(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 495: Reducing Emissions on Highway Projects

This week we’re joined by Move Minnesota director Sam Rockwell to talk about climate bills Minnesota legislators have passed that could reduce highway and road building emissions in the state. We chat about setting transportation related climate targets, highway modeling, and taking the time to read federal rule comment letters.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (40s):
Sam Rockwell, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Sam Rockwell (1m 19s):
Thanks a million. I’m really excited to be here.

Jeff Wood (1m 22s):
Well, we’re excited for you to be here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sam Rockwell (1m 25s):
For sure. Yeah. I am executive director of an organization called Move Minnesota out here in the guest at Minnesota. And we are both an education organization and an advocacy group working to improve transit, transit operations, transit funding, as well as kind of complimentary biking and walking facilities and funding across the state, particularly in the metro region. And then more recently we’ve been working on reducing vehicle miles travel. That’s kind of always been part of that transit piece, but we’ve become much more explicit about that. My background is kind of at the intersection of transit and land use. I am a lawyer by training.

Sam Rockwell (2m 6s):
I, I actually teach in the urban planning Master’s program here at the University of Minnesota. I teach land use law, but I had a background in politics, worked for a New York City council member who worked on a number of transportation initiatives, worked for a group called Transportation Alternatives, doing kind of odd jobs for them when I was a touring rock musician in between tours and, yeah,

Jeff Wood (2m 30s):
I was gonna say, your name sounds very like rock, you know San Rockwell.

Sam Rockwell (2m 33s):
Yeah, well, you know, you gotta, you gotta then do the thing if that’s your name, you gotta do the thing. Right. So kind of a very background, but often at the intersection again of transportation, land use. And for me really involved in those initiatives because I see how much impact it can have in people’s lives. And on climate,

Jeff Wood (2m 53s):
That band thing is interesting because I’m wondering, I went to a lot of shows when I lived in Austin had some favorite bands and things like that and you know, they always had their tour buses or vans that they drove around the country. These were like low end kind of groups, you know, they didn’t have a lot of followers and they didn’t have a lot of money, but they went from city to city basically on tour by how close they were next to each other. So I’m wondering if there’s like a transportation connection there that you can share with us or if there’s a, you know, a venue that you really liked because maybe It was walkable and you could go out and do something after the show.

Sam Rockwell (3m 19s):
Yeah, that’s a good question. I certainly did the van thing. I did not do the bus thing. I never made it to bus level and I’m not sure the, the transportation overlap really intersects with reducing vehicle miles travel since you’re of course not putting a lot of miles on driving around the country. but yeah, we played up and down, It was based in Brooklyn at the time and we played up and down the eastern seaboard a lot. Got out to California and down to Texas and so on as well. But the nine 30 club to me, I was just an incredible club and the black cat in Washington DC we played a lot of fun shows there. I’m discounting all the New York City venues ’cause that’s, that was our home turf. Yeah,

Jeff Wood (3m 58s):
That’s where you’re from.

Sam Rockwell (3m 58s):
Yeah. Yeah. And then the 40 watt club down in Athens, Georgia was really fun. We had a partnership with a band down there and we would go there and wander around Athens afterwards. It was a lot of fun.

Jeff Wood (4m 11s):
That’s awesome. I spent a lot of time at Emos in Austin. That was my, that was my place. I

Sam Rockwell (4m 15s):
Played there one time. That was great.

Jeff Wood (4m 17s):
Yeah. Yeah, they have the small show venue and the larger one in the back and a couple south by Southwests. I was there the whole time and I spent a lot of, a lot of Saturday nights there as well. Well, so I wanna know how you got into transportation policy then? Like was your interest started when you were a little kid? Was it something that you, you know, thought about early on or was it something you kind of stumbled into?

Sam Rockwell (4m 34s):
It wasn’t something I thought about, but It was something I did and then I started thinking about it a little bit later. So you know, as a kid I grew up in the city of Minneapolis. My family had one car and my dad took the bus to work and took a cab home. And when I went to take classes in downtown or wherever, I would take the city bus. So I had a city bus card pretty young. And then once I turned, you know, driving age, my parents said, we are not getting another car, you have a bicycle. And so I was able to bike all over the Twin Cities and I never really thought twice about it. That was just how, how It was I went to college out in New York City and there, loved the transit system but wasn’t really thinking about it.

Sam Rockwell (5m 19s):
I was very involved in environmental policy and then worked for a city council member, David Yaki after I graduated from college. And there I really started to engage with transportation policy. He was really interested in figuring out ways to make it easier to bike, make it easier to take transit. So we had one of his signature bills, we called the bikes in buildings Bill, his wife rode her bike one time to work and was not allowed to bring the bike in the building up to her office and store the bike in her own office. And so we passed a bill saying you gotta let people bring their bikes into their office, make it easier to bike, make it so if you forget your lock, your bike’s not gonna get stolen.

Sam Rockwell (6m 1s):
He had a bill that turned many of the New York City taxi cabs into hybrid cars. And so really started thinking about that intersection of transportation and climate and your ability to get around and got to know folks at transportation alternatives. And then my then girlfriend, now wife worked there and so on and so forth. So kind of started without me really thinking about it, but living it thanks to my parents.

Jeff Wood (6m 26s):
Yeah. That’s awesome. Okay, so before we get to some policy solutions, I kind of wanna ask a table setting question, which is like, what are the problems we’re facing right now and specifically with transportation emissions and climate change and those types of things. Because I feel like we kind of need to set like what we’re going for before we get to like the policy solutions that you all are working on in Minnesota.

Sam Rockwell (6m 44s):
Yeah, well that’s a pretty, pretty big question. One we could talk about for a couple weeks here

Jeff Wood (6m 51s):
I’m sure.

Sam Rockwell (6m 52s):
But you know, I won’t go into climate change as a challenge. I think look it up,

Jeff Wood (6m 58s):
We’ve also covered it a fair amount on the show. but yeah,

Sam Rockwell (7m 1s):
So you know, I mean climate is a major challenge obviously for us in Minnesota, for the us for the world. And it is, you know, when I was a kid was something that was on the front page of newspapers but was a little more theoretical and you know, we’re cranking through another record setting heat there. So I guess I’ll leave it at that except to say that here in Minnesota and across the United States, the highest emitting sector is the transportation sector. And addressing those emissions is obviously critical to eliminating climate pollution. And we are not going to be able to get ourselves through to those goals, to that zero emission goal with electric vehicles alone.

Sam Rockwell (7m 47s):
And there are just some kind of details in the mechanics of how we’re transitioning from internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles that are standing in the way. For example, we actually make pretty high quality cars, right? So a car that you buy today and we’re still selling about 90% of the cars today or gas cars, it’s gonna be on the road for about 20 years, right? And we need to have transitioned by 2050. It’s not really about transitioning, it’s really just about bringing the total amount of emissions down, right? And we talk a lot about these dates and and so on and so forth. But when you talk to climate scientists, really about the carbon budget, we don’t want to emit that much carbon into the atmosphere.

Sam Rockwell (8m 28s):
And so whatever we can do to reduce the carbon emissions the better. you know, when we read articles about reducing emissions across all sorts of sectors, right? Power sector, whatnot, we often hear, you know, retiring this coal plant is equivalent to taking 300,000 cars off the road, right? you know, whatever, planting all these trees is equivalent to taking this many cars off the road. And what we have started to say is why not just take some of cars off the road? Clearly that’s a thing that we all admit is a carbon reducer. And so let’s just get to that. And your question was about climate, but I, I do wanna note that part of why I got interested in transportation and part of what’s so interesting about thinking about shifting how we move around is it’s not just about climate, right?

Sam Rockwell (9m 19s):
It’s about the flavor of your neighborhood. Ours kill 40,000 or so folks a year in America. It’s the number two killer of kids in our country. We have major impacts again on community health. We have impacts on our pocketbooks, right? It’s the second highest expense for our households in the US and that’s because we are car dependent. Too many of us are car dependent, cars are very expensive. And so by thinking about how we can create communities, create the conditions to move away from single occupancy vehicle reliance, we are thinking about ways to make our lives better across so many different areas.

Jeff Wood (10m 2s):
So then what are the state of Minnesota’s goals for climate change that kind of feed into later policies about reducing things like VMT and other actions?

Sam Rockwell (10m 11s):
Yeah, the state of Minnesota passed in 2007 a goal to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. And then this last year, 2023, the legislature updated that goal to a net zero target by 2050. So we’ve had a goal on the books for a while now, right? A couple decades almost. And, and we’re kind of ratcheting that up as the science has shifted since 2007.

Jeff Wood (10m 43s):
I’m interested in that comment about folks saying taking cars off the road, because I feel like that’s pretty frequent. And I’m thinking the same thing where like, why don’t we just take cars off the road? And we’ve done all these amazing things like in the inflation reduction act and the infrastructure bill. We’re giving money for things like solar panels and for heat pumps and all kinds of other stuff. We’re giving money to energy companies or energy startups to do more solar and things like that. We’re investing in all these things to reduce energy consumption. We’re investing in emissions reduction from all these investments, but transportation, it’s like here’s a $7,500 rebate for a car that’s electric or things like that. And so I feel like we’re kind of uneven in the way that we’re attacking this.

Jeff Wood (11m 24s):
And it’s interesting that we always say cars off the road and then we don’t do it. So I’m wondering from a transportation standpoint why we’re so kind of reticent to think about, you know, all those other things on the same level as transportation.

Sam Rockwell (11m 40s):
Yeah, I mean, I guess I’ll answer your question directly and I may maybe make another comment. I mean, I think we, for the most part, obviously generalization, but we tend to forget that it’s possible to get around without a car. A trick I use when I’m talking to folks sometimes to show our assumptions is I’ll say to them, you know, you work at the capitol, how long does it take someone to get from your house to the capitol? They’ll say, 16 minutes, say 16 minutes by car. Like, have you ever taken the bus there? Have you ever rode your bike there? Right. The answer is always that our trip, not always, one time I got called out on an observant person.

Sam Rockwell (12m 20s):
And so I think that that’s part of it, right? I mean, we have created a system where we’re very car reliant, therefore a lot of the people, most of the people making policy are driving they own cars. And it’s just ends up being kind of a, a mind space for folks. And I agree with you about the federal bills. I will say that the IIJA…

Jeff Wood (12m 43s):
Infrastructure Bill

Sam Rockwell (12m 43s):
The infrastructure bill, yeah. Or the bipartisan infrastructure law’s got many, many names and many acronyms. The infrastructure law, bipartisan infrastructure law that passed right before the Inflation Reduction Act that has a ton of money for infrastructure including transportation. It is our transportation reauthorization for this kind of this five year period here. And it has money that can be used but does not need to be used for the kinds of investments that would help people get out of their car, right? Investments in transit, investments in bike walk and education and so forth. There are things that we are not funding that we should be funding, right? Transit operations for example, is not being funded, but flexibility there.

Sam Rockwell (13m 27s):
The problem is that the flexibility then kind of falls to the states and then somewhere along the way, someone actually has to affirmatively make the decision. We are going to embrace this flexibility. And what we have seen is that states are not doing that. Transportation for America national organization working on transportation and sustainability and so forth, put out a piece not that long ago, I think was titled is the I-I-J-A-A Climate Time bomb. And you know, they said, look, the 26% of that money is being spent on highway expansion projects and so it’s not being flexed. So why aren’t we investing in, you know, the solar panel equivalent in the transportation sphere.

Sam Rockwell (14m 9s):
you know, I think folks just don’t wanna take the political heat for taking somebody’s car away. you know, it’s also, it’s not just that the car is something that is taken as a given. It’s something that’s really valorized, right. When, when you think about, I don’t know, the Grammys, this last year Fast Car won a Grammy again, didn’t it? Or no? It at least got performed.

Jeff Wood (14m 31s):
It was performed in It’s very popular. Yes.

Sam Rockwell (14m 33s):
It was very popular, right? I mean I like that song and you know, whatever it is, right? Part Talk is a national public radio program and you know all of this stuff, right? It’s just kind of, it’s ingrained in our thinking when you get married you tie the cans on the back of the car and if you go right, it’s kind of part of our everyday life, part of our cultural touchstones.

Jeff Wood (14m 54s):
Yeah. Well so this journey to reduce VMT for you all, at least started several years ago. Obviously something happened in 2024 and 2023, but It was before that where, you know, things started coming together. I’m curious, you know, how did the ball get rolling and what was the first kind of steps that were made politically And on paper?

Sam Rockwell (15m 12s):
Oh, It was hard to figure out where the story actually starts. I think the story actually started in 2018 when the Department of Transportation drafted a report on itself called the Pathways to Decarbonization report. And the Pathways report, as it’s colloquially known, outlined how the transportation sector could get to, you know, climate targets, state climate targets. Again, at that time that climate targets were 80% reduction by 2050. Within that Pathways report, there was a recommendation to create an advisory committee at Middot, the Minnesota Department of Transportation, an advisory committee to help the department figure out how to hit our climate targets.

Sam Rockwell (15m 54s):
Okay. So that committee was then formed in 2020 or the very end of 2019. And I was involved in that committee. It was comprised of folks who were, you know, from the advocacy world, from kind of representing some some trade associations and so forth. We got together on I think a monthly basis split up into a couple of working groups. One of the working groups was a VMT reduction working group. I mean the Stack Sustainable Transportation Advisory Council decided that VMT reduction merited its own working group. So there’s an electrification group, A VMT reduction group, and the VMT reduction group. Initially we were talking and folks were saying, you know, why don’t we recommend a fix it first policy?

Sam Rockwell (16m 38s):
This is kind of a classic policy where you tell a Department of Transportation don’t expand highways anymore until you fixed everything you’ve got. And kind of the undercurrent there is, they’ve got so much to fix, they’ll never expand a highway again ’cause they’ll never catch up. Right? Okay. And then we said, you know, that’s not actually what we want. We’re not the decision makers here, we’re not the politicians here. We are advising, we are making recommendations. Let’s recommend what we actually think should happen. And so we did a little research and we said, we actually think to hit the carbon reduction goals, we have to have a 20% reduction in vehicle miles traveled. So that group recommended that to Middot. Middot took that under advisement and a couple years later, in December of 2022, men put a 20% per capita VMT reduction target into their 20 year transportation plan.

Sam Rockwell (17m 30s):
And then that target also got inserted into the Governor’s Climate Action framework, which is kind of a multi-sector climate plan that was being drafted for the full state.

Jeff Wood (17m 42s):
Was MO initially really open to this or was it something that as the advisory group, you have to say, you know, these are things that you should be paying attention to. I mean, state dots across the country are famously against, you know, anything that will stop expansion of highways. I’m thinking of my home state of Texas specifically, but were they open to this?

Sam Rockwell (18m 3s):
They were open to it.

Jeff Wood (18m 5s):
I guess you’re where you’re now. So

Sam Rockwell (18m 8s):
I don’t think they started out excited about it. But I also, you know, I kind of hesitate to talk about where the DOT was because the DOT is a 5,000 person agency, right? There were some folks within the agency who were explicitly hired to work on sustainability efforts and they were very helpful in this process and they knew that this was necessary. And so there were key folks within that department who knew that this had to happen and who supported this process and who, when you talk to them, you know, they wanted to see this happen and to give credit where it’s due.

Sam Rockwell (18m 54s):
The commissioner, we ended up having a couple different commissioners over this process, but the commissioner of transportation chaired that Sustainable Transportation Advisory Council. That meant that every meeting they were sitting there in the room at the well on the Zoom, ’cause a lot of, a lot of It was during Kevin with us and they were listening to the entire conversation.

Jeff Wood (19m 16s):
How important is that?

Sam Rockwell (19m 17s):
That is important because ultimately when the top endorses something, it has a chance of flowing through the agency as a whole, right? And in order to get the commissioner’s office on board with this, I think It was really important to have the commissioner’s ear. And we had a member of the advisory council who is a doctor, and she advised our committee to take a do no harm approach when talking about VMT reduction, right? We should not expand highways and we should be reducing VMT. We recommended a highway expansion moratorium. The Department of Transportation did not accept that one and this VMT reduction target.

Sam Rockwell (20m 1s):
But I think that framing, I think hearing from real people who are experiencing things out in the world, who are experts in their own right was really important.

Jeff Wood (20m 10s):
So at the same time you mentioned 2022, Colorado is going through something very similar and doing something where they are putting into policy an opportunity for the DOT to say whether they’re going to accept expansions of highways or not expand highways. So what was going on in Colorado that you all learned from or were learning together with?

Sam Rockwell (20m 31s):
Well, in establishing the VMT reduction target, actually Colorado doesn’t have a VMT reduction target. And so we weren’t really talking to Colorado at that time. The Colorado connection came actually right at the end of 2022. And just sort of a for folks who are planners or in the advocacy space in a pretty absurd way, I think I had written a comment letter on like the greenhouse gas rule, the federal greenhouse gas rule. It’s a greenhouse gas reporting rule. I wrote a comment letter and couple folks over at RMI, which is based both in DC and in Colorado, read all of the comment letters.

Sam Rockwell (21m 13s):
And we had talked about the need for vehicle miles travel production and they called us up and said, Hey, I liked your comment letter, want to talk? And we said, I, who reads these comment letters? I thought these just went into the void, but no RMI, folks are reading your comment letters. And so Miguel, Vic and I and some colleagues got on the phone and kind of got to know each other. And then Miguel talked us through, he had helped in the process of writing that Colorado law that you just referenced. And so he talked us through that law. We were really excited about that kind of work. And we brought him out at the beginning of the legislative session in 2023.

Sam Rockwell (21m 57s):
It said, you know, would you come out and testify? We had a big hearing on transit equity day, a day that kinda celebrates racial justice. It’s, it’s around Rosa Parks’s birthday and transit and talks about how transit is really critical for delivering on justice principles. And we all said, sure, it all came out, testified in person. And then we were kind of dragging ’em around to some meetings that we were having. We were trying to get a big transit funding package passed and It was just an informational hearing. We were dragging ’em around to some meetings with legislators. And we got in a meeting with the transportation chair of the house, a guy named Frank Hornstein. And you know, we talked for 28 of our 30 allotted minutes and Frank said, I got, I gotta go.

Sam Rockwell (22m 41s):
We said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we’ve got Miguel with us. We haven’t let him talk. Just let Miguel talk for a second. Miguel, you know, pulled up his slideshow and said, look, we’ve got this VMT reduction law in Colorado. And Frank said, chair Hornstein said, okay, this sounds cool. I’ve got another meeting in half an hour. Come to that meeting. We said, okay. So then we all showed up at that meeting, It was down the hall at the Capitol and we sat down with Chair Hornstein and another representative, Larry Kraft and a woman Katie Jones, who is a climate expert and an advocate. And they were all talking about how to think about integrating land use and transportation in a climate law. And so we sat down and we started brainstorming a law in that meeting, framing it a little on the Colorado or maybe a lot on the Colorado law, but also integrating RVMT reduction targets, thinking about how we could influence land use planning as part of this.

Sam Rockwell (23m 35s):
And that was kind of the jumpstart.

Jeff Wood (23m 37s):
So then that led to the 2023 law. What does that law say?

Sam Rockwell (23m 42s):
That law says that anytime Mendot is going to do a capacity expansion project, so you know, a road expansion project on a major highway, they have to measure whether that capacity expansion project over the course of 20 years will be consistent with the state’s greenhouse gas and vehicle miles traveled targets. So in other words, they have to take into account the induced demand impacts of that project and say, is this consistent? Are the projected emissions on this roadway consistent with the climate targets?

Sam Rockwell (24m 24s):
And are the projected driving impacts on this highway consistent with the VMT reduction targets? If they are not, which almost by definition they are not, then the agency has three options, right? One, cancel the project, two, adjust the project enough so that it is consistent, right? So take, you know, a set of bi-directional lanes and make those transit lanes, you know, add biking, walking facilities on the sides if it’s a rural highway, something like that. Or they can create a portfolio of projects that does achieve those targets. So, they can fund more projects, the other projects have to be fully funded that then all of the projects together, the highway project and the other projects all meet the goal.

Sam Rockwell (25m 9s):
So those other projects could be transit projects, biking projects, walking projects. You can also have land use initiatives like Rezonings as part of this. And so that’s, that’s really what the law does. There’s a preference for where those mitigation projects, those offset projects should be. So if they can be in the community where the highway project is happening, then great. If that’s infeasible, they have to be in a historically disadvantaged community if that’s infeasible and go all the way up to statewide.

Jeff Wood (25m 37s):
Was there a working group involved in this as well that came off of the law?

Sam Rockwell (25m 40s):
Yeah, so the difference in our law, and there are a number of differences, but the big difference in our law and the Colorado laws that we baked this vehicle miles traveled component into it. So you’ve gotta be hitting a vehicle miles travel reduction target. And that was in part because the folks in Colorado said, you know, we’re worried about loopholes in our law of folks saying, well, you know, we’re gonna be a hundred percent electric fleet by 2035, so you know, the emissions impacts are gonna be low. So we said, okay, we gotta make sure we’ve got the VMT reduction targets in there. So because of that, we really had a law that like it doesn’t exist anywhere else. And so the legislature created a working group to figure out how to implement a law spend, you know, six, eight months talking through the dynamics of the law, thinking about how it can be implemented.

Sam Rockwell (26m 29s):
And then if there are changes that need to happen to the law, come back with a report and recommendations to the legislature. Do you need funding? Do you need adjustments to the law, whatnot. And so that group met every two weeks starting last June through February. So It was a pretty exhaustive process. It was hosted by Minot and the group was comprised of folks who really supported the law and folks who testified against it. The representatives from the City Engineers Association, accounting Engineers Association, the Metropolitan Planning Organization Group from the Greater Minnesota outside of the Twin Cities, someone from the Twin Cities NPO, which is called the Metropolitan Council and so forth.

Jeff Wood (27m 12s):
What were some of the oppositions saying about this?

Sam Rockwell (27m 14s):
A number of things. I mean, in the legislative session there’s a lot of concern about projects that were perceived to be needed for safety purposes, right? So you’ve got a dangerous intersection here and let’s make it an interchange, right? You’ve got some bottleneck, let’s let’s add a link to relieve that bottleneck. And So, they really thinking about those safety initiatives. you know, I think the transportation department was not, Minot was not concerned about this surprisingly, but they really said, you know, we have a big toolkit of things that we can do. We can reduce speeds, we can, you know, think about ways of diverting traffic when you come to an intersection, whatever, it’s, there’s a toolkit beyond expansion.

Sam Rockwell (28m 0s):
And the Department of Transportation was interested in that. So safety was one thing. you know, another thing was that the transportation engineering community made I think a very good point that, you know, a lot of what they do is responsive to land use developments, right? So there’s developments happening and then congestion, clogs the roads and then, you know, their job is to deal with that congestion by expanding the roads. And you know, I think that what’s not really acknowledged there is well by then widening the roads, you enable more development to happen. But I think that that’s, you know, it’s a fair point. We actually had part of the law passed in 2023 address some of those land use impacts.

Sam Rockwell (28m 44s):
It said that you’ve gotta have VMT and climate impacts taken into account when you’re doing land use planning in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.

Jeff Wood (28m 52s):
VM T’S kind of squishy sometimes in that it’s hard for folks to get their heads around what it is and how it impacts development and transportation policy and those types of things. Here in California, obviously we have SB 7 43, which goes a long way towards requiring us to, you know, rethink level of service and development projects as it pertains to like things like CQA, which is our environmental law. What did you learn about VMT during the process of putting together the working group in and everything that happened after the law was passed? The 2023 law I should say?

Sam Rockwell (29m 22s):
I think, you know, I went in with a fair amount of knowledge, right? Having worked on the creation of the VMT reduction target, I think the thing that I really didn’t appreciate before the working group was how complicated it is to measure the VMT impacts of a particular project. It just hadn’t, I mean, I’m a lawyer, I’m not an engineer, I’m not a planner. It just hadn’t occurred to me how far flung the impacts on a road network can be, right? I mean, you expand a highway here and then maybe there’s actually a reduction in VMT on the immediate frontage roads, at least for a while, right?

Sam Rockwell (30m 4s):
’cause now folks are going onto the highway, but then it’s inducing more traffic altogether. So then you see, you know, you see expansions 10 miles away. We were talking about some big interested projects as examples in the work group and you know, folks are saying, look, I mean this could affect travel patterns 150 miles away, right? People coming to the Twin Cities if this interstate no longer exists. Well they used to go, you know, from west to east and then south and now maybe there’s a whole different road they’ll take. And that is kind of mind blowing. And it’s one of the things that we really wrestled with in that work group is how do you create a model?

Sam Rockwell (30m 46s):
How do we even measure this? And that’s one of the things that MID will be doing over the next few years, is creating a model to, to be able to better measure the VMT impacts of highway projects.

Jeff Wood (30m 57s):
Are you worried about the model? We just had Michael Baton, who’s a computer scientist and urban planner in the uk and he talked about his book, the Computable City. And his kind of thinking is generally that models aren’t ever gonna tell you really what you want to hear and input is, you know, we always hear the adage garbage in, garbage out kind of thing. So I’m always a little bit nervous about models. I have friends who are modelers who probably would disagree with me a lot, but I’m always worried about the outputs and also the inputs, right? How are we gonna get to something that’s positive from going through a black box?

Sam Rockwell (31m 30s):
Yeah, I mean I’m, I’m worried about it. I mean, I do think that at a certain point we could probably get through a lot of this by just using common sense, right? I mean there’s communities like can operate a certain way and people drive a lot less, it’s not rocket science, it is just the history of human civilizations. So I, I am nervous about it. One of the things that we did, we haven’t talked about this year’s legislation, but one of the things we accomplished in this year’s legislation was creation of a technical advisory council for this law. And that council’s job is to provide accountability on the model And on the application of that model to various projects And on, you know, the efficacy of different potential mitigation or offset initiatives.

Sam Rockwell (32m 20s):
And we spent a fair amount of political capital working to get the right mix of folks on that advisory council. So we’ve got climate reps from the pollution control agency, kind of our state EPA equivalent. We’ve got representative from the Center for Transportation Studies, which is a research entity at the University of Minnesota that does a lot of really great work as well as other government sector representatives. So a model is a model and you’re right and it is risky. And also we’ve put some accountability metrics in place from people who really know what climate progress looks like.

Jeff Wood (32m 57s):
You also mentioned mitigation efficacy and I, I was thinking about that too because again, here in California, you know, we have cap and trade and there’s always discussions about what we spend our money on, our cap and trade money on and whether that’s effective at reducing emissions and and going towards our climate goals, right? We can say that things are, but then whether they are or not is dependent on how well they’re executed and things like that. So I’m also curious about that discussion as well that you all had about, you know, the efficacy of, of these mitigations that could be had if you know it said that the highway will increase VMT, so what are you gonna do instead?

Sam Rockwell (33m 29s):
Yeah, I mean in the 2023 legislative session we started with a closed universe of potential mitigation measures and we actually took that univer, you know, so It was a list of nine different potential measures and that came from Colorado. They had done a fair amount of work to figure out what the right kind of mitigation types of projects are. And so that was really helpful to be able to dovetail off of that research and off of that law this last year in 2024, we allowed for some flexibility there to allow for more mitigation types, but they have to be recommended by the technical advisory council and then approved by the commissioner. you know, the reason we did that was thinking about the speed at which we are coming up with innovations in the transportation sphere and not wanting to preclude those and require legislative action.

Sam Rockwell (34m 20s):
And I’ll give an example and by innovations I don’t necessarily mean like ai, right? I mean we, last year in 2023 when we also got this law passed, our friends at Pike, Minnesota championed a bill to create an e-bike credit here in Minnesota. It actually we’re speaking on the day that it went live and then it crashed a couple weeks ago. It went live again today and 10,000 slots on the waiting list were filled in 18 minutes. Wow, okay. Yeah. People want e-bikes, right? And I am sure that you can measure A VMT reduction impact from an e-bike ownership. I own an e-bike and we’ve put 2000 miles on it since last September.

Jeff Wood (35m 1s):
We learned from Colorado too that you can, ’cause they’ve done research and studies on their rebate as well, right?

Sam Rockwell (35m 6s):
And so putting $2 million into the e-bike rebi fund may have a really significant impact. And that’s not on the list. Right? So we should allow for that kind of thing to get put on the list. Yeah. What we did do was ensure that the legislative language requires mitigation measures to be in the transportation sector. So this is not a scenario where you can have a highway that’s gonna create a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and then you go weatherize a bunch of buildings. Weatherizing buildings is important, but we are trying to focus in on this sector and achieve the outcomes we need in this sector.

Jeff Wood (35m 41s):
That’s a good point. You mentioned 2024, something happened this year as well that added onto the 2023 bill.

Sam Rockwell (35m 48s):
Yeah, so this year, you know, I already talked about the technical advisory council that was created in this year’s legislation. And the other big thing that happened in this year’s law, again Champion Dubai representative Larry Kraft, was an expansion of the law from just applying to capacity expansion projects to applying to our entire trunk highway system. Trunk highway system in Minnesota is kind of the core big state roads in the state and there are about 12,000 miles of trunk highways. That means there are about 8% of the total road network, but they carry close to 60% of the miles driven in the state.

Sam Rockwell (36m 29s):
So it’s a really big deal. No longer are we just looking at expansion projects and trying to not do kind of extraordinary harm. But we’re actually looking to say no. I mean the goals are not to stop increasing VMT to stop increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The goals are to reduce VMT and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So that means a reconstruction project that doesn’t expand the highway, that’s not doing its job, that’s not reducing VMT, that’s not reducing climate emissions. And so now we have a law, now we have a framework that will apply to that entire front highway system and help us actually achieve the goals on that system.

Sam Rockwell (37m 11s):
And again, the majority of the miles driven in the state are on that system. So that’s really exciting. And then for the non-state roads, county roads, local roads and so forth, there is a provision in the law this year that requires those local jurisdictions to report to Mendot dot the projected greenhouse gas and VMT impacts of their road projects. So the law doesn’t actually apply to those local projects, but we’ll start to have sunlight on what is happening there. And we can think about whether additional action is needed in future years.

Jeff Wood (37m 46s):
That’s such a large number, 60% on such a small amount of roads, 8% of the roadway miles. Was that a shocking number to you when you heard it?

Sam Rockwell (37m 56s):
Yes, yes. Although, you know, this is the entire interstate network and I think the entire state highway network, or at least most of the state highway network So, they are all the biggest roads except for some major county arterials. So yeah, It was really surprising initially, but when you think about it, it makes sense.

Jeff Wood (38m 15s):
You mentioned the transportation system specifically is the target and I think that’s great ’cause you can’t kind of shuffle it off to other sectors that are already doing things like we talked about the inflation reduction act, but land use, land use is such a big, you know, part of this and I think it’s important to tie those two together. And so is land use part of the mitigation or is it just something that the cities and states are expected to focus on when they’re doing their comprehensive plans or, you know, you have Minneapolis 2040, obviously St. Paul did some stuff with their three plexes and things like that. So how much is it the responsibility of this law to kind of mesh with some of the things that are happening in land use?

Sam Rockwell (38m 49s):
It is partially the responsibility of this law in two different ways. So one, you know, I, I mentioned that in 2023 we had a a list of nine different mitigation measures. There are actually two of those on the list that are not transportation sector. One of those is land use. And so you can have a rezoning, for example, long-term land use planning as a mitigation measure. You have to show what the projected VMT impacts are gonna be, what the projected climate impacts are gonna be. But that can be a mitigation measure. And I think that that’s really important how you measure that, you know, is, is gonna be tricky.

Sam Rockwell (39m 32s):
But that’s above my favorite. Also, I mentioned that in the 2023 version of the law, we had provisions in there that require the land use planning processes in the metropolitan area to be consistent with VMT targets and greenhouse gas reduction targets. So in our metropolitan area we have an MPO Metropolitan Planning Organization called the Metropolitan Council. And every 10 years the Met Council creates a series of system plans and development guides for the whole region system being like the transportation system, land use, et cetera. And those plans then inform the comprehensive plans of 180 different jurisdictions in the metropolitan area.

Sam Rockwell (40m 20s):
So the comprehensive plans for every individual jurisdiction have to be consistent with those system plans. And then the zoning codes all have to be updated to be consistent with those comp plans. So you get this waterfall effect. And the requirement in the law that we passed in 2023 is that the system plans and development guides at the metropolitan council level, that those are structured in such a way that they’re projected to deliver on the MT reduction and greenhouse gas reduction targets. And that the Metropolitan Council provide a guide for what it means to incorporate those targets into your comprehensive plan.

Sam Rockwell (41m 3s):
So that’s a big deal. you know, the metropolitan area has more than half of the state’s population and so that’s gonna be pretty impactful. And the MET Council also controls Metro Transit, which is our main transit agency. And so they’re in a unique position to be planning land use and transit together to make sure that we’re really maximizing the potential of that land use transportation intersection.

Jeff Wood (41m 28s):
I also had another question about the mitigations and transportation and thinking about walking and and biking transit kind of next to a highway. Is that something that you’re worried about? Them deciding that they’re gonna build like a bus line in the middle of a highway or obviously you can’t build pedestrian paths on the side of a highway. There’s emissions, but also like particulates and things like that. And the land use component of that is, you know, more highways next to people’s houses and things like that. So I’m just curious like if that was something that’s been thought of because the first thing I thought of when I heard mitigation and bus lanes in the middle of a highway was having a, a bus stop in the middle of a highway, which I think actually Minneapolis does in some parts,

Sam Rockwell (42m 5s):
Got a couple

Jeff Wood (42m 6s):
On some crossroads. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean it’s a frustration for transit planners around the country is like, oh, well we have this highway median, you can put your, your line in. And it’s like, well that’s not really the best for the people who are gonna use this line. Or maybe it’ll actually scare them away. Right?

Sam Rockwell (42m 22s):
So kind of two part answer. I mean, first I think it’s important to remember that when we’re talking about the Trunk Highway system, we are talking not only about interstates, again kind of the full state highway system and in almost every state, right? That state highway in a rural area, you’re on highway and then that highway becomes a main street and then that main street becomes the highway. But actually when it’s main street, it’s actually still a highway legally, right? And so the ability to like do real walking, biking interventions in the geographies of a lot of these highways, actually it’s pretty good, right? A trail, a bike trail walking trail, connecting communities along a rural highway is actually, you know, something that’ll get used.

Sam Rockwell (43m 5s):
And particularly once it runs into the town center is something that actually increases walkability quite a bit. And yeah, I mean I would hope that the way the, you know, coming back to our model question that the way the model and the technical advisory council kind of see the impacts of pedestrian investments near an interstate, I would hope that that would show that those aren’t very effective, right? To your point, I mean, people don’t really wanna walk next to an interstate. It’s unpleasant, it’s unsafe, it’s not healthy for your lungs, all the things. And so I would assume that that kind of investment actually wouldn’t generate much of a mitigation impact. And again, the way the law is structured, OC can say, well, it’s not really feasible to do these mitigation projects right next to, or as part of the project itself.

Sam Rockwell (43m 56s):
We’re gonna do them further away in the region. We’re gonna make investments elsewhere in the state and historically disadvantaged community. And so it’s really about kind of that, that net effect over the state as a whole priority given to creating positive impacts in the community where arm might be occurring. But, you know, sometimes that that direct relationship might not be possible. To your point,

Jeff Wood (44m 20s):
This has been a really impressive process and laws that were put together that I feel like, you know, aside from Colorado, there’s not a lot of movement on this around the country. And I think that, you know, kind of shows the way and lights the way. I wonder if you’ve had any requests to talk about this with, you know, DOT folks from other states that are looking into this. I know there’s certain states that won’t even touch it with the 10 foot pole, but there’s probably some that are like, oh hey, this is cool and maybe we should be following Minnesota’s lead.

Sam Rockwell (44m 45s):
Well, we’re always happy to take calls from DOT folks, but I think Minot is taking calls from DOT folks,

Jeff Wood (44m 51s):
I imagine. So we have

Sam Rockwell (44m 53s):
Had a lot of conversation with, with advocates in other states. Yeah. And you know, a number of calls with folks in the state of Illinois, I know they’re working really hard on this same kind of law. We’ve had calls with folks in Michigan and New York and Maryland and Oregon, and I feel like I’m missing one or two, but we’ve had calls with folks in, in a bunch of different states across the country who are interested in this law, interested in, in how they can move things forward. One of the things we talk about when we’re talking with other states is that this law, the VMT Greenhouse Gas Reduction Law kind of paired with a big transit funding package. And so we were able to close a fiscal cliff deficit and increase transit funding by several hundred million dollars per year going forward.

Sam Rockwell (45m 42s):
And that that’s a really important partnership with this law, right? This, this isn’t about being punitive, this is about shifting investments, increasing investments in multimodal options and shifting away from single occupancy vehicles. And so the pairing of those laws has been a lot of what we’ve talked about when we’ve talked to other states.

Jeff Wood (46m 1s):
That’s a really important point. ’cause I, I feel like a lot of folks might think this is punitive, but I think it’s really about increasing accessibility right? To things and people and places and, and the places where people want to go. And I, I think that’s a really important point because I imagine that there’s a lot of folks that would, you know, listen to the show if they’re not already in this, in this mindset and think, well, well you’re just trying to take away my vehicle, or you’re just trying to do this or that, you know, trying to reduce emissions by taking it off of the back of somebody else economically or otherwise. And I feel like that’s not really the, that’s not the game because, you know, accessibility, as the accessibility observatory has pointed out many times, it’s important to get people between places and maybe it’s actually better for them to not have to drive a car. There’s a lot of people that don’t drive cars.

Jeff Wood (46m 41s):
I mean, we just had Anna Zivarts on Yeah. To talk about her book and driving is not an option. I mean, 30% of people don’t, don’t even drive or don’t have access to a car. And so there’s an important, you know, point to be made about giving people opportunities to get to the places where they wanna go.

Sam Rockwell (46m 55s):
Yeah. And you know, I would also note over the last, you know, several decades, if you look at a graph of, you know, population growth versus vehicle miles, travel growth, I mean, vehicle miles traveled has increased significantly faster than population and economic growth. And so, you know, I think even if you didn’t increase multimodal options, which I made a review, that would be crazy not to, but I mean, there’s a lot of room to just rethink kind of how, how we’re functioning. I mean, the number of miles driven in the state of Minnesota every year are 60 billion miles a year. Right? And so a 20% per capita reduction, you’re still driving more than 50 billion miles in the state.

Sam Rockwell (47m 37s):
And you know, I challenge anyone to say that we can’t have a thriving economy with 50 billion miles driven in a state our size.

Jeff Wood (47m 44s):
Understandable. You talk about the 2023 bill writ large, you know, It was pretty impressive as well. Indexing the gas tax to inflation, sales tax for transit, retail delivery fees, e-bike rebates, lots of different things in there. And so I think that’s a actually a, you know, that’s probably a whole nother show, but it’s interesting to hear that, you know, this is part of that. Yeah. And you know, there’s so, so many bigger things that are happening as well. Yeah, a

Sam Rockwell (48m 5s):
Hundred, a hundred percent clean energy in the electricity sector as well. I mean, that was a really big one. And folks who worked on that bill helped, helped move some of the transportation stuff forward too.

Jeff Wood (48m 17s):
So last question, what did you learn the most outta this process?

Sam Rockwell (48m 19s):
Oh man, I don’t know. So many lessons.

Jeff Wood (48m 23s):
Is there a political lesson to be learned? Is there an advocacy lesson to be learned? Is there a technical lesson to be learned? I imagine there’s all three, but yeah,

Sam Rockwell (48m 31s):
There’s all three. I mean, we, we were in a pretty unique environment, right? You just noted how many bills got through in that 2023 legislative session. And because It was a really big, a crazy legislative session where so many things were happening, we actually took a really quiet approach with this law. We had a public approach for getting transit funding. We had did action alerts, we wrote blogs, we got press for this law. We, we kept it quiet as long as we could. I mean, moving aside, did not put out a single tweet about this law until later in the session because we knew that we had to figure some of the details out.

Sam Rockwell (49m 14s):
First work with our partners out in Colorado, you know, work with Representative Kraft who really became an expert in this work with Katie Jones, really helped craft this law. And Abby Finnis was somebody who, who joined to help ate some of the land use components. And we just needed to workshop it without it becoming kind of vilified. And so that was the strategy in 2023, I think since it passed in 2023. My takeaway is that being open to talking with anybody about this law, about these kinds of policies is really important. I mean, this work group that was put together to figure out how to implement the law, it had county engineers, city engineers, again, folks who did not support this at the beginning.

Sam Rockwell (49m 55s):
And It was one of the most productive working experiences I’ve ever had. I mean, people came into that room saying, how do we work together? And it’s a testament to everybody in the room, including those of us who were pushing for this, right? To have some humility, to really take the concerns that other people had seriously, to really work on explaining why this kind of thing is needed is a real mindset shift. But also to be willing to figure out where we can give a little,

Jeff Wood (50m 24s):
Yeah, I think that’s really important. Well, Sam, where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

Sam Rockwell (50m 29s):
I am at Move Minnesota or move men.org and definitely reach out. you know, we are talking to folks all over the country. We’re, we’re loving the fact that other people are trying to do this work. We were only able to write this bill because folks in Colorado and folks at NRDC and RMI helped us do that work. And so we’re doing our best to be available to others to pay it forward.

Jeff Wood (50m 52s):
Awesome. What’s the website? Where can folks find out more information about Move Minnesota?

Sam Rockwell (50m 56s):
It’s moven.org.

Jeff Wood (50m 60s):
Awesome. Folks should check it out. Sam, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time, Jeff.

Sam Rockwell (51m 4s):
Thank you. This was awesome.