Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

Transit Agencies Are Climate Agencies, Too

With emissions from transportation rising, it’s up to the states to fix it.

Highways and a desert.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Last September, Jeanie Ward-Waller, a deputy director at California’s state transportation department, was called into her supervisor’s office and told she was being removed from her role, no explanation given. But Ward-Waller thinks she knows what happened.

A few weeks earlier, she’d threatened to blow the whistle on the agency for a highway repaving project that she believed was covertly — and illegally — going to widen the road. Under state law, highway expansions require environmental review and public input. It was also exactly the kind of project the agency was supposedly moving away from, according to its climate action plan, which said it would prioritize alternative forms of transit.

“Caltrans leaders believe they are widening highways in the public interest, despite decades of empirical research proving otherwise, and the agency’s own policies requiring solutions that reduce driving,” Ward-Waller wrote in an essay for the San Francisco Chronicle after leaving the agency.

Ward-Waller’s firing riled up climate advocates and sustainable transit proponents, and not just in California. (Multiple people I interviewed for this story mentioned it to me.) State transportation agencies all over the country are stuck in this kind of outdated thinking, critics say. Transportation is the biggest source of emissions in the U.S., and one of the only sectors where emissions grew last year. But most state transportation agencies are still funneling most of their budgets into road expansion projects. Few have taken on addressing climate change as part of their mission.

“State departments of transportation are kind of the next frontier for climate advocacy to conquer,” Justin Balik, the state program director for Evergreen Action told me. “There’s a lot of blue states where the transportation decisions are still divorced from the climate conversation.”

It’s a pivotal moment to change that, Balik argued. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed in 2021, has been sending billions of dollars of flexible funding into states for transportation projects. The Biden administration will also soon begin requiring these agencies to set greenhouse gas reduction targets. Although the targets are non-binding and states won’t be penalized for failing to achieve them, they will have to regularly report on their progress.

States have until February 1 to submit their initial plans to the federal Department of Transportation. So on Monday, climate and clean transportation advocates around the country sent letters to the governors of 22 states urging them to set targets consistent with reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. The letters ask officials to consider what’s achievable both through vehicle electrification and by reducing highway expansion.

“Electrification is critical and essential, but it’s not enough, just looking at the math, in terms of how long it's going to take for the vehicle fleet to turn over,” said Balik. “We need to think about the transportation system holistically and stop digging the hole deeper when we’re making transportation investment decisions.”

He directed me to a report published by the Georgetown Climate Center after the infrastructure law passed. The policy think tank modeled two scenarios, one where about a third of the $600 billion of flexible funding went to highway expansion, and one where states put more toward public transit and road maintenance. It found that the first scenario would increase emissions 1.6% by 2032, compared to business-as-usual, whereas the second would enable deeper emissions cuts — 1.3% more — than would otherwise have been expected with market forces and existing policies.

The reason is an effect called “induced demand,” and it’s at the center of this whole story. When state departments of transportation evaluate projects, they use models that assume building new roads or adding lanes increases the flow of traffic — thereby reducing congestion and reducing emissions. But real-world evidence has shown that expanding highways, especially in dense areas, actually encourages more people to drive — and within a few years, the traffic is just as bad as before.

“They’re vastly overestimating the benefits of expansion projects,” Miguel Moravec, a senior associate at RMI told me. “If the models are not capturing the reality that expanded lanes lead to more traffic, then you can’t really seriously engage with the pollution problem.”

The modeling is a symptom of a more entrenched issue. State Departments of Transportation are big agencies that can have thousands of staff, many of whom have been in their roles for decades. (Caltrans, for example, has more than 22,000 people.) The culture of these offices is built around an old paradigm where the primary metric of performance is to relieve traffic congestion — to help people drive places more quickly and easily.

“There’s a new movement to say, maybe it’s about helping people get to where they need to go efficiently, affordably, and safely,” Matt Frommer, the senior transportation advocate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, told me. “But that is a really hard shift to make in a giant institution like a state DOT. Because all of the models and all of the policies and funding decision processes have been set up around the old paradigm.”

Even in places where that’s beginning to shift, there are still long-term challenges. California, for example, has had a law on the books for a decade that says the state must assess the impacts of transportation projects by measuring the amount of driving they induce or reduce — not by their effect on congestion. But local advocates like Jamie Pew, a climate advisor at NextGen Policy, say this has failed to move the state meaningfully away from highway expansion.

Ward-Waller’s firing brought long-simmering criticisms of the state’s climate strategy to a boil, he said. “For all of the money that we’re investing in new transit infrastructure, electrification, and green mobility options, as long as we continue to invest in freeway expansion, we’re not going to see the progress in emissions that we need to see.”

There are a few states that are starting to do things differently. Colorado, for example, has seen a significant shift in the way the state approaches transportation projects. In 2021, the state legislature passed a law directing its transportation agency to set regional greenhouse gas reduction targets and incorporate them into project planning. Frommer said the new approach has already resulted in real changes. In 2022, the state scrapped a long-planned highway expansion through downtown Denver after it was found that it would undermine the agency’s targets.

“That freed up hundreds of millions, if not over a billion dollars for other multimodal projects to help enable transit, biking and walking,” said Frommer.

The state that is leading the nation in innovative transportation policy, however, is Minnesota. Like Colorado, it has transportation-specific greenhouse gas targets. But it also has a specific goal to reduce “vehicle miles traveled” — a measure of how much people drive. Last year, lawmakers passed a big transportation package that gave more teeth to these goals, requiring the state’s DOT take them into account in decision making. It also went a step further and said that if the agency moves forward with any projects that induce demand, it has to offset them with additional projects that get people out of their cars.

The new federal rule requiring state transportation departments to report on their progress achieving declining greenhouse gas targets could help nudge more states in this direction. As climate advocates tell me on a weekly basis, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Green

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate

What Started the Fires in Los Angeles?

Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.

Los Angeles.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?

Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Climate

AM Briefing: World’s Warmest Year

On rising global temperatures, LA’s fire disaster, and solar stations in space

2024 Was the Year We Broke 1.5C
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A sinkhole threatens to swallow up Ecuador’s large hydroelectric power plant • Air quality is poor in Delhi where dense smog has caused travel chaos • Nearly 40,000 customers are already without power in Texas as a winter storm rolls in.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Biden directly links LA fires to climate change

At least 10 people are known to have died in the Los Angeles fires, and some 10,000 structures are believed to have been destroyed. Five blazes continue to burn. The Palisades fire, the largest in the city’s history at 20,000 acres, remains just 6% contained. The Eaton fire has consumed 13,700 acres and is 0% contained. While lower wind speeds have helped firefighters make some progress over the last 24 hours, the Santa Ana gusts were expected to peak at 75 mph last night. “We are absolutely not out of this extreme weather event,” Los Angeles fire chief Kristin M. Crowley said in a news conference.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
A destroyed house and a blueprint.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Recovering from the Los Angeles wildfires will be expensive. Really expensive. Insurance analysts and banks have already produced a wide range of estimates of both what insurance companies will pay out and overall economic loss. AccuWeatherhas put out an eye-catching preliminary figure of $52 billion to $57 billion for economic losses, with the service’s chief meteorologist saying that the fires have the potential to “become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss.” On Thursday, J.P. Morgan doubled its previous estimate for insured losses to $20 billion, with an economic loss figure of $50 billion — about the gross domestic product of the country of Jordan.

The startlingly high loss figures from a fire that has only lasted a few days and is (relatively) limited in scope show just how distinctly devastating an urban fire can be. Enormous wildfires thatcover millions of acres like the 2023 Canadian wildfires can spew ash and particulate matter all over the globe and burn for months, darkening skies and clogging airways in other countries. And smaller — and far deadlier fires — than those still do not produce the same financial roll.

Keep reading...Show less
Green