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Former Boulder Mayor Will Toor’s letter to City Council urging it to take a leadership role in encouraging adoption of electric vehicles presents the council with an interesting dilemma.
On the one hand, accelerating the adoption of electric cars would help to reduce vehicle emissions, an important part of the city’s climate action plan.
On the other, the leadership of this council has been trying to achieve that goal by coercing people out of their cars onto buses or bikes, so it may find it difficult now to embrace cars of any kind.
As Toor acknowledged in a meeting with the Camera’s editorial board last week, much of the strife around recent transportation policy, including the battle over reducing lanes on Folsom Street, comes from a sense that city officials are wagging their fingers reprovingly at drivers for doing what most Americans do — getting from place to place by car — while providing no realistic alternative for many of them.
Toor’s proposal casts drivers as part of the solution and offers hope of a less divisive municipal approach to reducing emissions. With the country now on a course to clean up its sources of electric power, EVs present an opportunity to transfer those gains over time to the transportation sector. Even if the city were to meet its highly optimistic projections of behavior modification, Toor contends it would get only about halfway to its auto emission reduction goals. Another solution is needed.
Electric cars are not exactly in their infancy, having debuted in the 19th century, but technology is improving their utility rapidly. Tesla has revolutionized the field with high-end, high-performance cars. It is an open secret in the tech community that Apple is working on its own electric car, according to Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk. Traditional car companies’ electric offerings are improving their range per charge slowly but surely.
Although Boulder likes to think of itself as cutting edge in environmental matters, it trails the cities leading the way in automobile innovation, perhaps because of its leadership’s apparent antipathy for cars generally. As Camera business columnist Sean Maher pointed out earlier this month, leading cities are aggressively enabling experiments with self-driving cars. On Thursday, the Obama administration proposed a 10-year, $4 billion campaign to speed development of that technology. Combine it with EVs and car-sharing applications, and we could see fleets of shared, driverless, electric cars, reducing congestion, emissions and the need for on-site parking.
“If you are skeptical about encouraging more cars in Boulder, consider the evidence that driverless cars will be amazingly green,” Maher wrote. “In his book, ‘Clean Disruption,’ entrepreneur and Stanford professor Tony Seba argues that autonomous vehicles will eventually be all-electric and operate under a business model that is a cross between car share and Uber. If Seba is right — and he makes a very persuasive case — this disruptive force will not only make auto travel safer and faster, it will make it infinitely cleaner and less intrusive.”
The city could take a number of steps to encourage this future, including converting city-owned fleets, offering incentives for workplace chargers and joining Boulder County in a group-buying program that offers substantial discounts to electric car buyers. The county’s program last fall resulted in a quadrupling of electric car sales in a four-month period — with only a single dealership participating. More are expected to join the program this year.
City staff has laid the groundwork for some of these initiatives. Last year, the planning department, along with the county and CU, contracted with the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, where Toor runs the transportation program, to evaluate Boulder’s electric vehicle infrastructure. But, as Toor pointed out, it needs council’s active support to become a core part of the climate plan.
Technological innovation in this field seems likely to whiz past Boulder’s 20th-century central planning based on bikes and diesel buses. Shared fleets of electric cars could even solve mass transit’s first mile/last mile problem in spread-out jurisdictions like Colorado. If technology ultimately provides a way for each car to be cleaner and serve more people, next-generation autos might yet turn out to be the best solution to the issues of climate and congestion that now plague us. It is time Boulder’s elected officials opened their minds to this possibility.
—Dave Krieger, for the editorial board. Email: kriegerd@dailycamera.com. Twitter:@DaveKrieger