Class 5Is Urban Transportation Sustainable?Ref: Low and Gleeson, Making Urban Transportation Sustainable, PalgraveMacMillan, pg. 1 – 12.IntroductionLow argues that personal mobility is a freedom bestowed by modernity.In older or less advanced society mobility is the privilege of the elite that the masses strive to attain for themselves. According to Low we travel in pursuit of social values including access to work, friends, childcare, education, recreation, and for supplying the home. He also points out that freight transportation and especially, road transportation, has provided a level of flexibility that keeps profit up and costs down and is essential in supplying the consuming city.But like Good, Low points out that this freedom and flexibility can be illusionary if the opportunity cost of providing unending mobility is never considered. These opportunity costs include increasing distance to be covered, travel becoming compulsory, stressful, dangerous, and expensive. The problem is also compounded by the fact that the cost of mobility is often shifted from the individual to society and the environment.He suggests that we need to protect the real benefits of mobility, contain and allocate the costs properly. This suggests that we need to clearly understand what it is we are trying to achieve thru mobility, understand the trade-offs in providing various levels of mobility and have mechanisms in place for making appropriate choices and allocating costs.Low implies that the concept of ‘sustainability’ is a framework for clarifying the real benefits and to develop the mechanism needed to protect these benefits and to appropriately contain and allocate costs.The Paradox of SustainabilityLow introduces what he refers to as the familiar model of sustainability made up of a triad of economical, social, and environment sustainability. This model suggests that for sustainability three simultaneous goals must be achieved: economic profitability, social responsibility and environmental conservation. He refers to this as the ‘triple bottom line’ perspective and states that this model might be agood accounting tool but not an effective or realistic way of characterizing sustainability. He argues that true sustainability requires a paradigm shift in the believe systems of engineers, urban planners and economists – three groups who are the main shapers of cities. The triad bottom line perspective of sustainability does not support this needed paradigm shift.Fundamentally the triad model is based on a triangle of forces in balance. However, to achieve environmental sustainability we need to change both the society and the economy. We cannot have a stable triangle where we are trying to sustain all three systems in their existing state.He points out, for example, that we need to find ways to “curb consumption while spreading the capacity to consume”.This is the huge paradox at the heart of our attempt to achieve ‘environmental sustainability’. And many questions arise from it including the following: How do we improve people’s quality of life without necessarily increasing consumption to levels that might cause environmental degradation? Can we have a sustainable economy without the need for constantly increasing levels of consumption? Canwe satisfy people’s desire for access without environmentally damaging levels of mobility?Low quotes the 2002 Johannesburg Earth Summit in saying that ‘access and mobility gains are often reaped at the expense of severe damage to human health and global biodiversity’.For example, by 2010 in the UK, CO2 emission from road transportationis expected to be 27% of all CO2 emission.He claims that much urban transportation policy often defies sustainability. The paradox in the conventional approach to sustainability emerges strongest in urban transportation. Governments often espouses environmental sustainability while at the same time espouses transportation policies that deplete and ruin the environment.Often where environmental sustainability is discussed, the necessary social and economic change is glossed over in language designed to reassure the reader that the right ‘trade-off’ or (balance of the forces inthe triangle) can be found between economic, social and environmental policy.As we saw in the first class, this is a good description of the situation inJamaica and many other third world countries. The politicians are very aware of the need to ‘talk’ sustainability but the policies often don’t add up to changes that support environmental sustainability. Environmental and health sustainability is often traded off in the interest of economic growth. This is a huge barrier to overcome. The calculus in the USA is not that much different – often technological fixes are offered up as the solution that will cause us to achieve environmental sustainability without changing any of the economic or social issues that impact on environmental sustainability.As Low pointed out, we cannot trade-off environmentally unsustainablegrowth against environmental sustainability. “Growth is either sustainable or it is not”.Affecting Changes in the BiosphereThe growing recognition that the action of man is causing catastrophic changes to the environment supports the need for change in both society and the environment. The environment in question is the global biosphere with one energy input and no output for waste. This biosphere consists of natural ecosystems at different scales. Low points out that one of the dilemmas we face in trying to move towards an environmentally sustainable existence is the scale of these ecosystems, which dwarf a single human actor. He points out that a single human cannot directly act to influence the biosphere but it is thecollective action of society – through its institutions and market economy – that is important here.The example he gives is of a single drive making a single trip – that driver perceives correctly that his individual action has minimal impact.However, when that trip is multiplied by millions we begin to see a noticeable effect on the biosphere. However, this drivers one trip and the millions by his peer are only possible because they are facilitated by society.He points out that transportation patterns feeds into socially created patterns including land use, distribution of goods, distribution of social opportunities, health and diseases. And some