(Source: The Brookings Institution)

The Obama administration’s move to increase vehicle fuel economy standards and reduce greenhouse gas emissions addresses the source of one-third of U.S. CO2 emissions—transportation. In this report, the authors analyze the current state of carbon emissions by metropolitan area, listing the places that emit the least per capita and proposing policy avenues to move the entire nation toward reduced climate impact.   

America’s Challenge

The nation’s carbon footprint has a distinct geography not well understood or often discussed. This report quantifies transportation and residential carbon emissions for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, finding that metro area residents have smaller carbon footprints than the average American, although metro footprints vary widely. Residential density and the availability of public transit are important to understanding carbon footprints, as are the carbon intensity of electricity generation, electricity prices, and weather. 

Limitations of Existing Federal Policy
Numerous market and policy distortions inhibit metropolitan actors from more aggressively addressing the nation’s climate challenge. Economy-wide problems include underpriced energy, underfunded energy research, missing federal standards, distorted utility regulations, and inadequate information. Policy impediments include a bias against public transit, inadequate federal leadership on freight and land-use planning, failure to encourage energy- and location-efficient housing decisions, and the fragmentation of federal transportation, housing, energy, and environmental policies. 

A New Federal Approach
Federal policy could play a powerful role in helping metropolitan areas—and so the nation—shrink their carbon footprint further. In addition to economy-wide policies to motivate action, five targeted policies are particularly important within metro areas and for the nation as a whole:

• Promote more transportation choices to expand transit and compact development options
• Introduce more energy-efficient freight operations with regional freight planning
• Require home energy cost disclosure when selling and “on-bill” financing to stimulate and scale up energy-efficient retrofitting of residential housing
• Use federal housing policy to create incentives for energy- and location-efficient decisions
• Issue a metropolitan challenge to develop innovative solutions that integrate multiple policy areas

Click here to Read/Download Full Report

(Source: The Infrastructurist)

Our friends at The Infrastructurist compiled the national results from that study and compare them with the demographics of transit systems in three U.S. cities: Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco (well, the Bay Area). The snapshot offers an intriguing insight into which Americans choose not to drive to work.

If FTA can spend a bunch of money on such a compilation for the entire US,  that would greatly benefit many of our professionals engaged in transportation planning & policy research.  An analysis on the issue of social equity and its underpinning to transportation alternatives would be very helpful to say the least as the country’s demographics has undergone a signficiant shift in the past decade or two.

Blueprint America: Road to the Future, an original documentary part of a PBS multi-platform series on the country’s aging and changing infrastructure, goes to three very different American cities – Denver, New York and Portland, and their surrounding suburbs – to look at each as a microcosm of the challenges and possibilities the country faces as citizens, local and federal officials, and planners struggle to manage a growing America with innovative transportation and sustainable land use policies.

Over the next 40 years, America’s population will grow by more than an estimated 130 million people – most will settle in or near the country’s major population centers. At the same time, an unprecedented multi-billion dollar public works investment has just been made by the federal government to rebuild both the weakened economy and stressed national infrastructure. And, Congress is about to consider a transportation bill that will determine the course of the nation’s highways and transit for years to come.

(Source: National Transportation Operations Coalition)

A coalition of transportation and technology leaders – including state and local officials, industry and academic leaders and prominent stakeholder organizations – is calling on Congress to focus federal funding in the surface transportation authorization bill on the deployment of smart technologies and innovative solutions in order to create a performance-driven, intermodal transportation system that is safer, cleaner, more efficient and more financially sustainable for communities, businesses and the traveling public.

America’s transportation system is facing significant challenges that must be addressed in the next surface transportation authorization bill, from financing our transportation system and reducing traffic fatalities to combating congestion and CO2 emissions. Solving these challenges will require transportation agencies and private sector partners to use all of the tools at their disposal, including intelligent transportation systems (ITS), related technologies, and multimodal operational strategies that can help prevent accidents before they happen, reduce traffic congestion and freight bottlenecks, provide more effective incident and emergency response, reduce energy use and emissions, and enable innovative 21st century financing options.

“As a result of successful research initiatives and private sector innovation, technologies are here today which can help increase safety, reduce congestion and emissions, boost competitiveness, improve system performance, and create more livable and sustainable communities,” the coalition wrote today to House transportation leaders. “While a continued and strengthened research role is still needed, it is critical that state and local agencies and private sector partners make better use of technology to modernize today’s infrastructure and optimize existing capacity, while building smart and efficient roads, bridges, transit systems, and multimodal transportation options for tomorrow’s transportation users.” 

As stimulus spending on highways and bridges ramps up, Senate Democrats submitted legislation Thursday that suggests the nation’s transportation policy is headed for a major overhaul, with a strong emphasis on reducing automobile use and carbon emissions and boosting public transit, inter-city rail and rail freight service.

 Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) introduced legislation that they say lays out the guidelines of what they expect the next five-year federal transportation spending plan to accomplish. Their goal is to influence the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which is responsible for drafting the spending plan. The House plan is expected in early June, and the bill is due for reauthorization this fall.  The Rockefeller-Lautenberg marker, which got some early love from the Washington Post, states that the next federal transportation bill should accomplish the following:

• Reduce national per-capita motor vehicle miles traveled on an annual basis;
• Cut national motor vehicle-related fatalities in half by 2030;
• Cut national surface transportation-generated carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030;
• Reduce surface transportation delays per capita on an annual basis; 
• Get 20 percent more critical surface-transportation assets into a state of good repair by 2030;
• Increase the total usage of public transit, intercity passenger rail and non-motorized transport on an annual basis.

The focus for those trying to ascertain the administration’s transportation agenda has since turned to the five-year bill, which is expected to cost at least $400 billion. One big question is how the government plans to fund transportation spending, with revenue from the gas tax increasingly falling short. The new Senate bill does not address that problem.

Another big question is how much the bill will provide for public transportation. As it now stands, 80 percent of federal transportation money goes to highways. But David Goldberg, an official with the advocacy group Transportation for America, said Congress and the White House are sending signs that the new plan could represent a major break. The White House has already said it hopes to spend $1 billion per year on high-speed rail.

(Source: Washington Examiner)

• Region encompasses Washington, DC; Northern Virginia; and Suburban Maryland — an area 6,000 square miles (15,500 square kilometres)

• The 4th largest population in the United States (6 million people); population expected to grow by 1/2 million by 2010

• Gross regional product (GRP) of $342 billion — 4th largest in the nation

• Led the United States in job growth over past 5 years — 270,000 jobs added from 2000 to 2005

• But still has a Metro system that does not allow for ubiquitous communications.

Metro riders will still hear silence on their phones even when Metro extends cell phone service in its underground rail system later this year.   

The transit agency plans to expand cell phone service to include more carriers in the 20 busiest rail stations by the fall — but it won’t extend into the adjacent subway tunnels yet. And it could remain a patchwork of service for up to three more years.

“We’re going to have a lot of very frustrated customers if they are going to be getting and losing signals going in and out of stations,” warned Peter Benjamin, a Metro board member who represents Maryland.

The problem stems partly from the requirement that forces the agency to add the service. In exchange for $1.5 billion in dedicated federal funding that Congress authorized last year, Metro is required to have cell phone service in the 20 busiest stations by October, then have it in all 47 underground stations by October 2010. Service throughout the entire system wouldn’t need to be finished until October 2012.

Metro’s board of directors agreed earlier in the spring to negotiate a $40 million contract with national carriers Sprint Nextel, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless to fulfill the requirement.

(Source: Wheels Blog – New York Times)

There are bad work commutes. Then there are blood-boiling commutes that need to be vividly rehashed to unwitting co-workers, friends, anyone. Now there’s another option: The Washington-based nonprofit groupTransportation for America has launchedthis Web site as a home base for people who want (or need) to vent about their miserable trips to and from work.

(Source: Transportation for America)

With Congress preparing to write the bill that will determine the next six years of transportation spending, Transportation for America yesterday released a detailed plan to restructure the nation’s transportation program in order to build a smart, safe and clean transportation system that provides real choices to all Americans.

Image Courtesy: Transportation for America @Flickr

If our platform, released in February, lays out the vision and goals for America’s transportation system, then the Transportation for AmericaBlueprint contains the detailed directions for getting there.

The Route to Reform: Blueprint for a 21st Century Federal Transportation Program will serve as T4 America’s proposal for the policies and financing structures necessary to achieve real transformational change in America’s transportation system. (We’ll be highlighting and explaining pieces of the Blueprint here over the coming weeks — it’s a lot to digest at once.)

In the blueprint, Transportation for America recommends Congress include four critical reforms in the upcoming transportation authorization bill:

1. Articulate a National Vision, Objectives, and Performance Targets for the national transportation program and hold state and local transportation agencies accountable for demonstrable progress toward goals including safety, efficiency, environment, health and equity.
2. Restructure and consolidate federal programs for greater modal integration, with a focus on completing the second half of the national transportation system, providing more transportation options for all Americans and creating seamless transportation systems that meet the unique needs and connect metropolitan regions, small towns, and rural areas.
3. Empower states, regions, and cities with direct transportation funding and greater flexibility to select projects, using carrots and sticks to incentivize wise transportation investments and in return require demonstrated performance on meeting national objectives.
4. Reform how we pay for the transportation system and create a Unified Transportation Trust Fund that would achieve balanced allocations of federal funds in a portfolio of rail, freight, highway, public transportation, and non-motorized transportation investment

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell — a co-chair of the Build America’s Future campaign and one of the leading voices calling for a renewed transportation system – gave the event’s keynote speech in the same committee where the transportation bill will be written and considered first by Chairman Oberstar’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Gov. Rendell was followed by a panel that included James Corless, director of the Transportation for America Campaign; Elaine Clegg, Co-Executive Director of Idaho Smart Growth and and city council member in Boise; Astrid Glynn, former Commissioner of the New York State Department of Transportation; Andrew Cotugno, the director of planning for Metro in Portland, Oregon; andRonald Kilcoyne, the General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority.

“This report couldn’t be more correct when it says this is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Gov. Rendell said.

“If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity…nothing will change, and we’ll just bump along, funding some good projects almost by accident, some mediocre projects and some terrible projects. We won’t have national policy, we won’t move the ball forward, and we won’t do something that will improve our economic competitiveness – we’ll just keep moving along the way we’ve been moving along, and not solving any problems.”

(Source: The Infrastructurist)

Many of you heard through the grapevine (from Congress), particularly, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar — that the new transportation bill would be passed this year. Oberstar even offered September 30 as a target date. Sen Mark Warner (D, Va.) is now saying he’s “not sure” that the estimated $500 billion authorization will happen until next year. According to a story by Terry Kivlan in CongressDaily, Warner thinks that “Congress might have too many big-ticket items on its agenda this year to take on a transportation package.” Speaking at an infrastructure-focused conference hosted by the Departments of Transportation and the Department of Commerce, the senator remarked: “I’m not sure you are going to see a full transportation bill put out this year.”

He’s specifically worried about funding availability in light the fact that revenue from the gas tax, which pays for highway and transit programs, is no longer sufficient to cover outlays.  He called this the “elephant in the room” with respect to infrastructure funding.