Baltimore’s New Parking Perks Show Promise and Perils of Hybrid Incentives

Baltimore is catching hybrid incentive fever, but confusion still abounds on emissions.  According to the Baltimore Sun, on Monday, October 31, a new program will provide hybrid owners substantial discounts on monthly parking permits at 15 different locations around the city, including parking in special first floor spots.  Right now, Baltimore notes that they have only 17 hybrids registered for these permits; its goal is to get 200 in this first round of incentives.  You can check out the full list of locations in our incentives section.

On a good note, the city has chosen the three most fuel-efficient models on the market—the Honda Insight, Honda Civic Hybrid, and Toyota Prius—to be the only models to qualify for this incentive at this time.  The rationale, however, was a bit confusing.  Cindy Parker, a Prius owner and a board member of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, got it right:

"Encouraging people to move away from fossil fuels needs to be done with a combination of incentives and disincentives," said Cindy Parker, who owns a 2004 Toyota Prius, one of three models covered under the program. "The more incentives the better."

More fuel economy equals less dependence on foreign oil.  On the more confused side comes this from the mayor’s spokesman, Derek Slap:

"It's worth doing whatever we can to improve air quality," said Slap, who said one reason the city launched the program was to curb high asthma rates.

Okay, here we go again.  While there is certainly growing evidence linking global warming pollution with asthma, what Slap was probably referring to is smog-forming emissions.  And as we’ve said before on HybridBlog, hybrids give automakers the opportunity to combine fuel efficiency and low smog-forming emissions into one package, but manufacturers have to make that choice.  The model year 2005 and older Civic Hybrids with lean-burn engines and manual transmission Insights available in Maryland rate only a 2 out of 10 on the EPA’s smog-forming emissions scale.  While Honda’s 2006 Civics are all a sparkling 9.5 on emissions, the Baltimore incentive does not limit the perk to the ’06 model, and the manual Insight has not been cleaned up.  So some fuel-efficient, but high-emissions vehicles are going to be given this “air quality” perk.

I make this distinction not to chide Baltimore for their efforts, but as an important reminder that we need to understand the opportunities and limits of hybrid technologies, and not see anything with the “hybrid” label as a silver bullet for oil dependence or air pollution issues.  Incentives, just like smart hybrid buyers, should help push manufacturers to bring the most efficient, least polluting vehicles to the market.  Sacrificing emissions for improved fuel economy, or sacrificing improved fuel economy for a boost in power, are unneeded tradeoffs that harm the long-term value, and credibility of the hybrid market.

Posted by: ScottN

Comments

[altfuels]

This post points out that policymakers appear to be unaware that some hybrids, including models with the highest fuel economy, are among the dirtiest vehicles that are actually legal to sell in 2005. As I pointed out (at great length...) in a comment on a July posting to HybridBlog ( http://hybridblog.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/hybrid_incentiv.html#comments ), of greater concern in the long term is that automakers are succeeding in their efforts to sow confusion about the tailpipe and "indirect emissions" (from fuel refining and transportation) of even relatively clean non-grid-connected hybrids (i.e., those that you can't plug in) as compared with real alternative-fuel vehicles (i.e., those that can run without gasoline or diesel). As can be seen in table 9-3 of a 2000 California Air Resources Board staff report ( http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/zevprog/2000review/staffreportfinal.pdf ), a battery electric vehicle, or the electricity-using portion of a plug-in hybrid's driving, is ten or twenty times cleaner than even the cleanest gasoline vehicles, whether (non-grid-connectable) hybrid or not.

I agree with "ScottN" that hybrids provide a good opportunity (if automakers would only make use of it!) to combine high fuel economy, relatively low emissions of smog-forming and toxic pollutants, and the convenience of using the existing gasoline infrastructure. However, as the number of vehicle miles driven per year inexorably increases, hybrids will only allow us to tread water; even if the entire fleet changed to (non-"hollow") hybrids, we'd still be importing as much oil or more in just a couple of decades, long before hydrogen vehicles have any chance of making a noticeable dent in petroleum use (if they ever will), and we'll still be struggling to meet air-quality standards. Displacing petroleum with electricity in the transportation market solves both problems.

Since most driving, like politics, is local, a grid-connected hybrid would be able to do most of its driving on electricity, and battery electric vehicles could handle a large majority of daily commute/errand driving for those who don't feel the need for the "security blanket" of a hybrid's gasoline capability (or get a lithium-ion AC Propulsion special if you feel the need to drive 300 miles on a charge). But automakers, as I pointed out in that long comment in July, are doing their best to spin hybrids as being "good enough" (that is, when they aren't bad-mouthing hybrids in favor of promises of hydrogen vehicles) so that we don't need those icky, inconvenient alternative fuels like natural gas and electricity. Every hybrid ad or website prominently features the statement "you never have to plug it in," or in the case of the Civic hybrid, "you never, ever have to plug it in," which doesn't bode well for plug-in hybrids from major automakers; can you see them changing their pitch to "well, you don't have to plug it in, but you can if you want to run cheaper and cleaner, and by the way, that's not a bad thing despite what we've been saying for a decade and a half"? HybridBlog itself has contributed to the denigration of electric transportation: in the very first post ( http://hybridblog.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/04/welcome_to_the_.html ), the very first words "Don" wrote are "no, you don't have to plug a hybrid into the wall," and later he says "and, no, really, really—you don’t need to plug it in. I swear." As if that was a bad thing!

So while we need to be on guard against letting automakers get away with saying that "hollow", or dirty or otherwise sub-optimal, hybrids are "good enough," I'd say that in the long run worse damage will be done if the "good" becomes the enemy of the "best" and hybrids, even clean and efficient ones, are used as an excuse to push non-petroleum-powered vehicles out of the market.

Clear skies--
--Mark Looper
www.altfuels.org

[Nathan - 4 Easy Ways To Prevent Global Warming]

I'm all for government policies that encourage people to be more ecological, but when the policies get this specific I think they do more harm than good in the long run.

What we really want is for people to put less harmful emissions into the atmosphere, not to drive hybrids. Hybrids are just one way of trying to achieve the goal of less harmful emissions.

However, it may turn out that in the future there are better options than hybrids, but hybrids will be getting the government policy breaks, so people may continue to use hybrids when other options come along that are actually better.

[microsoft]

People are less moral than 30 years ago

[john]

Water pollution is the World's biggest problem today