Twinning Highways
Yesterday, the Ecology Action Centre held a press conference to announce its portion of the Climate Change Action Report Card, the collective effort that rates governments on their performance towards meeting the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals they established for themselves in 2001.
The Nova Scotian government received an overall grade of C, but the report was broken into eight sub-categories, with grades ranging from A to F. At the press conference, the grades were plastered on a large board posted to the wall above the speakers' heads.
A telling moment came when Scott Gillard, the EAC's transportation coordinator, stood up, crossed out the C- grade in the "transportation" category and wrote in a big fat F. "We had to change it after last week's crown speech," he said.
The ruling Conservatives used the occasion of the throne speech to announce the "twinning" of Highways 101 through the valley and 104 in Cape Breton, a "Yarmouth to Sydney" four-laned, divided highway from one end of the province to another.
Gillard rightly points out that the twinning will blow the province's announced greenhouse gas emission reduction goals all to hell. (Those are my words, not his.)
It's really as simple as that. We can't twin the highways and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I've laid this out in great detail before, but here are the facts:
I thought it was self-evident that twinning highways will necessarily increase GHG emissions, but this morning in the Chronicle-Herald we read this:
Energy Minister Richard Hurlburt said twinning roads will actually help cut emissions. "We do not have a highway to Yarmouth yet, and if they can get the highway open from Queens to Shelburne, that’s going to help reduce greenhouse gases because they are not going to have to be travelling the distances they travel now on secondary roads, and it’s going to shorten the distance to Halifax," said Mr. Hurlburt, who said he makes the trip from his Yarmouth constituency to Halifax four to five times a week.
So I guess I'm wrong: it isn't self-evident. Thankfully, the EAC issued a quick response to this nonsense, as follows:
If Fuel Consumption Increases, Emissions increaseFacts:
Transportation emissions are a result of fuel consumption Twinned highways have higher posted speed limits, up to 110 km/h Increases in speed result in an increase in fuel consumption The most efficient performance of a vehicle is between 50 and 90 km/h; increases above 90 km/h result in significant emission increases:
% Change in Fuel Consumption from Increased Speed
From
To
% change
90km/h
100km/h
+5%
100km/h
110km/h
+10%
100km/h
120km/h
+20%
Yea, you'd think an energy minister would understand the basics of energy consumption, but then you'd be living somewhere besides Nova Scotia.
More to the point, the purpose of twinning the highways isn't to speed up Buddy's trip to mother's house in Yarmouth, but rather to put more trucks on the road, as part of the province's grand scheme to turn us into New York City north. More trucks, obviously, means more gas use, means more GHG emissions.
It's clear, or it should be anyway, that twinning the highways will increase GHG emissions, therefore making it impossible for the province to meet the GHG emission reduction goals it has signed into law. The provincial government is violating the law it passed just nine months ago. No doubt, sooner or later someone's going to sue over the matter. And they'll win.
There are a couple more points to be made about this. First, as Gillard patiently explained at the press conference, the money promised for highway twinning would be much better used for alternate forms of transportation: mass transit, intercity bus service, rail service. The last applies especially to trucks, in that rail shipment of cargo is much, much better GHG-wise than truck shipment.
Nova Scotia has one of the worst records in Canada for funding mass transit. The national average is $24 per person per year spent by provincial governments on transit. In Nova Scotia the figure is 69 cents. But we could get up to the national average if just four percent of the money promised for highway twinning were instead used on transit.
Second, there's a bogus "safety" argument being thrown around, that those of us opposed to highway twinning are really arguing for death and mayhem on the highways. Of course, the province did not make an argument that twinning would be safer, and "supporting safer highways and investments in maintenance and upgrades is not the same thing as highway twinning," says Gillard. It's not clear that twinning leads to safer roads-- it's possible that people on twinned roads are driving at higher speeds, and so accidents may be more likely to end in death. Moreover, a staggering $4 billion in needed bridge repairs has been identified in Nova Scotia.
The short response to the safety argument is that I really don't know how twinning affects road safety. But the argument is a red herring: clearly, travelling by train is thousands of times safer than travelling by car. Those of us who want to see the twinning money spent instead on transit are advocating the most safe form of transportation-- it's twinning advocates who are advocating an unsafe form of transportation.
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