Fourth in a series
Re “An Early Bus Crisis Confronts the Coalition for Clean Air”
[Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years, Denny Zane, 63-year-old visionary-philosopher-politician-arch activist in Santa Monica, has been in the forefront of shaping and influencing public policy and environment-related projects. This is a first-person account of that journey. Summing up the way he has morphed through a series of (always-linked) career changes, he said: “I got into the habit of making a living by pursuing my personal political priorities.” Now concerned with mass transportation, accent on light rail, his address is movela.com]
At the Coalition for Clean Air, we started to launch a small campaign. I say small because our first effort was going to, then it would have been the Rapid Transit District Board, the Operations Committee board, to urge them not to give up on alternatives, to go back to natural gas, not to go back to diesel.
We rolled out and the information about Pierce Transit in the state of Washington and Sacramento Transit.
On the RTD board at that time was Richard Alatorre, who represented the city of Los Angeles, and on the committee board was a young man named Antonio Villaragosa. He was a member of County Supervisor Gloria Molina’s staff. He was sitting there as her proxy. The actor Ed Begley Jr. came with us, and we had a small crowd of less than a dozen activists. It turned out to be a day when TV cameras were there, and they kind of picked up on our issue.
When we pitched the idea, Antonio picked up the ball. He said, “I find the argument that Los Angeles needs to lead the way on these issues to be very compelling. We know that half the NOx in the South Coast Air Basin are from diesel technologies. We have done a lot to clean up cars and other vehicles, but we have done almost nothing to clean up diesel. And then there is the particulate matter that diesel has.”
At that point in the early 1990s, studies showed increased mortality, earth deaths, from exposure to particulate matter, had not yet been released.
Those studies were not going to come out for a year or two.
So the rap on diesel was heavily about half the NOx in the South Coast Air Basin, nitrogen oxide from diesel technologies. That was the key ingredient to ozone formation.
On that basis, Antonio began to argue we should be investigating natural gas technologies. He convinced Richard Alatorre to go along, and that essentially liberated the members of the RTD staff who were kind of technology visionaries.
Now this committee wanted a full report on these technologies plus the information we had provided on Pierce Transit and Sacramento Transit, to verify that and to give independent judgments about whether natural gas was an option.
When the committee brought it back, the information was compelling. The difficulty was cost of the natural gas technology was greater.
(To be continued)
