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| Nonprofit founded in 1988 |
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| The mess: U.S. roads:
over eight million miles of
them!
Clean Air and Public Health Threatened in Massive Transportation Bill May 2004, Washington, DC Congress should help put America on the road to cleaner air by protecting and strengthening the measures in the transportation bill that clean our air. But it doesn't. In a mostly thankless task, environmentalists lobby and use the courts to reform the system and get some crumbs for cleaner air and alternative transportation. ó There are seven parking spaces for every car in the U.S. The transportation infrastructure takes up a third of the urban land mass in U.S. cities. But in L.A. it takes up 60 percent. Does this mean other towns with trains have it better? Consider Chicago: "When you look at low-income households, the amount spent on transportation costs gets up to 40 percent of income," says the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago. ó U.S. transportation is over 95 percent dependent on oil. In 2000, cars and trucks guzzled 132 billion gallons of gasoline and an additional 33 billion gallons of diesel and other special fuels. ó Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the largest contributor to climate change and the transportation sector is one of the largest sources of CO2. Cars and light trucks emit 20 percent of the nationís CO2 pollution. Each gallon of gasoline burned pumps 28 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere ñ 19 from the tailpipe and nine pounds from upstream refining, transporting and refueling. The U.S. transportation sector as a whole is responsible for about 32 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions, and almost nine percent of the worldís total CO2 emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the 1990s were the hottest decade of the 20th century. ó Motor
vehicles are the largest source of urban air pollution, generating more than
two-thirds of the carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, a third of the nitrogen
oxides (which react to form smog), and a quarter of the hydrocarbons (which also
form smog). Some pollutants emitted
by cars and trucks are known or likely to cause cancer, including toxic
substances such as soot (fine particulates), benzene, arsenic compounds,
formaldehyde, and lead. In the 1996
National Toxics Inventory, EPA estimates that mobile sources such as cars,
trucks, and buses release about 3 billion pounds of cancer-causing, hazardous
air pollutants each year. Read testimony before Congress on straightening out funding priorities for transportation and the environment. Michael Replogle's remarks on policy: "Vital Concerns for TEA-21 Reauthorization." To learn more, see Environmental Defense's website: www.ed.org/go/tea3 Road fighting
background No environmental group is for more roads. All the groups are against sprawl. But none of the large environmental groups has endorsed a halt to all new road building, despite years of APM's attempting to forge a consensus. After ten years of road fighting and stopping some roads, APM's nonproift sponsor found that funding to stop the bulldozers was too hard to obtain and sustain. We conclude that as long as their is abundant, subsidized oil, road building and road widenings will continue, despite the fact that such a scheme of priorities means road repair goes undone, and despite the fact that freight is eight times as efficient by rail than by truck. The
paving moratorium was originally conceived to aid AMTRAK as the most efficient
motorized transportation, with hope that fewer roads and cars would being to aid
the environment. How is Amtrak doing? Here is the federal
government's analysis of the current rail
passenger system and its financial challenges. Also
see Surface
Transportation Policy Project |
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