I’m continuing to post flashbacks until we catch up in real time so any new folks that might join us have access to some of the past work we’ve created at our daily newsletter and on the blog.
Climate Seriousness | February 6th
The EPA is preparing to reject an air quality plan for the Los Angeles region put together by the South Coast Air Quality Management District because it won’t do enough to reduce smog. The District plan calls for the Federal Government to reduce 67 tons of emissions a day through the things it can control such as shipping, trains, and aircraft. The EPA then says states can’t tell the Federal Government what to do under the Clean Air Act or the Constitution, and it seems to have degraded into a Spider-Man meme where everyone is pointing at each other as if to find the imposter.
None of these agencies or the state of California seems to really want to deal with the true cause of the problem which is transportation emissions that we continue to make worse with highway expansion after highway expansion while we also slow walk solutions that can reduce the federally regulated airport emissions such as high speed rail. The port of Long Beach is already spending $1.5B to reduce truck trips with trains, why not electrify them? Even CARB, the California agency responsible for reductions in pollutants has said reducing VMT is important, but has punted to other agencies to enforce their mandates that ignore climate impacts of driving expansion.
Punting doesn’t seem to be going well. So maybe this is what the EPA is working towards since the region won’t get federal highway funding if this ends up at an impasse. And the Clean Air Act says that federally funded projects shouldn’t be increasing pollution in already polluted areas. Any other request to reduce driving is politically charged as a recent California Transportation Commission meeting showed. So this might just be the only way to get California to stop expanding highways since no one else will.
Railway Electrification | February 7th
On January 1st 94% of India’s trains have been electrified. In 2015 just 45% of the system had overhead wires, but a dependence on foreign oil imports to power diesel locomotives led the country to move towards 100% electric trains which will happen soon, and a goal of becoming net zero by 2030 is closer to reality.
I would love to see this happen here, but we’re distracted by plans for hydrogen train sets, freight rail companies set in their ways, and a deep dislike of overhead wires. I’m looking forward to seeing what Caltrain’s success looks like after electrification and wonder if that will change minds around the country on reducing emissions without having to carry energy on board.
The Pipes Aren’t Big Enough | February 8th
One of the things we emphasize on the podcast and here at the newsletter is how everything is connected. One of my favorite targets for this connection are our roads. They mean so much to everyone and I don’t think many people understand how much they carry. It’s not just cars as many would have you believe, but people, drainage and water supply, gas and electric energy, connectivity through the internet, and commerce to name just a few main items.
And that’s why what’s happening with sea level rise in places like Charleston and all the rainfall and atmospheric rivers drenching places like California are so important in a transportation sense. Streets and the drainage below them aren’t designed for the rain events that are going to become more commonplace with climate change. Engineers agree that we just can’t retrofit all the pipes under all the streets that are designed for five to ten year flood events that will become even more frequent.
As the New Republic article cited above notes, we need to be focusing on ways to not allow the water to get into the pipes as fast through green infrastructure like retaining ponds, creating space for rivers to overflow, and bioswales on streets. We could even fix up our lawns and yards to do a better job of collecting excess runoff and support biodiversity at the same time.
Perhaps this is where the highway widening money could go that the trades are worried would disappear when we stop building highways. Street level water management. Maybe we could also create some transportation changes that make us safer as well. Changing large systems like roads is hard, but it is necessary unless we want to get swept away.
State Road Diet Preemption | February 14th
Over the last few years articles about state pre-emption of cities have been increasing a lot. (There are 44 links specifically on the topic in our premium link archive) As more and more cities go to left leaning elected officials, conservative states try to gain back lost leverage and control over legislative priorities. But lately culture war politics have been spilling into policy disputes such as when the Texas Republican Party Platform decided road diets were a plot and needed to “protect drivers”. San Antonio was the target of the governor specifically on this front. A single Indiana legislator has also been trying to kill approved bus lanes for several years.
The most recent of these is a bill in the Arizona legislature which would approve a continuation in funding for the Arizona State DOT. But the tagged amendments are quite ridiculous and read off like someone watched too many 15 minute conspiracy theories on TikTok. The primary objective is to kill intercity rail between Phoenix and Tucson by restricting funding from federal sources. That specific fight is an old saw, but the other added items in my opinion are more damaging longer term. The bill would restrict the State DOT from doing any lane reductions, building or maintaining electric charging stations, planning for emissions reductions or reducing VMT.
My favorite response to the bill was from State Senator Teresa Hatathlie who said “If you want to go suck on somebody’s tailpipe, be my guest.”
I would expect the governor to veto this specific bill over these additions, but my guess is that some state legislatures around the country will only get worse when it comes to transportation and climate policy bill restrictions when cities try something different.
Withholding Transportation Funds | February 21st
After being threatened with losing federal transportation funding, Louisiana changed the state’s drinking age from 18 to 21 in 1986. Ever since, pulling transportation funding to induce different policy outcomes has been discussed for a number of topics including traffic safety with the Louisiana example as a precedent.
Now that idea of withholding transportation funding is being discussed as a way to fix the housing shortage. In Colorado, Democratic state legislators have introduced a bill that would limit transportation funding in 30 communities inside of MPO boundaries if they don’t take steps to reach certain housing goals laid out by the state. Cities could meet those goals in a number of different ways giving each city it’s own pathway to keeping transportation funding. As with all legislation that changes the status quo, this one is coming up against opposition, though advocates believe they have a path forward.
Along those lines, the Federation of American Scientists along with other groups including the National Zoning Atlas has issued a housing ideas challenge which resulted in two scholars writing up a similar but more narrow plan for federal housing as the one released in Colorado. In this proposal, federal highway funding would be conditioned on the adoption of zoning reform. The withholding of highway funds would occur in Metropolitan Statistical Areas with median incomes above the national average where more than 30% of the population are rent burdened.
What’s interesting about these bills and suggested policy is that they are tying together urban policy that should have been connected more closely a long time ago. The disconnection of transportation and housing policy has really made our climate challenge even harder considering all the infrastructure we’ve built for vehicle travel and it won’t be easily fixed by an electric vehicle changeover.
But it’s not just our housing policy but industrial policy as well that suffers from this short shortsightedness. As our friend Scott Bernstein points out in a recent piece written with Bruce Katz, manufacturing, warehousing, and supply chains are impacted by this disconnect as well. Instead of building wealth and siting investments appropriately based on transportation infrastructure, everything costs more than it should. Perhaps it’s time to change that.
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