Urging a conclave on transportation in the Northampton-Greenfield-Amherst triangle

By LARRY ELY

Published on September 25, 2009

With the inexplicable non-green recent proposal by the Transportation Section of Pioneer Valley Planning Commission to take the train away from Amherst and give it to Northampton and other centers on the west side of the Connecticut River, many feathers have flown, as you surely know.

Since trains have lower carbon per passenger per mile than do buses, and buses lower than cars, and cars lower than SUVs, don't we need to publish that authoritatively far and wide right away to residents in the Northampton-Greenfield-Amherst triangle?

And don't we need to publish authoritatively that many people are sick of being left with a one-person, one-car mode of transportation? And don't we need to publish authoritatively that traffic calming from increasing numbers of cars is making our towns unlivable and unparkable and that for towns to keep working around the edges on these problems is wasting their valuable time for deliberation on other issues? And don't we need to publish authoritatively that increasingly people will not be able to afford gas as peak oil drives up gas prices astronomically in the next coming years and decades? And don't we need to publish authoritatively that money saved by getting out of incessant and unnecessary one-person, one-car use will save families from giving so much money to Exxon Mobil, allowing them to give more for property taxes and still come out ahead in their bank accounts?

I think we need the authorities to lead. A mayor or town manager alone probably cannot do this. It likely will have to come from concerted action by state Sen. Stan Rosenberg, U.S. Rep. John Olver, and the local mayors and town managers all being on board this. On board publicly and very openly.

We have the mindset to make big changes here in this triangle, but we do not have the political coordination to effect this change.

I think we either have Democratic party corruption or an inexplicable lack of imagination going on at the PVPC (funded by state government) and its interface with some Massachusetts executive branch departments, which is blocking any creative thinking and action along the lines we need to go in.

So I thought I would propound the idea that Olver, Rosenberg, the mayors/town managers in this triangle region, maybe the editors of the big newspapers, and the activist environment groups in this triangle region hold a well-publicized conclave to get the ball rolling for town-coordinated and maintained voluntarily signed up for separate male and female Web-accessible databases for carpooling for regular commutes and weekly food shopping, for bike paths to be put in towns by developing easements, for having 25 mph speed limits within three miles of a town center so that many people would be encouraged to take bikes safely on the sides of existing roads, to have both Northampton and Amherst have north-south Amtrak train service, to put in a hybrid regenerative braking light rail train between Northampton and Amherst stopping at the malls, to promote local Greenfield-to-Amherst and Greenfield-to-Northampton train service (including mechanisms whereby people can take cheap taxis, or minibuses/vans for example, from train stations to work places), and for supplementing the carbon inefficient big UMass buses with a fleet of high mpg minibuses running to weatherized bus stops with parking for cars and bikes a mile apart and serving the neighboring small towns that have no stores and to which the big buses cannot go.

All these things I am saying are just logical implications of the huge problems humanity faces with global warming and peak oil. Transportation is 25 percent of our carbon in any given region of America, and nobody in any town/region is doing anything about it in the systemic fashion that the problem requires and deserves.

Larry Ely, Amherst science writer, is a director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities (www.masschc.org/about.php), chair of the Pioneer Valley Relocalization Project, and member of the Coordinating Committee of the Pioneer Valley Sustainability Network ( www.PVSustain.com), a project of the PVPC.