Getting There
Sustainable Transportation and Smarth Growth

By Trip Pollard

            For decades, state and local transportation policies and public investments in the Southeast have focused almost exclusively on road building and motor vehicles. This approach has brought significant benefits, but also tremendous and growing costs to our environment, health, communities, and economy. Our transportation programs need a complete overhaul—fast.

We currently spend billions of taxpayer dollars on transportation each year in the Southeast, yet provide few meaningful transportation choices. Most people have to drive for almost every task, getting in their car to go buy a quart of milk, to get to work, or to take children to school. Southeastern metro areas have some of the highest driving rates per capita in the United States, and each day people drive over 1.7 billion miles in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. This is the equivalent of driving to the sun over 19 times each day. This staggering amount of driving produces an equally staggering amount of pollution, and the Southeast has the highest number of localities newly-designated as failing to meet federal health standards for ozone pollution. Road-centered transportation programs also have subsidized sprawl, opening new areas to development and helping give this region the most rapid rate of land consumption in the country. In fact, our transportation and land use patterns are a primary cause of almost every serious environmental problem facing the region.

The good news is that there are a host of practical and effective steps to improve transportation and to alter policies promoting destructive highways and sprawl. And citizens, business leaders, and decision makers are increasingly concerned about the rising costs and impacts of current policies. This concern has begun to spur significant policy changes and is creating important opportunities for smarter growth and more sustainable transportation.

Here are just a handful of the smarter transportation solutions beginning to be adopted in parts of the Southeast:

•Halting Wasteful, Destructive Projects.

In Tennessee, the new transportation commissioner asked the University of Tennessee Center for Transportation Research to conduct an unprecedented independent review of 15 controversial highway proposals in 2003. Following this study, four highway projects were scrapped or shelved and the others are being redesigned or studied further. For example, the proposed Route 840 North would be a 115-mile, $1 billion-plus portion of an outer loop around Nashville that would generate pollution and open thousands of acres to sprawl. TDOT has placed the project on indefinite hold, conceding that it did not meet any documented transportation need and that it would cause significant environmental damage.

•Fixing it First.

States are beginning to concentrate more on maintaining existing roads and bridges than on funding new projects. It is fiscally prudent to adopt such a “fix it first” strategy to protect transportation investments that have already been made, and this focus also helps reduce subsidies for sprawl and make existing communities more attractive to businesses and residents. In Virginia, the percentage of road funds devoted to maintenance will surpass construction spending this fiscal year, and the North Carolina Board of Transportation recently adopted a long range transportation plan that places much greater emphasis on maintaining existing roadways.

•Increasing Transportation Choices.

Although most transportation spending still goes to roads, there have been major new investments in recent years in cleaner alternatives such as public transit, freight rail, bicycling, and walking. Light rails, streetcar, or commuter rail systems have opened in recent years or are under construction in Miami, Memphis, Charlotte, Tampa, northern Virginia, and other places in the Southeast. In addition, Arlington County, Virginia’s innovative “Safe Routes to School” initiative has provided over $1.5 million since 1999 for projects that make it safer for children to walk or bike to school. Linking different transportation modes further increases the convenience and attractiveness of alternatives. For example, renovation of Richmond, Virginia’s historic Main Street train station not only returned rail service to downtown but it ultimately will create a center that integrates rail, bus, taxi, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic.

•Design for People, Not Cars.

Efforts are spreading throughout the Southeast to promote more flexible, context-sensitive projects that do not run roughshod over the surrounding natural and human environments. The Tennessee Department of Transportation, for example, has established citizen review teams to work with consultants to explore the redesign of a number of projects to reduce their adverse impacts. A related strategy is to retrofit existing roads, which often are overly-wide and built for excessive speed. Greenville, South Carolina dramatically increased pedestrian and economic activity after reducing Main Street from four lanes to two and making other improvements to revitalize downtown.

•Linking Transportation and Land Use.

Some states and localities are beginning to direct transportation investments to strengthen existing communities rather than building farther and farther out, and to promote more compact, mixed use development that can also provide alternatives to driving. Perhaps the most ambitious effort in the region is the Charlotte area’s $2.9 billion long range transit plan that also seeks to guide growth to locations along five corridors to be served by transit. In addition, the Atlanta region uses a portion of its transportation funds for a Livable Centers Initiative that offers localities incentives to move toward smarter growth, including funding for planning that promotes mobility and livability in existing communities and for projects such as mixed-use developments close to transit.

•Promoting Cleaner Vehicles.

The steps mentioned above can all reduce the amount of driving we have to do and the impacts of road building. The impact of each mile we do drive can be reduced by deploying vehicles that can significantly cut polluting emissions, such as gas and electric hybrid, compressed natural gas, electric, and biodiesel vehicles. State and local vehicle purchasing efforts, the formation of Clean Cities programs to promote alternative fuel vehicles, and tax credits and grants for the purchase of zero or low emission vehicles are among the strategies to promote cleaner vehicles.

Although steps such as these are only beginning to be undertaken, they indicate the enormous potential for smarter growth and more sustainable transportation in the Southeast. It is past time for change.

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