Fewer Cars on the Road in 2009

  • Last year, there were four million fewer cars, but two million more drivers than in 2008. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

America’s love affair with the
car skidded a bit last year.
According to data from the
US Department of Transportation,
the number of cars in the
US dropped in 2009. Lester
Graham reports that’s the first
time that’s happened since
World War II:

Transcript

America’s love affair with the
car skidded a bit last year.
According to data from the
US Department of Transportation,
the number of cars in the
US dropped in 2009. Lester
Graham reports that’s the first
time that’s happened since
World War II:

Last year there were four million fewer cars, but two million more drivers than in 2008.

Lester Brown is with the Earth Policy Institute. His group reviewed the numbers. He says the market’s saturated.

“We have more licensed vehicles than we have licensed drivers. So, we couldn’t get all our cars on the road at once if we wanted to because we don’t have enough drivers. That’s one way to define saturation.”

The Earth Policy Institute also found more people have access to mass transit, people are concerned about the impact of foreign oil, gasoline prices, and young people socialize on the internet and cell phones more than driving around in the car with their friends.

Auto industry experts say the decline of cars on the road has more to do with tight credit for auto loans than anything else.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Rolling Out a New Tire Program

  • This is a mock-up of what the proposed label would look like (Photo courtesy of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)

Back in 2007, Congress told the
National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration to come up with
new fuel efficiency labels on tires.
Mark Brush reports on when we might
see those labels in tire shops:

Transcript

Back in 2007, Congress told the
National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration to come up with
new fuel efficiency labels on tires.
Mark Brush reports on when we might
see those labels in tire shops:

It’s been 2 years, and the government is still working out how to get this labeling program going.

Right now, if you walk into a tire shop, it’s hard to compare tires on how fuel efficient they are. There’s no official standard yet.

But that should change soon. The new tire labeling program is expected to roll it out in the next few months.

Dan Zielinski is a spokesman for the Rubber Manufacturers Association. He says they support a labeling law because it’ll help competition.

It could give tire makers something to brag about.

“’It will be an incentive to say ‘my tire is better because,’ or, ‘my range of tires here are better because.’ It offers the consumers better performance on certain criteria. And I think that will drive the market even before the consumer demand does.”

A more fuel efficient tire will only get you a couple of miles per gallon more. But, put those tires on the 200 million cars and trucks driving the roads these days, and that could add up.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Recycling Your Roof

  • Several states are studying how the material holds up for asphalt roads, but for now most of the singles are mixed in asphalt used for parking lots. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

It’s estimated, every year, somewhere
between seven and eleven-million tons
of old asphalt shingles end up in landfills.
Some states are short on landfill space.
Lester Graham reports, they’re now
encouraging grinding up and recycling
the old shingles:

Transcript

It’s estimated, every year, somewhere
between seven and eleven-million tons
of old asphalt shingles end up in landfills.
Some states are short on landfill space.
Lester Graham reports, they’re now
encouraging grinding up and recycling
the old shingles:

Two-thirds of American homes have asphalt shingle roofs. They last twelve to twenty years before they need to be replaced.

Since most of the material in asphalt shingles is the same stuff used in asphalt pavement, that’s where they’re going.

(sound of machinery)

New businesses are popping up across the nation that take the shingles.

Chris Edwards is co-owner of Ideal Recycling in Southfield, Michigan. He says roofers can dump old shingles at his place cheaper than taking it to the landfill.

“And then they can also sell it to their customers that they are recycling and it’s green. So it does help the contractors quite a bit.”

Several states are studying how the material holds up for asphalt roads, but for now most of the singles are mixed in asphalt used for parking lots.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Stimulus Money Spent in the Wrong Place?

You might have seen road construction
signs that read, “Project funded by the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”
That’s economic stimulus money being spent
on road repair and construction. Shawn Allee reports one environmental group wishes
there were less construction and more repair:

Transcript

You might have seen road construction signs that read, “Project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

That’s economic stimulus money being spent on road repair and construction.

Shawn Allee reports one environmental group wishes there were less construction and more repair.

The land-use policy group Smart Growth America tracked how much stimulus money is going toward road repair versus road construction.

The group’s state policy director Will Schroeer says new roads and bridges are getting about a third of transportation stimulus dollars.

Schroeer says to employ the most people, we should be spending even more on repair, not construction.

“The largest reason for that is that you don’t have to buy any land to repair the road and as soon as you start buying land, that’s money that you can’t put toward wages and other things that produce secondary employment.”

Shroeer’ says about 20 percent of transportation stimulus money is still up for grabs.

That gives states about a year to turn spending toward projects his group advocates, including road and bridge repair and public transit.

For the Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Keeping Panthers and People From Colliding

  • Rebecca Galligan with her dogs Roscoe and Sable in their new panther-proof pet house. Galligan and her husband lost their dog Riley to a panther, so they had this enclosure built to keep their pets safe. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

People are killing Florida panthers.
Usually it’s not intentional. But
Rebecca Williams reports biologists
are trying to figure out how to keep
panthers and people from running into
each other:

Transcript

People are killing Florida panthers.
Usually it’s not intentional. But
Rebecca Williams reports biologists
are trying to figure out how to keep
panthers and people from running into
each other:

There are only about 100 Florida panthers left in the wild. They’re endangered.

If you live down here, it’s one thing to know there are panthers hunting for food in the Everglades. But it’s something else when they visit your backyard.

(sound of tropical birds singing)

Rebecca Galligan and her husband didn’t give panthers all that much thought. Until one day, when they came home from work, and found their dog Riley had been killed.

“The scratches on the body and the way he’d been killed it was pretty obvious it was some sort of wild cat.”

Two days earlier something had killed their neighbor’s sheep. Then a dozen goats got killed.

A biologist decided the predator was a panther. In the past few years in South Florida, more people have been losing pets and farm animals to hungry panthers.

Galligan calling to dog: “C’mere, have a seat!” (Roscoe sniffs the microphone)

Now, when she’s away, Rebecca Galligan keeps her dogs Roscoe and Sable in a little panther-proof house. It’s made out of steel and chain link fencing.

“There’s so much nature and wildlife, and so I mean, we just can’t destroy it all because we want to be safe. That’s why we had this pen built, so we can keep the animals a little safer from the animals that live around us.”

And a lot of people here think the panthers have a right to stick around.

But some say there’s a gaping hole in the law that’s supposed to protect panthers.

The panther has never had what’s called critical habitat set aside. That means developers don’t have to consider the land panthers need to survive. Panther habitat or not, they can just build.

So panthers are getting crowded out by subdivisions and huge new cities.

Andrew McElwaine is president of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. He’s asked the Obama Administration to officially give panthers that habitat.

“So, the more habitat we take away, we’re forcing panthers to move out. We’re getting reports of panthers in urban areas of Southwest Florida looking for somewhere to live, if you will.”

And, as people move in, panthers are becoming roadkill.

Last year 10 panthers were killed by cars. So far, this year, six more panthers have been killed.

(sound of cars whizzing by)

“There are some panther tracks here. There’s one there… and there…”

Mark Lotz is a panther biologist. We’re hanging out in an underpass below the highway. It was built for panthers. Miles of fences run along the highway and make a funnel, so panthers have to go below the road.

Lotz says there are 36 panther underpasses on this stretch of highway. And he says fewer panthers get hit here. But underpasses are expensive – about $2 million each. And giving panthers room to live isn’t always even that simple.

Lotz says the biggest challenge is getting people to adapt to panthers. To him, the cats are majestic. But he also knows a lot of people think they’re terrifying. Somebody actually shot a panther a few months ago.

“Naysayers could make the argument there’s no panthers in Pennsylvania or any other eastern state and things are going just fine. But then I would counter – look what’s happening with deer populations there. You know, panthers are part of the ecosystem. Without them there’s just something missing. In a way part of the wildness disappears.”

But if panthers keep running out of space, they could disappear.

We talked to the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar. And we asked him whether he’d set aside critical habitat for panthers.

“Yeah, we’ll have to get back to you on that.”

That’s been the kind of response he’s given to other reporters too.

Giving panthers habitat protection would mean more obstacles for developers. And, in this economy, that could be pretty unpopular.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Phantom Traffic Jams

  • A phantom traffic jam is when everyone slows down or stops, but starts to go again inexplicably (Photo source: Crazytales at Wikimedia Commons)

According the the last report from
the Texas Transportation Institute,
traffic congestion in the US causes
more than four-billion lost hours stuck
in traffic and nearly three-billion
gallons of wasted fuel. Lester Graham
reports mathmeticians have found – on
paper – one type of traffic jam looks
something like a bomb going off:

Transcript

According the the last report from
the Texas Transportation Institute,
traffic congestion in the US causes
more than four-billion lost hours stuck
in traffic and nearly three-billion
gallons of wasted fuel. Lester Graham
reports mathmeticians have found – on
paper – one type of traffic jam looks
something like a bomb going off:

Phantom traffic jams are frustrating. You know the kind – traffic slows downs or completely stops, and when you finally get to the end, there’s no wreck, no closed lane – nothing.

Mathematicians at MIT say these phantom jams are a lot like detonation waves produced by explosions.

Morris Flynn is the lead author of the report published in the online edition of Physical Review E.

“You have a single person who taps on their brakes. The driver behind them will over-react, hit their brakes just a little bit harder than the person in front. And this disturbance is just cascaded all the way back so that eventually you get this very rapid deceleration.”

And, phantom traffic jam.

Solutions: more lanes on the highway, and automated signs that warn drivers about slowed traffic ahead.

Or, get more people on mass transit.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Follow the Soybean Road

  • A soybean oil sealant is now being tested on roadways (Photo courtesy of BioSpan Technologies)

Asphalt is usually made with oil.
The rising price of oil has made it more
expensive to repave roadways. Now some
cities are starting to give green alternatives
a chance. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Asphalt is usually made with oil.
The rising price of oil has made it more
expensive to repave roadways. Now some
cities are starting to give green alternatives
a chance. Julie Grant reports:

Cities use asphalt to reseal old roads. It oozes in and fills
the cracks, extending the life of the pavement.

But the price has gone up 200% in the last two years.

Paul Barnett is director of the Akron, Ohio Public Works
Bureau.

This year he plans to try a soybean-based sealant. Barnett
says now it costs about the same oil-based asphalt, but the
road runoff is better for the environment.

“So you have a soybean oil that’s biodegradable instead of a
petroleum product that’s going into the streams and creeks,
rivers.”

The cost of soybeans has also been increasing – for food,
for fuel, and now for things like pavement.

Barnett figures if soybean oil becomes popular, it will drive
the price higher, but for right now it’s a good alternative to
asphalt on some roadways.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Adopt-A-Watt

  • The Adopt-A-Watt program allows people to sponsor clean energy (Photo courtesy of Adopt-A-Watt)

A new program gets businesses and
groups to pay towns to switch to alternative
energy. Lester Graham reports it’s a
little like an “Adopt-A-Highway” program:

Transcript

A new program gets businesses and
groups to pay towns to switch to alternative
energy. Lester Graham reports it’s a
little like an “Adopt-A-Highway” program:

Imagine seeing a bank of solar panels that power nearby street lights, and a sign
underneath which recognizes the company that sponsored the project.

Thomas Wither is the founder of the National Adopt-A-Watt program.

“Our program mimics the very successful “Adopt-A-Highway” program. Only instead
of giving supporters community recognition for picking up litter alongside the road,
we have come up with a means of giving community recognition for supporting clean
energy and the funding for alternative fuels.”

Wither says several airports are among the first to use the “adopt-a-watt” program.

Sponsors get the benefit of being connected to clean energy – like solar power – and
airports, towns, and other government entities get the cost of using clean energy
subsidized by those sponsors.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Driving Down Road Noise

  • Heavy traffic on a Houston freeway. (Photo by Ed Edahl, courtesy of FEMA)

Whizzing tires, whining engines and booming car
stereos are just about everywhere. Those sounds are a
form of pollution, and can affect the way we feel. Kyle
Norris has this story:

Transcript

Whizzing tires, whining engines and booming car
stereos are just about everywhere. Those sounds are a
form of pollution, and can affect the way we feel. Kyle
Norris has this story:

The engineers at Chrysler are hard-core about noise.

Right now they’re inside a high-tech studio.
And there’s a car on rollers.
The engineers are trying to pinpoint the noises that a driver would hear.

Inside the cabin it’s pretty quiet (quiet sound inside cabin).
But outside, well… Engineer Taner Onsay explains.

(yelling over whirr of tires) “This is how it sounds outside. See, I cannot
communicate with you, with this sound. Inside this would be totally unacceptable.”

Cars that are quiet are the inside are a huge selling point in the auto biz.
But what about the sounds that a vehicle puts into the world?

Like road noise.
What are people doing about that?

Not a whole lot.

Story goes, there used to be a federal office that dealt with noise.
It was the EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control.

But President Reagan shut that baby down in 1982.
Basically to save on cash.
The idea was that state and local governments could deal with noise.

The noise office did a lot of good things just to help protect our ears.
It had noise standards and regulations – on the books.
And the office was just a really good resource for state and local organizations, and also for people who were just having problems with road noise.

But since it’s been gone…

“Well a lot of the local noise-control programs at the city and county level just dried up
and blew away. It’s hurt the noise program tremendously throughout country.”

That’s Bill Bowlby.
He’s president of an engineering company that consults about road noise.
He’s also worked for state departments of transportation and for the Federal Highway
Administration.

He says that state departments of transportation are concerned about road noise.
And that they’re thinking about things like quieter tires and quieter pavements.
And about not building residential areas near highways.

But states are only required to do so much about road noise.

For example, when states are widening or building highways and using federal money –
which they almost always are – they’re required to study road noise and obey certain
standards.

But when it comes to road noise coming from an existing highway, it’s totally voluntary if
a state wants to deal with it.

So you get a range of how different states deal with it, which they call retrofitting.

Bill Bowlby that says although some states take the issue very seriously…

“…other states have had little interest in idea of retrofits usually because they’re looking
to spend their limited amount of money on highway related projects.”

And the kicker about road noise is that it can seriously, seriously affect people.
For people who live near noisy roads, it can make their lives miserable.
Plus it can make it hard to concentrate as a driver.
And to hear the vehicles around you, like motorcycles and other sounds, like sirens.

Dennis Weidemann is a guy who’s thought a lot about all this.
He wrote his thesis about road-noise.

He says that road noise isn’t dramatic or flashy.
So it doesn’t grab our attention.
And road noise does not have a villain, so we’re all responsible.

Weidemann says it can seem hopeless to people.

“They know they don’t like it but they don’t know how it effects them. And if you don’t
know that, you just get the impression, well, it just bothers me, I’m weird, I’ll let it go.”

Noise experts say we need to re-open the federal noise office.
Or something like it.
And we’ve got to figure-out how to make things quieter.

This is starting to become a hot topic in the pavement industry, where different
businesses are trying to one-up their competitors by making the quietest pavement.

But for car companies there’s really no incentive to make cars that are quieter on the outside.
And right now there are no regulations of how quiet a car needs to be when it comes off
the assembly line.

Although that’s not the case in Europe,
where vehicle noise regulations are much more strict.
And where the whole subject of road noise is taken a lot more seriously.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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Road Salt Damage

  • Overuse of salt can cause damage to concrete, steel and the environment. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Each year about 118,000 people are hurt and 1,300 people are killed on
the roads during snowy and icy conditions. So, snowplows hit the
roads, scraping snow and ice off the surface… and spreading
incredible amounts of salt on highways, streets and roads to help keep
them clear. Lester Graham reports there’s some concern about the long-
term effects of all that salt:

Transcript

Each year about 118,000 people are hurt and 1,300 people are killed on
the roads during snowy and icy conditions. So, snowplows hit the
roads, scraping snow and ice off the surface… and spreading
incredible amounts of salt on highways, streets and roads to help keep
them clear. Lester Graham reports there’s some concern about the long-
term effects of all that salt:


This dump truck is getting ready for a load of salt for a coming
winter storm. Salt helps make icy roads safer. It helps prevent
people from slipping and falling on sidewalks. And… it’s pretty
cheap. But there are problems with salt. Salt pollutes and salt
corrodes.


Mark Cornwell has spent a good deal of his career trying to convince
highway crews that there are better ways to keep things safe and reduce
how much salt is dumped on roads and sidewalks:


“Salt basically damages just about everything it comes in contact
with. Salt moves through concrete and attacks structural steel,
bridges, roads, parking structures; it eats the mortar out of bricks
and foundations. It damages limestone, you know, just on and on and
on.”


So, even though salt is cheap, the damage it does costs a lot. It’s a
hidden cost that’s seldom calculated. Imagine the cost of having to
replace a bridge five years early because the structure is weakened by
salt. And then there are your direct costs: trying to keep salt
washed off your vehicle, and still seeing rust attack your car.


Cornwell says there are some cities and road commissioners working to
reduce the amount of salt spread on the roads. But in most places, the
political pressure to get the salt trucks out early, and laying it on
thick to keep drivers happy, outweighs any concerns about trying to
reduce the salt:


“I’m sure the public expects full attention to snow and ice. And they
have absolutely no understanding, however, of what it costs to provide
that.”


Nobody thought a lot about the damage salt was causing until the last
couple of decades. In a few places, the people responsible for keeping
the roads and walkways safe have been trying to reduce the amount of
salt they use and still keep public safety tops on the list of
concerns:


“So, this is our shops. The brine-maker is right here.”


Marvin Petway is showing me some of the tools in his arsenal to reduce
how much salt is used and still keep things safe. He works at the
University of Michigan, where there’s a goal to cut the amount of salt
used in winter in half. What they’ve learned is using innovative ways
of putting down salt can actually help melt snow and ice faster. One
way is to mix it with water to get the chemicals in salt working
a little more quickly:


“Why use 5 pounds of rock salt when you can use 2 gallons of liquid
salt? We’re able to get better coverage, quicker, better cost, and
we’re putting the material that is effective in reducing ice build-up
directly to the area where we don’t want ice located.”


The crews trying to reduce salt use computer assisted spreaders to
measure out only the salt needed, they mix in less corrosive chemicals
that make salt brine more effective, and even just wetting the salt in
dump trucks with chemicals all help to melt snow and ice faster and in
the end use a lot less salt.


Nothing is going to replace salt altogether, but those efforts can add
up to a lot less salt. That means less destruction of infrastructure.


But there are more reasons for reducing salt than the damage to
roadways and parking decks. Salt also damages the environment:


Mark Cornwell first noticed the effects of salt because he was a
horticulturalist. He’d work all spring, summer and fall planting
shrubs, make the grass green, tending beds of flowers. Then the winter
would come:


“Unfortunately what we were doing in six months of winter was
undoing everything we did in the other six months of the year.
If you’re going to get ahead, you’ve got to solve the problem
and in my mind, that was misuse of salt.”


Use too much salt and it kills plants. And it turns out the cost of
using all that cheap salt could be even greater than anyone guessed.
For decades, it’s been assumed that rain washed away most of the salt, but
studies in Ontario find that a lot of the salt doesn’t get washed
away.


Instead, a good deal of it is percolating down into shallow aquifers.
Researchers predict that in the future we’ll start find salt is getting
into the groundwater that supplies many of the wells where we get our
drinking water.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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