Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 18, 1990 TAG: 9003182548
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Matthew L. Wald The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The smog-causing gases that cars give off are a prime target of the new clean air bill that is making its way through Congress. Senate leaders and the White House struck a deal on March 1 on exactly what further steps would have to be taken by automakers and fuel producers, among others, to try to reverse the degradation of the atmosphere.
In fairness, it might be said that Mr. Hyde has already made passable efforts to be a good citizen. The auto manufacturers, often under duress, have managed to produce cars that give off vastly less carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and hydrocarbons - three ingredients of smog - than the models of the 1960s.
Scared by enthusiastic talk of alternative fuels like methanol and natural gas, the automakers are pressing oil companies to make cleaner gasoline.
But air quality in major U.S. cities has nevertheless continued to worsen. In the 1986-88 period, 101 metropolitan areas did not meet the standard on ground-level ozone pollution, up from 64 that were not complying in the 1985-87 period. Weather was a factor, but most of the problem is cars.
One reason is that the Hydes of the world, not to mention the Smiths and the Joneses, are victims of circumstances seemingly beyond their control or anyone else's. While manufacturers were making cleaner cars, the number of cars and the number of miles they were driven increased enormously.
Statisticians try to make the astronomical numbers more comprehensible by expressing them in terms of trips to the moon, although no interstate goes there. Thus, in 1970, vehicle miles traveled in the United States came to about 2 million round trips to the moon. Now cars do about three million round trips annually.
That is even worse than it looks at first glance. As total mileage rises, emissions can rise even more steeply, because more of those miles are covered in stop-and-go traffic.
Trends cut both ways: As the years go by, dirty cars from the pre-control days are replaced with clean new ones, but then the effectiveness of even the new models declines as the cars get older.
Americans are driving more miles than ever because of cheap gasoline, population growth and longer commutes that are often a consequence of housing costs. They also like to shop, visit and just plain drive; only about 35 percent of car miles are driven to get to work or as part of work, according to one government survey.
The result of all that driving, though, is not necessarily greater convenience but ever-denser traffic, ever-longer delays and ever-sicklier air.
Yet rather than giving up their cars, Americans have responded by transforming their rolling prisons into cocoons of comfort. The gear includes multispeaker stereos, orthopedically correct seats, car phones, air conditioners, heavy soundproofing, even laptop computers and fax machines.
These days it's hard to find a car without FM stereo. All these comforts help motorists routinely endure a virtually unbearable environment, even as their idling engines make that environment worse by the minute.
Cars impose other costs, too, like the environmental damage caused by spills from all the oil tankers needed to feed the refineries, and the payments to foreigners for 8 million barrels, about 40 million fill-ups, every day.
Against these facts of life, the new round of clean air proposals, said Terry F. Yosie, a pollution specialist at the American Petroleum Institute, is "trying to find other means to stay even with the vehicle miles traveled, and get to the next increment of improvement beyond that, so we're not overtaken by events, as we were to some extent in the last decade."
The Senate-White House compromise would delay until 1995 a new set of regulations on auto emissions and would require another phase to begin only if certain levels of improvement in air quality are not met. The pre-deal Senate version would have required two rounds of emissions tightening, the first in 1993.
The compromise would also delay stricter standards on utility smokestacks and other sources of pollution. Government officials are quick to point out that vehicles, or "mobile sources," are not the only culprits that add to smog, deplete ozone in the stratosphere, where it helps shield the Earth from damaging ultraviolet rays, or cause acid rain.
The degree to which cars are culpable and the comparative ease of cleaning up tailpipes and smokestacks seem to vary according to factors like how many auto plants a congressman has in his district.
But the car is the most democratic of these pollution sources; far more than emissions from paper manufacturing, say, or electrical generation, the pollution from cars comes down to millions of personal choices.
And those choices, environmentalists fear, will affect the whole planet, through the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is believed to be a major contributor to global warming, and Americans' cars emit about as much carbon dioxide as all the sources in Japan do.
Technology can ameliorate some of these problems, through better fuel economy and cleaner tailpipes, but just treading water is a challenge. In 1970, people outnumbered cars by 2.5 to 1, but the cars reproduce faster.
By 1988, there were just 1.7 people per car. The only limit seems to be that once there is one car for each driver, increases in the car population cannot increase pollution or gas consumption unless the cars learn to drive themselves.
The projection is for more of the same. At the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, a coalition comprising New Jersey, New York and the New England states that last year required the oil companies to produce less-polluting gasoline, Allan C. Van Arsdale, a staff analyst, said that in the next 10 to 15 years, vehicle miles traveled will jump an additional 25 to 40 percent.
Some experts say that center-city congestion is not much worse than it used to be. But wide-open roads of suburban counties are getting as bad as city streets.
At some point, simple congestion would seem to put limits on auto growth, but it is not clear where that limit is. "Twenty years ago, if someone had told me that the average speed driving across Manhattan would be allowed to get down to 1.5 miles per hour, I would say, no, it'll never happen." said Michael Oppenheimer, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. "But you don't know what people will stand for."
And car manufacturers have found new ways to help them deal with their frustration. Christopher W. Cedergren, an analyst at J.D. Power and Associates, a Los Angeles consulting firm that measures customer satisfaction with cars, said the next item on the list of standard comforts is compact disc players, which will be in a majority of cars by the end of the decade.
Another accessory that is part of the solution is also part of the problem: the air conditioner. In 1970, 40 percent of cars had them; now 90 percent do, said Cedergren. That piece of equipment is a synergistic nightmare for environmentalists.
Air conditioners do not just encourage people to drive; they also eat gas and are notorious leakers of a chlorofluorocarbon that is particularly dangerous to the atmosphere, encouraging the greenhouse effect and depleting stratospheric ozone.
While the ozone above 30,000 feet is being depleted, it is being created at ground level by the interaction of sunlight and auto emissions. Unfortunately, ground-level ozone does not replenish the ozone at high altitude.
It instead turns into the smog that causes lung and nasal irritation and, scientists believe, may cause long-term lung damage. It is also damaging to plants and trees.
All of this for a convenience that is becoming a home away from home. The most recent study, conducted by the Census Bureau in 1983, found that 30.1 percent of the miles traveled were logged getting to or from work, 13.4 percent were for shopping and 15.5 percent were for other personal business.
The energy consumption is vast. Moreover, the private car is not efficient.
Oppenheimer and a co-author, Robert H. Boyle, point out in a book to be published later this year, "Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect," that only about one-seventh of the energy in gasoline moves the car forward. The rest goes out the tailpipe or the radiator.
But if Americans are doing more driving, it is not irrational from the driver's point of view, because the price of gasoline has gone down.
According to the Department of Energy, on an inflation-adjusted basis, the price of gasoline at the end of 1989 was just below what it was in 1973 and 42 percent below its peak price, which was in 1980.
The roads are already built, the car is in the driveway, and the additional cost of driving to a restaurant 40 miles away is too small to stop anyone.
"We have built a society that is dependent on personal mobility, and we are envied all over the world for that," said Michael R. Deland, the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality and formerly the Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator in Boston.
That mobility, he said, "is consistent with our most cherished national values of independence. I don't think we're going to change that in the near future."
But Deland believes, with most other experts, that the United States will have to cut its dependence on cars. As Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian, put it in "The Crabgrass Frontier," published in 1985, "The United States is not only the world's first suburban nation, but it will also be its last."
The Earth cannot sustain many more economies like this one, he said.
If the U.S. mass transit system is 140 million cars and 200 million people to drive them, what is the alternative?
An effective public transit system requires concentrations of population, while each year since World War II has seen more dispersal.
People travel from dispersed homes to dispersed workplaces, shopping malls, restaurants, theaters and schools. To make matters worse, the route maps would not be like simple lines or grids, but like a bowl of spaghetti.
Until World War II, said Jackson of Columbia, land near transportation lines was valuable and land far away was not. Now, he said, the South Bronx, crossed by subway and train lines, is in ruins, while virgin land reachable by car over the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey is being converted to prime housing.
"Let's reverse what's been going on for the last 60 years," he said. A start, he said, would be a gasoline tax and an end to private transportation's public subsidies, a category into which he puts everything from road building to snow plowing to police protection of the highways.
Los Angeles is making preliminary moves to reduce the demand for travel. The South Coast Air Quality Management District and other government units there have drafted a plan that calls for using zoning to intersperse housing with employment centers.
It is a long-term solution that even proponents say will be difficult to bring about. Cleaner-burning gasoline and possibly some alternate fuels seem likely to come sooner. What else can be done to tie the web of modern life together without the automobile?
"There's not too much on the horizon right now," said Van Arsdale, "other than, `Beam me up, Scotty!' "
by CNB