Book Review
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March 2002
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Book Review
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles ... Bikes and Ferries, Too
Gregory V. Button reviews Jim Motavalli's "Breaking Gridlock"
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Calculating Your Eco Footprint
Breaking Gridlock: Moving Toward Transportation That
Works.
Jim Motavalli. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2002
Reviewed by Gregory V. Button
Many of us have our own homegrown theories about what is wrong with the trans-portation issues facing our sprawling cities and how we would rectify the problem if we were “king for a day.” Jim Motavalli, syndicated car columnist and editor of E: The Environmental Magazine, has written an insightful book that examines the transportation issues facing our nation’s major urban areas.
In Breaking Gridlock: Moving Toward Transportation That Works, Motavalli demonstrates just how complex the problems with our trans-portation systems really are and how unlikely it is that any one of us could single-handedly solve the problem. While he doesn’t provide us with a universal solution, he does review some of the approaches that hold promise.
Of course, as many of us realize, our cities were built around cars, and our nation’s dependence on cars is a major part of the problem. Motavalli notes fact that “a third of the average city’s land is devoted to serving the car, including roads, service stations, and parking lots.” Our driving habits are compounding the problem. In 1970, says Motavalli, “Americans drove a trillion miles per year; it’s been more than two trillion since the mid-1990s.” Nine out of every ten miles traveled happen in a car. Obviously, as the author and others point out, we can’t continue this dependence on automobiles.
Searching for solutions, Motavalli examines the different approaches taken by metropolitan areas in the United States and Europe, as well as alternative modes of transportation such as trains, planes, and ferries. The facts he uncovers are provocative and by no means pessimistic, although he quickly makes the reader aware that there aren’t any easy or immediate solutions to the problem.
Portland, one the cities Motavalli examines for its innovative approaches, is lauded as “the only U.S. city to come close to balancing investments between roads and public transit.” He praises its state-of-the-art public transportation, crediting it with making Portland one of the most “livable cities.”
![[Cover of Breaking Gridlock]](200203/book.jpg "Cover of Breaking Gridlock")
However,
Motavalli reminds the reader that, compared to most European
cities, “Portland remains heavily auto-dependent.”
Only six percent of its residents use public transportation.
In Berlin, 40 percent of peak trips are on public transportation;
in Stockholm, that gure is 70 percent.
New York, our most densely populated city, is the least car-dependent city in the U.S. Here’s why: 55 percent of the households have no car and 18 percent of all trips are taken on foot. Compare this with the city of Los Angeles, where 97 percent of travel is done by car. Southern California pays heavily for its automobile dependence: according to the Environmental Defense Fund, annual health-care costs of automobile-related smog and emissions in the region are $3.7 billion.
Perhaps second only to our romance for cars, Americans have embraced the airplane as a favored mode of travel: 10,000 commercial ights y every day, and that number is expected to double by 2020. As air trafc increases, so does the resulting pollution. Motavalli cites an article by Gar Smith that claims that a jumbo jet consumes “526,344 gallons of air per second and in the rst ve seconds consumes as much oxygen as is produced by 49,000 acres of forest in a day.”
The airports surrounding our metropolitan regions also contribute to the problem. According to Environmental Health Perspectives,