Environmental Review

If a 28-minute ride between Chicago and Cleveland at the speed of sound seems too good to be true, well then you're not dreaming big enough. Or fast and long enough.

It's the first of nine installments! This edition focuses on North Carolina’s plan to complete the southern half of a loop highway around Raleigh. It's a boondoggle with epic environmental repercussions.

Here's the thing with highway expansion projects: They're big. They're expensive. And they have limited benefit. Our friends at US PIRG present their annual report.

Some early policy recommendations have started to take shape and they are pretty exciting.

It's been more than 40 years since the National Environmental Policy Act was enacted. In that time, America has built a lot of emissions-inducing, land-devouring highway infrastructure despite the environmental review process mandated by NEPA. It's fair to ask: When it comes to transportation infrastructure, does environmental review make a difference for the environment?

There are three little words that will make any livable streets advocate groan: Level of Service.

Bridges are getting a lot of attention as senators add their two cents to the upper chamber’s transportation budget proposal for next year. The Senate transportation appropriations bill includes $500 million for "bridges in critical corridors" (BRICC), designed as a response to the recent bridge collapse along I-5 in Washington state -- home of Senator Patty Murray, the chair of the Transportation and HUD Appropriations Committee. And in the amendment process, Republican senators have been lining up to mold the BRICC program to their liking.

Since 1970, the National Environmental Protection Act has required federal agencies to consider the impacts of their projects on air, water, and soil pollution -- but not on climate change.

Bike and pedestrian funding got slashed. Federal assistance for transit operations was rejected. Even the performance measures – arguably the high point of the recently passed federal transportation bill – are too weak to be very meaningful. For Americans who want federal policy to support safe streets, sustainable transportation, and livable neighborhoods, there were few bright spots in the transportation bill Congress passed last month.