How can the proposals in our Blueprint help strengthen the economy and create jobs? As we noted in the last post in this series, making our economy more competitive, increasing workforce development opportunities, and improving the efficiency of our transportation system represents one of our six national objectives that must guide our national transportation program.

As a quick refresher: while many of our 10 performances targets line up with this objective, there are two that we believe are particularly important:

• Reduce delay per capita by 10 percent by 2030
• Lower congestion costs by reducing traffic crashes by 50 percent by 2030.

Meeting these goals won’t be easy — it requires us to rethink how we approach our transportation investments, to create an integrated system that balances investments in highways, public transportation, rail, and walking and biking, and to use state-of-the art technology to manage our existing transportation infrastructure.

To see what programs and policies in our Blueprint will help us reach this objectives, keep on reading below the fold.

Reduce congestion with smarter policies and smarter infrastructure

In some of our earlier posts, we’ve talked about how “intelligent transportation systems” — computerized communications networks that feed through our infrastructure — will be essential to improving our transportation system. To support and bolster these efforts, Transportation for America has proposed a new Smart Communities Innovation Program (page 43 in our Blueprint) which would promote the deployment of efforts like congestion pricing or a driving-tax pilot program to help make our system more efficient without simply building more.

Instead of attempting to solve congestion with the construction of more highways, T4 America is also looking to greatly expand investments in public transportation, walking, and biking — through our Multimodal Access Program (pg. 87) and Major Transit Capital Program (pg. 39) — and shift a portion of our freight from highway to rail through our Green Frieghts and Ports Program (pg. 36).

Finally, while an improved safety program is absolutely critical for reducing deaths and injuries on our roads, it can also play an important role in cutting down on congestion and improving the efficiency of our transportation systems. For this reason, we propose a revitalized federal safety program that holds states accountable for demonstrating measurable reductions in deaths and injuries and invests in safety where it’s needed most, for all users of the transportation system.

Develop our transportation workforce

The transportation sector is a critical contributor to our national economy, employing millions of Americans who build and operate the highways, bridges, and transit systems that keep Americans moving.

Though the transportation bill has often supported hundreds of thousands of jobs by paving the way for construction projects across the country, Transportation for America believes that the next bill must help us train the next generation of workers in the transportation sector and provide economic opportunity to populations underrepresented in the workforce.

While current federal law mandates that 1/2 of 1 percent of transportation funds from five separate programs can be used for training, education and workforce development, T4 America supports raising that ceiling to allow states and metro regions to use as much as 1 percent of all federal transportation dollars for these purposes.

Invest for the future

We don’t need to travel across the world to know that countries like China, Spain, or India are building modern, 21st century rail systems and other large-scale transportation projects — we hear about these stories from our own transportation secretary. If the U.S. expects to create strong local economies and remain competitive in the global economy, we need to think big about our transportation system and jumpstart investment in efficient, technologically-advanced projects of the future.

Transportation for America is supporting two essential programs that will lay the groundwork for these investments: our Intercity Passengers Transportation Program (pg. 35) is designed to give people options for quick and efficient travel between large cities by rail or bus by the year 2050 through investment in the corridors that have the greatest demand for travel.

And our Transportation Projects of National Significance Program (pg. 40) will provide targeted funds for the “mega-projects” that cross regional boundaries and bring truly national benefits without favoring any specific mode of transportation over another. To help fund this program, we support the plans by the Obama administration to create a National Infrastructure Bank, a government-owned corporation that could fund these large-scale projects by leveraging private investment.

We’ll return — other big Capitol Hill news permitting — to our Blueprint later on this week with a look at a new objective. Stay plugged in as we unpack T4′s policies for a renewed transportation system.

When President Dwight Eisenhower laid the groundwork for the interstate highway system in 1956, he understood that an efficient, interconnected, well-functioning transportation system is absolutely essential to building a strong national economy.

A successful transportation system ensures that we arrive to work on time, moves goods quickly and efficiently, and employs millions of Americans in well-paying jobs. With our nation facing some of the greatest challenges in recent history, it’s particularly important that we make the right investments now to promote long-term economic growth for the future.

For this reason, one of our six national transportation objectives is to improve economic competitiveness, transportation system efficiency, and workforce development opportunities.

As we’ve discussed in this ongoing series breaking down the blueprint, our six objectives are tied to 10 performance targets — which should be met by 2030 — to help guide our program into the 21st century. While laying the groundwork for a more efficient and competitive economy through better infrastructure is a complex, multi-faceted goal intertwined with our whole transportation system, we believe that two of our performance targets are particularly relevant to this objective:

Traffic congestion puts a huge burden on our nation’s economy, draining $78 billion in production annually through 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

Those of us who have to deal with mind-numbing commutes every day, or see the impacts of endless pile-ups on the movement of goods and freight, know that these numbers don’t begin to tell half the story. While the federal government has historically focused on solving traffic issues and increasing economic output by simply expanding road capacity — a method proven time and time again to fail — Transportation for America advocates fighting some of the root causes of traffic, like highway crashes caused by a lack of focus and accountability on improving safety, limited capacity for public transportation and rail movement, and subsidization of sprawling, outward development.

Flickr photo originally uploaded by Atwater Village Newbie

Improving our economic performance is also about providing Americans with good-paying, green jobs in the transportation sector. Research from the United States Department of Transportation has shown that each billion of federal dollars invested in transportation creates approximately 34,000 jobs.

Congress and the Obama administration acknowledged the role of transportation projects to create jobs in the federal stimulus and invested more than $45 billion in public transportation, highways, high-speed rail, and walking and biking paths as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

While elected officials have often seen the federal transportation legislation as a “jobs bill,” we believe the next transportation bill needs go beyond the status quo by expanding existing provisions to recruit, train, and retain underrepresented workers in transportation construction. The numbers of women and minorities in transportation construction don’t reflect the percentages of those populations in the workforce at large in most regions of the country. Apart from simply creating jobs, this next bill should help create a more diverse, equitable workforce.

Obviously, improving economic performance and competitiveness goes far beyond making our roads less congested or training our workforce for jobs in transportation. It means creating better technology to make infrastructure more efficient; it means connecting small towns and metro areas through vastly expanded high-speed rail; and it means promoting economic growth in towns and cities by creating incentives for transit-oriented development.

In our next post on the Blueprint, we’ll tell you how some of our proposals can help make our transportation system more efficient and competitive to meet these targets.

In our previous post breaking down the T4 America Blueprint, we discussed our national objective of creating an energy efficient transportation system that boosts our economy and helps America use less oil. Today, we’re going to look at this issue from a slightly different angle, by explaining how we plan to achieve this goal — and measure our success — through strong, accountable reforms.

It may seem obvious that our federal transportation program should encourage less fuel use. Unfortunately, our existing policies do the exact opposite.

Instead of giving Americans options like public transportation, high-speed rail, and walking and biking, federal policy still has a heavy bias towards new road construction, promoting more driving — even as Americans continue to drive less and use transit in record numbers. And while research shows that transferring even a moderate portion of our goods movement from trucks to rail would have a huge impact on our overall fuel use (not to mention congestion), recent federal transportation bills have done nothing to incentivize this smart and essential shift in our freight policy.

To jumpstart the needed transition to an energy-efficient transportation system and a secure economy, Transportation for America has created a road map to reform that includes strong, clear policies and programs that we recommend Congress adopt in the next transportation bill. Continue reading below the fold to learn more about some of the specific policies and programs we’re proposing to lead this transition:

Build our passenger and freight rail networks

Westbound Freight Originally uploaded by Clark Westfield

While the United States has historically lagged behind other countries in its investment in rail systems, T4 America’s Blueprint includes multiple programs to help us create a 21st Century network of passenger and freight rail infrastructure. Our Intercity Passenger Transportation program (page 35 in the Blueprint) would use a competitive grant process to create a passenger rail network to be completed by the year 2030, focusing on establishing connections between the country’s largest towns and cities.

Our Transportation Projects of National Significance program (page 40), echoed in President Obama’s plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, would fund the kinds of large-scale transportation projects that have a national scope and national benefits — but cross jurisdictions or include different modes, resulting in a level of complexity that poses a significant challenge within our current program. Projects of this scope deserve special consideration for federal funding.

This program would give priority to the projects that promote energy security, like passenger and freight rail. Additionally, the Green Freights and Ports program (page 93) would support the transition to a green, energy efficient economy by targeting federal funding to freight investments that will use less fuel and emit fewer pollutants.

Help create walkable, livable communities

Helping Americans drive less isn’t only about giving them better options — it’s also about investing in communities to make them more accessible and give people the choice of living near the office, grocery store, or their children’s school. For this reason, we’re calling for the federal government to create programs that will link up transportation investments with other issues like land use planning, housing, and economic development, (Sustainability Challenge Grants, page 42) and incentivize investment in biking and walking infrastructure (Active Transportation Innovation Program, pg. 42). Additionally, we support setting aside certain federal funds for direct investment in “livable communities” to support investment in transit-oriented development, allowing people to live closer to jobs and public transportation.

In order to ensure that our communities are accessible to transportation users, T4 America  recommends that any federally funded roads should be built as “Complete Streets,” and include accommodations for bikers, pedestrians and people with disabilities, when appropriate.

Revitalize our public transportation systems

Public transportation use saves us about 1.4 billion gallons of fuel per year, according to the American Public Transportation Association. In the next transportation bill, we are fighting to get rid of the modal silos that separate funding for public transportation from spending on roads and bridges, freeing up localities, regions, and states from inflexible federal mandates to spend money on specific modes, allowing them to decide which type of investment best suits their needs for mobility.

Our Multimodal Access Program (page 87) — which breaks down into categories geographically, instead of by mode — will give communities expanded opportunities to expand their transit capacity while increasing the overall pot of money available for these investments. For significant new investments in transit, Transportation for America supports creating a Major Transit Capital program (page 39) that would create a streamlined federal review process, thereby making it much easier for local and regional governments to get federal approval for new transit projects — compared with the long, uphill battle they often face now to build transit projects.

In November 2008, President Obama described America’s dependence on oil as resembling a “shock and trance” cycle. Our growing demand for foreign oil, he said, creates skyrocketing energy prices, leading to dramatic calls for energy independence and sudden cutbacks in our consumption that quickly dissipate once the price of oil drops — beginning the cycle all over again.

Transportation for America believes that the push to make our country less dependent on oil begins with a smarter, cleaner transportation system, and for this reason we’ve made one our top national transportation objectives to promote energy efficiency and achieve energy security.

While we’ll talk later this week about the programs in our Blueprint that help us reduce our dependence on oil, we wanted to explain today why we have this national objective, why our transportation system has such deep effects on our country’s energy consumption, and what performance targets are linked to this goal. As you’ll recall from the previous posts in this series, our 10 performance targets are measurable goals that will help us ensure that we achieve our objectives. While nearly all of these performance targets are important to create a more energy-secure economy, we are including two here that are particularly critical as we look towards this goal:

The transportation sector is, simply put, a massive engine behind our addiction to oil.

Each second, our transportation sector burns through 6,300 gallons of oil and produces more CO2 emissions that any nation’s entire economy except China’s. A full two-thirds of the oil consumed in the United States is used for our transportation system, and 40 percent is used to fill up gasoline tanks in our personal vehicles. Our economy is responsible for nearly 25 percent of oil consumption globally, despite the fact that we have less than three percent of the world’s oil reserves.

Click to enlarge. Reducing how much we have to drive is a popular idea.

The president made big news last week when he declared new federal fuel standards, mandating that new cars must have an average fuel economy of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. But as many experts have told us, creating a more fuel-efficient, energy secure country does not revolve only around cars that use less gasoline. Extensive research has shown that unless we actually reduce driving by shifting to more fuel-efficient modes of transportation and meeting the pent-up consumer demand for more accessible, walkable communities, we’ll completely wipe out any gains we see from driving more fuel efficient cars and continue on the exact same energy-dependent path.

While few of us spend a lot of time thinking about how our goods movement is tied to energy efficiency, this sector of our transportation system is a critical component in our push for energy security. Trucks currently use 27 gallons of fuel for each ton of freight moved from coast to coast; at the same time, bringing the same ton of freight buy rail only uses seven gallons of fuel. And as you may have seen in their commercials for freightrailworks.org, 1 gallon of gasoline can move a ton of freight 436 miles by rail. Transferring a mere 10 percent of freight currently moved by truck to our railways would save more than one billion gallons of fuel per year.

Click to enlarge. Where we live and its impact on the cost of transportation.

As we’ve noted many times on this blog, reducing total miles traveled in automobiles is an essential part of this equation. Thanks to the automobile dependence required in many areas and the high cost of gasoline, families living in areas where the only option is to drive spend a full quarter of their income on transportation, nearly three times the percentage for people with good access to public transportation. (See graphic at right)

Americans are already changing their driving habits, supporting investment in rail, and expressing their desire to live in walkable, accessible neighborhoods. But in order to tap into these shifting preferences in our transportation policy, Transportation for America believes the federal government needs to make bold changes and targeted investments in the modern infrastructure that will make us more energy independent.

To get the details, come back later this week and see some of the specific policies and proposals included in our Blueprint that will help our transportation system achieve this goal.

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.

As we’ve discussed here before, our Blueprint has six overarching national objectives, which we believe should provide a vision for the future and a guide for our federal transportation policy. One of the biggest criticisms leveled at our country’s transportation spending is that there are no clear goals for what the money should accomplish. Therefore, T4 America is looking to define a clear purpose for our system — and these six objectives are like the rudder to 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. (You can see the two that most directly link in with this objective at the top of this post.)

Our country needs a transportation system that keeps our air clean, helps us fight climate change, and protects all Americans — no matter who they are or where they live — from dangerous environmental pollution. Unfortunately, our existing policies — which subsidize sprawling development and foster dependence on automobiles — have made protecting our environment and our communities an increasingly challenging task.

Thirty percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States comes from transportation, which produces more CO2 than any other country’s entire economy, save China. And while policymakers in Congress have mandated increased fuel efficiency for automakers in order to help reduce emissions, the sheer growth in the number of miles Americans drive — and lack of other viable transportation options — threatens to overwhelm these benefits.

As we described in our previous post on public health and safety, pollution from automobiles and other sources can have devastating effects on people’s health, particularly in the poorer or impoverished communities that often bear the brunt of these negative impacts.

In order to guide our transportation program and help create a safer, cleaner, and healthier system, Transportation for America believes in that we should strive to meet these two performance measures:

1. Reduce transportation-generated carbon dioxide levels by 40%.
2. Achieve zero percent exposure to at-risk levels of air pollution.

To achieve these goals, we’re going to need some real reforms, direct accountability, and a strong commitment to a 21st transportation system. This commitment must include the construction of the second half of our transportation network — including public transportation, bike and pedestrians paths, and high-speed rail — a stronger linkage between transportation and land use policies, and repairs and maintenance on our existing infrastructure to help Americans save time, money and fuel. Investing in the transportation systems that emit less pollution while moving people more efficiently will help us reach these ambitious targets.

To get a better idea of how we plan to enact these reforms, check back later this week when we dive into the specific policies and proposals that T4 America is supporting — and see how an improved transportation system can protect our environment, fight climate change, and foster healthy, clean, pollution-free communities.

Earlier this week, we talked with you about Transportation for America’s national objective for a healthier, safer transportation system, and showed you the performance targets needed to measure our progress towards these goals.

Today, we’d like to talk about just how we hope to reach these goals through some of the policies and reforms that we propose in our Blueprint.

As some of you probably know, trying to understand federal transportation, and the programs, funding mechanisms, and institutional structures behind it, is no day at the beach — these policy details are complex, confusing, and sometimes, pretty boring. In an effort to create a more coherent national vision for our transportation system, T4 America has drafted a simple and clear set of targets and programs in our Blueprint, which we believe can serve as a more accessible guide for the future of transportation policy.

While the programs throughout the entire Blueprint encourage and incentivize investment in safer roads for all users, more walkable, bikeable communities, and cleaner air, we thought we’d focus here on a couple policies and priorities that exemplify our commitment to improving safety and public health.

• Continuing our commitment to reducing deaths and injuries: The last transportation bill, 2005′s SAFETEA-LU, placed a heavy focus on improving safety, and required the creation of detailed plans from state departments of transportation for reducing deaths and injuries. Despite these requirements, we have yet to see clear results and improvements in public safety (Highway deaths have hovered around 42,000 each year this decade, until the plunging economy that resulted in decreased driving lowered them to 37,000 in 2008.) The federal government needs to exert clear leadership in the next transportation bill by holding states and metro areas accountable for showing measurable improvements, and drafting laws at the national level — for example, a freeze on truck size and weights — that will prevent any backsliding on safety issues.

• Encouraging active communities T4 America is supporting direct, targeted investment in our towns and cities to help communities complete walking and bicycling networks, shift a portion of trips to these active modes of transportation, and support a more active, healthy populace. We’re also calling for the creation of complete streets by recommending that all new construction of federally-funded roads included accommodations for all users, including pedestrians, cyclists, and people with disabilities.

• Prioritizing safety where its most needed The Safe Routes to School Program, which provides our kids with active, safe ways to get to and from school through walking and biking, and is an incredibly valuable tool; for that reason, we believe the federal government needs to ramp up its commitment to this program. In order to provide safe options for older drivers and pedestrians, we’re also supporting a strong federal investment in efforts that will make our transportation system safer and more secure for these users.

For those of you who want more details on these issues, check out our Blueprint in full. For the rest of you, be sure to check back next week as we continue to explore the other reforms that Transportation for America is calling for to create 21st Century transportation system!

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.

Last week, the Transportation for America campaign took a huge step by releasing The Route to Reform: Blueprint for a 21st Century Transportation Policy, a comprehensive, detailed set of recommendations for Congress and the Obama administration as they lay the groundwork for the upcoming transportation bill.

Since then, we’ve held a big event on Capitol Hill to highlight our proposals, influenced an important new bill being proposed in the Senate, and continued to pressure Congress to follow the Blueprint’s recommendations and craft a transformational, 21st century transportation bill.

Of course, all the work we’re doing to promote this document is probably making you ask one critical question about the Blueprint — just what does it say? While we’ve posted the Blueprint in its entirety on our website, we don’t expect everyone to comb through all 100 pages or memorize each and every idea we have for building a better system.

For that reason, we’ll be unpacking the Blueprint in the coming weeks in a continuing series of posts highlighting the vision, objectives, and program recommendations that T4 America has drafted to guide Congress as it works on the legislation to steer transportation policy in the United States. Whether you consider yourself a die hard transportation nut, or just someone who is sick of getting stuck in stop-and-go traffic each morning on the way to work, these blog posts can help you understand the key reforms that underline our vision for a brighter future.

We’ll start tomorrow morning by going over the first — and arguably, one of the most important — of our six broad objectives: the need to make our transportation system safe for everyone and beneficial for public health.

Check back tomorrow, and in the coming weeks, to get a clear sense of our solutions for creating a safer, more accessible, cheaper, and cleaner transportation system.