Transportation's Role in Reducing U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions ...

Transportation's Role in Reducing U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Volume 1
play a particularly important role in the achieving the vision. Many of those
agencies have statutory responsibilities that impact planning decisions.
Coordination and cooperation among all interested parties and relevant agencies
is necessary to achieve the vision. This is particularly important as State and
local transportation planners do not often have control over land use decisions,
but can serve as conveners of stakeholder groups and work closely with land use
planning authorities. Similarly, by providing funding and requiring a planning
process, the Federal government is an important stakeholder, but much decisionmaking
power appropriately resides at State and local levels.
While planning is an open and collaborative process, it also is disciplined by the
need to abide by important fiscal and environmental constraints. These
constraints limit the extent of projects and strategies that may be recommended
in plans, forcing communities to make difficult tradeoffs. In the end, a plan
represents the community’s preferred actions, limited to those that are
achievable within reasonable constraints.
Federal statute requires that States and MPOs engage in a transportation
planning process and develop a plan that “include[s] both long-range and shortrange
program strategies/actions that lead to the development of an integrated
intermodal transportation system which facilitates the efficient movement of
people and goods.” They must also develop a short-range program of
transportation improvements, based on the long-range transportation plan,
designed to achieve the area’s goals using spending, regulating, operating,
management, and financial tools. Transportation agencies confront a wide range
of tradeoff decisions within and between modes, policy objectives, performance
goals, geographic regions, and market segments when developing these plans
and programs. Therefore, any decision on GHG reduction activities, including
where to invest limited resources, needs to be balanced with its impact on other
goals and priorities.
There are three main ways in which the Federal government can influence GHG
reduction through transportation infrastructure planning and investment:
technical assistance, regulations, and incentives. When considering each of these
avenues, the Federal government can learn from the experiences of States and
MPOs on incorporating climate change considerations into their transportation
planning processes. As documented in a recent study, 117 these experiences vary
widely. Climate change can appear in the vision, goals, policies, strategies,
trends, challenges, and performance measures of long-range transportation
plans. Some plans merely recognize that climate change is an issue that relates to
transportation and begin to point out the relevance of existing plans and
strategies to climate change. Other plans make climate change more central to
117 ICF International (2008). Integrating Climate Change into the Transportation Planning
Process. Prepared for Federal Highway Administration.
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