What Would Ann Arbor Transportation Look Like if We Really Implemented A2Zero?

 It's pretty clear at this point (January 2022) that Council, and mostly staff, have no intention to actually attempt to get to A2Zero with regard to transportation.  If they were at all serious, they'd at least have the relevant commissions not pointing fingers at each other saying it's someone else's responsibility.  I've been to the three 'candidate' commissions at this point, trying to get them to see the scale of the problem and to start moving us there.  

 The Environmental Commission, which has a council mandate to deal with the environmental aspects of transportation (I know, because I was a founding member, put there to help deal with that - separate story) has pretty much washed it's hands of the topic.  They've got enough to do dealing with PFAS, the Gelman plume, and a couple other important topics.   They suggested I go and talk to the Energy Commission.

The Energy Commission has always been an interesting story.  It was really Dave Konkle's pet committee, put in place more or less to try to give support to the City Energy Office (is that still there?)  Long before there was OSI, Dave moved heaven and earth to try to keep the city to not waste energy left and right, and it was the Energy Commission that did some of the earliest work in the city on climate change.  However.  While there is considerable expertise at the Energy Commission on climate change, it's almost all in terms of stationary sources.  Let's face it, they also have enough to worry about, given that about 60% of our greenhouse gas emissions are from stationary sources.  While they have OSI's ear, and they have the OSI staffer who handles the city's greenhouse gas inventory, when it comes to transportation, they don't have the time nor expertise to handle the topic.

Which leaves two options.  First, there was supposed to be some kind of advisory committee to go with the new transportation plan.  You know, the one that says transportation is only 18% of our greenhouse gas emissions (it's actually closer to 40%).  However, it looks really unlikely that staff will allow such a committee, and if they do, it will be staff-only.  Why we would want a set of out-of-town-commuters, who have gotten us into the current situation, to do all the advising on how to solve our transportation greenhouse gas emission problem is beyond me.

Which leaves the Transportation Commission.  I'm hopeful for the Transportation Commission to step up and actually deal with transportation sustainability, but so far they don't seem to have enough expertise in transportation greenhouse gas emissions to be willing to say anything.  They seem to be pretty tightly controlled by staff, which makes it somewhat unlikely.

When I was on the A2Zero TAC, we looked at the problem in a lot of depth.  The biggest issue is the University, followed by the DDA, and then city staff.  The actual emission problems are most likely due to trucks (and I'm counting light trucks in that), cars, construction and lawn equipment, and air travel.  We came up with a bunch of ways to deal with the emission problems, and voted it down to something like six of them.  Then the OSI staff had their hired consultant (no idea who that was) look them over, and the consultant whittled it down to two.  They're a little interesting.  One is to cut VMT in half by 2030.  That wasn't actually one of the options we sent to be considered.  However we all looked at it, considered the pros and cons of it, and decided not to protest.  The second was to increase the bicycle trip share percentage of in-town trips to 25%.  That was one of our proposals. 

 Let's look at those two in a bit of detail.  The pros for the VMT reduction proposal are:

1. Easy to measure - we have on-going measurements being done, all the time for VMT on various road segments.  It's constantly rotating, so on a ten-or-less-year basis, we have a decent count for the number of trips on a given segment.  We assume some things about those trips, combine it with state and federal data on trip lengths and things, and a group like SEMCOG or the Department of Energy through their DARTE model can make a good estimate of the amount of VMT both in town and Ann Arbor related.
2. If we really did reduce VMT, either in town or Ann Arbor related, by 50%, combined with the slow electrification of the fleet, by 2030 we wouldn't be down to zero but we'd have gone a long way in the right direction.
3. That much reduction in VMT would also greatly improve the situation for cyclists, pedestrians, transit users, and even the people still driving, through less congestion.  

The cons are:

1. It's pretty unlikely to happen.  The long-term trends are for VMT to slowly increase every year, at pretty much every level in the US.  It will require a drastic change in direction to pull that off.  While it's possible in ten years to do it, and we really should be working toward that in the US, it would be a serious stretch to manage it.  (Borne out by events, as several years later we don't seem to be trying.)
   
2. It's kind of anathema to the DDA, businesses, and the University.  The University just tried to get the Med Center Drive bridge widened.  (Don't be surprised if they come back and succeed in the end.)  Their main argument is that the hospital is a state and interstate region-wide resource, and will need the additional road capacity to allow them to expand as they naturally should with such an important facility.  The university put in 1700 additional parking spaces on the other side of the river recently.  They're expecting lots more traffic, and we're still not talking about move-in or football games.  The DDA has never really stopped building parking decks, for the same reasons as the University.  They want people driving here, the more the merrier.  We argue a lot about the Library Lot, but if we really cared about climate change, it would have never been built in the first place.  
3. While reducing VMT allows easy calculation, it's a false sense of accuracy.  If everyone driving into or around Ann Arbor were using electric cars powered by solar, we might have exactly the same VMT, but drastically reduced greenhouse gas emissions.  (We don't count embedded emissions, because the place with the auto plants are supposed to count them, and we're not double counting, though we probably should count some of that.)  This was a primary concern at the TAC.  Several of our main proposals involved electrification of transportation, and VMT seemed to be half counter to that.  

The second method - increasing the bike share percentage for in-town trips to 25% - is a cake-walk in comparison.  Pros are:

1. Fully measured, with all of the biking trips by students actually counted instead of ignored, we might be reasonably close to this metric already.  
2. Except for lack of staff and sometimes political support, we have all the demographics and markers for a community that should have quite high bike share. 
3. That change by itself would help us immensely get to a 50% VMT reduction, since bike trips aren't counted as VMT.  Michigan is the odd-state out that doesn't legally consider bicycles to be vehicles.  (Yes, we're literally the only state in the country - including the federal government itself - that doesn't count bicycles as vehicles. I digress.)

The cons:

1. There's not much staff support, and sporadic council support.  Along with that, there's ambivalence from the DDA and the University (some will point to some things they've done, and say I'm completely wrong, and I'd start by pointing to the parking decks, refusal to consider removing parking most of the time, and absolutely horrible bike parking.)
2. The whole country is moving to very large vehicles, and Ann Arbor is no exception.  Besides that, we have rampant speeding and other forms of aggressive driving around here.  That points back to staff support in part, but the sizes of those vehicles is a national trend.
3. Winter.  Actually weather in general.  Did you know Ann Arbor gets almost as many precipitation events per year as Portland?  While our winters are slightly milder than Madison, they're much worse than Boulder.  But we get a good deal of snow - and staff has little interest in keeping bike facilities cleared.  There's only marginal interest in better - covered - bike parking to match our weather.  There are plenty of places with much worse weather than we have and much more biking, but they generally have a lot of staff support, which we don't have. 

So, let me get back to answer that initial question.  What would Ann Arbor Transportation look like if we actually got to a 50% reduction in VMT and a 25% bike trip share?  Some people would point to the Netherlands or Denmark, but they have 25% national bike trip shares.  Much higher than we're talking about.  We'd want a city like ours, with a 25% bike trip share, and about half our VMT.  This page has a nice chart of how countries rank on those measures.  We'd want a city in something like Germany (exactly half our VMT per capita, 13% national bike share).  Conveniently, there's an easy example: our German sister-city, Tubingen.  So, it would look like this:

This:

and this:

Some notes on these last two.  First, do you see bike lanes?  No, because in most of town, you don't need them.  The motorists in Germany are very well trained and can lose their licenses easily.  Gas prices are quite high, so they mostly drive smaller cars.  They obey speed limits.  There's traffic calming all over the place.  This last picture is right in the middle of downtown Tubingen.  To the right is the very large downtown car-free zone.  Pedestrians, cyclists, emergency vehicles, and only at certain times of day, deliveries. 

We had a great time biking in Tubingen.  It was way out of our way - probably added 200 miles to our trip, but it was totally worth it, and we liked biking in that part of Germany for the most part.  Being Germany, there isn't google maps streetview for every street, but there's decent coverage for Tubingen.  I'd urge people to take a look around.

Clearly, we don't have German drivers, cars, or gas prices.  We'd definitely want to keep the bike lanes.  I'm not a big fan of the boulevards, but we could definitely use a few of them here.  But we could also *really* use the car-free parts of downtown.  It would help a lot to have more housing and less office space downtown.  It would also help to have more housing for people and less for cars.  Presumably we're stuck with the parking decks (the transportation greenhouse gas equivalent of a coal mine).  We should at least plan to convert them to EV-only by 2030 (only paint and signage is needed, though chargers wouldn't hurt).  We should also designate most of the on-street parking as EV-only by then.  And we could use a lot more bike parking, particularly covered bike parking.