Sustainable Transportation: Options Beyond Gasoline Cars

The modern world depends on transportation. It’s what gets workers to their jobs, students to their schools, patients to their doctors, and shoppers to stores. But when transportation takes the form of gas-powered cars, it also comes with a host of problems.

For starters, it’s a major contributor to climate change. Transportation—especially vehicles—accounts for about one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Gasoline vehicles also produce other harmful pollutants. A 2019 study found that vehicle emissions killed 385,000 people worldwide in 2015. That’s a big number, but it’s dwarfed by the 1.35 million deaths caused by road accidents each year. And aside from the health impacts, road traffic and noise reduce the quality of life for city dwellers everywhere.

But these problems aren’t inevitable. Sustainable transportation systems can deliver the essential benefits of transportation without the hazards.

Benefits of sustainable transportation

Sustainable transportation options have many advantages over gasoline cars. These include:

• Energy conservation. Sustainable transportation doesn’t depend as heavily on fossil fuels. That leaves more of this limited resource for other jobs, such as manufacturing.
• Less pollution. Burning less fossil fuel also reduces greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of air pollution. When COVID-19 lockdowns took most cars off the roads, the air in many cities got much cleaner.
• Less traffic. Some forms of sustainable transportation, such as bikes and buses, take the place of cars. That reduces traffic, making the roads safer and shortening commute times for the drivers who remain.
• Land conservation. Having fewer cars means there’s less need for car infrastructure such as roads and parking spaces. That leaves more room for green space while minimizing paved areas that contribute to stormwater runoff and water pollution.
• Better public health. Sustainable transportation reduces air pollution, noise pollution, and road accidents. And some sustainable forms of transportation, such as walking and cycling, provide healthy exercise.
• Economic benefits. Investing in new transportation systems creates jobs directly and also increases employment by helping more people get to work. A 2020 study found that each dollar invested in transit yields $5 in economic benefits.

Electric vehicles (EVs)

One way to make transportation more sustainable is to replace gasoline cars with electric vehicles (EVs). Fully electric models have no engine, just an electric motor powered by a large, rechargeable battery. There are over 40 all-electric vehicles available in the U.S., including cars, trucks, and SUVs.

Benefits of EVs

EVs have obvious environmental benefits over gasoline cars. Their carbon footprint is smaller even when they run on electricity generated by fossil fuels. Using renewable energy to power them makes them cleaner still.

EVs are also cheaper to fuel and, because they have fewer moving parts, cheaper to maintain. And in some areas, driving an EV gives you access to special parking spots or carpool lanes on the highway.

Concerns about EVs

Despite their benefits, some people are hesitant about switching to an EV. Their concerns include:

• Higher purchase price. EVs typically cost more to buy than comparable gasoline cars. However, because fuel and maintenance are cheaper, their lifetime cost to own is usually lower.
• Battery lifespan. Replacing an EV battery is a big job that costs $5,000 to $15,000. However, you should only have to do it after 12 to 15 years. And “dead” batteries don’t just go into landfills. Most can still hold enough charge to be useful in industry or as backup power for the electric grid.
• Range anxiety. There’s little need to worry about running out of charge during day-to-day EV driving. The average range of modern EVs is about 217 miles and 98% of car trips are under 50 miles.
• Charger accessibility. Charging up during long trips is a bigger problem. Although the U.S. has over 56,000 charging stations with around 148,000 charging ports, they’re not evenly distributed. It can be a challenge to find one that isn’t occupied or broken. And when you do, recharging can take anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours.
• Environmental costs. Though EVs are greener than gasoline cars, they aren’t a cure-all. Mining and processing the materials for EV batteries causes a lot of damage in developing countries. Possible solutions to this problem include cleaner battery types, better mining methods, and more battery recycling.

For those concerned about these EV challenges, an in-between option is hybrid electric cars. These combine a small gasoline engine with a battery and electric motor. They can run on gas, but they use far less of it. Some, called plug-in hybrids, can plug in to recharge just like EVs while keeping the gasoline engine as a backup.

Encouraging EV use

Around the world, governments are working to promote EV adoption by minimizing the problems with EVs. Their efforts include tax breaks and incentives for EV purchases and investments in charging infrastructure. At the same time, they’re discouraging the use of gasoline cars with policies like higher fuel economy and emissions standards.

In the U.S., the Biden administration is strongly promoting EV use. It’s offering purchase incentives, building up the EV charging network, and investing in manufacturing of critical components for EVs.

Public transportation and shared mobility

EVs can go a long way toward reducing pollution, noise, and planet-warming emissions. But public transportation and shared mobility, such as car sharing, can do even more than that. By minimizing the number of cars on the road, they reduce traffic and free up land devoted to car infrastructure.

Public transit

Public transit includes buses, trains, trolleys, and “microtransit,” such as vans that hold several passengers. These forms of transit are much safer than cars, as well as much cleaner. Even when they run on fossil fuels, buses and trains emit less greenhouse gas per passenger than cars. Clean energy vehicles, such as electric buses, are even greener.

Cities all over the world are either building new public transit systems or making existing ones greener. One example is Jakarta, Indonesia’s Transjakarta bus rapid transit system, which won a Sustainable Transport Award in 2020. Founded in 2004, Transjakarta runs on dedicated bus lanes and links to smaller local buses around the city. Within the U.S., Baltimore’s free Charm City Circulator carries residents around the city on hybrid electric buses. And northern Virginia’s highly successful Metrorail system yields an estimated $1 billion in yearly revenue for the state.

Shared mobility

Public transportation is a form of shared mobility: a transportation service or resource shared by many users. There are many other types of shared mobility, including:

• Carpooling or vanpooling
• Car-sharing programs such as Zipcar, which have networks of cars that users can borrow as needed
• Ride-sharing programs such as Uber and Lyft, in which car owners give people rides for a fee
• Bike-sharing programs such as those in Paris, Shanghai, and New York City, with fleets of bikes available for short trips
• Scooter-sharing programs such as Lime and Veo, which do the same thing with electric scooters

Programs like these offer similar benefits to public transportation, but they require less up-front investment. They can also serve as a “last mile” option to get people from transit stations to their final destination.

Alternative fuel vehicles

Electricity isn’t the only alternative to gasoline for powering cars and trucks. Vehicles can run on a variety of alternative fuels that burn more cleanly. But right now, none of these looks likely to replace gasoline on a large scale.

Biofuels

Biofuels are made from plants. They have lower lifetime greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels because the plants absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) as they grow. This balances out the CO2 the fuels emit when burned. Types of biofuels include:

• Ethanol. This is the same kind of alcohol found in liquor. Most gasoline contains a small amount of ethanol, which helps it burn more cleanly. But specially modified cars can run on a fuel that’s primarily ethanol, called E85 or flex fuel. Most ethanol in the U.S. is distilled from corn and has around 40% lower lifetime greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline. E85 is available at some but not most U.S. gas stations.
• Biodiesel. This renewable alternative to diesel fuel works in any diesel engine. It can be made from vegetable oil, animal fat, or recycled restaurant grease. Biodiesel has lifetime emissions about 74% lower than petroleum diesel. It’s also safer because it doesn’t catch fire as easily and causes less pollution when spilled. Only a limited number of U.S. fuel stations sell biodiesel, mostly in the Midwest.
• Renewable diesel. This plant-based fuel is chemically identical to petroleum diesel and can be blended with it in any proportion. It’s a bit less green than biodiesel, reducing lifetime carbon emissions by about 65%. Currently, only a few fuel stations carry it, mostly in California.

Hydrogen fuel cells

A hydrogen fuel cell combines hydrogen fuel with oxygen in a reaction that produces electricity. The only emissions produced are warm air and water vapor. However, the process of making the fuel isn’t always clean. Green hydrogen, extracted from water using renewable energy, has zero carbon emissions. But dirtier forms of hydrogen pollute as much as or more than gasoline.

Hydrogen is an expensive fuel because it takes so much electricity to produce. Fueling cars with it costs about as much as paying $16 per gallon for gas. It’s also hard to ship and store because of its relatively large volume.

Today, there are only 59 hydrogen fuel stations in the U.S., mostly in California. To make fuel cell vehicles viable, we’d need to build a whole new system of pipelines, trucks, and storage facilities. That would be a costly project that’s unlikely to happen soon.

Natural gas vehicles

Some specially built cars can run on compressed or liquefied natural gas (NG) There are about 175,000 NG vehicles in the U.S. and 23 million worldwide. When they run on fossil fuel gas, they’re only slightly greener than gasoline cars, with about 15% lower lifetime emissions. However, NG vehicles can also run on renewable natural gas (RNG)—methane extracted from landfills and other forms of waste.

To make NG vehicles sustainable, we’d have to produce RNG on a much larger scale than we do now. And again, we’d need a lot of new infrastructure to make refueling practical. Right now, NG fuel is available at fewer than 900 fuel stations nationwide.

Other emerging technologies

Other types of green vehicles are still in development or just getting started. One technology on the horizon is renewable gasoline, a plant-based fuel that can burn in any gasoline engine. This could reduce emissions by 61% to 83%. Another is synfuels: synthetic hydrocarbons made by capturing CO2 from the air. Doing this with clean electricity makes the fuel carbon-neutral. But at present, synfuels are hugely expensive—around $37 per gallon.

Another technology coming soon is solar-powered vehicles. These are EVs with built-in solar panels that recharge their batteries as they drive. This can extend their range by 15 to 45 miles per day. Companies working on them include Lightyear in the Netherlands and Aptera Motors in the U.S. Their first vehicles could be on the roads as early as 2024.

Sustainable infrastructure and smart cities

Sometimes, making transportation more sustainable isn’t about new methods of getting around. It’s about creating systems to support methods that already exist. This can include:

• EV infrastructure. Right now, the biggest barrier to EV adoption is problems with charging. To make EVs the dominant vehicles on the road, we need more chargers everywhere: homes, workplaces, and public destinations. Two leaders in this area are the Netherlands and Germany. Between them, they have 150,000 public chargers—about half of all the chargers in Europe.
• Bike and pedestrian infrastructure. Cities can encourage car-free transportation by building more bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly pathways. One successful program is the “superblocks” of Barcelona, Spain, which limit access to vehicles and prioritize foot and bike traffic. Norway’s capital, Oslo, has gone even further, banning car traffic entirely on certain streets in the city center.
• Urban planning. Compact neighborhoods, with homes, businesses, shops, and schools close together, make it easier to get around without a car. One good example is the French District in Tubingen, Germany. This former military site is now a dense neighborhood with a mix of homes and businesses. Rates of car ownership there are less than half those in the rest of the city.
• Smart city initiatives. Smart cities use advanced technology, such as sensors and automation, to control their transportation systems and reduce congestion. For instance, in Fujisawa, Japan, automated robots handle package deliveries. In Detroit, a digital system dispatches city buses and tracks their location.
• Congestion pricing. Another way for cities to reduce traffic is through congestion pricing. Drivers must pay a toll for being on the road at the busiest times of day. London, Stockholm, and Singapore have all successfully reduced traffic and pollution this way. New York City announced plans for a similar program in 2023.

Overcoming challenges

Making transportation sustainable is a big job—especially in the car-dependent U.S. The simplest way to do it is to replace most gasoline cars with EVs. But to do that, we have to fix two big problems with EVs: cost and lack of charging infrastructure. The Biden administration instituted tax breaks and incentives to address these problems and spur widespread EV adoption.

However, relying on EVs alone isn’t the best solution. It doesn’t address problems like road safety or land use, and it doesn’t help Americans who can’t afford private vehicles.

Public education and awareness may be the key to making change happen. When people understand the many benefits of sustainable transportation, they’re more likely to advocate for it. That’s what happened in Baltimore, where public school students successfully campaigned to replace diesel school buses with cleaner electric buses.

Residents can also promote sustainable transportation by fighting back against new car-dependent developments. In the Houston area, for instance, several grassroots groups organized to fight a proposed highway expansion. Their activism convinced the Federal Highway Administration to request a pause on the project.

Toward a sustainable transportation future

We can’t halt climate change without ending our dependence on gasoline vehicles. Fortunately, there are many ways to achieve this goal. Electric vehicles, public transit, shared mobility, and increased bike and pedestrian infrastructure can all play a role. We need to explore all these pathways to make our transportation system sustainable as fast as possible.

Doing this will bring benefits beyond just fighting global warming. It will also reduce air pollution, traffic, and noise in cities. It will replace packed highways and parking lots with green space and pedestrian paths. It will change more people’s daily commute from a stressful drive to a relaxed trip by train, bus, or bike. In short, it will create a cleaner, safer, healthier world with a higher quality of life for everyone.