Decreasing The Use Of Personal Vehicles To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Gas emissions are today’s leading cause of global warming. The future is currently not foreseeable without the devastating effects of today’s absentminded lifestyles, and therefore, governments are beginning to place an emphasis on how to reduce these emissions. This brings into question whether or not Toronto authorities should be striving to enforce the decrease in use of personal vehicles; the answer is yes. A recent paper by Seth Wynes and colleagues conveys that in a typical North American household, personal vehicle use accounts for 26% of a household’s total greenhouse gas emissions. In specific, the average person will emit 2.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide gas a year, multiplied by the millions of people that work and commute to the major urban areas that are Toronto and Mississauga. Evidently, personal vehicle use should not be discredited by the government for its carbon emission contributions as it accounts for such a large amount of pollution every day.

The effect of using a more environmentally-friendly form of transport has been statistically shown to result in drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In a study performed by Sukor and his colleagues, 176 students selected from 48 different secondary schools were required to monitor their normal travel patterns for a week — all of which were by the use of a personal vehicle. Then, for another seven days, they were told to take the public transport. For both weeks they were required to record their route, car model and transport times so that Sukor and his colleagues could calculate the mass of carbon emissions while factoring in distance, gas efficiency, and traffic. The calculations implicate that the carbon emissions from personal vehicles in a day are twice the amount emitted from the public transport. With this data it is apparent that enforcing Toronto and Mississauga citizens to use another method of transport would have significant, positive effects on the environment. In opposition, the research of Babayev and Johansson imposes that the other methods of travel such as cycling, walking, or running, would take a lot of physical energy. Due to this physically taxing commute, it would require more food to account for this loss of energy. Depending on an individual’s diet, the consumption of this food accounts for the greenhouse gas emissions of agricultural processes. Through computer-generated calculations, they propose that one person walking to work is equivalent to a person driving an electronic car, and a person running would produce 43% more carbon dioxide gas than this. It was found that the threshold where cars become a better option in terms of carbon emissions is when there are three or more persons commuting.

Theoretically, these implications seem valid and reasonable, but ideally, they do not have many realistic applications for citizens of the Greater Toronto Area; most employees are not going to run to work, and walking could be too far. Therefore, the current stance that reducing the use of personal vehicles will have large effects is still predominant. A more challenging opposition to this idea comes from a simulation that theoretically calculated transit scenarios; it suggests that even with new transit investments, there would be no significant greenhouse gas reductions. However, the researchers have acknowledged their simulator’s limitations which could have possibly accounted for the data results; there was no consideration for off-peak travel times, bus lanes, traffic, etc. Although this simulation seems plausible, a simulator has less validity than data that has been collected from already past events; this includes the concrete evidence mentioned before that using the transit would reduce carbon emissions by half. Overall, the evidence currently collected suggests that reducing the use of private vehicles in Toronto and Mississauga would in fact be a worthwhile implementation for significantly reducing the city’s carbon footprint. As of right now, eliminating the luxury of car ownership seems restrictive and unlikely, but looking towards the future, it is necessary. A possible option to compromise would be to require a pollution permit — households would have to get a permit for a certain amount of pollution a year; this way, people would be encouraged to use other methods of transportation, could occasionally use their personal vehicles, all while ensuring a more environmentally conscious future.