Last week, leaders from the Biden Administration announced they would start awarding $5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law for a nationwide electric vehicle charging deployment.
I appeared on KTVU News in the San Francisco Bay Area to discuss this investment, which promises to be among the more consequential climate provisions that the administration has passed so far. You can watch the clip here:
I was also interviewed on NPR Marketplace about the spending, and I described why consumer perceptions about the ability to take a long road trip in an EV can loom large in purchasing decisions. You can listen here:
The administration still has another $2.5 billion to spend on EV charging from the law, and this next allotment will go to local communities, including rural and disadvantaged ones that too-often lack sufficient EV charging stations.
Last week, President Biden made a major environmental announcement that his administration will be largely restoring Obama-era vehicle fuel economy standards through 2025, which had been rolled back under the Trump administration. It’s a big deal because 30% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation.
Beyond restoring the standards, the president directed his agencies to develop more stringent standards beyond 2025 model years, for light- as well as medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. The goal should be 50% of new vehicles sales as zero emission in 2030.
To discuss the announcement, I appeared on KQED Forum on Tuesday and KTVU Channel 2 News in the San Francisco Bay Area last week. The radio audio is linked above and I’ve included the KTVU video below.
President Biden is nearing a potentially significant bipartisan win on federal infrastructure spending, as a $550 billion package nears approval in the United States Senate. But the United States has a poor track record of spending this kind of money wisely, particularly on rail transit.
As the Eno Center has documented, U.S. taxpayers pay a premium of nearly 50 percent on a per-mile basis to build rail transit compared to our global peers. Tunneled projects furthermore take nearly a year and a half longer to build than abroad
In a piece I just published for Smerconish.com, I lay out key requirements that federal leaders should consider including as conditions on these “Biden bucks” to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. To summarize the piece, federal transit dollars should:
- Include measures that prevent local transit agencies from “over-designing” projects to appease narrow interests with counter-productive and costly concessions;
- Ensure local leaders choose optimal rail transit routes to boost ridership and overall utility and cost-effectiveness;
- Streamline federal permitting, including via multi-agency coordination and expedited environmental reviews, with exemptions from analysis on impacts not all that relevant to environmentally beneficial rail – like traffic, air quality, and noise;
- Incentivize smart procurement of contractors, including a maximum on contract size to break up the work on large projects among smaller and more competitive firms;
- Give transit agency staff more flexibility on construction oversight, including ability to make basic decisions on project implementation to speed construction; and
- Require 24/7 construction to shave potentially years off construction timelines.
With a challenge this complex, no single solution will cure the United States of its poor track record on rail transit project delivery. But the infrastructure bill now gives Congress and the Biden Administration an opportunity to start fixing the problem — delivering climate-friendly infrastructure quickly and effectively to more people.
