Green Labor Journal - Working for a Substainable Future

Clean Transporation Creates Good Jobs

Success stories: Portland streetcars, UPS hybrid-electric vehicles and Los Angeles' clean ports program.  The Apollo Alliance is developing a Transportation Action Manufactuing Plan - a national strategy to build a clean transporation system and to create quality, high-paying manufacturing jobs

 

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In the coming year, Congress will likely pass a national transportation bill – legislation that comes up only about once every six years. The bill presents a unique opportunity to reexamine U.S. transportation policy—which hasn’t been seriously altered since the passage of the Federal Highway Act of 1956—with an eye toward the twin goals of cleaner transportation and good jobs.

A new transportation policy that builds a more sustainable transportation system through investments in public transit and energy-reducing transportation infrastructure will create millions of jobs throughout the economy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, health-threatening air pollution, and our dependence on foreign oil.

Done right, these investments will also create hundreds of thousands of new jobs manufacturing public transit buses, rail cars, clean trucks, and other systems and component parts.

To determine how best to support the creation of U.S. jobs manufacturing rail vehicles, energy efficient buses, clean trucks and their component parts, the Apollo Alliance convened a task force comprised of representatives of businesses, including Alstom, New Flyer and United Streetcar; labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, United Steelworkers and United Auto Workers; transportation advocacy groups, including Transportation for America and the American Public Transportation Association; environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council; and academics, including Joan Fitzgerald of Northeastern University and Jonathan Feldman of Stockholm University; among many others.

Based on feedback from this diverse group, the Apollo Alliance is developing a Transportation Manufacturing Action Plan (TMAP) – a national strategy to leverage federal investments in building a cleaner transportation system to create quality, high-paying manufacturing jobs.

Clean Transportation, Good Jobs Success Stories
Even in the absence of national clean transportation policies, a number of success stories that show how clean transportation can create good jobs are unfolding around the country. Below are just a few examples.

American-made streetcars: Portland company rebuilds lost industry

United Streetcar, a union company in Portland, Ore., and wholly owned subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works, has built the first American-made streetcar in over half a century. United Streetcar already has a deal in place to build thirteen of its streetcars for the cities of Portland and Tucson, Ariz.

The initial streetcar was unveiled in July 2009 in a ceremony attended by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who called Portland the transportation, streetcar and livable communitycapital of the United States. “I believe this is the dawn of a new era for public transportation in the United States,” said LaHood. “A new opportunity to claim ‘Made in America.’ It’s a chance to generate good-paying union jobs right here in the region.”

United Streetcar, LLC was formed in 2005 after Chandra Brown, the company’s president and a vice president at parent company Oregon Iron Works, made the startling discovery while talking to friends that modern streetcars were not manufactured in the United States – or at least not by American companies – and hadn’t been for 58 years. Given the variety of complex products that Oregon Iron Works has manufactured since 1944, Brown was sure that the company could handle streetcars as well.

United Steetcar’s product is truly American-made. To meet “Buy America” requirements, at least 60 percent of the components had to be domestically produced by American companies.

Brown says that United Streetcar’s product is approximately 70-percent U.S.-made, with components coming from vendors in more than 20 states. The steel streetcar shell was fabricated in Portland; a company in Pennsylvania finished the trucks; a company just down the freeway from Portland provided the fiberglass; and the seats came from Michigan.

One part of the streetcar that is not American-made is the propulsion system, because currently there is no domestic manufacturer of streetcar propulsion systems. But this will soon change. In April, United Streetcar and the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon received a $2.4 million Federal Transit Administration grant to work with Rockwell Automation to develop a domestically produced streetcar propulsion system.

Once an American propulsion system is ready for order, the content of United Streetcars vehicles will be 90 percent U.S.-made.

“Instead of outsourcing jobs, we are ‘insourcing’ jobs, bringing them back to the States,” Brown said. “This is key to keeping Portland’s manufacturing industry thriving, as well as promoting American-made products.”

UPS: A Pioneer in Hybrid-Electric Vehicles 

What if a delivery company could reduce air pollution by taking 100 trucks off the road, create good jobs for Americans, and deliver packages to your door just as fast as before? The United Parcel Service (UPS) is doing just that, thanks to its growing fleet of hybrid-electric delivery trucks.

In 1998, UPS tested its first hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV). By 2007, the company had put 50 HEV delivery trucks into service in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix. In the spring of 2010, 200 new HEVs hit the streets in seven major cities across the United States.

Compared to conventional trucks, UPS’s 250 HEV trucks save 220,000 gallons of fuel annually, resulting in an emissions reduction of more than two metric tons of CO2 each year. This is the equivalent of removing nearly 100 conventional vehicles from the road.

UPS’s hybrid trucks are made in America, providing the good manufacturing jobs that Americans need. Freightliner Custom Chassis Corporation builds the trucks in Gaffney, South Carolina. Pennsylvania-based Eaton Corporation provides the hybrid power system and lithium-ion battery.

The trucks are then fully assembled at Utilimaster Corporation’s plant in Indiana. Investment in advanced clean truck technologies like HEVs not only creates manufacturing jobs throughout the supply chain, but also creates jobs in other sectors, from engineering and software design to maintenance.

UPS supports good jobs for all of its employees, including its HEV drivers. UPS truck drivers are members of the Teamsters union and earn an average wage of more than $40 per hour, including benefits.

According to Teamster spokesperson Leigh Strope, “UPS is not only reducing emissions through its hybrid truck program, but…also creating good jobs for thousands of Teamster members nationwide.”
 
The hybrid-electric trucks represent only a fraction of UPS’s diverse portfolio of more $15 million in investments in alternative-fuel technology. Its entire alternative-fuel fleet consists of more than 2,000 vehicles that use technologies such as compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, propane, and hydraulic-hybrid drive systems.

In time, UPS hopes that other companies will start making similar investments in hybrid and alternative-fuel trucks in order to increase research and development in the area and generate enough demand to achieve economies of scale.

Los Angeles Clean Ports Program Benefits Environment, Workers and Local Community

Up until 2008, diesel exhaust pollution from trucks and other vehicles at the Port of Los Angeles was so severe that it threatened the health of local residents as well as truck drivers.

But, thanks to the adoption of a visionary Clean Air Action Plan in late 2006 and the hard work of the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, an alliance of labor unions, environmental organizations and community groups, the Port of L.A. can now boast that it has the most successful clean truck program in the country.

As Fred Potter, a vice president at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, testified to Congress in May, “The results are undeniable. The Port of Los Angeles’ comprehensive Clean Truck Program is the only approach that has transformed a local port fleet, bringing thousands of brand new cleaner trucks into service, and simultaneously lifting drivers’ economic circumstances up.”

The Los Angeles Port’s Clean Truck Program uses a combination of regulations and incentives to gradually phase out older, polluting trucks with newer trucks that meet more stringent emission standards. Since implementation began in October 2008, more than 6,600 clean trucks are in operation at the port, including at least 600 natural gas, electric and hybrid trucks.

Upgrading the truck fleet will reduce diesel particulate matter emitted by trucks at the port by at least 30 tons per year, the equivalent of removing nearly 250,000 automobiles from Southern California highways.

According to John Holmes, deputy executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, polluting emissions have already been reduced by 70 percent since the program began.

In addition to these environmental and health benefits, the Clean Truck Program has also created a new, expanded market for cleaner truck technologies. The Clean Truck Program provided more than $56 million in incentive payments to licensed motor carriers to help them purchase new and alternative fuel trucks, which has leveraged more than $600 million in private investment by trucking companies.

With truck sales down by 60 percent nationwide in 2009, the Clean Truck Program enabled truck dealers near the Port of L.A. to see their business go up by one-third.

Recognizing that port truck drivers, who mostly work as independent contractors, would not be able to afford retrofitting or replacing their trucks, the program funnels grants through trucking companies and encourages them to bring drivers on as employees. As employees, drivers earn better wages and are eligible for benefits provided for under Federal and State law, including unemployment insurance, workers compensation, Social Security and worker safety protections.

Unfortunately, the ongoing success of the Port of Los Angeles Clean Truck Program is in jeopardy. Without clarification regarding state and local entities’ jurisdiction to regulate trucking companies, successful clean truck and good jobs programs like the L.A. Port model may be stopped short of full implementation.

U.S. Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY) is expected to introduce legislation this summer that would amend the Federal Motor Carrier Act to allow the port of Los Angeles and other major ports to implement environmental and job quality standards like those included in the Clean Trucks Program.

This article was written by Andrea Buffa, Erik Lyon and Jacob Wheller. To learn more about the Apollo Alliance’s Transportation Manufacturing Action Plan, stay tuned to www.apolloalliance.org.

American Made Streetcars photo courtesy United Streetcar

UPS Electric Hybrid Truck photo courtesy UPS

Los Angeles Clean Ports photo courtesy Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports