There is an epidemic of truth telling underway, globally, nationally and in Massachusetts.  And as hard as some of that truth is to hear it is a very healthy and important exercise.

On the global level the business and political leadership is finally waking up to the deep and systemic threat of a changing climate.  The 2013 Global Risks Assesment from the World Economic Forum describes how business and political leaders see climate risk as the only thing competing with “risk of financial collapse” as the biggest threat facing the world economy:

respondents also identified the failure of climate change adaptation and rising greenhouse gas emissions as among those global risks considered to be the most likely to materialize within a decade. Compared to last year’s survey, the failure to adapt to climate change replaced rising greenhouse gas emissions as the most systemically critical. This change in our data mirrors a wider shift in the conversation on the environment from the question of whether our climate is changing to the questions of “by how much” and “how quickly”.

Meanwhile back in America, the experts preparing the National Climate Impacts Assessment dropped a terrifying draft report on the government and the internet, seeking public comment. That report, summarized in a “Letter to the American People,” described how the changing climate is already visible:

Americans are noticing changes all around them. Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of  extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between.

 The report then goes on to lay out in excruciating detail the impacts of global warming that have been observed and are anticipated by very solid science – laying out the facts in over a thousand pages of text (147 MB PDF) and 32 alarming charts and graphs.

So what does all this have to do with transportation infrastructure, and paying for it through taxes, in Massachusetts?

It matters because the transportation sector is the second largest (or largest depending on what definition of “sector” you use), and fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts. If the Bay State is going to meet the mandate of the Global Warming Solutions Act and live up to its Clean Energy and Climate Plan we will need to invest in a modern and effective transportation system.  The Governor and his Department of Transportation have laid out the formidable challenge of updating a chronically underfunded and neglected system to meet these challenges in a startling clear and powerful document titled, “The Way Forward: A 21st-Century Transportation Plan”.

The job of solving our transportation infrastructure crisis brings together a powerful coalition.  Citizens who just want a transportation system that will let them lives,  the business community who are shouting from the front page of the newspaper about how the weaknesses in our transportation system are undermining our economy and need to be addressed through investment and Climate Hawks who want Massachusetts to again lead the nation and the world.  Leading, as it did at the time of the American Revolution and as it did as the cradle of the movement to abolish slavery, both through our words and thoughts but also lead by example by building a better Commonwealth with the clean and climate-protective transportation system of the future.

Transportation options in nothern tier states like Maine are a critical part of sustainable communities and a low-impact ecncomy. Photo credit: Lawrence Whittemore @ flickr

Let’s face it: population density is a critical factor in any decision to provide transit services. In CLF’s “northern tier” states, where dense populations are limited to a few metropolitan areas, transportation options like bus services  have been slow to develop, leaving people to drive. In asking for directions from one place to another, the response most often is: “You’re on your own.”

In Maine, for example, Portland and surrounding towns and cities are served by a number of independent municipal fixed-route bus systems, an inter-city commuter bus linking Portland with a few cities in southern Maine, and an outlying “on demand” provider. But there is no regular service between Portland and Maine’s second-largest metro area, Lewiston-Auburn, about 40 miles away. Maine’s L/A has a growing immigrant population and plenty of affordable housing, but greater Portland, where housing is expensive, is the locus of most employment expansion.

CLF Maine has been working with the elected leaders of these areas to promote new ways for commuters on this corridor to avoid single-occupancy vehicle commuting, and provide greater connectivity to Portland’s air, bus, and train transportation hub. Recently, at the urging of Auburn’s mayor, Jonathan Labonte and Portland’s mayor Mike Brennan, Portland’s city council voted to explore this option, as reported here.

It’s an encouraging step in the right direction and validates the work of CLF and its partners to create a unified transit authority for the entire southern Maine region. This would promote better customer service and alignment among providers as disparate as a ferry service, Amtrak, and local bus lines, and provide the potential for common investment and bonding authority.

Imagine this: the Governor of Massachusetts addresses the people of the state about an important issue. From the television screen he looks us all in the eye and discusses . . . transportation infrastructure. Improbable? How about if this happened back in the days of when Boston had 5 commercial channels and one public TV station and a statewide address by a Governor was a very big deal? It may be hard to believe that a subject that wonky and technical could be the focus of that sort of hot and intense attention. But it happened.

The year was 1970 and the Governor was Frank Sargent, the strong leader who years later served as Chairman of the Board of CLF. In that dramatic 1970 speech Governor Sargent accepted a report from a special task force reviewing plans to build a massive network of highways in and around Boston and launched a planning effort that set the course of transportation planning for decades to come. Memorably, Governor Sargent, a former head of the state agency that built and operated highways (then known as the “Department of Public Works”) confessed: “Nearly everyone was sure that highways were the only answer to transportation problems for years to come. But we were wrong.”

The powerful story of that speech, the events that precipitated it and most importantly the massive planning process that followed it is told in The Roads Not Taken, the core story in Turn Signal, the Winter issue of ArchitectureBoston, the quarterly publication of the Boston Society of Architects. And the rest of the issue is well worth your time – both for the eloquent essays, like the story of the activists who fought off the highways that were threatening their community, and the photo essays that document what was saved when the highways were stopped.

The good folks at ArchitectureBoston have done something very important here. The Boston Transportation Planning Review (the “BTPR”) that grew out of that  very unique moment set a powerful precedent for the nation and charted a course that has literally shaped the face and communities of Greater Boston. CLF has had a front-row seat at the implementation process for the BTPR and dove into that process even deeper, unsurprisingly given the importance of the transportation system to our mission and the unique fact that Governor Sargent served as Chair of CLF’s Board of Trustees after leaving office.

As Stephanie Pollack, who worked here at CLF with great distinction for many years, powerfully describes the challenge going forward in an essay in Turn Signal:

Forty years on, the time has come for the Commonwealth to fulfill three of the most important unkept promises: institutionalizing open and visionary planning, healing the scars still left in neighborhoods cleared for the cancelled highway projects, and completing and funding the state’s public transportation system.

This theme of the need to finish the job of the BTPR by providing needed funding to our transportation system and institutionalizing good planning practices was picked up in a recent Boston Globe Op-Ed by former Governor Michael Dukakis and another elder statesman of Massachusetts government who began his career in the BTPR era, Stephen Crosby. Dukakis and Crosby wrote:

With transportation issues again at the top of the Commonwealth’s political agenda, we should look back at those long-ago events not out of nostalgia, but as a roadmap for the equally momentous decisions we face today. After decades of investment, Massachusetts has a vastly improved transportation system that includes an extensive network of highways, the MBTA, and regional transit systems serving virtually every part of the state. But this system and the people and businesses that depend on it are in trouble. From aging bridges in Springfield to the T’s financial woes, the state is paying the price for neglecting the basic maintenance and financial backing that any transportation system requires.

And we can’t just maintain what we’ve already built. For a first-class economic future, the Commonwealth requires a first-class transportation system. As state transportation officials have already spelled out, this future will rely heavily on public transportation and will focus highway funds on maintenance rather than expansion. Massachusetts needs to expand existing transit and build high-speed rail to serve the entire state. With so many projects awaiting action, the Commonwealth once again needs to set honest and rigorous priorities for transportation investment — and create a long-term financing plan to efficiently implement those priorities.

This is indeed the bottom line: building thriving communities will require vision, careful planning and investing in our transportation system. This is not the most fun message (folks may claim otherwise but no one really enjoys slowing down to plan or paying for investments) but it is a solid truth — if we want to keep moving forward we need to build, maintain and operate the system that literally keeps us moving.

photo courtesy of dklimke@flickr.com

Cleaner cars are on the way. In an important step for climate change and air pollution, Vermont is updating its vehicle air emission rules so we can all have cleaner cars and breathe easier.

The rule follows California’s standards and reduces the allowed emissions and greenhouse gases from cars beginning with the 2015 car models.

The greenhouse gas reductions contained in the proposed amendments are expected to reduce new passenger vehicle carbon dioxide emissions by about 32-36% by model year 2025.

Cars that are 1/3 cleaner. That’s a huge step in the right direction. Transportation is responsible for nearly half of Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions. These emission controls are vital to achieve Vermont’s greenhouse gas reduction goals.

CLF and Vermont have a long history of support for cleaner transportation. In a lawsuit where CLF provided key support, Vermont defeated a challenge from the automobile industry to previous emission rules. The decision was followed in other states and continues to pave the way for reduced emissions.

Conservation Law Foundation joined with other organizations and submitted these comments in support of Vermont’s rule.

Photo courtesy of Lhoon @ flickr.com

The concept of a private East-West highway that would cut across Maine is a proposal that CLF has had significant reservations about, for various reasons, since its inception. Recent events and discussion have only heightened those reservations.

The East-West Highway has been an on-again, off-again proposal since at least 1937. The concept last came under serious scrutiny in 1998, resulting in a report that the costs of building an East West highway outweighed the benefits, and that report’s focus was largely on the economic costs and benefits and not the environmental or community costs. The most recent proposal has generated a storm of criticism. A recent panel discussion of transportation experts that included Peter Mills, former State Senator and the current head of the Maine Turnpike Authority and former rail executive Matt Jacobson laid out the various economic and environmental problems with the proposal. See a video of that presentation here.

During the last legislative session, we at CLF believed that the decision by the Legislature to fund a study of a proposed private East West Highway to the tune of $300,000 was a waste of scarce state resources, both in the $300,000 that was allocated for the study and in the amount of time that the Department of Transportation staff would have to spend on designing the scope of that study. The proposal has proved so unpopular that the sponsor of the legislation, State Senator Doug Thomas, recently asked the Governor to suspend the study until more trust could be established with local people as noted in these articles here and here. Rather than slow down the study, as the Governor has proposed or propose new legislation to prevent a private party from exercising the power of eminent domain as Senator Thomas has done (a thinly veiled effort by Senator Thomas to change the subject to one he is more comfortable with although just as much of a red herring), Maine would be better off in evaluating how to increase the amount of traffic on its rail system.

As others have noted, Maine has an East West Highway: our railroads.  Rather than throw good money and time after bad, we should be spending time and money on how we can create better incentives and improve efficiencies in order to increase the flow of goods that leave and enter Maine via rail. The recent news that the Maine Northern Railway has tripled its volume of traffic is indicative of the economic value that rail can bring to Maine, especially for its natural resource industries.

In addition, the environmental benefits of not only using an existing system and avoiding all of the impacts that constructing a major new highway would have but also the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by transferring the shipping of freight from highway to rail are enormous. So perhaps the best result of this timeout would be for the money originally allocated to yet another study of an East-West highway to be reallocated to a study of maximizing the use and benefits of Maine’s existing infrastructure that can move goods across Maine.

Platform at Park Street Station. Photo: takomabibelot@flickr

“Watch the doors. Doors are closing. There is more service immediately behind this train. Please wait for the next train. Doors are closing.”

I find I am hearing this message more and more on the MBTA. So when the transit agency announced yesterday that average weekday ridership topped 400 million trips in FY2012, setting a new record, I was not the least bit surprised. Ridership was up 5.7% over last year and June 2012 marked the 17th consecutive month of growth as compared to the same month in the previous year.

Ridership increased across all modes, with the biggest increase in trolley ridership, up by 8% followed by buses up by 5.9% and then subway, up by 5.2%.

MBTA general manager Jonathan Davis credited the record ridership to various factors including a growing state economy, lower state unemployment rates, increased availability of real-time information for riders and an overall improvement of MBTA reliability. To me, the reasons for the increased ridership are less important than the bigger, general trend: more and more people are relying on the Commonwealth’s transit system. This is great news for people and the environment because it means less air pollution and fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Choosing transit instead of driving alone produces half the greenhouse gas emissions per mile.  For this we can all breathe easier, whether you use public transit or not.

Unfortunately, last January, the MBTA announced a budget deficit of $159 million. Just a month ago, on July 1, fares went up 23% to raise an additional $84 million a year for the agency. The rest of the deficit was closed by a combination of service changes, administrative efficiencies, and one-time revenues. Already, the MBTA has projected a new operating budget gap of close to $90 million for next year. That means that it’s a guarantee we’ll be having the same conversation again soon and fare increases and service cuts will be on the table once again if we do not come up with a long-term solution and balance the MBTA’s budget for good. The numbers are clear. People want a healthy transit system and the time to invest is now.

Rush Hour in Copenhagen, photo courtesy of Mikael Colville-Andersen @ flickr

On the afternoon of July 6th, I rode my bike home from work through the streets of Portland, Maine, sharing the lane with car traffic. Parts of my commute could benefit from a bike lane or increased signage, but the prospects for those projects do not look good in the near term. Earlier that day, President Obama had signed a new transportation bill that slashed federal funding for biking and pedestrian infrastructure.

The bill reduces funding for bicycling and pedestrian improvements by about thirty percent. Additionally, it allows those reduced funds allocated for bike and pedestrian projects to be used instead for other transportation work at the discretion of the state. This despite the fact that a 2010 census study showed that the number of people who used a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation increased by 43% in the preceding decade. Even greater gains were seen in cities, where commutes tend to be shorter.

My own bike obsession (my third-floor walk-up houses eight bikes, four of which are mine) began when I spent a semester abroad in Denmark. Its capital city, Copenhagen, is full of wide bike lanes bustling with two-wheeled traffic. The bike lanes are bordered by a curb to separate them from the road and are built so that bikers can safely pass one another within the lane. According to the City of Copenhagen, half of its residents bike to work or school every day. To compare, in Portland, Oregon, the large U.S. city with the most bikers, 6% of residents primarily use their bike to get to work.

Bicycling is contagious. Living in Copenhagen I found that having so many bikes on the roads and such good infrastructure makes it more fun, safer, and easier to ride. Drivers expect cyclists and operate accordingly. Bike racks sit on seemingly every corner. People carry heavy loads of groceries in bike baskets, transport their children around the city in specially-made cargo bikes, and use fenders or even an umbrella to get around in the rain. My memory could be deceiving me, but I still swear that I once saw a man in a business suit eating a sandwich and talking on a cell phone while navigating rush hour bike traffic.

I returned to Portland for law school largely because it is such a wonderful place to live. The city is big enough to have great restaurants and good music, but relatively quiet and geographically small. I own a car, but never drive within the city because biking is cheaper, more fun, and often faster. Traffic is light, speeds are slow, and drivers are generally courteous.

The city has made strides in recent years, adding bike lanes, pursuing federal grant money for further improvements, and even hiring a bike-pedestrian coordinator.  However, more remains to be done. Dangerous intersections, narrow streets, and perilous railroad crossings remain unsafe even for experienced cyclists, and intimidate those who might otherwise choose to commute or recreate on a bike. Greater federal funding would enable Portland to more quickly and completely make its streets safer for all users.

Our country’s transportation system needs help, that much is clear. Many roads and bridges need costly repairs to remain safe. But it is short-sighted to spend huge sums on automotive infrastructure in lieu of making cities more livable for bicyclists and pedestrians. Walking and biking keeps people healthier and happier, all while saving gas and reducing emissions. American cities could be cleaner, more bikeable, more walkable, and less car-dominated if we choose to invest wisely in our biking and walking infrastructure.

Rafael Mares, staff attorney at Conservation Law Foundation, authored the following letter to the editor of the Boston Herald in response to Charles Chieppo’s op-ed on July 3, entitled “Fast Track to Trouble“.

Photo Credit: waterj2/flickr

In his op-ed, Charles Chieppo accurately states that the “T is a cornerstone of the regional economy and a lifeline for countless people.” (Fast Track to Trouble, July 3, 2012)  Ironically, Mr. Chieppo considers the very transit improvements that help make the T so important “the worst Massachusetts transportation decision of half of the 20th Century.”  To come to this conclusion, he relies on a number of inaccuracies.  The transit projects required to mitigate the Big Dig air pollution were not finalized two decades ago during the Dukakis administration; they have changed over time, most recently during the Romney administration.  The negative impact on air quality from the Big Dig is real and has been confirmed by scientists during both Democratic and Republican administrations.  The commitments obligated the Commonwealth—not the MBTA—to pay for these improvements.  The MBTA was saddled with the debt only in 2000, through Forward Funding legislation, which overestimated the revenue stream it dedicated to the T.  The legislature’s failure to correct this mistake, by providing sufficient funding or relieving the T of the debt, is a better candidate for the worst transportation decision in recent history.

photo courtesy of Mark Setchell@flickr

When Vermont’s Governor Shumlin announced last year that the outdated, expensive and ill-conceived Circ Highway would not be built as planned, it opened the door for lower cost and less polluting solutions that would actually help folks get around and not just pave over farmland, forests, and wetlands.

In the first round a number of good solutions are advancing, including the Crescent Connector in Essex Junction which transforms a small downtown with thoughtful design, making it easier and more pleasant to walk, shop, get around and not simply drive in traffic.

Unfortunately, for the next phase, some officials still seem stuck in the dark ages.

When presented with an evaluation by the County’s transportation planning officials that building portions of the old highway would be expensive, have the same environmental problems and opposition as the Circ, and fail to solve congestion problems in the area, town officials still decided to advance this project for further consideration.

The sad part is that being stuck with these outdated non-solutions, keeps real solutions at bay. Any trapeze artist will tell you that you have to let go of one trapeze before you can grab the next one and move forward. If you just keep hanging on to the first trapeze all you will do is swing back and forth in place.

It is time to let go of the old Circ trapeze and move forward with real solutions like fixing the existing roadways and improving transit so everyone can get around more easily and not simply suffer through more traffic and more sprawl.