green urbanism

By staff - Morning Star, April 12, 2023

UNION leaders are calling for new investment to meet net-zero targets, saying it would create high-quality jobs in transport and manufacturing.

The TUC has set out an investment plan for public transport across England and Wales, arguing it would improve quality of life and boost the economy.

The union organisation says its proposals fill a gaping hole in the government’s recently published net-zero strategy, which it claims fails to explain how it will achieve a shift away from car use.

The TUC says its plan would require an average of £9.9 billion in annual capital expenditure up to 2035.

Extra operating costs for expanded bus, tram and rail services would reach £18.8bn a year by 2030, its report, published today, says.

The plan is estimated to boost annual economic growth by £52.1bn by 2030 through productivity gains, creating 140,000 jobs in the bus, tram, and rail sectors.

A further 830,000 jobs would be created in manufacturing, construction, and infrastructure for buses and trams up to 2035, says the TUC.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “Everyone knows that we have to cut carbon emissions and that switching to public transport is a big part of how do it.

“Investing in public transport will help us meet net-zero targets and reduce the threat of catastrophic climate change, and it creates jobs throughout England and Wales, boosts the economy in every community and improves everyone’s quality of life.

“Commuters will have faster and cheaper journeys to work. New connections will bring new businesses to places where people need economic opportunities.

“We will save lives with cleaner air, and we will reduce loneliness and isolation by making everyone better connected, wherever you live.

“With this report, we’ve done the work that Conservative ministers should have done with their empty and incompetent net-zero strategy.”

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch, who will be speaking at the launch of the report today, said it shows that investing in public transport is vital for fighting climate change and delivering significant economic and social benefits.

He said: “This report shows that there is an alternative where we can expand and invest in our transport infrastructure.

“It is therefore vital that bus and rail services all run as a public service under a public ownership model which is free from profit-hungry multimillion-pound private companies.”

By staff - National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), April 12, 2023

RMT responds to TUC transport and climate change report.

Responding to the TUC Public Transport for the Climate Emergency report, RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: "This is a welcome report that shows investing in public transport is not only vital for fighting climate change but that it will deliver significant economic and social benefits for everyone.

"The government - in league with private transport operators, are ideologically committed to securing the maximum profit for shareholders. This approach is leading to the managed decline of rail and bus services across the country.

"This report shows that there is an alternative where we can expand and invest in our transport infrastructure. This will create thousands of jobs in across every region of England and Wales, helping build strong local economies and at the same time, secure an environmentally sustainable future.

"It is therefore vital that bus and rail services all run as public service under a public ownership model which is free from profit hungry multimillion pound private companies."

The full report can be viewed here.

By Liz Blackshaw; Gareth Forest; Kamaljeet Gill, et. al. - Trades Union Congress (TUC), April 11, 2023

Public transport has a vital role to play in decarbonising our economy and safeguarding a planet fit for our children and grandchildren to live in. Improving our public transport is not only about protecting our environment, it’s also about the quality of life in communities all over England and Wales.

Decent public transport is essential for access to work across the economy, it also means that grandparents get to see their grandkids, and working parents get home earlier to spend time with their children, we call get to share in culture and entertainment. It means that teenagers can get to school and adult learners can access training that can transform lives. It means people on low incomes can visit town centre shops, and businesses can get the customers they need to reinvigorate local economies.

For too long, people have had to put up with inadequate services. All too often, buses are expensive and infrequent, with routes that get cut because the private providers are driven more by private profit than by a public service ethos. Train services are expensive and chaotic, with services frequently delayed – when they’re not cancelled at short notice due to staffing levels cut to the bone and maintenance services outsourced and short-staffed. The transport workforce has suffered alongside passengers. Years of frozen pay and attacks on terms and conditions are a poor reward for those on the frontline during the pandemic.

Public transport fit for the climate emergency sets out a plan for the investment in public transport throughout England and Wales that has long been needed. From town and cities, to villages and rural communities, this plan would mean more services, new routes, cheaper fares and modern fleets of low emission vehicles. This radical transformation must be funded by central government and delivered by local and regional transport authorities. And we should all get a say on the transport needs where we live and how this investment is allocated.

Passengers, local communities, and transport workers should all be consulted on public transport improvement plans where they live and work.

The investment proposed by this report would achieve the transition to low-carbon transport needed to honour our climate action agreements with the rest of the world. It would generate green and sustainable economic growth in regions across England and Wales. And it would directly create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the transport sector, plus many more in construction and manufacturing supply chains. As well as cheaper, more extensive and reliable buses, trams and trains, we would have cleaner air to breath. And the roads would be less congested for all road users.

To make sure that every community benefits as fully as possible, with ongoing investment and the best value fares, our public transport should be publicly owned.

The climate emergency means we must act. But the benefits of affordable, reliable and extensive public transport are so great that we should want to anyway – for the lower cost of living and higher quality of life it will bring. This report lays out the blueprint for 21st century public transport, all that’s left is to build it.

Download a copy of this publication here (link).

By staff - Greener Jobs Alliance, March 8, 2023

This Blog contains a number of statements and briefings on the Ultra Low Emissions Zone extension.

• Editor’s view (pers cap)
• Health impacts of Polluted Air in Outer London – Imperial College
• Mum’s for Lungs view
• Trade Union Clean Air Network (TUCAN) statement
• Friends of the Earth Briefing
• The truth about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods – Possible

Making Positive Demands to clean up our air and cut car dependence

Anyone who watched the London Mayor’s Question Time from Ealing last week will not have missed the atmosphere of fear and loathing that make this issue almost as toxic as the air we breathe.

There are four overlapping imperatives when dealing with transport in cities.

That greenhouse gas emissions from transport are a quarter of the UK’s total and have not declined for ten years because, while car engines have become more efficient, more people are driving them, and the models they are driving are heavier. This has to be cut hard and fast to allow us to survive as a society.

People have to get around and, overall, cars are becoming more of a problem than a solution. If the 40% of people in London who don’t have cars did, no one would be able to get anywhere; because the streets would be gridlocked. The individual “aspiration” to own a car becomes socially dystopian if universally realised. For freer flowing, quieter, safer streets, we need fewer cars and fewer car journeys. We will have less of a need to travel inconvenient distances if we enrich our immediate neighbourhoods. 

We need cleaner air for our health and life expectancy. 90% of people want it. Some people drive. Everybody breathes. 

Some people are locked into car use, because they can’t afford to live near work and need concrete affordable alternatives as they are understandably anxious about how they are going to cope.

By Aghilah Nadaraj, Asli Mwaafrika, Najari Smith, Marion Gee, and Keenan Rhodes - Climate Justice Alliance, January 25, 2023

By Beli Acharya, Andreas Cluver, Bill Whitney, and Danny Bernardini - Construction Trades Workforce Initiative (CTWI), January 12, 2023

Alameda, Contra Costa and Napa-Solano Building & Construction Trades Councils (BTC) and Construction Trades Workforce Initiative (CTWI) respectfully submits our comments in response to the California Energy Commission (CEC) Equitable Building Decarbonization Program Request for Information (RFI).

CTWI is the nonprofit partner of the East Bay Building Trades, working to ensure the long term sustainability of the construction industry by bridging the gap between union construction labor and key stakeholders. The three BTC’s together represent a coalition of over 30 affiliated unions representing workers in various construction trades throughout the East Bay. Together, CTWI and the three BTC’s act as the collective voice of construction trade labor.

We support equitable efforts toward decarbonization and climate sustainability, and we believe the California Energy Commission (CEC) initiative to develop and implement an Equitable Building Decarbonization Program is a great opportunity to advance these shared goals. We appreciate the opportunity to submit comments for consideration.

It is important that equity be considered for all stakeholders involved in the program. We believe that decarbonization work and climate sustainability can be achieved in a manner that allows for everyone to be better off and collectively prosper. There is a clear emphasis in the program on equity for low-to-moderate-income residents and ensuring that the program is accessible to these residents. There must also be a clear emphasis on equity for the low-to-moderate-income workers who will be performing the work and labor involved in the program. The jobs created and utilized by the program should be quality, high road jobs available to local and disadvantaged residents.

By Zully Juarez - Just Solutions Collective, December 2022

By Alison Wishart - Overland, June 23, 2022

On 13 August 2021, the Geographical Names Board officially approved Bayside Council’s request to rename Eastlakes Reserve as Jack Mundey Reserve. Mundey was neither a local resident, councillor nor mayor. Yet sixty years ago, he led a movement that saved these four acres of land as a park for the local people.

The reserve, situated within the centre of a new housing development christened ‘Eastlakes’ (a much more appealing name than ‘Botany Swamps’, as it was previously known) is used for recreation, exercise and community events. To understand how Mundey—a rugby player, labourer and communist who left school at the age of fourteen—came to be honoured in this way, we need to go back to 1961.

Jack Mundey Reserve was once part of the much larger Rosebery Racecourse. In 1961, Sydney Turf Club contracted L.J. Hooker Real Estate to sell the racecourse to the highest bidder. The sales brochure proclaimed that this 56.5 acre site was just ‘four miles from the heart of the city’; ‘perfectly cleared and level’ and ready for development. In characteristic sales hyperbole, the brochure confidently declared that ‘without a doubt, it was this century’s greatest opportunity for developers and investors.’

Despite the sales pitch, the land was passed in at auction on 26 September 1961. Sydney Turf Club negotiated with the highest bidder and signed a contract for Rosebery Development Corporation, a subsidiary of Parkes Development, to purchase the site for £450,000 (£75,000 below the reserve price). Six acres on the eastern and western edges of the racecourse were reserved for the Housing Commission of NSW and not included in the sale. Harry Seidler, the famous modernist architect, would design the housing commission unit block on Maloney Avenue.

By Paul Prescod - Jacobin, March 1, 2022

Labor leader Tony Mazzocchi believed unions could inspire their members to engage in a broader political movement of working people. His Local 149 did just that in the 1950s — and in a suburban environment where no one thought it possible.

There’s no denying that strong labor movements often thrive in urban centers. The organization of capitalist production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while heavily exploitative of workers, also created the conditions for robust forms of worker organization. Being densely packed in cities that were relatively close to their workplaces allowed industrial workers to form deep bonds of solidarity with each other. Apart from the shop floor, these workers were likely to also interact with each other in other social spaces common to cities.

But how does the labor movement fare in the suburbs? Traditionally, the suburbs are thought of as bastions of conservatism, where workers go to become atomized consumers free from the common public spaces that feed solidaristic action.

Indeed, the business class has long believed this. While commentators often examine the offshoring of manufacturing jobs, not nearly as many focus on the relocation of urban jobs to the suburbs. This process was already well underway in the 1950s and ’60s.

Despite the very real challenges that suburbanization present, the labor movement cannot resign itself to the impossibility of maintaining strong unionism in the suburbs. History can serve as inspiration here.

In the early 1950s, the Helena Rubinstein women’s cosmetics plant was moved from Queens to the leafy suburbs of Long Island. Tony Mazzocchi was president of the union representing its workers: Local 149 of United Gas, Coke, and Chemical Workers’ Union (Gas-Coke). While today Mazzocchi — whose life is chronicled in Les Leopold’s excellent book The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi — is known in labor circles for his pioneering work in the realm of workplace health and safety, he cut his teeth building in the heart of the suburbs one of the most well-organized, militant, and effective union locals in the country — “a vibrant ‘city-style’ union smack in the middle of all those boxy little houses,” Leopold writes.

In the fifth chapter of his book, Leopold tells the story of the new Rubinstein plant, located in Long Island’s North Shore, a beautiful setting that seemed to make worker discontent impossible — not just because of its geographic setting, which seemed to discourage aggressive trade unionism, but also the times. Red-baiting within the labor movement was at its peak in the early 1950s, and Gas-Coke had experienced purges of leftists already in the late 1940s. But the overwhelming anti-communism still could not eliminate all residues of good trade union culture.

By Yonah Freemark, Billy Fleming, Caitlin McCoy, Rennie Meyers, Thea Riofrancos, Xan Lillehei, and Daniel Aldana Cohen - Climate and Community Project, February 2022

The transportation system is the connective tissue that transforms pockets of communities into a networked society. It links home, school, work, and play. It drives economic growth, social mobility, and employment opportunities. 

The transportation sector currently emits more carbon pollution than any other sector in the US economy. The automobiles we drive, the trucks, trains, and ships that deliver our goods, the airline flights we take, and other transportation activities account for about 28 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. The passage of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is replete with new funding for state and local highway expansion, and seems likely to further exacerbate the sector’s emissions. More than 120 years after electric vehicles briefly achieved popularity in the 1900s, petroleum products still power over 91 percent of today’s transportation system. Americans collectively drive more than three trillion vehicle miles per year, most of those as a single driver in an automobile. Life in the United States is organized around personal automobiles powered by petroleum. For a Green New Deal in transportation to be possible, that has to change. A climate-safe future requires a swift and just decarbonization of the transportation sector, a major expansion of public and active transportation, and the parallel decarbonization of the electricity sector.

Transportation often exacerbates social inequity and racial injustice within and between communities. Its infrastructure speeds the movement of those who are better off, to the detriment of those who are most in need. In far too many communities, governments, planners, and engineers prioritize vehicles over people and efficiency in travel time at the cost of quality of life. Choices made by elected officials and transportation agencies about how funds are allocated at the federal, state, and local levels have played a major role in reinforcing these outcomes over the past century.

In 2021, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – the centerpiece of President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework. It provides substantial new funds for intra-city public transit, intercity passenger rail, and new electric vehicle charging infrastructure. It also includes $7.5 billion in new discretionary funding for innovative transit projects in the RAISE program (formerly BUILD and TIGER), along with new incentives for roadway repair and maintenance. However, the bill also allocates $350 billion towards new road and highway projects that will be administered by state and local departments of transportation. Much of this funding is likely to be spent on highway expansion projects. In short, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is poised to invest in a small number of innovative, low-carbon public transit projects alongside a massive new investment in roads and highways – locking in higher emissions for the sector than those that predated the bill. In other words, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act could invest dramatically more on highway expansion than on innovative, low-carbon public transit projects. That dynamic has to change.

In this report, we propose a series of critical opportunities for new transportation-related policies to improve equal access, mobility, and opportunity in our transportation system, reduce emissions, support global climate cooperation, and develop long-lasting infrastructure and workforce development strategies on a changing planet. We argue for a move away from past policies that encouraged the release of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants while furthering social inequity. Crucially, this report aims to shift the conversation surrounding the transportation sector and decarbonization from focusing exclusively on electric vehicles and high-speed rail to addressing the many disparate parts of America’s transportation system. This includes a focus on intra- and intercity rail in addition to high-speed rail; an approach to electric vehicles that pairs supply-side policies (e.g. manufacturing tax credits) with a more progressive demand-side approach that benefits low and middle-income households with few public transit options instead of wealthy, coastal city residents who tend to purchase high-end luxury electric vehicles (e.g. Tesla).

Instead, the transportation system should be viewed as a strategic lever for investing in good-paying low-carbon jobs, justice, and a decarbonized economy. We build on the important progress Congress members have made through their introduction of bills such as the Moving Forward Act to identify a series of policies that would further that ambition.

Read the text (PDF).