Electric vehicles will be a big part of stopping global warming, but you don’t have to buy an EV. We will stop global warming by stopping burning fossil fuels: gasoline, natural gas, coal, diesel and other petroleum products. Our electricity will switch over to hydro, wind and solar. Snohomish County PUD already reports our electricity is over 96% renewable, but SnoPUD can’t help you if you burn gasoline, so you need to stop burning gasoline on your own. That does not mean you need to get an EV. The light rail is electric. Sound Transit and Community Transit are switching to electric buses. You can stop burning gasoline by riding public transit.
Once you get used to it, public transit is better than cars for many trips. On my last vacation, we enjoyed going everywhere on buses. We got to relax and watch the world go by. Rick Steves recommends this kind of travel: “I tell people: You could have your own limo parked outside of your hotel, but I’d rather have a transit pass.”
You have a choice about how you commute. You can sit behind the wheel of a car, vigilantly avoiding getting killed in high-speed, stop-and-go, rush-hour traffic, or you can sit on a bus and read a book, listen to a podcast, watch a movie, answer email or play games.
There are also health benefits. Riding public transit gets you walking. Walking at least 8,000 steps every day reduces the risk of seriously bad health by more than 40%. The average American walks too little: about 3,500 steps per day. The average public transit rider walks almost 2,000 more steps each commute day.
Another concern is what will be affordable. The Washington State Department of Transportation estimates that the average car in Washington costs about $9,200 each year for loan payments, depreciation, maintenance and repairs. That is before you pay for gasoline. The most expensive Orca unlimited transit pass costs $2,268 a year. After the new federal tariffs transform our economy, you may find you want to get rid of your car, ride the bus and hold on to the savings.
Pointers
Community Transit and Sound Transit provide instructions for riding buses and the light rail. Here are more pointers about switching to public transit.
Plan Your Route with Google Maps
The easiest way to plan your trip is with Google Maps. Get directions, and select the “Public Transport” option.
The initial setting is for leaving right away. If you’re planning to leave later, click on the “Leave” button and set the time and day to when you want to leave. Set the “Leave” option to “Arrive” to get a plan that delivers you where you need to be by the time you need to be there.
You can use Google Maps anywhere: in Edmonds, Lynnwood, Olympia, Chicago or Tokyo.
Get an Orca Card
An Orca card can be used on almost all public transit in the Puget Sound region. It’s a lot easier than fishing for change as you board the bus. I put credit on my card that pays for each ride as it comes up. If you ride a lot, an unlimited pass might work better for you.
Get Lyft or Uber on Your Phone
Lyft and Uber work well as fallbacks if something comes up on your transit ride. My son once found himself out after the last bus home. It was no problem. $15 delivered him safely home on Lyft.
If you have never ridden Lyft or Uber, take a first ride to get familiar with it.
Bring a Cellphone, Book, Magazine or Laptop
The bus takes longer (and saves you parking fees), but you end up with more time to live your life rather than stare at the brake lights of the driver in front of you. Bring a book. Download a book on tape to your cellphone.
Dress with Layers and a Backpack
Weather in the Puget Sound can change a lot within hours. You don’t want to go to work without a jacket and then freeze on your way home.
Bring a backpack. That’s where you stash your extra layers and book.
Prepare Your Fitness
Transit riding increases how much exercise you get and improves your fitness. It’s uncomfortable to change how much exercise you get. Sports science recommends increasing your exercise gradually and gently. If you have any worries about walking another mile each day, track your steps and ramp them up slowly. Whenever you increase your exercise, it’s a good idea to check in with your doctor and be safe.
Enjoy!
Happy riding!
Nick Maxwell is a certified climate action planner at Climate Protection NW, teaches about climate protection at the Creative Retirement Institute and serves on the Edmonds Planning Board.
You made the statement. “We will stop global warming by stopping burning fossil fuels.” I wonder how you can make that statement? Can you prove the earth will stop warming once we do? My vague understanding is we have been warming since the end of the last ice age I see nothing that indicates it won’t continue to warm. I wonder what we will do when the planet decides it wants to cool and we start another ice age do you have a answer for that? I have heard suggestion that by ending our burning of fossil fuels that might trigger a ice age. I wonder what is better for our country global warming or being covered in a sheet of ice? I did try to take the light rail but it didn’t run early enough. But I doubt that saved much cause I took a long flight isn’t that like driving a car for a year? And then on a giant ship, I think that was like driving a car for 4 years. Rick Steves says we should travel so I guess it is ok.
To Our Fellow Edmonds Community Members;
We’re reaching out as concerned residents of Dayton Street regarding the recent addition of a bus route through our residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, this decision was made without any advance notice or input from the homeowners directly affected.
What’s most concerning is that this route runs directly past the Frances Anderson Center, where children are regularly dropped off for daycare and hundreds more gather for sports and recreation on the adjacent playfields. Adding a high-traffic bus route in such a critical area for children’s safety, is a serious oversight and raises real safety concerns.
Since its implementation, we’ve observed buses frequently traveling up and down our street—often completely empty or carrying just one or two passengers. Extension buses also pass through several times a day, similarly underutilized. The noise and frequency of these large vehicles have become a major disruption to the peaceful nature of our neighborhood.
While we strongly support accessible and effective public transportation, this particular route appears to lack both efficiency and community need. It feels like a misuse of public funds and a disruption with little benefit in return.
We believe it’s possible to support transit solutions that serve our city without compromising the safety and livability of our neighborhoods. We welcome open dialogue with fellow residents and city officials to explore better alternatives.
On MyEdmondsNews, the boldfaced blue text provides links you can click on to learn more.
In the case of “We will stop global warming by stopping burning fossil fuels”, the word “stopping” is in boldface blue. If you click on that boldface blue “stopping”, it takes you to an recent review article that I recommend to anyone who would like to learn more about why we need to focus on stopping burning fossil fuels.
I don’t know what you have been seeing about past global temperatures. You may have seen that the Earth heats up and cools down to create ice ages about every 100,000 years.
If you think the ice age cycle is the same thing as the human-caused global warming we’re suffering now, you’re mixing up two different things. The fossil-fuel-caused global warming we’re doing now lifted global temperatures 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per year over the last 100 years. The Ice age cycle lifted temperatures about 0.0006 degrees per year (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ice-age-temperature-science-how-cold-180975674/). 0.3 is very different from 0.0006. They are not caused by the same thing. 0.0006 would not be hard to deal with.
I clicked the link read the whole thing and not one mention of global warming being stopped. So again I ask how? Certainly we can slow down man’s contribution to warming but there is no evidence the planet will stop warming although the rate may slow. 2024 record emissions 2025 expect higher emissions, global economic and population growth are expected to continue going up and so will emissions for some years to come. We had a great trip thanks for asking one of the highlights was a stop at the mercury and apollo space memorial park where my children and grandchildren got to see their grandfathers name on both displays and also whitness a SpaceX launch.. couldn’t of done it without fossil fuels society as we know it today wouldn’t exist without fossil fuels strange how you want to punish the businesses that have given you/us the world we have today
The first mention is in the first paragraph of the Introduction: “In the 1950s and ’60s, scientists were alerting the public, and the fossil fuel industry itself, that fossil fuel use causes anthropogenic climate change”.
Maybe this helps: “anthropogenic” means “human caused”. “climate change” is global warming
Here’s the link again: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/5/1/kgaf011/8099165?login=false
To the writer…I suspect you have a typo somewhere when you say global temps have risen “0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per year over the last 100 years”. That equals 30 degrees Fahrenheit since 100 years ago? I’ll ask my mother about this, she turns 105 this summer and hopefully will remember if temperatures were 30 degrees colder when she was a kindergartner.
As far as riding transit goes, I’d like to see a calculation of the carbon footprint per actual rider. Be sure to include all the empty or near empty busses we see continually around here. My opinion is we’d be much better off to keep the busses parked and plant as many trees as possible…trees actually remove carbon from the atmosphere versus busses which don’t.
You are correct. 0.03 degrees.
When the buses are all electric and the electricity generation is renewable, the carbon footprint will be zero.
If you are still driving a gasoline car at that point, you will be contributing to the problem when you could have stopped.
Sorry about the typo.
As far as public transit goes, I agree with you, John, that money would be better spent and the climate somewhat cooler if empty or near empty public transit vehicles were out of service. As an occasional user, my sense is that such vehicles following a dependable schedule will attract travelers more than ones with haphazard timetables. Let me point out that I am a person who argued that bicycles will come to Edmonds (their riders will spend money here) in greater numbers with bike lanes painted on some roadways. I now see more of them. Likewise, I believe we will see more riders once the public transit system is reliable. The Light Rail is operational. There is more need for bus service to and from its stations. Our public transit system is becoming more comprehensive, dependable and, very importantly, safe. The system must find a way to ensure the safety of the bus drivers! There are transit security personnel very visibly present on the trains and at the stations.
Thank you Nick for explaining the difference between the global warming since the Industrial Age and the changes that have occurred in the past millions of years.
I cannot predict the future. There may be a number of volcanic explosions like Krakatoa in Indonesia that will darken and cool the earth. The earth could be hit by a meteor large enough to alter the climate. Absent unpredictable events, I choose to follow science, which has proven beyond doubt that human activity (burning of fossil fuels and deforestation) is warming Earth’s climate. With the caveat of unpredictable events like those stated above, I agree with Nick’s assertion that humans can stop the continued warming of Earth’s climate.
I will add another aspect of public transit that relates to the dynamic of human interaction, which Nick did not mention. One will encounter commuting workers and the homeless, the well-clothed and the tattered, the talkative and unfriendly, the loud and those asleep, ones who willingly give up their seat or help as needed, and those who ignore. You participate in travel with those who live in your vicinity. The upside is that it will give you a greater understanding of those who ride public transit. In the future if a bus starts a route in your neighborhood, hopefully it will be electric, thus quieter and filled with people you understand why they use it.
That’s a really great point, Michael: Public transit is a chance to get out of the small circle of folks in your bubble.
I find it interesting and worrisome that clean, reliable, non-polluting, nuclear energy is never or rarely mentioned. It’s not clear why this is so since nuclear energy is the most effective, dependable, and safe form of energy available to us at present.
It’s a really good question. I looked into nuclear, including interviewing several Hanford nuclear engineers.
I think it’s a good idea to leave our nuclear power plants (that have not aged past their design limits) going until their electricity generation is replaced with solar. Building new plants seems like a mistake.
In addition to other problems, we have no good disposal for the used uranium from fission plants. We mine all that uranium up, destroying natural lands and their wildlife, and then we create toxic radioactive waste that cannot be recycled except as bombs, and our “disposal” strategy is to put it in barrels in a back room at the power plant.
We did create the WIPP site in New Mexico, but that has a big problem, and it’s full now anyway.
The big problem with WIPP is that engineers found they could drop the barrels in massive salt deposits. (This is what I’m told by engineers who were involved.) The barrels would sink out of reach of any human ever. The Department of Defense nixed the project, explaining, “That’s our nuclear waste. We need it to make bombs.”
Nuclear bombs are not for killing soldiers. They are for killing citizens, including children. WIPP was developed with elevators to retrieve the waste for bomb making. That is not OK. Nuclear waste is not OK.
Thank you for your comments, however there are several issues I would like to contest.
First, nuclear waste CAN be recycled and reused. The French, who have used nuclear reactors for approximately 85% of their energy needs for years, do recycle nuclear waste; we do not. This greatly reduces the need for mining and disposing of uranium. This technology is also evolving and will undoubtedly improve causing even less environmental impact.
In contrast, solar “farms”, as seen in Arizona and especially in California, cover many thousands of acres and kill millions of desert creatures and plants annually. The windmills similarly kill millions of birds each year, including protected species. Also, the mining of lithium and other metals necessary for electric batteries, also create toxic wastes and despoiling of the local ecosystems.
Finally, storing of nuclear wastes has improved with technologies, such as vitrification (making them into stable glass), is improving the problem of disposal of spent nuclear fuel.
Wind and solar energy sounds great but is unreliable and, in many parts of the world, useless.
The issue of nuclear weapons is beyond the scope of this discussion which is about safe, reliable, clean nuclear energy
It looks like the recycling of radioactive nuclear waste is still in development.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/nuclear-waste-recycling
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-can-nuclear-waste-recycled-stored-1628903
It’s a real thing, and might eventually be something that nuclear power plants do in the U.S. All sorts of things may appear in the future. Someday we might have fission reactors. That’s why physics departments in U.S. universities have to be well funded. While the researchers work out the kinks, the rest of us need to get on with things.
The Hanford nuclear engineers I spoke with thought the idea of dropping radioactive nuclear waste into vats of molten glass was so awful as to be hilarious. They joked, “What could possibly go wrong?”
Wouldn’t it be nice if the issue of dropping bombs to kill civilians would just go away, both instantly and with prolonged suffering of radiation sickness? That would be nice.
Plus riding light rail and transit is just plain fun as well as the cheapest way to go. I’ve been using them to get to and from the Sea Tac airport a bunch this winter. On my last trip North from Sea Tac an obvious Drag Queen got on wearing full costume (or not so full costume actually) at Federal Way and got off at Capitol Hill. Quite a contrast to another couple of “oldies” and I with our little suitcases. The other notable passengers on that run were a young pregnant couple who stood up, making out constantly from Rainer Beach clear to Northgate. Where else can you get entertainment like that and a ride from the airport for about $2.00. I knew my transit district lic. tab fees would pay big returns someday.
Yes! That too!