Mobility and Environment by Corrado Poli

Author:Corrado Poli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

Expectations and the 10% Plan

Just a few weeks before the end of his third mandate, the Italian Veneto Region Governor, Mr. Giancarlo Galan, decided not to run for his fourth mandate. At the last Council session he tried to win the vote for construction of three new waste incinerators. The act did not pass because of the usual NIMBY syndrome that often occurs in these situations that are even more likely before elections. The Governor’s act did not pass also because, during his 15 year mandate, he never approved a waste disposal and treatment plan that took into consideration the possibility to enact a policy aimed at reducing waste production, but rather presented the incinerators as the single and ultimate solution. Somebody suspected that there was no interest in reducing the production of waste because this would have made more incinerators unnecessary; these facilities are notoriously owned by big business, funded and subsidized by government money. If the plan had been approved it would have included some more general concern about how to deal with the overall waste treatment problem. If a plan that included a waste reduction policy had been proposed, part of the opposition might have accepted a compromise, i.e. one or two incinerators to face the emergency, but no more waste growth or, even worse, no import of waste to burn for money from other areas thanks to an exceeding capacity of the incinerators built. The incinerator’s constructors and the Governor preferred the very arrogant strategy to avoid any planning and to push instead for having more waste and more incinerators because they were confident they would win council approval. In this case the Governor’s strategy failed, but the consequence is that now there is neither a waste reduction plan, nor incinerators and there are not even grounds for a compromise.

The waste treatment problem is similar to the traffic problem. The strategy I propose is not expected to work on the whole mobility system, but just on a portion of it, perhaps 10% that can realistically and immediately be managed. With this 10% quota, we can likely intervene to control mobility inflation. Doing so, we can change expectations, which are a major factor in traffic and economic behavior and are now featured to generate an untamed growth. If we expect that the solution to our mobility problem will be the construction of a new road, we are likely to buy a new car and a new and less expensive house, no matter how far it is from our job. Knowing this, the business community will invest in road and car/bus/rail construction and in scattered land use developments, such as shopping centers that are absurdly located where jackrabbits live rather than where people live, as Gottlieb wittily argued (2007). On the other hand, if we expect that the solution to our mobility problem will be more telecommuting, more subsidized loans for housing in high-density areas, fewer taxes for neighborhood retail distribution, and so on, we will make our decisions and organize our lives accordingly.

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