NewVA Moves

TDM 101: The Environment (Part 2)

A few days ago I was talking with a neighbor of mine who is in the homebuilding industry, and the conversation turned to "being Green."  One of the problems he saw was an increasing tendency for companies to market goods or services as environmentally friendly, often in contradictory ways, and sometimes with spurious or patently false justification.  Some green products, he provided as an example, were identified as such because the trucks they were shipped on might use biofuels, but that was the extent of their pedigree.  In other cases, customers were unsure of or had differing ideas of what constituted being green – one customer chose a certain roofing material because it was made of recycled wood; another customer chose a pure-wood version of the same material because the recycled material used various glues and epoxies to hold the recycled bits together.  Both materials were marketed as being environmentally friendly, but for very different reasons.

Consumers face the same choice regarding transportation.  Should I invest in a hybrid, or track down a used Geo Metro?  Should my company move to biodiesel?  Do I have to go deeper into debt to buy a more fuel efficient car, and if I can’t afford it, am I simply stuck?  Generally questions of “green driving” are about the technologies involved – hybrids, hydrogen cells, electric vehicles, B5 or B20, golf carts – and the variety of choices and impacts can be confusing and overwhelming.

That’s why TDM doesn’t really talk about transportation technologies, but rather transportation choices and transportation behavior.    We talk about mode – Single Occupant Vehicle (SOV) vs. High Occupancy Vehicles (HOV).  The environmental impact made by TDM isn’t in helping commuters choose among the multitude of green technologies, but making small but significant changes in commuting behavior altogether.  Whether you move from a 15 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG minivan or a 35 MPG hybrid, none of them will have the impact of carpooling three days a week and not driving at all, or taking the bus three days a week, or doing your shopping trips on your bicycle.  If you’re already un debt up to your eyeballs and there is no way you can sell your Expedition and buy a Smart, that’s fine; just make try to put one or two more people in those seats every morning, or take the bus when you go to the mall rather than driving along.

On the macro scale, TDM positively affects the environment by encouraging participation across the range of potential modes, thus making each mode more efficient and aggregating lots of little behavior changes into one massive impact, all using existing technologies, existing infrastructure, existing commuters.  This is particularly true in the facilitation of carpools, where the ridematching services we provide might be the only way that carpoolers have of meeting with each other.  Through education, incentives, and services, TDM helps commuters push aside the question of green products altogether and gets down to a very basic question – what are my alternatives?

Basically, every trip you don’t take is cleaner than the one you do, no matter what you do it in.   That’s what TDM does.