Rich Kassel's Blog
Help Dan Save Traffic
August 21, 2008
Posted by Rich Kassel in Curbing Pollution , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Sorry that I’ve been out of the Switchboard loop for awhile. While I was away, my friends at USPIRG held a “21st Century Transportation” video contest and you can watch the winner here. (Kudos to Streetsblog for highlighting this today, and for their continued great work covering the NYC sustainable transportation scene).
The video is about Dan. Dan loves “Sweet Lady Traffic,” loves everything about it. His greatest fear: in next year’s transportation funding bill, Congress will take money away from building highways and spend it on trains and buses. This will, according to the video, “suck the lifeblood out of traffic.”
Take a minute and 41 seconds and watch:
There is, of course, a serious side to this issue.
In response to high gas prices, Americans are turning to transit to get to work and school in numbers that have not been seen since the 1950s. Unfortunately, in too many cities, high diesel prices and transit funding cuts (in part due to lower gas tax receipts) are adding up to overcrowded buses and long delays at exactly the wrong time.
Here are just a few examples: In New York, the transit system faces its worst fiscal crisis since the 1970s, cutting services and facing a 5-year capital funding gap that could be as high as $20 billion; in California, there’s a proposal to cut $1.4 billion from the state’s transit fund for next year; in Cleveland, San Diego and many other cities, services are being cut to fill a budget holes despite record ridership levels. The list could go on and on – according to the American Public Transit Association, roughly one-fifth of the nation’s transit agencies cut services over the past year.
Responding to this transit funding crisis, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6052, the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act, by a vote of 322 to 98 in June. The Act authorizes 1.7 billion dollars to transit agencies across America to expand services and reduce fares.
When the Senate returns to work in September, will it take up a similar effort? Thankfully, Senator Clinton has introduced a Senate version of H.R. 6052, but that’s a long way from passing a bill for the President’s signature.
The bottom line is that we cannot break our addiction to oil, we cannot solve our global warming problems, and we cannot give Americans clean, health air without investing in transit and other alternatives to driving. Support increased funding for transit.
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- Rich Kassel
- Senior Attorney and Director, Clean Fuels and Vehicles Project
- New York City
- I came to NRDC in 1991 on a three-year grant, and never left. Over the...
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