As state and local governments grapple with reduced revenue from traditional sources, deferred maintenance needs, and traffic congestion, many are searching for ways to generate revenue and reduce congestion without making major capital investments. An …
emissions
“Mr. Obama has the historic opportunity to begin solving three of the nation’s most vexing problems: global warming, the thirst for oil and high gas pump costs.”
How? Obama should adopt tough car mileage rules, according to a New York Times editorial by Daniel Becker and James Gerstenzang: “Under standards that Mr. Obama set last year, cars and S.U.V.’s and other light …
Policy options for reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. transportation: No silver bullet
Transportation accounts for 2/3 of the nation’s oil consumption and produces between ¼ and 1/3 of all the CO2 emitted from the nation’s energy consumption. TRB established a special committee of experts to explore policy …
WSDOT quantifies the GHG reduction impact of sidewalk coverage.
“If you build it, they will come” seems to hold for building sidewalks. A recent report for the Washington State Department of Transportation found that increasing sidewalk coverage from 30 percent to 70 percent of …
Parking spaces add 10% to per-mile carbon emissions
From Sean Slone’s blog on recent reports highlighting transportation and the environment: One thing holding back efforts to decrease the number of cars on the road is the availability of lots of free or cheap parking. …
California’s Green Trade Corridor project underway
Construction of California’s Green Trade Corridor, a TIGER grant funded project to increase the share of freight moving on inland waterways between the Port of Oakland and California’s Central Valley, began last fall. The project is …
CO2 emissions from transportation continue to rise
Even where gas prices are higher than in the U.S., CO2 emissions will not decline by market forces alone, according to a recent report [PDF] commissioned by the European Union: The report argues that “meeting climate change mitigation …
New Report on Climate Change and Transportation
Actions across three fronts – technological developments, policy changes (including substantially higher fuel efficiency standards), and consumer behavior – could reduce transportation emissions by up to 65 percent from current levels by 2050, according to …
Getting Back on Track: Aligning State Transportation Policy with Climate Change Goals
A new report by NRDC and Smart Growth America analyzes each state’s transportation policies and evaluates how they support efforts to reduce GHG emissions. The report can be found on both the NRDC and Smart …