Transportation For America » Breaking Down the Blueprint: Climate Stability and Environmental Protection

Breaking Down the Blueprint: Climate Stability and Environmental Protection

May 29, 2009
By Stephen Lee Davis

The T4 America Blueprint has six overarching national objectives to provide a new vision and guide our federal transportation policy. If our transportation system is in need of a clear purpose, these six objectives are like the rudder that will steer the ship. To ensure that we can meet these objectives and measure our progress, we created 10 performance targets — clear, quantifiable goals for the next 20 years that are tied directly to the six national objectives.

Ed. note: This is a continuing series of posts breaking down the six objectives in our Route to Reform Blueprint. While we’re trying to explain the Blueprint in simpler terms, it’s a document full of complicated policies geared at Congress and these posts are fairly detailed.

On Wednesday, we looked at the second of our six National Transportation Objectives and two corresponding performance targets. This second objective describes our goal of building a transportation system that protects our communities from pollution, preserves our environment, and helps us protect our climate.

As a refresher:

As we’ve noted in our previous post, transportation comprises 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. Simply put, to address climate change and global warming, we’re going to have to cut carbon emissions from the transportation sector across the board.

We can begin by creating cleaner fuels and using more efficient cars, buses, and trains. In this respect, this week’s announcement by the Obama administration of increased efficiency standards is an important step. But if we expect to reach the widely accepted goal of an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050, we can’t just drive cars that don’t emit as much pollution or get better mileage. We need a transportation policy that helps us drive less, that provides better and cleaner options, that makes it easy for us to walk to the store, and that allows us to live closer to our schools and jobs.

Reducing emissions and pollution from our transportation system is also an important step in making Americans healthier. Today, low-income people are subject to an undue share of the negative effects of our transportation policy; oftentimes, the less money you make the more at-risk you are for asthma and numerous other ailments tied to the quality of our air and water. Transportation for America not only is making environmental protection a goal of our Blueprint, but is also calling for policies that promote environmental justice and help protect at-risk populations.

While the programs throughout the entire Blueprint are geared towards meeting this objective of climate stability and environmental protection, we’re including a few examples of our policies and priorities here to give you a general sense of how we plan to achieve this goal.

Climate and transportation legislation must work together.

As we’ve pointed out, environmental protection and transportation are inextricably tied together. For that reason, Transportation for America believes that revenues raised by cap-and-trade revenue should be reinvested in the kinds of transportation options that will lower emissions from the transportation sector. Our Energy Security for Clean Communities Program calls for the allocation of 10 percent of climate legislation revenue to fund clean transportation investments.

Under this program, 10 percent of climate auction revenues would be allocated to states and regions for the development of plans and strategies to reduce vehicle miles traveled and carbon emissions. For example, if a region determines during their planning process that congestion pricing could help lower their area’s total vehicle miles traveled, they can use money from this program to help fund its implementation. (p.30 in the Blueprint)

Congress must reaffirm its commitment to clean air and clean water.

Congress established CMAQ (Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement) program in 1991 to steer transportation funds to eligible projects that could help specific areas reduce congestion and improve air quality. T4 America believe this program is an essential, and we propose that it be elevated and expanded to allow CMAQ funds to be used in four additional areas: vehicle efficiency, low carbon fuels, VMT reduction (as illustrated in the previous paragraph), and system efficiency improvements. (p.30)

To make our communities more sustainable, we need to link transportation to land use, housing, and other local issues.

T4′s Sustainability Challenge Grants program will provide targeted grants to visionary communities to develop the innovative solutions needed to encourage shifts to cleaner modes, link local planning objectives, and create more sustainable towns and cities. By creating a flexible program that allows funds to be used for these interdisciplinary issues, we believe the next transportation bill can help us take a big step forward in developing broader solutions to issues of transportation, land-use, urban planning, sustainability, and economic growth. (p.42)

Focusing on the best projects to meet the targets, rather than on specific modes

Our current one-size-fits-all system means that transportation problems in rural areas, small towns, or large metropolitan areas often get treated with the same single-minded solutions. To address the vastly different and locally sensitive needs of our communities, Transportation for America is recommending the the creation of Multimodal Access Programs (MAP). This represents a fundamental change in policy in shifting from a modal (roads vs. rails vs. trails etc.) focus, to one where states and regions can choose the solution that will best help them meet the national objectives and performance targets. (p. 33-34)

Funds in this program could be spent on highway, bridge, transit, bicycle, pedestrian and rail projects; but rather than focusing blindly on a specific mode of investment, this program is structured so that states and regions will have to demonstrate that they’re using a diverse package of investments to meet the national performance targets. It would put all the different modes of transportation on an equal footing under one program — and ask states and regions to focus on improving overall access and mobility — rather than pitting them against each other in a zero-sum battle on a tilted playing field.

As we said earlier, these are just a few examples of programs tied to these objectives and targets, and they don’t provide a full picture of how we’ll achieve our climate and environmental protection objective goals. You can read the full Blueprint for more — start on page 65 to get a clear introduction to our performance targets and the rationale behind them — and stay tuned as we continue this series next week.