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A Day With Less Driving

Marc Silver, Jun 7,2010, National Geographic

Can one day of eco-commuting make a difference? Pittsburgh is the case study. Compare the typical workday breakdown for the city and its metropolitan area with a hypothetical green day.

What if commuters were to cut back on driving for just one day? That’s not the kind of sweeping change environmental advocates urge. But it seems doable. And there is an ongoing effort to encourage one-day vacations from Earth-unfriendly activities. The big question: Would a day of less driving make any significant difference? To find out, National Geographic asked Luke Tonachel, vehicles analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, to crunch numbers for a big American city. He picked Pittsburgh, which has good commuting data, and projected modest changes. He filled empty mass-transit seats but added no new buses to the fleet and doubled carpooling from 9 to 18 percent of commuters, with a carpool defined as two people. He also factored in a jump in “eco-driving.” The stats are in. The drop in greenhouse gases for the “what if” day in Pittsburgh would equal taking 370 cars off the world’s roads for a year. And cars would burn 213,700 fewer gallons of gas. At $2.50 a gallon, that’s $534,250 in Pittsburghers’ pockets.

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