The Strategic Value of Electric Public Transit.

A Reflection on the advantages of reducing dependence on personal vehicles.

I like to walk, and as of late, something I’ve noticed each time I walk is that gas prices are up further.

Right now, the entire world is being squeezed by high oil prices that are downstream of a war in the Middle East that is in the control of a small few. This, when you think about it, is really unfortunate (obviously any war is much more incredibly sad and unfortunate, but this is a transportation blog): people’s mobility has suddenly become massively eroded because of forces completely out of their control. Even if you don’t drive, the things you rely on like groceries get to stores on overwhelmingly fossil fuel-powered vehicles, and so you’ll be affected to.

All of this makes me think of China. The nation obviously is massive and uses huge quantities of fossil fuels, but its economic fortunes are rapidly being decoupled from these resources over which it does not have control. Over half of new cars in China are electric, and electric freight innovation is in large part taking place in China as well - from electric trucks to ships. Those pushing these policies, despite their obvious problems (EV overproduction and involution) are clear eyed that dependence on a very unstable resource for all of modern society to function is untenable. Of course, to some extent China uses the fossil fuels it imports to generate electricity (which for what its worth is way more efficient than direct use), but enormous dams in western China, among the largest in the world, as well as massive nuclear and renewable build-outs are increasingly meaning the entire energy system can be without fossil fuels.

Of course, China also has an enormous, domestic and urban transport system that is entirely electrically powered, in the form of high speed rail and massive urban metros. This means that the drag on China’s economy from high oil and gas prices is significantly reduced. In the US, Canada, or Australia - higher oil prices mean intercity transport with flights, and much urban transport, still heavily reliant on diesel for buses and trains, and gasoline in cars all slow down.

I’ve thought a far amount about whether on balance Canada does better or worse because of our significant energy exports as prices rise, but the lack of infrastructure for moving energy domestically makes this largely irrelevant. We can’t really strategically stop exporting to feed our own demand. And whats worse is that there is an obvious and major political divide between a place like Alberta, which benefits handsomely from high oil prices, and places like Ontario and Quebec which pay the price.

I have two main comments here.

For one, it is absolutely insane that any jurisdiction which does not have its own fossil fuels is not speed running infrastructure and transport electrification. And two, public transport in particular is possibly the most obvious place to invest.

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I specifically say jurisdiction, because this applies on provincial and frankly municipal levels. Obviously global markets influence everything, but you can blunt the blow if once goods cross your borders they can be inexpensively transported using electricity. Its also a real competitive advantage in places like Quebec that unlike in Ontario the price of heating a home has not exploded, because they heavily rely on electric heat, and generate the electricity with an enormous fleet of dams. People want to live in places where heating their home isn’t something they have to try and seriously reduce because of a war on the other side of the world. I guess ultimately for what its worth Ontario and Quebec both kind of get a pass on this, though obviously Quebec is much better, and there are better places still.

Thats obvious to me most clearly because while Quebec leads Canada in EV adoption (or at least battles with BC for it), it doesn’t seem to be scaling generation at the speed it should be to fully electrify that which already can be electrified, despite the fact that Quebec is actually competent and cost effective at building new generation. The other side of this coin is just that Quebec ought to have more like Norway levels of EV adoption, and a large electric vehicle industry, and to be clear that doesn’t mean Quebec needs to try to woo passenger car factories with huge subsidies or tax breaks, as a friend mentioned recently, there seems like a lot of room to be the best at electric commercial vehicles, or even a master of electric mining and other specialized vehicles - think garbage trucks, snow plows and the like.

But, whats most perplexing to me is just that these places - and places around the world, are not taking China’s lead in not only massively scaling personal and industrial electrification, but also electric public transit.

The case for electrifying public transit should be obvious, while building new industries and driving massive EV adoption (that governments aren’t funding huge quantities of fast chargers along major highways is unbelievable, and presents another opportunity to create a best in the world industry designing and install this equipment) is cutting edge, and potentially economically valuable, those are risky propositions. Meanwhile the fundamental mechanics of electric public transport were determined over a century ago. Trolley wires, third rails, sometimes even distributed and cogeneration - this stuff is not complicated.

A major barrier of course is costs, which are average-ish globally in China, and waaaaay higher than average in a place like Canada. But, part of how we get costs down is by scaling this stuff up. Its actually the case that in the (at this point very limited) cases where governments have institutional capacity to build stuff, Vancouver will trolleybus infrastructure, Calgary with light rail extensions — costs are much more reasonable.

Imagine our largest cities made it possible for a significant quantity of their populations to get around entirely on electric public transit. That would mean more metros, trams and trolleybuses, and finally upgrading and electrifying regional rail. Suddenly people in these cities would not only have great transit, but they would have the ability to to some extent opt out of the insane price fluctuations that at this point feel inherent to the oil market.

Even smaller cities could build out trolleybus and (in some cases) tram networks (this would be much easier if we had an RATP style organization from one of the large cities that would go around and detail how to design, procure and build such systems - Translink for example), you could imagine every city with over 2 or 300,000 people building out a system in such a country, sort of like what you see in central and eastern Europe where these systems are everywhere. They could even be used at the margins for creating basic intercity transport routes, and in some cases freight transport.

This stuff should be obvious, but our classic human tendency is to forget about recurring problems when they go away, and only go “ah if only we did X” when they reoccur. Keeping stuff like this in the public, and political consciousness at all times going forward seems sensible, so that the next time an oil price firestorm emerges we can weather that storm a little better.