Green Vehicles for Public Services: Potential Watershed for Clean Fuel Economy

One day, recently, I saw a fire-engine, crawling its way through a stop light, sirens blaring, hulking its way to provide the noble service of putting out someone’s fire or performing some other rescue operation. It was pouring a dark grey exhaust from one side, looking shiny new and well cared for, but obviously lacking advanced exhaust filtering or clean-energy drive technologies.

Police vehicles, government SUVs, public buses, fire engines and other public service vehicles, could be the great watershed moment required to effect a workable clean energy transition. Their ubiquity would mean that a fleet of high-powered electric vehicles, or alternative fuel or cutting-edge solar-supplemented hybrids, could help spur the development of a clean car infrastructure, with one or more stations in each town.

The US is in the midst of a complex array of government economic recovery outlays, designed to provide incremental support for a reformed energy economy and a more sustainable future, in which environmental degradation, technology breakdown, infrastructure erosion and public health ill-effects, are less of a drain on finances public and private.

Directing some of that clean-energy infrastructure funding to public services related to security —like police and fire departments— could half a multiplier effect, covering several points of needed investment at the same time, killing two or three birds with one stone. That kind of efficient investment could help make the economic recovery plans more far-reaching and more long-lasting. It could also be the best way to finance the desperately needed investment in a clean energy overhaul.

Major cities have experimented with using such vehicle technologies in the city centers to clean the air and reduce pollution-induced respiratory disease. Requiring buses and public service vehicles to reduce harmful emissions to near zero and rewarding private motorists who use fuel-efficient, hybrid or electric vehicles, can dramatically reduce the density of harmful particulate contaminants breathed in by people traveling through or living in major city centers, from London to Athens to Mexico City to Beijing.

But green vehicle technology is not the only way to green public service vehicles. There is also city planning. Use of lightweight rail-based street-car systems, better pedestrian-friendly design elements, and city-wide bicycle circuits, can all help contribute to the greening of a city center and its transport infrastructure. Those elements won’t make the fire engine breathe less toxic exhaust, so a focus on putting new clean-fuel vehicles into circulation is a must.

At a time of economic uncertainty, critics like to say, it’s not helpful to talk about “spending more money”, because there isn’t enough to go around. That’s precisely why this kind of strategy, that combines environmentally helpful spending with public service spending and security spending, to speed an overhaul of the transport infrastructure and the overall fuel economy, is not only smart, but morally and economically necessary.