Burned by a reporter
Yesterday, Robert Scott of CTV came to The Suite for an interview on a proposal going to Edmonton City Council to prohibit the construction of new drive-through restaurants in our city.
I’m enthused about the idea, not just for its environmental benefits (which I’ll go into shortly) but because it demonstrates the critical role municipalities play in shaping human behavior and the environmental impacts arising from it. The structure of the built environment changes the behavior of the people who live in that structure.
Before the invention of the drive-through restaurant, we had the drive-in.
The drive-in was built so that customers drove onto the site, parked, turned off their engines, and were served food in the auto-centric confines of their own vehicles, for whatever pleasures this might afford.
But the complete replacement of the drive-in with the drive-through (this is the case in Edmonton) has induced a different behavior among Edmonton’s driving population: more idling. While waiting for an ExtraValue Meal or a large double-double, drivers sit in line, their engines running, sometimes in a line so long it creates mini-grid lock traffic jams in the strip mall parking lots. It’s an object lesson in how the people who design the shape and use of space dictate how the people who live in a space will behave.
I should know better than to try to say something like this in a television interview. None of this got into the story that aired last night.
I also like the idea for the environmental benefits, which are difficult to envision. How bad can ten minutes of idling your car possibly be?
Well, it’s like this:
Idling your average North American car for ten minutes while waiting for your cup of coffee burns 3.3 ounces of gasoline, which adds 10-cents to the sticker price of your coffee (at Edmonton retail prices).
That probably doesn’t sound like much. I’m sure a lot of Albertans will pay 10-cents for the convenience of not having to get out of their cars.
But that 3.3 ounces of carbon-rich gasoline, combusting with atmospheric oxygen, creates 269 grams of carbon dioxide. If CO2 were visibly solid rather than invisibly gaseous, it would look like four and a half candy bars dropping out of the tailpipes of every single car lined up at every Wendy’s, MacDonald’s, and Tim Horton’s in the city.
People are dumping a load of carbon into the atmosphere for the added benefit of being able to sit in a line of cars at a drive through rather than stand in a line of people at a counter.
[At this point, insert the latest climate change related horror story. The last one I’ve heard is the dying coral reefs.]
I thought that the 4.5 Mars bars would drive the wastefulness point home, but the reporter must have thought that my pouring 3.3 ounces of coffee into a measuring cup was more visually interesting, and edited the story so that my only comment is that people are wasting 10-cents worth of gas every time they line up at a drive-through. And looking out my window this morning at a -29C Canadian winter’s day, lots of people are thinking that’s a fine price.
Burned.
I’m enthused about the idea, not just for its environmental benefits (which I’ll go into shortly) but because it demonstrates the critical role municipalities play in shaping human behavior and the environmental impacts arising from it. The structure of the built environment changes the behavior of the people who live in that structure.
Before the invention of the drive-through restaurant, we had the drive-in.
The drive-in was built so that customers drove onto the site, parked, turned off their engines, and were served food in the auto-centric confines of their own vehicles, for whatever pleasures this might afford.
But the complete replacement of the drive-in with the drive-through (this is the case in Edmonton) has induced a different behavior among Edmonton’s driving population: more idling. While waiting for an ExtraValue Meal or a large double-double, drivers sit in line, their engines running, sometimes in a line so long it creates mini-grid lock traffic jams in the strip mall parking lots. It’s an object lesson in how the people who design the shape and use of space dictate how the people who live in a space will behave.
I should know better than to try to say something like this in a television interview. None of this got into the story that aired last night.
I also like the idea for the environmental benefits, which are difficult to envision. How bad can ten minutes of idling your car possibly be?
Well, it’s like this:
Idling your average North American car for ten minutes while waiting for your cup of coffee burns 3.3 ounces of gasoline, which adds 10-cents to the sticker price of your coffee (at Edmonton retail prices).
That probably doesn’t sound like much. I’m sure a lot of Albertans will pay 10-cents for the convenience of not having to get out of their cars.
But that 3.3 ounces of carbon-rich gasoline, combusting with atmospheric oxygen, creates 269 grams of carbon dioxide. If CO2 were visibly solid rather than invisibly gaseous, it would look like four and a half candy bars dropping out of the tailpipes of every single car lined up at every Wendy’s, MacDonald’s, and Tim Horton’s in the city.
People are dumping a load of carbon into the atmosphere for the added benefit of being able to sit in a line of cars at a drive through rather than stand in a line of people at a counter.
[At this point, insert the latest climate change related horror story. The last one I’ve heard is the dying coral reefs.]
I thought that the 4.5 Mars bars would drive the wastefulness point home, but the reporter must have thought that my pouring 3.3 ounces of coffee into a measuring cup was more visually interesting, and edited the story so that my only comment is that people are wasting 10-cents worth of gas every time they line up at a drive-through. And looking out my window this morning at a -29C Canadian winter’s day, lots of people are thinking that’s a fine price.
Burned.