Kent Portney's "Our Green Cities" Blog

Building plug-in hybrid recharging infrastructure

For those of you in the New York City area, I see that the New York Academy of Sciences is sponsoring a talk by a number of people on how the City can contribute to building an infrastructure to support all the new plug-in gas/electric hybrid vehicles that are going to hit the market very soon, starting with the Prius, and followed by many others.  The talk, entitled "Powering up Cities for Plug-in Hybrids" will be held on January 21 at 6 pm, and requires registration. I highly recommend this to anyone who can attend. Wouldn't it be nice to see a little of that federal funding for infrastructure made available for modest efforts like this?  This would certainly be consistent with President Obama's stated goal of contributing to building a green economy. 

NYC Congestion Fee Approved

In case you may have missed it, the NY City Council approved by a vote of 30 to 20 Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to impose a congestion fee on vehicles entering Manhattan.  Check out the
NY Post Article on NYC Congestion fee from April 1.  The proposal now must be approved by the New York State legislature.

I know that politically this must be a real challenge for any mayor or city councilor, but there are situations where pricing must be used to help protect the bio-physical environment of cities, and this sure appears to be one of these situations.  Our economist friends are always telling us that command and control regulation is bad because it is economically inefficient, preferring instead that policies be adopted to affect behavior through pricing (and market) mechanisms.  That is exactly what the congestion fee is designed to do.  If something costs more to do, people will do less of it.  It remains to be seen whether this particular effort will work (assuming it is approved by the state legislature), but it is worth a try.  But the city also needs to be prepared to assess the fee, and to make judgments about whether it is working.  My understanding is that in London, the city best known for using such a congestion fee, it has only marginally reduced congestion (which is good, but is it good enough), and has raised a lot of revenue.  In other words, there are more people willing to pay the price than there are who stopped driving into the city because it is too expensive. 

NYC Taxi Fleet to be all hybrids

I saw an AP story this morning reporting that NYC has decided to make its entire fleet of taxis hybrids by the year 2012.  New York has had a number of hybrid taxis since sometime in 2005, and the city has approved a number of different specific hybrid vehicles for use as taxis.  Mayor Bloomberg has now announced that city is going completely hybrid.  That means going from the current 375 hybrid taxis to well over 13,000. 

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/G/GREEN_TAXIS?SITE=KPUA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

This seems to me to represent another way that NYC has decided to be aggressive about trying to become more sustainable.  I suspect that in most cities, decisions about what kinds of vehicles taxi companies operate is considered largely "private" decisions.  The idea that the city government would get involved in such decisions would probably seem somehow out of bounds.  But cities can and should take increasing responsibilty both for the vehicles that it buys or leases, and for other vehicles that they have some authority for regulating, such as taxis.  The fact is that hybrids emit so much less carbon and sulfur than vehicles powered only with gasoline engines, this makes a tremendous amount of sense.

PlaNYC

I think one of the most impressive recently announced sustainability plans comes from New York City.  At the end of April 2007, Mayor Bloomberg announced the City's PlaNYC, a pretty comprehensive strategic plan for moving toward becoming more sustainable.  As an aside, Mayor Bloomberg will be the commencement speaker here at Tufts later this month, and I'm looking forward to any comments he might have about this new plan.

Check out the Plan's web site at

http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/home/home.shtml

I'm sure everyone recognizes the enormity of the challenge for a city as large as New York to actually make progress toward sustainability.  Yet other large cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles have also started to get serious about sustainability, and I will discuss some of these in forthcoming posts.  When New York decides to embark on policies or programs related to sustainability, they do it in a big way.  As one NYC official told me, when the city did its green building program and focused just on city-owned buildings, they probably had ten times the impact on improving the environment as other small cities that did more comprehensive green building initiatives.  Tell me what you think about NYC's efforts.