Special Series
The Parable of the Electric Bike
In a Series
The Body Electric
In part II, I described the extraordinary growth of electric bikes in China, which grew from novelty items in 1998 to almost one e-bike per ten people today. What caused this growth? What can we learn from China about overcoming the Northwest’s four barriers to e-bikes?
The economic context of e-bikes is radically different in China than in the Northwest. In China, most buyers of electric bikes are stepping up in vehicular speed and comfort from heavy, low-performance bicycles. They are opting for electric bikes not in place of cars but in place of bicycles, motorcycles, or scooters. In the North America, e-bike buyers are stepping down in vehicular speed and comfort from the automobile. (Actually, they’re mostly buying an additional vehicle, to use in place of their car some off the time.)
Chi-Jen Yang, a policy analyst at Duke University, has examined Chinese experience with electric bikes in detail. He argues that their proliferation over the last decade has been “a policy accident.” Overrun with noisy, dangerous, fast, polluting motorcycles, more than 90 major Chinese cities have cracked down by banning or limiting new licenses for motorcycles. But they haven’t regulated electric bikes—even electric bikes (like many in China) that are essentially motor scooters with decorative pedals. So motorcycle demand, burgeoning with China's economic miracle of the last decade, has switched to electric bikes.
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Where The Streets Have No Name
From Knute Berger comes an idea that is sheer brilliance: re-naming city streets. Because the places we love should be named not for integers, but for people.
Just for example, would not Seattle be a better city if "Northeast 125th Street" -- a memorable name to be sure -- were named for the poet Gary Snyder, who wrote much about the Northwest, and who lived in the area as a child? Or might not "12th Avenue East" sound better as Bruce Lee Avenue -- I mean, right? -- to honor the Seattleite who once lived nearby, and is buried in the cemetery that interrupts the street?
Plus, there's a sustainability dimension. Great cities -- the kind of places that can last, and that foster thriving communities -- are forward-looking. And yet they are also densely layered with history and context, with echoes of the people who lived here before us.
Unfortunately, nowadays the city streets are mostly relics that commemorate the standard crew of 19th century white guys who founded the place. That, or worse: they're just a bland exercise in sequential counting. With a few notable exceptions, street names in the Northwest are devoid of local distinction, and they ignore the rich histories that unfolded long after the city fathers laid down the grid. It's a sorry lot: uncreative, disappointing, and overwhelmingly Eurocentric.
Yet re-naming is entirely possible! Both Seattle and Portland boast a major thoroughfare named for Martin Luther King Jr, and there are a handful of small scale examples scattered about. But it hasn't happened often enough.
To correct things, Knute has developed a terrific list of iconic personalities that deserve recognition on Seattle's streets. To me, it seemed like such an obviously good idea that I was almost surprised it hadn't been done before. I mean of course Seattle should have streets named for Denise Levertov, Quincy Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Bernie Whitebear, Bertha Knight Landes, Harvey Manning, Bill Boeing, Patsy Bullit, and so on. (You can listen to more discussion in a KUOW program this morning.)
Special Series
The Parable of the Electric Bike
In a Series
Circuit Breakers
In part III, I promised to describe the obstacles that are keeping electric bikes from taking hold in the Pacific Northwest in the way they have in China. Here are four.
1. Immature technology.
As BikeHugger’s master blogger (and e-biker) DL Byron points out, electric bikes may be past the garage-tinkerer phase of development, but they’re still complicated, imperfect devices, plagued with breakdowns and performance issues. Battery care, for example, is still challenging, though it’s vastly simpler than it used to be.
2. Bike Culture.
In Asian and northern Europe cycling cities, bicycles are ubiquitous utilitarian objects like appliances. In the Pacific Northwest, as throughout North America, cycling is uncommon as anything but a form of recreation and exercise. Among sport cyclists, a major purpose of cycling is to get a good workout, and electric bikes destroy the workout. So sports cycling is no friend of the electric bike.
Special Series
Green-Collar Jobs: Realizing the Promise
In a Series
Got Green?
Are you wearing green today? It’s Saint Patrick’s Day and all over the place you’ll certainly see people donning all manner of green in celebration. Green is also the term attached to so many clean energy efforts. Our own Green Collar Jobs Primer uses the term. A local Seattle effort called Got Green is using the Saint’s day to kick off its work to green homes in some of Seattle’s least economically advantaged neighborhoods.
In many ways Got Green is like Sustainable Works but with an urban focus, using tools often not found in the retrofitter's tool box like hip hop music. Got Green was inspired by the work of Van Jones and by Green For All.
What makes Got Green special is its efforts to mobilize youth to become advocates in local neighborhoods, encouraging homeowners and businesses to complete energy retrofits, and training workers for long term jobs in energy efficiency.
Got Green’s work has included light retrofits and their hope is to access some of the many funds now available to do deeper retrofits. We’ll be watching their work and that of similar efforts in the region to expand the benefits of energy efficiency to truly create retrofits for all.
Cash for Clunkers Coda
Did last summer's Cash for Clunkers program do any good? The latest assessment by Maritz Research, highlighted in Green Car Reports, suggests that it did:
[The] government-funded "Cash For Clunkers" program ...did just what it set out to do: get old, low-mileage cars off the road and stimulate auto sales in the U.S.
That may come as a surprise, given the sharp criticism leveled at the program last year. On the one hand, some folks claimed that the program was an ineffective economic stimulus; they argued that it mostly helped people who were already planning on buying a car, rather than stimulating new sales. On the other hand, some felt it did too little to reduce gas consumption -- and pointed out that some buyers simply traded an old pickup for a new one.
But now that the dust has settled, it seems that the program was at least modestly effective in meeting both economic and environmental goals. On the environmental side, the new vehicles sold under the program used 38 percent less gas per mile than the clunkers that got traded in. Of course, I still wonder how much of that MPG gain you can attribute to the Cash for Clunkers program, as opposed to just general industry and consumer trends. Still, those numbers are at least consistent with the claim that Cash for Clunkers did help trim the nation's appetite for gas. And now, on the stimulus side, Maritz found that the Clunkers program really did spur additional sales of more-efficient vehicles, rather than just shifting the timing around a bit.
So it seems that some folks have given the Cash for Clunker tires a good kick, and concluded that the program was no lemon.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Tony the Misfit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonythemisfit/ / CC BY 2.0
How Will It End?
My favorite cliff hanger scene is in a film called the Italian Job, in which the hero (played by Michael Caine) is left at the end, hanging, quite literally, over a cliff in the Alps. Following a bill through the legislative process can often feel much like watching one of these thrillers. Take Washington State Representative Hans Dunshee’s bill that would increase the state’s debt limit to improve energy efficiency in public schools. In spite of passing the House of Representatives the bill seemed dead after it failed to get out of the Senate during the regular session. But now the bill is back, as Publicola reports.
The opposition continues to raise fears that the bill's passage would require the state to raise its debt limit, and what that might mean for the state’s credit rating. Opponents argue the legislation could lower Washington's credit score. It’s true that agencies frown on states taking on lots of debt when they aren’t collecting enough revenue, which is a special problem during an economic downturn. A bad credit rating means higher interest rates.
However, in our analysis of the bill we found that its impact on Washington’s bond rating would be comparatively small – tiny even – compared to the large outlays planned for highway projects. The legislature is considering billions of dollars worth of these costly road projects that are prone to cost overruns (and that contribute to auto dependence and to the state’s carbon emissions). By rights, the legislature should be more worried about those multibillion dollar roads projects than the relatively small $860 million increase in debt created by Dunshee’s bill.
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Special Series
The Parable of the Electric Bike
In a Series
Flipping the Switch?
As I argued in part II, electric bikes could be forerunners for electrifying the whole transportation sector. They’re sweeping into urban areas in China by the tens of millions. New technologies are improving e-bike performance. And powerful institutions are aligning to speed battery innovations.
Many observers now believe e-bikes will grow rapidly in North America, including in the Pacific Northwest. Colorado-based market analysts Pike Research, for example, predict that US sales will quadruple from 250,000 e-bikes in 2010 to more than 1 million in 2016, as shown in the chart below. (Asia is left off the chart, because it's on a different scale. Some 98 percent of e-bike sales worldwide have been in China.)
To speed this process, one common approach—evident in the bevy of tax credits available for purchasers of hybrid and electric cars—would be to subsidize e-bike sales. That’s what Santa Cruz, California, did early in the 2000s decade. Coupons from local authorities helped sell as many as 1,000 e-bikes there, making it briefly the e-bike capital of North America. Similarly, rebates from Swiss localities have boosted e-bike sales in Switzerland. Some 16,000 sold there in the first half of 2009, according to one report.
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Government Mind Control
Over at Grist, Dave Roberts has a fascinating interview with congressman Brian Baird, who hails from southwest Washington. Baird argues, basically, that behavioral science is often better context than economics for thinking about climate and energy policy.
An excerpt:
Science offers ways of figuring out how to help people understand and adapt to new technologies... nobody designs a fighter plane or a spaceship or a nuclear power plant without human factors engineering. You can't build a fighter plane without putting people in mockups to see whether they can read the dials, whether alerts make sense, whether the radar information is understandable. That's social-behavioral research in the applied realm.
These are little, simple things about how to interact with technology. Should adjustable thermostats be pre-programmed at the store so people don't have to worry about it? It's not always clear on the water heater how you set the temperature. People say, ha ha, it's obvious. Well, if it's so obvious, and people can save money, and people are motivated by the desire to save money, why don't they do it? The argument that it's all economics just fails repeatedly, but people continue to make it.
Baird has a PhD in psychology, so he knows of what he speaks. It's a shame that Congress will be losing his perspective after he retires this year.
Special Series
Game Changers
In a Series
Un-democracy and the US Senate
This series is about flawed institutions of governance. Notice the word “governance”—not “government.” It’s not about inadequate or wrong-headed laws and policies. Nor is it about heroic, passable, or ineffectual leadership. Such things are the normal stuff of public debate, and we write scores of posts each year about them here at the Daily Score.
Instead, I want to talk about design flaws in the way public policies are made: constitutional provisions, legislative processes, electoral rules. I want to explore the rules of the game; the lawmaking procedures. It may sound tedious and arcane, but it’s a vitally important subject. It might be the most important subject of all.
Last time, I gave an example of why changing the rules can make all the difference: Washington state’s recent constitutional amendment in favor of majority rule for school levies will yield tens of billions of dollars of investments in Washington state’s public education system over the decades ahead.
And then I mentioned the US Senate—an institution with incalculable influence over the future of the Northwest, and that is also, as I argue below, the single most undemocratic institution of government among all the industrial democracies.
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The Hype Cycle
In his recent TED Talk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates focused on global energy policy. He clearly takes the risks of global climate change seriously, and nicely summarizes the state of the science -- namely, that the majority of professional climate scientists sincerely believe that humans are changing the climate, and that climate disruption could bring new troubles to the world's poor.
If we're going to reduce the risks of climate disruption, Gates argues, we need a major research initiative to look for an energy "miracle" -- a game-changer that advances energy technology radically as the silicon chip advanced computing. If you've got the time, the talk is worth watching:
Almost as an aside, Gates mentioned that he's funded research into a particular nuclear reactor design. And for some reason, we've gotten a couple of follow-up press calls focusing not on the guts of his talk, but on the aside: what do we think about Gates's endorsement of nuclear power?
That's exactly the wrong question.
Special Series
The Parable of the Electric Bike
In a Series
Charging Up
In part I, I described the appeal of and demand for electric bikes, and mentioned that three trends bode well for them in the Pacific Northwest and the rest of North America. Battery-juiced two-wheelers could finally break out of their current status as transportation novelties, helping us rise to challenges as great as climate change, oil addiction, and recession. In this post, I detail these trends.
Technology, overseas markets, and political trends all bring good portents for e-bikes.
Contra "Carbon Neutral Caution"
I see carbon neutrality as a necessary goal in and of itself. Many people, including Bill Gates, think we need the entire developed world to be carbon neutral by 2050 in order to reach a worldwide reduction in emissions of 80% by that time. I think that 80% reduction is an insufficient goal, but leaving that argument aside, if we want carbon neutrality in the developed world by 2050, then we need leading cities to hit that goal decades earlier to create the innovation paths others can follow.Just as importantly, however, I see carbon neutrality as a huge opportunity. Urban climate action offers us a fabulous tool chest, presenting solutions to all sorts of other problems we want to solve as well, from a flagging economy to energy vulnerability to mounting health care costs. Overall, I think Eric's missed a few key points...
Go the read whole thing here.
As usual, Alex makes a number of thoughtful and detailed points. (Which is not to say that I entirely agree with each and every one of them.) Anyhow, I may write a longer response at some point, but first I've got one defensive-sounding nitpick: I did not say that Seattle cutting it's emissions by 50 percent is the best we can do.Far from it! For many of the reasons Alex's mentions, it's conceivable that Seattle (or any city, really) could do much better.
What I said was that if the city could do that in the next 20 years, then it would be worth "shouting from the green rooftops." And I stand by that. With an electricity supply that is already essentially carbon free, cutting emissions by a further 50 percent in Seattle by 2030 would be a feat worthy of celebration.
Special Series
The Parable of the Electric Bike
In a Series
Juice Hawgs
Editor's note: This post is the first in a five-part series. Read more from the Parable of the Electric Bike.
Mmmm. An electric bike. Zipping through the city. Surging up hills without gasping for breath. Riding in business dress and arriving fresh and dry. Healthy, moderate exercise. No traffic jams. Free parking. Huge load-hauling potential. Near-free fueling. Zero emissions. Breeze in your face. Appealing!
So why haven’t e-bikes caught on (yet)? Especially in the Pacific Northwest, which is brimming with well-heeled tech enthusiasts? What’s stopping electric bikes from devouring automotive market share the way DVDs killed VHS? At least in good weather? Why aren’t they as commonplace on our boulevards as motorcycles or scooters or muscle-powered bikes or even motorized wheel chairs? Will they be soon?
Might electric bikes even be the vanguard of the electrification of all vehicles, rushing us through the long-awaited transition off oil and into a no-carbon future? Might this market-driven, job-creating electric vehicle revolution provide a detour around the bitter and intractable-seeming politics of climate laws? If we all push hard for electrification through the market, might we simply bypass the bickering morass of the US Senate, with its undemocratic procedures and filibuster rules?
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Special Series
Green-Collar Jobs: Realizing the Promise
In a Series
The Maine Lesson of Cap and Trade
Last week, I referenced an official from Maine saying:
"The investments we are seeing in renewable energy, in energy infrastructure, appear to be the largest wave of capital investment in the state's history."
Which is obviously great news for the state, especially during a recession.
Since then, the Kennebec Journal has reported on the formation of the Efficiency Maine Trust, which is significantly funded by the auction of RGGI carbon permits (as well as by federal stimulus dollars). The Trust is exactly the right kind of intersection between carbon pricing, energy effiency investments, and green jobs. It will:
...focus on reducing the demand for energy by making cost-effective financial investments to help people save on electricity and use less heating oil.
"The evidence shows time and time again that we are saving up to three dollars for every dollar we invest," he said. "Those three dollars stay in the Maine economy, where they get re-spent on other things."
And that money-saving energy efficiency isn't just good for the climate. It's good for job-creation too because it's stoking demand for labor that is necessarily local:
In addition to providing financial incentives, such as perhaps paying for a business to install more efficient lighting, or giving a small cash bonus to homeowners who replace their outdated refrigerators, the trust will help coordinate marketing and technical support for products like pellet stoves, solar water heaters, and storm windows.
The Maine example is encouraging, but it's hardly the economic only success story from the nation's first carbon cap-and-trade program.
The State of Electricity Prices
I was messing around with some spreadsheets, and out popped this little guy:
The chart plots the 50 states -- minus Hawaii but plus DC -- with the price of electricity on the horizontal axis and consumption on the vertical axis. (I left off Hawaii because it's a serious outlier, with average electricity prices nearly twice as high as any other state.) A simple regression shows that price "explains" about 42 percent of consumption.
My conclusion? Price seems to be a factor in residential electricity consumption. In fact, the same kind of relationship appeared when I ran a couple of regressions using utilities instead of states.
But I don't want to venture too much further, because things get murky. In statisics, "explains" doesn't mean "causes" -- and I haven't controlled for income or for local climatic conditions, either of which could have a big influence on response to prices. Plus, 50 data points is a pretty small number for trying to tease out a statistical relationship with a regression; and data that's aggregated up to the state level may mask important differences that would be apparent in a more granular picture.
Yet even with all those caveats, it hardly seems crazy to think that price affects demand -- and that high prices dampen demand. I mean, the relationship is true in some sense for pretty much every consumer good I think of, even including purportedly inelastic goods like gasoline.
All of which may mean that the Northwest's extremely low electricity prices may be working at odds with conservation. (Idaho has the cheapest residential electricity in the nation; Washington is fourth cheapest; Oregon is 11th; Montana is 16th.) The Northwest has a laudable history of efficiency and conservation programs, and there are still many more market failures to fix. Yet if policymakers are serious about taking the next steps toward a cleaning up the region's energy portfolio, they should probably take a hard look at raising prices.
All figures in this post refer to 2008 and are calculated from the US Energy Information Administration data found in Table 5A, here.
