(ed. note. Please welcome contributor Chris Bradford, author of the economics blog Austin Contrarian.)

As this recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report reminds us, the answer is "very regressive."

Even in lean economic times, the average rent in San Francisco (above) is close to $2,000/mo. (Photo: BinBin.net)

The disparity between the federal government’s support for homeowners and renters is stark. In fiscal year 2009, according to CBO, Washington spent almost four times as much money ($230 billion) to support homeownership as it did to improve rental affordability ($60 billion).

That spending on homeowners included $80 billion for the tax deduction for  mortgage interest, $16 billion for the state and local property-tax deduction and $16 billion for the capital-gains exclusion.

But it also included temporary commitments, such as the Obama administration's mortgage modification program ($75 billion) and the first-time home buyer tax credit ($14 billion). And let's not forget the continuing federal outlays to subsidize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s credit activities ($43 billion). 

By contrast, Washington devoted just $60 billion to improving rental affordability, mainly through a combination of low-income housing tax credits, Section 8 rental assistance, and public housing.   

Most people, I think, will acknowledge a general uneasiness with this disparity. It seems unfair for the government to spend 80 percent of its housing budget on the 67 percent of its households who own property.

What's more, these federal subsidies flow disproportionately to the most affluent of those households. Homeowners see no benefit from the mortgage interest, property tax or capital-gains deductions unless they itemize -- which means that many homeowners get little or no actual subsidy. The subsidy rises with the value of the home and the tax bracket of the buyer.

In other words, the federal government handsomely rewards the affluent for buying expensive homes and leaves renters (as well as low-income home owners) relatively worse off in the process.

But Washington's housing subsidies, which have continued under both Democratic and Republican administrations, have an even more insidious impact in the nation's most expensive markets. There, they make renters worse off in absolute terms by raising the overall cost of housing.

How does this happen? While federal homeowner subsidies nominally flow to home buyers, the actual beneficiaries depend on the particular housing market.

In markets where it is easy to add new housing -- those with an elastic supply -- rising demand spurs more new housing rather than higher prices. Home buyers do indeed receive the subsidies’ benefits (though they often take an environmental hit from new, often sprawled construction patterns). The federal programs reduce their cost of housing without raising the cost of housing for renters. 

But the story is different in markets with high demand and tight supply, such as the expensive markets on the coasts -- highly desirable, highly productive metropolitan areas constrained both by geography and restrictions on new construction. In these markets, sellers possess a scarce good in high demand and can force buyers to bid away their federal subsidies. The federal subsidies are bundled into the sales price; in the end, home buyers are neither better off nor worse off than without the subsidies.

Renters, however, are unequivocally worse off.

But unlike buyers, renters do not enjoy large offsetting subsidies from Washington. They are stuck with higher real prices ... until they decide to flee for a city with cheaper housing. The relative pittance the government spends on rental housing cannot begin to remedy the imbalance (and might actually make things worse, to the extent the government merely creates more demand for housing without stimulating new supply).

The federal homeowner subsidies are thus doubly regressive in our most expensive cities. These cities have the richest residents living in the priciest homes that command the largest subsidies. And these cities have the tightest housing markets most vulnerable to distortions in demand. These places would undoubtedly be expensive to rent in anyway -- I can’t imagine center-city San Francisco being affordable to a young, working-class household -- but are decidedly less egalitarian, thanks to our federal government's housing programs.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) (Photo: CNN)

The Finance Committee held a hearing today on the job-creating implications of its climate bill, which would set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for annual clean transportation grants. Neither the transit industry nor the renewable energy sector was invited to testify, although two oil industry-backed witnesses were brought in to criticize the measure.

During the hearing, Finance chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) sounded hopeful notes about the need to address carbon emissions. "We should recognize that in the case of [regulating] acid rain, the negative consequences were far less than projected," Baucus said. "We should keep this in mind when similar claims are made about the effects of legislation to address climate change."

And on a conference call with reporters today, the Finance panel's senior Republican, Chuck Grassley (IA), gave a reluctant but upbeat assessment of GOP senators' openness to a bipartisan climate deal:

Well, we have one, Lindsey Graham, working with [Sen. John] Kerry [D-MA] on some sort of a compromise -- if it would include nuclear and would include offshore drilling. I don't know whether that's good enough to offset the bad that's in the bill or not. I don't think it's good enough for me. But you'll at least him working there. And I wouldn't want to say that there's not two or three other senators.

Photo: npGreenway

The Congress for the New Urbanism's Project for Transportation Reform summit in Portland, Oregon, has brought together transportation engineers, city planners, and transportation reform advocates to share best practice policies for reforming transportation metrics, funding mechanisms, and regional practices that isolate transportation planning from land-use and growth targets.  The highlight of the first day of the program was Portland itself, as councilors from Portland Metro, one of the only elected municipal planning organizations (MPOs) in the country, elaborated on their multi-disciplinary mission, which seeks to limit development within an urban growth boundary and coordinate transportation, parks and recreation, and solid waste management to achieve a more sustainable city.

It's quite a mandate, one that Metro's own councilors and representatives reminded the audience was a work in progress. Despite Portland's reputation among new urbanists and livable cities advocates as a national leader in promoting pedestrian safety and multi-modal accessibility, the region's municipal stewards said they have a long way to go.  

Metro Councilor Robert Liberty said, "I know this is the image many of you have of our region," while displaying a slide of Dorothy and her cohorts skipping along the yellow-brick road to Oz (Portland's green bike lanes do beg at least a chromatic comparison to the Emerald City). In reality, said Liberty, moving onto a photo of one of Portland's many crisscrossing freeways, the city is still fighting off the influence of Robert Moses (who visited in the 1940s and convinced city leaders they should build bigger and faster roads). 

Since 1973, with the passage of Oregon's Senate Bill 100, which led to the original urban growth boundary around Portland, the region has incrementally chipped away at the Moses paradigm of freeway expansion, instead funding light rail, robust bus service, extensive neighborhood traffic calming, and ever more impressive bicycle infrastructure. So thoroughly have Portlanders embraced the bicycle, in fact, St. Stephen's Episcopal Church recently unveiled a new bicycle shrine in its efforts to reach out to cyclists.

An abandoned spur from the planned Mt. Hood Freeway, plans for which were scrapped after the freeway revolts of the 1960s and 70s. Photo: Matthew Roth

Despite this effort to moderate the expectations of conference attendees, it was clear twenty minutes into the first presentation that Metro has so thoroughly incorporated new urbanist principles into their lexicon that they are essentially speaking a different language than any other MPO in the country. What's more, they are not merely drafting good plans that collect dust on a shelf, but funding the innovative policies and setting performance targets so the public, which has a remarkable opportunity to give direct feedback via the ballot box, can gauge their successes and failure.

When I asked the city engineer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, how receptive his peers, their MPO and the state DOT were to principles of network connectivity and human-scale transportation objectives, he gave me a bemused smirk. He explained that his city was moving closer to installing a 2-mile streetcar route, but that most efforts to convince Wisconsin DOT that it should consider transit projects are met with responses like, "we're in the highway business."

Two other conference presentations from the day were particularly interesting, the first from CNU President John Norquist, who explained the efforts his organization has been involved in to build support among fire and emergency service personnel for human-scale streets, traffic calming, and dense development. Norquist said the process has been slow but positive: they are hoping more states will adopt policies similar to Oregon's, where final authorization of traffic calming depends on traffic engineers, not the fire marshal.  

The other presentation, by University of Connecticut Engineering Professor Norman Garrick, bolstered Norquist's assertion that dense cities are safer cities, per capita. Garrick presented data from a yet-to-be-released study of cities all over California that measured the impact of street design on a range of safety factors, from emergency response times to bicycle injury collisions and pedestrian fatalities.

Garrick found that cities built on a grid network and cities built before 1950, which tended to have smaller streets not designed primarily for automobility, realized significantly better safety indicators. In grid cities, according to Garrick, one's chance of dying in a car was 50 percent lower than in suburban-style cities (branch street networks) and injury collisions were 30 percent lower in grid cities.  People living in grid cities were four times more likely than their suburban counterparts to walk and bike and two-to-three times more likely to take transit.

During the afternoon, attendees broke out into groups to take tours of Portland's various networks, from streetcars, to bicycles, to green streets (my post on the green streets tour will be forthcoming). Today's highlights will be  panels on MPO reform and analysis of the VMT reduction benefits of dense development along transit corridors. Tomorrow, attendees will hear from Representative Earl Blumenauer on his national transportation agenda.

You can get updates from the conference on Twitter by searching for #CNUtrans and be sure to check the CNU website for presentations and video.

Senate environment chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA), at right, with the panel's top Republican, Jim Inhofe (OK). (Photo: CNN)

The GOP gambit is intended to push the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to conduct a complete analysis of the Senate climate bill, a task that could take upwards of five weeks.

The senior Republicans on the six Senate committees with jurisdiction over climate change renewed their entreaties in a letter sent yesterday to environment panel chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA). They wrote:

While such analyses are never perfect, they are an essential aspect of the legislative decision-making process when policy changes of such consequence are in play. As is the case with legislation itself, these analyses are worth the time and resources required not only to get them done, but to get them done right.

As Grist's David Roberts observed on Friday, the Senate climate bill is largely similar to the House version that was passed in June after in-depth analysis by the CBO and the EPA. Performing another full workup of the Senate climate bill, then, would serve little purpose other than to push its consideration past next month's global environmental talks in Copenhagen -- notching a political win for GOP leaders.

So how can Boxer take up the bill with only Democrats in attendance? The answer is a complicated one that relies on a specific interpretation of committee rules and precedents; but even if work can begin today, it's unclear whether amendments to the bill can be considered without a GOP presence.

The Republican senators referred to this outcome in their letter to Boxer:

We understand that there may be an effort to report [the Senate climate bill] from the [environment] committee not only without a satisfactory analysis, but also without sufficient opportunity to address the bipartisan concerns raised over the course of legislative hearings on the measure.

In fact, neither Boxer nor Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), the Senate climate bill's co-author, likes the idea of pushing the legislation through its first committee votes without a debate on amendments. Kerry released a statement yesterday afternoon noting that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) supported emissions limits during his presidential run last year and asking "everyone to come back to the table," sentiments also voiced by Boxer.

Limiting amendments to the climate bill would also have consequences for transportation policy. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) has submitted a proposal to increase the bill's annual set-aside of revenue for clean transport by more than $400 million.

Sign of the times? Sde-by-side foreclosures in Massachusetts. (Photo: Yovani via Flickr)

Similarly, government policies such as low gas tax rates and import protections on light trucks encouraged the development of a bloated domestic auto industry focused on the production of inefficient SUVs.

When high oil prices and deep recession then threatened to push General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy, leading to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, the government felt it had no choice but to step in to keep the companies afloat.

Now the government owns large stakes in companies that will only profit if the American public goes car-buying crazy over the next few years.

The list goes on. The economic crisis that currently afflicts us has made it clearer than ever that we need to change the way we do many things, but because the economy is in such difficult shape, it is hard to pursue anything other than policies designed to keep the economic engine from stalling out completely. Big transitions must wait for later.

Can the same be said for sprawling urban development? Have government interventions essentially bailed out the very places that proved most vulnerable amid oil shocks and housing busts?

Chris Leinberger argued that very point in a recent blog post at The New Republic's Avenue:

While there is no federal or private ... dataset that identifies where exactly in metropolitan areas the most mortgage defaults are, local analyses and some news reports indicate the bulk of the problem is on the fringe...Thus, some of the biggest beneficiaries of federal efforts to stem foreclosures and keep families in their homes are those located in exurbia.

He has a point. Foreclosures have been concentrated on urban fringes, so federal efforts to modify mortgages and otherwise reduce defaults have tended to direct more aid to exurbs than inner suburbs and city centers. In addition, rates of home ownership and car ownership are higher in the suburbs than in city centers, so federal housing subsidies (including the new home-buyer tax credit and low interest rates generally) and automobile subsidies ("Cash for Clunkers") have had a geographic bias toward suburbanites.

To a certain extent, this has been unavoidable. Most Americans live in auto-oriented areas in suburban places, and a large share of those Americans are facing financial difficulty. Any measure that helped stressed households, including checks of equal value cut to all workers, would tend to benefit suburbanites more than urban dwellers.

One should also be careful not to oversell the value of the interventions. Efforts to reduce foreclosures have actually had pretty depressing results.

But certainly the government might have done things differently -- and pursued policies designed to help households as much as possible -- rather than those aimed at keeping households in homes they couldn't afford, or moving families into homes in unsustainably sprawling locations. So it's important to ask: What can we expect for exurban areas and how will the government's policy choices affect them?

First, it's important to understand the dynamics of the bubble. For a number of reasons, among them low interest rates and innovations in mortgage finance, the residential real estate market began to experience a boom at the beginning of this decade. This energy in housing markets manifested itself in different ways in different places.

In areas where housing supply was tight -- where it was not easy to respond to increased demand by building more -- prices rose sharply. In areas where housing supply was more elastic, prices rose some, but construction exploded. In general, it's tough to build in dense center cities, and easy to build on the low-density fringe.

As a result, rising housing demand led to construction on the urban fringe. It also led to higher prices in center cities, which pushed many low- and middle-income families to move to places with cheaper housing markets, which increased demand for homes on the fringe and led to even more construction. Rising demand for exurban living led to construction of exurban housing, and rising demand for urban living led to construction of exurban housing.

When the crash came, it quickly became apparent that housing inventory on the fringe had grown out of all proportion to the actual demand for such housing. Meanwhile, there continued to be excess demand for homes in center cities.

So while the bust ended up being painful for everyone, it was far less painful for urban centers. In those places, price declines brought in buyers, helping to keep inventory down and price declines orderly.

In exurbs, by contrast, falling prices went hand in hand with huge numbers of vacancies. Prices fell chaotically and dramatically as inventory overhang led to falling home values, which contributed to foreclosures, which added to inventory, which further depressed home values and led to still more defaults and foreclosures.

Another way to say this is that center-city housing markets experienced a correction, while exurban housing markets entered a vicious cycle leading to wrenching housing price declines that will likely push prices below replacement costs in some areas.

This is a dangerous place for neighborhoods to be. Vacant homes will begin to deteriorate, and occupied homes unlikely to sell for more than replacement costs (or more than the value of the owner's mortgage) will suffer from disinvestment. The housing stock will become second-rate.

As neighborhoods fall apart, wealthier and more mobile homeowners will move away, while excess inventory and rock bottom prices will attract low-income households. The tax base will fall and so services will decline, and the general desirability of such areas will drop. Some, and perhaps many, of these neighborhoods will become slums.

How do we know? Well, this is a storyline we've seen before, both in center cities during the decades of urban decline and in depopulating Rust Belt cities for much of the past half century. It is a process that is very difficult to reverse.

And in some ways, suburban slums may be far worse for the poor than the previous urban version. In center cities, density and public transit provide a basic level of mobility for the working poor; in suburbs, by contrast, lower income families cannot survive without an automobile. And even with massive suburbanization, inner-city decline could never entirely escape public attention, thanks to lingering employment concentrations in center cities, as well as historical and cultural attractions there. As a result, there was always some pressure for renewed investment in center cities.

But suburban neighborhoods are relatively remote; the very idea of the places is that residential neighborhoods remain well away from employment concentrations and other destinations. Remoteness may well allow suburban slums to decline in obscurity.

These changes will not be universal, just as previous decline in urban centers was far from universal. Rich suburbs will likely stay rich, and denser suburban areas may well experience great success by shifting to greater walkability and density. But many suburban neighborhoods may find themselves in circumstances that once characterized urban slums -- poverty, deteriorating services, failing schools, and rising crime.

Given all of that, how do the federal government's assistance programs measure up? Not particularly well, unfortunately.

The mortgage modification programs have primarily been oriented around keeping people in their homes (and loans). These have generally not been that successful; a surprisingly large number of modified mortgages still wind up in default. Keeping families who cannot afford their loans in their homes is likely to be bad for the families themselves and may lead to disinvestment, as those homeowners will continue to be cash-strapped and may suspect that they'll be unable to sell the home for more than the value of their mortgage.

Meanwhile, the housing tax credit is tailor-made to get relatively low-income buyers -- and first-time buyers -- into suburban homes. That's the intent; the thinking is that bringing buyers into the market will support prices and end the cycle of decline.

But this effort may well fail. Housing inventory in hard-hit neighborhoods is too substantial to be much reduced by an $8,000 credit (particularly one put in place when one-fifth of the population is under- or unemployed). And by encouraging lower income families to move to these neighborhoods, the government may actually be accelerating the process of decline. Higher income families already in those areas may not be willing to stay alongside the newcomers, and their departure will reduce the tax base.

In short, the government isn't just subsidizing sprawl. It's subsidizing the deterioration of sprawling areas.

What should the government be doing? Well, for starters, it should recognize that the housing crash has meant an increase in the relative price of center city homes, which were already unaffordable for many families before the bust. It is important to provide opportunities for affordable center city housing (for its own sake, and to reduce the rush of lower-income families to the fringe), and that means encouraging construction in center cities.

In particular, since it is clear that safe, walkable neighborhoods are in very high demand and are therefore holding their value well, it is important to build more such places.

Next, the government needs to stop subsidizing home ownership and focus on increasing mobility. Home ownership in an area where prices are declining is an anchor on a household. It can trap families in declining neighborhoods or in metropolitan areas where jobs are scarce. If keeping struggling owners in their homes is a priority, then policy should focus on getting them out of their loans and keeping them there as rent-paying tenants.

Third, government officials should learn the lessons of urban decline -- particularly that allowing the decline of the tax base to lead to an erosion in service quality will create negative social outcomes that will be very difficult and costly to address in the future. Once poor schools and high crime levels become the norm, it will take years and overwhelming investments to turn things around. It will be better for all involved to step in and continue to support services in deteriorating neighborhoods.

And finally, policy should focus on improving physical mobility and urban design in these places, for two reasons. First, greater mobility -- including walkability and transit access -- will be of great use to poorer families which may have irregular or no access to an automobile. And second, efforts to improve the design and connectivity of these communities will make them more attractive and less likely to suffer from complete collapse.

The problem is that these represent substantial changes -- a transition away from the prior way of doing business -- and it is difficult to do anything other than keep fingers in the dam at this point. This is understandable.

But with our approach to the housing crisis (and to the crisis of home and transportation affordability generally) as with the banking crisis and the crisis of consumer spending, and so on, the problem is clear -- putting out the fire is not enough. Absent real reform in banking, another crisis will hit us, and soon. Absent an increase in savings rates, over-indebted households will paralyze the American economy.

Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) (Photo: Capitol Chatter)

As the subscription-only CQ reported today:

Efforts in the Senate to take up a six-month extension of surface transportation law this week appear dead, over objections by a few Republicans to passing it without a full debate, said James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

... Inhofe said Tuesday that at least two Republicans objected and that there is not enough floor time to finish a bill this week under normal procedure. 

The Senate's lack of progress means that officials working on the nation's transit, roads, bridges, and bike paths will likely have to continue operating under a second short-term extension of the 2005 transportation law, this time lasting until December 18.

Despite the prospects of continuing uncertainty on the local level, House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) remained upbeat and focused on a singular goal: getting his colleagues to elevate infrastructure to the top-of-mind status currently occupied by health care (followed by financial regulation and climate change).

"Encircle the White House," Oberstar advised the organizers of today's rally, who parked heavy-duty construction equipment along the sidewalk to symbolize their plea for more transportation spending. "Encircle the Senate!"

The economic stimulus law's $48 billion in transport aid, $8.4 billion of which went to transit, "will dry up" by spring of next year, Oberstar added. He threw in a jab at Obama administration officials who insisted on cutting stimulus transit spending to pay for tax cuts: "I don't know of anybody who's thanked me for their $250 tax credit ... God only knows what's happened to it."

Speaking to reporters after the rally, Oberstar said that extending the 2005 transportation law until the holidays "will give us time between now and Christmas to agree on a six-year bill."

But the Minnesotan's push for taking up his $450 billion proposal by year's end has yet to be met with any enthusiasm from the White House and senior Senate Democrats, who until recently had aligned with Obama aides in favor of an 18-month delay.

And even if the Senate had won passage of its six-month extension, Oberstar said he would have raised concerns about the measure in the House, citing several "serious problems." One example, according to Oberstar: the Senate's plan would have shifted the current grant program for significant projects -- which helps fund some transit work -- back to the states, potentially jeopardizing the money.

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) (Photo: Baucus 08)

The Senate climate bill calls for a 20 percent reduction in U.S. emissions by 2020, relative to 2005 levels. The legislation also sets aside nearly three times as much money for transit, inter-city rail, and other cleaner-burning transport than a similar bill passed by the House in June.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), a sponsor of the effort to focus more climate revenue on transportation, credited environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) with doing more for transit than her House counterparts.

"It will make a huge difference on the infrastructure we need to conserve energy," Cardin said of the Senate climate bill. "We do subsidize the passenger car more than we do public transportation in this country. We need to change that."

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also hailed the bill's dedication of valuable emissions allowances to rail, while reminding senators that the economic stimulus law's $8 billion high-speed rail fund would represent only the tip of the iceberg for America's under-performing passenger trains.

"We know [rail] is cleaner-burning," LaHood said, "and we know that when someone's on the train, they're out of their automobile. The benefits will be enormous in terms of getting CO2 out of the air."

But amid the hosannas for the climate bill's transportation provisions were signals of the rough political journey that faces the Senate legislation.

Republicans on the environment panel reiterated their vow to delay a committee vote on the climate bill, which was co-authored by Boxer and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), until they are satisfied with the amount of time given to examine the plan and for analysis to be done by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). All GOP members of the committee left today's hearing before the four Obama administration witnesses had finished taking questions, further underscoring the partisan tension.

And Republicans were not alone in their criticism of the climate bill. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the powerful Finance Committee that plans to claim jurisdiction over emissions allowances -- including those for transit -- said he would pursue a softening of the bill's emissions reductions targets (which are already softer than international goals) and a preemption of the EPA's ability to regulate CO2. Baucus said:

I have some concerns about the overall direction of the bill before us today, and whether it will lead us closer to or further away from passing climate change legislation. For example, I have serious reservations with the depth of the mid-term reduction target in the bill and the lack of preemption of the Clean Air Act's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), with a copy of the Senate climate bill. (Photo: AP)

The Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the International Center for Technology Assessment last year filed a petition with CEQ seeking climate change's inclusion in future environmental rules, but CEQ chief Nancy Sutley has remained mum on its fate. "I won't tell you what the answer is because we don't know yet," she told GreenWire in March.

In the meantime, GOP senators are starting to push CEQ towards a denial of the petition. Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), the environment committee's senior Republican, and Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) wrote to Sutley on Thursday requesting all documents related to the CEQ's consideration of adding climate change to NEPA.

The two senators made their stance plain, lamenting that the median time required "to complete environmental impact statements for highway projects in recent years has been as high as 80 months" and contending that climate change should not be considered under a "bedrock environmental statute" such as NEPA.

As of last year, the median time for completion of NEPA review for highway projects had fallen from its high of 80 months in 2002 to 63.5 months. Moreover, the long-term transportation bill proposed in the House by Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) would set up an office of expedited project delivery within the U.S. DOT to ensure that NEPA reviews and other assessments be completed without lengthy delays.

Still, any progress on resolving NEPA compliance issues is unlikely to deter Inhofe and Barrasso's push to deny the pending CEQ petition. As the battle over the Senate climate bill heats up, opponents of legislative action are sure to use any strategy they can to prevent the Obama administration from addressing the issue.

Check out Inhofe and Barrasso's full letter to the CEQ after the jump.

Dear Ms. Sutley:

We are seeking information on the activities of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) with respect to advising other federal agencies on whether or how to incorporate greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts into National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analyses.

On February 28, 2008, the International Center for Technology Assessment, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club filed a petition requesting that CEQ "amend its regulations to clarify that climate change analyses be included in environmental review documents." We are very concerned about the consequences of CEQ acceding to that request.

NEPA, of course, is a bedrock environmental statute, which requires federal agencies to consider how their actions could significantly impact the environment. It is not an appropriate tool to set global climate change policy. Any attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions must be debated on its merits and not regulated under laws that were never intended for such purposes. We firmly believe that NEPA should achieve environmental goals without unnecessarily obstructing economic development. Requiring analysis of climate change impacts during the NEPA process, especially at the project-specific level, will slow our economic recovery while providing no meaningful environmental benefits.

Projects across the nation are already experiencing delays or being cancelled due to inappropriate and inefficient implementation and litigation from existing environmental regulations. The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission pointed out that the median time to complete environmental impact statements for highway projects in recent years has been as high as 80 months. The Commission noted that these delays can cause significant increases in project construction costs.

In light of these concerns and our responsibility to conduct oversight of these issues, we ask that you provide to us the following documents and information:

- The specific steps CEQ plans to take in the coming months to respond to the 2008 petition, including CEQ's anticipated timeline and the expected format of that response;

- All draft Federal Register notices, draft guidance documents, draft regulatory changes and other draft official communications drafted in response to the 2008 petition;

- All e-mails and memos to and from you or CEQ staff, notes and call logs taken by or for you or CEQ staff and all other documents concerning the substance or format of a response to the 2008 petition;

- All draft Federal Register notices, draft guidance documents, draft regulatory changes, letters, e-mails, notes, memos, call logs and other documents created by or for or made available to you or CEQ staff discussing the issues involved with incorporating greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts into NEPA analyses, even if not drafted in direct response to the 2008 petition. This includes all documents related to the preparation of the draft memorandum to all heads of federal agencies transmitted on October 8, 1997, as well as to the decision not to finalize the guidance document;

- A list of all Federal, State and local government agencies, industry groups, non-profit groups, associations, advocacy groups, relevant stakeholders, contractors, consultants and private individuals that you or CEQ staff have met with or are scheduled to meet with regarding the 2008 petition or the issues raised by the petition from February 28, 2008, through the anticipated response date;

- A detailed discussion of what role, if any, Carol Browner, her staff, other White House officials or CEQ staff have had in the process of developing a response to the 2008 petition.

- A list of all NEPA documents, draft and final, that have incorporated greenhouse gas emissions or climate change impacts into the analyses.

Please provide the documents and information requested above by November 13, 2009. If you have any questions regarding this request, please contact us or have your staff contact Angie Giancarlo on Senator Inhofe's staff at 202-224-XXXX or Brian Clifford on Senator Barrasso's staff at 202-224-XXXX.

Sincerely,

James M. Inhofe

John Barrasso

Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA), the climate bill's authors. (Photo: Intercon)

And the release brought good news for clean transportation: The Senate has largely tripled the share of allowances set aside by the House for transit, inter-city rail, and other efforts to trim transport-based emissions.

While the lower chamber of Congress gave states the option of using 1 percent of climate revenue on transit, the Senate measure would set aside more than 3 percent of allowances in the first two years of the cap-and-trade system for limiting pollution from the transportation sector.

The Senate's beefed-up transportation language comes after a strong push by sponsors of the so-called "CLEAN TEA" bill, which set a high-water mark of a 10-percent climate set-aside for transit, local land-use planning, and other sustainable development projects. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), a chief author of the "CLEAN TEA" measure, hailed the Senate's move in a weekend statement.

My CLEAN TEA bill is a common-sense solution to the problem that we use a gas tax to fund our nation's transportation system. My language in the [Senate climate bill] directs cities and states to determine how much they can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their transportation systems by investing in driving alternatives, public transit, intercity passenger rail, transit-oriented development, sidewalks and more. States and cities with more ambitious plans will receive more federal funds - finally rewarding local governments for doing the right thing.

According to the environment committee's weekend release, the share of Senate climate allowances reserved for clean transportation would total 3.21 percent in 2012 and 2013, before dipping to 2.35 percent in the two subsequent years and returning to a share that ranges between 1.9 percent and 3.5 percent in future years.

But not all emissions allowances are created equal; 1 percent of the total amount going to clean transportation would be reserved in the early stages of the program, thus increasing the value of those allowances relative to the ones distributed later on. These early set-aside allowances would also go towards reducing the federal deficit and supplementing other high-priority programs.

Though it falls short of the "CLEAN TEA" mark, the 3-percent set-aside represents a victory for clean transportation advocates as well as the nation's cities. The allowances would be split between grants to states for reducing transport-based emissions and transit grants -- with 80 percent of the latter going to urban areas, 10 percent going to rural areas, and 10 percent to growing states.

However, it's important to note that the transportation section of the Senate climate bill is not written in stone. The environment committee, chaired by climate bill co-author Barbara Boxer (D-MA), will begin holding a series of high-profile hearings on the legislation tomorrow, and months of intense horse-trading is sure to follow.

The Congress for the New Urbanism will meet in Portland, Oregon, in early November for the annual Project for Transportation Reform, a summit to further define and clarify emerging urban transportation policies that embrace entire networks, rather than interdependent transportation segments, and that seek to balance modal transportation splits and reduce overall vehicular miles traveled (VMT).

Summit attendees and partners, including Streetsblog, will participate in discussions on emerging network planning and develop a strategy for informing the national transportation infrastructure debate, of particular significance as the climate and transportation bills move forward. As the draft CNU Statement of Principles on Transportation Networks notes [PDF], climate change and infrastructure problems in the US continue to intensify:

The US now has the world’s highest level of VMT per capita, while simultaneously experiencing the highest traffic fatality rates of any developed nation. Per capita traffic delay has more than doubled in the United States since 1982. This deterioration in transportation system performance has occurred in spite of an ongoing public investment of more that $200 billion per year in transportation infrastructure."

CNU President John Norquist said the current focus by transportation professionals on road capacity gives us cities like Detroit, where consistent spending to widen roads has destroyed communities.

"Federal and state DOTs don't understand how cities work. They still want to take rural forms and jam big roads into cities." he said. "Rather than measuring projected traffic flow, they should be measuring how much value it adds to a neighborhood. The US can't afford to be energy wasting and spending money on projects that destroy the value of neighborhoods."

U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer will kick off the summit and representatives from Oregon Metro will showcase the many innovative transportation and design policies they have implemented in the region that have given Portland one of the highest walking, transit, and bicycle mode shares in the country.

Summit organizers hope to develop the language around network-wide transportation reform so the CNU can persuade lawmakers in Washington DC to incorporate this new urban vision into upcoming climate and transportation legislation.

Marcy McInelly, co-chair of the CNU's transportation reform initiatives and principle of Sera Architects, said, "Reform is about giving more latitude to use highway funds for pieces of the network that may not be for highways. Right now the federal funds have to increase vehicular mobility, which raises VMT. If you had a funding formula that allowed you to count benefits to cost, it would almost always [result in] the other modes besides cars coming out more beneficial.  It would balance consideration of other modes."

Norquist said the CNU is working with the Institute for Transportation Engineers (ITE), the most significant body of professional transportation engineers in the country, to develop transportation standards that ennoble urban streets alongside rural roads and freeways in guides like AASHTO's Green Book for highway and street design.

According to Norquist, reform initiatives should focus on altering "the functional classification system. The current regulatory framework tries to feed future traffic demand, instead of trying to facilitate the network." 

Referring to the traditional advocacy position that tries to chip away at the 80-20 funding formula (80 percent of federal funding for freeways, 20 percent for transit), Norquist said a more fundamental change is needed.

"We're completely for the idea of changing the 80-20 split. But even if the environmental community wins and gets 25-75, you're still spending 75 percent of the money on road capacity. They should focus on creating roads that are useful and pleasant and create a place where people actually want to be."

When lawmakers failed on Wednesday to reach a deal on avoiding the cancellation of $8.7 billion in transportation spending authority, the consequences of Congress' inaction weren't immediately palpable to most voters -- but the loss is sinking in on the local level.

(Photo: USGS.gov)

From Texas to New Jersey to Colorado, local DOT officials are starting to lament the loss of federal funds that resulted from lawmakers' decision to give themselves one more month to resolve the stalemate over extending the 2005 federal infrastructure law.

And while the $8.7 billion cancellation is mostly imperiling road work, at least one state is cutting money for "enhancements," the catch-all term for bike paths, greenways, and other clean transport projects: 

Even though Congress has passed a one-month extension of the federal highway bill, Tennessee will still lose $190 million it had not yet contracted out.

State transportation officials say $30 million will come out of money for enhancement grants.

Enhancement grants have been made for cities to restore old train stations and build bike lanes or sidewalks. They are typically unconventional transportation projects, and TDOT spokeswoman Julie Oakes says competition is stiff.

It's unclear how many states are following Tennessee's lead, but we've got feelers out to various state DOTs and will update this post as more information becomes available. If any readers know of clean transportation projects that have been put at risk by the $8.7 bilion cancellation, please tell us more in the comments section.

Even states that are slicing only highway projects, however, are grappling with the fiscal uncertainty caused by the cancellation. Colorado's two Democratic senators noted last week that their state's scheduled loss of $115 million amounts to one-quarter of the total transportation aid they received under the economic stimulus law.

Congress still has the power to replenish the cancelled spending authority, whether this month or next. But given  House budget rules that require most new funds to be offset, and conservative senators' insistence on using stimulus money for that offset, an agreement may be hard to come by this week.

Late Update: Here's another example of the $8.7 billion cancellation affecting more than just roads. The Nevada DOT says it's having to cut $8 million from transportation enhancements, as well as $4 million in funding for federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) projects and $4 million from the Safe Routes to School program.

The state typically uses CMAQ money on new transit buses for Las Vegas and Reno, as well as ride-share programs to reduce transportation demand and "channelization" work that aim to manage traffic more efficiently, according to Kent Cooper, the Nevada DOT's assistant director of engineering.

"It's a very difficult economic time, and there's a huge impact to the state of Nevada in terms of being able to get contracts out,"Cooper said in an interview . "We got the stimulus money about five or six months ago. This seems to be reversing the impact of providing that stimulus money."

Sept. 21st I attended the 8th annual Mobility 21 Transportation Summit. I've been to every summit since the event was conceived by then Metro CEO Roger Snoble and the late Rusty Hammer who at the time headed the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce.

In my reading during the 90s I would often run across mentions of similar summits held in other parts of the country, and often wondered why we didn't have a similar event here. Of course it took bigshots like Snoble and Hammer, partnering with the Auto Club, SCAG etc., to get the ball rolling.

And after initially being a L.A. County centered event in 2007 Mobility expanded to encompass the adjacent counties of Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties.

Sen. Mark Warner (Photo: NYDN)

Warner's amendment would appear to resolve the administration's quandary over getting approval for new data collection without upsetting the transportation detente between Senate environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and her panel's top GOPer, Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK).

But consider that the White House had sought $310 million to help state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) embark on the arduous but necessary path of empirically tracking transportation performance.

The pot of research money that Warner proposed opening up for the development of national performance measures totals $8.2 million in the Senate's version of the U.S. DOT spending bill. The House version of the bill dedicated $14.7 million to research.

(Photo: Pufferfish)

The Center's work directly answers a question asked by many attendees at last week's University of Virginia infrastructure conference: How can the public be awakened to the relevance and political importance of transportation as an issue?

Unfortunately for the elite industry players who attended the conference, the answer may be that the public isn't yet aware of just how much waste is built into state and federal transportation spending. From the Center's initial report:

The matter of how and from where the federal money is actually doled out is among the biggest headaches. The majority of federal dollars for these various transportation programs actually get distributed to state and local governments to be spent at their discretion. But that has caused problems.

For one thing, wrote the Government Accountability Office last year, “Rigorous economic analysis does not generally drive the investment decisions of state and local governments.” That was an understatement. Most state transportation agencies surveyed by the GAO in 2004 — 34 out of 43 — called political support and public opinion “very important” when investing federal dollars. Only eight states attributed the same importance to cost-benefit analyses.

With the debate in Congress currently focused not on how to reform the bloated, broken system but how long to delay reform, it's unclear whether the Center's findings can move the needle in the short term.

(Photo: UVA)

But the lone congressional proposal to set national transportation goals, including an annual reduction in per-capita vehicle miles traveled and a focus on repairing existing assets, has languished on the Hill.

The current long-term House transport bill leaves the difficult question of measurable performance targets to state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which could have a vested interest in keeping the bar low.

Given that uncertainty, attendees at today's University of Virginia infrastructure policy conference spoke of forging consensus on how to achieve a "performance-based" system.

Yet the very question of setting national goals appeared to divide and disillusion several speakers.

"Everyone agrees that performance ought to be the driver," said Mortimer Downey, President Clinton's deputy Transportation Secretary and current chairman of the firm PB Consult.

"[But] I'm concerned when I see legislation come out," Downey said -- however "well-intentioned" that legislation may be -- that attempts to set transportation performance goals for the states. National goals, he added, shouldn't turn into "national diktats."

Steve Heminger, executive director of the San Francisco area's MPO, said specific national goals were "the key missing ingredient" that could restore public faith in the importance of transportation spending. "They need to be readily understandable ... things that states and metro areas can be rewarded for meeting and penalized for failing."

Still, Heminger sounded pessimistic about the public's willingness to coalesce in support of a set of transportation targets. The interstate highway system built during the Eisenhower era "was something everyone could rally around," he said. "We're never going to have that again."

Craig Lentzsch, a former Greyhound president who served on the federal panel that recommended a 10-cent gas tax increase earlier this year, emphasized the need for specificity in what transportation dollars would be used for rather than the environmental benefits that would result.

When asked what value they would place on every 15 minutes sliced from their daily commute, 36.5 percent of CPI respondents said between $10 and $20. That's about five times the recent trading price of a ton of carbon emissions on the nation's climate-change exchanges.

And the price of a shorter commute was higher in more congested cities. In Los Angeles, 22 percent of residents said every 15 minutes not spent en route to work would be worth between $31 and $40 -- or more than $100 per hour.

What does the data mean? For one thing, those who fear that voters would revolt if asked to pay more for a more efficient, less congested transport network shouldn't let that stop policy-making. As every successful politician knows (and the president is re-learning on health care), messaging is the key to winning over the public.

In other words, Democrats who feign unwillingness to subject voters to higher gas taxes are ignoring their ability to control the message. When a greater contribution to transportation is pitched as a way to shorten commutes and give workers more free time, the prospect becomes more desirable.

And it's not that lawmakers don't know how to decrease congestion, particularly in the urban areas that were polled to produce the CPI. Reducing the number of car trips and lowering demand during peak travel times are proven to be a cheaper and more effective method of battling congestion than expanding highway capacity.

Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) (Photo: UPI)

Jim Oberstar (D-MN), chairman of the House transportation committee, continues to press for action on a six-year infrastructure measure with a $450 billion price tag that has no matching source of revenue.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is pushing for an 18-month extension of current law that would delay broader reform until 2011.

Oberstar counts many allies on his committee -- and even House leaders are sympathetic to his cause -- but a July letter urging Democrats to find a way to pay for his six-year bill "as soon as possible" was not signed by 10 members of the pivotal Ways and Means panel, which controls the bill's revenue source.

With a September 30 deadline for action on federal transport policy, the biggest question may be whether the Obama administration is willing to compromise with Oberstar and like-minded House members on a shorter-term stopgap.

Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), one of a small group in the upper chamber that has not sided with the White House in favor of an 18-month delay, has not given up on his proposal for a 12-month extension of current law. In a newsletter for his constituents published over the Labor Day weekend, Voinovich wrote:

Across the country, Americans are still hurting. In our home state of Ohio, where unemployment currently stands at 11.2 percent, people are asking, Where are the jobs?

Folks should know that some of their elected leaders are actively joining the Obama administration in its quest to blow yet another golden opportunity when it comes to creating jobs and stimulating the economy: they are refusing to support a robust new highway bill. ...

[After aligning with Oberstar] I offered an amendment at an Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee business meeting to shorten the length of the proposed extension to 12 months and keep the pressure on Congress to invest in our nation's roads and bridges, meet America's surface transportation needs, and create thousands of jobs. Those few months could make the world of difference when it comes to job creation, yet the amendment failed by a vote of 8 to 11.

My proposal for a 12-month extension is a reasonable compromise; the House is opposed to any type of extension. They understand the urgency of the situation we face.

Oberstar and the White House held fast to their positions in July, which ended with lawmakers approving a $7 billion rescue for the nation's cash-strapped highway trust fund that did not include extra transit money secured by several senators.

Fairgoers in Minnesota depart a private charter bus that benefited from federal rules barring competition with public transit agencies. (Photo: Star-Trib)

This year, it's Minnesota State Fair attendees who are contending with privatized bus service that left them waiting for hours and caused "ugly scenes," as the local Star-Tribune reports today.

The rule was intended to shield "private charter operators from unfair competition by federally subsidized public transit agencies," as the Bush administration wrote in its initial regulatory justification. 

As a result, public transit agencies were barred from offering bus services to special events if a private company was able to do the job instead. The rule prompted outcries from the American Public Transportation Association, but it has yet to be overturned by the Obama administration.

In a June letter to senior members of the House transportation committee, 19 lawmakers -- three of them Republican -- asked for the rule to be reversed in the next long-term federal infrastructure bill. From the letter, spearheaded by Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and David Dreier (R-CA):

By making public transit agencies ineligible to provide what has always been considered public transit service, this ill-advised [Federal Transit Administration] rulemaking contradicts federal goals to encourage public transportation to alleviate traffic congestion and improve air quality nationwide.

Charter bus service is reserved and exclusive service to events, many of which are traditionally open only to a select group. Service open to any member of the public to board and ride, without advance reservation, to a public event has always been considered public service and that definition should be restored.

That long-term infrastructure bill is likely to be delayed for at least a year at the request of the White House, however. The question is whether the FTA is willing to undo the pro-privatization rule on its own before the bill is taken up.

The Chevy Volt (Photo: TreeHugger)

Johnson Controls, which has worked on battery packs for Ford's "Transit Connect" hybrid van and other plug-in vehicles, was the biggest grant winner at nearly $300 million. 

The electrification elation continued yesterday in the Senate, where Department of Energy (DoE) assistant secretary David Sandalow told environment committee members that half the nation's autos could be run on electricity within 20 years without having to build a new power plant.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Jon Wellinghoff echoed the sentiment: "If we want to move off of foreign oil, we have to electrify that transportation system and ensure that we have the clean, reliable electric energy to provide that energy for the transportation system," he testified.

Of course, generating clean electricity free of new power plants would be impossible without expanding the use of wind and solar, not to mention achieving significant efficiency savings from the existing grid -- a goal that's about to receive the next wave of economic stimulus money from the DoE.

The environmental merits of electric vehicles are the subject of much debate among sustainability advocates, but the need for clean power affects transit and inter-city passenger rail on a substantial level, as Yonah Freemark has observed.

In addition, a Georgia Institute of Technology study released earlier this year found that a comprehensive approach integrating hybrid vehicles and local land-use reform has the potential to maximize carbon-emissions reductions.

The California Transit Association, that called the winter budget deal that zeroed out the state's operations assistance program "Armageddon," were the plaintiffs in the case that resulted in yesterday's big win for transit.  They celebrated and explained the court decision yesterday.

While the Court claims no authority to order repayment of funds re-routed in past budget deals, the decision means that continued diversion of voter-mandated transit funding is illegal going forward. And that means that approximately $1 billion earmarked for the General Fund as part of current negotiations must be restored to transit.

“The ruling clearly states that the rip-offs are illegal,” said Joshua Shaw, Executive Director of the California Transit Association and lead plaintiff in the suit that was originally filed over $1.19 billion taken from the Public Transportation Account (PTA) as part of the 2007-08 budget agreement. “It says they’ve been illegal since before 2007, and it says that the definition of mass transportation that lawmakers have adopted since then to mask these diversions is illegal.”

Unsurprisingly, the Schwarzenegger Administration is already promising an appeal and is asking the appeals court to stay its decision pending the outcome.

Update: Dana Gabbard of So.CA.TA. sends the text of the decision.  It can be viewed here.