Pew: People will flock to light-weight electric cars but they won't stand for smart growth

Streetsblog points out the blind spots in a Pew Center on Global Climate Change report on curbing transportation emissions.

Streetsblog's Tanya Snyder explains: "Pew has a well-earned reputation for integrity, commitment to hard-hitting research, and impact on policy debates. And the report, “Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from U.S. Transportation,” does an excellent job of analyzing the potential of various vehicle technologies to reduce emissions. But when it comes to Pew’s conclusions on transit and smart growth, the report is skewed by major omissions and dubious assumptions."

Some of the dubious assumptions involve assuming a transformative change in vehicle preferance, yet little or no change in housing preference, built environment, or willingness to ride transit.

“Yeah [transit accounts for] a very low percentage of current passenger miles,” Deron Lovaas, transportation policy analyst for NRDC told Streetsblog. “That’s true. But hybrid electric vehicle sales also account for about that percentage of total vehicle sales, currently. Let’s be fair, this is a long slope to climb either for breakthrough technologies such as hybrid electric vehicle technology, or for transit systems that attract higher ridership.”

Notes Snyder: "The Pew study envisions a world where people are making vastly different vehicle choices than they are today (even in the age of the three-dollar-gallon) but rejects a future where transit is a more viable travel option. Even more strangely, the authors dismiss smart growth the same way, saying local control of land use regulation is an insurmountable barrier to instituting compact models of development."

The Pew report takes assumptions from a 2009 report that were criticized for being too conservative, and makes them far more conservative. The Pew writers assume that, by 2050, smart growth can reduce travel and greenhouse gases by a mere 1.5 to 5 percent. By contrast, a recent report from the Center for Clean Air Policy report estimates that smart growth can reduce vehicle miles traveled by 65 percent.

Why is the report so assymmetrical? Streetsblog offers two possible reasons. One is that the Pew writers, David Greene and Steven Plotkin, have tremendous knowledge and experience with alternative fuels and vehicles, but less experience in transit and smart growth. "Their resumés are thin in those areas," Snyder writes. "So whom did they pull in to offer further depth of understanding? Officials from the Federal Highway Administration."

The second is that funding from highway advocates influenced the conclusions. Pew was cagey about this funding.

"I asked Pew project manager Nick Nigro why the acknowledgments specifically state, 'This report is not a publication of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, or The National Academies.' It turns out the report was funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, a program of the Transportation Research Board that works in close collaboration with AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. 'They provided the funding,' Nigro told Streetsblog, 'but it’s a Pew report. They were just source of funding.' "