green new deal Archives - Transportation For America

Why we need federal operations funding for public transit

For decades, the federal government has only provided funding for public transportation maintenance and infrastructure projects—not the day-to-day costs of running trains and buses. This has to change in order to create the equitable and sustainable transportation system necessary to connect everyone to opportunities.

Person in a wheelchair inside a bus. — Credit: IndyGo

Senator Menendez said it best at a Banking Committee hearing a few weeks ago: “We subsidize roads and bridges. I don’t get how transit is any different.”

We don’t get it, either. For decades, not only has the federal government allotted just 20 percent of transportation funding to public transit, but they have limited that funding to only maintenance and capital needs—not operating dollars. This moratorium has been lifted for rural transit agencies since 1998, but large and mid-sized agencies still do not receive operating funds, which make up two-thirds of public transportation’s costs.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government matched as much as $1 of operating assistance to transit agencies for every $2.25 provided by local and state governments, as we wrote with partners in the Green New Deal for City and Suburban Transportation. Now, agencies have to count on fare revenue and sales taxes to maintain and expand service. Yet these two sources of funding are far from reliable. These two revenue streams plummeted in March 2020, forcing many agencies to temporarily cut service until federal emergency relief arrived.

The current federal focus on building infrastructure, not providing service, leads many transit agencies towards spending “large quantities of federal funds upgrading or extending a handful of routes while neglecting the broader network of service, and ridership stagnates or shrinks” as a result, as we wrote in the Green New Deal report.

All Americans—no matter where they live—deserve transportation options that are convenient, affordable, sustainable and safe. Yet federal transportation policy makes it impossible for transit agencies to deliver this service. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of Americans live within walking distance of transit that runs every 15 minutes or less, TransitCenter found.

Funding public transportation is also a matter of equity. The lack of operating support for public transit—and the severe underfunding of transit in general—doesn’t impact everyone equally. People of color make up 60 percent of transit riders. Of that, 24 percent are Black Americans. In addition, 19 percent of Black households have no access to a vehicle, compared to 9 percent of households nationally with no vehicle access.

“A transit system that truly works has to be frequent and reliable,” said former Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater in a recent op-ed. “People should be able to depend on a bus coming every 10 minutes, no matter where in the country they live.”

Imagine a United States where every community has great transit service that can safely and conveniently get you to work, school, shopping, church or anywhere else you need to go; a place where you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars per year owning and operating a car. Putting every American within reach of frequent transit service is possible—we just need to fund it.

We urge Congress to include operating support for public transit in the next surface transportation authorization, the long-term law that determines how much we spend on transportation and what we spend it on. The current law, the FAST Act, expires this September, giving Congress a rare opportunity to fundamentally remake American transportation.

The Generating Resilient, Environmentally Exceptional National (GREEN) Streets Act re-introduced in the Senate today

Today, Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Tom Carper (D-DE), and Representative Jared Huffman (CA-02) re-introduced a bill that would measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled. This would be transformative.

We originally wrote this blog when the bill was first introduced in July 2019—we hope that 2021 is the year it becomes law.

Crossing the street in Boston. Photo by Yu-Jen Shih on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG), contributing 28 percent of the United States’ total GHG emissions. While many other sectors have improved, transportation is headed in the wrong direction. Driving represents 83 percent of all transportation emissions and these emissions are rising—despite cleaner fuels, more efficient and electric vehicles—because people are driving more and making longer trips.

Unfortunately, our federal transportation program forces people to drive more by measuring success through vehicle speed—not the time it actually takes people to reach their destination. Building wider highways and sprawling cities to accommodate high-speed driving creates a feedback loop of more driving, virtually guaranteeing ever-increasing transportation emissions (and congestion).

To reduce emissions we must make it possible for people to take fewer and shorter car trips, as well as make it easy and convenient for people to bike, walk and use transit. But we can’t do this if we only measure and value high speed car trips. The bill introduced today would change what we measure and value in transportation to include reducing GHG and vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

The Generating Resilient, Environmentally Exceptional National (GREEN) Streets Act, introduced by Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Tom Carper (D-DE) and Representative Jared Huffman (CA-02), will create new performance measures and goals requiring that states measure, and reduce, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and GHG in their transportation systems. Read more about the bill on Senator Markey’s website.

“Business-as-usual is building bad highways and breaking our planet — we can build smarter, safer, and healthier systems if we factor climate impacts and emissions into our decision-making process,” said Senator Markey, a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee and co-author of the Green New Deal resolution. “We can advance the goals of clean energy, climate progress, and healthy communities, as well as fortify ourselves against the adverse impacts of climate change. An essential component of that effort is to re-envision how we plan for, construct, and maintain our national highway system, using climate measures that matter and ensure that we hold systems accountable.”

To reduce VMT and GHG, states would likely have to employ a variety of strategies, including better transportation options and smarter land use. These strategies come with a host of benefits besides reducing GHG: reduced congestion, lower household transportation costs, safer streets, more attractive communities and better health outcomes. By measuring how successful transportation projects are by how many destinations—like jobs, schools, and grocery stores— people can access, the federal government can incentivize states and local governments to invest in transit, biking, and walking, as well as build places closer together.

“Our transportation system gives many Americans no choice but to drive everywhere, which is no surprise because our transportation program is designed to consider only vehicle speed, not whether people (driving, taking transit, walking, rolling or biking) reach their destination. We need to measure what matters,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “Doing so will help give Americans more freedom to choose how to get around, save them money, and also reduce the harmful emissions wreaking havoc on our climate. We are hopeful that the re-introduced GREEN Streets Act will resume an important conversation about aligning federal funding with the outcomes we deserve from our transportation system, and we are pleased to support it.”

Transportation for America strongly supports the GREEN Streets Act and urges Congress to pass this transformative legislation.

Here’s what Transportation for America has been up to this March

With COVID-19 throwing public transportation into an existential crisis, Transportation for America mobilized to preserve America’s most essential transportation service—and we did, with Congress agreeing to $25 billion in emergency assistance for transit operations last week. But while the news has understandably been consumed by COVID-19, the pandemic hasn’t been the only thing on our plates.

March Madness might have been cancelled, but it’s certainly been a crazy month in America—and crazy busy at Transportation for America. We started the month in report-a-palooza, gearing up to release two landmark reports—and then the global pandemic struck the United States.

Even though we’ve been working from home, we’re still laser-focused on our mission: to work towards a transportation system that safely, affordably and conveniently connects people of all means and abilities to jobs, services, and opportunity through multiple modes of travel. So here’s what else we’ve been up to.

Exposing the congestion con

The U.S. spends billions every year to “relieve congestion.” But building new and widening existing highways only makes traffic worse.

The Congestion Con, our report released earlier this month, found that congestion increased in regions that built new and widened existing freeways, regardless of population growth. Between 1993 and 2017, the U.S. increased the number of lane-miles in the largest 100 urbanized areas by 42 percent on average, significantly outstripping the 32 percent population growth in those regions over the same period. Yet this strategy has utterly failed to “solve” the problem at hand—delay is up in those urbanized areas by a staggering 144 percent.

You can read our full report or check out our webinar on the report with T4America Director Beth Osborne, Strong Towns Co-Founder and President Chuck Marohn, and Los Angeles DOT Transportation Planner Mariana Valdivia.

A Green New Deal for Transportation

The original Green New Deal, released in February 2019 by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and Senator Ed Markey (MA), catapulted discussion about an equitable transition to a carbon-neutral economy into the mainstream. But it had one glaring omission: how federal transportation policy and development patterns make it impossible to reduce transportation emissions.

A new report—A Green New Deal for City and Suburban Transportation—fills those gaps. Co-written by T4America, TransitCenter, Data for Progress and the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, this Green New Deal gives transportation policy the same visionary makeover other sectors received in the original plan to show what we could achieve if our transportation and climate goals were aligned. Download the full report.

New polling shows that Americans support expanding public transit by 77-15 margin

What we always knew to be true is now backed up with polling: Voters want more transportation options. This month, T4America—alongside the same partners behind the Green New Deal for Transportation—released a new polling memo that found exactly that.

The data reinforces many of the same results we’ve seen in our polling over the years: voters are prepared to spend more on public transit and want to orient government spending toward improving existing infrastructure. While many rely on cars, a majority said they want to have other options to get around each day. Democrats and Republicans agree that the government should be prioritizing fixing our roads and helping with congestion in our cities.

You can download the full polling memo here, and get the highlights in this post from Emily Mangan.

What would a Green New Deal for transportation look like?

Current federal transportation policy is diametrically opposed to climate action. The Green New Deal framework released a year ago mostly left that unchanged. But a new report T4America contributed to fills in those gaps and gives transportation policy the same visionary makeover to show what we could achieve if our transportation and climate goals were aligned.

When the Green New Deal was first released last year, Transportation for America Director Beth Osborne had some pointed critiques.

The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gasses in the United States and it’s also the one that federal officials have the most control over with the power of the purse. Yet the Green New Deal is largely devoid of the bold reimagining of federal transportation spending which encourages more roads, more driving, more sprawl, and more emissions.

The Green New Deal as originally introduced completely ignores the role development patterns play in driving the climate crisis and fails to align our transportation policy with our environmental goals and aspirations (to say nothing of what people actually want from our transportation system). Though the Green New Deal is a broad policy framework, that’s a glaring oversight for something billed as a comprehensive answer to climate change.

We also know that current federal policy is actively undermining any progress on achieving real climate progress. The way we distribute money incentivizes more road building and more driving. The amount we spend on transit is pitiful compared to the amount spent on highways. Americans want more transportation options, but are stuck with their cars. Electric buses would be welcome, but too many people can’t safely walk to the bus stop because our streets are designed to prioritize high-speed traffic over safety.

So what would our federal transportation policy look like if the Green New Deal reimagined it? How would we invest limited transportation dollars to align our environmental ambitions with our policy? In a new report that we contributed to—A Green New Deal for City and Suburban Transportation—we outline how federal transportation policy can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by:

Putting the majority of Americans within walking distance of frequent, high-quality public transit by 2030, by providing agencies with operating assistance to run more buses and trains, expanding overall funding for transit projects, and encouraging transit-oriented development.
Incentivizing and requiring communities to design transit-friendly streets and safe roadways for all users.
Prioritizing roadway maintenance over expansion, and ensuring that any new road capacity meets environmental goals.
Ensuring a “just transition” that creates secure, well-paying jobs and funds training and apprenticeship programs in the transit industry.
Providing funding for research into barriers to equitable transit provision.
Creating an EV incentive program weighted by income, geography, and vehicle size.

A better transportation system

A Green New Deal done right provides an opportunity to break out of the status quo and do transportation better. It’s an opportunity to reevaluate our transit and roadway systems, invest in electric vehicles, and broaden our conception of frontline communities in this sector—namely, the suburban and urban communities where public transit service is sparse or non-existent and owning a personal vehicle is all but required.

We can use the transportation sector as a strategic lever toward a Green New Deal by tackling our highest sources of carbon emissions, putting millions of people to work upgrading and repairing existing infrastructure rather than building new roads. Bringing our road and transit systems into a state of good repair over the next 10 years could support or create over 6.6 million jobs across the U.S. economy.

By making our cities and suburbs easy and safe to navigate without driving, we’ll also equitably grow our economy. In an America with abundant transit and safe streets for walking, biking, and rolling, more jobs will be within reach of people with low incomes, and transportation costs will consume far less of their earnings. What’s more, with less driving we’ll have less congestion. Our expensive gambit to build our way out of congestion hasn’t worked, but a Green New Deal could.

By providing more options, we’ll enable millions of people to take advantage of jobs and opportunities throughout their cities and regions, reducing the current disparities in mobility linked to race, economic status, age, or ability. The incidence of asthma, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic ailments caused by car pollution—which disproportionately afflict communities of color—will fall.

Getting transportation and climate policy right

It’s striking that many climate plans almost completely ignore transportation and land use. But our new report makes it clear what a huge opportunity we would be squandering without more direct, visionary action with a Green New Deal.

We have an enormous opportunity to both reduce emissions and rethink our transportation system. Let’s focus on the outcomes we want to achieve, not just how much money we’re going to spend. We can’t keep doing the same old transportation policy. Download the full report to learn more.

Voters want and need more transportation options

New polling conducted by YouGov on behalf of T4America and our partners finds that Americans support expanding public transit by a 77-15 margin—even as many transit agencies face a growing generational funding crisis brought on by COVID-19.

Americans want a better transportation system that provides them meaningful options. This week, we released new polling results alongside our partners at TransitCenter, Data for Progress, the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, and the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. It helps us answer a crucial question: what do voters really want out of our transportation system?

Unsurprisingly, voters want more transportation options and to see tangible outcomes from their investments in the system.

For too many, driving is the only option

Car use is prevalent among voters in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to drive everywhere, all the time, for every single trip. Far from it. By and large, voters feel they have insufficient alternatives to driving and have no choice but to use their cars as much as they do.

Among those who reported a car was their primary mode of transportation, about 80 percent agreed that they have “no choice” but to drive as much as they do. Just over half of car users report wishing they had more options, and about the same share of car owners said that public transit was not convenient for their needs.

Surprisingly, voters on net support a policy to reduce the number of personal automobiles on the road. By a 47-38 margin voters agree that the government should aim to reduce the number of vehicles in the U.S. over the next few years. This includes a clear 68-12 net support among Democrats and 43-38 net positive support among Independents as well. About 23 percent of Republicans somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement.

Voters want more options, but are they willing to pay for transit? The answer is a resounding “yes!”

Voters support transit

Even though many Americans don’t have access to a convenient transit network, they still believe transit has enormous benefits. The polling shows that 66 percent of voters believe their own communities would benefit from expanding public transit while about 77 percent of voters believe the US overall would benefit from expanding public transit. This support includes near unanimity among Democrats, 90 percent of whom agree.

Overall, Americans clearly support having better public transportation systems. This basic conclusion is robust across a variety of political, demographic, and geographic factors.

To have better public transit, people are willing to pay for it. Nearly four times as many voters support increasing public transportation funding as support reducing it. There’s even no appetite for cuts to investments in public transportation, even accounting for party identification and geography. Less than 1 in 5 Republicans support cutting transportation spending. As recent historical data has borne out, when voters go to the ballot to raise taxes to invest in transit, those measures pass at around a 70 percent clip.

Across the political spectrum, voters support increasing funding by a 77-15 margin. When asked how much should be spent on public transportation, the average response was $0.33 of every federal transportation dollar; current public transportation spending is only about $0.20 per dollar. Americans are clearly ready to shift transportation dollars toward transit.

Broad agreement on fix it first

Most popular of all, and what we’ve been saying for years, is that fixing our existing infrastructure before building something new is enormously popular across the political divide. The polling indicates that not only do voters support additional spending on maintaining existing roads and bridges, they want new policies that would obligate local governments to do so.

Fully 79 percent of voters agreed that the government should fix existing roads before building new ones. About 73 percent support a new set of obligations on state governments to justify any new roads, and 61 percent support an outright moratorium on new roads for ten years as a means of reorienting local governments toward repairing infrastructure.

There is bipartisan agreement in the electorate that we should be prioritizing maintenance, but Congress is ignoring what their constituents want.

Give people options, but also give them EVs

We found that in addition to wanting more and better transit across the country, voters also want to be able to afford an electric vehicle. Subsidies that would increase the availability of electric vehicles were widely popular.

We also found support for “generous rebates” for electric vehicles that specifically help those living in areas where a stronger transit network is less feasible. About 69 percent of Democrats supported while Republicans only narrowly opposed rebates, by a 37-47 margin.

What voters want

American voters want a national transportation system that provides more options, that frees them from total dependence on cars, and that fixes our existing infrastructure. Unfortunately, current policy is designed to achieve precisely none of that: we underfund transit, over invest in roads, and favor new construction over maintenance. It’s clear that voters want to build a better transportation system—and they support the policies that would make that possible. Now it’s time for Congress to act. In our new report released today—A Green New Deal for City and Suburban Transportation—we show how Congress could fundamentally restructure federal transportation policy to achieve the basic outcomes that Americans support, while also protecting our environment, health, and pocketbooks.

The Generating Resilient, Environmentally Exceptional National (GREEN) Streets Act introduced in the Senate today

Today Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Tom Carper (D-DE) introduced a bill that would measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled. This would be transformative.

Crossing the street in Boston. Photo by Yu-Jen Shih on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

The Generating Resilient, Environmentally Exceptional National (GREEN) Streets Act, introduced by Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Tom Carper (D-DE), will create new performance measures and goals requiring that states measure, and reduce, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and GHG in their transportation systems.

“To combat climate change, we must reduce emissions and build safer, healthier and more resilient communities,” said Senator Markey, a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee and co-author of the Green New Deal resolution. “That means advancing the goals of clean energy, climate progress, and healthy communities, as well as fortifying ourselves against the adverse impacts of climate change. An essential component of that effort is to re-envision how we plan for, construct, and maintain our federal highway transportation system, using climate measures that matter and hold systems accountable.”

“For decades our federal transportation program has been full of incentives that encourage more driving, longer trips, and more congestion. It’s high time for us to reduce all three of those things as a unifying purpose for the program,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “Doing so will help give Americans more freedom to choose how to get around, save them money, and also reduce the harmful emissions wreaking havoc on our climate. We are hopeful that the GREEN Streets Act will help kickstart an important conversation about finding a new, more productive purpose for the federal transportation program and we are pleased to support it.”

Transportation for America strongly supports the GREEN Streets Act and urges Congress to pass this transformative legislation.

We must address the climate crisis—which requires changing transportation and land use

Good news! Since the time Beth wrote this, we put our money where our mouth is and wrote a Green New Deal for Transportation. You can check it out here.

The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gasses in the United States and it’s also the one that federal officials have the most control over with the power of the purse. Yet the Green New Deal is largely devoid of the bold reimagining of federal transportation spending which encourages more roads, more driving, more sprawl, and more emissions.

Yesterday, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Markey (D-MA) introduced the much anticipated Green New Deal resolution. The brains behind the Green New Deal (GND) should be commended for treating the climate crisis as the existential threat it is. As a policy framework, the GND acknowledges the need to use cleaner fuels and invest equitably. But like most conversations around climate change, it gives only a glancing mention to the transportation system and completely ignores the role development patterns play in driving the climate crisis.

Transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG), outpacing the power sector and comprising at least 28 percent of the United States’ total GHG emissions. Surface transportation represents 83 percent of transportation emissions, and transportation has now surpassed electrical generation as the top emitter. Pollution from transportation comes from three drivers: the efficiency of vehicles, the carbon content of fuels, and the distance people travel. And transportation emissions keep climbing in spite of the fact that vehicles are getting more efficient and fuels are getting cleaner because people are driving more and further.

Why is that? Our surface transportation program is designed to keep people in their cars. For example, Congress distributes transportation funding to states based on how much fuel is burned. The more gas burned in a state, the more money that state gets. It should hardly surprise us that states have built systems tailored to driving or that this system has pushed people to drive more over the past 60 years. Moreover, the transportation program dedicates 80 percent of those funds to highways and only 20 percent to transit—and the highway funding is guaranteed over multiple years while transit funds are on the chopping block every year. Further, if you build a new highway, a transportation agency has to come up with a 20 percent local match. But if you want to build new transit, you have to come up with at least 50 percent. Is our priority clear yet?

Back in 2012, Congress gave state departments of transportation more flexibility over how they spent federal transportation funds. In exchange, they created a performance management system to establish some accountability over that spending. That system requires states—most of which are organized around building highways and have very little staff focused on less polluting modes of travel—to set targets for their performance in safety, state of repair, and traffic flow. Strangely, Congress allowed them to set targets in these areas to do worse every year. And even in this embarrassingly weak “accountability” system, efficiency measures and GHG emissions were completely left out.

Considering the GND is a statement by Congress about what we should do to make every sector more efficient and less polluting, it would be nice if they would look at their own spending (i.e. federal dollars) and consider aligning it with their climate priorities.

Underlying these transportation challenges is the fact that our local governments are pushing housing further and further from the jobs and services that people need. And they have been doing this since the beginning of the highway era. It turns out that if houses are spread out and placed far away from all the things people need then they will have no choice but to drive more often and further.

While the development rules that create these patterns were set by the federal government in the 1920s, the federal government likes to pretends it is a purely local issue and that they have no role in the solution. Of course, many federal programs today continue to support and even encourage this spread out development that predictably creates long car trips and traffic congestion.

If the supporters of the GND are serious about addressing GHG emissions, they are going to have to spend time on the sector that is going in the wrong direction—a sector they have more direct responsibility for than any other. Without that, it looks like they are throwing stones from a glass house.