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The infrastructure law is not climate legislation, but states could make it green

A man observes a stretch of Dock Street in Annapolis, Md., that flooded after the area received over three quarters of an inch of rain in 24 hours on Jan. 25, 2010.
A man observes a stretch of Dock Street in Annapolis, Md., that flooded after the area received over three quarters of an inch of rain in 24 hours on Jan. 25, 2010.
On Jan. 10, 2015, Dock Street in Annapolis, MD flooded after receiving over three quarters of an inch of rain in 24 hours. Flickr photo by Matt Roth/Chesapeake Bay Program

Though distinctly not serious about fighting climate change, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, the infrastructure law) can still help lead to some decent climate outcomes if states and metro areas make the choice to prioritize doing so with their flexible funding.

promo graphic for a guide to the IIJA

This post is part of T4America’s suite of materials explaining the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which governs all federal transportation policy and funding through 2026. What do you need to know about the new infrastructure law? We know that federal transportation policy can be intimidating and confusing. Our hub for the new law will walk you through it, from the basics all the way to more complex details.

The most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change warns us that even with the most aggressive emissions reduction strategies, global warming will more than likely exceed 1.5°C in the near term. So emissions reduction strategies that can prevent even more destructive consequences from greater global warming are urgently needed, but we also need to prepare our communities for the disastrous effects of climate change that are already hitting much of the country. 

That is why this post will focus on how the federal government and its state and local grant recipients can use money from the infrastructure law to:

  1. reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, and
  2. make our transportation infrastructure, especially in our most vulnerable communities, adaptive and resilient to the all-but-inevitable effects of global climate change.

Both of these strategies are essential to reach the Biden administration’s climate goals and save Americans from the worst of climate change.

Emissions reduction

How and where the infrastructure law money is spent will have a massive impact on whether it is able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to the bill’s separate $46+ billion dedicated toward resiliency and new climate-focused programs outlined below, states and metro areas are free to spend much of the law’s $650 billion in surface transportation money on climate-friendly projects like transit, active transportation, or repair, thanks to the broad flexibility built into the law. But it could just as well be spent on expanding roadways, inducing more demand for driving and thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions. 

It all comes down to what states choose to prioritize, and how they direct their money. Here’s what we mean, via two potential future scenarios of IIJA spending, courtesy of the Georgetown Climate Center (GCC):

pie chart graphics
Analysis and chart by the Georgetown Climate Center

In the high-emissions scenario (left), highway expansion outpaces highway repair, encouraging yet more driving and doubling down on a system where a car is required just to participate in the economy. But the low-emissions scenario (right) heavily prioritizes repair and shifts five percent of funds toward transit, providing room for communities to provide for multimodal accessibility and move away from a dependence on cars. (According to the GCC, our recent spending/priorities are somewhere in between these two scenarios.) Both scenarios are legal and valid uses of infrastructure law money, but represent two radically different spending approaches.

But only one of these scenarios will bring a net decrease in transportation emissions:

bar chart graphic element
The change in transportation emissions over the next 20 years, with zero representing the levels we were set to hit without the new infrastructure law. The vertical axis is measured in cumulative million metric tons (MMT) of CO2. Analysis and chart by the Georgetown Climate Center

When one-tenth of a degree of warming could make the difference in extreme weather events, the difference between these two scenarios is massive. Especially when the GCC’s model predicts that the high-emissions scenario would in fact substantially increase emissions above where we would be without the infrastructure law.1

Each of the largest formula grant programs (like the NHPP and STBG) and every other program with broad eligibility can and should be used to reduce emissions by enabling modes of travel other than cars. In fact, most of the infrastructure law’s funding could be marshaled toward either of the scenarios, so we will not list every specific program in this post. Check out our IIJA hub for guides on how to make sure the low-emissions scenario wins out, category by category. But three climate-focused programs are worth noting:

The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement (CMAQ) Program: This formula grant program is funded annually at about $2.6 billion (up from $2.4 billion) and can be used for a wide range of projects that reduce congestion and therefore air quality. The IIJA allows states to spend CMAQ funds for operating public transit and shared micromobility, including bike share and shared scooter systems, as well as for the purchase of medium- or heavy-duty zero emission vehicles and related charging equipment.

The Carbon Reduction Program: States receive more money overall under the IIJA, but this new program requires them to set aside about 2.56 percent of their total apportionment toward reducing transportation emissions. There is a loophole, though: states can redirect this money into their highly flexible STBG funds if the Secretary certifies that the state has reduced transportation emissions on a per capita and per unit of economic output basis. (More about fixing this loophole under “what the administration can do” below.) Of the new carve-out, 65 percent of the program’s funds are to be allocated by population in the state, whereas the remaining 35 percent is at the discretion of states. For areas with populations over 200,000, the metropolitan planning organization (MPO) administers that 65 percent local share of program funding for eligible projects. These can include planning, designing, and building on- and off-road active transportation facilities and improvements to the roadway right-of-way to facilitate reductions in transportation emissions and congestion.

Reduction of Truck Emissions at Port Facilities Program: This new discretionary grant program, funded at $400 million over five years, will be distributed to America’s ports so they can invest in technology and operational efficiencies to reduce emissions from idling trucks. They can also use the money to electrify their operations and conduct the required workforce development and training therein.

Adaptation and resilience

Catastrophic hurricanes, heat waves, flooding, and other extreme weather events devastating American communities have become more frequent due to climate change and will happen more often as global warming worsens. So while we reduce emissions, we must also work to protect people from these events, with a focus on the disproportionate impact of climate-related disasters and public health hazards (like urban heat islands) on marginalized communities. The kinds of adaptation and resilience resources outlined below should focus first and foremost on these communities. The EPA’s action on clean water justice is a good model for environmental justice in climate resilience. 

The National Highway Performance Program (NHPP), which accounts for over half of all Highway Trust Fund formula program spending, expanded its mission to address resilience, clearing the way to use these highway dollars to upgrade or repair existing assets to make them more resilient. It is still only an option on a menu of uses, but advocates can now pressure states to use NHPP funding for this newly stated purpose: “mitigate the cost of damages from sea level rise, extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires, or other natural disasters.” 

The most direct funding mechanism for adaptation and resilience is the Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT) Program. Split between competitive and formula grants, the program is designed to help communities anticipate, prepare for, and adapt their transportation systems to natural disasters. The $7.3 billion (over five years) formula portion can be used by states and MPOs to build more resilient roads, transit, or ports, such as through the elevation or hardening of key infrastructure, as well as adjacent infrastructure like flood gates and culverts. The competitive grants, funded at $1.4 billion over the next five years, can be used for many of the same purposes, with more of a focus on access to services and evacuation routes. 

The Healthy Streets Program is a competitive grant program that dedicates $100 million a year (subject to annual appropriations) to address the urban heat island effect. Local, regional, tribal, and state governments can apply for funding to make improvements to tree canopies, porous pavement, and other cooling projects.

Many states like Rhode Island have found federal flood mapping inadequate to capture evolving risk, so the law provides the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with $492 million to develop improved flood mapping and water modeling which could inform critical areas for future resilience investment. This will improve existing resources like the Sea Level Rise Viewer (which you should check out if you have not).

Finally, USDOT will provide for the establishment of 10 regional Centers of Excellence for Resilience and Adaptation and one national Center of Excellence for Resilience and Adaptation, each receiving $5 million annual grants to research resilience and adaptation technology, support data collection, and develop new approaches to keeping our communities safe.

How else could the administration advance our climate goals?

Other than prioritizing projects that do the most to lower emissions when awarding competitive grants, the Biden administration can pull a couple other administrative levers to make sure that federal action is oriented toward a lower-emission future. 

As noted above about the Carbon Reduction Program, the Secretary of Transportation can allow states to divert CRP money to their highly flexible STBG pot, likely resulting in projects that will lead to much higher transportation emissions. So USDOT needs to codify strict guidelines for determining sufficient emissions reductions before allowing states to shift these funds—protecting against a future administration allowing states to fund projects that do not actually lower emissions.

Any efforts to address climate change should focus on those who are and will be most burdened by its effects. Some essential steps include focusing on communities with a history of underinvestment, addressing comorbidities like asthma and heart disease, and accounting for flooding vulnerabilities in marginalized communities (and conversely, climate change-induced gentrification in marginalized communities). The administration should continue to push guidance to include those strategies in formula and discretionary grant distribution.

USDOT should require clearer and more robust data for the public on transportation emissions. For one, induced demand should be included in transportation growth modeling. Also, USDOT should track transportation emissions per capita by state and publish results and trends online. They should include emissions reduction from the system, not just vehicles.

So what?

Many of the Biden administration’s most serious emissions reduction policies were in the (stalled) Build Back Better Act, but the future of that bill is uncertain and advocates should continue to push for emissions-slashing transportation policies not only at the federal level, but state, regional, and local level. 

The infrastructure law largely gives states the flexibility to do what they like with climate-related money. So now, the onus of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and making our communities more resilient falls to states and localities. Whether you are a planner, a legislator, an advocate, or a concerned citizen, now is the time to raise the alarm and make sure infrastructure money is spent in a way that minimizes the impact of climate change on American communities.

The infrastructure law and safety: Will it be able to move the needle?

Image from Vignesh Swaminathan, a keynote speaker at this year’s SGA Equity Summit, of his quick-build bike lanes in Emeryville, California

The new infrastructure law authorizes around $650 billion to fund transportation infrastructure through formula and competitive grant programs, some of which have safety as a core emphasis. Here’s what you need to know about the new money and (modest) policy changes to the safety program, as well as how you can make them work for you.

promo graphic for a guide to the IIJA

This post is part of T4America’s suite of materials explaining the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which governs all federal transportation policy and funding through 2026. What do you need to know about the new infrastructure law? We know that federal transportation policy can be intimidating and confusing. Our hub for the new law will walk you through it, from the basics all the way to more complex details.

Update March 3, 2022: This post was updated to reflect that Safe Routes to School funding is subject to appropriations (see the formula safety programs for details).

We are facing an astonishing safety crisis on our roads. The first nine months of 2021 were the deadliest first nine months of a year on America’s roads since 2006, with an estimated 31,720 fatalities. There’s no reason to think that 2022 won’t continue this same trend, which prompted Secretary Buttigieg to present a National Roadway Safety Strategy to set a goal of zero deaths and end this crisis.2

One reason we are facing this crisis of preventable deaths is that within most transportation agencies, prioritizing vehicle speed over safety for all users is a deeply embedded priority. Our priority is different, and we need to start there if we’re ever going to make good on USDOT’s new stated goal of zero deaths:

The new infrastructure law does include some bright spots for holding states and localities more responsible for improving safety, which we discuss below. But overall, Congress largely decided to uphold the status quo, failing to reorient the giant formula programs around safety. Now it’s up to USDOT to do all they can to prioritize safety within their program guidance and grant programs, and for applicants to submit projects that improve safety.

Note: this explainer and webinar from America Walks is full of practical advice about “how volunteer advocacy groups, or local governments without a full-time planner” can steer these funds into improving safety.

What’s in the law?

The new infrastructure law does include funding for safety improvement projects like road diets and Complete Streets, but these are spoonfuls compared to the giant excavator of overall road funding where safety is just one of many considerations as we illustrated here: 

An excavator digs a massive hole titled "Dangerous Roads $$$". On the other side of the hole, a man tries to fill the hole with a small pile of dirt (labeled "Safety Improvements $." The comic is labeled "U.S. Approach to Road Safety."
This illustration was produced for T4America by visual artist Jean Wei. IG/@weisanboo

The new bill does not reorient the transportation program around safety.  It allows funding to be used to build safer roads but doesn’t require it. Dedicated safety funding remains a relatively minor amount of the entire program. But the new law does make some alterations to safety policy. One is how we measure state performance and then hold them accountable. If 15 percent or more of a state’s fatal crashes involve vulnerable road users (i.e. pedestrians, cyclists), then a minimum of 15 percent of their Highway Safety Improvement (HSIP) dollars must go toward making those vulnerable users safer.

We’re giving states a small amount of money to improve a problem that transportation agencies can continue to create or exacerbate with a much larger amount of money. 

The law also made several other important changes to how USDOT will evaluate safety. It updates standards for the mandatory Highway Safety Plans to change the word for vehicle collisions from “accident” to “crash” (a small but meaningful shift) and to include more public participation and feedback. It updates uniform standards to acknowledge the role of human error in new vehicle technologies. The law allows USDOT to reapportion (i.e., give away) state funding to other states if a state continuously fails to improve their safety outcomes and prevents states from setting worse/lower safety performance targets than the year before. 3

And the law requires USDOT to set minimum performance targets for states in consultation with the Governors Highway Safety Association. This is not an exhaustive list, but overall USDOT does have several more policy levers to create safer roads across the U.S.—if they use their new powers effectively.

Formula safety programs

Program nameAuthorized funding (over five years)Can be used for:Should be used to:
Transportation Alternatives Program$7.2 billion (10% of STBG funding), up from a flat $4.2 billion in the FAST Act, with 41% going to state DOTs and 59% going to MPOs and localities.Projects that promote modes of transportation other than driving, with notable inclusions being anything eligible under the SRTS program and newly defined “vulnerable road user safety assessments”.Make roads safer for all users by planning for and building facilities for walking, biking, and other modes that protect those users from high-speed vehicles.
Safe Routes to School (SRTS) Program$1 million minimum to states by formula (subject to appropriations), based on primary and secondary school enrollment numbers.Active transportation and complete streets projects, plus education or enforcement activities that allow students to walk and bike to school safely.Give students safe, convenient routes to school by prioritizing their travel over the speed of cars.
Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP)$16.8 billion, apportioned to states by formula.Highway safety improvement projects, which are defined very broadly, from rumble strips and widened shoulders to data collection and safety planning.Re-orient highway safety spending toward traffic calming and projects that protect all road users, not just drivers.
Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program$13.2 billionAny transportation project that reduces emissions from vehicles, including micromobility (bike or scooter share) and electric vehicles.Focus emissions mitigation efforts on mode-shift away from driving, not on increasing vehicle speed. Specifically, states and localities should use CMAQ funding for micromobility projects.

Competitive programs applicable to safety

Some of the safety funding in the infrastructure law is split between several programs, many of which are made available directly to states or localities as competitive grants (more here on best practices for applying to those). 

Program nameAuthorized funding (over five years)Can be used for:Should be used to:
Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program$1 billion, subject to annual appropriations of $200 million each year.“Active transportation” projects.Provide safe and integrated road facilities for pedestrians and bicyclists to access community destinations.
Rural Surface Transportation Program$3.25 billion, with $1.5 billion set aside for Appalachian highways.Most projects on rural roads, including projects that protect all road users but also highway projects with adverse effects.Retrofit roadways to serve the community’s road users vs speed.
Safe Streets and Roads for All$6 billionVision Zero plans and implementation projects.Expand upon road diets, sneckdowns, and other treatments to improve vulnerable road user facilities (through directness to destinations, level of comfort, and intersection visibility).
National Infrastructure Project Assistance$60 billionProjects that provide economic, mobility, or safety benefits.Build safety infrastructure to protect all users on highways (like traffic calming) and across highways (like pedestrian bridges that reconnect communities). But those uses are likely to face headwinds in delivering true safety benefits without accountability.
RAISE competitive grants. (This is the former TIGER and then BUILD program, so is not a new program, but is now funded at a much higher level)$30 billion, up from only $4 billion spent from 2009-2020.Local or regional projects that improve safety, environmental sustainability, quality of life, economic competitiveness, state of good repair, and connectivityBuild projects that accomplish numerous goals including safety. Many of the best TIGER projects over the years made major safety improvements while ticking off other goals.

How else could the administration improve the safety program?

In addition to creating robust guidance for administering all of the programs listed above, the Biden administration should modernize the traffic engineer’s go-to guidance (the MUTCD) to reorient it completely around safety and people, and away from its outdated focus on vehicle speed and flow. Unfortunately, the indication from USDOT is that they are punting more substantial edits to a future revision. USDOT closed comments in May 2021 and have suggested that only modest revisions will be forthcoming, but what they choose to change will still matter.4

In addition, the FHWA Administrator’s vulnerable road user research should make sure the agency’s very good recommended safety countermeasures have teeth and recommend substantial design changes, not just behavioral suggestions.

How can the new money advance our goals?

Equity

The safety of all road users is closely tied advancing racial equity and addressing climate change, among many other goals. Our research in Dangerous by Design indicates that low-income and people of color make up a disproportionate amount of the people struck and killed while walking. So providing safe ways for all people to use our streets is critical for advancing our communities’ goals of being more inclusive and connected.

Relative pedestrian danger by race and ethnicity

Climate

There is incredible interest and demand in switching more trips from cars to bikes or other modes (an important strategy for cutting down on carbon emissions) but if Americans do not feel safe enough to bike or walk regularly, the ones who have the option to do so will continue to drive.

Translating federal funding into projects that advance safety is more complicated. As outlined above, formula grants are mostly controlled by state and regional governments who have other top priorities other than safety, no matter how much they profess that safety is #1. Approaching them with projects that have wide and deep support within a community usually gives you the best chance for success. For the highly flexible competitive grants, the America Walks’ explainer contained some concrete advice:

Ken McLeod of the League of American Bicyclists gave a great breakdown of the biggest opportunities in competitive grants for active transportation. First, he said, start by looking at your existing transportation plans. “If you have a plan that is a 20 year plan, and if you are in phase 3, this is like a perfect grant program to get your phase 4 or phase 5 funded in a quicker timeline than you might working through other federally funded programs,” explained Ken.

National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)’s Sindhu Bharadwaj underscored the importance of coalition building for competitive grants. Advocates in small towns or very car-centered regions might be able to acquire some additional funding. The key to their success, though, is focusing and working together. As Sindhu said, funding opportunities can be a chance to bring together a number of organizations and advocates to pick one big goal, like adopting a new design plan. She suggested that the pursuit of funding can be a galvanizing point for a governing body or advocacy group.

So what?

The most important thing to remember is that every single one of the federal transportation programs can be used to improve safety. Safety is always an eligible use. So as you engage with local, metro, and state decisionmakers, you can remind them: If safety is the top priority then every dollar from every program that they have at their disposal can and should go to improve safety for all users. And then hold them accountable: Congress has given them the complete freedom to prioritize safety, so if safety is getting worse, there is no one else to blame.

Considering the crisis of roadway deaths and the limited funding available for safety, it’s critical that we ensure that 1) the safety funding is spent in the best way possible, and 2) that states and metro areas feel the pressure to tangibly improve safety with their bigger, flexible pots of road funding. Creating a vision for what you want to do is a great first step. More from America Walks:

 ‘I think the most important thing is to have a strong vision locally, and worry about resources next,’ [Beth Osborne of Transportation for America] stated. ‘With good commitment and vision, you can find resources. And…there are tons of places to go for money! You do not have to stay in one tiny pod, you also do not need to make every active transportation effort its own project.’ With that vision, ask your state and local transportation officials how they are planning to seek federal dollars. They ultimately write the grants or propose budgets to elected officials. You need to know if they are working to fund a walkable equitable vision for the community, or are they trying to fund projects envisioned in a prior era. With prompting from community leaders you can help break the inertia of the past.

For planners, engineers, local officials, and other decision-makers, you will be competing with other states, MPOs, and localities for these competitive grants. Understanding the programs in and out will be critical for mustering the financial and vocal support needed to put forth a strong application. That’s how you learn, for instance, that National Infrastructure Project Assistance grants can be used for safety projects. 

One last important note we addressed in our competitive grants blog post: Strong local matching funds (ranging from 20 to 50 percent of project cost) are critical to winning these grants, and the process to raise these funds starts by engaging in state and local budget processes far in advance (6-9 months before the start of the fiscal year.) So advocates, this means you should engage agencies early and often on resource prioritization to realize transit projects.

(Note: For the more policy-minded, read our pre-existing funding memos on the programs that the IIJA can fund. Many of them have the possibility to improve safety if used well, but the active transportation memo contains the programs that can be most easily flexed to fund safety projects.)

If you have additional ideas for how to utilize these expanded programs, or have questions about the content listed here, please contact us. Our policy staff is eager to hear from you. 

USDOT urges states to prioritize repair, safety, and climate with their influx of infrastructure bill cash

road sign that says "changed priorities ahead"
road sign that says "changed priorities ahead"
Flickr CC image from Flickr/PeteReed

Although state DOTs have always been free to prioritize repair, safety, or improving access for everyone across the entire system, most have traditionally chosen to use that flexibility to build new highways instead. With state DOT coffers soon to be loaded with billions from the new infrastructure bill, USDOT is urging states via a new memo to focus on their repair needs, take an expansive view of what they can invest in, and invest in reducing emissions and improving safety.

promo graphic for a guide to the IIJA

This post is part of T4America’s suite of materials explaining the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which governs all federal transportation policy and funding through 2026. What do you need to know about the new infrastructure law? We know that federal transportation policy can be intimidating and confusing. Our hub for the new law will walk you through it, from the basics all the way to more complex details.

Last week USDOT finally released the long awaited state formula funding apportionment tables, which document how the first year of the infrastructure law’s formula funding will be divided up to the states. When it comes to the FHWA and FTA’s role in the oversight and messaging on formula funding to the states, the experience has not been consistent, which this memo looks to tackle. 

FHWA sends a clear and consistent guiding message

With the funding amounts published, the Federal Highways Administration (FHWA) followed up the next day with a notable and perhaps unprecedented memo of administrative guidance from Deputy Administrator Stephanie Pollock directed to FHWA headquarters administrators, division administrators, and their teams. This memo sent a clear message on where USDOT wants to emphasize its technical assistance and oversight of federal transportation program funds.

Here are four points the Deputy Administrator made that we want to highlight:

1) Prioritizing repair and rehabilitation first

Since Congress chose not to prioritize repair by discarding the House’s INVEST Act which would have instituted hard and fast requirements, USDOT and the Biden administration want to emphasize the critical need for improving the state of repair of the transportation infrastructure. The guidance reminds the role states must play in maintaining a state of repair of their existing infrastructure (23 USC 116) if they plan to participate in the federal transportation program. Lastly, in advancing maintenance, FHWA encourages incorporation of safety and multimodal accessibility into the repair scope of the infrastructure project.

2) Prioritizing investment on all federal-aid transportation infrastructure

The memorandum makes note that the formula funding being directed to states is not for exclusive use of state DOT-owned and managed infrastructure and that they should consider all the needs in their state—not just the big ticket state-owned highways where many typically focus their funds. The memo notes that the 50,000 miles of state DOT-owned roads and bridges are in much better condition than the one million miles of other roads not owned by the state but eligible for that funding, 85 percent of all miles driven takes place on these other roads/bridges, and formula programs also have money dedicated to these “off-system” roads and bridges.

3) Simplifying project review

The memorandum guides FHWA to help fast track and simplify the review of projects that prioritize repair, improve safety, or invest in multimodal improvements. Streetsblog summed up this provision well last week:

Among the most potentially transformative new guidelines is a federal advisory that multimodal projects, like bike lanes, sidewalks and BRT lanes, should no longer be subjected to onerous environmental review — and that highway expansions and other high-polluting projects for which the National Environmental Protection Act was created should be scrutinized much more heavily than they are now. Opponents of sustainable transportation across the country have long abused the environmental review process to stall carbon-cutting projects, while letting autocentric efforts sail through.

4) Emphasizing operational efficiency over expansion

The memo says that FHWA will do what they can with their technical assistance and oversight to emphasize operational efficiencies to move more people and goods within existing infrastructure over capacity expansion (i.e, new highways). The memorandum acknowledges that FHWA is in no position to prohibit states from expanding system capacity, but that FHWA will explore all policy mechanisms at their disposal to not only strongly encourage and influence, but require an emphasis on repair and alternative enhancements to roadway capacity expansion. Of special note as well, FHWA underscored the flexibility that state DOTs have and should exercise in supporting public transportation projects.

–

Though this policy memorandum does not have any enforceable mechanisms in what state DOTs can and will do with their formula highway funding, it makes a major statement about where the administration’s priorities lie, gives ammunition to the advocates trying to hold them accountable, and can help nudge and encourage states that are in the midst of attempting to change how they prioritize their spending. 

Aarian Marshall wrote in Wired last week about the potential impact of this memo and what’s happening in Colorado, (where the state’s transportation commission approved a new rule requiring the state to consider the greenhouse gas impacts of their projects and try to reduce them):

The DOT’s gentle, “have you thought about this?” approach to climate-friendly and safe road infrastructure may feel toothless. But states that have experimented with similar approaches say it’s helpful. In Colorado, Governor Jared Polis has urged the state DOT to emphasize people-friendly—rather than builder-friendly—infrastructure projects. More than half of the state’s transportation money goes toward “state of good repair” projects, like filling potholes, fixing bridges and viaducts, and adding shoulders to rural roads for safety, says Shoshana Lew, executive director of Colorado’s DOT. Prioritizing safety and climate effects “forces the conversation to be more rounded,” says Lew. “It makes you think really hard about whether the project is worth it, and what the implications will be.” As a result of Colorado’s approach, she says, an expansion project on Interstate 70 will include a new van shuttle system that could grow bigger with demand.

This memo empowers USDOT representatives to the state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to be more vocal and consistent in advancing department priorities. This also gives local, regional, and state community advocates something to point to as they try to build momentum towards decision-making change in the implementation of the federal transportation program in their backyards.

Reducing emissions with better transit, part two: Improve transit access

Increasing funding for transit operations is a vital first step to help more people drive less, but there’s an equally important next step: connecting more people by transit to more of the destinations they currently reach by car.

Bus riders wait at the Silver Spring Transit Center in Silver Spring, MD. Photo by BeyondDC

This post was written by Rayla Bellis, Director of Thriving Communities at Smart Growth America, and Abi Grimminger, T4America Communications Associate. This is the second of a series of posts on this topic—find the full set here.

In our first installment of this series on the importance of transit to reduce emissions, we focused on increasing spending on transit operations—more buses, more trains, running more often (in the 288 urbanized areas with available data.) We found that by increasing federal support for transit operations across these areas, we can make meaningful progress in reducing driving emissions. But while that’s a crucial step in the right direction to meet our climate goals, we also need to consider how to expand access to transit and help more people use transit to get where they need to go.

Pairing expanded transit service with greater access to transit

For a second phase of our analysis of how investing in transit can help meet our climate goals, we looked at what we could achieve by improving transit access—in this case meaning how well transit connects people from their homes to available jobs in their region within a reasonable travel time. Improving transit access goes beyond simply expanding transit service. While offering more routes or more frequent service can certainly improve transit access, it won’t necessarily do so if those routes aren’t designed to connect the places where people live as directly as possible to the places they need to go

In the 288 urbanized areas studied, we examined the annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) estimates for all 88.5 million households included in the 2017 National Household Travel Survey. We analyzed what share of their regions’ jobs (within 45 minutes from their homes) they could reach with existing transit service using data from the EPA’s Smart Location Database. Unsurprisingly the households that are unable to reach any jobs by transit within that time frame traveled quite a bit by car—averaging 23,090 miles per year.

Households that could get to work using transit drove significantly less, and the improvement came with even modest levels of access to jobs via public transportation. Households that could reach just 10 percent of jobs in their metropolitan area by transit drove 19,040 miles per year (an 18 percent drop). When that access increased modestly up to 10-20 percent of jobs, households drove 17,710 miles per year on average (a 23 percent drop), and when they could reach over 20 percent of all metro-area jobs with transit, average driving in those households dropped to 16,380 miles (or 29 percent less than households with no transit access).

Even improving transit access to connect people to up to 20 percent of metropolitan area (MSA) jobs leads to significant drops in average miles driven per year, reducing emissions. 

Based on those results, we estimate that if we could manage to give all 88.5 million households we studied access to at least 20 percent of their region’s jobs by transit by 2050, we could reduce annual vehicle miles traveled by these households by 23 percent, leading to a total reduction in VMT (including non-household trips like deliveries and ridesharing) in those urbanized areas of 16 percent in 2050 compared to projected VMT based on our current trend. This is 377 billion fewer miles driven annually. Given that transportation emissions are the main perpetrators of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., this would be a major step toward improving climate outcomes.

Raising the bar

Providing all households in the 288 urbanized areas we studied with access to at least 20 percent of their region’s jobs by 2050 will require more than simply increasing investment in transit or even just running more trains and buses because of the existing low-density suburban development in many of these regions, which has contributed heavily to VMT growth and emissions in these cities. It will take a real push to make transit-supportive land-use decisions and provide the right transit service to connect people to the destinations they need. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. In fact, some urbanized areas are already providing a significant share of their residents with access to at least 20 percent of their regions’ jobs by transit today, raising the bar for communities across the country.

In cities like Champaign, IL, Bloomington, IL, Duluth, MN-WI, and Boulder, CO, more than 70 percent of households can currently reach more than 20 percent of metropolitan-area jobs using transit. Bringing all 288 urbanized areas we studied up to a level of access comparable to those regions by 2050 (in line with the current top 2 percent of cities in the graphic below) would result in an 11.9 percent reduction in  VMT in 2050, compared to what is currently projected for that year. Though a slightly less ambitious target, bringing all 288 urbanized areas up to the level of access provided in the top 5 percent of cities would still have a sizable impact, resulting in a 9.5 percent reduction. That would significantly reduce both emissions and the amount of time Americans spend in their cars on average—a win for the environment and for commuters.

In cities with the best current transit access (those in the top 2 percent), about 70 percent of households can reach more than 20 percent of their jobs by transit.

Bringing all 288 urbanized areas to the level of access provided by the current top-performing regions could reduce annual VMT in 2050 by 11.9 percent compared to currently projected levels for that year.

If we brought all 288 urbanized areas up to a minimum level of transit access to jobs already achieved by the……we could achieve a reduction in annual VMT in 2050 of……meaning a cumulative VMT reduction over 30 years of…
Top 25% of urbanized areas-3.7%-2.0%
Top 10% of urbanized areas-6.5%-3.6%
Top 5% of urbanized areas-9.5%-5.2%
Top 2% of urbanized areas-11.9%-6.5%

Source: Estimated using data on household VMT from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey and data on transit accessibility from the EPA Smart Location Database.

It is important to note that the impacts of poor access to transit aren’t felt equally. People who most need an affordable alternative to car travel are often the same people who don’t have viable transit access. Black workers are four times more likely to take transit than white workers, yet transit access is roughly 24 percent worse in the quartile of urban areas with the most Black residents, compared with those with the fewest. Areas with high poverty rates get less frequent, reliable transit service than wealthy neighborhoods. If we want to face climate goals head-on, we also have to address these inequities in transit access.

But how?

Increasing access to jobs via transit will require an intentional policy and investment strategy, because it depends on several factors beyond just how much we spend on transit: how well transit serves different populations currently, development patterns in the region, and where jobs and services are clustered. And overall, to make the more ambitious scenarios possible, changes in local and metro-area land-use decisions need to go hand-in-hand with the increased transit investment. 

Some cities would need to spend a great deal to significantly improve transit access in the more sprawling portions of their regions if development practices don’t change, which is all the more reason to change those development practices now. Yet scores of cities could likely make meaningful improvements to transit access with very little additional spending. For instance, some cities (like Columbus, OH and Houston, TX) have been able to expand transit access simply by reconsidering the way their routes are structured and reconfiguring their service from the ground up with a focus on improving access. 

To address the pressing need to reduce emissions from transportation to meet ambitious climate goals, we’ll need to not only invest more money overall in running more buses and trains more often, but also consider how to expand that transit service into more places and serve more people—especially those who need it most. More on this in an accompanying report coming in the new year.

Lemonade from lemons: Improvements worth celebrating within flawed infrastructure bill

Pier 1 embarcadero

Money from the finalized $1.2 trillion infrastructure deal is already flowing out to states and metro areas who are plugging it right into projects both already underway and on the horizon. After covering six things the administration should do immediately to maximize this mammoth infusion of unexpected cash, here’s a longer look at some of the law’s incremental or notable successes, with the aim of equipping the administration and advocates alike to steer this money toward the best possible outcomes.

promo graphic for a guide to the IIJA

This post is part of T4America’s suite of materials explaining the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which governs all federal transportation policy and funding through 2026. What do you need to know about the new infrastructure law? We know that federal transportation policy can be intimidating and confusing. Our hub for the new law will walk you through it, from the basics all the way to more complex details.

Passenger rail

Amtrak train pulling into a station
Image from Wikimedia Commons

If you’re looking for good news in the infrastructure bill, passenger rail probably represents the most encouraging and exciting inclusion in the bill. After being woefully neglected over the past 40 years, passenger rail is one of the biggest winners, receiving a historic investment that totals just north of $100 billion over five years. (All of which is thanks to impressive bipartisan work by the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this summer—read our much more detailed take on all the passenger rail provisions here.) 

This will provide significant opportunities to reshape American passenger rail in a transformative way. With the record investment, there is ample opportunity to improve safety and state of repair for existing rail infrastructure, make existing service more reliable, and support new, expanded passenger rail service. Communities near rail and lacking in intercity mobility options could connect their community with affordable intercity mobility and integrate passenger rail service with first- and last-mile community connections. 

But these improvements are not going to happen automatically nor will they happen easily. The Biden administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, Amtrak and others will have to be very aggressive in ushering this money out the door and supporting state and local plans for those improvements to see the projects that have been promised or mentioned in breathless news coverage come to pass. If the administration fails on this count, this could turn out just like the 2009 Recovery Act, where money sat idle or was even declined by governors. On top of that, freight railroads will be opposed to the improvements in some places, just like they’ve fought or negotiated in bad faith against the publicly and politically popular plan to restore passenger rail along the Gulf Coast.

Additionally, Amtrak’s mission and governing structure have been adjusted to bring a greater focus on expanding and improving the national network. For the majority of Amtrak’s existence, the mission of passenger rail service was to justify investments with performance and operate to make a profit, no matter the cost to user experience, and no matter that nearly every other transportation mode fails to turn a profit. This hampered innovation and opportunity to build and retain rail ridership. Small but significant changes in the infrastructure bill reorient Amtrak’s mission towards the value of the customer and the importance of connecting those customers across urban and rural communities. 

While the bill lays out goals for an Amtrak Board of Directors that better represents a diversity of perspectives and communities across the Amtrak system, as we noted last week, those slots need to be filled immediately if the administration is serious about improving passenger rail service and taking advantage of the funding and this historic opportunity.

By reinvigorating passenger rail infrastructure and user experience, this bill could lay the groundwork for other future advancements, including high-speed rail.

Connecting people to jobs and destinations

Alaskan Way Viaduct demolition in progress in Washington
Image from WSDOT via Flickr

As we’ve noted, the bill pours the lion’s share of the funds into the same old highway programs with few substantial changes. And states are already responding to their hard-won flexibility and historic amounts of cash by supercharging previously planned or ill-conceived projects. But there are some notable ways the bill recalibrates the highway program for the long run. 

First, a portion of every state’s funding will go to new programs aimed at reducing carbon emissions, improving transportation system resiliency, and congestion relief, in addition to existing money devoted to Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) dollars. States and metro areas must also now dedicate a portion of their planning money towards Complete Streets planning and implementation. (2.5 percent of each state’s State Planning Research dollars and 2.5 percent of their metropolitan planning dollars.) This money will be dwarfed by the hundreds of billions going into streets and roads being designed the same old way, but this is an incremental step toward elevating active transportation and livable streets within the transportation program. 

Within the largest pot of funding that states and metro areas control (the Surface Transportation Block Grant program), the amount set aside for smaller but vital transportation projects like bikeways, new sidewalks, safe routes to school, and micromobility was increased from 1.5 percent up to 10 percent. This bill also lets local municipalities control more of this funding directly by increasing the share of that 10 percent that they directly control from 50 up to 59 percent

Lastly, while the $1 billion Reconnecting Communities program will be overpowered by hundreds of billions in highway funds perpetuating the very problem this program aims to solve, its inclusion is an important step toward repairing the damage of past highway projects and is worth celebrating. For the first time, Congress is acknowledging the racist and damaging history of highway building, laying the groundwork for future efforts and also providing a way for advocates to spotlight how some of the worst excesses of the past are still going on today in many urban areas. But devoting any federal dollars to tearing down divisive infrastructure plus the means to stitch communities together again is a vital step on the path toward reorienting the highway program to serving people and communities with the transportation system. 

Transit

A Philadelphia bus drives through a snowy intersection
Image from BruceEmmerling via Pixabay

Most of the headlines and coverage about transit focused on the fact that it will receive historic levels of investment over the next five years from the infrastructure deal. That’s certainly good news, but that also glosses over some important shortcomings. 

First off, unlike the Senate Commerce Committee did with passenger rail, the Senate Banking Committee never actually drafted a transit title to incorporate into the infrastructure bill. This preserved the transit policy status quo in amber for the next five years. Secondly, while the House’s superior INVEST Act proposal focused on trying to maximize transit service, frequency, and access, this bill failed to fix the current priority of keeping costs down no matter the effects on people when it comes to service, ridership, and access to transit. T4America is still looking to Congress to redress that wrong within the still-in-progress budget reconciliation bill (the Build Back Better Act), ensuring that public transportation, a fundamental backbone in our communities and a lifeline towards affordable housing opportunities, is properly funded.

Thirdly, while the $39 billion is a historic amount for transit and many excellent projects will be built because of it, this amount should have been higher. $10 billion was cut from the original infrastructure deal’s framework agreement with the White House back in June. 

While we weren’t anticipating the Senate increasing the share for transit, the infrastructure bill did maintain the historic practice of devoting at least 20 percent towards public transportation and did not decrease it. On a positive note, the bill emphasized improving the nation’s transit state of good repair, plus improving transit accessibility via a grant program to retrofit transit stations for mobility and accessibility.

Environmental stewardship and climate adaptation

A parking space painted green with a symbol indicating the space is dedicated for EVs
Image from Noya Fields via Flickr

Although the infrastructure bill continues to heavily fund conventional highway and road expansions, digging us into an ever deeper hole of traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, it is also the federal government’s biggest investment yet in climate adaptation and protection and recognizes the severity of the impacts of climate change which are already being experienced across America.

The new PROTECT program dedicates $7.3 billion (~2.9 percent of each state’s share of all highway funds) and $1.4 billion in competitive grants to shore up and improve the resilience of the transportation network, including highways, public transportation, rail, ports, and natural barrier infrastructure. Knowing where climate- and weather-related events are likely to be worse is a vital first step, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will invest $492 million in flood mapping and water modeling which could inform future infrastructure planning and investment.

The existing Alternative Fuels program is expanded and recalibrated to focus more, though not exclusively, on zero-emission vehicles and related infrastructure. A new Carbon Reduction program will dedicate ~2.5 percent of each state’s share of highway funds (~$6.4 billion total) to support active transportation, public transit, congestion pricing, and other strategies to reduce carbon emissions. (Although the core highway program will continue making emissions worse.)

All of this represents a positive first step in federal recognition of the severity of the impacts of climate change, but it is still not scaled to the level of risk that we face, though we applaud Congress for taking a bipartisan step on climate change and we hope to see more.

Safety

Cyclists on the Black Lives Matter Plaza in DC
Photo by Ted Eyton via Creative Commons

When it comes to safety, a new federal safety program, even a large one, is not what we need. The entire $300+ billion transportation program should be a safety program, with safety for all users as the highest and ultimate consideration in every single case on every single project. A transportation system that cannot safely move people from A to B should be viewed as a failure, regardless of whatever other benefits it brings.

With that backdrop in mind, there are key safety provisions that ensure a fairer shake for vulnerable road users. If injuries to and deaths of people walking, biking or using assistive devices exceed 15 percent of a state’s total traffic injuries and fatalities, then that state must dedicate at least 15 percent of their Highway Safety Improvement Program dollars towards proven strategies to make those people safer and lower that share. This helps put some teeth into highway safety dollars to target investments where they are critically needed, versus typical lip-service and disingenuous investments sold as safety projects that are really about increasing capacity, speed, or other goals.

The new Safe Streets and Roads for All program is a competitive grant program allowing applicants to seek funding to better plan and implement Vision Zero strategies in their communities and regions. Once deemed a niche concept, the Vision Zero safety framework has gained some prominence. For it to go mainstream, it will need to be fundamental to all highway spending.

Looking ahead

Though this bill leaves much to be desired, there are still some notable changes that will start to shape the direction of state, regional, and local transportation programs. The key will be how they are used. In the coming weeks, T4America will highlight key opportunities to better administer, deliver, and shape the US transportation program for generations to come. 

From policy to action: Six things USDOT should do yesterday to maximize the potential of the infrastructure deal

entrance to the USDOT headquarters

Because of the shortcomings in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)’s actual policy, an enormous amount of pressure now rests on USDOT and Secretary Buttigieg to deliver on the administration’s promises. But the good news is that there are scores of actions that USDOT can take to deliver positive outcomes for equity, climate, safety, state of repair, and enhancing community connections.

entrance to the USDOT headquarters
Image by U.S. Department of Transportation
promo graphic for a guide to the IIJA

This post is part of T4America’s suite of materials explaining the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which governs all federal transportation policy and funding through 2026. What do you need to know about the new infrastructure law? We know that federal transportation policy can be intimidating and confusing. Our hub for the new law will walk you through it, from the basics all the way to more complex details.

After 200+ weeks of #InfrastructureWeek, Congress was sorely overdue to take action on surface transportation reauthorization since the FAST Act was fast expiring in 2021. The House took up the challenge by crafting and passing the bold five-year INVEST Act in July, which would have moved the needle in major ways. But the Senate failed to produce the same kind of transformative bill, instead playing the politics of “compromise” and “bipartisanship” in what would become the infrastructure deal as we know it (the IIJA). 

With the conclusion of #InfrastructureWeek on Capitol Hill and Congress pivoting to other issues of national interest, the media spotlight on the US transportation program will quickly dim.  

This is unfortunate, because in many ways, the real work on infrastructure is just beginning—especially for USDOT and the administration. Advocates and the media are failing to grasp that the first year of transportation funding from the IIJA is already flowing out to states and metro areas, supercharging project lists that were decided upon years ago in some cases. And states have made it clear that they plan to maximize the use of the flexibility that they have won from Congress to spend this money how they deem it in their interest.

Using this historic infusion of infrastructure funding to make meaningful progress towards equity, climate change, and fostering community economic opportunities is going to be an uphill battle, but that is what the Biden administration has promised. They certainly have the talent and the expertise to make it happen, but Secretary Buttigieg will need to exercise his authority and the flexibility of US transportation policy to realize these outcomes. 

Over the next few weeks, we will unpack the details on a range of actions that could be taken administratively to further our three principles and national priorities of economic development, equity, and climate change mitigation. For now, here are six immediate and important actions that would make a big difference:

1. A new commitment to passenger rail needs equally committed leaders.

As the country begins a heavy investment in intercity passenger rail and Amtrak, its Board of Directors is made up of members whose terms have expired (other than Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and Amtrak CEO Flynn). It is time for the President to nominate a new and current Board to lead Amtrak through this unprecedented opportunity to create a world class passenger rail system and push Amtrak to deliver on a new customer driven service delivery mission.

2. Find other ways to prioritize safety.

In late October, Secretary Buttigieg cited the country’s unacceptable traffic death “crisis”:

We cannot and should not accept these fatalities as simply a part of everyday life in America. No one will accomplish this alone. It will take all levels of government, industries, advocates, engineers and communities across the country working together toward the day when family members no longer have to say good-bye to loved ones because of a traffic crash.

—Secretary Buttigieg

With a call to action on safety, the USDOT should bring more attention to the impact of roadway design on safety, including the removal of references to the disproven 40-year old study that claimed 94 percent of crashes are caused by human error and discouraging grantees and the press from using the term ‘accident’ as opposed to ‘crash.’ Furthermore, the USDOT can look to prioritize safety investments across all funding streams (more on that next).

3. Bake important priorities into the many competitive grant programs.

Use competitive grant programs to reward project sponsors that have made a dedicated commitment to safety, state of repair, climate, and equity and to focus the sponsors that have not on addressing those issues. For example, those states who set regressive safety targets could be restricted from getting funding for safety-oriented projects.

4. Require clearer data for the public on transportation emissions.

Track climate emissions per capita from transportation by state and publish results and trends online.

5. Consider the poor track record of transportation models.

Require major NEPA (environmental review) documents to include a report on the past accuracy of any transportation demand modeling used, as well as documenting the expected induced demand from projects.

6. Streamline the arduous process of applying for competitive grants.

The IIJA also establishes several new competitive grant programs. To ensure they are accessible to communities of all sizes and capacity, USDOT should create an easier, more automated process for receiving applications and benefit-cost analyses for all competitive grant programs.

How this historic bill gets implemented and how the hundreds of billions in new transportation spending is spent will determine how far we are able to move the needle on key goals. We will continue to unpack more ways that the administration, states, metros, and advocates can engage in the implementation of the IIJA to produce a transportation system that is safer, cleaner, and more effective at connecting people to jobs and opportunity.

Electric vehicles aren’t good for equity, but we should try

An electric Smart car charges at a curbside charging station in DC

Electric vehicles, while vital for reducing emissions and meeting our long-term emissions reduction goals, are not a good strategy for improving existing inequities in transportation. But there are specific things we can and should do to make this transition more equitable than it otherwise would be.

An electric Smart car charges at a curbside charging station in DC
Flickr photo via DDOT.

Yesterday, in part one of this post, we chronicled why it’s going to be difficult or impossible for electric vehicle adoption to be a major force for improving equity, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it as equitable as possible. Here are some ideas for how:

E-bike incentives and infrastructure

Most daily trips on average are short, but many can still be just outside of the realm of capability for a lot of people to take by walking or biking, especially in hot climates that make it difficult. E-bikes are a game changing option for many people, increasing the ease, range, and comfort of biking trips while still delivering the public health, space-efficiency, and zero-emission benefits of bikes. They are way cheaper than electric cars and therefore cheaper to subsidize. Perhaps this is why e-bike sales have more-than doubled last year, and why e-bikes are projected to out-sell electric cars globally in the coming decade. For the cost of the incentive for a new electric car, you could outright buy an electric bike for someone. All this means we can help get more e-bikes into the hands of people for whom it can make a real impact on their access to opportunity, and reduce emissions. The e-bike incentive in the Build Back Better Act is a great start. To get the most out of this new option, we also need to invest in infrastructure where e-bike riders feel safe.

Fleet conversions

Cars for individual drivers sit parked most of the time, using up valuable space for parking—and not presenting as big and quick an emissions reduction. Transitioning institutional fleets to electric has a good return on investment, whether they are for carshare fleets that give low-car households access to a car when they need it, rental fleets that quickly rack up mileage, business fleets that are used by company personnel throughout the day, or diesel trucks and buses that produce more pollution. Incentives can also target non-profits that deliver valuable community services. We should also consider targeting high-polluting areas for specific and notable impacts, for example prioritizing truck conversions at ports adjacent to neighborhoods that bear the brunt of port pollution. If we’re going to subsidize electric vehicles, focusing on fleets first can build the EV market while delivering the most bang-for-the-buck on pollution reduction and benefits to impacted communities.

Deploying the right charging strategy in denser urban environments

A heavy bike sits to the side next to a hanging bike rack

One of the benefits of EVs for consumers is charging at home. If you plug in your car overnight, you never have to go to a charging station unless you’re taking a trip that exceeds your car’s range. Your car has a “full tank” every morning. But that only works if you have a dedicated parking space with access to your own electricity. In denser urban environments, many people lack a driveway or garage to charge an EV. Historically excluded communities are much less likely to have the kind of dedicated parking where overnight charging from your own outlet is possible.

Photo on left courtesy of @kiel_by_bike

We’ll need a comprehensive set of solutions to address this that won’t all fit in this blog post (and no one has all the answers for that yet). But there are two areas to focus on. First, we need building codes that require charging access in multifamily housing parking AND bike parking that accommodates level entry and charging for e-bikes that are much heavier. No one wants to lug a heavy e-bike up and down stairs. Second, we need a comprehensive policy on curbside charging that considers the vast complexity of managing curb space, which is something we have written about before, including:

  • Prioritizing carshare
  • Protecting current and future bike and bus lanes
  • Integrating chargers with public space and ensuring an uncluttered pedestrian environment including quality Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) access
  • Ensuring deployment in historically excluded neighborhoods

Phasing out ICE vehicles through legislation

Much of the discussion around getting EVs into the hands of consumers has been around incentives and subsidies. This is an approach to benefit industry and wealthier new-car buyers. At this point, every major car company has electric models coming to the market soon. If we need to transition the fleet to electric, rather than offer subsidies to buyers who least need them, eventually we’ll need to consider both carrots and sticks. Why not follow the lead of California, which is moving to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, and set a date to phase out new internal combustion engine (ICE) cars by a certain date a few years from now?

Workforce training and support

As with any major change in how we do things, some jobs will disappear and others will be created. We’ll need programs to support mechanics and other workers impacted by the EV transition. For example, programs supporting the EV transition should incorporate training for mechanics who work on cars, trucks and buses so they can transition to working on electric vehicles. Likewise, we also need to provide workforce education, training, and certification for electricians installing and maintaining EV charging infrastructure. Training for new manufacturing jobs should target deployment of jobs and job training programs so that frontline communities are prioritized and have an opportunity to benefit from manufacturing jobs. Finally, policies should require prevailing wages for jobs installing publicly funded charging infrastructure and/or union representation for publicly subsidized manufacturing jobs. The Coalition Helping America Rebuild and Go Electric (CHARGE), with which we’ve worked this past year, has done a great job thinking about workforce considerations as part of their policy recommendations.

EV advocates can and should do what they can to address equity in the EV transition, but they need to recognize that the strategies for doing this are by their very nature afterthoughts. EVs are a GHG reduction strategy, not an equity strategy. Investing in transportation options like public transit, walking and biking, and meeting the demand for new (attainable) housing in locations where people naturally drive less is the way to truly address transportation equity as part of an overall GHG reduction strategy.

If you’re interested in digging deeper into equity and electrification, EVNoire and Forth, two partners we work with in the EV space, are hosting the E-Mobility Diversity Equity and Inclusion Conference next Wednesday and Thursday, November 17 – 18.

Electric vehicles are good for emissions, bad for advancing equity

A Black man walks to a bus stop along a multi-lane highway

Climate funders, electric vehicle industry groups, and environmentalists are rightly confronting the question of how to address equity in the electric vehicle space. They may not like the answer.

A Black man walks to a bus stop along a multi-lane highway
Photo by Steve Davis

Converting the transportation fleet to electric vehicles is essential (but not sufficient) for us to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets that can limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis. As the crisis of social justice has also risen to the fore in the past several years, advocates for EVs are rightly looking for ways to address equity in how we deploy electric vehicles.

So how do we bolster equity in a significant way by increasing the adoption of EVs? The hard-to-hear answer is that we don’t. Other strategies must be paired with this transition to ensure that we don’t make existing inequities worse.

Cars are expensive to own and operate, full stop. The infrastructure that serves them is expensive and environmentally damaging, whether they are fueled by gas or electricity. Many people cannot drive due to age or disability. A transportation system in which everyone must drive to reach jobs and services is by definition one that is not equitable because it excludes many people from participating fully. Electric vehicles fail to fix these problems.

Iceberg chart showing the many invisible aspects of car-related transportation emissions

Building and maintaining lots of roads also produces significant climate impacts, generating emissions from the resources required and creating heat islands that exacerbate the impact of heat waves. Expanses of asphalt and concrete roads and parking lots also increase stormwater runoff and flooding, and use up a lot of land. Because they are heavier, tire friction from EVs releases even more particulate matter and micro-plastic pollution than equivalent standard cars which already has a disproportionate impact on low-income communities and communities of color.

Subsidies for EV purchase and EV infrastructure—expected to become even more prominent in the years ahead—benefit EV buyers, who skew wealthier and whiter. Cars are so expensive (even more so than a decade ago) that it takes a pretty big incentive to convince many people to switch over, especially lower-income people who are more likely considering a used vehicle if they’re buying one at all.

We do need to transition our vehicle fleet to electric vehicles, but the best way to fundamentally address equity (while also reducing emissions) is to focus on the affordable, healthier transportation options we already know how to provide: expanded public transit service (as we chronicled last week) and more safe streets for more people to walk, bike, and roll. Our Driving Down Emissions report provides the right framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while addressing equity, if equity is really the focus:

The good news is that, when paired with other strategies, we can make a significant dent in the growth of emissions simply by satisfying the pent-up market demand for affordable homes in the kinds of walkable, connected communities where residents drive far less each day than their counterparts in more sprawling locations. And providing these more affordable homes would help make the transition to a lower carbon economy in a way that doesn’t place a heavier burden on those with less means.

EVs, while important for reducing emissions, just aren’t the right arena for tackling transportation equity, which is why it’s so important to pair significant and historic investments in expanded public transit and safe streets along with any investments in the transition to electric vehicles. Improving transportation options will also have positive impacts on public health and the environment in historically marginalized communities, which already deal with staggering levels of pollution from transportation and other sources, as chronicled in last week’s devastating map of industrial pollution from ProPublica. 

Having to buy a brand new car isn’t the only way to transition out of an older, gasoline-powered, polluting vehicle—or minimizing their use. Making more trips possible by transit, walking, biking, or rolling would bring significant positive impacts on our climate goals.

In a second post, we’ll take a closer look at some specific ways to ensure that the transition is as equitable as possible.

The bipartisan infrastructure deal’s passage: More money for more of the same

Yesterday the Senate passed the bipartisan infrastructure deal, which incorporates the Senate transportation reauthorization in all its good and all its flaws. We outline what’s in it and where to go from here.

an out of service bus drives through an intersection
The White House and Senate’s infrastructure deal says a lot about change, but largely maintains the broken status quo. Photo by BenderTJ on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Mostly lip service for climate and equity

The bipartisan infrastructure deal includes a lot of new spending, but that spending isn’t directed toward outcomes, much less the priorities that the President articulated in The American Jobs Plan. Though this bill mentions safety, climate, and equity often, as it stands, it will fail to produce meaningful shifts. “The White House will soon discover that they’ve dealt themselves a challenging hand in their long-term effort to address climate change and persistent inequities, while kicking the can down a crumbling road that’s likely to stay that way,” T4America director Beth Osborne said in our full statement after Tuesday’s final vote.

Overall, despite all the headlines about the $1.2 trillion total investment, the bulk of the bill’s five-year funding for transportation will be governed by the two reauthorization proposals approved by Senate committees earlier this year and folded into this deal. (Here’s some of what we had to say about the highway title, and the Commerce committee’s rail and safety title. A transit title was never produced by the Banking committee.) 

Some funds ($1 billion) will go to reconnecting communities separated by highways, an important step in undoing the ongoing damage of urban renewal programs. However, these funds are a fraction of the $20 billion originally proposed by the House and are dwarfed by historic increases in highway spending, without any guarantee that future highway expansions won’t separate more communities. (This isn’t just some historic, old problem from the Civil Rights era—it continues today. See I-45 in Houston, I-49 in Shreveport, I-5 in Portland, etc.)

There’s language supporting Complete Streets and vulnerable transit users, but the overall status quo approach to safety will undermine those modest improvements. States are still allowed to shift safety funds for non-safety projects and set annual “safety” targets for increasing numbers of people to die on their roads, with no penalties or accountability for doing so. Competitive funding is offered for states, regions, and local governments, but local leaders still have very little control over the projects and the designs of projects that will be built in their neighborhoods with formula funds.

This bill includes a climate program that many states can opt out of, so long as their population and economy is growing faster than their carbon emissions. It offers funding for electric refueling stations, but a late change diverted one-third of those funds to emissions-producing natural gas and propane stations. And the freight program is still written to have states identify their biggest freight needs and then require the majority of the available freight funding to only address the highway projects on that list. 

There were four amendments that could have significantly improved the bill’s repair, climate, and equity outcomes (listed below). Along with nearly all of the 400 amendments offered, none of these four were even considered.

  • Sen. Kaine (VA) offered a proposal to require a “fix it first” approach to highway funding
  • Sen. Klobuchar (MN) offered a proposal to eliminate regressive safety performance targets
  • Sen. Cardin (MD) offered a proposal to create a greenhouse gas performance measure
  • Sen. Warnock (GA) (and Sen. Cardin (MD)) offered a proposal to increase funding for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program to $5 billion

Rail is the deal’s silver lining

The Senate Commerce Committee’s plans for rail, which we praised in June, made it into the final deal, increasing funding for passenger rail across the board. Amtrak is rightfully treated as a valuable national service deserving of federal funding. The mission of Amtrak is to now maximize convenience and service to the customer, not to cut costs making the experience difficult to those traveling on rail. Plans to duplicate the success of the Southern Rail Commission across the country also made it into the final deal.

This bill doesn’t meet the moment

The only major cut made to the original bipartisan deal announced with fanfare in June was to transit, by $10 billion.

The deal’s $39 billion  is still more than what the current FAST Act has been providing over the last five years, and the White House believes that the overall increase is a win. But Transportation for America cares far more about how the money is spent. This bill provides every category of spending with more funding, but it doesn’t change the balance nor does it create accountability to the taxpayer for results.

The administration believes they can run any program so well that the flaws don’t matter. This is an admirable goal, but one that’s putting them in a bind. There are a record number of competitive grant programs, which provides great opportunity for this USDOT (and future ones) to implement their priorities, but they’ll have to battle the flaws in their own legislation. We are not sure that an administration that struggled to do things like call for state road safety targets that would improve safety, or stand on their laurels to make long overdue safety updates to the manual that guides street design is really up to the challenge of, for example, stopping every project that harms a minority neighborhood. We certainly hope they are and will do all we can to help. But the administration has put themselves in a challenging position.

The IPCC’s latest climate report calls for transformative, immediate change—less emissions, less waste. This bill is far from transformative. It adds some new money for programs to fix some problems while spending far more perpetuating those same problems.

Going forward

Now that the reconciliation bill has passed in the Senate, the House is expected to come back during the week of August 23rd, before the end of August recess, to consider the infrastructure deal and the reconciliation package. Though it’s not clear yet if we can expect to see further policy changes to the infrastructure bill, it will be worthwhile to remain engaged in how additional funds will be distributed through the budget reconciliation process in the House. The budget resolution passed in the Senate gives the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure $60 billion in additional budget authority to appropriate how they see fit.

Beyond that, our eyes turn to the administration to see how they’ll manage this program. They’ll have control over a lot of money, and they’ll need to move quickly to provide better accountability for  lowering emissions, improving racial equity, and increasing access to economic opportunity. They’ll have the power to provide greater control for local governments over what is built in their communities. We’ve been keeping tabs on what the administration has accomplished so far, and we’ll continue to do so from here on out. If they’re going to accomplish what they set out to do, they’ll need help from all of us to do it.

Nine ways the House’s transportation proposal starts to make a “paradigm shift”

With the House’s INVEST in America Act being considered in committee on Wednesday, it’s a good time to look at what else beyond our core three principles in the bill are worth praising and potentially even improving.

Photo of Metroway (bus rapid transit in Northern Virginia) by BeyondDC on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Most of the time, when we evaluate long-term transportation policy proposals or infrastructure bills from Congress, we start with a “good, bad, and ugly” post, but this House bill doesn’t fit well into that rubric. There’s a lot of great, some good, a few things that could use further refinement, and a couple of missed opportunities; but nothing that falls into the category of “bad,” much less “ugly.” It also has a lot of the same language in the INVEST Act introduced in the last Congress which stalled before a Senate vote, which also went 3 for 3 (after some modifications) on our scorecard.

With that in mind, here are nine specific things in the House bill (INVEST 2.0 for shorthand) that we wanted to highlight. Bear with us, this is a longer post!

1) Avoids the Senate’s cardinal sin of creating small, new programs to fix mistakes actively being perpetuated by the larger, unchanged, status quo transportation program

The overall approach of the last 30 years has been to create small, exciting new programs to fix established problems (safety, pollution, etc) while allowing the much larger core program to exacerbate and further those same problems.  This was our biggest complaint about the Senate’s bill from a few weeks ago. 

If you want to create a program to fix the issues created by running interstates through neighborhoods, you should also stop actively running interstates through neighborhoods. Or consider the issues of repair and maintenance. As we noted in our scorecard post, this bill doesn’t just create some new repair programs, it requires states to produce a plan to maintain any proposed new capacity while making progress toward their state of repair goals anytime they spend money from the biggest pot of highway funding. That’s the kind of new approach that the Senate completely missed, but the House is proposing to implement for key issues like repair, climate change, and others.

2) It recognizes that transportation is primarily about people and connecting them to what they need

The current federal transportation program does not require that states actively improve access to jobs and services for the real people who use the system every day. Say what? This is why the bulk of current transportation funding goes toward increasing vehicle speed, a “goal” that focuses on concrete and steel instead of the needs of actual people and where they need to go. This House bill kickstarts a huge shift toward focusing on people instead of vehicles by instituting a new performance measure that requires project sponsors to improve access to jobs and services by all modes. 

Under the House bill, state departments of transportation and regional planning organizations would have to measure whether all people traveling (not just driving) can reach jobs, schools, groceries, medical care, and other necessities. Further, states and MPOs would have to project the impact their projects would have on access and USDOT will review and publicly report their targets and progress. USDOT also has to collect that data and make it available to help with the measurement of multimodal access, and there are requirements to analyze the accuracy of the models and update direction to states and MPOs on how to improve access. 

While seemingly minor and perhaps a little wonky, this would mark a big shift in how transportation projects are evaluated. Measuring access—not vehicle speed—is a people-first way to consider the impact of the billions we spend on transportation each year. With this, we can create more equitable access to economic opportunity, lower transportation costs, and reduce emissions and the damaging climate and health impacts of them.

3) Nails all three of T4America’s core principles

Click to read our scorecard post

As we’ve done with every infrastructure proposal or long-term policy proposal for the last few years, we’ve produced a scorecard to evaluate how it starts to redirect transportation policy toward T4America’s three core principles of 1) maintaining the current system, 2) protecting the safety of people on the roads, and 3) getting people to jobs, schools, groceries and health care.  This bill nails all three of these principles  Read more about how the House bill advances these three simple priorities in this post with the scorecard.

4) Advances our proposal to start tearing down divisive infrastructure and repairing the damage

Since 2020, with help from Third Way, T4America has been advancing a policy to undo the damage of “urban renewal” projects that have displaced more than a million Americans since construction of the Interstate Highway System and that continue to harm communities of color today.  Our plan focuses heavily on creating a competitive grant program to redesign or deconstruct things like divisive highways, and creating strategies to prevent displacement so that this work generates wealth for the communities that suffered most, in addition to a few other strategies.

What the sunken, divisive Rochester Inner Loop used to look like, before being filled in and replaced with a surface boulevard. The House bill would kickstart efforts like this across the country. Flickr photo by Friscocali

The House runs with our proposal through a $3 billion ($600 million a year) Reconnecting Neighborhoods program, which is six times larger than a similar proposal in the Senate bill. This program will analyze neighborhood barriers (like interstates) and identify candidates for remediation, repurposing, or removal. In addition, part of that money can also be used to establish a community advisory board or a land trust to preserve the new wealth for those most affected by the divisive infrastructure. There are some details we’d like to enhance, but this idea has gained incredible traction over the last year and we are excited about the possibilities for the future.

5) Recognizes that you must address climate change within the entire transportation program

Download our report on lowering emissions through better land use and transportation

Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States, and the majority of them come from driving. The bill addresses the entirety of the transportation program by establishing a new greenhouse gas performance measure and requiring states to set positive targets to reduce emissions. It gives states the latitude to figure out their own preferred path to hitting those targets, but we know that infrastructure investments that give people more options than hopping in the car are key to reducing these emissions. INVEST 2.0 creates programs to fund these projects at both the state and city levels.

While making it easier to drive less overall should be central to our short-term climate and transportation strategy, we do need to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles as well. This is why we’re part of a unique coalition called CHARGE—the only “electric vehicle” coalition where improving and expanding public transit is the first priority. This bill creates a new program to build electric vehicle charging stations along corridors and sets standards to require them to be open to the public and work with all kinds of electric vehicles.

There are also some good provisions targeted at making the transportation system more resilient to climate change and making resilience an eligible use in the largest highway programs. One place where the bill could be improved is to require resilience to be built into the design of all projects. 

6) Measuring access to jobs and services is one of the best ways to address equity, but this bill includes others

As noted above, requiring agencies to measure and improve access to jobs and services for all people is perhaps the single greatest change to remake transportation policy in a more equitable way. But INVEST 2.0 would also improve equity in other ways—something we wrote about at length last summer in the context of the House’s very similar 2020 proposal. Prioritizing access, investing in more and better transit, building safer streets for people, and investing in what we have would all have an impact on equity. Considering the similarities between that bill and this year’s INVEST in America Act, that evaluation still stands.

7) Support for expanded national passenger rail

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) addresses an enormous crowd in Gulfport during a rally for restoring Gulf Coast passenger service. Photo by Steve Davis / T4America

Expanding and improving our nation’s passenger rail network to bring better, more reliable passenger rail service to more people is one of the best ways to improve access for millions of Americans in big urban areas and small rural ones alike. This bill creates a new $5 billion a year program for high speed and intercity rail investments, triples the funding for the existing program for improved safety and efficiency in passenger and freight rail service, and funds Amtrak at $32 billion over the life of the bill.

The House incorporated several of our other recommendations, including updating the Amtrak Board to have better representation from riders and the national network as well as the Northeast Corridor. More importantly, it allows for the formation of more multi-state rail commissions like our partners the Southern Rail Commission, which has been the key to (almost!) restoring passenger service along the Gulf Coast, and provides funding for them to operate. 

There is some opportunity to strengthen the authorities for the Federal Railroad Administration and the Surface Transportation Board to prevent the freight railroads from obstructing or interfering with that service.

8) A strong commitment to transit…

INVEST 2.0 provides over $21 billion for transit, a sizable increase over the current $13 billion program, and it also includes some funding for operations—a major win, as operations funding has typically been a no-go with federal funds. Funds from the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program and even the core Surface Transportation program can be used for transit operations. There’s also a new one-time competitive grant program to support capital and operations costs associated with addressing transit deserts through better, more frequent transit service.  

Improving service frequency is a big focus of the bill. There is a new $100 million competitive grant program for transit agencies collaborating with state or local governments to increase bus frequency and ridership by redesigning urban streets to better move transit (and more people) in congested areas. There is also a change to the funding formula that prioritizes frequency.

9) But with opportunities for greater improvements on transit

While the bill makes some important changes and does slightly increase its share compared to highways, the bill does not hit T4America’s priorities of equalizing transit funding with highway funding, nor does it create long term support for keeping transit running. We will be once again turning to leaders on Capitol Hill to move these efforts forward. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia of Illinois has led the effort to invest in transit as strongly as we do highways, and we hope he uses this bill as an opportunity to push that effort forward.

READ: Letter of support for Rep. Johnson bill, signed by ~100 organizations (June 9, 2021)Download

On the operations side, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia is leading an effort to create a federal program for transit operating support. The Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act would create a new grant program available to all transit agencies, rural and urban, to increase service frequency so that people don’t have to wait so long for the bus; to provide additional hours of service so that those who don’t work regular hours can still get to their jobs; and to add new, frequent service in the region. We are proud supporters of that bill and we encourage you to tell your House rep to join Rep. Johnson as a sponsor. 

Tell your representative to support a bill to increase funding for transit operations

Minnesota takes important steps to drive down emissions

To address urgent climate needs, every state will need to make it possible for their residents to drive less every day. But too many shy away from taking concrete steps to do so, putting all of their efforts into improving fuel efficiency and electric vehicle adoption. The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) just took a key step in the fight against climate change: setting an ambitious target for reducing driving (measured as vehicle miles traveled, or VMT). 

Riders on a bus in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, June 2020. Photo by Metro Transit.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) recently made a highly anticipated decision to adopt a number of recommendations from the state’s Sustainable Transportation Advisory Council (STAC) made in December 2020, including setting a preliminary statewide goal for a 20 percent VMT reduction statewide and per capita by 2050. For the average Minnesota driver, that will mean traveling about 45 miles less per week in 2050 than today. 

MnDOT’s VMT reduction target is preliminary, and will be finalized after engaging the public and stakeholders through the Statewide Multimodal Transportation Plan process that will occur throughout 2021. MnDOT may also set interim targets, as well as different targets for the Twin Cities region (which already has locally-established targets) compared to the rest of the state.

Minnesota has already had some success reducing emissions from the transportation sector in recent years, particularly compared to some of its peers, but setting VMT reduction goals has been a gap in the state’s efforts. We highlighted the need for VMT reduction targets with our partners at Move Minnesota in our Minnesota case study for our Driving Down Emissions report, as have local advocates and stakeholders, so it is great to see the state step out as a national leader working toward reducing the need to drive. 

This step is a big deal—most states are still heavily focused on improving fuel efficiency standards and electric vehicle adoption with little or no emphasis on how growing VMT is undercutting those efforts. This is shortsighted and leaves valuable strategies that would also create more livable and equitable communities on the table. 

Importantly, MnDOT also plans to develop an approach for estimating the VMT that will result from its program and proposed projects by assessing both induced demand from adding lanes and reduced demand from increasing walking access. MnDOT will also evaluate the accuracy of existing travel demand forecasting methods—an important step, since many traditional forecasting models have a poor track record of accuracy and can prompt premature or unnecessary highway expansions that induce more driving and more emissions. 

Minnesota isn’t the only state taking action this month to reduce emissions by reducing the need to drive. The California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA) recently released a public discussion draft of its plan to reduce VMT. The Climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure (CAPTI), created in response to Governor Gavin Newsom’s executive order, will be finalized later this year. It includes 28 action items with a number of potential strategies aimed at reducing driving, including pricing, using state transportation funds to incentivize land use decisions that reduce the need to drive, and establishing VMT mitigation banks that allow transportation project sponsors to purchase VMT allowances if their project will induce more driving, creating a fund for VMT-reduction projects. 

California’s plan also includes strategies aimed at addressing the transportation system’s entrenched inequities, such as pollutants that disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities. And California has also already developed an approach for estimating the induced driving that will result from its highway projects, which other states can and should adopt. 

We are very excited to see MnDOT take bold steps to address climate change emissions in transportation by addressing the role the transportation system plays in forcing people to drive more and further. They are showing themselves to be leaders and we hope to see many more states follow.

Why the INVEST Act is good for climate and business

We can have it all: a federal transportation program that reduces carbon emissions while boosting our economy. The House of Representatives led the way last summer with the INVEST Act, a bill that starts the work of connecting federal funding to the transportation outcomes Americans—including our businesses—need. Here’s how. 

A Washington, DC street in June 2020. Photo by Ted Eytan in Greater Greater Washington’s Flickr pool.

Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States, and the majority of them come from driving. Infrastructure investments that give people more options than hopping in the car are key to reducing these emissions. And luckily, these investments are great for our businesses, too. 

When the House of Representatives passed the INVEST Act last summer—a transportation bill that took huge steps toward aligning funding with the outcomes Americans want (getting to where they need to go)—we took a deep dive on the parts of the bill that do the most to reduce emissions. It’s not just one “climate title”—reducing emissions is in the bill’s DNA. 

With the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee holding a hearing this Wednesday on the “business case for climate solutions,” let’s revisit the climate measures in the INVEST Act to see how they boost our economy. 

Investing in public transit = good for business

As our partners Smart Growth America found in their report Core Values, businesses are relocating to transit-accessible downtowns to attract talent, bringing economic development with them. Yet the federal transportation program works against this trend. Public transportation has been underinvested in for decades, with the few federal funds transit receives undermined by overwhelming highway funding that doubles down on sprawl—an environment where transit can’t succeed. 

The INVEST Act increases transit funding by 47 percent, while also overhauling policies that have long obstructed transit as a truly viable option in communities, as we wrote last summer. The bill incentivizes transit agencies to increase service frequency, reversing policies that in practice incentivized agencies to do the opposite in order to decrease operating costs to the detriment of transit service. 

Members of Chambers for Transit—our coalition of over 35 local chambers of commerce fighting for robust public transit investment—know that increased transit investment improves access to jobs, sparks new development, and creates the kinds of vibrant communities that can attract a talented workforce. (That’s why Chambers for Transit sent a letter to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week.) It also improves access to the economy for people of color and low-income people, who make up larger shares of transit riders. 

Measuring access, not vehicle speed = good for businesses

Businesses want the federal transportation program to invest in projects that improve people’s access to jobs and services—not increase vehicle speeds. That’s why so many of our Chambers for Transit members support using new technologies to prioritize projects that improve people’s access to the things they need. (This is one of our three principles for transportation policy). 

For decades, the federal transportation program has done the opposite, measuring the success of its investments by vehicle speed. This doesn’t take into account whether or not people actually arrived at their destination. And it encourages states and planning organizations to build more and wider roads. This pushes homes and businesses farther apart from each other, making it much more difficult to walk, bike, or use transit, while in the long-haul, making congestion worse and increasing vehicle miles traveled and emissions. It also limits access to the economy to people who can afford to and are able to operate a car. 

To build the type of communities where you don’t have to drive everywhere, we need to measure success by access: how many destinations you can reach from your home by any mode. The INVEST Act transitions the federal transportation program to just that. 

Through a new performance measure, the INVEST Act requires recipients of federal transportation funding to improve people’s access to jobs and services, whether they drive, take transit, walk or bike. This will direct more funds to projects that shorten or eliminate the need for driving trips. The bill also requires states to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their transportation system. States that reduce emissions can be rewarded with increased flexibility, while states that fail to reduce emissions will face penalties. 

Improving safety to make it easier to walk and bike = good for business

Connected, walkable neighborhoods vastly economically outperform neighborhoods where the only way to get around is by driving—especially in terms of real estate. For-sale housing in dense, walkable neighborhoods in the 30 largest metropolitan areas were valued nearly double more than the rest of the for-sale housing market in those regions, as found in Foot Traffic Ahead, a 2019 Smart Growth America report. 

It’s not just real estate: businesses thrive on streets safe for biking and walking, as expertly highlighted (with great photos, too) by our friends at Strong Towns. You’re much more likely to cross the street to grab a cup of coffee if it’s safe and easy to do so. And with pedestrian fatalities skyrocketing across the country, there are too many streets where that is impossible.

The INVEST Act takes a comprehensive approach to make walking and biking safer through a combination of increased funding, policy reform, and better provisions to hold states accountable, as we wrote last year. Some of the bill’s safety provisions include: 

  • Requires states to adopt Complete Street design principles and makes $250 million available for active transportation projects including Complete Streets
  • Changes to how speed limits are set to prioritize safety results over a faster auto trip.
  • Requires states with the highest levels of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities to set aside funds to address those needs.
  • Prohibits states setting annual targets for roadway fatalities that are negative—in other words, targets that assume the current trend line of increased fatalities is unstoppable, essentially accepting more fatalities every year as an unavoidable cost.

Reducing transportation emissions has a host of other benefits 

To reduce transportation emissions, we have to give people more viable transportation options than driving. That means public transportation, biking, walking, and incentivizing community growth where destinations aren’t sprawling. 

Not only are these investments good for our businesses, but they improve equity too, by removing the $10,000 barrier to enter the economy—the average annual cost of car ownership. These investments also increase transportation access for people with disabilities or people unable to drive, and they significantly reduce air pollution, too—one of the largest risk factors for bad cases of COVID-19. 

If Congress wants to help our businesses embrace the 21st century and fight climate change, it’s time to invest in transportation that works—not new roads to nowhere.

Over 75 organizations and elected officials want the greenhouse gas performance measure reinstated

Reducing transportation emissions is necessary to slow down climate change. Which is why in less than a week, over 75 organizations and elected officials signed a letter by Transportation for America urging the Biden administration to reinstate the greenhouse gas (GHG) performance measure for transportation. This letter supported a similar effort in Congress led by Senator Cardin and Rep. Blumenauer. 

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States, and the bulk of them come from driving. Reducing these emissions is critical—but in 2018, the Trump administration repealed a performance measure that would have required states to measure greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions when planning new highway projects.

That’s why in less than a week, over 75 organizations and elected officials urged the Biden administration in a letter to reinstate the GHG performance measure. This letter was sent to Secretary Buttigieg along with a letter by Senator Ben Cardin and Congressman Earl Blumenauer, signed by 47 Senators and Members of Congress, who asked the secretary to “urgently” restore this performance measure. 

Restoring the GHG performance measure can be done immediately through executive action initiating a notice of proposed rulemaking. According to Transport Topics in 2018, “The proposed measurement rule would have required state DOTs and MPOs to undertake administrative activities to establish targets, calculate their progress toward their selected targets, report to [the Federal Highway Administration] and determine a plan of action to make progress toward their selected targets if they failed to make significant progress during a performance period.”

Please read the full letter—with the list of 80 signatories—here. For more on the connection between transportation and greenhouse gas emissions, check out our latest report: Driving Down Emissions.

How zoning keeps the number of low-emission neighborhoods artificially low

Many Americans want to live in walkable neighborhoods that are served by rapid public transportation. But these neighborhoods are few and far between and incredibly expensive to live in. That’s because in many cities and towns, building walkable neighborhoods is illegal, putting a premium on the few dense communities that exist. 

A neighborhood in San Diego.

The following blog is adapted from an excerpt of Smart Growth America and Transportation for America’s recent report, Driving Down Emissions, which explores how changing transportation policy and land use patterns are key to lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

It may appear that the United States’ typical car-oriented suburbs and exurbs that we’ve been building for the last 60-plus years—where often the only way residents can access what they need is by car—is the most in-demand style of neighborhood. 

This isn’t true. For the past few decades, the demand for compact and walkable neighborhoods connected to jobs and services by transit has skyrocketed, but the housing market hasn’t kept pace. That’s because local zoning rules often make building more of these types of neighborhoods illegal. 

In 2017, 62 percent of Americans reported that living near transit was important in choosing their home, and 54 percent cited their desire to live near bike lanes and paths, as found in the National Association of Realtors’ Community Preference Survey. And despite numerous news stories warning of a mass departure of residents from U.S. cities due to COVID-19, data has shown the opposite: Zillow’s research showed that, during the pandemic, “suburban housing markets have not strengthened at a disproportionately rapid pace compared to urban markets.” Even during an unprecedented pandemic, large numbers of people are not fleeing the cities for the suburbs, and cities will endure. 

Millions more Americans want to live in compact, transit-connected communities than can find or afford a home in one. And those who do pay a premium to be there. Yet in many towns and cities, local zoning regulations artificially constrict the number of these communities that can exist. By limiting how densely housing can be constructed or requiring minimum lot sizes, zoning interferes and prevents the market from meeting the demand for walkable, transit-served communities. In fact, it’s illegal to build anything except single-family detached houses on roughly 75 percent of land in most cities—which might explain why in the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., walkable neighborhoods account for between 0.04 percent and 1.2 percent of land area.

The consequences of making housing like duplexes or multi-unit apartment buildings illegal are severe. For one, the artificial dearth of compact, walkable neighborhoods dramatically increases property values in these types of communities that already exist—often to levels that make them unaffordable to those who could benefit from them the most. This trend has pushed low-income people out of compact cities to more affordable suburbs, where fewer transportation options fail to thoroughly connect them to jobs and services. Their transportation costs immediately go up, sometimes wiping out the gains of the more affordable housing. One study found that residents in low-income suburban neighborhoods with some transit access can reach just 4 percent of metro area jobs within a 45-minute commute. This means many people without access to a car can’t reach most jobs, further trapping them in a cycle of poverty.

In addition, it’s an immense challenge to efficiently serve a neighborhood of only single-family homes by transit. This fact, combined with the way that destinations spread farther apart, trips become longer or more frequent, and roads become wider and less safe to walk along or cross, results in more greenhouse gas emissions. Driving contributes the majority of transportation sector emissions in the United States, making transportation the largest source of U.S. carbon emissions and the only sector of the economy where emissions are rising, not decreasing. 

One solution? Permit the construction of more housing and neighborhoods that people want by reforming zoning rules to allow more homes, and more types and sizes of homes. More housing near transit and communities where people can live, work and play is needed to meet the demand and reduce the price pressure. 

Many cities are already updating their zoning to help build these walkable neighborhoods. Consider this: 

  • In San Diego, where housing prices have gone up 70 percent in the last six years, the mayor is seeking to address this issue by making it easier to build more housing near transit. 
  • Minneapolis also passed a comprehensive plan in 2018 that allowed duplexes and other types of housing citywide and eliminated parking requirements, which together could have a substantial impact on transportation emissions in the region. 
  • South Bend, Transportation Secretary Buttigieg’s former domain, eliminated parking requirements citywide, halting the practice of requiring developers to build expensive extra new parking that residents often don’t want or need but which ends up being rolled into the cost of a new home or apartment. 
  • In Portland, OR, the city recently moved to allow up to six homes on almost any residential lot. 

In these cities, anyone is free to continue building single-family homes in almost any neighborhood, but now more home types are legal. These changes will encourage compact urban development and make it more affordable to live in these cities, mitigating future sprawl and the additional driving it would cause.

However, local zoning regulations don’t exist in a vacuum: many zoning decisions are made in response to federal incentives. Federal transportation policy’s disproportionate investment in highways encourages many local governments to double down on sprawling land use patterns that best accommodate the high speed roads their state is building everywhere, pushing destinations further and further apart. 

Federal transportation policy can help reverse this trend by allocating funding to programs that increase access to jobs and services the most, regardless of mode—as is the case in the INVEST Act, the surface transportation bill passed by the House this past summer. The federal government can also commit to funding public transit and highways equally. 

Cities and towns should reform their zoning so that everybody who wants to can live in a walkable neighborhood connected to jobs and services by transit. Allowing the market to meet the demand for more homes in places that naturally come with lower emissions is a powerful climate change strategy. We’ll never reduce our carbon emissions, dismantle barriers to opportunities (particularly those faced by people of color), or rebuild our economy if we don’t make it easier and more affordable to live in great places.

Everything we liked (and didn’t like) at Buttigieg’s Transportation Secretary confirmation hearing

Last Thursday, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg faced the Senate for questioning on his nomination to be Secretary of Transportation. We liked almost all of his answers, and we weren’t alone: Senator Tester said Buttigieg’s testimony was “refreshing.” Here’s what T4America liked and didn’t like from Buttigieg’s confirmation hearing. 

Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg facing the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee as President Biden’s nominee to be Secretary of Transportation. Screen grab from C-SPAN.

✅ Complete Streets is a priority for Buttigieg

When answering a powerfully-worded question from Senator Schatz (D-HI), a cosponsor of the Complete Streets Act, Buttigieg confirmed his commitment to a Complete Streets approach. He even highlighted the Complete Streets projects that took place in South Bend. (Smart Growth America provided technical assistance to South Bend to pursue Complete Streets demonstration projects.)

“It’s very important to recognize the importance of roadways where pedestrians, bicycles, vehicles, any other mode can coexist peacefully. And that Complete Streets vision will continue to enjoy support from me if confirmed,” Buttgieg said. 

✅  Our “autocentric view” is a problem

Doubling down on his commitment to Complete Streets, Buttigieg noted that transportation in the United States overwhelmingly prioritizes cars. “There are so many ways that people get around, and I think often we have an autocentric view that forgets historically all of the other different modes,” Buttigieg told Sen. Klobuchar (D-MN). “We want to make sure that every time we do a street design that it enables cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, and businesses and any other mode to coexist in a positive way. We should be putting funding behind that.” 

✅  Addressing past damages is a priority 

Transportation infrastructure—particularly urban highways that have demolished and divided communities of color—is sometimes a major roadblock to improving equity in this country. Buttigieg knows this and told senators so in his opening remarks. “I also recognize that at their worst, misguided policies and missed opportunities in transportation can reinforce racial and economic inequality, by dividing or isolating neighborhoods and undermining government’s basic role of empowering Americans to thrive,” Buttigieg said. 

✅  Policy hasn’t kept up with automated vehicles 

Automated vehicles (AVs) is one of the transportation technologies that often captures lawmakers’ imagination. But in response to Sen. Fischer (R-NE), Buttigieg acknowledged that the federal government has failed to provide the leadership necessary to ensure that AVs actually deliver the benefits they promise. “[AV technology] is advancing quickly and has the potential to be transformative, but in a lot of ways, policy hasn’t kept up,” Buttigieg said. 

This couldn’t be more true. After investigating deaths from two separate AV crashes, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) billed the utter lack of federal safety performance standards as one of the causes for the fatalities. 

But proactive federal policy is needed for more than just ensuring that AVs are safe. Policy is needed to ensure that AVs are equitable, accessible, and sustainable. That’s why we joined Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and other partners in creating tenets for AV policy. 

✅  He supports passenger rail

Buttigieg said he’s the “second biggest enthusiast for passenger rail in this administration,” referring of course to President Biden, a long-time rider and fan of Amtrak, as the first.  “Americans deserve the highest standard of passenger rail,” Buttigieg said. 

When Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS)—a major supporter of restoring passenger rail to the Gulf Coast—asked Buttigieg if he’s a rail rider himself, Buttigieg said he enjoys short rail trips “and long ones too.” In light of Amtrak’s proposal to cut its long-distance network, this might signal Buttigieg’s support for those critical routes.  

✅  The BUILD program should be easier to apply for

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) offers a host of grant programs for cities and towns to construct and maintain transportation infrastructure. But the application process is often daunting for smaller entities. As mayor of a small city that wasn’t able to have “full-time staff managing federal relations,” Buttigieg told Sen. Wicker (R-MS) that making BUILD and INFRA grants easier for small and rural municipalities to apply for are one of his priorities. 

“It’s very important to me that this process is user-friendly, that criteria are transparent, and that communities of every size, including rural communities and smaller communities, have every opportunity to access those funds,” Buttigieg said. 

✅  Senators on both side of the aisle support Buttigieg

Buttigieg felt the love from both sides of the aisle during his confirmation hearing, with Sen. Tester (D-MT) going as far to say that Buttigieg’s testimony should serve as a model for other nominees facing Senate approval. Sen. Wicker (R-MS) listed Buttigieg’s accomplishments in his opening statement, praising his “impressive credentials that demonstrate his intellect and commitment to serving our nation.”

With slim Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, bipartisanship will be key to passing surface transportation authorization. But historically, infrastructure is one the areas where lawmakers bipartisanly agree to pass bad policy—rather than ruffling feathers and taking a hard look at what the federal government spends money on and why. (We blogged about it here.) It will take lots of work—like the herculean effort the House underwent this summer to pass a new kind of transportation bill—to make sure that the long-term transportation bill lawmakers must pass this year actually connects funding with the outcomes Americans want.

🚫 His climate answer only mentioned electric vehicles 

When Sen. Schatz asked about Buttigieg’s approach to climate change, Buttigieg only discussed electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, and increased vehicle fuel efficiency as a solution. Yet it’s a fact that electric vehicles and improved fuel efficiency—while critical—aren’t enough to reduce transportation emissions on their own. 

While we applaud Buttigieg’s support of President Biden’s “whole government” approach to addressing climate change (meaning that climate work isn’t confined to a single department like the EPA), we need Buttigieg to understand that USDOT needs to do more than invest in electric vehicles as a climate solution.

We like what we heard. Now let’s make sure it happens 

Buttigieg might be one of the most promising new Secretaries of Transportation that we’ve seen, but we must hold him accountable to following through on these initiatives. Now is not the time to lay back: we have a lot of work to do to ensure that USDOT does what it can internally to connect transportation funding to the outcomes Americans want (like our three principles) and that Congress passes a long-term transportation bill that ends decades of broken, misguided policy.

How the Biden administration can make immediate strides on climate and racial equity

The spread of COVID-19 has sent the United States plummeting into an unprecedented national crisis, but it has also illuminated the path forward. Transportation for America teamed up with our sister organizations at Smart Growth America to identify immediate executive actions and long-term policy changes that the incoming Biden administration can implement to eliminate structural inequities and address catastrophic global climate change. 

EDIT, December 2020: We updated the recommendations! Check out the full set of recommendations here and read our summary below.

Earlier this month, Transportation for America teamed up with our partners at Smart Growth America to send recommendations to the Biden transition team on executive actions and legislation. Read the full memo here, updated December 2020.

With years of federal advocacy and public service under our belts, all of us here can say this for certain: simply pumping more money into existing federal programs won’t help the United States recover from the COVID-19 crisis. In fact, taking that approach will just make our economy more unequal, lead to more pollution from transportation, and result in more expensive housing that still isn’t getting built where it’s most helpful. Money alone cannot rectify the structural inequities we are facing. 

To truly unlock our economic potential in a fiscally responsible way, tackle climate change and promote racial equity—the three goals of our recommendations—we need a new playbook. We must reform and better utilize the vast quantities of direct spending, tax credits, loan programs, formula funds, and financing that already exist. And only through a holistic approach that connects transportation, housing, and infrastructure policy can we provide Americans with freedom of transportation choice, access to affordable housing, and healthy, resilient communities.

Our recommendations to the transition team are best summed up with two simple messages. One, do not overlook how housing, land use, and transportation are interrelated in determining household costs, access to opportunity, wealth accumulation, and how much emissions we produce. And secondly, climate change and equity must be addressed together—the best strategies to improve the built environment to address one challenge also address the other.

Smart growth is the affordable, equitable, and sustainable path to recovery and prosperity. Now is the time for change enabling us to build back better, and we are glad for the opportunity to provide these recommendations to the incoming presidential administration. Read the full list of recommendations.

Here are some highlights from Transportation for America’s recommendations for immediate executive actions—most of which stem from our three principles for transportation policy.

  • Reduce emissions from transportation by re-establishing the greenhouse gas (GHG) performance measure for transportation that the Trump administration repealed, with annual state ratings.
  • Require federal agencies to issue guidance on identifying communities with infrastructure that creates barriers to mobility (such as highways that slice through a community), measuring the degree of harm to that community, and providing incentives and prioritizing resources to address those disparities by removing infrastructure barriers or creating new connectivity.
  • Require the Federal Highway Administration to update the Highway Capacity Manual to improve standards for pedestrians and cyclists which are based on accurate measures of safety and the perception of safety, including the level of traffic stress and crossing delays as opposed to volume and capacity.
  • Help transportation agencies measure access to jobs and essential services by directing research funds to create a national Geographic Information System (GIS)-based resource that allows transportation agencies to measure current levels of access to jobs and services by all modes of travel and assess the impact of planned projects.
  • The Department of Transportation should issue guidance clarifying the appropriate use of the common transportation design standard known as level of service (LOS), taking into account the impacts on induced demand, climate change, equity, and health outcomes.
  • Make a statement of support for the existing national network of state-supported and long distance passenger rail routes routes as essential connections for people in smaller and rural communities.

Driving Down Emissions in Minnesota

State and local policymakers have an important role to play in making it possible for people to drive less, which is essential for lowering transportation emissions. With our partners at Move Minnesota we produced a new case study companion to Driving Down Emissions looking at how Minnesota has seen some success reducing transportation emissions, why that progress won’t be sufficient, and how to stop leaving valuable strategies to create more livable and equitable communities on the table. 

Our new report, Driving Down Emissions, identifies strategies that can help make a significant dent in growing transportation emissions while building a more just society simply by allowing Americans to drive less to accomplish daily needs. While national policy changes will be needed to address that goal, many state and local governments continue to create barriers by over-investing in new highway infrastructure and imposing onerous government regulations that make it nearly impossible to build more housing in walkable and transit-accessible places.

There is a lot that other states could learn from Minnesota. The state and its localities have taken a number of valuable steps to make it possible to drive less. Yet Minnesota also faces challenges common to many other states—including an overreliance on future electric vehicles to reduce emissions at the expense of strategies that can be used right now to help people get around outside of a car.  

Read on for a summary of our Minnesota case study, and download the full version here.

The good news: progress reducing transportation emissions, and clear opportunities to do more

Minnesota has had some success reducing emissions from the transportation sector in recent years, particularly compared to some of its peers. The state’s annual transportation emissions peaked in the mid-2000s and then dropped 13 percent between 2005 and 2009. The state achieved this reduction partially by keeping driving per person in check, with annual miles driven per-person declining slightly between 2005 and 2017 (total miles driven annually has risen slightly).  Minnesota has maintained that lower level since in contrast to national transportation emissions which began to climb since the last recession. 

Minnesota also has a solid foundation to do more to make it possible for residents to drive less. The Twin Cities region (home to 65 percent of the state’s population) has made several strategic investments in light rail and bus rapid transit expansion, and has seen ridership increase on those lines in contrast to declining transit ridership elsewhere in the U.S. Outside of the Twin Cities, communities from Alexandria to Biwabik have made real progress making their streets safer for walking and biking, thanks in part to the state’s Complete Streets program and related initiatives.

The City of Minneapolis passed a comprehensive plan in 2018 to allow the addition of more housing in neighborhoods throughout the city while eliminating parking requirements, changes that have the potential to make a significant impact. In most urban areas in the U.S., the supply of affordable housing in walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods is artificially constrained by government-mandated zoning requirements. Removing those restrictions will allow more housing in the region and make it more affordable to live in the city, mitigating future sprawl and the additional driving it would cause while addressing a continued source of economic and racial discrimination in the region. 

Leaving valuable strategies on the table with an over reliance on electric vehicles

Despite those successes, Minnesota’s progress is just a start, and the state is not currently on track to meet its emissions reductions targets. Like many states, Minnesota has a legacy of prioritizing highway infrastructure that continues to have lasting impacts without further change. Sprawl continues to force more driving—in fact, the counties surrounding the Twin Cities are the main contributor to the state’s overall growth in driving annually.

Unfortunately the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s (MnDOT’s) plans for decarbonizing the transportation sector largely downplay reducing driving as an option. Instead, they rely heavily on ambitious assumptions about future electric vehicle adoption—and even on as-of-yet undeveloped biofuels technology—despite the fact that Minnesota has lagged behind the national average in adoption of electric vehicles. 

This is shortsighted and will lead the state to miss major opportunities. It also won’t address the needs of Minnesotans who can’t afford a car or are otherwise unable to drive, perpetuating existing inequities. Reducing the need to drive in Minnesota is not only doable, it’s what many Minnesotans want. Outreach conducted by MnDOT has shown broad public appetite for more walkable and less car-dependent communities. In fact, “walkable and bikeable communities” and “improved public transit” received the greatest support as a decarbonization strategy in MnDOT’s outreach, along with electric buses and trains. 

It makes no sense to leave any emissions reduction strategy untouched, especially when Minnesota has had success reducing driving in the past. The state should do more of what it knows works.
Read the full case study.

We’ll never address climate change without making it possible for people to drive less

With transportation accounting for the largest share of carbon emissions in the U.S., we’ll never achieve ambitious climate targets or create more livable and equitable communities if we don’t find ways to allow people to get around outside of a car—or provide more housing in places where that’s already an option. Our new report shows how we can reach those targets while building a more just and equitable society. 

Join us on October 28th for a short online discussion about what’s in Driving Down Emissions. We’ll be walking through the report briefly and sharing some stories about how one state has had some success—and the limitations of electric vehicles. Register here.

It seems like climate-focused policymakers have a single-minded obsession with the silver bullet solution of everyone in America buying a brand new electric car, while ignoring an underlying system that requires everyone to drive further every year, kills people walking in record numbers, and creates communities that cuts people off from jobs and opportunities. Yet the simple truth is that we’ll never achieve our ambitious climate targets or create more livable and equitable communities if we don’t find ways to allow people to get around outside of a car. 

We need a different set of solutions to pair with one day being able to convert our current gas-powered vehicle fleet to electricity.  Driving Down Emissions, a new report from Transportation for America and Smart Growth America, explores how our land-use and transportation decisions are inextricably connected, and unpacks five strategies that can make a significant dent in the growth of emissions while building a more just and equitable society:

  • Getting onerous government regulations out of the way of providing more homes where people naturally drive less;
  • Making safety the top priority for street design to encourage walking, biking, and shorter driving trips;
  • Instituting GHG reduction and less driving as goals of the transportation system;
  • Investing heavily in other options for getting around, and;
  • Prioritizing access to destinations. 

Reducing transportation emissions and reducing the distance we drive is both needed and possible. The vast majority of Americans are clamoring to spend fewer hours behind the wheel, not more. Only a cynic would declare that Americans want to drive more and more each year to accomplish all they need to do each day. Polling and consumer preference research has consistently shown that millions would prefer to live in walkable, connected places where trips are short and there’s a menu of options for getting around.

Yet that demand is going unmet, and some of the biggest obstacles to meeting it are onerous government regulations and policies (at all levels) that make it nearly impossible to build more housing in places that fit this bill, or to retrofit streets to make more areas safe to walk or bike in. These factors combine to make existing housing in walkable places unaffordable and unattainable.

Let that sink in: millions of Americans would love to live in places that guarantee shorter trips, fewer trips, more ways to get around, and less emissions—whether climate change is their motivating factor or not. But millions can’t find a place they can afford because of zoning requirements that make it either incredibly difficult or downright illegal to meet this demand, and because transportation designs and objectives that make it dangerous to try to get around elsewhere without a car. 

If lower-income Americans can’t afford a car then they have no choice but to limit the possibilities for their lives to what can be reached on dangerous streets by foot or bike, or via infrequent buses or trains on underfunded transit systems that fail to connect them to opportunity, even if the emissions are low. Finding ways to put more housing in places where people can drive less—and making those homes attainable and affordable—will be a key aspect of transitioning to a low-carbon economy without placing a new burden on lower-income Americans. 

This report shows that reducing emissions from transportation is entirely doable—which is a good thing, because there are other areas where making significant reductions will be far more difficult. While we don’t want to repeat the economic conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the massive drops in traffic and emissions during the shutdown showed us the potential benefits of lowering driving rates, even if just a modest amount. And while we have no idea how to completely electrify our fleet of vehicles or how long that transition will even take, we can absolutely lower emissions in a short timeframe by meeting the demand for more housing in smart locations—helping millions of Americans who want to live in places where they can emit less and drive less find ways to do so. 

The urgency of our climate crisis requires it.

Download Driving Down Emissions

Webinar recap: How the Senate’s transportation proposal would make climate change worse

Transportation is the largest source of U.S. carbon emissions, and most of it comes from driving. But a long-term transportation bill passed by a Senate committee last summer would only make this problem worse. Last week, along with Third Way, we discussed the role federal transportation policy plays in making climate change worse—and what a better transportation bill looks like. 

Last summer, the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee passed a long-term transportation bill that was, quite frankly, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The bill included a groundbreaking $10 billion for carbon reduction programs (“groundbreaking” simply because no prior transportation law had ever included any climate-related funding), while pouring 27 times that amount into programs that are perfectly designed to increase carbon emissions.. 

That’s why we teamed up with Third Way to host a webinar debunking the bill’s climate-friendly ethos. Our Policy Director Scott Goldstein and Third Way’s Transportation Policy Advisor Alexander Laska discussed how the Senate bill will just wind up increasing emissions, and what a better long-term transportation bill looks like (psssssh: it looks an awful lot like the bill passed by the House of Representatives this summer). 

Here are three of the most frequently-asked questions from the webinar. 

Why isn’t electrifying vehicles enough to reduce transportation emissions? 

The reason: Americans are driving more than ever, and electrification can’t keep up with the pace of growth. As federal transportation policy and funding encourages more and wider highways, destinations—like housing, businesses, schools and more—get placed physically farther apart from each other to accommodate highways. This results in people living further away from the things they need and the places they go, causing them to drive further and further just to reach everyday destinations, as our former colleague Emily Mangan wrote in this slam dunk of a blog post. 

This ever-increasing driving (known as “vehicle miles traveled”, or VMT) is why emissions have increased despite relatively large increases in fuel efficiency standards and the slow-but-steady adoption of electric vehicles thus far. Despite an admirable 35 percent increase in the overall fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet from 1990-2016, emissions still rose by 21 percent. That’s because the total amount of miles traveled increased by 50 percent in that same period. 

If we only electrify the fleet but don’t find ways for more people to drive less each day, this trend will continue to go in the wrong direction. And make no mistake, this Senate bill gives states billions in new money for new roads that will just produce more driving.

What role does Congress play in local land use decisions? 

The common belief is that land-use decisions are made strictly at the local level, and that the federal government has no role or effect on them. That’s false. Federal policy plays an enormous role in local land use decisions, largely due to the incentives that federal programs create. 

In the federal transportation program, 80 percent of funding is set mostly for highways, where the overarching priority is to increase vehicle speed, not to improve safety, not to make it easier to bike or walk, and not to make transit more efficient. As a result, towns and cities make decisions in response to these federal priorities and investments: they’ll widen a highway instead of repairing the existing street network or building a protected bike lane, and decide to zone more land for low-density housing or retail. 

Changing federal incentives can have a ripple effect on local land-use decisions. Allowing cities and towns to use transportation dollars to invest in transit operations and maintenance might encourage local governments to make zoning decisions that support those investments: that means denser, walkable neighborhoods and downtowns. 

Congress can also unlock more federal funding for equitable transit-oriented development. As we wrote with Third Way in their Transportation and Climate: Federal Policy Agenda, Congress should require that the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) and U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) coordinate to leverage billions of dollars in existing loan authority that could support mixed-income, mixed-use development and provide new revenue streams for transit, affordable housing, and local governments. 

How can college-aged students and climate activists help amplify the importance of this issue?

There’s a lot that anyone can do to make sure that long-term transportation policy actually reduces carbon emissions. 

It’s vitally important that members of Congress understand the connection between transportation and climate change. Anyone can understand that cars pollute the air, but making the next step—that we need to reduce driving, not just electrify it—is something that needs to be explained to many people, particularly our elected officials. The failure to understand this point has been bipartisan.It’s not enough to somehow make every vehicle electric: we also need a transportation system that allows more people to bike, walk, and take transit, as well as take shorter trips in a vehicle. Making marginal changes to yesterday’s transportation policy won’t get us there. 

We have a couple of ways you can start educating your members of Congress about the real connection between climate and transportation: 

  1. Send a letter to your members of Congress explaining why the Senate EPW Committee’s long-term transportation bill is actually really bad for the climate. We have a draft letter you can use, which you can find here. 
  2. Tweet at your members of Congress (particularly your Senators) to urge them to pass a climate-friendly transportation bill. You can use our social media toolkit. 
  3. Submit a short letter to the editor to your local newspaper explaining what it takes to truly reduce transportation emissions: investment in a transportation system that makes shorter trips, biking, walking, and riding transit possible. 

Why the Senate’s transportation bill is terrible for climate

Last summer, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed a long-term transportation bill that was praised for its climate title, marking the first time the word “climate” was included in a bipartisan transportation bill. But while this climate title was worth celebrating, the bill overall would actually result in more emissions, not less. Here’s how, and why we need a different approach.

Check out the recap of our webinar with Third Way, where we discussed why the Senate’s bill is bad for climate, why the House’s INVEST Act is much better, and what advocates can do to help Senators improve their next transportation bill.

A protected bike lane in Washington, DC. Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Last July, the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee passed the America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act (ATIA), this committee’s stab at reauthorizing transportation policy once the existing law expires this September. Amid the status quo of more money for existing federal transportation programs, the bill would spend $10 billion over five years on a new suite of climate and carbon reduction programs, including funds to incentivize states to develop and adopt carbon reduction strategies and grants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. But this $10 billion for climate will fail to accomplish much when the rest of the bill funnels $277 billion into traditional programs that are perfectly designed to increase emissions. 

Here’s how—and how the House’s recently-passed bill will actually shift the climate paradigm. 

To reduce emissions, we need to allow people to drive less

Transportation accounts for the largest share of carbon emissions in the U.S., and those emissions are rising—even as other sectors have improved. This is because vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is increasing, negating the 35 percent increase in the overall fuel efficiency of vehicles on our roads between 1990-2016. Carbon emissions rose by 21 percent over that period because VMT rose by 50 percent. 

We won’t be able to increase fuel efficiency and electrify cars faster than VMT is rising, reducing the impact of electrification particularly in the next 10-20 years. And VMT is rising because the current federal transportation program—the broken program that the Senate is proposing to effectively renew with more money for five years—increases driving by design. U.S. transportation policy is focused on building more and wider highways instead of maintaining what we have, and without making sure that those new highways actually improve people’s access to the places they need to reach. This divides communities by the highway from the things they need across the highway and pushes development (and the people who live there) further away from the things they need, making them drive further and further just to get where they  need to go on a daily basis.  

The bill passed in the House is much better for climate 

If we want to reduce transportation emissions, we must reform the programs at the heart of federal transportation policy that allow and even encourage states to build new roads and expand existing ones in a way that divides communities and pushes development further out. The Senate bill’s $10 billion for climate doesn’t stand a chance against the unchanged status quo, but the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives—the INVEST Act—is a step in the right direction. 

For one, the INVEST Act requires that states maintain roads before building new ones. This is a huge step toward reducing unwise road building and expansion that often cuts off short local trips making people drive more, displaces existing communities (more often people of color) and encourages more development far from everything those residents will need to get to. That is the status quo maintained by the ATIA: increasing VMT, the backlog of maintenance needs, and congestion. 

While the Senate created an Accessibility Data Pilot Program in the ATIA, the House took that up a notch by creating a performance measure that requires states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to improve access to jobs and services by all modes. This means that project sponsors must determine whether people traveling (not just driving) can reach jobs, schools, groceries, medical care and other necessities. 

Under the INVEST Act’s performance measure, states and MPOs will be penalized if they fail to use federal funding to improve that access—effectively incentivizing project sponsors to not build new or expanded roads. New roads don’t help nondrivers and they don’t help drivers get where they need to go any faster if they have to travel further, which is often the result of these projects. 

In another major shift, the INVEST Act also requires that states measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their transportation system. States that reduce emissions can be rewarded with increased flexibility on how they spend federal dollars, while states that fail to reduce emissions will face penalties, as we wrote in this blog with our partners at Third Way. 

These aren’t the only ways the House has taken a far superior, holistic approach to the Senate on climate. While not perfect, the INVEST Act makes significant progress towards electrifying our vehicle fleet, increasing transit funding, and making biking and walking safer (read more about these policies here). 

The Senate’s bill doesn’t go far enough 

One thing is certain: the Senate doesn’t go nearly far enough. To be clear, we understand that the climate champions do not have the numbers to overcome the climate deniers in the Senate and that getting any climate language in their bill took real work. Kudos to those that fought for these programs. However, there should be an understanding from real climate champions about its weakness and how little it does to attack the underlying climate problems with our approach to transportation in this country. 

These champions might tout the climate provisions they got but vote against the bill, which happens all of the time. Or they could vote for the bill while being open about the continuing problems caused by the 96.7 percent of the funding that does nothing to address climate, much of which will harm our efforts to stave off catastrophic climate change. Or if not those options, they could loudly praise the superior House bill and welcome those ideas to the conversation in conference. And to be clear, this isn’t just an issue with those seeking to address climate in the Senate but also to those stakeholders that work on the issue from across the country, who praised this bill as if it made real change and didn’t just give a tiny portion of funding to fix the problem that is continuing to be generated by 30 times the funding given to climate.

It is too late for this meek approach. We all must do more. It’s time for bold action, not just an add-on to the status quo. 

Bipartisan, climate-forward transportation legislation is possible—but only if lawmakers rethink what transportation investments can achieve. Check out our director Beth Osborne’s take on why bipartisanship on its own can’t make a transportation bill great.