Transportation is the leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., but addressing this pollution requires more than just vehicle electrification. Fortunately, this broad range of policy solutions comes with benefits that extend far beyond emissions. Climate-oriented transit systems improve public health and safety, increase access to affordable housing and local jobs, and better-connect community members with each other and public spaces.
We convened a panel of experts to explore the wide range of benefits that come from holistic transportation policy. Our speakers included Steven Higashide, Director of the Clean Transportation program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and Peter Wagenius, Legislative & Political Director of the Sierra Club North Star Chapter.
More Transportation Choices Benefit our Health, Communities, and Planet
Learn more by watching the webinar at 06:00.
Steven Higashide explored how improving access to transit, walking, and biking translates to better public health outcomes, more economic opportunity, and a more feasible clean energy transition. Highlights from his presentation include:
- Transportation is a driver of community health because we are healthier and happier with access to food, jobs, education, healthcare, and the people and places we care about.
- The nationwide electrification of buildings, industry, and transportation sectors necessary to reach our climate goals would triple electricity use by 2050, requiring significant buildout of the grid. However, if we drive less, we can reduce necessary grid buildout by eight percent, avoiding hundreds of billions of dollars in energy infrastructure and public health costs and saving households nearly a trillion dollars in electricity and gasoline costs.
- Case study: 30 years of transit investment in Seattle
- Investments in frequent bus service, rail, and land use reform has allowed the Seattle’s’s population to grow with very little increase in driving.
- From 2017-2023, Seattle added 35,000 households and only 3,300 cars. The average Washington resident drove 1,100 fewer miles in 2024 than in 1994.
- Policy levers used to enable this transition include a state-level commute-trip reduction law, local and regional tax increases to fund transit, and transit agency support of city transit projects.
- Federal action: defining the road lobby
- It’s essential to help policymakers understand the highway lobby, composed of truckers, asphalt firms, and other industries benefiting from the highway-centric status quo.
- UCS and other researchers have analyzed the funding tactics, political strategy, and discourse of this lobbying group to influence transportation outcomes of federal and local elections.
- Recent progress: Illinois’ 2025 transit law
- Facing a fiscal cliff for transit, UCS and other statewide transit coalition members advocated for legislation to eliminate the risk of fare hikes and service cuts.
- The Northern Illinois Transit Act (2025) authorized $1.5 billion annually to stabilize and improve public transit across the state and strengthened transit governance.
The Case for Transit: Lessons from Minnesota
Learn more by watching the webinar at 22:00.
Peter Wagenius shared lessons learned on framing transit benefits, pulled from Minnesota’s advocacy for improved transit-oriented development (TOD), including recent success in the state legislature. Highlights from his presentation include:
- In 2023, the Minnesota state legislature passed a historic transportation funding bill, including a ¾-cent metro area sales tax for transit, walking, and biking investments. Prior to this bill, there was a lack of dedicated funding and the state had only allowed metro area counties to raise their own revenue.
- They also passed the Climate Impact of Highways Law, requiring the state Department of Transportation to abide by reduction targets for both greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled (VMT).
- To pass a transit investment bill, it’s not enough to tell the positive story of transit and TOD — you must also tell the negative story of the status quo, as many legislators are more incentivized to avoid risk than pursue positive benefits. Examples include:
- New highway lanes guarantee more pollution.
- Dollars spent on highway expansion are dollars taken away from fixing existing infrastructure, which we can’t afford.
- Although we’ve reduced tailpipe emissions from individual vehicles over the past 30 years, that progress has been mitigated by increases in VMT.
- Transit paired with land use reforms yield the best results for climate, affordability, and equity. Densely-populated areas see lower emissions per capita, not only due to VMT reductions but also because:
- Sprawl destroys natural spaces and their related carbon sequestration.
- Multi-family housing improves cooling and heating efficiency.
- Building new infrastructure to connect people far away from each other is highly carbon-intensive.
- For cities that have decreased in population, like Minneapolis, transit-oriented development is an opportunity to restore population size and economic development without increasing emissions.
Q&A
Learn more by watching the Q&A at 44:25.
Q: When you build out rail in areas that were designed for cars such as suburbs or larger-sprawl cities, what should be prioritized: increasing density and walkability for shorter transit connections, or meeting people where they’re at, such as adding parking lots at transit stops?
Q: Are there examples of sprawling cities and communities that “re-densified” after the buildout of public transit?
Q: Why would truckers be part of the opposition to transit investment?
Q: In cities like Chesapeake, Virginia, with large sprawl and many farms, we need better transit but there’s a big discrepancy in accessibility of transit, and so many residents don’t want to pay for it. How should we navigate this sort of political situation?
