Building a Green City on a Blue Lake: The role of Cleveland’s transportation system
By Emily Mastroianni
Forty-eight years ago, on an ordinary Sunday in June, the city of Cleveland’s environmental reputation went up in flames — literally. The Cuyahoga River, which runs through Cleveland and feeds into Lake Erie, caught fire due to its immensely polluted water. This event set the stage for how Cleveland would be perceived for decades to come: as a symbol of environmental degradation.
In 2009, Mayor Frank Jackson decided to alter this negative image of Cleveland by launching the Sustainable Cleveland initiative, a 10-year plan to transform the “Mistake on the Lake” into the “Green City on a Blue Lake.” The goal was, and remains, to see the City of Cleveland recognized as a thriving, environmentally friendly community by 2019—the 50th anniversary of the Cuyahoga River fire.
“We will work through these 10 years, so that when the media comes back to do a retrospective on Cleveland, they’ll see this city transformed in a more sustainable way,” said Matt Gray, chief of sustainability for the City of Cleveland. With only two years left to go, Sustainable Cleveland has been a proven success according to Gray. “If you compared Cleveland now to 2009, it’s night and day, and a lot of that progress is looking at it from a sustainability standpoint.”
Much of this progress has also stemmed from the initiative dedicating each year to one particular action area, for example, 2017 is The Year of Vibrant Green Space, and 2016 was the Year of Sustainable Transportation.
“Public transit is pretty crucial to the quality of life,” said Kari Solomon, budget management analyst and head of sustainability for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. “It influences how people work, who they socialize with, what they do in their free time and who they connect with.” Therefore, The Year of Transportation was a vital part of the Sustainable Cleveland initiative.
The idea of sustainability as a pressing agenda item for cities and nations worldwide was first heralded in 1987, when the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development released its report, Our Common Future, which emphasized the reality of global climate change and the role of human activity in bringing it about.
The U.N. commission, also known as the Brundtland Commission after its chairwoman, distinguished sustainability as the idea that humans should maintain Earth in a healthy manner, so that it may be left in equal or better condition than when they inherited it.
So, what role does transportation play in sustainability? According to author Jean-Paul Rodrigue in his book, The Geography of Transport Systems, sustainable transportation is “the capacity to support the mobility needs of people, freight and information in a manner that is the least damageable to the environment.”
According to a CQ Researcher article on mass transit in the United States, “Public transit ridership has grown 35 percent between 1996 and 2015, reaching an all-time high in 2014 of 10.5 billion passenger trips.”
At a local level, in the Cleveland area approximately 33 million people use the transportation system annually, which means approximately 160,000 passengers every day travelling to and from work, school and other activities, according to the Greater Cleveland Transit Authority’s 2015 Annual Sustainability Report.
Even though these numbers may seem high, only 5 percent of Americans take public transportation to work every day, leaving the remaining population to rely upon their own cars as their primary means of transportation, according to CQ Researcher. The substantial amount of single-occupant cars on the road is immensely damaging to the environment according to Gray.
“Transportation is crucial; we all do it every day, and our current system isn’t the most sustainable system, with a lot of people driving alone in their own cars,” says Gray, confirming that the availability of public transportation, in itself, has a direct impact on environmental sustainability.
According to the Federal Transit Administration, the transportation sector “is one of the primary users of energy in the United States.” Most of the energy consumed for transportation is provided by fossil fuels, according to Ramesh Agarwal in a 2013 article in the International Journal of Energy & Environment. Burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which contributes to massive environmental issues such as global climate change.
However, when comparing the impact of public transit vehicles versus private vehicles, it is important to realize that, “although transit vehicles consume more energy than private vehicles, the average amount of energy utilized per passenger is far less,” according to the Federal Transit Administration. In fact, “heavy rail transit, such as subways and metros, produce on average 76 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than an average single-occupancy vehicle.”
Public transportation not only reduces the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the air, but also reduces the amount of wasted fuel. For example, in 2004, the Federal Transportation Administration claimed that 947 million gallons of fuel were saved solely from passengers using transit systems rather than driving their own cars. That’s because they’re not sitting in traffic, idling their engines.
Accordingly, taking public transportation is a convenient choice for passengers because it removes the distance and travel time spent sitting in congested traffic, and is ultimately very economically rewarding. According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s periodic report on congestion, “The average American annually spends more than 47 hours in congestion with a resulting cost of 3.7 billion hours of travel delay, and 2.4 billion gallons of wasted fuel.”
Additionally, the Federal Transit Administration confirms that a family that owns one car and supplements this by using public transportation can save around $6,000 a year compared to those families who use two cars, and have no access to public transportation.
The City of Cleveland continues to recognize the importance of public transportation and has made significant changes to the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, or RTA, throughout last year’s sustainability initiative.
“The RTA as a system removes cars from the road. If we didn’t exist, you would see a lot more congestion in Cleveland and a lot more pollution. So by its very nature, all public transit systems are good for the environment,” says Jerry Masek, head of media relations at the RTA.
In terms of changes made, Masek confirms that the RTA has recently become “100 percent environmentally friendly in all of their vehicles.” All of the rail cars run on electricity, the buses are fueled using either propane or compressed natural gas, and one of the newer additions, the Bus Rapid Transit, runs on diesel electric. In fact, Solomon adds, “There are 93 buses in service right now fueled by compressed natural gas,” which is projected to reduce emissions by 6 percent per year, solely from those buses.
In 2015, Solomon confirmed, the RTA set priorities and strategies for sustainability efforts in upcoming years, aligning most of their goals with the goals of the Sustainable Cleveland initiative. These monumental changes have allowed the Cleveland RTA to be recognized as a silver level recipient for sustainable commitment by the American Public Transport Association, according to Solomon.
In its quest to become the “Green City on a Blue Lake,” Cleveland has been making positive changes to its public transportation system, offering more sustainable options to the Cleveland community. Therefore, Solomon truly believes that the City of Cleveland will be remembered much more positively during the 50th anniversary of the Cuyahoga River fire in two short years.
“One of the reasons we have the Environmental Protection Agency is because Cleveland and Chicago kept catching on fire,” she says. “But I know that Cleveland will have a much more environmentally-conscious association with it, and its efforts will be recognized nationally, come 2019.”
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