After almost 40 years of building our world-leading interstate system, many people started to realize that this excess of people driving alone at rush hour created a whole lot of air pollution and congestion. Some busy cities were seeing their air fill up with nasty pollution and smog from tailpipe emissions, and their roads were choked with traffic several hours a day.

After the environmental disasters of the 60′s and 70′s helped catalyze the movement to clean up our air and water, Congress declared clean air a national priority in the 1970s and Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. On the transportation side, in the transportation bill written in 1991, Congress created a new program called the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program (CMAQ), dedicated solely to helping communities deal with the negative side effects of over-reliance on major roads for rush-hour travel.

A provision in the House’s transportation bill (H.R. 7) upends that intention by opening that fund to construction of regular highway lanes.

Essentially, the bill’s authors in 1991 recognized that efforts to build our way out of congestion had reached a point of diminishing returns, where each new lane simply invited more cars, leading to more emissions and, ultimately, still more congestion. They decided that it made sense to take a very small slice of transportation dollars to help address and mitigate those problems.

The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program gives states a small pot of funding to help provide other options, promote carpooling, or address other impacts of too many people driving alone at peak hour. Washington, D.C. used some CMAQ funds to kick-start their world class bike sharing program known as Capital Bikeshare, which helps people make short trips throughout the city and part of the region without having to get in a car, a bus or a train. Other cities have used it to fund new transit service in or adjacent to a congested corridor, add new high-occupancy vehicle lanes to provide an option that rewards carpooling on congested roads, or improve the flow of traffic with more intelligent transportation systems.

Some states even give the CMAQ funding directly to their metro areas, because the local leaders in a metro area usually know best how to spend the funds and address their most pressing needs.

Our cities are as congested as they’ve ever been, and though our air is significantly cleaner than it was in the 1970′s thanks in part to cleaner vehicles, it doesn’t make any sense in 2012 for the House bill to “decide” that air pollution and congestion are no longer negative side effects of building new roads, reversing 20 years of stated transportation policy.

Two proposed amendments to HR7 would fix the problems with CMAQ. Amendments 191 and 97, proposed by Reps. Blumenauer and Ellison respectively, would restore the current function of CMAQ to helping reduce exhaust and emissions. And high-occupancy vehicle lanes would once again be the only new eligible road capacity.

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With the House in recess and the Senate poised to pass a bipartisan transportation bill this week, we’ll be taking a longer look at a few other issues with the House transportation bill in the coming days — and how some of those issues can be fixed. Though they may have addressed one issue by restoring dedicated transit funding (reportedly, though not publicly confirmed), there are still other issues that need work to improve the bill and get a bipartisan majority of House members to support it.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Center for Clean Air Policy, titled “Growing Wealthier: Smart Growth, Climate Change and Prosperity.” The findings, released this morning, point to communities that have already improved quality of life and economic growth through increased transportation options and more efficient land use strategies.

The driving force is the pent-up demand for walkable communities better served by public transportation. For decades, the bulk of new housing has sprung up in suburban and exurban cul-de-sacs, accessible only by auto and often requiring long commutes to work and daily activities. Existing zoning, tax incentives and subsidies have heavily favored status-quo development, leaving more sustainable approaches at an unfair advantage.

Building farther and farther out — with the idea of giving more Americans access to a single-family lifestyle — was supposed to make our lives richer, literally and figuratively. But CCAP’s findings indicate otherwise. In fact, the communities that have created opportunities for people to live closer to where they work and utilize new travel options have seen remarkable progress. (This amplifies the Wall Street Journal story from last week about how Generation Y is less and less concerned with big yards and cul-de-sacs far from town than their parents. Could that be driving some of this change? Read that story here.)

In Dallas, Texas, for instance, downtown retail sales rose 33 percent the year after the new light rail system began operation. Portland, Oregon attracted $3.5 billion in private investment after just $100 million in streetcar funding. In Sarasota, Florida, downtown development costs clocked in at just half the cost of new development in the suburbs and generated four times the revenue in tax receipts.

Denver, Colorado perhaps best exemplifies the market for new approaches to growth and transit. Home values for Denver residents within a half-mile radius of the Southeast light rail line increased by 18 percent just as home values in the remainder of Denver declined by 18 percent, between 2006 and 2008. Nationwide, one study found that every one-point increase in a home’s “walk score” — a measure of how accessible the area is by foot — corresponded with a $700 to $3,000 increase in property value. As the report puts it:

The preponderance of the evidence leads us to conclude that smart-growth strategies can help communities, businesses and individuals make money, save money and enhance quality of life.

The TIGER grants program, which awards transportation projects that integrate environmental and economic innovation, is cited by CCAP as a starting point for federal reform. Expanding on the popularity of this important program is a good start toward a more merit-based and comprehensive approach to spending in the next surface transportation bill.

The report was authored by CCAP Transportation Analyst Chuck Kooshian and CCAP Director of Transportation Programs Steve Winkelman.

When we think about our daily commutes to work, walks to the grocery store, or bus rides our kids take to school, there are few things more important than making sure these activities keep us healthy and safe.

After all, the numbers related to these issues are simply staggering — more than 37,000 people killed on our roads in 2008, between $40 and $60 billion in annual health care costs from negative air quality associated with transportation, more than 16 percent of children, and 66 percent of adults, considered overweight or obese due in large part due to a lack of physical activity.

Transportation for America believes that a renewed transportation system must Ensure Safety for All Transportation Users and Improve Public Health Outcomes — a goal that will require some critical changes in the way we approach transportation policy. For that reason, we’ve made it one of six top-line objectives in our Blueprint.

In another post later on this week, we’ll provide you with some of the details for reaching these outcomes; but for now, we wanted to talk about three of our “performance objectives” — measurable outcomes that will come from a new transportation program — that are essential for meeting this goal:

• Triple walking, biking and public transportation usage.
• Improve public safety and lower congestion costs by reducing traffic crashes 50%.
• Achieve zero percent population exposure to at-risk levels of air pollution

Establishing these performance targets in the next transportation bill, and holding states, metro areas, and localities accountable for working towards them, is absolutely critical towards making our roads safer, our air less polluted, and our communities — particularly disadvantages ones — more conducive to healthy activities like walking and biking.

On the surface, it seems slightly obvious to say that if we want to achieve better outcomes, we need to define our goals and make sure that we have a system in place to measure our success. The problem, of course, is that federal policy has never actually established what these goals are.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director American Public Health Association (a T4 coalition member) said in our recent webinar on safety and public health that the next transportation bill presents a “huge opportunity to benefit the public health” with some major reforms. Unfortunately, he added, there is also an opportunity to do nothing, which will end up harming Americans through more vehicular crashes, less active communities, and worsening air quality.

Let’s make sure the next transportation bill helps make Americans safer and healthier. Check back with us later this week to get a look at some of the specific programs and policies related to public health and safety that Transportation for America is recommending be included in the next transportation bill.