The West Coast Environmental Law Research Foundation Newsletter

WCEL NEWS

Vol 18:9
Mar 5, 1995

Budget gives Greens the blues




Finance minister Paul Martin's February 27 budget slashed federal spending on the environment. Environment Canada's staff will drop from 5,700 to 4,300 employees and its budget will fall from $737 million to $503 million (more than 30%) over three years. Weather and conservation services will be the hardest hit. The Department of Fisheries' budget will be cut by 27% over three years. In addition, cuts in next year's federal transfers to the provinces will reduce the funds available for environmental management at the provincial level.

Amid the bad news, however, there are a few bright spots:

• enforcement was NOT dropped from Environment Canada's mandate, following objections by WCELA and many others to the Program Review's proposal that the department switch to purely voluntary approaches;

• the budget's only major personal tax increase -- the one and a half cent increase in the gasoline tax -- is a carbon tax that will discourage greenhouse gas emissions;

• charitable donations of ecologically sensitive land get a tax break: the tax credit won't be subject to the usual limit of 20% of the taxpayer's annual income;

• there will be far fewer federal subsidies to resource industries.

Overall, the budget promotes long-term sustainability of government finances, despite the short-term pain.

-- Bill Andrews

Vehicles Outnumber Drivers in the Northwest

By Alan Thein Durning, with research by Christopher D. Crowther
Reprinted with permission of Northwest Environment Watch

After a decade of rapid growth in both car travel and automobile ownership, motor vehicles now outnumber licensed drivers in the Pacific Northwest. Despite the best efforts of transit authorities, Northwesterners get into a car or truck for 90 percent of the trips they take. The main reason is the spread-out form of Northwest cities. Suburbs are now the Northwest's leading place of residence.

From 1983 to 1993, the distance driven in the Pacific Northwest grew by a third and the number of motor vehicles increased by more than a quarter. Both grew faster than either real personal income or population. Meanwhile, the share of Northwesterners who live in suburbs rose to 30 percent.

Automobiles are an excellent form of transportation when they are one choice among several. When they become the only option, however, the results are disastrous: in the Northwest, traffic accidents kill 2,000 -- and injure 150,000 -- people per year. Providing roads, parking spaces, and other facilities for motor vehicles takes up as much as one fourth of urban space, edging out parks and homes. Motor traffic endangers children and isolates the elderly. It undermines locally-owned businesses in historic neighborhoods and favors malls full of national chain stores. The Northwest's motor vehicles account for three-fourths of all petroleum consumed in the region, and internal combustion engines release the single largest share of air pollution regionwide, including climate-changing greenhouse gases. In Washington state, road vehicles cause 55 percent of air pollution. Cars and sprawling development are a drain on government coffers -- for road work and defense of foreign oil fields -- and on our most limited resource: time. Typical Americans now spend eight hours per week in their cars.

This report highlights trends in driving and registrations of motor vehicles as an indicator of the long-term viability of transportation patterns in the Northwest. Private cars and light trucks make up the bulk of the motor vehicle fleet, with buses, heavy trucks, and commercial vehicles constituting the remainder. The area covered is British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington -- home to 97 percent of the population of the Pacific Northwest bioregion, defined as the watersheds of North America's temperate rain forest rivers.

Car Count

The trend of the last century has been rapid "automobilization". By the 1970s, the Northwest was adding a million motor vehicles every three years. The oil price rise of 1979 slowed growth, but there have still been another million vehicles on Northwest roads every four years since 1978. The number grew from 8.3 million in 1983 to 10.7 million in 1993.

The motor vehicle fleet has grown far faster than human population in the Northwest, pushing vehicle numbers per capita steadily upwards. They rose from 0.78 vehicles per capita in 1983 to 0.83 in 1993. In 1920, there was one motor vehicle for every ten people. In 1963, there was one for every two people -- every Northwesterner could get in a car and no one had to sit in the back seat. Today, there is nearly one motor vehicle for each woman, man, and child. Vehicles actually outnumber licensed drivers: if all the region's drivers took to the road at the same time, there would still be a million parked cars.

Idaho has the most vehicles per capita, with 0.93, because of its large rural population. It is followed by Oregon with 0.87; Washington with 0.84; and British Columbia, with 0.74. The lower vehicle-to-person ratio in British Columbia is a result of B.C.'s comparatively compact cities, better transit service, and higher fuel taxes.

Distance

The sum of all miles driven by motorized vehicles has grown especially quickly. Vehicles in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington (British Columbia does not consistently track distance driven) covered 21 billion miles in 1957 -- 11 miles per person per day. Vehicles drove 86 billion miles in 1993 -- 25 miles per person per day.

Rising vehicle numbers and longer distances traveled do not merely reflect rising affluence or growing populations. Since 1957, the distance driven has increased fourfold and vehicle numbers have increased 3.7-fold. But aggregate real personal income has grown just 3.4-fold, and population has increased 1.8-fold. Until 1983, however, trends in vehicle numbers, driving distances, and personal income were fairly similar. Then driving distances -- and to a lesser extent vehicle numbers -- shot upwards, a result of lower fuel prices and the suburbanization of jobs, shopping, and housing.

Auto Dependence

The share of people in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington who live in suburbs has risen from just seven percent in 1950. In the American part of the Northwest (comparable B.C. data are unavailable), suburbs overtook towns in population in the 1960s. They passed cities in the 1970s, and exceeded rural areas in the 1980s. In 1990, suburbs reached 30 percent of the U.S. Northwest population. And this understates their true size. The U.S. census defines suburban areas narrowly, with the result that many places that are suburban in character are categorized with cities, towns, or rural areas.

Suburban development was made possible by the automobile. Now, it has made the automobile indispensable. Northwesterners get into a private car or truck for 90 percent of the trips they take. People who live in suburbs lack alternatives. Northwest suburbs are almost all so spread out that they fall below the 12 people-per-acre threshold where pedestrianism and transit become options. Below that threshold, there are too few people to justify frequent transit service and too few customers to support corner groceries and other local amenities. This is why typical households in Northwestern suburbs own one car per driver and get in their cars twelve times a day. Per person, suburban dwellers drive three times as far as those who live in pedestrian-friendly urban neighborhoods. If suburbs are defined by the threshold of auto dependence, the suburban share of population registers higher than 30 percent.

Car-nage

Across the Northwest, traffic accidents killed 1,924 people in 1993 -- more than died from gunshot wounds or illegal drugs. Another 167,597 people were injured in motor vehicle accidents.

Since 1980, motor vehicles have killed almost 31,000 Northwesterners, and injured more than two million. Automobiles are the leading cause of death among Americans aged 15 to 24. This death toll fails to arouse as much public concern as other, lesser causes of death and injury. The risk of crime in the city may be less than the risk of traffic accidents in the suburbs.

Pay As You Go, Reverse Sprawl

Sustainable transportation requires backing out of auto dependence, and that requires two reforms. First, drivers should pay the costs of driving. At present, costs of driving ranging from health bills for lung cancer to weapons budgets for the defense of oil are debited to taxpayers, society at large, or future generations. Each car in greater Vancouver, for example, costs society an estimated C$2,700 per year beyond what its owner pays. Governments can ensure that drivers pay these costs by eliminating subsidies to driving and by shifting the tax base off of payroll and sales and onto fuel consumption and pollution.

Second, cities should grow inward rather than outward, in order to achieve population levels that can support diverse transportation options. Among the Northwest's big cities, Vancouver has done the most to arrest car dependence. Aggressive redevelopment has allowed thousands of people to move into the central city, creating neighborhoods where pedestrians typically outnumber vehicles ten to one. Portland has resisted sprawl better than most U.S. cities, thanks to land-use laws enacted in the early 1970s. It has also created a vibrant downtown where walking, cycling, and riding transit are as convenient as driving alone. Seattle has trailed its neighbors, but is considering land-use and transit plans that hold promise.

The Northwest's predicament is that nowhere, neither in the cities nor elsewhere, have we yet seen anything dramatic enough to affect the basic trends -- more cars, more driving, higher costs, more danger, fewer alternatives. When we do, car numbers, driving, and suburban population will diminish. And thousands of lives will be saved.

ELIB NOTICE

Please note that ELIB's dial-in service will be discontinued as of Tuesday, March 7. ELIB is now available on the Internet via the World Wide Web, at http://freenet.vancouver.bc.ca/local/wcel/.

ELIB access is also available during office hours in our library, located at 1001 - 207 W. Hastings St., Vancouver, BC.

Budget bolsters harmonization

When the CCME harmonization initiative began, its supporters denied -- apparently accurately -- that it was a budget-cutting exercise. Instead, the stated purpose of the initiative was to rationalize environment management in Canada, to "eliminate overlap and duplication."

Despite this 'motherhood' objective, many environmentalists fear that the initiative will lower environmental standards. At the February 19-20 national multistakeholder workshop on the initiative in Toronto, environmental representatives argued convincingly that there is no documentation of precisely what "overlap and duplication" the initiative is intended to eliminate. The response -- 'trust us, there is a problem' -- is clearly an inadequate basis for what is described as a fundamental restructuring of environmental responsibilities in Canada.

Events, however, have overtaken us. The February 27 federal budget confirms that the federal government's role in environmental management will be curtailed drastically over the next three years. Moreover, the cuts in federal payments to the provinces will also reduce the provinces' ability to fund environmental services in the coming years. Thus, "overlap and duplication" will quickly become -- if it is not already -- a minor problem.

The real problem now is how to cover the gaps in environmental management roles caused by the budget cutbacks. This should be the basic purpose of any revision of the roles of the federal and provincial governments regarding environmental management. Let's be frank about it.

-- Bill Andrews

Upcoming Events

Pesticide Action Network
Hospitality Hour

The National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides (NCAMP) is holding its Thirteenth National Pesticide Forum on March 17-20, 1995, in Alexandria, Virginia. On March 18, the Saturday of the forum, PAN, the Pesticide Action Network, will host a hospitality hour for affiliates and other attendees.

Aboveground & Underground Storage Tank Systems
Seminar and Trade Show

Highlights: new codes that apply on federal lands; latest technology in leak detection and overfill protection; vapour recovery systems; proposed provincial regulation changes.

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