seven Simple Things We Can Do to Transport Greater Boston to a Better Place."

1. Ax the Asphalt-first Approach. End new roadbuilding. Forget widening for the likes of the Weymouth mega-mall. Bury any notion of a new Cape Cod Bridge. Cease and desist from the dribs and drabs and mini-swipes of road expansion attacking local neighborhoods. Forget the urban ring with its torturous right-of-way and small constituency. Why build a new bus "boulevard" when the dirty diesel buses that serve 40 percent of all riders are an urban disgrace-slow, irregular, poorly-maintained, ill-signed-and downright racist and classist in their poor service to the most needy population.

2. Retrofit the Streetcar City. Old is eternal. We have a fine trolleyline eroded by the starving of the MBTA's brainpower and budget. The system-that skeleton-is splendid. Bring back the Arborway and Watertown routes. Give Roxbury the rail replacement it deserves, not just broken promises. And speaking of broken: fix the escalators, the balky turnstiles, the under par streetcars. The T should give us more bang for our current bucks before begging for more.

3. Get Connected. Mini-and-mega transportation links are essential to get the city un-stuck from traffic. Stop dawdling and start with the North/South Rail Link. The Great Connector will unite all the other means of mobility in a carrying system hat links riders within and outside the state. Then connect the passengers to the world around. Too many T and train stations sit wrapped in grim asphalt parking lots, hostile islands of automobiles severing them from the sidewalk and city. No place for bikes. No space for safe walking. Confusing to reach. (Just try approaching the splendid but road-gagged Worcester station). Only connect.

4. Bring out the Bikes. Boston, everyone says, isn't a biking city. Sooo Cambridge is? Nonsense. Any place is bikeable if people persist. (In snowbound Finland, the bikepaths are clear 90 percent of the year)> Bike routes are a priority-they should be on the street, as well as greenways. There should be racks for the vehicles and, hey, showers for the riders. Start with the new Central Artery corridor; its freed-up space has six or seven lanes for cars; none for bikes. That's grounds for staging a critical mass ride through the atrium of the Transportation Building.

5. Get Creative. How about circulating a trolley through the Seaport along that Central Artery waterfront corridor? San Francisco does it. Start from South Station, say, chugging around the seaport, looping 'round back down the Northern Avenue Bridge on the surface to a new North Station. Trash Fidelity's private dirty diesels now shuttling staffers to the Promised land and spewing the city. Forget the clunky, costly transitway with its unproven, ungainly silverwash buses. Streetcars could civilize this auto land at a fraction of the price.

6.Stop the Parking Dog from Wagging the Beast. If the axiom is "the more parking, the less place," Boston is on its way to being place-less, courtesy the 23,000 new parking spaces counted by the city. Destined to take up vital land encourage still more cars, this pernicious pattern wastes valuable real estate by putting half the parking places in the urban core. The rest get dumped in the most vulnerable neighborhoods. Put the lid and limits on this invitation to car-bound congestion and space consumption.

7. Concentrate the Core: Plan forward, don't drive backward. It's time to reverse the poor planning, or no planning, that destroys urban density, promotes sprawl and makes the car a necessary evil. Remediate and reclaim the old urban brownfields (toxic waste sites, parking lots). Ban such pedestrian-hostile, Big Box badlands as the proposed Assembly Square project in Somerville and other auto-oriented malls. Put a moratorium on fringe development. All projects should be compact and transit-oriented. Subsidizing sprawl is the death knell of urban walkability-and life. Like the SUV, it should take a back seat.

The article appeared in the Boston Globe, on June 18, 2000.

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