(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 466: Making DOTs Measure Emissions

This week we’re joined by Beth Osborne, Vice President for Transportation and Thriving Communities at Smart Growth America. We chat about the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Measure Rule that will make State DOTs and MPOs measure emissions on the federal highway system. We also talk about how Beth thinks we have things lining up for positive change, politics of implementing rules, and how the NTSB treats air travel and surface transportation so differently.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

Jeff Wood (1m 24s):
Beth Osborne, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.

Beth Osborne (1m 38s):
I’m so glad to be back. Thanks for inviting me.

Jeff Wood (1m 41s):
Yeah, well thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell folks a little bit about yourself? And perhaps they might not have heard you on episodes 2 54, 1 46 and and actually 41 really early on, so Wow. Yeah, you, you probably don’t remember the 2013 episode or 2014 episode that we had.

Beth Osborne (1m 57s):
As my mother says, I can’t be expected to remember anything before yesterday. So yes, I’m Beth Osborne, I’m the Vice President for Transportation and Thriving Communities at Smart Growth America Smart Growth America is a national nonprofit focused on the built environment and the role it should play to create communities that are healthy, prosperous, and resilient. And the transportation Thriving Communities team is obviously focused more on the Transportation side of things. Our goal is to connect people to jobs and essential services no matter how they travel, no matter their financial means or their physical ability.

Jeff Wood (2m 37s):
And before we’ve talked to you, I don’t know if I’ve asked you the question of like how you got into transportation. I can’t remember if I did or not, but I know that you’re from New Orleans and I imagine that played a part in all of that.

Beth Osborne (2m 46s):
Well, it’s, it’s funny when you look back, but when I was a little kid, we used to use masking tape to lay out roadway systems on the floor and then we’d bring Legos and build buildings around it and bring our hot wheel cars in and, and create, you know, just a whole little community kinda sim city before computers in Sim City. ’cause I’m that old and, and I loved it. And I can tell you I never once built the cul-de-sac. Nice. I only built grids, as did my sister and brother. And when I came to Washington DC I did not expect to work in transportation.

Beth Osborne (3m 27s):
I worked on environmental policy, but then I kept running into Transportation as the culprit for so many environmental problems that eventually I switched over and, and became obsessed. So that happened really back in the, the early two thousands when I was working for the Southern Governor’s Association and I was working with the likes of Paris Glendenning, governor of Maryland, and he had partnered with the then governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, who had invested a lot of his time in revitalizing downtown Little Rock and in making it walkable and denser and more mixed use.

Jeff Wood (4m 13s):
That’s awesome. I I love origin stories. I mean, they’re, they’re really great and I really appreciate the masking tape aspect of it. That’s, that’s super awesome. And then before we get to our main topic, I do wanna ask you about your feelings. It’s 2024, we’re in the new year now. How are you feeling about the coming year from a transportation policy perspective?

Beth Osborne (4m 30s):
Well, I’m really excited about the work we have planned and I am comforted by the fact that so many of our partners are ready to fight in a way that I haven’t seen before in my career since the first transportation reauthorization that I observed, which was T 21 in the late nineties. There’s always been this attitude that you have to be part of putting more money into this program to get any reform. And so every reauthorization everyone fights for more money, but we get no reform. And yet it seems like no one learns.

Beth Osborne (5m 11s):
I feel like at this point people have learned. And so I think we’re setting ourselves up for a more meaningful fight this time. I also know we’re gonna be a big part of explaining what we got for the infrastructure bill investment. A lot of promises were made and people got a lot of excitement over the itty bitty programs. And that was enough to make them forget that the big funding was gonna do the same thing. It’s always done. I believe we’re gonna be able to profile that in a meaningful way and hold people much more accountable for the unfortunate and really, in my opinion, embarrassing results that we continue to produce as a nation in transportation.

Beth Osborne (5m 56s):
I, I know that doesn’t sound very positive, but that’s the first step to convincing people to do things differently is you can’t say everything’s great and I’ll support more money, but then please change the program dramatically. That’s not how change happens. You have to show that people aren’t getting what they want and let them know that there isn’t a coalition to back ’em up to do more bad work. If, you want change. And I feel like things are lining up for that finally. And that’s really, really exciting to me. I think we can, I think the next reauthorization could go very differently from the past ones.

Jeff Wood (6m 30s):
I like that. I feel like we’ve had some optimism in the past about these types of things, but I, I do feel like that, you know, if we go back just 10 years even we are, we’re seeing a lot of different feelings about things. You see it on social media, you see it on, you know, in the news generally. I mean, there was an article yesterday in the New York Times about a roadway collisions and things like that, that was a, you know, a long read in the New York Times magazine that I don’t think ev you know, would’ve been published before. And so I think that kind of indicates some sort of consciousness that things are not right, things need to be changed. There’s a climate change issue. There’s the, the roadway deaths issue. There’s safe Streets, there’s all kinds of stuff that need to be fixed. And hopefully we can do that in the next authorization because as you said, I think people, you know, were really excited about the infrastructure bill.

Jeff Wood (7m 17s):
But some folks definitely have been disappointed, A lot of folks I should

Beth Osborne (7m 21s):
Say. Well, I was never excited about it because it was obvious more money for the same thing will get more of the same thing. And the past thing was bad and it doesn’t matter If you say. Yeah. But this time we have a little tiny program called the Carbon Reduction Program. So, you know, once we spend 2% on good things, the other 98% will somehow evaporate into thin air, which is always a foolish and ridiculous position to take. However, we do have a crop of reporters now who mean business, who are interested in this issue, who are very talented in terms of getting data out of a program that has no oversight whatsoever and doesn’t make data very available or easy to use.

Beth Osborne (8m 4s):
And that is a massive positive change. We have one more step to go every time the administration says, look over at this tiny shiny object when everyone says, I don’t care about that. I care about the gigantic looming death star behind you, then we’ll be ready. But so long as people stay obsessed and focus on the little tiny good news while the death stars behind us we’re, we’re in trouble. And there’s still too many people that do that.

Jeff Wood (8m 32s):
Well, I’m always guilty of looking at the negative and, and so I want to acknowledge that there is some really positive stuff coming forward and, and I’m, I’m excited about that and so I’m glad that you, you are positive and looking forward to this next cycle as well. Well, so this topic feels like an instance of moving forward, even if just a little bit on November 22nd, USDOT released its new Greenhouse cast performance measure rule, which would require states to track Greenhouse gases from the highway system and set targets for reducing them. So what stands out to you from this rule?

Beth Osborne (9m 4s):
So this is a very exciting rule. It’s something that the Obama administration worked on as part of the original rulemaking required by the 2012 reauthorization known as MAP 21. What they did was If, you look at the law section one 50 of Title 23, and it’s really just two pages. It’s not a lot of language and it’s very simple and it has just a few performance measures. But one of them is this very generalized measure, which is the quote, performance unquote of the national highway system. There’s no definition of the word performance.

Beth Osborne (9m 44s):
Performance is a gigantic word. Performance in terms of safety, in terms of emissions, in terms of speed of movement, in terms of throughput, in terms of access to jobs. It could mean anything that the regulators decide to define. And the Obama administration decided to include in their Greenhouse gas emissions. Frankly, they could have done 20 measures in there had they wished to. And if Congress doesn’t like it, they could define the term. But they didn’t, the Trump administration repealed that part of the rule within six months. And then the Biden administration revived the rule and unfortunately took three years to reestablish it so the, the Trump administration could undo it in six months, took a lot of time for this administration to put it back in place.

Beth Osborne (10m 37s):
And they, it’s very simple, it’s just a sunlight role. The state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations can either set their own targets or sign on to the state’s targets need to set a target for how much they’re going to emit in terms of Greenhouse gases from the highway system. They need to measure how much they’re emitting in general now, make a target to reduce it and then report back on how well they’re doing. It’s not particularly enforceable, but none of the performance measures are enforceable really. But it is a very good way to give the public and the press and elected officials better information about what we’re getting for our investment.

Beth Osborne (11m 25s):
You can’t fix something you don’t measure. What you measure is what you prioritize. So I don’t mean to get people overly excited, like I said, it’s unenforceable, but it is a very important sunlight rule and will give us a lot more insight into what is happening in the Transportation system. And that is important. It’s, it’s essential first step.

Jeff Wood (11m 47s):
So why did it take so long the first time and then again, I saw when it was basically January, 2016, which the new administration was coming in right away. So that was kind of a late bloom on on their part. And then three years after, you know, the Biden administration’s come in, we’re starting this all over again right before another election. And so why is it taking ’em so long each time till like they put it at the end of the road?

Beth Osborne (12m 10s):
Well, the first time around, and this might be more geeky detail than most people want, but that’s why

Jeff Wood (12m 18s):
We’re here implementing. That’s right, that’s

Beth Osborne (12m 20s):
Fair. The way the law was written was very simple, but implementing a process for like this is, is much harder than it looks. And so I was in the Obama administration when we started implementing the MAP 21 performance management language. And the whole idea then was that the law had consolidated a lot of programs and given state DOTs substantially more flexibility on how they spend the dollars. But in return they would have to be more accountable for that expenditure. In reality, the accountability was pretty weak. It was really just they had to be honest about what their goals were and how well they did in fulfilling the goals that they declared to the taxpayer.

Beth Osborne (13m 2s):
What we decided to do was start with the safety measures that are in the law because they were something we had a long track record of measuring and we thought they’d be the easiest to put out. And in doing so, we would also start to structure the process. How often would you report, how would you establish baselines who had to report, did it MPOs, have to set separate targets, all those sorts of nitty gritty issues that create the framework. The second rule was all of the system measures like state of repair measures, also something that was, you know, we had a good track record in measuring it wasn’t super unfamiliar.

Beth Osborne (13m 47s):
We then took further steps in creating the structure. And then the third rule was all the other things, the performance of the NHS and the congestion measures and the congestion mitigation air quality measure. So that third measure, which included all of the reliability measures on the highways, the congestion measure and the air quality measure came third and the Greenhouse gas measure was in there. And that was the only piece repealed. And the reason it was repealed so quickly is a, it was a new rule and the Trump administration doesn’t sit around and lolly gag. It’s a priority they did it. Yeah. In terms of the Biden administration, I think my, this is my guess not being on the inside, there was a lot of pushback from the career team.

Beth Osborne (14m 39s):
There was concern from counsel that re-upping this rule would be hard to do without a a long record of why counsel’s job is to coach everyone to do things in a way that won’t attract lawsuits, which is stupid. Everything attracts lawsuits. Free yourself from the responsibility. ’cause it doesn’t matter what you’re gonna do, you’re gonna get sued. That’s not how council thinks. And political leadership, and I don’t mean within DOT, I mean within the White House did not just make a decision and push it through. So my best guess is the true holdup was the White House and the Office of Management and Budget that just frankly does not make climate a priority within transportation.

Jeff Wood (15m 28s):
And that’s crazy ’cause it’s so much of a percentage, like what is it, 20, 29% of US emissions are

Beth Osborne (15m 34s):
Parcel and going up in a lot of places, but they’re gonna electrify it and tech’s gonna save us.

Jeff Wood (15m 40s):
We could talk about that. We could talk. Yeah, always does. And there’s no path dependence or anything. Not

Beth Osborne (15m 46s):
At all.

Jeff Wood (15m 47s):
Well so that’s an interesting point about the suing because 21 states are now suing because the rule, obviously council didn’t matter whether they made it safe or not. And so they’re, they’re saying they don’t even wanna measure emissions and basically it’ll be

Beth Osborne (16m 0s):
Too hard. They’re multi-billion dollar agencies. But it would be hard to measure CO2 ugh. Unbelievable whining

Jeff Wood (16m 10s):
Even though there’s no penalties for missing targets. Nope. And there’s no requirements to, you know, have them be accurate even so, you know, all they have to do is measure and they just don’t even want to do that.

Beth Osborne (16m 20s):
Yep. That is correct. And they say it will be some huge impetus. But I, I’m reminded of, I don’t know if you’ve seen all the articles that came out recently about immune system response. It said that if our immune systems don’t have things to fight, they’ll turn on us. They’ll turn on the system because an immune system just has to stay active. So it’s gonna find something to fight. I think the same can be said of some of the Republican leadership out there. If USDOT doesn’t give them stuff to fight, they will fight whatever’s left. So if say an administration did nothing in the first couple years except for put out an unenforceable memo that maybe, you know, federal highways, state leadership should encourage states to think about repairing infrastructure before building new infrastructure, they’ll fight that.

Beth Osborne (17m 15s):
Thanks Stephanie. Because it’s the only thing that was given to them to fight. Yeah. In this realm. And I think it the same is to be said here. This is, I mean what else have we left them with to fight? So they’ll pick this one instead and it encourages the administration to do nothing in transportation. It, it’s a, it was a very interesting filing. It said things like we can’t possibly measure this. We have no idea how to measure CO2, but we already know that we’re going to be emitting more because it’s impossible not to. So we don’t know how, but we clearly do ’cause we know what’s gonna happen and the notion that they get so much money in a trust fund without having to fight for it, almost nobody has that luxury of lifestyle as DOTs do.

Beth Osborne (18m 9s):
And they can’t tell me how much they’re going to emit. I would argue that maybe they shouldn’t get the money if they can’t do this base level work. Measuring Emissions from Transportation is not hard. We’re doing it with criteria pollutants. It doesn’t take any more special work to measure CO2. And so, you know, either they’re lying or they’re incompetent or both.

Jeff Wood (18m 35s):
There’s even a GAO report that came out of mid-year last year that talked about how to measure emissions. I have an article here on my desktop from Jeff Davis and it talking about fuel data, VMT data modeling, all the ways you could possibly measure emissions. And it’s out there in easy plain English.

Beth Osborne (18m 50s):
Well, and they do it for every EIS environmental impact statement. They know how to do it. They don’t wanna, yeah. So their filing is a, we don’t wanna, B, we expect to emit more because the only way our economy can grow is to make people spend more of their money and their lives driving. That’s a pretty bleak future they’re offering to their constituents. But that’s what they said.

Jeff Wood (19m 14s):
But some states wanna, right, they wanna do it. Yeah, they wanna measure. There’s states out there that are already doing it. Yeah.

Beth Osborne (19m 21s):
And there’s a bunch of states that were not part of the lawsuit. So clearly some can you just have the list of 21 who are, you know, either just unwilling to or not capable of it. And in both cases I, I think that’s a highly problematic statement on their parts.

Jeff Wood (19m 40s):
What’s the fear? I mean, I understand the politics of it. There’s a kneejerk reaction against anything climate change related or emissions related from, you know, certain constituencies. But I feel like why wouldn’t she want to figure something out that in the future might actually create value for you? And you know, we had Paula Derna on to talk about her book called Price Pricing the Priceless and was talking about how You can, you know, basically create market systems for measuring environmental Impacts. And I feel like taking data and measuring these types of things will actually lead to a system that might actually, if they do the right things, get them more money or get them more value over time.

Jeff Wood (20m 20s):
And so I don’t see kind of the, I mean I, I understand but I don’t see the long-term like prospects for all of this opposition to a simple measure like emissions.

Beth Osborne (20m 32s):
I don’t think they are afraid and I don’t think they’re incapable of it. I think they’re virtue signaling to their constituents and they want to let everybody know that they’ll fight the tiniest thing. So don’t do stuff. And it works for them In other agencies, you know, they’re taking loads of actions and so it keeps the opposition on their toes and they have to prioritize what they’re gonna fight back on. But you know, USDOT in terms of actions hasn’t ruffled any feathers. They’ve really just maintained the status quo. They focused on grant making, which is hard and it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of staff to do, but they have not focused on changing the system.

Beth Osborne (21m 17s):
So the system encourages and rewards better projects for the climate or for equity or for health or safety or anything like that. I know when I was part of the Obama administration, there was a thought that we could lead by example by what we funded. We’d fund overwhelmingly projects that we, that showed our values and then others would somehow be inspired. But the stinging lesson I learned in my time in the administration was, If, you don’t change the systems. It’s like you were never there.

Jeff Wood (21m 55s):
Do you think this administration understands the long-term environmental outlook? I’m thinking of reports that like RMI have put out saying like, you can’t just electrify vehicles, that’s great, but we need to reduce VMT overall. Do you think that they even understand that there’s that goal that needs to happen where we need to reduce driving in order to get to our climate goals? Or is it kind of something that that blows over as they’re talking about the next Ford truck?

Beth Osborne (22m 23s):
I think there are a ton of leaders within USDOT that understand it. But I think there are, you know, almost no people within the White House infrastructure that do and DOT works for the White House. And look, when the presidential election was gearing up, we did an evaluation of all candidates transportation proposals and Biden’s was bad. So I don’t know why I would be surprised that he got an office and his proposals to put more money through the same programs and cross your fingers super hard and squint and hope the results will be different. That’s what he proposed and all the senators did.

Beth Osborne (23m 5s):
That’s the thing, statewide elected Democrats, this is what they do. They believe in, if we put more money in the same programs will get different results. And it’s just, it’s amazing how rare it is to find a statewide elected democrat that thinks that the program actually has to change.

Jeff Wood (23m 22s):
Yeah. Here in California of cap and trade funds are distributed to projects that should reduce emissions. And I think that there are folks out there that are skeptical of which ones have the greatest impact. I’m wondering how much actually capturing this data from the highway system would give us like a clearer picture of the solutions that we need to, you know, make in order to reach our goals on the Greenhouse gas and, and climate change fronts.

Beth Osborne (23m 46s):
I mean it, it’s, it can’t hurt. It’s definitely data that we can use. We can ask a question if a state sets a target and misses it, are they missing it because there were unexpected things that happened? Are they, did they miss it because their projections were wrong? It gives us a starting place to have a conversation. I do think that their tools are antiquated and inaccurate. So we’re gonna need to go deeper and really need to do things like ask states to look back at past modeling that they have done projects and see if the results they model and they expect are the results they actually get.

Beth Osborne (24m 29s):
So often they model if they just expand that highway, that somehow the traffic will get moving, it will fix the traffic and moving traffic amidst less than standstill traffic. But in reality it induces more demand and their models can’t see that. And that’s the crux of the problem. So it’s more than just tracking the overall program and setting targets and checking in. It’s about doing it on a project basis, looking at their model runs and things like that more in the weeds. But if we can start here, it’s easier to get there because once they miss targets or they set targets that aren’t as ambitious as their stakeholders want them to be or they are as ambitious but then they wildly miss their targets, that is the basis to require them to dig deeper and look at their tools and their assumptions and their models and all those things.

Jeff Wood (25m 25s):
Do you think this would also be beneficial for active Transportation in terms of measuring things? Because I feel like there’s a lot of projects out there that aren’t necessarily as good as they could be and maybe measuring and checking to see later on if they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. There might be actually some value in that too.

Beth Osborne (25m 43s):
Absolutely, right. We need to have better information about what we get for all kinds of investments. One thing we need to keep in mind is it isn’t good enough to put active transportation on top of dangerous roadways. What we have to do is transform the roadway and what we’ve done in transportation, particularly on the democratic side is said and we’ll continue to do all the bad stuff and we’ll do some good stuff. And what that does is create bad outcomes, sideline the effectiveness of your small good investments and give people an excuse to say, see it did those so-called good investments aren’t effective so we shouldn’t fund them anymore.

Beth Osborne (26m 27s):
So this you know, halfway approach by those of us from the reform side that so desperately just wanna be at the big kids table actually backfires on us badly. So we really need to think about that overall system would be great if the federal government would participate in some guidance on efficient land uses and land use Impacts of land use Impacts on transportation and on climate just like they recommended the system we use today a hundred years ago. They could participate in the solution to the problem they created. But I think we need to recognize having people drive more, faster, longer and then adding a sidewalk on the side that is not gonna model well.

Beth Osborne (27m 14s):
So we really need to think about how to reduce the footprint of roadways, how to slow traffic down and how to create environments where people just want to move around outside of their car where that’s inviting and easy. And that’s when you see the real Impacts on Emissions. There was a report that came out yesterday, the Institute for Transportation and Development policy, ITDP put out a report yesterday that looked at the carbon Impacts of electrification of transportation and built environment solutions and then the two together. And it is an, it’s an incredible review.

Beth Osborne (27m 58s):
It shows that the two together have vastly improved results but they also don’t even touch all the other great results. Like the safety improvements and the access to opportunity for people that can’t drive or don’t drive or the economic improvements, the money savings, there’s so many other improvements other than just CO2 that are captured with that approach. And it, it shows the negative is we’re not gonna get there with just electrification. But the positive is that if we did both together, we could accelerate this and get incredibly positive results.

Beth Osborne (28m 39s):
And I’d love to see the federal government be more a part of embracing that and giving people the analysis capacity and tools they need to implement it.

Jeff Wood (28m 51s):
You were talking about reporting earlier. I saw a piece in Newsweek yesterday or the day before that just kind of out of the blue was talking about well it’s, it’s actually cheaper to live in cities than it is in rural areas. And I was like, okay, well what’s this? It’s not gonna be what I imagine it would be but actually was they were talking about how people in cities, they might make less money but they actually have more opportunities to find situations that work for them. Whether that’s cheaper groceries, that’s cheaper housing, that’s ability to get to their jobs because they have access to transit, selling their cars. All these things that we always talked about for, you know, a very long time were in this this random Newsweek article and I was like wow, I’m really impressed that this is actually breaking the consciousness because it wasn’t from, you know, one of the reporters that we know is not from

Beth Osborne (29m 34s):
A magazine usual

Jeff Wood (29m 35s):
Suspect. The usual suspect. Yeah. It wasn’t from a usual suspect, it was actually just, I felt like it was outta the blue and I was like oh that’s really impressive that we’re starting, it’s starting to break through a little bit and we’re thinking about those things.

Beth Osborne (29m 46s):
It really is and it comes from the individual experiences of those reporters. Yeah. you know, so many of them graduated from school with massive debt. I think it’s quite ubiquitous in the millennial population in Gen ZI unfortunately as Gen X participated in this coming out of school with huge debt and not necessarily earning the salary one with like with that huge debt. And I had to make those choices too. I was one of those people that moved into the city and paid higher rents because I didn’t have to own a car because it was so cheap to get around and if I got the cheaper rent I had to buy a car and it didn’t add up.

Beth Osborne (30m 28s):
And so that personal experience informs how you report on things and how you write. And I can really see it when I look at things like Dangerous by Design and the number of reporters who want to cover this issue who are selling their editors and their bosses on letting them cover these issues. They see it in their personal lives, they understand it on a very fundamental level and that really, it results in exactly what you’re saying Jeff, where you open an article and it’s not one of the three or four reporters, you know, do great work on this. It’s just, you know, some reporter in Houston or in Indie or something like that who saw this recognized the truth of it and went and got the data to back it up and to write a good article about it.

Beth Osborne (31m 17s):
So I do think you’re right, it is breaking through the consciousness in that community in in the press also we’ve done polling that shows the American people get it too. There’s only so many decades You can tell them that If, you just give me a little more money and we add more roadway capacity that this is gonna get better. And you see it get worse before you start thinking, huh? Turns out government might not always tell me the truth. They might not always spend my money efficiently. And with the general skepticism about government now that’s even more likely to happen including in quite conservative circles. Both in terms of those who might be swayed by some sort of, you know, social issue, you know, rural versus urban but also in the budget conscious conservative area.

Beth Osborne (32m 3s):
And you know, it’s really interesting to see that rural versus urban thing come up. It, it was in the filing from the 21 states that, you know, our rural states desperately need the ability to build more roadways for development. So fascinating issues underlying that statement. One, basically what they’re saying is we have to urbanize our rural areas for them to develop. I don’t know that that’s what most rural towns want is to become subsumed by an urban area. But that’s the sort of approach that this development pattern creates. And then also rural areas aren’t the ones creating CO2 Emissions from transportation If.

Beth Osborne (32m 47s):
you look at every state, it’s their urban areas that are responsible for this. And I think rural states would wanna show, hey I’m not the problem here. It’s the Urban areas that are so the fact that they don’t want, I think maybe they don’t even understand that this isn’t a rural issue, it’s Urban areas transportation that’s causing the problem and it’s urban areas that need to focus on a solution giving everybody the opportunity. You talked about a neighborhood where You can live and get where you need to go without having to buy $50,000 car.

Jeff Wood (33m 20s):
Yeah and I think people see their bank accounts, right? I mean it’s simple. Yeah. You, you look at your bank account, you know what goes in and out. It’s, and so I think that you see that and you’re like, okay well if I get rid of this car payment and if I get rid of this insurance payment and if I get rid of this all this gas I’m spending money on every month, that adds up to some coin and it’s, you know, it can be depressing to look into your bank account If, you see all those things gone.

Beth Osborne (33m 41s):
Well it, it’s not about just one car, you know, it’s not like my family has one car but I grew up in a family of five and we had four cars. Right? How many communities, how many households would love to go from four cars to three or three to two or two to one. It’s not about, you know, looking for a bohemian lifestyle where you never have to get in a car. It’s not having to impoverish your family and choose you know, cars over home ownership or cars over education or cars over retirement and savings. And that’s what we need to provide. There are a lot of households that would love to be able just to get by on two cars for their four people and we should be making that much easier.

Beth Osborne (34m 24s):
Yeah,

Jeff Wood (34m 25s):
I was just trying to look at my computer ’cause I, I remembered a map that I made long time ago for T four. It was like, it was a map of Montana and it was called Urban Montana and we were looking at how many people lived in cities in Montana and it was a pretty big amount, right? It was like 50% or or more actually live in cities in Montana. So I find that rural urban also interesting from that perspective too. A lot of these states that have rural populations, the population in the rural areas is quite small and the population in the urban areas is large in and growing. I imagine that’s from the data back then as compared to the data now it’s probably even more urban than it was before because of the pandemic migration and stuff like that. So it’s interesting to think about it from that perspective too, where there’s rural states but there also have cities in them where most of the population lives.

Beth Osborne (35m 13s):
Absolutely. And we did a study of travel in rural areas and we found some really interesting facts like average trips are increasing in size, particularly in rural areas. So the trip to work, medical care, the grocery, all those trips are longer but overall VMT per household is not going up. So their individual trips are longer but they’re not traveling more. That means rural households are giving up trips. That’s a tragedy. That does not mean rural areas getting more access to opportunity or getting more mobile. They’re being forced to use their finite transportation budget.

Beth Osborne (35m 55s):
Budget in terms of money and budget in terms of time to do le fewer things. And the response is we’re just going to give them wider roads that feels very much like a let them eat roads solutions, not actually investing in rural communities and investing in the sort of mobility that gives rural people the same access to opportunity that You can have in urban America. I have to stop myself sometimes and really I just struggle to understand the, so-called rural champions because they seem so often to either understand rural America the least or be straight out anti rural.

Beth Osborne (36m 37s):
The notion that you’re doing great things for rural America by saying I’ll let you go faster to the healthcare that’s now a hundred miles away from you ’cause I closed your clinic down is just, it’s just tragic for rural America that that’s, that’s what their champions do these days. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (36m 54s):
I wanna talk a little bit about the measurements for the emissions as well. Yeah. How important is it to like standardize the emissions measurement over every state? I mean I imagine that there are different methods and modes and, and as we mentioned there is a GAO report about this, but how important is it to have every state on the same page?

Beth Osborne (37m 12s):
Well it’s hard to get an understanding of what’s really going on if everybody’s measuring everything differently. And of course our travel doesn’t stop at jurisdictional lines, so we need to understand the result of having people move. When we measure travel time data, we don’t change that measure at every jurisdiction because that’s not how people travel. So that kind of standardization gives us a much better sense of what’s happening in a metropolitan area, which often crosses state lines in a region and nationally as we’re developing and funding a national program. Also, of course climate emissions don’t stay in a jurisdiction either, so we need to make sure that the information we’re getting is as accurate as a possible and that means giving people some guidance on how that information should be collected and analyzed from the perspective of the 21 states who are suing, they’re claiming a lack of knowledge or ability to measure emissions from transportation.

Beth Osborne (38m 17s):
Makes me wonder if they’re doing their conformity work very well. Maybe we should look at that for some lawsuits as well. But it also means they need some guidance and that’s why you lay it out and you give people as much step-by-step information as possible and direction as possible so that those who might not be as sophisticated are able to take on the task and you guarantee it is a doable, relatively straightforward task. And the information you have is useful on the, the level that we are legislating and that we are designing transportation systems for.

Jeff Wood (38m 56s):
Also this, this rules at the highway level, right? So basically the national highway system is the interstates and on on all the roads that make up that. But then there’s another what, 46% of roads that aren’t a part of this measurement at all. And so I’m wondering how we discuss those or how we pull those in. As you mentioned, Emissions doesn’t care about state lines or MSAs or MPO corridors and things like that. So I’m curious like how that kind of bringing those other Emissions in as well that are still transportation that are not part of the highway system.

Beth Osborne (39m 27s):
That’s an authority issue. The way the law was written, measuring the performance of the national highway system was the authority USDOT was given. So they focused on where their authority was. But what you need to know is what the vehicle miles traveled on those stretches of roadway are and the vehicle mix and the fuel mix you have. So once you’re doing it for the NHS, it’s a very minor step to do it across the board. I’d love to see it done on all roads and systematically, but I still think since the overwhelming majority of vehicle miles travel that happens on the national highway system, we will still get extremely valuable information and we’ll get directional information.

Beth Osborne (40m 12s):
Are we going in the right direction at the speed we need to, to meet our goals to stave off catastrophic climate change And we’ll know just from the NHS.

Jeff Wood (40m 24s):
Do you know off the top of your head, this might be a hard question, how much percentage of national VMT is on the interstates versus local?

Beth Osborne (40m 36s):
I don’t know the specific numbers off the top of my head. I’ve seen the numbers and one of the things that is often told to me when I point out that the arterial roadways on the NHS are the ones where most pedestrian fatalities happen, A lot of the naysayers first statement is, well that’s where most of the VMT is and therefore we should expect it to have most of the fatalities. So we

Jeff Wood (40m 59s):
Should expect death, we

Beth Osborne (41m 0s):
Should, well, I mean you can’t, it’s like a wave we can’t manage for safety. We can just, you know, hope that people don’t drive that much more or that we don’t kill people at a higher rate is the basic position that they’re coming from.

Jeff Wood (41m 16s):
Can we talk about for a second how we just had an airplane blow out a door? Could we talk about

Beth Osborne (41m 20s):
This?

Jeff Wood (41m 21s):
And the NTSB was all over that and nobody died fortunately, but they were all over it. They made Boeing ground their planes, they’re fixing the bolts and all the thing whatever happened because of that error in manufacturing and you know, probably, you know, another several hundred people died on the roads between the times of them announcing that something happened and them announcing that they’re shutting things down.

Beth Osborne (41m 45s):
Yeah, it is wild to me to see the statements coming out of the FAA, the Fed Federal Aviation Administration and the US Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Because you look at some of these statements and you think, huh, we have a very different approach when it comes to our roadways. The FAA statement said, and I’m looking at it right now, the safety of the flying public, not speed will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 7 3 7 9 max to service. Oh.

Beth Osborne (42m 25s):
So we’re gonna prioritize safety over speed. That’s wild. We do the opposite on our roadways. We prioritize speed over safety then I think Secretary Buttigieg said, this is another quote, every plane they deliver to an airline, every plane that goes in the sky needs to be 100% safe. They need to be able to demonstrate that, which means finding an AFF and fixing anything related to this issue. What do we put on our notes again? Untested avs. We test avs on public roads and see what happens. We put massive SUVs and trucks on our road where the driver is blinded to an entire classroom worth of elementary school kids in front of it.

Beth Osborne (43m 13s):
But that’s fine. No reason to interfere with that. It’s just wild to me the opposite positions of our federal highway safety approach, which is we need everybody to be able to drive as fast as they can since we’ve laid out our communities in an incredibly inefficient and inconvenient way and we’ll make people as safe as possible so long as we do nothing that makes people feel like they have to slow down versus the Federal Aviation Administration, which is anything that could potentially damage a life is unconscionable when it’s in the sky.

Beth Osborne (43m 56s):
My mind is continuously blown. Keep reading these quotes. They’re wild.

Jeff Wood (44m 1s):
Well has anybody, you know, I kind of tossed that back. I mean I know on Twitter they do but, or on whatever social network people are on, but has anybody actually asked them this in the recent days? Like have, has anybody asked Pete to this question like where are we allowing so many people to die on the highway system when, you know, in the air we don’t accept any deaths, which is the way to go? Which is the

Beth Osborne (44m 20s):
Right way to do it? Yeah, not that I know of.

Jeff Wood (44m 24s):
I just wonder where it comes from. Is it because, you know, aviation has always been highly regulated and, and people are just numb to car crashes. I mean that article in the Times magazine was really illuminating to me for a few reasons. And one of them was just like the automakers themselves. you know, they, they spun this hail of freedom and driving anywhere you want to go, but also they made cars that were death traps, you know, until the sixties and seventies till Ralph Nader got involved. And even then they still are, you know, horribly unsafe. But there’s like, I don’t know, I’m, I’m just, it’s, it’s, it’s maddening to see the split between the two transportation modes and, and why we treat one one way and why we treat the other another.

Beth Osborne (45m 2s):
You know, Cass Sunstein who ran the Office of Management and Budget and the Obama administration wrote a book on different ways to measure the costs and benefits of federal investments. I read it because I am a super big nerd and one of the things that he talked about was people are much more afraid of dying in a plane crash than in a car. And it’s due to their sense of control. They can’t control what happens to them in a plane. So the demand on the government to keep private industry responsible is very high and the pressure is very high.

Beth Osborne (45m 45s):
There’s also a limited number of actors, so it’s an easier to regulate field. On the transportation side, people both believe they are in control, which is adorable. We are not in control of what other people do to us on the roads and there is a belief that we are better drivers than we are. There’s also a belief that you are in total control and not paying attention to the design. I don’t think people get how much they are lemmings to the design. We all are, you know, if, if we have a wide open road and it’s straight ahead and lots of space, we are going to drive faster and more recklessly.

Beth Osborne (46m 33s):
Every last one of us will in in fact If. you take a defensive driving class, it is considered quite inadvisable and unsafe to go at a much slower rate than the cars around you. So as the responsible driver, do you keep yourself safe by traveling at the speed or something close to that of the people around you? If they are driving at an unsafe speed, both choices now are unsafe. So I think we have a sense of control in the driver that doesn’t result in a demand for change, doesn’t result in that pressure and a lack of understanding of the fact that the vehicles we’re being given are incredibly unsafe.

Beth Osborne (47m 16s):
We’re going to need some breakthrough on the fact that frankly a lot of the trucks and SUVs we drive are not roadworthy. We wouldn’t let people drive blindfolded. And that’s what the cars are doing to them because of the design and make people understand better that this auto oriented design of the roadways is anti-D driver. What it does is sets the driver up to make a mistake and then blames the driver for the mistake that the designs set them up for. I think the sooner people understand that the government is taking their hard earned tax dollars and using it to build roadways that set them up to fail and then blame them, they won’t be real happy about it.

Beth Osborne (48m 2s):
But that those DOTs have not been connected for them.

Jeff Wood (48m 7s):
Yeah, we could talk about this all day. The targets are due on February 1st for the emissions. Do you think that they’ll get pushed back because of the lawsuit or do you think that some states will just put in and then you know, decide,

Beth Osborne (48m 21s):
Continue? They’re unenforceable. So If you don’t put ’em in or If, you put in that your emissions will be zero. There’s nothing that’s gonna happen when you don’t hit zero and or when you don’t put them in. But we’ll get information from the majority of states and that’s a good thing. Yeah, and then frankly it might be a good thing to see USDOT do the measurement for the states that don’t put in their targets. USDOT has the same vehicle miles traveled information, fleet mix, fuel mix information. They could calculate what the baseline is and they could come back each year and tell the public what the performance of the states that aren’t participating is.

Beth Osborne (49m 2s):
Even if there’s no target. I’d love to see them do that. If they don’t, maybe that’s something an organization like mine could do.

Jeff Wood (49m 9s):
Census counts feels like a census count. You just have an annual census of the emissions that the transportation system, you know, emits and then, you know, state by state year after year you measure me again and measure again and If you don’t like the way that it’s measured, then You can measure it. Exactly.

Beth Osborne (49m 26s):
And I think it will we’ll set off some alarm bells with some of our policy makers before the next reauthorization. Almost universally, particularly the Senate. Democrats think that all they need is to change in the drive train of vehicles. And yeah, I, I think the better we can do in tracking the fact that stubbornly high and often increasing driving is, you know, an anchor around the neck of our electrification efforts. It’s blowing up all the good work we’re doing on electrification and undermining it. The more they will understand as we come to the next reauthorization that just crossing your fingers and hoping tech will save us is not enough and they need to be part of the solution.

Beth Osborne (50m 13s):
I would love to see stakeholders, reporters, folks across the board look back at the quotes from those senators who swore that the IIJA was gonna result in all these great investments for climate emissions reductions and look at these results and ask them why the results aren’t being produced as promised. Until we do that, I, I don’t think they’ll quite get the message, but if we’re measuring it and the results are coming out and people are reporting on it, then I think that’s a natural next step is to ask those that promised us something different why we’re not getting something different.

Jeff Wood (50m 53s):
Yeah. Well, Beth, where can folks find more information about what you’re doing and what SG a’s doing T four is doing? Where can folks find out more information about that?

Beth Osborne (51m 2s):
Yeah, so Smart Growth America is just smart Growth america.org and the Transportation for America project ’cause we’re part of Smart Growth America is at t the number four america.org and we’ve got some great reports. We’re gonna have a new Dangerous By Design this year. We’re gonna be putting out a whole lot of information on the IIJA federal spending for folks to get a sense of whether or not states are spending money in a different way than they have in the past. Spoiler alert, they are not. And and I encourage people to look at our report we did last summer called Divided by Design that looks at the historic damage caused to black and brown communities and the economic loss felt to this day of highways built through those communities.

Beth Osborne (51m 56s):
And the fact that the policies that led to those results are in place today, and therefore it is not a problem of the past. It’s a problem of the current system and we are locking in more damage by the way we’re building today. If we understand where these things come from and that they’re still happening, we can fight it, we can fix it, but if we pretend like it’s all, you know, a vestige of the past, then that disarms us. It prevents us from creating a better world. So we’re trying to put that information out there so people know where the problems are and potential solutions and we can all work together on it.

Jeff Wood (52m 33s):
Did I also get a hint that you all are gonna start measuring emissions?

Beth Osborne (52m 37s):
We are gonna look at general performance data where they are available and we’re gonna try to put that together so that as we go into the next reauthorization, people can say, well how did my state spend the money? What did we get for that investment? Did it line up with what I thought I was getting for it? Or did I get more of the same even though there might be a new program with the word carbon in it? And we hope to be able to set it up in a way that allows them to use that information for their work locally and at the state level while we all come together to work collectively at the be level.

Jeff Wood (53m 22s):
Awesome. Well, Beth, thanks for joining us. We really, really appreciate your time.

Beth Osborne (53m 26s):
Thanks for inviting me and thanks for all the great work you do. I love listening every week.