Enviro Leaders: EV’s Won’t Save Us, Invest in Transit and Active Transportation

To the surprise of few, the incoming presidential administration of Donald Trump hit the ground driving, signing executive orders that will boost oil production and could eliminate federal tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. While California has set its own climate and emission goals, its plan relies on drivers switching to emission-free electric vehicles.

This change in federal priorities caused the leaders of over five dozen of the state’s environmental advocacy groups to write to state decision-makers (pdf of letter) at the California Transportation Commission, California Air Resources Board, Caltrans and the Department of Housing and Community Development. Advocates want the state to invest more in active transportation, transit operations, and to de-emphasize car travel when making plans for the future.

“He just pulled us out of the Paris Climate Agreement and said ‘Drill baby drill,'” said Jeanie Ward-Waller, interim director of ClimatePlan, of the new President. 

But, California still controls how the state spends its own transportation dollars, and thus is responsible for meeting its own Climate goals, Ward-Waller continued.

“We’ve (California) built the transportation portion of our Climate plan assuming that we can count on the most ambitious projection for deployment of electric vehicles, all the regions have been counting on that, but there’s no reason to assume that will hold up for the next four years,” she continued.

Even without Trump in office, the state is not meeting its Climate goals. In 2022, California approved a plan to combat carbon emissions that included reducing driving, not just emissions but driving itself, by 25 percent by 2030. However, state surveys have shown that despite a large drop in driving in the early days of the pandemic, every portion of the state has seen a return to pre-pandemic levels.

The authors of the letter state this failure is because regional transportation decision makers at Municipal Planning Organizations (MPO’s) have continued to prioritize expanding the state’s highway networks. 

The letter echoes a piece that appeared in Streetsblog Los Angeles last week, where Joe Linton begged Caltrans and LA Metro to stop widening highways even as large portions of the city burned…partially as a result of conditions created by Climate Change.

In his piece, Linton listed the current and future projects in Los Angeles County that would increase highway capacity, blunting or eliminating any progress that will be made in other sectors as the state claims to be lowering its Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The list includes fifteen projects totaling hundreds of new highway lanes and billions of dollars.

And that’s just Los Angeles County.

Zack Deutsch-Gross is one of the authors of the letter which he signed on behalf of TransForm, a Bay Area advocacy group. Deutsch-Gross writes to Streetsblog that the Bay Area’s regional planning organization has similarly let the state down in their long-term plan.

“They’re frontloading highway expansion into their plan…our MPO’s are not taking leadership,” Deutsch-Gross said of the “Plan Bay Area, the regional master plan.

“The Bay Area isn’t looking at pricing or all-lane tolling until 2035 at the earliest…we’re building highways in the near term. By the time we get to these investments we’ll have already baked in these emissions.”

But the environmental groups aren’t just complaining that the state is not living up to its climate goals, it proposes seven changes the state can make on its own to “Trump proof” (to borrow a phrase that Governor Gavin Newsom has adopted) its environmental future.

In general, the letter calls for the state to increase funding for transit operations and active transportation, direct those funds to improve the network (and air quality) in disadvantaged communities, require regional plans to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled in their region, and develop a Plan B in case the federal government is not a partner in the state’s efforts.

In particular, the seven asks from the letter are:

1. Convene a task force with representatives of state, regional, and local agencies, academic experts, labor unions, NGOs, and other stakeholders to develop policy recommendations to equitably shift future investment away from highway expansion and toward transformative improvements that provide safe, convenient and affordable alternatives to driving. 
2. Require Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) to prioritize transportation investments that reduce driving in their regional transportation plans (RTPs) and programming documents. We are concerned about the request by MPOs across the state to pause and reevaluate the SB 375 framework at a time when we critically need to strengthen the mandate for implementation of sustainable communities strategies (SCSs) and focus near-term investments on projects that reduce driving.
3. Avoid weakening the mandate under SB 1 (2017) that a region must have an adopted SCS that is approved by CARB to achieve the regional greenhouse gas emissions target in order to be eligible to nominate projects for transportation funding from the Solutions for Congested Corridors Program (SCCP) or Trade Corridors Enhancement Program (TCEP).
4. Align the 2025-26 Transportation Budget as well as any new transportation revenue sources with CalSTA’s Climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure (CAPTI). CAPTI has demonstrated success at beginning to shift existing state funding programs to projects that reduce GHG emissions, and the CAPTI action plan update currently underway outlines many areas where more progress can be made.
5. Strengthen community engagement requirements for transportation projects to ensure future investments provide meaningful and direct benefits to disadvantaged communities, using the Caltrans Transportation Equity Index (EQI)
6. Articulate a “plan B” for meeting the emission reduction targets in the Scoping Plan to compensate for any anticipated shortfall in emissions reduction that result from losing a strong partner in the federal government in the work to advance our climate goals. 
7. Reform the Transportation Development Act so that funds earmarked for public transportation projects cannot, under any circumstance, be reallocated to roadway projects. 

“There is a real need at the local level to be making these investments in active transportation and transit operations and we’re being squeezed at the federal level,” Deutsch-Gross concludes. “There is more urgency than ever to make the right kind of investments, but that takes bold action.”