Posts Tagged “carbon offsets”

Fellow geek driver C sent this my way, evidently having missed my April post on the same topic:

Left-Hand-Turn Elimination

It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful — of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton of gas and money if we’re talking about just you and your Windstar, say, but immensely wasteful if we’re talking about more than 95,000 big square brown trucks delivering packages every day. And this realization — that when you operate a gigantic fleet of vehicles, tiny improvements in the efficiency of each one will translate to huge savings overall — is what led U.P.S. to limit further the number of left-hand turns its drivers make.

Earlier this year, I humbugged this as a drop in the bucket compared to greater gains that UPS could achieve with more extensive and expensive innovations. Some interesting things have changed since then.

The first piece I noted in Time magazine, said the no-left-turn program had saves 1,000 tons of carbon in the greater New York area in a couple of months. The NY Times piece above says that they’ve reduced by 31,000 tons already. Hard to compare. BUT, back in April the price of a ton of carbon offset on the Chicago Climate Exchange was around $3.70, and today it’s down to about $2.00.

Maybe I’m figuring this wrong, but I find it hard to see how a $62,000 savings by an outfit as large as UPS even covers the cost of equipment and programmers to figure out how to save that carbon. And what does it mean that the price of carbon offsets is down so much since the spring? It makes me wonder if the carbon trading thing is working. (At least in the short term, the idea would be to make emissions credits expensive enough to change behavior, and a drop in price would seem to indicate slack demand, so either everybody has already gone green, or nobody is paying much attention…)

Let’s take a different tack: if UPS trucks and only UPS trucks can save 31,000 tons of carbon making fewer left turns, why not make every driver (or at least every truck driver) follow the same rules? What if local traffic planners took UPS’ data model and used it in planning light timing and intersection design and all that? What if GPS units and online map programs could be programmed for “greenest” route instead of “fastest” or “shortest”? If UPS trucks are 10% of all trucks (seems a high estimate to me), we could end up saving 310,000 tons of carbon this way, or if we add cars into the mix, maybe twice that!

If you live in a city modern enough to have the luxury of choice between three rights and one delayed left, consider this modest proposal. As Confucious said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Back when I lived in San Francisco, I lived near Van Ness Avenue, a wide boulevard from which it was very difficult to make a left turn. People trying to make left turns on or off of Van Ness would often cause traffic to back up. I complained that these people should just make three right turns and not cause so much trouble. If anybody asked, I would advocate making left turns on or off two-way streets illegal.

So, imagine my joy at finding this piece in Time magazine:

United Parcel Service took a detour to the right on its way to curb CO2 emissions. In 2004, UPS announced that its drivers would avoid making left turns. The time spent idling while waiting to turn against oncoming traffic burns fuel and costs millions each year. A software program maps a customized route for every driver to minimize lefts.

In metro New York, UPS has reduced CO2 emissions by 1,000 metric tons since January. Today 83% of UPS facilities are heading in the right direction; within two years, the policy will be adopted nationwide.

As much as I like the geeked-out contrarian wing-nut logic, I fear this might be a canard. Not that I have anything against canards, in fact I love them, especially here and here.

1,000 metric tons of CO2 sounds like a lot, but the market price of a ton of carbon offset is only $3.70 at the Chicago Climate Exchange. Although I can find much higher prices for a ton of carbon offset - up to $50 at some European exchanges - $3,700 or even $50,000 is not an impressive savings for months of UPS driving in NYC. I bet the savings from switching to CNG or hybrid delivery vehicles would dwarf the right-turn dividend.

But on the other hand, if this seemingly sinister policy reduces the time I spend waiting behind trucks trying to turn left, I can’t complain.