Modernizing freight is a smart challenge that releases innovation and creativity. Photo: Port of Los Angeles.
In our last post, we highlighted some innovative and promising port and corridor plans that improve freight transportation and cut pollution. As we said then, plans to improve freight and clean it up ought to be the norm, not the exception. So how can that be done?
By breaking with tradition.
Historically, the federal transportation bill has not directly addressed improving the surface freight sector. Past bills included funding for highway improvements that affect freight, but it takes more than good highways to make a good freight system. It takes better rail lines, smarter use of technology, cleaner ports, and more modern and efficient equipment—and that’s just part of the list. In a world economy that increasingly depends on moving products to meet a growing population’s demands, freight transportation as a whole needs more focused attention. In the federal transportation bill, it needs attention that will help it modernize while also reducing freight’s extreme pollution.
This time around, it looks like freight might get more focus in the federal bill. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee bill introduced in August includes a section addressing freight improvement. And the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee is preparing to draft its own bill, and its leadership has said it will use the Houses’s framework as a starting point.
This new attention will be most productive if environmental performance is an overt goal. The new federal transportation bill should ensure that precious public funds are spent to generate the greatest modernization and the best environmental performance for each dollar spent. One way to spur this is to ensure, as the House bill does, that freight corridors and hubs of national importance are identified and that improvement plans are developed.
However, the House bill could still go farther. It does not ensure that improvement plans will result in better environmental performance and better freight transportation reliability. We believe it is possible—and necessary—to have both.
The good news is that there’s still time to refine the House bill and to incorporate environmental performance into a freight improvement section in the Senate bill. We’ve been talking to a lot of folks in the freight sector lately and it seems clear that there’s an appetite to improve freight transportation’s environmental performance. Nobody wants to be a polluter, rather, the sector wants to be part of innovative and creative solutions to these challenging problems.
The federal transportation bill offers a chance to create the world’s most advanced and least-polluting freight system—one that provides jobs, keeps the economy going, and doesn’t burden communities with life-threatening pollution. It ought to begin with corridor and port improvement plans that reduce pollution. Then the best plans that meet the dual performance goals of reliability and pollution reduction ought to be first in line when freight system funds are distributed.
We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs. Telling a freight transportation expert to come up with the best plan for modernizing a corridor’s performance and reducing freight transportation’s environmental impacts is a smart challenge that releases innovation and creativity.