- November 8, 2018
- COWS
- Mayors Innovation Project
Affordable, reliable, and equitably distributed transit can offer enormous benefits to U.S. cities, which today are growing, changing, and diversifying. Transit that is well-planned, well-funded, and well-operated can help protect the environment, improve public health, encourage economic development, raise standards of living, and reduce racial and income-driven disparities.
Despite these many potential benefits, transit ridership today in most cities is falling. Faced with competing transportation options and aging infrastructure, cities must deploy targeted resources and explore key strategies to ensure a robust, sustainable transit system that helps it meet its equity, economic, and environmental goals and obligations. Good transit policy and infrastructure can be put to work to dramatically improve cities, but local governments need to implement policy using a holistic, non-siloed approach centered on equity. Mayors and other city leaders must understand the big picture, use their leadership role to hire and champion effective staff, and direct city departments and transit authorities to work together to design integrated transportation options that consider all modes of transit and all riders.
As we’ve previously written, Initiative 1631 would inject hundreds of millions of dollars per year directly into communities in Washington by imposing a carbon pollution fee on businesses that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide or sell carbon-laden fuels. Revenues from the fee would help our state transition to a dynamic, low-carbon economy with cleaner air and water. And a substantial portion of the new revenue would be rightly invested directly into communities that have been most harmed by decades of air pollution.
Yet to persuade voters to reject this commonsense initiative on the November ballot, opponents (mostly massive, multinational oil companies) frequently reference an unrealistically high estimate of the pollution fee’s average cost to households. While the measure would appropriately increase the costs of carbon-intensive fuels, the actual average impact on households is up to $100 per year lower than opponents are claiming.
In reality, I-1631 would raise high-carbon fuel and energy costs by an average of $13 per month per Washington household in 2020. That’s a small price to pay for cleaner air, healthier communities, and more efficient energy and transportation infrastructure – all of which would create new good-paying jobs in the clean energy, or “green jobs” sector. This estimate is derived from the same model used by the state Office of Financial Management to estimate the amount of revenue that would be generated each year under I-1631.¹
Maryland’s Eastern Shore is a place with significant assets including natural beauty, productive farmland, and an iconic seafood industry. The region also faces significant challenges. Some of these would be familiar to residents of any other part of Maryland, such as wages that barely keep up with the cost of living and leave too many unable to afford the basics. Other challenges stem from the region’s distinctive geography and development patterns, like the long distances many residents must travel to get to a hospital…
While the threat of climate change looms over our entire state, it is already a dangerous reality for many of the Eastern Shore’s coastal communities. The region needs thoughtful solutions that balance community preservation, public health and safety, and long-term sustainability.
- September 24, 2018
- COWS
- Mayors Innovation Project
This is a guide for practice, with relevance for technically trained staff and non-technical elected officials and other stakeholders. It is intended to inform policy around mitigating the traffic impacts from land use changes, a major factor in transportation system funding and design. It argues that conventional practice, which focuses on funding increases to roadway capacity, has created many problems and suggests that entities involved in mitigations, whether state or local governments, consider demand-side measures before resorting to roadway capacity increases. The report is general enough that it should apply to practice in most U.S. places, and to state DOTs as well as local units of government, but the reader will need to consider how the program would work in specific settings.