President Obama’s stimulus bill was so good for the environment—$15 billion for alternative energy? We’d never seen anything like it—that it seemed ungracious in February to point to those areas where it might have done more, such as mass transit. While it did improve funding for buses and trains, it didn’t offer enough to lower fares, as any city dweller knows, to significantly increase service, or to begin to do what really needs to be done: get people out of cars.
The latest float in the parade of public works goes after those goals. Senators John D. Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) submitted a bill today that establishes goals that would transform the U.S. surface transportation system. The Federal Surface Transportation Policy and Planning Act of 2009 (S. 1036) would guide the next federal transportation spending plan, which is due for five-year renewal in Autumn.
(The) bill sets goals of reducing miles driven, increasing use of public transit and intercity passenger rail, and reducing the amount of transportation-generated emissions 40 percent by 2030.
The Rockefeller-Lautenberg bill also calls for a 50 percent reduction in auto fatalities by 2030 and a 20 percent increase in the amount of roads and rails that are in a state of good repair by the same year.
It’s gratifying to see auto fatalities showing up alongside carbon emissions as costs of the current system. Our culture has always seemed eerily willing to pay a price in carnage to have three cars in every garage and one person in every car.
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