Environment Program Essay

Reinventing Transportation

---

By Richard F. Mark
Director, Environment Program

---

Have you ever wondered, perhaps while stalled in traffic, what your life would be like if there had been a different approach to transportation planning in the 20th century?

We might take a short walk, or a short drive in our nonpolluting car, to the nearest transit stop. That transit stop would enable us to catch efficient, nonpolluting, and safe mass transit to the nearest city or the next community, to an airport, train station or a major multimodel transportation center, where we could connect with long-range transit.

Our houses would be clustered near centers for shopping, entertainment, work, schools, and medical care. Cities within our region would be linked by high speed rail, using tracks formerly used by freight and long distance train service.

Our air would be cleaner, our children and grandparents would be healthier, our lives would have less stress as we did less and less personal auto travel. We would be able to reach jobs and services with much less expense and effort. The industrial sector would plan its centers of business based on accessible transportation patterns that would enhance worker productivity, safety, and health, and lower transportation costs.

Sound like a dream? It can also be a reality. But first, it will take a concerted effort to end our love affair with the automobile, an affair that has side-tracked good community planning for decades.

Too Many Cars, Too Many Miles

According to recent data, Americans now have more than one car per licensed driver. We drive these cars 2.23 trillion miles per year, with the number of miles the average car travels annually growing twice as fast as the population. Between 1970 and 1990, the U.S. population increased by 23 percent while the number of motor vehicles on the roads rose from 108 million to 189 million, a 75 percent jump. Driving alone dominates all other modes of commuting, with only 13 percent of workers sharing a private vehicle, a decrease from 20 percent in 1980.

The security and quality of life of our towns and cities depends on the choices we make about travel as we go from our homes to our jobs, to needed services, to the homes of our friends. It is not too late to encourage policy changes that will ensure a new, healthier, wiser transportation future.

Our transportation systems, while often perceived as budgetary burdens, have great potential for helping build healthy, economically vibrant communities. As researcher Donald H. Camph noted recently, "Apart from entitlement programs, surface transportation is the Nation's largest domestic spending program, at over $100 billion per year. Is it unreasonable to expect--if not require--that our Nation's transportation policies and investments be harnessed to help address some of our most pressing social problems?"

The Ways We Pay

Eighty-six million Americans, almost a third of the nation's population, live in areas with serious air pollution problems. Our children spend three times as much time as adults do in sports and other vigorous exercise. This means that they breathe harder and breathe through their mouths more often, thus taking in more air pollutants. Children's lungs in Los Angeles now operate at a 15 percent diminished capacity. These same children are increasingly susceptible to disease. Similar findings exist in urban and rural communities of the Northeast and in some cities in the Great Lakes region.

In addition to children, elders face a growing threat to their lungs, increasing mortality rates, and skyrocketing costs for medical care. Almost no one can escape the effects of ground level ozone, the primary toxic from automobile emissions. Pollution from automobiles is a cross-generational, cross-societal threat.

Motor vehicles account for about 25 percent of total U.S. CO2 emissions. These emissions are the most important greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming--a growing threat to the entire planet.

Our dependence on foreign oil to support our current transportation needs increases our national debt, provokes unnecessary military confrontations, and precipitates opening new and extremely fragile regions of North and South America for further oil explor-ation. These are among the initial expenses of our relationship with fossil fuel.

A Change in Focus

As states wrestle with issues of growth, congestion, suburban sprawl, respiratory disease, and the quality of life for the next century, we have the opportunity to take advantage of important recent legislation to make the case for sustainable transportation. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) was adopted in 1991. It requires citizen participation in the deliberations of state and local transportation regulators on issues that determine crucial transportation and community development policies.

A provision in the Clean Air Act of 1990 requires that regional transportation plans "conform" with state air quality plans, or lose federal highway funding. Crafters of this provision successfully argued that we need to shift from urban reliance on single-occupant cars to a variety of transportation options.

Opponents of tough environmental laws claim that such regulations hurt economic growth. However, in a new study on the relationship between tough air pollution regulations and the creation of jobs, California State University researchers reported in April 1995 that they could find no adverse impact on the economy over a period of two and a half decades.

From 1964 to 1990, California implemented the most aggressive laws regulating air emissions in the nation's history. Yet area jobs rose 85 percent while nationally they rose only 53 percent. The increase in household income exceeded the national rate. Manufacturing jobs rose 17 percent compared with a 4 percent drop nationally.

Since automobile travel is cen- tral to the American identity and the traditional balance of our economy, it is not surprising that this legislation is presently under attack in Congress. Yet, community groups throughout the country are making good use of ISTEA and conform- ity laws.They are forcing the development of cleaner cars and trucks and more efficient forms of mass transit. And, they are redesigning community plans to support transportation that is more accessible to more citizens, less costly to their health, and that enhances economic growth.

Investing in New Technologies

Intensive research is being done toward the development of a new generation of cleaner, safer vehicles. Ultralight, ultrasafe, and ultraefficient are the talk of national and international automakers. Honda announced last year their plans to market a car that is 90 percent more efficient than current models. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has designs for a 150-300 miles per gallon "hypercar" running on clean fuels. New school buses and public transit vehicles are being developed with lower emissions and better safety standards. Sustain- able energy sources, including sun, wind, and water, are moving into the mainstream commercial markets, providing us with the same energy as fossil fuel, minus the dire consequences.

The need for sustainable development is also beginning to produce prudent economic decisions. The long-term rewards of such investments are increasingly understood by companies large and small across the nation. Federal and state governments are creating partnerships with the private sector to further sustainable development. Private investors are betting big on new transportation technologies. Public officials are starting to understand the importance of thoughtfully developed transportation polices to the economic and public health of their states, as well as to their own political success.

Sustainable transportation coalitions are hard at work, often with a suprising variety of participants, including utility companies, developers, environmentalists, transportation planners, and public health advocates. They are finding new ways of working together to develop regional and statewide strategies that will provide a range of transportation options to assure rapid mobility of people and goods without devastating costs to the environment and public health.

We are traveling toward a new era in transportation, not just of awareness about the problems but of concrete decisions that will lead to solutions. The opportunity is upon us, to choose to support our needs and those of coming generations. It is our responsibility to decide well; the future may not provide a second chance. u rior to the discovery of antibiotics, doctors defined their role as follows: "to comfort always, to relieve pain sometimes, to cure rarely." Antibiotics ushered in technological and scientific advances that have dominated and directed medicine and the delivery of health care ever since. Instead of expanding the horizons of health, however, technology appears to have shrunk the focus to only what is visible through a microscope. Curing illness has become modern medicine's obsession, while relief of pain, despite advances, has remained a sometime thing and giving comfort has been all but forgotten. ead to solutions. The opportunity is upon us, to choose to support our needs and those of coming generations. It is our responsibility to decide well; the future may not provide a second chance. u rior to the discovery of antibiotics, doctors defined their role as follows: "to comfort always, to relieve pain sometimes, to cure rarely." Antibiotics ushered in technological and scientific advances that have dominated and directed medicine and the delivery of health care ever since. Instead of expanding the horizons of health, however, technology appears to have shrunk the focus to only what is visible through a microscope. Curing illness has become modern medicine's obsession, while relief of pain, despite advances, has remained a sometime thing and giving comfort has been all but forgotten.