ACCESS 03, Fall 1993
Melvin M. Webber
Despite huge reductions of noxious emissions from factories and cars, Southern California's air is still terrible. It's so bad that the state is requiring that two percent of new cars sold in 1998 be zero polluters and ten percent by 2003. Many researchers here have become preoccupied with the foul air, and so are searching for ways of making cars less obnoxious and hence better servants.
Charles Lave
In the Spring of 1993 California and the EPA faced-off over the EPA's new mandates for checking auto emissions. The California Senate asked the University of California Transportation Center to provide a "blue ribbon" evaluation of the issues. This article tells what we discovered. The final picture is not clear enough to distinguish good guys from bad guys, but we can see well enough to know that the EPA's new national rules for smog checks are deeply flawed.
Allen J. Scott
The California economy is in the doldrums, especially in the Los Angeles region, owing in large part to the decline of aerospace-defense industries. The region also suffers from the nation's worst pollution problem, owing largely to its dependence on automobiles. So, we're led to ask whether these linked perils might be converted into a combined opportunity. We ask whether we might blunt both the environmental and the employment problems by building a new electric-vehicle industry in Southern California that exploits its skilled but underemployed labor and managerial resources and creates a transportation system that doesn't pollute.
Mark Delucchi and
David Swan
In 1990 General Motors unveiled a new battery-powered electric vehicle, called the Impact – the flashiest, best-engineered electric vehicle ever. Thanks to an advanced electric drivetrain and a lightweight aerodynamic, energy-conversing body, the Impact accelerates faster than comparable gasoline-powered cars. However, even under the best conditions, despite its advanced technology and its state-of-the-art lead-acid battery, it will go no more than 120 miles and, as with all battery-powered vehicles, it requires hours to recharge.
Allan B. Jacobs
Streets are more than public utilities, more than mere traffic conduits, more than the equivalent of water lines and sewers and electric cables, more than linear physical spaces that permit people and goods to get from here to there. To be sure, communication remains a major purpose, along with unfettered public access to property. These roles have received abundant attention, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century. Other roles have not.
Brian D. Taylor
Planning and construction of metropolitan freeway systems in the 1950s and 1906s are frequently cited examples gone awry. Critics point to insulated and indifferent highway builders, who concern themselves more with traffic flow than communities and carve up cities with little regard for the negative social, psychological, and aesthetic effects of freeways. Many freeway projects in cities around the country provoked “freeway revolts” – intense community opposition to specific freeways projects which lead officials to delete controversial routes from state freeway plans.
Charles Lave
Travel and Demographic Change in the U.S.