The Green New Deal's Trains and EVs Won't Work for Everyone

By Aarian Marshall of Wired. Excerpt:

"It’s hard and time consuming to get around many places in the country without driving, and 20 percent of those living in poverty don’t have access to a personal vehicle. A broad and long-term study published by Harvard researchers in 2015 suggested that longer commutes are associated with lower chances at social mobility. Alternatives like public transit and biking are greener, but most infrastructure and systems are slow and underfunded. Sometimes, they’re straight-up dangerous. Plus, transit is viable in only relatively dense areas, which happen to be among the most expensive places to live in the country.

“The challenge with a lot of these things is that there's kind of an anti-car lobby, but they don’t deal with the equity problem,” says Carla Mays, cofounder of the sustainability and equity research and advocacy group SmartCohort. “In many communities of color and low- to moderate-income communities, there is no transit, so you can’t even talk first and last mile. It doesn’t exist for them.”

Which is why more policymakers have come to an uncomfortable solution. Faster trains and more bike lanes are great green goals for the future. But the best way to connect low-income people to jobs right now is with cars.

“The research is really robust on this point,” says Evelyn Blumenberg, chair of the urban planning department at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. According to her work, which looks at low-income households involved in federal voucher programs in the 1990s and early 2000s, households with cars were able to move to neighborhoods with lower crime rates and more amenities, like high-performing schools. They had less exposure to poverty and were less likely to return to high-poverty neighborhoods than those without cars. People living in households with auto access had an easier time finding jobs. They had an easier time keeping those jobs, too.

“This is particularly true for women,” Blumenberg says, or for anyone who’s a family caregiver. “Trying to balance unpaid responsibilities and unpaid work is just really really hard while ‘trip chaining’ on public transit, or while the kids are on the back of your bike.” (“Trip chaining” means making more than one stop on a trip—for example, picking up something from the grocery store and then the dry cleaners’ on the way home from work.)

There’s yet another hitch. The cars that lower-income people can afford are often older and less gas efficient. (Reminder: The Tesla Model 3, the electric vehicle “for the masses,” starts at $42,900. Even more affordable, used EVs might cost $10,000 up front, no small cost for a family living paycheck to paycheck.)

So it seems the Green New Deal’s central tenets—sustainability and economic justice—are on a collision course."