Google won't save cities from climate change, but is offering a big tool

October 29, 2018 12:08 PM

Google, with its Environmental Insights Explorer, is estimating greenhouse-gas emissions for cities in part of the company's ambitious new plan to share its geographic information to support climate-concerned local leaders. It's just starting with five cities, Buenos Aires, Melbourne City, Victoria, Mountain View (Calif.), and Pittsburgh, and plans to expand the program gradually to cover more municipalities worldwide. As part of this initiative, Google says it will also release its proprietary estimates of a city’s annual driving, biking, and transit ridership, generated from information collected by its popular mapping apps, Google Maps and Waze.

More from Robinson Meyer's article in The Atlantic:

The explorer remains a better tool for getting a glancing sense of a city’s carbon emissions than it is for making meticulous policy. Right now, it can only estimate carbon emissions from electricity and transportation—two important sources of pollution, but not the only ones. Heavy industry and agriculture, for instance, generate roughly a third of U.S. emissions. Google is also hampered by the age and quality of some data: To estimate how much carbon is emitted to power a given city, it must use a six-year-old data set from the EPA.

But it can still provide useful information. In Pittsburgh, for instance, it estimates that the power grid drives more than three times the emissions as the transportation sector. The situation is reversed in Buenos Aires, where cars and trucks produce twice the pollution created by the electricity grid.

“This is not sufficient information to decide whether to build another tunnel underneath the Hudson. We don’t know that yet. But we can say that in Buenos Aires, you should probably focus on transportation as opposed to building emissions,” [a program manager at Google Earth, Saleem] Van Groenou said.

Why this matters: With Local Action, Major Economies Can Get Closer To Meeting Paris Climate Targets (Amy Weinfurter for Data-Driven Yale, Aug. 29, 2018). Here's the report: Global climate action from cities, regions and businesses: Individual actors, collective initiatives and their impact on global greenhouse gas emissions (106 page PDF)

posted by filthy light thief (6 comments total)

And if you're wondering what will tell a city, state or region to build another tunnel or a new bypass, that's transportation forecasting, or Travel Demand Models, as spelled out there by Ohio Department of Transportation. In short, this is a software program that takes inputs like current travel patterns, traffic volumes, populations and purposes for travel, then applies growth factors to populations and tries to figure out how people will move in the future. Once that system is set up, you can the model different events, like the addition of a new route. Such modeling can be done for streets, transit, or a combination of modes.

If those two resources have piqued your interest, here's a deeper dive into TDM options and features from Travel Forecasting Resource.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:15 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Tangentially related: ‘They’re Bold and Fresh’: The Millennials Disrupting Boston’s Transit System -- Armed with data and outside-the-box ideas, TransitMatters is redefining citizen engagement. (Erick Trickey for Politico,October 25, 2018)

Over the past three years, Ebuña, Ofsevit, and their comrades in transit-nerdiness have emerged as leading voices in the debates over how to improve Boston’s beleaguered transit system, which runs the oldest train and bus fleets among the nation’s major transit agencies and faces a $7 billion backlog of repair and upkeep work. TransitMatters, run mostly by millennials and using everything from encyclopedic knowledge of train schedules to a network of government insiders, has scored several wins with its data-driven proposals to improve the MBTA’s service. This year, TransitMatters’ advocacy persuaded the MBTA to launch overnight bus service for the first time in decades. Members of the group also played a major role in persuading the city and state to add a bus lane to the design for a renovated bridge over the Charles River between historic Charlestown and downtown—a change that will speed up some of the T’s most popular, overcrowded and often-gridlocked bus lines.

The best sort of transit "disruption," where it's not proposing a new, private system but trying to improve the public system for all.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:19 PM on October 29, 2018 [9 favorites]

Where did they come up with this definition of "Melbourne City". Does anyone recognise it?

It's not the CBD, it's not the electorate, and it's not "Greater Melbourne". I mean, they're including Flemington, but not, eg, Albert Park. Are they only counting traffic on one side of St Kilda Road? They say "administrative city boundaries as represented in Google Maps", but it's not anything I recognise.
posted by pompomtom at 3:53 PM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

pompomtom: it's the City of Melbourne, i.e. the Melbourne council area. See here.

Kind of a strange choice, given that it covers 136,000 people out of the 5 million in Greater Melbourne.
posted by nnethercote at 12:10 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

And if you're wondering what will tell a city, state or region to build another tunnel or a new bypass, that's transportation forecasting, or Travel Demand Models, as spelled out there by Ohio Department of Transportation

Or you can treat transit and transportation as an effect, and not use a 'demand forecast' to guess how people are going to live in the future. Spoiler: the chart always says its more of the same, which is exactly the opposite of what I would guess Google is trying to accomplish by making this data publicly available. Unless cars and trips to work are going to be way cooler in the future, and people will do more 'Sunday driving for its own sake' and less to get places to do things. That would actually require a 'transportation demand model'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:57 AM on October 30, 2018

Or you can treat transit and transportation as an effect, and not use a 'demand forecast' to guess how people are going to live in the future. Spoiler: the chart always says its more of the same, which is exactly the opposite of what I would guess Google is trying to accomplish by making this data publicly available.

In travel demand modeling, transit and transportation is an effect, developed from socio-economic data (population and business/ work trends) and the transportation network, including possible changes to that network.

So to make better guesses about the benefit of transit system changes, major investments, or direct long range policies, we run different scenarios to evaluate what will happen when populations grow or shift, or businesses grow or move away, or a new bypass is installed or a new transit stop is provided.

For major metro areas and cities, the population trend (and in turn, the traffic trend) is generally growth, so it's hard to make transportation investments that have real, lasting impact travel in major ways, because of induced demand, if nothing else. The common comment on this is that you can't build your way out of congestion, even that's the "easiest" thing to try, because that means it's only the people who build roads who have to develop the (short-lived) solution.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:05 PM on October 31, 2018