Boston Globe profiles TravelMatters
Mac Daniel of the Boston Globe, in his Starts & Stops column on Sunday, February 1, 2004, pointed readers to TravelMatters.org as a “pollution solution”, using the Individual Calculator to see what sort of impact his Toyota Corolla and other travel choices were having on the environment. “Pretty interesting,” Daniel admits, after discovering how a direct flight across the country caused his monthly CO2 emissions to skyrocket …
Pollution solution?
So you’re environmentally curious and want to figure out what you are contributing to the nasty carbon dioxide emissions that are filling the air. You should check out travelmatters.org, an emissions calculator created by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology. The calculator, a project overseen by the Transportation Research Board and the National Academy of Sciences, uses your monthly mileage, use of public transportation, airline miles traveled, and even bike miles ridden to come up with a fairly accurate calculation of what you’re belching into the atmosphere.
If you’re really intrigued, you can save your profile and monitor it over time, either individually or as a group. Public transit agencies can also use it to monitor the impact that route or technology changes will have on overall emissions.
The calculator has you identify the area in which you live, the vehicle you drive, the number of miles you drive per month, and the type of traffic you drive in to begin the process. The next page includes the number of miles you traveled by bus per month, the type of fuel those buses used, and any other miles traveled on public transit.
Then there’s a page for airline travel which really burps pollutants.
In the end, with no airline travel last month, our Toyota Corolla basically burned five 20 pound bags of charcoal, which would require 59 sugar maple trees to offset or scrub away the impact of our emissions. When we added an imaginary direct flight from Boston to San Francisco, the numbers skyrocketed to 51 bags of charcoal and 588 sugar maples. Pretty interesting.
“We think it’s very powerful to make information available to people,” said Sharon Feigon, research and development manager for the Center for Neighborhood Technology. “We really don’t understand the impact we have on the environment and the big difference we can make by just making a few changes in our life.”
